I'd like to call this meeting, this special meeting to order at 503 Tuesday, May 24th, 2022. Adjustments to the agenda. Okay, seeing no adjustments, we'll go right into discussion. 3-1 EEI service update on HVAC and heating projects, Rochester and Stockbridge possible actions. I can go ahead. I was in attendance meeting, virtual meeting, Robert Mayer was as well and Ethan Bowen was. Unfortunately, Pat was under the weather and unable to join. So, not everyone may know, but we've been actually limping along with our current boiler at the Rochester Elementary School. I guess it had a leak and was repaired recently, but it needs more repairs to get us through another winter. EEI, as we know, has been evaluating our buildings to try to help bring us more efficient. The Rochester boiler is in immediate need so that is where they focused at first. They did provide us with a solution in the subcommittee meeting that we had that would change us from a steam boiler to a hydronic LP system, changing from oil to propane, changing from steam to hydronic. There are some other options with the LP part that we started to talk about a little bit, but they really have not been fully vetted for cost yet. We brought up questions about pellets, wood, or wood chips, I guess, and electric. Again, they haven't really been fully vetted for cost, but they are a cost more than the LP system that was presented to us. The timeframe for EEI to switch our current system to the hydronic LP for the coming school year is pretty tight. As we know, all the work would really need to be done by the end of August, meaning we would have to approve this change by June 1st. So the committee discussed quite a bit and felt that the timeframe to make that commitment to an LP hydronic boiler system just didn't leave up a lot of time to really explore it and explore our funding options to try to figure all that out. This does leave us with still the issue of the current boiler needing to get through another winter, and that we are going to need to repair it, and it is that cost of repair. But it would give us some time to be able to move forward on making a decision on a new system for the future, which we're going to need to do, but this would hopefully give us a little bit more time to look at the cost, look at funding options, etc. So the cost to repair the current boiler, I think it's about $12,500. Is that correct, Jamie, or somebody? Yes, but it looked like that would be best case scenario if they didn't find a crack in the section. If they do take it apart and using gaskets and all that doesn't resolve the leak, because they find a crack, then they're going to have to change out a section of the boiler which is going to be an additional 2,000 something or other. So it'll be a little bit more than that worst case. That's an add alternate on the proposal if I recall. Okay. The cost of just changed over to a new LP system is quite a bit more than that. We're talking in the $700,000 range. So the committee would like to recommend to the board that we approve repairing the existing boiler for this coming year as we look to doing a change in the future, in the near future, but for subsequent years. Anybody have any questions or comments? Can I just add because I was and do know so we're still working really hard on additional grant funding as well. I have a meeting with Lyle just on Thursday to work on an RFP. The state's indicated that they may have some interest in us around doing a significant match around pellet heating and multiple buildings in the SU. The recommendation of the fix gives us a solution while we continue to work on the EEI performance audit. We've got efficiency Vermont showing interest in working in your district. They're especially interested in Stockbridge. We have this, it's pellet heat, correct Lyle? This RFP is for? It's for wood heat in general. I think it really depends on the size of your school and what makes the most sense for your particular application. I think part of the process that we want to go through is between now and in the fall, when you look to make a final decision around what to do moving forward for next year, would be articulating the plan for phase one, which is the immediate work with the EEI, phase two, which would probably be about five years from now, and then phase three, 10 years from now. It's what I'm picturing we're going to be rolling out to all of our districts and when I think about ARSUD, that would mean both Rochester and Stockbridge, is that we'd be articulating a three-phase plan for the board to consider, and then also suggesting how we would put money away and use the performance contract and your building reserves to pay for this. Then the board would have some decisions around bonding going with a longer range plan, just how they would go about that. We would give you multiple options. The immediate that is needed from the board is direction to the administration to go ahead and do the repair at this time. It sounds like we're ready for a motion. I would move that the ARSUD board instruct the administration to go ahead with repair of the existing boiler in Rochester. Yeah, I think that's all we need for today because we know we're going to do the other work going ahead. Is there a second? I'll second that. Thank you, Robert. By the way, are these two numbers, this is a quorum, correct? We have Pat too. Oh, we have Pat. Okay. Yes. Good. I hope you're feeling better, Pat. Any questions? Yeah, any discussion? Sorry, Amy, you're doing a very good job running this meeting, so I don't need to say anything. All right. Any further discussion? Okay. There's been a motion and a second. So all in favor? Aye. Thank you. Aye. Pat, aye for me. Then all opposed? Okay. The ayes have it. Still the four of us did vote, so that is still quorum. So we're good. Okay. Okay, great. Then the next on the agenda is the High School Environmental Assessment. Unfortunately, I did not see this email until I just sat down in front of my computer and I tried to open it and I did not find any. Oh, I'm sorry, Robert. I think I thought you meant it for the June board meeting, not for this meeting here. So I did look at the edge. So I got confused about that. My apologies. I would have jumped on it sooner. Okay. Well, let's see. I was hoping that this document would be in front of everybody, but there's been something in that. Vic, could you help me out and give a quick summary of the document? I will make sure that it's converted to a PDF and distributed right after this meeting. Yeah. Thank you. And thanks for allowing me to join the conversation today. I'm appearing as the co-chair of the High School Repurposing Committee. And I wanted to introduce a topic tonight for your consideration and not for decision making tonight, but just, again, to introduce a topic and suggest some things for further reading and follow-up, which I'll get to in a minute. It has to do with the environmental assessment of the high school building. There are reasons why we believe that environmental assessment should be done very soon, which I'll get to in a minute. We brought this to the Rochester Select Board last night, and they agreed to go ahead and begin to pursue the process as a step towards considering the acquisition of the building. As the potential purchaser of the building, the residents, the Select Board, they need to know what, if any, contaminants, well, we know as best as is an issue. We need to know what contaminants are in the building, what is it going to take to clean up, how do you get the money to clean that up, all that information, and that we think that it would be important to have that issue settled before going to ask the residents for a vote so they can have an informed opinion about what the, at least that aspect of the building is about. Also, part of what would potentially make the high school project work financial is to have tenants in the building willing to pay for leases to be in the building. And in order to attract tenants, they too need to know if the building is safe, meet standards, et cetera, and whether all the environmental issues have been addressed before signing on the dotted line. So that's important. Third issue is that in Vermont, legal obligation, liability, for cleanup transfers with ownership. And I want to say, I should say it at the outset, I'm no expert at this. This is learning on the fly. And I learned a lot in the last week, particularly from staff at Two Rivers. So I'm sharing recent knowledge and would encourage you to have your own contact with Sarah Rait at Two Rivers for more background and understanding what your liabilities, obligations, advantages are in working through this. So there's two types of environmental assessment. One is, pertains to the National Environmental Protection Act, that has to do with federal funding programs. So as we go forward, we're going to want to access implementation grants through community development block grants that will require a National Environmental Protection Act survey. This is a desk type of audit. It doesn't mean going to the building and drilling holes. That's review of documents primarily, and that will take a couple of months to pursue. And we're going to want to do that before ownership is decided. The other process is a state level process that considers brownfield sites, which this would be. It's an existing facility that's being transferred to a different purpose and is likely to have contaminants in the building. It needs to be assessed. There's a process for doing that. The first step is that the potential owner of the town in this case requests the state to determine if the site is eligible for an assessment. And in order to do that, it requires the approval of the current owner, which would be the school board. So there's documentation that the school board would have to approve and provide to two rivers who then transmitted to the state. It's a one-page document. You ought to have your lawyer look at it. You ought to consider it. It's one of the things that Robert attempted to send along to you today. So just in a nutshell, what the process is, there's three phases to it. The first phase is primarily a desk type of audit with a look at documentation for what might be in the building, what's been proven to be in the building and site, not just when it was a school, but going back to whatever the original purpose of the building was. And we know that there was a wood products factory somewhere on that site in the past, back in the days of the railroad. So that's sawmills. And I'm sure there are petroleum products driving those saws. And so they're going to look back that far, at least. So the first step is that desk audit, they will examine whatever documentation is available, come to conclusion about the probability of contaminants. That is the conclusion of phase one. That then goes transmitted to the state. The state after three to four weeks deems, it's complete. And then at that point, the buyer enters into what's called the Bralla process, which is the Brownfield reuse and environmental liability limitation. Exactly. Thank you. Let's see. Is the audio coming through? OK, I just got somebody just texted me. OK, good. Yes, what Robert said. And what that does is if you go to that process, which is a next step, then you are relieved of state level liability for cleanup. The process will provide guidance and funding for both the examination and for the actual cleanup itself. So after this phase one is done, phase one is the desk audit, then the next step is phase two. The first part of which is a consultant would put together a work plan to figure out, based on the documentation they've got, what might be there, how to sample the building, how many holes to drill, where, what's in the ground, what in the walls, the air handling system, all of that. And then the second part of that is the actual sampling process, where a contractor would be brought in to do all that work. There is state funding available to pay for all that. And the result of that would be a clear picture of what the contamination risk of the whole property is. And then the third phase is the plan for improvement, where you get contractors come in and figure out, OK, how much is it going to cost to take care of all these different problems? That whole process is easily nine months, maybe longer. Yeah. So this is what we've just learned this past week from Two Rivers. So at the end of that process, the buyer, whether it's us or anybody else, would be in a position to understand what's in the building, how to take care of it, what it's going to cost to take care of it. And the buyer can, at that point, back out and say, not for me, I don't want anything to do with it. And if that's the case, then the owner is then obligated to clean up what's been discovered. So here's again where my advice to you as a school board is to really take a close look at your obligations and liabilities for this process before you decide if you want to do it or not. But what we were told also is that in one second, one last point, the school as the owner already owns the liability for the process. So this process would not add new liability. That's what Sarah Ray told us today. So let me stop there. Talked a lot. You might have questions. Go ahead, Ethan. I have to remember what I was going to ask. Yes. Regardless of the transfer, is this something that needs to be done anyway, just as we own the building, whether we transfer it or not? Yeah. What Sarah told today, it's not required. I mean, you're under no legal obligation right now from the state because the state doesn't know what's there. I got you. If someone's aware of what's there, then there becomes an obligation to clean it up within some reasonable time frame. So this presents the option of us doing nothing. And this is me being devil's advocate just to look out. If we do nothing and do not present it as a sale to anybody, we are not liable and no investigation happens. I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah, that's my understanding. OK, that's the understanding. It sounds like we do need to get our lawyer involved in this to find out what are legal. And I very much appreciate both you and Roberts and the committee's work, the detailed work on this, because obviously this was going to come up somewhere and much, much better to have it be now than further down any road. So yeah, very much. Thank you. Go ahead, Robert. Yes, I did ask the question, and Sarah is going to research. If we did demolition, that possibly might trigger a need for environmental assessment, probably doing absolutely nothing, but then you'd still have to heat the place if, well, you could let it just go. But I have asked that question in the past, and we need to check with the state to see if that's even an option, because they may require us to continue to heat it. They may not allow us to let it go to pot. So I haven't gotten an answer on that. I'll let that slide, but I'll try and follow that up. I remember hearing that before. Right, but I haven't heard that. I wasn't that we weren't, we couldn't actually, we might not be able to, like, the Department of Ed or something like that, might have a say in whether we can actually let it. And I just want to repeat to anybody who's listening or for the recording, this in no way indicates any preference on my part as far as what happens to the building. I just think it's always very important to explore all the possibilities of what each new part of this process brings. So we have, we need to get our lawyer involved to look over this document, correct? Is there anything else we're taking away from today, aside from this knowledge of this process and the length of the process? Now, just one other thing is just the recommendation to speak that someone speak with Sarah Rae, do you have a more detailed background on the process? You're getting the second hand from me. I'm certainly no expert. And it's always better to speak to the source. Could the next committee meeting be a meeting with her? Yeah, sure. Well, no, I guess that's all right. It's a board meeting. It's not committee. Committee is to do with the energy efficiency of the entry school, getting a little confused what committee we're at, what meeting we're at. Jamie? Just so I'm clear, I remember originally that this environmental study had to do with trying to seek out grant funding. Is that accurate? It isn't necessarily a requirement of selling the building for a dollar to the town? I think as a practical matter, it's going to be required to get the confidence of the voters to accept the building. And my concern is that the building, I've already heard from several people, including one of the select board members, that they're very concerned that the building is contaminated and you can't deal with it. So let's not take the risk with it. I think that there are other people in the community who feel the same way. I mean, we know from the Black River study there's asbestos. PCBs is all in the news. The oil tank has been discussed. And who knows what else from chemistry lab and whatever else might be in the building. But so my opinion is that it'd be well to clear this issue up in advance of trying to mount a vote in the town. Ethan, as is Henry. Go ahead, Ethan. Oh, I'm just savoring the silence we're all dealing with right here. This is big. This is a, yeah, just big. Okay, so it's from sitting down, some of us, sitting down with Sarah Ray. And can you forward, at least me and Jamie, contact information, email, whatever. Happy to do that. Set up a conference with her. And where is she? I'm gonna need whatever document you sent to the board before to our attorney, because I don't have a copy of that. Yeah, I'll send that in. If I, I'll convert it to a PDF and both documents to a PDF. And if you do need the favor, Jamie, if distributing it once I sent it to you. While I'm on, I wanna point out that strictly speaking, it's only the first phase that needs to be done before applying for federal grants. But as a practical matter, I think we need to, if we're going to sell it to the town or to anybody else, we'll have to go through the process. And really, I'm sort of of an opinion that we don't want to bury our head in the sand. This is a liability that we had all along. So keep in mind, we may have to go through a similar process when we're working with the, some of the work on the elementary school, like digging up the tank and that sort of stuff. If we're gonna get, we may need to have some, and I'm not sure yet, but we may need to have some environmental assessment. Well, and also remember that this does, although it sounds quite alarming, we did have kids in there three years ago. So we're not talking about that this is a, really has this toxic waste dump. That's right. To put it into perspective. Thank you. Thank you. And I would look forward to reading the information that will be provided the PDF on this. I mean, this goes without saying, it's just, wow, I wish somebody told us about this a year and a half ago when we were trying to put it out to real estate agents. I wish they just said something like, cause they must have known about it. Somebody must have known about it. We could be so much farther ahead of the curve. Okay. Pointless to say, but I had to say it. I understand. Okay. Is there any further questions or comments? Yes, Robert, go ahead. Yes, why don't we put this on the agenda for next meeting on the 7th and allow some time for it? It may be that we have to have a special meeting for this at some point. Yeah. I think it's reasonable, Jamie, that you and I could meet with this, Sarah, right before that meeting and possibly with our lawyer and have something to, we'll have something to bring to the board. Great. Any further discussion on this discussion item? I just wanted to mention that all the hazardous things that you're speaking about were part of a renovation that I just completed. So this is not, you know, it can, it's scary, yes, but it doesn't have to be that scary. It really, you need to do the testing before you get too, too worried. They asked best this, we know where it is. We've been, you know, had that under control for a while. You know, you can manage that and still have school in there even if you have asbestos. You know, the PCBs are unknown. The stuff we had was cocking and it leached into some blocks. So we had to cut some block out before we put the new windows in and frame them in. That was not, you know, insurmountable. People take out oil tanks every day and do soil mitigation efforts. So I'm not, I wouldn't, you know, raise the alarms just yet until we actually do testing. And the report may come back very much in our favor. That is an option. Yep. Thank you a lot for putting that into perspective for us that you have done this with other schools recently and it's not as scary as it seems. Okay. Thank you. George. All right. Is there any public comment? Pat, do you have any comment? I mean, Pat Harvey. No, I don't think I have any comment especially since the RSUD is going to be conferring with their attorney. I just, I'm just gonna let that dog lie right where it is for the moment. And we will have discussions further down the road after you've made your decision about which way you're gonna go. If you're going to hold our hand through this process or continue to hold our hand through this process, I should say. Thank you for what you've done so far or if this is where we terminate the relationship.  Mm-hmm. Okay. If there's no other public comment, is there any other business? If not, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. So move. Seconded. All in favor. All right. Thank you, everyone. See you in it.


So now that we've done the distance formula, let's find a practical application for this mathematical equation. And one such way is through collision detection of 2D objects. So let's say, for example, that I have a nice little wall right about here. And then we also have our single point. This would be where our character is on the screen and whatnot. And to determine if I actually have run into a problem, what I can do is I can actually use that distance formula to determine if I'm colliding with the wall. For example, the first thing we'd want to do is we'd want to look at the two points of our single object. We'll call this point A and we'll call this point B. Point A is going to have some x and some y associated to it. And point B is also going to have some x and some y associated to it. Now our character, our character, again, we're going to call him point C. He has an x and a y again. Well, what we can do is we can actually look at the distance. Say, for example, the distance between points A and B. I'll call this the distance between A and B. What we can look at here is this is going to be a set amount. It's always going to be, in our case, we'll say that it calculates out to 5, just an arbitrary 5. Well, what we can do is we can look at the distance formula now of our character to the A point and that same distance from our character to the B point. So D from C to A and D from C to B. When I add these two formulas up, if I'm colliding, if that equals the same amount as A to B, then what I've actually run into is C is actually on the wall. So let's have a look at that. Right now, say, for example, we're looking at the distance from C to A. Let's say, for example, that is about a 7. Actually, let's just arbitrarily say it's a 3. And then down here, the distance between C and B, well, that's also a 3. If we add these two distances together, so we'll say D1, which represents C to A, plus D2, which represents C to B, if that equals the distance 3 from A to B, then we know we are colliding with the wall. We are the same distance to the wall. We are here. If it is larger or if it is smaller, we know that we're not at the wall. We actually physically cannot be smaller, but we are farther away. As you can see, we are just a little bit too far away, so this is now not equal. I'll even change that color. We can say that these two are not equal to each other. And as a result, they are not colliding.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we'll be talking about what many have termed the attack of science and the rise of pseudoscience in India, especially ever since the far-right wing government of Narendra Modi came to power. To talk more about this, we are joined by Professor Satyajit Rath. Professor Rath is a member, is part of the Indian Institute of Science Education Research and is also an activist with the Delhi Science Forum and the All-India People's Science Network. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. So India is quite unique in the sense that it actually has mention of scientific temper and the constitution. And we've always had, of course, a group of people, a fringe, if you can call it so, who have talked about how India is the origin of all civilization, how Indian science achievements have been the greatest in the world, etc. But what we do see is that over the past many years, especially since 2014, when Narendra Modi came to power, this has acquired a certain structural element and there's been a lot of institutional support to it from the level of the Prime Minister. So could you talk a bit about how these kind of narratives, which were always thought to be, say, minority of fringe narratives have acquired this legitimacy? Well, let me start with something of a disavowal. In these times, people like us tend to think that in fact, there was a mainstream commitment to science rationality and the scientific temper in days and years gone by. This is a particular privilege of the elderly, but many of us think this. And I think it's important to remember that this is not the case. So has India had a commitment to scientific temper? Yes, but there are two interesting and instructive components to that commitment. The first one goes back to the man who sort of coined the phrase, sort of coined the phrase Jawaharlal Nehru. And when he talked about scientific temper, he talked about its two components in shall we say lopsided ways. He talked about the contributions of science and technology to public policy and public good in very prominent ways. He also, to be fair to him, intended for science, scientific temper and rationality to be the basis of citizenly empowerment. He did. However, if you ask whether he talked about that as effectively talked about the technological mediation of science for society, I must admit that he did not. Now, at what point did scientific temper get incorporated into our constitutional citizenly duties? It's the 42nd Amendment. And the 42nd Amendment, which committed us both to a secular republic and to the dissemination of scientific temper, was passed during the emergency. There are many instructive ironies in this to unpack. But for this particular context, let me make one follow-on point from there. And that is, until recent years, India's commitment, Indian society's commitment to scientific temper was aspirational in the main, meaning that we didn't behave rationally. We didn't necessarily display any great evidence of scientific temper. We displayed all sorts of other temper. But we had a common shared aspirational hypocrisy, if you will. That scientific temper was a good thing. Rationality, evidence-based approaches to public policymaking for the public good were all good things. We sought of kind of wish that we had them. And to some extent or the other, in fits and starts, we made attempts at it. It's exactly, forgive me for bringing up yet another of our many subcontinental sore points. But it was exactly like declaring in our constitution that we did not accept caste-based inequalities. It was aspirational. That said, the aspiration was deeply meaningful because it formed the basis of what I'm calling these small attempts in a variety of ways, not all of which went anywhere and so on and so forth. But it was the basis of the attempts to achieve this. So what I would argue the last five, six years have done is not so much that we have seen a fringe or a minority opinion become the dominant driving measure of discourse. It's much more that we have abandoned our aspirational ideal of scientific temper. And we have done so in two different ways. One in what let me call the Uncivil Society and the other very prominently in state forward matters of state and governance. So when we think about what the past few years have done, I think it's important for us to remember that it is this shift rather than simply a sort of lunatic fringe opinion that suddenly comes in out of nowhere and takes over discourse. We need to be clear about what the transition is that we're talking about. So you mentioned these two elements. That is one of course at the level of state policy and institutional structures and one is at the level of the Uncivil Society itself. Now the Uncivil Society bit has got the far more attention because you often see many proclamations sometimes by people in power, sometimes by scientists also, which make absolutely no sense at all. But how does this function in the realm of state policy and institutional structure because that can often be the more long lasting and enduring, that can have a more enduring impact on people? Yes. And I'm not quite convinced that both components have not received equal prominence in public discourse and in media.  So let me give you an example. Changing textbooks. At one level, this is an exercise of state power. To change textbooks and to change textbooks of social science and history and so on and so forth away from evidence based scholarly interpretations and towards a mythologizing, glorifying perspective is, despite the fact that it's a street textbook that's being altered, I think an example of the systematic retreat from scientific temper. But it's been talked about. The example of should we be examining what the cow gives us for its medicinal, nutritional and related properties? Particularly, mind you, the Indian cow, not this... Inconsequential, not to say foreign cow. So, Baas Taurus and Baas Indicus as the examples. In all of these, you have the Indian Council of Medical Research making commitments. You have various state agencies making all sorts of commitments to examining this. You will have pushback. Was this not done earlier? And the answer is yes, it was. It's in how much, how aggressively that we see the shift. Now, to give an example of exactly this, India has, and this is a controversial example, India has currently a government ministry that is called Ayush. And Ayush is one of those copywriters, advertising copywriters, fantasies come through. It says life in India's original sacred language. But in the language of the colonizer, whose claims to empire we continue to assert, it is an acronym, and it is an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Yunani, Siddha, and Homeopathy. Homeopathy is not subcontinently. So, again, there is much to unpack in this. The interesting thing is, it is in the last five years that the ministry of the department of Ayush was created. True, but the acronym doesn't date back to only then. The acronym dates back earlier within the apparatus of the state. The acronym dates back earlier with a council, a board, a commission, and various sort of intermediate entities. So, it is in quantity and aggressiveness that the shift is most prominent. Added to this is the example of where these kinds of efforts from the state rather than being directly influential in and of themselves as acts of governance. Things don't necessarily change because the state wants them changed. It's not as if there is a monumental amount of money spent in huge numbers of biomedical researchers who are examining cow urine. There are not. There is a small handful. So, what difference does it make? So, the difference it makes is that when the state makes these gestures of governance that are committed to an anti-scientific ideology, what you have is the emboldening of the anti-rational, the anti-scientific in public discourse. And again, let me give you a borderline example. You're familiar with one of India's central universities, the Banaras Hindu University, is currently ongoing one of more than one controversies. This one relates to the appointment of a Muslim gentleman as an assistant professor in a certain department. A letter written by 20 scholars in the subject has been submitted to the president. And the letter claims two interesting things. One, the letter claims that the department is a department of theology. The theology is a peculiarly Christian concept. And it's instructive that the prevailing dominant atmosphere of homogenizing Hindutva is borrowing these terminologies. Even more interestingly, the letter then apparently goes on to say, from media reports, the letter then apparently goes on to say that this department examines subcontinental sacral traditions and practices, such as it lists Sanatana Dharma, the ancient way, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and therefore, the adherent of any one of these subcontinental faiths would be alright, but not the adherent of a non-subcontinental faith. And quite suddenly, you see a peculiar utilization of apparently logical rational discourse in the service, in an instrumental sense, in the service of a xenophobic agenda. So to kind of pick up on this a bit more, one of the issues we are also seeing is that, say, the kind of impact this is having on people in general. And this comes at an interesting time because on the one hand, India is claiming to be aspiring or claiming to be some sort of a technological superpower. It has been an IT major for so many years. That's the way the brand is being sold in many countries. For instance, in the field of space research, there has been considerable achievements. So how does exactly this sort of anti-scientific, anti-rational spirit work at a time when India is also marketing itself, especially the state, as one of the frontrunners and one of the countries in the forefront of a technological evolution? So it's interesting and particularly so if you think about that question in a global context. Globally, conservative, right-wing, xenophobic, elitist ideologies are deeply enamored of the technology that science provides. They want you to have your smartphones. They just don't want you to read the wrong kind of stuff on it. Technology in its consumer sense is welcome for right-wing ideologies. Technology in its emancipatory potential is not, which is why all the technological achievements that we are talking are on the background of a steady increase in the push to withdraw from public sector manufacture in the public good. And all of them are on the background of what I'm calling a growing and steady separation of science for private sector profit-making technology contributing to the economy and to consumer satisfaction on the one hand and the ability of science, of evidence, of causality and ideas of causality in empowering ordinary citizens, particularly empowering the disempowered to give them cause and effect and is to give them control, is to give them agency. The withdrawal is not from all of this. The withdrawal is very strategically from the empowering agency providing potential of scientific temper of rationalism but it is not supposed to touch marketable technologies. So to move a bit on to the aspect of resistance itself. So one of the major developments that has happened due to the processes you are describing is that the notion of actually in a scientific manner examining say India's scientific achievements or what has been the progress of science and technology seems to be like it's vanishing because the right has almost claimed complete hegemony over that space. So from a completely different perspective how would you see the possibility of serious examination of these achievements? Okay, so a realistic one with all its wants. Yeah, no. So let's look at it this way. Every time resistance to this conservative, revisionist, xenophobic ideological agenda is asked what is your response to the prime minister of India or to the education, human resource development minister of India saying that India had transplant surgery because we have stories of mythological entities with elephant heads and so on or that we had wireless or that we had aircrafts etc. What is your response to this? And one way of responding to this is to say very earnestly and sincerely no, we didn't. There is no such evidence. That's not what's called evidence. That's not what's called cause and effect. The reality is that we are being trolled. The reality is that this is a stylistic device being deployed in the same way that the current incumbent of the US White House deploys his tweets. They are not somebody said this about him and I think it applies to the broader point. What they say is not to be taken literally, but it is to be taken seriously. That distinction is a distinction that their supporters understand more than we in the resistance do I sometimes think. We need not to be responding to them literally in any seriousness. All literal responses need to be as a return trolling because it's the only way that you can respond. What we need to take is the subtext seriously and when we take the subtext seriously, we cannot be responding. Resistance must aggressively set the agenda by describing nuanced, sophisticated, evidence-based and deeply researched ways of recasting the narratives that are being used for trolling. So to give really just a couple of examples, I'm not saying this for the first time. Everything I have said, better people than me have said in the resistance in India and outside far better than I have said it. So in that spirit, ancient subcontinental contributions to science and technology have been deeply researched and have been talked about. What we don't do enough of is to insist that it is those very real achievements in all their interesting, fascinating complexity that need to be in our textbooks. Rather than saying this should not be in our textbook when an assault on rationality and science is facing us, we need to be proactively setting the agenda by saying current textbooks are insipid and anodine because they don't have this. We need to be including this. The narrative of the ingenuity and the complexity and the persistence of the human spirit globally needs to be foregrounded in our own narratives. Rather than simply in response. So to give an absolutely contemporary example, there has been a great deal of talk about the peopling of South Asia and about the civilizations, so-called civilizations. I'm not sure one can call them civilizations, but at least cultures that have developed in South Asia have disappeared in South Asia and who were these people? Where did they come from? How did the culture evolve? How did the culture disappear? Who are the inheritors of the culture? These are all interesting questions. And recent weeks and months have provided startling examples in India of how extremely complex, extremely interesting, extremely nuanced additions to that story can be essentially reworked wholesale into a mythology that supports the xenophobic right-wing conservative narratives. And my argument is rather than simply responding to those components in that narrative, no matter how dominant it is, we need to be able to say what is truly interesting, what is truly empowering about those narratives. And finally could you just talk a bit about the March for Science, especially over the past couple of years you've been an active participant. What is the kind of impact that you've seen over the past couple of years and what is the agenda you're looking forward in the coming years as well? So, here's an interesting thing about the March for Science. The March for Science in India has been in a variety of elements, a complexly sourced effort. All sorts of loosely allied groups and components and movements have come together in the various Marches for Science. Inevitably there have been creative disagreements as well. If one fairly common component is this is a western import that we are simply following. This is, as I said, sufficiently trolling and nonsensical that I am not going to respond to it seriously. If we are not all human beings together across the world, then we are nothing. But let me take an example of a criticism that's been made of the March for Science, which is, oh, these people are asking for more money for themselves because they are asking for somewhat better stipends and salaries. They are asking for a little more money into research, into higher education and so on and so forth. Oh, these are just people who are asking more money when people are not, et cetera. Is this true? So, in the first place, is it true that there is a demand for greater funding? Yes. But what we need to do is to look at this in the context of what's been happening. And what's been happening is not so much a reduction in funding. There has not been any great increase in funding. And if you count inflation and everything, there is a reduction in funding. But the point isn't whether there is an increase or a reduction in funding. The point is the priorities being set by the government are altering to the point where scholarship in science, where the kind of empowering agency providing cause and effect insight for ordinary people that the narrative of science provides is getting less and less support. What is getting support is technology development. And in that, what is getting support is technology development that is attractive to the private sector for making money. And it is this that has politicized in the March for Science a very large section of natural science students who typically in India consider themselves apolitical. And what that really means is consider themselves quite content with status quo, whatever status quo is. There is no such thing as apolitical. But consider themselves status quo. And it is instructive that it is over these past few years that this so-called apolitical category of upper middle class India has begun to be deeply concerned about the way funding for science, for scientific research and for higher education in science is being organized and funded. And that I think is a remarkably interesting development given what we started with that we have a state ideology that is inimical to the power of science and rationalism to give agency to the disempowerment. Thank you, Professor Rath. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.


It also has a set of accessories for the holiday mansion that you can use for Christmas and for Halloween And it comes with dyes. How cool is that? So these are a great pair together, but me?  I can't stamp my That that one little spider web yet, but I can stamp the rest So I move move the spider web temporarily out of the way I'll pick it all up with the misty. You haven't seen the misty before you have been under a rock So now I've got my finished piece of paper in the misty the incredible stamping tool and so now my stamps are inked up and They're all down there ready to roll. I'm using some eclipse tape, which is a little masking tape to Create little masks for these guys And so I'm gonna just stamp on top of them and then trim each one out And then I'm gonna put them in the package so that I can use them the next time I want to stamp and not have to cut out masks all over again You can use sticky notes for this with little tiny ones. You can certainly use that But the masking tape itself this eclipse tape is sticky on the whole thing So it's a little easier to have it be sticky all over Then when I stamp my house on top of it, then all of those little critters are masked out. So It's kind of cool. Now since I'm not gonna use the dies I have to fill in some of the other parts, which for me is fun So I'm gonna draw in the pillars. I'm gonna draw in a couple lines for stairs and Then stamp a bunch of spiderwebs on there Just doing them manually so that I can add a little bit of fun to My haunted mansion. This is almost like playing paper dolls, but with a mansion, which is kind of fun And I love adding different kinds of textures to something so here I can add You know all these different colors and make different kinds of wood. You can do a brick house you can do different color houses and If you have other stamp sets, so if you have a stamp set that has little bears in it You could make a whole bear themed House you could make a princess themed house and Whatever you have that has little tiny stamps like this you can put them peeking out of the window So just use some sticky notes to mask out so that they're just inside the house You can make scenes outside of it. You can do all kinds of stuff. It's just a lot of fun So I've colored the whole base of it with a a light brown and then I'm going to throw in this really dark brown this is one of the the good dark ones e7 9 and Just add a texture on all of this So I added a horizontal texture on one part of it the doors will be vertical and So a little bit of vertical up here and then I'm going to just color right over top of it With another color now often I'll do this with a medium brown more of an e3 7 But I wanted this to be a really nice rich dark color So it's going to just barely allow all that line work that I did with the dark brown to show so that You get the idea that there's texture there, but it's not screaming at you It doesn't jump out at you Which is kind of nice And now when I go over with the e3 7 you can see the difference between the e3 7 and the e2 9 Because that this will give me another layer of brown. It's almost like having milk chocolate versus dark chocolate In your brown colors So I'm just trying to to manage those so I end up with some areas that are different colors But not having them be so different that they're bright and light like the base color that's down there I'm leaving just a few choice tiny tidbits of that base color showing Not very much of it because that's going to add that that real dimension that Pardon me. My voice is going. That's going to just make it pop Because I am going to of course add a background to it because that's what I do because I'm weird that way That's gonna be a really simple background. This is a background you can do on a lot of different stamps a Lots and lots and lots of cards that you make so if you're going to participate in my world card making day giveaway today Or this weekend. I'm gonna pick winners on Sunday night, and this is posting on Saturday So if you're watching in real time Then you still have the opportunity So you can use a technique like this background Just do a curve for the ground and then color in the whole sky in the background And I wish I could color this faster in real life, and that'd be nice But then I just drew trees all over it. So I did some I'm just gonna show you half of this and I'll waste your time But I did a couple of really big tree trunks and then just lots of little lines and then got smaller and smaller with the lines As I went so that I could get a little teeny tiny Lines and little tiny branches and almost ones that looked I Guess sort of almost leaf like you could put leaves on them, too But this will just cover up all that background so you don't have to worry about making the background all smooth How's that for a quick tip? So cover all of that up Do a couple little flicks here at the bottom to really give my forest a little bit of depth at the bottom And then I decided to darken the grass around the outside by just going over it with a BV color and then one more time with the YG just to make sure it was good and finished up in Dark green and then started working on the last elements on the house And you'll see in the finished card the richness of the color, but I'm trying to Use the light from the windows to light my objects So this little monster is gonna have light on that left side Because that's the one that's facing the window and then these little guys the ghosties are going to have Light that's coming from the the center of the picture so that shadows are on the outside And again, here is that nice dark rich color Camera, I wish you would cooperate with me, but there you go I try to set it to pick up that dark color and then the whole thing looks black and which is weird so Such is life, right? But this is a really fun stamp set So if you like to play paper dolls with a house, this would be a really fun one to get and I will see you in the next video. I got another one coming in three hours Be sure to check out my blog post about how you could win a card from me, and I'll see you later on. Bye. Bye