So welcome everybody. This is, this talk is about deploying dead-end and dead-end light systems in large infrastructure, particularly in the, we're just not blinded. We have, we have, in a really large university setting, so folks who are interested in how to do this get some ideas and ask some questions, hopefully. And we're lucky to have Frank Brocken with us here, Andy. Do you want to come up and give the intro? I just wanted to... Oh, I think you should keep going. We're saving some time. So, we have Frank Brocken here, and I'm sure that I actually can't even pronounce, Conan, is that Conan Brocken? No, you're close. Okay. I need a good job action. So, I'm just going to turn it over so you can get started. I hope people have some chance for a question. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you very much, and thank you for attending my talk. This is the opening slide that I'm sure you have seen by now, so I'll immediately switch to a completely, I hope, surprising slide. Now there's this. This is Debbie, as you can see from the headline, and this started about, say, 15 years ago, where my wife and I, Esther, were entering the high charas in the western part of the United States, which is Windows. And we were constantly frustrated by Roche that we couldn't enter and things that were blocked for us, and so we decided to completely head the other way, and eventually we found our way into the Californian and Nevada deserts. This is probably the northern tip of Death Valley National Park, and it's a beautiful area. It's very hot in the summer, and it's extremely cold in the winter, and short is a beautiful piece of nature. And I don't care if all these people stay in high charas and use their Windows system, as long as we can use our Devinian system, we are happy, and we are in the wild, and we can do all these nice things that Devinian has to offer us. So what am I going to tell you in particular? Here are the topics that I had in mind. A little bit about the context. I'm going to tell you a little bit about that strange name, University of Oregon in the Netherlands, and don't try to pronounce it unless you are fluent Dutch or English speaker. And in there, there was at some point in the university, a call for an alternative working place. That is an alternative computer working place where people could do their computer things. And that became, eventually, the Linux working place. I'm going to tell you a little bit about that. But there's much more Devinian at the University of Oregon than the Linux working place. I, my group, have been using Linux from the very, very early 90s, so that was even before version 1.0 came out, and we switched to Devin, I think, in its first year of existence. I'm going to talk about that in detail. There's more Devinian at the University, more or less because of the switch that we made, and I'm going to give you an overview of the kind of Devinian products that you may encounter as well. Somewhat, extensive example will be Stealth, which is a five-integrity scanner that was designed about five or six years ago. Then I have some conclusions and maybe questions. So first of all, as we learn from anti-stock, open is in. There's a smorgasbord of open things. If you look at where there are all kinds of open things, and one of the things that I haven't heard about since anti-stock was open government, but I'll add that to my smorgasbord as well. Interesting is that in Europe, all these various governments, and over here, this is my point, you guys, over here you see the Dutch following buildings. There is a law of the past that requires official organizations to start using open source products. Now that's a deal, and before it is actually effectuated, you're probably tens of years farther, but at least that deal was passed. Anti-stock law, Munich, the country of Denmark, this year decided that their official product must be written in the open document forward. So that is a great step. And once you see that all these levels of people and then governments are accepting open sources as their favorite standards, then you see that the supernatural thing, the European Union, and here we have the Foreman Building for European Union in Brussels, that the European Union as a supranational organization, also enforces that bill and requires that the member companies start promoting open source. So we are at a perfect moment in time to promote open source products in all lower levels because we can say governments require that. If you would like to have an overview of worldwide use of open source products, then I would like to refer you to the Center of Strategic and International Studies, which is located in Washington. And my paper that will be in the proceedings of this conference gives you the reference, but I'm sure you can find that on the web. It is an extensive list of all kinds of open source products as they are required or used in the world. You may have used this, actually. I don't know if you did. Are you aware of that? No. Well, it's a nice list. I look at it and it's great. So, the context. A little bit national and supranational stuff. Then if we look at the university, the University of Cronin is the 5th one oldest university in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1614, 49 years after its first university was founded. It was laid in 1575. The University of Cronin has about 25,000 students and our staff consists of about 5,000 people. That's not only scientific stuff. That's also support stuff and things like that. But also, they're all in like 30,000 people working at the University of Cronin. Well, students. Well, they work. Since several years, the university's information of technology center is responsible for running all its IT facilities. And what we see here is the main building. It has a remarkable architecture. The main building of the center of information technology. What I like about this picture is the fact that it shows this window up here behind which is my office. So I got this from the web and I think it's a great, great picture. It gives you an idea in what kind of location we are. As you know, the Netherlands is full of water and so we are in a little pond because I thought there wasn't enough water in the Netherlands. The University of Cronin is well known for its high performance computing work and one of the main projects that we run is the LOFAR project which is a project on astronomy which is the equivalent of the largest radio telescope in the world which has a diameter of, I think, 200 miles. Now, you cannot build a structure like that. So what I did, I did some really ingenious things with all kinds of measuring points spread out over an area with a diameter of 200 miles and effectively acts as a big dish in which you can collect all these astronomy data. All those data run into our computer center is cleaned out there, is washed, is filtered and that's one of the things that we do. We see here some pictures of these big holes and in there, apart from the supercomputers that are used for the LOFAR, for all kinds of servers for the email, for the university library for basically everything that you would like to have at the university to keep it running and most of these systems are running on Unix kind of operating systems. There are some window systems in there but I would rather not talk about them. At some point, if you look at this this is the server area, if I may give it that name but people at their desks and the students they are using very simple computers and for a long time it has been MS Windows that has been the working place which became a standard working place in the 1990s and I think that's a very good idea but on the other hand at that time you really couldn't give the university students and staff members a Unix-like system either it was commercially much too expensive or it wasn't ready to be spread out over the whole university. Initially we used selectware but that required you to recompile every package from scratch at that time and that was a non-option for the non-user so selectware was not now.  It is not open, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes except for that it's bad, it is expensive it takes a fair amount of the budget for the IT facilities for the university it's monopolistic, that's bad. I'll go back to that. And it is constantly in need of repairs. Now I don't say that our open source products do not need repairs and don't have but but this is symptomatically wrong and you can more or less prove that it cannot be better than it is. Fortunately at some point there are open source alternatives for almost everything people were using at their normal distance. So why don't you use open source products? Especially if the political climate at that moment is favorable towards open source. There are more products with the traditional working place. One of the things is that if everybody is using windows but that basically holds true for everything that you use as a monoculture if more than 50% of your systems is that particular system then you're running the risk of a monoculture and thereby of all kinds of diseases. Let's see, how many of you running Linux, Demian Linux run a virus ban on you? Okay, there are two. How many of you run also a Windows system occasionally?  So that is exactly the reason why a monoculture is so dangerous. It is the only system that is run by a large number of computers in your organization and the attacker only needs to find one vulnerability in that system and a whole range of your computers is gone. The malware tends to target the dominant in this case, Windows system. And because that system is so complex you cannot get it right. So there are plenty of reasons for using open source alternatives. I have a nice example in about 2007 and once, one particular day over 200 computers of our university were infected by a group of hackers and became victimized to that hackership. I don't think you could do that even if they were all running Debian because there are so many variants of that Debian system. I mean there is a basic operating system below there but what everybody is using in their computers is basically varying from installation to installation. So it was time to start realizing the Linux workplace. And indeed it was clear by the time we started working on that that it should be the Linux working place because the Linux working place we have a stable system we have all the software in place and so why don't you use that system as an alternative? There are very good reasons for doing that. The choice now is what kind of system should we use RAD, should we use Sleggware, should we use Susie. In fact there were two competitors and that was Ubuntu and Debian. To me there is not so much difference. I prefer Debian, I've run Debian since when I said early 90s or something like that and it seems that Ubuntu is somewhat more familiar to the common user but if you are more into the computer system itself if you are more interested in what's going on behind the scenes then Debian might be your system of choice. And if you go to the core system administrators or our university and here we have one fine example of a system administrator and his words when I took this picture you can't find anything on Ubuntu. Now I don't want to offend my wife in the back of the room there but this morning she had a problem connecting to the universities here wireless internet and me too couldn't find something on Uwit windows so I think you may be right when the focus is on the Uwit character of Ubuntu. Fortunately for the distribution of the system it's not so much a problem. The Linux working place looks like this. If you have difficulty reading this diagram I can completely understand that and that's not the point. The point is not that you cannot read this diagram because I'm going to dissect this diagram in a few minutes. So this is the whole picture. This is what Jurian Bogma and his picture is over here. Jurian Bogma is one of my colleagues and he run the Linux working place project. Now his name is a famous name in the Netherlands, Bogma because Bogma is the manufacturer of a particular kind of booze in the Netherlands called Geneva and since there is no wine being grown in the Netherlands I thought it might be a nice idea to bring to the cheese party a bottle of Bogma. Unfortunately when I asked yesterday through customs the security officer looked at my bag and said what's in there and he looked in there and I found my bottle of Bogma which I bought at a liquor store and he said that's not sealed so you cannot take that into your claim to the United States. So I had no other option than to remove the Bogma bottle give it to the customs official and say I hope you like it. There will be no Bogma at the cheese party but I took some cheese so I hope you like that. Let's go back to business. Back to business. There is this working place and the unattended install goes from some playing computers using all kinds of mirrors to a computer that can be in principle booted it's not yet ready to do that and if your original computer was a Windows system it comes out of the initial unattended install as a dual boot. Now interesting here is that we use our own Ubuntu mirror and we have a known package repository and those repositories are called Debian repositories and for this I have the help of the Debian developer George Danchef who helped us creating those packages. George is from Bulgaria and we invited him over to the university for a workshop for about a week where he trained us to create packages to create these repositories so we could do all these kinds of things ourselves from then on. Now we are here. We have computers that will become the Linux workplace either pure or dual boot. Then in the second part we are going to create images. We use a novel product for that and it creates images. An image for each of these different forms such as the dual boot form or the single Linux workplace. Then for all that we clone computers that will eventually be installed in the several departments and that run specific scripts. The university has a class B network and that's subdivided on all kinds of smaller networks have their own IP addresses, ranges of IP addresses, have their own system administrators and all these new kinds of specific things that must be fine tuned, must be tweaked for that particular situation. That happens in the first boot period and from there you have a running ideal boot or running Linux workplace. And that is an eventual working place for either a student's workplace or it is a working place or a staff member depending on where the person is working. And then if you look at what you have then you have something that is not a standalone system as such. But this computer talks with all these kinds of supporting systems around it. That's why all these arrows running towards these installed computers. For example, the basic system administrative work software is installed in these computers. The user's home directories, they tend to be roaming and that means that if you log into this computer you have your home directory. So all the home directories and user's own unpacking software will be available there as well. Then authentication takes place using the LDAP. That's a spelling error. That's the LDAP system. But what we do for authentication is we immediately go to the root credentials and it's hash form into the working place computer so just in case this one goes down you can still log in here. Then we have remote services and remote administration that we use all these kinds of products for. And the fact that it says you know well my print doesn't mean that it has to be well but that's what Jürgen made when he created this picture for me. Then there's a service desk that can talk with the users here and give them help if they are running through problems. There are all kinds of statistics being collected and being used. You can immediately see if a computer is being used where it is located who is using that computer and if you are for example a student and you would like to find a working place you call the help desk and say I would like to have a living workplace where do I find the nearest help desk and where are you located right now I'm here ok if you go down to that one there's that computer and it's available for you. Very helpful. So that's the system. Now how flexible it is. So we have a living working place and it's being created how flexible it is not complete. It cannot be complete. You have like 30,000 people and all these people have their specific wishes and things like that but we think that a living workplace will be asymptotically complete in the sense that once somebody asks for a particular package whether it exists or not it will be added to our standard in the working place. So tomorrow's standard is a super set of today's standard and to cook Larry Wall the good thing about standards is that there are so many of them and indeed we have tomorrow our standard and we have today. Every added package every new package will be added to the system. That's very good. How do you do that? Well there are basically three ways to do that. You can, as an ordinary user, say I have this program and it's great I would like to have that into the standard living working place. Now there are two routes. The formal route is to file a request at the service desk and then eventually it winds up into a living working place but it is much faster and much smarter to go to Urion and say hey Urion you are running a project could you help me out and do that program into the LVP? Yeah, fine, good, let's do it and it will be there in an hour or so. If you are a more experienced user you can have pseudo route access. That means you get the right to run a script from your computer on that controls the organization of the software and the repositories and makes sure that that request package becomes embedded in the living working place. And then there are these kind of super users that are so trusted that they can be given direct access to the route partitions of these mirrors and repositories. That's good. If you're in that then you can photograph and you can change all the things around but you are trusted and of course you don't do them. Very nice. So that's it. Is that all? No, that is not all. I already mentioned George Dunchef and this picture of this little squirrel I found all his Facebook slides. We've seen George earlier in the earliest slide so we now have a problem we don't know if he looks like the one in the earliest slide or if this is the one he looks like. The other one here is Tony Menzil and we can verify his picture because he's sitting over there in the room. There he is. And both George and Tony have been extremely helpful and willing to support me in creating the Debian packages that I have been creating over time and I'll give a short overview and some more extensive overviews of the packages. To teach programming languages one of the languages that we teach is the C++ language and for that since the early 90s already we use a document that has been enlarged and grows over the years which is called the C++ annotation which is now a Debian package as well. And yet on that programming course my students learn how to create their own grammars and for that I created a C++ parser generator just like Bison but now specifically aiming at the creation of C++ source parts. I've been writing various tools ITMATE which is a major technology XD which is actually a very nice little tool it's an abbreviation for X++ directory change and you can do something like XDULB and then XD will change directly for you to, for example, use a local bin very nice, very addictive and I don't think I could survive if I cannot use XD anymore. And then Yodel and Stealth Yodel is what we do in the Alps but it's also something else and I have two somewhat extensive examples of these products, Yodel and Stealth. Yodel is a meta pre-documented language and it can be used to write all kinds of documents in a very simple way and I've given you an example of how to create a manual page using Yodel and one of the things that you see here that all the meta characters that you use in a meta language they're only parentheses but it's a special meta character in the sense that if it is not used as a meta character then it's just a parentheses so that's nice, you don't have to do special escape things and that kind of thing and if you do something like that you just write what you would like to do in plain text and then eventually you get something like for example HTML or you get later or you get plain text or you get a geofile this one, if you use it to create a manual page you get a geofile and it comes out like that it's a perfect manual page and all the manual pages that you will see in the Debian products that I have been creating they're all made using Yodel and it's a jiffy it's absolutely nothing to do with it we do it for big documents as well but I'll spare you the illustration you should read in the manual page now, here if you look at the linkage working place try to extend that try to extend what's going on there to the whole universe then you will agree with me that there are many many systems that must be in a pristine stage the software in there must be okay hackers, the bad guys will try to improve at some point in the systems and we try to chase them away but at some point they will succeed what are hackers doing when they are into your system they change things no matter what way you look at it they will change things so the idea that we at some point had was why don't you have a program that verifies the integrity of the essential software and that's what stealth is doing normally what you do, you have all these kinds of standard frequent uploads you check your logs you do a default deny all these standard security no worse comes to you and the hacker really enters your computer how do you track the hacker how files don't tell you that something has happened if he comes through the default deny policy if you have upgraded to your latest software, what do you do you run stealth the SSA space trust enforcement required through a locally trusted home now I want you to look closely at that expansion of the word stealth and you will understand that it took me quite some time to find this meaning for the word stealth and yes it did it is an open source file integrity check and the core idea fortunately is not mine so I can proclaim it here in all absence of any modesty what you do is you create a fingerprint of the current state now many integrity checkers do that so that's nothing new that's what you do you detect modifications of the fingerprint many integrity checkers do that and then you separate this is new the state info from the target computers that are being checked so your fingerprints and the handling of the comparisons are not taking place on the computers that are being checked for their integrity so this is the setup we have a stealth monitor we have SSH connections we have several client computers that may be connected to the internet and that's it several I wrote two here but that may also be 200 or too fast very good we only need one stealth monitor and also we would like to have this system as separated as possible from the internet there shouldn't be any incoming connection into that computer only outgoing connections so that's so what do we do about it the fingerprints that we get from the software here is maintained on this computer and there are no specific things on these computers that hit to the fact stealth is being used to detect the integrity of the software of these client machines a client machine could be a server it could be a user computer it could be a Linux worker it could be a repository the stealth monitor computer itself is inaccessible if you want to access that computer you have to go to its console and login as a user and then you have access but there is no way to access the computer from a distant location interesting thing is that again different from existing file integrity checkers that nothing is pre-specified by stealth that adds to its stealthy characteristics if you would like to use this kind of software to verify the integrity or inspect or generate these statistics you do that that is fine you could use FIND you could use MD5 some or SHA256 some all these kinds of software that are available you could use those software to verify what the actual state is on your client computers now in order to do that it is clear that if you are using all the client computers programs like FIND or these Hashem computer software that that software must of course be in a performance stage as well so that we can do it we can check locally whether the state of that software that is used there is still intact so we can inspect vital software locally and finally normally you would do a self run or something that you would like to do every once in a while using a drone job but even that could be a hook that is used by the attacker to see whether something is going on if always at a certain moment in time FIND is running or the Hash is computed of files then the hacker might start to think isn't there something real going on so we can change this in such a way that the stealth runs themselves are not predictable then they start at any moment in time you can say to a stealth do for example for example in the first 20 minutes of every hour do a check or do a check once every hour it is up to you to decide to do that you have complete freedom to specify when in what interval you would like to do these integrity checks and it is easy to configure that so let me give an example here is what you do to check the integrity of the system sent you ID files you have some arguments that you would like to specify with the FIND command where you say I'm interested in the SUID you and group flags for the user root or the group root and those arguments are being added to the FIND command where this one is replaced by what I wrote here and for that you run the Shalonson program and that one is being run for all the SUID files and the logs are being sent using a secure connection to the stealth module and what you can get is these kinds of reports for example the hacker added a file he added a file user root perm I didn't do that there is no package called user root perm and suddenly it appears who has done that this is his hash it wasn't there to begin with and not only that the bastard also removed his bin Unix check password he removed that one why did he do that? I don't care but he did it and we have to take measures to prevent him using it and of course this is a nice one he modified the login program into a cooked version of his own all this information you get automatically and it's very hard for an hacker to detect we've been using stealth now for several years and all our important systems and it runs as a chart perfect so that's it as an age based trust enforcement and then somebody hacked through the screen required this is a locally trusted host of course because you have to trust his computer to do all these funny things on your client computers connections are as age based and it is trust enforcement so that's the system and that's how it got its name that's a bad new product it's been there for I don't know how long it's one of the first things I think of the project so conclusions there's a worldwide interest right now and I can say worldwide because we know that because of that Washington organization there's a worldwide interest in open source products you can use that to convince your managers or decision makers that they really should I don't say switch to but at least consider changing to open source products as we've seen as we've seen for example from that hack that we had thank you monocultural operating systems are inherently dangerous it's not only the case in software it is also the case in agriculture and in intensive farming and all kinds of things last year we had in the Netherlands a case of the Q fever with goats and that resulted in the killing of I think 20 or 30 thousand goats where more than half of them had no fever at all and that's called preventive cleaning up I think that's preventive killing and I have some other strong feelings about that that I'm not going to share here because I might offend people but in private I could say the university of Cronin by now has an alternative not to killing goats but to using a working that's the way it works and the nice thing about that is that it is an alternative we are not enforcing people into using Linux no we are offering them a choice we are offering them a choice you can be continuing using that bastard system that you've been using over years but you'll have much more fun if you at least consider switching to something else like what we did like 15 years ago when we decided not to go into the high Sierras but into the desert that being a package is of such good quality people you have an idea how good it is because you are all dead in force Jürgen told me that he has been working for five years intensively creating that limit work like thing upgrade or upgrade and over those five years he didn't have a single problem with dependencies with software that didn't work with things that broke when you upgraded to a new version of Debian it works perfectly there is no other system that does it so well and actually that was the main reason why the university decided to start using Debian as its main system rather than for example a system like Red Hat so we covered the things that I intended to do why should we use open source I told you a bit about the reasons why we wanted to switch to a Linux working place I told you a bit how that is organized you now know what kind of products we are running I gave you some examples and some conclusions and there is only one thing left for me to do and that is to thank you for your attention that's it now I wrote for some questions thanks for the talking description I'm curious about you sort of describe the deployment scenarios I'm curious you could describe a little bit about the maintenance approaches for instance if you are using configuration management tools for once the machines have been deployed how do you keep them up to date is it just a rewrite process to reinstall or I think you do that the way I'm not sure because you actually over asking me but I think from what I understand from what Jurgen told me is that they do what you always do and that is you do an update and an upgrade every once in a while and make sure that you have the reason software and if upstream in our own repositories changed something then that software is being redeployed and we have the let me see if I can go back to those slides no there's the unattended install and then you have the next slide remember where the installation takes place there's also something where you can at the third slide I think that was visible where you can remove system administration and system maintenance that is the situation where the administrator is able to draw from the repositories and spread the new software over the distributed limit working places is that an answer to your question? there will be a puppet for the further session coming up later in the conference that I think you might be interested in talking about puppets configuration management system I know that we are using several long W2 tools right now Jurian also told me that he had some problems finding the right tools in the W standard software but things changed and maybe right now there are appropriate tools for example one of the things that is going to be changed is that we are using SIFS right now to mount the user home directories and that will be changed shortly into NFS version 4 so things like that changed we tried to do SIFS for home directories at University of Connecticut we tried to do SIFS for user home directories at University of Connecticut we had trouble with window managers they create some sort of block files or some special files that didn't support did you have that problem and if so how would you work on that I don't think so because we are talking about Linux we are talking about Linux Linux creates like GNOME and KDE creates some special files in the home directories and SIFS doesn't support that so it may be that Jurian told me that he had several problems with indeed SIFS he didn't explicitly go into the problems at most there was simply no time to do everything and he said but I don't care I'm not going to solve that right now we are trying to get away around it maybe I can give you here address and you could contact him anyway and he said I don't care because we are going to switch to NFS level 4 shortly anyway so why invest money into NFS does that bother us to answer your question if you would like to have Jurian SIFS come to me and I'll give you an answer thank you so this is sort of pointless but yeah that is a no problem if you run into that with open NFS as well I recommend looking at NFS before you decide for sure to do NFS before there are features both ways but NFS is also open source project also with Demian we had a little video syncretic in some respects but it gives you management capabilities that NFS doesn't have but yeah it's a no problem with file systems that don't really like special devices I'm pretty sure there's a way to change it in the known configuration to use it in a different directory to store that stuff and then you just stick that somewhere on a little disk to store just those session sockets and leave the rest of the stuff out of the user's home directory okay thank you I think that was another question I'm just wondering in the university setting I haven't seen anyone training Debian developers do you have any plans for well we had George come over to train us using the package constructions and things like that and most of our core system administrators prefer Debian anyway so they are pretty well versed in using Debian and then I know how it goes there's a new guy coming in and he's learning from the existing people and then he can do it as well and he can read also most Dutch people can read so they read the manual and they can do things that the other guys could do also I'm kidding this lightly but you know what I mean it's not that much was that answer your question you're welcome to visit us I mean come to us and talk to your in person and see what he did or also if I can give you his address and you can contact him I'm sure he's happy to write back to you okay great clients but we should break up and people who want to go to another talk can go and we can wait for people to come on hours


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the three talking points from Everton One West Ham United, the three at Goodersham Park today. West Ham have came with no points and have left with all three. Four defeats out of four for them before they arrived at Goodersham Park today. We went into the game full of confidence and Everton did it for one to the better three. But the three things I'm going to talk about firstly is Dominic Calvert doing on the left hand side just never way, never ever way. I just don't think he's good enough full stop at the moment. I don't think he's good enough to play off the left hand side or where he's going to. I don't understand why managers persist doing a cumin did it, Aladais done it, Silver's done it. He doesn't offer enough, he gives us no width whatsoever and it's not his natural game. So we're watching a player struggle in a position, putting a performance that I thought was woeful to be honest with you. But he's not in his right position anyway and he's a young lad laying in his trade. I don't understand it. We've got players who can play there. I don't understand why, why persist with it. It didn't work against Huddersfield. Okay, he's a good header. Don't get me wrong. But it didn't work against Huddersfield. It really didn't work and now we've had Huddersfield at home and West Ham at home. Two teams without being disrespectful to them. There were two home games we looked at as fans and went two victories and we're going to be right up there. We took one point out of six, really poor, really poor. I can't help thinking that if we had a natural player who plays in that position out there it would have saved us so much better. I just think it needs to stop. You can't have so many wide players not used to put them square pegs in round holes. Let's sway that. Let's sack it until there's really no other choice. We've got what to do that because we're having to patch a team. That wasn't the case today. Bains could have played left back and Dean out there. We could have had Bernard out there. We could have had Luckman out there. There was options today and the manager chose a different route and it didn't work. It didn't work at all. So let's sway the call of it looming on wide. Let's hope that that is the end of it and we never see it rear. It's ugly-ted again. Second thing I want to talk about is the two defence of midfield plays. Basically just a make-up of Armedfield. It doesn't work. Quite simply, it doesn't work. Obviously we haven't got Andre Gomes fit yet. We don't know when that's going to be. You know with a muscle injury. He was jogging, he was out on the grass, he was passing and then he got into the game. So he knows he could be out for two weeks, he could be out for three months. We don't know but that midfield make-up isn't right. Again, it's too slow. It's too slow. Sigarton's too slow to play in the same midfield I think with Snideland if it's Garner. Garner's not good enough on the ball and Snideland's immobile. So one of them is not saying they're not good players because I think all three of them actually are good players. I think Snideland is just doing his job. I think if you put him in the team with two quick lads in there with him, I think it takes the pressure off him and he can just get the ball and knock it and keep things ticking over. Nobody carries the ball. Guilfe is a clever footballer. He sees things, he passes, he's got great ability from Deborah to say that. But he's not quick enough. He can't go through the gears and I think Garner could play on his own if you put people with him but he leaves his position. But he's having a lot of the ball Garner. I'd be interested in when I do the tactics show later in the week to have a look just how much Garner had the ball and how many side and back passes he gives because he has a lot of the ball Garner but doesn't use it well. When did he last make an assist? When did he create something? Doesn't he feel he has to be able to do that as you go higher? The big thing for me today, the key worry for me today, yes, technically trying to create chances it was poor but what really worried me was Mark Noble just out ran on three of my field players and that is embarrassing to me because he's bang average if that. Damage field that I looked at on paper was like deckling rice, decent young lad, obyang, not in a million years and Mark Noble. I was thinking all that would be all over this and they weren't and I had to go fair play to Westam, fair play to Rice, fair play to, obyang didn't really do anything but noble had a really good game for them. So, really disappointing, the make-up of arm of field is really boring and it's not Mark O Silver's fault but that scenario needs to look at. One player who's fault it isn't is Tom Davis. He gets sick when he's in arm of field for not doing, creating things, when he's not there you see that they're still just as bad at creating anything or competing, at least Tom gets an arm of pitching compete. So, there's a real issue there for me, I don't know how we combat it, it looked slightly better when Guilty went alongside Garner in the second half but I don't know. I mean it was a flip of a coin of Garner or Snadlin who came off wasn't it, so I don't know. I don't know, I don't know but really that's an area that we need to solve for me. I look at our neighbours and I see them, Champions League final, finishing a top form when a botan in the field and you're like, we're still here with them in the field from Cuman and there you go. And finally, very quickly, I'm going to harp on about this but Jeng Towson and his massive lack of confidence because that's what it is at the moment. He's showing all the signs of a centre forward that isn't scoring goals. Quite frankly, he's going further back, he's not in the right areas, he's missing opportunities that he would certainly have hit the target with last season. The header in the first half was really poor, great ball from Lucas Dean, it was a fabulous cross and Guilty scores a header for me a much more difficult chance. And then in the second half, the one that broke to him in the box in four yards out me blazed it over the bar, alright it was 3-1. But there was still about 20 minutes left when he done that and blazed it. It's a player with no confidence so do we take him out the team now and sit him on the bench and go look.  Will that damage him? I don't know. But do we keep him in because he's not going in the right areas and hope that he plays through it? I'm not sure. Will he benefit from having the Charleston back? Of course he will because we're quicker in the transitions and the Charleston's extra. Will the team benefit at the moment from the Charleston going through the middle and playing Bernard who was extra when he came on, maybe bringing Cenk out of it for the bit and giving Cenk 20-25 minutes towards the end of games? I don't know. But he's certainly lacking in confidence and that's certainly a bit of food for thought I think for the manager. So there you go. There are my three talking points from today. Very, very, very, very disappointing afternoon at Godderson Park. We've lost our first game of the season and the start is now poor. You have to say that six points out of possible 15 is really poor when the start we've had and we've had three home games against teams that we would have expected to take nine points from. So really disappointing. What can we do? There are my three talking points. Make sure you watch all of my reactions. If you haven't subscribed, please do so if you want more videos. Get over to Patreon. Thanks for watching. See you soon.


All right, Patricia writes, excuse me, Nicole writes, question. If you lost someone almost a couple years ago and you're out of the depression funk, is it safe to date again? I feel better today in a long time. If you lost someone close to you. You know, it's interesting as I'm reading this, I'm thinking of my son who passed away. There he is, Connor. And I remembered I actually was dating, or I was putting myself out there, quite frankly. I was in so much pain and I just wanted some attention. I wanted some love. It was as if my heart got ripped out. And it was hard, you know, and I wanted, it was like that line from the movie Jerry Maguire. I need you to complete me. I wanted someone and I was almost desperately dating. And interestingly enough, I was talking about him as well. Thinking I was healed, it took me, it took a couple of years to actually let go of the idea that on some level he even abandoned me. Isn't that terrible to think I thought he abandoned me? And so there's no doubt there is a time to heal. Now I wanna share with you a quick story. Not everybody needs that per se. I know a woman who just started dating a man. She was one month into dating a man. And she also lost her son named Connor. I've known three women who've lost children named Connor. Can you believe that? All right around my Connor's age, 1920, 18, 19 or 20. It's just terrible. And she just started dating a man and she could have easily collapsed and thankfully he leaned into the relationship as a support person in her life. And eventually they actually got married. It brought them two closer together because she could be her most authentic, vulnerable, transparent self. She was radically honest with him. Ladies, I'm such a big proponent of genuine radical honesty because that creates intimacy into me. You see, if you're not familiar with the book, Emotional Intimacy by Robert Masters. I highly recommend checking this out because what relationships are lacking today is real intimacy, real, because people feel emotionally unsafe. So just in general, men and women alike feel emotionally unsafe because the number one emotional health issue, excuse me, is I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable and I'm not likable. And dating triggers that wound like nobody's business. So coming back to your original question, you lost someone very special to you. I certainly believe that a year or two of just grieving and experiencing the pain actually better prepares you for when someone special comes in your life because most likely my hope is you'll learn to appreciate. Here's the thing that lost us. It creates genuine appreciation. I want you to think about this for a moment.   I know I have. And usually three days later, I go back to my patterning. Patterning, loss temporarily creates this place of appreciation, a place of humbleness. And so there is a, the beauty of loss is maybe we don't operate from our ego as much and we can operate from more of a heart-centered space. This is why ladies, I'm so tired of the dating rhetoric centered around men must do this and women must do that.  I remember buying this book and reading it in two hours. I've never read a book from cover to cover in one day. And this one, I couldn't stop. I just fell in love with the messaging in this book because it's all about how to connect with someone in a heart-centered space. And sadly and thankfully loss actually humbles us. It takes us out of our ego and into our heart. And so thank you, Connor.  You inspired this book and I wanna thank you for that. And I wanna thank you because you allow me through this experience to be a better coach. And I think that's what loss does because it connected me more to my heart. And my hope for you as well, Nicole, it's connected to your heart. And I hope you're ready to go out and meet a great guy to begin a juicy, delicious, healthy relationship with someone. Giving you lots of love and giving you a big, gigantic job and bear hug of love as well. Thanks so much for that question. All right, we have time for one more today. If you'd like to purchase a super sticker, super chat. Nicole just said, I got your book. It's great. Thank you so much.


Private prisons privately run companies whose sole revenue source is locking people up They use campaign contributions and lobbying to make sure we're incarcerating more people than ever So they can make more money than ever privately run prisons rake in about three billion dollars a year Yeah, here's the problem private prison companies by definition need to put people in jail in order to turn a profit these Sorry mom make money by charging taxpayers per person per day in prison like a hotel They're using our corrupt political system to do it and they're growing the prison industry grew 1600% between 1990 and 2010 they're turning our tax dollars into their profits with this simple three-step process Private prison corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America and Geo group use their lobbyists to help raise money to reelect popular incumbents in state and federal elections Democrat Republican doesn't matter they pick candidates who are likely to win and donate enough money to ensure That they get a seat at the negotiating table when it comes time to start writing laws Next they hire lobbyists to write laws that make sure their prisons stay full regardless of what's actually best for public safety The nonpartisan Justice Policy Institute did some digging to find out exactly what this looks like reports as quote over the years These political strategies have allowed private prison companies to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration And thus greater profit margins for their company Once private prisons have buttered up politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying they get everything from lucrative state contracts to new Horsher laws that lock up more people for lesser crimes with longer minimum sentences Nearly every prison deal includes a bed mandate that requires the state to fill 90 to 100% of the beds in privately owned detention facilities It's what we do with the private prisons in Arizona Essentially, we promise them that whether their beds are empty or full We will pay for X amount of guys in their prisons really really think about this for a second These companies are buying political influence to actually change criminal law not because it you know makes the public more safe or anything like that But because their entire profit model depends on it And this sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories But CCA the biggest private prison company in the country openly admitted as much in its 2014 annual reports Which we're just gonna go ahead and quote directly here quote Any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested Convicted and sentenced thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them So if you're someone who thinks the war on drugs is a disaster And we should stop throwing nonviolent drug offenders in jail Or if you're sick of a mass incarceration system that targets racial and ethnic minorities and praise on the economically Disadvantaged or if you want to stop locking people up in inhumane facilities that cut costs by slashing security and medical care And lock up children then too bad because it means lower profits for private prisons And if you're someone who likes the idea of letting the private sector handle government services in a more efficient and cost-effective way bad news It turns out that private prisons don't actually save any money at all a recent review of more than 40 studies found that Ohio New Mexico, Florida, Georgia and Arizona all huge private prison states fail to see any of the savings that were promised by Private prison companies. In fact the only study we were able to find that showed private prisons save taxpayers a significant amount of money was funded by wait for it Private prison companies. So to recap the private prison industry is growing thanks to a corrupt political system This will keep happening as long as special interests can use lobbyists and campaign money to buy influence with lawmakers And as with any political issue you can find the root cause by following the money And like us on Facebook to get all the latest updates from anti-corruption land You can also click right here to learn more about joining the thousands of volunteers who are fighting right now to pass a wave of tough New anti-corruption laws in cities and states across the country. I am Monsoor and zip and we are represent us Thank you so much for watching and have a lovely morning afternoon or evening I think that covers all of it, right or mid-day or Hey, there's a behind-the-scenes look At how we prepare for our end videos movie magic


Welcome to the Daily Decrypt, your home for currency competition. I'm your host Amanda B. Johnson and today's episode is brought to you by BitShares. Andrew Stone is a member of the development team of Bitcoin Unlimited, a reference client which seeks to scale Bitcoin with bigger blocks and guide it with an alternative governance model. The Daily Decrypt reached out to Andrew after hearing about unlimited's newest development called Thin Blocks. Thin Blocks is a network optimization on the blocks. It allows them to be sent using a lot fewer bytes. And the basic idea is the Bitcoin client today essentially has two different protocols running within the PTP network and they don't really communicate to each other. One is the transaction protocol and one is the block protocol. So if a transaction comes in, it just forwards it to everyone. If a block comes in, it forwards it to everyone. These are completely separate. And then what miners do of course is they take the transactions from the transaction level and they mine a block and produce a block, right? But Peter Shipper, who's the author of this and I think Mike Hearn actually created an initial cut at it had the observation that most of the transactions in a block are already at all the nodes because the transactions have already been passed in this transaction layer in what's called the memory pool. And so rather than passing all the transactions inside a block, the observation was we should just pass like a hash of the transaction which is essentially an ID of the transaction. So that can be like 256 bits, right? Or in the extreme block case, we just crushed that down to 64 bits. And so you end up with huge savings in block sizes because you're essentially just passing a pointer to the transactions instead of the transactions themselves. We'd heard thin blocks mentioned in relation to the great hashing power which resides behind the Great Firewall of China or GFC which is geographically enforced internet censorship. We were appointed to this censorship as a potential problem in miners' abilities to relay increasingly large blocks. We asked Andrew if thin blocks could indeed provide a solution and if so, how? Presumably most of the transactions originate from outside of China just because there are more people outside of China than are inside, right? So all those transactions have to enter China, right? And then be put in blocks and turn around and come back out again, right? But there's absolutely no point for that to happen, right? We could just have the transactions come in and then send back out a reference to those transactions waiting just outside of the, you know, GFC, right? So actually what we're planning to do as one of our next steps is to extend our relay network into inside mainland China. This is a concert shout-out from ChangeTip, a team that's upgrading their popular social tipping service to give users control of their own Bitcoin private keys. In other words, ChangeTip is becoming a hot wallet for both web and mobile. You can open your own ChangeTip account or request an invite to test the private beta at changetip.com. Andrew reports that the Bitcoin Unlimited team will soon be setting up a donation address to help fund the placement and maintenance of their thin block relaying node in Beijing. And what about cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin? Could they also benefit from potential incorporation of thin blocks? Yeah, I mean, it could be pulled into any Satoshi client, right? Anything that's forked off of the fundamental client, including, you know, classic and core, right? Got it. Yeah. Or any cryptocurrency. You can learn more about the developments coming from Andrew and his team by visiting bitcoinunlimited.info. Today's episode is brought to you by BitShares, a delegated proof-of-stay currency with three-second block times. The BitShares wallet is also home to a decentralized exchange where profit-sharing tokens from exchanges like CCEDK and MetaExchange are traded without requiring traders to give up their private keys. You can learn more at bitShares.org and have a censorship-resistant day.


I love it, all right, joining us now. It's been 11 years in the NBA, nine of those in the nation's capital, five time all star, one time all NBA. John Wall joining us from University of Miami. Is that where you are right now? What's going on down there? Yeah, this is where I work out every day at University of Miami. So yeah, I'm here in the background. I just finished a workout. I like that. That's like, that's a great optics, my boy. I love it. Yeah, sir. Well, we want to get, we want to pick your brain all things that are happening to leave right now. The big story, I guess, that came out of the weekend was the James Harden going to the Clippers, just like he had predicted. You played with Kauai and PG last season. Tell us how you think this is all going to fit together.  For me, it seemed like both sides got what they wanted and they just got to see and see how it works out for everybody. So the big thing that, I mean, Lou has been saying it from the beginning. He's like, you do not bench Russ. You just try to do this all together. Everybody starts. Is that what you would do or would you decide you got to bench one of them? I think you just got to keep Russ in the starting line of ball. So, you know what I mean? He's been playing well. He found his pojo back. A lot of people have written them off. You can see he's back happy and playing basketball the way that we know Russ has been playing that most of his whole career. You know, I think he is a great leadership and his competitiveness, you can tell he leads on to all the other guys. That was my, that was my whole thing, John, for the last couple of seasons, it looked like Russ has been trying to find his footing. He's been trying to find somewhere he can call home and get into a groove where he can play at a high level. Now he's playing at a high level. Why disrupt that? Yeah, for sure. I see you watched last night. You played at a high level. You make open shots for him in trying to run their team. And I think he's been great for him to see a smile back on his face. First of all, Jimmy. John, you know. Got other shams. Oh, there you are, Shams, my bad. John, you played for the Clippers last year.  What's your mindset? What do you, what do you think about your NBA future and how bad are you trying to get back in the league? Well, I still love the game. I still love to grind and getting up every day, doing core workouts, doing conditioning, weightlifting. I like to go for a nice bike ride throughout the city of Miami like I used to back in DC. And I believe I still got a lot left in the tank. I just being patient and working out and staying ready. And I know how much I want to still play. I know how much my agent, Rich Paul, is pushing to try to get something to happen. You just got to stay ready. I'm not giving up on myself. And I feel like I can help a team win.   For sure, for sure. We got to get up. Yeah, we got to get up. And I hate that you're not in the league right now because there's definitely teams that can use you.  There's backup point guards that I still think you can play at a higher level. But if there was one team right now, they called and said, come play for us.  Or are you pretty much over? No, no, I want a job. So I'm over for any job that come my way, to be honest. I feel like, because I just feel like in the past, you know, like I made mistakes of saying certain things and then doing stuff off the court that kind of put a character out there. People, how people think they look at John Wall, that's not me, but I can set my mistakes and my ability to identify the past. And for me, I'm past that. I'm a father of two boys and a stepdaughter. So I look at being a father as much as I can and loving the game. So I know how much I love the game, how much I can impact the game with either playing or just being a vet and being alluded to the young guys. Cause I think a league needs that. A lot of young guys need a lot of vets on their team to kind of mentor them and tell them the things we went through and what the league is all about.  I want to do something else. But lately it's become so public and loud. You got Dame Lillard, Harden, Kyrie, all that good stuff. When you're watching this outside looking in, what is your take on the way things are being done these days? Hey man, whatever makes these people happy that I'm all for, you know, for me, like I was, when I first came in, I always said I wanted to play for one team for my whole career. And that's something I pride in myself off of. Giving DC everything I had. And then I ended up getting traded to Houston, played there for two years and then got bought out and then I ended up being with the Clippers. So I think just forever, whatever you feel like is best for you in your career, cool. I know everybody wants to compete at a high level and try to be loyal as much as possible. Johnny, like you said, you spent so much time in Washington through the ups and the downs, the adversity. Even when it got rocky at the end, have you ever been a guy to ask for a trade? No, no, like me, I wanted to stick it out, figure it out, you know what I mean? Like I feel like DC was me. Like I was all of DC, you know, Lou Ballin against you for years there in the playoffs. I just felt like what I brought to the city and what I brought to the fan base and just everything I gave on the court just playing through injuries and all that. I never wanted to be outside of that journey, but you know, things happen and you move past that and you look for whatever's next for you in the future. You mentioned the, traded by the Wizards for us. Is it true, like how did you find out you were getting traded? Is it true that it was a DM sent by Russ? No, me and Russ just talked, we was cool. You know what I mean? Then we got a conversation after that and then I talked to the front office people. That, so, cause I'm always fascinated by how, how you guys find out like, oh, you are moving now and you're going to another place. Like if you would have stayed in DC, do you think about what could have been, what would have been? For sure, like I never wanted to leave. You know what I mean? But things happened. But like when I knew I was getting traded, Tommy Shepherd had gave me a text message and said, please call that night when I was watching games. And then we talked on the phone and we told him what happened and you moved forward from there. John, your guy, Brad, was traded to the Suns over the summer. He hasn't made his debut yet, but what, what do you think he brings to the Suns? How good do you think he can be for that group? Oh, we got three guys that can get 30 or 40 any given night. You know what I mean? So I think just with them is about just getting on the court. You know, most important throughout the whole league is staying healthy. We all know that. And just seeing how they gel together. You know what I mean? Like we've seen a little snippet of like one or two games I think in preseason. But that's why you have a long NBA season to try to get where you can find out where you're going to fit it in on the West.  Would you be interested in a reunion with Brad? Obviously that's a team in Phoenix that only has one standard point guard on the roster. They're playing with Brad at different points once he's back as a starting point guard. But would you be interested in a reunion? For sure. Yeah. Like for sure. That's what I was hoping for in D.C. in one different ways. But me and Brad are still brothers. We still talk a lot. You know, a lot of people always want to make us like we're not cool with each other. That's the reason why things happen. But we still have conversations. We still talk a lot. And I congratulate them on moving there and hope the best for them. And hopefully we can finally win them a championship. But yeah, I would definitely, if I could join their team for sure, I would love that. Honestly, that Phoenix situation to me makes the most sense. I think you'd be perfect. They literally have one true point guard on that team and the way you play, I think it'd be a perfect fit. But moving on to DeMarcus' cousins, we had him on the show. We know he's one of a kind. You play with him at Kentucky. I think you live with him. How was that experience? What was that like? Any funny stories? And how was it like living with Boogie? Oh man, a lot of funny stories. I met Boogie at 13 at Nationals. Oh, you met at Nationals or whatever. You came cool since then and every time with the camps and stuff, we said we was going to play in college together. He was my roommate.  And at night, he got listening to slow jams to go to sleep. I liked to watch sports and I'm like, bro, I'm not listening to slow jams with a seven foot guard. He's Boogie cousins. He likes to watch them out to some slow jams before he goes over the R&B, a wonderful visual. He's an R&B guy. He's a big teddy bear. On the court, he tried to like, I like he's not, but he's a big teddy bear on the court, man. He loves slow jams.  I kind of love the visual of that. Okay, so you're from Raleigh and then you chose Kentucky and you had told the story about going to North Carolina and then Tyler Hansboro and it was a whole thing where he just basically ignored you. He now earlier this week has said, does it remember anything like that happening? Doesn't remember you coming to campus. What is the story here? What went down? There was an unofficial visit, so it wasn't official. So, you know, back then it wasn't social media and all that and I didn't take official visits. You know, I'm right in the street 30 minutes away. So I went up there, watched them practice and went to a football game and stuff like that. But, you know, let him say what he gotta say. And you gotta know, you gotta know Psycho T. You gotta know him. He's, he lives his own, his own style. Let me, let me ask you this, John. Former Kentucky player, Shea Gilgis Alexander. He's getting a lot of love, a lot of MVP talk right now. Can Shea go down as one of the best players to come out of Kentucky? If not the best. What's your opinion? For sure, a thousand percent. Like, I knew Shea was good, but I feel like Shea's got a lot better and he's more quicker than I thought. You know what I mean? Like in college he didn't look like that explosive in that quickness, but he's definitely got better. And like, you're not double teaming them up. You're in for a long night, I can tell you that. And I feel like they got a great young core around them. All the pieces they're at it. And I kind of heard y'all saying like, I feel like they can move check to the four and give them a five man kind of like the Spurs are doing with Wimby. I think they'll definitely be a dangerous team because I like Giddy. I like Doord. I like Jaden Williams. I like their team a lot. You know, he's my CTV. You know what I mean? You got to watch him, bro. He's very gifted talent. And he's shooting 50% getting like 30 a game and it's not all layups. It's mid range, stepbacks, threes, whatever you need. I got to miss my MVP pick this year. Yeah. Hey, you're not wrong. You can't be a sleeper. There's not a sleeper no more. You know what I mean?  They know about Shea. They know that team is coming. And if they can be like a top five, top four team in the West, they can mess around and win it. I'm going to go rogue here, John. Oh, dear. I want to go rogue here. I wanted, this isn't the question I'm supposed to ask. I want to know in your opinion, who are the best five Kentucky Wildcats? What's your starting lineup? Oh, yeah. I want to spot. Man, that's a good, you know what? Position, position by position. Yeah, because I feel like the NBA, all NBA should go by position by position like they used to.  For me, I'm going near the point. I'm going Jamal in my... Isn't going to be the best Kentucky Wildcat. She is out already. He's out. No, no, no. Pick one, he's out. I'm putting them at the two. No, no, no, no. But as you and my two. All right. Be Brooke at my three. Yeah. That's a good deal. AD at my four. And Brooke at my five. That's a nasty five. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's a nasty five. See, like to me, I'm going to tell you why it's tough to say because now Deere and Fox at the level he's at now. True. See, people forget about Deere and Fox. Like he's at the level he's at now. So it's like, he could be a front-runner for MVP or that can be one of those top teams and like, you know what he's been doing to team.  Yeah, that's exactly.  Like it's, even though he's done quite well in the game so far this season, but he's one of those guys that it's a love hate thing and there's nothing in between. Why do you think that is? Oh, I think AD, you want to say gifted, bro. He has everything you need.  If the fan can shoot dribble pass. I just think, you know, at times sometimes they say he goes missing and that's what a lot of people credit him off of. Like he have a good game and he goes missing and they have another good game and then he have a stretch or then he might get injured. But you know, injury is a part of the game and sometimes the game plan changes. So he has to be feeling where he can. I just feel like when he's more aggressive, the leg is a lot better, when he's super aggressive. John, a serious question. The John Wall dance, does that come out to play ever? Man, I don't know. I ain't been doing that in so long, but it'd be funny to see people do it, man. That was so long ago, I was a kid, like no social media, just having fun, happy to be in college and be on the biggest stage. You know what I mean? Kids from Lue know what I'm talking about. And I think you have an opportunity to be on that level. I remember watching Lue when he was on MTV careers back in the day, when he was at Sao Guinness. So I know how special he was and we built the bond of being brothers. So, no, I never thought it would get to that level.  But I think when I dug in my first game, it was against Lue, and then we played field game at home. You are synonymous with the dug-in. Yeah. That is your dance. Because Brawny just did it the other day. I'm for they midnight madness, and they was like, who won the competition? I was like, Brawny didn't know what he was doing. No. John, thank you so much. I know you can get back to your workout. We appreciate the time very much. Good luck, bro. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, bro. Yes, indeed.


My fellow Americans, this afternoon I thought I'd brief you on important changes that have taken place recently in our administration and on our agenda for the months to come. To begin with, every administration has its own national security team, the group of officials who assist the president in shaping our nation's foreign policy. With the recent addition of Senator Howard Baker as my chief of staff, Frank Carlucci as national security advisor, and the nomination of Judge William Webster as the new director of Central Intelligence, my own national security team is once again complete. Secretary of State Schultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger have been members of that team for some time, and let me say now that no president has ever been better served by two such men on his National Security Council. They have given long years of committed service to this nation in a variety of important positions in government, and the nation can be grateful as I am for their intellect, dedication, and integrity. They are also men of strong conviction, men who have never hesitated to give me their unvarnished views on national security issues under consideration. They are men willing to speak up regardless of the strength of opposition or the natural bureaucratic tendency to compromise or go along, and that's why I consider them so valuable. In the case of the Iranian arms sale matter, both Secretary Schultz and Secretary Weinberger advised me strongly not to pursue the initiative. I weighed their advice but decided in the end that the initiative was worth the risk and went forward. As we now know, it turned out they were right and I was wrong, but they discharged their responsibilities as my advisors and as my subordinates, and I am enormously grateful that I will continue to be receiving their views in the months ahead as we move forward with our agenda. And in these coming months, that word agenda will be an important one. You see, I've made these important changes here at the White House to see to it that we're back in control and moving ahead with all that you elected me to accomplish. On the domestic side, our agenda will include changes in the federal budget process and wide-ranging welfare reforms designed to bring to an end the cycle of poverty that has trapped so many needy Americans. And in foreign policy, well, let me put it this way, America faces great problems in the world, but even greater opportunities. We see a chance for significant progress in arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. Provided we maintain a steady course and bargain hard. Yet at the same time, Soviet adventurism must be dealt with. Central America in particular remains of absolutely vital importance to the United States. And here the Congress has crucial decisions to make about whether our nation will truly support democracy and help resist tyranny in a region so close to our own borders. My own commitment remains rock solid. I will fight any effort to cut off support for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters and consign them to death or defeat. In domestic and foreign policy alike, what it all comes down to is this. We've got a job to do. And for the next two years, with your help and support, we intend to do it. Permit me now to turn to other matters of great importance. First last year's tax reform meant that early this year millions of Americans found themselves filling out W-4 forms that were downright confusing. I know I had to fill one out myself. Well, we heard your complaints and worked with the IRS to come up with a new much simpler W-4 form that will be available in about a month. So the American people took on the tax man and won. Second, earlier this week our administration announced reforms at the Food and Drug Administration that will make it easier for victims of AIDS and other life-threatening diseases to obtain new experimental drugs. This step to roll big government back just a little bit further could very well mean less pain and suffering for thousands of seriously ill Americans. It's a measure, in other words, that's humane in every sense of the word. And now, if you will permit me, a final word about a subject that just happens to be close to my Irish heart, St. Patrick's Day. Since the potato famine in the middle of the last century, millions of sons and daughters of Aaron have come to America seeking a better life. But of course, whether Irish or not, virtually all of us as Americans trace our ancestry back to immigrants from distant lands. Men and women who came to America with a firm willingness to work, asking only freedom. And so I just have to believe that this coming Tuesday, well, as Americans, will all be entitled to celebrate. Until next week, thanks for listening. God bless you.