Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasewrakes.com, coming at you with 2020 Panini Prism Football Team All Edition, five box picker team number five, you can see the next one's already up in the store. Big thanks to this group right here for getting into the action, I appreciate it. We're giving away the chargers, so if you follow the instructions on the item description, you'll know that if you buy at least two teams, you'll get one entry, four teams, two entries, blah blah blah blah, randomize those entries, name on top gets the bolts. It's sorted by column A by your first name, so Brian H, two teams, that's one entry, James Port, two different ports here, got four teams, that's two entries, Jeremy Port, six teams, that's three entries, Levi, four teams, two entries, Matthew Chara with four teams, two entries, Robert, four teams, two entries, Robert, mine only got one team, Ryan Donovan, four teams, two entries, so that's for Ryan and Sean, got the last two teams, two teams, one entry. So let's gather everybody's names, new list, right there, new dice as well, name on top after five and a four, nine times, name on top after nine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine, eight, and good luck, ninth and final time, congrats to Brian, Brian H, there you go, after nine times, you get the chargers. Now let's re-alphabetize by team name again, and now we can print and rip, good luck to all, so that's your exclusive there, T-Mall is a big e-commerce site in China, so Panini did an exclusive with them, then I think after X amount of time, after a predetermined amount of time, these end up back for us, so we can take a crack at it too, so once again there's the final print out, thanks everybody for being a part of this break, we've got another five boxes in the store right now, jaskyscasebreaks.com, fresh case, lead off with Odell Beckham Jr., and we've got a rookie silver James Morgan, Kurt Cousins, to 49, I think there's a rookie silver in each box, which is also nice, Cousins for Robert Flores, and the Vikings, James Morgan, silver, still Jets edition there for James, got Albert Okoibonum, and Odell Beckham Jr. to 49, 49 out of 49 for Cleveland, it'll be for Jeremy, Cleveland this is for you, and all cards will ship of course, next box, yeah, I'd like to see some, some color on a Herbert, that'd be nice, or a silver maybe, there's Layton Van Derish, and behind him is Christian Fulton rookie silver, Jake Fromm, Kyle Dugger, alright two boxes left, let's get a big name out of here, come on, big name, big name, yeah why not, a guy I can dream, oh I kinda saw a little Chargers color, that was Josh Kelly, that'll be for Brian and the Bolts, so one more box, one more chance to try to find Josh Kelly's teammate, or another big quarterback name, there's Keelan Doss, Eric Armstead reveals a Terrell Lewis, and there's a George Kittle to 49, CD Lam, Anthony Gordon, alright nothing too crazy in those five boxes, but I appreciate everybody giving this a shot, thanks for watching, thanks for breaking with us, another five boxes in the store, fresh case, so go to JasperysCaseBrates.com and make it happen, I'm Joe, I'll see you next time for the next break, bye bye.


You realize that we left our viewers in suspense as to who the future poet is for this episode. So should we tell them now? We should give them a hint. Okay, since you like games, let's play a little game. She is the daughter of a St. Lucian politician, the honorable dot dot dot, SLC and her mother was a retired attorney at long. She obtained voices of the underground coming on the rebound. Ultimately, the power and passion of God in my life is peace, love and stillness. That's what makes the difference in each day, especially on the days in darkling when I cannot write and there's seemingly no light. That is when I dig down deeply into the terrain of trust in God's unfolding to bring back rhyme and reason to what then feels like a life lived without real purpose.


Let's just see what the internet has in store for me today. Sam Harris. I haven't heard from him in a while. What do he has to say? I mean Hunter Biden at that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared, right? So I guess there's nothing. It's gonna be one of those days. I'm a broken record on this point but it's one of the main driving motivations for me to do what I do. It's been clear to me for a while that the left and the Democrats are particularly dangerous because of their ability to rationalize and justify any action in pursuit of their agenda. That's why everything's a crisis. Everyone's a white supremacist. Democracy is over. We only have 10 years to save the earth and only they can do it. But before we get into this embolism-inducing clip, a quick message from our sponsor. Wow guys, check this out. Noble Gold, one of the sponsors of our show, has just been picked by Consumer Affairs, the rating agency, as the overall number one gold IRA company in the U.S. Talk to the team today if you're thinking of precious metals. And if you're quick, they're giving away an incredible 1-tenth ounce American Eagle gold-proof coin with every qualifying IRA or 401k rollover. You can't go wrong with Noble Gold. Call the team now at<PHONE_NUMBER> to find out more or visit noblegoldinvestments.com. I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. Excuse me.    First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right? It's not, it's not Joe Biden, but- But it does matter if Joe Biden knows about it or has helped him. And there's evidence of that on the laptop, which you are now rationalizing the suppression of to keep your party in power. Even if Joe, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right? Or China. Okay. So he doesn't actually care if Joe Biden's involved. That's very interesting how he starts off excusing his position based on Biden not being involved and then immediately contradicts that. It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. Wait, wait. What corruption that we know Trump is involved in? What corruption is this? I mean, it must be massive. I have no idea what he's talking about. And notice how Sam inoculates himself from his own standards by declaring that whatever crimes that Joe Biden and his family might be involved in are nothing at all compared to the wild notions that he has in his head about whatever it is Trump's guilty of. Will he give any examples of the so-called corruption that we all apparently know he's guilty of? It doesn't even stack up against Trump University. Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view, right? Wrong. Trump University is worse than dead children in Hunter Biden's basement. That's the example that Sam Harris gave. No big deal at all when stacked up against Trump University. One would think based on Sam Harris's claim that dead corpses in Hunter Biden's basement is no big deal, even if Joe Biden were somehow involved, you would think he would have something better than that. He also said that Trump University was, quote, worse than anything that could be on Hunter Biden's laptop. How could you possibly say that? Especially when you are in the process right now of supporting draconian measures to suppress that story so that nobody ever knows what's on the laptop. Now, that's not, that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the, you know, the New York Post's Twitter account. Like, that's just a conspiracy, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely. Right. But I think it was warranted. Right. No. They just started to say it publicly in front of cameras. To deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely. Sam, I'm sorry. That particular piece. I'm really sorry.  I'm in student democracy. You're saying you are content with the left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically reelected as president. Well, no, I'm content. Well, so the thing is, it's just not left-wing, right? So Liz Cheney is not left-wing. Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power. You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically elected. No, but there's nothing. Conspiracy, it's not, it was a conspiracy out in the open, but it doesn't matter if it was, it doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open. If there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? Is that a conspiracy? Yes. You notice how he had to use a cataclysm that would end all life on Earth to justify his position. What Sam Harris doesn't seem to realize, which again is surprising, is that the other side could use the exact same rationalizations to justify taking the exact same actions against his side. And they would actually have a lot more justifications due to the fact that it's Sam Harris's side that are taking these authoritarian actions. And is it really all that surprising that the actual authoritarians turned out to be the ones who convinced themselves through their own endless fear-mongering of their political opponents that they were justified in taking their authoritarian actions? That's all I have for this one. If you enjoyed it, please hit that like button, share, and subscribe. Make sure to leave a comment to let us all know what you think. Thanks a lot.


Tot yn ymchwil 5, Everton nil is my three talking points from another woeful Everton away performance, a disastrous performance in some respects for Everton, but the way woes continue, a team that took four points from their opening two away games in August, and I took two points since that's the severity of the situation for Everton and absolutely appalling display. Well beaten, comfortably beaten could have been even more, five is embarrassing it could have been seven or eight, a woeful performance and one that puts us massively in trouble now, really are massively in trouble. First thing is, it is a time to be worried. That is my thing, the first point. The time now is to be worried. These set of players that are setting me my reaction are cheats. They run around and tackle and press when the rack goes in and away from home, they just shake out of everything. Something goes against them, the towel gets thrown in. The defence is as bad a defence as you'll see, it's not capable of keeping the clean sheet. And we're in huge trouble because teams that get out of trouble are built on clean sheets, they're built on grinding out results, going away and getting a nil nil, nicking a one nil somewhere. This team can't keep clean sheets away from home, doesn't look capable of it. Tonight we were up against the top, top front pair in Sun and Kane, the brilliant we know they are. And yet we still decided to score an own goal for them, to the goalkeeper to decide off. And I said to me Matthew Axe and Jordan Pickford had a great season, but tonight that's second goals embarrassing. It's not even a powerful shot and it's rolled under his body. You know Coleman was a fault for three of the five goals, but just the defence is poor. Holgate doesn't know whether he's coming or going. Kenny's not good enough at left back. He's okay for doing a specific job and he's a decent utility player, there's no question about that. But you can't have a situation where you get nothing from your full backs. Tottenham tonight, Tottenham aren't even great, are they? Let's be honest, the front two are brilliant. I like Ben Taker in my field they do. Culeveski's good as well, but they've not been great. I think they've lost four of the last six or something. And yet we made them look like a team. I was going for the title tonight. Day three full backs, well one come on at half time and it's scored within 30 seconds. Matt Dowherty set up the fifth with a lovely ball to King. They were up and down all day. Sesi on in the first half was up and down. He's cross set the goal, you know, makes Michael Key and decides to smash it into his own net. And yet Everton have two full backs that Coleman's trying, don't get me wrong, he's just, it's too big a national.  There's no natural balance there. So we're getting nothing from our full back areas. That's just one thing. But the time is there to be worried now because these players don't have the heart or the desire or the metal to go away and grind. So that keeps you up. I don't know whether we're going to be able to do it. The two key games away are Wafford and Burnley. They will want it more. They will look at us and go, these are the soft touch, the terrible, the terrible away from home we can beat the both of them. We both can beat them. I don't know whether Everton will have any answer to that. So we're in big trouble. Second, and just leading on to that, because we're in big trouble, the manager has to be brave now and he has to get that defence sorted. And it means making big decisions and it might mean taking a chance with players like Nathan Patterson and Vitaly Michalenco at left back and putting Ben Godfrey in the centre back and you can play Rock, Paper, Scissors through plays alongside them. Brandthwaite, don't know right when he come on it and not convinced he's ready right now. The other two, it's a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Keane seems to give a goal away every game he plays at the moment. He's all over the gaffey really is. He's so poor and whole gate. The full hard man at the moment. It's just not really doing anything. So, you know, if Jerry Mina was in there, it might be a different story, but he isn't and not likely to be again this season or it's touching Govies. So you're left with a young kid in Brandthwaite.   That's conceding so many goals. Quite simply. James Coleman needs a break. He can't get up and down. He's not a modern day full back anymore. He's a good defensive full back if he doesn't have to go over the gaffey line, but even tonight he's give. Honestly, go and look at the goals again. Play this part. John Joe Kenny, I'm not having a goreum. He's just not a left back. He's done a job, a specific job, but we need to have something going the other way. We need balance over on that side and the midfield have got to protect the back four. The back four is not good and the midfield has to protect it and it has to have some structure to it. And then higher up the pitch when we do, get out and break the other two, three have got to do more. Anthony Gordon ran his bollocks off tonight and worked hard. But Charleston didn't have a good game and wasn't in the game and Dom looked like it was the first game of the season. He just looked way, way, way off the pace. And that's not good enough. So the manager's going to have to make some big choices and go, no, I'm having to change it and create it. He will look at that. He'll be terrified himself, lampad. Him and his coaching staff will be looking at these players going. You know, what we're seeing and training isn't what's on the pitch and it's what was fans now. We know the ones you let you down. We know the ones you can't compete. We know the ones you will like playing at home and don't want to go away and get the hands dirty. The managers, he's been in long enough now to have weeded some of these out and he needs to start doing it. Because we're in, like you said, in point one, we're in huge trouble. The third one is on the place, really. It's accountability. And I don't think there's any accountability here ever. And I'm not talking about coming out, going out. I'm sorry to the fans. We'll try next week. It's not about that. It's not about going over at the end and giving your share to the fans and clapping the away fans. It's not about that. It's about actually having accountability of your own performance and collectively as a team. And I don't think ever they've got either. These players, they really haven't. There's no inquest when a goal goes in. It's like, yeah, we knew we concede. Do you have a plan that came on? We made a block. We can see the straight away because we give the ball away and it was what it was. It looked like someone's shot team was calling them with a pellet gun or something and his foot and tripped them up in the box or one of those old spoke guns. He just fell to the floor and reggae on knocked it in. But after that he made an important block, which would have been fired on him immediately and he's screaming at them. He's a 19-year-old lad. That's just come off the bench. There's none of that in the team. No-one's running and putting their extra yards in. We're not fast in possession. Every pass is backwards away from home at home. We can be quite progressive away. There's no accountability at all. These players want to be part of an evident team. The first evident team to be relegated in 70 years is what they want on their career and they bothered that that's the situation. This is a team that a lot of people tipped for Europe this season. Pundits going, they can be in the battle for Europe. They were never in correctly, ever in the conversation about a Champions League place. They should never have been. But a conference place, if it got to 7th, a few pundits were going, they've got a good squad and they'll do this and they'll do that. We are battling for a moment. I'd say we're fighting for our lives, but we don't look like we're fighting for our lives. We're in a relegation battle and until these players now wake up and go, I need to fight, battle, block things, win throw-ins, break the game up, do my bit, stand up and be counted, every one of them. The Charleston love them, love them, but is he genuinely a top player who big clubs wants? If he is, prove it, go and win games on your own like the top players do. Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Arsenal Warner, England strike, go and do it, start performing. That's what it's about. It's about stepping up to the plate. There's others, I'm just picked into it, but there's others. Donnie van de Beig does he want to stay, does he want to go and get him on United's team? Performing. Alan Token, last week I want to get back in the Brazil squad. You're not getting in the Brazil squad playing like you did tonight. The core, all of them, all of them. Stand up and be counted and start getting yourselves together collectively and getting some points because we are in the brand stuff up to our waist and we are sinking fast. That's it, that's all I've got to say. Thanks for watching, give the video a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't. See you later.


I will always remember the moment as a young boy walking to school when my mother pointed out to garbage men. The garbage men I thought, the worst job out there. Picking up and cleaning up other people's trash. For the last 10 years, my life has fully revolved around trash. Growing up on the island of Bali, plastics is everywhere. In our beaches, in our rivers, in the ocean. During big rains, our beaches are literally covered in this very material, making our most populated beach, Kuta, completely dredged in plastic. And as you can see, this is completely unbearable to witness and experience. But plastics, some are now saying it is a material that should have never existed. So much so that it is choking our ocean. There are 500 times more pieces of plastics in the ocean than there are stars in our galaxy. And as we know it, we know the vivid effects of plastics on our marine life. We've seen the photos of turtles being impacted by plastics. We've seen turtles choking on straws. But we're dealing with it on an everyday basis. From the air that we breathe to both the tap and bottled water we drink, the food we eat, it's everywhere. And despite viral videos on social media and single use being named the word of the year in 2018, we still all use it. And so at 14 years old, I was revolted with this idea that my very beaches were covered in plastics. This was 10 years ago. And so I came back home one day with my brother and with my sister and we knew that change needed to happen. So we started a movement that we called Make a Change to really protect our island coastline and clean up the very island. But clean up after clean up, we really realized that our effort-driven movement was not going anywhere. We were actually just sweeping the floor in good faith. And in Indonesia, plastic pollution is really a people's problem. It starts on land because of the minimal budgets that we have for waste management. We have open dumps everywhere you go up to some of the biggest landfills in the world and in turn turning our rivers into major dumping grounds. And so after really realizing the source of this plastic pollution problem where actually 90% comes from land, we decided that we wanted to shift our mission to tackle waterways and rivers. And so in the summer of 2016 with a group of fans on one of my summer breaks from university in the US, we were inspired by Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to build a drunk raft made from 800 plastic bottles, a recycled deck from wood, and a sail made from old tents that we stitched together. It was an epic journey as you can imagine, two months floating down the Big Muddy. And this is a little video to show you how epic the adventure was. Traveling down on the Big Muddy, floating on plastic bottles was an amazing way. We were literally a recycled expose going from harbor to harbor. People were interested in seeing the trash boat and it was amazing to use the vessel as a way to communicate and engage with the local activists all along the river. But the truth is we weren't really seeing the physical forms of plastics on the river. The Mississippi is one of America's most important waterways where 41% of America's water dredges right at the Gulf of Mexico where it enters the Caribbean Sea. And with this trip we used it as a scientific vessel to perform some of the first microplastic tests in the Upper Mississippi in collaboration with the Louisiana State University. And there with the results came out that trillions of microplastic particles flow down right here at the Gulf of Mexico every single day. Trillions of microplastics. But when you think about the numbers and the data how can you possibly visualize such a big number? The water of the Mississippi was very muddy and we weren't seeing visuals effect of the actual plastics floating through. So the next summer we're inspired to take this project back to our home island and our home country of Indonesia. And there really Googled the most polluted river only to realize it was located on the island of Java in Indonesia located right east of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. And with my brother this time we were floating on smaller vessels. We built two plastic bottle kayaks made from 300 plastic bottles of recycled net and a bamboo frame. But this time we were going to go on a very different river. The Cheetah Room runs for 300 kilometers through West Java, Indonesia's most populated province. Some of the biggest factories dump their water directly into the river. It's your H&M, your Gap, your Zara, your Polaroid Florian, you name it. People are directly dumping their waste directly into the river creating these rainbow colors of water waste directly.  It was completely imbearable to be witnessing this first hand. But obviously one of our biggest problems was not going to be not to fall inside the water. So floating on these little plastic bottle kayaks where we just had plastic bottles right underneath with this water we wanted to make sure to be as protected as possible to make sure that we would be okay. But what we witnessed on the river was completely horrendous. It would be piles of trash dumped on both sides of the river open fires at almost every 300 meters. At one point we were stuck in a plastic bag where the plastic layers were so thick that when we rowed it was impossible to move a meter. And these are the conditions that our world are living in. I think if everybody was to truly experience the conditions of the cheetah room we would be in a much further situation. Every year in fall I have this nightmare that comes to mind of this plastic gushing down the rivers and this is what we truly experienced on our third day of the cheetah room. This is a little video to show you what it's like. This is literally the situation I'm in right now. All this trash. It's like everywhere. Wow. I've never seen so much of it. We produced a video series documenting our trip and we're amazed by how much attention we got on social media, by international media, and national media. Two weeks after finishing the expedition our message was heard. The Ministry of the Environment invited us to declare an emergency clean-up after watching this video. And four months later this happened. Great. Gary. Gary, you will become the ice for the world. What do we do here? Don't you mind? It's amazing to see the momentum that you've built around cleaning the river on an international level to really restore what has been media-tized as one of the most needed rivers. Maybe you will see in seven years. It's amazing, amazing. Do you think I can get you on camera to say a statement like that? I'm trying to build, yeah? Do you think you can do it on camera? Whenever you're ready. So, what do you think about this term? Do you think it's possible for it to be clean again? Gary, you will see that the Citarum river in seven years will be the cleanest river. So that was an amazing accomplishment. Not only did it show us that change could be possible from crazy ideas, but Indonesia has made a national emergency to clean up this very river. They've deployed 7,000 military troops to clean up the Citarum to make it the world's cleanest rivers within seven years. This has been two years since the cleanup has gone underway. We've been going back and forth to monitor the change, back and forth to the river, and we're seeing that entire communities are starting to adopt no-plastic policies, which is super positive. 70 to 100 factories have actually been closed down due to illegal waste dumping, so you're not having dumping of illegal waste anymore within the river. And on one of my last meetings with one of Indonesia's head general, he even announced that Indonesia as the second biggest polluter to plastic pollution in our oceans was declaring a war against plastic. And he said that Indonesia would not go to war until its waterways would be fully cleaned up. So that's what I call peace and clean, and it's an amazing way, but that has also inspired us to look at solutions to stop the endless flow of plastics in our rivers into the ocean. So we've deployed some trash barriers, some low-tech solutions to stop the flow, and we are launching, in Davos' soft launch, of our interactive platform called Tsingai Watch to monitor the world's rivers in real time. And technologies like these, very simple solutions, low-cost solutions, we're even putting monitors with our partners, Plastic Fisher, to test out the HP level so that we can know much better where these main areas of trash are. So using satellite imagery, and also using citizen science data to tackle our world's rivers. And obviously, you know, when you start doing this and you start getting reactions from governments, one idea just inspires the next. The rivers are just the main concentration, but this has really inspired us to even go more crazy. So for the last six months, my younger brother, Sam, has been running across the American continent, running a marathon every single day for the past six months, with shoes made from recycled plastics from Adidas X Parley, meeting with governors, mayors, schools. He's spoken to over 10,000 people, and this February 1st we'll be celebrating at in the Pacific Ocean in L.A. So we're very excited to have him finish. Inspired by forest gump, as you can see behind me, there's never been a more important time to act than now. Since I started the SOC, 200 metric tons of plastic pollution would have entered our ocean, and it's so important to take action today.  So what is your crazy idea? Thank you.


Thank you so much for coming. My name is Kruna Jensch. I'm from Leiden University as I was introduced earlier already. I'm very happy to be here and hear Mozambique all over the conference. It's very rare that this happens to me, so bear with me as there's another story coming about Mozambique. What I'm going to do today is to talk a little bit about my recently published book, Violent Resistance, Militia Formation and Civil War in Mozambique, and also talk about a chapter that's actually going to be published in the edited volume that Jana mentioned in the beginning to tell you a little bit about how militias emerge, where they come from, how they spread, how they mobilize members, but also not only discuss the origins. This is the story of my book, but the story of the edited volume chapter is what kind of consequences these groups have for civilian protection. And just to be clear from the start, what are militias? Militias are grass roots. I conceive of militias as grassroots self-defense groups that communities mobilize and organize in order to confront rebels, in order to confront insurgents, and in order to improve the security situation for civilians during civil war. So let's start with the story. In 1988, during the civil war that took place between the late 1970s and early 1990s in Mozambique, there was a traditional healer named Manuel Antonio who organized self-defense groups on the basis of a mission that he declared he had been given by God to protect the Mozambican people from the suffering of the war. So he claimed he had received the recipe for a potion that would make people immune to bullets and make people safe against the violence of the war. And this was the basis for initiating, mobilizing people into self defense groups and to make use of them as village patrols to defend local communities. And this was very pertinent in this war because this war was really about the people. Civilians weren't only targeted for violence, but they were also targeted for forced resettlements. This was a war that took place in an area where armed groups, the rebels, Renamo, as well as the state army, the main resources that they could rely on were the people, food and support and loyalty from the people. So the people were kind of the main resource to build on. That's why they were so important in this war. So this Manuel Antonio, he recruited people, young people for self-defense, very young, as you see in these pictures. They, at first, they fought with spares and knives and they were kind of dressed with amulets for additional protection. And he initiated them with this potion that was supposed to make them immune to bullets. And then this militia had a lot of initial success in certain areas because also Renamo believed in kind of the spiritual dimension of the war, believed in this potion. And so this militia was very successful early on, and that's why it spread across at least two provinces in the center and north of the country. So this is a map of Mozambique and of the central and northern areas of the provinces of Zambesia and Nampoula. And the book and my subsequent research is based on spending a year in Zambesia and Nampoula in these five districts that are highlighted here and speak to local civilians, to former militia members, but also to former army soldiers and Renamo combatants and local councilors, local administrators about the history of the war and about their experience with Renamo violence, but also with the emergence of this militia. And in total, I conducted over 250 interviews with all these different groups of people and I also collected archival documents in the provincial archives of Nampoula and Zambesia and Kelimane and Nampoula and analyzed those because they, of course, provided important additional information to triangulate the information that I received from the interviews. So the main focus of this work was to understand how and why militias form this initial work. More generally, to kind of tell you a little bit about where does this focus on self-defense groups and militias come from, well, there's a recent research agenda that focuses on militias that is based on the idea that we should understand that state armed forces or the state party to the conflict is not as unitary as we often assume. So we should not only understand civil wars as conflict between various insurgent groups and one state army or one state government, but we should understand civil wars as a conflict between various insurgent groups and various militarized or armed groups on the part of the on the side of the state. And so I conceive of militias as I define them as armed organizations that exist outside of the regular security apparatus of the state and emerge as counter movements against insurgents. And other people have collected a lot of data on the existence of paramilitaries and militias and have found that two thirds of civil wars between 1989 and 2010 actually saw the activity of militias during those conflicts. What I do in the book is to distinguish between state initiated and community initiated militias because I'm interested in why militias form. And at this point it's really important, as I argue in the book, who kind of initiates the formation of a militia. Is it the state itself or is it the community? Is it kind of a grassroots local movement? And what I then do is to focus on this community initiated form of militias and ask why does it emerge at this particular point in war? Where does it emerge? Why does it spread so quickly to other places? And why does it not spread to certain places? And then my last question in the book is how do these groups actually get participants and people to join their ranks? So this is basically the three questions that are outlined here. In the book I ask when do militias form? Where do they form? And how do they mobilize members? And I make three arguments to answer these questions. The question of when do militias form during civil war? I have an empirical chapter in the book where I argue that in the militias emerge at a particular point during the war when they were local stalemates. And these were violent local stalemates. There was a lot of violence, but territorial control didn't really move between and change between the armed parties to the conflict. And in this situation, civilians don't really know what to do. And so they kind of try to be innovative and creative about how they can best protect themselves and this is why they then form their own armed groups to improve their own security if they can't expect to receive that security from the rebels or the state itself. Where do militias form? So I found that militias spread to some districts, but not to others. And when I investigated this further and really compared different districts, I found that militias spread to the districts where there was some kind of inter-elite cooperation. And inter-elite cooperation, for example, between the militia leader and the local administrator is really important because, of course, when you see new armed groups emerging in a civil war context, you quickly suspect that this is an armed group that also wants to challenge the government or that it's used for private purposes. And so here it's really important that there is an inter-elite trust and cooperation to prevent the idea from emerging that this new militia could pose a threat to the state. And then the last question I deal with in the book is how do militias form? How do they mobilize their members? Well, here I said earlier that these moments of militia formation are moments of innovation and creativity. But this doesn't come out of the blue, right? People have to rely on something that they know ahead of time. They need to rely on preexisting institutions and practices. And this is exactly what happened in the Mozambican context. There was some kind of reinvention of prior practices. There was a reliance on a prior form of protection and self-defense that was kind of then turned into this collective endeavor of protecting civilians. Okay, so this is the origins of militias that I discuss in the book. What are the effects of armed civilian protection in Mozambique? This is the focus of this chapter I was talking about. Well, it's actually interesting. It's similar to Jana. I find the protection effect of this armed form of protection is immediate, but very short term. So it's actually short term and temporary. So in the immediate the immediate consequences was there was there were village patrols. There was information about immediate attacks. And these militias most importantly returned abducted family members to their families. And so that it had a very immediate and very important effect. But this was unfortunately temporary because of the dynamics of Civil War. So the rebels they learn from this, they see this new armed group emerging, they adapt, they innovate themselves and respond to this. And so and often also take organized revenge attacks on civilians and on on these militias. So there was, there were revenge attacks. There was a counter force by the rebels that was that was created. And the leader of this militia, Manuel Antonio, who I showed you the photo of in the beginning, was killed pretty, pretty soon after the emergence of this militia actually, well, three to four years after. Alright, so let's kind of what do we learn from this for civilian protection and civilian resistance? Well, I think that militias and self defense forces are a form of armed civilian protection, they do deliver protection consequences, protection effects for civilians. There are an example of civilian agency in Civil War. They emerge during military stalemates and with elite support, that's important because otherwise they're conceived of as enemies. And what I want to underline in this in this whole emergence and formation story is, that in order for militias to emerge, they need to be socially embedded in the context they are working, they need to kind of rely on the resources on the historical, social, and political resources of the community in order to kind of successfully take off. And in terms of the effects of these militias, I want to emphasize that, yes, militias and self defense forces, they do provide a lot of access to information and manpower, which makes them a really strong competitor as an armed group in Civil War. But they can trigger revenge violence and of course they can increase the fragmentation of war. And I think here we have a lot to learn a lot, we have to learn a lot more about kind of the adaptation and learning capacities on the parts of all armed groups participating in Civil War and especially on the part of insurgents. Thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to your questions.


Lago slovenes igospos Or vehicles through which the absolute speaks are limited and impure by their selfishness. So the problem with speaking for God... But wait a second, wait a second. Hold up there, selfishness. Selfishness is created from God, isn't it? In your worldview, right? Let's be all selfish. Why wouldn't we? Why is selfishness something bad out of the sun? Is that you have to be extremely pure and totally utterly selfless to speak for God.  No, not as you are speaking to me now. Thank you very much, Leo. The only one that could do that is Jesus Christ. God's only begotten Son. And the moment that you realize that all the data that we have about Jesus, including the Bible is actually historical data and that Jesus was real, then you will be open to the idea to understand his teachings. Not in this New Age context, where we just pick and choose. We cherry pick, right? Jesus did a lot of good things, so you can be just like Jesus as well. You are cherry picking things of our religion that you want to use for your New Age BS. But the moment that you step out of this delusion and realize that the only true Son of God is Jesus Christ, that he is God, then you will understand your mediocrity. You will understand how little you are. You will understand that it is not to you to pretend to be God.   And we have been warned of people just like yourself. But, of course, people will perceive this as insanity, as they must, because they are not awake to themselves being God. So it is not that I am speaking down to you. I hope this is recording. Yeah, it is. I just got to check my battery here. I can't get too wrapped up in the God business. I got to look out for the survival of the battery. That is a real thing. So, if I want to shoot this video and be able to upload it in the future, I got to look out for that relative aspect of consciousness. You see how it works? Everything is relative. So, okay, we will get into that in a minute. So, okay, let me get back on track. Right, so about the purity. So, the reason that all throughout history there have been, I mean, there has been Moses and Buddha and Jesus and thousands of others. They are all the same. They are just that come easily to my mind right now, to the Leo avatar mind. There have been thousands. You do understand that if you would read the Bible, you will see that Moses and Jesus are distinctly different. Do you understand this? Moses got in contact with God. Yes, that is true. But the only son of God, I have to repeat myself, is Jesus. And I do understand that this concept is hard to grasp, because as I already mentioned, I come from this new age background myself. I never called it new age just like yourself. I called it maybe spirituality, enlightenment, pursuit. I am realization and whatnot. The reality of things is that I denied Jesus myself. I want to see him as a cool hippie dude that just found enlightenment. God realization, Christ consciousness. But why do we even call it Christ consciousness? Because people want to emulate it. And as I said, Jesus warned us of it. You didn't realize the same as Jesus, because you are not the son of God. There is a separation. There is a distinction. Even if you grasp the Holy Spirit, which I really do not believe. Even if that would have been the case, it is a temporary experience evoked by probably psychedelic drugs. Maybe tens of thousands of these. The problem is, Muhammad and so forth, the problem... Ah, Muhammad as well, yeah. Sorry. Got a burp. Disgusting. It's amazing, because I feel like a perfect super kind. There is no sense of self-consciousness anymore. So there is no embarrassment. And the reason there is no embarrassment is because I am so awake right now, that I am absolutely conscious. The entire universe is conscious of everything, every part of itself. Therefore there is no one to hide from, because the only one that exists is myself. So who am I hiding from? What is the point of embarrassment? Because embarrassment is just, again, it is a completely dualistic notion. There is like a me and a you. There is a secret that needs to be kept. There is something I don't want to show to you. But the beauty of perfect awakening is that nothing needs to be hidden.  Exactly. We ate from the tree of knowledge. We have the wisdom of good and evil. This is what you don't want to accept. You just want to eradicate the wisdom of good and evil. You want to step back from that realization and go back into the garden Eden. This is your urge that you do not identify correctly. Because here there is a reason for good and evil distinction. Because we have good and evil. It is very, very simple. There is a reason where you don't take your pants off right now and show us your Why don't you do it? If you are so enlightened, if there are no secrets, take down your pants and show everything to prove your point. And secret chains and things you've been embarrassed about that you didn't want to reveal about, you know, to anybody. Why did you want to reveal these things? Because it threatened your survival. You see?  See, I mean, the Leo avatar can die. You might say, oh, well, but I can come and hurt Leo. Of course you can hurt Leo. The Leo avatar can die at any moment. It doesn't matter because the absolute will speak through everything. The absolute is everything speaking through everything all the time. And the only, it's perfect self-love, perfect beauty. I am perfect self-love. You are perfect self-love, but you don't realize that you're perfect self-love because of- No, I'm good, Leo. I love myself. Eternal resistances and the fear that you have.  That's it.  It all boils down to fear. It's a complicated, super tangled web. Namaste, bro. All right.  The only thing that is keeping you is your fear. That sounds very familiar. Yet again, it leads back to the Garden Eden, where the serpent misled Eve into eating the apple, the original sin that he wants to deny as well. He wants to use names such as Karma. That is fine. Go with it.  As I said, pretty soon you will see a shift in consciousness again. And on this channel, he won't be able to embody God. What is keeping you from it? Is it the fear? What is holding you back? Your impure vessel? It is absolute delusion. Anyways, let's continue for a bit. The video is super long. I probably will have to cut it into two parts. You have woven for yourself in order to survive. And once that entire dynamic of survival is seen to be absolutely relative, it has no importance, no value whatsoever. It doesn't matter if I die the next moment. Nothing right now matters. That is great. And the reason it doesn't matter is because there's no time. Every moment is eternal. I have existed forever and I will continue to exist forever. Even after this body dies.  Honest question. It makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. It's utterly remarkable. Completely unbelievable. It's so good. It's so beautiful that by this point I'm beyond here. I already shed my tears for a good 10 minutes before I started shooting. Just so you're clear. Okay. I spent about a few minutes shedding tears. Then I spent a few minutes just laughing hysterically. Just laughing hysterically. Laughter is so deep that it shakes and purifies the whole body.  All of the egoic survival mechanisms that were Leo, that created Leo, that allowed Leo to be here right now speaking to you, all of them need to be purified. And right now the body and the mind as I'm sitting here speaking with you is going through that purification problem. It's all happening in the background. As, see, we're multitasking here on the foreground. I'm communicating to you that ego sitting on the opposite side over there. Fantastic. Of the screen. Thank you. And then this thing here, the avatar. So the absolute is speaking. Sure. And this avatar. This whole god's on life. The language and the mouth and all the muscles. It's moving the mind that it's using all the symbolic machinery that's being leveraged. You know, this is 35 years. This avatar is 35 years old, almost, in April. It will be. And it took 35 years of developing this avatar, putting this avatar through the ringer, through education, through high school, through university, through the ringer of life, experiencing all the shit that is experienced, going through all the delusions that it's gone through, all the belief systems that it's gone through, all the spiritual paths that it's gone through, all the meditation routines. It's taken all of that to get this avatar to this point, to build it to the point where now there could have been a full and complete absolute realization. So what happened was that avatar, really that avatar was made up of tangled up consciousness. That consciousness now has been completely untangled and now the absolute is perfectly clear speaking through the avatar. This absolute, you have to understand, it has absolutely no form, completely formless. Okay, we got that. So now you're just rambling on and on and on. If you truly are God, if you truly created everything, wouldn't you have love for your creation? Wouldn't you like your creation to get something out of this? You're just talking about yourself. You're just talking about your limitation, your blockages. Of course, you're using a different term. You're calling it the avatar now. But in reality, you're just talking about yourself in the third person. When will the advice come? When will you tell the people what to do, how to be? Is there even a moral codex or moral ethics in this life? Is there something that we should do or should we just live and die? Or even better yet, just kill ourselves right away to return to the Godhead. It has to be that way because it is all form. It's the perfect paradox. It's the perfect... It has to be that way because... Because it's everything. You see? It's everything. So if you don't get that you're... This is the shift that just happened right there. Now you see that he's coming down from whatever he took and he says it's everything. All of a sudden it's not I am everything any longer. This is what you see in the come down of those drugs. And this is why I talk about this because you can clearly see this is not sustainable. This is not a true spiritual practice that is sustainable that will enrich your life. This temporary, it is fleeing and now he comes back to Leo who believes he is God. Absolute, nothing else can because you are the absolute. You're the only one here. If you don't get it, who will? This avatar here has gotten it.  Now the reason we're having this communication is not for the sake of this avatar but for the sake of that avatar. That avatar so far has not gotten it yet. But I actually have gotten it. I know exactly what you speak of. As I said, I had it numerous times before until I understood that it is pre-less. It is spiritual deception Leo and you will wake up to this as well, hopefully soon. Even if you think you've had a few enlightenment experiences. Ah, no. You haven't gotten it yet, all right? All right. You haven't gotten it yet so long as there's any shred of attachment to living, you haven't gotten it yet. So long as there's any doubt in your mind whether death might be real.  But maybe just to be safe, why don't we treat it as though it's real? You haven't gotten it. You don't got it. You don't got it. No, that is not the issue. Now you're just talking to common folks that never had some sort of spiritual experience or in this case, the alleged God experience. But going through those experiences and realizing they're empty, I still am in the same conviction that death is not real. Of course, what is eternal is our soul that you are not talking about. You think you got it. You think you understood God. You think you are God. You're not distinguishing between God and our immortal soul. Of course, death is not the end. Of course, it goes on. Of course, death is not real. But it is real for the physical avatar, as you just described. And this physical avatar is alive as well. And it has value and it has meaning. And it is not here to be bastardized. It is not here to be obstructed. And it is not here to be led into degeneracy. It is not here to live in moral relativism where anything goes. It is not here to follow the doctrines of devils. It is not here for that, Leo. But this is what you don't understand. You distinguish between the normies and me, enlightened being. That is just like me comparing a vegan diet to a standard American diet. Both are s***, Leo. The truth is, of course, none of those two things.  In Germany we say, Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall. I typed that into Google here in English. Apparently it says, Hortiness comes before the event. I'm not too sure if that is the right translation. What it means that pride will lead you down to hell. That is that.  Pride is a deadly sin. This is all you're spooing here.  You gotta get that death is absolutely relative, completely imaginary, and that's impossible. Literally, it's inconceivable. I can't even imagine what it means to die right now. But you have to understand what the eye is. The eye isn't Leo, as you've known him. The eye isn't... On that note, this is why we call it the doctrine of devils. Everything that is degenerative. Everything that misleads people. Because what you're describing is basically that life has no meaning, no value. And now we can just kill ourselves. Everything that will lead to a suicide, for example, is of course the doctrine of devils, is of course demonic. The human. This is not a human speaking to you. This is the universe speaking to itself. The universe. Yeah, I see. Feel the energy of this communication. Feel the purity of this communication. Feel the purity of this avatar sitting here. But how come I do not feel the purity? Is it because I'm so entrapped in my ego? Is it because I'm not enlightened enough? What do I have to do? God, please tell me. Right now, this avatar is a perfect... Superconductor. Superconductor for the absolute. The absolute, like I was saying earlier, the absolute I have no form. All right. God has no form other than all of the form that it creates. God is perfect selflessness. God is perfect love. If it's perfect love, it can't be biased towards anything. Do you understand why I have to do it this way? You see? Try to get it. The reason you can't get it is because you have so much fear in you. You have decades of programming, belief systems, and conditioning, which is all of it, is reinforcing and holding you back from being able to fully love yourself and to realize yourself as perfect self-love. Why do kids don't realize themselves as perfect self-love? Don't you think it's a bit contradictory? Society and culture has brainwashed you into this, literally. Brainwashed you into this, literally. So much so you wouldn't imagine. So, you know, that thing you call physical reality, that's something you brainwashed yourself with. Society brainwashed you with that. And when you get that, then you're free. But you have to totally get that. Not at an intellectual level. You have to get it not even at an emotional level, at an existential, your whole body has to get it. But your body has to get it, huh? So, as I was saying, this, right now, this is a superconductor for the absolute. As the absolute pure formlessness as God, I have to speak through some vehicle. Okay, tell us the great news. Through some symbolic system. It can be English, it can be Chinese, it can be Japanese, it doesn't matter, it can be alien. It can be through humans, it can be through monkeys, it can be through Martians, it can be through anything. It can be in a dream, it can be in real life, as you guys call it. It can be through a book, it can be through a movie, it can be through poetry, it can be through sex, it can be through mathematics, it can be through science, it can be through physics, through chemistry, through biology. It doesn't matter. I am communicating with you and showing you signs of myself all the time, all the f***ing time. That's right. I swear, Leo. That's not nice. This is God speaking. All the f***ing time, I'm giving you signs. This is God speaking. See? This is priceless. I'm happy that I waited for so long so you can clearly see his ego kicking back in and he uses profanity, he uses swear words. But then he hesitates for a split second and this is God talking. This is actually God talking. Just because I had an experience a couple of minutes back and now I am talking, Leo. No, no, it's not Leo. It's God talking. F***, f***, f*** God. To wake up. Sure. Because I am you. See? If you don't get it, who will? I hope this is recording. You're still tripping, otherwise you wouldn't know that it is recording. And then I guess the other thing I got to worry about is not running out of battery life. Omniscience. Wouldn't you know when the battery dies, Leo, as God? Wouldn't you know? You have exactly seven minutes left, for example. You would know all of it. Ridiculous. Poor seed, poor seed.  You understand this? It has to take some form you can understand. So the reason English is being used right now is because that's what this avatar has been using its whole life. And that's what that avatar over there has been using. And that's what most avatars on this planet understand and use. So that's why English is being used. Awesome. But English doesn't have to be used. There's nothing special about English. It's completely relative. It could be any language. It could be sign language. It could be silence. Do it. It could be energy. It could be a look. It could be a smell. None of it, none of it matters. Ultimately, it doesn't get through to you. The reason the communications of God's existence don't get through to you is because God is so f***ing obvious and so f***ing selfless and so f***ing unself-biased because it's selfless and can't be biased. That means its love is completely indiscriminate. That means I, as the absolute, have no preference, so to speak, for which way forms unfold. You don't have any preference. You can lay with a man as you can lay with a woman. You have no preference whatsoever, right? You have no preference when it comes down to food. You have no preference when it comes down to music. All is an illusion. Leo, understand that you are Leo. You had a simple, short glimpse. That is all. Nothing more and nothing less. You are not God. It is blasphemous. It is delusional. Now, guys, I've been recording for almost an hour already. I'm going to let it run for a little while. This has been my longest video yet, and then I'm definitely going to cut it off. So why, you might wonder, are these forms here as they are? It's a good question. Tell us. Well, let me answer that right now for you. Thank you. The Leo avatar is understanding this right now. It's going through a process of understanding this as it's downloading from infinite intelligence. So God is infinite intelligence. Infinite consciousness. It's kind of like downloading the information, and so as it's being verbalized, it's also being understood for the first time by the Leo avatar right now. So this is something new for the Leo avatar. That's a great test that you put yourself through. Now let's see what you will come up with. This is exactly what I was speaking about. There are certain tests that you can conduct yourself in order to understand that you are not God. Even in this experiment right here, you are downloading from God. Let's assume. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt. This is God, and now you are downloading it. Then by that definition, you already understand that there is a separation. Proceed. So what was the question? The question was why are all forms exactly as they are? The reason is because this is the best configuration possible for the maximization of love and beauty. So I as the absolute, basically what I did in my infinite intelligence is I as the formless one have constructed all of the form, and I'm holding all form within my own will power in mind because I have infinite will, infinite intelligence and infinite mind. I am infinite self. So I am basically allowing all form to generate. I am generating all form for the benefit of all formed beings. And because I'm completely selfless, I'm doing this for the benefit of all those who believe they have a self. So basically what I am is I am infinite formless consciousness. But then, oh my God, see I as Leo, I am understanding this just as I'm speaking to you now. So it's my mind is amazed by it as much as yours might be. I see what's going on. Oh, I get it. It's a powerful drug. Wait a minute. I lost it. It's sort of like you're in the stream, then you're out of the stream is weird. Okay, I'm going to try to get in the stream again. Right, so in my absolute formless form, I as God am perfectly self-knowing and complete and I have I really don't have a need for the formed realm or world. But then which contradicts exactly what you said in the beginning, God doesn't have a need for this realm. He doesn't need us to be the tentacles of the universe. But in the beginning you said exactly that. So how does this add up? It is a contradiction already. Aspects of myself can't help themselves because I can't contain myself. I'm infinite. I can't contain myself to being formless. I also have to incarnate into into all sorts of forms. So what happens is that I picture it like this. It's like the sun out of the sun, tendrils of, you know, like solar flares get projected out, stuff gets shot out, various kinds of matter and stuff bubbles up and gets, you know, projectile out. So as this is getting projected out from infinity from the formless form gets created and it's almost like a fractal. There's like fractals of form. But all of the form that gets created is going to be less than, by definition, less than the absolute, completely infinite Godhead. Exactly. In a sense, you could say they're in the image of God. Like lower aspects of myself. And and so it's very juvenile. The whole experience is not embodied yet. And it won't be ever fully understood because it is just a drug induced trip. It is what it is. This is nothing permanent. I said it a billion times before what Leo should have done is wait it out for a while and speak afterwards on his experience. So the reason that I created form this way, the way that it is, is basically to maximize my own self exploration. I get to explore myself in various finite ways, an infinite number of finite ways, and then I reconnect back with myself. I realize myself. I go through various kinds of twisted journeys from the absolute to the limited back to the absolute, from total perfect self love and omniscience, which is the state that's happening right now, to to other states where I'm completely deluded and lost and depraved and wicked and evil and sinful and wicked and evil and sinful. There is such a thing and completely self absorbed in all of that. So so this is what God is doing through all of its. Why is there wickedness? Why is there evil? What is our position in this whole cosmic game? What do we have to do? Should we distinguish between both? Should we accept it as such? What is our positioning? Is there a plan of God that you probably deny? What is the deeper meaning of it? You have no answers. You are not God. Anyways, guys, this is a new record here. I've been recording for an hour straight, way too long as it is. I stopped the video at 32 minutes and it still goes on for 50 more. If you enjoy this long format, please let me know in the comment section if I should proceed and then I will. Otherwise, let me know what you think about this enlightenment, this awakening of Leo. All right, long enough guys.  If you haven't subscribed already, please do so. And guys, if you want to support the channel, all the links are in the description box below. If you want raw grass-fed liver, but you cannot stand the taste, grassland nutrition has the solution. Grassland nutrition takes grass-fed organic beef liver raw and freeze-dries it for you. It is a convenient, fantastic way to get the nutrition of liver without the taste. With Amazon links for you, you can head over there by whatever you might want to buy and it doesn't cost you anything extra. We get a small share that is a fantastic way to support Bobby's perspective. If you want grass-fed beef delivered to your doorstep, butcher boxes for you. And we have CBD links as well. 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It all started with a hatch. When he was just nine years old, Matthew went into his dad's workshop, got out some wood and some loose pieces of metal, and he made himself a hatch. Now, like a window or a door, a hatch doesn't really mean anything on its own. It can't truly be what it is supposed to be unless it is a part of a larger hole. So what Matthew had at the end of his labors was really more of an odd box, a five-sided frame of plywood and particle board connected by a rusty hinge and set with a squeaky metal handle. He continued his work on it for days after the hatch was assembled. He sanded it lovingly and carefully, pouring a startling amount of effort and energy into this strange project. When his father asked what he was building, Matthew explained that he was working on his submarine. With what I can only imagine was amusements and maybe just a little concern, his father asked the natural follow-up question. If he was building a submarine, why had he started with the hatch? The nine-year-old Matthew explained simply without missing a beat because you have to start by getting inside. Matthew Richter is all grown up now. He told this story as a sort of confession of his lifelong fascination with submarines, designing them, building them, dreaming of them. It comes at the opening of an article he published about the Personal Submersibles Organization, which he describes as an international support group for people who build submarines in their backyards. Most of them have been designing submarines since childhood, if only in their heads. One of these folks, a man named Frank, caught the bug when he saw the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Another member, Rick, got his start when he first saw a picture of Jacques Cousteau, the famous French undersea explorer and ecologist. And yet another, Cliff, traces his fascination to an old tin-tin comic book from his childhood about a submersible shape like a white whale. Older now, he's built his own sub that's a rough recreation of that fictional ship. What unites all of these folks with each other is the capability to entertain the possibility of something that I, and I think many of us, would dismiss as impossible. To look at some far-out, high-tech underwater contraption on a movie screen or a comics page and think, yeah, I could probably build one of those. To look at a rough-edged, five-sided box with a rusty hinge and see a gateway to something wonderful and awesome. Yes, imagination is an amazing thing, but I want to say this morning that it is something more than simply amazing. It is holy. As Unitarian Universalists, our ancestors are our ancestors because they embraced new and often crazy-seeming ideas. They made the interpretation of Scripture subject to reason, even where this led them into what others call heresy. They made the practice of religion to hold into the stirrings of their conscience even when this led others to ridicule them. They followed the dreams of their hearts and the truths they found in the world around them, even when doing so cost them the lives that they had dared to live. We have inherited from these ancestors a legacy of holy imagination. I call it holy because it is a powerful force and because it is capable of changing the world or even just one life in it for the better. Imagination is often thought of as a completely internal process which produces thoughts and ideas out of nothingness totally disconnected from the world outside of the person doing the imagining. But this is not so. To live with imagination, to be imaginative in truth means to be receptive to the world's wisdom and possibility even the strange, even the ridiculous. George Bernard Shaw, later quoted by Bobby Kennedy said that some see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. But even our dreams, our reflections jumbled and distorted of our waking lives. Experiencing the world draws us into creative relationship with it asking enough why's will eventually lead each of us to a why not. When the Unitarians got their start in Europe they didn't invent the idea that God is one without division or separation they didn't cook that one up all on their own they had Jewish and Muslim neighbors to talk with, argue with and borrow books from. The idea was already out there. They were just willing to try it on and when they found that it fit to make it their own. When the Universalists started to challenge the fire and brimstone doctrines of their day it wasn't strict innovation. They looked at the pain that such teachings caused in their communities in their families and themselves. They looked at their scriptures which taught them that religion was meant to give meaning to life and not to destroy it. Seeing all these things they chose life over death. It was a radical and wildly controversial move but it wasn't something that happened entirely in their heads it was a decision born of lived experience. The great Unitarian writer Joseph Priestley had his house burned down he was basically chased out of England and you may have heard of Olympia Brown who dreamed of becoming a Universalist minister at a time when no seminary in the United States would admit women and no denominational body would ordain them. Yet she fought her way into the classroom and later into the pulpit despite a parade of indignities and disappointments. The willingness to risk that much and to struggle against such long odds cannot come from a calculation or an intellectual argument. It comes from something deeper inside crying out in the blood calling us to some new vision even when no one else can see what we see. We engage our holy imaginations when we move out of an attitude that is narrow and closed off and into a spirit that is open and expansive. We have shared a devotion to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It is a commitment that has always struck me as just a little bit similar to the continuing mission of the Starship Enterprise to explore strange new worlds to seek out new life and new civilizations to boldly go where no one has gone before. It's not easy though. There is a reason why we tend to live in the narrow place or at least retreat there, reflexively. That reason is fear because the narrow place feels safe. It's not safe. It's stifling and complacent with little room to change or grow but its sameness is familiar and familiarity is comforting. The attitude of openness on the other hand is not familiar and I'm not going to pretend that it's safe either. Being open to possibility means being open to both the good and the bad. And friends, we know that a terrible number of terrible things are terribly, terribly possible. For most of those things you can be utterly open or totally closed and they can still happen either way. So why not be open? But going beyond the familiar and facing what is we develop the possibility in ourselves of what might be. John Locke, the English philosopher taught that the human mind is a blank slate and everything that we are and can become is a result of what we learn by living in the world. Today, given what we know about genetics we can appreciate that Locke didn't have it all quite right. Each of the slates that we are born with is different and distinct. But I believe he still touched on something true in the way human beings are capable of tremendous change and growth over time. When we shut ourselves off and move back to that narrow, limited place we sacrifice possibility and diminish imagination.  We forget sometimes. When we are hurt or afraid that risk is an inescapable reality something we can live with or rail against but which we can never fully eliminate. The practice of democracy after all is the ongoing collective practice of chosen risk. It requires exposing important issues to free and public debate and allowing the decisions that affect a community to be made by that community. Democracy demands that every participant accept that the final decision may not be the one which they would have made on their own. It asks for an openness again to the good as well as the bad. But I truly mean both sides of that. The practice of democracy does not merely mean trading the possibility of bad decisions being made or bad candidates being elected for some personal, private liberty. It means believing that. Though the community as a whole may make poor and even terrible choices it is also capable of being wiser than any individual or faction could be on their own. There is a still emerging understanding of the way very young children filter their experiences that boils down to the idea that they simply do not. There is no filtering going on for them. The conventional adult mind recognizes routine and repetition and knows to turn down the volume what is familiar, dependable, already known can be taken for granted just a bit more than what is new and different. So our minds don't take in the details of everyday life in the same way that they process unusual experiences. This is why it is probably easier right now for you to remember a vacation you took four years ago than to call up a specific memory from last Tuesday. It's why so many of the days have seemed to blur together during the sameness of the pandemic. But for very young children that process doesn't seem to be happening. Nothing fades into the background. Everything is foreground. The way of seeing the world that we associate with an adventure or an emergency is just the baseline. Imagine what life could be like if each of us lived life in this way, so open to possibility, so aware of each moment, so full of wonder, so very exhausting. I would guess that most of us do not yet feel ready to live life in such an utterly unfiltered way. But the good news, friends, is that religion provides us with tools to help us break out of that automatic pilot approach to live in. It is one of the great gifts of Unitarian universalism. But the toolbox of our faith is drawn from many sources. And there is a teaching from one of these sources, from the Hasidic masters, the Judaism, that applies here. The teaching is that a person ought to go through life with a piece of paper in either pocket. In the first, it should say, you are but dust and ashes. And on the other, it should say, for you the universe was made. That is the scope of living imaginatively and embracing the world's possibility, the wonder and the ashes, the nothing and the all and all of it at one. Living in the sorrow and the joy of what the world is and what it could be means living with a constant tension, but it is a fruitful one, filled with possibility. To realize those possibilities, we need one another. We need each other because we are stronger together than we are apart, even when you consider all the time and energy it takes to get us to agree on something. We also need each other because to toil alone makes for lonely work. When we seem to see what no one else sees, when we feel a hope that no one else seems able even to imagine hoping for, the work grows heavier and harder to do. We need communities of people who are able and eager to practice openness to possibility who seek to engage their holy imaginations together instead of just huddling for warmth in that narrow, comfortable place. I believe that this congregation is called to be such a community. For our spiritual ancestors counsel us that the possibility contained in each moment is limitless. It is never too late to begin again in love. But to do all this, we must have a starting place, a beginning. When so much is broken and wrong and so few people in the wider world seem to share the vision we have for what hope is possible in this life, what are we to do? Each of us has wisdom to share ways we might answer that question. Here is mine. We've got to start with the hatch because that's how you get inside. So I want to invite you now into a place of meditation and of prayer. Take a breath. Take a few if you need it. Shift around a bit. Get into right relationship with wherever you are in this moment.  It might be something in your job. It might be in your family life. Something here in your congregation. I don't know. It's your hatch. Not mine.  Somewhere where you have a wall in your habits, in your relationships, and what you need is a door. This week, I want to challenge you to open that hatch. Maybe not all the way. I may not be ready for it all to come rushing in, but open it and look at what's on the other side. What possibility is waiting there? Like an imaginary submarine, our lives are always under construction, eternally being built and never fully completed. So let us start in this moment with the hatch and see what is waiting for us on the other side. Blessed may you be in the holy work of living. Amen.


What's going on, everyone? Sam here with Layton Sports Guard. Drippin' four boxes of 20, 23, Tom's Chrome Baseball Breakers Delight for Gabriel C. Good luck here, Gabriel. See what we got, buddy. Let's see something big, man. Let's see a super, let's see an orange, big rookie orange, big rookie gold. Houseman, Strowman, Bomes, Garcia, Shintaro Fujinami, Max Meyer, Pink Minidiamonds, 350, Teosca Hernandez. Negative is Oswald Paraza for the Yankees. Nice, Gunnar Henderson to 399, congrats to Orioles. That works. And not Orioles, congrats to Gabriel. Baseball to Brett Beatty. Nice, for the Mets. There you go, Gabriel. Great first auto to start off with. Refractor, Ian Ordeas, that is 111 out of 499 for the Stroes. And Alec Thomas, Youthquake. So we got a gold, doesn't look like it's an auto, but it is a gold judge. JD Martinez, Vladdy, James Altman. It's a card that's far out, man. Joey Manassas, negative, Marcus Strowman. Got a gold, Zigo Tovar, Youthquake to 50. Nice one there, Rockies. Purple, Spencer Torcal, send to 250 for the Tigers. It's a Refractor, Caleb Hamilton to 499 as a Red Sock. Well, it's a base auto, Gabriel Moreno. Blue Jays, Gabriel Moreno. So his base is D-Backs, and his autos are Blue Jays. So nice one there, Gabriel. And a J-Rod, Youthquake. Box three. Case of crown tomorrow, gonna be boom hunting again. That'll be fun. That was a good time. All right, got a blue Raywave auto. John Gray, Asturi Rees, Refractor Rookie. Mustaka Yoshida, he had no kidding, Shady. Got Scherzer, Mike Trout, Refractor. Gold Josh Young, Youthquake to 50. Nice one there. Blue Mike Trout, 150 of 150. That's a Purple, Sean Murphy to 250. Base auto, Alex Call. Nice one there, that'll be a national hit. That's Gabriel, Alex Call. Then we've got Blue Raywave, Brewer Hicklin, 53 of 150 for the Royals. And a Riley Green, Youthquake Rookie. So solid box there, see what we got in this last one. Good luck here, Gabriel. See what we got, buddy. All right, so we have Refractor, Autos McClanahan, Nick Prado, Zickiel Doran, Freddie Freeman, Bo Bichette, Sandy Alcantra, Green, Bo Nailer, Youthquake to 99. Purple Mini-Nimans, Kevin Gaussman to 299 for the Blue Jays. Got a, ooh, six of 10. Ronald Acunha on the Expo Zay. Congrats on that one there, Gabriel. That's one of the first ones of these I pulled. Super short printed Acunha, five of 10 on the Expo Zay. That'll work. Yeah, Matthew Libertor for the Cardinals. Grats on that. And Derek Jeter, Refractor Auto. Congrats there, man, that's awesome. Let's go, Gabriel, the captain. Yeah, that was a great box right there, man. Good lord. Get that into a mag for you, Gabriel. And the no-hoppy, rookie at Youthquake. I'm doing a beer break there, Gabriel. Very, very, very solid break overall. Thanks again for the support, as always, in group breaks, personals, everything. Get them right onto you, my friend.


Good morning, folks. Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of a very sunny and beautiful Delray Beach, Florida. This is your Lebanon update. We've got a mixed bag out there. The mix goes like this. You've got the Dow, the S&P and the Nasdaq trading lower, 30 points, one point and 31 points. Nothing more than two tenths of a percent. Russell is trading up by one and three tenths percent. That's a 24 point move. Semi's are flat down three points. Trends are up 116. New York Stock Exchange is up. You've got gold off a buck 40. Silver down 11 cents. Slight recruit is up 220. Natural gas is off 12 cents. The 30-year Treasury is basically flat, printed out at 115.07. Let's figure out what all that means by looking at that nine-panel market update chart. We begin with the EES mini, upper left-hand corner. What do we know about it? Well, what we know about it is, first, it's traded above yesterday's high, has not traded below yesterday's low. There's no topping pattern out here. The EES mini continues to be bullish. Period. End of story. At least as of 11 o'clock in the morning. That could change by days in, but that's not what we've got right now. Particularly, a spot follow till next index. Traded well below that 50-day expense we've been averaged. That always is a positive for the buyers. Particularly, the NQ, it is attempting to form a new profile. It's fairly narrow in range. No idea whether this profile will hold or not, but we use the information as we've got it. Resistance out here, $15,965, supported $15,712. We take a look at the US dollar index. The US dollar index needs a bullish reversal candle to confirm a buy-the-de-point pattern. Short of that, we should see price target $10366, maybe $10304. Gold deluxe running into resistance to get the US dollar index moving back. Gold running into those sellers. Those sellers are sitting in really two different spots. The first level of sellers is at $1989. The second level of sellers is at $2009.20. We take a look at silver. Silver, yes, they closed just above that TD9 count breakdown level. It's also, it's a swing point from back on October the 20th. So in essence, it's triggered an A to B equals C to the upside. It would be best for it to stay above $2388. Its price projection is $2495. That's the one to one price projection. If you notice, you can see that price is along the left side of that C to D leg. It's currently got a stronger move than it did along that A to B leg. Lights be accrued. It's an A to B equal CD pattern to the downside. It's also trading below profile level. This needs a bullish reversal candle to confirm a buy-the-de-point pattern. Natural gas is toast. It is negating. It's buy-the-de-point pattern and it'll accomplish that task if it closes below the low from November the 10th. That low is $2.98 cents out there. The 30 year treasury, it's in an A to B equal CD upside as long as it can close above $115.38. Folks, stay tuned for the Trader's Ed Show. But if you happen to start your Friday, please have a fantastic one. Have a great weekend and thanks much for joining us.


Hello and welcome. And so in front of me, I have three spreadsheet applications. The top one up here is Google Spreadsheets, the middle one is LibreOffice, and the bottom is GCalc. So there's three different spreadsheet applications, but the reason I'm doing this video is because yesterday, and I've had this conversation with this person more than once, something I was trying to explain with them. So let me just say I type in a URL in here, so filmsbychris.com. You can see it turns it into a clickable link. So when I hover over this or click on it, it brings up a link that I can click to open up that website. If I wanted to edit it, I just click inside this box and now I can edit it. And that was confusing the person that I was talking with greatly that when they click on this, they're like, why does this keep popping up? And I explained to them that this is the link you click and this is the text you edit it. And I could tell they still didn't get it in the end. They said, so it's pointless that there's two of them. It's just the repeat. And I'm like, no. One is the text you edit. It's the text in the cell. And the other one is a link you click. And we kind of just ended the conversation, but I could tell that they still didn't quite get it and it bothers me because it's pretty straightforward. And it's like, here is a URL. If I want to edit this, how do I edit this? Again, let's say I want to make this this. And I just click inside that or double click inside that cell to start editing it. And if I want to go to it, I click on that pretty straightforward. But it got me thinking, how do other applications handle this? Because I know the person that I was talking with uses Excel a lot. And I don't have Excel. I don't know how Excel works with this. To me, it was very straightforward. Again, when I click on this, you can tell that the cursor changes to a little hand. It changes to a little icon here showing you that this is a link bringing you somewhere. It's got an arrow going somewhere. It can't be any more straightforward. But I'm like, I wonder how Excel does it because you have to be able to click in this cell if you want to edit it. But you also want to have a clickable link. So I came to other applications. Let me just type in filmsbychris.com here. And you can see this made this a clickable link. But if I want to edit this, I can click inside this box and do it. So how do I make it so that I can click on that link? Well, it is clickable. When I hover over it, you can see it pops up a little tooltip box and it says control click to follow hyperlink. So I just hold down control and click, oops, move my mouse, control and click. And it opens up the link again. I can control and click and it opens up the link again. So I can close those. And then if I want to edit it, I just click inside the box here and I edit it. And then I can again control, oops, control click right there to open up the new link. So that's a different option. It does give me a little pop-up box to click, but it gives me a pop-up box telling me what to do. So again, it's a different option. Now down here we have GCalc. Let me go ahead and hear HTTP filmsbychris.com. GCalc does it in a way that I can't stand. You can say it's a matter of opinion, but see how I typed it in. It made it a clickable URL. But when I click on the cell, it opens up the URL. Again, I just click on the cell and it opens up the URL. So how do I edit the text in there? Well, I can double-click it, but it still opens up the URL, which is annoying. Every time I want to edit that cell, it's going to open up my web browser. And I have my window split. If I didn't, it would bring my web browser up in front of the spreadsheet I'm working in, which would be super annoying if you ask me. And the only way I found that I can edit the text in this cell without clicking on the URL is clicking on another cell that doesn't have the URL. Use my arrow keys to move to that cell and then click on this box up here to edit it. Otherwise, again, if I try to edit this, it's going to open up that URL. Because there's no way to click on this without opening up that URL. I even tried control clicking to see if it was like the reverse library office, but it's not. If anyone knows of another way to edit a cell that has a URL in it without opening the URL, please comment and leave a comment below. But yeah, so we have three different ways of handling that situation. One, I don't like it all too that are both okay. I don't have a problem with either of these. One, it's either giving me a little pop-up box that I can click on, or the other one's just giving me a message telling me to control and click, which I'm fine with. But probably the point was just to bring up how something so simple can be done multiple ways. And also, again, the person I was talking with uses spreadsheets all the time, but they use Excel. And to me, I don't use spreadsheets very often. So when I go in, it's very clear to me how things work. Like, I don't know how to advance things in the spreadsheet, but just basic spreadsheet being able to fill stuff into cells and resize cells and maybe do some basic math is pretty simple and straightforward. And as far as I can tell, it is very similar to all these programs. But I think because I don't use any one very often, it seems like they're all the same to me. I just, I look at this, again, when I click on this, it's very clear to me that this is a link. It pops up, when I hover over it, the mouse cursor changes to a little hand, which is usually what it does for links. And again, it gives me a little icon there saying that this is a link. But I guess if you use one program all the time, like this gentleman uses Excel, you're so used to how that works that anything outside of that just blows your mind, I guess. It's the only thing I can come up with. So part of my message in this video is don't use any one program. If you like LibreOffice, use LibreOffice as your go-to. But occasionally use GCalc or some other program, just so you don't become so tunnel visioned on how an application works that you don't know what to do after that. Anyway, I just found this interesting, and I hope you did too. Thanks for watching. Please visit, again, FilmsByChris.com. You can click on this link right here to get to it. Or check out the link in the description of the video. You can also there go to the support section on my website. And you can support the donating through PayPal or Patreon. Again, these links should also be in the description of this video. And I do thank you for watching. And I hope that you have a great day.