Terima kasih, En. Sfika. Terima kasih, En. Sfika. En. Sfika, saya bergerak untuk memberi penerbangan saya keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan. En. Sfika, Prime Minister dan Minister untuk perniagaan ekonomi dan ekonomi dan Minister untuk perniagaan dan keadaan dan keadaan. Ia mengeluarkan penerbangan sebuah policy pada 20 April 2023. Penerbangan sebuah policy ini, En. Sfika, adalah keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan untuk keadaan. Penerbangan sebuah policy ini, En. Sfika, mengembangkan penting bahwa keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan untuk mengeluarkan penerbangan untuk mengeluarkan hidup orang kerja. Bersyukur, mengerah, dan keadaan yang tidak mempunyai keadaan dan juga berguna menjadi keadaan dan keadaan. Benar, En. Sfika, semua yang kita beri kepada keadaan adalah mengusahkan filosofi yang penting untuk mengeluarkan penerbangan. Bersyukur, En. Sfika, mengerah, mengerah, dan keadaan dan keadaan adalah keadaan yang mengeluarkan dan harus diberi keadaan dan keadaan untuk mengeluarkan penerbangan. Bersyukur, En. Sfika, kita telah mengeluarkan keadaan dan keadaan untuk mengeluarkan penerbangan. In the case of health, Mr. Sfika, we indicated that the St. Lucia Labour Party will pursue a health policy that is patient-centered, evidence-based, equitable, accessible and affordable. These are the things we said, Mr. Sfika. In the manifesto, Mr. Sfika, we identified 11 strategic priorities for the health sector, and we intend to deliver over our first term in office. I wish to mention three of these critical strategic priorities which will radically transform the health sector and which will advance our progress towards achieving sustainable development goal number three, namely good health and well-being. These three strategic priorities are as follows, Mr. Sfika. One, universal healthcare will be implemented within the first term of the Labour Party government. Mr. Sfika, we have already implemented the first phase of UHC. Mr. Sfika, our government has launched maternal and child health services on the phase one of UHC. I am proud to say, Mr. Sfika, that every pregnant woman will be able to access services of ultrasound and laboratory services at no cost through primary health facilities on the island. This became effective on June 1st this year, Mr. Sfika. Our government is a caring government, Mr. Sfika. You may be aware, Mr. Sfika, that our government launched from July 1st this year, the Golden 80 Plus Health Package. This benefit package for elderly citizens of age 80 and over includes the following, Mr. Sfika. One, the provision of prescription drugs at community wellness centers at no cost. Two, access to one annual hearing test at the community wellness centers offering the services. Three, IK services at our community wellness centers. Four, access to ice cream and surgery at the Cuban Eye Clinic. Our government will continue to roll out universal healthcare as we believe, Mr. Sfika, that health is a fundamental right and must be made available to all. We recognize, however, Mr. Sfika, that the provision of healthcare services to all cannot happen overnight as we need to identify the additional health resources to finance the course of health services. Healthcare is expensive, Mr. Sfika. And our government intends to make the tough but necessary choices to implement UHC. We will not do like the previous government, Mr. Sfika, in which healthcare regress under the term in office. They spoke about national health insurance for five years, Mr. Sfika, and that is all they did. Talk, words with no action. After they failed five to stay alive promise, made in the manifesto of 2016, they again try to fool the solution public with the same trickery by promising five for five, Mr. Sfika. Mr. Sfika, the solution public saw five for five as a six for a nine. This so-called promise, Mr. Sfika, included medical care for all, Mr. Sfika, through some national health insurance scheme, this fluff and bluff from a government, Mr. Sfika, attempted to again fool the people of St. Lucia by stating that they would introduce national health insurance with up to $75,000 in benefits per person per year. They stated further, Mr. Sfika, that healthcare will be free for elderly, unemployed, and single mothers. Mr. Sfika, this strategy did not work this time around as the people of St. Lucia told the former Prime Minister, fool me once, shame on me.  Fool me twice, shame on me. And indeed the people of St. Lucia spoke loud and clear on the 26th of July 2021. It appears that the leader of the opposition did not hear them, Mr. Sfika, but he is still up to his same old tricks telling St. Lucia that by now, he would have implemented his national health insurance scheme. This indeed was a scheme, Mr. Sfika, as the honorable member of Youth Whatself has stated in very clear and unambiguous terms that there were no documents in the Ministry of Health that showed the plans for national health insurance. We can recall, Mr. Sfika, that the former Prime Minister indicated early during his term in office that a white paper would be presented on the health sector when he was questioned by a journalist at the time about the update on the white paper he ignored her, Mr. Sfika. It appears, Mr. Sfika, that the leader of the opposition left with his paper on national health insurance as none of the technocrats in the Ministry have those documents. However, Mr. Sfika, he has not stated how he planned to finance national health insurance apart from stating that the working public will have to contribute to the health insurance, but he did not state how government would finance its contribution and how it intended to meet the additional cost of its so-called scheme. In St. Lucia, the word schema has a particular meaning and that meaning is appropriate for what was being contrived by the former Prime Minister, Mr. Sfika. Mr. Sfika, our second strategic priority is to reopen the St. Jude's Hospital within the shortest period of time. We have completed phase one Mr. Sfika of sanitizing the buildings and we will be moving to phase two of completing the buildings. And I have made it clear to Mr. Sfika that the only way St. Jude's shall not be completed is if the world comes to an end prior to the term of this SLP administration. And you can take that to the bank, Mr. Sfika. Mr. Sfika, the plans are advanced. The leader of the opposition aided and abetted by his apostles continue to embark on a smack campaign using propaganda, lies and deceit designed to discredit the work of our government and to attempt to cover up the mess they created at St. Jude's by spending over 100 million dollars on an unnecessary incomplete building. Our third strategic priority, Mr. Sfika is to ensure that the OKEU will be adequately resourced with proper emergency services. We have, Mr. Sfika, taken control of the OKEU hospital after it was handed over to healthcare man, Mr. Sfika not a failed experiment of the former government. We now have to ensure that we allocate resources to ensure that OKEU can provide health services to effectively implement universal healthcare. On the issue of crime, Mr. Sfika our government understood clearly that there are no quick fix solutions to crime that addressing crime requires root and branch reform that involves addressing the social structures given rise to crime. Crime should not be politicized, Mr. Sfika and we would have thought that the former Prime Minister would have learnt his lesson when he uttered the words Kenny could not but I will you would have thought that those words would have haunted the leader of the opposition but no, Mr. Sfika he has absolutely no shame in again pretending that he somehow again has the solution to address crime. Mr. Sfika our government is under no illusion about the systemic problems and challenges that crime presents and as a result is taking an approach that will provide long term solution. The issue of crime has to be addressed at many levels, Mr. Sfika and our government is determined to implement a comprehensive approach to crime. We have, Mr. Sfika under invested in citizen security and we need to provide additional resources to ensure that we can improve the security of our people. Our government has already increased the allocations for crime fighting strategy for the purchase of vehicles providing resources for training and we commenced the renovation of the viewport police station and the construction of the new Bruce Lee northern headquarters. Mr. Sfika our government is under no illusion that the issue of crime is one which requires sustained effort and can only be effectively addressed over the long term. We are however committed Mr. Sfika to effectively confront the crime problem head on and to commit to provide the additional resources required to fight crime. The issue of crime is such a vexing issue that the heads of government in Karecom held a two day regional symposium on the 7th from 18th of April this year. The declaration following the symposium rightly recognized violent crime as and I quote multifaceted in nature and its pervasive effects requiring a robust regional response that includes a public health response and a societal response including family, church, academia cultural and sporting personalities minority political parties and a wider civil society. On quote crime is a global issue and to effectively tackle it we must also address the issue of the illegal importation of guns from the United States to the Caribbean region. Mr. Sfika the prime minister highlighted the strategic approach as follows and I quote our strategic approach to reversing the rise and any normalization of violent crime will be focused on strengthening law enforcement and making social interventions on quote the reference for this quote Mr. Sfika is on page 29 of the 2023-2024 budget speech the areas of focus includes strengthening the legislation improving and upgrading our human resources for training and engaging the regional security system to assist our local police hiring new police officers and improvement of physical facilities and working conditions Mr. Sfika our government has recognized that we have traditionally under invested in both health and citizen security over the years and there is need to provide additional resources we also recognize that in so doing we must ensure that this does not compromise our economic sustainability Mr. Sfika the good news is that the economy has recovered at a record pace from the contraction caused by the global pandemic and the mismanagement of the economy by the former administration and it is now clear that we were already in a recession before Covid Mr. Sfika as the economy contracted by 0.3% in 2019 semasa ia diperkenalkan bahawa perjalanan ekonomi akan menerima alasan yang lebih untuk semua sektor ekonomi terutamanya perjalanan dan keadaan dan keadaan keadaan dan keadaan menerima alasan yang lebih perjalanan Mr. Sfika dalam keadaan Mr. Sfika keadaan mempunyai sekitar 5% GDP dan sebab data ini saya dapat memberikan memberikan perjalanan untuk mendapatnya pada apabila anda berharga, Mr. Sfika dalam keadaan 2020 keadaan sebagai perjalanan GDP adalah 6.7% tetapi ini disebabkan keadaan tersebut di GDP biasanya keadaan sebagai perjalanan GDP adalah lebih 9% perjalanan GDP sebab perjalanan populasi Mr. Sfika sebab keadaan akan membuat perjalanan populasi sebab keadaan mempunyai keadaan keadaan akan mempunyai keadaan tersebut sebab semua orang mempunyai keadaan tersebut daripada orang yang lebih kecil sebab itu, Mr. Sfika kita perlu memperbaiki keadaan tersebut untuk menghidupkan sekitar 8% keadaan tersebut Mr. Sfika sebab Prime Minister mengatakan keadaan dan keadaan dalam keadaan sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, sebabnya, bahawa dia tidak melihat kemungkinan dikacauan kemungkinan dalam kemungkinan untuk kemungkinan dan kemungkinan sehingga kemungkinan sebenarnya gagal. Lain akhirnya, saya akan membangkakan, adalah bahawa levi adalah penggunaan untuk perniagaan 2,5% kemungkinan yang dibuat yang kemungkinan kemungkinan penerbangan. Saya akan membangkakan semua negara yang dikatakan oleh pernikahan yang dikatakan yang kita tahu adalah penerbangan kepada kebenaran. Pertama, Puan Svika, Prime Minister jelas beritahu bahawa keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan akan dipercaya daripada makanan, medis, pembinaan, material, keadaan dan keadaan. Sebaiknya, keadaan ini akan mempunyai, yang menurut keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan dan keadaan mempunyai pengalaman, dan keadaan untuk menguruskan keadaan dan keadaan untuk keadaan. Sebaiknya, Puan Svika, pembinaan dan keadaan mempercaya pembinaan dari pembinaan yang dipercaya. Lain kedua yang telah dipercaya dengan pembinaan yang lebih besar oleh Puan WP, pembinaan pembinaan dan Puan WP adalah bahawa levi akan dipercaya sehingga ia akan dipercaya pada pembinaan yang terakhir. Sebaiknya, propagandis berkata bahawa 2.5% akan dipercaya lebih daripada 2.5% sehingga ia akan dipercaya pada pembinaan yang terakhir. Ini lagi sebuah lelaki. Sekarang dipercaya oleh pembinaan yang kita ada sebelum kita, Puan Svika, jelas-jelas dipercaya bahawa levi akan dipercaya pada pembinaan yang lebih besar pada pembinaan yang lebih besar atau keadaan yang lebih besar. Ia sangat jelas. Ia tidak ada ambiliti. Ia bermakna ia tidak akan dipercaya dengan dipercaya pada pembinaan yang terakhir yang mengambil semua pembinaan yang lain. Ia memiliki pembinaan yang biasa, dan tempatan. Di pembinaan yang terserah, levi akan dipercaya pada pembinaan yang lebih besar. 1. Pembinaan yang membuat pembinaan untuk orang-orang di St. Lucia. 2. Pembinaan yang membuat pembinaan untuk orang-orang di St. Lucia. 3. Pembinaan yang membuat pembinaan yang dipercaya dan dengan membuat pembinaan dari luar San Lucia ke jalan di luar sepanjang perjalanan di San Lucia. Kerana perjalanan levi di perjalanan adalah 2.5% 10 perjalanan di luar sepanjang perjalanan dan saya kata sebuah sub-seksyon 2 sebuah perjalanan yang dipercaya melalui levi ke perjalanan di perjalanan Inland di satu services provided by a resident to a resident in St. Lucia, two, services provided by a non resident to a resident in St Lucia, and three, services provided by a business established and carried on business from outside of St Lucia to the local branch of the business in St Lucia." The third lie is that we have not increased the quantum of resources as according to the leader of the opposition, we did not see it reflected in the budget estimate for the fiscal year 2023-2024. Mr. Speaker, this statement is coming from the leader of the opposition who used to be the minister of finance and should know better, Mr. Speaker. It is abundantly clear, Mr. Speaker, that the government is embarking on UHC and will require additional resources to implement this bold, ambitious, and revolutionary initiative. We are also investing significant resources in St. Jude's, Mr. Speaker. So in the case of St. Jude's, the project will be implemented via the design finance construct method and therefore the expenditure will not as yet be reflected in the budget, Mr. Speaker. But we must have the resources available to meet this cost, Mr. Speaker. So even though it's not reflected there, that does not mean provisions have not been made to deal with it, Mr. Speaker. Similarly, Mr. Speaker, the government has entered into bold agreements for the viewfought and grozily police stations. These amounts will not as yet be reflected in the budget estimates but we must prepare for the payment of such in the future. Mr. Speaker, a budget is an annual financial estimate which must be seen within a wider context of the medium term and prudent fiscal policy. Notice I said prudent and not imprudent fiscal policy dictates that we make arrangements to finance the additional cost of health and security. The final lie, Mr. Speaker, and to put things in proper perspective is that the levy is a replacement tax for the reduction in VAT. Now, Mr. Speaker, first I would like to state categorically that the former administration engage in what can only be described as fiscal folly in reducing the VAT by 2.5%. Mr. Speaker, all of our multilateral institutions no dumbfounded by this policy moved by the former administration. These institutions included the IMF, World Bank, and the ECCV. Mr. Speaker, these institutions cannot in any way be described as political and will assess the policy purely on the basis of its technical merits. This is also the view of our government as the country lost over $200 million for a policy that was implemented purely for political gimmick. Mr. Speaker, our government has moved on and we were looking at policy options to finance the increased cost of health and citizen security as these are areas of very high priority for our government. The Minister for Finance must be commended, Mr. Speaker, for coming up with a bold, ingenious and innovative solution for funding the increased cost of health and citizen security. Mr. Speaker, budgets are all about making policy choices and trade-offs. We believe that the 2.5% levy is necessary and just as the benefits far outweigh the cost and if we do not provide the additional resources for health and citizen security, it will endanger the sustainability of the economy and our development. The people of St. Lucia want and deserve better healthcare, Mr. Speaker, and many of the unemployed poor and elderly need UHC as they cannot afford healthcare. Similarly, all of our citizens need security as crime is now a national challenge and we must address these issues. We need the additional resources and this is why I am giving my whole hearted support to this bill, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I end by saying may God continue to bless the Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, continue to guide his hand and continue giving him the wisdom for him to get our country on a more solid platform. I yield the floor. Thank you very much.


My name is Dragan Pilipovic. I come from Serbia and I'm a freelancer working remotely for a company which is based in Canada, but we have people from all over the world and it is a small website. It is about cryptocurrency education and I work there as a back-end Drupal developer. I take care of everything related to the Drupal and to the code and I have one colleague which is working on the front-end like CSS and JavaScript and I work on PHP, all custom Drupal modules and everything related to our website. Yes, talk-talks are amazing and they are absolutely up to date and even it guides me to what I will work on in the future and what I will work today and everything. We had a talk from a Google developer which is exclusive I think, because they are they are they are they are influencing the whole web, I mean from the Google as we are, but they have that power which can be very relevant to us who are working as developers. People are really communicative. I came here alone so it wasn't problem to meet anybody, everybody is friendly and communicative and everything. I ask questions like where can I find maybe agencies which are trying to find workers and which are hiring actually and everybody is helping me. In one word, knowledgeable.


I'm Salvatore Babonis, and today's lecture is American Tinshah, State and Self at the End of History. The philosopher Georg Hegel famously wrote that the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom. And while I might not agree with him for the pre-modern era, I definitely agree that the overarching theme of the modern age has been the development of the idea of freedom. Of course, I'm not the only one. Karl Marx famously began his career as a young Hegelian, and over the course of his career he took Hegel's master-slave dialectic and developed it, or you might even say refined it into a bourgeoisie-proletariat dialectic for the modern age. Of course, Karl Marx saw the end of history as the victory of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, and the coming of a classless society. Karl Marx was one of the young or left Hegelians. We often tend to forget that there was an entirely separate and at the time probably much more influential group known as the right Hegelians, the right Hegelians focused on Hegel's notion of the state as the culmination of history, and ultimately came to be associated with the rise of militarism and then Nazism in Germany, which is I think why they tend to get written out of history. Nonetheless, we can see a 20th century heir of the right Hegelians in the philosopher Alexander Kozhev. Alexander Kozhev was a Russian-born philosopher who migrated to France and mainly wrote in French. He refined Hegel's concept of the state at the end of history into the universal homogeneous state. Kozhev found all of this latent in Hegel and brought it out and actually put it into Hegel's mouth in his book on reading Hegel. The universal homogeneous state at the end of history would be what it sounds like, a state that is universal, covers everything, is homogeneous, has no class distinctions, but also no racial distinctions, no ethnic distinctions, no distinctions among citizens of any kind, and is a state that is not an end of history where the state has withered away, but is instead an end of history in which the state remains strong. Kozhev, not coincidentally, was instrumental in providing the philosophical underpinnings for what is now the European Union, and many people, including Francis Fukuyama, have talked about the European Union as being the culmination of Hegel's notion via Kozhev of the universal homogeneous state. But farther to the right of the right Hegelians were people who weren't happy living in a universal state at the end of history, preferred the continuation of conflict, and here the leading light was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche famously wrote about the Superman versus the Last Man, and we all know the Superman. Nietzsche's Superman is the man who seeks to create his own destiny through struggle and is maybe the archetype for the Nazi warrior, but we forget about Nietzsche's Last Man. Nietzsche's Last Man was what he wanted to avoid. It was the comfortable man who had no longer any need to struggle at the end of history in Hegel, or as we know it now, via Kozhev's universal homogeneous state. If Kozhev looked forward to a world in which nobody had to struggle anymore, Nietzsche dreaded a world in which nobody had to struggle anymore, and not just Nietzsche, Leo Strauss was one of Kozhev's main 20th century interlocutors, and most English readers will know Kozhev via Strauss and via the dialogue between Strauss and Kozhev recorded in Strauss's on tyranny. Strauss himself took Nietzsche's point of view and argued that Kozhev might be right that the world was moving towards a Hegelian universal homogeneous state, but he didn't want any part of it. Strauss thought that was terrible, and he really wanted there to be supermen to disrupt this universal homogeneous state, and Strauss actually argued that no matter how comfortable the world became, there would always be those people who sought to overturn the existing order and to have an impact on history. With that kind of attitude, it's not surprising that Strauss was an inspiration for a whole generation of American neoconservatives. If you think of pretty much anybody who was associated with the project for a new American century in the 1990s and early 2000s, the whole slew of neoconservatives, most famously Paul Wolfowitz, they're all students of or admirers of or readers of Leo Strauss. One of the most famous readers of Leo Strauss was and is Francis Fukuyama. Francis Fukuyama took Kozhev's universal homogeneous state, and Nietzsche's last man synthesized them via Leo Strauss into his end of history thesis, the end of history and the last man, in which the universal homogeneous state at the end of history was conceptualized as liberal democracy plus, forgive me, VCRs and stereos. Now Fukuyama may not have been much of a technologist, but I think he was a very insightful and is a very insightful political philosopher. He wrote, we might summarize the content of the universal homogeneous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere, combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic. In other words, liberal democracy and consumerism or liberal democracy and the market economy. Fukuyama's original thesis was written in 1989 and for my money, you don't really have to read his 1991 book, The End of History and the Last Man, read the 1989 essay in the national interest. It's shorter to the point and much more interesting. And all of these ideas about the universal homogeneous state are really right there in the summer, northern summer, 1989 article in the national interest. What's amazing though is that Fukuyama wrote that article before Tiananmen Square, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the victory of solidarity. All of those events took place after Fukuyama wrote his essay, including the breakup of the Soviet Union. So we tend to telescope history and most retellings of Fukuyama say that inspired by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama said it was the end of history. That is an ahistorical reading of Fukuyama's work. Fukuyama said it was the end of history and then came Tiananmen Square and then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and then came the victory of solidarity and only two years later came the breakup of the Soviet Union. So I think we should see Fukuyama as incredibly prescient to have understood very early that everything was changing in 1989. But I think we can forgive him if he didn't see the full implications of his own thesis. In fact, over the years Fukuyama has, he seemed to tire of being asked over and over again, do you still think it's the end of history? And he seems to have pulled back from the original thesis to say that well, you know, it's the end of history for some people in some places. He hasn't really seized the concept and pushed forward with it. Someone who has, leave it to a Russian, is actually the Russian essentialist, often called a nationalist, but really a Heideggerian essentialist, autodidact philosopher, Alexander Dugan. Alexander Dugan wrote, when liberalism transforms from being an ideological arrangement to the only content of our extant social and technological existence, then it is no longer an ideology, but an existential fact, an objective order of things. What Dugan has understood in his writings is that the victory of liberalism is not just a triumph of the US over the USSR or of one system over another, it's the final system. There's only one system standing in the 21st century in the Third Millennium and that system is liberalism.  The universal homogeneous state at the end of history is not just liberal democracy and the market economy or liberal democracy and consumerism. The universal homogeneous state at the end of history truly is universal, that is global covering the entire world and homogeneous, that is, classless without ethnic distinction, without distinction based on sexuality, without distinction based on group membership. It is a liberal Tiansha. Now, Tiansha is, of course, the Chinese term for all under heaven and I think it really encapsulates the end of history that Fukuyama saw. Tiansha depicts an enlightened realm that Confucian thinkers and mandarins raised to one of universal values that determined who was civilized and who was not. In today's world, by definition, those who embrace liberalism are civilized, anti-liberal, by definition are excluded from civilization. Now, those words about Tiansha come from the eminent straight Chinese historian Wang Gengwu. He coined the term American Tiansha in a 2013 book on China. He said, today an American Tiansha has a strong global presence. It has a missionary drive that is backed by unmatched military power and political influence. Compared to the Chinese concept, it is not passive and defensive, rather unlike other universal ideals, it is supported by a greater capacity to expand. I think Wang has it absolutely right. And I think if you want to get to the heart of the American Tiansha, you can look to the founding document of the American Republic, the Declaration of Independence, in which the founders of the United States of America wrote, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the statement of the coming of the homogeneous society. And the universalization of that society, and after 1989, created a Hegelian universal homogeneous state. The American Tiansha is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama was looking for, but did not find. Now, when I say the American Tiansha, I do not mean the 50 states and territories of the United States of America. The United States of America is merely the central state of the American Tiansha, or one might say the Zhongguo of the American Tiansha. Zhongguo, of course, is China's name for China, but literally it simply means central state, or as it's more colorfully translated, middle kingdom. The United States of America is the central state of the American Tiansha, but it's not the totality of it. The American Tiansha is global in scale. Wherever you go in the world, you are inside the American Tiansha in the sense that you are inside an ideological zone based on liberalism and the market economy. Let me contrast with you the classic Ming Tiansha in China and the American Tiansha of today. Now, every Chinese empire had a Tiansha. The Ming Tiansha may be thought of as the ultimate development of this, and you could look to a document like Da Minglu, the great Ming code for guidance as to what Tiansha meant in the Ming world. The earlier Song Tiansha and the later Qing Tiansha are very similar, but let's keep with the Ming. At the center, the central core identity of the Ming Tiansha was the Han Chinese. The Ming code, the great Ming code, distinguished between the Han Chinese inside the Chinese empire and other people who were inside the Chinese empire, but were not Han. I think in the same way, we can see the United States of America, actual bona fide citizens of the United States of America as the very center of the American Tiansha, but more broadly speaking, there's an area of shared governance in the Ming Tiansha, which was the entire Ming Empire. In the American Tiansha, the parallel might be the Anglo-Saxon allies. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have complete military interoperability, share intelligence. These are the five eyes countries that cooperate to read all, essentially all, international electronic communications. The five countries, their systems are closely intertwined to the point where it's possible for an Australian media baron, Rupert Murdoch, to move to the UK, become a British media baron, and then to move to the United States and start Fox News, which then became the most popular news channel in America and influential in US elections. So a person who started out influencing Adelaide elections, later influenced Australian elections, later swung British elections, later swung American elections, and the same kinds of patterns have existed for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. There's an enormous shared space. It's not only the media, it's the entire world of governance and ideas. US think tanks will pick up pieces published by Australian, British or Canadian think tanks without a second thought. They're part of the shared discourse of governance in the American Tiansha. Outside that discourse, but sharing the basic philosophies, well, on the borders may be Korea and Israel, but on the Chinese side, outside the shared governance, outside the Ming Empire proper, but still sharing an adherence to Confucian values were the Confucian tributaries. So places like the Vietnam and the Ryukyu Islands, some minor dependencies, a small number of little principalities around the South China Sea that accepted Confucian principles and governance from, or Suzerainty from Beijing. But on the American Tiansha, we could also compare NATO allies, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, the Pacific allies, perhaps even Sweden, which is not formally an ally of the United States, but nobody doubts that Sweden shares the ideology of the American Tiansha, liberalism and orientation towards the West. So we can compare this shared ideology based on Confucianism in the Ming space, and a shared ideology based on liberalism in the American Tiansha. Now I would consider this sphere, this third sphere, the sphere of liberalism, and this sphere encompasses pretty much all of the substantial economies of the Western world, plus many smaller outposts around the world as well. Then in the Ming Tiansha, there was the outer layer of countries and places that shared Chinese principles in a broad sense. That is, they had treaties with Ming China, they were willing to play by Ming Chinese terms, they occasionally cooperated with Ming China. And here I include even Russia, which signed a treaty in the 1600s that was relatively favorable to Ming China. The era of unequal treaties came 200 years later. In the Ming era, in the 1500s and the early 1600s, in the Qing era of the 1600s, early 1700s, Russia was aligned with China in Central Asia against nomadic peoples. Of course also major Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Burma, and even the Yurkans and maybe some Mongols on the Ming-Northern border were broadly aligned with Ming power. They weren't confucian by any means, they did not accept the Ming emperor as their emperor, but they were pro-systemic, certainly not anti-systemic, trying to bring down the Ming system. Maybe even you might include the Western Europeans during the Ming era. British and Portuguese traders were willing to kowtow if that meant that they could trade with China. In the American Tianshaw we might think of India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, pretty much most of the rest of the world as being places that are not liberal, don't share an American ideology in its fullest sense, but that are pro-systemic powers that broadly cooperate in American governance of the world. And here we might even include China. China is often thought of as a quote-unquote rising power, a challenger enemy of the United States, but there's very little evidence that that's really true. And there's a ton of evidence that China cooperates with the American global system. Now I know there's a lot of rhetoric about China challenging America, but I don't think there's a lot of practical evidence that that's really happening. China challenging the Philippines, China challenging Japan, sure. China challenging the liberal market economy? No, I don't think there's really any evidence of that at all. The BRICS Bank, if anything, has endorsed IMF governance principles, and the BRICS Bank will only fund projects that are aligned with IMF principles. So I really can't see China as an anti-systemic power. Maybe anti-Philippines or anti-Japan or anti-Vietnam, but not anti the American liberal world order. That leaves us with just a few external enemies. For the Ming-Chianshah, Japan, some Mongol tribes, some Turkic tribes that were outside of the Ming-Chianshah on its borders. But of course, also outside the Ming-Chianshah was an entire world out there. Now as it happened, the Ming-Chianshah collapsed internally due to a peasant rebellion in 1644 and Jurkin invaders, the Manchus, invaded China and replaced the Ming-Chianshah with a Qing-Chianshah. But they took Da Ming-Liu, the great Ming code, and they simply expanded it into Da Qing-Liu, the great Qing code, and they governed China on Confucian principles, and they continued the tributary relationship with the neighbors of China. So even the Ming-Ching transition can't really be seen as an external overthrow of the Tian-Chah itself. A change in leadership certainly, a change in who the actual rulers were, but not a change in the system. It took the collision between the Chinese world and the European world in the opium wars starting in 1840 to really bring down the Ming-Chianshah. Well, the American-Chianshah also has its border disputes. Russia staying in many ways outside the American-Chianshah and challenging it in very minor ways from a geopolitical standpoint, challenging the American-Chianshah in borderlands like Crimea and Syria, but not making an attempt to overthrow the system. Russia has made no systematic attempt to put an end to the liberal American-centered global governance system. North Korea even less so. North Korea may be a very hostile country, but North Korea is not going to overthrow the Western liberal order. Syria the same thing. Even Islamic State has no chance of overthrowing the Western liberal order. And there we end. The big difference between the Chinese-Chianshah, the Ming-Chianshah, Qing-Chianshah, and the American one is that the Chinese-Chianshah was geographically limited. The American-Chianshah has no external borders. There's no over there beyond the seas. There are no Martian landers that may come and put an end to the American-Chianshah. Thus the American-Chianshah is likely to be very stable. It can only collapse through internal processes. And even if it were to collapse through an internal process, the successors would likely be built on the same system. That is, even if the political order in America were to collapse, a President Trump or some other person would end up seizing the levers of state machinery in Washington D.C. and running the American-Chianshah, just like the Manchurians seize the levers of state machinery in Ming-China and turned it into Qing-China. There is no external power that can overthrow the American-Chianshah. Now, I'm not the first person to think of this parallel. I actually have to give credit to Yuan Feng-Kong of the Lee Kuan-Yu School at National University of Singapore. Kong wrote an article in, I believe it was 2004, on the American tributary system interpreting the American world order. He didn't use the word American-Chianshah, but the American world order interpreting it as a tributary system parallel to the Chinese tributary system. And he went through a whole series of dimensions on which they are either parallel or similar. But there are two that he didn't focus on, two that he missed that I really think we need to consider. One is the ideological dimension with the Chinese-Chianshah, the Ming or Qing-Chianshah being based on Confucianism, the American-Chianshah based on individualism. And the second, the one being limited to East Asia, the other one being global. These two differences, I think, are pregnant with implications. Here you see, for example, the embodiment of the post-modern Chinese member of the American-Chianshah. This is a famous meme, a Chinese student graduating at Harvard Business School, holding in his hands the two symbols he presumably values most, the Chinese flag and the all-powerful American dollar. This is the American-Chianshah embodied and it's made possible by globalism, the Chinese student studying in the United States, but also made possible by liberalism. It's made possible by the fact that this student is able to become part of a larger world that is non-essentialist. It's a post-modern world. In a modern world of modern nation states, it would be impossible for a student like this to become a member of the American elite. But in the post-modern world, in the liberal world, that is very much a possibility. In fact, that's presumably why he went to Harvard Business School in the first place. You don't go to Harvard Business School to learn the skills to succeed in business. You go to Harvard Business School to enter the global elite and there's no barrier to Chinese students doing so. This is one reason why I don't think you can see China as a challenging power to the United States because Chinese people and especially elite Chinese people are much more interested in joining the American Tianshah than in overthrowing it. Like 80 years ago, 90 years ago, Oswald Spengler wrote, forgive my German, der Untergang des Abenlandes, literally the undergoing of the western lands, the decline of the west. This book was written at the end of World War I, actually published at the end of World War I, written during World War I. Although Spengler was not himself a Nazi, it inspired Nazi dreams that the west was over and a new energetic east would overthrow the western order. And of course, there were plans for a Nazi invasion of England and it's something that I just find, I don't mean to laugh at the Nazis, but sometimes maybe laughter is the best medicine. The Nazi plans for the invasion of England pointed out that Eaton College was the school to send children of the senior Nazi occupation officers and officials. That is, the Nazi plans Operation Sea Lion to invade England may have been, in some ways, a backdoor attempt to get the children of Nazi leaders into exclusive English public schools, to get them into Eaton and the other famous schools of England. I just find that incredible, but not so incredible if you consider that UK independent schools today publish statistics on their foreign student enrollments. The number one source is China. So in 1940, the Nazis wanted to get their children into Eaton. In 2015, the people who most wanted to get their children into Eaton were Chinese millionaires. And right behind the Chinese millionaires, Hong Kong based millionaires, who of course are many of them, also Chinese millionaires. Number three, if anyone wants to guess, Russia. So the top three contributors, foreign contributors of students to English independent schools, these exclusive schools in England that train elite students who go on to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and such. The top three sources of foreign students are puttively the places, or at least two of them, China and Russia, puttively the places that are going to overthrow the American liberal order. Well, again, I find it not credible to surmise that Chinese and Russian elites are trying to overthrow the Western order by getting their children educated at Eaton and Harrow colleges. And of course, you don't have to go to an English public school to get into a top university. You can go directly from China or Russia and where are the top universities? Well, according to the Chinese own ranking system, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, World University rankings, the Shanghai rankings. If you look at a list of the top 20, well, there you go, America, America, America, America, Britain, America, America, America, Britain, America, America, America, America, Britain, America. Number 20, a Swiss university sneaks in at number 20. 19 of the top 20 universities in the world by Chinese reckoning are American and British universities, and if not just the first 20, the next 20 as well. So if you go 21 through 40, you get a couple of Japanese universities in Canadian, which is also a part of, clearly part of the American Tiansha, a Danish school, a French school. But the dominance of Anglo-American universities in the Chinese university rankings is, of course, overwhelming. And the number of students who go to them is similarly overwhelming of 4.2 million Chinese students who have gone abroad to pursue education in the last 35 years. Only 2.2 million have returned to China. Now, that doesn't account for the fact that many of those who returned maybe didn't want to return, but couldn't get a visa to stay as a permanent resident in the West. It also doesn't account for the fact that some of those returnees keep a foot in both worlds and are not permanent returnees. Roughly speaking, something like half of the Chinese students who go abroad to study, and there are a lot of them, roughly half of them stay abroad permanently. They don't want. These Chinese elites don't want to build their lives in China to develop China so it can overthrow the West. This is not the Germany of World War I challenging the West. It's impossible to imagine in Germany in 1910 the German elites falling over themselves to get their kids into British and American universities. We live in a very different world. We live in a world in which the returns to individuals of joining the American Tiansha are so great that undermines the integrity, the coherence of countries themselves. One need look no further than the Harun Report. The Harun Report is the Bible of the Chinese rich list, China's Fortune magazine. The Harun Report does a regular survey of the citizenship plans of China's wealthiest people. The Harun Report reports that 64% of Chinese multimillionaires either have foreign citizenship or are planning to get foreign citizenship or foreign permanent residence. The top destinations, no surprise. Number one, United States. Number two, Canada. And Canada famously is a backdoor into the United States. So many of those going to Canada are actually going to the United States but couldn't get in. Number three, England. Number four, Australia. Number five is I think the European Union as a whole. They don't have statistics on breaking it out. So where are the Chinese going? The highest educated, the wealthiest Chinese are going to the American Tiansha, to the very liberal core of the American Tiansha, primarily the United States and if they can't get into the US, Canada, UK, Australia, maybe New Zealand. They're also the babies. China and the United States now have a reciprocal agreement for 10-year tourist visas, so multiple entry tourist visa for 10 years. It used to be the case that when Chinese women tried to get into the United States, if they appeared pregnant at their visa interviews, US consular officials would deny them a visa. At least that's the rumor that has, not just a rumor, it's a widely understood, widely well widely understood understanding throughout China. But now you can get a 10-year visa, which means that a Chinese woman can get a visa at age 20 or 22, just after finishing at university. And then when she gets pregnant five years later, seven years later, can just board a flight to the US. No need to go apply for a visa, 10-year multiple entry visa. The number of USA babies being born is unknown, but staggering. And I know it's staggeringly large because every time I fly back and forth to China, I find myself in the immigration line with women who have Chinese passports, whose babies have American passports. And if I'm seeing this every time I travel, I know it's not a small phenomenon. Look, there are entire hospitals in Southern California that exist solely to service the needs of Chinese women who are coming to the US to have their babies. There are even movies about Chinese women, romantic comedies about Chinese women who come to America to have their babies. It's such a well-known phenomenon in China that you can make a popular movie script around it, and everyone knows what you're talking about. When people are eager to have USA babies, they're not eager to declare war on the United States. We have entered a new post-modern world, a world in which individuals seek to develop their own identities and their own place in the world without much regard to the nation states to which they are nominally aligned by citizenship and passports. That post-modern world may seem very new, but in fact it is deep roots. Arnold Toynbee, the famous world historian, dated the beginning of the post-modern world very precisely in 1875. And I think he correctly said that it began in the United States. Now, he didn't give a reason for 1875. My own instinct is that he chose that date because it was 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence was, I think, the first recognizably post-modern document, and it took perhaps 100 years, or in Toynbee's case, 99 years, for this post-modern document of the Enlightenment to ultimately become something like reality. Now, what I mean by that is that the feeling, the actual popular sentiment that all men, and let's face it, by 1875 we were only talking men, not women, but the sentiment that all men are created equal. That there's nothing special about big men, about presidents and generals and artists, but that all men are created equal. That notion really came to be embedded in the American psyche after the Civil War, and let me give you an example. Here's the State of New York Monument at Gettysburg National Cemetery in the United States, built 1893. The State of New York Monument is not a monument to a general. It's not Nelson's column. It is a column to the ordinary soldier. It's topped by an allegorical figure of New York State shedding tears for the deaths of the men who have died in the Battle of Gettysburg, and around the bottom are bronze plaques listing the names of the men of New York who died in the battle at Gettysburg. Now, as far as I can tell, lists of names of the fallen originated in American Civil War remembrance. Only came to happen in the U.K. and in U.K. Commonwealth countries after World War I and only spread to the rest of the world, and then only certain parts of the rest of the world after World War II. Similarly, Memorial Days. The first Memorial Day was in the 1870s in the United States. It was called Decoration Day, the day that you brought flowers to decorate the graves of the fallen. That's why American Memorial Day is in May, traditionally May 31st, because that's when flowers were available. Whereas British Commonwealth remembrance days are November 11th, commemorating World War I. So what the Civil War was for the United States, World War I was for the rest of the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world only entered post-modernity much later. If I were to give some vague dates, I would suggest post-modernity arrived in America after the Civil War, arrived in the British Commonwealth after World War I, maybe arrived in France roughly around that same time, I'm not sure, only spread to Germany after World War II. And you might even say only spread to the eastern block after 1991. In any case, the Civil War was the traumatic moment in American history. Something around 20% of all Union soldiers were killed. Around 40%, 40% of all Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War. The average death toll for the United States as a whole was 30% of soldiers died in the Civil War. Now, you can find all sorts of war memorials around Australia and the UK, but even in Australia, which was famously hard-hit by World War I, 15% of soldiers died in the war. So the American casualties in the Civil War were twice as high as the Australian casualties were a generation later or two generations later in World War I. So you can imagine why people thought that the loss of life had to be commemorated, but it wasn't generals. It was the loss of life of ordinary soldiers. And this becomes particularly poignant in other monuments. For instance, this is the 138th New York Infantry Regiment. Here you can see a very postmodern monument. And this is a postmodern monument from 1888. The monument doesn't have cannons on it or battleships or rifles. Well, the monument is a tree stump, and on the tree stump is the soldier's kit. The drum, a dispatch bag, there is a rifle leaning up against the tree stump. That is, this is a monument, a sad monument to commemorate the loss of ordinary soldiers. And the material of the monument is the ordinary soldier's kit in 1888. Here's another one with, again, a New York monument with the muse, Cleo, writing the deeds of the 123rd New York Regiment into the scrolls of history. Here's a particularly poignant one, the 54th Regiment of New York soldiers. There was a flag boy, a boy who carried the colors, non-combatant carrying the flag in battle, who was shot and died in battle. That boy was commemorated on the monument. So the main figure on the monument is not a god, is not a general, the main figure on the monument is a boy who was killed carrying the flag, particularly a poignant one. And I could go on and on. There are 90 New York state monuments at Gettysburg battlefield. And that's just the New York state monuments. There are a couple hundred monuments to soldiers from other states of the Gettysburg battlefield. And that's only Gettysburg.  There are thousands of American Civil War monuments. And overwhelmingly, there are monuments of ordinary soldiers, at least the northern ones are. Interestingly, the south, which was maybe less advanced down the road to post-modernity, much more commonly put great heroes on its monuments. General Lee, most of all, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, General Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson. The south commemorated the glorious generals. The north commemorated the fallen soldiers. Or perhaps my favorite monument is the monument to the Civil War correspondence, the first reporters of the post-modern age. War correspondents have their own memorial just outside Antietam battlefield in western Maryland. I think that Toynbee was right to date the post-modern self from the period after the American Civil War. And to understand that it spread from there, and that the Jackson Pollock painting underneath this slide is of a kind with the monuments to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, because both embrace the dignity of the individual. And a hundred years later, a hundred years after the beginning of post-modernity, of course we have the ultimate post-modern, no more war, this is just the individual celebrating individuality by the 1970s. Post-modernity can be defined as the democratization of individuality. You don't have to be Leonardo or Newton or Napoleon or Hitler to be an individual. Every person is an individual. Every person's story matters. Everybody has an identity. And post-modernity then becomes the leitmotif of the American Tiansha. Running through the rise of America is the story of post-modernity. The great immigrant waves into America in the late 19th century were waves of people who gave up their essentialist, Heideggerian design, their sense of being, and just melted into the post-modern American identity. My own family are Italians and Greeks from 100 to 150 years ago who came to America and simply became Americans. They developed their own identities. Instead of having identities that were given to them at birth, they created their own new identities. And there's nothing more post-modern than that. But as America has expanded and as the reach of America has expanded, we have moved from an era when people moved to America to become post-modern individuals in the late 19th century to an era when America comes to you. You can attend an American-style university and get an American degree in Singapore, in Germany, in China, all across Africa, in the Persian Gulf. In fact, it's very difficult to find universities today that don't want to Americanize, even in Russia. The highest prestige universities all have formal programs, they call it to professionalize their research and their curricula, but the model that they're professionalizing on is an American model of higher education. The American Association of Colleges and Schools of Business have accredited business schools everywhere in the world. It's the gold standard for business education to be accredited by the American accrediting body. Well, what does that mean? It means that no matter where students study business, they study American principles of business. When we seek out success as individuals, no matter where we are and no matter what our passports may say we are, we ultimately are seeking a place in the liberal American tinsha. In this post-modern American tinsha, every individual participates directly in a single global sovereignty. They may have more or less rights in that sovereignty. Someone whose last name is Bush or Clinton has more rights than an ordinary American voter, and an ordinary American voter has more rights than a Canadian. But something that you don't realize is that even a Canadian has more influence on the American elections than a German. Because Canadians are part of the discourse that shapes opinion in those United States elections. A German is less so. But even a German is more so than a Russian. And even a Russian is more so than a Tajik. There are circles of membership in this post-modern American tinsha, but there's only one tinsha to be a member of. There's a flip side to that, which is that national politics is increasingly irrelevant. Fukuyama about the American tinsha, Fukuyama about the end of history was liberal democracy. Well, keep the liberal, nix the democracy. Democracy may be the form of government, but when decisions are made, or not necessarily made, when ideas are shaped, when the ideas that determine decisions are shaped at a global level, being informed by an American view of how the world should be run. Well, your country may be a democracy, but it doesn't mean that your country is actually voting on issues that will determine your country's destiny. Now, the classic example of that for 2016 is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Trans-Pacific Partnership fundamentally undermines national democracy in all sorts of ways, well, not all sorts of ways, in ways that are shaped by American liberal thought and the American tinsha. The result is post-political movements, people who are not seeking power, but who are protesting power. Movements like the hacker collective Anonymous. Movements like Nuit D'Abu in Paris and across French-speaking Europe. Occupy Wall Street, Indignados all over the world, or at least all over Europe and North America. There have been protest movements against the political system. Let's face it, the political system is democratic, so what do people want? They want something that is maybe incoherent, because no matter what political system they have, democracy, dictatorship, something in the middle, that political system will make decisions based on principles that come from outside the country, that come from this overarching American tinsha. Of course, the ultimate post-modern political leader is the reality TV star Donald Trump. Donald Trump is emblematic of post-modernity, of the post-modern self, the construction of the individual and the individual mattering more than democratic rules, more than political systems, more than modern technocratic procedures. The victory of Donald Trump, and we don't know whether he'll win the election or not, at least as of the recording of this lecture, but we do know that he's come very close, and he's come very close as a post-modern individual in a broader liberal American global system, not as somebody who worked his way up the ladder of American politics as it's construed at the national level. Look, Gork Hegel said that the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom, and he was smart enough, impression enough, to realize that America is therefore the land of the future, where in ages that lie before us, or at least that lie before him, the burden of the world's history shall reveal itself. Freedom is a wonderful word, and it's a wonderful thing. I wouldn't want to live in a world that is not free, but freedom, or specifically the sense of freedom as liberty, the liberty of the individual to do whatever the individual wants, and make of herself or himself whatever she or he wants to be. The freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the individual at a systemic level, at a global level, act to create a larger polity, a larger way of thinking that transcends national boundaries, but not in a generic way, in a specifically American way. There's only one country, only one major country in the world, whose people are organically postmodern, where nobody except a very small number of indigenous people can claim a connection to the soil. That one country is the United States of America, as we move into a postmodern world, that postmodern world is inevitably an American world, merely by virtue of the fact that it is postmodern. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at my website at SalvaturbaBonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.


So, let us talk about the importance of electrical properties of geomaterials in geotechnical engineering. These type of studies are becoming very essential and important for predicting and determining the following. The first is accurate determination of water content or the saturation of the geomaterial or the porous media. This is where actually most of the research is contemporary research is going on where people are trying to come up with several methodologies and they are trying to see which methodology happens to be the best among the all. Degree of compaction in most of the real life situations where the compaction control is a very important issue particularly designing embankments or the foundations fills and so on. Precise determination of degree of compaction is very important in the in situ conditions. So, till now in classical geomechanics we have talked about degree of compaction based on the proctor density. It is not we define relative densities or relative compaction efforts in the fields, but they are not very helpful. So, what people are trying to do is they are trying to ascertain the degree of compaction under in situ conditions. Some of you must have heard the importance or the application of nuclear density probe or nuclear probes for finding out the moisture content and dry density under in situ conditions. This is a good example of the efforts which have or the initiatives which have been taken by the researchers to define degree of compaction to the most precise level porosity of the material. Because as you have noticed porosity guides almost all the properties of the geomaterials and the porous media and its precise determination is very difficult. You have talked about several methods for finding out porosity including mercury porosimeter, helium gas, pachnometer, simple water absorption will also give you porosity, but you have seen where you would be if you follow simple water absorption technique and does not give you the most reliable results. So, determination of porosity of the materials is becoming extremely important and particularly for the situations where the diffusive contaminant transport takes place is it not. So, if you remember the diffusion coefficient is directly proportional to porosity term. So, if you know the porosity you can get the diffusion coefficient or vice versa you know the diffusion coefficient you can get the porosity hydraulic conductivity. So, hydraulic conductivity is also a very important parameter which people want to determine precisely and particularly for unsaturated soils is it not. So, this is where the electrical properties of geomaterials become very handy. If you know them you can determine indirectly hydraulic conductivity of the porous media or the geomaterials. Liquifaction potential of the soil mass is another important application in geotechnical engineering of electrical properties. If you know the electrical properties you can easily determine the liquefaction potential of the materials or the geomaterials of the porous media. I will discuss this in detail later on detecting and locating geomembrane failures. This is the only technique which can be applied to determine what is the extent of leakage or the failure of geomembranes and where they exist alright. So, you can find out the location of the cracks or the failure of the geotextiles or the geomembranes if you know their electrical properties and to estimate corrosive effects of soil on buried steel and concrete. So, corrosivity you must have noticed when you are talking about the corrosion potential of soil the electrical resistivity was a very important parameter there. So, if you know the electrical resistivity of the soil mass you can also estimate the corrosion effect of the soil for the structure which are buried in it particularly either steel or concrete structures. Similarly, to investigate the effects of soil freezing on buried structures. So, I can I am sure that you will agree with me that there is a full gamut of activities you know where people want to understand a mechanism or to identify some problems associated with geotechnical structures and this is where electrical properties become very useful or handy estimating soil salinity for agricultural activities. This is another important parameter where electrical properties of geomaterial are becoming extremely important. Now, you could always debate that electrical property or the thermal property which one is more suitable for a given circumstances what is your gut feeling. If you obtain the electrical properties or the thermal properties which one are going to be more appropriate and useful why actually there cannot be a direct answer you have to be careful in selecting the properties which may be helpful in a given situation like the biggest problem which comes to the mind when you are using thermal properties is the thermal flux. If thermal flux goes beyond a certain limit your thermal properties get affected quite a lot. Similarly, when electrical flux goes beyond a certain point it is also going to affect or the influence the properties quite you know substantially. So, it is a matter of convenience and the matter of confidence which should help you in deciding whether you would like to go for thermal properties or electrical properties. In short, characterize the material based on both thermal and electrical properties and then check that vis-a-vis these two where do you stand and how to employ certain parameters to characterize the geomaterials in a better way. So, this is a complete spectrum of the problems which people are trying to study in the present day world particularly civil engineers and geotechnical engineers and I am sure that you cannot undermine these problems there are problems of quite you know significant value in nature. Now, what is the basic concept the basic concept is change in water content leads to change in the dielectric permittivity of water geomaterial system or vice versa. So, this is the basic issue if you can measure the change in dielectric permittivity of the porous material or a geomaterial you can always find out what is the change in the water content or if you know the change in the water content you can find out what is the change in the dielectric permittivity. I will define dielectric permittivity slightly later when we are talking about the electrical properties part. So, this fact leads to determination of water content of the geomaterial if it is dielectric constant is known. So, this is a famous Topps equation which relates dielectric constant of a geomaterial with its volumetric moisture content. What it says is that if you know the dielectric constant of a material you can determine volumetric water content or if you know the volumetric water content you should be able to get the dielectric constant. Now, based on this concept many sensing techniques particularly in geophysics have been evolved over the years and they are still being developed for measuring soil moisture and some of these techniques are capacitance probe which you have seen in the laboratory which is known as sometimes F D sensor also F D corresponds to frequency domain. So, based on this we also call it as F D R frequency domain refractometry and the other technique is time domain refractometry that is the TDR probes. So, these are the two categories of the sensors or the probes which are being used for determining soil moisture content and when we say soil moisture content most of the time these soil moisture contents are the volumetric moisture contents of the material. So, it is so happens that all these sensors or these concepts are very useful for rapid determination of in situ moisture content and that to under non-invasive and non-destructive manner. This is a very important thing present day research is more into non-destructive non-invasive techniques that means you should not distract the matrix of the soil mass all right. So, under these circumstances the best situation is you should have a probe or a sensor which goes up to the place of interest in the soil mass or in the geomaterial and then it measures the properties which are required to be known and of course, as I said that when we talk about the moisture content it is the volumetric moisture content and not the gravimetric moisture content. Lot of studies have been conducted by people to show the applicability of these sensing devices by correlating volumetric moisture content to gravimetric moisture content and what they have noticed is that yes there is a relationship between volumetric relationship volumetric moisture content and gravimetric moisture content. I have told you in the previous lecture if you know the theta value theta is the volumetric moisture content this will be equal to porosity multiplied by saturation or porosity multiplied by gamma d all right. So, these are the two relationships which can be used for determining oh I am sorry it should not it is it is gravimetric moisture content multiplied by gamma d all right. So, second equation is theta equal to w into gamma d and the first relationship is theta equal to porosity multiplied by saturation. Now, here you should when you should remember that water is a material which has a very high dielectric permittivity which is approximately 81 which is more than any order of magnitude greater than that of the soils and the geomaterials and for dry soils the dielectric permittivity is 3 and for air the dielectric permittivity is 1. So, sometimes minerals contribute a little bit in the form of k value that is dielectric value and the total dielectric permittivity is about 3. So, basic idea is if you are measuring a material and if you know its dielectric permittivity you can put it on a scale of 1 to 81 and then you can determine whether geomaterial or the porous system or the soil mass happens to be saturated or not. So, if the values are close to 81 it is understood that the material is fully saturated. If it is close to 3 it is understood that you are working in the driest possible state of the material. So, this becomes a sort of a non-linear relationship where k values or the dielectric permittivity changes from 3 to 81. Now, let us talk about geomaterial characterization using electrical properties. So, electrical properties of geomaterials are basically their response to applied electric field. Now, when we say what is the significance of this? The significance is we try to talk about two parameters that is the electrical resistivity for a material which is defined as rho and dielectric constant for a material which is defined as small k. If you go back to your 10 plus 2 physics you must be remembering that 1 upon 4 pi epsilon naught is that term which we use now in capacitance is it not. So, 1 upon 4 pi epsilon naught is nothing but the epsilon s divided by epsilon naught. So, epsilon naught happens to be the permittivity of the free space and epsilon s happens to be the permittivity of the material. So, k is nothing but it is a relative permittivity of the material with respect to permittivity of free space. Now, based on this the concept of FDR comes into the picture that is frequency domain referred to me 3 where if you know the capacitance of the material you can always work out it is k value because epsilon naught is known epsilon s can be obtained depending upon how much charge is stored in a capacitor. So, when we say that these are the two parameters which will dictate electrical properties of soils the question is how to determine them is it not electrical resistivity and dielectric constant. Well this is a never ending story because as the knowledge and the state of the art is increasing people are adopting new and new techniques and lot of new concepts are coming into the picture. What I will try to do here is I will try to give you some basics of the methodologies which are adopted to obtain electrical resistivity and dielectric constant of the material. So, this is where I talk about the methods. Time of AC there are two methods one is known as low frequency method another one is known as a high frequency method. Now when we talk about the frequency what is this frequency of this is the frequency of AC alternating current alright. So, based on the pulse of the current which you are using if it is a DC current or if it is a low frequency current then the methodologies are based on low frequency resistivity methods. However, if the frequency of the AC goes beyond you know 10 power 4, 10 power 9 hertz, 10 power 9 hertz is nothing but 1 gigahertz and 10 power 4 hertz is approximately kilohertz range 10 kilohertz range. So, when you are working in this range this is known as high frequency dielectric methods. What is the difference between the two methods? Here I am using the word resistivity and here I am using the word dielectric. So, when you are working in low frequency ranges is only the resistance which comes into the picture and hence the generalized name of the method is low frequency resistivity measurement methods. However, when you work in higher frequency range the resistances become insignificant why because at high frequency the resistances will be quite low is it not the passage of current from 1 point to end of point will be very much high. So, that means, the resistance of the system gets subdued and the capacitance parts becomes more important is this part clear. So, based on this concept that means, in the low frequency ranges capacitance does not contribute and in high frequency ranges resistance does not contribute. So, this is the main issue when we talk about the methodology clear. So, based on this either the measurements are done at low frequencies or DC currents or at high frequencies with gigahertz range or the kilohertz range of the frequency of AC and the basic idea is to obtain dielectric constant of the material in this case second case and the first case only resistivity. Now, how high frequency dielectric methods are also termed as dielectric dispersion have you heard of dispersion term somewhere else in geomechanics correct condom and transport and in classical geomechanics load dispersion is it not. So, you apply a certain load and what happens it gets dispersed into the soil mass either 45 degree with the vertical or 45 plus 5 by 2 and so on there are different methodologies. So, you talk about load dispersion there now when we say high frequency dielectric methods what we are interested in is we are interested in finding out how dielectric response of the material changes with frequency clear. Now, what is your understanding about the dielectric constant of the material if dielectric constant is more material is good conductor of current or less conductor of its reverse. So, these concepts actually you should assimilate when frequencies are more the capacitance does not come to the picture clear what happens the dielectric properties gets enhanced ok. It overtakes resistivity part of the material why high frequency of the current makes a material more conducting clear. Now, dielectric constant if it is more a material is a good capacitor not a good conductor.  So, what it does it stores charge in it here. So, more and more dielectric response of a material it tells you that the storage capacity is more this is part clear. So, what I am trying to tell you here is the methodologies have been developed based on several concepts. The first concept is in which frequency range you are working and what is that you want to study about the material. Second is I am very much particular about studying a certain response of the material and that is I am adopting high frequencies and what is that response that is the response which is known as dielectric response of the material. So, it is so happens that the resistivity is not of much use except for profiling. In your geophysical studies mostly what you do you do resistivity profiling clear, but if you want to detect the material properties in terms of its porosity in terms of its saturation state of compaction moisture content in it what you have to do you have to study its dielectric response. In other words I would like to study dielectric dispersion of the material for a entire frequency range which is a high zone of frequency starting from kilo hertz to giga hertz. Is this ok? Is the difference clear to all of you have you followed the basic difference between the methodology number one methodology number two. In other words you are augmenting one response of the material and diminishing the other response in one method and in second method you are diminishing one response of the material and augmenting another response of the material. And what are these responses one is resistivity another one is capacitance. Is this ok? So, based on this technique all the probes work and your resistivity profiling does. When you are doing resistivity profiling what is the basic idea? The moment there is a change in the stratification of the soil the resistance offered changes and that is the zone where the resistivities are going to be different. So, this you could achieve very easily by using low frequency current, but when you are trying to understand the electrical response of the material then it becomes very very important to understand how dielectric constant is changing for a given frequency range. Now, what is the advantage of these methods over the other methods? As I said in the previous slide that these type of studies are non-destructive in nature what you need to do is in a control volume you have to just put across the control volume two electrodes. These electrodes could be point electrodes they could be even plate electrodes or the needle electrodes or whatever. So, geometry of the electrodes is also important. And what do you get is very fast and easy way of determining the material property. Why fast? The moment you get the electrical response of the material that is directly you know equivalent to some moisture content or porosity or whatever. So, you get the parameters very easily and rapidly and this is the beauty of these studies you are not disturbing the soil mass. So, whatever response you are getting that response will include the microstructure of the geomaterial particularly soil mass. Whenever Sochit presents his seminars you should attend because he has done extensive work in microstructure analysis of geomaterials particularly soils using high-frequency spectroscopy. Why do you use the word spectroscopy? Because you are trying to see the spectrum of the material response in a frequency domain clear? Yes please. Those two methods low-frequency resistivity method and high-frequency dielectric methods which basically they are laboratory methods or field methods because in field we are interested in measure the resistivity of the media. They could be both. You can do these studies in the laboratory on disturbed samples, undisturbed samples also and of course you can use these studies or you can employ these methodologies in field also under incident conditions. So, good way to see the microstructure changes would be if you work on a undisturbed sample and you destroy this matrix and remold the sample and see what is the difference in the microstructure. So, this is how you can identify the microstructure changes which have undergone in the sample because of its manhandling or whatever. Let us talk about the parameters which influence electrical properties of geomaterials. Of course, the porosity and the pore structure will definitely influence water content, salinity level, cation exchange capacity of the soil. If you remember we had correlated cation exchange capacity of the soil to its dry conductivity divided by the conductivity at hygroscopic moisture. So, hygroscopic moisture content for fine grained soil is very important. So, you can talk about the ratio of sigma value divided by sigma at you know hygroscopic moisture content and that should be a function of cation exchange capacity. Temperature of the ambience type and frequency of the current this we have discussed already and of course, what I have missed out here is the type of the soil is it not. So, type of the soil will also contribute a lot fine grained material coarse grained material we will be talking about this in a different lecture completely may be next lecture or next to next lecture. Now, there is something interesting that why people are talking about liquefaction detection or liquefaction potential determination of soils by using electrical properties. I hope you will agree that liquefaction soil depends upon its shape and size of the grains is it not porosity and relative density what else the variation in the water table and the external forces or the disturbances particularly shearing. So, there is lot of similarity because all these parameters are susceptible to change in the electrical properties of the material. If you can know these materials properties easily you can find out its liquefaction potential particularly for the sandy soils. What is the basic concept behind this? Resistivity is a function of void ratio and which in turn is a function of density. So, all of you are aware that if density causes a certain limit or the void ratio process the critical void ratio what will happen the liquefaction will take place. So, in a reverse way if I know the density where the critical void ratio is and if that happens to be the base resistivity of the material any change in the void ratio you know with respect to the critical void ratio is going to tell you whether the soil is going to liquefy or not. What is a critical void ratio? If you plot void ratio with respect to percentage strain what is going to happen? If the material is very loose because of shearing it will attain a certain minimum value of e and if a material is very dense you are starting from a low value of void ratio if you shear it what will happen dilatancy. So, somewhere if you extend them they tend to go very close to a value which is known as e critical. So, this is the critical void ratio that means this is the most natural form of the material whether you start from the looser state or the denser state. So, a shearing will always create a state of the material which is much more stable or constant volume of course, this you will be studying in your next course. So, idea is the variation with respect to ECR to E max and ECR to E min. If you can map the variation between ECR and E max and ECR and E min this is the potential of the material to change its void ratio. In other words this is the potential of the material to change its density. In other word is the potential of the material to change its electrical properties. So, if you can measure the change electrical properties you can directly correlate them with the change in void ratio and that is what you require find whether a material is going to liquefy or not ok. The liquefaction should be taking place anything which is in this range or in this range because this is the most stable state of the material in plus minus let us say 10 15 percent. So, if you are crossing the limits of 10 15 percent of E critical value in terms of void ratio you are going to exhibit or the material is going to exhibit liquefaction property because this is the most stable state of the material this band. So, beyond this band in terms of E max or E min both sides you are going to have liquefaction ok. So, it is a simple fundamental based on which you can define the liquefaction potential of the material and of course, the another. So, if you know the change in resistivity you can find out the change in the void ratio or vice versa if you know the change in the void ratio you can find out the change in resistivity which is nothing, but change in the density. So, this concept people are trying to use to define liquefaction potential is one of the direct methods by which you can find out how susceptible the material would be liquefaction ok. Now, let us talk in details about the parameters which influence electrical conductivity of the geomaterials. Again the basic concept here is that the conduction of electricity in geomaterials is mainly through the pores or the pore fluid. In another lecture I will come in I will discuss in details how conduction of current takes place through the geomaterials, but to start with this a good idea to understand that the conduction of electricity in geomaterials is mostly through pores alright. Pores may be filled with water they may be completely filled with air and then the soil would be saturated or unsaturated or a partially saturated soil where you have both the phases air and water. The question is why conductivity is not through the grain to grain because grains are not good conductor of current clear. So, basic the majority of the conduction is through pore fluid. Therefore, electrical conductivity of the soil is influenced by the interactions between the following soil parameters. What are these parameters? The pore continuity. What is meant by pore continuity? Water filled pores that are connected directly with the neighboring pores tend to conduct electricity more rapidly. How do you obtain pore continuity? How do you check the pore continuity? You have to conduct MIP, mercury intrusion porosimetry to see whether the pores are interconnected or not and that is where actually you require pore size distribution, pore connectivity distribution in the materials and that is the reason why you study MIP. So, soils with high clay content have numerous small water filled pores that are quite continuous and usually conduct electricity better than sandy soils. What is the meaning of this? The electrical resistivity of clays would be less or more than sands which will be less sorry conductivity. Conductivity will be more that is right. So, the resistivity will be less conductivity will be more. What is the other reason? Most of the clay particles are charged alright. So, that is the best possible differentiation you can make between the materials whether the soils are more resisting or less resisting depending upon their conductivity or resistivity. Compaction normally increases the pore continuity and hence the soil electrical conductivity. So, well compacted soils will always show resistivity more conduction. Now, this is where the concept of H to H contact or the grain to grain contact comes in the picture. So, for the same situation of the pore fluid and the same type of soil in what way density is going to contribute to the conductivity higher the density the conductivity will be more. The second parameter is water content is basically because of the ionic conductivity. So, more the solution or more the water pore water better will be conductivity sorry. More compaction need. Yeah, you have asked a good question even if there is no water and even if the only hygroscopic moisture is present in the soil that is good enough for ionic conduction clear. Now, because of compaction what is going to happen to the ionic conduction the conductivity due to grain to grain contact is going to get added up alright. So, you think of a situation where the particles are spread apart and it is only the fluid through which the current is passing. So, conductivity is some value there is another situation where that fluid is present whatever may be the amount or the fraction, but there is a grain to grain contact also. So, there is another mechanism which is getting added to the previous mechanism and hence the conductivity increases. So, that means a well compacted soil will show a better conduction of electricity as compared to a loose compacted soil with the same pore fluid. I will discuss in details the models which are normally used for defining the flow of current in porous media in the subsequent years. So, coming back to water content dry soil conductivity is less than the moist soil. So, which one will have more dielectric constant moist soil correct salinity level increase in concentration of electrolytes that is the salts in pore solution will increase the electro conductivity appreciably. So, that is why if you do a net search Google search you will find that there are most of the time people have with EC sensors electrical conductivity sensors. So, many sensors are there which talk about only electrical conductivity of the soil, but they are blind of the cations or the anions which are present in the soil mass. You got this point these sensors will measure only the conductivity. So, because of the presence of a cation or anion the conductivity is definitely going to increase, but quantitatively and qualitatively they cannot tell you which species of cation or anion is present in the soil mass or the geomaterial. So, basic idea is that salinity always increases conductivity. In other words the concentration of electrolytes will always increase conductivity of the solution or the soil mass or the geomaterial or the porous media cation exchange capacity. Well this is very well understood. We have discussed several times mineral soils containing high level of organic matter and or minerals such as monpronite, elite, bermiquelite have a much higher ability to retain positively charged ions such as calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, ammonium and hydrogen then the soils lacking these constituents. So, if this is a case the presence of these ions in the pores would enhance the electrical conductivity in same way that salinity does because these ions will be acting like you know concentration of electrolytes in the pore solution. So, if cation exchange capacity is more conductivity is going to be more correct cation exchange capacity of clays is much more. So, electrical conductivity of clays will be more is this correct is quite coherent, but what about thermal resistivity of the clays it is high. So, what is the meaning of this how electrical resistivity and thermal resistivity are related to each other they are inversely proportional to each other. Temperature as temperature decreases towards the freezing point of water electrical conductivity decreases and below freezing point pores become increasingly insulated from each other and overall electrical conductivity declines rapidly. So, this concept can be utilized for monitoring the gas hydrates or the frozen soils is it not. I see the good conductor of electricity or not sorry as compared to water why excellent it is a bad conductor, but why ionic conductivity is always more in liquid phase as compared to solid phase clear. So, the moment water freezes the ionic conductivity is going to be less and hence ice is an insulator as compared to water. If you add some electrolytes in water it becomes much more conductive is this part clear. So, just by measuring the electrical properties you can differentiate between the state of the water which is present in the pores extend this philosophy a bit. If ice is present in water or in the pores what will happen to direct the constant it will be less or more it will be less clear. So, it becomes insulator that means the storage capacity becomes more. So, you can very easily differentiate between the soils which have free water bound water and the frozen water why sorry storage capacity of water. I am simply talking about resistivity. So, water in free form will always show you higher value of dielectric constant as compared to the water which is not in free form. So, the idea here is that if I am trying to differentiate between the frozen soils and the soils with free water and the bound water. I can put again it on a scale of dielectric constant and I can say that this type of soil happens to be dry soil this type of soil happens to be frozen soil this type of soil has more free water this type of soil has more bound water and so on it is part clear. So, this becomes a very interesting tool to differentiate between different states of the pore solutions and their physical forms. So, a pore solution gaseous form is going to be different than a pore solution in the liquid form based on its dielectric property. So, that is the reason why do you use GPR for finding out the gas reserves what is the reason what is GPR ground penetrating radar what it does it sends the signals and these signals will measure the dielectric constant of the soil mass. So, if the hydrocarbons are present their fingerprint will be a different value as compared to a signal where the water is present as compared to the signal which is for dry soils. So, depending upon the dielectric contrast you can easily pinpoint that which location is going to have more petroleum, more pores, more water, dry lands, arid lands and so on. And that is what actually people are using in satellite imagery I suppose is this correct this concept. So, that is why this has a very big scope in present day science and technology people are trying to study more and more into details the parameters and how do they get influenced because of different phenomena is this ok. So, in short these parameters will help you in differentiating the type of soils the type of pore solutions which are present and their state of physical state gaseous liquid solid and so on.