Hey there friends, thanks for checking in today. We're looking at a new release from SAR USA called the SR 38 38 special and 357 Magnum now when I saw these at shot I Handled the one with a four-inch barrel and I was very impressed with it very much quality star has been making Revolvers for a while now, but they have not made their way to the US until now and this is a six-inch barrel SR 38 it has some heft behind it It should it's a full-size revolver made of forged steel with the frame the barrel and the cylinder This is the stainless steel model You may have seen some of those out there with the blue finish on there the four-inch barrels You haven't seen many of these six-inch models yet, but they are they are supposed to be Available shortly you can see it has a rubber grip right there Man, would I like to change this out for a beautiful wood grip? That would be so nice for for my purposes and traditional way of thinking Revolvers need a wood grip, but this one certainly serves its purpose. It's it's Got a nice texturing on there.  It has a full solid underlug and I like that that should cut down on some of the muzzle flip with the 357 Magnum certainly not worried about 38 special through this thing, but if you take a look at the cylinder We have six chambers in there. It's a six-shot 357 Magnum double action revolver push button cylinder release And of course we have the ejecting rod right there stainless steel now the crane and the ejector And the trigger and the hammer and the cylinder release to me that looks air-coated, but I'm really not sure But it has a nice look to it. The sights are really cool It has a fully adjustable rear sight if we take a close look at that we can see that and there's your elevation and then it has a Flathead screwdriver Right adjustment right there that you can adjust the windage if you so Choose but it's a good-looking revolver. There's no doubt about that It has a replaceable front sight ramped up quite a bit and then when you put that sight picture on I Think you just bury that front sight in with the rear and it aligns quite well Nice-looking revolver now the single action trigger is pretty amazing It measures my scale right at four pounds Like it is really nice heavy double action But check this out again and you you just put a little bit of pressure and That hammer is going to drop. There's a look at the rear of the grip Has the screw right there. I don't know if they're gonna make Wood wood grips for these I don't think Sarwell perhaps an aftermarket company will but I have a feeling It's going to be very popular one of the reasons is because the price Many of the sites are showing this out of stock, but right around five to six hundred dollars That is a major savings from the Smith 686 models. No, I'm not saying it's better Put the pitchforks away, but I'm not saying it's worse either I didn't shot it yet, but I'm going to shortly and I can't wait love the full-size Revolvers huge revolver fan here. I'll take a look at the internals. Then we'll get it on the scale All right, you look at the forcing cone Timing hand both stop right there Firing pin right there Top strap no no serrations or anything on the top strap smooth but it certainly has a Nice overall feel just what you would expect from a full-size revolver And I'm liking the price on this sire is known for making Very affordable Hang guns and and when I checked this out at shot It was like well, you know right around seven eight hundred dollars, but we're seeing it for less Hey, I need to cut in real quick because I want to show you what it comes with if you go with this Revolver okay, SR 38 Get this big case that comes with and inside You'll see get a sire usa sticker put one on my safe already a lock bore brush and if you want to run a patch through the bore you can do that with This stick there, but nice heavy padded case comes with or ships with the SR 38 so we'll put that on ounces and we'll see it's weighing in at 46 and a quarter ounces Six rounds of 357 Magnum. It's loaded weighs just under 50 ounces 49 and Three quarters, but if you could get this and by the way We're we are yet to see what it is going to be selling for Because all these sites say out of stock, but it's on its way You know and get on the list or whatever. It's Selling for a budget price all things considered, you know the the full-size revolvers a lot of material in here a Lot of machining and so forth. It says sire usa right there stainless SR 38 38357 Magnum the cylinder rotates counterclockwise But I want to show this once again because that is that is as nice as Shall I say my python? I'm not gonna say it's as nice as my python But it is a really nice single-action trigger pull. It's kind of mind-boggling in a way You know, I mean I'm used to single-action trigger pulls But that hammer just drops like don't see a transfer bar in there and a lot of people will say hey is Is that safe to carry? I I think it is, you know the modern revolvers everybody's worried about is a drop safe. Well They're referring to revolvers that are 40 50 years old things were different back then they they have internal safeties and so forth that I We we if I pull this trigger here You can see that firing pin see that right right there. That makes its way out but if I Whack this with a hammer like there is no give there to give any indication that that firing pin is going to protrude and Make contact with the primer if I were to drop it. I'm not gonna drop it I'm not gonna throw it around or anything like that, but it's a nice-looking revolver a nice feeling Full-size six inch revolver. I don't think you've seen this yet. You may have seen pictures But sarsal moz Is getting it done there. They're coming out with all kinds of models I have some more to show and I think you're going to be impressed and for the price of their offering These revolvers for I certainly am impressed. I walked away impressed with the four-inch model The blue ones are cool But I'm really impressed with what is offered for The price that they are asking for so there it is the SR 38 made by sarsal mass and ported by sir USA says right there The planes Illinois Miami, Florida one of those that's coming in one of those made in Turkey But nice stainless not ever not a heavy shine But a nice stainless steel revolver that I think are gonna make a lot of revolver fans happy Yeah, if you like videos like this, please subscribe and sure I always appreciate thumbs up button Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


Thank you, professors, Lira and Shun. It is my honor to introduce Dr. Sarah Hull to lead our next question and answer session. Dr. Hull has worked at the NIH since 1999 and is currently on detail with the NIH Tribal Health Research Office to support the development of policies, procedures, and training to enhance the ethical conduct of tribal research. In addition, Dr. Hull holds joint appointments as the director of the Bioethics Corps of the NHGRI, this chair of the NIH Intramural IRB that is a faculty member in the Department of Bioethics. Over to you, Dr. Hull. Good morning. Thank you so much, Chris. And thank you, professors Lira and Shun, for your excellent presentations. The work that you've done to characterize these cases is so important in answering questions of how could this happen? How did this happen? But I also, I really appreciated how both of your presentations engaged both with stories of resistance and dissent, stories that I was a little less familiar with, but also they engaged with the enduring legacy, the modern-day relevance of how we apply these claims that were used to support eugenic policies and so many social spheres and structures and aspects of modern-day life. And a lot of the questions that we've been receiving from participants engaged with how we can better, how we learn the lessons of history, how do we apply these lessons to what we're seeing today? Both some applications, it seemed just really overtly problematic and offensive, but even by those who are working in well-intentioned ways to do socially valuable work, work that many of my genetics colleagues do on a daily basis. So if I could, I'd like to begin with one of the questions that engages a little bit with the past and then bring us into some of the modern-day contexts that our participants have pointed out in the discussion. There was a question about the role of medical professionals in implementing eugenic policies and a recognition, and you both spoke about social workers and physicians and nurses and others who are medical professionals. And the attendee would like to ask if you can engage a little more deeply with what you know about how medical professionals justified their work, especially in light of ethics codes that existed at the time and how this supported for them or justified for them their willingness to engage in eugenic policies. Can I start out by thanking the organizers, the participants and the audience for this really amazing conference? I have been blown away both yesterday and today by the discussion and the questions and the presentations. This is really fabulous and so important. I can speak a little bit to North Carolina, although I will preface what I say by noting that not much is known about the way in which medical professionals who were directly involved in eugenic sterilization responded to it. So the way that it worked in North Carolina is that if the eugenics board authorized a sterilization, it was assigned to a particular hospital to a particular surgeon and the surgeon did the sterilization as part of his, they were all men, a caseload of the day. And I'm actually not clear in how far the surgeons knew the details about the fact that the person that they were sterilizing at a particular time was somebody whose sterilization had been authorized by the state. I do know that there was some tussle between the eugenics board and members of, I think it was the Duke University medical staff, particularly residents in the 1960s who did not want to participate. And I suspect what, I don't know the outcome of that because I do know from the sources that Duke university physicians and surgeons were regularly involved in sterilizations, but I suspect if the board encountered physicians who were unwilling to participate, they just moved to a different surgeon. And I also have to say, I mean, yes, I mean, to a certain extent we can talk about the moral and ethical requirements of medical staff, but physicians and surgeons during that time were often very conservative. And in fact, many of them actually supportive of sterilizing those people who became the center of eugenics board attention so far so that there were many physicians and surgeons who just sterilized, especially women on their own accord without getting state authorization. And those are sterilizations we don't really know anything about because there is no record left. So I would not assume that they were constitutionally critical of this. I think it is likely that it was fairly easy to find people who supported the program and who also felt that the people who came to the attention of the eugenics board were actually good candidates for sterilization. Yeah, I'll add that in California and I agree with what Dr. Showne said that physicians and nurses were not kind of like a tool of eugenics. They were part of the eugenics movement very often. And so they didn't see this at or many of them didn't see this as contradictory to any kind of moral or ethical professional guidelines. They saw this many of them as kind of a humanitarian practice that through a very paternalistic view that these are people that are incompetent and this is what's best for them and this is what's best for society, right? It's in California and in North Carolina and in many other states, a public health department was involved in eugenics sterilization. The Supreme Court case that legitimizes eugenics sterilization in the 1920s, but Vibel in part does so through a public health reasoning, right? That this is a public health measure. And so this is seen as in line with the professional goals. I'll also say that's not to say that there weren't nurses and physicians that dissented, there were and in my research, I did come across a number of letters from physicians and nurses who were very alarmed by this practice, right? I'll also say in California and another one of in the other institution that I didn't talk about in this presentation, Sonoma, the director of the institution was a physician, Brad Butler, who performed many of the sterilizations himself and so I wouldn't position physicians and nurses as separate from this program and this policy. They were embedded and it was often a professionalizing opportunity that many of them made their careers off of this practice, especially in California. I would also add just to remind people, right, that the first thing that I did to remind people, right, that most of these practices took place during a time when there wasn't effective birth control and when abortion was illegal. And so far as physicians had humanitarian concerns where they felt they were really helping clients, I would say to some extent, those were heartfelt concerns because there weren't many alternatives for people to control their reproduction if this is what they wanted to do. And I think the fact that many of the people who were sterilized, I mean, in North Carolina, I know this in particularly had many, many children, I think speaks to that further. And I think the other thing that we can notice that the point at which both social workers but also medical professionals became increasingly skeptical of the petitions that came to the North Carolina eugenics board was the point at which the pill becomes available and at which the IUD becomes available. And that is the point at which eugenic board members turn around and basically say to social workers who submit petitions, well, show us that you have tried these forms of birth control for these clients and that they don't work before we're willing. So I think there is a link between what was accessible in terms of controlling reproduction and the excitement and enthusiasm with which people approach eugenic sterilization. Thank you. There's been a really, I think, important and nice connection between the presentations from yesterday into today. And one of the themes that comes out is the use of language and descriptors as a way to undergird the scientific basis of these policies. And so now I'd like to ask you if you can help us consider the present day context. One of the questions that's gotten upvoted and I think really nicely characterizes this issue about learning from our mistakes from the past. Sometimes in the throes of a situation, the mistake is not apparent. There were and are works being done in the hopes of improving something. So today, how do we, how do geneticists and other researchers collect information about characteristics like skin color? We talked about hair texture yesterday, variation in intellectual ability and cognition in such a manner that achieves the important health related goals of some of that work without offending, without harming and without repeating past mistakes. Do you have any advice to that attendee and others who are asking similar questions about how they can think about this in their work today? I think part of it is about being very clear and deliberate about why certain data and information is being collected and the usefulness of that data and information. And so I'm just, I'm kind of finishing up the semester of seminar on race medicine and society and we talked a lot about the use of race in medical studies for example and the way that race and racial categories are used very uncritically, right? Without an understanding of what race is socially and politically and that unintentionally perhaps reasserts the notion that race is kind of an essential biological category, right? And so, and I think the corrective for that is going, you know, being very clear about the reason why we're collecting these, this information and this data and what we believe the meaning and purpose of this information is. And I think that is a start, right? And I think it's less about offending people and more about being conscious of the way that this information skin color, hair texture has been used to make connections that are socially based and not biologically based and are not as useful as we think, right? So, you know, people will say like it's important to collect racial information because we need to know ancestry, but actually race, we know that race is not a very useful or accurate data point for ancestry. So I think that's part of it. I think Professor Lira is right on, I mean, I would almost counsel anybody who feels that they're interested and that it's important to collect and do research on racial differences to go and read Dorothy Roberts' work where she really kind of takes apart the incredible appeal that this research has, but the, you know, the fact that, that racial difference is socially constructed and that it doesn't really, that I think what we need to do is we need to change the paradigm in which we think about the research question that are going to lead us in the future. And then I think the other thing to realize is, but this is not an excuse to researchers, but to realize that researchers are not policy makers. So I think we also have to be really careful to differentiate between research results and how those are taken up by policy makers to then go and design the harmful policies. Thank you. Really excellent answers to those questions. A number of our participants have drawn out examples of language and discourse around COVID vaccination and both in the public policy and jurisprudence sphere sentencing as well as more generally in just the public discourse. And a lot of these characterizations judge populations related to their intelligence and their willingness to be vaccinated or assumptions about the likelihood that they will be vaccinated. So to sort of synthesize some of those questions, do you see these kinds of attitudes as potentially signaling the promotion of eugenics based on things like intelligence or compliance? I think that there is a connection there. I would have to think more about whether it's signaling eugenics. I think it's certainly troubling the line of thinking can lead to dismissiveness of people's genuine concerns. And a longer history of mistrust that often gets conflated with kind of just hard line anti-vax. I think there's a lot of conflation going on between an anti-vax movement and mistrust of vaccines and social policies and public health that is grounded in real histories. And so I think kind of like dismissing folks as unintelligent or as deserving to be excluded from healthcare or deserving to just die off is certainly troubling and can offer just an easy dismissal without having to grapple with real reasons why some people might be cautious in questioning. I don't know that I have anything to add. I think partly because I don't really understand the question. I do think that the skepticism over vaccine is more a political question and the way in which COVID in particular has been politicized in this country and the kind of increasing skepticism towards science. Then I mean, I don't really see the relationship to eugenics, I'm really sorry. A lot of questions are coming in rapidly and not all of them have had a chance to be upvoted. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your views on standardized surveys and tests that are used today. There's a number here that analogize current academic testing to tests that were used to support eugenic policies. And oops, the question did get upvoted and I lost it. But will these modern day, is there a risk that modern day behavior surveys will lead to eugenic policies? And are there concerns in the area of how race-based data are used in that realm? Well, I think, I mean, we should recognize that standardized testing is an outgrowth of IQ testing and that whole history. And I think that there are similar, I mean, research on standardized testing, for example, in high schools shows that, there are serious biases in the testing and they lead to inequality in outcomes. And so I think there is a clear line there and there are questions about the usefulness. I think given COVID, people are now a lot of universities, for example, are suspending their reliance on these tests and kind of rethinking how useful they are and really determining people's ability to succeed in college, for example. But I think there is a clear line there between the history of intelligence testing and contemporary standardized tests. Yeah, I think going along with the notion that we can test and identify students who will not be able to benefit from education, right? That was one of the prime issues and prime topics that we can see in the kind of more popular eugenic literature. There have been a number of comments, both yesterday and today and multiple speakers who have really drawn out the importance of understanding the perspectives of those who were the victims of eugenic policies, those who were sterilized. And we know certainly from the discussion of compensation that there are still living survivors today. Are you aware of research that's been done that really looks at how they're doing at what their life experience has been and the impact of having been subjected to these policies? And if so, could you share what you know about that with us? I have to say that I don't know of any such research, but I also have to say that if it exists, I don't know that I would know, partly because it's a totally different field. So I'm sorry, I can't answer that. You know, the survivors of... So California's sterilization program largely ended by the early 1950s. So there aren't very many living survivors. You know, our lab has estimated a couple of hundred. And so for that period, the studies that I know that exist on folks that were sterilized in Pacific colony in particular were conducted by actually an anthropologist, Robert Edgerton, who did follow-up interviews with people that were institutionalized in Pacific colony. There is one article in particular where he talks about where he's looking at their reactions to sterilization. And many of them were, of course, very negative, you know, many of them. Some of them didn't even know that they had been sterilized. Many of them talk about not understanding why it had been done to them, talking about interfering with future romantic relationships because they either didn't want to be involved with someone that they wouldn't be able to have children with or the person that they were involved with that wanted to have children. Many of them experienced, of course, emotional trauma, some of them also physical trauma because the operation was performed poorly. And so, you know, that is a set of experiences that he documents later on when we, you know, have the sterilizations that occurred in the 60s and 70s. We have a couple documentaries, for example, the Nomaz-Bibidz documentary, which features women who were sterilized at the USC County Hospital in Los Angeles. They talk about very similar things, right, that they interfered with their marriage, that it caused them long-term emotional harm, trauma. And so, I think there are echoes of that throughout various periods of sterilization abuse. And I'm not sure that there are, like, longitudinal studies or official studies, but there's certainly evidence in films and in different sources that point to the impacts of sterilization. Yeah, if I can add to that very briefly. Certainly the survivors who have spoken out in public who are survivors of the North Carolina sterilization program have expressed exactly what Professor Lira just described. So being very traumatized and basically feeling that they had no control over their lives, feeling devastated by the fact that they couldn't have their own children, difficult, romantic relationships and so on. I think to get back to the question of specific research, I mean, I think one of the issues that makes such research difficult, if not impossible, is that the identity of sterilization victims unless they come out and speak out in public and self-identify continues to be protected. So it's not that anybody who's interested in the topic can just go access a database, identify those who have been sterilized and then send them a questionnaire or conduct interviews. So the only way we know about them is because they have come forward and have talked about, or because journalists and documentary filmmakers have found them and they were willing to talk to them. There's a documentary about the compensation program in North Carolina that interviewed a number of sterilization victims in which the victims are also very evocative about their lives. Great, thank you. Professor Lyra, I was really struck by some of the evidence and information you shared about the characterization of Mexican Indian residents and the ways in which they were both counted and characterized. We have a question that builds on that related to current day immigration policies and their relationship to eugenics policies. And this participant is particularly interested in both African and South American nations and policies concerning immigration to the United States. Can I invite you to expand on that theme of it either from the evidence you learned in your historical research or how you see that playing out today? Sure, and I'm understanding correctly the question. I think concerns around immigration were certainly informed the racialization of Mexican origin youth who were committed to Pacific colony. And I want to reiterate too, that ideas about the defectiveness or the unfitness of Mexican origin youth build on already existing racial stereotypes of Mexicans in California that are grounded in these concerns over immigration and this seemingly problematic population in California in the state. And so I think that in these ideas about Mexican youth as Mexican origin boys as criminal is something that exists since before eugenics, right? And of young Mexican women as hypersexual and sexually deviant also exists before eugenics. And eugenics, what eugenics really does is make it scientific, right? A legitimate idea. And I think these ideas continue in contemporary notion, contemporary nativist ideas and kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric. And we see this particularly, I see a very clear parallel here, particularly around, you know, these concerns over unaccompanied youth migrants kind of flooding the border and coming across the border, right? And a lot of, you know, if we recall, for example, in 2006, when there was kind of this wave of unaccompanied minors, concerns revolved around public health risks and criminality, right? That these were gang members that were coming to the United States, right? And so there are very similar discourses that eugenics winds up legitimizing and that, again, I wouldn't, I can't say that it's eugenics again, but it's the same type of argument, right? That these racialized immigrant groups are a public health risk, that they're a social risk, right? They're socially deviant in that, just by coming here, they're bringing all of these problems. Thanks, we're getting very close to the end of our time, but I'm going to try to squeeze in one additional question about gender. There's a question that for me is really provocative, which was whether women ever served on eugenics boards? And it really, I mean, you both spoke about the relationships between race and disability and gender and the interrelationship of these constructs, but how did that play out on the side of the professionals? And do you have any observations about the relevance of gender in that space? I mean, I think women were as much eugenicists as men. So the eugenics board in North Carolina was for most of its duration, really run by Ellen Winston, who was the director of the Department of Public Welfare and most of the social workers who submitted sterilization petitions were women because it was a women's profession. So yes, very much so. Yeah, I'll say, you know, in my research, certainly like the institutional superintendents were often male, but the kind of other professional folks that were really invested in kind of supporting Pacific colony were largely women. So a lot of women's clubs took up this kind of humanitarian effort of building this institution to like address the social problem. It became part of their kind of organizing in their own, you know, formation of their own civic identity and identity as kind of like capable, active social women. Right. And so we have them building kind of an identity of white able-bodied women who deserve the right to vote who deserve the right to serve on judges because actually the law that passed, that established Pacific colony was passed at the same time with support of the women's group at the same time as a law that allowed women to serve as judges on the court or as participants in legal processes. So there's a very clear connection there and women were very much active, especially in Pacific colony and kind of establishing the institution and also supporting leader efforts. Well, unfortunately, we've come to the end of our time and maybe borrowed a little bit from folks lunch break, but I just want to thank you both so much for both of your presentations, the work that you do and for engaging with these really challenging questions. I can tell there's going to be spillover into these later discussions we have today and hopefully far into the future. And I apologize to all of those whose excellent questions we didn't get to in this moment, but we are tracking them and we will continue to engage with them. So I think now, Chris, do I turn this back over to you? Yes. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you again, Professor Shun and Lyra for this fascinating and impactful and meaningful discussion. We will be on break until 1pm Eastern time for lunch. Thank you very much and we will see you in the afternoon.


Hello and welcome to another episode of our frankly forgotten bruise and Today I'm gonna bring to you shockwaves, which is my German Rogan beer, which is a German rye beer I was struggling to find a name for it I had some kind of a German name for it set up and then I was like, ah What else is German in the horror? John world and it just hit me as a shockwaves. Okay. It's a good name for a beer It's all right It turned out pretty good, but a little darker than I wanted I think little more like chocolatey and caramel either than I wanted But anyways, I used two kilograms rye malt one kilogram Pilsner One kilogram red X and then for the specialty grains I did eight ounces of Cara red six ounces of Cara aroma and four ounces of chocolate malt So I think that's what darkened it. It's crazy. How much a little bit of chocolate Darken up a beer almost black For the hops I did one ounce of Liberty hops for 60 minutes and one ounce of Liberty hops for zero minutes Like I was kind of thinking I was maybe some German ingredients in the in the grain and then I'll use American Sounding hops because there's Americans in the movie. Yeah used heffa wise in the east, which is that wheat the wheat east Yeah, and it came out to about 20 IV use and it started off at six and a half percent And it ended after it was done fermenting at about five and a half percent, and it's good. So there you go Shockwave is a good rye beer. I like a good rye beer. Yeah Mmm. Well, I think there's too much in this word models that spiciness though. I think I don't think so. You don't think so. No There you go enjoy


Hi, I'm Tom Stewart with Cleaning Business Today and for today's KPI tip, we're going to be talking about direct labor as a percent to sale. We talk about direct labor. What we mean is the amount of money that you pay the people who are actually cleaning for you. This is the dollars that go to the to the staff that are cleaning homes or offices or whatever it is you might be cleaning. This is a very important number to try because direct labor is your largest expense category and one that you want to manage on a weekly basis. To get at your direct labor, most people don't have an accounting system. A lot of times you don't have an accounting system set up where you can easily track that, but we can all get our total payroll for a week either out of our accounting package or from the people that do our payroll for us if we outsource that. It's usually easier to take that total payroll dollar and subtract from that the people who aren't cleaning every day. We call that our indirect payroll. That could be management supervision, office staff, anybody who's not cleaning. That number oftentimes is constant weekend and week out. In this case, we're going to use an example where a total payroll is $5,450. We're going to assume that our indirect payroll was $800 for that week. And I just take one and subtract it from the other and it gives me a direct payroll of $4,650. Now, I want to take that number, divide it by my weekly revenue. In our example here, we're assuming our weekly revenue is $10,245. So, I take the $4650, divide it by the $10,245 in this formula here and it gives me a direct payroll to sale of 45.39%. We want to look at another week. We just did another example here, made up some numbers. You notice that the indirect is constant, it stayed the same. The payroll was a little bit more this week, direct payroll, but lucky here, the weekly revenue was a little bit higher that week. And the percentage came in at 46% in change. If you track your direct labor payroll as a percent to sale weekend and week out and manage your business in a way where you can keep this percentage here in this column constant and implement scheduling efficiencies and other things where you're constantly trying to manage that and keep this number as low as you can, you'll find that you're making a whole lot more money off of whatever you find yourself cleaning weekend and week out. Hope that you find this KPI tip helpful. Thank you for watching Cleaning Business Today.


The study presents an approach to leverage phylogenetic analysis of metagenomic sequence data to conduct several types of analysis including Bayesian hypothesis tests for the presence of an organism in a sample, comparison of community structure across a collection of many samples, and association between the abundance of certain organisms and sample metadata. These analyses are implemented in an open-source software pipeline called Phylocift which incorporates several other programs to automate phylogenetic analysis of protein coding and RNA sequences in metagenomic datasets generated by modern sequencing platforms. This article was authored by Ernie Darling, Guillaume Jospin, Eric Lowe, and others.


I heard of the 23th general election, the immediate past minister of state for Nigeria Delta, Taira Alashwadira, has lost his bid to claim the ticket of the all-progressive Congress for Undo Central Senatorial District, Tohadini Yadibomire Alashwadira, who polled 88 votes lost to Adini, who scored 144 at the primary. On the primary, four other house parents, who include Umiolatunji, got two votes. Umiolat Alashwadira, got 44 votes. Adini Roryabadi scored several votes and Ilishola Akinpalumi had 45 votes. This is to certify that Adini, Adini Omiretsan, scored the highest vote of both castes, thereby declaring winner. They have not lost. We are members of one big happy family. We have one objective which is the success of the APC and I have no doubt in my mind that they would come together with me to see that the APC is successful in general elections. So I have no doubt in my mind at all. I don't think there's any.


We care about this because it's the oldest park in Portland, 1866. Just imagine, 1866, July 4th, when a fire right here blazed from the ocean right up onto where Franklin Street is now. So the park afterwards was built as a firebreak. It was named Phoenix Square, rising from the ashes. A year later, 1967, 1867, it was renamed Lincoln Park in honor of President Abraham Lincoln. I'm Frank Riley. They called me the Chief Spear Carrier for Friends of Lincoln Park. It is Friday, October the 2nd, First Friday, Art Walk. And tonight represents the third year to the night that we began the Friends of Lincoln Park. And Allison Hildreth was here at that time, talking, giving everyone a little understanding of Lincoln Park. And that started the whole process of why we're here tonight. Allison? Well, Frank is our hero, really. He came that night. I was here because I'm a member of the Portland Public Art Committee, and the founder is part of our collection. And Frank took a look at the park and thought the park needs some help. And he has been valiant in getting people from the city together and citizens together. And this is the way things happen, really, isn't it? You care about something, and you try and make something happen. And so with the help of the Portland Public Art Committee and Friends of Lincoln Park, I hope we can complete, restore the fountain to its former beautiful self. So we can call it Hello Beautiful again, right? Exactly. Because the photographs are so dramatic of the way the park used to be and the people that used to come to the park. And it's just sadly neglected, and we need to do something. Sharon, my wife and partner in crime, and I actually went into the fountain. There was no water in it, and found the insignia on the fountain of the foundry in France. Val du Seau, Sharon? Val d'Ausone. And I emailed the gallery, and it's now a gallery, it's no longer a foundry. But the building was still there, they understood what it used to be and how they would cast these beautiful fountains in the 1800s and then ship them all over. I'd like to introduce my wife and partner in crime, especially with Friends of Lincoln Park, Sharon Riley. And we worked together, and did you ever imagine when we walked into that pond three years ago and found the insignia that we'd be here tonight, and it would be so much to do? I know, I thought we'd have it all done by now, actually. Yes, I know. It's a slow process. We were very naive, weren't we, but what a pleasure it's been to work on this for three years, and excuse me, the starting of the third year. So many people who really love the park, there's a dedicated group of people who really want to see the park and the fountain be restored. Yeah, and that's a good point. That kind of enthusiasm excites us and motivates us to carry on and to press forward. Well, it's a task that's very large and it involves the city and various different departments and various groups, and so it's not something that we can do solely the way we're used to doing things. No, you need cooperation from everyone, especially the city people. And they have been wonderful, like Jeff and Troy and Deb Andrews and the new city manager now, John Jennings. And Mayor Brennan. And Mayor Brennan's been wonderful. In fact, he's invited to join us today. We have 13 new benches all around the park, thanks to the Goron Bank. That was their donation. And then there were three others somewhere that the Keep America Beautiful donated, and what Jeff, three trees, right, from Keep America Beautiful. So there's some progress. I'd like to introduce Jeff Tarling, City Arborist for Portland, and a true friend of the Friends of Lincoln Park. Thanks Frank. We've had a long collaboration here in Lincoln Park, working with the Friends. It started three years ago in the park tonight. And we made some great progress with the Portland Arts Committee and also the Portland Historic Preservation, trying to get some momentum to restore their park. It was formerly Phoenix Square and it's Portland's oldest park. So, you know, we made good progress and it's great having friends and people from Portland that have the same vision. I'd like to introduce Sally Oldman. She's with the Greater Portland Landmarks and a friend of Lincoln Park. Would you like to say anything about Lincoln Park? Well, I would just say I'm very excited that there is a group of citizens who are really working to revitalize this park and make it much more vital part of our city because it should be. Well, your enthusiasm, your enthusiasm, Sally, and your support helps tremendously. I'd like to introduce you to two very special friends of Lincoln Park. Tim Honquest, to my right, and to his right, Marvin Olson. Do you want to say anything, gentlemen? We're happy to be here. We hope to see as much done in Lincoln Park as possible because it's a viable location in the city. Thank you. We agree. We're in total agreement. It's a very special pleasure and honor for me to present someone who's not only a friend to Lincoln Park, but a friend to all of Portland. Hillary Bassett, the director of Greater Portland Landmarks. Hillary, would you want to say something? Wonderful to be here in Lincoln Park, which is a true hidden gem of Portland. I think people don't realize once you get into the park how it's a large space and it's really getting there. Thanks to Frank and Sharon Riley and the friends of Lincoln Park, the park is starting to get revived, getting the fountain going again, the benches, having activities here. It's just a great, great turn of events here. There's also some great potential with Franklin Arterial, the plans of Franklin Arterial to narrow down the road corridor and to have Lincoln Park come back to its former size. So I think this will be, I think Portlanders are in for a great streak in coming to Lincoln Park and the new developments that are happening. The Franklin Street plan goes through. It will enhance the park again, as Hillary said, because we'll reclaim the land that belongs to Lincoln Park and it will jut out and traffic will just meander around it. So it will really get the park to its former, almost its former extent. Yeah, and once again it will be considered the top of the city. That's what it was called when it first was built. It's a wonderful amenity for the city. I think all the projects with the art and the benches and getting the fountain going, repaving the pathways. All of that. It's just fabulous. Yeah, and Hillary and Greater Portland Landmarks also proclaimed Lincoln Park and in peril location, which helps us because it gives, I think, a little more urgency to our needs. I think it really is. It's one of those. It is a place in peril in the sense that it had been neglected for so long and having a friends group now that is so active and making sure that there's an advocate for the park. And Landmarks is very strongly behind the project and behind the friends and all the fundraising and all the good event planning that they're doing. Master planning. It's just a great, great. Well, thank you, Hillary, for your help and your enthusiasm and support. It's my honor to introduce his honor, Mayor Michael Brennan, Mayor of Portland, Mayor. Well, I'm happy to be here on this first Friday in October at the event. It's always a great day in the city of Portland when we have first Friday because so many people turn out to enjoy Congress Street. And one little tidbit fact about where Lincoln Park looks right over Congress Street. Yeah. And a year ago, Congress Street was designated as one of the 10 best streets in the United States. Nice. And we're on the same list with Broadway and. I love Broadway and King Street and Charleston, South Carolina. We're a good company. So Lincoln Park plays an important role within the city. I like making Congress Street one of the 10 best streets in the United States. Hey, that's a sale. And I want to thank you and the friends of Lincoln Park for focusing attention on this because because of your work and because of your effort, we're going to figure out some ways to get some resources here to continue to upgrade Lincoln Park and to make sure that it realizes its full potential. But this plays an important part in kind of the complex of City Hall, the courthouse and the exchange street area of Portland. I have music to my ears. So it's a great park and we're just really excited for you to be here and to do this and keep bringing to our attention how important it is for us to keep investing in the park here. Thank you, Mayor. When I first got elected mayor, Lincoln Park was occupied. Yeah. I'm Severin Beliveau, a recent arrival to Mungo Hill. So I travel across this park almost every day. Notice the improvements that have occurred in the last few months or so and the opportunity that you have here to restore it, I think, which I think is really impressive. But I also note that the font was cast in France in 1870. And ironically, I have to be the French consul in Maine. So there is a connection there. Maybe we get the French government involved in this too. Maybe we could. That's a wonderful idea. I'll pursue this with them. I'll talk to the French consul and the ambassador and tell them what's happening here. Would you please? And you can find me right here. What are the sources of the funding for this? We're trying to get city funding and we're also trying to get private funding. What's the budget? Well, we don't know. We think this is to do everything. All the fencing has to be scraped and repainted. The fountain has to be done. The plumbing, the facade of it, we need a new spire. I think this is my own guess. About a million dollars to do the whole thing. Jonathan Taggart, who's a very well-known sculptor-conservator, is right now making an estimate for us in detail for the fountain to be repaired. And Moore and Saradan, the architectural firm, they're doing the plumbing. They're estimating what it would take to do reconfigure the plumbing. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you. I'm glad you stopped by. I've been asked how do we, the friends of Linkin Park, go about making our needs known? And our need is to totally restore Linkin Park to the way it was originally. We want this fountain to once again be referred to as beautiful. A lot of it is with personal letters to people who might want to contribute, maybe even contribute to the complete reconstruction of the fountain, or the fencing. All the fencing around here is iron, and it was done by the Portland Company, who's become very popular again today. And so, but it needs to be scraped and repainted. So that's a major job. But all these things are possible. The pavement needs to be redone. And we need more trees, and we need more benches. We have 13 new benches already. For $1,500, you could donate a bench and memorialize it. Have your own personal message. If you'd like more information about Linkin Park, and we hope you do, go to our website, which is lovelinkinpark.org. It's easy, lovelinkinpark.org.


So, up until recently, I have worked really hard my entire life to keep a secret. And the secret, more or less, is that I constantly am fighting a series of ticks and twitches that I can't perfectly or even imperfectly control. I imagine that these ticks and twitches come partly from my diverse neurology, and I imagine they come partly from some significant childhood trauma experiences, but I've spent more or less every moment of my life trying to hide them. I have dermatillomania, which means I pick at my own skin, I pick at my fingers with my teeth. I do this until I bleed and I can't stop myself. I do it in the most inappropriate and embarrassing of times and it's awful. I shake, not just a little bit, but I shake a lot. My hands shake, my legs are always shaking, my head's shaking. I am moving constantly, not just a little bit, but I am moving all of the time and I have a really hard time ever stopping myself. And I have a really unfortunate verbal tick that just comes out in the most inappropriate times. I suppose it's a good tick because it's a kind one, but I talk about love and marriage when I don't intend to. I am just walking down the street or in the middle of a conversation or alone in the car and all of a sudden I love you and I want to marry you and they're beautiful and you're beautiful and I want to marry you and I want to be married and I can't stop myself from saying it. I wish I could stop, I can't. But as I said my whole life I've been keeping this secret because I haven't wanted anyone to know and by anyone more or less I mean anyone. And I've gotten really good at keeping this secret. I learned over time that I could just simply run a script in my head to stop myself from chewing on my fingers. Well, stop myself isn't true, but to slow myself from chewing on my fingers. So I can just stand there and run a script in my head. Don't chew them. Don't do it. Don't chew them. Don't do it. Don't chew them. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And the moment I stop running the script there in my mouth I've learned to stop the twitches and the shaking by simply holding myself tight. Every muscle in my body starting with my toes I hold them in and then I hold in my feet and I hold in my legs and I hold in my body and I simply don't move. And I simply hold it all in whether I'm sitting on the plane next to you for four straight hours or whether we're in a business meeting or whether I'm sitting on the couch. I am holding myself in trying so hard not to shake and telling myself not to chew my fingers. Don't chew your fingers. Don't chew your fingers. Now stopping the verbal tick is something that took me a long time to figure out, but I did. I figured out a way to keep that little part of my brain busy so I was less likely to do it and I did this by counting numbers. It's weird, but it worked for me. So from a pretty young age I'd learned that if I just started counting numbers it would keep that part of my brain busy and I got really good at it. So I would take a number like 31 and I would just add it, 31, 62, 93, 124, 155, 186, 217, 248, 279, 310, 341, 372 and it would keep that part of my brain busy and I wouldn't do it and that's all I would have to do.  I always knew that dark was the right place for me. I always knew that being in the back of a dark closet was a really good place for me or that really amazing spot in between two mattresses where it's nice and dark and you feel warm. I always knew that was the right spot for me. So, flow tanks in many ways seem to make a lot of sense, but it also made no sense at all because it's a completely inhospitable environment for someone like me, you can't be shaking in that water nonstop and I was told that you have to be silent the entire time, which means I can't be talking out loud in my constant outdoor voice and most important of all I simply can't be taking my ripped apart bleeding fingers and putting them in the salt water, but I wanted to go really bad. So Float Center opened up in my town of Evanston, Illinois and there's an absolutely amazing couple that opened it. Their names are Jillian and Marlin. It's a two tank float center. They also do massage there and they curate those two float rooms like nothing else. Marlin cares so much and I have a really special relationship with them that they don't even know that we have. Part of this relationship is so special because the first time I went there and I sat there with Jillian in the room, I told her right there and then that I have this verbal tick. Jillian didn't realize it, but when I told her, she became one of the very first people in the whole world that I ever said that secret allowed to. And one thing about secrets like that is when you tell them it pricks a balloon and all of a sudden it takes a lot of tension out and it makes that tick even less likely to happen the next time. But that was only a year ago and I wasn't even smart enough to know that then. I was just telling Jillian this out of self-protection so I wouldn't be mortified and embarrassed when I'm lying in the middle of the dark yelling that I want to get married. What I found in the float center was everything that I had imagined. I found true dark and true dark is really special. And I also found the feeling of my body relaxing, of all of those muscles in my body starting to relax and come undone. I did find the feeling of my fingers hurting, but the truth of that is it's a spectrum between 10 seconds and about 3 minutes before that pain is gone and it's no problem, it's worth it. And there I am and as I'm in this float tank now time after time after time again I realize that I am feeling my body relax and I realize that in my time in there these scripts are getting shot off. I'm not counting numbers, I'm not telling myself to stop chewing on my fingers. I'm not shaking, the water is still, something's happening, I don't know what. But I'm finding slowly the tools to slow down. And I'm also learning that the secret to slowing these ticks isn't in holding myself in but is actually in letting myself go. So what I found in the float tank was more or less my own thoughts without having my bandwidth entirely directed to adding numbers and holding myself in and telling myself what to do and what not to do. I started to open up bandwidth that I simply never had before and started to open up thinking that I never had before and really started to dramatically see the way I saw myself as different than I ever had before. So importantly what I found in the float tank was a far better way of starting to control my uncontrollable ticks but even more importantly what I found in the float tank was permission to not have to control them at all. Thanks so much.


I was 11 back in 1993 when Jurassic Park first hit theaters. I'd been to a fair share of movies up to that point, but that movie was the first time where every single seat in the theater was sold out. It was completely packed. The audience ooed and odded all the special effects and applauded at the end, and I'd never been a part of something like that before. So because of that experience, I've always had positive memories of Jurassic Park. But as far as all the other stuff went, like action figures, video games, all that not really into it. I did play the Genesis game a few times at a friend's house. It's your standard action platformer with two playable characters, Dr. Grant, who has a bunch of weapons you can use, and as a Velociraptor. That's what made this game memorable for me. It's a perfectly good game, although the controls are a bit wonky, and there's only five levels here available for the raptor where there's seven if you play as Dr. Grant. But still, this game was pretty good, especially for a movie-licensed game, and playing as the raptor is still pretty cool to this day. I didn't get around to playing the Super Nintendo game until many years later. I remember getting pretty far into the game before wanting to take a break, and it was then that I realized there is no way to save. There's not even any passwords. Ugh. At least the Genesis version had passwords. So I gotta let you know right off the bat here, if you want to play Jurassic Park on Super Nintendo on the original cartridge, it's gotta be in one sitting. And this is a long game. If you play this one any way you can, then you're able to utilize save states, and the game is a bit easier to stomach. But other than that, it's just one long playthrough that's hours and hours long. The frustrating thing about Jurassic Park is that despite that major flaw, it does have some pretty good qualities. You get five lives and two continues to get through eight areas, with the goal of the game being to just get off the island. You can move in eight directions, making this play a little bit like, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, albeit a bit more limited than that game. The A-button fires your primary weapon, Y fires your secondary weapon, which can be anything from a shotgun, missile launcher, a tranquilizer gun, a gas grenade launcher, or whatever this is. From a pure action standpoint, the game plays pretty well. The hit detection can get a little weird at times, but all the controls are as they should be. So this aspect of the game can be pretty fun. The problem here is that the map you're contending with is huge, and there's no in-game map at all. So that leaves you with three options. You can either Google it, and there's plenty of maps online you can find. You can go old school and draw one yourself, or you just hope you memorize the right way to get each area, and good luck with that.  Thankfully, the game gives you a break from this monotony by having you go into buildings to find a keycard which restores power or motion sensors or whatever, at which point the game switches to a first-person perspective.  I mean, yeah, from a graphic standpoint, this is pretty dang limited. It's about on the same level as the Super Nintendo port of Wolfenstein 3D, but still, that was all that game was, whereas in Jurassic Park, this is just a part of a larger game. So from that standpoint, it is really cool to see. Even more interesting is that these sections are compatible with the Super Nintendo mouse. However, from an actual gameplay standpoint, it's not the greatest. You run into dinosaurs here and there, and they just kind of stand there like, hey, whatcha doing? And even then, it can be frustrating to aim properly and hit these things. It's one of those things where, yes, it's obviously impressive that the Super Nintendo hardware was able to execute this and make it playable, but no, that doesn't necessarily mean it's worth slogging through today. Outside of saying, hey, how about that? This is probably pretty cool in 1993, before losing interest like two minutes later. I don't mean to be too hard on this game. I mean, it was developed by Ocean Software, who had a hand in a ton of movie-licensed games, like The Flintstones, Waterworld, and Robocop 3, as well as TV-based games like The Untouchables. And compared to those games, Jurassic Park looks like a friggin' masterpiece. My favorite thing about this game is probably the music. No, it does not fit the sweeping classical cinematic soundtrack. It's something else entirely, and it really sounds good. And in a game where you do a lot of wandering around and exploring, it really helps to have a good soundtrack to ease the pain. So while I don't want to rip on Jurassic Park too badly, there's one thing I can't abide by, and that's the ending. Well, I guess I should say the quote-unquote ending, because there really isn't an ending here. You just get off the island, the camera zooms out, and you get to the end screen. Yes, I know I missed this one for my worst endings list. That's my bad. What's funny to me, though, is that the website vgmuseum.com, an excellent resource that has screenshots of thousands of endings to thousands of video games, does not have the Super Nintendo Jurassic Park ending there. Seriously, it's got well over 500 games listed for the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom, and it completely skips over Jurassic Park.  I should point out that the Super Nintendo also got Jurassic Park 2, subtitled The Chaos Continues, and it's also developed by Ocean Software, and that one's a bit more of a run-and-gun contra clone, believe it or not. It's totally different from its predecessor, and it's a brutally difficult game with kind of a confusing layout at first. And no, the game has nothing to do with the Jurassic Park film sequel, The Lost World, that didn't come out until 1997. But this game is actually pretty good for what it is, and it's two-player co-op. Anyway, yeah, Jurassic Park for the Super Nintendo does have some good qualities. The game certainly looks nice, the music is great, and all the different weapons are fun to use. And the novelty of the first-person sections is pretty amusing, and it's honestly kind of shocking to see at first.  But if those things don't bother you, then yeah, this one's worth checking out. I personally prefer the Genesis Jurassic Park to the Super Nintendo Edition, but the latter still has some good qualities. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


The paper discusses the use of synomorium coxinium peels extract for cotton fibers dying without mordants, analysing its properties using UV visible, FTIR spectroscopy, TPC, and TFC. The study examines the effect of pH, temperature, extract concentration, and time contact on dying performance, with optimal conditions being pH equals 5.5, T equals 72.5 degrees Celsius, extract concentration equals 0.275 percent, and dying duration equals 25 minutes. The study also shows that increasing the electrolyte NaCl can improve color strength. The results show excellent textile dying characteristics with uniform morphology as proved by SEM analysis, and good fastness to washing, perspiration, and rubbing. This article was authored by now HRSA Bayer, Marjib Jabli, Hainan Ghanmi, and others.


Hey, welcome back to my YouTube channel, guys. Today we're going to talk about five lies that America has told me. Now, this is not a bashing of the US. I love the US. I'm from the US. But with that being said, there's no perfect place. And so you're not gonna wanna miss this video. And in fairness, I will do a video on things that New Zealand can do better as well.  And you're definitely gonna wanna watch the whole thing because I think all of my points are going to be quite relevant and interesting. So subscribe below, stay tuned, here we go. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is a great all-in-one platform to get your business online quickly. Now, the first lie I would like to talk about and I have talked about in the past is America is the greatest country on earth. How many of you have heard that? I mean, I think that honestly, as an American, you are fed that early on. We are pledging allegiance to the flag when we are children. This is just what we do. We are always talking about it being the greatest. And so with that said, there's so many people in America that don't travel, don't even consider living somewhere else because they think they're in the best place. Well, I'm here to tell you, I actually don't think that that's true. Now, America is a great country, but there are also many great countries and just they don't do things the same that just make some different. There's just different ways of doing things and they're all valuable. And so that is what I'd like to talk about today. I live in New Zealand. If you don't know me, we are a family of six. I have moved to New Zealand. I've been here for six years and we love it here. We love New Zealand. Now, New Zealand, is it perfect? America isn't perfect, okay? But New Zealand doesn't go around also saying it's the greatest place on earth. In fact, they probably air on the other side where they're just a little bit, you know, nervous and sensitive about their country, but we will go into that in another video. So make sure that you subscribe below. So America being the greatest country on earth, it is great.  We've talked about freedoms, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. They're concerned about just being able to establish themselves independently. And so what you're gonna see is that the values in the U.S. are the same. They have just continued through the years that this is what we value, that we think that we're the greatest because we've pulled away weak and function on our own and not only do we function on our own, but we are a superpower really in the world. Basically because we spent a lot of money on defense, but other than that, you know, we have a lot of influence in the world and they feel very, very proud of that as they should. There are some really great and amazing things about that, but it isn't everything. People talk about anybody outside of, you know, the U.S. as socialists or, you know, and there are bad places. There isn't like the greatest thing, but like for example, New Zealand is social democracy. It isn't the same as socialism, okay? We are a democracy here and we just believe more and caring for the community than just individual needs. And you'll just notice that at its core. And I think it really comes from the Maori people in New Zealand and how they value accepting anybody that arrives. This is the most amazing place if you are not from New Zealand. Now, I know people have had bad experiences and not everybody in New Zealand is perfect, but as a general rule of thumb, people are treated very well as outsiders. Whereas I don't know that you get that in the U.S. I think it might have been early on settlers and everybody was moving here from all over the place, especially Europe, but, you know, now it's more like, you know, if you're not American, you know, so it's definitely not as accepted. Whereas here it's like, oh, it's cool. What can you add to our culture? What can you bring? You have cool food. You have cool ways of doing things. And it's just really great and really accepted.  People here have no problem extending their family way beyond blood, okay? And I think that there's definitely people in the U.S. that do that too, but it's not as a culture, it's not as common as a whole in a culture. So that's point number one. And number two, universal healthcare, socialized healthcare is bad and is not good at all. And let me tell you, I have lived in it for six years. It is not perfect, but it is really great in so many ways. So just because the U.S. decides to use insurance companies that, you know, make really all the money so that they can have a million specialists and they can, you can get to a doctor or specialist at any point doesn't mean that your healthcare system is amazing, okay? It's great for people that can afford it, but at the same time, you could have an accident, you could, something could happen to you that's way beyond your control and you could actually go bankrupt. And this is an actual problem. Like this is actually true. People hesitate, they make decisions in their life based on healthcare. Whereas in New Zealand, it's looked at as just a human right that you should be taken care of if you're sick, if you have an accident, when you have a baby, this should not be something that can cause you to go broke, that you could get these huge bills. It's definitely out of control. And I think that at least 80 or 90% of Americans would agree with me that the healthcare system is messed up and it needs to be fixed. Do I know the solution? Is it as easy as doing something that Canada does, that New Zealand does, Australia does? You know, New Zealand isn't that big. So it's a little bit hard to compare that, but there's plenty of healthcare systems around the world that are run really well that are not insurance-based and pay-based. And so I really think that if you're an American and you're watching this, that, you know, to really kind of rethink that. Like I think that people like, they hesitate to call an ambulance because of how expensive it can be, anywhere from $250 to $1,500, depending on your insurance. People don't go to the doctor because they don't have insurance. People stay in jobs that they hate for years and years and years because they have good insurance. Like you guys need to take a step back and think about your values here. What's important to you? There's a lot of happiness that happens around your job. And if you're stuck in a dead-end job because of healthcare, it's not good. And so I just think that Americans need to re-have the conversation and open their eyes to ways that other people are doing it very successfully in large countries as well, and just have another look at it, point two. And number three, to be a good worker, a hard worker, a team player, means that you have to work an enormous amount of hours way over what you're contracted for.   You can't take your holiday even though you're given very little. You don't get any maternity leave. Like this is Americans associate hard work with giving your life. What kind of feels like giving them your blood to your job. And that is just not good. That's just not good. And I personally, I'm a hard worker. I am an entrepreneur. I have the drive. I have the ambition. I can be very successful in the American society, right? And so when I come to New Zealand and they value family time, can you tell you the arguments I've had with my boss or coworkers, people like, no, when you're on holiday, we are not calling you. We, you do not have your phone. You do not have your work computer. And I'm like, it's all right. I can just answer a couple of calls, you know? And they're like absolutely against it. They have a different value system around it. And that has just taken me a while to get used to.  It's hard to be like, it's not hard to be like, I can go pick up my kids or to end my work day at four o'clock or five o'clock, whatever it's agreed upon, that's easy. It's the taking the vacation to valuing time off, to saying, hey, it's good. It's good to take more than two weeks of holiday to actually take three or four weeks. And so this whole idea that in order to be a hard worker or a team player that you need to work all the time is just not true. We're overvaluing that, then happiness, then rest. We're all sitting there stressed out, overworked, hitting burnout, whatever words you wanna use. I don't think we need to get all caught up in words, but we're not happy at the end of the day when we're working like maniacs, right? And that balance, balance is also a hard word I don't love either, is hard to do. But it really is nice when you live in a country, in a society, in a culture that values more than your work is unbelievable. I cannot say enough about this.  You're actually motivated to work harder. You're just more on it. You just love it because it doesn't take everything to give to it. And then people don't get fired or lose their job because of economic reasons and then have no idea who their identity is. That doesn't happen here. You have a lot more stuff that fills your identity. In fact, if you go to like a party here, if you get together, people don't talk about work. Nobody asks you what you do for a living. I had some of the closest friends in my life for years, for two years, had no idea what they did for a living. That just wouldn't really happen in the US. And so like it's hard, it's different. So people coming from other countries, coming to visit America, people never taking time off to hang with them is weird. It's a concept like, hey, there's more to life than just working, and that's just true. And we need to value happiness. We need to value that people have lots of interests in their life, and that's a good thing. And so I challenge you, if you're in the States, if you're in America, if you own a company, if you have any influence over that sort of area, the HR area of your company, think about it. Look at what other people do of other countries and laws around that is just really, really valuable. I don't know about you, but I have been putting off creating my website until I found my solution with Squarespace. You guys are going to love this product. They have so many beautiful templates to choose from.  And literally within one day, I was able to get my website up and running. Another feature that I love on Squarespace is that they have this social sharing where my community can just go right out into my YouTube channel, my TikTok channel, which is where most of my content exists. And so it's really nice that it can connect directly from Squarespace. Other features that Squarespace offers that are really great is their, the fact that you can collect donations, you can do email campaigns from it. It's just overall really great. I personally also love the analytics. I always like to know what's going on behind the scenes.  I highly recommend that you check out Squarespace. Take some time today to go to squarespace.com and check out your free trial. And then when you're ready to purchase your website or your domain, you get 10% off with the link below. And number four, consumerism. Consumerism is not the ideal that you think it is. Now I love a good sale. I love the variety of shopping in the U.S. I pretty much haven't bought anything since I've been to the U.S. because I don't really like that there's no choices here. And I just like all the stuff in the U.S. because it's so cheap. But let me tell ya, I don't miss the consumerism. The constant feeling like you have to buy more that you can't miss the sale that it's just such a big part of your life shopping. And also in the U.S. that it's weird to wear the same thing more than once. Or like the same thing like multiple days in a row. Or you have to have the new clothes for the new season. And that just doesn't happen in New Zealand. Like people value taking care of things. I mean, there's actual shops in Wellington where you can get your shoes fixed. They can fix this so you don't just get rid of things. They're very much into reviving what you have. Wear it until you really can't or fix it if you can. And it's just very good. It's just very good for the environment. It's good for your pocket, for your money. Like you're not spending money all the time. And so it's just, it's not, it doesn't bring happiness. Like so many people think, oh, I could just get this. It'll make me happy if I get this card. It'll make me happy and it's just not true. It's like we all kinda know it's not true. But like, we still want it because it's valued in our society, especially in the US, it's very valued kind of what you have and what you don't have. You know, even at any economic level, there's that people value certain things. And so it isn't that people don't value things here in New Zealand, but yeah, it's just so great to not have that consumerism, to not be spending that money to wearing the same clothes year after year and being okay with that.  Like all of my closest friends, I know their entire wardrobe, entire. So I would know when they got a new shirt because it's not often and it's great. It's great for raising children in that. It's really great. It saves parents a lot of money. And it's just not a real good thing to value as a society. So it's just my challenge to you today is to think about that a little bit. And number five. Last, but certainly not least, the lie of freedom. That freedom above all things is the most valuable trait. Because I think that everybody has a different definition of freedom. Okay, let me just tell you a quick story. My first year that I lived here, it was the 4th of July and I was talking to some friends in there and they were like, oh, happy 4th of July. And I'm like, yeah, you guys are still working for the queen. We broke away from England a long time ago. Suckers or whatever. And they looked at me like, we don't actually think that that's freedom as you think it is. They think it as like, why not work together? Why not, you know, combine forces for the greater good because that's very much a cultural accepted value here in New Zealand. And so that's how they look at it. And like to me, it was like, wait, what? You don't want just like your own rights. America is very individualistic focused in terms of freedom, but a lot of countries are more working together and collectivists and the way that they look at things. And that has a lot of freedom in it. A lot of freedom that we're looking for. Some of the freedoms that you really don't have in the US are a couple of things. Safety, feel very unsafe. I think really no matter where you are, there's levels of a safety that you just, you don't have other places, people don't understand. It stresses me out when I think about somebody from New Zealand going to the US because there's just a lot of cues that they're not gonna know, okay? Your kids can't go to school without active shooter training or a bulletproof backpack or walking through security when they get to school. That's not okay. That's not freedom. That's not freedom for your children. So that one really is not good. Education, so expensive. Higher education specifically, so expensive. Why are we making education so expensive? And it's just not valued enough in society to make it free whereas a lot of countries do make it really affordable and free and that's to me also as an educator has a lot to do with freedom for somebody being able to have the ability to learn and to learn their entire adult life. And then kind of what I mentioned before about healthcare, just the fear of medical, there's a lot of fears in American culture. Another one that doesn't speak freedom to me is I am an entrepreneur, I am a small business owner and it is very hard to succeed in the US as a small business owner because it's pretty much run by five main companies and so they don't have the economics for small businesses to succeed well. Also, what I have found in addition to the economics is that there's a level of unethicalness that you have to overcome that is not, I just wasn't willing to do that in my business. Now that isn't everything, it isn't like you can't, it's a capitalist society and I'm not against capitalism because I am a business owner and I see that it's amazing what Amazon has accomplished. It's amazing what all these different things have accomplished, but is it good as a level of freedom? Is it good that all these big businesses that can just trample on all the little ones, like it's just not set up for small businesses to succeed in my opinion. And so yeah, so this overvaluing of freedom is what I have really struggled with and to try to understand and so would love to know your thoughts. Would love to know your thoughts on all of what I've had to say. I know that many of you are gonna have and I haven't covered everything in detail because I'm trying to keep this to a reasonable length but I've just kind of started to highlight it. I wanted to start the conversation. I wanted to hear what you have to say about. So please comment below and let me know your thoughts. Well, I hope you enjoyed my video today. Please, I hope that nobody is overly offended. We're just opening up the conversation. We're having thoughts. I am just really a believer in someone being honest and let's just deal with issues. Let's just talk about them together. So please comment below, let me know your thoughts and thank you again for Squarespace for sponsoring this video and make sure that you click the link below if you want 10% off your website or domain. But yeah, so you're definitely gonna wanna subscribe below and stay tuned because I will overview in the next couple of weeks my thoughts about New Zealand and some of the pros and cons of that. And I also will be highlighting what I experienced in the healthcare sector.  Have a good week. I'll see you next week.


Today I'm going to talk about this piece of research that I've been carrying out with this fantastic group of colleagues, Vincenzo, Jessica and Roberto, and the study is trying to assess the impact of peacekeeping mission on reproductive behavior. I mean, we know from the literature that, you know, armoured conflict or exposure to violence have important implications for long-term decisions, including fertility rates. There is extant research showing that, you know, fertility rates are important also for long-term outcomes and long-term development, because they can, you know, can exacerbate, higher fertility rates can exacerbate population growth or environmental threats. It can also pose health risks. And there is also evidence that is, you know, are associated with low education and poor economic growth. There is, again, from the literature, you know, very large evidence showing the impact of conflict on fertility rates. And what we, you know, we know so far is that we might have some sort of negative or positive, you know, effect.  So what I'm talking about is that, you know, you have, you might have women, you know, with low educational background, with low educational level, sorry, they use low contraception use because there is no lack of health services, but also there is the desire to replace children lost to conflict. On the other hand, we also have some other strength over the literature showing that conflict affect negatively the fertility rate, and this is basically because individuals tend to postpone childbearing in the, you know, expectation of better times. So there's a sort of quality quantity trade-off, right? Now, given that conflict assured lived in general, and they are followed by a prolonged period of peace, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how, you know, the dynamics of fertility rates varies in, you know, during peace, and especially when, you know, conflict is settled, and then there is, you know, a peace is being kept by, for instance, UN peacekeeping operation. So there is also, you know, sorts of evidence showing that peacekeeping, besides the impact of reducing violence in ongoing wars and reducing the probability of conflict recurrence, has also important social and economic implication. In a recent paper of mine, we show that it improves household well-being, and basically because by, you know, providing security, you know, peacekeeping can try to revitalize the economic activities so that increased, you know, consumption and also increased labor market participation. There is also, you know, evidence that peacekeeping affects maternal health by increasing maternal health and also women access to service and education. In this paper, we actually are going to, as I said, to look at the impact of peacekeeping on fertility rate, and we are going to focus on a particular case, which is the Liberia. Why we choose the Liberia? Actually this is, to be honest, is sort of a pilot project, so the idea is to scale up to all relevant African countries or relevant UN peacekeeping mission. But we start from Liberia, because Liberia is one case where, you know, we have, you know, peacekeeping operation lasting from 15 years, and, you know, the sort of operation that has been, you know, labeled as such as successful. And also because Liberia has one of the highest fertility rates. And then in order to address the research question, we use data from the DHS survey, so the demographic and health survey from the three different waves, 2007, 2013 and 2019. And then, I mean, I will be more precise on this in a bit. The main outcome variable, so the dependent variable we are looking at, are the likelihood to have a child and also the number of children.  So in a sense, you know, they lay the groundwork, the groundwork for, you know, the provision of public goods, including medical services. So as I was saying, I mean, we use three rounds of the Liberian DHS. And then from that, data sources, we construct the full birth histories of women so that we are able to trace all children, women have ever given birth in the years before and after the UN arrival. We use, we couple this information with geo-coded information of peacekeeping location thanks to this fantastic paper from SEAL and co-authors that, you know, they geolocate the UN peacekeeping peacekeeper in a number of different countries. And so what we do basically is to combine the information from the geolocal, you know, the information on the locality of peacekeepers with the locality of district or villages where the survey was run in order to construct our, you know, treatment if you want or exposure, exposure variable, which is basically, you know, the exact exposure to peacekeeping base. And then given that during the period we are looking at, you know, the mission moved across country, we are also able to track, you know, precisely the movement of these peacekeepers. I mean, this is just a map of Liberia. And then what is shown here is that you have the black dots, which are the locality of peacekeeping base. And then there are some, you know, dashed yellow lines, which are the road networks. Why I'm showing this? Because instead of, you know, constructing our exposure variable in terms of cluster, I mean, the cluster that the DHS provide, I mean, we construct a more precise measure of exposure, which is based on the road distance, okay? So basically what we are able to do is to exactly, you know, measure the length between the women's survey and so interviewed and then the PK base. And there is one advantage of using this method instead of just, you know, selecting the DHS cluster is that it might be, if you look at the right hand side of these slides, it might be that, you know, if we were to consider just the cluster, we would omit the information of women that are equally distanced from the base but are outside the cluster. So in a sense, this is sort of improvement on the treatment variable. And then, I mean, these are the main results. I'm going to show you all the results we produce, but these are the results that are also robust to a number of, you know, sensitivity checks. What we found is that where UN troops are deployed, we have the likelihood of having a child drops by 5 percentage points, which, you know, amounts to 6% of the mean. Then the second result is on the number of children. And so we find that the total number of children per woman declines by 25%, which is equal to the 30% of the mean. And also we find some important heterogeneity, especially in particular, we find that these effects are more pronounced, sorry, the effect of the number of children are more pronounced on older cohorts, which makes sense, on women with higher parity level. So it means that they have more than one child and also on married women. And we're trying to provide an explanation from these results, okay? And these are basically the, you know, sort of mechanism that we are able to test in this paper. Actually, I would say that these are suggestive evidence. It's just correlation of a number of indicators with the peacekeeping exposure. And then we consider two main channels, which are, you know, the improvement in maternal health and child children outcomes. If you want, this is, you know, it's square within the quantity, quality tradeoff, which is measured by this indicator here, the number of maternal visits, the absorption of iron during pregnancy, the birth weight, the number of postnatal checks, the number of children dead under five, dead under five, and then, you know, delivery at all more, if you want, at the hospital. And then the second channel is on the opportunity cost. So the opportunity cost of raising children. And then we're trying to measure the second channel by the, you know, an indicator that we show there. Then what we find is that there is evidence, or if you want suggestive evidence on the first channel, so on the quality quantity tradeoff, then you can see the arrow means this positive effect on exposure to peacekeeping to this number of indicator, while on the opportunity cost channel, we only find significant effect on the contraception use. So basically, what is the implication of all of that? Very briefly, that peacekeeping deployment, in addition to, you know, improving local security, I'm done, can support better and more informed family planning. So by increasing, you know, the maternal health and child, children health, but also, you know, trying to plan better the, you know, the family. Yeah. And that's all from me. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.