Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. It's a Thursday morning. We're talking about history lens. We're talking about history of the United States. The title of our show is Fixing the Constitution to Resolve Our Competing Narratives. That's complicated. My brother joins us from Yale, Gene Fidel. He teaches there. David Louis, former Attorney General of the State of Hawaii, joins us from Honolulu. Welcome, gentlemen. Hi, Aloha. I want to start this by reading out of an essay, Gene, that you sent me. Before you do, Jay, let me mention I'm teaching now at NYU, your alma mater. Okay, yeah, alma mater. That's a step up. Okay, so it's not enough simply to get Trump out, undo what he has done, and make some reforms, like who came up with Bill back better. We should recognize, thanks to COVID and Trump, that our government has become dysfunctional. And that our national narrative, which won several New York Times had a project on that, is spent. What is our national narrative? We are entering a third chapter into the American story, a fourth that you consider 1619 to 1776 as a colonial period with its own narratives, fashioned by Puritans and the Board of Trade in London. And we need a significantly new narrative that takes account of not only our important respects, nasty history, but also our changed demographics and heightened expectations of social justice. Okay, let's stop there. There's more to the narrative. But I want to get your thoughts about, you know, A, what periods we've been through, whether we're in the third or the fourth chapter now, and what and, you know, how American history as looking back on the United States, how it has evolved. Where are we in terms of the American narrative? Gene, you start, you wrote the essay. Right. Well, the point about the narrative is, the narrative is the organizing myth. And, you know, myth doesn't mean it's just a fairytale, but, you know, it's what people buy into and feel deeply. The organizing myth around which society forms and that breeds life into what would otherwise be a mere collection of individuals. So, step one, I think, is to try to identify the epochs in the country's life. And every step of what I'm about to say is contested territory. And David Louie can help me on this, but I'll just give you the very short version. The first epoch is, I can't give you the beginning date for the first epoch. I can give you the end date. The end date is July 4, 1776. The beginning date is itself a function of what your narrative is, because for Black people in America, the beginning date is 1619. For other people, it's 1492. For other people, namely the original inhabitants, it's, you know, creation. For people in Hawaii, it's, you know, whatever it is when society coalesced in what we call the sandwich islands, right? So, you know, that's step one, phase one. And of course, you know, you would identify different epochs since you all are in Honolulu. I want to respect that and the notion that the epochs are somewhat different for people in Hawaii. The epochs may run to the consolidation of power by Kamehameha the first, or they may run to the great Mahelei, correct my pronunciation, they may run to the end of the monarchy, and they may run to the end of to statehood, and so forth. So, you know, that's a somewhat different slicing of time. But for the United States as a political entity, as I say, epic number one, notionally ends on July 4th, 76. Epic number two, I would say ends at Appomattox courthouse. Epic number three is ending now. And the question is, what will be the nature and character of epic number four? So that's sort of setting the stage. Now, just a word about narratives. The fact is that you can have more than one narrative operating at any given time. So that, for example, you could have the narrative of the melting pot, right? You could have the narrative of liberation. You could have the narrative of America first. You could have the narrative of universal suffrage. And so forth. And these themes do not begin and end at the same instant. Some may be peaking at a time when other narratives, competing narratives may be reaching the bottom. And by the way, Native Americans have a whole other narrative, which we shouldn't neglect. And Native Hawaiians ditto. Native Alaskans yet another narrative. So it's a very complicated process that doesn't lend itself to mathematical certainty. But I think most people who are willing to look at the long run of the American state can identify both the function of narratives, keep the foreigners out, bring the foreigners in, give me a tire of your poor, build a wall. But right now, Gene, isn't it all focused on just two narratives? One is the people who are attracted to Trump and the other people who are not attracted to Trump. And that's what's coming up here on November 3rd, isn't it? We collectively are going to have to make a decision about which narrative to take. Well, no, but I don't think President Trump, I don't think there is a Trumpian narrative. I think Trump exemplifies some themes that we've seen over American history. I mean, if the Know Nothing Party still existed, it went out of business, I think in the late 1840s, early 1850s, he'd be a Know Nothing president. I mean, with initial caps, Know Nothing Party president. So there's nothing particularly new there, the notion that there's what is it, the paranoid strain in American politics is a famous essay. You know, that's been there for a long time. So he's not novel, except to the extent that we now have a combination and it's a very toxic combination. I'm almost finished, David. He's almost finished, David. I need to hear from David. But we now have a toxic combination of that narrative with a lunatic as its representative. Silence to me like this is a combination of complex and simple. What do you think, David? So, you know, I totally agree that there's a narrative going on right now and that it is important for the country, for the nation to have a narrative. I like quite frankly, Trump's narrative make America great, or let's go back to the good old days when whites were supreme and everybody else knew their place, including women and minorities and people with color. You know, that doesn't do it for me. But currently, the Dems narrative is we don't want Trump. And that's not good enough for me. Okay, because that's just being anti-Trump is not a good narrative. I think the narrative ought to be, and I quite frankly, I don't like Build Back Better. That came from a 2015 UN disaster recovery conference in Sendai, Japan, where they came up with that slogan. And yes, we are talking about getting rid of Trump and that is disaster recovery. But it's not really a good slogan to me. I think the slogan really is, or should be, the better angels. Or what Bill Bradley said, that President Lincoln said, which was can't we all do better? And really, it's to me that the narrative that I think has resonated throughout American history, sometimes more, sometimes less, is let's all achieve and let's all do something good for everybody. The greatest good for the greatest number, which is sort of the underlying foundation of good government in my mind. So I think that's the narrative that should be pushed, whether or not we're going to get there. I don't know. Narratives are, simplifications. I agree with Gene. They are myths. They are rallying cries so that you can simplify things and appeal to the base instincts of people so as to engender action. It comes back to ethos, pathos, and logos. And it's pathos, which is let's get right to the emotional resonance of something so that people will not think critically about what's going on. And so that's what narratives are. But they do have a useful place. And so I hope we can come up with a new narrative for the American dream. Well, I hope you'll agree with me. We're at an inflection point and we have competing narratives now that are more troublesome and are in need of resolution. Let me read, Gene, the third paragraph of the essay. We need to really work on the racism piece, on policing, on limitless military spending and foreign adventurism, equal suffrage of the states in the Senate and the Second Amendment are our enemies now. The latter can be fixed to some extent by changes for the better on the Supreme Court. But the former is well and truly baked in and therefore requires a new constitution. I'm sorry to say, and this is really an important part of our discussion, that I would predict civil disorder. So tell me, how do the narratives raise their heads now and require us to consider amendments that could be sweeping? Gene? Well, let's start with the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate. And a word of history here that you gentlemen both know very well. There were two things in the 1787 Constitution that were outside the amending power. Right? The key element of the Constitution is how you change it. And the two things were, number one, Congress could not tinker with the slave trade. They didn't use the word slave trade, but that was one. And that provision was untouchable until 1808. The other provision was that the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate could not be tinkered with ever. That is there. And as long as we're under the 1787 Constitution, we have to live with that. Now, are there workarounds for that? Yes, there are. For example, I spoke to a gifted friend the other day about this, and he said, well, California could be split into several states. And the problem, and then you wouldn't, I'm now going to pick on a state with a small population. It is very difficult to explain to a person from California why Idaho has whatever it is, three or four votes, you know, three or four votes in the Electoral College. And remember that I think four of the last five presidential elections have gone to people other than the, am I right on this? There have been repeated instances in which the winner was not the winner of the popular vote. Mr. Trump being the most recent example of this, but it's happened before. And with some regularity in the late 20th and early 21st century. So there is a problem, particularly, and here I'm going to play lawyer for a second, since the 14th Amendment, we've had equal protection of the laws. Since the 60s, we've had one person, one vote. It was originally one man, one vote, but you know, now it's one person, one vote. So there's a notion of equality that everybody should have roughly the same say in the operation of this polity. And the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate is wildly inconsistent with the notion of equality, which talk about a narrative, the notion of equality since the 14th Amendment was ratified.  Let me insinuate this provision, which is the very end of Article 5 of the Constitution. It says, in the Constitution, it says, when talking about amendments, it says, no state without its consent shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. So you would have to, you know, somehow turn that upside down in any amendment that would change the, you know, the arrangement in the Senate. No, no, what you would do is simply have to somehow negotiate the addition of states by division. Now you couldn't break up California without, I'm not picking on California, my daughter lives there, but you couldn't break up California without its consent, but there's no reason you can't break up a state. For example, Virginia was broken up during the Civil War. Right? It's true. There was one state and it became two states. So, you know, that can be done. That can be done in theory. But, you know, how would you carry that out? I mean, it would really have to be, you'd have to have tremendous political leadership on a national level in order to bring that over. Now, the one other thing, just to wrap this piece of it up, there's another thing that you could do, which is you could create two new states or a couple of new states without, you know, cutting up California. The District of Columbia could be made a state. Puerto Rico could be made a state. Puerto Rico has a larger population, I believe, than at least one or two or maybe three states. So there's a certain logic to that. So there are things short of tossing the whole thing over, but those things are launch shots. And it's not a surprise that the Republicans have basically resisted the creation of the District of Columbia as an additional, as a 51st state, because they're certain for some reason it will be a democratic jurisdiction. I don't know why they say that. Where would they get that idea? So if a state is created, both houses of Congress, its legislation, have to agree, and it has to be signed or passed vetoed by the president. Let's see. I don't think that you would need a constitutional amendment. No, the standard would be less than a constitutional amendment. David, what do you think about all this? Is there a solution on this senatorial problem? Well, I do appreciate the structural problems, the electoral college, the Senate, all of those things. To me, the structural problems that exist in the country are kind of baked in. And while it would be nice to try and change those, it is an unbelievably heavy lift to change any of that structure. And so I believe that the efforts are better spent in actual direct initiatives towards social justice initiatives, such as Black Lives Matter, such as reforming police unions, such as balancing the budget, such as stopping wars, such as giving equal rights to women and getting an equal rights amendment. So I would advocate for spending the time doing that, because I think when you go into trying to change the structure, although it becomes a proxy, it is a proxy for whether we're going to have progressive change or not, you can get too caught up in the structure. And then you don't really get to the problem, which is to me, so I mean, I'd rather address the problem. Yeah, you know, it's hard to change the structure chain, but does David's approach go far enough to get where we need to go? Well, David's a realist, and he's lived in the cockpit of political life in ways that I haven't. And so, you know, feel free to discount what I am saying. I also think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think, you know, David's approach is this worldly approach, and mine is the world to go. But that said, I think that there are things that really are very concerning. And I don't think we can assume that it's going to be business as usual in this country in the final days of this administration, as this era comes to a an abrupt and really messy end. I believe that this era is going to end in civil disorder. I'm not happy to say that, but I believe that's the case. I think in large measure we have President Trump personally to thank for this. He has spent years invoking the Second Amendment as if it was a battle cry. He has done nothing to foster intelligent gun control. The Supreme Court, in the case of Heller against District of Columbia, got the Second Amendment so bollocksed up that we're now at the mercy of anybody who can find someone who will sell him or her an automatic weapon. And Trump has basically thrown a match into the gas tank. Somebody referred to him as an arsonist, a political arsonist. And I think that's absolutely the case. And the gas tank that's been sitting around, it's like Justice Jackson referred to leaving a loaded gun around. Justice Jackson referred to leaving a loaded gun around. The Second Amendment has been a loaded gun, no pun intended, a political loaded gun. And unfortunately it's there for anybody to take. And people can wrap themselves in the Second Amendment and claim to be a truthful, faithful adherence of the US Constitution. It's totally crazy. Now that can be overcome through either the Grim Reaper dealing with the Supreme Court and the proper sensible justices being named who will overturn Heller against the District of Columbia. Or it's not written anywhere, aside from an act of Congress, that there can only be nine justices on the Supreme Court.  FDR tried it and it cratered and it was a kind of black guy. But you know, would you be with a president who had really a great head of steam and was an effective leader and if the country was appalled by the amount of gun violence everywhere, be able to overcome that and say, well, we're going to name five more justices and we're going to overturn Heller. Maybe that's the way around that, simply let it work out through time. But in the meantime, I have to say that thanks to the president and his enablers, the transition to the next administration touch wood headed by Vice President Biden and Senator Harris is not going to be a friendly one. Now there's friendly and friendly. I remember that wonderful New Yorker cover about the transition from President Hoover to President Roosevelt 1933. And they're in the limousine driving up to Capitol Hill and President Roosevelt sitting there, you know, a cigarette holder, very jaunty and Hoover is sitting there in a top hat, very glum. What we're looking at for next January 20th is going to make that look like the Tea Party, you know, Love Fest compared to the transition. You know, will President Trump even attend? Will he be standing his ground saying the election was no good? Will Attorney General Barr be continuing to lead the Department of Justice and create so much uncertainty and tie things up on their way to the Supreme Court? And we may not know for quite a while, even after January 20th. Happily the Constitution and the law seem to deal with every contingency. But that may be famous last words. There's always the next contingency no one thought of. But I see here a genuine prospect for civil disorder. And when the President of the United States talks about invoking the Insurrection Act and putting making fast work of demonstrators and protesters in an environment where everybody is on to the teeth. I'm not happy to say this, but I have to say it's at least as likely as not that there's going to be a real crisis. Yeah. David, do you share the concern? I share the concern that there will be civil disorder. I think it will be damped down. I think the military will and the police authorities such as they are will maintain order. There will be demonstrations. There may even be riots, but I don't regard it as a crisis. I believe that there will still be a transition of power. In order for Trump to do what he really in his heart of heart wants to do, he would need the complicity of the military. I don't believe that the military has changed over like the Turkish military has changed over to empower Erdogan to just become a dictator. I don't believe that our military agrees with that and will do that. So I think we will have a transition of power. It will be bumpy. I see bumpy, but I think it'll happen.  You must have thoughts about how the military would present when this crisis takes place. I think the military will be a model institution of American democracy. I think we'll all end up owing another kind of debt to people in uniform. It's interesting. It's not just national defense. They're defending the Constitution. I have every confidence. However, I also fear that we are going to have to rely on them as a sort of firewall. Well, it's hard to be optimistic about the resolution of all this and our lives after the fact. But I want to just ask you guys one more question. So walk and chew gum is something you said which interests me, Gene. Shouldn't we be considering constitutional amendments here? But how likely is it that we can pass one? If you look at Article 5, it's not so easy. You have to have votes of two-thirds or three-quarters. It has to bounce back and forth between the states and the Congress. We've had 27 amendments so far. How likely is it that we could pass an amendment that would reform the problem in the Congress, the electoral vote issue, and the second amendment? How likely is it that we could do that? Well, it's not likely at all that we could get an amendment that would fix the equal representation of the states. The other things that I talked about were workarounds around that problem. The only way you can fix the equal suffrage of the states is actually by getting a new constitution, which would require political violence. I don't mean people shooting at one another, but I mean it would be an act of political violence and you'd at that point enter the second American Republic. Other countries have had multiple republics. The French Republic, the fourth, fifth republic, the Germans, you know. So, you know, we might have to contemplate a second American Republic. I would recommend that everybody who's concerned with these issues read the book by now the late justice, John Paul Stevens, where he identified a number of amendments that he would make to the Constitution. That's a little book, but it's a book of great wisdom and people should be reading it. The other book they should read is Tim Snyder's book on tyranny. That's the more urgent task. Absolutely. David, you know, we had some experience with constitutional conventions in Hawaii, and one of the options in Article 5 is a constitutional convention. In Hawaii, it has not been successful. What are your thoughts about whether it will ever be successful in Hawaii and why not, and whether it could ever be successful nationally? Right. Well, so let's just take the national first. Three letters, DOA. Dead on arrival. Not going to happen because you need too much political agreement. We're not anywhere close to that. So, if you can't pass the Equal Rights Amendment for God's sakes, the idea of reforming the Constitution and fixing things is not going to happen. So, the trouble with changing the social compact, whether it is a marriage contract, whether it is a contract between business partners, is everybody anticipates whether they're going to win or lose with the new thing, and people don't want to be losers. And the only way they become winners is if they can snooker the other guy or the other person on the other side so they don't realize that they're going to be losers. As far as the Hawaii Constitution, we had a con con back in 1976, I believe, or 77, and a whole bunch of amendments passed establishing Native Hawaiian rights. Now, since that time, the Native Hawaiians, at least publicly in the press, have been reluctant to endorse another constitutional convention because they are afraid that there is backlash against that and that there will be a constitutional rollback of privileges and entitlements and things that they may have received through that con con. That was the Native Hawaiians calling, David. Yes, they didn't like what I said. But because there are always winners and losers and people anticipate whether they're going to win or lose, none of these constitutional conventions happen in a vacuum. People are so attuned now to what might happen and the prospect of loss that I don't think anybody's going to agree to a constitutional convention, certainly not in Hawaii and certainly not in the United States. Well, given all of that, Jean, what do you suggest it's the individual citizen ought to be thinking about and doing to preserve the Republic and to preserve the quality of life that he or she has enjoyed up to this point? Well, there are people who would say that this Republic needs a fresh start. People who have studied it closely and traced the 1619 narrative, the narrative that suggests that the American state has slavery in its bones. That's a serious issue that the country has to address. But I want to sort of wrap up if I can on a positive note. The first thing is, I think, and in response to your question, Jay, everybody should vote once. I don't do criminal work, but everybody should vote. There's no excuse for not voting. That's the first point. The second point is, by my rough calculation, the three of us, our ages would be somewhere north of 200 years. There is a new generation that is arising, that has arisen. People like AOC who actually represents part of Queens County where Jay and I grew up, and other young people who are entering politics for whom social justice is a major issue and inequality is a major issue, a driving force, and I'm encouraged by that. They're going to inherit whatever wreckage exists as we enter this next epoch of American national life. I wish them well. Some of the stuff that they're going to want to do is going to be unwise. It's going to be messy. At times it will be ill thought through. But I think they're willing to take a fresh look at that pretty much everything and come up with a better narrative than what is it? Build back better. I think they're capable of doing it. I look to them. I'm excited by them. AOC in particular gave some remarks on the floor that has representatives when some member of Congress insulted her on the Capitol grounds. It's outrageous. I was blown away. I think some of the other young people who, some people who have just been successful in the primaries who are coming forward now, some of these people in the House of Representatives who are phenomenally impressive, phenomenally impressive people, many of them women, many of them minorities, Native Americans. It's just tremendously exciting to me. I cheerfully passed them on wish them well. I got to reserve a little time for David. David, what are your thoughts about that? Do you have optimism and on what basis? Yeah, you know, I do have optimism. My time in government, as brief as it was, I got a chance to see both Hawaii and the national scene. I met all these attorney generals, Republicans and Democrats. And although there were ideological clowns sometimes, for the most part, they were all highly professional, intelligent, pragmatic people. So I am optimistic about the bench of leaders that exists on both sides of the aisle and their ability, now standing our foray into Trumpism, that their ability to come together and work together to get pragmatic solutions. Now, in my view, people do need to vote and people need to be educated. I do share genes, enthusiasm and optimism for young people. But I think it's also extremely important that we are doing a better job to educate our young people about the importance of civic engagement and civic issues. There is too much apathy. There is too much. I don't want to be bothered. It's too complex. I don't want to think about it. Kind of a mentality that some young people have and hopefully better education about why their vote matters and why they need to be engaged will bear dividends. Because to me, the hallmark of a functioning real democracy is an educated electorate who can consider these things and on balance come to a good conclusion. A good conclusion. Thank you, David. David Louis, former Attorney General of State of Hawaii and Jean Fidel, a professor at NYU, was a gene. Thank you very much for coming around, you guys. Thank you for this valuable discussion. Aloha. Thank you, Jean.


Eddie can we start with some tea news please? Yes if I can remember it all. We're pretty much in the same place. Added by the returns of Simon Francis and Lloyd Kelly in the week. Obviously different stages of their comebacks but great to see Simon back after so long. And Lloyd too on the pitch after his recent injury so the squad's getting stronger. We mentioned it a few moments ago and obviously it's still early but what kind of incentive is it to you and your players that you could potentially end up, or you would end up in third place tomorrow and up with a win? Yes a big thing to take into the game. I'm sure both teams will be thinking the same thing. At this early stage of the season there's no better thing than winning and to try and get yourself as high as up as the league as you can. I think every team is looking for that consistency and you can see from how tight the league is at the moment. A lot of teams congested together that it may well be that type of season where there is very few points between a lot of teams and we've got to make sure that we get as many points on the board as we can. As you say it's very constant in that middle section probably even more than that, probably third down to 16th of the year. Early signs perhaps that one of the unfancy sides like yourselves could possibly get crashed at top four, maybe even top six. Difficult to tell at this stage, I still think it's very early to make dramatic conclusions as to how the season will unfold. I just think from our perspective we've got to get as many points on the board as we can. I think we had a great start to the season last year. We're trying to build momentum in the campaign. I think that's hugely important home and away. You want to get that confidence going into every game that you can win. Certainly the last result we had will do us the world of good but we need to back that up now against Southampton. You have a proud record at this club of returning players from injury after long spells out, sometimes even career threatening conditions. The latest obviously being Lewis Cook very good against Everton. His injury last season I think coincided with a bit of a dip in form and he's come back looking strong. How pivotal is he to what you're trying to do here? Very important player, someone that we really like as a player and as a person. All the way through his rehab from this injury he was very very focused, very driven to get back to his very best. I think when you see someone with that kind of mindset you only want good for them and Sunday was a really nice moment for him. A lot of hard work went into that performance and I said after the game I think the most impressive thing is physically he didn't really tire and that's all down to the way he's approached the running aspect and the fitness aspect. He's come back in really good shape and I was delighted for him. If he continues in that level it's still a bit of a way away from the Euros next summer but is he somebody who could, based on ability, based on application, could possibly be part of the conversation for the Euros next summer with England? Without a doubt I think pre-injury he was right in amongst it. He was doing very well for us and as you say coincided with our really good start to the season and when we lost him we tailed off in form so a big player for us and I also know very highly rated by England obviously what he's achieved with them at the youth age groups, captaining the World Cup winning team. So he's very highly thought of and I think if he gets a good run of form stays fit then he's got every chance. Just on the topic of injuries more widely you've disappointed the game before last in the later stages of the Leicester game. Do you think that situation where there's possibly wasn't the competition for places that you'd like to see that came about as a result of the injury list? Do you think that left you in a difficult situation? I don't know, I think there's many reasons behind sometimes a poor performance and I think the majority of the Leicester game were okay. It was just that last aspect, that last 20 minutes I was disappointed with in particular. So yeah we reflected and analysed and returned to a really good performance at home which was as I said after the Everton game so important that we try and win at home and build momentum there. But now we look to this game and a different test totally and as I say we're looking to back up our performance against Everton with another good performance. What are you expecting from them? It was a good away day for them last time out at Sheffield United. They were under cost for a lot of the time but they came away with three points didn't they? Yeah very good team, I think they've improved under their new manager, implemented his philosophy. Certainly very hard working team, they've got undoubted quality as well I think. So we know it's going to be a tough game and a very good atmosphere I'm sure. Both teams go into the game of confidence so I think it's set up to be a really good match. See this is perhaps the eminent South Coast derby now. I mean you play each other a lot more often in recent years and you have done historically brightens a couple of hours away. Saints don't play ports without often anymore. It's the one in this part of the world everyone talks about now isn't it? I think it's building. I think I've said every year I think the more games we have the more rivalries will increase. I think from our perspective we enjoyed the games. We've had some really good battles in the Premier League against Southampton. Some successes, some disappointments but I think that all adds to make the game what it is. I think we've enjoyed going to Southampton to play these games. We haven't won one yet in the Premier League and we're desperate to do that as soon as we can. Do you think you need a rival to some degree? I mean there's two sides of the coin isn't there? George Graham used to say 20 years ago when he was Arsenal manager that it was harder for Arsenal to win the league because they had about 14 London derbies to play but you're kind of just building one. You don't really have any others in the area do you? No, I don't think we're a club that really has had the history of too many huge rivalries especially locally but I don't know. Do we want one? I suppose we do. I think adding that competition means you've been successful and I think when you've been successful then naturally will be people that want to beat you and I don't think that's an unhealthy thing so if we can build that in a positive way not in a negative way but if we can build it then I'm certainly for it. Richard, to respond from me early. For the fans this is a big game, the rivalry is actually very important but do you just see this as just another of many important games? Yeah I think every game in the Premier League is hugely important and I think we are aware that this holds extra importance for our supporters and everybody locally so I think that has its own responsibility but I think to say you're more motivated for one game than any other is wrong because for me you need to be at your best levels every week so that's certainly my mindset.


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Strecco from the School of Cast & Ex, I'm here with Oli Frost, our movement specialist that's got a nice little routine follow-along that I'm going to do and you're going to be able to do with us. Tell them what we're going to just go through quickly. So we're going to go for a head-to-toe routine of some basic mobility drills, which I think you can do at any point in the day, wherever that's in the morning, before bed, when you get a little break in the day, to keep your joints or chicken over, improve maintenance of that joint health and that longevity as an overall goal. So spend a minute on each exercise, then move down the whole routine, just take about three to four minutes in total and you can do this every day, if not twice a day, to begin with. So feet square, squeeze your hands tight like this, isolate, trap energy stomach.  So if Jacka keeps taking his head all the way around, super slow. So the purpose of this was to do a couple of each side and then we're going to change direction. Maximize that tension for your fist, you should be squeezing your fist super tight, squeezing your quads and your abdomen so you can feel that full-bodied tension throughout. And then we'll change direction if you haven't already. All the way around, full range. Any pinching angle pain here, so any sort of closing angle pain in terms of sharpness into the neck or into any of the joints, please stop straight away. That's a red flag to stop what you're doing. Okay, so once you've done that, we're now going to go into swimmers with both arms. So from here, we're going to take the arms up, keep the shoulders down and then we're going to go full rotation around the shoulders like this and bend your elbows, that's it, perfect. And then take the arms back again, squeeze the fists, squeeze the fists all the way around, good. And then go again, back, squeeze the fists, take it through the full available range of motion, good, keep going, take the arms back and around like that. It's important that we're not just doing this, by the way, just really slow and so really fast passive movements. We're doing really controlled work. Okay, now we're using thoracic mobility. So from here, cross your arms like this. Imagine your pelvis is going to stay straight, this lower abdomen is going to be still in a place forward. Flex your spine slightly. I want us now to do more tension through here, squeeze the quads and I want us to do really small circles around the middle of the back. So jack of a basically this way, face side on, it's just going to do small circles around this point of the spine. Try and keep these, these hips super still and super straight. And that's going to make sure that we only mobilize the thoracic spine and we haven't got any lower body rotation involved as well. Good. And you can just relax there. Great. And then if you come on to all fours, we're just going to flow through some cat cows. Again, trying to segment through the spine, lumbar spine first, keep coming up, keep coming up, keep coming up. Good. And back down again, you'll spend about a minute on each exercise. Don't worry about reps and sets. You want to just really think about if there's an area you might need to spend a little bit more time on, which you can just give that time to. So come down slowly, slowly come down. If you might have had luck a bit of a bar back on the day or you did a lot of training, you might want to just do some lumbar spine cat cows in this distance from here. From here, we're doing some hip circles. Knee comes up, rotate all the way around, super slow and back round. Keep this knee in line with this hand. Keep this arm straight. Knee a bit wider. That's it. It's knee a bit wider. That's it. So we don't want to see any hiking through the torso. We just want to mobilize the joint like that. So you might spend maybe 45 seconds on each side on this particular exercise. Keep your arms straight. Good. And back. That's it. Good. Don't hike up too slower. So just relax there. Okay. And then once you're done both sides, come into a squat position like this. If you're not happy to be in this squat position, you can place some plates or you can put some underneath your feet to elevate your heels. And then we're going to do knee pushouts from here to open up the hips. Really think about driving the hips out. Again, if you've got limited range for now, don't worry. Just try and work within your current ranges for now. Okay. And then you're going to push one knee out. Try and extend the knee as much as you can. That's it. Unchained. So no rural set time or reps on this. You're just trying to move, wake up the body, sort of get mobilized and get prepared for the day or the activity, what you're doing at that current time. Handling your head, flex forward. Slowly peel yourself back and back down and back up. Good. Down. And then feet together. You're going to bring your feet together like this. And he's going to do some gentle pulses into the hamstrings. Really, really gentle. Nothing too much. Never too strenuous to the back. Really gentle. Then you're just going to do some squats angles tight and push back and squat. Good.  Really heavy through the shoulders. Back up slowly and back up to the top.  Maybe if you've had a sore back of Alaska for days, or you've done a lot of training, which involves and flag work, then you can obviously prioritize certain areas. But the point of it is to get all your joints working really, really nicely and give yourself that longevity for the future. Yeah, whether you're just working on, it might be a handstand session, the whole point of getting the whole body moving, everything we're trying to do is integrating the whole of that connect chain, the whole of the body. It all works as one. So getting all of those joints moving and you starting to get more awareness of what bits are tight. And as Ali says, you can then focus little bits of time more on those areas that you're aware of because you're doing this now mindfully and aware of which bits are tighter, left, right, hips, shoulders, whatever spine and giving yourself some self-care to be able to look after your body for longer longevity and a better life.


Hi, welcome back to fill 320 deductive logic. I'm professor Matthew j. Brown and today we're starting unit for on proofs in SL and we're going to be talking specifically today about the basics of proofs and The rules of what we call direct proof, right? So Let's get into it First let's start off with the question of what is a proof? What does that term mean to you in everyday language? Think about it for a second. Where have you encountered it? You might have encountered it say when someone asks you to provide proof of something that means to provide some evidence, right? Or And that's certainly how we mean it in a court case when we say we're going to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt We're going to provide a certain amount of evidence, right? But what does it mean informal logic? That's what I really want to get down to formally a proof like an argument is just a sequence of sentences, right? The first sentences of the sequence are the premises and these are given at the beginning every sentence later in the Sequence after those premises is derived from earlier sentences by one of the rules of The proof system that we use, right? The final sentence of the sequence should be the conclusion of the argument proof is crucial concept for deductive logic It's what we mean when we say deduction, right? It's a certain kind of process of derivation Proofs are another way of showing the validity of an argument Now we can already do that with truth tables, right? So if we have a simple argument like this if a then be a therefore be, you know We can give the truth table here, right? And we can show everywhere in the truth table that the premises are true The conclusion is true that tells us this argument is valid But there's something pretty intuitive about the argument that the truth table doesn't really help us understand It doesn't help us understand why this argument is valid and others aren't it's kind of a brute-force way of showing it without really explaining it Also, remember, this is a simple truth table, but truth tables get exponentially Larger and more complicated as the number of sentence letters we're dealing with increases if we have two sentence letters We only have four lines in the truth table if our if our argument has three Sentence letters, then we have eight lines if it has four sentence letters We have six lines and if it has only ten sentence letters We're already up to one thousand and twenty four lines, right proofs by contrast can get at the underlying reasoning involved in an argument and help us understand why the argument is valid and Sometimes with less Complication or less less you have to lay out unless you can possibly get wrong In a large truth table in this class. We use an approach to proofs called a natural deduction system, right? There are different kinds of deductive proof systems for Logics like sentential logic or SL But in a natural deduction system Every connective has two rules associated with it. It has an introduction rule that allows us to prove A sentence with that as the main connective So for example the conditional introduction rule allows us to prove a sentence with a conditional as the main Connective as the conclusion of our argument every connective also has an elimination rule It has allows us to prove something given a sentence with it as the main logical operator So every connective has an introduction rule or an elimination rule that helps us derive or Derived from that rule The book introduces all of the rules together But today we're just going to talk about the simplest rules rules for what we call direct proof And we'll learn what that means a little bit later first. Let's look at how our proof notation works We use something called a Fitch proof Notation and the one we use has this sort of guidelines on it, right a sort of vertical line on the left side and a horizontal line Above the horizontal line are the premises of our argument To the left of the vertical line. We number all of the sentences in our proof, right? Everything under the line is a kind of intermediate step and the last line of the proof is our conclusion To the right of every line in our proof With the exception of the premises We write the rules that are allowing us to write down that line So let's start this one simple rule. The only rule that's not connected to any connective is the rule of reiteration, right So here is an example of applying the rule of reiteration. We have on line one. We have a simple atomic sentence a On line two we can reiterate a on another line and our rule is is abbreviated are With one as the line number that We are applying the rule to right Reiteration is a very simple rule almost seems too simple But we will see it's useful under certain conditions when combined with other rules Now this is just an instance of the rule of reiteration when we when we write the rule itself We have to use some meta variables. You'll remember meta variables We used in previous units, right? So I use here the script sort of scripty a To stand not for a sentence letter a but any sentence any arbitrary sentence of SL the M here is a line number could be any line number and You see here that the reiteration rule allows us to write the exact same sentence, whatever it is As long as we write the rule are and the previous line that where that sentence was on M Let's look at some other of our of our rules of Direct proof you see how this plays out, right? So the next one I want to mention is conjunction introduction, right? This is the rule that allows us to derive a conjunction, right? and if on some arbitrary line earlier in the proof we have a Sentence a and On the line in we have a sentence B. We can derive a and B Using the conjunction introduction rule Referring to lines M and N Now M and N don't have to be right next to each other. They don't have to be right above the line Where I am writing down the conjunction. They just be anywhere up in the proof earlier, right? This will make more sense. Perhaps when we look at some examples, but I want to introduce you to the rules first We also have an elimination rule for conjunction that tells us if we have a conjunction a and B on a previous line We can derive either a Or B right both of those are valid applications of the conjunction elimination rule now Again, I want to remind you script a and script B are meta variables that stand for could be very complex sentences All that's all that matters here is that the conjunction the and is the main connective for this sentence, right? We have a disjunction introduction rule, right? That tells us it whenever we have a sentence We can in we can introduce a disjunction Doesn't matter which order We put the a on it could be the first or the second disjunct and B can be any arbitrary Sentence, right? You might think why why can I introduce anything that seems that seems crazy But it's because you already have a right because a or B is true Whenever either a or B or both are true if you already have a You know the conjunction is going to be true I hope that makes a little bit of sense disjunction elimination is a little bit of a more complicated rule, right? It requires not only that we have the disjunction But also that we have the negation of one of the disjuncts, right? If online M, we have a or B and online in we have not be we can derive a and likewise if we have a or B Online M and we have not a online P We can derive B. We also have a conditional elimination rule We I mentioned earlier how intuitive this is whenever you have if a then B and a you can derive B That makes a certain amount of sense given that the in the truth table, right for conditional Whenever a is a one B also has to have a one whenever a is true B also has to be true I'm not going to tell you the conditional introduction rule yet because again, that's not a direct proof rule That's what we call an indirect proof rule, which we'll talk about in the next lecture Biconditional elimination is also a direct proof rule. It works like this whenever you have the biconditional and One side of the biconditional so if you have a if and only if B and a You can derive B and vice versa. So let's look at some examples. Here. I have Simple argument relatively simple argument and I want to show you how we're gonna prove it and to do that I'm going to take us over to Carnap and show you how we write down proofs in Carnap. So what I'm gonna do to demonstrate how you do proofs in Carnap is I'm gonna head over to what I call the proof Playground and this I've assigned this to you in Carnap. So if you log in at Carnap.io You should be able to find this and what this has in it among other things is a set of Reminders for how we generate connectives using the keyboard what kind of sentence letters we can have And also how we write the rules that justify our proofs But what I want you to focus on right now is the actual proof playground itself This is gonna allow us to write down proofs and check them for Validity, okay So let's go back to our To our problem and see we've got Again, if a then B or C a and not B as our premises, right? So I'm gonna put those in if a then B or C and To mark a premises a premise we use this colon PR says that's one of our premises, okay? A was also one of our premises and so was not B And that's all the premises and you can see over on the right how Carnap has Nicely sort of formatted it for us based on what I put in with a keyboard and what I'm trying to get is C Okay, and I look at what I've got And I see that C is embedded there in in line one I also see that I've got everything I need for a conditional elimination. So I'm gonna start there, right? I can derive B or C based on the conditional Elimination rule using lines one. That's the conditional and line two that has the antecedent in it Okay So that's that's a good start now I've got a disjunction and it looks like I need to use the disjunction elimination rule to get that C out and it looks like I have everything I need to do that as well so I can derive C using the disjunction elimination rule on Line four, which is our disjunction and line three, which is the negation of one of the disjuncts Okay, and that is an example of how we do a proof in an SL Here is another example of an argument. I want us to try to prove that we can prove with direct proof What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to Carnap. I'm gonna reset the proof playground so I have a fresh screen to move from and all I had for my premises were A and B and what I wanted to get Oops, I misspelled premise. All I want to get what I want to get is this longer sentence Which I will write down here as a or a or C and B or D, right? Obviously Perhaps not so obviously I'm not gonna be able to get this directly, right? So Let's see how I can use disjunction introduction to get the first part of it here, right? Let's Think about how disjunction introduction works, right? All I need is to name the line that a appears on and there I have The start of my disjunction Introduction, okay. I got it. Similarly. I can get B or D through disjunction introduction on line two and Now that I have both of the disjunctions I can get a or C and B or D through conjunction introduction Conjunction introduction takes two lines three and four in this case and now you see I've proved a and B Validly imply this longer expression Okay, let's look at yet another example a if and only if B a Therefore a and B Let's see if we can do that in Carnot. I'm gonna reset the proof playground again by reloading the page and I've got the Biconditional a if and only if B That's a premise and I have a that's another premise And then I want to get The a and B, right? Well, I can get B through Biconditional elimination on Line one and two if I have either a or B I can get the other right and now that I have a and I have B I can get I can use the conjunction introduction rule on lines two and three to get what I wanted to prove right so there is your valid proof of This argument before we wrap up. I want to talk a little bit about this language I've been using of direct and indirect proofs, right? Direct proofs, which is what we've seen so far Derive their conclusions from the starting premises using rules of introduction and elimination The only things in a direct proof are the starting premises the intermediate steps derived from those premises and From prior intermediate steps and the conclusions similar similarly so derived So every line in the proof after the premises is derived via a specific rule Indirect proofs, which is what we'll talk about in the next lecture in one way or another Introduce additional assumptions in the course of the proof They're indirect in the sense that there are some lines of the proof that we don't directly derive from a prior line or or set of lines We'll talk more about what that looks like in our next lecture until then I suggest you have a look over the first part of chapter 6 in for all x and Let me know if you have any questions Bye


When we think about primates in space, we usually think of ham and enos, the two chimps NASA launched in advance of its Mercury astronauts in the early 1960s, but more than a decade before these famous chimps took flight, scientists launched Rhesus monkeys on V2 missiles. All named Albert, they were among the first casualties of the early space age. Within a year of the Second World War's close, America imported more than a hundred German rocket engineers and tons of V2 missile parts and supporting documentation. Both men and machines were sent to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where the V2s would be studied, repaired when necessary, assembled, and launched as part of Project Hermes. Within Hermes were a number of spin-off programs, including the Blossom program, which was a biological series of launches designed to help gather data for future spaceflight. The idea was to send small primates and animals on suborbital flights to gather data that might apply to future human space travelers. These Blossom V2s were specially modified. They carried different warheads than the standard missile and boasted fuselages 65 inches longer than the standard V2 rocket. And four of these Blossom rockets had Rhesus monkeys named Albert on board. Albert 1 launched aboard V2 number 37 on June 11th, 1948. The missile reached an apogee of 39 miles, but Albert 1 didn't make it. He succumbed to respiratory issues inside his cramped capsule, but he probably wouldn't have survived anyways. The parachute designed to deliver him safely back to the ground failed. Albert 2 launched on V2 number 47 on June 14th, 1949. He fared slightly better than his predecessor, surviving launch to reach an apogee of 83 miles.  A slight sliver lining for the scientists running the test was that all the biomedical instrumentation on board had transmitted data throughout the flight. Albert 3 launched on V2 number 32 on September 16th, 1949, but he didn't last long. This V2 suffered a tail explosion 10.7 seconds after liftoff and was destroyed just three miles above the launch pad. The monkey was killed in the explosion. Albert 4, who launched on V2 number 31 on December 8th, 1949, suffered a similar fate to Albert 2. Albert 4 survived the launch and reached an altitude of 79 miles, sending biomedical data to scientists the whole time. He, too, was killed when his parachute system failed. The Albert's gruesome deaths underlined just how immature the science of rocketry and rocket testing was in late 1940s. It also underscores just how far rocketry had come by the time NASA was ready to launch men on the same suborbital flights in 1961. Leave questions or comments below, and for weekly vintage space updates, don't forget to subscribe.


Feedback. Listen to your learners. It's essential as educators that we listen to our learners to gauge their opinions and improve our teaching. There are several modal activities for surveying students. Here we look at feedback, which allows you to create your own questions of different types. In this feedback activity, the student is asked to give her opinion on the course. She has multiple choice questions, short text questions and a longer text question. This student didn't use the Moodle app, but when our second student completes the feedback and responds yes to the Moodle app question, note that he's then presented with some extra response-specific questions. With the feedback activity, you can make questions display dependent on previous responses. Our teacher, Sam, in their basic French course, adds a feedback activity by enabling Edit Mode, clicking Add an activity or resource, or anywhere on the page between activities, and then from the activity chooser, selecting Feedback. Feedback is an activity because learners interact with it. So we can click once to go straight to the setup screen or click the I icon for more information and then press the Add button bottom right. We give it a name and an optional description which may be displayed on the course page by ticking the box. Other settings can be expanded by clicking the links. Availability allows you to set a period of time when the feedback will or will not be available. In question and submission settings, you can choose whether the submissions are anonymous or user names are recorded. Note that this is not totally secure as the logs will still reveal identities. You can allow users to submit more than once. You'll need this for anonymous feedback to be notified when feedback is completed and to have questions auto-numbered or not. After submission, once students have completed the feedback, you can provide a link to the analysis, you can add a message of thanks or information, and you can give a link to another part of the course if you feel it's necessary. In activity completion, to track that students have accessed the feedback activity, do we want them to manually click to confirm they've seen it or do we want it automatically marked complete when they've simply viewed it or submitted feedback? No need to select view as well as the requirement to submit. To alert course participants that a feedback activity has been added or updated, click Send Content Change Notification. When we save and display, we can add our questions by clicking Edit Questions. We can add questions from a template or import questions, but Teacher Sam is going to create their own choosing from the dropdown. Here's a multiple choice question. We tick the box if we want to four students to answer this question, and we can allow one or multiple answers, and we add the answers. Setting Not Selected to Yes means this doesn't appear as an option. Answers appear on separate lines. Here's a short text answer question. It's worth experimenting with text field width and maximum characters accepted. Now we can continue our feedback by adding more questions, but let's try making some questions dependent on previous responses. As we make this new multiple choice question about the Moodle app, we give it a label. This is important for future reference. We then have to add a page break, and we need to add another page break at the end of the dependent questions. So we're enclosing them on their own page. For each conditional question we add, we must choose a dependence item. That's the label we added before. So this question depends on the question with the label Moodle app. Then we must choose the answer our new question will depend on. We select Yes, because we only want the question to appear if students tell us that, yes, they use the Moodle app. And you see these dependent questions appear in grey to the teacher. Once we've added any dependent questions, it's important to remember to add that second page break, and then we can continue with any further questions which apply to all students. It's useful to know we can export these questions or save them as a new template. Once students have submitted feedback, we can click Analysis and Export to Excel, we can view the responses in graphical format and also as chart data, and we can download and view individual responses. To summarise, feedback allows you to listen to learners and improve their course experience.


Hello, welcome to Database of the Week. I'm Todd Quinn at the University of New Mexico University Libraries. This week we're covering the Foundation Directory by FromCandid. This is a great resource for helping nonprofits find grants from corporate givers to nonprofit foundations. This tool allows you to search for grant makers, grants themselves, and you can look up recipients. You can do a search by an organization itself. And if you're looking for grants, you can use the advanced search filters. You can select an area. So if I select art services, I can put in a location and say Mexico. You can even select an age group as well. So I'll select children. Among other sources here, and if you select additional filters, which I recommend, you can add in dollar amounts, like a minimum. And I also like to look up more recent stuff. So this is my search criteria, and if I scroll below, I know there are 63 grant makers, 131 grants, and 31 recipients. And then I can select each one of these to find out more information about each, the grant maker, the grants itself, and the recipients. All kinds of information here are about each one of those, and if you scroll to the very bottom, actually you can get more help as well. So there's lots of resources here to help you find grants, learn about the grant makers, and learn about other organizations who have received grants, and even get their 990 forms for nonprofits. So use this tool while you're looking for grants for nonprofits.