My topic is on democracy, de-civilization and the building of a counterculture. I'll start with some very systematic things and then it becomes a little bit easier. Because every action requires the employment of specific physical means, at least the body, standing room and some external objects. A conflict between different actors must always arise whenever two actors try to use the same physical means for the attainment of different purposes. The source of conflicts is always and invariably the same. Namely the scarcity or the rivalrousness of physical means. Two actors cannot at the same time use the same physical means, the same bodies, the same spaces and objects for alternative purposes. If they try to do this, they must clash. Therefore, in order to avoid conflict or resolve it if it occurs, an actionable principle and a criterion of justice or law is required. That is a principle that regulates the just, lawful or proper versus the unjust, unlawful or improper use and control or ownership of scarce physical means. Now logically what is required to avoid or conflicts is quite clear. It is only necessary that every good be always and at all times own privately. That is controlled exclusively by some specified individuals or individual partnerships or associations. And that it is always recognizable which good is owned by whom and which is not or by someone else. The plans and the purposes of various profit seeking actors or entrepreneurs can then be as different as they can be and yet no conflict will arise so long as their respective actions involve only and exclusively the use of their own private property. Yet how can this state of affairs, namely the complete and unambiguously clear privatization of all goods be practically accomplished? How can physical things become private property in the first place and how can conflicts be avoided from the beginning of mankind on? Now a single praxeological solution to this problem exists and it has been essentially known to mankind since its very beginnings even if it has only been slowly and gradually elaborated and logically reconstructed. To avoid conflict from the start it is necessary that private property be founded through acts of original appropriation. That is property must be established through acts instead of through mere words, decrees or declarations. Because only through actions which take place in time and in space can be an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link be established between a particular person and a particular thing. And only the first appropriator of a previously unappropriated thing can acquire this thing as his property without conflict. Because by definition as the first appropriating, the first person who appropriates something cannot have run into conflict with anyone in appropriating the good in question because everyone else appeared on the scene only later. Now this importantly implies that while every person is the exclusive owner of his own physical body as a primary means of action, no person can ever be the owner of any other person's body. For we can use another person's body only indirectly. That is in using our directly appropriated and controlled own body first. Thus direct appropriation temporarily and logically precedes indirect appropriation. And accordingly any non-consensual use of another person's body is an unjust misappropriation of something that is already directly appropriated by someone else. All lawful and just property then goes back directly or indirectly through a chain of mutually beneficial and because of that also conflict free property title transfers to prior and ultimately to original appropriators and acts of appropriation. And Mutates Mutandis all claims to and uses made of things by a person who had neither appropriated or previously produced these things nor acquired them through a conflict free exchange from some previous owner are unjust and unlawful. Now let me emphasize that I consider these elementary insights argumentatively irrefutable and because of that also a priori true. If you want to live in peace with other people and you demonstrate that you wish to do so by engaging in argumentation with them then only one solution exists. You must have private or exclusive property in all things, scarce and suitable as means or goods in the pursuit of human ends. And private property in such things must be founded in acts of original appropriation namely the recognizable and bordering or enclosure of scarce resources or else in the voluntary transfer of such property from a prior to a later owner. We can say then that these rules express and explicate the natural law. Natural given the uniquely human goal of peaceful interaction and natural because these laws are given and merely discovered as such by men. That is, they are emphatically not laws that are made up, contrived or decreed. In fact all men made rather than discovered or found law that is all legislation is not law at all but the perversion of law namely orders, commands or prescriptions that do not lead to peace but to conflict and are because of that dysfunctional of the very purpose of laws. Now this does not mean that with the discovery of the principles of natural law all problems of social order are solved and all frictions are to disappear. Conflicts can and do occur even if everyone knew how to avoid them and in every case of conflict between two or more contending parties then the law must be applied and for this jurisprudence and judgment and adjudication in contrast to your addiction is required. There can be disputes about whether you or I have misapplied the principles in specific instances regarding particular means. There can be disagreements as to the true facts of the case who was where and when and who had taken possession of this or that at such and such times and places. And it can be tedious and time-consuming to establish and sort out these facts. Various prior later disputes must be investigated. Contracts may have to be scrutinized. Difficulties may arise in the application of the principles to underground resources to water and to air and especially also to flows of water and flows of air. Moreover there is always a question of fitting a punishment to a given crime that is of finding the appropriate measure of restitution or retribution that the victimizer owes to his victim and of then enforcing the verdicts of law. Difficult as these problems may occasionally be the guiding principles to be followed in searching for a solution are always clear and beyond dispute. In every case of conflict brought to trial in search of judgment the presumption is always in favor of the current owner of the resource in question and Mutates Mutandis the burden of proof to the contrary is always on the opponent of some current state of affairs and current possessions. The opponent must demonstrate that he contrary to prima facie evidence has a claim on some specific good that is older than the current owner's claim. If and only if an opponent can successfully demonstrate this must the questionable possession be restored as property to him. On the other hand if the opponent fails to make this case then not only does a possession remain as property with its current owner but the current owner in turn has acquired a lawful claim against his opponent because the current owner's body and time was misappropriated by the opponent during his failed and rejected argument. He could have done other in his view better things with his body time except defend himself against his opponent. And importantly also the procedure to be selected for dispensing judges along the lines that I just indicated is also clear and implied in the very goal of peaceful argumentative conflict resolution because both contenders in any property dispute let's say John and Jim make or maintain opposite truth claims. I John am the lawful owner of such and such a resource versus no I Jim am the lawful owner of this very same resource and because of that both John and Jim are interested partial or biased in favor of a particular outcome of the trial and because of this only some disinterested or neutral third party can be entrusted with a task of dispensing justice. This procedure does not guarantee that justice will always be done of course but it assures that the likelihood of unjust verdicts is minimized and errors of judgment most likely and easily be corrected. In short then for each and every property dispute between two or more contending parties it must hold. No party may ever sit in judgment and act as final judge in any dispute involving itself. Rather every appeal to justice must always be made to outsiders to impartial third party judges. Now we may call the social order that would emerge from the application of these principles and procedures and natural order. A system of natural justice, a private law society or also a constitution of liberty not to be confused with Hayek's. Interestingly although the prescriptions and requirements of a natural order appear intuitively plausible and reasonably undemanding on its constituent parts that is on us as individual actors. As a matter of fact however we inhabit a world that sharply deviates from such an order. To be sure there are still traces of natural law and justice to be found in civil life and in the handling of civil disputes. But natural law has become increasingly deformed, distorted, corrupted, swamped and submerged by ever higher mountains of legislative law. That is by rules and procedures that are at variance with natural law and justice. Now it is not too difficult to identify the root cause for this increasingly noticeable deviation of social reality from a natural order and to explain this transformation as a necessary consequence of one elementary as well as fundamental original error. This error you can call also the original sin if you will is the monopolization of the function of judgeship and adjudication. That is the original sin is to appoint one person or one agency but no one else to act as final judge in all conflicts including also conflicts involving itself. The institution of such a monopoly apparently fulfills the standard definition, the classic definition of a state as a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making and of violence. The state and no one else is appointed and permitted to sit in judgment of its own actions and to violently enforce its own judgment. Now this involves in and of itself a two fold violation of natural law and justice. On the one hand because the state thereby prohibits anyone involved in a property dispute with the state from appealing for justice to any potential outside third party judge. And on the other hand because the state excludes everyone else except itself from proffering his adjudication services in such conflicts. Moreover from the original error predictable consequences follow. As a universal rule each and every monopoly shielded from competition leads to higher prices and lower quality of the product or service in question than would have been the case otherwise. In the special case of a judicial monopoly and the particular service of adjudication this means on the one hand that the quality of law and justice will fall and natural law will successfully replaced by monopolist made legislation. That is by perversions of law because predictably the monopolist will use his position as ultimate decision maker not only to resolve conflict between contending property owners but increasingly also to initiate or provoke conflicts with private property owners in order to then decide such conflicts in his own favor. That is to expropriate the just property of others to his own advantage on the basis of his own made up laws. And on the other hand the price to be paid for justice will rise. In fact the price of justice will not simply be a higher price that justice seekers may or may not be willing to pay as would be the case for all other monopolies that justice seekers must pay whether they agree to it or not. That is private property owners involved in property disputes with the state will not only be expropriated via legislation but they must also pay the state for this service of expropriating them thus adding insult to injury. In effect with the establishment of a judicial monopoly all private property becomes essentially fear property that is state granted private property. Private property is only provisionally private and left under private control. That is only until some state made law or regulation does not decree otherwise. Thus creating an environment of permanent legal uncertainty and causing an increase in the social rate of time preference. Now let me term the process that is set in motion with the institution of a state namely the progressive deviation from a natural order and system of justice and the increasing erosion of all private property rights and the corresponding growth of the legislative and regulatory powers of the state that causes the process of de-civilization. While steady in its direction the process of de-civilization that is begun with the establishment of a state may proceed at different speeds at different times or places sometimes more slowly and sometimes at a faster pace. However another additional error can be identified that will result in an acceleration of the process of de-civilization. This second error is the transformation of the state into a democratic state. This transformation does not involve any change in the status of the state as a judicial monopolist yet it involves a significant two fold change. Entry into the state and the position of ultimate judge is open for every adult inhabitant of a given territory and the function as final judge is exercised only temporarily for some short fixed period by the winner of regularly recurring secret and anonymous one man one vote elections. Now predictably this change will lead to a systematic acceleration of the process of de-civilization. On the one hand as Helmut Scherk above all has amply demonstrated the feeling of envy is one of the most widespread and powerful of de-civilizing motivational forces. All major high religions have therefore condemned the desire for the property of one's neighbors as sinful. In a natural order or a system of natural law and justice people too some more and some less are tempted of course to expropriate the property of others to their own advantage but in a natural order quite in accordance with religious prescriptions such temptations are considered to be immoral illegitimate and even sinful. Everyone is expected to suppress such desires. With a state in place some initially just a few people are permitted to give in to such immoral desires for an indeterminate period and use legislation and taxation as means to satisfy their own desire for the property of others. Only with democracy however that is the free and unrestricted entry into the state are all moral restraints and inhibitions against the taking of others lawful property removed. Everyone is now free to indulge in such temptations and propose and promote every conceivable measure of legislation and taxation to gain advantages at other people's expense. That is whereas in a natural order everyone is expected to spend his time exclusively on production or consumption under democratic conditions increasingly more time is spent instead on politics. That is on the advocacy and promotion of activities that are neither productive nor consumptive but exploitative and parasitic of and on the property of others. Indeed even the opponents of such a development must waste their time increasingly on unproductive endeavours that is on politics if only to defend themselves and their property or take precautionary actions against such incursions. In fact under democratic conditions a new class of people emerges namely politicians whose profession it is to propose and promote law decrees and taxes designed to expropriate the property of some to the advantage of others mostly of course to themselves. Moreover owing to regularly recurring elections the politicization of society never comes to an end but is constantly reignited and continued. Legal uncertainty or lawlessness is thus heightened and social time preferences will rise still further thus increasingly shortening the time horizon taking into consideration in one's action plans. And in the process of political competition that is in the competition for the position of ultimate decision maker such politicians and political parties will rise to the top who have the least moral scruples and the best skills as demagogues that is of proposing and propagating the most popular assortment of immoral and unlawful demands from a near unlimited supply of such demands on offer in public opinion. On the other hand as the other side of the same coin democracy will lead to increasing corruption. With open entry into the state the resistance against state rule is reduced and the size of the state will grow. The number of state employees and administrators will increase and because their income and livelihood is dependent on the continuation of state power to legislate and to tax they will not necessarily but most likely become reliable and loyal supporters of the state. In particular the class of intellectuals that is the producers of words, the wordsmiths in contrast to the producers of things namely the manufacturers will thus be bought off and corrupted because there is little and highly fluctuating market demand for words rather than things. Intellectuals because of that are always desperate for any help they can get to stay afloat and the state in permanent need for ideological support for its relentless onslaught against natural law and justice is only too willing to offer such help and employs them as public educators in exchange for the appropriate propaganda. Yet it is not only state employees that are so corrupted tax revenue and the state's range of control over other non-monetary assets and holdings will far exceed what is necessary to employ and equip its own workers. The state can also disperse income and assistance to various members of civil society. The loyalty of the poor and downtrodden for instance can be assured through so-called welfare programs and the rich and the captains of industry and indirectly of course also their employees can be corrupted through government privileges, contracts, interest-bearing government bonds and so forth. And the same policy can be used also for the purpose of dividing the members of civil society so as to more easily control and increasingly factionalized or atomized population, the policy of DVD at Impera. Now while the principal direction of social evolution can be safely predicted based on a few elementary assumptions about the nature of men, the state of democracy in particular, all details concerning the process of de-civilization remain of course uncertain and unclear. And to be more specific, one must look at history. In particular, one must look at the last 100 years. The history since World War I in 1918 when modern democracy came into its own displacing the former monarchical system. Now while this history confirms the general prediction the actual results are truly horrendous surpassing even the worst fears. As far as moral degeneration and corruption is concerned and taking only the US as a dominant example and model of a democratic state into consideration a few indicators shall suffice as an illustration. In the US, a code of federal regulations that is a document listing all government rules and regulations did not exist at the beginning of the period that I'm looking at from 1918 on until 1937. By 1960 however, the code of federal regulations had reached 22,877 pages and by 2012 this code had swollen to a total of 174,545 pages subdivided into 50 titles regulating in minutest detail everything imaginable from agriculture and aeronautics to transportation, wildlife and fisheries. Whereas natural law is comprised of only three principles namely self-ownership, original appropriation and contractual property transfer from a prior to a later owner then. Today after 100 years of democracy no aspect of production and consumption is left free and under regulated. As well at the beginning of the period considered here, no more than a handful of federal crimes existed concerning methods such as treason or the bribery of federal officials while all normal crimes were defined and prosecuted by the individual states. By 1980 however, the number of federal crimes had already grown to about 3,000 and by 2007 it had reached 4,450 criminalizing not just ever more non-tortuous actions and victimless crimes but increasingly also motives, thoughts and speech. As a second indicator for the degree of corruption it is revealing to contrast the total population number with a number of state dependents. Presently, and these are rough figures, presently the total population of the United States is about 320 million or about 260 million if we subtract the number of people below age 18 and ineligible to vote. By contrast, the number of people wholly or mostly dependent for their livelihood on state funding includes the following. The number of state employees, all levels of government considered, is about 22 million. 46 million people receive food stamps in the United States. 66 million people are social security recipients. 8 million people receive unemployment insurance. Federal government spending alone for profit firms amounts to some 500 billion dollars which accounts according to an estimate by Charles Murray for about 22% of the American workforce and that is roughly 36 million. And lastly, non-profit organizations and NGOs which have an annual revenue of about 2 trillion and employ almost 12 million employees receive about a third of their funding from government accounting for about another 3 million dependents. All of this brings us to a total of state dependents of about 181 million people. That is only 79 million people or about one third of the adult U.S. population of 260 million, a third of them, can be said to be financially, wholly, or largely independent of the state. Whereas close to 70% of the U.S. adult population or 57% of the total population are to be counted as state dependents. Finally, as a third indicator of moral degeneration and corruption, a look at the top of the democratic state system is instructive, namely at the politicians and political parties who run and direct the democratic show. In this regard, whether we look at the U.S. or any of its satellite states in Europe and all around the globe, the picture is equally unambiguous and clear and equally bleak. If measured by the standards of natural law and justice, all politicians of all parties and virtually without any exception are guilty whether directly or indirectly of murder, homicide, trespass, invasion, expropriation, theft, fraud, and the fencing of stolen goods on a massive and ongoing scale. Every new generation of politicians and parties appears to be worse and piles even more atrocities and perversions on top of the already existing mountain, such that one feels almost nostalgic about the past. They should all be hung, robbed in jail, or be forced and busy making compensation. Instead, they parade around in public and bright daylight and proclaim themselves pompously, pretentiously, arrogantly, and self-righteously as saintly do-gooders, as good Samaritans, selfless public servants, benefactors, and saviors of mankind and human civilization. Assisted by a higher intelligentsia, they tell the public in endless loops and variations that, as in Alice's Wonderland, nothing is what it seems. A quote from that book. When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master? That's all. And it is politicians who are the masters who stipulate that aggression, invasion, murder, and war are actually self-defense, whereas self-defense is aggression, invasion, murder, and war. Freedom is coercion, and coercion is freedom. Saving and investment are consumption, and consumption is saving and investment. Money is paper, and paper is money. Taxes are voluntary payments, and voluntarily paid prices are exploitative taxes. Contracts are no contracts, and no contracts are contracts. Expropriation is restitution, and restitution is expropriation. Indeed, what we can see here or otherwise since does not exist, and that which we cannot see here or otherwise since does. The normal is anormal, and the anormal is normal. Black is white, and white is black. Male is female, and female is male. Worse, the overwhelming majority of the public far exceeding even the number of state dependents falls for this nonsense. Politicians are not despised and ridiculed, but held in high esteem, applauded, admired, and even glorified by the masses. In their presence, and in particular in the presence of top people, most people show themselves awestruck, submissive, and servile. Indeed, even those opposing or denouncing one particular politician or party do so almost always only to propose or hail yet another different, but equally absurd and confused politician or party. And the intelligentsia, which finds its own verbal mumbo-jumbo echoed in the blabberings of this or that politician or political party, virtually drools over them. And on the other hand, the number of those who still hold onto the principles of natural law and justice as a basis of all moral judgment, and who assess the contemporary world accordingly as some sort of absurdist that is as an insane asylum run by crazed megalomaniacs makes up no more today than a minuscule minority of the population. Smaller in size even than the infamous 1% of the super-rich of leftist fame, but with little overlap with this 1%. And Tenia still is a minority of those who recognize also however vaguely the systematic cause of this outcome. And all of these, the few sane people left within the asylum. These people are then under constant threat by the guardians and wardens of this absurdist town called democracy and are branded as neanderthals, reactionaries, extremist, pre-enlightment, dum-dums, sociopaths, or even scum. Which brings me to the property and freedom society. Because the property and freedom society purposefully assembles and wants to attract precisely such neanderthals, such social outcasts, people who can see through the Schmierentheater, I think the English word is flipid, going on before their eyes, who have had it with all blathering politicians and mass media darlings, and who have consequently just one wish, namely to exit that is to opt out of the legal system imposed on them by the democratic state. But wherever these neanderthals happen to reside, they find themselves in the same predicament. The exit is barricaded or entirely barred. The session from the state's territory is not permitted. One might emigrate from one country to another and thus leave one state jurisdiction A for another state jurisdiction B. But once the movable property remains thereby subject to the jurisdiction of A, and especially also in the case of sale, and likewise remains the transfer of all movable property subject to A's jurisdiction, that is no one anywhere can exit with his property left intact, whether in staying or by moving elsewhere. And not only is the session prohibited and considered treasonous by politicians, but it is viewed as illegitimate as shirking one's duties also by the overwhelming bulk of the educated or rather brainwashed public. Thus matters appear almost hopeless for Neanderthals. The property and freedom society cannot offer a way out of this predicament, of course. Its gatherings too must take place on the ground and are as such subject to state law and jurisdiction. It cannot even be taken for granted that meetings such as ours will be always and everywhere permitted to take place. The property and freedom society meetings can offer no more than a brief escape and reprieve from our real life as inmates of an insane asylum. If not on the ground, then at least in the virtual reality of ideas, thought, and argument. But of course these meetings have a real purpose. They want to accomplish a change of course. At the very minimum they want to prevent the Neanderthal culture, that is the culture of natural law, order, and justice from going entirely extinct. That is they want to help to sustain and provide intellectual nourishment for this increasingly rare species of people and culture. More ambitiously however the PFS wants to help their culture regain strength in public opinion by putting them on display and showcasing them as a uniquely attractive and fascinating species and counterculture. To achieve this goal the PFS seemingly paradoxically engages in a policy of strict discrimination that is of exclusion and inclusion. On the one hand the PFS systematically excludes and discriminates against all representatives and promoters of the present dominant democratic state culture against all professional politicians state judges prosecutors, jailers, killers tax collectors and bankers all warmongers and all advocates of socialism legal positivism moral relativism and egalitarianism whether of outcome or of opportunity. And on the other hand positively the PFS seeks out and admits only people who have adopted for themselves Thomas Jefferson's dictum that there is not a truth which I fear or wish unknown to the whole world. Who accordingly know of no intellectual taboo and of no political correctness and who are committed instead to uncompromising intellectual radicalism willing to follow the dictates of reason wherever they may lead. More specifically the PFS seeks out and admits only people dedicated to the recognition of justly acquired private property and property rights freedom of contract freedom of association and disassociation free trade and peace. Following this strict policy of discrimination the PFS after ten years of its existence has established itself I believe as a veritable monopoly in the world of intellectual societies. A society made up of exceptional individuals of all ages intellectual and professional backgrounds and nations free and unpolluted by all status and everything status unrivaled in the interdisciplinary threats and depths of its radicalism joined in beautiful surroundings and united in a spirit of conviviality and comradeship. A society also of course as we would expect smear despised and even hated yet secretly envied by all the usual suspects but fortunately hailed by those who have had the wisdom and the fortune to experience it. Unlike other normal monopolies however it is not my goal to preserve and maintain the PFS monopoly position quite to the contrary by setting an example in producing an all around appealing and indeed beautiful product a privately produced public good if you will it is my hope that the PFS current monopoly position will only be a temporary one and its example will serve an inspiration to others and more and more similar associations and meetings will spring up and put the mainstream democratic state culture increasingly on the defensive and open it up to the public ridicule that it is so well deserved. There are some positive sides to this institute in the United States put on some road show on weekends Rahim in Vienna attempts something like like this something similar Andre Lichtschlag of Eigentümmlich Frei imitates what I do to a certain extent now. However I'm afraid it is not easy to match this that this is not an easy task and that the PFS is to maintain its unique status for quite a while. Personally I'm planning to continue this project as long as my and even more important as long as Gulshan's strengths holds up. Even more importantly as long as you keep coming and effectively supporting the intellectual enterprise and product that is the PFS Thank you very much.


Zero accounting software, comparative balance sheet creation, get ready to be an office hero with zero. Here we are in our custom zero homepage. We set up in a prior presentation, zooming in a bit, holding down control, scrolling up on the scroll wheel currently at one seven five percent zoom in, opening the demo company but doing so with the reset button, resetting the data and opening the demo at the same time. We're going to open a few tabs up top duplicating the tabs to put reports in as we do every time. First hiding, right-clicking the tab up top to duplicate it, right-click the tab up top again to duplicate again, tab to the middle. We're going to go to the accounting drop-down, open up the balance sheet standard as we do every time, tab to the right to accounting drop-down. This time we want the P to the L, the profit to the loss, the income statement, tab back to the right and we're going to change the date and bring it up to a custom date for two thousand and twenty-two December and that's what we want updated. That's the process that we have been doing every time. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course, each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. This time we're going to make a custom comparative balance sheet using the edit layout tools below. In prior presentations we looked at the balance sheet in general and we looked at some of the tools up top here remembering that as we learn these tools they're not just applicable to the balance sheet we can apply them to other reports as well. Also just note that the balance sheet and the income statement are the two primary end reports when you're thinking about applying these tools to any other report it's useful to think of them in terms of are they like the balance sheet and that they have one time frame as of a point in time or like the income statement which has a beginning and an end type of report that can have some implications in terms of the type of format teams you're going to do including comparative reports which we're going to be working on at this point in time. So we'll start with the balance sheet reports over here and we also saw that there's some custom balance sheet kind of layouts that we could do. So for example if I hit the drop down we've got the comparing items let's update that so this gives December and November, December 1st and then November so that's a neat and nice report so now however we might want to add some other columns here that will give us some more detail possibly a difference column. So instead of having like multiple comparative months or quarters or whatnot we might have another column over here saying give me the difference between these last two months out where do we stand as of one month versus the end of the other month and we could have a percentage difference as well percentage increase or decrease that we could add. So those I'm going to try to start with this report and add these other two items to it with the edit layout items down below. Now remember as we work in zero if I go to the first tab and I go to my accounting drop down and the reports we don't have as many kind of comparative reports in the defaults over here as some other software like a QuickBooks for example but I actually think that's kind of nice because they're not really flooding this area with too many reports because most of those reports you can construct from a standard report so if you want them we can construct them and that's what we'll do here we've got the default options up top and then we'll add some more things with the layout view. The layout view let's go ahead and click on it can be a little confusing at first but once you get used to it it's fairly intuitive but it has a lot more flexibility than some of the other some some other tools that might be used in other accounting software. So for example if I wanted to like collapse these items here I could show the report in a collapsed format like this and that will show like a summary balance sheet which we might talk about a little bit more later but if I update that just to check it out and I don't have to worry about this messing up my original balance sheet because I could just save this as a draft here so we don't want to to make it our default report but I can save it as a draft and I should still be able to open up a standard balance sheet and not have a problem with it. Let's go ahead and do that by the way let's go to the right tab and duplicate and make another balance sheet just so we can see a standard balance sheet as comparing to it let's open up another balance sheet here and just make this one as of the end of December 2022 so we have something to compare to so we'll have that so there's that let's go back to the first tab so so now so see how we collapsed it this could be a nice simplified view so you can just say instead of having all the details you just have the balances for the categories of accounts right so we can have those options which is nice let's go back to the edit layout again and we'll talk more about some of those different options later but I'm gonna expand these again expand all of these items and then what we would like to do is now we've got two columns up top so I'd like to add another column so just a quick a quick recap of the tools you've got a text block that you can add to it you've got a schedule they can add at the bottom you've got a footer you've got the rows so if I wanted to add rows in between these items we can add a row we've got the columns which is what we're gonna work with having a column to the right and you've got the page break and then you can delete some of these items over here and we can also group some items together which we might talk about in future presentations to show some of these drop-downs and and it's a kind of similar to making sub-accounts on other sorts where like a quick books or something like that but right now what I'd like to do is make another column to the right by the way just note that you can also say this notice I have the most recent column or amount first here if you want to see it the other way and like chronological order you have the capacity to do that right I can pull this one on either side so I can go December to November or November to December which that's neat flexibility that we have there on our reports okay so let's go ahead and add a column so I'm gonna add a column and I want to make it a formula column because I want to make a formula between these two items and the formula it's gonna be fairly straightforward I'm just gonna say I want to take the December numbers minus the November numbers I'm gonna say I'd like you to take December minus November see how neat that is and I can just have a difference column that I have constructed I don't want to show it as a percent I just want to show the actual number and then the heading I'm gonna say is going to be let's just call it the change the change or difference you might call it so I'm gonna say that let's go ahead and update the layout and check it out so I can update it and there it is so how neat is that so I can I subtract these two and there's the there's the change column so so now the next common step is to have a a percentage increase or decrease so if I pull out the trustee calculator the calculation usually looks something like this if I this is like a horizontal type of analysis so if that's the change or difference I got the two one nine four point five five divided by the prior month which is in this case is the six nine seven eight point oh eight so moving the decimal two places over thirty one point four four so let's try to do that calculation and add another column over here so I'm gonna go into the page layout and we're gonna say add another column and I'm gonna make it a formula column again and so I'm gonna say okay so there it is now let's say this is gonna be the change divided by the the prior month November I mean how neat is that that you could do so you can imagine a bunch of different flexibility you have within the system and other assaults were like a quick books or something like that if you wanted to do some more complex reports now you can build a report kind of like this in a quick books for example but with with kind of more the default settings but they're much more restrictive but you can imagine building reports within zero with these kind of formulas that are are more detailed it's kind of a neat thing I think so I so then this is gonna be I'll call it the percent change percent change and so let's update that and let's check it out let's check it out so it has to think about that when it's calculating so there it is so now we've got our change over here so that calculation here once again was the the change to one nine four point five five divided by the prior month which is six nine seven eight point oh eight so there we have it thirty one so there it is and now I might want to see that as a percent right I was gonna put it as a percent let's go back to the edit layout and make that show it as a percent update it boom calculates shows as a percent so cool so so that's a nice report now now we could adjust like up top I might call this like a comparative balance sheet comparative and you can change the name up top notice for some reason it's kind of it's kind of frustrating they don't let us change this item right here so so it's still going to have the company name and the as of because I might say well it shouldn't really be as of now because there's kind of like two dates down below so you would think you'd be able to change that but that's not gonna bother me too much if you wanted to change it you could export it to excel and change it there I don't believe you have the custom capacity to change it for some reason within the software which is kind of weird because everything else is so nice and flexible but so there we have that now we might want to like oftentimes we might want to like remove the decimal so sometimes I like to take the decimals out so I'll take that out and update that so now we've got the decimals removed this is still in percentage format looks a little bit cleaner that way so that looks nice so I will do too much more but I just want to note just some other things on the flexibility of this edit layout because we're just kind of like touching the surface on it just realize that you could change like the the ordering of these kind of accounts which is another thing that you have a lot less capacity to do in software oftentimes like a quick books for example and also remember you don't have to have the account numbers on so you one way you can change the order as you can as you can turn on your account numbers or your your account codes and that'll put the order not by alphabetical order within each category but by code but you can also I can hit the drop down and say I'm gonna take that off and go to my edit layout and and make the change down here as well so say I want say I want the office equipment above above the computer equipment so I can make that kind of change in here and update it as well so it doesn't go in alphabetical order within a particular category necessarily if I make some customizations like that so now I've got the office before the computer so that's again really neat stuff that we can do so now that you have that you could save it and of course export it if you did it if you needed to do more editing you could export it to excel I'm gonna save it just as a custom report right now just to show and I'm gonna call it a comparative I'm not gonna make it I'm not gonna make it my default I'm just gonna save it in the customs and then if I go back to the first tab and I go into my reports drop down here and we go into the custom reports hold on a second what happened hide this and then I'm gonna go let's do that again I'm gonna go into the reports and there's the reports I'm gonna go into the custom and there's our custom report so if I was to just open this up in the future in the following month let's say and I wanted to open it up and then my my layout is fine I can change the date then up top to whatever I want to change you know the date to and and then we have the layout saved so that's why you have a you have a lot more it takes a little bit more work a little bit more understanding to use this edit layout but this edit layout thing has way more flexibility within the actual software in zero than some other software so once you get the hang of it once you build the custom reports then you can you can have more customization within the zero software as opposed to having to like to export it to Excel and then make changes in Excel and so on that you would have to do like every time so I it's a really neat tool this this thing here that I that again could be a like a game changer for some people I feel like in terms of if you want to be able to do a little bit more customization in terms of just to look and feel an organization of your reports in this fashion so we've just touched the surface on it on this one we'll do a couple more like this but you can you can take a look at these tools and get a feel for them yourself


So question here is what question is Philanus trying to answer and what is his answer? So in case you don't know this by now Philanus is well when either Philanus nor a Highless exists, right? They're fictional Names drawn up merely for this dialogue Philanus serves as Barclay's mouthpiece, right? Everything Barclay believes he's using Philanus to as his you know Protagonist as his advocate a Highless is kind of the opposing viewpoint So the question is you know, what is what question is Philanus trying to answer? Well, you might think that he's trying to ask the question whether objects exist and that no objects don't exist No, that's not what he's trying to do. Now Philanus thinks objects exist He thinks that there are things that out there that exist and okay great But the question is whether they're material So Philanus is asking whether material substance exists whether material objects exist And his answer is is no now to be clear. He thinks objects exist The guitar behind me the wall my shirt the sun all this exists It's just not material Now for Barclay What objects are are ideas There's minds and ideas. That's what exists Not material substance Now you I think this is a little strange. I think that he's reducing a self-scepticism. No, he's dead serious, right? Objects exist They're just not material


I'm Ian Caglio. I'm from Canada. I'm a Métis person. My mother's family is from England and we've got your Scottish and Irish descendants. And my father's family is from the Michelle First Nation, which are an Iroquois tribe. So historically, we were from Ontario and Quebec. We're mostly like around the Mohawk, the Iroquois Confederacy area. But my personal, my father's personal family story is that his ancestor is called the Sun Traveler, Carquante, which means the Sun that travels. And they ended up working as voyagers for the Northwest Company and Hudson's Bay Company. And through those travels ended up in Western Canada and settled there. So Iroquois are not native, so to speak, to Western Canada. So we're sort of a bit of an anomaly. And as such, we don't really exist, even though my great uncle was the signatory of treaty one with among other like Cree and Dakota and those types of people that would have been out there. So just to start, because we're going to get lost and I'm going to get lost and we're going to get lost together, I'd like to maybe show you a few quotes to sort of help us get lost and also help us to sort of establish the territory. First is a quote from Guyantary Tafoya. Stories go in circles. They don't go in straight lines. It helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories. And finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. Part of finding is getting lost. And when you are lost, you start to open up and listen. And so that's sort of a lot of Indigenous research is that sort of sense of getting lost. And hopefully a lot of research is that sense of getting lost and trying to find your way back and sort of trying to find the resources to get yourself back. The next couple quotes are just going to sort of center us with regards to agency and who has agency and sort of try to center the idea of Indigenous research, non-Indigenous research. And the emphasis here is to try to treat it in a collaborative way and try to not to be antagonistic, although some of the quotes might seem a little bit antagonistic. That's not the intent. Bell Hooks wrote, no need to hear your voice. When I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. Only tell me your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in such a way that it becomes mine, my own. I'm still the author authority. I'm still the colonizer, the speaking subject. And you are now the center of my talk. And Bell Hooks wrote this and it resonates, I think, with a lot of research and a lot of researchers. And I think it resonates with a lot of contexts. And I think it is important for us to realize when we're doing research with the group that's not our own or even just with others that we have to be sympathetic and we have to find a way to do research that we aren't colonizing. So how can we do that? And that's sort of one of the things we can think. And this came from my own research. This is one of my participants. And this is what I was asking him about reconciliation in Canada. And I'll get to this and talk. And he says, I'm really aware of my limitations in terms of storytelling. So I don't speak for my nation. I don't even speak for my community. I suppose for my family and for those that have asked me to speak for them. And another one is you've got problems with representation. I've got no interest in speaking on behalf of anybody but myself. But there are many, many people out there who are speaking on my behalf, whether they've asked me to, whether they've asked me or not. And we have a really important task. And with indigenous knowledge, you'll often hear it is people will make almost sort of the academic process of citing. And when you talk to an elder, he'll tell you who told him that story.  Knowledge isn't taken for granted as something that you own. Knowledge is taken for granted that it's something from the community. And so when we do research and we're engaging with our participants, we have to be mindful of the fact that we don't use their words to talk beyond what they have to say. And some of that is coming, some of that becomes quite limiting. And we sort of like to work from this objective frame where we're quite far away from our research subject. But you know, academics like maybe would call that academic apartheid that sort of distance that you put between yourself and the people you research. And we really as indigenous research want to get close. We want to get dirty. We want to get messy. We want to sort of get lost in that thing. And we also don't want to overstep that because we're only able really able to define and research our context rather than, you know, that we're only able to situate the research within the context and really the understanding start to come from that contextual understanding. So this is a quote from a from a non indigenous academic Terry Tempest Williams, who remind us that we are not Navajo. Their traditional stories don't work for us. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create our own stories. And I think that's another important aspect of sort of of getting started in this in this sort of research process is that, you know, I'm not Ojibwe. I'm not Ojikwe. I'm not Dakota. I'm Metis. I mostly associate as being Iroquois, because Metis culture isn't even my own. And so when I did my work in reconciliation, I had to be very careful to say, this is what these stories that are told to me, you know, if they're someone's carry shared story about Saab a big foot or the sturgeon that I that I was telling the story as if they were telling the story and accounting it to them rather than making it my own, you know, this is the real problem that we have as researchers is trying to, we want to sort of take ownership even without even trying to we end up taking ownership of this knowledge. And we have to really, really be careful about what those stories can tell us. And if what they're talking, we might not be able to understand the definitions that they're that's being told to us and not sort of the emphasis that we'll get to ahead with both research being quite personal. So quite briefly because I don't have a lot of time and I prepared a 45 minute presentation, and I don't want to keep you guys here that long. My research came from my thesis, which was about understanding reconciliation in Canada from an indigenous perspective. And it was centered in Manitoba, Canada, which is quite, quite central to Canada, and engage with elders, educators, activists, and community leaders, all that were indigenous, or had a very, very, very strong connection with the digits community, usually meaning that they had children that were indigenous. It's my personal journey. And that was one of the things that was, you know, when I started the process, I was, I was sort of thinking that this is going to be a research project, and I'm just going to get through it, and it's going to get done, it's going to have a, you know, beginning, middle, and end. But going through it, I found that, you know, I was having, I was being changed by the research. And, you know, there's one of the quotes that if the research doesn't change you, you're not doing it right. And so I think that's an important sort of element to get across. And that's sort of what came across in my, in my, my work. Some of the methods that I use was sort of trying to build what you call these sort of circles of representation. So I started with things like elder interviews, within the elder of interviews, because you're engaging with elder, you also, you often have a research ceremony. And this research ceremony is really important because it's about building that respect and that trust like that, where I was talking about, and it also is going to, we're going to see later how it started building, building sort of what's called a social contract. One of the things with these, these long interviews. And one of the things that sort of, and this is something that was quite challenging to me, that you're going to see a lot of stuff when you do work with Indigenous peoples or Indigenous people are doing research that looks like Western practice. And then you're going to have to say, well, this is problematic. So the idea that elder interviews are elite slash expert interviews, which can be problematic. And, and reason why it's problematic is then you get that whole sense of agency and who's talking for whom and who are these people and where they're situated. But in Indigenous knowledge, elder knowledge is very, very important. It's very central. Mostly because it's not just knowledge that's vetted by the elder, but it's actually vetted by the community. And elders will be very particular about where their knowledge is situated and the extent to which they can speak. And an elder, an elder knowledge is also doesn't preclude that idea that you have to do the learning and you have to do the understanding and you have to do the re-articulation of that knowledge. Elders don't want to teach you. They want to share information with you and you have to teach yourself. And so this is sort of sort of what I went through. One of the things at the bottom is this sort of relational accountability and findings. And one thing you'll see a lot with a lot of Indigenous research is this idea of context and building contextualized understandings of knowledge. What that means is there's a guy back at Teri Tafoya and he's excited and Sean Wilson and he's citing a theory from physics, a guy named Heisenberg. Heisenberg has this theory of I think certainty and that you can never know the exact position or the exact speed of a molecule at the same time because to understand its position you have to remove it from its speed, understand its speed, you have to remove it from its position. How that extends to Indigenous knowledge is that you can never know the exact, you can never know the context, you can either know the context or the definition which means that to understand something definitionally you have to remove it from its context or understand something contextually you have to remove it from its definition. The further you get to defining something, the more you've isolated it from its context. So in Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous, what I did with my research I guess I should say was contextualized with long quotes. And what you can do with a long quote is you can try to sort of see where that quote occurred and try to get into the spirit or into the space where I was when I was listening to that quote rather than atomizing the quote and picking out sound bites here and there. So how did I do this? Well, when I went to the field and did my research I was sort of trying to find a way to articulate how reconciliation has happened in Canada and how the harm and tinnitus generational harm has occurred in Canada and what sort of came to me and it actually kind of is funny because after going through this whole process I went back and reread my interviews, literally the day before I submitted my thesis in and I found this quote that I skipped and it was talking about this process of a tree. And she was referring it to this tree of life. She was talking about being a mother and she was talking about how she was giving birth and how the placenta inverted is actually a tree and how in Indigenous communities, her Indigenous community they celebrate that sort of that representation of the placenta being the tree and how that's that tree of life and that's that relationship. Well, what I had done in my research was to trace reconciliation to this construct of the tree and so what that meant was that I was able to take a proxy for my understanding and place it within sort of an ecological framework, which is something you'll see quite a lot in Indigenous knowledges and often try to explain things in a way and this is the real challenge because in Western practice it's almost seen as quite limiting when I talk about things in a concept of a tree they're going to say oh that's very cute that you're talking about it things that way but you know when you start to break down the components of a tree for instance roots can be a tree can be 60 plus percent up to 200 percent larger than that then you can see for the for the leaves and so when you're talking about intergenerational harm and you're saying that the hot that harm is actually the roots it's an invisible you can talk about a tree being unhealthy and that tree needing to be healthy but not really realized the extent to the damage that's been caused by the harm from the roots and so it actually is that's sort of a utility of Indigenous peoples explaining things within nature because we in our process of atomizing information placing things in different disciplines what will then happen is then you sort of lose out on that symmetry that happens in nature and a tree naturally grows and what's most efficient for it and if we were to break down that sort of structure of a tree and see and see how broad it is it sort of makes perfect sense that in Canada Indigenous peoples have faced harm and that harm is having these long-term consequences when you when you look at how widespread that harm is and across how many generations I don't really want to get too much into this I've already devoted too much time but just sort of that sort of how I how I contextualize it and then coming out of this journey I sort of started to realize that there's a lot of a lot of sort of different not truth but sort of things that I found with reconciliation or not with Indigenous knowledge and to teach too much it's a takeaway and what person's opportunity to learn and so you know when we when we come into these situations where elders are teaching us they don't want us to they don't want us to be told the truth they want us to be told some some facts or some opinions and we have to take away with that Indigenous people are less concerned with establishing that universal truth and more of letting one person make their journey for themselves and that's the thing that we've sort of tried to reconcile Western Western Academy is this idea bias and this idea that we can sort of understand someone's point of view if we think hard enough about it and if we just do the right ethics and we just do the right you know all these right things that we can we can make it but the reality is that's not true it's always going to be a personal opinion and you know there is there's you know that fallacy of that there's that circle of circular relationship with knowledge and that circular relationship goes beyond not only just the collection of the knowledge but the transmission the analysis and how it goes back and the idea the stories go in circles and this is really important because you'll hear a story once and you'll hear it again and it'll mean something entirely different in indigenous cultures in Iroquois culture they have them they have a the long house they talk about this long house and that's what the Iroquois people used to live in and having four doors and and and each of those doors was guarded by a different tribe and as you entered in through each one of those doors it meant something different and we're going to see that in practice later on but you may enter into a story at a certain time through a certain door and hear it in a certain way and doesn't mean that you know the truth of it because when you hear that story again it's going to have different meaning it's going to have different relevance and so you need to re-listen to these stories over and over again and that research is a ceremony and a journey so what's one thing that sort of I did and this is again I want to make perfectly clear the all you know all these practices are contextually based right you're all going to find your own practices for with with which you're going to be able to work with indigenous peoples or even at even work within your own communities it's this idea of the land acknowledgement which is actually something quite new and it's something that actually does have historic roots and it's going to be something that's going to be I don't say a little bit controversial because it's taking something that's been I don't know almost it's a bit comical now the land acknowledgement and trying to put into an academic space so what a land acknowledgement is is basically this this place where you know an organization every university in North America for most part now houses land acknowledgement they'll say we're doing we recognize that we're on treaty one territory traditional homeland of the DNA and this type of thing and we recognize that sort of thing and it's it's very common and it's also you know the reason why it's kind of interesting is it's come out of the sort of imperative for reconciliation but often within the language there's this sort of controversial aspect to it I mean I'm going to show you one in particular and and what's controversial about it is that it often doesn't achieve what sure it might build recognition but it often doesn't achieve what what what it's and old goal is and what I'm going to pull up this one from Concordia and I don't know if anyone can make a guess on it's within the first line about something that would be it's in the first sentence there's going to be something that's a little bit ironic about about it I mean it's a great it's a it's your typical let territorial acknowledgement land acknowledgement so anyone want to take a guess unseated indigenous lands right so you're recognizing that you're doing work on indigenous plans isn't Concordia University going to tear down Concordia University and move it probably not right so this this is the thing so it becomes a sort of problematic thing you know they call it what somebody on Twitter called it a pro forma platitude you know something that's done just to you know make itself feel better and it the land acknowledgement can become this sort of proxy for continued colonization I mean who does land belong to who has the right to use occupied land and then there's this question of who should write it and who should it be written for and Ryerson University the guy who wrote the land acknowledgement for Ryerson University said I wish never wish you never did it and like why do you wish you never did it like why is it because I wrote it I worked I'm indigenous person I worked at Ryerson University and they asked me to do it so I wrote it for them but but you know that's like getting the teacher to do your homework right like she he shouldn't have had to write it he knew exactly what was supposed to be and of course he did because I mean he lives it and so this is the sort of this the sort of aspect of it that that becomes sort of problematic but you know there is sort of a sense of can there be a good land acknowledgement I'm gonna show one a bit of one video and a bit of the other video and and and neither one of them I would say are less early good so that's you know come shows just you know how problematic these land acknowledgements can be right like I mean that that what's the intention what we're trying to get out of out of them and what sort of the purpose out of my core sort of hint to that earlier like who's writing them right you and and and I think that there is a this is just quickly it's a current practice of land knowledge there is there is a way that you can use land acknowledgements in a positive manner you just have to think about how you can do it so the current practice amnesty's got a bit quite good practice so you're naming the indigenous territory you're on you're explaining why you're acknowledging land you're addressing the relevant rights and and I think that's sort of like the start but actually think that it's actually something that can be used in research you know for me I had an landing on law acknowledgment right at the beginning of my of my of my thesis it's because I thought that you could use it as a social contract not to traditionally social contracts or something out of politics it's about like the right to govern a right to be governed but the contemporary usage social contract is about consent that you consent to do something that you consent for the state to govern you or you consent for somebody to have sort of power authority over you and that power is quite important because when you're making that consent you're saying I'm doing research here I this is I recognize that these are the values and this is what I pledge to do it changes that balance because now you're held accountable for the research you're doing right and and you can be held accountable obviously if that nobody's reading it in indigenous community or nobody cares but it but what it does is that that accountability helps you sort of locate yourself and sort of get back to that sense of being lost once you start to establish the territory that you're working in and start to locate yourself you can start to look use that that a land acknowledgement as a tool to sort of navigate and and and get yourself out so this was my land acknowledgement and it's not perfect it's something that I am working on but you know it was what I used in my research right that my research where where the research took place who who was with the Anishinaabeg, Oji Kiritakota, Anishina Moeka, Metis and Denne land also land of Treaty 1 and again that's not that to fully inclusive I think if we go back historically that you probably see there's other indigenous groups that would have territorial claims that land but that I pledge to respect the land and the people and one thing that I made point of is that I was reflecting accountable, relational accountable practice went on the lands and off them and that sort of you know this is to me is sort of the idea that you can start to use this tool of a land acknowledgement which has sort of become a bit of a you know in some ways a joke but you can use it to make yourself accountable for your own research and like I said becomes a sort of centering practice I was going to do this exercise but I don't think we have the time so we're just going to plow right through if that's okay but I was going to get you guys to write your own land acknowledgement and just sort of just to think about who you do research with and the values that you have to reflect while doing that research and then sort of try to replicate something that like I did so we'll go just a step further because I don't know how much time I have left so one of the aspects in indigenous knowledge is a sense of relational accountability right it's like being accountable for your research being accountable within research being accountable to yourself and what I what I found is that with this in within this attention of within the object of the research there is several tensions that you have to navigate the land acknowledgement sort of defines that terrain and the context the context but there's still a need to get out right you're lost you need to find you know get out and often when you come back with your from these foreign lands you've got the great stories everybody wants to hear right and that's the the goal of the research so to go negotiate the territory yet to negotiate this territory and train you have to negotiate these different relations or the relations with people the relations with the environment the cosmos and the ideas things that indigenous people sort of negotiate within their own understandings of their own societies so the land contract doesn't become a burden it becomes a tool and this tool itself is negotiated right because it shows that you have an understanding of the cultures that you're doing work with and therefore it can sort of act as a map or a compass so one of these tensions that you sort of have to navigate this is what sorry this is tension I had to navigate within my research what this sort of I had a curiosity and I had to get to knowledge right we started a specific point right so I started at my curiosity but and if you consider like for me the this became well take this would be this point became reconciliation right that's what I want understood my curiosity was probably quite broad so knowledge became who had the knowledge it became the elder the elder had the knowledge so we start this journey and if you've ever navigated in in the woods or out you use a use a compass or whatever you take a bearing right that became my bearing we started quite broadly and we sort of worked our way down to a narrow narrow spot just just like the elder or whoever had the knowledge they too had a broad base of knowledge and they would often meet me in the middle with a narrow sort of focus of knowledge so if I went to talk to an elder about reconciliation they weren't going to talk to me about like medic medicinal plants unless it was like pertinent to reconciliation so we must negotiate that distance and there's also a level of trust that we're going to meet up in the middle right another tension was this sort of tension between analysis and tension and the tension of respect with indigenous communities right like that the problem is is that often people are coming in claiming the knowledge and then leaving them with the knowledge so if we're going to negotiate this sort of sense that we want to do sort of analysis with them with indigenous we want we have to sort of get this respect how do we get indigenous knowledge unless there's that level of trust and with that level of trust comes a level of respect indigenous elders and indigenous communities know that we're going to be doing analysis right that sort of that sort of comes comes to pass but that land acknowledgement then sort of holds us accountable for the type of analysis we're going to do plus it sort of does in many ways inform how we're going to do the analysis and this this trust and is also part of this personal journey I'm a Goulet reflects how the journey is evident how indigenous people pass on knowledge is as one experience is they learn and access to knowledge is a function to access to experience right and so what what will happen in it with indigenous communities with indigenous knowledge is an elder will tell you as much as they think you can handle they aren't going to tell you everything and as you learn you're going to handle a bit more and one of the things that was that came out with one of one of one or an ethnographic researcher had was doing a just living amongst one of the people that the hell took I believe in in near Alaska and he went on a dog sled he'd always wanted to go on a dog sled see how they they commute and see how they get around and the after being on the trail for about four or five days they said you're going to take the reins tomorrow he'd never he never pat pat piloted a dog sled before but they'd expected him because he'd been there and if like any person would have been he would have supposed to have been watching nobody's going to tell him how to run a dog sled no one's going to tell him do that because that like I said before would be disrespectful to tell him exactly how to do it so he got on he supposedly did fine because he lived to tell the research tale about it but that's sort of the that's sort of the aspect of that level of trust in that relationship you have and you know if you try too hard to gain that trust you're doing it wrong you know if you just are respectful and that relation to the accountable way they're going to respect you and they're going to respect that you know when when I went and spoke to my elders and I did the ceremony I gave them tobacco I listen to them they told me about there was no talk about this is how you should analyze it this is what you should think and that's what you should do they knew I was going to do what I was going to want to do right because that's part of that personal journey so these tensions and these negotiations and meeting up at the points they sort of they sort of have a meeting there is a meeting with it in indigenous cultures many indigenous cultures in in in North America they have this idea of a medicine wheel and a medicine wheel is just sort of this fork point compass right compass being for navigation but it's a four-point compass that's used to explain a lot of different social phenomena it's also used to explain with a lot of processes and it's a lot it's it's spiritual it's medicinal it covers a lot of different things right within each of these colors and with each each of these parts of the circle is sort of certain attributes that are generally ascribed to many medicine wheels this one I believe I adapted from an Ojibwe medicine wheel but there's also like a Dakota medicine wheel there are a lot of medicine wheel cultures and you actually will see the medicine wheel occur in other cultures and Polynesian cultures that have something similar to a medicine wheel right so note take note of these sort of the the the place placement of all those things and those negotiations that I had for those tensions all correlated to the medicine wheel and this is not something that really happened to me that I thought about this is something that sort of happened organically I knew I noted that I needed to get knowledge because I was curious well that sort of aspect within the medicine wheel is part of that being a child right a child as a child you approach the world with this curiosity and it's also interesting because the sacred medicine is associated with the with the spring is tobacco and tobacco is the gift that you give and you'll smudge and what the smudging was doing is it's actually preparing you it's clearing away the bad spirits it's clearing away the negativity and it's actually preparing you to be receptive of either knowledge or you know wisdom or even just an experience and so that you know that became quite important and as your curiosity moved just like on the medicine wheel towards understanding right that negotiation had sort of a polar opposite so as you move towards understanding it's because you were able to negotiate the respect to get to the understanding right and that and that's that sort of summer attitude of being a teenager and you sort of start to understand the world you start to understand your place in the world and with that you start to respect your elders you start to respect their knowledge and even though you there is always that tension and that tension is always there and that's the point the point isn't that we're going to absolve the tension the point is there's always that tension it keeps distance but it also keeps things close and that's moves that knowledge as you as you've progressed with your understanding you move to your knowledge so in turn in turn to you have that sort of sense of you you've built this knowledge and you've negotiated carry your own curiosity and this whole thing is part of a circle right all this whole experience within with an indigenous knowledge is part of a circle and it becomes a sort of ability to negotiate and understand yourself in this whole circular process that becomes your ability to sort of negotiate your way out of this muddy terrain of how do I do work with indigenous peoples what's indigenous knowledge right because I mean if you're receptive you know if you what what one of the one of the what I was listening to there's an Iroquois elder and she she was talking about reconciliation and she was talking about how we can hear how we can sort of pick up new knowledges and she said talking about opening up the space and just listening even to the silence you know and if we're just still in those silent moments we're still information that's being told in the silence you know we we talk about how you know this self-reflection is such an important part of indigenous knowledge such such an important part of being able to work work within this framework and I think that is an important sort of aspect of of being able to have these negotiations so hopefully we've found our way home I know I've got lost and I'm sure you've got lost with me and there's really interesting quote from Maya Angelou and I just you know I just I just really like a lot a lot of the literature Maya Angelou onto Lord and and the one who I forgot her first name but anyways Maya Angelou talks about I look up the road and I and looked up the road I was going back and the way I come and I wasn't satisfied so I decided to step off the road and cut me a new path and you know what if you're just going to follow the same routes you know Maya Angelou was probably going to the same place right the destination is the same but you know sometimes you have to take out step outside of what's the regular navigated roads in Western discourse Western Academy and and be able to sort of help yourself get lost and get found and get lost again you know and not sort of the process of of life as I just all knowledge there's some sources not not some resources for you guys just some stuff to look at some good readings this one right here this is quite an interesting one for non indigenous researchers this ways of knowing experiencing power Monday it's a little old 1999 or 98 but you know when I read it it's surprising I've never it's not it's not very well very widely cited think you know on Google scholar it's got maybe like four or five citations but his work that you can tell that he gets it you can he gets that understanding


The Scottish Parliament has asked for our opinion on the voting experience. We gathered all the results and this is what we found. First, we had to exclude answers from all the people who couldn't vote because they were too young. Did you get enough information about registering your vote? The majority of people said they had enough information to register to vote for a quarter of them. When asked, what was your experience voting for the first time? Most people said it was exciting. Some people say it was good because of the good instructions on the polling station. Many people got information from attending or watching debates to search information online or social media. Many people commented on the BBC being biased and they were reporting and was therefore not a reliable source of information. When asked about the Dursgroncurch, the debate and discussion of this year, most people said no because teachers were banned from saying anything. Almost all pupils felt it was a good idea to give 16 and 17 year olds the right to vote in the referendum. Most pupils also felt that they should be given the right to vote. In the future elections, some commenting, it would make them more interesting in politics. Did you get enough information about registering to vote in the referendum? Yes, because I got the registration letter in the post and we were also reminded in school about it. What was your experience of voting for the first time? It was like surprises in the casual and normal and easy to do and it had my parents with me to keep me right. What were your main sources of information on the issues in the referendum campaign? Mainly the internet and the news. 16 to 17 year olds also have the right to vote in elections? I think so because again, if they're old enough to make a informed decision and if they're interested enough in it, then why not?


Here at the MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab, we have fission reactions going on in our core, and that means that there are uranium-235 atoms that are splitting into neutrons, heat energy, and other smaller atoms. Power reactors use the heat energy to generate electricity, but it turns out that there's so much more that you can do with a fission reactor, like measuring tiny amounts of a bunch of different elements. We can even measure our snake in a sample of hair. For this, I take my hair sample, place it in this container, put the lid on, and put it in this tube here. From here, the hair gets sent through the pipes into a chamber that's right next to the reactor core where it absorbs some neutrons, which makes some of the arsenic in the hair radioactive. After 12 hours in the reactor and a few days of decay, I take the sample, put it in this lead container to protect me from the radiation, and I go analyze it. I put the hair sample in this detector, which is very sensitive. So sensitive, it measures radiation from individual arsenic atoms in my hair. The area under this peak tells us how much arsenic is in the sample. So our reactor can tell us if someone's been exposed to things like arsenic just by analyzing their hair. It can measure very small amounts of a lot of different elements in materials that are difficult to measure otherwise. Another thing, number two, is that we're using the neutron beam produced in our reactor to see the microscopic structure of materials. The neutrons produced by the fission reaction come out as a beam and they hit the sample, which is positioned right here. When the neutron beam hits a sample, the sample acts like a mirror, reflecting the neutrons in all different directions. Inside this drum, there's a detector that measures the different directions and number of neutrons reflected in each direction. And this can actually tell us how the atoms are positioned inside our sample. So on the x-axis here is the angle of the detector with respect to the sample, and on the y-axis is the number of neutrons the detector sees. So at this position, there are a lot of neutrons, almost 1400 per second. And over here, there are about 600. Down here, there are almost no neutrons. So using these numbers, we can figure out how atoms are arranged inside the material. Scientists and other reactors want to use this method to see how the atomic structure of different nuclear fuels change while they're used in a reactor. Seeing these changes can help us develop new, safer, and more efficient types of nuclear fuel. Using neutrons is the only way that we can see these changes in atomic structure. You wouldn't be able to see the same thing with a regular microscope or any other method. Number three, we can turn gold into tools to fight cancer. We start by loading tiny seeds of gold into a holder that we call a rabbit. So I'll take the rabbit over to one of our shielded work areas where we can insert the rabbit into the reactor. And now I'm going to send the gold seeds next to the reactor core. They go in there where they'll absorb neutrons and become radioactive. After they stay in there for a few minutes, we send them back out and package them up. We package them up and move the gold seeds into a lead container. The gold seeds are now radioactive. The fact that it's radioactive is actually a good thing because doctors are going to take those gold seeds and inject them into a tumor and it's the radiation from the gold that's going to kill those cancer cells. Number four, another cool thing our reactor does is we help create electronic components for things like airplanes, train stations, and hybrid cars. So right now this silicon does not conduct electricity, but I can change that by loading it into the reactor. Okay, so what's happening behind me is that silicon piece that I just loaded is traveling through a tube that runs underneath the reactor core. Once it's under the reactor core, it gets bombarded with neutrons from the fission process. Some of the silicon atoms absorb a neutron and transform into phosphorus. It's this phosphorus that makes the material a really good semiconductor. This is what the silicon looks like before it goes into the reactor, and this is what goes into electronics. The reactor turns the silicon into a semiconductor in a super precise and controlled way. Which I control from over here. That's why we use these semiconductors and mission critical components like the power grid and not your cell phone. And last but not least we test materials that can make safer and better reactors in the future. This morning we put an experiment into our reactor with a special type of salt. So our reactor like almost all reactors in the world uses water to cool it. The special thing about this salt is that it can run at much higher temperature than water and still be a liquid. It doesn't boil. So a reactor using salt as coolant instead of water can go to much higher temperature. And the efficiency of a reactor gets better the hotter it runs.  Which means you don't need to have thicker walls and bigger pipes to keep the reactor safe. So the salt in our experiment is down in the reactor core. And this experiment is going to let us take that salt, heat it up to the same temperatures that would be inside the core of a full-size salt reactor, and then hit it with the same kind of radiation that it would see in the core of a salt reactor. And as you hit the salt with radiation, does it produce different products that come out of the salt or does it change the salt in certain ways? This salt experiment is going to be in our reactor for about a thousand hours. But that's not the only thing we study. We also look at different materials, fuels, and even sensors to go inside the core of reactors. All of this research is working towards making reactors safer and more efficient in the future.


The San Lusia Med Services has informed that the system has moved the bits for the south towards Grenada Notwithstanding this, we are still expecting gusty winds, rainfall, thunderstorms and flooding. Persons who live in low-lying areas, we are asking you to take the necessary precautions for your livelihoods. We are also asking fishermen and small craft operators when you are venturing out that there still there is a possibility of gusty winds, low visibility, rough seas. Nemo is asking residents to be vigilant and to follow the updates as given by the Med Services and Nemo.