Good morning. I hope you guys had a great, yesterday, what was yesterday? I'll do the same thing. My name is Brian Sambolden. I'm from Phoenix, Arizona. I'm actually from Scottsdale. And I'm here to talk about Trellis, which is the product of conference-driven development. Basically, every conference I go, I write a little bit of it, and I release a new version. In Trellis, it's a component-driven web development framework. It's all Ruby. Right now, it runs on Ruby 187, because that's what was running on my Mac when I started doing this. 186 doesn't work just because of how I deal with blocks. In 19, it's still broken in some areas, so I'm fixing that pretty soon. So components on the web. There's three things that I actually was looking for when I wanted to build a framework that was radically different from Rails. And don't get me wrong, I love Rails. I make, basically, a living with Rails. But in the Java world, yeah, that's right. I was a Java developer. I am still a Java developer in the skies. And if they give me enough money for it, I'll still do it. I'm that dirty. So one of the things I wanted is reusable components. And it's one of those things that when I'm doing a Rails application, dealing with partials and the exponential explosion of partials, you strike me crazy. Everything looks great. Fat models, skinny controllers, and then this grace of a view layer. And it always takes me a great deal of refactoring to actually clean the views. So I wanted a way to basically encapsulate view logic and also encapsulate some of the logic that manipulates that view logic. And that is the definition of a component. I also wanted to be able to build components out of components and do the kind of recursive type of development. I wanted events and event handlers. I didn't want to call anything directly. I want things to say, hey, this is what I publish. This is the kind of things that come out of me. And whoever wants to listen to them, go ahead and subscribe to them. Transparent state management. I hate dealing with HTTP. Dealing with HTTP in the Java world, it's always been one of those things that was always in your face, basically with the Java server API. And then I discover Rack on Ruby. And Rack basically makes dealing with HTTP so simple that for me to create an abstraction on top of that, it became cake. So what is Trailers? It's magic like Rails. So there's a lot of DSLs. And I kind of went DSL crazy with this because I was getting into writing DSLs. And I was writing DSLs for pretty much any Java library. I wrote a DSL and JRuby for it just because I could. In metaprogramming, it's kind of like a drug, you know? You get the first hit and then you're hooked and from that point on, I was like, okay, I don't need a DSL for this. Stop now. It is a micro framework or at least it started as a micro framework. In 300 lines of code, I did about 60% of what a Java framework written by a good friend of mine did called Tapestry. And that was kind of one of my main inspirations for this. But the moment I saw that 300 lines of Ruby code could do what, you know, thousands of lines of Java code did, I was like, that's it, I just can't go back now. Unless you give me enough money, we already talked about that. So it's more like camping in Sinatra. It's very Sinatra-like when you look at the code. And actually one of my plans is to get rid of all the plumbing that is unnecessary and write on top of Sinatra pretty soon. Because those guys, I mean, they have a pretty large development team now. And it's, you know, I might as well concentrate on the component features of the framework and not on the underlying plumbing. So just like any rack applications designed for small mounts in, that sounds wrong, in small apps, components. So of course, that's the main goal of the whole thing. It's supposed to be easy to be built. They got to encapsulate the complexity of the application. So when there's something too complex, you move it to a component. Components could be core components from the framework or custom components for your application. And it's NVC all the way. NVC at the application level and NVC at the component level. So here's a quick overview of how things work. You have an application, which is a trellis application, just like a Sinatra application.  The pages have components in them. The components are declared on the template of the page or if there are invisible components in the actual page code. The components emit events. The components consume events. The pages consume events and also dispatches events to the components. The inspiration, pretty much tapestry and web objects were the two big ones to begin with. Then when it came time to implement, I started looking at seaside. Of course, continuations in Ruby still suck, so I couldn't do continuations. So I had to basically do HTTP magic behind the scenes with state management to basically deal with things like that. How to freeze the state of a component, put it in the session or put a token in the session, store the component in the database or in memcache or whatever rack could actually give me to do session management, and then bring it back. Of course, Sinatra, the moment I saw Sinatra, I'm like, wow, I got to do something like that. Camping just because of the size and how easy it was to just get started. Of course, there's some lesser-known frameworks like Iowa and We, which have some really cool features, but again, they're not that well-known. Of course, the big 800-pound gorilla rails, which all the magic of rails, just the first time you saw Active Record, if you came from the Java world, you're like, oh my God, I've been doing hibernate for all these years.  I actually teach a hibernate class, which at the end of the class now I have a slide where I say, well, all those three days of hibernate you can replace with this one slide of Active Record. And they hate me for that. So of course, it's built on rack. I was going to do some nice rack jokes, but I'm going to move on. And let's look at some code. So hello world. Everybody needs to see hello world of any framework. The hello world in our trailers can have a simple RB file, in this case called simplest, in one HTML template. And this is what I have in there. So I have the RB class. And you can see that it has an application. It has a star page. And it has a command at the bottom basically to launch the application standalone. You can deploy them to anything that rack supports. So I deploy them to Heroku. You can use anything that supports rack up to launch an application. You can use to launch the application. This template, it's just an HTML template. Very simple. You can see that there's components in there. The components are those tags that start with trailers. And here's a bigger view of the same application, but all in one file. So I also have inline templates. And I kind of like that when I'm doing developer oriented web applications. But I don't want to be doing anything with an HTML editor. I know what I want. I know the structural semantic markup. I throw it in there and I worry about the CSS and all that stuff later. So in here I have a markup template. And it's a little small, the font, but there's embedded components. And here I have a component called value that returns the value of a property of the page, or an instance variable. And I have a page link which generates an href to basically go to a specific page. So up there I have the application. It has one entry point, the home page. I have one page class that has an instance variable for the current time. So you guys pretty much can figure out what I'm doing with this very simple demo. And I have one page template embedded in the page class. And there's two components that I use right now. So one is the value in the page link. And I can get access to that current time instance variable from within my value component. And there's many ways to get to things. An instance variable is raw just like you do in ERB. And do loops in the templates if you want and all that stuff. But I cannot prefer not to do a lot of scripting in the views. And that's one of the reasons to have components, to basically hide all that nastiness from the views. So let me show you this. To run them, they're just Ruby scripts. So there's a start method there on that last command that I put in the file. And you can just run them. So let me go ahead and show you that application. Oh, and I broke it. Yay. All right, let me move on to the next one. It's always happens. It's beautiful. So how do you navigate from page to page? To navigate from page to page, you basically, when you handle an event, the return value of that event becomes the value of the page you're going to. Each page has to know in advance which pages it can navigate to. So you have to declare them in your page. You can say page home goes to page X and Y. And then from the event handler methods, you can say return, you know, you can return an X or a Y instance that's already available to that page, and that will create the navigation link. And of course, this doesn't make much sense without a example. So here's an example. This is the Hilo application, a very simple game, where you're guessing, basically, the number guessing game. And I'm going to have a page. It's called a star page, a guest page, and a game over page. And most trailers applications are like this, they're little state machines where the nodes are just pages. And the transitions happen via event handling. So I have three HTML pages, and I have the Hilo RB code. The application has the home page, and you can optionally define the pages you're going to navigate to. So here I'm saying that I have the guest page and the game over page as pages available to my application. You can have multiple applications with the pages across different apps. The star page has an onSelect. That onSelect, the convention that I put in there is that everything that starts with on, it's an event handler. So there's going to be a select event created by a component on the page, and the onSelect is going to answer that call. I put the return, I know it's just to make it more clear in terms of explaining what's going on. So I'm going to set a value on the guest page, which is the target of the number to be guest, and then I'm going to navigate to the guest page. Very simple. On the star page, I have the start guesting link. That's what it's going to generate the select event that onSelect is responding to. The default routing URL scheme, it's like this. You have a page.event underscore the source, so where it came from. Then you have optional values, as many query parameters as a URL can handle. Then inside of that, when I go to the guest page, I'm actually running a loop component. So it's another trail is built-in component that basically loops over any set of values. Of course, a loop is something very simple to pull off with just Ruby code, so you could do that too. The loop component is one of the first components that I wrote to see how to handle basically HTML tags produced in Ruby code under the scenes. It creates that link of numbers. When you click on one of those numbers, look at the URL looks like guest.select underscore link, so it's coming from the link component. The event it's select, it's coming from the guest page, and it's passing the value one. Of course, you've got different values for all the 10 digits that you have in there. Then you can make a guest. You can see that the loop generates all the guest links, and you're going to end up with something like this. Let me go ahead and launch this guy. So there's the high-low browser. It's on the wrong side of the moon. If I click on start guessing, you can see that there's a typical number guessing game. I can't really see what I'm doing here because it's too low. Sad things to be proud of. So basically, here's a state machine with the nodes replaced with the actual pages. You can see really what's going on. But again, it's a very simple... If you have something that you have a very well-defined flow, this is a really easy way to basically get that flow ahead of time and then flesh out the nodes. In a Rails application, we kind of go more with the controller. The controller has multiple views, and that sometimes can get out of hand in terms of understanding what the application is doing. Of course, this only scales to a certain size. So that's why I like small applications that are little state machines to be built with this. I want to go and build a CMS using this, which I did, though. But I proved my own point that I started basically getting confused about how the flow of events happened. Not as fast as you would in a Rails application, because if you have a very large Rails app, you have to really start basically whiteboarding what goes where. In this case, this is actually pretty helpful with that type of application. I have also a Hangman application. I'll show you that when running. I'm going to skip the code just so you guys can see what goes on. Similar state machine type of app.  But you can see that you have a list of words. This is about probably 100 lines of Ruby code. Very simple. And I'll show you the Ruby code for that. So here's the Hangman application. And it has a main application. Notice that I have static resources, and RAC basically gives me all the magic to basically have static resources, have, you know, read, for example, things like a JavaScript file and cache it. There's all kinds of RAC middleware. Yesterday you learned a little bit about RAC. And the number of middlewares available enables you to build a web framework like this. I mean, I built the first version of it on one conference. So it is really amazing a framework to build things like this. Here's the start page where I basically create the list of words from a text file. Then I have an unselect to start the game. I set the target word. On the guest page I have some persistent fields now because you have to remember the guesses that the user has made. This is where the state management comes into play. A page can have persistent fields. A component can have persistent fields. You can also tell the page this persistent field is going to go to the session. This one is going to go to cookies. This one is going to go to the database. This one is going to go to memcache. Decide what to put where. So in most cases you will put something simple like a token, a encrypted token on a cookie and use that to find the chunk of information that might be in memcache or in the database. Other than that, this is just some traditional Ruby code. I'm noticing here that I basically have an array of underscores to show basically the things that haven't been the letters that have not been picked from the word. The game over page of course just has the target which is the target word that we were guessing so I can print them in there and say, hey, you failed to guess this word or yay, you found the word X. And the number of guesses that they had left. So I can tell them, hey, you found the word and you only had two guesses left. All right, let's talk about templates. Templates, I can do XHTML templates or HTML templates or HTML5 templates. And I have a removed component that is nice that came from Tapestry for a designer so they can have a preview of the page aesthetically and that gets removed at runtime. So it's a very simple component but I thought it was a really cool feature that Howard created in that framework. Hamel, so if you like Hamel and SAS, you can use that in line or in templates. And let's talk about components though which is the main feature of Trail is that it should basically drive you towards using components. Components in Rails. There's the sales for stateless components project and there's also Apotomo which is for stateful components. So if you like the concept of basically reusing view logic and some controller logic instead of copying and pasting or doing some weird hierarchy of controllers you can use something like sales or Apotomo. And I don't know why I'm selling the competition here. So here's that loop component that I show you and this is basically the 10-15 lines of Ruby code and you can see in here that basically it's just looping over some values that are available to the context of the page. So I use something called radius to basically do all the templating and all the tags. So that tag, that render do tag it's something that comes out of that radius gem. And other than that basically just each one of these components contributes a little bit of markup to the page. So that's a stateless component. Here's another one, a custom one. In this case I created a component that basically goes to Flickr, uses the interestingness API and grabs a bunch of random pictures. Which when I show you the demo something inappropriate might show up I apologize in advance or not. And you can see when I put one of these components in there I can tell it I want two pictures from the API or I want three pictures from the API. And let me show you that code. So there's the FlickrRB project and in here I have my custom component. It's the Flickr interestingness. It's a trellis component. This is basically just the rendering of the tag. And in here of course I'm not caching anything. I mean I'm doing this brute force. I'm hitting the service which is an XML RPC service using the XML RPC client. And I'm calling that method the Flickr interestingness getList then I'm using Nokogiri to parse all that stuff. And then I create I do some expat to basically grab what I need the URLs for the pictures. And then I dump those using builder onto the markup of the component. So inside of the application now I have one embedded template in here and I can now use my components like this. So I have there one component and then I can have another component some other place with some parameters. So this is the beauty of this. You can have every time that you see a pattern in your views that repeats with some changes in, you know, cardinality or something like that a component might be an appropriate abstraction for that. So let me go ahead and launch this guy. I believe I have the little hyperlink there. And let me go and make sure that it's running.  Okay. So I'm going to quickly okay now it's running on 306. Let's go back to the browser 306. And of course assuming that the web is working for me I should be able to now see the component. And you can see the moment I refresh the page of course it's going to go and make that call again. Now I could do some magic behind the scenes. I can say, hey, cache some of these URLs in the background the component itself could cache them that's a class level type of caching. So the component could say, oh, start caching some of these URLs and then I can do randomizing from those URLs that I cached rather than do the call again. So you have those choices. That's some of the things that I built into the framework. So that is a stateless component, but really a stateful component it's where you're going to get your money's worth. And here's an example of a counter component. This is my contribution to the bounty. So I have a component called a counter and that counter has a state. It's just a count. In a page I'm going to put a bunch of those named counter 1, counter 2 and counter 3 and when I call the events on that component the page will intercept the event and then pass it to the component instance. And, of course, refresh the page. Right now, of course, I'm doing everything on a page refresh. I'm doing non-AJAX events. I also have AJAX events that can do some pretty cool stuff. And I started with UE and I kind of get disappointed with the framework so I'm rewriting everything with jQuery now so it's kind of in a state of flux. And I also have each component has a reset method that basically sets the count back to zero. And I have a reset event handler on the page that then will call the instances of reset on all the components. I have two ways to communicate. I have the indirect event-based communication so when an event happens on the component the page graphs it and then gives it to the right component instance and then I have a reset link that has an event handler on the page itself that actually then manipulates the component instances directly. So for each component that I place on the page I have an instance variable available to the page. I can show you what that looks like and it's better if I just show you the actual code running first. And I believe I have this one running. Let's see. Okay. So here's my component and you can see that I can increment I have three instances of them I can increment them all they're all keeping state for this particular demo I'm keeping the state in a cookie. This is just my choice for this demo.  So let me show you the code now and I think we can then go into questions. So I have stateful counters it's the code for that and here is the code for the component it's called counter it's a stateful component I was playing with my DSL-ish language in here I think this is a goofy way I was doing an acts as stateful type of approach but I think I'm just going to have a component that's a stateful one and just inherit from that. I went too crazy with this syntactic sugar right here. There's a tag name for that so there's going to be a counter tag that you put on the page I have a field call value which is persistent and again you can see here that I'm playing with my DSL still everything is still in flux in terms of the final you know lingo for the framework. I initialized I call a reset method to set the value back to zero and here's what I'm actually rendering the component and I'm rendering an href for adding and subtracting and then again I'm using builder to basically put an h1 with the value and two hrefs for adding and subtracting that's it. I have an on add so this component generates events that the component itself responds to. So when I click one of those links it's going to generate an on add event that on add is going to respond to and increment the internal value. So this is through OO construct encapsulation. The page doesn't really have access to that value. Well in Ruby we have access to anything but I'm not exposing that value directly to the page. There's an subtract and there's a reset. On the counters application I have in my page three instances when they click on reset here's what I'm manipulating the components directly. I'm calling reset on all three of them. Of course I could loop and do some nicer stuff in here and I'm returning the page itself. So when you return self in a trellis application you're basically saying refresh the page or navigate back to this page. There's of course redirects routing all that funky stuff in there. But that's it. That's basically the application. In the template all I have it's a three tags for the components. So very simple but you can see the power of this. This is where the real power of this lies. The stateful components being able to have state localized to a view and a little bit of a controller all wrapped together that you can reuse in other places. You can put parameters in there to change the behavior slightly and avoid having an explosion of basically controller snippets or if-then-else's or case statements in a controller which I seem my fair share of them. You can do pretty complex things. I wrote a grid component that basically takes a model object in this case just a data mapper model object and basically does all the table sorting editing all those things. So you can create components that are CROT components then you can place them on pages. You can put those pages in a gem and basically have CROT applications out of the box with just pages and components. Routing. I have basically routes just like in Sinatra. I basically stole most of the Sinatra code for routing but then I actually started experimenting with new things. So the routing, if you know Sinatra routing you can do the routing in trellis the same way. For example, I have a day of the year month and day same type of route substitution of parameters. I also did something cool that I think actually I'm not a genius but I thought it was pretty clever. Rather than having to put your routes in the right order, I sort them by reachability. So I automatically sort all the routes by reachability and that way you don't have to basically, like in rails we have to have our routes in routes RB in order. You don't have to do that with trellis. Trellis will basically figure out that the catch hole route should be the last thing to try because I evaluate them and I give them a weight. And those with the highest weight goes first and the ones with the lowest weight go last. So of course the catch hole has the lowest value possible. And that's of course just an aspect test for that. I also have filters. I have before, around, and after filters. And this is when I broke 186 and 19 because I used the 187 block parameters style so I have to rewrite this to basically work in 19.  So now I own it. But my goal is not for people to adopt this massively. If it works for you it's something small, great. But the idea of components I think is something that now there's a big momentum behind pushing those into rails in a clean way. Probably as a plug-in. Apatoma I think is doing a great job for that. So again take a look at that. So I can do filters to do for example things like authorization and the like. For testing I use rack test. So basically I TDD all my Trellis applications. And I can basically use RSpec to do a rack test. So basically very traditional Ruby development TDD. And now what's next? Of course sessions. I'm actually working on some more session magic which I think that's where the value of the framework comes into place. I'm going to do some crott pages so I can do the ten minute or the five minute blog demo and that type of stuff. And wow some newbies. Ajax again I ripped out all the Yahoo stuff because I was pretty surprised. I'm falling in love back with JavaScript because of jQuery. Actually I hated JavaScript before. It's not falling in love back again. This is a bad dating service. Persistence. I use for some of my demos I use Datamapper. It just works pretty well. And deployment it's rack so I deploy my apps to Heroku. You know one push there all you have to do is to rack up file. And again the more conferences I go the better it gets. There's some links in there and I already gave the PDF for the presentation so you guys should have it pretty soon. There's a website where I basically blog about all the things I'm discovering so this is very experimental.  I ripped it out of the framework. It's a production level right now. They asked me to pitch Sony Conf in Arizona. Which is again another Ruby conference in the desert. Notice how beautiful of a setting it's here and of course we're going to have Joe watching you so but if you're with me you don't need your papers so we should be good. And that's my company. We do Ruby, Rails and actually Groovy and Grails too. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. That's what Apotomo has done and they've done a great job at that and actually I'm copying a lot of things that I'm seeing them doing but there's some things in there that they haven't seen because they haven't worked with a component framework. They didn't come from .NET or from Java to see components fail miserably and sometimes succeed pretty well. I saw for example JSF and I was like oh my god what a monstrosity and then I saw Tapestry and it worked well. Even makes Java palatable. So you have to be have gone through those successes and failures with components to know how they work well and of course back in the day I used to do Delphi and all the Windows base drag and drop type of things and of course I saw all the horrible things that happened with those two. You guys remember somebody putting a button double clicking on the button and putting a whole cobalt program here the framework to basically create small applications with very simple handlers with three or four lines of code at most and take a lot of the complexity into the components. Yes. I played with it for about a week and a half then I tried to get really familiar with Ruby Continuations then to realize that it was going to be a worthless effort for me to go the continuation route. So then I figured well I'm going to have to do something the HTTP session to deal with that type of approach. So I wrote a lot of plumbing code that basically deals with trying to fake Continuations in a traditional way. Yeah, it's small talk. Yeah, somebody is talking about small talk in seaside pretty soon. In small talk I mean it's a wonderful language. It just didn't get enough momentum at that point in time. In history of computer science languages it just had to be at the right time. Things like Java succeeded. Despite of the language. Of course the Java VM is a wonderful piece of machinery. But the language now we all know I mean I went from C to C++ to Java and I thought are we going backwards? What's going on in here? Any other questions? Well I used to actually have my own library of Delphi components back in the day. So I used to write hundreds of components fairly complex things. So I had that knowledge behind the scenes of basically how to build components that work well. How not to do how to let people customize the components but not too much. And basically avoid people basically creating components for everything. Not everything has to be a component. You can do things in a traditional way and only use components for the stuff that requires state and required to be reusable and slightly parameterizable. So if Sinatra runs on rails, so then Trellis will run on Sinatra or run on rails. So I'm piggybacking on the successful ones. All right, excellent. Thank you.


On April 5th, 1588, there was, we are told, a looming threat off the coast of Britain, a Leviathan of a different kind, the Spanish Armada. Just inland, a young woman named Catherine lay frightened into an early premature labor of which the product was a boy named Thomas Hobbes. This boy would someday grow to become known as perhaps the greatest political philosopher of his age. Being abandoned by his father sometime in his teens, Hobbes gained assistance from a successful uncle, which allowed him, at 15, to begin his higher education at Magdalene College, Oxford. He was less than enthused with the philosophy taught there and spent much of his leisure time reading instead Greek and Latin classics. Graduating at age 20, Hobbes found himself tutored to William Cavendish, the future Earl of Devonshire. This relationship would turn out to be invaluable when his teachings would later land him in boiling water with the local powers that be. Following some travel, he returned and served as secretary to the great English philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon. These various connections would go on to shape much of his later philosophy, simultaneously saving and endangering his life. There came for Hobbes a turning point when, at age 40, he found in Euclid's The Elements, the sustaining structure which could support his thoroughly empirical philosophy. This structure was demonstrated in Proposition 47 of Book 1 and showed the process of referring to earlier and earlier propositions until returning to the original axioms and definitions, such as we saw in Spinoza's geometrical form of exposition which he implemented in his ethics. From the year 1629 onward, he would begin to compose his library. It was rather late in life for such a beginning. But for a man who lived until just shy of his 92nd year, perhaps this could be considered early. As stated before, he began publishing in 1629 with a translation of Thucydides. The reason for this translation was apparently quite simple. He meant it as a warning to England on the dangers of democracy. Following this in 1658, he published The Elements of Law, Natural and Politique, wherein he argues and defends the absolute power of the king. Next he spent some time away from public life due to the danger that the rising political tensions posed to a philosopher who championed absolute monarchy. After several more minor works of little consequence, Hobbes mustered all his strength in depending on the dominant political treatise of the age. This work he would name after a powerful deep-sea creature depicted in the book of Job, Leviathan. The style of Hobbes was pithy, idiomatic, forceful, and direct, with now and then a tang of pointed irony. He did not partake in the pretensions so common in the philosophic craft. He rather preferred clear and direct terminology. Words, he said, are wise man's counters. They do not but reckon by them. But they are the money of fools that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas. This may seem to us a little ironic in that his definition of philosophy is different than how we today choose to define it. He states that philosophy is the knowledge of effects or of appearances acquired from the knowledge of their causes and conversely of possible causes from their known effects. In his reasoning, he prefers deduction from experience or true radiosynation rather than the inductive form practiced by Francis Bacon. But reason he concedes is imperfect and can lead us away and not toward ultimate understanding. A knowledge of how the mind understands and what limits are placed on our natural understanding is necessary if we are to reach the conclusions which bring practical benefits to the human race. He places sensation as the indispensable antecedent of all knowledge and states that there is no conception in a man's mind, which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. We take sensation and make connections between things and do not, as some suppose, know them directly or absolutely. He stated that no man can know by discourse, reasoning, that this or that is, has been or will be, which is to know absolutely, but only that if this be, that is, if this has been, that has been, if this shall be, that shall be, which is to know conditionally. He approached human nature mechanistically, meaning that the divine human is, at its core, a complex work of machinery determined to act as the laws of nature dictate. Motivating this machine is a profound desire for self-preservation, meaning that all action is at heart self-interested and in accordance with what may benefit the individual most. Decisions are not blind, but are guided by our rationality and through rational means we attempt to guide ourselves away from death or misfortune and toward what may provide the maximal benefit and joy. It is important to understand that the desire for self-preservation is not opposed to cooperation between human beings, though this cooperation will not be with altruistic intentions. Rather, it will be out of a desire to achieve personal security by recognizing that working as a collective makes defense from outside attack or natural misfortune more unlikely. Hobbes's psychology is an important prerequisite to our later look into his political theory. But first, let us uncover briefly his thoughts concerning ethics and morality. To begin, Hobbes believed that there are no moral absolutes and man in a state of nature would differ only in method from the meanest beast. Without society, there would be nothing but fear to inhibit his animistic urges. The life of man, as Hobbes famously said, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This makes Hobbes a moral subjectivist, meaning that what we perceive to be right or wrong are molded by the cultural and environmental information which we take in, and not, as was generally believed in his time, moral principles sanctioned and dictated by God. And as stated in our previous section concerning psychology, it is egoism and self-preservation, which, like in the individual, produces the proper moral views of a society. What constitutes what is categorized as good or bad regarding moral judgment is entirely dependent upon their utility within the society in which and for which they were created. This deterministic view on morality means that the human will is consequently not free. But he contends that society should and is justified in encouraging some actions and discouraging others for the express reason that some actions lead to increased security and prosperity of the group while others do not. More about his ethics will become clear as we step foot into the murky waters of politics. Much of what will be discussed regarding his political beliefs will be taken from his 1651 work, the Leviathan, also called the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. It was a momentous work, not all original, strains of Machiavelli can be heard throughout, but it was a work which would help to shape the political discourse of the Western world. We will start as he did with what he describes as the state of nature, meaning the state of human life prior to organized societal structures. It was a sorry state of affairs and consisted predominantly of sorrow, misery, and constant fear. It was a state of perpetual war of every man against every man. In Hobbes' view, the state of nature can exist in no other way. And what dictates this certainty is as described before, the innate desire for self-preservation. Without what we are all accustomed to, that being societal control by higher authority and the societal contracts which enable it, man would look out only for himself and what brings him closer to fulfillment of this one primitive desire to survive. It was a state in which human action is inhibited only by fear. We see much of this state of affairs, Hobbes believed, in the relationship between nations. He said, in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointed and their eyes fixed on one another. That is, their forts, garrisons, and guns on the frontiers of their kingdoms and continual spies upon their neighbors, which is a posture of war. Where there is not a common power, there is no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war, the cardinal virtues. A constant state of war is not only when bullets are flying and swords thrusting, but also in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently shown. To solve this inborn issue of the human race and to arrive at some level of security, Hobbes suggests a social contract which the people form amongst themselves to concede their power to a greater authority in exchange for peace and security. To confer all their power and strength upon one man or upon one assembly of men, this done, the multitude so united in one person is called a commonwealth. This is the generation of the great Leviathan, or rather of that mortal God to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defense. This commonwealth may come about by natural power as when a man make it his children to submit themselves and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse, or by voluntary agreement in search of security against all outside parties not associated with said contract. The picture of the ideal state which Hobbes painted is colored with the brush of absolute authority, though the sovereign Hobbes estate is not given his power by the divine right of kings, but by the people agreeing through a social contract to give up their power in exchange for the peace and security provided by this sovereign. But this power he wields cannot be limited by the subjects which are ruled over, not by popular assembly, church, or law. However, there are circumstances wherein this absolute authority can be questioned. For instance, if the sovereign directs one of his subjects to injure himself physically or by confessing to a crime under duress, which the evidence does not adequately support. This also means private property is allocated by orders of the sovereign for what is deemed by him alone as best for the public good. The need here for absolute power, Hobbes believed, is necessary because when power is shared between king and subject, there always arises conflict which will threaten to destroy the state. This monarchy will be hereditary as the right to choose who inherits power lies within the scope of our sovereign's power. He is willing to admit to governance by popular assembly, but the absolute nature of their power must not be questioned. Democracy, of course, is out of the question as he believed that a democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orders. In summary, our state will be without individual liberty. What the sovereign says is absolute outside of the few instances which we highlighted before. If revolution occurs and is successful in establishing a separate power or overthrowing the existing power, the subjects of the sovereign are obliged to join with the new established government since the obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long and no longer than the power lasted by which he is able to protect them. The final paragraph of the Leviathan reads as follows. And thus I have brought to an end my discourse of civil and ecclesiastical government occasioned by the disorders of the present time without partiality and without other design than to set before men's eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience. Reaction to his impartial political theory was varied, but regardless of your views regarding the legitimacy of his theory, no one can argue the profound impact it had on his and subsequent generations of political philosophers. He lived some time after the publication of his magnum opus, but starting sometime around 1650, he developed palsy of the hands and by 1666 was unable to continue writing in an illegible manner. However, our vigorous philosopher would not cease to write because of this malady and wrote much about mathematics as well as some other works of history. He even published in 1675 on autobiography. He approached the end following a move which proved to be too exhausting for the aging philosopher and on December 4th, 1679, died at the age of 91. His influence was profound in many circles, whether this be of the positive or negative sort dependent on the person. But Bale ranked him as one of the greatest geniuses of the 17th century. Reading him Bacon and Locke or Fontenelle, Bale and Voltaire, we perceive again what the Germans had made us forget, that obscurity need not be the distinguishing mark of a philosopher and that every art should accept the moral obligation to be intelligible or silent.


On the night of July 25, 2005, Nickelodeon experienced a mysterious and unexplainable glitch during the airing of one of the episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants. This strange glitch caused this specific SpongeBob episode to glitch out and morph in strange ways. A few lucky people were able to catch a glimpse of the episode, and some clips of the episode made it onto YouTube, making this occurrence known to the public. I myself am one of the people that witnessed the incident. I was chilling at home one night, scrolling through channels on the remote, and found that an episode of SpongeBob was airing on Nick. I was bored at the time, because I didn't know what to do that would keep me entertained, so I decided to watch it. The episode that was on was Your Shoes and Tide, and Gary takes a bath, though I believe I missed a part of the episode. I continued watching, but I noticed something odd. When Patrick said, Hi SpongeBob! SpongeBob wouldn't move. He wouldn't even reply. He just stood there, as the camera zoomed in to his body. Patrick was confused at this. SpongeBob! He asked, but SpongeBob didn't reply, he just stood there, staring at the screen as the camera zoomed in on him. Then, SpongeBob got up for a split second twice, which made it look like he was gasping for air. It continued to stay on SpongeBob's body, until cutting to static after a few minutes. Now I've seen this episode a million times, but this wasn't it. It cut to SpongeBob laying on the floor, but he's now at the Krusty Krab in the kitchen. A few seconds later, it cut to SpongeBob's body in a black room, floating in the air in a different direction, but in the same pose. Then it immediately cut to SpongeBob and Gary, sitting in a huge shoe, while the ladder slightly moved up and down, while a weird distorted music track played.  I mumbled to myself. After a few more seconds, it cut to static for a few seconds, and then went to black. After a minute of nothing but a black screen, the episode Gary takes a bath started playing. The episode started out pretty normal, but halfway through the episode, there was a split second scene of SpongeBob in a distorted visual with Gary. They were just staring at the screen, smiling creepily. It then cut to static. I was confused if this was even the real episode or just some glitch. I tried shutting it off and turning it back on, but the episode stayed the same. I decided to just turn off the TV and went to bed. The next morning, I went and turned on the TV, and saw that everything was back to normal. To this day, I still have so many questions about this drug trip of an episode. Was I having a bad dream? Was the TV hijacked?  It's been a couple of years since the incident, and I still don't have any answers, even after searching through the Internet for hours on end. To this day, no one knows how this incident occurred or who or what caused it. But I am determined to find this out for myself. One of these days, this mystery will be solved.


Many years later, Austria and Ireland are still neutral, but we have other things to worry about, such as the Euro crisis, which is part of the topic of my statement today here. Now before I actually go into the substance of that, I would say something about the rather peculiar nature of European foreign policy. You know, every single one of you knows that of course security concerns the very origins of the integration process, but later on the whole dynamics came from the economic side, and the foreign policy made its reappearance only in the early 70s and remained for a long time a sideshow, and to you could say it still remains a sideshow of the European integration process as a whole. The member states share a common market, many of them share a common currency, many of them share the Schengen space, many of all of them share a very rich and very heavy legislativearchy. Many of these aspects have their own external implications, such as trade policy, visa policy, international environmental policies. And on top of this elaborate construction of deep integration, you have something that resembles very much traditional intergovernmental organizations, such as the Council of Europe or the OSCE, you have CFSB. It's sort of superimposed on something that goes way beyond a traditional intergovernmental organization. And that I think explains sort of the schizophrenic aspect of CFSB, that on the one hand it benefits from the identity-building effect of the much stronger integration in other areas, which means that external partners of the EU and also many European citizens would expect something at the level of the overall relevance of the European Union. But at the same time CFSB is in a way the weakest link in the chain of EU activities. And for that reason, many of these expectations are frequently disappointed. Now, the reason why I briefly describe this sort of outlook on CFSB in general is that I really believe it's quite fundamental to keep in mind always that it is the economic integration, the integration of Europe that drives the foreign policy dimension. I read recently a paper by a very good colleague of mine whose work I admire very much, but basically he said now with the Euro crisis and all this mess and all these difficulties, why don't we shift our efforts really to foreign and security policy, really to try to improve things in this area and so and re-energize the European project by this means. I think this is absolutely not an option. This is simply not possible. If the eurozone is in crisis, so is European foreign policy. If the crisis is eventually resolved and I very much hope it will be, European foreign policy will once again become more relevant. But basically the driver is always the integration process as such and foreign policy is one of the elements that are moved by the dynamism in this economic and other areas. Now I come to the ways in which the euro crisis affects European foreign policy. And I must say, I must warn you what you are going to hear now is fairly depressing. But I'll keep it short and really highlight only the most important parts of it. The one, maybe even the biggest effect that is frequently not overlooked but underestimated is distraction. If you look for instance at the year 2011, at year 2011 was as rich and as loaded with big international developments as the year 1989. You know, it's unique. Everything changed in the Arab world. These are very, very far reaching and profound transformations. Normal times you would have expected the European Council to meet many times on these issues that you would have expected the president of the European Council to take, make missions here and there to engage in diplomacy to sort things out. In 2011, as you know, the European Council met every few weeks, but it only had one really substantive discussion, operational discussion on these issues that was on Libya, I think, in March 2011. Otherwise, this was simply not happening because the EU in a way was at war with the bond markets. And at times of war, most other things get neglected. Now, you might say, okay, there are also foreign ministers and it's a fact, of course, that the Foreign Affairs Council discussed all these matters at great lengths. But unfortunately, the dynamics of European foreign policy has changed. Foreign ministries in the last 15, 20 years lost a lot of their role. They lost it to the line ministries, but in particular, they lost it to the heads of states and government in most of these countries. And this is one of the paradoxes of the present situation that now that the bosses really have all the authority and power for foreign policy, they have no time to use that. So this explains to some extent why the European Council was, it continues to be fairly, fairly inactive on a very rich external agenda. The second point is the loss of ambition.  If you have a big internal crisis, the willpower and the confidence that you can influence outside event reduces, is rapidly reduced. This has happened before in European integration. To some extent, this is just a reordering of priorities. You put your own house in order first before you deal with other matters. But I think in this case, it goes beyond that. It is really sort of a question of self-doubt and the fundamental crisis of confidence that many people, irresponsibly, experience in Europe these days. The third point is loss of prestige and soft power. That's the flip side of the loss of confidence. And it's undoubtedly true that the Euro crisis has resided in a huge loss of soft power. The Europe is no longer perceived in many places as part of the solution of problems, but it's seen as a big problem in its own right. I've been told by a colleague who participated in the EU ambassadors conference in Brussels a few weeks ago, who reported that many of his colleagues said that basically most of their conversations in the countries where they serve are completely dominated by concern about the Europe crisis. And they keep having to explain the various efforts to manage the crisis. And this is completely dominating their role at the same time, at the present time. Now, I've been to Belgrade two weeks ago. And my impression from talking to people with whom I've worked for many years is that, of course, the Euro crisis has also reduced our leverage and our influence on the countries of the Balkans. They look at Greece, and suddenly the perspective of EU membership looks rather different from what it used to. I've read something quite hilarious, an interview with the Croatian after the Croatian referendum, which was very strongly positive, of course. But he said that for Croatia joining the European Union now is a bit like arriving very late at the party, when half the people are drunk and half are from the wake. So it's clearly that it's the case, unfortunately, that both the reality of the promise to join has lost credibility. And also the attractiveness of this perspective is also suffering. I think these countries still are where they are. They have no strategic alternative. They maintain on the course, but the confidence and energy in which they pursue the agenda is not what it used to be. But this effect does not only affect the European neighborhood. A friend from the EAS told me that he recently went to Pacific Islands very, very far away, and he was shocked by the amount of commissuration he had to listen to and concern about the future of the European Union. That was of course also mixed with concerns about the continuation of assistance. Now there is of course one collateral benefit from all this misery is that because of the crisis the interest in Europe has increased again. It's interesting that GMF, a German Marshall Fund, does polling every year on the transatlantic trends. And the 2012 polling had 55 percent of Americans believing that Europe was more important to the U.S. than Asia. In 2011 it was still the other way around. So you can be relevant and significant also when you have problems, not just when something that is particularly useful. The fourth point is fairly trivial but very important, is the lack of resources. Foreign policy costs money. Less money means less foreign policy. The resource constraints in Brussels and in the member states explain why the CSDP operations over the last years have been diminishing radically. The new ones, many of the old ones continuing some of them with very severe resources and many constraints and many problems. Because simply there is in many countries not the money there to mobilize the resources for missions that are seen as less important than having these people, policemen serving in your own country. Also of course financial constraints are part of the reasons why the external action service was not implemented in a way which really exploited the full potential that was foreseen in the Lisbon Treaty. If you look at the number of people that the protecting presidency used to use foreign policy. If you take this into account then the overall number of people that work on foreign policy now in Brussels and in the delegations is about the same as the number working on this issue during the Solana's time. Even though of course the new treaty has involved considerable additional tasks and what you hear at the moment is I think the council has frozen the years budget. It now depends on the process whether the parliament helps reopening it again. But the situation is quite serious and the years might be in the unfortunate situation of having to look at cutting the network and actually reducing the overall manpower simply because of financial constraints. I do hope it will not get that far but it is clearly a very difficult moment. The fifth point and I'm approaching the end of the list then it will be more uplifting again I hope is the loss of coherence. I think as a result of the crisis you have centrifugal forces at work in the EU. If you there's this publication annual publication the ESC CFR scorecard and they speak about the renationalization trend creeping renationalization of European foreign policy. It is I think obvious that the Euro crisis also produces a lot of new divisions between north and south between ins and outs. It also affects the confidence and the solidarity among member states and I think it can be shown that it's sort of anecdotal evidence rather than sort of something that is really statistically research. But I think the overall coherence of the EU has gone down in recent years. There's a greater readiness of individual countries to take their own national positions without coordination. There is a lack of less investment in the common project in European foreign policy and there is also I think a greater readiness to use national interest to block EU positions within the institutions. All this is not you know dramatic and it's what we used to have was not so terribly strong and efficient but it is the trend is clearly in the wrong direction. Now all these consequences are serious and they are problematic but they are not tragic at this point. I think the amount to the relative weakening of foreign policy instrument that was never very strong and they can easily be reversed if the Euro crisis can be overcome and this brings me to the I think more interesting but also highly speculative part of my presentation the scenarios for the future. Now the first scenario would assume that the Euro crisis cannot be resolved. Either the Eurozone breaks up or this kind of dancing on the brink of disaster continues for a number of additional years. Under these circumstances I think all these negative trends will continue and will result in a much more fragmented Europe. The bigger countries will continue to play a significant role but it's particularly smaller countries that will lose part of their voice in international affairs. Cooperation among the big countries if it takes place might take place outside the EU institutions in many cases and it could well be that sort of coalitions of the willing will be the normal way of dealing with European foreign policy challenges. The kind of attractive force of the EU that has a very important stabilizing influence in the Balkans in Eastern Europe and even beyond will diminish which would mean that this would benefit the nationalist parties and forces in these countries that could threaten the stability in the region as a whole and of course the chances and the possibilities to affect changes in the Arab world and beyond to participate in global decisions on global future orientations will of course also diminish greatly. If the EU manages to to overcome the Euro crisis I see basically two scenarios. One would almost certainly I think the consultation of the Euro would require a significant deepening of integration within the Eurozone. Banking union, fiscal union, much closer economic coordination. Not all countries are likely to join the Euro but it is imaginable that these countries reach some kind of a durable accommodation with the countries in the Eurozone. This would not result then in a sort of federal Europe but it would result in something much looser construction of based on policy communities and variable geometry. There would be several policy communities which share the internal markets but otherwise have different rules and different participants and different degrees of of integration. To some extent this is just the continuation what you already have at the moment when you have the Eurozone you have Schengen you have defense policy etc but this would probably be much further developed. If this happens then foreign policy will certainly be or will likely be one of the broadest policy communities where practically everybody would participate even though defense policy might be organized on a more narrow basis to accommodate neutral countries among others. It could be based for instance on the permanent structured cooperation foreseeing in the Lisbon Treaty. Following the Euro crisis I would expect external challenges to rise up on the agenda again. I would not believe that the structures of foreign policy making would radically change. I think what could well happen and I certainly would hope it to happen is that the Lisbon arrangements would be implemented in a in a more ambitious way. This would mean for instance strengthening of the political mandate of the EU higher representative and the reinforcement of the European action service in terms of more resources, more engagement, more buy-in, more commitment from the Commission and from the member states. Following this trajectory the member states would remain international players. They would preserve their right to be produce foreign policy but probably over the years more and more foreign policy would actually be made in the framework of European institutions. Now how plausible is such a scenario? There are a number of interesting variables. One is the degree of deepening in the Europe so if this is really serious for instance leads to a common European Treasury or a separate budget then I would think it's almost inevitable that there would be a core periphery relationship between the Eurozone and the rest. And if there is such a core periphery relationship then this wonderful notion of variable geometry and various communities of policy will no longer work because there would be sort of a hierarchy among member states and this construction would be more difficult to sustain. Another big variable, important variable is the number of participants in the Eurozone deepening. If this follows the model of the fiscal pact which means that almost all member states actually participate in deepening even those who do not yet participate in the Eurozone, the effect on European foreign policy would be much less than if the Eurozone remains a much more exclusive club and quite a number of countries that are sort of left beside, behind in an auto-circuit. Now imagine for instance that the heads of state of governments of the Eurozone have a meeting in parcels to discuss budgetary issues and we would have a big international crisis breaking out. Now the question is are they going to wait until the people fly in from the capitals of the non-Eurozone countries to participate in discussing this crisis management or would they discuss these issues and make statements? It's an open question one doesn't know yet but I think the more you have sort of business at the center the more meetings you have the more likely it is that this eventually develops also foreign policy dimension. The third key variable maybe the most important one is of course the UK. The British attitude to the EU is absolutely crucial. I visited London in July in preparing this paper and I was impressed and actually quite shocked by the number of well-informed interlocutors who told me that referendum on EU membership in the next parliament through around 2014 is close to inevitable because they clearly the political dynamics in the various parties move in this direction. I think UK departure would have a huge impact on the US as a whole and on EU foreign policy in particular. The UK is certainly one of the strongest foreign policy players in Europe and in terms of the substance of foreign policy making the loss of the UK contribution would be a huge loss, huge loss. I think in the daily work but the British diplomats bring to the table in terms of their expertise in terms of their sort of networking resources in terms of creativity is enormous. I think it's possibly one of the strongest countries in the EU foreign policy at the moment. At the same time of course the UK is also a big constraints when it comes to developing the structures of European foreign policy particularly in the area of security but also on foreign policy in general and also it's true that the UK already now is not 100% in. I was struck I think it was two weeks ago when the foreign secretary William Hague gave a statement announcing a big program of having joint embassies in in third countries and on the face of it this looks really good and interesting sort of pooling and sharing in diplomacy. It's a very nice idea but the interesting fact is of course that the UK is about to do this with Canada which I think shows this kind of same detached nature already now of the UK role in European foreign policy. Now this brings me to the second scenario which assumes that the euro crisis can only be resolved through a really massive deepening of integration in the euro zone. The transfer of fiscal and economic policy competencies could be so far reaching that eventually this leads to a genuine hard core based on the euro zone based essentially on federal principles. The countries that are unwilling or for the longer term unable to participate in the euro zone would be relegated to a second auto-circle. Now if the integration in the in the core is sufficiently dynamic this could have as a consequence that the auto-circle finds itself increasingly marginalised. Eventually I think this certainly would happen a few years later this core could develop foreign and security dimension. If the whole construction of the core by that time is almost federal in character one would assume that also on foreign and security policy you could have much more efficient decision making procedures you could have a stronger strategic vision and you can seriously have seriously upgraded instruments. However this gain in punch is comes at a high price because presumably quite a number of countries that now participate in European foreign policy will not be part of this construction. So I think this would necessitate to have very good mechanisms to associate these countries effectively to the European foreign policy making otherwise you would create new divisions in Europe which obviously nobody would want. Now I've come to the end all this is of course pure speculation it's not hard to come up with three other scenarios for instance a friend pointed out to me that he believed that even if there is very serious deepening based on the euro zone member states would strive to maintain the rule of maneuver and foreign policy basically this might be the only area left where they want to reassert the sovereignty and they will keep it out of the hands of Brussels bureaucrats and keep things basically as they are. Personally I don't think so because of the thought that I explained at the very beginning of this statement I do believe that the driver of foreign policy making in the EU is economic integration. If this moves forward rapidly and successfully it will also give a very strong impetus to do more on the military and security side. I think what is very clear is if the euro zone crisis cannot be resolved European foreign policy will be part of the collateral damage. If it can be resolved it is likely to be strengthened again to be revived but shape and form of this revival and the participants and the geometry of this revival is impossible to predict at the moment but what seems very clear it's likely to look very different from what we have at the moment. Thank you very much.


Chris Brown may have lived in the same home since 2015, but it's no doubt one of his prize possessions. And he's created quite the private sanctuary here. Aside from the more obvious features like the 8,300 square feet of space and glass walls for both style and views, Chris also won't be having a problem with security. The star had a state-of-the-art alarm system and 16 security cameras installed throughout his property for the utmost protection, among other smart features. Chris purchased his home in Tarzana, California for over $4 million and over the years he's really settled in and made this contemporary mansion his true home. In 2015, Chris Brown purchased his current smart home abode for $4.3 million, and it's located at the top of a hill in Tarzana, California. Tarzana is located in the San Fernando Valley near Encino and it's actually named after the jungle character Tarzan, which might be fitting for Chris since he can be a wild boy himself at times. Anyways, Chris's contemporary and gated estate offers top-of-the-line privacy, and aside from the secluded location, the 16 security cameras and state-of-the-art alarm system both help make that happen. Moving inside, the mansion spans 8,300 square feet of space, with six beds and six baths throughout. Not to mention it's reportedly both a green home and a smart house. The estate encompasses nearly an acre of land, also boasting solar power. Chris's home not only has an oversized garage with parking for three cars, the sprawling motor court is able to fit 10 more. And being the car lover that he is, it's clear that this feature was a selling point for the singer. While the house may be somewhat simple-looking from the outside, walking in, you're greeted with a dramatic double-height foyer and spacious common rooms. There's a grand staircase leading to most of the bedrooms upstairs, while there are glass walls throughout the home for a sleek look. The glass walls also come in handy considering Chris's property both amazing panoramic views of the city lights and mountains, so you can soak in the surroundings from indoors or out. Chris's home has spacious living and dining rooms while luxury finishes include stone and hardwood flooring throughout. There are also mahogany wood doors and plenty of balconies off of the abode to enjoy the view. The gourmet kitchen offers a breakfast nook, stainless steel appliances, central island with bar style seating and another laid-back table to eat at. The living rooms and dens have a clean design with flat screen TVs while one with a retractable glass wall has a built-in fireplace and leads out to the patio. Some of the awesome features include a soundproof home theater that looks dark and cozy with the 120-inch screen and 14 reclining seats. There's a first floor bedroom suite while the upper level of Chris's house has five more bedrooms with en suites and also upstairs you will find an open concept office or family room. Of course, Chris's master suite is the nicest of them all, overlooking the entire valley through walls of glass. It has a luxury en suite bath, fireplace, private balcony and of course, walking closets. You already know those spacious closets are just ideal for his shoe collection. We can see that Chris has customized the home since moving in with personal touches such as his beloved graffiti art. I don't know what's better at Chris's place, the interior or exterior because the yard is also full of luxury amenities. The backyard offers a ton of space to entertain and lounge, including an outdoor living room with the full kitchen and three inviting fire pits. The saltwater swimming pool also has a center Baja shelf, spa, waterfall and glass pebbles. See what you want? But Chris is notorious for throwing wild parties and over the years many of his crazy gatherings have even made the news that massive motor court and expansive entertainers backyard must come in handy when Chris throws parties at this level like the one back in May 2021 where he had a rumored 300 to 500 cars parked at the estate and nearby. While Chris clearly loves his current Tarzan mansion, he has some other pads before as you might expect, one of which was famed for the graffiti artwork he embellished the exterior with. And while Chris might have been proud of that artwork, his neighbors, they were quite the opposite. Back in 2014, Chris sold his former home in the Hollywood Hills for $1.69 million, graffiti and all. It was situated hard up on the street with barely any privacy compared to his current living situation. Property records showed the entertainers snag the multi-level hillside residents in the foothills above Hollywood for $1.5 million back in 2001. Considering this nearly 3,000 square foot home had over four stories, there was also an elevator to get around seamlessly. This home boasted three beds, three baths, soaring ceilings and sunny interior spaces throughout. And of course, like any good modern home, there were also walls of glass to get the most of the city lights views. Decked out in concrete, glass and steel, Chris's former abode was designed by architect Jay Vanoes and customized to suit the then-young star's taste. While the exterior graffiti was repainted before Chris listed the home, several interior walls in the home were decorated with cartoon-like characters. The high-tech house boasted ultra-modern furnishings and LED lighting system and top-of-the-line Italian kitchen. Not to mention there were bonuses like an art studio and a loft. The main living room here was attached to the kitchen and there were double-high ceilings with full walls of glass looking right into the hills as well as a built-in marble fireplace and flat-screen TV. The open-concept master suite on the top floor, well, that was definitely unique. It featured a red stand-alone tub and a glass shower in full view of the bed. Privacy here was definitely not an option, but at least the shower offered massage features. Chris's Hollywood Pad also had some very cool outdoor living spaces, including a couple of fire pits, a projection screen for movie nights and stone waterfalls. If that's not enough, the saltwater pool and spa were illuminated by colored LED lights. Even before Chris's graffiti-clad mansion, he lived in a penthouse in West Hollywood, which he got rid of in 2012 after only a year living there. He sold it in an off-market deal for $1.6 million, the same price he purchased it at. Reportedly because it wasn't a good place to party and neighbors were more reserved. During Chris's short time at the 3,000 square foot residence, neighbors also said he played loud music and raced dogs in the hallways. That's kind of strange, but whatever. The penthouse condo occupied the top floor of the building, offering three bedrooms and four baths throughout, along with bamboo floors and high ceilings. The large kitchen dining room combo allowed Chris to chat with guests while cooking, and the kitchen also had Caesar stone countertops and stainless appliances. The three bedrooms were spacious and had cream-colored walls, each with their own en suite. Elsewhere there was an office, a bar, and another small bonus room. The condo opened out to a spacious terrace overlooking the streets of West Hollywood and city views. Chris was right in the heart of the trendy West Hollywood neighborhood when he lived here, and only a short jaunt from Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevard. While the penthouse was spacious and pretty luxurious, his homes to follow were definite upgrades. After taking a look at a few of Chris Brown's homes, that's going to bring today's house tour to a close. But before we go, answer this question for me. If you had a spacious home or mansion, would you be throwing parties there whenever possible? Let me know in the comments below, or if you would rather enjoy the home in a little more of a relaxing environment. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and follow me on Instagram to chat. I'm Kara the Vampire Slayer, and if you'd like to check out another tour before you go, then stay tuned because next we're going to look at the homes of rapper Drake. Bye! In recent news, Toronto's favorite Drake is expanding his luxury real estate portfolio by many multi-millions, this time in Los Angeles. Located in the upscale Beverly Crest neighborhood, the rapper is purchasing the 20-acre mega mansion off of British musician Robbie Williams in an off-market deal for over $70 million. Of course, Drake spends most of his time at his custom Toronto estate, but now he'll have yet another stunning option. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses, and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Drake is best known for being a rapper and singer who is arguably Toronto's favorite son. The Canadian superstar has a net worth expected to exceed $180 million by the end of 2022, making him one of the world's wealthiest rappers. And that fortune, well, Drake also knows how to spend it. Word is that the OVO star has treated himself to a new mega mansion in the Beverly Crest area of LA in an off-market deal expected to close north of $70 million. It makes sense because the former owner of the estate, Robbie Williams, was first trying to sell the place for around $80 million. Hey guys, it's Kara The Vampire Slayer back with another exclusive house tour here in Femus Entertainment, this one about Drake's brand new mansion in LA. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit me up on Instagram to chat. Now let's get into this video. Let's take a look at the place Drake is picking up. Well, for the last year, the rapper has been scouring the California real estate market for a new home, and this time, it seems he's found what he was looking for. Drake is snagging the Beverly Crest mansion of English singer-songwriter Robbie Williams in an off-market deal, and while details are slim, sources say the mansion should close for over $70 million, likely in the mid-70 million range. The massive price tag is due to the price property's rare combination of size and scale, which is super special in the Beverly Hills Post Office neighborhood. Overlooking Los Angeles Beverly Hills Post Office is a neighborhood that values seclusion and an upscale suburban lifestyle. Residents of the area are the recipients of the world's most coveted zip code 90210. With gated sections including Benedict Canyon, where Drake's new mansion is located, as well as Mulholland Estates and Coldwater Canyon, the affluent area boasts spectacular views of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains all around. Drake's new Trophy estate boasts a whopping 20,000 square feet on more than 20 acres, not to mention, there's no other home on the market in the 90210 zip code with even close to that much land. Perched in Benedict Canyon, Drake's new mansion was built by LA architectural firm at KAA Design Group and offers up a dramatic Tuscan style, including pillars and stone, along the ivy covered exteriors. Inside, there are multiple formal living spaces, including great rooms, family rooms, and more. Meanwhile, the bedroom count is at 10. If that's not enough, there are mind-blowing 22 bathrooms throughout, while Robbie Williams said the mansion actually had 27 toilets in total. Other lavish amenities include an 11 car garage, elevator, wine cellar, a home gym, and a games room. Outside on the grounds, Drake can enjoy a mosaic, towels pool, an outdoor kitchen, tennis court, and orchard, the perfect property for entertaining. There are also terraces and balconies all over and in the past, Williams has shown the incredible outdoor area which both views across the city. Looks like Drake has found a winner. The sale is the rapper's first property in the neighborhood. For the last decade, he was also compiling a compound in Hidden Hills in the San Fernando Valley, and, of course, his pride and joy, his 50,000 square foot mega mansion in Toronto. If you watch this channel, then I'm almost certain you've seen Drake's mansion in Toronto, Ontario. The rapper purchased the land for his main mansion back in 2016 for $6.7 million, getting the home custom designed and constructed from the grounds up, which took years. These days, Drake's home is also known as the Embassy and is worth an estimated $100 million. It's located on two acres of land in the upscale bridal path community in Toronto. Not to mention, he installed super high fences surrounding the compound for ultimate privacy. No expense was spared in crafting the Drake dream home. The abode is made of limestone, bronze, exotic woods, and other top-nuch materials, clocking in at a whopping 50,000 square feet of space. The entryway is decked out in black-and-white marble with soaring ceilings, and also on the main floor, there's a two-level hallway, a party area, and a great room with 44-foot-high ceilings and a fireplace. The kitchen boasts a clean white-color palette with a large marble block island in the center as well as blue suede bar chairs to dine in and designer appliances, while the dining room is close by to easily flow from one room to the next. Drake's wave spot in the mansion is his 3,200-square-foot master retreat that's located in its very own wing of the home. Here, there's a large one-ton bed, and bedding and tapestries are all designer as you'd expect, while there's an extra 1,100 square feet of covered terraces here too. His spa-style bathroom boasts a steam shower and hot tub, while the suite also encompasses two dressing rooms and a kitchenette. Other luxury rooms in Drake's palace include a cozy studio lounge, awards room, recording studio, and a jersey hall full of basketball memorabilia on display. Elsewhere, there's a home gym, a movie theater, a snack bar, and an elevator. Being the basketball ambassador and fan that he is, Drake has an NBA regulation-sized basketball court inside his home, custom-designed with his OVO brand logo. Downstairs is one of my favorite rooms, where the rapper hides his Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool decked out in black granite, also boasting special lighting to set the mood, seating around the pool and mirrored walls. Drake had to include two pools, building another one outside, which is also massive and perfect for the summer months. Alright, now that we've gotten a taste of Drake's new Beverly Crest estate, what do you guys think? Has he secured a gem or overpaid? Well, either way, I cannot wait to see more of it. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on Drake's homes down in that comment section. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram and I'll see you all in another video. Bye!