We have predators on our streets. How can he really be a progressive and want to lock these people up? And I'd say lock the SOBs up. Increase the penalties. Increase them. I would put the son of a gun in jail. Put them to death. Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2020 election by running as a moderate unifier, hoping to win over voters with the promise of a return to business as usual politics from the pre-Trump era. Consensus is not a weakness. I did it when I was a senator. It's what I did as your vice president to work with Barack Obama as your president. Now we can find some fringe folks, libertarians, and left-wingers in my party who say, no, that's not what we should do. But politically, that consensus has been arrived at. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has led him to rethink his platform of a return to the days of bipartisan consensus, seizing the opportunity to offer bold change on issues like climate change, healthcare, social welfare, and infrastructure. But it's worth remembering that in his 44 years in the Senate and then as Vice President, Biden repeatedly took advantage of moments of crisis to push through policies that have exacerbated some of the most critical problems afflicting American society. The Biden crime bill. Biden crime bill. The Biden crime bill. The Biden crime bill. Hell, we've got crime bills coming out our ears. The President says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that's true, what we need is another D-day, not another Vietnam. President Bush did not last out precipitously at Iraq after 9-11. At each pivotal moment, he's chosen a course of moderation and deliberation, and I believe he will continue to do so. Just to set the record straight, almost the same thing that got passed, the Patriot Act, was introduced by me in 1994. I voted for a fence. I voted unlike most Democrats and some of you don't like it. I voted for 700 miles of fence. Four women accused him of inappropriate behavior. Several women have accused Biden of inappropriately touching them in public, and now his campaign is in crisis because of a sexual assault allegation by a former staffer. Another person has come forward to support Tara Reid's allegations against Joe Biden. If they believed Tara Reid, they probably shouldn't vote for me. I wouldn't vote for me if I believed Tara Reid. Women should be believed. But the terrible choice put forth by the two major parties in 2020 isn't just about sexual misconduct or character. Joe Biden's greatest political liability is his legacy as a lawmaker and vice president, a legacy that laid the groundwork for the Trump administration's most draconian policies. I think I'm looking forward to helping on this one too. On crime, drugs, civil liberties, surveillance, immigration and foreign policy, Biden's record serves as a cautionary tale about bipartisanship and bold thinking in response to perceived crises, going all the way back to the 70s. A literal epidemic of rape in this country. Every major crime bill since 1976, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware, Joe Biden. I sat next to Strom Thurman. No, no, no, no, no, no. And became friends with Strom Thurman. Together, we passed a crime bill. So don't tell me you can't work with people and compromise. In the 80s, Biden worked on several bills with the former segregationist that established mandatory minimum sentences, raised maximum sentences, and effectively created the modern system of civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to seize the money and property of the accused without charging them with a crime. Where's all this from? The government can take everything you own, everything from your car to your house, your bank account. They can take everything.  We already have it five years. Minimum mandatory.  You never intended to use it. We're only going to give you one year. Judge has to say five years. Well, he wants to make it 10 or 20 or 60. We can work that out. He wanted to remove judicial discretion for those who, quote, don't meet the middle class criteria of susceptibility to rehabilitation. They are beyond the pale, many of those people. They literally have not been socialized. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society.  So I don't want to ask what made them do this. They must be taken off the street. They are in jail away from my mother. Your husband, our families. The Biden-Therman Violent Crime Control Act of 1991 would have increased the maximum sentence for 44 crimes to include the death penalty. A wag in the newspaper recently wrote, Biden has made it a death penalty offense for everything but jaywalking. Republicans won up Biden by adding 46 capital crimes. I'm going to make it for 46 crimes. Biden says make it for 51. We're going to get tough. So he proposed 53. Then he presented the final version of the legislation. 60 new death penalties, brand new, 60. There are 70 additional enhancements of penalties, i.e. you go to jail, longer. After his disastrous 1987 presidential campaign, Biden had staged his political comeback, in part by becoming a media darling on issues of policing and crime. And he led the fight to pass the landmark 1994 crime bill under Bill Clinton. When I wrote the original bill that started this whole process, the so-called Biden crime bill, I didn't call a liberal comm fab and write it. I didn't call any big society people and write it. I call the cops. A democratic president wants 100. A democratic president. That's the secret that somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher. I say poppycock. They didn't make anything tougher. I wrote that bill. He convinced Republicans to support urban community programs as a way to keep inner city kids away from respectable families. They started looking at it and found out that this midnight basketball and get a bunch of giant folks who are black, white, and Hispanic, who live in inner city to do, you know, try to see if they can be Michael Jordan.  They're in a gymnasium and my daughter will be safer. My wife will be safer. My mother will be safer and I will be safer and I will be happy. Never again should Washington put politics and party above law and order. Along with several laws passed in the 80s, the 1994 crime bill drove up the local, state, and federal prison populations and it tarnished the reputations of Biden and Bill Clinton, who signed it into law. When Biden ran for president in 2008, he told the New York Times that he knew more people would be locked up across the board, but that it would drive down crime. In fact, crime rates were already falling when Biden pushed for the passage of the 94 crime bill and they have continued falling as the prison population has declined in recent years. You ashamed of that bill? Not at all. In fact, I drafted the bill. We had enormous success. The mass incarceration created by Biden's lock him up policies ripped apart vulnerable communities and families for a generation and the federal funding streams and law enforcement infrastructure it created continue to hinder reform efforts. There are things I would change, but by and large, what it really did, it restored American cities. America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed and fully capable of declaring total war against the nation and its people. We have to hold every drug user accountable. In the 1980s and 90s, Biden was a prominent figure in the bipartisan war on drugs. Today, there's a new epidemic, smokable cocaine. This is crack cocaine. It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones and it's murdering our children. In his first primetime address to the nation from the Oval Office in 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced a major escalation of the drug war. An assault on every front. We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors. Quite frankly, the president's plan is not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand. Biden made it clear that Democrats were just as tough on drugs as Republicans. He even suggested that state and local officials eradicate marijuana fields themselves. We're going to have to worry about getting governors to go out in the mountain sides with flamethrowers with you next to them, dealing with it in their backyards. During the period of bloodshed and mayhem of which the president has spoken, we passed a law, bipartisan. We said crack cocaine is such a bad deal that if you find someone with this much of it, a quarter's worth not in value in size. Five years in jail. Biden had cosponsored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which meted out the same mandatory minimum prison term to someone possessing five grams of crack cocaine as to someone possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine. Five years, no probation, no parole. If you have this much, lock them up and put them in our prison. He continued pushing to create the office of the drug czar after President Ronald Reagan had vetoed his first legislative attempt and advocated locking up young drug offenders in quote military style boot camp prisons. Boot camps for youthful offenders. Under this bill, we can string up barbed wire. We can build quants and huts and we can put them in boot camps. We can do that. In 2002, Biden introduced the Rave Act, or the Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act. He argued that ecstasy abuse among teenagers was skyrocketing and that it was time to pass legislation he had long planned. I've been fighting to get these club drugs changed in schedule for years. DEA was my opposition. The Rave Act not only increased penalties for drug crimes. It went after anyone who owned the property where people did drugs. That's the scum we should be put in jail. Not just the guy selling the pills. Arrest the promoter. Find a rationale unrelated to drugs. You don't have to get them for drugs. Turn off the water. I put you in jail. I put you in jail. The law expanded authorities power to classify venues as crack houses, a provision that federal prosecutors are now using to stop cities from opening overdose prevention sites. I'm the guy who authored the Crack House legislation. We can use the Crack House legislation to tear down these buildings. You can literally bulldoze down their business. Great big bulldozer just bulldoze it down literally, not figuratively. Biden also lamented not being able to force press outlets to stick to the government's messaging about drugs. Hold our media accountable is something we all desire. But there's a thing called the First Amendment, which is read in a way that I think is a little excessive. In 2008, Biden began to recant on some of his past stances on drugs and crime. As vice president, he pushed for the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced, but did not eliminate the crack cocaine sentencing disparity he had helped usher into law. After 21 years of studying reviews, these facts have convinced me that the 101 disparity cannot be supported. But as Biden prepares to confront new perceived drug crises, where former are still struggling to unwind, many of the consensus policies he has worked to enact in the war on drugs. It was a big mistake when it was made, but it's trapped an entire generation. We disagree with the president's decision to cut the customs service, the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol. We think we should do more to stem the flow of drugs across our borders. In 1996, Biden boasted about the additional resources his crime bill had funneled to border security agencies and argued for sending the military to the Mexican border to deal with drug trafficking.  People are driving across that border with funds, funds, here's your funds. It's all coming up to corrupt Mexico. Today, Biden mocks Trump for using the military at the border. He said that calls to build the wall are divorced from reality, and won't stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human smugglers. All the bad things are coming through porch of entry right now. We don't need a wall. But leading up to his 2008 presidential campaign, he said this. I voted for the fence related to drugs. A fence will stop 20 kilos of cocaine coming through that fence. It will not stop someone climbing over and around it. Biden was referring to the 2006 Secure Fence Act signed by George W. Bush, which didn't tamp down the drug trade or border crossings, but did force migrants further into increasingly dangerous routes and remote desert areas, which according to the ACLU contributed to thousands of deaths. President Obama, I think, did a heck of a job to compare him to what this guy's doing is absolutely, I find, close and moral. Biden now condemns the Trump administration's tactics of enforcement and deportation. The most vulnerable, the undocumented, how are we made better or stronger as a nation when immigrant and Latino communities live in a daily terror of an ICE raid on their workplace? This is heartbreaking. Not only heartbreaking, it's the very definition of being counterproductive. But in 1996, he voted for a law that increased detentions and expedited removals for immigration-related offenses, largely creating the current approach. Money, American employers who knowingly violate the law when in fact they hire illegals. During Biden's years as vice president, the federal government took full advantage of the infrastructure and expanded powers the law had established. And the Obama administration deported a record number of people. You called me deported. We lay the groundwork for passing comprehensive immigration reform. It took much too long to get it right. And the president did get it right by DACA, as well as making sure that he tried to protect parents as well. And by the way, moving on an immigration bill as well. But that bill failed, so the best Biden can do today is promise that he won't use the deportation machinery he helped create and that presidents from both major parties have employed during so-called border and immigration crises, at least temporarily. In the first hundred days of my administration, no one, no one will be deported at all. Law enforcement today faces terrorist bombings like we've never seen in our history as a nation. In 1995, Biden had introduced a bill that combined all of his ideas for growing the surveillance state. Civil libertarians were opposed to it. You guys tried to help get it passed, including the wiretap changes and the rest. Though it floundered for years, after 9-11, Congress rushed through an amended version of that legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. You can ask the attorney generalist because I got a call when he introduced a Patriot Act. He said, Joe, I'm introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994. This bill met with an overwhelming, overwhelming agreement in Congress. He had laid the groundwork for a sweeping surveillance law that allowed the federal government to carry out criminal prosecutions based on secret evidence and to detain even U.S. citizens indefinitely without due process. This new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the internet, and cell phones. We'd have a special bill passed through here, Mr. President, to allow enough money to let the FBI agents buy weapons as powerful as the drug cartels had to get beat up. Continuing his decades-long effort to militarize domestic law enforcement in the fight against drugs and terror, Biden had added a provision to the Patriot Act, allowing state and local police to obtain federal funding for special equipment to combat terrorism. There is a strong likelihood that Iraqis will welcome us as liberators. Biden played a key role in helping the Bush administration build support for other elements of its disastrous post-911 agenda, including toppling Saddam Hussein. There is an emerging pattern that convenience may throw him into the arms of al-Qaeda, so it must be dealt with. He must be dealt with. If you turned on now and the television showed aircraft striking Baghdad, it would not be a preemptive attack. There's nothing preemptive about that. It's an enforcement. Biden teamed with John McCain to defeat an amendment that would have prevented Bush from going to war unless he got approval from the UN Security Council. The UN will conclude, if we don't act, America will, so we better. He is still harboring and he is still seeking the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. That case, I believe, has been made. Today, Biden has attempted to recast his vote to authorize military force in Iraq, claiming that he trusted President Bush to use that power only to pressure Saddam into allowing weapons inspections. The rationale was that's the way to not go to war because I didn't believe he had those nuclear weapons. I didn't believe he had those weapons of mass destruction. Former Bush and Obama administration defense secretary Robert Gates wrote in 2014 that Biden, quote, has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it's a march to peace and security. I've learned one thing since I've decided to run for president and I assume one thing. Everything about me, everything about me is going to come out in the public record.  Joe Biden is again opportunistically changing his political approach in response to a high-profile threat and is preparing to remake himself as an economic populist who will bring transformative change through federal legislation. This is when leaders have to lead and governments have to work. This is going to take bold creative federal action. This will go down as one of the most progressive administrations in American history. The younger generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break. No, no. I have no empathy for it. Give me a break because here's the deal, guys. We decided we were going to change the world and we did. We did. In 2020, voters may feel obligated to choose the lesser evil, but they should be under no illusions about what a Biden presidency would mean. Trump keeps saying that he's a wartime president. We'll start to act like one. An avatar of the political establishment for over four decades, Biden has repeatedly taken advantage of critical moments in history to help lead us to disastrous foreign wars, police militarization, warrantless surveillance, border walls, and mass incarceration. Use your full authority. This is a war. Act like a commander-in-chief. Use it all.


So I crammed as many acronyms and words and project names as I possibly could in the title. I could have put some more, I guess, but I had to make the font smaller. So we're going to talk about Rails 3.1 and everything we could cram into it. All right, so we're going to start a quick little introduction on me, OpenLogic, background of where we needed Rails 3.1 and all that stuff to come in, what kind of problem we solved, how we went about it, and then a little bit about each of those technologies, how they work and don't work. And we'll wrap up a little bit with some final thoughts and save some time for questions. Okay, so I'm CTO and founder of OpenLogic. Been in software a long time, some large companies, small companies in between startups. And right now I'm actually writing a book, Cloud Computing and Action Innovating with Open Source for Manning, and there's a little code there if you want 40% off the early access. OpenLogic, quick background. We help primarily large companies with Open Source getting up to speed, policies, training, SLA support, 24-7 production, governance scanning solutions, kind of a one-stop shop. And we have a free site, olex.openlogic.com with over 350,000 Open Source packages on it. So you can search and slice and dice and learn about things that you might want. And then we certify over 650 so you can download them, get support from us. And that's all free. And we have a couple hundred enterprise customers today. Okay, so the background, why we need all this stuff? Well, we decided to create a new product a couple years ago in the cloud, like everybody else, right? We called it OpenLogic Cloud Swing. It just came out in beta last month and we're having a beta 2 go out this coming Monday. OpenPASS, so the idea of what it's trying to do is to get people up and running very quickly in the cloud of their choice with the stack of their choice, kind of how they want it. And the things that are underlined there are the bits that are already implemented in the first beta today. So that's what we had to build very quickly. And by quickly, I mean, I created a prototype late last year and we wanted to get that prototype rewritten from the ground up zero to production in two months on all those technologies that we hadn't used yet. So that's the crunch time. So some of the problems were that there was a lot of excitement around the prototype that I wrote. We won a CloudConnect competition in March at the CloudConnect conference. That gave us a lot of attention. We have a lot of Fortune 500 customers over the last six, seven years that were interested in what we were doing with the cloud and so they were ready to jump on it. Marketing sales said, can we sell this today before we wrote the first line of production code? So the usual problems with a quick prototype. And all of our existing SaaS products, although we've been in production for four years now with Rails 2.3x, it eventually started at 2.0, 2.1. We used some jQuery, Redis and MySQL. We hadn't been on the cloud yet. We hadn't used Amazon or Rackspace or anything like that. So a lot of this stuff was pretty new technology-wise and we didn't drop everything. We still have all our existing products, existing customers that we have to keep making happy, keep adding features and building, and it's not a big team, right? So we had to juggle a lot. So what we did, the approach was to partition the team. So we said, okay, we're going to have to carve off some time. It's too hard to put all of these things in one big bucket of stories or an agile team kind of scrum-based. We need to isolate to make sure that we progress on both the new stuff and the existing stuff no matter what. And so the way we did that is we actually split the team and we asked the team, we were kind of nervous about how this would work. Would we have to, you know, as management, just make the decisions and say, well, you're the best fit for here, you're best for there, or should we ask? And we started by asking and the good news was they basically self-selected exactly like we wanted. So it was perfect. Some people said, I don't want to give up on the old stuff, although it was making us money. And it's very important. They saw it as, well, I've got lots more to do there. I'm not done with that product yet. I really want to make that thing better. I want to push it. And then some other people, I really want to jump into the cloud and I don't know any of it, but I'll learn it. Let's go for it. So that worked out really well. So try that. If you run into this kind of situation, leave it up to the team and see what happens and then you might have to deal with some consequences but it's worth a try. So we just kind of jumped in the deep end. And what that means was we essentially just did just-in-time research on each of the bits of technology to see how they work, where the holes are, you know, kind of where's the quicksand. And I'm usually the kind of scout the commando on the drop-behind enemy lines. So I kind of looked at each one of those things just ahead of the team. So at least I could say, well, here's a major pothole coming up, or this just does not work. That's not even used out. Let's steer this way instead. So that smoothed out a lot of bumps and kept us from wasting too much collective team time, all kind of working on one nasty problem together. So it smoothed the road a little bit. So we did that for the UI, for Rails, for CoffeeScript, Couch, the Asset Pipeline. I've got more to say about a bunch of this stuff later. Insecurity, and that's mainly encryption. So in transit and at rest, because in the cloud that's definitely a best practice for security. We encrypted everywhere. So all those things required testing new components, seeing what worked and what didn't work very well. And we did tweak our agile process a bit. I think we heard from GitHub yesterday about this. They did something similar, or do something similar. We used to be all story-based, and we moved to more feature-set-based. So it's kind of clumps or clusters of stories that make up a very small but cohesive release that we can put straight into production. So that might be one story. That might be five or seven stories, but it's kind of in the ballpark of, you know, hopefully a week or less of work. So we're not pushing the production 40 times a day. That sounded interesting. Gave me a heart attack a little bit to hear that, but we do try to push a couple times a week if we can. And the other thing we did is we split out DevOps work. So there's a lot of stuff that has to be done for a product like this that's not code features sort of directly visible to the end users. So things like setting up our DNS, global DNS, round robin-ing, round robin-ing, SSL certs. How are we going to send e-mail? Do we want to use a service for that? Do we want to set up our own e-mail agents? What do we want to do with that? How do we want to deploy to production? Somebody's got to write all the rake scripts to automate this. All the monitoring configuration, all that stuff. We decided let's carve that out into a tiny DevOps team of two sort of part-time people over a couple months to kind of attack those issues and integrate with the team and bring back any extra development that might need to get done to them but at least pave the way and do most of this work on their own. And that's actually worked quite well. Okay. So now to talk about the tech, what is all this stuff? So kind of a brief poll. You can raise your hands and keep them up if you applied all these. Who's already been using Rails 3.1? Okay. We're about Rails 3.0. Okay, so most of the room is on one or the other. Coffee script. Decent amount, maybe half. Counts DB. Handful people. A couple dozen. What about jQuery? Everybody, yeah. Prototypes dead, right? What about SAS? Decent amount of people using SAS. Okay, so good mix. Maybe you haven't put them all together quite yet. So I've got some things to say about this. Hopefully it's something new. So on Rails 3.1 side, some interesting new bits. There are page streaming, which we just heard about. Kind of the concept of doing things more dynamically, more asynchronously. In this case, page streaming in Rails 3.1 says, well, let's go ahead and start pushing the page out to browsers so they can start loading JavaScript, loading style sheets before we even render the bulk of our page, before we've gone through the whole Rails stack. So it gives a kind of the sense or the appearance or performance, perception of performance, which is just as good as a real thing as far as a user's concerned. Their page starts loading faster. That's what we want. The asset pipeline, really nice way to sort of pre-compile down your SAS style sheets, your coffee script and a JavaScript, et cetera, and make that easy to push into things like CloudFront and other content distribution networks with your Rails apps so you get good fast load times for users everywhere in the world. So it's a good start. There's definitely some issues with this, which I'll talk about. Rack, cache, e-tag, and conditional get support is all baked in by default now in the default middleware stack. So it's nice. So you get good caching capabilities baked right in. You don't have to kind of write a bunch of code for that like we had to do pre- Rails 3.0 and 3.1 days. Engines are now back. They kind of got drummed off the stage early on as being kind of nasty, and now they've made sort of a full comeback because they have good support with the refactored Rails 3.0 and 3.1 code so they can have their own sort of isolated, almost like an isolated mini app inside of your app where they can have their own configuration and own views and kind of nice, cleanly separated plugins and hooks and things, but still work with your app. So they're back. SAS, jQuery and CoffeeScript are now there by default, which is great because we had already decided to go with all three of those technologies back with Rails 3.0. So I was very happy to see those choices. Backbone was another... Who's using Backbone? Anybody? A few people. Okay, more than I expected. Backbone, kind of a lightweight client-side MVC so you get Model View Controller in JavaScript on the client side so you can have more of a robust and separation of concerns kind of way to run your app if you've got a heavy or UI-rich front end and then synchronize with the back end, almost treat the back end of front end like peers as opposed to one being sort of the lesser child or lesser brother. CoffeeScript, I think most people know, but it's essentially a new scripting language that translates JavaScript or translates into pure JavaScript and it's got a lot of flavors and features from Ruby and Python other languages baked in. I'll show a little bit of that in a while. jQuery, kind of de facto standard. And SAS, if you haven't used it, it's a superset of CSS3 with all kinds of awesome stuff like variables and functions, overrides, inheritance. It's very dry. It's exactly what we've kind of always wanted. And then Couch. Couch, if you're not familiar with CouchDB, is a document store with map-reduced views. Definitely not anything like a relational database. And I'll talk more about the differences later. The one kind of nice feature is you get a safe shutdown via kill-9. Your data is pretty much always going to be safe just the way Couch works under the covers, which is good if you're putting things in the cloud like on Amazon EC2 where things just disappear. Okay, so pros, cons, and WTFs. We'll take a look at each one of the technologies and see kind of where they're good and bad where we had issues and what we think of them. So first of all, with Rails 3.1, back at RailsConf, it was just coming anytime now. On May 22nd, we got the great news that, hey, Final Version's going to be out in a couple weeks. Should be good stuff. Like, okay, good, this fits our timeline perfectly. It'll be out in production. We might even get a patch afterwards before OpenLogic has to go live on it. That's all good news. And then two and a half weeks later, June 8th, they said, well, here's another RC and should be out in a couple weeks. Everything goes well, great. We still got plenty of time. Not too worried about that. And then two weeks go by. And another two weeks. And another two weeks. And I'm starting to get this money pit feeling. Anybody remember that movie? Fixing a house. When's it gonna be done? Just two more weeks. Two more weeks. Anytime you ask, it's two more weeks. So I started to get a little nervous. And two more weeks go by. And then two more weeks go by. And then it actually came out two days ago, if anybody hadn't picked up on that. Woo, it's finally out. Unfortunately, it was well after our first beta release to production. So we're still on an RC. Good news is it's out now. Bad news is now we have to figure out, well, what's changed and what's broken. Because basically every RC either randomly broke and fixed things that worked or didn't work or was pretty much all the way along. Especially in the asset pipeline, which we'll talk about in a minute. So anyway, it works. And the first thing I asked our team, I kind of did a little team interview for this to put some information together about Rails 3.1.  Or I love bundler. Everybody been through that yet? The love-hate relationship with bundler? Just love. There's no hate for bundler in the room? Hate, there we go. We got having babies, love, hate, you name it. So there's some of the quotes I got from our team when I asked.  I love it, it makes things easy. So you kind of get the roses and grenades kind of thing. Tries too smart and fails miserably. It's a good quote.  Get repeal usage is great and terrible at the same time. In fact, you can point straight at GitHub and get some point-in-time snapshot of code. It is awesomely powerful, and also will screw you hard. Which is interesting, because everybody on the team, whenever they go to install, is going to have a different code, right? Every time they do a bundle update, well, I did it yesterday, oh, I did it today, it didn't work for me, oh, that's what it was. There's this commit that happened. So powerful and painful at the same time. So it turns out that whether you like it or love it, it's kind of good for you and you kind of have to use it. So, you know, enjoy. All right, other good things, or good or indifferent things that came out with Rails 3.1, there were a lot of good improvements for Active Record. Unfortunately for us, using Couch didn't help a lot, but the split out of Active Model from Active Record definitely helps a lot. It means you can step back from a relational database, sort of fixed view of the world, and a lot of tools that they now focus on Active Model can work also with CouchDB, with CouchResq Model and some other layers in between. Now, the sprockets or the asset pipeline was a great theory. I love the concept, I'm waiting to see it work perfectly. Kind of very finicky, lots of moving parts, and again, every single beta sprocket went through what, 15 betas or something, and they're kind of changing along with the Rails 3.1 RCs and they would break and then fix and then break. A little bit painful. We had to do something like this, perform casting goals, true to get our Unicorn, NGNX, EC2 environment to actually serve static assets at one point, and that's actually the point where we're in production right now. So hopefully the final will fix some of that, but just be aware that the concept is awesome in the implementation, might not be 100% yet. Laundry list of other stuff we kind of ran into. Stack traces are now incredibly deep, as one of our guys put it. If you ever do a puts caller or sprockets kind of barfs and you look at a stack trace, now you get 10x, the stack trace used to get kind of bore through. So the stack trace silencers are your friend, but they're still a little bit of a pain. Nice new router syntax, everybody likes that. Tested form, handling improvements, everybody likes that. Now respond with has been one of those love hate things, depending on who you ask again. So respond with, if you're not familiar with that, you know the respond to where you take a format and say, well, if I'm serving HTML, do this. If I'm looking, if I need to return JSON, do that, or XML, do this. Now respond with can replace all that, boilerplate and say, I'll magically do the right thing for you. It's kind of another Rails magicism. And if you walk this straight narrow path and you do it just as they expect you to use it, it works well. And if you tend to color outside the lines or have a little bit of a special case, it's actually more of a pain than it's worth. It doesn't work very well. So again, based on who you ask, love or hate. And there's the asset pipeline right now, the way we saw it. Hopefully it'll be nice and clean and shiny with the final release. Okay, SAS on the pro side, SAS is awesome. It's what CSS3 should have been. So you get things like nice nesting. You get inheritance, you get overrides, you get variables and functions. It's all good, all goodness. And so some of the quotes I got from the team on that, SAS is freaking awesome. Never want to work without it again. However, we couldn't get Compass to work with sprockets with the RCs. So as of, you know, a whole couple weeks ago. If you're not familiar with Compass, what that gives you is, and I know I'm really downplaying all the magical things it does, but the coolest thing it does in my mind is gives you a nice little library of cross browser compatible CSS generation. So in my SAS, I can say, oh, for this element, I want a border radius of four pixels, and this guy will automatically spit out the big blob of stuff that's well for Mozilla to do this and, you know, for this browser to do that and all those, that junk that clutters your CSS, auto-generated, hidden behind that one little clean line. Totally awesome. So we're going to have to try again now that Rails 3.1 finals out. Sprockets 2.0 is the final outcome. See if those weirdnesses with the asset pipeline are resolved. But very good stuff. You're not using SAS. You probably shouldn't even listen to the rest of the talk. Starts to start using it right now. Okay. Prototype versus jQuery. So we've been in production over four years now with prototype, of course. But we have used jQuery. It started slipping in off and on over three years ago, just because libraries were moving towards jQuery. So we've been using both for a long time, and there's a clear preference on our team for jQuery. And not just for the libraries, just for kind of the feel, I guess. It's kind of hard to describe, but that's kind of the way it got reported to me. I like it, too. It's become a standard. The default in Rails Run makes it even easier. Now, one of our guys said that the unobtrusive JavaScript seemed a little weird on the way it works, because it's kind of the Rails way. There's a little bit of magic, where if I just sort of decorate an element and put this data attribute in it, then the unobtrusive JavaScript will magically come along later and do the right thing for me to attach some action and make that browser independent. Good, but it's one of those... You know, there's no direct tie in your code. Just because I put an attribute there, this thing over here happens later. It's kind of like aspect-oriented programming if you've done that. So it's very Rails-like, and it can be very powerful and a little painful to debug and track down, when things don't work, when there's not that explicit relationship sometime. I'm still a fan, though. Okay, CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript, pretty cool stuff. You get nice variable assignments. You get statement modifiers, like if and unless the Ruby... Easy ways to define functions. So I can define a function that takes one argument, x in return, x squared. I get list, easy to define. Easy to find hashes. I get var args type support. I get nice ways to ask if something exists, because JavaScript makes this a bit of a pain, right? You get a check, well, is it undefined, is it null, is it false? All this kind of stuff. So CoffeeScript is intended to fix a lot of those JavaScript wards, and all this generates pure JavaScript code. And then I get Python-like list comprehension. So you get a lot of stuff, and this is just the tiniest taste of CoffeeScript, so check it out if you haven't looked at it already. A lot of good stuff there. So it does translate to 100% pure JavaScript. It's supposed to run just as fast, or sometimes faster than handwritten JavaScript code. It does have a bit of a weird syntax, if you're not used to. Especially our team is not a Python team, so the fact that there's whites-based sensitive formatting is a turnoff to some people. So a little bit of hard to get used to, some strangeness. So we find that there's a little bit of inconsistent usage so far in our own code base of some people saying, well, I just need some really simple JavaScript here. I don't want to use CoffeeScript. Maybe I don't want to learn it. Maybe it's just a little bit more overhead, four characters JavaScript there, so I might as well expand it to 50 lines. So maybe some laziness there. We just got to tighten that up a little bit, but that's just to give you a feel for what our team's been through so far. So some developers don't really see the benefit of CoffeeScript. They kind of say, well, it's just a new syntax, or it just fixes some JavaScript words, but I already know JavaScript, so why do I need that? And I think that we might all like it more a little bit when we have a more complex UI. So as we continue to expand the product past the first couple betas, and it gets more and more rich on the front end, I think CoffeeScript will become more important when we have real classes, objects, hierarchies, and not just a collection of functions in JavaScript that work together. Backbone, client-side JavaScript MVC, like we talked about, we haven't needed that complexity yet. We decided to use it in advance when we had a need for a problem that looked like X, and we haven't run into that X just yet. So I think what will happen is because we've got tight-led deadlines, it was a lot to bite off. Oh, it's yet another new library to learn. It brings a very sort of complex set of new concepts, especially when you're already new to CoffeeScript and maybe jQuery for some of the team and everything else. It was a little bit much under the time pressure, and if we didn't have a strong need to actually use it now, we just didn't. So we may come back to that. Right now, we're happy with what we've got. Okay, on the couch side, great stability, it's cloud-safe. So one of the things I really liked about it is you can kill dash nine at any time. You can have safe data the way it, you know, right ahead, safe B trees, the way it basically stores all its data on disk. Essentially, you're not going to lose anything. Nothing is going to get corrupted, which if you're running on EC2 and you've got so many experience there, you know that things can get kind of funky at any point in time. It can disappear. You could lose a disk. EBS has issues, et cetera. So I liked it for that kind of point of view. It does affect everything, as you might expect, because every data store-related tool we have typically understands either SQL or ActiveRecord, if you're in a Ruby and Rails world-like device. And so it restricts our choices a little bit to things that understand CouchRest model, or now there's sort of a series of ORM mapping tools and shims that are all over GitHub on kind of ways to wedge in access for Couch to other tools. But it means you're going to spend a lot of time googling and looking for blogs and docs and other people's experience and experimenting and tweaking things. It's not as clean as it would be nice to see. Not a relational database, so modeling takes some time. Views take some time. You have mandatory optimistic locking. So that's kind of a big change if you use the MySQL or Postgres and aren't already using optimistic locking. Because whenever you update anything in a Couch database, you have to pass along the ID of the document you want to change and its current revision number. And when you go to say, make my change in Couch, Couch says that's not the latest revision barf 409, deal with it. So you have to realize that if you've got a lot of concurrency, if you've got something updating like some auto-update field or you're polling or anything like that and you're updating some little, even just a timestamp and you're going to have multiple places concurrently, now you have to deal with this issue. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a mindset kind of change if you're used to pessimistic locking. And as an example, we're used to MySQL and Postgres as a very senior team. We've got Solar and H-Pace and all kinds of stuff running around. Moving to something like Redis was a no-brainer. Moving to CouchDB definitely takes effort. More work. So because we're in the cloud, we decided to go with Big Couch. By the way, they don't have any logos, so I decided to come up with some good ones for them. There's the Big Couches. It's a clustered CouchDB. So it's based on Dynamo concepts, like read and write, write quorums and replication. So it's just what we need. It's open source. But it was a little more work and expensive we wanted to buy off initially to bring up our own cluster of full-time in the cloud to handle that when we found, you know, Cloud and the guys that created Big Couch offer a service for hosting Big Couch. Now we do have some performance reliability issues that we kind of worked through early on and are still working through a little bit because it is slower. You're clustering the database now. So if you want it to be really safe, you've got to write to multiple databases, get a response before you can assume the right happened, which of course is going to slow anything down. So it's a little slower. You've got to think in terms of documents, not rows. You want to minimize roundtrip because now we're using a database as a service, essentially. So even though they also host in EC2 East, which is where our first cluster is, you're still going out across machines and going through Amazon's network and there's some overhead in the stacks there. So you need some caching. You need to think about minimizing roundtrip. Other things we use, just kind of bonus items. I couldn't cram that first title. We do use device. Who's using device?  If you're not using it, it's really quite awesome for authentication and setup. It supports a zillion standards for OpenID and et cetera for single sign-on. Documentation is not perfect and it takes some work to integrate with Couch. Again, there's some shims and other layers that we got working, but we wound up submitting a lot of patches and things back to the various communities to smooth things out. Machinist. Anybody use machinist? Not very many people. Kind of a competitor to Factory Girl for better fixtures. We did use Factory Girl for a long time and decided to move to Machinist. It's kind of like maybe the grass is always greener a little bit. Close, but not exactly identical to real object testing. Capybara and WebDriver, still a little impedance mismatch there between real browser testing. All these are changing. None are perfect.  They take time. Let me wrap up kind of quick. EC2 and Rackspace, great for firing up new servers in a clean state. Really easy for developers to test stuff. A better VMware than VMware is what some of our guys called it. Disposal snapshots. But things like fragmentation is really annoying, the fact that you can't use one image across regions. Things like that are really kind of aggravating. Also load balancer issues across availability zones. The documentation says one thing, it actually does something else, and what it does is not as good as the documentation. Ugly, things hang, themes won't start, random slowness, inconsistencies abound. So you've got to expect when you're living that worldy design for failure to take it right in. So kind of final thoughts. It's all business as usual. This is what we do for a living. It's always a tight deadline. There's always a lot of pressure. There's always a bunch of new stuff, and it comes together last minute. No surprises there. But if you haven't experienced that world, if you haven't been doing this for years and expecting all those weirdnesses to happen, don't expect smoothness. Weird stuff will happen. Cloud services can help. They sped things up for us like cloud, and things we're looking at, like a single worker for async job management, dying for distributed DNS. It just saves you time if you're in a hurry. And of course this wouldn't work without open source. We use everything we can get our hands on. So if I already blown my time, we're gonna have any time for questions? A couple of questions. Okay. Anybody? So a couple of comments there. One is the compass support for Rails 3.1. There's a new alpha. The new version always fixes everything.  And then respond with, it sounds like it may be dropped entirely for Rails going forward because it's low in A. Any other, any other questions? Okay. Did we look at MongoDB versus CouchDB? I'll make a good controversial statement here. I'm using CouchDB because I like my data. And I prefer when it's actually the same as this and doesn't just disappear and get corrupted and share like that. The Mongo half the room is not clapping. I don't know. Mongo is very fast for a reason because if you don't do things like, you know, bother to commit to disk and have things like that, it's really fast. So are hash tables.  It really requires quite a deeper answer than that. Until very recently, however, Mongo, I know had all those issues, absolutely. Now, as of the latest release, major release in theory, these things are changed. Why I'm a little nervous about that is because it is a new major release and there's no time yet. So those problems may be completely gone. I don't know. And so I'll prove it otherwise I'm suspicious. Any other questions? Okay. Well, thanks a lot.


All right, I want to thank Nathan and Saus and Anna for bringing me here today. And thank you all for coming to listen to me. I practiced this talk, and it might be a little bit long, so I hope you're patient with me. Looking through my notes, I remember that I gave a somewhat similar talk a few years ago in 2016 at a workshop in Chenmai. And I called it Linguistic Evidence for Ethnic Origins in Search of the Unfindable. And what had brought about that talk, and what also is sort of motivating this talk, is that a colleague at the University of Zurich at that time had asked me, what is all the evidence for the, what is the earliest evidence for the Burmese language and the Burmese people? And when he asked me this, I kind of groaned, because I thought, all right, here we go again. You know, we're going to have to look at the old colonial era scholars to find answers to these questions, which are not easy to answer. Do you, shall I? What do you want? I can do it myself. I don't have that many slides. Okay. Yeah, and it's going to be a while before I go to the next slide. And that question, and you know, here's my colleague's question, and then this question of the origins of the Burmese and the Burmese brought me to Luce, because he is one of the few people who have actually addressed this question of where did the Burmese come from and what are their origins? So again, I'll say a little bit more about that talk. I found, you know, I found there was a lot to say about origins, about migrations. And then it struck me how important this idea of the migration has been in historiography, both inside Burma and outside Burma, in Southeast Asia in general. You'll find, for example, whether we're talking about the Bermans, also known as the Burmese, the ethnic majority, or some of the other ethnic minority groups of Burma, they will often say, oh yes, we came from somewhere else. We came from China, we came from Mongolia, we came from Central Asia. So in 2016, one of the themes that I had wanted to develop was how linguistics and history often inform each other, but they can also misinform each other because scholars in one discipline don't necessarily understand how the scholarship in the other discipline works or changes that have occurred in more recent decades. And I see this all the time on both sides. I won't name any names, but there are some real guilty parties out there. The most important point I was trying to make at that point was that origins, in the sense that my colleague was asking, and in the sense that a lot of people want to know, is not something that we can really answer easily. It's ultimately a political question, one that the evidence from history and linguistics alone cannot prove or disprove, but it can only give us ideas which nationalists, in the sense of nationally-minded historians or intellectuals, can then decide is a point of origin or not. I hope that makes sense, and if it doesn't, I'm gonna come back to that theme. So, at that talk I was talking to a bunch of hardcore linguists who maybe weren't so sympathetic to my line of reasoning and also maybe didn't really understand what I was going on about. The reaction to that audience was kind of summed up by a Vietnamese, a specialist in the Vietnamese language who said, oh, I always make sure to show my work to historians first, so I know that it's right. Anyway, today I have a bit more time for me to talk, and I'm also gonna be able to focus more on Luce himself and his ideas. And I think it's really important that we talk about people like Luce and some of these other early scholars whose work is really foundational, not only to Burmese studies, Burmese studies which we're talking about today, but more generally in Southeast Asian studies across the board and today, what we call Indonesia or Thailand or Cambodia, Vietnam. There's a lot of this early scholarship from early European scholars who really set the tone for how we see these countries and places. And we haven't necessarily, especially in Burma, gone back to their work and see whether it still stands up to more recent developments. So today I'm gonna talk about Luce, the trope of migration. I'm gonna spend some time talking about the larger context in which British scholars were writing with Luce being a really good representative of a whole generation of scholars. I'll talk about the actual idea of migration and what it does, why it's useful, why people like to talk about migration or at least used to. Then I'll step back a minute and spend a little bit of time sort of historicizing or critiquing some of Luce's ideas and other ideas of that time. And finally, I have a few interesting examples of how intellectuals and scholars in Burma today still very much make reference to the idea of migration. All right, so let's dive in. So I'm gonna talk about the larger context. So when Luce was active, I wanna talk about what was going on in Britain and Europe and what had gone on before Luce even got here. Burma was a colony of Britain from 1824 to 1947 and the British were coming from India. So the British, you know, the British, this mean, when I said the British, it's a shorthand for colonial administrators, for scholars, for other people involved in the machinery of colonialism. They brought with them new concepts, new practices and new technologies of governance to Burma. Also at the same time, in Europe, or we could maybe say the Western experience, there were new ideas and new ways of looking at the world that were developing. So just one really good example is Darwinism, the idea of the survival of the fittest, that certain species survived because they were better adapted than others. So an offshoot of this in the 19th century was the idea of social Darwinism, the idea that certain people, certain cultures, certain civilizations were inherently stronger or superior and more fit to rule than others. Another thing, I think another important development in the 18th and 19th century was an ongoing political development. That you could say is a move away from seemingly irrational forms of government or political arrangements, like the empire in the European sense, into the rational ideal of the nation state. So when I say empire, I'm speaking here specifically of things like further in the past, the Holy Roman Empire, or more contemporary with that time, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, we have Prussia not already, but this idea that, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that's what I mean. So the idea that under one kingdom, under one emperor, you would have many languages, many peoples, and all sort of mixed up. And so the ideal was, under the idea of romantic nationalism, just let's say nationalism, the sort of national awakening, is that you have this ideal new form of the nation state in which there's one people, one culture, one language. And that ideal is, if we don't have to think very much, to realize how much political violence was committed in the 20th century in the name of trying to create this kind of nation state. Now interestingly, at the same time, that in Europe, at least Western Europe people were fighting against that idea of empire, they were also actively going out in places all throughout the world to establish the British Empire, the French Empire, and et cetera. And when the British take over the territory of what would become Burma, which really wasn't called Burma yet at that time, I'll get into that, they were also taking over a kingdom that had a lot of similarities with an empire. You had the center in Mandalay, and it had control, often very loose, over a great variety of peoples and cultures, languages, all that stuff. So when the British got to Burma, I keep wanting to say here, because I think I'm still in Burma. They wanted to make sense of what they found, the people and the place itself. Now in India, they could classify people based on religion and caste. Classifying them this way was very useful. It told administrators who was civilized or the level of civilization they had, and it also said something about, once you have these classifications, it also said something about where in the colonial machinery you could put people. So you could also figure out who would be taxed and who would be useful in serving in the government. So for example, Bengalis were often put into the civil service, as you find a lot of Bengalis going into Burma and doing that. Tribal people, like today we've been saying in Northeast India or some of the other tribal people in Central India, were kind of to be left alone because they weren't that civilized. And then the people like the Gurkhas were to serve in the armies. So, oh, and also the British administrators in India had gotten very interested in history, and here I'll use the script, the scare quotes, the idea of history as we understand it today, which means something like the establishing of truth and the facts. And their interest in India in getting in history was often to resolve conflicting claims for land ownership, which meant the more you study history, the more you could understand taxation. Anyway, so when the British arrived in Burma, they found that religion and caste were not useful in a country where there was no caste and most people at that time were a Buddhist or animist or some combination of the two. So the practice of governments that governance that the British introduced was to classify people by language, which, so language became a proxy, an indicator of the idea of race at the time. And race is something which now has largely been replaced by the word ethnicity outside of the country. But in Burma today, people still, in when speaking English, they still often use this word race. And I wanna make a point here that I suspect to an English speaking audience, this seems normal and natural that language would equal ethnicity or race, but it actually isn't. It's a particular, you find the association particularly strong in the English speaking world. It's less strong, for example, as I understand in French scholarship and some other intellectual traditions. And I will come back to the idea of race and go into that more. The other thing that the British did is that they took over control of writing the past for Burma and its interpretation. So the past and history were taken out of the hands of the Burmese courts, which was one of the traditional sites where histories were written, and also to a degree out of the hands of monks because monks were also interested in recording religious histories. So to use a modern phrase, the Burmese were no longer in control of the narrative over their own past. So a new dynamic was set up. The British, which included, here I'm using, I'm going across several decades when I had mentioned these names, this included people like Blagdon, like Harvey, like Hall, Fernable, Loose, and some others, were often dependent upon local people, local interlocutors to help them with the reading and the interpretation of sources. Especially those that were not in Burmese, those could be in Maun, or as we'll see, in Loose's case also Chinese. Although as Carol has pointed out, he did study Chinese. But then in the other hand, the Burmese themselves would take on much of the British ideas and practices of dealing with history, which they had learned through exposure to colonial institutions of learning, so schools. So the British would come in, they set up the story, and then through schools, the Burmese would internalize these new ways, these new ideas about their own history, and new ways of looking at their own past. Most importantly, the British brought in a new kind of history. So of course there's always been history in Burma, but the British brought in a very particular conception of history as the pursuit of facts and the truth, again the scare quotes. The idea of we're going to study to find out what really happened. There was scientific reading of the past, whether it was artifacts or sources. So British scholars, and I should say, Burmese scholars trained in the British tradition, looked at Burmese sources and found them wanting. They were unreliable. They didn't tell the truth. They were all mixed up. And Caramelment mentioned Harry Shorto, who taught here at SOAS, and his specialty was a mon language and mon sources, and he has this essay that was published in a volume dedicated to Hall, where he says these mon sources, they're pretty unreliable, they're pretty useless. As part of this process, there was also people started to divide history into genres, so this is a really simple point. Whereas history writing might be this sort of big overall field in a place like Burma, pre-colonial Burma, pre-colonial Siam, all those places. Now it was divided into proper history, then literature, then myth and legend. This is where you put all that stuff that was in the Chronicles, which was not the truth. And a point, this is a bit abstract, but I think this is an important point to understanding what Luce is trying to do. In doing, throughout this whole process, what the British were essentially doing was creating new subjects or objects of study. And I should point out, it wasn't just British scholars, but it was also people like those, the administrators who were doing things like conducting censuses, where they were trying to figure out all the different people living in the country by giving their languages names. So what do I mean by that? Well, we can understand something as an object of study, right? I don't mean to get too precious here with the linguistic terminology, but you can think of what are people studying? Oh, I am studying Burmese history. I am studying Burma. I am studying this ethnic group. I'm studying that ethnic group. So they became objects of study. But these, they also became subjects in a more literal sense. You find in English language histories, and then later on in Burmese histories, that these new subjects, so I'm talking here about the Mons, the Bermons, the Buu, became actual subjects of studies. The Mons did this. The Bermons did that. If you look at a pre-modern Burmese or Mons source, they never talk like that. They talk about very specific people. They talk about forces. They talk about personalities, but they don't talk about races. They don't talk about, they generally don't talk about countries in the sense that we understand them today. Right, and so I'll spend more time a little bit later talking about the racial categories. But the most important point right now is that these new subjects were created. And so there were new categories of thought when people were looking at Burma and the Burmese past. So this is the intellectual inheritance, or a big part of it, that Loose had when he came here. So as Carol mentioned, and also not only here but in her book, she goes into great detail. She didn't give a plug for her book, but I will. Loose, as Carol indicated, Loose was fascinated by Burma. And as you would say, and where I come from, he was like a kid in the candy store. He was interested in everything and tried his hand at all different kinds of disciplines, topics, whatever you wanna call it. So he wrote related to history, related to philology, historical linguistics, art history, archeology, everything. As far as I know, he was fairly dependent on working with local scholars. My understanding is that he could not speak Burmese or not speak it very well. This is not for me, but this comes from Michael Onglund who had gone to meet him in the 70s before he died. And he said he wasn't really able to have a conversation. But I do understand that he could read it and he could probably read Maan. He studied Chinese, but I also know that for his work on the Manchu, which I will get into a moment, I think he also had to work closely with some Chinese speakers. And as we know, as Carol told us, he worked closely with Pei Mengdin and even married his sister. So, since Lewis was looking at so many things, all these disciplines and spheres of competence informed each other. So that means that his observations in art history or archeology would inform his ideas of linguistic interpretation, which informed his thinking about history. I'm just gonna have to swallow water if you don't mind. All right, to return to a theme that I brought up in the beginning. Luce was looking for origins. This is what the British and other Europeans were doing in the rest of the world when they would go off into their colonies. They were asking themselves, at least intellectually inclined, where do these people come from? And this was especially important in places where the Europeans thought that the new subjects had no history. They didn't have a lot of sources. They didn't have any inscriptions. This is true in Burma, it's still true today that people like the Kachins or the Khorins don't have history because they don't have lots of old manuscripts. Also, we have to keep in mind that Burmese sources didn't talk about origins in the way that the British were interested in. So sources here, I've used that word a couple of times now, it generally needs something like the court-sponsored chronicles. And these chronicles, which are written, there are lots of them and they were written over several centuries and they often, they cite each other quite a bit. There's a lot of intertextuality, as they'd say. They talk about miniages and precedents of kingdoms. What was the earliest, what is the connection between this kingdom and another kingdom? What's the connection between this royal line and that royal line? And they talk a lot about the Sasana, which is a word I will use because I think it's important because that's the precursor to what we now call, since the 19th century, Buddhism. But at the time there wasn't, if you look at the sources, they don't really use this word, anything like Buddhism or the Burmese or Mauna equivalent. They're talking about the Thalana, the Sasana. And of course the sources themselves were not static, they developed over time. Kings and courts would want to rewrite them and have them have mistakes removed. In a process of purification, which is my word, very similar to the purification of Buddhism or the Sasana that happened periodically. So, let's see. So to the extent that the Burmese sources talk about origins, they say that Thalana was the first Burmese kingdom. And, right, Lewis didn't like that idea. Something else that I learned recently, which I think is really fascinating, is in the 19th century, there was this assumption that the world was not that old. This comes from a biblical perspective. The world had only been around for a few thousand years, so how do we account for the great diversity of people and languages we find all across the planet? There's a great diversity of physical appearances. I'm not saying that any of these British scholars who I've mentioned necessarily believed that in a biblical sense, but this is sort of an idea in the air. So one way to understand why there's such great diversity is that people migrated from somewhere else. And if you think about this, something else that was going on at the time was a great interest in the Indo-European languages, English and all the languages that are spoken, most of the languages spoken in Europe, and in the time before the Age of Discovery were spoken all the way from Iceland to Bengal. So the idea is there with the Indo-European languages is that there was a great migration, and that's how we understand that's why there's such a widespread, there's such a large swath of the planet that was covered with these speakers. And also related to that is the idea of the Urheimath, that there was this homeland somewhere where they all moved out from in this great migration. And if any of you are familiar with Indian history, this is a central trope in Indian history that the Indo-European speakers, the Indo-Aryans, as they were called there, moved in great mass and pushed the Dravidians out into the southern part of South Asia. And also migration was central to contemporaneous European historiography. We know that there's this idea of the period of migration, the idea of Germanic speaking people somewhere between the fourth and the sixth century, which caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. So again, migration was this idea that's in the air. So, oh, here, my first slide. This is a, these are some of, oh, there's actually two slides. These are some of the loose, in which loose talked about the idea of migration. This is not an exhaustive list. But as you can see, let's see, 1953 to 1965, actually, as I get into this one, well, Jocelyn, the coming of the Bermans, he started thinking about this in the 30s. So, migration was something that he spent, migration origins was something he spent several decades thinking about. So, when loose starts writing, first of all, he takes certain things as given. It's a given that Burma is this place, it's a site, it's a subject. And Burma specifically, as we understand it today, this country that has these international demarcated borders. And he also tapes as given the so-called historical races, the Mons, the Bermans, the Shans, the Buu. And historical, again, means that, I mean in the sense that they have historical records to support their existence. This is opposed to people who don't have that close kind of records like the Kachins, or the Chin, and the Corinne. And I think Lewis wanted to create a national history. And I mean this in two senses. First of all, in the sense of a history for all of Burma. I'm not sure if he ever said this explicitly, and I don't think he had as explicit a project as someone, say, as Harvey did, who very much wanted to write narratives which Burmese schoolboys would read in readers and things like that. And again, so he's looking for answers to the questions of how and when the various people, these various historical races, appeared in Burma. And the answer and the methodology that he employed to get these answers differed a little bit for each of the groups that he talks about. We're talking into a moment. And as I said, local sources do not talk about origins or don't answer these kinds of questions that he wanted to know. So in order to get the answers, what he did was, first, one of his main strategies was to look at language. So language is the way to classify people, but it was also a way to understand the past. So he would look for shared words and loan words. And in his thinking, not unreasonably, loan words can indicate who arrived in Burma first. With the idea that people who came in later and often were at a lower stage of civilization when they came in would borrow words from those who were there first or earlier. And these borrowings can tell you about food, they can tell you about agriculture, but they can also tell you about things like the level of cultural development, about art and architecture. And this other strategy, Luc's other strategy when he was trying to reconstruct this past was to look at Chinese sources with especially this one called the Manchu, which I will get into in just a second. So I'm gonna, I spent a little bit of time talking specifically about the article, Old Jalsay and the Coming of the Bermonds, and then I'll make reference to a few other articles that he wrote. So this Old Jalsay and the Coming of the Bermonds Luc wrote in the 1950s, but was based on ideas that he'd been knocking around since the 1930s. Again, this is, as far as I know, really the only piece of scholarship that I've seen that really addresses, by anybody, that really addresses this question of where do the Bermonds come from? Where do the language come from? Luc points out in this article that there is this period for which we don't have good evidence. So Burmese writing only appears in the 11th century, but as I understand, art archeological, sorry, art historical and archeological evidence points that begone in places like that were already established in the 9th century. So there's about this period, Luc was saying from the 9th to the 11th century that we don't have Burmese sources to tell us what was going on. So he made extensive use of this Manchu, which means something like the Book of the Southern Barbarians, which was written in the 9th century by Fan Chuo, I don't know how you say that. And it's a description of the Nanzhao kingdom and the people associated with it and their neighbors. No, Nanzhao didn't come up very well. So if this is Burma here, Nanzhao is up north of Kunming in what is Yunnan. So it's not that far away. Now scholarship on Nanzhao has changed in the past decades, but the idea is that you have this kingdom up there from the 8th to the 9th century that was ruled by people who were probably related to either the Bai people or the Yi people. And the Yi are still a very large nationality in Yunnan and parts of southern China. And their language is somewhat related to Burmese, but yeah, it's not very close, but close enough. And there's this idea that under this kingdom, there were many people, many different ethnic groups, very different speakers of different languages who were associated with it. Maybe they were under the control of Nanzhao. Maybe they were sort of mercenaries from Nanzhao. So Louis Reed, the Manchu, is providing information about what he calls the Proto Burmans. They were one of the peoples that he says we're living around Nanzhao. And he ends up reading sections of the text and decides that some of the words that he finds are actually Burmese words. So for example, Man, he reads as being the same word, which in modern Burmese is pronounced mean, but we know that several hundred years ago it was pronounced Man, before some sound changes in modern Burmese. And okay, we'll look at that text in a minute. His idea was that we know that Nanzhao attacked the few city-states of Lower Burma. And so he thinks the Proto Burmans went along on these attacks, knew how to get to the Irawati Valley. So when Nanzhao finally collapsed in the ninth century, they decided to be free of their masters, whom Louis says they hated, because they wished to be free of the Nanzhao Chao Yoke. What I find, oh, here, let's look at this. So if we read this description, they live in multi-storied houses without city walls, sometimes painting their teeth, they dress an untreated cloth, it sounds very much like something Southeast Asian, right? From a thousand years ago, whether this is what Burmese people were doing or looked like we don't know, but it's, you know, you read this and Louis wasn't pulling something out of thin air, right? I think there is something suggestive about some of these descriptions. What's fascinating about Louis's article is that he provides an extremely detailed path, geographic path, that he thinks that these proto-Bermans took all the way up from Nanzhao down to Jause. No, is there a pointer or something? There's no pointers. I apologize, this isn't the best map, but from what I can work out, basically, he thinks that the proto-Bermans lived between this, it's a call, the Namaika River, which is up near Michina, and between there and the Mekong, so it's somewhere up here. And then they came down, he has the exact path mapped out, and they go through this path, they go through that path, they go through Siwa, they cross the Migni here, then at Luxach, they turn down this way, and then, let's see, where's Mandalay? So at some point, they end up around here, and then they get spit out on this end, and so they end up at Jause. And as I recall, the Gaud is actually north of there somewhere. That was the original idea that the British sources talk about. What are you saying? No, this is where the proto-Bermans popped out. So. And just to complete the picture of what Luz was doing when he was talking about migration, when he talked about some of the other ethnic groups, he also read the Yuanxi, a history of the Mongol rule in China, and that was a particularly important source for his discussions of the Shaans. He had a lengthy two-part article from 1958, 1959, called The Early Siam in the Shaan in Burma's history, and he also argues they were up there in Yunnan, and he worked out a path that they took from Yunnan into Burma. And similarly for the Mons, he had a slightly more complicated, elaborate theory, a civilizational theory that the Mons were part of the development of wet rice agriculture. And he argued that until a particular ethnic group developed wet rice agriculture, they weren't very civilized, and the Mons crossed that barrier, the Rubicon, as he called it, fairly early on, and so then he was, unless you crossed the Rubicon, you never made it to this higher level, something like that. So he traced, in this article, he compares lots of vocabulary lists from various languages of Burma, and so he argues that the Mons were there first in Burma, and that all these later groups adopted vocabulary from them. All right, so this is the point where I will step back for a moment and think about, well, how do some of Luz's ideas hold up to more recent scholarship? And I'm not the first to do this. One of the first, a more recent attempt to sort of historicize or critique some of Luz's arguments were in Michael Ong Dwin's 2005 work, The Mists of Ramana, but that book wasn't very well received in a lot of quarters. And I would also point out, as I think I've said before, within Burma, Luz's ideas are still very important and often not at all critically accepted, I'm sorry, not treated to any sort of critique, and that's especially true outside of academia. So people still quote him. And I wanted to point out that this is true also in international scholarship. There's somebody, I think it was either Randy Lapala or David Bradley, who quoted this elaborate pathway of the proto-Bermans from Yunnan into the area of central Burma that I was mentioning. If any of you know who that is, and I don't know if John said who it is, I can't remember which article it is. I've been quoting it now for a couple years and I don't have to look it up. All right, so I just have a few points. The first, the idea of migration is itself. More recent scholarship has talked about, has brought some new ideas of understanding migration. Luz and many other people were understanding migration as large numbers of people moving in sort of hordes across the plains. Another idea, more recent scholarship has talked about the idea of elite replacement, or sorry, elite spread. And a good example of this is modern day Turkey or Anatolia. And what happened in Turkey is that a small elite group came to sit upon a conquered population. So, speakers of a variety of Turkish speech came from Central Asia to Anatolia. So the genetic profile of most modern Turks shows that only a small amount of their DNA came from Central Asia, and that most of the people are Anatolian. In other words, the language moved, but most of the people didn't. So closer to home in Vietnam and Laos, a French anthropologist, Georges Cordeninas, studied the relations between Thai speakers, or Thai speakers, the speakers of the Thai languages, white, Thai, black, Thai languages like that, and Austro-Aziatic speakers. And so, Austro-Aziatic includes languages like Vietnamese, Mon, Khmer. But he was studying specifically many of these upland people, very small groups. And he found that the Thai languages, including, I think, Shan, spread because of, in part, primogenitor. So we have this in, I think, Anglo-Saxon history. The idea that the eldest son inherits everything and all the other sons get nothing. So they are encouraged to move out. So in the context of upland Southeast Asia, you would get small bands of people moving to settle new valleys where they could start wet rice agriculture.  And this is a process that you could still observe in the 20th century. And this is George Cundaminas himself. I love his picture because I think it represents a particular moment in anthropology. I'm not trying to make fun of him, but it was really a way of participatory research. He himself, I think, was of partial French, Portuguese, and Vietnamese, we extend ancestry. And he was very famous. I think he only died fairly recently. So I just wanna say that there's other ways of understanding how language moves than just this idea of the mass migration. The other thing I wanted to talk about was Chinese sources. Now, I'm not an expert, maybe you can tell us more about Nathan. Nathan, Nathan, you can tell us more about Middle Chinese and the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. It's a slightly complicated discussion, but if you look at the Manchu as written in Middle Chinese, which doesn't sound like modern Chinese does, and if you understand, as we do now, more about the reconstruction of Middle Chinese, you can understand, you can get a clearer sense of the kinds of sounds they were trying to represent at the time. So foreign place names would often be represented in these texts. And even though we've got a better understanding of what these things sound like, you can still see that loose was just, there was a lot of conjecture in what he was saying. You know, oh, when they mentioned these people, when they mentioned those people, those are clearly the Maons or they're clearly the Khmeres or something like that. It's not at all that simple. And as this text, this quote, which I'm gonna go back to for a second, suggests, we have to keep in mind that Chinese sources are written from a Chinese perspective, what does that mean? Well, the Chinese saw themselves as central, superior, civilized, the center of the universe. And they're talking about these barbarians who are wild, uncivilized, dangerous, threatening, living at the periphery of their kingdom. And there are all kinds of texts, not just the Maonshu, but the Chinese wrote all kinds of texts about their people who lived on their frontiers. So for example, the Maonshu can be extremely detailed. It can give you seemingly precise descriptions of clothing, of hairstyles, of ornaments, you know? Yeah, here we get something about the painting of their teeth. And then it can be extremely vague about places and times. And the names that they give you are based on Chinese perceptions. Oh, it's the people who wore white clothes. It's the people who wore dark clothes. It doesn't say what they themselves call themselves, if that makes sense. So I mean, on the other hand, it's clear that the linguistic descendants of the peoples that the Maonshu were talking about are still in the area today. I think a good analogy might be is if we looked at Roman descriptions of Germanic tribes along the Danube or Celtic tribes in Gaul, we know there's a connection, but we can't say, oh, look, they were talking about the French. They were talking about the Germans. You see what I'm saying? I think it's a very similar leap that Luce was making. They think, they have some visuals. Yes, so this is the way that these people would be, that this Chinese scroll from someone in the 19th, sorry, the 19th century would just represent people from the southern frontier. I mean, you could sort of see some similarities, but then to say that's the same as a human today. I mean, it's just not possible. The last main section I wanted to talk about has to do with the idea of race, which I've talked about before, but I think it's important to understand how race as a construction has really influenced, what was really influencing what Luce was doing, but it's also one of the places that things can sort of fall apart, can come apart if we understand if we can contextualize it better. So I think how people identify, how they understand themselves changes over time. It's not a given. And I think if, all right, let's start again. Luce was following British ideas and so he was talking about language as indicating race. So where there's evidence of a language he argues, we can know the people. But I think that's only true in a more limited sense. We can know about a lineage or we can know about ancestors like I was just explaining here. But the question of when this woman became what she is now and who decides that point, it was in 1850, no it was in the sixth century, no it was in 1572, that's a political question. So to make that clear, let's think about how let's think about what we understand about how people understood themselves and difference and community and identity before the colonial era. And this is not just true in Burma, but it's true in a lot of places. So ideas and practices varied a lot. People understood themselves in terms of hintship, in terms of political allegiance, which could mean ties of loyalty, ties of submission. It could be in terms of religious affiliation, it could be in terms of geography, the people who lived here. People's identities were often contingent, they were contextual, especially when people are multilingual, so that means that in one context you might identify yourself one way, but when you're speaking another language or talking to other people, you might also identify with them. Also there was a total ecosystem of identities so that they were often relational. So what do I mean by this? We can still see this today, or see this until the recent past in Burma. You have Leech talked about the kitchens and the shans and how in certain circumstances the one could become the other. But we can also understand that they understood themselves in relation to that other.  We wear this, they wear that. They live there, we live here. They raise that kind of rice, we do this kind of agriculture. They do that religious practice, we do this religious practice. So it's very much, it's not just a singular unit understanding themselves as sort of existing and avoid, but always in relation to other groups and other people. Now if that isn't quite making sense, think of it this way. Let's look at how race and ethnicity work today. Ideally, people have a united single identity. There is one people. There is the Monts, the Bermans. They speak one language. They have a common history. They have common ancestors and they should have unique cultural practices, ideally not shared with any other group. They ideally should live in one territory and there should be other people in that territory. So it's a coherent entity and it's essentialist. There's some sort of essential spirit to being a member of this group. Now, it doesn't take any thought to realize that that really doesn't work in Burma or actually most of the world outside of a limited part of Western Europe, people are just so mixed together. And I would just point out that what we see in Burma today is that these two different ways or two different schemes are sort of in tension with each other that you've got sort of the ideological idea that we Bermans, we Monts, we Shans, we whoever, should all be separate and not mixed, for example, not mixed with other races against these older practices. All right. So in the final section I just want to talk about, some of the, I just wanted to show a few examples of ways that the idea of migration still has a lot of influence in local intellectual context. Migration is really well established in local self-understandings. For example, in writings among Mon, Shan, Chin, Rakhine intellectuals, they often, when they talk about their past, they often talk about a migration. And this is just the first page of an article that an amateur historian who I knew, Nike Monley, who was the director of the Mon Cultural Museum in Malinaya, wrote in a Dui Amin magazine between 2013 and 2014. And you don't need to read the Burmese or to even be able to see this that clearly to see that the actual title is the Mon migration and he uses the English word migration to describe the process. And then here you can see he's quoting people like Luz, Christy, Hully Blank, and all these various sources. And he's recycling a lot of these ideas to make this very lengthy argument about where the Mon's came from. And another, this comes from a 1990 Facebook on the history of the Zo people, the Chins. And he doesn't cite a source, but all these lines, if you read the text, they represent different ideas of mostly 19th and early 20th century scholars of where the various ethnic groups came from, which is usually Yunnan, places in China, into Burma and how they moved around. This is just another one. So you first get the people coming way over here in Kashmir, then they go through what's now Mongolia, they end up in Southern China and they go from Yunnan into Burma. And some of the sources that they're, like I said, some of the sources are quoting are quite old. The final one is from the races of Myanmar. It's called races of Myanmar and ways of migration. And this is from Sion-Ton's history of the Shan State from 2009. And he's just got them all in there. He's got the Proto-Bermans, the Muso Lolo people, the Kachins, Monk commanders and the Thai-Chinese. For example, Thai-Chinese, that's not even, it's no longer an accepted idea that the Thais and the Chinese have a shared language. So he's basically quoting somebody from 1933 to make this argument. Now, I just wanna point out, there's a lot you could say about how Burmese intellectuals and scholars argue and how they use evidence and what they're doing when they present this kind of information. But I think the most important thing is to think about how they're very concerned with establishing their presence in the country from as early a time as possible, to show some kind of ancient lineage, to show that they can sit at the table with the big historical races, like particularly the Burmese, but also the Shans and the Mons. And that they can claim antiquity for the people. So Sion Tone, for example, cites some very early speculations that were made in the late 19th century that the Shans were a race that were formed 2,000 years ago and that they'd been in the region ever since then. So in conclusion, I would just say, we can think about migration as a trope. We can think about it as a reality. We can think about it as an idea, as a way to understand a historical process of the spread of languages and people. But at the same time, it's important to separate out language and people. And locally, migration has become a crucial element following the ideas of loose people used to understand themselves. And so I think it's actually not gonna be very easy to displace it. And I just wanted to point out that it's not just in Burma that you find this. The American anthropologist, Robins Burling, spent a lot of time in Northeast India amongst people like the Galo and some other speakers of Tibetan Burma languages and he found that this is an extremely common question in the region, where did my tribe come from? And so he wrote this essay called, where does the question, where do my people come from, come from? Why is there this notion that we all came from somewhere else? And I also wanna say, I may have tried to make it sound like migrations aren't important and I think that's actually not true. I just mean it in a very sort of specific sense that loose was arguing. There is actually some really interesting stuff coming out of research having to do with the South China expansion. This idea that maybe around 2000 years ago in Southern China, many of the ethnic groups, sorry, the languages that are spoken in Southeast Asia were originally spoken there but they were pushed out with Han expansion. All right, and I'll leave it at that. So thank you very much.


Hi everyone Sean with jaspyscasebreaks.com here doing 20-20 update blaster one box random team number 17 where we're giving away 10 spots in the immaculate four box random team break That's in the store jaspys.com one more filler to do and we can do that break 30 spots only rookies and insert ship All-star game cards do not ship at the end. We will take all 30 names randomize them top Tim names when a spot in the immaculate baseball break There you go Here is the list of customers from David Mollell down to Jeremy Falecker with the last spot mojo and The teams from the Diamondbacks down to the Nationals dice roll to randomize both lists and pair them up six and a four ten times 10th the final time from Jason Cedar down to Jeremy Falecker ten times on the randomizer ten times on the dice and ten times on the teams Separate dice roll separate randomizer at the end of the break to go away those ten spots in immaculate as well 10th and final time From the Phillies down to the Braves Ten times ten times on the dice again. There you go. No trade window. I'm not going to read through every single one of these Since it is a filler break, but let's get them all on screen and look at some of the highlights Mariners Kyle Lewis Nick Rizelis Blue Jays Boba Shett Nick Rizelis Trent Grisham Padres Kevin Hall Dodgers Gavin Luxe Nick Grizelis White Sox Luis Robert Jeremy Falecker Artist Dennis Aquino for the Reds Jeremy Falecker There you go. That's an end the rest is all on screen So let's print and rip Here is our update blaster And there is our finalist Good luck. And this is the Player coin we'll save that till the end Randy a raise arena Tampa Bay Rays Jeremy Falecker Jordan for the Astros Jeremy Falecker Francisco Lindore foil for the Indians Jeremy Falecker Artist Dennis Aquino for the Reds Jeremy Falecker David Price Tops chrome insert Kyle Lewis for the Mariners Nick Grizelis That uh, David Price goes to the Dodgers Nick Grizelis as well There you go. Now. Let's see who the player coin is Anthony Rizzo Cubbies Got a little coin in there for you Chicago Cubs at Aaron's There you go ahead And now let's pop back over here and give away those spots in immaculate baseball 10 spots give it away Here is the customer list again from David Mollell back down to Jeremy Falecker last spot mojo And dice roll top 10 names after two and a five seven times Let's see top 10 seven times on the dice Good luck seventh and final time top 10 Mark Dubauer Kevin Miakawa Jonathan Arnaldi times two Jason Siebert Jeremy Falecker Blake Hilgenberg Jason Siebert Matt McLaughlin and David Mollell seven times on the randomizer Seven times on the dice There you go guys. Congratulations You all just won spots in the four box case break of immaculate baseball One more filler to do before the break itself and That's it. That was 2020 update blaster one box random team number 17 from jaspyscasebreaks.com I'm Sean jaspyscasebreaks.com. Thanks for hanging out. See you next time


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