Well, when I first came to the first-ever meeting of the Property and Finance Society, that was four years ago in this very same place, I was really looking forward to it. Not just because I had finally found an economic theory that made sense of Australian economics. Not just because I had finally found a philosophical theory of politics that made sense, that's Ayanako capitalism. Not just because I had found a theory of ethics and morality that finally made sense, the ethics of private property. No, I was looking forward to it mostly because I thought the society would be, for me, a support group. You see, I was not a normal man. I was an investment banker. And it's not easy being an investment banker. Everybody hates you or despises you or both. For example, I am French, so I have a lot of French friends. And you know, a French has been brainwashed by a Marxist man.  And they even said it to me at New Year's Eve parties. You know, happy New Year to you. As Hans mentioned, in my previous career, I was a university professor. And when I announced to my dear professor colleagues that I was leaving to go to Wall Street, they thought I was prostituting my considerable intellectual talents for something as days as money.  Namely, I thought that by coming here, at least I'd find some people who respect my profession. I would be a capitalist hero. Imagine that is the point that I was. I realized that members of the property influence society thought that investment bankers are thieves. As Hans mentioned, elegantly, people who enrich themselves at others' expense without anyone noticing it, which is the title of my talk. At this first meeting, 2006, some brave souls tried to explain to me while I was a thief, but I have to admit I did not understand a single word. I think I did want to understand. It's only after a study at home, coming back to many months of Australian economics that I understood the penny drop that I was a thief and exactly why. So that's why I'm going to explain to you today. Just in case anybody wonders, I'm looking back a little. Maria Rothbard has been very clear about that. Even if you're an eco-capitalist, you can work for the state. I mean, he did himself work for state universities. So it's completely okay as long as you don't do anything evil, like shooting people, torturing them, or collecting taxes. I didn't do any of that, so I'm completely fine. This is a very special kind of thing, thievery, the most elegant kind, because like Osunsu said, the art of war is to conquer the enemy without firing the gun. The art of thievery is to steal without the victim knowing that it's being fleeced. But the sum of this is that the thief himself doesn't know he's stealing, which was my case, I'm sorry. Here we go. I will anchor the presentation on a quote by Jim Rogers, who's a very nice guy, he co-founded the quantum fund, George Soles, retired at age 37, and recently he left with his wife and two daughters to Singapore, because he just didn't believe in the US anymore, so he's apartment in Central Park. And he's often quoted on the world call.com on communities. So his quote, very famous, you're repeated it on TV many times. You don't see any 29 year old cotton farmers driving around in Maserati, but you do see a lot of 29 year old on Wall Street driving around in Maserati. This is not the world, the way the world is supposed to work. This is a Maserati. In order to figure out what's going on here with Jim Rogers' quote, we need to have a model of the world, or more specifically of the economy. Another level of the economy is that the market is a social network. Social networks are all the rage nowadays. Facebook, social network, Myspace, I think you can show them on LinkedIn now, so really everybody's on it. The internet is just a big social network also, because each web page links to only a few of all the possible pages in the world. And those few links give a certain topology to the internet, which is exploited by Google and PageRank, but similar in social network, that is the market, because there are so many butchers, only by the meat from who was the same one or two butchers and so forth. So in this social network, every arrow represents a relationship between a buyer and a seller, and you see that not everybody buys and sells from everybody. So this is, I think, a realistic model. Well, only 26 people, because I ran out of letters, and I took the arrows more or less randomly, but that would be enough to illustrate the purpose today. There's a folk theorem about social networks, which is a six degrees of separation theorem. It says that anybody in the world, like a gondolier in Venice, is related to anybody else, president of the United States, through six degrees, they know somebody who knows somebody who knows that person. It's not really proven, but it seems to hold true with most social networks. And they even made a movie out of it. So we're gonna pick somebody at random in this social network, which is the economy, like Mr. B, for example. We're gonna look at his social network. He buys from C, GM, and the people who are in red. So they are first degree of separation from Mr. B. There is first circle. In turn, the people in red, they buy other goods and services from the people in orange, B, L, R, G, and D. So these are the second degree from Mr. B. They're twice removed, second degree of separation. And so forth, you can give different colors to all the circles, and at the end, I designed a network so they'd be exactly six degrees. So the people invited to V and Z are the furthest removed from Mr. B through economic transactions. They don't trade directly. They are quite far, they're six degrees apart from each other. You can see the whole network now with all the colors. It is useful to represent the economy as a series of concentric circles around Mr. B. Remember C, GM in red, the first circle, the inner circle, orange, and so forth. V and Z in the outer circle of the economy furthest removed from Mr. B. Where does this lead us? We can take this model for a spin and inject money into it. Mr. B, then, will be the one who injects money. He creates money out of thin air, so Mr. B is B for Ben, you know. When he does so, he doesn't. Just sort of give the money away to people. Even to his first circle. He can't do that because that would be conspicuous. He'd print the money, give it to his friends, that would be conspicuous, and that would qualify as stealing without anybody else's money, because everybody would notice that. So when he does, he takes this newly printed money and he buys something with it. That looks okay, I'll be buying myself things all the time and Mr. B goes shopping. So who is in first circle relative to Mr. B? Well, first it was shopping for labor from macroeconomists and monetary economists. Most monetary economists actually work for the Fed or have taken money from the Fed in the past, so that's what he does. He also buys treasury bonds and he buys toxic debt produced by Wall Street. You can see the balance sheet of the Fed has a blue, sort of, at the bottom, treasury bonds and everything else is toxic debt produced by Wall Street. Don't see any economists in the balance sheet but they're in the income statement. So that's the first circle, and in the term of the second circle, these people turn around and Fed economists would not actually talk about this in the future, whatever. Old people service because they paid out of treasury money in the second circle. They set up a labor to the state and 29-year-old Muslim bankers, who are all the friends of D. Rogers, they're also in the second circle because they are selling their labor to investment banks. We're now going to go through all the circles and third circle, there's a Maserati dealer. Maserati to the second circle in the Muslim banker. And so fourth, sixth circle, who's in the sixth circle? The rest of us. The rest of us, yes. So that's a 29-year-old Muslim banker. D. Rogers, all the friends. And the rest of us, they're breadwinners, normal people, to summarize the main street. Now, assume Mr. B doubles the quantity of money while it's going to happen. It's not just an assumption because this is what happened to the quantity of money since 1917, obviously he doubled it at the end, but even before that, it was always sort of increasing. I know the feds put in theory, brain money out, but cumulatively, it's pretty clear that it's only going up. So then what's going to happen in the economy when he does that? The first step is that he's going to turn around and buy things from his first circle. That means that the prices of goods and services produced by the first circle will go up. There'll be more demand.  That means the people who are in the first circle will have more money because they have more demand for their goods. They will turn around and buy stuff with it, real stuff that some of them will consume. And because of the structure of the economy, they'll back from the second circle. So they're better off. They have more money, they buy stuff, they consume it, they're happy. That's the first step. Then you see we've done something with the second circle. We've put more of their stuff, so there's going to be a trickle-down effect here. Surely the price of goods and services produced by the second circle will go up, not directly because of them, but indirectly through the first circle. They'll have more money and they can buy more stuff from the third circle, but there is a budget. What they can't do is they can't buy anything from the first circle anymore because Ben Bernanke has outbid them. Everything's first circle is really, the price went up too fast, too high. They can't compete. There'll be more money, but only by buying stuff in the third circle, which was priced at Avon-Gonop yet, can they consume something.  They're better off in one way, but they're worse off because they can't buy anything from the first circle. We'll see where this is going. Now we touched the third circle, same thing. And once again, they're better off because they can buy more stuff from the fourth, but less worse off because they can buy less stuff from the first and second because prices are better before they can see the money. So fourth, fifth circle. Right, go to the sixth circle. So eventually, if the money go trickle-down to them, prices will go up of the goods produced in the sixth circle. They'll have more money, more dollars, more digits, if you wish. But they can't afford anything with it. They can't buy anything from the first, second, or fifth circle. They've been surprised out of all this consumption that they used to do. And they can't turn around to buy stuff in the seventh circle because there's no such thing.  That's a theory. And we can summarize that by saying that creating money out of thin air just transfers the wealth from the outer circles of the economy to the inner circles, from main streets to wall streets. Graphically, you can see the wealth flowing from the outskirts to the center.   So then we can answer Jim Rogers and explain to him why he saw what he saw. 29-year-old investment bankers, the Maserati goes out among the first ones to lay their hands on the newly created money. Whereas the 29-year-old cotton farmers are among the last to lay their hands on the newly created money. And that's why they do not drive Maserati's. Now, that's something surprising to this. It's an intrinsic feature of the modern economy. It's not an abuse of the system. It has to be like this, because as long as money gets created, it has to be created somewhere. And whoever is standing close by will get first debt to be better off. There's no other way to do this. As long as we give somebody the right to create too much out of thin air. Obviously, I did not come up with this. Richard Cantillon did. He lived from 1618 to 1734. So it's called the Cantillon Effect. He has a Spanish name, Cantillon. But he was born and raised in Ireland and made his fortune in France, speculating on John Lowell's bubble, which was the real first big bubble of paper money. And he saw it, he lived in it, he made money with it, he understood it, and then he wrote the book. This book. Everything here is false. It's not translated from the English, because at the time he was worried that he would throw to jail, so they just pretended that that was translated from the English, but it wasn't. And Fletcher, Giles, and Wolverine, they don't exist, they let it just don't exist. So at the time he had to go play a few tricks to get published. This is what he said in his book. He didn't talk about paper money, he said, I suppose gold money is created out of, not out of tin air, but out of the ground, from gold mine. So whoever is hovering around this gold mine, the owners of the mine, the adventurers, the explorers, the smelters, the refiners, all the workers, they'll be bare off because they're the first ones to lay their hand on the newly minted gold. They'll be accustomed to better cloth, finer linen, better furnished houses. The share of the other inhabitants who are further removed from the creation of gold money from the gold mine, well, they have less share of all the good things in life, less meat, less wine, less wool. Right there, exactly what I said before, the outskirts get really cut. That was how mainstream economics was done in this time. It stayed like this for a long time, we can actually understand this sentence. Now, this paper presented it at some universities, I've written it up for publication in a mainstream economics journal, and this way it looks like it. If we vectorize this expression and multiply both sides from the left of the matrix A we obtain beta minus one a m equals m a one plus a p, where one denotes conformable vector of ones. So you can continue like this for many pages, like here we have the square root of minus one, it was actually like this, and this, and this. Exactly the same paper as our journal did, but I had to do a few fancy tricks to get it publishable. So, the system only works because some people are cheerleading for it. And who are these cheerleaders? Well, there's the Machlifrinists, they say, we need to keep the system going, otherwise there'll be no growth. The government says, well, we need to keep the system going, otherwise there'll be a rot in the street. And the investment banks say the same thing, they say, oh, we need to keep the system going, otherwise there'll be a recession. Funnily enough, they are the ones who leave in the first circle. They operate on television, one after the other, they say, well, it was a good system. How do they pacify the average voter on the outskirts who gets hurt? They have obfuscation. Nobody actually understands any of this. But more than that, they have the old scapegoats technique, where they point their finger at the scapegoat. And who is that? That's Alfran, the 29-year-old investment banker driving Maserati. He's not really the worst defender in the world. I mean, I think the state benefits more from the system. And the economy makes a profession also. But you know, it's an investment banker. So, is investment banking immoral? Well, it depends. If you're willing to end the Fed, it's wrong to also look. If you're willing to denounce fractional reserve banking as a product, if you are willing to repeal legal tender laws and enact the separation of money and state, like church's state has been separated, then yes, you have the right to participate in the investment bank. So that's really you, basically. Everybody else has to shut up, okay? In front of his beloved mobile team, it is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow.


Welcome to NTN Nightly, I am General Norvel. This edition stops stories. Swipping amendments have been announced to national protocols as the nation battles increasing cases of COVID-19. Government increases the stock of ventilators to ensure comprehensive management of critical COVID-19 patients. And a close look at flood mitigation measures being undertaken by government agencies. Swipping amendments have been announced to the COVID-19 prevention and control regulations as the nation confronts increasing cases of COVID-19 in the community. During a live update to the nation Thursday 20th January 2021, Chief Medical Officer Dr Sharon Belmar George explained that based on data coming out of the contact tracing process, the spike in cases is due in part to mass gatherings held over the holiday season, including house parties lack of physical distancing during the period 21st December 2020 to 11th January 2021. During this time, health officials had been monitoring a total of 165 primary contacts of cases. However, from the 12th of January the Ministry of Health noted a rapid escalation in transmission. The number of individuals being monitored as of the 20th of January 2021 stands at 270. The numbers that we also noted during that period of December, January, apart from the tracing that I indicated, we also have been monitoring and regulating our COVID-19 approved accommodation sites to ensure maintenance of the required standards. Some of the numbers that we note in the spike were in relation to some of the, one of the COVID approved accommodation sites, which during the period November 23rd we had noted 60 positive cases recorded from there and this has since led to urgent measures being implemented to contain and manage the outbreak, with public health being the main priority for us. Dr Belmar George explained that the country remains at a critical point. She noted that all risks must be identified and addressed to improve the country's situation going forward. We need to look at all of the risks, we need to address all of the risks because all of them contribute to continued community transmission and how we move forward to the rest of January and February. The risk at this point remains the high risk in the international tourism markets, the illegal entry of persons from countries of high risk who come into communities, the non-adherence of citizens to home quarantine, the non-adherence of visitors to hotel protocols, the reduced use and poor use of face masks in public places, the increased mass crowd events that continue to occur across the island, the crowding of our public buses without the use of a mask. Between the period 11th March 2020 to the 20th January 2021, the Ministry of Health and Wellness has confirmed a total of 713 COVID-19 cases. 418 recoveries have been recorded with 287 cases remaining active. The country has also confirmed 8 COVID-19 related deaths. Grozilia counts for the highest incidence rate of infection. A total of 22,760 tests have been conducted to date. A look now at the new protocols. 9 adjustments have been made to the St Lucia's COVID-19 protocols for the next 10 days to reduce the spiralling rates of COVID-19 infections on Ireland. Effective 6pm Friday January 2021, only the following business and commercial activities are allowed to open. There are gas stations, supermarkets, financial services, inclusive of insurance, all with a blended approach. Restaurants take out service only, manufacturing, exports, hardware stores, public transportation, vendors on rotation, agricultural sector, call centres, hotels for international tourists, doctors' offices, diagnostic and lab services, other health support services, pharmacies, law offices with a blended approach, utility companies, media services and customs brokerage firms. Except hotels, all other listed enterprises are to seize operations and dismiss staff by 9pm daily. Separate provisions apply for essential government services, construction operations, manufacturing operations, call centres, hardware, banks and port facilities. These businesses must institute work-from-home regimes where applicable and a blended service operations approach were possible. Additionally, where possible, there should be a complete move to staff and board meetings being held virtually. Restaurants and other food vendors are to restrict their services to take away only as dining services are strictly prohibited. The sale of alcohol has been suspended at supermarkets, minimarts, gas stations, restaurants and bars. Liquor licenses have been suspended effective immediately, Wednesday the 20th of January 2021. So it means as of today, we don't anticipate there to be a sale of any alcohol beverages at the various locations where we have indicated. Additionally, public consumption of alcohol is also prohibited, particularly as a feature in small social gatherings. Social gatherings are now strictly prohibited in both public and private settings. What we have recognized is that there has been a lot of social activity, despite the protocols, despite the plea. We have heard that even people in quarantine, they have had parties returning nationals. There was one famous party over Christmas at a house in Capistate. We were told there were over 100 individuals who were at in attendance of that party. And so what we want to do is to remove the incentive. We all go to these parties and alcohol consumption is at the center of these social gatherings. Special accommodations have been made for religious services. Such institutions may operate using a blended approach. Physical service is limited to 25 people, inclusive of religious officials. Religious rites, including christings, weddings and funerals, are limited to 10 people. In education, all schools are to be closed and exclusively operational via multimedia platforms and all non-contact and contact spotting activities are prohibited. Special permissions are granted to training athletes and one-on-one personal training. The amended national COVID-19 protocols take effect 6pm Friday 22nd January 2021 and run for 10 days except legalized and suspensions which take immediate effect and will remain for 21 days. As the protocols come into effect Friday 22nd January 2021, the overall hope is that a limited movement amongst nationals and across sectors would result in a decline in the transmission rate. With active cases nearing the 300 mark, the Ministry of Health has implemented a management system in order to avoid overwhelming the medical facilities. Chief Medical Officer Dr Sharon Belmar George says individuals who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms are allowed to isolate at home. Persons who have moderate or don't have the conditions at home for isolation, we keep those within the hospital setting. So the patients that we have at the respiratory hospital, the majority of them do not actually need hospital care. They're there for isolation because they don't have safe isolation conditions at home. We're also using some guest houses and inns to house some of those positive patients. In terms of our capacity, we are not at a breaking point. We only have one critical person in care at this point. Our recoveries so far have been 418. Government has also increased the stock of ventilators with 24 new ventilators installed along with other oxygen machines. Dr Belmar George says given that 5% of COVID-19 cases require critical care, St. Lucia is capable of meeting that demand. That would be 15 people based on a number of active cases who at this point based on the statistics, which is less than the number of ventilators. The clinical team, they're monitoring the situation in terms of setup. We always ensure that we have extra ventilators prepared just in case. And this is one of the things we are hoping later this week to have a press conference indicating the measures that have been put in place by the health sector to manage the increased cases. And in this press conference we'll give you details from every aspect of management and one of them is the respiratory hospital. Dr Sharon Belmar George there. Meantime Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Sharsney says he, nor the Cabinet of Ministers, want a situation where the island's medical facilities are overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. It is for that reason action is being taken with stricter protocols being instituted. It was sufficient to watch it on TV in Italy and in New York. We don't need to learn that example for ourselves. That's horrible. And I can say to you that that's what drives our decisions. That's what's in our conscience every day when we make decisions. But at the same time we recognize that there are livelihoods, that the state does not have the resources like other countries that just print money. In our case we have to borrow because globally the economy contracted and there was a significant shortfall in revenues from the state. But at the same time the state has an obligation to make sure that members of our society cannot take care of themselves that we're in a position to help them. And that's why the income support programs, the social stabilization programs, the feeding programs that we've done and in many cases still continue were so important. But when the opportunity arises that we can allow the economy to grow and to recover some of that revenue, not for the state alone. Individuals being able to get a salary and to go home and to take care of their own kids. To give some hope in a period which has been consumed with anxiety. Honorable Shasne however says while the new protocols are in place for 10 days in the first instance, the nation cannot remain closed for prolonged periods or indefinitely. Therefore it is critical to find the balance in coexisting with COVID-19. Keeping the ports open, shipping and airports was critical. Solutions who wanted to return home to help their loved ones, to come home for funerals, to come home for any other forms of celebration, to take care of their own assets on island. Solutions themselves who need to go abroad for medical reasons or need to continue their business and to be able to travel abroad. That's a vital lifeline that we had to keep open. We understood that keeping hotels open was a direct way of making that happen. And keeping hotels open was also a way of making sure of the 12,000 people that lost their job that we can get some of them back to work. We did it knowing that there was a risk. There's risk every day you're leaving your home. But we have to. We must. We're mindful of our children's education. Why? Because we can't take decisions every day in isolation of the future. The prime minister noted that the country has a crisis at hand, albeit small. However, if not managed by all government health authorities, public and private sector stakeholders, and most importantly the public, there is a potential for catastrophe. This is NTIA Knightly. Stay with us. When we come back, we switch focus with a look at flood mitigation measures being undertaken by government agencies. In an effort to ensure patient and first responder safety, the St. Lucia Fire Service has reviewed its patient transfer procedures, especially for patients with respiratory distress. Face masks will be provided. At no time during transportation should the face mask be removed. Please be patient and cooperative during this time to ensure you receive the best possible care while keeping our first responders safe. Welcome back. The Water Resource Management Agency continues efforts to enhance the island's capacity in flood resilience. Anissa Antwan tells us more. Three automatic flood warning stations have been installed at strategic points in Union, PI, and Magway Toot. The newly procured equipment forms part of an initiative of the pilot program for climate resilience in partnership with the University of the West Indies and Caribbean Institute for Metrology and Hydrology to reduce property damage and the disruption of commerce and human activities. Miguel Montut is the water resource specialist at the Water Resource Management Agency, WRMA. There are certain areas in St. Lucia, low-lying areas which flood easily as a result of high intensity rainfall, flash floods are experienced, and some of our structures, for instance bridges, are also vulnerable. So this station will allow us to actually assess the relationship between rainfall and river flows so that we could actually make these assessments for engineering designs and would also feed into early warning systems in collaboration with NEMO. Montut explains that in the event of an emergency, the real-time data received from the stations will be relayed to the National Emergency Management Organization, NEMO, to enable a faster, more efficient and predictable response. Basically when the flows, the various thresholds are reached, the information will be communicated to NEMO and the determination will be made based on ground truthing, truthing on the ground, and coordination with various local partners because we need also to validate the flow levels to determine whether flooding is imminent or not. So this whole mechanism is coordinated by NEMO. So it's a combination of getting that real-time data and ground truthing with the various community partners. The three solar-powered automatic flood stations are estimated at US$30,000. From the communications unit at the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisia Antoine reporting. Meanwhile, the Disaster of Vulnerability Reduction project has been engaged in several initiatives aimed at raising the protection levels of the country from natural disasters including floods. Jesse Leos has an in-depth look at intervention measures implemented in vulnerable communities. Flooding in certain parts of St. Lucia is seasonal and perennial. Pastries, denry, ancillary, marsha and bexaw are all flood-prone areas. Every time the river gets polluted, endless gardens and things, especially in this time, rain time, I tell you, all in the yard there, water has been over the bridge, even that bridge we're standing on right now. Country Village is a community off the Bexaw Highway with 100 residents. They are scarred by Mother Nature's annual assaults with the Bexaw River and the lack of proper drainage exacerbating the problem. The water was so high, it was up to that meter board right there. You can take a boat and ride through the flat on it. The little houses was covered. We cannot leave our home and go through the main road. They had flooded everywhere.  They have water right up to there. You see that boy house? Right by the window, those flood. All these people here, it was taking a little shelter. Three of the main ways to reduce flooding are, one, create flood plains. Two, improve community drainage using culverts and concrete drains, engineering to handle the beyond torrential downpour. And three, disilting of rivers. The Marsha River threatens residents annually, but through the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project DVRP intervention, Marsha residents can breathe a sigh of relief. Currently, we are disilting the part of the Marsha River, the main river, and between Marsha to Wavin 212. Typically, without it being disiltered, it would have so much debris coming down throughout the lifespan of the year that it was not disiltered.  And for us to be able to prevent flooding and blocking off the rivers and going over the bridges and stuff like that, the rivers have to be disiltered. The disilting of the Marsha and Mark rivers was funded by the DVRP. But when rivers threaten homes in low-lying areas, ingenuity must be employed to protect property. You had some flooding and embankment erosion and persons houses were being threatened. So you find when the river is coming down, it would erode this embankment here and then jump the embankment and flood out these two houses and houses lower down. Because if you notice, the person had to end up putting an elevated wall to the front of their property and also their staircase to get away from the flooding. The embankment was a lot further out and over the years it has been eroded. So what we came in to do was to line the embankment with some boulders to create a bit of a hard protection area so that the water would not erode that embankment anymore and more or less control the flow going back out. The Mark River snakes through the Bexaw community. Every year several houses along its banks are flooded. Over four million dollars was invested into flood mitigation works in this highly susceptible area. This culvert crossing was taken water from the entire San Diffay shore perridge and quite a bit of water comes off that catchment. And as a result of that, this area was constantly flooded out especially the homes lining the drain going back to the river. So having been aware of that, we came in and we did a complete drainage system for this area where we installed a fully concrete lined drain from this culvert crossing all the way back to the main Bexaw River. Flooding can never be absolutely solved and over the years millions of dollars have been spent in the Bexaw region in this pursuit. With the help of DVRP funding, a new drainage system has been designed to accommodate a flood of 250 millimeters to 500 millimeters of water per hour. To put that into perspective, typical rainfall intensified during Tropical Storm Debbie was 100 to 150 millimeters per hour. Basically all we've done is to look at the catchment size, look at the rainfall intensities for this area, factor in what it would be for climate change and then from that we know or we can predict what volume of water can come down in this area and then based upon that we designed the drainage channel to suit. Over the three month period, a total of 287 meters of drains were constructed in Country Village. When we were in the community, we built a drain. So I was part of the work and I was still in the drain. Most of the workers came from the community persons who are unemployed due to COVID now most of us are out of jobs. So it has helped a lot. Well I was given a small job to do one of the drains in the area. It really helped given the fact that I'm unemployed and it helped sustain my family for a little while. On November 7th of 2020, St. Lucia was drenched in 8.5 millimeters of rainfall within a 12 hour period and predictably swollen rivers caused flooding in many parts of the island especially in Baxong. The Country Village community however was not affected. And we see a good improvement in it. It wasn't flood at all. So you can see the work was very good. It didn't really flood here again. It just came up to us and went back down because of the construction of the drains. It was a little better. But since the village drain, there is no flood here. Nothing flooded here as well. No flood here. We had a couple of rains and other places flooded. But the wrong here was no flood here. The main objective of the Disaster Vulnerability Investment Project is to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change impacts in St. Lucia through investments in resilient infrastructure and improved hazard data collection and monitoring systems. The DVRP is funded by the World Bank, International Development Association IDA, Pilot Program for Climate Resilience, Strategic Climate Fund and the Government of St. Lucia. The DVRP has committed to funding flood mitigation works in Denry South, Ansleray, Miku and Sufra. Well, I'd like to say a big thank you to them. They stepped in and helped us out because before that, we really wondered if we would have gotten help. So I would like to say a big thank you and you have done a great job. For the Government Information Service I am, Jesse Leons reporting. That brings us to the end of NTN Nightly. Join us next time at 7 p.m. with a repeat at 7 p.m. You can also catch up with us anytime on the St. Lucia Government Facebook page or YouTube channel. I am General Norvel.


Okay friends you watch behind the scenes divine intimacy radio. We're talking about the interior life today Q&A from our listening audience and Before we jump into the show make sure you check out etch a homo for Lent and That's you can find that a spiritual direction comm events 50 Catholic speakers by the Josh Johnson. Oh, that was just one other Boniface Hicks That's like to Dan Burke. No, that's weak Yeah, it's their amazing crew If you want to be blessed and it's free that doesn't mean low quality and it doesn't mean free to us But we're trying to help the world become holy. So go check it out spiritualdirection.com events you can also find all the pilgrimages we do and the other retreats and all that good stuff So should we start the show? Yes, and your market check go. This is Dan Stephanie Burke Welcome to divine intimacy radio your radio haven abreast your hermitage of the heart your monastery of the mind We lift our hearts and minds to heaven To draw on the wisdom of the saints to help us to navigate the two volts of life and with joy and Peace possible. Yes. It's actually supposed to be normal. Yes for the Christian life. So First before we jump in the show, I just want to say thanks to you to be 10 Wtm is just an awesome organization and Really when you look at all the jump going on in the church, especially I'll just say it in Germany You know, I I think that mother Angelica a WTN Bishop Fulton sheen that crew Really kept the church in America from going a lot worse Places than it could have so I'm so grateful for the work of EWTN and all their news Efforts and everything to do and that they let us do the show. Yeah, very good. I'd be praised. I'd be praised All right. So what is spiritual direction sound like? It reminds me of that famous song. What did the fox say? Don't oh, no, no, no, no, we're not going there But what is it sound? It just sounds like it's an animal and it makes a noise But I guess that's not what they're really asking It's so they go on my apologies to everyone who knows that song and it's now playing in their head I don't even know the song. So it seems like spiritual directors can only lead with questions That is not the case. You want to answer that? No, however as Well, first of all, I think there's there's needs to be clarity in that the true director in This relationship of director and directee There is a third person and that's the bless the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is the true director Yeah, so the spiritual director is The discerner and is helping to discern with the directee of how the whole Holy Spirit's moving Listening for movements. Yeah, listening for inspirations Listening for patterns in the person's spiritual life their walk in their prayer life all of this thing and also looking to to To recognize what is off? So that involves a lot of stuff that you know, it involves questions. It involves feedback. It involves clarity and Teaching and so there's a lot going on there When I give direction, I'm utilizing all of that So It's not just asking questions. It's I would say it's prayer and discernment and it's very core Yeah, and I think sometimes you ask questions of the directee and Sometimes as you observe patterns, you'll talk with them about that and propose, you know, is this where the Lord's leading? I guess that's a question, but it's not all just Questions in fact, it's it's modern spiritual directions. Best in the United States has been heavily influenced by a psychologist named Carl Rogers who proposed that the only way that you should have Someone in therapy come to conclusions is when they do it on their own and that's not really a perfect model for spiritual direction There's some good things about it the philosophy but In spiritual direction, you know, let's say somebody's in Mortal sin and they're not aware of it. It's okay for the director to say This behavior will send you to hell and yet you really should stop, you know Directions are usually a lot more nuanced than that but I think in particular this is important because there was a time in history When you know the catechesis that that individuals were receiving was better the even through homilies and you know so on and so forth, right? So Nowadays when our life is so Modernized it's so spread out. It's so compartmentalized Where people maybe are just going to mass on Sunday and their catechesis has been very poor You have to be able to fill in those gaps with Assigning spiritual direction spiritual reading with assigning church documents, maybe The catechism, you know books on prayer and the interior life and all of that So you cannot just ask questions Even though the Holy Spirit is going to work and he's going to do what he wants to do I think we are called to Enter into that Relationship in a deeper way to help people find and fill in the gaps in their own catechesis that they may have experienced So there's a lot going on in direction outside of just asking questions. There you go What is the difference between mental prayer and listening to a Catholic evangelist? So I have an example. I have analogy I have so what's the difference between mental prayer? So so let's go back to the first century Okay, so if you watch the chosen you should have a good holy Imagination let's go back to the first century and Jesus is let's say he's in the living room of the house and You can decide to go talk to him or Matthew is in the backyard and they're both Of course still alive that you know, there's not been a crucifixion or any of that part of history Who would you go listen to? Right ain't Matthew. I'm gonna go sit at the feet of Jesus So it's not complicated. I mean mental prayer is made for the most intimate kind of Communication with God it is not it can't be replaced by YouTube or listening to father Mike Schmitz. However amazing or praise and worship music I love it listen on the first one to love praise and worship music It cannot replace your mental prayer time right and people need to consider mental prayer time is I Talk about it. It's it's akin to the marital embrace Without a sexual connotation to it. It's one-on-one no interruptions The world falls away It's you know loving God and allowing yourself to be loved in return. It's deep intimacy In deep silence. Yeah And anything outside of that is gonna is gonna interrupt it And not only that it's so important for your spiritual life. It's transformative. It will change your life. Yeah, that's the positive side St. Alphonse's Liguri I think Teresa of Avila Both doctors of the church will tell you That if you're not practicing mental prayer, you're not gonna make it. It's too hard But when you draw near to Jesus you get to know him And you're walking with him on the narrow way In and through the sacraments in and through all the graces that the church has to offer mental prayer keeps you Deeply rooted in christ and deeply rooted in relationship with him. Yeah, and he's so long To be with us I think if people could understand how he longs To be with each one of his beloved children in that one-on-one To love them to to bless them to heal them to restore them to fill them He longs to be with you. Yeah, and and why would you deny yourself such a great grace? Because you're busy because you know, whatever Allow yourself that time And You will never regret one minute spent in prayer I can guarantee you that and if this is appealing to you or this idea or Stephanie's Plead to learn how to do mental prayer Um, and you you don't really quite understand it or what to do head out to spiritual direction dot com And you can get a hold of I did a what is it a five part? series on On mental prayer called into the deep and it is free And it's on the events page And you can go to It says into the deep into free free event But you can watch that series and and normally If you were to try to get something like this from any other organization You'd be paying for it because it cost us a lot to produce it. We had four cameras set up and A very high crew every it's very very high quality audio crew very high quality so Check out Finding peace through prayer into the deep based on my book into the deep Finding peace through prayer and that'll help you to get started in mental prayer and It's necessary to being an authentic disciple of jesus. That's right. All right next question Do you write your responses to examine questions or is it purely mental? How do you respond as you say yes and no in your mind? So what they're talking about is we recommend us does Teresa of Avila that the most basic practices for entering into The interior castle what we call authentic discipleship Is beyond the foundation of the sacraments is daily mental prayer and the examine The examine is a is a practice you can do just in a few minutes morning or evening That evaluates your day and asks the question. Where's god and where am I in relationship to god? Basically, how am I doing in relationship to his call to me in all the various Aspects of my life my state in life that sort of thing So the question then i'll read it again and you can take a swipe out if you like Do you write your responses down to the examine questions or it's a purely mental? And do you respond? How do you respond as you say yes and no in your mind? Maybe describe the detail of those? so um Well for one You and I use a form through epistole v. A that you created Where we have our plan of life our plan of love and so we our commitments to the lord whatever they are and I divide them in Commitments to god and then to others And and so I'll I'll run down that list and you know, did I get up at my prescribed time? Did I take care of my auxilium christian norm prayers? Did I pray my rosary my mental prayer time? Did I? um, you know, we have a commitment to the liturgy of the hours and so all of those things um I I know like at this point in my life I know whether I completed those and there's so much a part of the rhythm Of my day that I don't necessarily have to check those off I can just do a quick mental check and go. Oh, yep. Got everything completed Um, that's good and good, but at the beginning sometimes we need those mental cues So we may use the checklist to do that So I think if you're in the pre-pergative purgative way and you're starting out on this journey And you've made commitments to the lord. I think those you're gonna need to be more specific So having some sort of notebook and some way of of doing that I think is very helpful um as far as I'm more general examine of How did it how did my day go? You know, I I'm going to look starting at the beginning of my day up until that point at the end of my night Kind of from a 30 000 foot level and I'm thinking about well, did I get up on time? Did I pray how are my encounters with my husband? How are my encounters with other people that I love and serve people well?  I wish I hadn't said or I was uncharitable Those kind of things I can make those notes and jot them down so that I can take them to confession And then what we also do is a redemptive And it's just saying lord. I praise you for all these good things. Why don't we continue when we get back from the break? Okay, that's important. We'll be right back When your mark gets Go, this is dana Stephanie Burke. Welcome back to divine intimacy radio before the break Stephanie was talking about the Examine and how to do that daily and we you sort of kind of get cut off Which we're talking about the redemptive examine, right? Which fundamentally is we look at all of this as positive if I see that I've sinned I don't praise me to congratulate myself. It's like, okay. I'm sorry You know, let's if it's a pattern. Let's break the pattern. Let's work harder Yeah, when I say praise me to God is that I'm aware, right? I'm aware that I've sinned so that and then there's a remedy so I can take that to confession If it's venial I can do a confidia right there and I can offer that to God and get rid of it So the redemptive examine is both checking our day against those things that were in affront to the lord or to others or And or both Or I rather it's and Praising God for those moments of grace. Thank you lord for the exchange of love with my husband Thank you lord for that beautiful phone call or that text That was an encouragement or an act of love. Thank you for The phone call from my son, you know, whatever it is that was a grace moment in our day That we can praise God and thank him for that. Thank you lord for our priest Thank you that I was able to receive the Eucharist today Thank you for the sacrament of confession, you know, we I don't think people understand the power of a heart full of gratitude A heart full of gratitude drives out resentment a heart full of gratitude Brings healing restoration and oneness With the lord and those that he's entrusted to us So this idea of looking back on our day and praising the lord for all that he's given to us Is a beautiful way to end your day To go into your night in peace and then you're ready to rise again All right, very good If you want to learn more about the redemptive examine you can head out to spiritualdirection.com and Type in redemptive examine and you'll find out you'll get a document that describes what what Stephanie was was talking about So this is a good question for uh, I don't know when this will air may air afterland I don't know But uh, regardless will you do mortifications? Whether it's lent or not so, um How can I be sure if the intent of my mortifications? Are for spiritual and not personal Benefits specifically right regarding to good things. I should be doing anyway like exercise, you know Some people you can get overly scrupulous about their and they And these are all good people by the way like nobody cares about this who's not Heading from good to better It's like well, I realize my motives are mixed because I want to see my muscles grow So when I look in here or or I'm tired of not fitting into my jeans, right? Well either way, right? Um, but you also know you're responsible for taking care of your body and that sort of thing Look, you know, I just can't conceive of a human being Unless they're a saint Not having some kind of mixed motives for doing any good You know, um Yeah, you know, it's it's can people have pure motives sure, but I you just got to forget it Just if you if you have mixed motives, you have mixed motives. Just go do the good thing And eventually the lord will purify your motives. That's I don't know you do you agree with that? Yeah, and I I think you just have to consider that that desire to to be How do I say this without sounding like somebody else's jingle? um To to refine I'm going to reword it to refine and perfect this temple of the holy spirit that you've been given, right? In in all its facets mind body soul spirit All of that That's fine. The lord's placed that desire on you. He wants you to be free He wants you to be able to be able to squat down and pick up your granddaughter You know, he wants you to have a healthy body Because the healthier you are The more that you can complete the mission that he's given to you unless he's given you one to suffer and and be ill for the sake of That redemptive suffering and and and suffering that for others and for the whole church And and those the those situations do occur But other than that the motive to be healthy Isn't a negative, you know Now if the motive is so that you can fit into the you know um You know the I don't know whatever those those different designer dresses are So that you can vainly go to a party. That's something you shouldn't do right But to be healthy and to do something that you need to do anyway for your health I wouldn't worry about it. I would just make an offering to the lord and keep going What about if a person has a roots in a vanity? um Well, then they should Not work out in front of mirrors Yeah, maybe that's a good thing. I mean, really if you have a roots in a vanity that doesn't mean you let yourself go Please don't let yourself go you have a responsibility to be happy clean well cared for holy And in a decent amount of health for the sake of those he's entrusted to you so Just don't look in the mirror and if somebody gives you a compliment say thank you and move on Yeah, yeah, and that you know if your roots in a vanity Then it's good to fast from looking at yourself in the mirror And i'm being dead serious Uh or taking pictures of yourself and posting them You know of your workout or on social media or whatever. Yeah, it's really weird. Yeah, okay Is divine intimacy for mental prayer or spiritual reading? It's a great question So their divine intimacy is a book and some of you may not know that you might just think oh, it's just a radio show Or a podcast or whatever But the podcast was named after a book and it was published by Or compiled by father gabriel of saint mary magdalene Who is he a blessed or anything? I think his cause is up I don't know if the producer can look that up, but I think his cause is is Is creeping but I don't know for sure, but it is certainly an extraordinary book. Yeah. Well, listen, it's out for Uh outside of scriptural reflection there. I've never encountered a book That is better to do daily meditations on then than divine intimacy But it is more spiritual reading than it is mental prayer But it can lead you to mental prayer. I don't know if you've ever experienced that using it Yeah, I mean Way back when, you know, probably 10 12 years ago or whatever I was very dedicated to reading through divine intimacy And I would do my mental prayer on scripture using the better part Which is a resource that we recommend for mental prayer For a script, you know, christian meditation, which was extraordinary and then I would read divine intimacy So I didn't use it solely for my mental prayer time I used it for spiritual reading, but it became mental prayer because of its richness So it was kind of like an add-on What I found extraordinary about this and maybe this was just a special grace, but You know, they it comes with kind of a daily theme whatever it is humility Patience, you know different kind of themes that come through it And what I found is that the lord was truly working through that time of prayer with that with that passage In my daily life and it was awesome. Yeah, it was an extraordinary resource because I I do think it is deeply graced Yeah, I do too. I think it's it's If you want to learn spiritual theology in small bites, you know, it has two meditations a day Two prayers a day and it does teach you in the book how to Practice mental prayer and the spiritual reading that will lead to mental prayer You can find that book out at spiritualdirection.com And go to the shop page and then it you may need to Pass through to the sophia institute press website if it's not on our page But i'm definitely gonna work on getting it on our page because it's covered In our system. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a great book. So Um, I'm gonna have to give this one to you because I don't know the answer How any advice on receive in working toward healing? from a father wound Oh Wow, that's a deep question I you know I think We all have parental wounds of some sort And just don't I haven't met any perfect parents except for mary joseph and our lord Um, and and you know people bring what they have they bring their strengths their weaknesses their imperfections All of that to the table when they become parents and For the most part, I think people really desire to give their children nothing but good But often the woundedness is so extreme and the lack of self-awareness is so extreme that it causes Deep wounds I have experienced deep wounds in the in the father area And I think the most important thing Is first of all to do a deep reflection on God the father And his love for us And also the prayer that he gave to us And if we reflect on the our father and it says, you know Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive right as we forgive We are entering into A you know this contract with the lord of sorts of saying Lord, I'm asking you as I pray this on a daily basis, whether it's in the context of the mass or in my daily prayer That you forgive me as I've forgiven others And there's no little bracket in the middle of that prayer that says if everybody was on their best behavior or If they merit the forgiveness Or whatever it is and this is not And I and I say this with deep love And deep tenderness and and understanding the deep sacredness of this It is not to say that the wounds that have been um Done to you or are the wounds that you have experienced It's not to excuse what's been done to excuse to excuse that pain Um, and the lord's not asking for you to excuse what they did but he is Asking you to forgive as we ask him to forgive us. Why is that? Unforgiveness poisons us it poisons us and And we'll keep talking about this when we get back here in a minute. Um, but when we're in the second segment Oh, we can't okay, so quickly He asks us to forgive and to leave him to to take care of that for us So that his grace can heal us and restore us So we leave the forgiveness to him We know that when we forgive in jesus name, he brings to perfection that Area of healing that we need and then we surrender that to the lord And I would add at the end of saying in the name of jesus I forgive my father for enlisting those that you ask that all Curses be turned into blessings that the that your father be restored a hundred fold and you set him free So with that until next time May the god of peace make you perfect in holiness May he preserve you whole and entire spirit soul and body Irreproachable at the coming of our lord jesus christ amen


What's up everybody, Jason here for jasperjasebasecasebrakes.com. We just filled up 2020 Balmain Baseball Jumbo eight box full case break Picker teams number eight on our website sold it up straight up No pack break needed to fill this up and again We're gonna give away $200 in break credit and the way you're eligible is if you buy two or more teams in this break So two entries give two teams give you one entry four teams give you two entries Etc. Etc. And then again, no paper-based ships unless it's wit, Dominguez, and I think we added Powson and then again, of course Full case of jumbo Three box three autos per box. So let's roll guys. Let's do it. There you go. And this is actually our last case of jumbo Our last case of jumbo we have so all we can break tomorrow Is Hobbies JD. Yeah, Jason Dominguez. Yes, we got one unless you mean jaren dirang. It can also be another one Yeah, we got one in the last break we did One more guys one more guys. Let's start. This is half a case right here I'm gonna grab it from right here. You guys can see my hands Brandon Davis man. I'm on a hot shoe with this guy Red dragon. There you go. We've definitely caught up to the cases. You're in started getting some red red some Brandon Davis Supposing I have no idea. I feel like he's a very popular player for the Cubs, but I don't know if This is his first Autograph even though he doesn't have a bowman's first. I have no idea Dominguez 18 drop was his first bowman, but he hasn't had it. Oh gotcha. So this is technically like his first autograph All right. Yeah, I'm at still here man Six cases down today as I did Friday So Gotta do what we got to do, right? Actually This completes the box over here on this side. So we'll start with this one. Wow. We got a Mike Trout autograph I've been wanting one of these Nice. I've been wanting to hit one of these. There you go Bowman 1990 25 out of whoa He's number 27, all right. Yeah, it's still too off his jersey number. There you go Mike Trout How about that? John hyang it with the angels in this break Very very nice. Although it's a sticker. It's still pretty cool on this guy's amazing amazing Very very nice. Oh, what do you mean? What time do we show up here for work, man? I get here right before two o'clock. Maybe like 10 15 minutes before to start setting up and Start setting up and I'm getting ready for the night I'm saving an extra hour and a half tonight To finish off both of these bowman breaks so that way tomorrow it's more light bowman Although we're still gonna probably do bowman tomorrow. I think hobby sold out number five But it won't be like six cases worth the bowman tomorrow if anything. It's gonna be just like three So if Nick can come back and help me out tomorrow Rip some of these then we can get those done in the first three hours Then we have the next five hours to do whatever we need to do But yes, and if I'll select and MLB select Baseball will go tomorrow and anything else that's sold out. So I'm assuming we're gonna start the day off with Select baseball select football The last three boxes of the prism pick your team You know Anything that pretty much sold out today. We'll start tomorrow first and Vargas Oh, I might I probably might not do I guess and I get here like 10 15 minutes before so maybe around 145 but Not that I'm trying to say you can't meet me, but If you're gonna do the curbside we have to just take it out to you We're not letting customers come in here not until probably July 1st once the the stay at home Thing is lifted on June 30th So, yeah, yeah, I can do well to a clock will be all the breaks We'll be all the breaks tomorrow that sold out today that we couldn't add into the schedule today I'm not sure what time Nick will be here tomorrow and Edwin in or sorry not Edwin Gerard Gerard Gerard, right? Yeah, Gerard in Carnation To 250. Yeah. Yeah, someone's here to pick someone will be here by nine o'clock tomorrow at nine or ten o'clock So I think our curbside hours are the same as our store hours used to be from 11 to 11 to eight o'clock, so but for sure Around one to a clock pretty much most of us will be back in here our first our first wave of a Sort of shippers come in around nine o'clock ten o'clock and then The other ones come in later at two o'clock Yeah, just give us a call or email and let us know when you're gonna be here So to have your stuff ready, although I think I already put your Dominguez stuff to the side If that's what you're gonna come pick up unless you picked up yesterday after all But like I said everything else Bowman, we're barely gonna start sorting through it So like I said, if you want to pick up the rest of your stuff besides the Dominguez That won't be till later in the week Maybe by like Wednesday. We'll have everything I'll sort it out from Friday Saturday Sunday But the Dominguez I definitely pulled already Nick Allen Proctor it's that Thompson people Paulini, I don't know if I remember saying that Matt Just know though man, we're working really hard to get this out as you can see We did the 24-hour stream and we start to ship out the stuff that broke before Friday Out today tomorrow, so Just be patient man. Like I said, I put away your Dominguez stuff already if you haven't picked that up you can definitely take that but Like I said, we only have like three four sorters here, so we're trying our best to get this out as quick as possible So I can't guarantee that all of your Friday stuff will be sorted out tomorrow because it's probably not because we're gonna ship out some stuff Like I said your Dominguez stuff I did pull to the side already so you can always pick that up if you have any other questions you can You can email us man I'm probably gonna have to do some sorting probably tomorrow too or the following day So So that's why I'm a singer patch And now apart from cupcakes expecting around six autos and 23 and I have I think three base one sparkle on refractor Nice, okay, not bad then right? And again, you still have you have them in this one, right? And we obviously already hit one but we can hit more and then of course If we hit more later in this case or I don't know if you're in the mixer case, but Yeah, man, that's a little bit more Feel like we made up some ground though man today. I think I hit three of them today for you We made up some ground Bello. Oh, is that another pairing too as well? I'm Maya Sam Huff to 499 range is going to Matthew I Don't know if this was last bomb older, but I feel like it was Think Saturday. We were just missing the Rangers. I believe in number eight Edwards old rich Detroit first speckle and for the rays John Diaz speckle Our last box and then we're halfway there. Yes, and for Detroit Zach Hess To 75 first for Detroit Adam Richards We'll give you your favorites okinaw for the Reds Bear Roberts and Cardenas next four boxes You think so? I'd be nice if we do. I Mean we hit that trout Like I said, they put the Mingus pops out that just makes us let us know that was a great case As most most cases have been when you hit it to Mingus, right? But I would not that I don't want to hit another base I'd love to hit Ryan was the Yankee the color card You know if I can I'll take a base with that trout be a pretty solid case Yeah, because so far Look, we got in your Davis. We were talking about that. We got an incarnacion, right?   I didn't really pay attention when I hit the base in the last case break, but I didn't realize if Dominguez came after those players or not or before those players All right guys here you go last half case here. I'm gonna no more jumble till later this week I'm gonna get our next next shipment in Giselle, how's it going Sam Huff? Speckle for the Texas Rangers paper McKenzie Gore paper Max Muncie Shortridge Dominguez paper Jonathan India John Diaz Incarnacion Amra This happens you did your homework. I'll tell you that So I have to go in that in that format right just has to be base Man if I were to get the super Dominguez right now, I don't think I'm gonna break the next break There he is Man read you predicted it Jason Dominguez back-to-back base autographs for the Yankees What a case So there you go very nice and volume on to 100 Minnesota Twins went to red.  Oh, man, what looks like you got it down Now we just need the cotton right We got the Davies we got the Incarnacion. We got the Dominguez that we get the cotton and yeah, you're pretty much you're sat You got it down But this is on this only works for the base though, right for the base That's basically what they're linked to What you're saying? Gotcha. I Mean, that's still good to know them. Yeah Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean honestly, I mean that this would be the most insane case ever but think about it You got the Rogers. I mean you got that burning Davis. You got that Incarnacion base.  Like that's that's crazy that were to be the case too, but I feel you maybe with the color though I'm with the base and you have the trial. Yeah, exactly Eric Rivera Speckle So that'd be a crazy crazy case That happened Probably the product run maybe right While I'm out man. We had a lot of doubles in this case Let's get a double Dominguez. How about that? Or a double trout. Let me awesome Feel like in this case has been double everything box right here guys Good luck. Well, I see the cotton. I'm for sure you got it down man. I mean even then I mean, that's still pretty good. I have to look back at all the other case breaks and see if we pulled any Incarnacion all the other base to now Just to see But at least mostly on average for that one, right? Harris Harris there for the A's is the first auto two more autos guys Wander Frank go to 250 For the rays The Harris was a base. Yeah paper, I was only 75 for the Cubs Joe Jenner to 499 refractor Swaggerty All right, and the loss all here is gonna be Dustin May little base rookie autograph Dodgers going to Robert throne Ryan.  I don't remember calm was in the last case boat in the last case I remember there was the Incarnacion and a Brennan Davis base. So I Think yeah far to the fight was pretty good for sure So maybe maybe just runs mainly with those two guys or those three guys. They go nice Nice nice break. This is a good case guys honestly great case We'll do a little recap right now So again all the colors and the papers, of course All right, here were all the Dominguez Paper chrome stuff like that. So insert paper chrome insert insert paper paper paper chrome insert Chrome or paper chrome chrome paper. This one had a lot of Dominguez actually one two three four five six seven paper base One two three four five chrome And then three inserts so not too shabby at all right there And then here you go here the autographs Dustin May Genron Harris volumons Rivera speckle Incarnacion Jason Dominguez autograph Vernon Davis volumons a double there short ridge a rise speckle Huff Cardenas has Diaz Huff again a Maya bello Paulini Proctor Incarnacion color Vargas a Mike Trout bowman 1990 25 out of 30 and a brand Davis refractor to 49 Very very solid case guys. Appreciate everybody last break of the night. It's gonna be bowman mixer picker team number eight


Well folks, today we're back talking about Nintendo Switch Shoe and Mario Wonder because we have some interesting news and I guess rumors surrounding Switch Shoe and news when it comes to Mario Wonder. I'm really excited to bring this stuff to you today because I love keeping you updated on the latest going on in regards to Nintendo's upcoming hardware and obviously what's going on today with their current games, their most current being Mario Wonder which had a pretty impressive sales debut and we're going to get into that. We're also going to deep dive a little bit into a brand new game coming to Nintendo Switch too along with a smidgemore information or at least rumors on things from a fairly reliable place. Now before we dive in I just want to remind you we are on our road to 150,000 subscribers so I'd appreciate it if you would drop a like in this video, subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed and why not wringling that dingaling to be notified of all future uploads. The first thing we need to talk about is something brought up by Necrophilipe Lima. He is the owner I think or lead editor anyways at Universal Nintendo, a Brazilian Nintendo outlet but he's actually had a lot of things tied to him over the last couple of years that really proved to be correct so we do pay some attention to him and he's pretty well respected at least here among United States fans anyways I have no idea in Brazil I don't live there. Let's dive into what he said over on X because it's some pretty interesting stuff especially in regards to a brand new game. When asked if Grand Theft Auto VI is coming to Nintendo Switch too, Necrophilipe Lima simply responded with yes. Now this is obviously a really big deal, Switch never got Grand Theft Auto V but we did end up getting the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy remaster one two and three although that was kind of a hot mess. It was a hot mess on a lot of platforms just even worse on Switch. I don't want to dive into that because we own that here like we bought that copy because Julio really wanted to play Grand Theft Auto one two and three and frankly she's very very disappointed with a lot of the bugs and usually she wouldn't care about that kind of stuff but it's pretty buggy. That being said what's really interesting here obviously is Grand Theft Auto VI which is something that is heavily rumored right. There are tons and tons and tons of rumors out there around this game. Tons of actual leaks as well we're literally expecting it to possibly be revealed as soon as this week although the games you know as far as we're aware isn't planned to release until sometime next year or the year after but yeah Grand Theft Auto VI it's a big deal. Grand Theft Auto V is you know slowly creeping towards a hundred million in sales. This would be a really big get for Nintendo especially if they can have this sort of announcement there with the announcement of Switch 2 right if you can have Grand Theft Auto VI packed in with it obviously I think Grand Theft Auto VI being announced before Nintendo Switch 2 is but it is fascinating to imagine a world where Nintendo is getting that level of support. Like if it's getting Grand Theft Auto VI if it's getting Call of Duty if it ends up getting the next Assassin's Creed game and everything in between at this point you should just no longer be surprised when third party games start getting announced for Nintendo Switch 2. Now again until Nintendo announces the platform we're not going to see those announcements officially but the point is if this is true and we have to treat this as a rumor but if it is true then damn the Nintendo Switch 2 is just going to have everything and that's just a win for gaming and obviously a win for us Nintendo consumers. But that's not all Necrophilema Lipa had to say because why were people even asking him questions well he put this out as well and this had to do with Ray Tracing and all the stuff he put this out on FAMI boards and he said I've been informed by my sources several times before and after games come that Ray Tracing will be a common thing on Switch Next Gen and again this is literally backing up stuff that Nathan Hates said last week on his podcast but he said a little bit more they could choose to not use this in portable mode to avoid performance issues on certain titles yes he phrased it as a question get a remember I don't think English is his native language so sometimes he phrases things a bit weird anyways but the consensus is works well will use applies to both DLSS and RR2. Now the funny thing is is Ray Reconstruction RR is actually part of DLSS. DLSS is a suite which includes Super Resolution which we already kind of figured they were going to be using and obviously Ray Reconstruction it also includes Frame Generation which is something that doesn't appear to be enabled on the system I know people love Frame Generation on PC I am a PC gamer but hey having Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction are wins having either one of those let alone both are wins for this platform and should make Nintendo Switch 2 have pretty impressive Ray Tracing support which does simplify development for many game developers so it actually is a good thing and it just sounds like the more and more Ray Tracing is brought up the more it sounds like a lot of developers are going to end up using it and that's really the point it's not always Nintendo gonna start using Ray Tracing yeah they might but a lot of third-party games are finally starting to come around on using Ray Tracing and you need to have a competent ability to support Ray Tracing it does simplify development and whether or not it's usable in handheld obviously we don't know because it would be nice to have higher power draw but hey guys it being usable even just in docked will be great and obviously you can have a lesser lighting system in place when it's not but man I I'm just really really excited by this and I do think that we need to remember that Nintendo and Nvidia are trying to put together a platform that is not only good in the you know present day but gonna be good in the future as well Nintendo switch back in 2017 was using the best technology it could at that given time and that's why it was most powerful dedicated gaming handle but technology has come a long way and companies are focused more on that dedicated handheld gaming space it's why we're seeing triple-a games pop up on the iPhone and stuff so I am willing to bet that when this comes out it's again gonna be the most powerful dedicated gaming handheld on the market which is saying something considering all of the mobile PCs or handheld PCs out there now that being said we also need to get into the news I'm Mario wonder because I'm having a wonderful time playing the game oh my gosh it is quickly climbing as possibly my favorite side scrolling Mario game of all time just entering world five I am having a blast I'm not gonna spoil it and if you guys guess I'll probably saw us do a super long opening live stream you know launch live stream back on Friday but that's either here nor there where am I here to tell you my opinions on the game we could talk more about that maybe tonight on our live stream but I really want to dive into our sales data and oh boy Christopher drink has some stuff to share on that over on X from the UK he said in the UK Super Mario World's Wonder is the third biggest launch for a Mario platform in chart history it is only very narrowly behind Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D all-stars those are the two games ahead of it including digital sales may make it the biggest Mario game launch in UK history that's important to note the physical sales in the UK they're only tracking like that because Nintendo doesn't provide digital data so digitally it actually you know if you include digital physical together it could be not just the best-selling Mario of all time it could be the best-selling game last week but because digital is not included because Nintendo doesn't provide that data Mario Wonder is behind Spider-Man 2 in terms of like best sales last week in the UK but again this is not including digital spider-man 2 includes digital you know Mario doesn't it's all because Sony provides digital data and Nintendo doesn't it is what it is but it doesn't really matter who's at the top what it matters is how is the performance relative to other Mario games yes the fastest selling side-scrolling Mario game of all time how about that how about that it's literally just behind the pace of Mario Odyssey yeah how about that Mario Odyssey the 25 million plus seller yeah I think Mario Wonder is doing quite well for itself for not being a 3d Mario game of course side-scrolling Mario games always tend to sell pretty well and the crazy thing about side-scrolling Mario is it tends to be pretty evergreen so it doesn't just get huge numbers at launch it continues to sell for years into the future so I can see Mario Wonder still be in this thing selling three years from now even though we'll be well into the Nintendo Switch 2 era because that's just what side-scrolling Mario games do they'll probably be a re-release again on Switch 2 and stuff like that so guys I actually am pretty excited for the future of this game I don't know if we'll get DLC or future content updates we did get the Luigi stuff added to Mario Odyssey as a free update later so we can't dismiss potentially new content or DLC down the line but right now I'm just really enjoying what I'm playing with Mario Wonder I hope you guys are enjoying it as well and that's going to do it for this video I just wanted to get these that this is up to you as quickly as I could you guys are awesome and amazing I thank you so much for tuning in during this you know last full week of us spooky month no sorry sorry I can't help it guys okay I really love October it's my favorite month of the year you guys are awesome and I'll catch you in the next video


Thank you very much. Yeah, so as was already said, this is going to be a joint talk about two papers, which are very similar in techniques, and therefore it makes sense that they were submerged. And basically the plan is that I will give a very high level introduction into the topic and the techniques, and then Rupeng will take over in the second half and give one of the protocols and also applications of our result. Okay, so our papers are concerned with zero knowledge proofs for letter scriptography, and in this area basically the main problem that one wants to solve is proving a short solution to a linear equation. So this means there's some public matrix A and some public right-hand side, we, and the prover wants to prove that he knows the short vector w such that a times w equals we, and yeah maybe the simplest example of this, which maybe should also convince you that some unnatural letters problems can be phrased in this way is proving knowledge of an LWE secret, and therefore I've put this example on the slide so there you see that for example such an LWE secret you can write in this matrix vector form, and the secret vector will then just consist of the LWE secret and the error. And I should also say that we are basically interested in really concretely efficient protocols, so really protocols where the proof size is measured in kilobytes, and for this reason it makes sense to look at ring based, or at least for this talk to focus on ring based, yeah problems. So if now the goal is to prove such an equation really exactly, and in particular this means that the solution you can extract from some prover is as short as the solution some, the honest prover at least really knows, then until basically this, yeah basically this year the only proof system for this were the so-called stern type proofs, and unfortunately they are very inefficient. So for example for this ring LWE case if you prove this exactly with a stern type proof system then your proof size is a couple of megabytes large, and in our papers with our techniques we can basically improve on this by about a factor or by about an order of magnitude. So proving such a ring LWE sample now takes a couple of hundred kilobytes. Yeah before, yeah before I give a high level overview of our techniques I want to also mention other systems, but I think we have also seen this in the talk before, so maybe I try to go very quickly here. So because these stern type proofs have been so inefficient there has been a lot of yeah other basically other proof systems developed which prove slightly relaxed statements and are more efficient than stern type proofs, and the most important example are the so-called approximate proofs, and in these proofs what you do there is that or what they achieve is that the vector they prove is significantly longer than the one the prover really knows, and also the equation is perturbed by some small polynomial on the right hand side, but still for some applications this is enough, and the most important example are signature schemes. So for example the deletion signature scheme in the NIST competition this is based on such a proof, and you can really get down to for example in the case of deletion to 2.7 kilobytes, but yeah for some applications this is just not enough, then there are so-called amortized proofs where you prove many equations at once, if you happen to have many equations that you want to prove, and then amortize over all of them they are also extremely efficient, and different to the approximate proofs they don't have this annoying somewhat perturbation factor on the right hand side. What they still have is that they are not exact because the basically the vector they prove is much longer than the one the prover knows, and then last but not least what you also can do is you can transform or transform your lattice equation to something which is amenable to discrete log-based proof systems for example bullet proof, and then prove them with bullet proofs if you're fine but your sum is just being based on discrete log. Okay so much for this introduction now to give a high-level idea how our exact proof system works, we maybe look at approximate proofs and basically one of the main steps in these proofs is that the prover sends some masked secret or some masked version of the secret, so if w is one of the secret polynomials inside this vector w then what the prover sends is basically some challenge polynomial alpha times w plus some masking polynomial, and yeah in the case of approximate proofs now what you do is you choose alpha to be really small polynomial and then alpha times w is small and then with the help of a technique which is called rejection sampling you can also only take the masking polynomial to be quite small and then the verifier can basically infer something about the secret polynomial or about the size of the secret polynomial from the size of the masked version of it. This is how these approximate proofs work. What we do differently is that we actually prove that the secret polynomial inside the masking is short or more precisely that really all the coefficients of the polynomial they lie in some small interval and yeah the simplest case is that we prove that all the coefficients are binary so they are 0 or 1, yeah the standard technique to prove something to be 0 or 1 you prove that it's a solution to the polynomial x times 1 minus x and for the polynomial to now prove that really all the coefficients are 0 or 1 what you need to do is you need to prove that the point wise product or the coefficient wise product of the polynomial w times the polynomial where you flip all the bits which is the all one polynomial minus w that this point wise product is 0 and if you now look at this equation and basically replace w by our masked version of it and now also somehow restrict our challenges to not be arbitrary polynomials but really only integers in the queue then we see that we get an equation which on the left hand side is some quadratic point wise product and on the right hand side is a polynomial where basically the term we're interested in appears at the at the leading or as the leading coefficient and this gives us a strategy to prove that this basically that this secret inside the mass secret is more and namely we basically only have to convince the verifier that the mass secret is of the correct form so it's really like r plus alpha times times the secret and that in this quadratic point wise product there is no quadratic term so this leading order term finishes and the difficult part is to basically prove this in zero knowledge and before I explain how this works I want to do two observations or maybe three first since we now have these coefficient wise products this is not really compatible anymore with polynomial products that we want to have for what at least in the approximate proofs we have for for the challenge polynomial and so and this is why in the slide before I basically said we have to really basically restrict to to integer challenges and this is bad because the reason why the approximate proofs are so efficient is because they can use polynomial challenges now if you cannot do this anymore at least what we want to do is we want to choose the challenges from all of the queue so to basically have as large a challenge base as possible but then we also need a uniform masking polynomial and this as basically the from this follows that the simple technique in the approximate proofs to to to prove that sectors of the correct form by just giving out a times r is not enough anymore because this does doesn't bind the this polynomial are anymore so this part of the approximate proofs you also have to change so yeah the we achieve all this by using basically some sort of homomorphic commitment scheme and what we need is a commitment scheme where it is possible to compute basically linear expressions over our ring r inside the commitment so basically given two commitments to two messages that the verifier doesn't know he needs to be able to compute a new commitment to some linear expression of the messages and if we have this and also prove to prove that there some commitment is actually commitment to zero then we can we have a tool to prove linear or linear expressions in inside commitments and then in the knowledge and to give an example how this works yeah this is yeah and so I said we need to prove that that is of the correct form and that this is somehow now more complicated than in the approximate proofs and what we do is that the prover gives out commitments to to to the masking polynomial and to to to the secret and then he proves that this linear combination of the two commitments is actually a commitment to to to the mask secret to to that this is yeah the first part and then now to really prove that the that the secret is zero one remember that we had this quadratic point-wise relation where on the on the right hand side there was this polynomial in alpha and we were only interested in the in the leading term so we we basically commit to these low-order terms that that we call garbage terms and then prove that all already basically this linear polynomial with coefficient these commitments is is a commitment to this quadratic product so this basically means that there is no quadratic term meaning that this vanishes what we wanted to prove actually so in now in our paper there's a slightly different technique I think I now have to be very quick to explain this so what what we already have in the proof is that the prover gives out some some commitment to the to the to the secret because we needed this for this to prove that the mask secret is of the correct form and this means that in this quadratic relation where we had basically twice the mask secret we can use the actual secret ones and then only the the mask secret only once and to do this directly what we would need is basically a commitment scheme where we could do point-wise products but our commitment scheme doesn't support this and what we use as basically as a method to to still do this is basically use the fact that the entity of a polynomial product translates to a point-wise product in the entity domain and then with this trick we can basically prove that if the entity of some quadratic polynomial product that they are in the leading term an expression evolves which which shows that the entity of our secret polynomial is 0 1 yeah and with this I hand over to yeah ropeng thanks Greg hi I'm ropeng and we'll finish the remaining part of this talk Greg has just shown how to construct a zero-knowledge argument okay Greg has just shown how to construct a zero-knowledge argument for linear equations is a binary solution a very rough idea and next I will talk about how this idea can be extended to prove a much wider lattice-based relations okay both their work and our work aims to achieve some standard sonics and high efficiency ten years late okay let's start with our main protocol the main relation considering this work is linear equations with quadratic or with quadratic constraints over its weakness in particular the proven need to prove that he knows a secret wax a w marked as right here satisfy a linear equation a w equals way and a quadratic formula fw equals 0 and here for simple city we consider a simplified instance where w is only three and that the quadratic formula is w1 equals w2 times w3 okay so to prove this our standpoint is a standard small protocol in the lattice-based setting this is perfect to prove the linear equation part but tells nothing about the quadratic constraints so to prove the second part okay so to prove the second part we rely on the observation that after receiving the response day the alpha is able to compute the two times a three and one times alpha and the difference between the two products is the linear in alpha if and only if w1 equals w2 times w3 so we can reduce the problem of argue of critical constraints into the problem of argue that the two parts the two these three minus the one alpha which is the density here is indeed a linear in alpha so to prove this we can commit the coefficients and send send the commitments c and cb to the WIFI and then the WIFI checks if alpha c a plus cb is a commitment of D this seems to work if the commitment scheme is homophic but it requires that the run this used to commit D is is equal to alpha c a plus sb so next we will require the approval to send the correct run this to the WIFI and then the WIFI check will check the equality of commitments using this correct run this the equality will hold if the commitment scheme is homophic with respect to addition and multiplication by constant so as a some this is guaranteed but partially partially revealing the but but partially revealing the run this our commitment may affect its hiding property and thus we will comprise the there are no property of the whole protocol to analyze to analyze why this to analyze why this does not occur we can we consider a concrete commitment scheme developed recently by Balm et al. in this commitment scheme the run this s is sampled from a constitution and it can be proved that if we write reject sampling on the run this the correct run this s then the whole protocol is still there knowledge one problem of this commitment scheme and all knowing all knowing that is this commitment scheme is that it is only homophic with respect to multiplication by a small constant so here instead of sampling alpha from the queue we will sample it from EP where P is small number okay this is the main part of our our main protocol our the full protocol also includes some auxiliary commitments and some auxiliary proofs but they are omitted from this talk okay notice that our protocol can perfectly prove the linear equation part where a standard small protocol and can perfectly prove the quality constraints where argue linear equations or the commitments so it so it achieves a standard soundness also if P is not too small then this basic protocol will only repeat a few times rather than 200 times to achieve negligible soundness on this error so it can achieve a high efficiency okay this is okay okay okay okay okay we just we just talked about our main protocol and next we will see how our main protocol can be used to prove three different and commonly used that is relations first we will see how to prove linear equations with short solutions here for simplicity we assume that the bound beta plus one is a power two and to prove this we rely on first although although that I integer a is bounded if and only if it can be decomposed into a boundary vector or bounded length so in the first step we will decompose the vector w into a binary W prime and prove that this binary vector certify a new linear relation to prove that W prime is a binary vector we rely on the following observations that I integer a is binary if and only if it certify that to a square equals a so in the next step we will prove that W i prime is binary we argue that W i prime equals W i prime times W i prime so in this way we can transform the whole relation into a linear equation and a correct a constraint over its witness okay so this is exactly what can be proved by our main protocol okay next there is also some troubles okay okay yeah thank you okay next I will talk about how to prove some sense some of my emulating equations here the base here each bi is a bit and is used to select each AI w i and the task a to prove that the sum of the selected AI w i equals way for simple city here we consider a simple file example that m equals 2 and each W i is our least one to prove this okay to prove this let w i prime is equal bi w i then we can transform the first equation into a standard standard linear equation and the correctness of each W i prime and the fact that each bi is binary can be argued where quality constraints so again we know how to prove this from our main protocol okay next we will see how to prove linear equations with hidden metrics here the protocol should protect both the metrics a and the work to w and for simple city here we come we assume that a is 2 by 2 metrics and to prove this that you are j equals a r j times w j and it can be very easy to see that we 1 equals your 1 plus your 2 and we 2 equals your 2 1 plus your 2 2 so we can transform this linear equation with the hidden metrics into linear equation with a public metrics also current list of each u r j can be argued where quality constraints so again we know how to prove this to summarize from our main protocol we can construct there are knowledge arguments for 3d different and basic lattice relations and next we will see how this there are knowledge argument can be used to construct reward applications here we will not go step into the detail construction and only give a graph route map and some results first as just missing as just mentioned from our main protocol we can construct there are knowledge argument for some basic lattice relations and then from this there are knowledge arguments we can construct there are knowledge argument for some cryptographic primitives for example prune knowledge or plaintext for pke scheme and for some of these cryptographic schemes for example accumulator or prf we currently we only know how to construct there are knowledge arguments for them from standard protocol and our work solve this problem next from suitable lattice based cryptographic schemes and and there are knowledge arguments for them we can construct prism primitives that are used in reward applications including risk signature gross signature electronic cash and rent proof if we set if we set the concrete parameters of our schemes suitably we find that schemes from our solution are much more efficient than those from a standard type protocol but is less efficient than schemes from a physical mirror without protocol but we stress that we don't use optimization such as structural lattice and some application specific optimizations and we believe that the efficient thing could directly improve if we use these optimizations okay that's all thank you for your attention and okay okay and I will uh by the way I will get my PhD degree this December and I will be on the market then if you are interested please contact me thank you um could you go back to your main protocol sorry could you go back to your main protocol or is it offline okay okay so this I think this is this whole called binary proof and this has been known for a few years in the discrete logarithm setting and was extended to the lattice setting last year what's the difference of this protocol versus the previous ones uh from the previous uh from small protocol yeah so what's your new technique in this protocol versus the previous one okay uh the main uh the main difficulty is to prove that uh vector is small in previous small protocols they use small also they set also small for example a small r a small alpha and then check if they is small right but I think the previous protocols can still prove that the this thing the secret that you have is binary so you are proving that it's short in the previous protocols as well by Gregor no it's not by Greg no no uh in previous protocols they don't okay they don't use the they don't argue linear relations over the components so uh actually we don't know how to prove that uh uh the witness is binary no we haven't seen that maybe uh if you say okay if we can use the one-off proof in the that this idea this is possible but we don't know how to make it in details yeah okay thank you