All right. So my name is Marcus. I'm with IBM Research and today my colleague Bono Vavallafon Interleps will join us through this computer and present as well. And today we will talk about Fabric Private Chain Code. So someone in the room who has heard about that project before, raise your hands. Oh, wow. Okay. Have you also used it? Oh, yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. Let's start easy. Okay. So why do we want something like Fabric Private Chain Code? So there are many use cases where the blockchain actually makes sense in order to trace data on the blockchain. Everyone can see the data and verify that certain things are going on correctly. However, some use cases come with very privacy-sensitive requirements.  And all these use cases, they have some portion of privacy requirement in it. So for a sealed auction, we understand that if we submit a bid, it should be private until we evaluate the auction and release the winner. For a voting mechanism, we should actually never reveal the individual bids. For healthcare data, well, I don't want my patient's data stored on the blockchain. Not good. And for supply chain use cases, so we can think that, I mean, people are making contracts, making good deals for buying certain gifts. Storing that on the blockchain might be nice for traceability, but sometimes we don't want to reveal the good price we got to our competitors. Luckily, Hyperledger Fabric already comes with a few of built-in mechanisms to solve those use cases or to solve those issues. For instance, we have channels where we can basically establish multiple blockchains on our network in order to split the participants that only the participants can see the data, what they should see on the transactions. Then we have private data collections where we only exchange the data among the people who need to know the data and submit essentially a hash or commitment of that data on the blockchain. And then we have private or transient fields, which allows us to put data in a transaction which do not show up in the end of the day on the ledger. However, all these mechanisms are making a good contribution towards privacy-sensitive use cases. We still have a problem. And the problem is that all the data is still visible to the endorsing peers. What do I mean with that? So I mean, endorsing peer which executes our functionality or smart contract needs certain data, most probably the sensitive data, in order to process this chain code. So let's think about that. In a voting example where the government then runs an endorsing peer, well, maybe that's not a good idea that the government then when they execute the smart contract can basically encrypt or basically see our data and clear and process it. That's not nice. In order to understand that a little bit better, I have a single slide which represents hyperledger fabric where we can see we have the clients, we have the peers in the middle and the ordering service. And the peers, as I already said, they are responsible to execute the chain code, maintain the word state and the ledger. So if you're saying, okay, for my use case, I'm actually fine that a certain organization can process that data, that's fine for me. However, think about deployment use cases where your fabric peer is deployed somewhere in the cloud where you don't have control over your data. So you do not know if the Adlin maybe is malicious. What should you do then? So in order to overcome this as those issues, we have introduced fabric private chain code, which is the framework to build, deploy and run private chain codes on top of hyperledger fabric, which is exactly built in order to tackle those use cases where privacy is an issue. And we solve or we tackle that problem by leveraging trusted execution technology or confidential computing code nowadays, like InterSGX. Who of you have heard about InterSGX? Very good. All right. And so by leveraging this technology for our smart contract, we get essentially three nice properties. So the first one is confidential compute, where all the transactions and the ledger only contain encrypted data. And only the smart contract or chain code running inside the trusted execution environment will get access to our data in clear. That means that the endorsing peer does not see the data in clear, only encrypted data. The second property is verifiable operations. So with fabric private chain code and the use of trusted execution, all the transactions, they are actually verified through a mechanism called attestation that allows us as a user to verify that our smart contract is protected in such a trusted execution environment. And this we can basically then transitively show for each transaction and say, okay, this transaction has been executed by a trusted execution environment. Here's the attestation that it's using InterSGX, things like that. And this also brings us to the last property, which is data misuse prevention, because we now bind our data through encryption to our actual chain codes. We can get a measure in order to control who's allowed to access our data. And now I will give the word to Bruno. Let's see. Hi, everyone. FPC announces confidentiality for fabric chain codes by using harder based security mechanisms to isolate the chain code from the rest of the platform. Our current implementation uses Intel SGX to create an enclave, which is a protected environment where the sensitive chain code runs. The hardware enforces the isolation of the enclave, which means that outside components such as other hardware, the advertiser, the operating system and any other application cannot tamper with it nor read any sensitive data. These are laws to preserve integrity and confidentiality at fabric gears. Finally, a hardware-based attestation allows to distinguish an FPC chain code from a regular fabric chain code. These are laws to establish trust in an FPC chain code running remotely before communicating any sensitive data to it. Here is an overview of FPC, and now it integrates with fabric without modifying fabric itself. So you can use FPC in your existing deployments. As in fabric, so in FPC, orgs have to install and approve the chain code that they want to execute. In FPC, additionally, the chain code definition includes the MRA enclave, roughly corresponding to the hash of the chain code attested to by the hardware for integrity purposes. At initialization time, the chain code enclave generates and attests some cryptographic keys, which are crucial for the authenticated encryption of client communications and data storage on the ledger. The orgs can then look up an enclave's keys using the enclave registry, and this is a regular fabric chain code which collects, verifies and shares such information on the ledger. At this point, the FPC chain code is ready to execute transactions by receiving encrypted invocations from clients and delivering encrypted responses to clients. All of the lookup, cryptographic and storage operations are handled transparently by the FPC client SDK at the client side, and by the FPC shim at the chain code side. Both components expose interfaces similar to the fabric client SDK and to the fabric shim. Now, back to Marcus. Thank you Bruno. Isn't that real? Yes, please. So say that again. So right now, fabric private chain code does not integrate private data collections, but we would like to work on that. Well, that depends, I guess, on the configuration of the private data collections. But if chain code needs that data in order to make a decision to run your logic, then that endorsing peer, assuming it has the rights to basically consume the data from the private data collection, basically needs that data. Yes, that's correct. I mean, so the contrast with using confidential computing is here that we're basically idolating the execution of the chain code from the endorsing peer. So the endorsing peer does not see the content. So when the admin of that machine does a memory dump, he will not see the data in clear text. Yes, exactly. So can I suggest that we do that discussion maybe after the talk? I mean, super interesting that let's definitely have that discussion. Any other question quickly related to your understanding of FPC? We did a very fast one on one here. Okay. So let's see. I mean, how can we use this stuff now?  So in our repository, we have an SDK to build Fabric Private Chain Code in two languages right now, C++ and GO, which I talk more about in a second. We also have an FPC client SDK, which is very similar as Bruno already mentioned, to the traditional Fabric client SDK for GO. But it basically helps you with all the, let's say, nasty parts of the security, in particular the encryption or data protection when you're communicating to your chain code. We also integrated recently the Fabric smart client. So from your Fabric smart client application, you can also call Fabric Private Chain Codes. And you will find many more examples how to take your FPC chain code, deploy it on a Fabric test network, for instance. We also provide a docker-rise development environment, which comes with all the tools you need in order to get started without installing a lot of stuff on your machine. Let's quickly talk about, I mean, how to write FPC chain code. So as I said, there is C++ chain code. The reason why we introduced C++ chain code is when Intel released their Intel SGX technology, they only provided an SDK, which allowed you to program your code in C++. So we had to go that direction when we started that. As a usual chain code, you basically start writing your invoke method, and then you can do all the things like, I mean, getting the parameters from the transaction inputs, you can get the state and put state operations. The nice thing from the user perspective is that our FPC shim basically provides you all the features to protect your data. So this is very similar to traditional chain code where you just write your data in clear. However, our FPC shim takes care of encrypting and decrypting those data before it's going on the ledger. But moreover, the shim provides mechanisms in order to produce a signature on our transaction saying, hey, this transaction was really executed inside the trusted execution environment using the remote attestation capability of Intel SGX. So now you may think, hey, Marcus, are you serious? Do you really want me to implement my chain code now in C++? Nah.  So this is maybe now more familiar to you. So we can now write a normal Go chain code, also use the functions which are provided by the shim or by the stub. We can run put state, get state, things like that. And very similar to the C++ version, all the complexity is hidden behind our framework implementation. And what I really find pretty cool in that project, that this was a collaboration with the University of Bern with the crypto group. And there, a student, Ricardo Zappoli spent quite a lot of time to hack this together and had to build our preview. In order to integrate now FPC, there are actually very minimal changes you need to do on your application. So you just import the FPC library and wrap your chain code as a new private chain code and compile it with the tools we are providing in our repository. So now the scary part, I will try to do a live table in order to show you that this is really real. So the idea is, hey, let's pick one of the samples which we have in the fabric samples repository. And I would suggest that we go with an asset transfer basic sample. There we go to the go chain code. If we go there to chain code again, you will see here the smart contract implementation of a chain code. And let's look at this for instance. So here we have a method or a function which is implemented to create an asset. The asset has an ID, a color, size, owner and a value. And that looks pretty straightforward. So the chain code checks if the asset exists, it will create an asset, marshal it to JSON and then performs a put state. So as a traditional chain code, you understand now that in the right set of that transaction, this object as a serialized JSON string will appear unclear. Our goal with FPC is that this is not unclear anymore. So how do we do that? So I created a little sample which is available in our FPC repository on the samples demo's Hyperledger global form. And here I basically only have a single main function which we need to modify now. Let's see if this works. So what we need to do is, so with Fabric Private Chain Code, we use the chain code as a service model to run our chain code. So what we're going to do is we go here to the main file of the asset transfer, take this asset chain code. I think we can ignore this error for a moment. And then we also need to import the logic. So now in order to make it an FPC chain code, we need to wrap it. So luckily, GoLand will help me figure on the right Go imports here. That's good. So next thing is we need to build this. We will use our tools building on top of the ego compiler. Since that might involve multiple commands in the command line tool, I provide here a little make file with a reference make file which you can use for your application. The only thing what we need to configure is here to give the chain code a name. FPC basic asset transfer. So and that should be it. Let's see if we can build it. That's cross fingers. FPC pass, sub, demo. We are here. Right. There's our make file. That's cross fingers. Doesn't work. Okay. So the thing is that it complains that there is no ego compiler on my machine installed, which is also reasonable. It's a Mac. It does not support into SGX. But as I promised before, we have a development environment for Docker. So I'm switching now into a Docker container which also runs on this machine, having all this stuff installed. Samples, demo. Right. Here's our stuff. So let's hit make. So now you can see it uses the ego compiler to build our chain code. And then it also packages for us a Docker image containing the binary plus the runtime things you need in order to run an SGX application essentially. So if we look here what we got now, we got now a binary, we got a public and private keeper which is used to sign actually the binary so that we can make sure that me as a developer that the correct chain code is actually executed. And more interestingly, we also got this little file here, which contains the MR enclave of our chain code. And the MR enclave is basically, as Bruno said, a hash of our of our chain code logic, which clearly identifies our logic. We will need that later. So let's. So now we have a Docker image. Let's see. Yes. So this is apparently the Docker image we just built. Cool. So next step would be let's run our chain code. However, when running the check, now we're actually entering the, let's say the madness of deploying or running chain code or running hyperledger fabric in order to make this easier as a developer. We would like to use the fabric smart client integration test suite, which allows us to spawn up easily a fabric network, install our FPC chain code or any other chain code with a few lines and just run and test it. So you don't need to deploy your actual an actual network. So for that, we have in our samples and deployment fabric smart client. There we have a project and this project here has a topology dot go. And in the topology, we can specify now our network. What you can see here is that we specify a fabric network with two organizations. We enable FPC and we install an FPC chain code with a given chain code name and a chain code image because I don't want to actually, I would like to reuse this project now. I don't change here the code. But in the other terminal, we saw that we basically have these export statements, which we can load for that example. So in order to do that, we source this little file and then we can just make a run, which hopefully does something now. Yes. So it's starting now a network. Now you can see, hey, orders are spawning, fabric peers are spawning. We can also see that we install chain codes here. Maybe you cannot see that. I mean, I saw that quite often, which is very nice for debugging, but maybe for presentation, not really ideal. Sorry for that. But so what we will also start is an Hyperledger Explorer instance in order to see then which chain code is running on our network. So it's still installing. It takes a little bit. Any questions so far? Yes. So the MR enclave is part of the attestation you get from an enclave. And the attestation essentially will say, hey, I'm an enclave. I'm running this particular code, which is corresponds to the MR enclave. And then this entire attestation thing, in case of the APID-based attestation is signed by Intel. So then you basically get that. You can verify that the statement is signed by Intel. You can check that this attestation contains the MR enclave you are happy with. Yes. So as Bruno said in his part, we put the MR enclave as part of the chain code definition. So in the normal fabric life cycle, we need to install the chain code, we need to create a chain code definition, let this approve, and by adding the MR enclave, all the participants on that channel or using that chain code, they agree on a certain MR enclave. And under the assumption, we have a reproducible build that actually works pretty well. All right. So now our network is up and running. Let's quickly see if Explorer is there. It's loading. All right. So we can see there are two nodes, two chain codes. When I go to the chain code panel here, I can see now that our FPC basic asset transfer chain code is installed and another one, which is our enclave registry chain code. And the enclave registry chain code is basically our entry point in the system in order to store the attestations in order to track or maintain a list of what are the enclaves installed on our channel and what are their public keys, what are their encryption keys I need to use in order to send a message in a way that the endorsing peer does not learn the contents of it. Yes. Not at the moment. So right now, when we install or when we register our enclave, we essentially also store the IP address of the endorsing peer, which runs that particular enclave. So therefore, the ERCC is right now used for us as a discovery. Okay. So we see now the FPC chain code is installed. And so in order to produce a transaction out, we will need to use the fabric private chain code SDK in order to let the invocations be encrypted, protected, things like that. In order to demonstrate that, I would like to use also in our samples under applications, a simple CLI, which is essentially, I mean, a little CLI too, which allows me to invoke transactions on the inside. It uses the fabric private chain code client SDK to encrypt the data. So let's quickly build this. I think I also need to source again in order to, in order to configure now the client very similar to all the configurations you do normally for the peer command, you need to provide, I mean, the endpoint of the peer you would like to connect to things like that. Let's do that quickly. And our test network also provides us now a little script to get all these writing and talking is sometimes incompatible. So we would like to now configure our client as org one. So this is the stuff we need to specify. And now we can use this client to invoke a chain code. The function we would like to invoke, let's quickly double check again what was the actual command in the code. So we need to provide an ID, color, size, owner. Okay, so ID, it makes this thing blue. We make it size 10. Who wants to own it here? Hard. Perfect. And let's give it a good value. All right. So now you can see that something is not working. Uh-huh. So I forgot something. I forgot the function name. And I think this was create asset, create asset. Let's try again. Cool, worked. So here in the terminal you can, since I've enabled debugging that you can actually see that something is going on. You can see quite a lot that the enclaves are now doing something, I mean, running the chain code, endorsing the transactions, things like that. If we now look at the explorer, we should see in our latest transaction, which is this one. Can you read this? How does this work? So let's quickly open the right set. I'm trying to make it as big as I can. No, that's worse. Okay. So what we can see in the right set is that we see the key 101. This is the ID we specified in our command. And at the value, we don't see so much. I mean, we see something. However, if we would run this as a traditional chain code, we would see here the JSON string of our asset as produced here. So maybe for you an exercise at home is install the normal, this chain code as a traditional chain code, run this open and hyperlink explorer. And then you will see that the traditional one will appear in clear text, but with FPC not. Okay. So this is the data we see now on the letter. Let's see if we can get back the data in clear. So now we do a query. I think it's called read asset. Yay, we got it back. All right. So this concludes my hands-on demo on FPC. And it worked. Yay. So if you think that's a nice thing and you would like to see more of it, there is another demo today by Koshy. He's also here in the room. He will also show FPC in action with a different, with a real use case, let's say, not with my little toy application here. And yeah, please go and enjoy his talk. And also check out our GitHub repository, join our community meetings, talk to me here at the Hyperledger Global Forum, and get in touch with us and use it if you find it useful. Thank you. Question. Well, so the rich, as you said, rich queries actually require you to, I mean, have some meaningful information inside of your keys in order to make a good query. So this is the reason that we write now by default do not encrypt the keys, only the values, in order to allow rich queries. However, we all have, we have all the code in place that you as a user, if you also would like to encrypt the keys as well, you can do that. But then you're sacrificing the usage of range queries. That's true. Yeah. So, I mean, as a researcher, I would say, yeah. So if your trust model says, okay, trust the trusted execution environment, then you're fine and don't care about side channels. But this is, reality looks different, right? So what you were saying, this is a real thing. I personally believe that Intel does a very good job in going to academia and, I mean, to the open source community, throwing the hardware and letting people, I mean, really fire on it in order to basically reveal such limitations of the technology. But on the other hand, they also provide fixes and improve that. So that's a good thing. And I mean, as any other technology we built in the security space, it's most probably never perfect. It always has to have something, but we definitely would need to integrate additional measurements in order to deal with it. So for instance, in Fabric Private Jenkins, you could say, okay, my enclave code is only or in attestation, my enclave is only valid, I don't know, for a week. After that, you do a key rotation, things like that. But those are really additional means you have to put on top on that. So yeah, you should not always rely on one single security measurement, right? Yeah. No, no, that's no. So the other thing, what we would like to look is to extend also FPC to different trusted execution technologies other than into SGX, which is not a trivial task. I mean, the Linux Foundation, they created this confidential computing consortium in order to bring all the manufacturers on the same table and see, okay, how compatible are our different technologies here. And if we could also use this for Fabric Private Jenkins, that would be ideal. So we could imagine that we build then a policy that a certain chain code runs in SGX and on AMD SEV or whatever. And if both agree, come to the same result when they execute, then this is considered to be even more trusted than just executed by Inter-SGX. Welcome. Any other questions? So I think right now we require at least Fabric to point three. Right now, our client SDK does not work with the gateway work we just have seen here. Because there, think about that with the gateway, we as a client, we sent our request to the gateway. The gateway then does all the magic with it and then needs to end up in the enclave. However, that would be something we could actually solve by just engineering work. So that still the client does the protection of the data sent to the gateway sink like that. Then as dependency, we have the ego compiler, which we need, or for the C++ chain code, the Inter-SGX SDK that you need to use. But other than that, okay, so I mean, as a requirement, you definitely need a machine which is capable, which has Inter-SGX available. In Koshy's talk, you will learn about how FPC can run on the Azure Cloud, for instance. Otherwise, you basically, you just need the hardware. But for just playing with it, I mean, I tried to demonstrate this on my Mac using our Docker-based development environment. So you mean, this is right now not implemented, that's true. So right now, we have basic functionality for a chain code. But for every other feature we need to think about, okay, if one chain code codes another one, that chain code might need to also verify that the other enclave is an enclave running the expected code, things like that. So this is not yet implemented. I think that's it, and we go for lunch.


Welcome folks. This is Tom O'Brien of TFNN. We go five days a week. We go seven hours a day We go 24 hours a day in the internet at TFNN.com Always remember folks, whatever you think about you bring about whatever you focus on grows Hope everyone's having a great day. Safe day. Let's make it a great night folks Ignore the opinions of others. Don't take anything personally Whatever people do feel think or say don't take it personally Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system So whatever they think about you is not about you, but it's about them. That's a that's a wild one. That's a wild card, man Let's take a look at it out here. We have the now industrials up 255 Nazark up 187 S&P's up 47 gold gold contract down $5.80 trading at 18 18 1984 ounce silver up 8 cents $23.50 an ounce of light sweet crude off 26 cents trading at $72 93 cents a barrel notes and bonds a ten-year note down four ticks trading 114 16 the 30 year are five and 129 25 and King dollar King dollar trading up 244 ticks at 2674 the euros at 108 the yen is at 132 and the British pound is at 123 to 1 US dollar our phone numbers 877 9276 648 give us a call folks one notes going on to y'all world and the world of the S&P's Let's take a look at them. They had this is really cool where we're at here, man Wow, when you see this so what we have I'll bring the e-minis up again. We just did that update So at this point Yeah, you're at eight minutes into this 10-minute bar. So check out what we have here. Okay, so your benchmark here for the for two minutes okay is 4049 and What we did is this is that the first be your first bar you get the spike the second by you got even a heavier spike and You get some big volume on it the When when you are gonna basically start back and down again What you have here folks is that if we close under that benchmark of 4049 0.00 that would be saying that you got a failure and What would end up happening then is that this type of volume? It's not a day day trade Okay, it'll go right down to the other side of it. So we'll see where this happens It's really it's it's close. The reason it's close is this I said most of the time when you get a spike like this, right? That with the with the markets looking for is okay How many more buyers do we have up and you can see we don't have a lot of more buyers up here That's what ended up happening. He spiked it once spiked it again, and you know, we have 50 I mean how much they want to guess but but I'm just kind of trying to explain to you on an intraday basis What normally shakes out here? We go into the end cues. We take a look at the end cues the end cues have the same type of setup and We take a look at the end cues and what you have here Did the same deal With the same type of volume, but you can see there's not much movement after the first two bars And so the end cue has a lower benchmark that benchmark is 937 We're 10 points over that right now. I suspect what we're gonna see first is this you have a fight here If we get under those benchmarks, right the next five ten minutes bottom line is that you're gonna have more Sellers than your buyers coming into the close here That's how this shakes out because see what should have happened if well If we stay up here and it's 10 minute by they'll run into the close now because if we go to the The day let's go to the dailies now if you go to the dailies This is another contraction a monster contraction to you're going into the In the spy this thing was trying to hit the 402. We hit 400 point seven seven and You can see the contraction the contractions pretty dramatic man. I mean, you know yesterday we did 62 million we're at 50 right now you're going into 111 million, you know, so that's a big number We go into the end the x100 we take a look at the cues cues are set up the same type of way, man You know the cues want to get that 313 again 313 68 We made it to 312 54 the contractions there and once again though that I suspect the cues are gonna get it You know, it looks to me the cues cues want that they're gonna get it So the real question is is they did I get it today? Which they could very easily because we hit 312 54, you know already so we'll see how that baby shakes out Gold gold contract out here. We take a look at the gold contract. What do you have with the gold contract? You're pulling back with light volume This is building costs for higher price, man, you know, you really get a hundred and thirty eight thousand contracts on the pullback Let me show you this You get high volume today, you know, but you roll them yet. Well, you haven't got below lows either You haven't got below lows. You have high volume You know, this is this is staying at highs the longer this stays at highs the higher the probability that you're gonna bust through We go into the dollar we take a look at the dollar We have what the dollar is this the dollar has rejected lower price again just barely but rejected lower price And that's not a lot of price moving out here You know the dollar hit a high today of one or two seven eighty six, you know You have a hundred points off it, you know, not much action My take is this dollar is gonna try to get up to the one oh six to one oh seven area once again And then we go into the bond market. We take a look at the bond market out here The note and bond market we take a look at the note note market first You're gonna see notes and bonds one higher price folks higher price low yield coming at us If we take a look at this what you're gonna see We're backing down. There's no sellers in the market, you know, you get you get one point two million contracts Inside of the ten year that's going into one point eight. That's going into two point eight. That's going into 4.35 you're talking about some monster numbers out there some of the higher volume equities out here today Inside the market. This is gonna be a very low volume market. You get Intel up $2.40 Tesla's up $3. You have advanced micro up a buck and a half micron technologies up for 80 and video is up 576 You have Let's go inside the end the x100 the straight versus the weakness Lululemon, that's what I was looking for. That's up to our 13% Rivians up 11% Taken away from it. Ross Stores is down eight tenths or percent not highly nothing inside the end the x100 No way down JD is down seven tenths or 1% regener on five tenths Micrantech is up 8% you get some movies out here and Spades we have some movies, but you're going up to the top You have a volume that continually contracts. So, you know the bottom line is that And the any coming into window dressing. That's what we have happening here. This is today Yeah, today's an important day, you know, we'll see if we if we contract again And you stay at these prices you can picture that they're gonna go after the swing points The swing of highs and the contract should be there and this will go into window dressing Okay, which brings us into Monday or Tuesday next week and that's where you'll get the failure Dow industrials right now 272 Nasdaq's f198 S&P's are up 50 stay right there folks who come right back


As a curator, as a historian, I love material culture. I love objects that hold the possibility to tell stories. My name is Lisa Small. I'm a curator of exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, and I'm the curator of the exhibition Killer Heels, the Art of the High-Heeled Shoe. I didn't want to present a chronological survey. I wanted to do a thematic sort of look. So I was looking at shoes that really had very striking or innovative designs, different ways that designers have interpreted this form. And I began to see that there were so many visual echoes and relationships between old and new. I talk about things like the platform, which has been around for over 2,000 years, or the shape of the Louis heel, named after King Louis XV of France. I noted the eastern influences, designers looking at the form of the gaita, the wooden sole Japanese shoes, or the Manchu platforms from China, along with heels that really incorporate fetish style, a lot of studs, spikes, things like that. I wanted to explore architecture. Architecture and high heel design have a lot in common when you think about support and structure and height, even. I saw so many heels that were about ideas of metamorphosis. High heels that themselves have sort of hybrid forms and designs that have a really futuristic, space age vibe to them. We also have six commission films that run through the entire exhibition that somehow took the high heel as their conceptual or thematic starting point. There's a real range from the Salvador Ferragamo stiletto that belonged to Marilyn Monroe and the Schiaparelli shoe hat to something that looks like it was grown in a laboratory. I think we're in a moment where people are asking, can they get any higher? Can they get any more extreme? And it's funny because I think that's a question that's been asked actually for hundreds of years.


U.S. officials now say Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. accidentally. The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous U.S. officials saying that the Chinese spy balloon we've been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over the United States at all. The article is titled U.S. Tracked China Spy Balloon from Launch on Hainan Island along unusual path and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms suspected spy balloon and suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and the U.S. government's terms spy balloon and airborne surveillance device. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage. The Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course and the Pentagon's own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not create a significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit. What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing's assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course. Yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a spy balloon. Here's an excerpt. Quote, by the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace last month U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China's south coast. U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam but somewhere along that easterly route the craft took an unexpected northern turn according to several U.S. officials who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn't intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device. The balloon floated over Alaska's Aleutian islands thousands of miles away from Guam then drifted over Canada where it encountered strong winds that appeared to have pushed the balloon into the continental United States the officials said speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. End quote. The article really reads like someone trying to reconcile two contradictory narratives claiming that although China didn't intend to send the balloon over the United States it decided to seize the opportunity to surveil U.S. nuclear sites while it was there anyway. It's crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and it's hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident officials said raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence right the articles authors Ellen Nakashima Shane Harris and Jason Samnow. Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental but are confident it was intended for surveillance most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific they write. No mention is made of the two weeks of hysterical shrieking from the Western political media class about China's outrageously brazen intrusion into U.S. airspace or the claims from conservative China hawks that it proves Biden has failed to make Beijing sufficiently afraid of American might. No mention is made of the rhetoric from warmongers like House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher who claimed the balloon is evidence that China is a threat to American sovereignty and is a threat to the Midwest in places like those that I live in and no mention is made of the White House's recent admission that the three unidentified objects that U.S. warplanes shot down over the weekend were most likely benign balloons. The intelligence community is considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose the National Security Council's John Kirby told the press on Tuesday. So it's entirely possible that the American political media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more Cold War escalations over four harmless balloons. It's entirely possible that the world's mightiest air force just spent two weeks waging kinetic aerial warfare on random pieces of junk in the sky and that this is being used to manufacture consent for more aggressions against China. In a recent article titled media spy balloon obsession a gift to China Hawks. Fair.org documents the ways the Western media have been committing journalistic malpractice with their obedient regurgitation of U.S. government slogans about a Chinese spy balloon despite a complete lack of evidence for this claim quote. Despite this uncertainty U.S. media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon's conjecture as fact. The New York Times reported that the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon only to call the device the spy balloon without a tribute of language within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC where the description shifted from suspected Chinese spy balloon to simply Chinese spy balloon. The Guardian once bothered to place spy balloon in quotation marks but soon abandoned that punctuation. Given that media had no proof of either explanation it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility spy balloon versus weather balloon equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the U.S.'s official narrative than to that of China end quote. And of course getting lost in all this is the obvious fact that it's no big deal for major governments to spy on each other they all do so constantly and the U.S. does it more than anyone else. To suddenly treat increasingly flimsy claims about Chinese spy balloons as some kind of incendiary existential threat is ridiculous. As commentator Matthew Petty recently observed on Substack the U.S. has historically been so insistent on its right to fly surveillance aircraft over foreign countries that it has repeatedly come close to war with nations who've shot down its spy planes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis then Attorney General Robert Kennedy issued a red-line threat to the Soviet ambassador that if the Cuban military didn't stop shooting U.S. spy planes the United States would launch an invasion of Cuba. Just in 2018 the U.S. came close to the brink of war with Iran when its military shot down a U.S. surveillance drone and was only averted because Trump was talked out of it by TV pundit Tucker Carlson. If the U.S. insists on its right to conduct aerial surveillance on foreign nations it's a bit silly for it to throw a tantrum when foreign nations return the favor. It would be even sillier to throw a tantrum over a surveillance mission its own intelligence says was accidental. It would be even sillier for the news media of the Western world to assist it in doing so. Sometimes I think American media should abandon its whole free press charade and just switch to publishing the news straight out of the Pentagon. This is definitely one of those times.


If you have more than $10,000 in credit card debt, you have the right to let us settle that debt for a fraction of a dollar. Hey guys, Sean with jaspyscasebreaks.com doing a quick personal and single-pack break of 2020 Panini Contenders draft picks football for Mike Cass. Personal breaks are available on our sister website, jaspys.com, typically do on Instagram seven nights a week. Mike, I've got five packs available in this box. Left, one, two. Right, packs, one through three. Let me know which one you want to do. Hey guys, so seven nights a week, middle on the right. Okay, seven nights a week, jaspys.com. We do personal breaks on Instagram, jaspyscasebreaks, and on jaspysafterdark on YouTube. We can do them as fillers, as little time fillers if there's no case breaks that are in line. Good luck, Mike. One auto per pack. Haskins, McClaurin, Allen, Favre, Johnson, Michelle, and your auto is Dayton Flyer, Adam Trotman. I forget where he went offhand, but big old tight end. Brandon Ayuk, cam makers, Fromm and Swift, Henry Ruggs, Elliot Dobbins, Kenan Allen, Christian Kirk, Michael Thomas, Derrick Henry, Russell Wilson, and Jacobi Myers. That's your pack. Thank you very much, Mike. Oh, he's a saint. Very cool. And that'll do it for the single pack break for Mike Kass. jaspyscasebreaks.com and jaspys.com for personals. Thank you, guys.


Welcome to the Logic Gates. In this video, you'll discover the names, symbols, and boolean expressions for Logic Gates from the ANSI system. You'll also learn the correct way to pronounce boolean expressions and how to interpret truth tables for Logic Gates. This is the symbol, boolean expression, a-handed with b, and truth table for the AND gate. The truth table shows the output is high, or 1, only when all the inputs are high. This is the symbol, boolean expression, a-ord with b, and truth table for the OR gate. The truth table indicates the output is high when any of the inputs are high. This symbol, boolean expression, a-not, and truth table reflects the hex inverted or NOT gate. In this truth table, the output is the opposite level of the input. This symbol, boolean expression, a-nanded with b, and truth table represent the NAND gate. And the truth table displays the output is high, when at least one of the inputs is low, or 0. This is the symbol, boolean expression, a-nord with b, and truth table for the NOR gate. The truth table's output is high, only when all the inputs are low. This symbol, boolean expression, a-exclusive-ord with b, and truth table represent the exclusive OR gate, also referred to as the XOR gate. This truth table shows the output is high, when all of the inputs are different. Lastly, this symbol, boolean expression, a-x-nord with b, and truth table represent the exclusive NOR gate, also referred to as the XOR gate. And the truth table indicates outputs are high, when all of the inputs are the same. Now that you're familiar with these seven logic gates, let's do a matching exercise. Watch as we match the logic gate symbol and its boolean expression with the correct logic gate name. Please feel free to pause the video to think about your answers. So how did it go? Were you able to match the correct logic gate symbols and their boolean expressions with the correct logic gate names? Check your answers with the correct matches, and feel free to do the matching exercise again for additional practice. Thank you for watching the logic gates video. If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this, subscribe to our channel. We'll notify you when we have something new for you to learn.


It's Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock, it's October the 13th, 2021. That can mean only one thing. It's time for What Now America? I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and welcome. Today's title is The Insurrectionist Wear Suits and Ties. You know, I borrowed this title from Adam Schiff, who's a House representative. You might remember him from the House impeachment hearings. And that's a direct quote from Adam Schiff. And what I think is interesting is when Adam Schiff says that the people who stormed the Capitol, they didn't know better. They believed in Donald Trump's big lie that the election was stolen from him. And they reacted, well, thanks to his prompting, they reacted and they stormed the Capitol. They're the insurrectionists. However, those who are in Congress and the Senate, the ones that wear the suits and wear the ties, they know better. They know that Donald Trump did not have a stolen election taken out from him. They know that he lost the election fair and square. They know that there was no massive fraud. And they know only one thing, that they can't say anything different than what Donald Trump wants them to say, because they cower in fear. And that's the state of our general GOP, Congress, and state legislatures, county legislatures. Anyone who dares step outside the boundary of Donald Trump is in risk and fear of being ousted from the party, and that frightens them. So we're here to talk about that and many other things. So good morning. Our guest today is Jay Fidel and Winston Welch. Good morning, everyone. Morning, Tim. Uh-huh. Jay, Steve Scalise, number two, the highest position in the House of Representatives. He's the minority whip. He was on Fox News with Chris Wallace. And several times, Chris Wallace tried to get him to basically state his opinion, whether or not the election of 2020, the presidential election, was stolen from Donald Trump. Steve Scalise, number two person in the House. Number three in the whole Republican Party refused to answer that question. He kept going to statements about how these states didn't follow the rules, didn't follow the Constitution of each state. But when Chris Wallace pinned his ears back to the wall and said, do you or do you not believe that this election was stolen, he punted. He didn't answer it. What does this say about those who wear the suits and ties in the GOP and where they're headed and what is their agenda? What is their agenda, be it either with the 2022 election or the 2024 election? We know it's not the crazies, the Marjorie, Brown, Taylor, people of the world. It's now the establishment of the GOP. Where are they headed? We're in a bad place. The Republican Party has been gutted and replaced, hijacked by these people. And the Liz Cheney's of the world are very, very few. And I think what's happened one way or the other is that the regular Republicans are out of there. And this new crowd of Republicans, the cultists call them are in there. And they are increasing just as somehow magically, mysteriously, Trump is able to, you know, get new supporters around the country. We are in a transition to Trump. And it is as scary as anything that has happened in this country from the beginning. Winston, same question to you. What do you think the established GOP party is headed? Particularly when they cannot acknowledge that Donald Trump lost Farron Square to President Joe Biden. And where does this take this nation? Where does it take the next election? And certainly the 2024 presidential election. Well, I think that his, with Steve Scalise, you saw that the no answer was an answer. You know, when you can't answer Chris Wallace, I think any normal person can read between the lines there. And they could see that they're neither willing to confirm nor deny the report, which, you know, it says what it says to whoever's looking at it. But yeah, how many joined in the impeachment process right after the Capitol was stormed? It was 10 people, wasn't it? And the Republicans out of the 50. So we're not hopeful that that party's gonna regain its bearing anytime soon. And yet, you know, the optimistic part of me says that the middle portion of this nation that just says enough with the shenanigans, we can't go back to that time of just such extreme insanity, really, where we're led by this one person where we can get back to some conservative principles for those who feel that way. I think that they will probably step up. I hope that they will, but right now the entire leadership is beholden to one individual. They're afraid to say something or maybe they just wanna keep their jobs, you know, and at the end of the day, that might be it. But they're also afraid to speak up. And if you look at people around the nation and school boards or wherever it is, you're seeing people become completely unhinged by whatever beliefs they have. So this idea of decorum, rule of law, good faith on the other side, it seems to be being jettisoned and yet it's not gone all the way. So I'm hopeful that something will change as the midterms approach, but underlying all of that is the more scary reality that this sort of eternal recount and false elections, like we've seen in Arizona or now what it is, is it Texas or Michigan or Georgia, whatever's next that this is, this groundwork's been laid in what a third, maybe half of the states. That's where any legitimate election will then be subject to this process and you can't have a functioning country when you're faced with every single election being a question like that, when it is in fact, free and fair elections as evidenced by international observers. So that's- You mentioned a very good point and that is the rule of law, the level of civility. There's something called a tipping point. And the question is, where is that tipping point where we go from what we've called an organized democracy of an election to a total and utter chaos in the future? And this tipping point seems to be advancing. Your thoughts on that and what should be done to stop and cool things down? Well, unfortunately, it may be someone unhinged that goes into a school room and waves a gun or something and hopefully that won't happen. But when things like that do happen, it gets national news and then people say, wait a minute, am I aligned with that party, with that people, with that, am I lumped in with them or do I stand for reasonable discourse for not always getting my way, but for realizing that there is room for compromise or intelligent discussion that may, in fact, win me over to another point of view because I have more information or better information or my position has changed. But when it resorts to this thug mentality where people are coerced, thugged into behavior, they're terrorized into behavior, if nothing else, that's when we really lose the essence of what this nation is about. And we need to go back to that place and really marginalize those people in our media, in our everyday discourse and just say, that is not us. You may have passionate beliefs, but you may not get to just only have your way because it suits you. Okay, you know, Jay, Winston just mentioned about the media marginalizing these crazies, if you will. The insurrectionists that aren't wearing the suits and ties, are we seeing a good enough job for the media that should be marginalizing those Republicans that do wear the suit and ties, the congressmen, the senators? What do you think? Is the media doing a sufficient job to point out the error of the GOP's ways? Or are they just kind of playing along as if it's a normal news story of the day? Not realizing what's at stake here. Let me touch on two things before I get to that. One is Winston mentioned the notion of reasonable discourse. And I think a lot of people in this country, especially the Koch people, don't know what that means. They have no idea what it means. They weren't educated in civics. They don't know what the rule of law is. They don't know really what the Constitution is. They don't know what the social compact is. They don't know what it is to be a citizen in a country. And they certainly don't know about reasonable discourse. They are driven by something else. And that's really tragic. The other point I wanted to bring up is the Karl Bernstein approach. Karl Bernstein, you asked about tipping point. Karl Bernstein, if he were here today with us, he would say, we're past that. We've already lost it. We've lost our democracy. And I would tend to agree with him. We're already in the frying pan on this. And the only question is just how bad it's gonna get and how soon it's gonna get as bad as it's gonna get. But we can talk about Karl Bernstein later. To go to your question about the media, okay? I think the media has to be treated as part of this. There's obviously Fox News is spreading disinformation and lies as fast as you, and you think that they would have some sense of order, discipline, reasonable discourse, some sense of truth, of journalism, of democracy and of the damage they can do with all their listeners. But they follow the rule of engagement.  To maximize your engagement, you appeal to the lower instincts. You know, that sounds just like Facebook, doesn't it? So we have many, many influences on our lives. We, all of us, have many influences on our lives that tend to engage us with raw meat stories. And that includes not only Fox News, it includes the liberal press, if you will. You know, where do I look for my nudes? And I'm, I have to say that it's really getting old.  And they have, you know, a certain amount of prestige, but they come on all the time. You know, it's, you can count them on two hands, all of them. And they're always talking about the same issues. And, you know, if you compare that, for example, the BBC, and somebody told me yesterday, I should be looking at Al Jazeera because Al Jazeera, though it's not, you know, available in this country is, is actually a pretty good news organization. What's happened is we've gotten into opinion and bubbles and they are catering to what they think we want to hear. They are not giving us the old kind of BBC type of news. They are not giving us a lot of global news. They are not giving us facts.  And they're telling us that the opinions of these handful of contributors is what tells the day. I don't think that's good media. And I think over the years, they have exacerbated the divisions between us and they have not helped us, but only excited us and made us angry, which is exactly what we want to avoid. Agreed. You and I have many offline conversations about Fox News and even CNN and MSNBC about, you know, these opinions about, be it the coronavirus or treatments, vaccines, it's pandering to their audience. So more about that later. Hey, Winston, we have a question from Tom Yamashita. And the question is this, how can we go back to what this nation is all about when we have prevalent my way or the highway mentality? For example, Mitch McConnell's handling of Merrick Garland's nomination to be a Supreme Court justice. Wait, Tom, if you got the answer to that, please let us know. But I think Jay hit it partially on the head was that folks aren't being educated. They're not being educated in civics. They're not being educated in what makes this nation great and why it's great because of its institutions, because of how it functions, because of setting aside our differences where we can and forging ahead together as we move one direction or another. And we've seen this nation go left and right and now we're seeing a sort of bifurcate. But I would posit that most of us want the same exact things. And on the edge, that's just being flamed like a forest fire when in fact, it's not really there but when people can be tricked or misled or almost hypnotized into believing, oh, if I don't have this, my livelihood is at stake. And that's what you're seeing this silliness in replacement theory and in critical race theory. These things that are just red herrings is put out that probably the masses really don't understand. They might feel at some gut level like, oh, people are taking my jobs away. Well, not when you're educated at an eighth grade level. And as I saw from Lucero Cantu of the folk realm, it was printed in the Hawaii Tribune Herald, which is the big islands newspaper on Sunday, October 10th, 2021, says the OECD, the organization for economic cooperation and development found that 50% of U.S. adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level. So the National Institute of Literacy estimates the average American reads at a seventh to eighth grade level. Despite these concerns and analysis of 21 major media outlets, found that consumers require a 10th grade reading level to comprehend any of them. Most notably Fox and NPR ranked it at 11th grade level while outlets like MSNBC and Politico exceeded a 12th grade level. So it says whether we're talking about COVID-19, climate change, whatever it is, maybe what we need to do is follow the U.S. Plain Writing Act, which is to ensure that the public can understand and use government communication. But not only that, just sort of apply it to this media idea. So if we get our news from MSNBC or Politico, which we consume that news and we understand what they're talking about, hopefully for the most part, although it's easy to understand why it's confusing, maybe MSNBC needs to go through and run it. There's programs where you can say, put this at a 10th grade level or an eighth grade level so that they're able to reach more people at a level that they can understand and say, this isn't what it's risk. This is what we're looking for. And maybe all the news outlets need to do that and just simplify that instead of saying, this article goes on to say something about being carbon neutral. Just say, when you burn too many fossil fuels, which are gas, coal, and oil, it heats up the air. That causes climate change. That's sort of like that. You're talking about a picture book, a strategy for our education books in the future, on the short term. On the short term. Right now. Right now. The short term, right. And reach the people where they're at and not be, although we have relied on this sort of political and economic and in all levels, there's a sort of a ruling class. I mean, isn't there, whether they're university professors or whatever the experts, but there's another book out there called The Death of Expertise where every man or woman is an expert unto himself because they read a TikTok article about it or an Instagram post. And so suddenly they have, I was reading about the COVID-19 and this idea that it causes infertility. And it was an article. Yeah. I want to take this that you brought up and I want to ask Jay a question about this. Jay, it does seem like the genesis of all our problems is a lack of understanding from the population of what the basics are, the origin of our country, how we came to be, civics lessons 101, the basic understanding of the rule of law and how our government works, be it to judicial, legislative and executive branch. The basics are not understood. So how do you preserve a democracy when half the country doesn't understand what a democracy is? Is there a long-term solution and a short-term solution to try to get to this very problem so that we can preserve the democracy? Jay Leno, when he was doing the night show, used to have a thing called jaywalking and he would stop people in the street and he would ask them these really basic questions like who's the vice president? 90% of the people he asked did not know. They don't follow it. They don't care about it and they don't know to care about it. The problem with re-educating the public is, dumbing it down may not be the solution because you need to be educated and dumbing it down doesn't really require you to be educated nor does it help you be educated. And they say it's a generational thing. You've got to get into the schools and educate people and it takes a generation, a new brand new generation of kids entering schools where you train them up and you teach them about these things but think about the time that it takes. It takes a generation. It takes a number of generations before you have the country educated. We aren't going to get there. Carl Bernstein, I'm sorry. Carl Bernstein would tell you it's too late. He would tell you that we've already crossed the tipping point. He would tell you that we are in a civil war right now and it only leads to bad things, further divisiveness and violence. As it has in developing countries around the world, we're on that track. But let me add one other thing. It's not just education, it's interaction. One of the things I love about this program, Tim and Winston is that we interact. We throw out opinions. We test each other. We disagree. We learn. The three of us or anyone on this program learns a lot during the program but most people do not have that opportunity. Okay, A, they do not have that opportunity in COVID and if you look at your own life you find that you're talking with and engaging with fewer people all the time.  Therefore, we don't have the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation and a little conversation, a conversation where we test and learn. We don't have that. The other thing is that we have the, and that's been going on before COVID by the way. That's the way our world works. We have lost this opportunity, this engagement, this critical thinking opportunity. But the other thing is to exacerbate that, to accelerate it, we have social media. And as we discussed a minute ago, the press, which gives you what you want to hear. You know, I've talked to one of the networks years ago and I said, why don't you guys cover more energy news, more global news, more news that affects our future? Why don't you do that? He says, no, no, no, no, we can't do that. We have to give them what they want to hear and they want to hear sports, news, weather and crime. That's what we give them. And if we do that, they come around and we get views. And if we get views, we get advertisers, we get advertisers, we get profit. The system is broken. It's not about to be fixed. We are not about to have opportunities for critical thinking and true education. Winston, you'd like to comment on what Jay said and to add to that, you know, we're going to get an education here shortly, maybe in the next month or two from the January 6th Steering Committee for the House of Representatives about the capital insurrection. That report would be beneficial, would be educational, will it enlighten even those who are, you know, on the Fox News watching circuit, will it give them insights to what really happened or does it sit on a shelf and gather dust and cobwebs? It will sit on a shelf and gather cobwebs at the end of the day. I mean, there'll be useful information in it. Who knows what revelations are would be. But again, when you have the supporters of Donald Trump saying they don't care if he was fed Russian information or any information, if he was lying to the public, it doesn't matter the goal of having him stay in power is what mattered. And when you have that level of belief and of acceptance of horrendous behavior, that just doesn't work. Now, to get back to Jay's point, yes, it is a generational thing. And are they going to get it? I don't know, what percent of kids here in Hawaii are in public schools versus private schools? I think we have the highest percentage in private schools. It's a lot of people that just say, I'm not putting my kids in public schools. How are they getting a uniform education? Do we really know what they're getting? And if we do have a ruling class, which I think most nations do and who controls the banks? How do they set financial policy? You and I can't make those decisions. We don't understand the mechanisms of it. Or even if we do, a lot of it's just sort of a black box. We have to entrust the people who do have a 12th grade education and who do have a master's degree or a PhD or at least graduated from college who are members of Congress and most of them who are attorneys or a lot of them, who know better to make the right decisions for all of us. And that's where that's a short-term thing. I don't know if it's gonna happen, but they're also motivated by these rallies where they have, you know, tens of thousands of people show up or whatever it is in support of a leader with a specific agenda who's telling you who to blame, how bad it is and how to vote. Or if you vote and your vote is accounted in the way that he wants or that is wanted, then it's a lie and it's fake and it's a fraud. So we've got a lot of fronts to face on this, but one of them can be, I don't even wanna call it a dumbing down. I wanna say it's a meeting of people where they're at. Now, are we gonna get suddenly people who are Donald Trump supporters to start watching MSNBC or reading Politico if they go to a ninth grade reading level by just simplifying some terms without really dumbing down the message? I doubt it. Is the media's job to present facts and information? Ideally, but really fundamentally, these are owned by corporations whose sole responsibility is to create a profit for their owners, which means selling the most ad space. Now, whether they're selling it to the left or the right or the center, is there a center? I may be the mainstream media is the center, but that is their only responsibility at this point that I'm aware of. Let me go to that point exactly. We got a question from Cynthia Sinclair. Do you think stricter regulation will help stem the misinformation, which is to say, where is the FCC on all the misinformation that's being blithered and blathered about on Fox News, specifically about COVID vaccinations and COVID virus itself? I mean, this was irresponsible reporting and yet not a word out of FCC in its regulatory powers. Where do you put someone like Seth Rogan or like a Rush Limbaugh who may have their own channels and they don't rely on even Fox to disseminate their news, that they have their own followers outside of that? Where do you draw the line? There is something called public airways for the benefit of the public. And I've been harping about this for quite a while now and that is the FCC seems to be remiss in its ability to oversight the public airways, be it radio, be it TV and where are they? But how do you do that? How do you go, I was in Arkansas, right? How did they do it before? I mean, how did they do it before? You know, I was in Arkansas and all I heard was basically talk right wing, talk radio, a lot of Christian music, radio stations and country music and not a lot. Rachel Maddow was not on the menu that I heard there but if you go to Seattle you're gonna get the opposite. It's everyone's listening to Seattle Public Radio or whatever it is and NMS NBC and that sort of thing there. So how do you ensure that? How do you ensure that we on Think Tech right here in this program don't have to have Steve Scalise on here to give his opposing viewpoints good people on both sides? It's a really tricky question. And I don't know that we have any easy answers that the cat is out of the bag and has a million different venues for disseminating his or her like a Marjorie Taylor Greene.  I don't know. I mean, that just kind of gives pretense to what Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying. So I don't have a good answer. Maybe Jay does. Yeah, it's a tough one. You know, sometimes- Oh, so that's a free-for-all. We have an information free-for-all and anybody can say anything they want under arguable cover of the First Amendment. You can make the craziest statement in the world and the government is not going to get involved because of the First Amendment or its perception or the perception of the person who made the statement about the First Amendment. And Joe Biden, this is one of his great weaknesses. He's got a few weaknesses as it now appears. He's not doing anything about it. You know, he's not encouraging the FCC to do anything about it. And so what you have is a, you know, it's a, what do they say about the internet? It's an information highway. This is a free-for-all information highway. Anything goes, even obvious lies, and the government will not step in. But don't worry because when Trump is elected again, okay, we will have regulation about information and it'll be regulation that's political regulation. And if you say something against Trump, he will find a way to your front door. This is a reminder of what happened in Germany in the 30s. In that next administration, there will be control of information and we will not like it. I wish that Biden would do something about this. I wish that somebody would speak up about it. But the truth is, you know, a lot of people in this country, they don't care about this issue. You know, the three of us care about it passionately, but there are so many millions of people say it's gonna be okay. It's all gonna work out fine. You know, this is the American backbone, the American exceptionalism. We will prevail, survive and prevail, and truth will out. And more and more, it does not appear that's gonna happen. More and more, we have a melee of information and we have the terrible possibility that when the Republicans get back in office, they will control and promulgate enormous amounts of disinformation. If you think the public is confused now, wait. All right, we've run out of time. My only comment is we'll see what happens to the Voting Rights Act that's right now pending in Congress. It's languishing, but it's pending. So I wanna thank you, Jay Fidel, Winston Welch. You bring to the table a lot of insightful comments. Hopefully a lot of food for thought for those who watch this show, it is concerning and it's depressing at times to hear what I think is the progression of things to come. As Jay, as you put it, the metrodome of time that keeps ticking on and nothing's getting done to prevent the advance of the diminishing rule of law and some of our electoral things that we cherish in our electoral process. And it's my hope that Joe Biden watches this show and starts to act. So with that, I'd like to say thank you very much. Join us again next Wednesday at 11 o'clock to What Now America? I'm Tim Appichelle, your host. We'll see you then.


Hello, it's Weyland Chow and this is Law of Contract Formation, Module 2A, Part F. In this part, we will look at consideration, which is the third essential element of a contract. Let's go back to our old friends Daria and Jamal. Out of the goodness of her heart, Daria offers to give up her laptop to Jamal for free at the end of the semester. Jamal gratefully agrees. At the end of the semester, Daria changes her mind and does not give her laptop to Jamal. I will tell you upfront that Daria did not have a legal obligation to give the laptop to Jamal. But I'd like you to think about explaining why there is no contract between Daria and Jamal and also suggest how the deal between Daria and Jamal may have been changed so that there is a binding contract. So we have two parties. One person makes an offer to the other and that second person accepts the offer, provides an acceptance. So what that results in is an agreement or a meeting of minds. So we talked about that in Module 3A, the previous module. Now what we also need to have a legally binding contract is an exchange or a mutuality of consideration. So consideration has to flow from one party to the other and vice versa in order to have the valid contract. So in other words, if we have just a one sided promise or a gratuitous promise where one party is making a promise to the other and the other party is not providing anything in exchange that promise is void for lack of consideration. In other words, it's not a valid contract. However, there is one exception where if that gratuitous promise is made under seal it is a valid contract. We'll talk further about what is a seal later on in this module. What exactly is consideration from a legal standpoint? Forget about whatever normal meaning of that word that you know about. It has nothing to do with being thoughtful or nice or considerate. There is a specific legal meaning. Consideration is said to exist when one party gives or promises to give a benefit to someone else. Another way consideration exists is instead of giving or promising a benefit it could also happen where someone suffers or promises to suffer a detriment to themselves. For example, if someone promises to give a smoking in exchange for a promise from someone else to pay them a certain amount of money to give up smoking. So giving up the smoking is not giving someone a benefit but is that person giving or suffering a detriment to themselves. Consideration has to be what's called sufficient. Now what that means is that the consideration has to be of some value. So that obviously includes things like money, goods, land, or services. But it specifically does not include what's considered to be love and affection or gratitude or good feelings. So if you give a gift to someone and they are very thankful and they express their gratitude and good feelings that gratitude and good feelings is not legally considered to be consideration. Consideration does not need to be adequate. You can pay whatever amount that you want or agree to pay whatever amount that you want regardless of the value of the item that you are getting. So if something is worth a million dollars but someone agrees to pay one dollar for it does not seem to be a fair deal but the requirement of consideration is considered to be satisfied. There is something in the cases that's called the peppercorn theory where someone agrees to sell this valuable horse in exchange for a tiny peppercorn which is practically almost worthless but does have some minute value. So in that situation where a horse is agreed to be exchanged for a peppercorn the requirement of consideration is said to be satisfied. In our scenario the first question explain why there is no contract between Daria and Jamal. Although Jamal did accept Daria's offer of the computer so there was offer and acceptance and therefore an agreement there was no exchange of consideration. Jamal did not provide anything in exchange for Daria's promise of the laptop therefore a contract was not formed between Daria and Jamal. The second question suggests how the deal between Daria and Jamal may have been changed so that there was a binding contract. If Jamal had provided any kind of consideration of any value even something as small as a promise to pay one dollar to Daria there would have been a binding contract or alternatively if Daria had put her promise in writing and signed it under seal there would have been a binding contract. Let's now look at the issue of past consideration. We already know that mutuality of consideration requires each party to provide consideration in exchange for the other party's consideration so the key word there is that there has to be an exchange. Now with past consideration that's where the consideration was given before the contract was contemplated or entered into. In that type of situation there is no mutuality and therefore there is no consideration that has been exchanged. For example, if you're my neighbor and you mow my lawn as a favor and once you've already done that I promise to pay you $100 for mowing my lawn. That promise to pay is one-sided. There is no consideration being given in exchange because the service has already been rendered the service being the mowing of my lawn. Now an exception to that treatment is where if an agreement to provide services or goods does not include any mention of price and those services or goods are actually provided the court may find an implied promise to pay a reasonable price instead of finding a lack of consideration due to past consideration. If my neighbor agreed to mow my lawn and we didn't talk about a price there was no mention of it being a favor and then my neighbor goes ahead and mows my lawn and then asks for payment. Then a court could interpret that as being that there was an implied promise on my part to pay him a reasonable price even though we did not discuss or negotiate a specific price. Let's look at the issue of whether a pre-existing obligation can be used as consideration for a new contract. So if one party is already obligated to do something to deliver something under a previous contract can that obligation under the previous contract be used as consideration for a brand new contract? The summary of the law on this chart will look at each type of pre-existing obligation in further detail in the context of the leading cases on this issue. The second type of pre-existing obligation is a pre-existing contractual obligation owed to a third party. So for example, I will do for you what I already promised to do for someone else. So that is considered to be consideration for a new contract because that pre-existing or old obligation is considered to be a new benefit for the other party under the new contract. The second type of pre-existing obligation is where the obligation is owed to the same party. In other words, I'll perform our existing contract if you pay me $500 extra. With that type of pre-existing obligation it is not considered to be consideration for the new contract because there is no new benefit being given to the other party. The leading decision on pre-existing contractual obligations owed to a third party is the purchase of Pao An and Lao Yi Long or I call it the Food Chip case because it involves a corporation by that name. The plaintiff in the Food Chip case had entered into an agreement with Food Chip Corp for the purchase of shares. So the consideration exchange there was that Food Chip shares would be sold by the corporation to the plaintiff in exchange for the payment of a certain price and also a promise not to resell those shares or not to resell more than 60% of those shares within a year. Now another agreement that the plaintiff entered into was an indemnification agreement with the majority shareholders of Food Chip Corp. So this is the agreement that was called into question as to whether or not it was a valid contract. Under that indemnification agreement the majority shareholders of the defendants had promised to indemnify for any losses that the plaintiff may suffer so if the price of those shares had gone down below a certain level the majority shareholders would have compensated the plaintiff for that loss under that promise. In exchange for that promise the consideration provided by the plaintiff to the majority shareholders was a promise not to resell more than 60% of the shares within the year. So it was the exact same promise that the plaintiff had made to Food Chip Corporation under the other agreement the agreement for the purchase of the shares. So the issue was is that promise to not not to resell more than 60% within a year made to the majority shareholders is that considered to be valid consideration because it was a pre-existing contractual obligation that the plaintiff already had to someone else which was the corporation. And the court there found that that promise was valid consideration that this previous promise is a new benefit for the majority shareholders under the indemnification agreement and therefore it is valid consideration. The leading decision involving pre-existing contractual obligation owed to the same party is the case of Gilbert Steele and University Construction which is a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal. In that case we have two agreements and they both involve the same parties. One party, the first party which is the plaintiff is Gilbert Steele and the second party is University Construction. Gilbert Steele was a supplier of Steele for construction and University Construction was the general contractor. So agreement number one between these two parties involved a promise by University Construction to pay a set price for the supply of Steele by Gilbert Steele. So Gilbert Steele I promised to supply several shipments of Steele at that set price. Now as after a few shipments have been made the world price of Steele had gone up. So Gilbert Steele went back to University Construction and told them about the increase in the price of Steele to see if University Construction would be willing to pay a higher price for the remaining shipments of Steele. So that led to agreement number two between Gilbert Steele and University Construction. Under agreement number two University Construction had agreed to pay an additional amount for the Steele and that additional amount for Gilbert Steele to supply the remaining shipments as per the original agreement number one. The court found that that promise to supply the remaining shipments under agreement number two was not valid consideration because that promise had already been made under agreement number one and that University Construction did not receive any new benefit from that promise to supply the remaining shipments and therefore that second contract agreement number two is void for lack of consideration. Situation involving a promise to forgive debt also involves an issue regarding consideration. You know for example if you owe me $500 and you tell me that a lot of difficulty paying me back since you lost your job and I agree I agree to forgive your debt if you pay me $200 then that is a promise to discharge debt upon part payment. The legal problem there is that the promise to discharge debt is unenforceable because no new consideration is being provided by the debtor. So in effect I am charging $300 of your debt in exchange for nothing from you so there is no exchange of consideration. Now the solution to that legal problem is one of three possible solutions. If the situation occurs in Ontario there is a piece of legislation called the Ontario Mercantile Law Amendment Act which says that you can't have a valid contract part payment to fully discharge a debt obligation even though there is no new consideration. So that legislation essentially changes the common law position that there is no agreement so the legislation overrides the common law position. Now for other provinces in Canada that don't have the equivalent of the Mercantile Law Amendment Act the other way of making a promise to discharge debt an unenforceable contract is to make that promise under seal and we'll talk about a seal on the next slide. And a third way of getting around this problem is to have the debtor promise to provide some kind of new benefit in exchange for the forgiveness of the debt. So if you promise to pay me $200 and I'll forgive you the remaining $300 but in addition you promise to pay me that $200 sooner than the usual deadline than the required deadline then you are giving me a new benefit which is the benefit of early payment and there is an exchange of consideration which makes it into an unenforceable contract. So we know that a one-sided promise where one party is making a promise to the other or making anything in exchange a one-sided promise lacks an exchange of consideration and therefore is not an enforceable contract. Those one-sided promises can be made into enforceable contracts by one of two ways even though there is no exchange of consideration. The first way is by using a seal and the second way is under the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel which by the way is not covered in this course we won't talk about that any further. Now, what is this seal? A seal is a special mark on a written contract to indicate a party's intention to be bound by the terms of the contract so what it would involve is simply the person who's making that one-sided promise put that in writing and sign it and put a special red sticker on it so I call it a magic sticker so the effect of that magic sticker is to make that one-sided promise to a legally binding contract.


Just yesterday, September 19th, 2022, members of the royal family far and wide made their way to Westminster Abbey for Her Majesty's State Funeral. During the funeral procession and over the course of the national mourning period, the Queen's funeral will be the first held for a monarch since the death of her father King George VI more than 70 years ago and will be the first held for a monarch in Westminster Abbey since 1760. This was a passing felt the world over. Still, there were plenty of us who missed the broadcast, so we decided here at Famous Entertainment to piece together a top 10 list on the most shocking moments you might have missed. Did Meghan Markle break royal protocol again? Why didn't Prince Harry salute the Queen's coffin?  All of this is coming up in our top 10 highlights from the Queen's funeral. Also for the thumbnail, we want to inform all of you who are confused if Big Ben did in fact explode. We can inform you that it didn't. We know that this is a meme all over the internet. No monument represents England better than Big Ben. We apologize to anyone outraged in the comments. Please leave your condolences down below and let's get right into it. First up at number 10, we have the royal cost of this massive tribute event. The Queen's Royal Funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 19, 2022 will be paid for by British taxpayers. Even though the royal family is worth $28 billion, it can fund the funeral. Security costs seem to be a major component driving up this event's price tag. Why so? Well, with most of the world's international state leaders expected to be in attendance, including President Biden and his wife, as well as Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But we're going to break down the entire guest list a little later in this video. Per the New York Post, a former royal security officer predicted that $7.5 million would be the cost of the security for the funeral alone. In fact, according to London The Tropolin Police, Queen Elizabeth's Funeral is the single largest policing event that they have ever undertaken, surpassing the 2012 London Olympics and the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations that occurred earlier this year. In total, 10,000 officers took part in the policing operation for the Queen's service. The Queen herself shared the cost of the Queen Mother's funeral in 2002, with the ceremony reported to have cost her around 5.4 million pounds. Although the British government has not yet confirmed the exact cost of the state funeral, stating that details will be shared in quote-on-quote due course, reports estimate that the total is expected to be upwards of $20 million. Exactly where this money will come from is still unclear, though it's expected it will be mostly be funded by the taxpayer, with the family picking up some of the bill too. The worth of the royal family is reported to stand at an estimated $28 billion, like I said, so they can certainly afford it. A significant amount is expected to have been set aside for the Queen's funeral over recent years by both royalty and government. Moving on to number nine, we have the guest list, which side note didn't have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle anywhere near the top. The palace has not released a formal guest list for the funeral, but reports indicate that around 500 VIP guests were expected, including major world leaders and fellow royals. Among them were US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Other representatives from the Commonwealth were present too, as well as British Prime Minister Liz Truss. Royals from around the world have also flown to the UK to attend her Majesty's funeral, including King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain, Queen Margaret and Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark and Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako of Japan. In terms of celebrities, there was Bear Grill, Sandra Oh, Sophie Winkleman, and then there are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, who were treated more like celebs than actually part of the royal family. But more on that shortly. Next up, we have the sheer number of people who showed up and the viewers around the world who tuned in. A billion people were watching the Queen's funeral on TV and online, and that's an impressive number for sure, but more than a million people are right there in central London to catch a glimpse of her coffin and to say one final farewell. Five miles or eight kilometers of people lined up to file past the Queen's coffin in Westminster Hall. The mammoth line stretched back from the House of Parliament along the South Bank of the River Thames to the South Ark Park. As for the live broadcast, the event is expected to be one of the most watched events in history. Moving on to number seven, we have the Queen's funeral details about centuries of royal mourning traditions being carried out. The great traditions associated with royal funerals and the Langan state formalities date back hundreds of years. It's all about securing the succession. The Queen's English oak coffin was constructed some 30 years ago alongside a coffin for her late husband Prince Philip. London undertakers Leverton and Sons told this at the Times in 2018. The flag draped on the coffin is the royal standard, which represents both the Sovereign and the United Kingdom. The crown atop the velvet pillow is the Royal Imperial Crown, which is encrusted with 2,868 diamonds, 269 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and four rubies. It was first worn by the Queen when she left Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation in 1953. It was originally made for the coronation of her father, King George VI, in 1937. Following Monday's funeral, another procession will take the Queen's coffin from Westminster Abbey to St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. This is where she will be buried in the King George VI Memorial Chapel alongside her parents. Her sister, Princess Margaret, and husband, Prince Philip. This will all go down during a private service for the royal family members. For more on this, we're going to discuss the outfits worn by royal members and why Prince Harry wasn't permitted to wear his royal uniform. Needless to say, black was the predominant color among the estimated 2,000 guests packed into London's Westminster Abbey for the ceremony. And while the attendees' choices of outfits were appropriately understated, hats, brooches, and nods to national dress added character to the otherwise somber attire. Making statements is a very delicate task, but the brooches, the pins, and sashes carried subtle significance. Catherine Princess of Wales wore a pair of drop earrings made from pearls given to the Queen and Prince Philip for their marriage in 1947, as well as the four-row Japanese pearl choker from the Queen's personal jewelry collection. Now, this was also an item previously worn by the late Princess Diana. Wearing an elegant cape dress, Meghan Duchess of Sussex followed suit and a pair of earrings gifted to her by the Queen in 2018. Both Queen consort Camilla and Catherine Princess of Wales could be seen wearing black veils. It's tradition for female members of the royal family to also wear black veils for funerals.  Why is this important? Meghan didn't wear a veil. Some speculate that she was eager to get as much publicity as possible from this highly publicized event. Deeper dives have been made on the uniform or lack thereof a uniform worn by Prince Harry, who waved goodbye to all military practices when he stepped back from his role as a senior royal, meaning he was unable to wear his uniform during the Queen's funeral. As promised, we're going to talk more about one woman getting a lot of headlines from the royal family, all for the wrong reasons. And this might be because Meghan Markle may have broken royal protocol. As just mentioned, maybe Markle prefers to be in a viewpoint of photographers in paparazzi, unlike most other members of the royal family. She did leave the royal family for more of a practical life living in the US. But it was the very public interview given to Oprah in March 2021, followed by the release of and recently her Spotify podcast that really put a strain on her relationship with the royals. So we know that Meghan is on the outs, but how about Harry? There was no eye contact or acknowledgement between Prince William and Prince Harry as they walked behind the Queen's coffin. In his 10 years as a member of the British military, Harry served two tours in Afghanistan and rose to the rank of captain in the British army. Yet he gave up his three official military titles in 2021 as part of a deal with his family when he stopped working for the royal family and moved to California. Many members of the royal family appeared in uniform, including King Charles III, Prince William, Princess Anne and Prince Edward. Harry, however, donned a suit and tie for the occasion. Buckingham Palace required him not to appear in uniform because he is no longer a working royal. Similarly, Queen Elizabeth II's second son, Prince Andrew, who was forced to set back from royal duties over his relationship with sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, also was barred from wearing his military uniform. But unlike his brother, Prince William, Prince Harry didn't salute instead keeping his arms by his side. It wasn't long before royal fans took to social media to ask why and the answer is all to do with the Duke of Sussexes standing within the royal family. Saluting is a military custom by which a soldier signals acknowledgement for the due respect to a superior rank. In this case, members of the royal family are saluting to her majesty who was the head of the armed forces and served as their commander in chief. However, although Prince Harry was in the military, he waved goodbye to those military practices when he stepped back. This means that he wasn't able to salute alongside his family members during the Queen's funeral. When Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Sussex chose to break from the royal family in 2021, they relinquished the duties, income and security protection that comes with being working royals. There was another young boy and girl who caught people's attention as well. The two eldest children of the Prince and Princess of Wales, George and Charlotte, formed part of a procession with the royal family following the coffin as it entered London's Westminster Abbey to Cambridge children who are second and third in line to the British throne. In a short video of the moment, seven-year-old Charlotte can be seen telling her older brother you need to bow. As she gives the instruction, the second in line for the throne listen intently. I had to include that just because they're so cute. But before we get to the end of this list, we have to take one more look at Meghan and Harry's seats at the funeral. I saw a meme that read, No one puts Harry in a corner except the royal family and it appears to be very true. William and Harry, who have a strained relationship over the past few years, were as far away from each other as could be, separated by the Church Isle. During Queen Elizabeth's funeral, the palace seat and Harry and Meghan directly behind Harry's father, King Charles III and the Queen consort, Camilla. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were among other royal family members right at the foot of the high altar. Their royal status was the reason they were relegated to the second row. Here, their cousins Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, the children of the Queen's son, Prince Andrew. Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales sat in the front row with their eldest children Prince George and Princess Charlotte. Finally in the number one spot, let's talk about the now King Charles III who waited longer than anyone in history for his time to accede the throne. King Charles III has been waiting his whole life for this moment. At his birth 73 years ago, he became second in lying to the throne. And for the past six decades, ever since his mother ascended the throne in 1952 when he was three, he has been the heir apparent. Those watching took note that King Charles III didn't sing British national anthem during the Queen's funeral. This is because the song is one that has traditionally been saying to the reigning monarch. The anthem was formally recognized as God Save the Queen throughout Queen Elizabeth II's 70 years on the throne. According to the Royal Family's website, the national anthem lyrics have remained the same since it was first performed in 1745 with the changes being Substitute and Queen for King were appropriate. How he handles his reign will shape the future of the monarchy and indeed determine whether if it is even necessary at all. Based around the intrigue and attention this funeral has generated, it appears the Royal Family are still as relevant as ever. The tributes from around the world and the silent queuing of her loyal citizens at home speak volumes of the kind of woman the Queen was. May she rest in peace after a life of tireless service.