Hello and welcome. I'm Lynne Freese, producer of Global Political Economy, or GPE News Talks. I'm delighted to be here with guest, Jody Ghosh. We'll be talking about her op-ed, the fertilizer conundrum. A renowned development economist, Jody Ghosh is currently a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Prior to that, she held a long-standing professorship at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She's founding member of IDEAS, the International Development Economist Association. She's a prolific author and has advised governments, consulted for international organizations, served as a high-level member of international boards and commissions. Among her numerous distinctions, she's been named the 2023 recipient of the Galbraith Award by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Welcome, Jody. Thank you. A thread running through the argument you put forward in the fertilizer conundrum is that governments should shift away from policymaking that incentivizes chemical farming, and to instead incentivize farming without chemicals, so agroecological farming. The larger argument being that when it comes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, there needs to be a major paradigm shift from decades-long practices that favor industrial food and agriculture. To give viewers a quick take on why, I'll briefly cite some opening lines from your op-ed. To quote, The global food system is broken. Largely dominated by multinational corporations, it enables and encourages unsustainable and unhealthy production and consumption patterns, and generates enormous waste across all stages of production and distribution. The global food system also produces massive greenhouse gas emissions, thereby inflicting substantial ecological damage, and deprives small-scale farmers in many countries of secure and viable livelihoods. Perhaps worst of all, food access remains profoundly unequal, causing extreme hunger to increase rather than decline. Let's start with some thoughts on corporate concentration in the global food system, and what's happened as a result of that. Actually what we don't realize often is that food is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, and it's concentrated at two different levels. It's horizontally concentrated, that is to say every sub-sector has got a few players who dominate that industry, but it's also vertically concentrated, that is to say literally from farm to table. It has often one company that is organizing the entire thing, and reaping benefits and profits out of every segment of that production or distribution. So whether it is from the inputs that enable cultivation or even the farm credit that is required for cultivation, on to the process of cultivation, the storage, the initial processing, the transport, the distribution, and finally the supermarkets and the retail. You find that major agribusinesses dominate this industry. Whichever part of the food system you're talking about, you will find that there is a role somewhere for these very large agribusinesses, and particularly what are called the big four, ABCD, that is Archer Daniels Midlands, Bungae, Gargill, and Lewis Drayfuss, who dominate the industry and they dominate all the different segments of it.  One of the things that has happened as a result of this immense concentration is a real breakdown of the way in which people used to think traditionally about food. And that's especially in the rich countries, which is to say that we would think about food as being seasonal, certain crops and certain fruit and vegetables would be available at particular times of the year. We would think of freshness as being a dominant concern. We would think of the availability not just in terms of year-round access and all the different types of food, but you would think of it in terms of local varieties. Now that's no longer the case, especially in the advanced economies. Those are accustomed to strawberries year-round, they're accustomed to fish from every part of the world, and animal products from every part of the world, and vegetables of all kinds and fruit of all kinds available whenever they want. Now there's something that is unnatural about this, and the way this is done is not only through massive storage and transport facilities, which are of course hugely carbon emitting, but also through ultimately undesirable ways of storing and encouraging particular types of consumption that often turn out to be quite unhealthy. So we are encouraging, and in fact it's partly marketing by the major retailers as well, we are encouraging much more processed food consumption, which is much more unhealthy. We are encouraging the uses of additives, of preservatives, of different kinds of chemicals that are required to transport food over long distances, including fish and seafood and things like that. We are encouraging a lot more meat consumption than in the past, and especially meat that requires huge amounts of land just simply to enable the grain that will feed them. And so in many, many different ways we're encouraging unsustainable consumption, but then we're also encouraging unsustainable production, because we're trying to maximize the productivity of the land no matter what it does in terms of the chemical additives that we're using. We use chemical fertilizers, we use chemical pesticides, we use various kinds of additional inputs. We know that this has an impact on soil quality. We know that this can even have an impact on the product, on the crop, and can affect how healthy those are, but we keep doing more and more of that because we want to maximize the yield. And we're increasingly getting into genetic modifications which are designed not only to sometimes avoid the chemicals, but more often to give you the perfect crop, the perfectly round red tomato, the perfectly shaped potato, the perfect egg and so on and so forth. We're looking at different types of genetic modification that are designed to appeal to a very standardized consumer and to enable much greater preservation over long distances of transport. So all of these add up to really quite an unhealthy system of production and consumption, but it's also deeply unsustainable from the point of view of the planet. So it's unhealthy for both people and the planet, because of course it's massively carbon emitting, but it also erodes the soil. It also leads to lots of other kinds of concerns about the ecologies in which these plants are grown. To give viewers a picture worth a thousand words, I'm going to put up a visual on corporate concentration in the food system. And this graphic shows different sectors of the agro-food supply chain and the percentage of the world market that the top firms control. From seeds, to agrochemicals, to fertilizers that we're discussing today, to farm machinery, animal pharmaceuticals, the global grain trader, so the big four ABCD firms you just mentioned, to the food and beverage processors, and last but not least, retailers. In making the case the global food system is broken, why in this op-ed do you focus on fertilizers? Actually, I was concerned about fertilizers, of course, because of the fact that the recent increase in prices has been largely driven by profits, as in so many of the major commodities in the world over the last two years, but also because to me it represents a dilemma that is at the heart of so many of our policy decisions over the last couple of years, which is the dilemma between what we need to do in the medium and long term and what is the immediate short-term kind of policy response. And in the case of fertilizers, we've had a dramatic increase in prices over the last few years, which is, of course, bad news, because it affects especially small cultivators all over the world. Many of them are now finding it unaffordable to use fertilizers. And if you don't use them, that will affect yields, that will affect local food supply. So it's not just the livelihoods of farmers, but it's also the ability of many developing countries to produce the food that they need. All of that is affected. So how do you respond? And the immediate attempt is to respond by somehow reducing these prices or subsidizing fertilizers when countries can afford that. That's in a way counterproductive, because, as I've said, fertilizers are part of a chemical input dependence, which is not really healthy, and where we really do need to be thinking of alternatives, and we have alternatives. It's just that those alternatives will take time, they will be more expensive, we need to invest a lot more in them. And instead of doing that, we quickly try and somehow manage the big increase in fertilizer prices. Your op-ed cited a study on profit-driven price increases in fertilizers aptly titled A Corporate Cartel Fertilizes Food Inflation. It was published by Grain and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. In May 2023, as an update to the fertilizer trap, an earlier report on the rising cost of farming's addiction to chemical fertilizers published in 2022. A graph in that study shows the total profits of the big nine fertilizer companies over the past five years, so 2018 to 2022. According to this study, these profits exponentially grew from an average of around 14 billion US dollars before the COVID-19 pandemic to 28 billion dollars in 2021, and then to an astounding 49 billion dollars last year. Give us some context on this dramatic rise in fertilizer prices. Yes, I think the evidence is now mounting across the world that so many price increases of the last two years have been delivered by increasing profit margins. I mean, even the IMF has come up with a study now that more or less confirms this. When my colleague Isabella Weber mentioned this way back about two years ago, she was pilloried for making this argument. But now it's actually become accepted wisdom that the recent period is not one where supply shortages were the dominant reason for price increases. It's really that the news about possible supply shortages, whether because of COVID-related transport constraints or because of the Ukraine war and the impact this might have on Russian and Ukrainian exports, was used by multinational corporations in energy and in grain. It was used by them to jack up their prices. Basically, increase their profit margins. So Russia is a major exporter of fertilizer. And even though it wasn't really that that Russian supply was affected, it turns out now we have the evidence it wasn't affected. But major fertilizer companies could simply use this and say, oh, look, fertilizer is bound to be affected. So clearly the price is going up. And so they increase their profit margins from about I think 22% to as much as 36%. Dramatic increases in profits over sales. Explain more about the issue of government responses to this increase in the price of chemical fertilizers. I think there are two issues here. And one is the fact that, as I mentioned, there's this contradiction between the short-term response and the long-term response. But the other is that also you should be seeing these rising prices as a way of shifting production and consumption away from something that is essentially not desirable. And that is true of fossil fuels, and it is also true of fertilizers. In fact, as you know, a lot of fertilizers come out of fossil fuels. So there's a strong interdependence between the two. So yes, in the immediate case, what do you do? Well, I think there is a very strong case. To do a windfall profit tax and those windfall profit tax should be so high as to discourage attempts to just raise prices because you think you can get away with it, which is what's been happening over the past couple of years, really, for both the fossil fuel companies and fertilizer companies and a bunch of other corporations, really. But also a strong case in certain countries for price regulation for saying, well, no, you can't really increase these prices because it's not justified by your cost increases. This is something that's been done not just in socialist countries, but it's been done in the United States in the wartime. I've been reading about Galbraith's price controls during and after the Second World War, for example. So it's possible to exercise price controls in sectors that are seen to be strategic, important, essential. But that leaves pending the larger question. Now, how do we then convert this broader problem into a possible opportunity? And you see, here is where. Agroecology, now there is so much scientific evidence that it is viable, it is doable, it is sustainable, it is desirable. In other words, there's really no good reason for not subsidizing and pushing and promoting agroecological techniques. What are those? Well, those are really techniques that rely much more on natural farming, not necessarily all organic, but certainly much more natural. So natural fertilizers, natural pesticides, much more local products, not things that are necessarily out of season or requiring special efforts to grow in particular areas. Things that can be produced seasonally and consumed as far as possible locally and not have to rely on being transported vast distances for export. Now, these techniques are to begin with more expensive. Why simply because they haven't benefited from all the massive subsidies that fossil fuels and fertilizers have got. So when people say, oh, that's too expensive, they leave out the fact that both oil and fertilizer have benefited from decades of massive subsidies. And when I say massive, the official estimate of subsidies in 2020 before the Ukraine war and all of that by the IMF was about 700 billion is the total amount of subsidies just going into fossil fuels. But if you take the indirect subsidies as well, it was 5.8 trillion, that's nearly 6 trillion. Can you imagine going into subsidies for fossil fuels? And of course, those subsidies make fertilizers cheaper as well. And in addition, many countries then further subsidize fertilizer. So we are actually making it much cheaper than it is. And then we're saying, oh, agroecology is too expensive. Whereas if we shift some of those subsidies away from fossil fuel and fertilizer to agroecological techniques, we will get healthier outcomes and more sustainable outcomes. It's not so hard to understand how decades of massive subsidies for the fossil fuel and related agricultural chemical industry has resulted in a global food system where so many of the world's farmers and countries are dependent on agricultural chemical input. Comment more on the challenge for those who want to shift away from chemical fertilizers. So the shift away from chemical agriculture cannot be abrupt. It can't be something that you just do like that. It has to be a much more thought out, careful, sensitive transition. So for example, in Sri Lanka in 2021, they did this massive rejection of chemical fertilizer import. And that proved to be a complete disaster for the farmers in the country, for agricultural harvests in the country, for the economy. You can't do this kind of thing which will dramatically affect farmers' ability to produce their yields and their incomes without providing some compensation and without easing it over a longer period. So this has to be a transition, which you begin now. So the point is not to say, well, we will do this at some point in the future and we'll just suddenly do a big dramatic shift. No, the point is to say, we start this year. We start this year by subsidizing, providing farmers with special subsidies if they're going to engage in agroecological practices. Give us a bit of a glimpse of the situation in India with respect to all this. India is a subcontinent that is full of all kinds of cultivation practices and farmers. So we have everything. We have farmers who are completely dependent on chemical agriculture and want to continue that dependence. And we have those who are interested in agroecology and doing alternative farming techniques. We have women farmers groups who are not even recognized as farmers in the official data. We have many different kinds of groups who have all remarkably come together. Now in their demands, they have a huge list of demands. Some of them are in fact contradictory because of the nature of that very disparate movement. Some are saying, continue subsidizing the chemical agriculture. Some are saying shift those subsidies to more sustainable practices and techniques. But all of them are saying that you have to keep farmers in mind when you're formulating policies about food. You cannot design policies for food consulting only with corporations. You have to talk to those who are actually producing the food. And I think it's that central point which governments miss and even international organizations miss. You link the need for this shift in production from chemical agriculture toward more natural agriculture to a shift in patterns of consumption. Expand on that. What we have today, as I mentioned, why is our global food system broken? Because we have a pattern of consumption encouraged by this heavily concentrated agribusiness that I mentioned, which is deeply in equalizing. But it's also ridiculous because it encourages malnutrition and malnutrition of both kinds, under nutrition and excess nutrition. That is to say overconsumption, obesity and all the illnesses that come with obesity. And that type of food consumption is being pushed by retailers who are parts of the same big nexus of agribusiness that I've mentioned, even in the developing world. So we now have crises of obesity, let's say in countries like South Africa, often in the same household, you will find under nutrition and malnutrition because of obesity in the same household because the poor are underfeeding themselves or they're overfeeding on junk food and on processed foods which are deeply unhealthy. In some of the Pacific islands, you have diseases, heart disease, diabetes, all kinds of things coming from the consumption of processed foods from particular types of very fatty meat products that are pushed and encouraged and advertised by these global marketing agencies. And so you get all kinds of new illnesses coming because there is a push towards certain kind of food consumption that is not just unhealthy. It doesn't really help in giving you better nutrition but at the same time, it's very important for the profits of these major corporations. The rich in the developed world are now very conscious of this and they eat healthy and they eat organic and they eat local and they eat slow food and they've got all of that.  As I noted earlier, in the up-ed, you say that perhaps worst of all the things wrong with our global food system is this point you just made that food access remains profoundly unequal. So comment briefly on that. So effectively, the political economy of food. Food has always been, at one level, it's central to human existence. At another level, it is deeply indicative of all the divisions of society and economy. So access to food, it's not something that is necessarily universal and access to different types of food, it's critically dependent on not just the total production or availability in any one country or globally. It's very much determined by class, by income, by the pattern of livelihood, by the kinds of social discrimination that enable access or lack of it. So the broader political economy of food actually reflects the broader global political economy of everything, of all the different power relations that are determining how our economies are evolving. So the fact of extreme inequalities of income and assets which we know have ballooned in the last decade, for example, or extreme inequalities of health and so on. All of these are also directly reflected in inequalities in access to food and inequalities in outcomes with respect to food. So as I've mentioned, whether it is malnutrition because of under nutrition or malnutrition because of nutrition of the wrong kind, which gives you different kinds of diseases. All of these are very much reflective of the broader tendencies of inequality in our economies. So this kind of commentaries conspicuously absent in mainstream media. Instead, agribusiness, whether chemical fertilizers and pesticides, GMO or next generation products like gene editing is presented as the solution for feeding the world. I think there's a real problem in the way in which agribusiness and global media have worked together to sort of make people feel that there is no alternative, that we have to have this pattern of production and consumption of food because that's the only way in which people will be fed. We now know that the food problem is ultimately one of distribution and that there's surplus and excess and wastage. 40% of the food in the world is wasted while huge amounts of people, billions of people in the world are going hungry and they're going hungry, not just because of failure of global supply, they're going hungry because of local supply failures and because their livelihoods are not enough for them to be able to afford food in the poorer countries which are affected, food-important countries which are affected by exchange rate changes and economic distress and lack of employment. So we know that the causes of hunger are different and yet we persist in thinking it's a problem of aggregate supply, it's not. Even today, the attempt to reform agriculture in Africa is unfortunately going in the wrong direction. It's led by an initiative called the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, Agra which is really something driven by the major foundations and the Gates Foundation in particular but has got the support of the World Food Summit and Agra is really pushing this chemical agriculture that I have been talking about. I'll just jump in to note that there's a tremendous opposition to decades-long initiative driven by the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa. To cite one such example, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has called upon Agra donors to end support for green revolution programs in Africa. This in a letter that critiques the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa as an unequivocal failure. And AFSA is the biggest civil society movement in Africa and unlike Western philanthropists like Bill Gates, what they want is a transition to agroecology as the dominant farming and food system in Africa. In fact, Agra's own assessments and independent evaluations that they have commissioned all indicate that they haven't been successful. They haven't achieved their goals. That the so-called successes they have achieved, the minor increases in yields in a few countries and so on are nowhere near their stated ambitions and that in many cases they've actually made things worse if not stagnant. So to push a chemical model of agriculture at this point in humanity when we know that there are better alternatives available is not just irresponsible. I think it's really counterproductive and it's going in absolutely the wrong way. The point about chemical fertilizers is not just that they are bad from the point of view of say CO2 emissions, which they are. I think they contribute about 2.4 of global emissions at the moment. They are very strongly related to the fossil fuel industry and a lot of the nitrogenous fertilizers come out of the by-product of fossil fuel production. So again, it's very closely related to the whole carbon emission problem but they also have a terrible impact in terms of farming itself. They lead to soil erosion. They lead to the degradation of the quality of the soil. They have implications for the quality of the output and the crops and even for the health of the crops. So chemical agriculture is bad for the ecology that is it's bad for the local area, the land, the nature around it and it's bad for human health. And of course it's also then bad for the planet in terms of carbon emissions. We have to recognize this and then think of ways to ease ourselves out of this dependence on chemical agriculture. We embraced it across the world because it provided higher and higher yields and we thought that that was essential for solving the food problem. We now know that it's not essential that you can solve the food problem with sustainable yields using agroecological techniques but because we are subsidizing chemical agriculture and chemical inputs so heavily, agroecological techniques are not seen as profitable or even competitive. So we have to shift. We have to shift our subsidies away from chemical agriculture towards more natural agriculture. Talk more about power relations that as you commented earlier are determining how our economies and more specifically food and agricultural systems are evolving. You know, one of the tragedies of our times is the extent to which multilateral fora have been taken over or manipulated or dominated by private commercial interests and particularly by large multinational corporations who have not just lobbying power but they have the ability to, shall we say infiltrate to many of these organizations. I think it's a tragedy in many sectors but it's particularly a tragedy in the world food system and the fact that even the World Food Summit relied heavily on sponsors who were private food corporations and that so many of the big initiatives for changing agriculture rely on direct or indirect sponsorship from big corporations. I think that's very unfortunate. And of course it makes it much harder for, shall we say the voice of sanity to prevail because the voice of sanity would say don't do this. Don't make mistakes which you don't need to make when you know that there are other options available. But the voice of profit is saying well go ahead and do this and we'll worry about the impact later because right now you will get some benefits and we will get even bigger benefits. So countering that voice of profit is a tough call but I do believe that there are more and more voices around this as you mentioned there are many people in different food sovereignty and farmer sovereignty movements around the world who are trying to make themselves heard and there are many new initiatives coming up but I do also believe that eventually these problems have become so severe and so telling that humanity will have no choice but to take a sensible path. Do you see this as something of an inflection point? I noted that in the closing lines of your op-ed in referring to the fertilizer price inflation of the last few years he wrote to quote by reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers we could turn the current food crisis into a genuine opportunity. The price inflation and food could also be an inflection point if governments respond in the right way. If they don't it will just lead to greater hunger greater distress and you know, terrible circumstances but if governments even a few significant important governments can respond in the correct way it could be a very promising route to an alternative trajectory for all of us. Jadi Ghosh, thank you. Thank you. I'm from Geneva, Switzerland. Thank you for joining us in this segment of GPE News Dogs with guest Jadi Ghosh discussing her op-ed, the fertilizer conundrum.


My name is Gerd Leonhardt. I work as a futurist. I run a company called the Futures Agency, and I'm really happy to have today some really really interesting people with me guys come on up on stage here Some really great people a futurist a entrepreneur and tech innovator from from Kenya in telecom media futurist expert and Person that's dealing with an innovation in the bio genetics Bio information center sorry right so they'll be making an introduction shortly But what the format of this event is going to be about five minute presentations from each person and Then we have what we call the grilling session, which means that you can ask questions any tough questions through Twitter I have a Twitter feed here the Twitter hashtag is of course a hashtag ITU world 113 third day today if you want to tweet a question you can do that using this hashtag And I will try to answer the question and throughout the conversation We're also going to have questions to each other and afterwards after the first round We have a 20 minute question answer session and also a short poll to give you so Let's dive right in and of course me being the keynote speaker and the moderator. I get to go first So I'm gonna have a presentation. Let's start with my first presentation. Okay. Thank you put up those slides if you can Okay, so basically the whole topic of the session is what's what's happening in the network society In my view is a network society There's two things that are starting to matter one is that we're going from this idea of companies being networks rather than a network Like from NBC to YouTube right so companies becoming networked Also the empowerment of use as you can see here with the fish This idea of saying that the use of the individual actually is starting to matter more than ever before right in the network society and I think this is really quite hard as you can you can see in this slide here is that On a global level we have this shift towards people having more empowerment through mobile devices and social media For example, you can see the big change in rim in the business of blackberry The consumerization of it is that all of a sudden people are using blackberries a lot more than businesses Which is a huge shift for blackberry and of course one of the major problems of their and issues of their decline So technology means empowerment right and a lot more than empowerment as you can see here in the Arab Spring as a CEO of salesforce.com I said is not just about the Arab Spring. It's about the corporate spring at companies are changing Businesses are changing is the way that we communicate most global a global fortune 100 companies have strong involvement on social networks Which is actually quite difficult because as a big company You're not really set up to involve or have conversations that easily especially if you're bang for example or insurance companies Now companies are becoming what I call Going from the empire to networks. There's a great movie that just came out from a Tiffany Schley and called Connected the movie that you should watch it explains how companies are becoming networks And this is of course a slide of Facebook Facebook nearing 1 billion users so Facebook is the biggest country in the world very soon Just surpassed by China and I think India at this point So very interesting companies are becoming companies where co-creation is the new sort of standard co-creation meaning That you outsource ideas and Juliana from Ushahidi will talk about what she's doing later But crowdsourcing ideas BMW is looking for designs on the internet Many pharma companies are putting out ideas for the creation of new medication Into public domain using sites like crowdsourcing mechanisms and so on so co-creation is becoming sort of a new default Which runs against the idea of intellectual property and who owns what and those kind of things also very importantly I do a lot of work in Brazil Russia And other places like Indonesia Clearly the future will be shaped in those countries Here in Europe, of course, we do have a crisis Not just in Europe, but also other places, but basically if we're looking at Brazil Russia China That's where the future will be happening and mobile phones are the tools of empowerment for consumers there You can see for example that airtime is becoming a currency in many of those countries. You can trade airtime We also have total convergence Meaning that we no longer know what's online offline That many people for example if you go to a clothes store today You can tweet the dress that you're wearing and ask your friends for opinions. I mean, this is already reality Right, so we don't really know what's online offline any longer. It's complete convergence And basically being offline is becoming a luxury that is the new luxury, right? So if you're really rich, you're gonna be offline because you have somebody else being online for you That goes for our kids, you know our kids are growing up being people of the screen This is a quote from Kevin Kelly who says and no longer are we people of the book? We're people of the screen And this is true I mean their screens everywhere in the car in the airport in the airplane in your bathroom in your kitchen and very soon You can watch your recipes scroll by as you cook, right? I mean people of the screen and they consume entirely different as you can see for example in the demise of the music business 71% decline because of these kind of consumption Appoint that Simon will drive home in the next session next five minutes is that data is becoming the new oil And I didn't make this up It was made up six or seven years ago by the American Marketing Association and by the European Commission saying that basically what's happening Is that the value of the data that we create is becoming so powerful that will arrival oil as a driving force, right? Data companies Google is a master of data mining Facebook Companies like that and basically we are shifting now in our world to what Jeff Jarvis calls public see We're going from a world to where everybody that's doing anything in business is becoming somewhat a public person I mean everybody in this room is probably on LinkedIn or Facebook or zinc then zinc Zing or Twitter or so right we're becoming public by default Which is very scary at the same time has various benefits that we're going to discuss in our session I think there's a significant amount of Issues that will come here. So as you can see my time has been cut off So I'm going to take questions from the audience and from my colleagues here Is there any urgent question on the audience is there to eat somebody with a concern anyone? Anyone no then we start with my colleagues fire away if you have a question or a Objection there you Yeah, I only make this very brief because Simon's session is about this very issue in the next five minutes But basically the very fact that we're all generating data now We're saying where we are what we like what we rate we give the thumbs up We do the like button all these things right basically becomes a huge flow of information That is very valuable for companies This is one reason that Facebook will do probably the biggest IPO ever Because they have really powerful data about the users and that data can be used to sell things or to market things Which is a $1 trillion economy the telcos of course have data that they really haven't used much and Simon will talk about that so Basically that issue is a very very big issue and I think in fact there are wars fought over data as You can see on the end on the internet data is a real source of good things and bad things Which we'll hope to talk about other questions and we see if there's any tweet here any of you Very good question Thanks for throwing that ball to me I Think basically what's happening is that ownership is less important than access now For example, if you can see what's happening in the music business right do we still need to own the record? It's enough if we can just click a button and listen to the music right so copyright is still very important Of course is crucial to a lot of things But the way you monetize is not by selling a copy right the way you monetize by providing access The most successful service in the in the movie business until yesterday when their stock plunged was netflix 22 million subscribers paying $10 for access, but would thereby DVD maybe not right So I think what's happening with the idea of intellectual property and copyright is that we're going to see new embodiments of allowing people to use what we have Rather than keeping it back Have a question One should we try and fight against being too many too much people at the screen is it bad for us? Very good point I didn't get to that point But I think we're going to see a lot of movement towards what I call a digital detox Which basically means that we're going offline to recuperate from the river of information So part of that thing is going to be that essentially these tools are so cool and so new now You know iPhones iPads Android and so on that everybody's using it. It's a bit like a toy I think in five or ten years it becomes reality like like tap water or that electricity Right, and then we'll mellow down. I think in the abuse of this But clearly there are significant issues about addiction and all these kind of things that we're going to have to face Right, but let me remind you of one important fact of course Television didn't fare any better. I mean people are truly addicted to television and it's truly bad Right, so compared to that the internet is still doing pretty good There's a question from Twitter Mobile phones are the tools of empowerment for consumers. What about telecenters? I Don't know the answer to that. That's a very good question. The telecenters don't seem to be the tool of empowerment, but Maybe we can reserve that question for later and see if we can answer Do we have another question? How do we end users benefit from their data if it is not the new oil? Very good question. Anybody want to answer Well, they can't I mean a lot of the late legislation at the moment is potentially pushing no data to be recorded and No data to be kept so you get into a very bad situation within certain Directions the law might go in so we Yeah, I think one of the key issues about data is I think telecoms and operators and ISPs have to be much more Proactive about how to use that data how to mine it what to be permitted what they do with it How they collected how they use API's we're going to talk about API's later I think open API's are crucial to the process of the overall ecosystem which Giuliana will talk


Madam Vice President, ladies and gentlemen, let me first of all thank the society for this very kind invitation. I feel honored, and I am certainly very pleased to be here. And if I had a light here, I could read my manuscript. So that would have to be, that is wonderful. Can it be a little brighter? Too many times. All right, well, this is good, OK. So as is well known, one of the characteristics of medieval art is that pictures frequently feature writing as well. And that is especially true, of course, of the illumination of manuscripts, where the picture responds in some way to an already existing text. Sometimes elements of that text may even move across the divide and be fused with the accompanying image in what current scholarship refers to as the iconicity of writing. And you see it, for instance, in early insular gospel books. Still, the normal case is that the writing script is introduced as an alternative form of communication that conveys additional information. And that includes the recording of speech. Paradoxically, writing as an element of pictorial composition can make spoken words visible. The artist encloses them in ready-made graphic formulas that transport actual speech acts in extension of the speaker's gesture. So this, then, is my topic, the graphic shape and the function of such paratexts and their incorporation into the overall design. They rarely command the attention they deserve, ignored as merely occasional or purely pragmatic contributions. And occasional is actually correct. Most of the time, medieval artists and scribes have not chosen to accentuate their work in this way. Nevertheless, it is still a large field. And I will limit myself to the 11th and 12th centuries and to three sets of observations. First, a brief excursion into the special status and function of the role in this system of virtual communication. And second, looking at a few examples of iconography and iconographic and functional variation of the scroll across England and Europe. Third, considering a variant of this motif that occurs only in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and signals a rather different approach toward the visualization of speech. So the role, since the term scroll and roll are often confused or simply lumped together when it comes to describing the representational speech in such illuminated manuscripts, I want to say something just briefly on shape and function of the inscribed role. The speaker in this scene uses a role, a replica of an instrument of writing that was in actual use throughout the Middle Ages and in many areas of written communication just to remind everybody segments of parchment sewn together in vertical formation inscribed from the top on down and across the narrow width. Now, even in this stylized form, the role opens up, unrolls vertically in a straight line in front of the speaker and further reveals its iconographic origin in the slight curls at either end. The speaker on this title page of the Gospel of Mark is John the Baptist with the beginning of his sermon announcing the coming of Christ, may need for sure may therefore there come as one might hear than I after me. But in this instance, those words don't address the crowd to the right in the picture. That is John's original and if you like proper audience. Instead, the dynamics of the scene are directed outward toward the viewer. The evangelist in the left background has already recorded the event and now he looks at John who uses a role to deliver this message to the present day audience. And that is a rather typical constellation. The role does transport spoken words but it remains relatively static, informed and content. Stiff and declarative, demonstrative rather than dialogic. By contrast, a speech that reverberates within the framework of a pictorial narrative is conveyed by scrolls. So to the scroll, the scroll is actually related to yet another type of role that had its own place in this system of signifiers. And you see it here in somewhat exaggerated form, more and more like a bas-matt. In antiquity, it had served as an attribute of the scholar but the Middle Ages saw it as the insufficient precursor of the codex. And as such, it survived only visually as the symbol of ephemeral knowledge and mostly in the hand of those who had contributed provisional non-canonical wisdom prophets mostly. Here in this picture, it is one of the lesser apostles while Peter in the middle holds a book as the author of two canonical letters. This role is almost closed, rolled up tightly. But since it represents transient oral communication, it undoubtedly helped create the graphic formula that became the open and open-ended projector of speech in pictorial design. Alas, in effect, in actual execution, this graphic sign is a form sui generis, an artistic construct made to convert gesture into visible speech through a tape or a ribbon of almost indeterminate legs. It is inscribed horizontally along its narrow width, not unlike the banners carried in military action, hence the French term for Bande Heuil. It floats outward away from the speaker in almost any direction because unlike the script bearing role, it is generally unencumbered by the laws of gravity. This display here at the beginning of Jerome's commentary on Isaiah in a manuscript from Citro provides a good demonstration. Speaker is the prophet himself who directs two of his prophecies toward the opposite page where the Virgin Mary appears in fulfillment. Visually prominent, the scroll acts as an activating, almost causal factor. Isaiah's speech unvines from the tip of the scroll to where additional words may still be in hand, so to speak. And that seems logical. And yet the painter's dominant concern is function, not very similitude. Then you see that the writing switches back and forth between the two surfaces of the scroll in order to remain visible throughout its playful draping. So this graphic element is enormously variable in application as an integral part of any overall design. And I want to show just a few more examples. Like this one here, they not only convey information, but they strive for clear function, a certain aesthetic appeal, and the manipulation of the viewer. In their most stylized form, as simple flat strips, those scrolls along with their text messages may become visual props distributed systematically in a carefully balanced construction that helps lend geometrical rigor to an underlying vegetative design, which is the tree of Jesse. This sort of systematic abundance was especially common in the famous scriptorium of Hermashausen, but also in Hildesheim or in the southeast in Prague, for example. On the other hand, such strips could serve more individual purposes as well. In this initial to a sermon on the birth of Mary from Admont in Austria, the young Mary is being educated by her parents, and their words are shaped so as to highlight the domestic intimacy of the scene. So flat strips are quite common, but the general tendency was to retain the idea of a tape, a tape that could be rolled out and would be back up again, even where such tapes might serve, as they do here, more explicitly architectural purposes. In this illustration to Psalm 26 in a Westminster manuscript, they support the scene of David's anointment with quotes from Daniel and his interpreter, Augustine. In general, the slide curls at either end of the tape point to a larger framework that is just not being accessed in the present case. As the formal equivalent of conversation, this artist from the Muir's region has intertwined two speeches and written one of them upside down, presumably the response. The curious viewer will have to turn the book around only to discover that this is not genuine dialogue after all. These scrolls record laudatory summaries of each man's philosophical achievements announced in the third person. Such internal contradictions in pictorial fiction usually reveals the viewer, the external reader, as the primary addressee. And here, where this contradiction is underlined in a special graphic constellation, it even involves the book as physical object. The monastery of Lobes in Lorraine comes a Bible with this historiated initial for Hosea. Two scrolls serve as connective tissue that holds together a complex sequence of events. The gesture of Hosea's left hand brings together two different zones or levels, both Jehovah's strange command from above and in the real world, the evil adulteress Hosea has been told to marry. And with the other hand, Hosea holds the second scroll, arranged horizontally at a right angle to Jehovah's words and serving the mundane purpose of naming the outcome of this union in the third zone, with a couple's three mystic gotten offspring. And the daughter in the middle, who is called without mercy and her provocative stare, then challenges the viewer to take it all in and comprehend the incomprehensible. Artistic desire to fashion formal equivalents for different occasions led to an ingenious and rare modification in this Austrian manuscript of Anselm of Canterbury's prayers. When the words envisioned light and the divine, the scroll turns into an inverted funnel to reflect that special connection. But I bring up the scene of Peter's rescue, mainly because it exemplifies something else very well. Even in the 12th century, the large majority of these spoken texts is not original. Most are quotations from biblical, liturgical, or theological writing. Thus, they are often not even first person statements. So for example, the angel here says, quote, and the light lit up the prison, unquote. Or in a more mixed mode, quote, he woke him saying, arise quickly, unquote. In fact, as the musical notation above those words makes explicit, all of these phrases in the scene, including a titillus in the top left corner, are borrowed from the liturgy, and quite specifically here from a response performed during the monastic office on Peter's feast day, August 1. In other words, the pictorial staging of the texts may cast it as spontaneous monologue or spontaneous dialogue. But this visual fiction is really meant to lend historic immediacy, histrionic immediacy to slivers of sacred or edifying writing as they now flow from the mass of pictorial actors. And these actors don't just pronounce those texts, they perform them. And this performance invokes a textural dimension beyond the picture that is shared a priori by producer and consumer who habitually come together after all as a small and coherent group. In this particular manuscript, they even hear the added echo of communal liturgical singing. The text quoted and evoked on this tidal page of a Gospel of John is a theological toppers. How the anti-Trinitarian teachings by the Heresiat Arius are effectively refuted by the initial words of this very Gospel. John does the honors himself, as it were, and Arius is already on the ground, covered partly by his scroll that voices succinctly in his doubts regarding the concept of the Trinity. That is, in the beginning, the father must have been without the son. The writing is upside down, challenging the authority of the evangelist above who reacts with painful poignancy. Although there is physical contact as well, John's foot is only on his adversary's head, the more poignant effect and quite unconventional is created by the graphic formulation of the verbal response. Scroll and words in unison reach right into the heretics ear. And it is the vocali thrust of the last word, principio, that administers the dogmatic who declares. Words have consequences, and they can hurt. That is what the victors look straight at the viewer, seems to say. With this example, I have already reached my third set. For obvious reasons, such scrolls everywhere function in close physical proximity to the speaker. Most can speak just so when speakers still hold in their hands the tightly wound remainders of the tape, as we have seen in several cases. The most elaborate rendings even show a pin in the middle that provides stability. And all of that means that all of those speakers seem to quote at their discretion. The message emanates from them. They seem to have direct access to their source, and it is up to them, in their hands, as it were, how much of it is revealed at any time. Now in this picture, the modus operandi is remarkably different, as you can see in the detail on top. Instead of unwinding tape, his scroll from his hand, John uses his hand to pull that tape from a slit in the side of a cylindrical capsule that hovers somewhere above his shoulder, complete with a lid and a pin sticking out on top of the lid. This procedure deviates sharply from everything we have seen, and the question arises, of course, what accounts for it? Now the short answer is that this manuscript was produced in one of the workshops in Canterbury. Among the conventions developed in England, this one stands out as a specialty of Anglo-Saxon scriptoria, with a distinctive perspective of their own, maintained consistently for almost 100 years. This is the most basic form. It may not strike one as unusual at first, because the overall iconography on this title page of the Gospel of Luke is quite conventional. An angel or, as here, the evangelist symbol, the winged bull, brings him a scroll. It is empty, but that too is normal. It is a symbol of the word as such, or inspiration for recording it. What is unusual, at least from a continental perspective, is that the ends of the scroll, instead of being visible and maybe even curled slightly, are stuck in little brown boxes with slits in their sides. Now this page was painted around the middle of the 11th century, but exactly the same iconographic formula appears already around 970 in the benediction of Bishop Asselwold. Several times, in fact, and it can be found in other liturgical manuscripts during the intervening period. Here, angels announced the word, but containers at either end of the scroll suggest, instead of open-endedness, that its virtual contents have already been stored somewhere, hence selected in advance in an intermediate stage between the base text and its partial verbalization in personalized speech. Actually, that is true also when one of the boxes is removed, as in this other Gospel book of Anglo-Saxon provenance with the same kind of overall iconography, hence also maintaining the emptiness of the scroll. Mostly, though, when one of the boxes is removed, the scroll is inscribed. And in most of those cases, more imagination is invested in the appearance of the box. Among the various carriers of script in this scene are two scrolls held up jointly by the hand of God above and emerging from receptacles that blend completely into their overall surroundings. As a result, the scrolls themselves extend in harmony with that architecture, the Benedict on the left and the Marks of Christ Church on the right. But the most striking aspect of this arrangement is that those words, because they emerge from containers, do not originate with the speaker, not even God in this case, but are pulled by him from those receptacles, in other words, accessed from an independent source. Earlier in the same manuscript, that source is portrayed as a rather large handheld cylindrical object with a spindle in the middle, it serves as the virtual container of the pascal tables that an angel offers to the Egyptian abbot, Pekomias. And his reaction is significant. He pulls the emerging scroll toward him with his right hand as an active partner in this transaction. Here one has to really savor the sophistication at work here. A pre-codified and pre-stored text becomes a scrolled speech in transition to renewed codification immediately below in the first line of the actual tables. You can barely see it, but that is the same text, the first line of the tables. What gives rise to such medial playfulness is the interpolation of this particular iconographic feature. And it is a measure of its popularity that elaborately crafted capsules often replace the simple box. So here is another example. In this solder, the famous berry solder, a marginal gloss picks up two lines from the adjacent second psalm, where the psalmist announces the coming of a reform king who may let speak for himself, quote, I have been installed by him over Sion and so forth. And that is the figure portrayed on the margin standing on Sion, who repeats those words, making them visible in an elaborate scroll. The vehicle of this duplication, the intermediary agent, is the capsule that hovers in midair in front of him. The only explanation of this duplication is that the draftsman wanted to create a performance that would resonate well beyond the text. We have seen how the evangelist John manipulates the words of his own gospel as ready to use formula. This king of Sion is made to act out his own pronouncement as an exemplary recipient and as the promulgator of the face as he puts it at the end of his speech, declaring the decree of the Lord. Now, to repeat this kind of dramatization of the visual experience of orality constitutes a significant departure from the common formula that had by no means been unknown in Canterbury in earlier times. This is Matthew from the so-called Golden Evangelary of Canterbury holding a continental scroll. The Anglo-Sites variant arrived later as those workshops founded their own style and it was invoked right up to the Norman conquest. But there is just one much later example and it will round out my third set. We'll do yet another initial, this time introducing the prophet Isaiah in a late 12th century Bible from Saint-Homer. The artist was an itinerant master who had worked in England and in this instance he combined the old Anglo-Saxon model with the more general continental formula to distinguish the different modes of speech. His topic was King Hezekiah of Judah's Illness and Cure, during which Isaiah acts as a messenger of Jehovah. At the upper left Jehovah commands Isaiah to convey this message and in the interior below Isaiah informs the king that Jehovah has lifted his ailment from him. This is ordinary speech, so to speak, delivered in highly stylized scrolls. The king's response is something else, namely an eloquent and exuberant hymn of gratitude which the Middle Ages adopted as one of the canticles used in the monastic liturgy at various times of the year. Hezekiah pulls it from an oval capsule with knobs at either end that indicate a pin inside. In this context, this action amounts to a performance within a performance. Hezekiah's hymn was a set piece, a biblical speech of a higher histrionic order that had become canonical. And while the three speakers together perform a biblical event, Hezekiah's part enjoys the special status of liturgical celebration. And to make that point, the artist drew on a device that must, by his time, have been deemed archaic if not bizarre by French viewers. But what gave people the idea in monastic workplaces 200 years earlier to visualize and manipulate speech in this way? I think that this very late recollection of the Anglo-Saxon practice may hold the key to the answer. Let's think back also to the marginal scene that shows the reform king of the second psalm performing his own words, words that incidentally had also become part of the liturgical repertoire by then. Each time the tape emerges from storage in the capsule and does not release the text until the speaker takes symbolic possession by speaking it. And this overtly theatrical and unusually sophisticated performance goes beyond simple mediation. And I think it is understood best in analogy to the liturgical recapitulation of the word. Consider just two important common denominators in the relationship to the body of sacred writing in the background. Selection and appropriation for a new purpose are followed by active creative engagement in a performance that lends voice to the selection. This iconographic formula, and employed almost exclusively in the liturgical manuscripts as I have said, was conceived and continued in the spirit, even imitation of the liturgy. We can observe that impulse at work elsewhere as well, most obviously where such texts are accompanied by musical notation as they are in the answer manuscript I showed a bit earlier. In that case, those added newms appeal directly to a habitual communal experience on the part of the viewers. The Anglo-Saxon iconographic formula entails a more direct reference to the same thing, but it also relies on the depiction of a special object to connect it with liturgical practice. And that is, of course, the capsule at the center of those performances. It comes in different shapes. I show one more evangelist on the left with a hand-held exemplar and parallels that you have already seen. But the mechanics are always the same. The scroll appears to be stored inside, wound around a pin, sometimes with knobs at either end, and it is put out through a slit at the side to be put to use. Some descriptions are really generic. Others are quite detailed, and at any rate, to portray such a box in prominent position to the hand function would not have made sense at all if the viewer, if it had meant nothing at all to the viewers. Now, unfortunately, no such objects have been documented for Anglo-Saxon England or any other period in English medieval history. At least that is the answer I have received so far after making inquiries here, there, in London, and elsewhere. And now I'm, of course, hoping that someone in this audience can help identify the missing link somewhere. Maybe nothing's been found yet because there's never been a targeted search. Unfortunately, there exists a continental example that tells us what such a cultural artifact might look like in reality. It is the so-called loge rotulus that survives together with a wooden capsule with the obligatory slit. This long rule was made for the abbey of loge around 870, and it is inscribed with a litany of several hundred saints' names. So clearly, it was connected to the liturgy in some way. Pins with knobs are still fastened at both ends, and until 20 years ago, the scroll was still inside this capsule. The library in Frankfurt, where it is now, does not permit a dendrochronological examination, but the capsule itself bears an inscription that dates it to the 15th century. Having examined it recently, I think that is about right, but I also say no reason why it should not have been made in continuation of an older tradition dating back to the 9th century. Now, however that may be, this is an important parallel, despite the distance in time and geography. And taken together with the manuscript evidence, it suggests that planners and painters in Anglo-Saxon workshops did actually more than act in the spirit of the liturgy. They actually saw such containers for paralyturgical roles and adopted them in their device. So to see this relationship as merely analogous is perhaps not enough. Music, in one case, and spoken language in the other, mediate between the written corpus of sacred texts and its current echo. The speech act visualized in writing with a prompt after all the reader or viewer to read it out loud, to voice it. In other words, in a society that communicated orally for the most part, voice was the all-important means of communication, even for these more or less literate clerics who relied on it for their mission, after all, internally in the liturgy and externally in the celebration of the mass sermon and catechetic instruction. In the final analysis, one suspects that the urge to make speech visible may not at all have stemmed from pragmatic considerations, providing more information, for example. The intent was rather to pay homage to that other medium, spoken language. Other combinations of imagery and writing dissolve the medial differences, for instance, in the iconicity that I mentioned at the beginning. The graphic actualization of speech, on the other hand, that is meant to raise the viewer's consciousness of those medial differences. The picture is the third dimension that acts as the meeting place of orality and literacy. Thank you.


Here we are going to discuss a very key point, I've kept it separate from other modules because it is of a immense important element. Here it is called diversification. That's kind of backbone of financial risk management that is to learn about diversification. When I say diversify, that I mean to spread your investment. Spreadware that if you are investing in stock rather than investing in one, it is better to invest in two. If you're investing in two, it's better to invest in five. The more the number of scripts, the more diversified your portfolio. And imperial studies have identified that if you reach a number of 30 stocks, that can be referred to as a well diversified stock portfolio. Which doesn't mean we can only stay till 30, it can go to any number, but 30 is a fairly decent number to get the desired level of diversification. But if you have seen this point, I have not discussed anything other than shares. So that means it's still risky to a one particular category. We call it asset class. So we have spread into many shares, but the asset class is same, that is equity. So another better version could be if we spread it among different asset classes. When I say asset class, it is a categorization of financial instruments based on their risks and their dynamics and their properties. For example, if I talk about shares, stocks, what would be the better diversification? If I put some money in shares, I put some money in bonds. Rather than taking one share or one bond, I take some shares or some bonds. How can a portfolio be better than this? We can invest in real estate or any other category of assets. So diversification is a key. I'll keep this topic brief because you can give importance and weightage to this point. So let's learn how do you think this portfolio can be. I've just made an illustration for you. Portfolio A, we have shares of MCB. Theoretically speaking, it is a very good investment because it's one of the prime leading bank having a very strong base and we invest all our money in this particular share. Visibly, it seems to be a good investment, but for finance professional, it is not because it is risking a lot of your money. In a one particular institute. So let's, if you look at down, then we have spread our investment in three categories. MCB, NBP, Allied Bank. Again, very good portfolio, have leading banks of the country, but again, not a very good portfolio. Why? Why? All the banks are in this. MCBB, National Bank, Allied Bank. If the banking sector has any effect or a strict rule, then our portfolio will be losing a lot. Now look at another possible word. We have MCB, we have Nishat Mills and we have DG Khan Cement. Very good portfolio. Bank, textile company and cement company. My answer would be again, no, it's not a very good. Why? Just think about it because all three companies belong to one group of companies that is Nishat Mills. So that means their connection or their main sponsors are same. So if something happens to that particular sponsor, then all these portfolio will get affected. So moving down, now we have MCB, we have some Lucky Cement and we have Sophia textile. Now in this out of these categories, I'll call it the best portfolio. Reason being MCB, banking sector from one group of companies, Lucky Cement and from entirely different group of company. And then we have Sophia textile mill, an entirely different sector. So this way we can see our portfolio is diversified. But again, that high level of diversification is not yet achieved. That would achieve when we insert in more asset classes like bonds, like commodities, like real estate and any other investment that was available to us. So famous statement is there, never put all your eggs in one basket. What does this mean? Suppose you have all the assets that you have parked in one place and if something happens to that basket, then all the eggs are finished. Similarly with your investment, if you have invested all the money in one place, then you can lose a lot. So what we have to do now is we need to diversify. How will they do it? Spread in different asset classes, spread in different assets. First go to different classes, then go to different bonds. If there is a bond class, then buy multiple bonds like Pell, MCB or any other company. And then do it. So this will be referred to as diversification. We should learn it by heart because that is going to be linked with other topics as well. Thank you.


Hey everybody, the Patch and Switch Consultancy is back with your unofficial end user guide to Microsoft Ignite, the digital event. Today, we're talking about sleeplessness 48 hours long. Everybody wake up. Come on now. Well, you know what? I'm glad that we have this because I've actually asked our good friend Rob Tuffer to come back, otherwise known as 3D T-Rex. Now, Rob, I know that as a parent of young children, you've probably dealt with sleeplessness and time management and stuff like that. So what is your game plan for handling the watching of a 48 hour event like Microsoft Ignite? Well, as I'm watching and enjoying the content, I need to make sure I watch the clock because if I don't, you can go to 12 AM, 1 AM, 2 AM. Before I know it, I have no time to sleep. I have to wake up in the morning to do my thing. So watching the clock is my biggest strategy. I'm going to have to disagree with you there, Rob. I see your environment there. You appear to have the perfect environment to be watching a 48 hour digital event. I do. Look, I got the computer right here. I have a 10 foot cable on my headphones. I have stunt dinosaurs so they can stand in for me when I'm listening to things that maybe I don't need to participate in. Yeah, I see that. Well, listen, if you want to do what Rob does and manage the clock in terms of watching what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, you need to be a registered attendee. So head on over to myignite.microsoft.com. Get yourself registered for Microsoft Ignite, the digital event. And for more stellar content with us and a dinosaur, head on over to our blog post located below. We've got more videos to come. Rob? He's there. I do. Rob? He's kind of asleep.


South Africa has a huge problem with illicit trade, so our participation in Operation MIRCAT is to make sure that we contribute to the decrease of the bringing in of illegal tobaccos as well as alcohol into South Africa. It is very important for us to work with customs because all the goods that come into South Africa through our ports and as well as our airports are managed by customs and so we have a very good relationship to make sure that we work hand-in-hand to make sure that we curb the trade in illicit goods coming into South Africa. The South African Police Service is committed to working with Interpol and many other organizations in future to make sure that you know we share our experiences as well as our resources in the fight against crime especially international crimes such as the trade in illicit goods and so we will work with Interpol and every organization in future to make sure that we decrease crime in South Africa as well as around the world.


Now this might be a controversial topic, but if you look at the data, at least in recent US history, protests haven't worked. In this video, we're going to be looking at why that is and what we can do differently to affect greater change. A copy of the script, including all sources, will be linked in the description. Be sure to make your voice heard down in the comments section below and let's jump in. A problem with assessing how successful a protest is is that the effects can take time and can only really be assessed retroactively. But the news doesn't like to revisit topics a year or two after the fact. They like to strike while the so-called iron is hot. And so they often equate huge protests with huge successes. But size is nowhere close to an indicator of success. The largest protests in modern American history, the 2017 Women's March, garnered the support of an estimated 4 million participants across the country. But just two days after the protests ended, the president signed an executive order, stripping USAID to many institutions that offered abortion services, even if that was only a small part of all the services they provided. And in the next election, despite the millions who protested, the total number of women in Congress increased from 105 to 110, an increase of only 5 percent, meaning women soon only made up about a fifth of Congress. In the states with the largest participation, D.C., California, New York, Illinois, Colorado and Massachusetts actually saw their combined total number of women representatives go down. The next biggest protest, the March for Our Lives in 2018, drew over a million participants, advocating for legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States. While some individual states pass new gun laws, studies show that gun control measures in individual states aren't nearly as effective as national laws, since arms can still flow from less regulated states to more regulated ones. For example, three-quarters of guns used in crimes in New York come from states with weaker gun laws. The year after these protests, of 110 bills, including the word gun, to come across the congressional floor, only one passed, and it wasn't even focused on the gun debate. It was the spending bill that ended the partial government shutdown in January of 2019. The next biggest march, the March for Science, took place in 2017, with about one million people in attendance. According to organizers, the goal of the march was to call for evidence-based policy in the public's best interest. Yes, so in the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, it says, shall promote the progress of science in useful arts. But after that march, public policy wasn't any more governed by science than before. And when those protesters could have made their voices heard in 2018's November elections, they sent only six new scientists and engineers to join the eight already in Congress, bringing their representation to just under 3% of Congress. So why have recent protests not resulted in the change they set out to? A Princeton study found that public opinion hardly comes to bear on legislation, and the results of most protests confirmed this. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in 1965 had no effect on war activities, which were actually ramped up until the war's end in 1973. We can see why most protests don't affect change by listening to the first-hand account from a reporter who joined the protests against the war in Iraq. She says she realized the protests wouldn't prevent the war, because the protest leadership wasn't telling us what to do next. The leadership didn't offer us a campaign. That's one of the biggest drawbacks from protests in modern times. Because of the internet and platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it's now easier than ever to get the word out to millions of people. Because amassing large numbers of protesters is easier than ever, protests have grown tremendously. The country's largest protests have more than tripled in size today, compared to the 1960s. But because protests are now more spur of the moment, they lack the necessary long-term plans to be effective. That 2017 Women's March is the perfect example of the contrast between organizing a protest and mobilizing a movement. In January 2017, activists using social media produced in just weeks the largest protest in U.S. history. But when the protesters took to the streets, participants noted that the organizers didn't have a plan laid out. And not until the next morning was a 10-point plan for defeating Trump released. And it wasn't even the national organizers who made it. So they quickly adopted an indoor step. Modern political protests, especially for more liberal ideas, are often sparked as emotional reactions to recent events. The 2017 Women's March was planned for the day after the inauguration of President Trump. The March for Our Lives protest was incited after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting a month earlier. And now the current protests have been ignited by recent acts of police brutality. But spur of the moment, emotionally-based protests don't lend themselves to its long-term change. Because protesting just isn't enough. Protesters need to be organized in a way that lets them keep pushing for the movement's goals, long after the protest has ended. This is why most recent protests haven't had much of an effect on the politics they tried to influence. The Tea Party made significant political gains, in large part because, after the first Tax Day protests in April of 2009, local groups stayed involved and frequent grassroots meetings funded by organizations like the Coke Run Americans for Prosperity helped the Tea Partyers push the Republican further to the right. So for one, protests need to lay forward specific plans for long-term change. Otherwise, come election time, their passion will have died down. And this is a problem we're seeing right now with the Black Lives Matter protests. The protests are arguing for equality and change, but not offering much in the way of concrete plans, apart from the punishment of a few select police officers, and they're not laying out a political agenda for 2020. Another thing they have to do is avoid violent behavior and punish it where it exists. Studies show the more extreme protest tactics, actions like blocking traffic and damaging property are effective at gaining publicity. But despite gaining publicity, these acts actually reduced popular support for a given cause, because they reduced the broader public's ability to personally identify with the movement. And the findings echo the results of another recent study by Princeton that found that despite perhaps helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the violent protests that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. increased support for Republicans and might have even tipped the 1968 election for Richard Nixon. Historically, when protesters remained peaceful, particularly in the face of aggression and violence, the resulting images tended to shock a more complacent nation into action. But when the protesters themselves turned violent, even in self-defense, the media's message was shifted from a framing around civil rights to one around the need for controlling this situation. And the University of Denver backs this up, finding that across the world, nonviolent movements tend to be about twice as effective as violent ones. Most importantly, it doesn't really matter if the violent acts are being done by the protesters themselves or by completely separate groups, since the media will often show them side by side. This coverage is serving to unify the images of the Black Lives Matter protests with those of the looters, even though they're completely separate. So to maintain public perception, protesters should actively try to discourage violent behaviors, helping to protect stores from looting, and hand those perpetrators over to the police, something that's actually happening in small part. And protesters need to play the political game. Currently, millions of dollars are flowing into groups, like the NAACP, to fight individual court battles over injustices. But we don't see super PACs forming, with lobbies to put pressure on lawmakers. This is like fighting the symptoms, rather than the disease itself. An example of protests being run more efficiently is the recent creation of an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and political groups that have been nurturing protests and applying political and legal pressure to overturn state and local said home orders. The groups have tapped their networks to drive up turnout at recent rallies, dispatched their lawyers to file lawsuits across the country, and paid for polling and research data to undercut the arguments behind the restrictions that have kept businesses closed. This is the kind of organized support and political focus that protests need to be effective, because the real battle isn't today, but in November. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Everything Science. If you did, be sure to check out some of our other uploads here. Have a great day. And remember, there's always more to learn.


so we all know now who Oliver Anthony is we've we've seen you I'm sure you've all seen the video of his song Richmond north of Richmond we've discussed it on the show it was played during the Republican the Republican debate and what is you know and it's it the song itself became this anthem for for kind of right-wing YouTube show hosts or podcasters and so on and yet Oliver Anthony himself is is trying to run away from that image and run away from that completely so really interesting I mean from everything I've read about him he is a prime candidate for kind of a death of a was before this is made him you know incredibly successful he was a prime candidate for kind of a death of despair indeed he's been he claims he's in his 30s he claims he's been experiencing brain fog and getting chest pains and the reason he uploaded all these songs onto the internet not this latest song but the reason he he started uploading songs that he had written up on the internet is I mean I'll just quote him directly quote I was feeling like my body was starting to fall apart and it got to the point where I was questioning how much longer I'd be able to be around and sing these songs and do this stuff so I was like well let me just go ahead and start getting everything uploaded so at least if God forbid I die of a heart attack in my 30s there are there's some legacy there anyway so this is a guy who was seriously depressed suffering from serious anxiety which was having manifesting itself in serious health problems he you know it being doing a bunch of different manufacturing jobs in the Carolinas and Virginia in different places he had managed to save us some money and take some loans and buy some land in Virginia he was also living out of a camper that I don't know cost him something like I can't remember we had this 49 bucks or something ridiculous like that and what happened here all right and you know he's not political certainly not right wing silly didn't intend this to become a right wing thing I told you all along that this was more left than right he's just disgruntled disgruntled with his own life disgruntled with the state of politics he he actually claimed that he was upset that the songs would the song was being used at the Republican Republican debate because it was about the people up and staged it was about Republicans he was he was against them so you know this is on another there was another one another interview where he did and where this is right after song became popular and he was on Fox News and he says quote we are the melting pot of the world right and that's what makes us strong our diversity and we need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from it so here's the the poster boy of you know the far-right anthem calling for diversity I mean yeah there's nothing right I mean there is in a sense of the modern right wing but there's nothing there's nothing to there's nothing to embrace in this song there's nothing positive about this song and you know other Anthony is is it confused he doesn't have a particular he's not a far-right guy he's probably not a far-left guy he's just pissed off and he's upset and he's upset at rich man he's upset at politicians he's upset at the working conditions he's upset at wages he's upset about his own life and it to turn this into a rallying cry pretty sad of the right anyway it turns out he's a he's kind of out one of these characters that you feel a little sorry for him that his life has turned out this way but there's no there's no political agenda you get from once you read interviews with him I mean he's not and and he's not the poster child intentionally at least he's not intending to be the poster child for right wing politics on many issues it seems quite the country


Hello and welcome to a new series by an LPM staff called LPM Tries. This is where we all get out of our comfort zones and try new stuff, anything and everything. So today, Akbar has brought duge, I'm probably not pronouncing that right, which is a type of yogurt soda. So Akbar, can you talk a little bit more about duge? Yeah, it's a very popular drink, soda in Middle East, and different countries have different kind of duge, even the name is different, and it's probiotic, it's healthy, the main ingredient is a yogurt, but they add salt and the taste is sour, but nowadays it comes in different flavor like this one, mint, like that, yeah, and it's very healthy. Where did you get it? From Mediterranean store, Persian store in Denver. How do you guys think this will taste? It's a carbonated, mint flavored yogurt, it kind of smells like root beer, give it a bit of float. It does smell kind of tart. Alright, well cheers, cheers, thank you guys for trying new stuff, thank you to Akbar for expanding our horizons, cheers, and cheers to our viewers, alright here we go. I'm looking at your face. I told you it's sour. No, I think I just, it's actually not bad, it's just, yeah, I didn't anticipate being as bubbly carbonated. Yeah, oh my god. I don't like it, it tastes like tart, no, it tastes like tart, like fruit. The mint is coming in like very at the end, yeah, see I took too big of a sip. There's a salad in it like plenty of it. Yeah. Not from me. I think the smell a little bit too, just can't. It's very sour. Yeah, it's actually not bad. Yeah, some people that they have their digestion problem as they recommend it, it helps. Yeah, I think the more I drink it, yeah. I like it. What other flavors are there? I should look it up on the screen because I was going to adjust for you. You have the biggest cup of it. It doesn't, yeah, it's growing on me. Like I can see this being very refreshing. So you would have Duke, Duke, Duke again? Yeah. There you go. Alright, what's your rating? I give it like a three out of ten. Three out of ten? Yeah. What did you like about it? It just reminds me of drinking like spoiled milk a little bit. You drink spoiled milk? I've had it once or twice at my time. Not my thing. I would give it like a seven out of ten. I think I would drink it again. I'm curious to try the other flavors. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't expecting it to be sweeter, but it's not sweet. There is no sweet, not at all. Well, thank you, Akbar, for letting us try something new today. So thank you for watching and we'll catch you all next time.


What's going on guys it's your YDPJ here today with another Destiny video and in today's Destiny video I can showcase to you guys my amazing locking hunter with that full prison of Alders armor. Now Varix Dolore this week is selling the leg armor meaning I can achieve full prison of Alders armor on all three of my characters now I've been saving this armor core from last week hoping this week he would have the legs and he did now I do have the legs on my warlock I believe I got them from a judgment chance package but I haven't had them on my titan or on my hunter as you guys will have seen I did open 10 judgment chance packages hoping to get this armor I only got one bit if you missed that video I will link it in the video description but you can see this week Varix Dolore is selling the cal hunters path for the hunter I'm not sure what they're called on the titan and the warlock these are the 152 strength for the hunter now I'm gonna buy these and just apply them straight away so I can see how badass I look okay let's just flip them over okay these carry more ammo for heavy weapons and greatly increased agility and grenade recharge with fighting hive in the prison of Alders equipped prior to the first waves of each round as you see my other armors this one greatly increased armor and melee recharge with fighting fallen in the prison of Alders these came all out for special weapons and came all out for auto rifle so these two paired basically are perfect together these ones are for 87 intellect and 80 strength and we have my garnet of the cal hunters rally these are from 110 strength increased grenade throw distance increased reload speed of special weapon and chance to generate all the killing fallen with melee attacks and my helmet if strength is right is all damn strength flipping how 466 strength and 87 intellect I could do I could do a few others but I didn't see what they look like damn they look weird they do actually look weird they don't look as good as I thought they would to be honest I got like balls on my knees balls on my shoulders damn balls everywhere apart from the correct place grenade hits restore melee energy and more super energy from non-guiding kills and greatly increased recovery and super recharge when fighting hive in the prison of ours equipped prior to first wave of each round now I could do better base stats in terms of intellect and discipline by the end of the day I have got full prison of alias gear at the moment and obviously I'm gonna get more gear drops in the future hopefully often with better base stats now let's check out what these look like with a few shaders we have a mafia there let's try Queen's Web damn fucking how let's try frostfire one of my favorite ones in a game looking sexy as I knew it would midday we are dodging you know I like to look at that first but now it just looks horrible and absolutely everything let's try Palace victorious see what this looks like not too great either Glow who is gonna look crazy actually not that bad not too I'm not sure about the top of their legs that doesn't work to me I'm sure I got of war pretty sexy imagines fire yeah I don't like that at all let's try no shader that actually looks pretty good that looks the best of them all what the hell what the hell what's up there I haven't even applied that yet but yep guys that is it that is my fun time with full prism of ours are you guys should be able to get it to I'm not sure has he sold every piece of armor yet I can't even remember to be honest I know he has sold the help yeah I think he has a solid piece of armor I'm sure he has unless I've got that from a just a chance package it's red and he hasn't sold the chest I'm not too sure I'm sure you guys will know and let me know down below in that comment section if you guys have got full prism of ours armor and all three of your characters if you do have a war titan and Hunter let me know down below in that comment section I do like I said I've all three characters at this precise moment in time I don't have full armor on each I would have to run a few prism of ours to get them armor pause before I can achieve full prism of ours armor and all three of my characters but yeah guys hoping you enjoyed the video do drop a like I do appreciate the support look at this dude here crime KD who else we got here I don't see his name he's teabagging but yeah guys hoping you enjoyed the video do drop a like I do appreciate the support thanks for stopping by as always empty center next time


As-salamu alaikum, I first want to thank Allah swt for the opportunity to speak today and of course the MCC community for providing a platform for the all too often silent voices of today. My Lord expand for me my breast with assurance and ease for me my task and untie the knot from my tongue that they may understand my speech. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. My name is Amir Nicole. I'm a Palestinian American with family that still lives and owns land in the West Bank. Being born in America, I was born into the ideals of this country. Ideals spoon fed to us from a young age that we should be proud to be an American where the Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition. How cruel to be taught to empower these ideals, to be grateful of them, only to realize too quickly that these basic human rights don't apply to me because of my ethnicity and faith. Some of my earliest memories I like to think that they're from my core memories or from my summers in Palestine. My mother passed away when I was very young so my aunts and uncles took me in and treated me as their own. I was and am truly blessed to have the connection and safety of a community that looks out for their youth. I couldn't have been more than five years old at the time but I still remember the smell of the fresh baked bread in the kitchens, the feeling of the sun while running through the olive trees on my family's land and the taste of fresh figs and grapes freshly plucked off the branches of a tree. The sweetest you could taste. That day my aunt was taking me to a local city to do some shopping. I was always very excited to go out and explore. I could never turn my brain off needing to see, hear, and experience everything around me. As we were walking down the street in this nearby city, things quickly took a turn. I heard screams, dust and smoke everywhere. I saw IDF soldiers beating on men, tying them together in long lines along the side of the road. I heard the sound of a man yelling then being dragged away by a soldier to an alleyway where I heard shots in silence. They threw tear gas at us. My aunt grabbed me by the hand and ran for the city limits. A man with a truck was there telling everyone he could see, just get in, just get in. So we all crammed ourselves into the back of his truck as he sped away from all the violence. I was five years old at the time. I later learned that this, uh, sorry, I'm pregnant. So I'm a little emotional at times. Alhamdulillah. I later learned that this was part of the first intifada when Palestinians who had had enough of the apartheid regime, the military occupation started to protest. That protesting was met with violence, cruelty, and death. In my later visits, I realized how oppressive it truly was. I felt the discrimination of being Palestinian, being held for hours on end every time I tried to enter my country. When I was 16 years old, I traveled alone to visit my aunts and uncles. Israel held me for eight hours with rifles in hand, interrogating me without just reason. I still believe this is a tactic that they used for many of us to intimidate us and scare us from ever returning. Simple visits to the Holy Land, just a short drive away from my village, maybe 15 minutes, were made almost impossible for many members of my family. And for me, with an American passport, it was still extremely difficult. Unable to pray in a luxe semester and only being 15 minutes away, can you imagine? I realized quickly that the wall that supposedly separates Israel from Palestine was separating Palestinians themselves from neighboring Palestinian villages and from their own land. For example, we had wanted to go to a bakery in a neighboring village, and we couldn't because of the checkpoints. There are no other words to describe it. It is a civilian prison. My family this year could not even go to their own land to harvest the almost 5,000 olive trees, which used to be much more. But in recent years, the Israeli settlers, the illegal Israeli settlers and the IDF burned and tore down over 1,400 trees. The settlers have now began building homes on the mountain tops surrounding the smaller villages, and they've been armed with weaponry. When I left that trip, I had to go back through Israel to get to the main airport. Seeing the contrasting differences in resources and amenities and rights was very hard to witness. I went more than six hours earlier for my flight. I almost missed it due to the interrogations. Again, I was 16 years old at the time. In hindsight, I was protected. My friend's son, years later at 16 years old, was beaten merciless and held without legal or parental aid. His younger cousin murdered by his legal settlers in the West Bank. Shortly after returning to the States that summer, I was the target of a hate crime. A woman saw me on a plane wearing a headscarf and she started screaming hysterically that I was a terrorist and that I was going to bomb and destroy the plane. She kept spewing out such hatred. When the flight attendants finally were able to calm her, they spent the entire flight looking at me. One man out of over 100 people present, only one man, I think he was of Asian descent, had the strength to say something against that woman. I had to endure the rest of the flight hearing her.  She had two young kids next to her and she would point out the window a lot enough so that I could hear, look, that's where she's hiding all of the bombs and ammunition.  I again felt powerless, voiceless, so young but unable to explain to the world what I had witnessed and seen. As our beloved religion teaches us, ikra, read. So I turned to reading and then to writing. I wrote some of what I had experienced downed and shared it with my high school newspaper. It caught attention quickly. Israeli students were allowed to write rebuttals to one of my pieces, flooding the paper with their narrative. When I wrote my response, I wasn't told till it was too late, but the administration pulled the piece the night before it was scheduled to be printed, censored again. I recently reached out to my aunt to ask her about the more recent accounts of what is happening. It was just simply too painful for her to share. She did manage to tell me about the destroyed trees, the stolen land from our village, and all around as these legal settlers get closer and closer to our homes. She unfortunately has been banned from ever going back to the land and the home that she still owns. The injustices are sometimes too numerous to recount. Too often the voices of those being oppressed and mistreated are censored by those whose voices are louder and more aggressive than our own, the irony. That's why we must have the strength and knowledge to speak louder. Our beloved Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, known for his kindness and beautiful character, taught us the importance of speaking and advocating for those being mistreated. I pray we can all stand on the right side of history and stand before a lost Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi with a sound heart that we did what we could. Just remember I'm one story of millions. Don't let the media continue to vilify, censor and dehumanize us just to set their own agenda. I wanted to end with a poem that I had written while I was in college many years ago. Many years later it still holds relevant. It's called searching for humanity. One day I woke up to crying, running down his face with tears. My heart ached as I looked at him and knew I could not wash away his fears. His little body endured so much yet his years remain so few and the justice that he deserves is long overdue. When will the world open up its eyes and see all this in humanity? No, instead it just looks down upon them with such insensitivity. Palestine is and was the home buried deep within our hearts, the blood that flows to our souls giving life to all our parts. Palestine is the birthplace of our sisters and our brothers and the burial place of even more of our fathers and our mothers. So strong Palestine and its people have withheld all the fury and the guns yet time and time again it is Israel that receives international's excessive funds. Will you let me take you on a journey? Will you let me take you by the hand? Then maybe through the eyes of another you will begin to understand. Is apartheid too strong a word to make you see what's true? Can I believe that you will try to see things from another point of view? The year was 1948 when so many lost their lives. When the bonds that fell upon them were as many as a swarm of fireflies. Some who were capsaid it was as if the stars were falling from the skies and still at night they awaked to hearing all those heart-wrenching cries. Dar Yassin was but one of the many cities massacred that year before nightfall over 250 people were systematically murdered as the land was washed with children's tears. The death toll has been so vast that through my breath it's difficult to speak and yet in 2023 it still has not yet reached its peak. Now don't even get me started on Hafrada the segregation wall that rises as a prison over eight meters tall.  So why are there so many people misguided or has the whole world just gone blind? Is it just because it's not directly affecting what they believe is their own kind? We are all brothers and sisters in the fight for the rights of those who cannot speak out and so I leave you with just one last thing, the most important thing without a doubt that the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance itself it is the illusion of knowledge the misconceptions of one's true self. Please continue to make dots for the Palestinians in Ghazan, the West Bank and all those being oppressed around the world. If I said anything of benefit, it's from Allah SWT, if I said anything that was incorrect and it is all from me. Thank Allah if you come for staying and listening to all of that inshaAllah.