Yeah, I would like to welcome Judith Chahma to our show for an interview today. It's very exciting. I haven't known you very long, but what I've known, I've really appreciated, and so here we are. Judith, can you tell us a little bit about your background? Like, you know, how did you start writing, and where are you from, and what are your details about you? Yeah. Well, I started writing pretty late in life when I was maybe in my late 30s, and it really happened kind of serendipitously. You could say I had, at that point, thought that I wanted to be a feature article journalist, and I just didn't know I'd get started, and one day I saw this ad for a poetry workshop at a women's center in Montpelier, and I thought, well, you know, I don't know about poetry, but it'll probably loosen me up, and so I went, and I just will never forget going home from that, that first day, and saying to myself, I've been waiting for this my whole life, and the person who was teaching it, Nadelle Fishman, was so good, she sort of stayed with me after the eight weeks were done. She's now, you know, became a mentor and now is a dear friend, has remained a dear friend ever since, and from there I went on to get an MFA at this program that morphed in where it was located from the Vermont College to Norwich University, and then to what it is now, when I graduated, it was Norwich University. Yeah. Is that what brought you two from Vermont, or were you here previous to that? No, I was here for quite a while before that. Again, I seem to bumble my way through into just about everything, so it was the very early 70s, and I didn't have a job for this summer. I was going to school at the University of Toronto, I came here, stumbled on a job on the long trail as a caretaker, said to, I was married at that point to a man, and we just said to ourselves, we just never want to leave here. So, you know, I dropped out of school and came here, so I had been, and then got an undergraduate and finished my undergraduate studies at Goddard in their low residency program. And you're married, right now? I am married to my darling Lisa, to whom my book Minnow is dedicated, yes. Yes, we got together in, you know, oh, approximately 2000 and re-ish, and have been married since it's been legal to be, since it's legal. Very good. So, I'm going to read what Allison Prine, who is another well-established writer in Vermont, and then I would like you to read Minnow, which I really think it's the title and your first poem in here, and here's the book, and Judith's Poems is sensuous, vivid, and richly detailed. Minnow awakes us to the urgency and grace of natural landscapes and intimate connections. And I think Minnow, for me, really spoke to the times we're in right now, sorrow. There seems to be a lot of real sorrow in the world, and the poem talks about that, but it also talks about how we can uplift ourselves and how we can be positive. So, if you wouldn't mind reading that poem. Sure, Poem Minnow, covered in mist, cover of night, the serious air, cold fog swirling around us, the Minnow that lingered while we talked, dirt surrounding us, soot everywhere, the path fringed with fungus. It takes something serious, something drastic, like leaving your bed, like finding a stick to really change. All night we stayed covered, cold, the path frilled with fungus, soot all around us, and still we smelled wintergreen, we smelled apple and berry. We made a bed that was soft in the night, the serious night. We touched hands and our breath was swirling, sticks snapped, turtles fled. We looked different to each other and smelled. It was good. It was serious. The path was fragrant with fungus. We slid a stick in the water and talked. The Minnow we saw disappearing. Thank you. That's really beautiful.  From me. It's out of print. The publisher went out of business a long time ago. But I have some, yeah. Okay, so books of translation, too. I translate with a friend from Montpelier, Michiko Uishi, who writes in Japanese and then does the first translation, and together we work on really making those poems into poems in the English language. And we have two books of those that are published as well. Great. And are you always into the natural world?  And so were you always interested in the natural world and how to interpret that as into your writing, into your work? I suppose you could say so. I grew up in Buffalo in a very urban setting. But actually my favorite place in the entire city was the zoo. And that connection with more than human. And I have memories of places like the side of the railroad bank where the milkweed was, of the mud in a construction site.  But yes, those are my strong memories. And then of course, when I came here, it was overwhelmingly amazing. I know, I found that too. So you came directly from Buffalo with your ex to Mont? Yes. And then had a series of pretty, I feel like I've had wonderful work in my life. Well, one of the first jobs that I really loved was, I was a typist B for the state. And I was working for, well, this was pre OSHA. I was working for what was then the division of industrial hygiene. And working with a bunch of people who were just so labor positive and so proud of making conditions for the dusty trades, you know, grant it's late marble, best is talc clay, making that safer for workers. And I, it was, it was pretty inspiring work to be part of that, to learn how to take X-rays and meet people from all over. And it was in Barry to learn from the person who was supervising me about Barry's rich ethnic heritage. And a bit later after I got my MFA, I became, I taught in a number of such a number of circumstances, one of which was an art space senior center in Morrisville called the out and about center. And that was, I did that for 12 years leading first writing workshops. And then as the funding changed for senior centers and people with more profound disabilities were there, we changed to what we were doing to storytelling. And I just again, it was such deep cultural learning for me in terms of getting to know people who had lived through all the enormous changes of the 20th century. And what was essentially Northern Appalachia making their livings and subsistence farming and logging and mining. And I, then I was also teaching non-traditional college age students through a given that set of programs, undergraduate programs that were at Vermont College and then Norwich University and then Union Institute. And lastly, my beloved work and such deep learning for me of being the executive director of what was then VSA Vermont and thankfully now has a better name, much better name of inclusive arts Vermont, which is engaged in arts and disability and was just such incredible joyful work.  How did that have an effect on your writing? I know you had a reading at the synagogue there. And how has all of that influenced you? Do you feel? Yeah, it's certainly profound. I grew up in a family that not only was highly identified Jewishly and but was part of a really intense immigrant and refugee community. One part of my family were Holocaust survivors. And I also experienced some quite a bit of death early on in my life. And that led me to the kind of existential questions that children and people of all ages struggle with. So the combination of sort of the cultural, ethical background that I grew up in, again, highly labor positive, labor oriented that sort of connection. And the spiritual questioning is in the community. Just I really love the community. I also love the same way I love what people do that is richly engaged, everything from cooking to singing to making beautiful ceremonies. To me it's just part of the way I love what human beings can do. And so the poems in Minnow, there's quite a few of them that reference Jewish tradition in one way or another. And yeah, it's part of the way I am in the world, you know? You're full, yeah, you're inner self, maybe you're, yeah. So I would like to request that you read one last poem before we have to leave. And I want to thank you for being here. It's wonderful to see you. And thank you so much. So well, Linda, thank you so much for your wonderful show in the first place. And for being your wonderful inquisitive, positive self. Thank you. This is really, it's really fun to be here with you. I'm really honored. I think I'll read the point. My neighbor's footprints frozen on yesterday's path, softened today to flush, and even the leash lies slack in my hand. The beach is bare again, the gulping surf testy in its winter thaw, the sand here and there, a sudden soup. Grace and drizzle have left us the place to ourselves. I think I must be late considering death and purpose, the sky and all that's beyond bearing. The dog races to a lingering goal. The clouds begin to break apricot at their evening edges, then deepening to pink. It seems a long wait till spring and the possible. You know how it is each year settling in unfamiliar, uncertain. In a few months, the sun on our arms will shed a layer, put our backs into our paddles. There's always a point, the boat slipping from shore, the air's sharp, the lake's still too cold for swimming, woods full of moss and fungus. When we're tugged into a bewildered hope, with nothing beneath us, but a whisper. Thank you, Jared. That was wonderful. And we'll see you soon. Take care. Thank you so much, Linda. Bye.


First time chat. Akronuk and tier 1 sub, thank you very much.  I've been taking different anti-depths for the majority of this year and I hate it. Yeah, for me, what's happening, what I'm seeing right now is people are so disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry, with centralized power, that they're shutting away from other medications that they might have been taking because they have lost complete confidence in our current Western, I don't want to say health care system because it's not a health care system, it's a medical system, right? The veil has been lifted and people are like, wait a second, if they're lying about this, what else are they lying? They're doing research, they're finding out. There's tons of things they've lied throughout history, right? So now they're re-evaluating how they want to interact with food because food is your number one medicine, really. Your own awareness of your own body is your number one person you should consult, right? If you're, you can tell, by the way, gang, if you want to know if you're, you have a good doctor, right? Personal doctor, private doctor, if someone you're visiting for whatever it is, for your health, if they're a good doctor or not, pay attention. Any good doctor, this is one of the first things, or one of the most important things that would tell you, is that you are your, are your most important person you can, you should consult regarding your own health, right? So you should not necessarily first hand go to experts or people who have a degree in something to get their opinion. You can consult them, but the final decision maker is you. How are you going to deal with this, right? What is best for your body because you know your body, yourself, better than anyone, right? If you know something agrees with you or doesn't agree with you, you know your mental state, right? So a doctor in one way or another, a good doctor will tell you that you should pay attention to how you feel and what you think is best for yourself.


Well, hello everybody and welcome back to my channel. We're starting something a little bit different here because I'm gonna change out my planner cover to this one. I did not get this personalized just from the Erin Condren website. Links are always below. But, um, yeah, I don't know. I just figured I got like a seasonal one. I might as well put the dang thing on there, right? And I really didn't like this cover, so I put it like this. My weird, yeah. Yes, yes, I am. So I actually got a couple of different covers. I got these during the, um, like buy one, get one free or buy one, get one half off. So I got this like marble one that I did not get personalized. Um, and then I got this one too, not personalized, and this one also not personalized because I don't really like personalization to be completely honest. At least with the planner covers. It's just, it's just not my bag, y'all. It's just not my bag. But different strokes for different folks, right? Oh, these are always so difficult to get in the first time. Come on. Watch Emily's struggle on the struggle bus. Yeah. Oh, here we go. I'm gonna like break my nails doing this. And P.S., I just took my nail polish off and they're like really kind of yellow underneath so I was wearing kind of a darker like mauve-y pink color. So, oh well. I think I wore it for a little bit too long so kind of stained my nails a little bit. Well, that's okay. And do you guys switch out your planner covers a lot? I don't, I don't know. I feel like I don't tend to change it out too often but I do like a good, you know, seasonal cover. There's my new cover, y'all. All right, so where are we at today? We are working on October and here we are. Okay, so that's gonna be a different video maybe next week. All right, cool. So, there's a lot going on and I am actually going to do like Halloween themes during the month of October but I need different washi because my regular washi is over here and my other washi is over there but I got to get up for it. Okay, so here is all of my other washi. That's like seasonal and whatnot. So, let's see what I want to do this week. Let's do something fun. All right, I've got the plan. Carter, move this kind of out of the way. Whatever, whatever. Okay, so I am needing to write in just a couple of things that aren't gonna go specifically anywhere this week. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just gonna put in this. Crystal is the new gal that is working for the company that I previously worked at but I'm still technically working there, I guess. I'm doing a bunch of training with her to get her up to speed on some things but I work till 4.30 now. So, I think one of these nights, I'm not sure which night but one of these nights I am gonna actually go to my old office with her. Obviously, she'll still be there and do some training stuff. We did a little bit of training actually this morning. Today is Sunday and yeah, so it's kind of the gist of things but I know she's gonna have a ton of questions and there's a whole bunch of, you know, things that I'm sure I totally forgot to tell her about too so yeah, it's just... It's a lot of information, you guys. It's just a lot of information so... I'm trying to help out as much as I can and I'm still technically working there, I guess.  But I think she's a great replacement and will do really, really well in the position and I'm still doing all the social media stuff and all of that for the company so... Yeah, come... We talked about it and come end of November. In December, I don't want to be doing this anymore at all and she's totally fine with that. She said two months is more than enough time to get her bearings and figure it all out so that should be a good amount of time and then we'll be texting and talking probably... maybe even daily, I'm not sure and actually tonight I need to do a bunch of stuff with the inbox for the email before she starts tomorrow because I want to clear all that out and then let her know what's pending and whatnot. All right, so this is all my work. Let me grab my... my stickers. Because you know, you need stickers. I feel like I'm all over the place today. Probably mainly because I'm vlogging right now too. Oh, by the way, it's vlogtober y'all so you guys will see vlogs from me. So yeah... Oh my gosh, seriously, I should figure all of this out before I start filming but I didn't do that today because I'm me, so sorry y'all. Okay, I hate that I'm looking for like one specific sticker and I can like never properly find it and it's always like the last ones. You know what, I should go to the end because I think it's back here somewhere. Come on, here we go, all the works. There we go, there we go. All right, and I think I'll actually hold on. Hold on, I have more of them. Okay, I try to like use up the sticker sheets that I've already started using.  Sorry, I just didn't put it in and I'll put it in this week. To do laundry. And randomly like a laundry is one of my favorite things to do. Something about making things clean and putting that away is like insanely satisfying. I don't know if you guys ever feel that way, but I do. And I might get questions on where I got this washi to be completely honest. I don't remember where I got any of this. Pretty sure that this stuff was like from a planner friend. So I don't know you guys. But it's really cute. It's really cute stuff. Oh, okay, I have an update on the Friday video situation. I know a lot of you have been asking me what was going on with Friday's video. All right, so I did a DIY and I'll probably end up just showing it in the vlog of like what I did because the footage is like gone. I got it edited in my computer and saved the file. Everything saved properly. I think well actually that's probably not correct but everything saved you know in the right way. Deleted the original files because I didn't need them anymore and then when I tried to upload them it just like wasn't syncing up with YouTube or something. I was like what the heck is going on with that? So anyway come to find out after like two days of researching that the file is basically corrupted and won't upload to YouTube. So I just don't have a video unfortunately. So that Saturday or that Saturday sorry I was working on it on Saturday. That Friday last Friday my Halloween DIY didn't happen. So sorry guys. But you know technically issues happen from time to time. So what I'm going to do is I'll just end up showing it in one of the vlogs coming up soon. Not sure when but at some point, at some point I'll show it. And then I'm vlogging the entire month of October. Or should I put it? Should I put it in here? Sure. Why the heck not? My little vlog stickers which are so cute. And my garbage. Alright let's put in the work stickers. You gotta work to make the moneys to pay the bills. The bills is? Yeah the bills is. Oh my goodness. I am so loopy today you guys. I'm just like really tired. I actually ended up taking a nap today which was glorious. And I'm just like still kind of tired from the nap. So I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't have taken a nap. Okay and this is my Chrissy and Designs binder. Actually I should put this in too for this weekend at some point. Should work on that. Doodle doodle, where am I going? What am I doing? Functional stickers. There we go. Here we go. Okay. I always like to pull them out because I don't like the ring in the way. Kind of like this.  I need a maca. All right. What color? What color you guys? What color? Let's do this teal because there's kind of like a blueish teal in there. All right. So Monday is the day you're watching this. So it is a plan with me day of course. And then Wednesday I actually have a planner to review for you guys. I literally haven't even opened it up. I just got it in my public mailbox which the information is below if you guys ever want to send me something. I get questions about that once in a while. You know, if someone can send me something go ahead. It's right there. So and it's not my house. Don't worry. It's not my house. It's just a public mailbox which actually that public mailbox by the end of the year will be changing because I don't really drive by that mailbox too often anymore. I'm going to choose a different place. It's a little bit closer. But anyway, so I just got that in the mail this weekend. So I'm going to do an open box planner review. Like not an intense review obviously but like, you know, some sort of review on it because I want to share all the goodness with you guys. But yeah. So then I think on Saturday or Sunday, maybe I'll just mark this on Sunday at some point I need to do some work for my previous employer. I feel like I'm just keeping previous employers so you guys will like understand that I have like basically three jobs right now. One is YouTube which you're watching and then my, you know, normal nine to five ish job which is really eight to four thirty job. And then I'm doing stuff for this is my old employer. So I'm just helping out with stuff, getting all that transition stuff kind of happening. So but like I said, I'm still doing like social media and I'm still, you know, assisting the new gal in some of the stuff that needs to be done as well. So I'll have a bunch of stuff that needs to get handled on Sunday morning. So anyways, I'm going to pull this out too because I don't really have TV anymore. You guys, I know I've said that a bunch of times. If you guys have watched me for a little while, I don't have like an antenna yet. I need to like get one, but I just haven't done it yet, but I think this is going to be it for the week. I know this is like epically kind of boring because it's just me working and honestly Saturday. I'm so looking forward to Saturday. I have nothing planned. I want to keep it that way because I want to sleep in so bad. You don't even know. But yeah, I'm very excited about Saturday morning. I want to sleep. I want to sleep so bad, but yeah, so that is going to be it for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Sorry there's not too much craziness going on, but if you want to, obviously on this channel is where I post all my vlogs as well. I will be vlogging every day. As for the vlogs, sometimes there may be like two vlogs in one day, like two days in one vlog if that makes sense because if I don't have enough content, I'm just going to like push it to the next day, you know, to make it like, I don't know, five, 10 minutes long if it's like super epically short. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to try to upload every day as well as my regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday's. But we'll see how it goes. We'll see. But I will always update on Instagram if there's like questions or whatever. But anyway, I am going to jet. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to post them in the comments below. If you like this video, make sure to give it a good old thumbs up. Also, make sure to hit the red subscribe button if you haven't already. And if you're so inclined, you can hit that little bell too and it'll actually send you email notifications of when I post videos because honestly the vlogs are kind of sporadic as to when they actually come up on the channel, but Monday, Wednesday, Friday are typically 9am Central Standard Time. So that's it for me. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. I really appreciate it and I will talk to you guys in the next video. Bye guys.


Hi, I'm Darren Thomas here on City Talk, President of Thomas Media Group, host of the annual Columbia Black Expo, and I'm here today to talk about the 2018 Columbia Black Expo Economic Empowerment Summit. Power of Praise, this is a partnership with a local church and this year we're fortunate to have a relationship with Word of God Ministries and Pastor Eric Davis. We invite you to come out and fellowship as we lift up praise and we talk about our spiritual connection as associated with the Black Expo event. Expo officially kicks off on Thursday morning with our Black Expo Empowerment Breakfast. This is the first time we've done an Empowerment Breakfast in past years. We've done a kickoff reception, doing things a little different. Our guest speaker is a young lady, Miss Miles, who is a very powerful, high profile African American female with dominion power. We're all familiar with Dominion NG and their quest to help us in this community with the transition with SCANA, SCNG, and we invited them to be a part of the Black Expo Empowerment Weekend and really talking about how Dominion as an entity will empower all of South Carolina's citizens, particularly those in the Midlands, particularly those from the minority community. So we will kick off our Black Expo Weekend with our Empowerment Breakfast, Brooklyn Baptist Church from 7.30 until 9.00. This will be the 14th annual Black Expo Charity Golf Tournament. This year we've moved the tournament to Wood Creek Farms. They're in Northeast Columbia. Again, a great event as we raise money for the Judge Matthew Perry Scholarship Fund as well as the Clyburn Golf Center and the First Tea Program. Very excited this year. This year we will actually be honoring with the Trailblazer Award Dr. Charles Waddell, who's Associate Athletic Director at the University of South Carolina for his efforts. We welcome Coach Don Staley and USC football coach Will Muschamp, who will be there at this golf tournament. This is a great event, a great tournament. I think one of the highlights for us in having put on this event for many years. After the golf tournament ends that day, we go into the eighth annual Taste of Black Columbia. This event has grown tremendously over the years and thankfully to a partnership with Jack Daniels, as well as the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. Friends, we will welcome over 30 chefs, chefs, caterers, and restaurants who will be participating. This event will be at the South Carolina State Museum from 7.30 until 11. This will be reviving for four awards, the best dessert, the best savory dish, the best display, and the Certified Grown SC Award. This is the award given to the chef that produces the best dish using South Carolina based agricultural products. Each category carries a $1,000 prize. It's a great event, a great networking event, lots of fun, lots of excitement, and to top it all off, we've got great entertainment. Turnbee Sensation Silk will be performing at that event. It's just a wonderful time to come out, take part in the Jack Daniels Lounge, sample food from 30 different restaurants, and just have a great evening. So this year our focus is more of an empowerment. We have five pillar areas, health, because your health is your wealth. We'll be looking at health disparities and how we as a community can look at our health to really lean towards longer living, healthier living, which is also more economical living. Then we've got our jobs, our jobs fair, looking at career opportunities. We empowered the same event down in Charleston, was very excited, young lady who came to the Charleston Black Expo Empowerment Summit and got hired on that day at the event. We're looking for those same kinds of successes with this event, but our job fair is a huge part of the Black Expo Empowerment Summit. Then you've got your, our education. You've got several colleges from around the Southeast, all there talking with young people about their college choices, but it's really beyond just their higher education. We've got friends there talking with folks in school just about how to better prepare our kids for the SATs, standardized tests, but we're also doing FAFSA assistance onsite, helping families get over the hurdle and the intimidating factor of completing FAFSA forms and whatnot. Then there's the wealth generation side. Thanks to our partnership with Merrill Lynch. We're doing, we're teaching individuals the basics of investing, understanding the stock market, but then long-term planning. How do you build generational wealth? How do you build generational wealth for your families? How do you employ strategies to move your family forward? It's bigger than just wills and trusts, but how do you set things in motion that your children and your grandchildren down the road can make better economic decisions based on the economic processes that you put in place for your family. Then the fifth component is, of course, entrepreneurship, business. We're doing everything from helping people start business, eight steps to starting a business, thanks to our partnership with the SBA, but also how to grow your business through federal contracting. We've got representatives from the Office of Business Opportunities with some of the new strategies that the Office of Business Opportunities with the city has in place. We have several different elements that will make up our pillars. In the top of the law, we've got two great speakers, Dr. Dennis Kimbrough, professor at Georgia State University, and as our keynote speaker, young lady that we are excited about.  She'll be there as our keynote speaker at the Black Expo Empowerment Summit. When the expo is over at 2 o'clock, final phase, the Black Expo Day Party. We thought we'd do something a little different this year as the expo ends at 2 o'clock from 3, from 2 o'clock to 5 o'clock, the Black Expo Day Party all there at the Columbia Convention Center. Go to our website, blackexpo-south.com, blackexpo-south.com. Please follow us on Facebook. We're doing a lot of campaigns, a lot of special promotions on Facebook. Black Expo South is our Facebook page, our own Instagram, our own LinkedIn, as well as, of course, you can give us a call in the office at 254-6404.


So going on talking about initiatives, what are some Navy personnel initiatives that you would like to talk about and what is Sailor 2025? Sailor 2025 really started out as a group of independent initiatives just to try and get our arms around how we might modernize our personnel system. Today we've really coalesced that into about 43 different initiatives that are alive and well and those initiatives fall into three major categories. The first one is to really completely modernize our entire personnel system. We would envision someday where folks can interact with their detailers on their personal mobile devices that you would be able to have complete transparency on all the jobs that might be available for your next assignment and that you could negotiate that on sort of a LinkedIn type of venue. We want more flexibility, things like the career intermission program, things like graduate education opportunities or initial four year degree education opportunities for folks and just the ability to have choices, flexibility and transparency into the process. The second level of effort is about modernizing our training.  It's about getting the right training to the right Sailor at the right time rather than going all the way through an initial training pipeline of what we call today, A school and C school in certain ratings that might be advantageous to break that up into the blocks throughout the career so that as you come back for your second or third C tour you're getting updated training on updated and modernized combat systems or whatever systems you operate in a particular career field. And then the other aspect of this is not only the right training at the right time but it's the training delivered in the right manner and we're proud to be sort of leading the way for the Department of Defense and some innovative training mechanisms. It's things like use of artificial intelligence tutors for our cyber warfare experts. It's things like computer aided training devices that are essentially rooms full of flat screens that could be reconfigured to be a submarine radio room one hour the next hour it's a Tomahawk vertical launch console and that's designed to after folks have some initial familiarity with their jobs now they can get the reps and sets necessary to become really confident in their skills. And then there's there are other things like simulators and other reconfigurable training systems that help us again practice more frequently practice in between C tours go get to your ship ready to do your job with very little ramp up whenever you get to the ship. And then the third piece of it is really enriching our culture that's about the life work balance that's about family friendly services more childcare options more childcare hours it's about a culture of fitness being fit all year round not just running twice a year for your physical readiness test.


We are talking tax with Tom Yamachika. This is Jay Fidel. It's ThinkTac. We're talking about stealth taxes today pending in your state legislature here in Hawai'ine. Welcome to the show, Tom. Thanks for having me on the show, Jay. Well, we're at the time in our legislature where things have kind of gone from public view and are now pretty much in backroom discussions in the so-called spoke-filled rooms. This is where the conference committees are appointed and meet, and then things happen to the bills that we may not know about until the results are made public. Well, that's comforting. You know, the legislature taken a lot of heat on corruption this year and you'd think they would try to rebuild their image. There was a piece of paper, piece of the paper the other day, about how notwithstanding the decision of the Supreme Court on a gut and replace, they were trying to do it anyway, trying to get around the decision. I mean, really, who's doing that PR? Because they should be seeking transparency. This is the opposite direction, right? Well, I mean, the two bills that we're talking about in the paper were kind of really borderline on whether they're related in subject matter at all. Like one of them had started off with a bill to increase the TAT if we got so many more tourists that it wound up being an earmark on the TAT. It still relates to the transient accommodations tax, but different aspects of it. We're kind of wondering if that would be enough for a court to strike down. What was the other one again? That was one of them, but I forgot what the other one was about. I know what you were talking about. Yeah. Well, what I'm thinking is, gee whiz, can somebody reel them in? It's not the governor. He doesn't reel them in. Maybe it's the president of the Senate and the Speaker, but they need to be reeled in. And these bills wind up making much too much progress. But let's go to the stealth bills that impose a tax without saying it's a tax through the Department of Health on the supply chain for food and other non-durables. What are those bills about? Okay, so I call this show stealth taxes because it's a means of having the government charge money, and of course the cost is passed on to you as a consumer. But you really can't see it as a tax. It doesn't affect the tax code. It's hard enough for us to watch the bills that affect the tax code, but then there's stuff like this that doesn't even do that. This one is House Bill 2399, which establishes an extended producer responsibility program that is designed to slap a so-called fee on anyone who imports your cell's fast moving consumer goods, which means anything non-durable, food or drink, for example. So this is on consumer packaging. The fee in the current draft of the bill is $150 for each metric ton of packaging material placed in the market. Now, how that translates to the individual consumer goods, we really don't know. I suppose maybe a fraction of a penny goes into the paper that wraps your burger. Another penny or two goes into the package that the burger is placed in. This is unprecedented, right? There's no tax like this right now. This is a brand new idea, right? It's a brand new idea. Now, it turns out that there was an extended producer responsibility task force that was convened a couple of years ago that some industry people participated in, and they unanimously agreed that more study was required, right? But this bill came through anyway, so some people couldn't wait. You mean the study wasn't finished? It wasn't started. Okay. Why couldn't they wait? I mean, what's the political, real politic reason for a bill like this? Who gains? Who loses? Who cares? Well, it's probably part of the environmentalist agenda. We have these packaging materials that are polluting our environment. Well, we got rid of the foam. Okay. Now, they use paper. Well, the paper shows up everywhere too, so we got to do something about that. So that's kind of where we're at now. So you see that in not only this, but also in other things like the carbon tax, which we talked about before, but carbon tax is kind of more, I mean, that one actually is a tax and it affects the tax code. So that one we could see right away. We didn't see this one. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, do you think somebody intentionally tried to get it by those who would oppose new taxes? Probably not because the industry groups knew this came up and the industry groups testified against it. Okay. And their view is that it's a tax. It's no more, no less than a tax and good for them that they spotted it and call it out as a tax, right? Well, that's not what they said.  Okay. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about public policy on this, because I think it's a case study. It's not just this one bill. It's a case study. So here we are. And we have inflation, which is especially troublesome when you're talking about food wrapped in these things. It's especially troublesome when you talk about the fact that Hawaii imports a lot of food and doesn't grow the food. And the state government has done little or nothing to incentivize new agriculture businesses, even though we've talked a good game for how many 20, 30 years.  And I guess there's more public policy considerations. Those are the ones that strike me. So that if I were doing public policy on this bill, I would say, are you kidding? Are you kidding? In times of inflation, as you said, in time of COVID, in times of restaurants going down, you can't afford the last penny, in times of, you know, a failure of sustainability on local agriculture, local food packaging, or anything having to do with food. So you want to impose a tax from left field on food? You know, if you weigh and balance the considerations, public policy would forget about whether, you know, it's tax or not tax. Well, I mean, the counterarguments we always see are, these robber barons are lining their pockets. They can easily afford it. So let's, you know, let's go whack them. Yeah, right. The argument that the taxpayer can afford it. So we just keep on whacking him and whacking him and whacking him. It's a bottomless pit of creative possibilities that are called tax or not called tax, which impose great burdens on the consumer. That's what it is. And you think the legislature would be really busy in trying to incentivize agriculture and trying to deal with inflation. This is the wrong way. Not only that, but this new fee kind of harkens back to the general excise tax of the old days when it was opposed on everything. And there was no like, I mean, there was a possibility that would pyramid multiple times. So as currently drafted, this fee could apply multiple times in the economic chain, you know, because it's imposed on sellers, it's imposed on the person who uses the paper plates to sell plate lunches, and it then is also applied on the seller of the paper plates. And if there's somebody who imports the paper plates and then sells them to a middleman, it's applied a third time and there's no different rate. Yeah. Wow. Who's watching the store? Who's the champion? Who introduced this bill? Let's find out. This one was introduced by a whole bunch of people in the house. This is the house version. And the Senate version, Acasio-Chen Gerber, Big Muriwaki, on the house side it was about 20 people. What makes it so popular? It sounds popular. It does sound popular. It's probably part of the progressive agenda. Sometimes the progressive agenda conflates with things that aren't really progressive. You and I know that. Sounds like this is one of those things. Yeah. The first introducer is Nicole Lohan, who currently heads the environmental committee in the house. So actually, how does this help the environment? Supposedly it gets rid of the solid waste. How does it do that? I didn't hear anything in the mechanics you described that would do, in fact, that. Well, let's see. It assesses the resources needed to reduce the volume of packaging waste sent to landfills or power plants that burn municipal solid waste as a fuel by 50% and 80% by a date to be determined by rule. So what they want to do is they want to reduce packaging waste and I guess propose to do that by making it more expensive. I'm not catching it yet, Tom. I'm sorry. Because it's more expensive than you don't wrap the hamburger in paper waste. No, because people buy fewer hamburgers because it's so damn expensive. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So you get rid of the waste by taxing the paper goods that come in. Right. Is there any indication of a logical connection between taxing the paper goods and getting rid of the waste because they're more expensive than buyers of these things won't use them, but they need them. They absolutely need them. And what's interesting is that they put that in the Department of Health. If you don't have the paper to wrap these things, that is a thread on public health. You need to be able to wrap them to keep them sanitary. Well, it's the same thing. It's the same kind of argument for the bottle bill. People are concerned about the number of bottles and cans. So they make the bottles and cans more expensive by adding the high five nickel plus the one cent or two cents administrative fee on each purchase. So they want to drive down demand and reduce the number of cans and bottles that are sold. So this is probably following the same logic we're trying to. Did the bottle bill work? I think it did. Yeah, maybe. So you've got to give them credit for following some sort of established pattern in the thought. Maybe it's experimental, but in the thought that if the bottle bill worked, then the wrapping bill will work. Yeah, the problem I have with the bottle bill is that the system as it had been run by the Department of Health was susceptible to fraud and was actually being preyed upon. And the State Auditor found that out, and then pretty much nothing was done about it. Let's go to our second bill. Before we do that, just one other thing is the Department of Health is the Administrator on this system. The Department of Health does not have the administrative capacity to charge a tax or something that looks and smells like a tax. They would be starting up a whole administrative effort of bureaucracy, if you will, by creating a mechanism to charge, to identify and charge the tax, and then collect the tax. This is not in their wheelhouse. What does this mean in terms of public policy and fiscal policy? Well, I mean, they can do it now, because since they're administering the bottle bill. So we can probably just tack it on to the same folks who are doing that. Okay, well, that means there's a certain logic to that, too, then. Yeah. I hate to say it, but there is, yeah. I know. Okay, well, we're trying to be reasonable and explore. I think my biggest concern is the legislature should be trying to make it easier for restaurants. A lot of restaurants are going out of business. Right now, I can tell you, and COVID has wrecked havoc with the restaurant industry. And agriculture is not growing. I mean, everybody says, oh, it's a good thing, but the legislature puts very little money into it. We made a movie about that called Scaling Up Hawaii's Food Supply. And we really don't grow much food here, nor do we incentivize anyone to grow much food here. And so if they want to spend time on trying to do something that will have a basis of public policy, then they really ought to look at that. That's much more important. The other thing is this money that's collected by the Department of Health, where does it go? Does it go to some good purpose or in the general fund? Special funded. Ah, special funded. Yep. Controlled by the Department of Health then. Right. Same like the model bill. It deals to a different special fund as the model bill, but the bottom line is that the Department of Health gets suspended.  I'd kill it. I knew you'd say that. Okay. Let's move on to the next one. Okay. The next one I wanted to bring to everybody's attention is Senate Bill 3040 sponsored. This is an administration bill sponsored by our Department of Accounting and General Services, and it deals with state procurement, namely where the state buys goods and services that it needs. Right. So it's a consumer like most of us, except that, you know, buys a lot more things and a lot larger quantities. So what happens here is the Department of Accounting General Services is going to come up with an e-procurement system. So they are going to do some computer upgrades and get a method by which they can go through bid solicitations and so forth over the internet, part of which they already have, and pay people over the internet. Okay. Here and here's the catch. There's a fee for doing that. Who charges the fee to whom? The bill doesn't tell us how much the fee is going to be, but it gives, the bill gives, the state procurement office, the authority to set the fee to cover procurement system automation costs. So what that would cover is an acquisition cost of five million dollars in the first year and one million to maybe half a million per year thereafter in maintenance and licensing fees. Okay. This takes me back to Sonny Bugwalia. Sonny Bugwalia, they hired him away from GSA. He was a management guy in GSA in Washington. They hired him and they said, would you please take a look at our computer system here in the state? This is... Hunter Governor Abercrombie, right? Abercrombie, yeah. And he couldn't stop laughing. Well, yeah, I mean, it was a joke. Abercrombie says this is like the second coming for him that he could get this big shot in here and the guy would have a staff and it was a public-private partnership. Some of the big billionaires in town contributed and they paid him a salary, got him a staff, had offices in the capital building, as I recall, and he was going to make a study of how the state computer system was deficient. Well, we all knew that. Everyone in the state knew that. Everyone in the state government knew that. But he spent a ton of money, millions making this report saying that the state computer system was deficient, that it was old, that it wasn't being supported by the original vendors, that it didn't do the job at all. And it was stuck, you know, it was like over the hill. And the big long report, and that was his conclusion that everybody knew anyway. And then he quit, went back to Washington, that was the end of that. I think Abercrombie hired him at $0 per annum to be our computer representative in Washington, which was a way of saying that, no, he didn't really quit, he was promoted. That was the propaganda at the time he was promoted. And then Abercrombie threw a great big party for him and he was gone. And the report sits on the shelf saying that the state computer system is terribly deficient. I don't think much was done about that report. And if something was done about it, and I'm getting to the point, if something was done about it, wouldn't that properly have been all along the way, all along those decades where we didn't do anything to upgrade the computer system in the state? It wouldn't have been paid out of the general fund. You wouldn't have to create a whole new source of income for it, just pay it out of the till. I don't understand why and why everything has got it. You got, in order for you to spend money on things like that, you have to create a source for it, take it out of the till. That's where it should come from. And now they're doing it again after not having done it for a long time. Yeah, that's what Kaya Townes philosophy was. But here, they're not focusing on the fact that an automated procurement system is going to save costs. It takes less money to do electronic steps than it does to shuffle paper. Okay. And it's much easier to pay people using electronic funds transfers than it is all true. We've known this for 20, 30 years. The business community knows this like its own heart that you have to keep on upgrading computer systems all the time. And you have to be careful and smart about it and not spend in the wrong direction. But ultimately, it will make your company more efficient, lots more efficient, magnitude more efficient. So I don't know why the state hasn't done this already. It should have been doing this a long time ago. And as I said, I think it should comes out of the till, not a special fund. But anyway, so I think you're saying what I'm thinking that this should be a general funded project. And people shouldn't be paying a tax for the privilege of getting paid from the state if they provide goods and services. Well, yeah, they're going to get taxed because that's how a GE tax works. But adding something else on top of it because you're I mean, to be fair, okay, it's not mandatory now. But that's the next step. I mean, it's written all over it. The next step is once this bill passes, the next step is going to make the fee mandatory. So when the bill passes, you would have an option of paying it or not paying it? That's right. Why don't they just update the system? I mean, what's so rocket science about that? Well, they're going to do that anyway. But now with this bill, they're going to get somebody to pay for it. Namely all of the I'm still lost. I think that this is a core production mechanism in state government, you know, state government as a service, right? It's the most important part of the brain. And to have this thought process and this processing capability with computers, which is everybody in the world does it from every continent. I don't I don't know why we have to have what amounts to a tax on that. That's a core function of all government, including state government. Am I wrong here, Tom? I mean, you're not wrong. I think this is something that we should be expecting of our government that, you know, they're going to get away from paper, you know, for, you know, lots of reasons, including, well, maybe we want to have them be defined as an extended producer responsibility so they can they can pay, you know, pay a fee on their, you know, the amount of paper they use to push their, you know, push their forms. Well, you know, it strikes me that that report, which I'm sure made recommendations, the one by Sonny Bagualia, you know, has things like that in there. I mean, for the basic principle, you want to have a more efficient, in fact, Abercrombie himself said this. In fact, I have it on tape that he said this, that if you want to have a better state government or more efficient state government, improve computer system. So I don't know why we get distracted with a bill like this, when we actually haven't done the job yet anyway. And my problem with it, in a larger sense, Tom, I like your thought, is this is the wrong road, creating a special tax for something that should be out of the general fund. Because there are a lot of state functions that the state should be doing. And now it's a kind of precedent, isn't it? If you want us to do our job, you have to pay a special. That's right. And the money goes into a special pot and is exclusively spent by the agency that's doing it. And, you know, they may or may not have some scrutiny by the legislature through the appropriation process, but it's designed to avoid the appropriation process. We raise this money ourselves. You know, this is self-sustaining. You don't have to look at it legislature. That's not the point. The legislature is supposed to look at all of the expenditures on behalf of us, the people. When Linda Lingle got into office, I was sitting on the high tech development corporation, the board, and her instructions to the board were you guys have to find a way. This is a state agency, an attached agency to DBED. You guys have to find a way to make yourself self-sustaining. You have to come up with ways to raise money. You have to act like a business organization. And then you have to perform your state duties and take instructions from my administration on what functions you should perform. But you have to raise the money to operate. I said, gee, that is a strange kind of approach. Isn't it a state agency charged with raising the money to operate? But I think we have more and more of that in state government. And I think it doesn't really reflect the reality. State government has the power to tax, let them tax. State government's obligations provide governmental functions. Let them do the functions. But operating like a private business to raise the money to perform functions it is statutorily obligated to do sounds to me like a twist on the basic concept. Well, I think we're kind of relegated to optics like that because of the reality that we're heavily taxed as is. And if we get taxed heavily and the state government's not doing its job, so what's it going to take to make them do their job? More tax and let the executive agency do spend it as they want. I'm not sure about that. Yeah.  You know, but at the end of the day, you are avoiding, especially in this and election year, lest we forget, avoiding raising taxes because that's unpopular, politically unpopular. So I agree with you. We have very high taxes to start with. And now we find ways to tax indirectly like this and like the packaging bill. And it doesn't show up. It doesn't show up. So we are not telling the public that we are raising taxes. And what's interesting too is we already have containers, structures of tax, which we could apply. You know, like for example, the use tax, the gross excess tax, which is plenary. And if we wanted to raise money in a transparent way, we would use mechanisms like that or by the income tax. But we're afraid to do that politically. And I mean, people have tried that before and have gotten all kinds of pushback. Okay. Well, what's your message on this, Tom? I mean, this is a really fundamental concept. And I don't know if it could be fixed in the short term, but what's your message on it? Well, I mean, if what lawmakers are trying to do is to avoid the message that voters were giving them when they tried to raise taxes directly, they really ought to kind of start listening again, because voters told them that they didn't want more taxes. And lawmakers should take that seriously and not try to get around it by this step or the other, artifice or strategy. You mentioned in the early part of the show that there were a lot of bills in the ledge that were indirectly or directly raised taxes. So the ones we've been talking about today, specifically, and not the only ones, it sounds like there's a whole onslaught of bills that would raise taxes on the people of Hawaii or that would raise other charges, which are effectively taxes. Well, I mean, there were more. They're not too many now. It's come down, but it's it still kind of raises the question that we need to be diligent as taxpayers and look for this kind of stuff. And as, you know, for a person in my organization, we've got to read up all our efforts to call out stuff like this so people understand this is what's going on. Very important public service. And hopefully it will have a long term effect and it will make our political leaders understand that fiscal responsibility is more than just raising taxes. You can quote me on that, Tom. I'm glad we can. Thanks for having me on the show, Jay. Thank you, Tom. Tom Yamachika talking tax with Tom. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks. Thank you. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.


A-City family and our Columbia community, we are out at Drew Wellness this Saturday with the Jump Start Your Heart event, sponsored by our wonderful public relations team. We have seen the young and the not so young really getting involved today. It's amazing to watch our children doing yoga but also some of our seniors and everyone in between out here enjoying all of the wonderful resources that have been brought to Drew Wellness on a lovely Saturday, particularly during the month of February where we're all bringing awareness about heart health. And I can't thank our staff enough, we're so blessed in the city of Columbia to have professionals that we can use every day right here at Drew Wellness Center. We don't have to bring folks in, we have wonderful facilitators, wonderful instructors who know how to get our citizens moving and also explaining the benefits of heart healthy activities, whether it's the exercise component or how to eat healthy, how to also take advantage of our partners in the community like the Clare Cooperative Health who is here to also demonstrate what they know through their healthcare services and share their resources. So we're just extremely excited today to provide an amenity like the wonderful Drew Wellness Center, the facility that it is in the heart of Columbia and share some additional resources as we all encourage each other to be aware and be actively trying to do better when it comes to heart health.


Hello, welcome back to OpenShift 4.x deep dive video series. In this video, we'll talk about over-the-air update process for your cluster. And we'll also see how the application operators updates happen through the operator lifecycle manager. Over-the-air upgrades to your cluster can be performed either using OpenShift Administrative Console or you can also use Red Hat Cloud Web Interface. Red Hat runs an OCP update service through which it provides over-the-air updates for Red Hat couriers and OpenShift. The release artifacts are packaged as container images so you don't require any other mechanism to deliver updates. These images contain the controller manifest, roles, and other resources required to update your cluster to a particular version. OpenShift 4.x runs a cluster version operator on each cluster and this operator pulls for any available updates from the over-the-air update service hosted by Red Hat. If the updates are available, it goes ahead and downloads the release images for the update. So if you go to your running cluster and navigate to the administration section and look at the cluster settings, if there are any updates available, it will tell you here this is because your cluster version operator would have checked with the OTA service and knows that there is an update. So on my cluster, it shows clearly that the update is available. If I click on this update now, it says that my current version is 4.3.8 and the 4.3.9 is available and I can click on this update and this will start performing the update. So the cluster version operator downloads the release image for the update and it manages the updates to all the cluster operators. So in the past, we discussed the difference between the two types of operators. One of them is the cluster operators or the platform operators make up your cluster and the other set of operators are application kind of operators that are managed by the OLM. Here, we are only talking about the cluster or platform operators that are updated based on this cluster version operator and these include things like authentication storage registry, EFK stack and things like that. It updates all these operators running on your cluster in the right order. Eventually your cluster gets updated. Now, let us talk about the application operator upgrades, the ones that are managed by the operator lifecycle manager. So these are the third party applications or your own applications that are exposed via the operator hub and if you install any of those operators, how do these operators get updated? So each one has a cluster service version and these cluster service versions for operators are stored in a catalog source. Within a catalog source, the operators are organized into packages called channels. On my cluster, we have a bunch of catalog sources and my operators installed via OLM are organized into one of these catalog sources. We'll look at one of the operators that is installed. I'm looking at the open shift serverless operator. When you look at the subscription for this operator, this is coming from a catalog source red hat operators and it is part of tick preview channel. I also note that the approval for this operator is set to automatic. I can change this from automatic to manual, in which case it will not automatically apply any updates. Now, every catalog source is associated with an operator source which provides the endpoint to inquire for any updates from the registry where this operators are published. Currently the updates to operators are published on quay.io. Let us look at the operator sources. So you can see that there are three different operator sources. We are interested in the red hat operators. You can see that red hat operators are coming from a registry which is quay.io slash CNR and this is the endpoint where the catalog source will fall for any updates. Now, let us describe this operator source for red hat operators. It shows the list of packages that the operator source provides and it also shows when the last reconciliation was done. So updates to the OLM managed operators are handled by the catalog sources by directly polling with quay.io and the subscriptions are updated on the cluster based on whether they are set to update manually or set for automatic updates. So to summarize in this video, we discussed how over the air updates to your cluster work and we also discussed how application operators are updated. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks a lot for watching.


Let's get over to our man, Mr. Basil Chapman, as we do each and every Tuesday at 20 past the hour. And don't forget, folks, Basil has an outstanding show here every trading day, 10 to 11 Eastern Standard Time. Also, a great newsletter, the opening call. Now, it's very easy to get his opening call, folks. Come over to our website at TFNN. You go into the newsletters. You hit the opening call, it's right on the left-hand side. You can hit Subscribe. You get the opening call for one month for $149. You get it for six months for $695, which is a savings of $199 or 22%, and you can get it for one year for $1195, which is a savings of $593 or 33%. Now, they all come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. When you do get Basil's newsletter, Basil is down approximately 10 to 11 archives out there. You get access to all those archives. Great education, folks. Check it out at TFNN. Basil Chapman, what's going on? Hi, John. How are you? I'm doing great, man. The market's not doing great, but bottom line is that it's pretty intense, actually. It is actually intense. And a couple of things going on. One is, I don't know if you recall, but last week I said that we've been short the Dow in an intermediate-term position from around about $33,300, and that goes back to August. But we also want to trade on a near-term basis the rally that we saw. So we had the Dow diamonds, just like along the Dow, for a very nice rally. And then we got stocked out for small gains today on the pullback, so we are now left with just the short position. But most importantly, you see this week, this is the weekly chart in the middle. See these two trend lines, one's green, one's red? I call that the inside-track repellent or propellant zone. So we're right there now. We're down 1139, 31,241. So there's another pattern that I look at all the time, which is straight line up, straight line down. That's one. And then a cup formation or an arch formation.  That's what we call the dreaded H. The very reason why we call it dreaded H is because you could get even a one-to-one to the downside from the H if it takes out that left-side low. All right. So both in the daily chart and the weekly chart, as we're talking right now, we are just about to test the trend line, the up trend line, the lowest trend line, which is the support level. If we take that out and we close underneath 31,182, which was the low back, it goes on the 6th of September. That's really not good at all. It means that the MACD is deflected lower. So this is a very critical level. Now you were talking about a bonds, and I'll just show you this chart. We had looked at it last week. I mentioned that this cup pattern that pulls back, we were looking at this. The subscribers were looking at the same. There's a really good chance that we're going to make a cup and a handle. Not one of my favorite patterns, but you've got to be careful because we've already taken out the 34.72. That's the 30-year TYX, that's the 30-year yield, and what the high today so far is 3458. So we're just underneath it, and we're really close to taking it out.  And look at this. I mean, we've not seen patterns like this for a very long time. So we've got to respect that yields are breaking to the upside. They haven't already taken out decisively on this weekly chart, on a weekly basis, that left side high that was made at 34.72, 3.472 would be the percentage there. But we are really close, and look how it's affecting. This is with the iShares global timber and forestry ETF. It's starting to go back down to the 200-period moving average. It's impacting the Philadelphia Housing Index, which is the HGX. So we've got to respect what's going on here as something that we haven't seen in quite a while, where the Fed is, in a way, they're kind of forced to raise rates. So how it impacts the market is going to be very important. So within that context, if you're looking at the IAI, which is the, I always talk about, this is the Broker Dealer ETF. It had a really nice rally going from the 91 area up to 98, and now it's given back a chunk. But actually it's holding quite well. So there are signs within this whole conglomeration of different indices and different stocks that are, or even in this case, it's an ETF, the IAA, the Broker Dealer Index. Let's say there is support. Now, most importantly, if at 94 in September, if we see the IAI start to take out 90 support, that's going to be really important, because that's, I like to think of the Broker Dealer Index as kind of being a leading indicator. If it's starting to rally, it means that people are buying stocks. If it starts to fail, they're selling. So there are a lot of things going on here. So we've whittled down the cash position, at least we've increased the cash position, whittled down our stocks, put in the stocks very tightly. And I think that's all you can do here. We've had some very nice positions on the upside, but you can give them back so quickly. So you've got to just be very careful. I'll tell you, they're going to have a hard time bringing this inflation down, man. I don't quite understand why, you know, it seems like markets think that the inflation is going to come down in a year or something. I mean, I've only seen the inflation hit once, but when it hit, man, I mean, it was unbelievable. And it took like four and a half years to bring it back. That was with Volcker, yes. And even more important than that, it's all the repercussions of the of the yields going higher. So yeah, and not only that, we've got to be watching things like crude oil. Crude oil is down at the lower end of the range at 87. But if we start to see crude oil suddenly spike higher, that's going to be very important. I'm not sure. I think that crude oil is telling us that there's kind of a weak economy right now. So I'm going to be watching this very closely. So this is a time for caution. And as I said, we wanted quick trades, near term trades, which have worked out nicely. Most of them have not everything. But I think conserving cash is really important. Oh, there's no doubt, man.  You know, for sure. That's right. And talking about the king, you're looking at the dollar. We're still on the dollar. The dollar is up 1.5 one today. It's holding in the upper part of the range. And it's only a leg C in the monthly chart. So there are a lot of there are a lot of aspects in this market that are a little unusual in the sense that the dollar keeps running strongly. That's going to impact profits from the international companies. So we've got we've got to watch very closely. But I do think that we will get as we did before, you can get very nice trades to the upside, which you've got to be very nimble. Yeah, they're not out there today, man.  That's a big number, man. Listen, folks, come over to our website, the TFNN. We're going to go right under Newsletters. You're going to see the opening call on the left hand side. Second one down, hit that baby and you are off to the races. Bows, you have a great one, a safe one. Of course, we look forward to the show tomorrow. You too, Tom. Thank you. Thank you.


Explain your thoughts on wearing shoes. Shoes are for suckers. Airports need to change their policy and start cleaning their floors. Can you explain to us how you walk your snakes? It depends. The ball, pythons, I wrap them around my wrist and they walk like bracelets. The boa, she's a little bigger, goes around to my shoulders and kind of does her own thing. Do you speak any other languages? I took Spanish for seven years in high school and I'm on Duolingo. I got a 150-day streak, shout out Duolingo for giving me right. What book are you currently reading? Tom Sawyer. Avenger of Tom Sawyer. If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? Well, I'm on like the Carnivore diet now. So just meat. Why Atlanta?