On December 7, 1999, an historic summit on private land conservation was held in Ames, Iowa. The summit sparked serious discussion on conservation needs in this country for the 21st century. On this half-hour tape, you'll see a news story about the summit, about 15 minutes of excerpts from People Who Spoke, and an 8-minute program called America's Working Land. If the enthusiasm for private land conservation at the summit is any indication, we'll be off to a great start in the new millennium. Three out of every four acres in America is privately owned, and efforts to control problems like soil erosion and tree and wetland losses on that land are falling short. At the National Conservation Summit on the campus of Iowa State University, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials released the National Resources Inventory, a once every five years study by USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. The NRI concludes that although we've been quite successful in conquering soil erosion on our most fragile lands, we are no longer making progress in overall erosion control. It finds that urban sprawl and development are swallowing up some of our best farm and forest land at an unprecedented rate. Wetland losses have accelerated, although we have been able to mitigate the impact on agricultural lands. The mixed news set the tone for a discussion of how to meet conservation challenges in a time of tight federal budgets and financial stress on the farm. A dollar spent on conservation is a dollar that's not available for purposes that may make the difference between farming next year or going out of business. If I can get more by selling it for development than I can to another neighbor to potentially farm it, I'm going to sell it for development. If there's any private land out there that's in as much jeopardy as the family farm, it's the family forest. Some said USDA conservation programs are being short changed while billions are paid out in disaster aid. Technical assistance programs, the farmers got cut while we were pushing dollars out the door. There's something wrong with the equation here. It's not an absolute lack of money, that's our problem. It's a consensus on how to direct it. A common theme was the need to enlighten lawmakers and their constituents about the public value of private land conservation. Conservation means a quality of life to the populace of this country. The clean air, the clean water, the wildlife, the aesthetics, it benefits all of us. At the beginning of the last century, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a national governor's conference on public land conservation. As we enter the next century and begin a new millennium, it seems fitting that we do the same for private lands. It's my intention as the Vice Chair of the Natural Resources Committee of the National Governors Association to call upon the National Governors Association to convene a conference on private land stewardship and my hope, Mr. Secretary, is that we'll have the cooperation of your office and of the president in that effort. Future generations are not going to remember us for what was said here today but by the actions that we take from this day forward. So let's go out and get the job done. Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It's my privilege to convene this summit and with this meeting the real work of laying out a national conservation strategy for the 21st century begins. The fact is that too often farm policy and agricultural policy in this country is viewed exclusively in terms of what the soybean program will be, what the wheat program will be, what the corn program will be, and those are critical obviously for farm income related issues. But the fact of the matter is that unless we look at agricultural policy as well in terms of what the land will be and will it be capable of sustaining and promoting the production of crops in the future, we're going to lose a lot of interest of people who are not involved in agriculture in this country, people from other parts of the country, people who live in urban areas, because you know less than 2% of the people in this country farm the land. So from a political perspective as well as from an environmental perspective we have got to create this tie between the land and all the people of this country in order to build on farm policy for the future. If we deplete our quality of our water supplies we create health risk for all of our people. And if we destroy habitats in the wildlife they support we lose critical elements of a quality of life, not to mention the building blocks that sustain our human species. In constant dollars, think about this, in constant dollars we spent more money during the depression on conservation than we're spending today. And that just doesn't make sense. We need more funding to support conservation practices and most certainly more money for NRCS technical assistance. Technical assistance that's needed so bad in these particular agencies are no longer there, funds need to be restored for that. Other type of incentive programs need to be developed for small farmers to get them, black farmers specifically to get involved. Many of them on car share and other kind of programs cannot afford to put up money up front. My view is that I think we should direct our responses to limited resource livestock producers. And I say that because if there is an economic benefit to get large, let the economic benefit pay then for implementation of the standards. Let us use our limited resource dollars to maintain the limited resource livestock producers and address the environmental concerns in a compatible manner. Let's not help the big get bigger and drive out the small independent producers. We have a program at the National Pork Producers Council which is called On Farm Odour Environmental Assessment Program. 67% of the challenges that we found on the farm so far have simply been management oriented. They have not taken big dollars to fix. It's just maybe a changing way we clean a fan or maybe it's a changeable way we handle something. And so it's something, it's a program that's for all producers and it's available to everyone. But like I said, it's a very good indication of how you can do if you partner together with producers and private industry as well as the government. We've seen our private lands programs and ducks limit to grow from a few thousand acres a year, 15 years ago, to over 500,000 acres that we're actually providing direct assistance to landowners on in the last year. We expect and we're challenging USDA to match us in terms of helping make some more of this happen. But we expect to have our private lands direct contact program being over a million acres of private land within two more years. That's a doubling in two years. That's because the private owner has the interest. Native Americans, of course, have had a lot of difficulty over the years as all of you know. And one of the drawbacks to progress in the agriculture field has been not having availability of the USDA programs that we now have. This has just happened in the last few years. So we're quite a ways behind as far as the non-Indian producer in programs that USDA has provided over the years. We're hoping to catch up, but we're going to need quite a bit of help to do that. Whenever you get on the regulatory side, it's a time-consuming, a money-consuming thing to do that takes the flexibility away from the local folks. And we strongly believe through the district movement that the local folks need to have a say in what goes on, on conservation on their own lands that they manage and own. There's not just one way to do whole farm planning. It's more of an attitude. And we'd like to see that kind of approach where the farmers in control, they have a flexible number of options to deal with their problems. We'd like that kind of tool to be at the center of a stewardship incentives program in the new Farm Bill. I'm one of the co-chairmen of the Congressional Sportsman's Caucus, and some of you may not know about us, but we have the largest group in the house. Since I took over, we signed up 90 new members. We have 290 members of the caucus now. CRP is kind of my thing. That's something I'm interested in primarily because when I was a kid, I used to go out and shoot my limited ducks in the morning and my limited pheasants in the afternoon right outside of the farm where I grew up. And today, the wetlands are all gone. There are no pheasants. We have farmed that land fence drill to fence drill. There is no cover for wildlife in that area, and we have that in a lot of places in this country, and we've got to figure out a way to get some of that back. We were finding that farmers were hearing an awful lot about conservation practices and initiatives from the government side, but they weren't hearing a lot from the industry side. And we thought that needed to be changed. And so for the last two and a half years, we, seven companies, have been doing as much as we can, being very aggressive on the private side as far as promoting buffers. Technical assistance is one of those things that with all of the debate about what's good and bad about the federal government, what they should do and what they shouldn't do, technical assistance is one of the things that there's always been very broad agreement on that the federal government does very well, does very appropriately and does very cost efficiently. Iowans are as concerned about the conservation matters included in a farm bill as they are about the economic matters. The CRP program, the buffer initiative, the wetland reserves program, and the technical assistance provided through NRCS are the foundation for our state and local conservation efforts. Now we've made progress over the years, the conservation is never and should never be done. Hypoxia in the Gulf, 159 impaired water bodies in this state, issues relating to animal and confined animal feeding operations are part of our concerns and part of what we will be discussing this year in our own Iowa legislature. We are trying to save the small farmer, but by handing out subsidies to produce things for which large farmers have a huge advantage over small farmers. Now what do small farmers have an advantage on? Producing conservation commodities. I see rank contrast at times in the sense of the stewardship of the land and thinking about tomorrow and the day after and you put a family independent farmer out there and they're going to love that land, that's just the way it is. I think we can have open space credits, we could have some tax incentives and just use cows, use sheep to manage the resource and we'll all live happily ever after. Thank you very much. We find a lot with certain communities we talk to, not this one, that there's a feeling that people in agriculture are only out to make money. Our work with people in the agriculture community has convinced me that people want to do the right thing and we mean to continue to forge ways to help them do that. If we can go out there and do the right thing on the land, we can avoid over-regulation and that to me is one of the biggest threats that conservation faces in this country is over-regulation, command and control telling us what to do as opposed to letting our scientists and our foresters and our farmers figure out for themselves how to solve the problems cooperatively. As I drive home very often, I look at a farm and I say that is fantastic and I say, should I stop in and say thank you? I don't even know how to do it. We've got to figure out how to say thank you to all those good stewards that are out there. If you look at the executive summary of the verbal content from the conservation forums, you'll see that that consensus exists in that document too and it's simply that people believe that we should commit ourselves to more significant funding, as Paul said, and more significant coupling of farm program spending to conservation objectives. If you have organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Isaac Walton League and all the groups represented here, go to members of Congress together. It'll do two things. We're going to back arrest on behalf of some of the congressmen to see these people come in the door together, but I think it'll also really get the job done. This concept we were talking about all this morning is a wonderful framework because it would allow us to hang together all these different environmental needs and integrate them in a way that makes sense so they're not working against each other. We're struggling with how to commoditize the other values that flow off of agricultural land and develop markets for them in the marketplace so that the public can share the cost with the landowner of delivering those products, whether they're wildlife habitat or open space or bridging the gap, the generation gap, for the farmer who is faced with sale and $1,000 an acre for farmland or $40,000 an acre for development, preserving that land for future generations has real value to our society and yet we have only the beginning of programs to recognize that. Whether it's farmland protection with easements or buffer strips or CRP we're really all talking about the same issue. We're talking about how do we attach public value to private land and how do we develop mechanisms to share the cost between the producer and the beneficiary who is downstream. Farmers are probably much more literate than the folks in the cities where watershed, forestry, natural resource literacy is at near zero. That's dangerous because they're holding the votes. We've really got to commit resources from our budgets to get profound public education just like we're doing on the farms into the hands of the individual property owners, land owners, land users in the city. I would hate to see the federal government give up its long-term leadership in the conservation area when we get something like the last budget bill and a piece put in at the last minute which basically eliminates some of the key sod buster provisions late at night that doesn't give us the kind of leadership we need to keep focused on the importance of this area. If we have fallen behind in some areas I do think, as Tom Harkin said, one of the reasons is quite simply inadequate federal dollars. On a per acre basis we spend five dollars on management of public lands for every one dollar we spend on private conservation. Earlier this year, after much deliberation and investigation and hearings and input, I authored and introduced a new bill called the Conservation Security Act. This legislation would establish a conservation security program, CSP for short, which would be a new incentive program for farm and ranch conservation practices. Totally voluntary, not regulatory, but voluntary. And here's one major distinction from some of our past approaches. The farmer or rancher who is already doing a good job is eligible to receive compensation for continuing practices they already have in place. I strongly believe that the reward should not all go just to supporting new conservation efforts. For my part I will do what I can to support the national funding and technical support for conservation efforts and to do something to enact some form of legislation along the lines of the Conservation Security Act. And again, I ask all of you here today to take a look at it, give me the benefit of your wisdom and guidance and input on changing, modifying, or in any way improving that. Future generations are not going to remember us for what was said here today, but instead they will measure us for the actions that we take to preserve and improve the health of the land from this day forward. So let's go out and get the job done. Thank you all for being here.


So it's Wednesday 10 22. We get those numbers in about eight minutes. There's our crude oil chart We're trading at 64 33 to jump around here to see what kind of action we have we'll start off with the 11 a.m. So the 11 a.m. 7 64 25 as a price point where you can get an exposure upward down one not bad, right? Yeah, you're only eight pennies away the bullish spread would be the one that has some intrinsic value because your eight pennies above You're looking at about 20 bucks on the bullish side your bearish spreads gonna be the same thing minus the intrinsic value, right? So about 11 12 dollars 11 bucks 31 so 31 3 31 cents Yeah, away from 64 25 and those are 11 a.m. So you're only gonna have a half hour after we get that news jump in to see where the the noons line up Okay, exact same prayer. No wait. I had 64 25 right 63 All right, so 64 50. Yeah different level. I thought it's 65 25 64 25 was what we're using now This is a great example with okay. We just do the 11 a.m. The 11 a.m. Has exposure from 64 25 You'd have a little bit of a bullish head start. What if you said, you know what? We're like this 65 level I'd rather have like a little bit of a bearish head start. Maybe it won't get above this 65 level well There you go. Now you have 64 50 where instead of having on the other side now yet positive You get 18 negative exactly So this is gonna be your bullish spread which is completely out of the money now the cheap one So about 12 bucks and on the bearish spread that one's gonna be the intrinsic value $40 instead of 31, but again this one is in 50, right? Yes. Yeah, so 40 cents away from 64 50 becomes your break even Let's see how the dailies Okay, well, it's nice and that the 230s these line up the exact same way 64 50 That would be the bullish spread And I always like to see so you can see the market not that big of a difference, right? Number one this one's still noon this one's till 230 and you also have exposure to 67 50 and you're only paying look at that two ticks three ticks, right? Difference not bad for that extra hour. So there's your bullish one Gonna be about 15 close this out your bearish one Gonna be about 30 So 45 so went 30 bucks basically at 11 right 40 at noon and 45 at 230 Let's take a look at this so Seems like in recent weeks just as you pull it up We've gotten huge misses where you could have seen the price plummet right now We had a build of 7 million barrels maybe last week I don't even think the estimate was that much of an increase if not a decline Yeah, and and we still go higher. Yeah, so I got here this morning That's the that's the first down what interesting man, okay, so that's down to yep. Well, guess what you know, what are we doing? I think it's gonna go south man south, you know, it's interesting here Yeah, this is wicked folks because they went when you take a look at this and you know It's pushed higher with volumes you can see because he this volume right behind it, you know That's the good volume in those last few days, right now that being said now watch this when I break this down Intraday and you're gonna see that your two cells, you know really down, you know, that's that's what I'm looking at Sure, you know sell down yesterday at 940 yet another one with volume and then this little one right here, you know So it's like okay. Yeah, that looks to me like that's where I would like to go first So that's gonna be intriguing too because what we what we do have here is that the oil market has been going right along with the S&P. I mean, you know, we look at that. They're both They're both up at highs right now, you know, they're moving together. We're complaining about the price of gasoline Yeah, and just bring it up if you just want to go bearish, right? I mean, there's still great trades, man We always look at both sides, but here's one you get the market trading at 64 37 Yeah, you're selling at 15 pennies below the market. All right That's the sacrifice you make but your losses are kept at 64 50 and you're putting up 20 bucks And you have exposure all the way down to 61 50 not bad with those numbers coming and that's until 230. Yeah Yeah So yeah folks Tommy and I coming right back at phone numbers eight seven seven nine two seven six six four eight We have the Dow industry was trading down 12 down 33 rather than Aztec is up 19 S&P's are up to come right Welcome back folks. So crude crude inventories rose seven point zero three million barrels That's right. So we had at least the Bloomberg user survey looking for a gain of three point two definitely above that level jumping back to the chart The initial thrust you would ink negative action, but still just like we're talking about right seems like every week Yeah, there's been more of a bill than they think that should cause prices to pull back You know why and basically a non-reaction in terms of sitting at 64 31 We were sitting at 64 31 right as we were coming into this number, right? See what happens they're gonna come up with a lot of numbers gas inventories falling 7.71 so they were talking about this as well I'm gonna scroll down a bit right because I was mentioning that and part of the they give you kind of a what to watch for here Crude unit outages at refineries. That's the head of the number, right? Just talking about our still trending high last week We saw 1.5 million barrels a day offline talking about refineries. That's a bullish signal for gasoline and That number kind of reed reiterating that right you have a huge Inventory fall of 7.71 for that gas market crude oil crude oil inventories rising 7.03 Yeah, we'll put that back up and let's just check back to the price one more time.  You lost the cap to 6450 right huge man not bad. Yeah, because the finder is crazy when you know You can you can be trading an inventory number the estimate on Bloomberg's three million barrels We'll pull up the median analyst estimate as it pops up there And nonetheless seven million barrel build right and the market's like we're trading higher man All right, and it's one of the targets in there. You know what we use gasoline. We don't use crude Gasoline uses crude to be fair, but that's all yeah, but it's still a crack Inside that barrel then yes, oh for sure plastic market. There's a lot of different markets We're fine rate the refineries are offline man.  We sure do man These are five-minute bars. We're looking at just making sure they show our so 10 40 a.m. 10 minutes to digest that news Right, we trade from 6440 down to 6406 now sitting at 6410 See what happens we get a lot of time left in the day Not even 11 a.m. Yet, and it looks like that inventory as in quite a build seven million plus barrels Maybe wait on that price a bit for the first time in a while And we were looking at the 6425 and 6450 correct Yeah, the 6450s were the ones we looked out more often as a bearish one Yeah, and the 11 a.m. So the ones that had your 6425 is your price point right the noons in the 230s We're gonna have 6450 as your price point See what happens


and the forthcoming horizon Europe. And to help with the context, the committee on its visit to Brussels some time ago met with the Norwegian directorate or delegation and will-earned at Norway has been particularly successful in tapping into horizon 2020. Can you update the committee on what the Scottish Government is doing to clarify the situation regarding potential loss of EU sources of funding? What are the current funding guarantees and what is the Government prioritising in terms of securing post-EU exit funding? What we are trying to do is try to keep raising it. It was one of the items on the agenda for the meeting yesterday, so it is an active conversation that we continue to press the UK Government to actually fulfil the commitment that it made, which was in absolutely direct and unambiguous terms that it would replace all of the EU funding. As yet, we have got absolutely no certainty around that. Now, if I was to be fair to my colleagues in DEFRA, they probably are looking for the exact same solution. The difficulty is that this is all being driven by the Treasury, and I think that there may be some frustrations even at the level of the various departments in Westminster, because I am pretty sure that they want an answer to this, too. We have absolutely no clarification, but we continue to raise it. As I said, it was actually part of yesterday's agenda, and therefore I am able to update you with I am sorry, but there is no movement on this other than that we continue to raise it. To raise it with ministers who themselves, I think, would like some clarity, because they are having to deal with those same issues in England. I daresay that they have stakeholders who are every bit as unhappy as ours and the Welsh are, as well. I will be making this afternoon with a body in Scotland that will undoubtedly raise with me as everybody does the issue of replacement funds. You can approach this in three ways. I want to approach it in three ways with you. The first is to say that there are some funds, such as Horizon 2020 and Erasmus Plus, whether we know that the UK Government has done a value for money exercise in their own terms, not in anybody else's terms, and come to some conclusions. Those conclusions are not finalised yet, but, for example, we understand that a Horizon 2020 continued membership is like the policy choice of the UK, and they will have to pay into it, whereas in Erasmus Plus, they do not think that it provides value for money. We entirely reject that, but that is where they are, and we can hope that that will change. The second one is that there is a shadow structure of funding. You have the shared prosperity fund, which has been allegedly established. There is no information about how it will operate. There is meant to be a consultation from James Brokenshire's department about how it operates. It has not started yet. You can find bits of information if you say that that used to be funded or will be funded by the regional fund. If that is being folded into the shared prosperity fund, presumably it will be part of it, but you have no knowledge of whether that will be the case. The third way to answer that is, I have to say pretty much in the manner that I was responding to Mark Ruskell earlier on. You cannot manage or administer your way out of this complete burach. It is impossible to do so. The question from Claudia Beamish about establishing an environmental watchdog, you cannot just replicate the good things that come out of the European system, the things that have made huge progress, and say that we will just put that in. First of all, it would not work, and secondly, you do not have the money to do it, and we have no idea what the money will look like. We cannot do that with a funding issue regrettably. I mean that I have a very long time ago, a decade ago, I was an environment minister. I was involved in setting up and administering the SRDP system. We moved at one stage from one system to another system. We knew that we were moving. We knew that that would happen. It still took about six to nine months. I know that Mr Scott remembers us, because he was asking questions about it. Six to nine months before the money started to flow after it stopped flowing in the original scheme, this is of a much, much larger scale, and we have no idea because it is hard to exaggerate the complete implosion of the UK Government on these matters, on the whole matter of Brexit. There is, to all intents and purposes, no functioning government in Whitehall. There is a Government that is focused entirely upon Brexit and the chaos of Brexit, so those questions, which are not only legitimate for this committee, are essential for every third sector body, for all bodies in the environmental sector, for every business, for the whole of society. There are no answers to that. It is distinctly possible that the UK could leave the EU anytime soon. It is an act of gross irresponsibility, which is having huge damage. I wish that we could mitigate it in the way that it is being suggested, but it cannot be done. Felly, on the shared prosperity fund, is it fair to say then that the Scottish Government had no opportunity to input into the development of the proposal? No, no, no. As far as we can assess, I would have to say that it is a phrase and there really is nothing else at the moment behind it. It appeared in a Conservative Party manifesto in 2017. There is apparently a consultation. There are bits and pieces on websites, but what it is going to be, where it is going to operate, how it is going to operate, the constant spin on it is that it will be administered from London. It will be a central fund. The secondary spin is that it will give power to the Secretary of State for Scotland and to the Welsh Secretary of State for Wales, and it will be administered through them in a sort of one-in-the-eye for the devolved Administrations. That is the level of consultation on something that is absolutely vital. Okay, on what analysis has the Scottish Government undertaken of the importance of participation in the various EU-level bodies that support environmental policy and implementation such as the European Environment Agency? We haven't really done an analysis because right from the outset in our view we need to stay with them. We need to stay involved. It was another issue that was raised yesterday directly at the DEFRADA meeting and supported by my Welsh counterpart Leslie Griffiths. From my perspective, I consider continued participation in the European Environment Agency as absolutely vital for Scotland. Of course, that is an organisation that is set up for participation of the state, so there would be a question whether or not a devolved Administration would be able to separately have any relationship, but we are urging, and I, yesterday, urged the UK Government to consider effectively signing on. I am not quite sure what the phraseology is. There is a capacity to sign up as a third party state to the European Environment Agency, and, in my view, it is an absolute given that the UK should do it. I raised questions with officials about whether or not there was any possibility that Scotland as a devolved Administration could do it, even if the UK did not. I am not certain about that, but I am strongly of the view. Particularly if we are to keep up with developments at the EU level. One of the issues is how to make sure that you are networked into all of that as it begins to develop. Committing yourself to keeping up with what happens in the EU is one thing, although it becomes difficult if you find out about it via a press release when something has already been decided, when you know that there has probably been a number of years of careful consideration given to that before it gets to that point. We need to be involved in as many of those organisations as we possibly can be to ensure that we continue to be part of those conversations. I press the UK Government, as I have done on the EU ETS, that the most sensible thing to do is to stay in. We are rapidly running out of time. Do you have one final question? I do, yes. Last week we heard how important EU funding from structural funds but also from the European Investment Bank is for the circular economy. How can the Scottish Government ensure that investment in the circular economy is maintained? Are you considering how it could be prioritised in the new Scottish National Investment Bank? I cannot make such financial commitments. I can say to you that the new bank is intended to take a mission-based approach to investment. There will be a strategic direction and a set of medium-term outcomes that are ministerially driven. I know that officials are already engaging with the bank about the potential for investment in innovation and infrastructure around the circular economy as being an absolutely vital part of Scotland's economic development. The First Minister has indicated publicly that a key mission for the new bank will be to support the transition to a carbon-neutral society, which one would presume has to have beneath that the whole circular economy idea. You will appreciate that I am not the minister who is going to be taking forward the investment bank. For exquisite detail, you are probably best to ask Derek Mackay. We have run out of time. We have gone over time, in fact. I want to thank everyone for their evidence this morning. We will suspend very briefly. The fourth item on the agenda is to consider a proposal by the Scottish Government to consent to the UK Government legislating using the powers under the act in relation to the following UK statutory instrument proposals. They are the environment legislative functions from directives EU exit regulations 2019 and the reach amendment EU exit number two regulations 2019. Are there any comments in relation to either of those instruments from members? Thank you, convener. Just in relation to the EU regulations, one that you have highlighted, I think that I have gained some comfort, if I understand it rightly, from the fact that there are obligations on the UK Government to come to Scottish ministers in relation to the marine environment, where there are ensure water issues and where there are any issues that affect us as a developed administration. I find some comfort from that approach. Mark McDonald. Thank you, convener. I think that the evidence session that we just had with the current secretaries was useful, but it does not reassure me in relation to the reach regulations that are being proposed. I mean, those regulations effectively dismantle that whole architecture of European policymaking. It removes the role of stakeholders, those civic movements that are protecting the environment, industry, academics, experts in formulating policy. I think that that is a huge loss. I did not hear at this stage, from the cabinet secretary, a commitment to try and replicate that in some way. You are never going to be able to completely replicate it, but I think that after the evidence that we had from SIPA last week, there is an appetite on behalf of SIPA to engage with experts, and at least the very least to feed that in to the process that will now be governed by the HSEs. So, I am concerned about the status of this reach amendment that is coming forward. I mean, it has been revised twice already. It is not competent in my view. There are new issues that are coming up the whole time, including the issue of animal testing, which was raised today, and it can seem to be an error that the Government has been unaware of. I understand the reasons why, because this is a situation that continues to unfold with unintended consequences from week to week. Right now, I would not want to be committing any support to this amendment. I do not think that it is fit for purpose. Sorry, it is regulation. I do not think that it is fit for purpose. Are there any other comments on this, Stuart? Given that it has been laid by the UK Government, our position is almost irrelevant. More fundamentally, I just wish to note—there is no more that can be done—that sending it on 28 March for implementation on 29 April 12 is simply an unacceptable way to proceed. Any other points on this? I think that we are all agreed that the lack of scrutiny time for these things has been a real problem throughout this entire process, as we have been preparing for a no-deal, no more so than this particular one. It looks, if I am right, that we will have to go out to vote on this. We will take the environment S.I. first, then. Taking the environment legislative functions from directives, EU exit regulations, does the committee agree to the Scottish Government's consent that the UK Government legislates on that notification? I am taking the reach amendment, EU exit regulations 2019, or the committee in agreement with the Scottish Government's consent that the UK Government legislates on this notification? No. We are going to go to a vote. Those in agreement, given the Scottish Government consent, the UK Government legislates on this notification, raise your hands, and those who disagree, are you abstaining? Yes. Those in agreement, raise your hands again. Marks disagrees with it, and Angus is abstaining. I am not sure what I am doing, to be honest. I share concerns, so I am going to abstain. The result of that has passed three votes. That concludes the committee's business and public today. It is the next meeting on 7 May. The committee will be taking evidence on tax and fiscal measures to inform its work in relation to the Scottish Government's budget. We will now move into private session and ask that the public gallery be cleared as the public part of this meeting is now closed.


Hi, welcome to Nursing School Explained and this video on a focused respiratory assessment. Now we always listen to the patient's lung sounds whenever we assess them, but when there's an underlying respiratory condition we need to make sure that we focus a little bit more on their chest and their lung sounds. Now there are some special respiratory assessment techniques that can be used that you might have learned about in nursing school such as bronchophony, egophony, whispered pectoriloquy and all these special tests. Now I'm not going to demonstrate these in this focused respiratory assessment, but I have some another video where I go into how to do this so that you can also see how that's done, although it's not very commonly used. So let's take a look at the focus respiratory system assessment right here. Hi, my name is Petra, I'll be your nurse today. I'm going to do an assessment. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay. First of all, let me do some hand hygiene here. And then I'll put on some gloves and can you tell me your name? Steve Jobs. And what year is it? 2022. Where are you right now? I'm at hospital. And why are you here? I'm having trouble breathing. Okay. So we'll take a look at you here and we'll take a good look at your lungs and do all those good assessment things. So first let me go ahead and check your eyes. Look straight at the tip of my nose here, please. Okay. And then open up. Okay. Great. So now I'm going to take a listen to your, actually we'll take a look at your chest first. So let me uncover you. And first I want to inspect just his chest and see any kind of chest movement that might be unusual. And of course I also have already checked his vital signs and assessed his respiratory rate. Just by inspecting I can see if there are any abnormalities going on, any paradoxical chest movement where maybe one part is moving in a different direction from the other one or if everything is okay. I also want to make sure that I palpate his chest because if there was any subcutaneous emphysema I couldn't detect that unless I'm palpating his chest. And subcutaneous emphysema is something that a patient can have if they had air escaping the lungs into the pleural cavity such as we would see in a normal thorax. And so by just palpating I feel make sure that there's no abnormalities. I can also check for any kind of lumps or anything like that. These, the subcutaneous emphysema would feel like rice crispies underneath the skin. Once you've touched it you really know exactly, you will know exactly what I mean. So we've inspected, we've palpated. Now I'm going to percuss his chest and I have a special, a certain video on percussion techniques. I'm not going to go into too much of an explanation here. But again just like with auscultation I want to compare the left side and the right making sure that the sounds are nice and hollow because underneath the chest, the chest wall we have the lungs and they are filled with air so they're going to be nice and hollow. And just watch the other percussion video that I have right there. So now I've done my inspection palpation percussion and now I'm going to go ahead and auscultate. Whenever I place my stethoscope on your chest please take a nice deep breath in and out through the nose. Go ahead. I'm starting to get lightheaded. I'm sorry? I'm starting to get lightheaded. Okay that's actually quite normal because I'm having you take some nice deep breaths so I'll just slow down the, the speed, the way that I'm going down on your chest okay? Okay. Are you feeling a little better now that we just talked? Just a little, yeah. Okay. So take a nice slow deep breath and again. So long, clear, nice and clear. Are you still dizzy or are you okay? I'm okay. Okay, very good. So now I'm going to just listen to your heart. So I'd like for you to just breathe nice and normally, okay? Okay, good. Thank you.  So I'm going to place my hands right here on your chest and take a nice deep breath. Okay, good. And do that again. We'll make sure we'll do this nice and slow.  I'm okay. Okay. And then one more time. So I'm checking here that every time he inhales my hands move in a symmetrical way with his chest wall and so his chest wall movement is okay here with the chest excursion. Now I also need to assess your back. Is it okay? Is it better for you if you sit up or roll onto your side? I can sit up. Okay, great. Let's do that. So now I'm going to check the chest excursion here again. So take some nice deep breaths. It's always a little bit more visible towards the bottom. And one more time. Good. So if there was some underlying pathology or maybe some consolidation underneath one side it would not possibly not be equal on the chest excursion here. And so then again I want to palpate and see if I can feel any abnormalities here. And theoretically you could do both sides at the same time. It's just a little bit more practical I think to do one side at a time and notice if there's anything unusual. And so now that we have done the inspection I'm going to auscultate. So nice deep breaths again whenever I touch my stethoscope I'll just make sure that I go a little bit slower so you don't feel dizzy. And if you feel dizzy just let me know. Okay, so one thing on the auscultation on the respiratory system whenever you listen to a patient's lungs make sure that you follow in this left to right version from the top to the bottom. And make sure that you get all the way out to the sides here to hear the lateral chest specifically because on the right side we have three lobes rather than on the left side where we only have two. And on the right side there's a middle lobe here that you really can't hear from below and if you miss listening to the side here you could miss an abnormality and the right middle lob pneumonia is fairly common. So make sure that you always follow it and then move out to the sides and listen to the mid axillary line here on both sides. So now that I'm done with auscultating I'm going to percuss again, again going in this methodical way, staying away from any bony prominences such as the scapula and the ribs making sure that I hear this hollow sound underneath. And so I'm done with my inspection, palpation, auscultation and the percussion. I've done a little bit out of order but I got them all done. Okay, let's have your lay back down. So now I'm going to check your upper extremities. Can you squeeze my fingers on both sides real tight? Okay, excellent. And then let me check your circulation. While I'm here I can also check for any clubbing of the fingernails and the patients with a respiratory issue and these nails look all normal. I'll check for his radial pulses, strong and equal and then one more strength test.  Okay, good. And this would also be a good opportunity to assess an IV site in the hospital setting if the patient has an IV. Okay, next I'm going to check your abdomen so I'll get you uncovered. And again first I'll inspect and everything looks pretty good here. Now I'll auscultate for bowel sounds. When was the last time you had a bowel movement? Yesterday. Okay. I'm going to palpate your abdomen now. Let me know if you feel any pain. Any tenderness? No. Okay, so I'll push a little bit more now. Any pain? No. And I'll check your bladder. That is not the standard. Okay, so now we'll move on to your lower extremities. We can tuck your arms. So let me get you uncovered here. Can you press down against my hands like on a gas pedal? Great. Pull your toes to your nose. Bend that knee here please. Kick your shin out against my hand and pull the calf back. Great. Relax. Let me see the other side. Bend the knee. Kick out against me and pull back. Good. Now let me check your circulation. Nice strong pulses and all the way down here. Okay, great. We're all done. Thank you. Thank you for watching this video on the Focused Respiratory Assessment. Please also make sure to check out the other focused assessment videos in the physical assessment playlist. Thanks for watching Nursing School Explained and I'll see you soon right here.


So you don't know how to import your face animations into Blender, not a problem. Most efficient facial mocap software exports your recordings as an FBX. So if you're in Rococo, you just right click, export, include face data and pick a location on your computer. Once you have the FBX, what you're supposed to do is open the file with your character, import your new FBX head and go to the timeline, copy all the keyframes and paste them onto your character. That's supposed to be how it works. But usually when you try that it'll give you this error message. And after spending hours of wasted time, I have found a solution. It's a pretty stupid and jank solution, but so far it's the best one I've found. So here it is. What you have to do is set the timeline to zero and then go to each shape key and press I to key frame. Do that with every single shape key and then Blender will finally let you copy the frames from your export onto your character. You're done. Another option you can do is you can try and join these two meshes together so that they share shape keys, but whatever method you choose those are the ones I've found. If anyone has a better solution I'd love to hear it down in the comments, but otherwise it's very unfortunate that Blender still hasn't fixed these kind of basic animation issues. But anyway, hope that helps and as always I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


Thank you. And it's always such a privilege to be here. So I'm apologizing in advance for any nose blowing, coughing, coughing bits. If I were really bad, why else would I bow? I may have, like, be sipping a lot of water that's back there. So I'm going to read the first chapter from a novel that I'm working on. And it's called The Music Book. And the first chapter is preceded by a prologue. And in the prologue, a woman who's the main character, her name is Ann Reynolds at that point in her life, who's in her 80s, has recently been living in a, or been moved to an assisted living, perhaps a nursing home, actually. And she's had a few small strokes. And in the prologue, she receives a letter in the mail with a music book. And the piece of music is a sonata. And it was written by a composer whose name is Arthur Cohen. And Arthur Cohen has died a few years earlier. And so this was left in his estate to her. And a composer was a modern composer who was fairly well known for a small period of time. And like a lot of modern composers, his work stopped being performed. So it was thought that, you know, assumed that he wasn't producing a lot of compositions. But after he died, they found music, some of it finished and some of it unfinished, in his house. And in his will, he specifically left this sonata, which is thought to be perhaps one of the greatest pieces of music that he produced by a music critic who's seen it, or a musician who's seen it. He left this for Ann Reynolds. And so she receives, has received it in the mail.  And when she was playing in this chamber music festival with Arthur, it was where she met him, with Arthur Cohen. And so the first, I would say, close to two thirds of the book mainly takes place during this festival. So this is chapter one, Rhode Island, 1953. The cello hit against her side as she came down the steps of the platform and through the crowded station. Outside, cars were bumper to bumper and the sun and sunlight threaded everything. Businessmen in their suits and hats, a woman dragging a suitcase and a child, one in each hand and the bright concrete sidewalk. Wind shields flashed in the sun. She held a hand above her eyes, squinting. Behind a large old station wagon with wooden panels she spotted the de Soto they told her to look for and Charles Grillo sprung from the driver's seat. Anne, right? Anne Seisel? He asked before she could introduce herself. She was 23 and strong looking, large bone with wide shoulders and a square determined jaw. She had soft gray eyes and long brown hair worn back from her face. When she played the cello it fell forward, parting now and then like a curtain to reveal her expression, a driven but dreamy assuredness as if she watched Phantom Shadows. She'd been hired to perform at the Chamber Music Festival last minute because the cellist with the modern strings quartet in New York had broken his arm. Patrick Dipsy, the quartet's violist had phoned her. They'd had difficult finding anyone and he'd gotten her name from the conservatory. They were playing the final event in a five day festival that showcased classical music from the baroque to the moderns and will perform a piece by Stravinsky and a debut and new composition by Arthur Cohen, the quartet's violinist. Had she performed modern classical music? Had she played much Stravinsky? Of course she'd answered, though her study of the moderns had been sparse. She should listen to the recording made last year of one of Arthur Cohen's pieces. Could she be there Monday afternoon? They'd put the rehearsals in during the festival. He'd mailer the music and Charles Breedlove, the quartet's second violinist could pick her up at the station in Providence. I'll take the train down Monday morning, she told me. That same week, the director of a music academy in Boston had found to offer her a position teaching cello lessons to her students. But if you were good enough and at the conservatory they called her gifted, even exceptional, you performed, you didn't teach. Mildred Ridley had managed a career performing in cello and so had Phyllis Crowder. Erica Morini, the only female solo violinist in recent years, and there were no solo violinists or cellists, claimed the problem with women performers was they lacked the single-minded devotion necessary to sacrifice everything to their instruments. Boston, where her family lived, was tight as a loose. Refusing to stay there was one of the reasons she'd given when she turned down her vengeance proposal in that horrible restaurant where the tables were so close together of everyone was listening. She'd never performed if she stayed in Boston, except with church groups and civic orchestras in that group at the conservatory. Charles drove through the crowded streets, cars glistened in the sunlight and horns blared. The smell of exhaust streamed through the open windows and when they drove through the far side of town she smelled the stink of the fishhands. They quickly reached the city's outskirts. Sidewalks and streets peeled away. A small trap of recently built houses disappeared and they passed billboards too fast to read them. The road wound closer to the ocean where tall grasses grew by the roadside and the water appeared in patches. Another road that went along the coast. Don't you, Charles called out? A damp wind blew through the cars. They turned onto a two-lane road close to the water. When they crossed the bridge that spanned the inlet Anne's hair stringed out the window. A buffer, the sky felt huge. Charles drove casually ignoring speed limits and not slowing even when they drove across a narrow bridge with open grating high above the water in the inlet. One hand stayed on the steering wheel and the other waved about. Have you heard Arthur Cohen's recent recording? He and Patrick met at Yale Conservatory which is how they founded the modern strings. The two of them together again in New York City. We've been asked to play at the Shelton Salon next month with this same program. You do know the program, don't you? Patrick said he sent you the music. John Spencer, who said you studied with and claims you're very talented. In fact, he says you're unprecedented. As Patrick probably told you, Les Carmichael, our cellist broke his arm just a week ago, water skiing. No doubt he had a girl on each side. They passed marshes and fields thick with brush and the bright air, everything green. Beachfront hotels, the white houses with dark green trim, the ocean behind them. The sun was a glowy white ball. Charles said how appropriate it was that the one group with a female musician would be the modern strings and she laughed and said she could cut her hair and wear trousers. In the distance, she made out a line of events, each opening toward the next and a vast spread of opportunity. They had a ferry ride to the island. Charles brought them hot dogs and Anne stood on the deck and watched the narrow islands coast spread into view. Cliffs fell in a steep descent to the water and a string of wealthy homes and mansions dangled along the cliff's edge. I can't remember if I said this takes place in Newport where a lot of chamber musicians actually happened during that time period. She'd never seen anything like it on the coast near Boston. Charles pointed out the one he thought was the largest mansion, which was the one that Jameson's had rented for the use of the festival's performances. I love this, don't you? He said pretending for a few days that we're rich. When they reached the island, they retrieved the car and drove away quickly from a small town toward the island's point. She saw walls of white and blue hydrangeas filled with dalphiniums, boats in the harbor, and an ocean laced with waves. White stones shimmered in the heat through a screen of greenery. They passed tall hedges that hid vast grounds and narrowed rives leading to more homes along the coast. That's where the performances will be held behind that black iron bait, Charles told her, pointing.  They put us all up in the main house, except for Arthur, who's staying in one of those cottages. Don't you think we're doing work on a co-ser like him? Eclipse, eclipse, eclipse. Did you say you'd heard that recording of his? You must if you have it. He's taken every piece of music written and synthesized them into his own style. Perform Arthur Cohen now and you'll end up in Carnegie Hall. That's what it feels like. That's what I predict. Men milled about in cars and taxis, unloading suitcases and instruments. Charles walked her to the doorway. Oh, look, that's Thomas Baxter and Louis Heath. They're performing Haydn and Bach tomorrow evening. They walked down to the front portico, lined with potted ferns and stepped inside the entry where a chandelier the size of a dining room table hung two stories above them. Her room, Charles told her, was upstairs, the fourth door down the hallway on the right. He set her tweaked suitcase and shelled her by the stairs. They can sleep up to 35 people here and I think we're probably close to it with all the performing musicians and maybe a wife or two along with a few guests. She followed him down a central hallway past a parlor and dining room. Patrick and Arthur by the water. Come, I'll show you, I'll introduce you. A comfortable looking living room in the back of the house, opened the outside with a pair of glass doors that led to a stove patio. White page ranges lined the lawn and near the patio yellow roses bloom. Beyond them she saw the ocean, light glinting off the waves. Three men stood at the edge of the lawn overlooking the sea. The two on the right are Harmon Rothschild and George Shields. Charles said, waiting. Didn't Harmon Rothschild perform as a soloist with Philadelphia Symphony this past winter? Yes, I believe he did. The man on the left next to the woman is Patrick Dempsey. Who is the woman? That's Adele Jamison, our patron and great lover of classical music. Patrick and Arthur met her a fundraiser last year. As Patrick went toward the woman, his head obscured hers. Beyond them the clip saw it fell off sharply and below that was a rocky beach. Close to the shore the water was pale blue with foam. The sunlight blinded where it touched the ocean. But when Anne squinted, she could see far out where the blue sky darkened. Arthur is the one in the ocean, do you see him? She held her hand above her eyes. Other musicians were walking out onto the lawn. She felt pulled towards something she couldn't see, something important. That's his dark head above the waves, Charles said. Earlier this summer we performed at an event on Long Island Sound. A group of us stayed up late drinking the night before. Arthur stayed up the latest and then he was up before the rest, swimming laps. I watched him going back and forth along a shoreline and thought, how does he do it? Then of course his performance was the most remarked upon. I think he also wrote the beginnings of a new composition while I was there. Do you swim? No, she answered. I forget you in the water at some point. He has a way of convincing one of us. In the distance, the dark head skimmed above the waves. It looked like the swimmer was approaching the shore, but just before he reached it, he turned and swam back out into deeper water. Later that evening, after a dinner welcoming the musicians, Arthur told her a story. She didn't find him immediately attractive, not with his straight dark hair or a little too long in his narrow face. A group of them had gathered outside on the lawn and the sun was about to prop it into the water, all that fiery light being extinguished. Arthur stood next to her, smoking. It's absolutely a true story, he insisted. I heard it from a fisherman near the island's point when I went for a walk. The whale washed up onto the shore and the fisherman happened upon it at the still living when he found it. How large was it, she asked. He said it was a pile of weight. They're a smaller variety, but I imagine it was big enough. Did it survive? Was the fisherman able to save it? Arthur shook his head. He got help and they tried to pull it into the ocean, but the whale was so heavy and the waves kept bringing it back. The body is still there around the tip of the point. Every now and then while we were talking, I got a lift of it. They migrated at the end of the summer and sometimes one of them comes too close to the island. That's likely what happened. Close to the shore, a group of herons rose with a great flapping of wings. I've got a revised copy of my sonata for you. Have you played this for Binsky before? She nodded where she had. My music goes in a different direction from his. We constantly have to reconsider the meaning of the lotus. I guess that's the work of a composer, she told him. She wondered if he'd invented the story about the whale. It's the work of any musician. Did she wear heels? Perhaps she had on pumps. She wouldn't have worn loafers.   Oh, sister, oh, Amy, play me like that. The sounds we could make. She saw the four days vivid before her. Music poured out of the bedrooms and downstairs parlor and living room in Jane's house at all hours. She heard snatches of Bach and Schumann and Tchaikovsky blending together. She had never heard so much music at once, including at the conservatory where practice rooms were soundproof. The next morning when she woke, Charles stood on a lawn playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy on his violin, facing the ocean. His suit jacket strained against his shoulders and hung sloppily. And the violin looked like a toy held up against his large shoulder. But he drew the bow back and forth with such grace. The sun had just come up and the light was still pale and the music made her weak. She became someone else's listening. Instead of going down for breakfast, she practiced Arthur Cohen's sonata over and over again. She was being steered towards it, steered towards something, not a future in Boston, living in a house with a husband who'd spend his life doing medical research. This other future swept down and lifted her. Later that morning, the ocean turned blue gray and the sky was bright, warmed with a few white clouds above the rocky cliff. The Jameson's house was a speck on the shoreline that ran for miles along the Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island coasts. From a room with a bat came the sound of a cello. Anne Seisel drew her bow over the a-string, playing it over and over with slight turns of the peg. When the others came in, they set up music stands and their instruments near the piano and the paintings of Hudson River. Arthur played first violin, Patrick Villola, and Charles was second violin. She was used to rehearsals at the conservatory where they broke down the irregular passages and talked about the accents before playing leaves of peace through. But here they started at the beginning and played to the end without direction. A long pause followed the final notes. Then Arthur said, that whole middle section was rushed and the end was sloppy. They turned back to the beginning.  She couldn't find the downbeat.  Patrick claimed the problem was intonation and they spent 30 minutes or more tuning chords. Finally, they played the entire piece through again and it sounded better but not much different from when they played it first. We've got more to learn on that, Patrick said, when they were putting away their instruments. It was somewhat better when we played it in the city and we need time to catch up. There's an hour or so before dinner, Arthur said. Many told Anne that they would show her how to reach the water. They left the house together but soon the three men had rushed ahead of her across the lawn and down toward the ocean. In front of the Januson's house, several large flat stones descended to a mirror of a sand beach. Wooden steps led from the lawn of the stones. Climbing over the rocks, the men reached the beach in no time. They took off their shoes and rolled up their pants, pushing one another and joking about the waves which could knock you against the rocks if you were a strong enough swimmer. Cheap all of them down to the flat rocks but then climbed back up intending to walk along this edge. The ocean stretched away from the island. She focused on the scene where the water met the sky. One rehearsal would not determine anything. The performance was what mattered. As she rounded the first bend in the narrow path between the rock face and the edge of the cliff, she heard footsteps behind her. Brother Collins found her pursuits with his jacket and tie on them. I liked your playing, Michelle, because it was windy and the ocean was loud. Your staccato was quick and crisp and the staccato was full of feeling despite the tempo problems. We're perfectionists. Not every musician has the stamina for that. She picked up her pace. He was trying to make her feel that the words she quit may need to find a substitute, a substitute with no notice. You don't have to compliment me. I'm not so fragile. I can't handle criticism. The rest of us have had the music longer. We used to playing with each other. Below them, narrow sandy beaches spilled out between the rocks close to the shoreline. Years later, Benjamin would show her the geodes that hid inside some of those rocks. On the outside, they looked indistinguishable, but if you cracked one open, you'd find a city made of crystal. Arthur walked a few paces behind her. She moved as quickly as she could, concentrating on the narrow trail. I wagered you played Lil Stravinsky and very little the moderns, he said. Patrick claimed you had, but I remember the conservatory's program of concerts a few years ago. Beethoven, Schumann, A Little Berlio, Debussy, and then Beethoven again. I studied Dvorak and Bartholk, and of course Charles I, she told him. Not an extensive repertory comment, but she achieved the timing in that difficult passage after just a few repetitions. Stravinsky reinvented timing. He altered our perception of it. By the end, you were keeping up with those shifts. He was falling behind her, shouting to be heard. She had to stop for a second to wait for him. Who were you studying with in Boston? She named a coach she studied under. Even while you were working hard on that difficult passage, you stayed true to the notes. You didn't try to show off your technique at least, but technique is everything, she said, thinking that it was technique that allowed her to master the difficult timing. The music itself is everything, he countered. The notes on the page are a lot of matter, but it's not music, of course, until it's played. It is music, he argued. The score is the only real music. She slipped off her shoes, which were full of sand. The ground was hot, but she hardly felt it. This section of the past stayed close to the cliff's edge, and down below them, the ocean glittered as if the sun can touch every single crested grave. Music is meant to serve itself, Arthur continued. When we play a piece, we have to surrender to it, and she disappeared. I can't stand musicians who talk about interpretations. It's presumptuous to think that we have the right to interpret a composition. Our duty is to bring the music to life, and it's a sacred duty, a responsibility. That means sensing what the composing meant, what the music itself means, not imposing your own meaning on it. That's true for any music, but especially true for music like Stravinsky's. People think that abstract music gives them more license or interpretation, but it gives them less. That's what makes it so difficult to perform. They had to walk single five. She stayed ahead of them. She was all nerves, and everything he was saying made it worse. She'd been so anxious to accept the job. She kept considering how difficult it was for her to learn music. You're quibbling with semantics, she shouted. If we feel the music, we go through the process of not just playing the notes, but becoming the notes, as you say, disappearing into them. Then we make it new every time we play it. That's true interpretation, and it has everything to do with concentrating on or connecting with one's own sense of meaning and one's own sound. When we play with a larger group, the music is interpreted in a new way by the conductor. That's what keeps it alive. What brings a symphony, written in 1700s, into the present? Pat Huyton and Arthur came abreast of her shaking his head. His longish hair swung back and forth, leaned under the sun. That is exactly when I began. Connecting with one's own sense of meaning is simply ego. I don't care if the person is doing the interpreting as a conductor or a musician. The idea is that one's individual ego can be greater than the music is pure and dangerous presumption. That's what destroys good music. Listen to Chicago Orchestra's recent recording of Stravinsky's Suite number one, and you'll hear one meaning. But if you're a musician, you find the meaning of the music, that essence or whatever you want to call it that's beyond you or anything you could ever mean on your own by going inside yourself. Connecting with it, that experience leads you out of the ego, not further into it. I don't know about the recording you've referred to, but I know what I experience when I play. You can't tell me that what I experience is ego. It's not. I'm not trying to tell you what you experience, if you love his hands. The path curved close to the edge of the cliff, rocks and scrubbed brush fell away on one side and on the other side spread verdant lawns and fluttering bushes.  You can hear the music that's produced, but you can't see inside the musician and know what he or she is experiencing. That's not what I'm saying. You seem to be. Look, I'm just saying that the music is bigger than we are. He stopped talking, but she kept, he stopped walking, but she kept going so that he was forced to shout louder and louder. She pictured him screaming at the ocean, ridiculousness of that. He was claiming that ego is what kept musicians from playing well, yet he seems subsumed by his own grandeur. Earlier when she looked at the sonata and tried to play the cello's notes, she found them difficult. Now it occurred to her that perhaps his piece failed to be musical. She wondered how much knowledge he had of the cello. Any piece of music has its own life, Arthur shouted. Our work is to experience that life. Performance isn't about making an audience happy or making them understand or appreciate anything. It isn't about the audience or about the musician. It's about the music itself. The medium is everything. The sky had darkened, but the air was still bright, shimmering with heat. She could see far out to the ocean, all the way to the thick line of the horizon. They descended closer to the water and reached a break in the path where it was possible to scramble down on the rocks. She held her shoes in one hand and didn't stop until she reached the bottom, where she threw herself down on a narrow strip of sand and shelves next to the water. Moments later, breathing heavily, Arthur lowered himself beside her.  If she weren't so tired, she would stand up and begin walking back at the fastest possible pace. What are you planning to do now that you've graduated? Patrick sent you an offer to the teaching position at the Music Academy in Boston. Yes, she answered. He glared at her with sudden intensity. They were only a few inches away from each other, and she could see every line in his face, the way his cheekbones were too prominent, his forehead too high. You could even consider merely teaching in a music academy. You shouldn't be performing. For a long second, she stared back at him. She had a terrible verge to spit at him. What do you know about it? You have to want to play music badly enough that you can't think about doing anything else. That's the one thing I know. For a moment, they continued to stare at each other. Then she reached up and grabbed two fistfuls of his hair. It was silky, sliding between her fingers, the type of hair that would untangle easily and took a brush to it. She yanked hard enough that she expected some of it to come out of my hands. But instead, his face moved into hers. Everything about it looked distorted, the shell of his nose, the indentations where his eyes rested. He tried to loosen her hands, but she didn't let go. And what happened next happened quickly before she had a chance to think about it. The small stones and the sand ground into her. She pulled at her skirt, bundling with a stick, but she didn't let go of his mouth. It was as if her teeth were locked around him. For a second, she worried someone in one of the houses above might see them, and then he moved his hips into hers. And she felt a sudden, sharp pain. Some people are greater than the music, she told him. Some people are meant to be, it's a medium. He slid under her grasp and everything rippled, turned, and thickened. Has Benjamin ever taken advantage, her mother had asked? And she seemed doubtful when Hannah said no. But Benjamin hadn't. They kissed, and he slid his hands under her clothes, always stopping there as if it were an end point. This was not like that. Not tentative, or based on the assumptions, spending long moments with one's mouth open to another's would be endlessly enjoyable. It was more like wrestling on the lawn with her brothers, pushing and shoving. She had liked that endless kissing, but now it seemed pointless. Here, she was someone different. Next to them, the ocean crashed against the rocks. She saw the dark outline of Arthur's head and saw his shirt white against the bright air.  There was blood on her slip, and it seeped through the sand, where it spread into a circle the size of a sand dollar. That was your first time, he said, watching as she raised the slip over her head. You should have said something. She walked down to the water and rinsed her underwear and slip, rubbing them with the cold, slow water, then shaking them dry in the hot air. She splashed water between her legs under her skirt. The sun had dropped close to the ocean, and a second sun, a mirror image, bled into the water under it. She fixed her sight closer in on the breaking waves. Arthur came up behind her. Are you all right? He touched her on the shoulder. The dinner they were required to attend would start soon, and they needed to walk all the way back past the Jamesons and to the breakers. There was no way they could get there in time. We needed to hurry and walk back, she told them, turning away from the water and beginning to climb up the rocks to the path. Just before reaching the top, she stopped and slid her underwear up under her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, then pulled the damp slip over her head. I'm not dressed properly, she said, as she refastered the buttons of her blouse. They're completely presentable, he told her. Beautifully presentable performer. Less than 30 minutes ago, you were telling me there was no reason for me to play music. She stepped away and they began to walk back, linking hands for a minute before the path narrowed. After a few minutes, she felt her fingers loosening. I was telling you there was every reason to play music. He said, just before they quicker in their pace, trying to get there before the dead-on was over. Thank you. Thank you. The first bugger has to be there. Mrs. Smith, if you can, it's your turn. I played piano for a number of years. I don't play much anymore. I have a sister who's a pianist, a classical pianist in Boston, who plays with a number of music groups, playing a couple of big opera groups, and the Foster Music Project, so which plays a lot of modern music, obviously. So I've been around classical music most of my life because of that. So there's more, I think, that connection than that. And I've never played the cello. I couldn't decide on the instrument.  The cello was such a much more physical instrument. And then I had decided on the cello and was doing some research on the turnip. One of my ex-students is a really, is a wonderful cellist. So anyway, everything that she said about playing the cello, kind of confirmed the choice of that instrument. Yeah, yeah.  Not in the old days. Was there such a strong Stravinsky influence? Was there a strong Stravinsky influence?  Right, well, because that's the piece that they're going to be playing. So they're getting ready for this festival and they're going to be playing the last concert and they're going to play at least by Stravinsky. And no, I mean, I love Stravinsky, I have to say. but I don't know all of his music exceptionally well. He's a modern composer, I needed a modern composer.  I'm asking her every question that comes up, but I did take a class last summer, John Montanari, the voice of classical music, if any of you hear him, I don't know if he's down in Connecticut too, but he retired about a year or two ago. He was the voice of classical music for a number of years in PR. And anyway, he lives in my area, so he gave a kind of community course that you could sign up and take. And so he played, it was the orchestra and all of the orchestra instruments kind of through the ages, starting with Bach and hiding all the way up. And we spent some time in Stravinsky and I talked down a little bit about it. That's how I decided on the Stravinsky piece. I'm still picking the piece, but I just wanted to know about him as a composer. Yes? But you, well, it's sort of a two-part question, I guess, but I really appreciate the way you got the piece because you changed the elevation of your voice when dialogue came in and stuff because I found myself very lost in your imagery. I mean, as they're dragging around the cliffs and sort of, they're noticing everything from the car and all of that, but I, you know, there's so much also beautiful repetition and the way these kind of stuff has seemed against each other that you're constantly recalling things that have been written previously. So I guess my question is, have you read this before? Because it seemed as though you were sort of speaking to us as the listeners to bring us back into the moment because I found myself wanting to stay in that image as you were already created. And they were actually reading the book, I thought it was about back in, you know, a little longer, so. Thank you. Well, no, I didn't have that key for it. And I have to say, usually I would like practice reading something new, but because my voice hasn't been, I don't have that great much of my voice that I had didn't do that, so I didn't practice it. I was a little worried about that dialogue because dialogue can be tricky. That's another thing I want to say, I'm sorry, but I love how you just opposed that sort of very concentrated talk about the practice of playing and their argument that was very kind of craft focused in the world of music with the running along the clips because it allowed, you know, that those two options made against each other a nice thing and possibly they're calling workshop as you're kind of reading because there's so much that you are doing and you're writing that you're inviting us students and it was really impressive how evident that was. I'm glad I've taken mine. I feel like I've done it. That's nice to hear. Reassuring. So the ocean plays a huge part in this, I think, just the bad descriptions that you're using. It seems like they mirror in some instances the action that's going on. Was there a large thought process of our revision and including that or taking out in the morning kind of what that was like a little bit? I do it with imagery a lot and so in terms of revising, I am often adding more images in or if I like an image, sometimes it will become more of an image thread. In terms of the ocean and the ocean imagery, water is really important for me. It's just sort of an archetype that I use a lot or it feels like something for me. It feels like a weigh-in emotionally to a piece. So having it by the ocean, I think, is good in that way. Although there are later scenes, several of them occurring in New York City, so there's some that don't. But certainly the ocean is something that's, I love that it's really close to the ocean and that the music in some ways, I don't know, something about the ocean is a rhythm and the music is always rhythmism. So I like the parallels of that, I guess. So being a short story about music, do you try to match or mirror the pacing of the story to a particular musical piece? No, but I am going to play around with that some. I haven't yet, but for example, it's naturally falling into three sections, so I'm going to have three movements and for chapter, what I'd like to do, but I've talked to my sister about this to see if it's really conceivable, what I'd like to do is have the chapter headings be taken from the music. If I can get that to work in a way that's reliable, I can do all the way through, I can just obviously do it in a few. So I wouldn't like to do some of that. I haven't thought of other ways to do it, those are the two minimums I've thought of. As you were writing, were you listening to any music soundtrack? No. You were with that music? I don't really like that, I tried that because I was writing about music, I thought I should try it, I tried it several times. I don't know, for some reason, I just have to have it quiet, I don't know what I just do. But I was listening to music during that while I was working on it. And it was good in a way to take that class because then it gave us all these ring stars, these different music, and turned me on to love music I haven't heard before on stuff. I listen to music a lot anyway. And I think that music is very emotional. In some ways it's a reminder, I think that it serves similar poetry in that way, that it's immediately emotional. And it's wordless, right? So that it's immediately emotional on a level that's beyond, in a place that's beyond words. What are we trying to do when we're writing, right? Let's say what can't be expressed in words, with words. Musicians cut right to it. And so music is great that way. Yes. I knew that they would, I knew that was going to be the story eventually, it was going right away. I was very caught up in the dialogue and it was just like, oh all of a sudden I knew she was going to spit at him, maybe he didn't do it. And then it was... So I was surprised. That was a surprise. How to do that to myself? How to do a surprise? How to surprise yourself? No. I don't know how to do it. That would be a good trick, wouldn't it? If I could teach that, I'll have to think about it.  I think. Because I do sort of sometimes try to do that when I'm working. Well, the one that I talked about today, when I mentioned that today and everyone's so shocked. So when I revise, I often will have a folder after something but then I'm ready to do a big revision. So I don't... I typically will not look at the original. Because if I look at the original, what am I doing? I'm fixing the original. I want to receive a whole thing. So I won't look at the original. So I think that the other thing that that does if you're not tied to your original is that I think that everyone was saying, oh it's so scary and it is kind of scary.  So there's this moment where you're really scared and then it's really thrilling, right? So that if you can do things like that in terms of your process, then I think that it is more likely that you will surprise yourself. You know? I'm going to think of other ways. Now I'm going to be on the lookout. I'm going to come up with a list of ways. No, I don't know. There's probably none of this. You have to destroy the whole thing just to help you surprise, right? If there was any kind of list, yeah. So just to clarify what you said, so you write something and you put it away and you write it from scratch. Yeah. That's hardcore. I've heard how it's doing that, but the commitment of doing that was a long process. I don't always do it, but I do it a lot. I do it a lot. I did it recently with this book. Yeah. I often do this after I write the first hundred pages over and over again just to get the voice and the way I finally got the voice for this one I'd written it over a bunch of times and looking at it, you know, it just wasn't working and I thought, no, it's gone and I am now looking at this ever again. And then I re-wrote it Do you hand post? Yeah, usually. Anybody else have any other questions? Were you surprised by our reactions at all? Like, were we parts that were supposed to be funny? Were we laughing? I didn't think any of it was funny. So it's good. Karen, you didn't think that those two fighting at the top of their voice was like, walking out of here. I was just caught up in it. You know, I was just... I was just caught up in it. Like, even if I was conscious that that would be a good way to have them that would be funnier if they were... Like, did you think, oh my gosh, Sean, I'm going to talk about all this. These two musicians arguing about tempi, or I don't even really know what they were arguing about. I don't even know what they were arguing about. It seems like they said what you've been teaching us that you would say, give this some action so that they're not just arguing, standing still. But was that a conscious choice? How cool is that? Think about it too much. Don't look at your originals. How could I not have been thinking about that? I don't know. Consciously trying to do that. So that, yes, I think it's important to learn all those things. To learn, like, you know, yeah, if you're having a conversation and it's paired, then you kind of stop sometimes and enjoy the action or whatever. And that there's a rhythm. I think one of the things we talked about is that there's a rhythm that can develop from the back and forth. There's a story too in our workshop and there was a rhythm between a dream and reality, a dream and reality. And that when you have that rhythm going back and forth, that's sort of visceral. The reader can feel that. It's almost like physical. And so that is hopefully what I had in that scene. But then I think what happens is that you have to learn all of that. You know? And I certainly know that and I see it in other work all the time and I think it's so important to read a lot and notice what's going on and what's working well. But when, and this is just me personally, when I'm on the page myself and I'm working I'm in the world of the story and of the language and of the character. And so I'm not thinking consciously of trying to do that. So I'm not making the effort towards creating that rhythm. It's just that hopefully I've noticed it enough in other kinds of places that I'm just, it's in my mind and it's just a part of me and I'm doing it. And I think that the revision process is different. There are certain points in the revision process where, you know, you do try to do that. Try to change a scene and make it work better more by consciously doing something. But a lot of times when I'm writing I'm not consciously trying to do anything. And it's certainly in that scene I remember that even the first time I wrote it that it just sort of took over and no one else was going. And so I was just, I was watching that or listening to that already. It's the girl happy with the guy then. No. No. No. I don't know. I was having trouble deciding whether this was a romantic scene or a rape. I don't think it's a rape. I think it doesn't come across that way. I mean she's the one who's the aggressor. She has a mama bear and all that. It happens without really thinking about it. So this is also that the time period of the 1950s in which she hasn't had much experience. And I think she's met someone that she suddenly is overcome with of her own feelings. And she doesn't stop to try to understand them or analyze them or anything. I think she's asking if she's happy or not. I mean in many ways the novel is much about the relationship of music also. So that's a lot of the passion and what it's about. It sounds like there was I hear the parallel between music and writing and some where you're describing what during explanations I can't pinpoint because it's not a friend of me. I just couldn't possibly be an artist. There's that and then just some of the tenets of being a good musician and being a good writer or their parallel or something like that a lot. Oh, thank you. Good. See now I'm going to have all this knowledge that I didn't have. Do you submit that individually to the generals in the light and as you're working towards an artist? No. I mean stand alone. Do you think it's a stand alone? Raise your hand if you think it's a stand alone. Well, thank you. Maybe I will at some point. I'm going to do it while I'm working on it because it feels a little too fragile for that. I know that I'll revise or change it too. But yeah, that's good to me. But you don't think of being able to do it now. Anyone else? I can't believe no one even asked me about the sexy. I feel like I got off the hook. Back to that panel. Oh my God, I'm reading a sexy. Here you are. Well, actually, I actually looked at Susan and said that's really well written sexy. It was very erotic but there was nothing like I like the way she said I looked at Susan and thought that Well, you said that. I'm sorry. I apologize. Thank you. All right.


It is just hours after U.S. President Joe Biden declared we have a deal to renew the infrastructure of the United States, but that hasn't stopped the opposition from criticizing the plan. The Senate's top Republican is unhappy with plans to follow the $1.2 trillion bill with another measure and, of course, another funding plan. Really good meeting and answer your direct question. We have a deal. U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a bipartisan Senate deal had been struck to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects. The $1.2 trillion proposal came after months of White House negotiations with Democratic and Republican lawmakers, something Biden embraced in his later remarks inside the White House. I'm pleased to report that a bipartisan group of senators, five Democrats, five Republicans, part of a larger group, have come together and forged an agreement that will create millions of American jobs and modernize our American infrastructure to compete with the rest of the world known in the 21st century. The deal has $579 billion in new spending that includes major investments in the nation's power grid, broadband internet, and passenger and freight rail. What we agreed on today is what we're here to agree on, the physical and infrastructure. There was no agreement on the rest. We're going to have to do that through the budget process. What was left out of Thursday's deal was new spending on home healthcare and childcare, key initiatives for some progressive Democrats. The Democrats who control Congress by razor-thin margins aim to cover those areas in another spending package that they want to maneuver through the Senate without Republican votes. One member of the bipartisan group of 21 senators who negotiated Thursday's deal, Republican Rob Portman said this. We didn't get everything we wanted, but we came up with a good compromise that's going to help the American people. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.