So hello, everybody. I'm Alexander Chodnowsky. I want to thank the organizers for the possibility to give this talk here. And just a minute. So the title of the talk, as you see, is Superconducting Insulator Transition. And I'm going to present a model, which is a relatively simple microscopic Hamiltonian that basically reproduces important phases, which are shown here, which are typical, proper to the typical phase diagram of a high Tc superconductor. The model is relatively simple. And you can see this phase diagram, which I'm going to explain in the rest. Strange metal phase, superconducting phase, quantum critical insulating phase, Fermi-liquid boson metal. The work was done in close collaboration with Alex Kamenev. And you can find it on the content here. So the subtitle of this work is a phase diagram of the SYK plus URA. So this SYK plus URA, I will introduce in the rest. This is the model I will be considering and will be presenting, which leads to such a phase diagram. Well, I will be able. So first of all, the Sartiv Yakitayev model attracted an interest from the solid-state community because out of many properties, but one of them is that it can reproduce the strange metal behavior of the resistivity if you make an array of SYK, so Sartiv Yakitayev grains. The Hamiltonian of these grains was introduced in the work of balance and co-authors. You can see this. Basically, there are two pieces. This is the number of isolated grains. This part is the SYK random interaction term. R denotes the position of a grain in the array. And C denotes the electron's creation or annihilation of errators at each side of a grain. So each side of a grain can host a spin-full fermion. It's important. I'm dealing here with the fermionic version, not myarana fermions, but real charged fermions. This is what I'm considering. The second part is the random tunneling between the grains from each side of one grain to any other side of the other grain. There are two energy scales characterizing this model, which is the variance of the random interaction in the grain, G squared, or G. And the randomness of the variance of the random tunneling, T0, or T0 squared. And OK. So important properties of this model was, as I told already, it exhibits a linear temperature and the dependence of resistance at temperatures higher than the typical temperature scale, T squared over J. And it exhibits also the fermi-liquid T squared dependence of the resistivity below this scale. All of this was obtained in the results of work of balance, which is cited here. And further, this work, this idea was extended in a number of works. I'm apologize if I could not cite all of them. But to the theory of a Planckian method. Furthermore, because of the strange metal phases, a typical part of a phase diagram of high Tc superconductor, which is seen there, the natural desire appears to modify or extend this model in a possible minimal way in such a way to obtain other parts of the phase diagram. First of all, superconducting phase and possibly pseudo-gap phase or other phases. Such an extension were proposed in several works. And more or less all of those works in one or another way introduce effective attraction between electrons. And the work I'm considering here is not an exception. We also start with the effective attraction in the electrons. And we introduce it in the most simple form, probably most simple possible form. This is just the local Hubbard-U term, attractive Hubbard-U term, which acts at each side of a given grain. As you can see, this is minus U. And all those C operators reside at a single side of a given grain R, with corresponding spins corresponding to the Cooper-Huper pair. And so we arrive at the model at the Hamiltonian, which I will be considering in the rest of the talk. And if you can see, this is again an array where R denotes the position of a grain in the array. The only modification is that in each grain, there isn't local attractive Hubbard interactions. First of all, what are the consequences? The simplest way to deal with this model is to do the mean field. The first attempt to do the mean field leads to the following phase diagram. So here is for the comparison, the phase diagram of the SYK array without Hubbard's term, that has only two phases, basically the Fermi-Liquid phase here and the strange metal phase, that basically differ in the temperature dependence of the resistivity. As soon as you do mean field, in such a way that you introduce the superconducting water parameter, effective superconductive water parameter as anomalous averages of the on-site electrons, forming a Cooper on-site local Cooper pair, you do some mathematics and you obtain the following the solutions of the mean field equations leads to this phase diagram. There's a schematically shown here. So you can send that immediately as soon as, first of all, this is a t equals zero axis. And you can see that as soon as you turn on even infinity is a really small u, you immediately obtain a finite amplitude of the superconductor order parameter. Yeah? This is not geometry. No, there is no geometry. I can assume, I don't go into the, it is nearest neighboring or some geometry which I will not enter into details because I assume the tunneling to be anyway small. And basically the whole, this whole results I will be, I will be reporting can be obtained from the considering the tonally tunneling between the nearest neighbor grain in the incoherent array where the whole resistivity is determined by the tunneling between the two nearest neighbors grains. That's why Tij is random. It's random variable with zero mean and the variance of these Tij squared is characterized by T zero squared. Yes, u is the same in every grain at each side. U is absolutely non-random. Yeah, for simplicity. Well, so what you get is the superconducting phase which is basically as you could expect it. An interesting point is that the, of course there is a gap in the single particle spectrum of single particle fermionic excitations opening and this gap is this time not delta. This is due to, this is the difference between the usual a conventional superconductivity and this superconductivity in the SYK model with random interactions. This is delta squared divided by J, this delta one here, which means that at small u and of course delta depends on u here is delta very small. This gap is much smaller than the usual expected superconducting gap. But even this phase diagram would be the end of the story. It would be not very interesting, maybe even boring. The interesting point comes now and this is the most important point of the whole. This is the crucial physical point of the whole talk and the whole work is namely that those phase diagram before is not quite exact. Why? Because the idea, the phase fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter in this model playing a very important role and they were not treated properly in the simple mean field solution, where if I turn back here, this delta was assumed to be a constant parameter without let's say, let's put it real number equal everywhere. So which means automatically by the mean field assumption you assume that phases are frozen as soon as the superconducting amplitude appears which is basically conventional assumption for the superconductivity. But this time let me now consider the phase fluctuations in more details. Basically, I starting business. So and first of all, to understand the most important result let me first consider a single grain. Here I disregard tunneling. I'm focusing on a single grain. What happens at the single grain if I introduce this Hubbard U. So basically technically one deals with using the field theory and makes Hubbard-Stratonovich decoupling. Importantly is that the Hubbard-Stratonovich decoupling of the U-term is naturally site local because U-term is site local so that you basically introduce initially a local decoupling field for each side. And this time I will make the following assumption that this local field has a constant amplitude delta which now I can put real. However, it has also this phase factor i e to the power i phi i for buy. So at each site, there is some superconducting phase which can be can fluctuate can differ from one side to the other. Yes. Yeah, okay. I understand. I can only, the thing is that if you, you can do it for, yes, the same goes to the J terms but basically the result is without details.  This is also J terms. Yeah, you do the same. Yeah, you do the same for the J terms also. Yes, that's true. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Exactly, yeah. Now, could you comment on the gauge invariance of the theory and why these phases are not swallowed due to the gauge invariance if there is one? Well, you can try, but this will not without going into details. You can not swallow all those phases with the gauge filled basically. I can, we can go into mathematical details and if further, but probably let just the answer is no, they are not, but the, which I will try to give in this short talk. So now, if I can proceed, so well, so now what you are doing technically. So formally, you again start with some mean field theory. Well, you have mean field delta. This delta is the result of the solutions of the mean field equations that I showed before. But now let us consider fluctuations around this mean field. So the phase fluctuations, what do they do? There are two effects coming immediately into the play. One was known and one is present. One is that the phase fluctuations even in the non-superconducting model result in the so-called one can tell on-site charging energy which is proper to the SYK model and independent on the Hubbard coupling. It is just the property of the SYK model itself and for fermions that we have this single part which is site charging energy. This is the reaction of the fermionic model to the infinitesimal change of the chemical potential. And while it was calculated before in this work and it is approximately half of the coupling of the SYK coupling strength J. If you, and immediately you understand that if you have only this coupling presence then it tries to destroy the phase coherence because this is basically the charging and it tries to destroy coherence between the superconducting phases and eliminate superconductivity. However, there is a second term which is an effective interaction between the phases, superconducting phases at different grains. Without going into details I will explain this interaction can be calculated out of this basic diagram and this diagram which is so tow imaginary times that it's imaginary time formalism. Important is following those points are the delt superconducting, local superconducting order parameters at site I and here at the another and some another site J. And now the lines, solid lines with single arrow are normal components of the grains functions. This bubble consists of anomalous grains functions with so double arrows. And those vertices are the scattering vertices due to the SYK interaction to this SYK J. So basically this diagram describes the assisted scattering of a cube per pair from a site I to a site J assisted by these SYK interactions. And one can calculate this diagram and the most important and obtain this result. For a single diagram. Importantly is this is delta squared divided by J and divided by N, which results immediately to the interaction energy. If you now sum up all those diagrams sum up the complex conjugated diagrams all together then you obtain immediately the interaction within the sites which is minus J divided by N and here some over all sites from one to N and cosine phi I minus phi J. Obviously this term tries to synchronize the phi so freeze the phases out, yeah? Yeah, but tunneling is not considered here. I, this is tunneling can see here. Yeah, you may get further corrections. You may get, this is the basic. Yeah, the they're parametrically smaller. You can get, you can get other terms of course but this is the basic, this is the basic one. Yeah, the similar question I mean without J this is just the stiffness like efficient of this term and the stiffness controlled by the density of electrons super fluid electrons. So when J goes to zero, this coupling has to go to another term which is controlled by T. No, no. So you can, you can have this term even in the system without the SYK interaction. What, what remains, sorry, sorry. Sorry, the stiffness. In some other systems possibly but if I stick by this Hamiltonian and remove the SYK interaction then my Hamiltonian is just zero. Every single, every single. We have the time, we have the hopping time. This is probably also the question that was there. Wait, wait again. I didn't say grain. Again, as I told from the very beginning let me focus here. I'm focusing on a single grain. I disregard possibility of tunneling to the other grain. I want to know what happens in a single isolated grain with you. What is this phase diagram? Without now, disregarding tunneling to other grains. And so an important point in this term is that despite what I was doing is the fluctuation expansion of large N, of a large N theory over the mean field. The result is not the one over N correction. This is important because this result, if you, this I, this is, I intentionally put here the powers of N so that you can follow the effect that the resulting proportionality is one over N, which means after multiplying N summation goes over N squared sides. So the overall total energy scales as N as it should be for the initial model, which means the fluctuations of phases is the effect of the equal strengths than as the mean field effects. The energies are proportional to N. This cannot be disregarded. This really changes the physics that you observe. And let me now. So, and the model that you arrive at, if I put those terms together, is called the quantum version of so-called Pura-Moto model. What is the Pura-Moto model? It is known as the classical model of phase synchronization. Basically, you can also consider this as a kind of a Josephson junction arrays with infinite range Josephson couplings, if you wish, because you see, so this is each I is the island, Phi is the phase of the on the island, but Josephson coupling is everywhere, everywhere with everybody. And let us now, and this is the model that describes, basically should describe the phase diagram below this line. So as soon as a finite superconducting amplitude appears, the model, the effective Hamiltonian for the model of a single grain is now can, should be formulated in terms of these phases. Now, the properties of the model are the following. This model allows exact, so exactly almost exact solution. And it exhibits the code and you see that there is, of course, the competition of charging energy and DG. And that's why in this competition results in a quantum phase transition and change of the ground state from the phase unsynchronized phase phase, which I would call, first of all, non synchronized. It is when the charging energy dominates and phase synchronization, which in this context means super, really superconducting phase with the superconducting coherence. Now let me go into details of this phase unsynchronized phase. Basically this is the most important point and most important physical result is the appearance of this phase unsynchronized phase. And the second point is here, the following. So what are, so if that one can get more insight in this phase phase in science unsynchronized phase, if one considers the correlation function of phase exponential, and one can see that at zero temperature, the correlation function, this is the sum of products of the phase exponentials on the site I and on some other site J, some over all sites, calculated in the Matsubara formalism and you can see the perfect pole structure of this propagator.  And what is important for this energy is that this energy epsilon one, it can be calculated explicitly. E one again is a charging, G is the coupling of this Kuramoto coupling, which is proportion, which depends on you. It is not proportional, but it rises with you naturally. And therefore one can see that they, and what is important for this mode? First of all, it is a single mode because of the pole structure. Second, this mode proliferates of diagonal long-range order over the grain because this is a correlator of the phase exponentials at different sites. And the third part important point is that this mode exists in the spectrum even in the quantum disorder phase unsynchronized phase, which means that even in the quantum disorder phase, non-synchronized phase is unsynchronized. The spectrum looks like the following. The ground state has non-synchronized phases, but the reason spec with an excited state in the spectrum that bears with these long range phase coherence, one can call them in quote superconducting state. It is not superconducting state, but it is long range coherence state. Now the, and the energy of this state diminishes and goes to zero exactly at the quantum phase transition point. Moreover, this mode is the single and only critical mode that describes, it characterizes all these quantum critical transition between the non-synchronized and phase synchronized phases. And this basically, this is the main physical result. Now, from now on, I will just outline the consequences of this result for the system and for the phase diagram. What are the consequences? First of all, one can conclude, so what is this non-synchronized phase in more physical terms? One can really understand, one can easily understand this is an insulating phase. Why? Because in this phase, finite superconducting order parameter suppresses one particle conductivity because of the big gap in the one particle spectrum. However, this pair conductivity is also suppressed because the pairs at different sites are incoherent. So naturally this phase at zero temperature is insulating. From the, on the other side, if I rise the temperature, I understand that if the temperature is, by final temperature, this state, this epsilon one, which has this long range phase figuring can be thermally activated. So I can expect that thermal activation of this state should result in the increase of conductance of the system. Now, if I go to the array, of course, not within a single grid, but nevertheless, this excited state with long range phase coherent should favor the conductance of the system, of the system in the channel, which propagates few pairs, not the single particle, but cuper pair conductance. Now, and as usual for the quantum phase transitions above the quantum phase transition point, there is the quantum critical region opens whereas the temperature plays the major role in the determination of the all those quantities. So this is the phase diagram. Now this is a complete phase diagram for a single grain, not for the array. Now let me show what happens if I introduce the array. So now let us restore the tunneling. I assume that the tunneling scale is the smallest one of all energy scale. So I can, I assume the possibility of treating the tunneling perturbatively everywhere. In that case, this is the comparisons of the diagram. What are all those tools? This is an isolated grain, this is the array. First of all, of course, the Fermi-Liquid region opens. This is as usual as expected that it was, but what is more important here, the, at this part, what changes is this right hand part of the phase diagram. What is this right hand part? Initially, each grain was a perfect superconductor in producing the tunneling. I obtained naturally Josephson junction array. So now I, so this part describes the Josephson junction array, but this time at higher temperature because the tunneling is small. First, the temperature will exceed the effective Josephson coupling. One can calculate it. This is this Josephson energy. And then this array goes to the normal phase where again, where the conductance is still there, but this is the finite resistance due to the transport due to the cooper pairs. And finally, let me outline the calculation, the explicit calculation of the resistance. First of all, the most important regime is this insulating phase. The single part, one particle conductivity is suppressed to calculate. Now the two particle conductivity. First of all, one should take into account the tunneling, which leads to the broadening of this initially exact energy level epsilon one due to the possibility of the escape of the cooper pairs in the other grain. This broadening can be calculated for the Dyson occasion. I call this phase correlated the cooper one. It is of course not exact rotation, but nevertheless for physically, it is basically the same diagram. So one can calculate this Dyson occasion. This part, this vertex basically evaluates to the Josephson energy. The physical essence of this vertex is nothing else that Josephson energy between the grains. And then one obtains first the exact solution which shows you the semi-circular density of states, which you can can for simplicity model just for the level broadening. And then the conductance to the conductant, the conductivity, pair conductivity in this case, this is the major channel is calculated. The major contribution is given by the slommas of Larkin. You can recognize here a slommas of Larkin diagram. I just want to say that those vertices, are the tunneling completutes. This is averaging over the randomness. The lower part, all correlation functions or propagators in the lower part are for the grain R prime. The upper part is for some other grain R. So this is the propagation of what you prepare from R to R prime. The result depends on the regime where you calculate these diagrams. The most important result is here. If you have the regime where epsilon one, this is again this energy of this superconducting, let's say, mode, much larger than the broadening, you have the conductivity, which has clear, thermally activated behavior, exponential e to the power minus epsilon one over t. And moreover, the activation energy depends on the distance to the phase transition. I consider exactly this point as a possibility of experimental verification, whether this model is true or not. Experimentally, you should measure the conductivity as a function of temperature and you should find thermally active, but changing the distance from the critical point. This is another question, how experimentally to change the distance, but nevertheless, you should change the distance to the critical point and you should see that the activation energy diminishes closer to the critical point. So the mode which is activated is actually the critical mode. It is the difference because, for example, for a single particle transport, the single particle gap remains unchanged and you also can thermally activate it, but this channel will have the constant activation energy. So, and then finally, if you go closer to the quantum critical regime, then you have a power law dependence of conductivity, either t squared or t, depending on the relation between the t and the level broadening gamma. So I'm close to the end. And so finally, this is a possible typical dependence of resistivity on temperature, which you should encounter if you go along the phase diagram along this dotted line. So first in this regime, you have thermally activated behavior, dropping down exponentially, then you have part of the quantum critical regime and then it changes to the linear rise corresponding to the strange metal. And finally, to the right-hand side of the diagram, I will only very briefly, so you can evaluate also the conductivity, the resistivity in the incoherence of subtraction array using the RSCJ, so-called model. The result is that the conductivity is N, which is a number of channel and it is independent of the temperature. So to conclude, this is the whole phase diagram I wanted to present for you with a typical temperature dependence of the resistivity. Important point is the following. Below this dotted dashed line here, the one particle transport is suppressed and the whole, this lower part of the diagram, the transport property in this are determined basically by the transport of Cooper pairs bosons. And here I just want to put my conclusions and summary and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much. Yes, good questions. Thanks, very interesting. Can I just, can you repeat the calculation with a, when you replace Tij with some Pyrals factor with a magnetic field, is it possible to do such calculation so that you have a field tuned, yeah, you have a field tuned superconductor it's later. No, wait, can you? I mean, so first of all, magnetic field explicitly is not here for the very beginning. Next step, but can it be added? It can be, yeah, it can be, but it can be, there are some preliminary result but the work is in progress, but yeah. Let me ask two quick questions. First, without hook on the first part of your talk, there were dashed lines in the phase diagram. And then you said that, well, yeah, strange metal and insulator. Is it really metal insulator transition or everything is crossover as a dashed line? At finite temperature, I would rather say crossover because you have finite. At zero temperature, you don't have a transition. I mean that. Well, as you, yeah, this is a crossover. Yeah. Okay, so the answer is- It's really never metal insulator transition. It's always crossover. It's crossover, the only transition, real transition is- Sure, sure. But this is those are crossovers because you have, in terms of conductivity at least or resistivity, you have finite conductivity everywhere. Yeah. And second question is referring to what Lara was asking during your talk. Suppose there is hopping. And you said it's small. Okay, let's take some number. And at the same time you have U. And at very small U, anything related to superconductivity is the scale of U, which is small. Why don't you have a conventional superconductivity out of Fermi-Liquid with large stiffness compared to TC at very small U? Because still you have the charge, because at finite hopping, if U is very small, then at finite hopping, you have still this charging energy proper to the- Yeah, stiffness EF over four pi, the standard state. So it goes as hopping. Yes, but this hopping is much smaller than J, which determines you the charging energy. What is J then? J is the, you should go this one. The S-Y-K-J is always present. The hopping is between the two S-Y-K grains. Each S-Y-K grain irrespectively whether the hopping is there or not, has the charging energy. Each side involved of the S-Y-K grain has its own charging energy. So you hope from one side, which has a charging energy to the other side, which also has the charging energy. This charging energy, if you assume the hopping is really small, then this charging energy dominates, which prevents you from being firmly liquid, so to say. If I can rephrase in a way that proven this to your question. So usually what you put there is the compressibility of the electrons which is controlled by the hopping. If you don't have J, so the usual way we do BCS superconductivity. Here, yes, the charging energy is not controlled by the electronic compressibility, but by J. And then this is fixed and it's large. This was make the difference with respect to usual BCS superconductor without J. At least this is what we understood. Okay. Good question. So if I randomize you, does the survive in some way?  The choice of the model. The simple question, it survives. It makes everything more complicated. But I saw my first, so first of all, of course, you keep, you randomize keeping non-zero average, right? Yeah, yeah, sure. It does look though. I mean, learning from York, it seemed that things will be different than the model was fixed, you know? Well, I don't know the exact answer, right? I understand that if you randomize, but so to say, make it slightly random, slightly in the sense that you have large average, average is larger than the widths, then definitely nothing special will happen, just the corrections. If you have large randomness, huge, so that you have really large regions or realizations with repulsive view instead of attractive, I don't know the answer. Let's say so. Maybe something will happen, but I don't, I cannot answer definitely what happens in that case. If you already have this type of happening in random view. Yeah, which probably nothing, but I'm, well, because I did not calculate it to the end, I cannot make it tell you for sure. Yeah, just very briefly. Continuing on those lines, what would happen if instead of you, you had an average J of minus U? Well, the thing is that if I introduce average J as attractive, for example, it immediately brings a superconductivity into the play. However, the whole structure with an insulator disappears. The difference is the following. J, as such, is responsible already for, you can understand it in the Cooper channel as a term which proliferates the hopping of the Cooper pairs, already formed Cooper pairs.  So U creates Cooper pair, but does not act as a hopping term between the Cooper pair. The coping does not know about attraction or repulsion. However, if you make J, then you kind of, you can tell about it as a global attraction between the electrons already not at the same side effectively, but on the different sides, which gives you the superconductivity, but does not give you the insulating state. In that case, the phases are frozen together with the appearance of the superconducting order parameter from the very beginning. Yeah. Okay, very, very, very last. Quick one, why don't you have a zero temperature both metal phase? Because either it is insulating because five phases are disordered or it is just superconducting. It's just zero temperature. It is just any connection, any relation between the array, the Josephson array at zero temperature will be just superconducting if you, ah, okay, I understand. The point at this point I was missing. The important is that the Josephson array you arrive at has charging energy much smaller than the Josephson energy from the very beginning. Why? Because the charging energy, because this formula, I did not explain it here. This is this formula. The charging energy diminishes by n, oops, by n where n is a large number of sides within the grain. So it is very tiny. So that way, which means that this array at zero temperature is definitely in the superconducting state. Okay, I think that we have to close the session because at two o'clock we should start the game. We thank you again, Alex, for the nice talk. And let's see, be back at two o'clock, right? Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.


from church. The children have gotten out of their Easter outfits of what have you. Everybody's relaxed. What do you do the day after resurrection? And rightly we should because it's obviously a momentous event in the lives of all believers. This is where our faith is based off of. But the issue is or the question is what next? Well, if we go to the Bible and we look at what happens next for the disciples, we can see some things that we can glean from them and then also see what they did and apply it to our lives. So if we go to John 20, verse 19, we see that so when it was evening on that day, that Sunday, that evening, which for the Jews that there's the changing from that day to going to the next day, the evening, the day of the first week. And when the doors were shut, whether the disciples were for fear of the Jews, let's stop there for a second, says they were in a place with the door shut wide for fear of the Jews. Well, what just happened? There was persecution, obviously of the person they were following Jesus. Now, they've been told about Jesus. They're waiting on Jesus. And so here they are.  They're concerned. They're worried. And let's see what happens. Here comes Jesus. Jesus came in and stood in their midst and said, peace be with you. Well, why the peace be with you? Well, because they're nervous. They're afraid. They're scared. There's a lot going on. If they'll do this to Jesus, what would they do to us? Now, we have this idea that these men were brave and strong and ready to die. Of course, they just said that as well, but that was just talk. But Jesus has to come in and offer these are the first words he says to him in a way of comforting them. He says, peace be with you. And he said this. He showed them both his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoice when they saw the Lord. Obviously, let's make sure that this is him or he wants to make sure to them that he is who he says he is. Here's my hands, guys. This is me. Do not be afraid. Have peace. In other words, calm down. I'm here. And so going back to it, he says again to them. So when he said, I said this to them again, peace be with you as the father has sent me. I also send you.  Wait a second. As the father sent you, now you're sending us. Well, you were just crucified. That can be a little bit bothersome for them. I would imagine. And so he says to kind of comfort that, to kind of alleviate that. When he said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Now, something I want to go ahead and clear up before we, it's not a big, big issue for this particular point that I'm making here, but I just want to go ahead and throw this out here in verse 43. He says, if you forgive sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they have been retained. And if you notice, we have what's called in Greek the perfect tense, meaning this is a completed action in the past. And so it's not saying that they have the power to forgive sins or to retain sins to, to not forgive them. It's saying, it's stating that they will understand what heaven has already done, kind of like when he says that you, that whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. He's only declaring to them, whatever they bound will have already been bound and whatever they lose will have already been loose. Same thing here. That's always, I just wanted to cover that so that wouldn't confuse him. Going back up to verse 22, he says, and when he said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. He's almost kind of, now he's projecting the future. They don't receive the Holy Spirit at this moment. He is letting them know that they're going to receive the Holy Spirit. Now, how do they know that? Did they fully understand that? Not totally sure, but we do know they did not receive the Holy Spirit at that moment. Why do we know that? Because Jesus told them before in John 15, 14, 15 and 16, telling them at his death that he's going, but the Holy Spirit is going to come. And when he comes, what is he going to do? He is going to testify of not the Holy Spirit, not of God in a generic sense, not of the power of the Holy Spirit, the ability to heal and things like that. No, he's going to testify the Holy Spirit in you or in them. Same with us. He's going to testify of Jesus. So that's what he's going to do. Now, how do we know that's what they're going to do? Well, we'll read another passage in the Gospels, but think about what he says to them when he sees them in Acts, Acts 1-8. He says that you shall receive the Holy Spirit and then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. So he says you're going to receive the Holy Spirit, meaning that they have not received the Holy Spirit yet. So he's speaking and grammarians will let us know that he's really speaking in a forward-looking sense. He's telling them that they're going to receive the Holy Spirit. Well, why is that? They are nervous. They're obviously, they're happy to see Jesus, but they are nervous. They're afraid. They talk one way when they were all together. Well, isn't that what we as Christians do? We talk one way when we're together, but when we're by ourselves or there's a large crowd of non-believers or there's some possible persecution coming, our tune tends to change sometimes. And that was the case with them. Now I want to go back for just a little bit and look at something that happened when Jesus was found, or I'm sorry, when the ladies visited the tomb after Jesus' resurrection. When they go in, they see the angel. The angel tells them to, one, that Jesus is not here, he's risen, but then in verse seven of chapter 16 of Mark, he says, but go tell the disciples and Peter. So he distinguishes from all the other disciples, the other 10 plus Peter. We're missing one because obviously Judas is not included in this number. So go tell the disciples and Peter about Jesus. He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him just as he told them, which is where we picked up in John, but go and tell Peter. Why Peter? Why focus on Peter? Well, there's a reason why, and we're going to see something, we're going to learn something about Peter, as well as us. And so if we go to John, I'm sorry, Luke 22, 34, he says, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like we. Well, that's pretty scary for Jesus to tell him that, or maybe it would be comforting for Jesus to say that because it's Jesus saying it. But then Jesus didn't really give the answer or the response that I'm pretty sure Peter or anyone else would have liked to hear. He said, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like we. Jesus says, I'm going to stop him. I'm going to make sure that the devil doesn't have any, he can't, he can't do anything to you. No, that's not what he said. Instead, Jesus gives the response, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. Well, okay, first of all, Jesus, why pray for me? You literally have the ability to stop him.   No matter what, I'm here for you, Lord. Why won't you stop him? Jesus doesn't. He says, I have prayed for you, which also indicates something about the power of prayer and the need of prayer. But look what he says. He says something pretty interesting. He says, I pray for you that your faith may not fail. Well, wait a second, we know that his faith does fail. At least from our standpoint, as a matter of fact, in our graphic sense, this is Peter who we know is going to deny him. Jesus is getting ready to tell him that, but then something else is interesting here. He says, and when, once you have returned again, or turned again, strengthen your brothers, what do you mean? Well, first of all, Peter probably still stuck on the fact that Satan's desire to sift you like we. And he says, but when you return, well, what does he mean? Well, obviously we know what he means because he says, but he said to him, Lord, this is Peter with you. I am ready to go to prison and death. Well, clearly you weren't ready.  You deny him three times. And so clearly that's not the case because we can talk a tough talk. We can talk a big game and so forth. But when the rubber meets the road, sometimes we're just not as brave, which tells us a reason why going back to when Jesus says receive the Holy Spirit. Maybe that has something to do with it.  And what does Jesus say?  But when you return, meaning you're going to do this, you're going to, Peter didn't know this, Jesus does, you're going to walk away. And so when Jesus is being attacked in the courtyard, beaten, sped upon and Peter is on the other side of the courtyard, he's denying them. They literally make eye contact and Peter, after hearing the rusher crow weeps bitterly. Now I want to fast forward a little bit about eight days or so later and the disciples are speaking to Jesus and Jesus says something to Peter, but it's not just to Peter. But look what he says. We all know this famous dialogue that happens between Jesus and Peter, one Peter doesn't feel too good about. Jesus asked him in John 2115, he says, so when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Now this is the same Peter who said, I do love you more than these. I'm willing to go to prison. I'm willing to go to death with you. He said to him, yes Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend to my lambs. He said to him again, a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, shepherd my sheep. He said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he asked him a third time, do you love me? And he said, Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you. Jesus said to him, tend to my sheep.  But now, but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hand and someone else will gird you and bring you where you do not wish to go. Now, we said this signifying what kind of death he would glorify God. And he had spoken this, he said to him, follow me. So now let's make this, let's kind of break this down. He's saying this to Peter. Peter obviously in his heart, in his mind, he feels as though he loves Jesus. He's strong. He'll follow him, but he also has in mind, I said that before. I failed. I messed up. And so Jesus makes this statement. He says, when you were young, you walked where you wish and when you're older, someone is going to gird you. And he's speaking about the death that he, he's telling Peter, Peter didn't fully get this at the time. I'm pretty sure that the death that you're going to suffer, but there's going to be something or I should say someone that's going to help you along. That's going to keep you moving. That's going to empower you for what you said. Yeah, I know you love me, Peter. As a matter of fact, I have already told you, I prayed for your faith that your faith should not fail, but it looks like, and this is how we can apply this to us. It looks like his faith did fail. I mean, he literally did what even many non-Christians have stated. I mean, many Christians who call themselves Christians, but really aren't, even those who are kind of wayward, who really aren't, or even us Christians before we became Christians. How many people have you met, not those that are just overtly out there and hostile towards Christianity and the gospel, but just your average run-of-the-mill person says that they would just deny Jesus really in this case, like Peter did to his faith. Seems like his faith fails. As a matter of fact, for a couple of days, if we judged Peter, we would not have judged him to be a solid follower of Christ, but Jesus said though, when you return, strengthen your brothers. And so he's going to use Peter. The same can be, we can glean from that in that we have these times, we struggle with the ups, the downs, the ebbs and flows and so forth, but there's one thing that Peter gets that we get. And there's one thing that we should do that Peter is also total, not to the same degree, degree that Peter is told to do, but we should do something similar. He says to tend to my sheep, feed my flock. Now, obviously Peter is going to be what's called the first among equals. He's leading, but in the same sense, we can do the same thing. Remember what he says in Matthew 28? Jesus makes this statement. He says, let's go to verse 16. He says, but the 11 disciples proceeded to Galilee to the mountain, which Jesus had designated. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some were doubtful. Why were you doubtful? Well, you just saw him. You know who he is. And so again, there's something lacking there that won't be lacking in the future. Obviously, it's the Holy Spirit. And so he says, and Jesus came and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you and lo I am with you always, even to the end of the ages. So what are we to do? That very same thing. And we will receive power, the very same power that they receive, the Holy Spirit. Will it show up the same way it did in them? No, as a matter of fact, it won't show up the same way in everyone, evenly the same way. But we will have the ability, the Holy Spirit will be in us and will cause us to move one teaching and preaching exactly what he wants people to know. Primarily, his gospel is death, burial, and resurrection, that he is king, that he is risen. Now we'll say that he is risen on Easter, but of the other 364 days of the year, how often do we proclaim that he is risen? Why he is risen? What that means to us? And so we are to do just like they're told to do, go and feed the sheep, be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. You don't have to. And the one thing about this passage is as is written, this go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them. Look what he says. It's not saying to go, but it's really as as you are going, it is in a participle. So he's saying to go as you're moving on your your daily course. You don't necessarily have to know.  And it does oftentimes let people know who who Christ is. You'll find out that many of those people are not his sheep, but you'll also find out that many of his people that you come in contact with are just don't know it yet. They will be and it might be you that God is using to bring them into the fold. So on the day after Easter, on the day after his resurrection, what do they do? What do they do? They began preparing to do the very thing that we're supposed to be doing. That is to share the gospel. This is continual nonstop until we're no longer here. Amen.


Good evening and welcome. I'm Diane Meyerhoff, host for tonight's Candidate Forum for Mayor of Winnowski to fill a two-year unexpired term.  We welcome your comments and questions. Please join the conversation at 862-3966. The ground rules for tonight's forum are that the candidates will make opening statements of up to two minutes each, followed by answering prepared questions also for two minutes with a possible one-minute rebuttal. Tonight, I'm joined by the two candidates, Eric Covey and Christine Lott. Thank you both so much for coming out. We appreciate it. Thanks, Diane. We are going to start with opening statements. Eric's going to start us off and tell us, Eric, why you're running and what qualifies you for the position. Well, thank you so much for having us here tonight, Diane. And also a big thanks to all the CCTV folks who are behind the cameras and in the control room. You all do such amazing work promoting access to local democracy and for transparency. So hugely appreciated. I also want to thank my opponent for being here tonight and for your interest in running to serve our city, which we both share. Right now, I think Winooski is at a really pivotal point. The decisions we make now are going to have an impact for five, 10, 25 years and even longer down the road. What I think Winooski really needs in a mayor is somebody who will be a strong voice and an advocate for our city. You know, even if it's something as simple as doing the bridge repair with Burlington or discussions that we're getting in on a regional or statewide basis when the legislature is making decisions that come back and have a huge impact in our community. I'm the candidate who has the experience and the skill set to really get things done for Winooski. Right now, I work as Chief of Staff for Vermont Secretary of State Jim Kondos. And I think that experience that I have in those statewide and regional legislative and policy settings and the network that I've built as a result of those work experiences that I've had make me uniquely qualified to be able to really be a strong advocate for the needs of our city and ensure that the decisions that are being made that impact our quality of life in Winooski are done in a way that is conscious of those needs. So I appreciate the discussion we're going to have tonight and look forward to continued discussion indoors with my Winooski neighbors. Thanks so much. So Christine, tell us what qualifies you for the position of mayor. Thank you. I also feel like this is a really exciting time to be in Winooski. We have a lot of big projects and a lot of work ahead of us. And I think we need leadership that is really going to focus on the implementation while looking at the bigger picture and the long-term impacts. So ensuring that the decisions we make now are financially sustainable, that we have resources available to address needs throughout our community. My participation in council and previously on our housing commission has given me a good understanding of the work that's ahead of us. And my day job as a business analyst at a non-profit organization has prepared me to bring that like systems level focus to this work. I work on project implementation. I look at budgets. I look for a sustainability and efficiency in the work I do and that's the kind of I want to bring to this role. I think we need someone who's really focused on details and also takes a very collaborative approach to the work. We have a lot of great organizations, great residents, great businesses that we need to be talking to throughout all of our decision-making process so that we are making decisions with our residents and not for them. And that process focuses what I want to bring to this role and to our city. Super. Great. Thank you both. You're both quick speakers. You're fast. We're going to get to a lot of questions tonight. This will be great. More content. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. Great. So you both talked about these important decisions that are going to be made in Manuski soon that will impact the future. So tell me what your top three issues are that you're going to work on if you're elected and we're going to start with Christine. Sure. So like I said my focus is really heavily on process and long-term sustainability. We have mainstream and pool replacement projects that voters are expecting action on and particularly with the pool rapidly. So I want to make sure that we start implementation. We get that work underway but that we are also considering throughout the process the impacts on the resources that we have for other needs in the community. Second that we are also considering the impacts on affordability. So affordability is a concern throughout the country, throughout the state and we need to make sure that we keep Manuski affordable for all residents across the entire income spectrum. And the decisions we make with our infrastructure can certainly impact that. The third thing I really want to focus on is the public process in general. Part of our strategic vision is that we will foster relationships within Manuski and we need to do more as the leadership body to do outreach, to do community engagement, to connect with these existing groups, businesses and residents to make sure that they are part of the decision making process and that we're bringing in as many voices as we can. Great. Eric, tell us your top three issues. Great. Well I think the top three issues that I'd be focused on are primarily governance, affordability and sustainability. So when we're diving in and thinking about governance I think it's important people understand what the role of the mayor is and what the role of the council is and that's really as a strategic policy vision setting body. Really there's going to be a lot of attention right now that's paid to the mayor's race but equally important we're going to have a brand new body of, you know there'll be three brand new counselors that are on and with that brings a lot of challenges and I think that's one of the things that I am highly concerned about. A lot of these discussions about implementation and operations I don't think are the appropriate discussions for the mayor or the body to be having. We have a city manager strong form of government for a reason, we have amazing paid professionals that are much greater experts in their issue areas than we are and it's really the job of the mayor and the council to set that higher level strategic policy. We write the destination and it's our staff's job to write the roadmap for how we get there. I think it's also really important that the mayor focus on how the body actually governs and really that needs to be done by ensuring that everybody at the table has the information that they need to be able to move forward confidently and get to a point where they're able to make a decision as a body. So I think governance and how the mayor is actually operating within the council is incredibly important. I think my opponent touched on it a little bit but affordability is the number one issue in our city right now and many of our longtime residents, people who live in our city are starting to feel that pinch point. So I think we need a strong focus on policy that ensures that as we develop we're doing so in a way that preserves affordability for our residents so that we don't go through the process of starting to price people out and then last is sustainability. You know if you look at our infrastructure we have pipes underground that are a hundred years old and we have serious infrastructure investment needs that we're dealing with now and that we'll be dealing with into the future. What we need is a strong plan to address those needs in a sustainable way and to also ensure that we're building out and not underfunding maintenance on projects or continued work on individual projects from on a year to year basis so that we don't end up in this position where then we need to sink a lot of money into extensive repairs because we have underfunded those ongoing operational maintenance needs. Okay thank you. You both talked about affordability so I'm gonna jump ahead to a different question. Let's talk about Winooski's economic development mix because that certainly has an impact on affordability. Would you pursue different policies and you both talked about affordability so I kind of wanted to talk about how we might be able to bring those together and also this somehow fits together in this question and I don't know how you'll tell me. The newly revised municipal plan is it headed in the right direction and I assume that's partly due to the economic development discussion in that plan so I'm sorry I'm not familiar with it but Eric why don't you start us off. Yes so we're absolutely on the right track and I think we made a lot of progress when we're talking about development on our corridors which are those three major roads that lead into our downtown by the circulator so you'll know Mallets Bay Ave Main Street on East Allen and I think we got that form-based code in that zoning ordinance to you know 90-95% there we're almost at the finish line but we need to run those last few yards to get across it and I think what's really missing there is those guardrails to have in place that ensure we have the resources and means to encourage and incentivize affordable housing development within our city. I think we also need to look broader at the city as a whole and what we are actually doing with our zoning policy and how that is either helping develop what type of development that is helping encourage within our neighborhoods and how we can ensure that we are supporting growth within our city without taking away those unique qualities of our city that make it such a special place to live. I do also think that the municipal master plan that will be the first major action that the new body will be taking and that's something that there has been a considerable amount of work that has been put in by local regional partners community volunteers are amazing experts on staff. It is a fantastic document that can really that really sets out the vision for how we can sustainably move towards the Winooski we want to see in the future and it's a fantastic document but I also think as we're looking to do let's say the Main Street Revitalization Project we need to look at accessibility and you know how our members of our community are able to travel our sidewalks and streets. One of the things I would look to do as mayor is to establish an accessibility advisory council or accessibility advisory committee a group of individuals who are directly impacted by mobility issues to be able to talk to us as a city and say what their needs are or what challenges they face when it comes to navigation in our city. Okay. Christine talking about Winooski's economic development mix and your new municipal plan. You know so I would agree with Eric the municipal plan is on it's on the right track. A lot of work has gone into there. A lot of stakeholder voices have gone into developing that plan. When I think about economic development I think about the livability affordability of our community as a whole. You know Eric spoke to needing to be mindful of developing affordable housing. I think that we need to be mindful of the big picture of housing and that we have a diverse housing market that supports everyone who wants to be here. We had a housing needs assessment done for us a while back I think 2015 that said that we needed to focus on maintaining and improving our existing affordable housing. It showed that we actually have a pinch point in housing for middle income folks. So I want to make sure that we don't get so focused on affordable housing for low income that we are ignoring and and progressing that pinch point on middle income and then we have folks who as they're moving up in life they're not able to find a place to stay here. We need to also think about the decisions we're making and how they impact home ownership. That's something we absolutely want to encourage and it's difficult to do in a city where we don't really have space to build new single family homes. I would like to keep that type of mind because an invested and active community is really one of the things that keeps people that makes people want to be in Winooski. I think the municipal plan does a good job at getting at that supportive environment. One thing that I feel is left out is really that we need to collaborate more with our school district. Schools are very important to the people who move to Winooski the people who live here and there's more we can do to work with them to bring up the perception of the schools to make sure that we are supporting each other and the folks have an understanding of what it is. I've heard plenty of concern in the community about young families moving away because of this misperception about the school's performance level and I think that's a critical thing we need to address. Okay great thanks we have two phone calls. Wow. So we're gonna jump to that. Hi there you're on the air. Hello. Welcome. What's your question? Hi. Yes my name is Alice. I'm calling in to ask about the Winooski Pool Committee. They've done a wonderful job fundraising and come up with a beautifully designed pool. And my question is do you support the pool as designed? Okay great thanks so much. Okay so do you support the pool as designed and Christine we'll start with you. Sure so if for anyone who has followed our public process I did not support the original design of the pool. I wanted to see a scaled-back version that was more more in line with what we used to have and really considerate of long-term financing. That said we came to a compromise on the council and through the support of voters to a slightly scaled-back design where the fundraising committee who is working very hard is going to cover some of the the pieces that were removed by council. I absolutely support moving forward with that what was supported by the voters that vision is where we're at. We are already past the halfway point on engineering design. There's really no turning back at this point anyway. The next step of the pool process you know so voters supported that bond vote they supported that design. The next step is them supporting our new fiscal budget that actually funds that and so I look forward to seeing voters reinforce their decision there. This is the design they want they want to fund this. I as mayor would absolutely be supporting moving forward with that work. Okay great Eric the pool design and fundraising committee. Unequivocally yes I think the pool is such a valuable and important resource that's been missing from our community since it's been shut down. I think if you look there's significant data that shows if kids have healthy outdoor recreation opportunities it stems substance use it stems crime in youth and there is a significant need in our community for those types of recreational opportunities and programs for our kids. If you go spend any time at our O'Brien Community Center after school hours or during the course of the weekend there are a number of our community residents and youth that don't have those places to go so providing a pool and providing that safe space for our whole community to congregate would be such an incredible asset for our community. I think scaling back on the pool is a major mistake. I think that if we're going to invest in this significant community resource and spend a lot of money no matter what let's build it and let's build it right and it by scaling back and value engineering down component quality of the pool we might still be spending a lot of money for a municipal owned asset that won't last nearly as long so I'm an incredibly huge supporter of the pool. I look forward to seeing it move forward and believe that it's a significant investment for our community not just in what we're offering to residents but for quality of life for the whole region. I would like a short rebuttal. You can have a short rebuttal please. Your reference to the value engineering when the council came to decision to move forward with value engineering we ensured and confirmed with the engineers that are working on this project that the pieces that were value engineered out did not have an impact on long-term sustainability and operations so I am comfortable with the value engineered version. Do you want to say anything else sir? I don't know. So I think Alice you can be comforted to know that whoever is the next mayor of Winooski they will be supporting the pool. Okay we have another call let's see. Hi there you're on you're on the air. Great this is Hal Colston. Hi Hal. Hi so I serve on the Winooski City Council and also I represent Winooski as a state representative and I know we're in a process to consider and put on the ballot non-citizen voting and I like to hear from both candidates why is this important? Okay is this coming up on town meeting day Hal? No no we're we pushed it out further so we can have more time for the community to weigh in. Okay so probably not till the next the next town meeting would that be like another year? It's not determined exactly it could be possibly another year out but we want to make sure we're doing a thorough process to get input from the community. Alright thanks we will have our candidates answer thanks for calling in. Sure. Okay so we're gonna talk about non-citizen voting and we are gonna start with Eric. Absolutely so I absolutely support what I call all resident voting and I was the one that had initially brought it forward to council for consideration. Right now we have a number of our community members who live in our neighborhoods may own homes pay taxes either through their homeownership or through their rent send their kids to our schools but then have zero say in how their local tax dollars are being spent on their kids education or on the same cracked sidewalks that they and I walk together. I think one really important way we can engage all of our community in these important discussions around the future of our city is making sure that everybody has a seat at the table and sometimes that means growing the table. So I was absolutely in support of moving non-citizen voting forward and putting it on the ballot for Winooski voters to consider because ultimately it's a multi-step process. First voters would need to approve it and that's after the process by which it gets onto the ballot. Once Winooski voters approve it it would go to the legislature and then the legislature would ultimately be able to decide whether or not they approve our charter change that we send to them. So in the discussions we were having as a council when it came there were a group of three of us myself and Christine included that were in support of moving it forward up until the final vote to actually put it to voters so that Winooski voters could one way or another whether they're in support or not could decide whether or not to send that charter change to the legislature and on that final vote it was actually just myself and Representative Colston who we just heard from that supported moving it forward. I think that that's really unfortunate. Montpelier did move forward and pass it on the ballot that they had in front of voters in November so they're in the legislature and as the most diverse community in Vermont I do feel a little bit of shame that as a city we weren't there with them. Okay Christine we're talking about non- citizen voting and putting it on the ballot in a future. Tom, meeting day. Sure and just to make a quick point of clarification for folks watching at home this refers to allowing all residents of the city regardless of citizenship status to vote on municipal local issues not anything at the state or federal level. As Eric mentioned I have supported this I have supported this expansion of voting of having more voices at the table. When we came to the point of deciding whether or not to put it on the ballot what we discovered is that we had not done our due diligence we had not engaged the stakeholders who would be impacted. We didn't speak with new Americans. We didn't speak with nearly enough people in the community to find out what their you know what supports will they need what concerns do they have. I I go back to my point about public process being the most important part of this role that we need to do this right and make sure that decisions are happening with people and we are not doing them to them. As someone sitting on the council making that decision I felt like it was something I was doing to these people without actually engaging them and that's not something I want to be a part of. I absolutely support fostering the committee that we have established to carry that forward so there's a resident driven committee spending the time to do the thorough investigation of what needs are going to arise and doing that outreach to make sure we're engaging all of our communities all of our community members and really understanding how we can implement this in the future. Really quickly to reflect back we heard you know I know of at least six individuals who were non-citizens directly impacted by this non-citizen Winooski residents that either spoke out at our public hearing as we were considering this issue or who reached out to the whole council individually to say I am an individual who is directly impacted by this and I support moving it forward and I think that it's a shame to discount the stories of those individuals who are the people who are directly impacted by this and did reach out and express their concerns and within that process that we would have passed to put it on the November ballot there was a significant public input component of that including multiple public hearings by which the public engaged in this process could shape the final language that ends up on the ballot. Christine do you want to take a minute? Sure I do not discount the stories of those six folks who reached out to us but I want to acknowledge that we didn't reach out to anyone ourselves and that's not the way to go about decision-making as the city council we we can't make big decisions for the city in like a three month time period. The time we spent working on the pool you know that's 2016 I believe when it closed down the time that's gone into form-based code and the Main Street project the fact that we weren't spending the same amount of time and effort and putting the same energy into this very important issue that really touches people in the heart I think is a shame and I'm pleased that we are moving forward in a way that does dedicate the appropriate amount of time and the appropriate amount of public engagement to that decision. Okay well you know let's follow up with that and let's talk a little bit about how the city is supporting new Americans and undocumented residents. So I'm curious to hear you know what are the things you would like to see happen I think you've you've you've referenced some of them already but but let's talk about a little bit more detail. Christine would you like to start? Sure you know so we passed a sanctuary city resolution back in 2016 and have already been kind of guiding some of our policy with that so that we are making decisions we want people to access all residents to access resources in the city without being afraid. We have made some steps on fair and impartial policing policy you know our police department is not going to use their limited resources to enforce immigration law they have other things to do at a local level that are very important. I think that expanding beyond that I would go back to taking a collaborative approach there are local organizations like migrant justice that are already connected to these communities and already understand the needs that are out there those are folks we should be connecting with so that we can make sure we have that understanding and we understand where we can plug in and where we can be of more help so that when we make a decision this is how we want to support this group in our community that we've actually heard from them directly. Eric undocumented residents and how to support them. Yeah so as Christine mentioned our fair and impartial policing policy was actually passed initially based on a model policy the state had put forward and I had noticed and worked with individuals worked with migrant justice and worked with other directly impacted community members and organizations to identify there were still a few areas of vulnerability within that policy opportunities where we wouldn't have been offering the best protections available for our immigrant community members and worked to shore up the vulnerabilities in that policy and I'm really proud that that policy I brought forward to council we were able to pass unanimously and now we have what is one of if not the strongest fair and impartial policing policy or sanctuary city policy in the entire country. I think that that's incredibly important not just for the protections that offers to those community members but also for general public safety because if even though I am a citizen if a non-citizen neighbor of mine notices that somebody's breaking into my house and they're worried that if they call our police department to alert them and act as a witness for that break-in that they might end up being funneled through our police department into immigration control enforcement that there would be retribution on their end so they would might be disincentivized to call and that weakens public safety for all of us living in Winooski so I'm incredibly proud that I brought that policy forward and that we were able to pass that important protection and I think this conversation circles back around to the discussion we were just having on non-citizen voting we need to ensure that people have a voice at the table and you know I think this is a conversation we have been having in our community for years and years and years and was at a point where the members of our community were ready to vote on and move it forward and lastly I think we need to ensure we have appropriate translation services available one of the things I asked at our last council meeting is that we engage the Secretary of State's office in a proactive conversation about translation services at the polls so that those members of our community who are coming to vote who may not be strong English speakers have the resources available to be able to participate in our civic process so I think that's an incredibly important discussion but it also extends to important city communications that we're putting out there we need to work with organizations that will help us appropriately translate documents for residents so that we are communicating information to all members of our community in a way that they can that is accessible for them okay and I believe or not we're almost out of time it always happens like this is so quick so I'd love to give you both a chance to do a closing statement to sort of sum up all things we've talked about today and I think Eric you're actually going to start us off great well I think we have a lot to be proud of in Wenuski our community and our city has really come such a long way and I think that it's important to recognize that vital history and how we've grown and developed to be an incredibly special and amazing community that so many people want to live in and have a strong connection to but I do think that we have some significant challenges ahead of us as we think through a lot of these discussions around long-term sustainability and affordability I am really excited that we're engaged in this discussion that our whole community is so interested in the direction of our city and you see that at our public processes where we're having discussions around Main Street community dinners around the pool wherever it might be I think that as mayor I would bring a significant asset to the community given my professional experience at working as chief of staff for our secretary of state to really be a strong and effective advocate for our city and that comes down to so many different factors whether it's legislation that's being passed that impacts our community in a huge way or ways by which we can grow out go out and seek funding or discussions we're having about incentivizing investment or development within our community so I really look forward to the conversation we're going to have over the next month I want to thank you for being willing to step up it's been a real pleasure to serve with you on the time that you've been on council I hope that regardless of the outcome on March 5th that we still are able to work together hand in hand on the future of our city and with that if folks are interested they can find more information about me and my campaign on www.Covey4Mayor.com excuse me we're in a two-year gap session there www.Covey4Mayor.com there's information about my issues ways to get involved with the campaign a list of the many community leaders and neighbors who have stepped up to support my campaign and I hope that I can count on your vote on March 5th okay thank you Christine closing statement sure um thank you Eric as well for being willing to do this job it's great to see many active engaged folks who who want to step up for the city I came to Winooski 10 years ago I've spent most of the last 10 years here I guess not here over in Winooski I own a home there I have family there I am deeply invested in the future of Winooski it's where my future is going to be and I want to make sure that we have a big picture long-term view on keeping that sustainable keeping it affordable I want to make sure that as mayor we are approaching the decision-making process in a really engaging way where we are making decisions with our residents I I do not bring my own agenda of policy issues to this role I want to work with the rest of the members of council work with additional organizations in the community and residents to find out what the best steps are and the best decisions that we need to make to get to our shared vision I look forward to talking to more residents if I haven't been to your door already you're in the minority um so I hope to see you and if you want to reach out to me I believe my email is being posted on the screen here yes um I would love to hear from everyone out there and I look forward to March 5th as well great super thank you so much both for coming out and uh good luck on town meeting day and I should let everybody know of course to stay tuned for chow 17 because we're going to have more forums presentations on ballot items and municipal budgets so we hope you'll keep checking in on our very busy schedule for the month of february and importantly of course to vote on tuesday march 5th um and also join us in town meeting night because we'll have um live our live results show why don't we just say where folks can vote and what how the times is seven to seven senior center seven to seven if you have any trouble not knowing where that is you can always go to city hall and they'll one two three barlow street easy to remember and voting early is an excellent way to vote I always forget everyone always reminds me of voting early you do not need an excuse or an absentee baller and those kind of things you just go to city hall and they'll take excellent care of you when the during their um open hours so let's hope people will do that as well so great thank you again thanks diane good night


Hwm shouldn't be a place of fear, everyone has the right to be safe and to live fear free. Getting in touch may be more difficult for you during this time, but help is still available. If you are experiencing violence or abuse at home or you are concerned about someone, our free Confidential Helpline is available 24-7. You are not alone. Chat to us online at gov.wales.livefeerfree Or call our helpline on 0808 80 10 800.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unizor Education. I would like to introduce you in just a few words what actually Unizor is about. Well, first of all, it's a website, Unizor.com, where I have decided to put a lot of educational material for advanced studies of mathematics for high school students. It's significantly more complex and more rigorous than what usually is explained and presented in most of the high schools. So I have decided to put it as an advanced introduction to mathematics for those students who are interested in challenges, in solving complicated problems, who are interested in more rigorous, more logical foundation of mathematics. Basically, my intention is to use this particular website not only as an educational tool, but as a tool to develop students' creativity, analytical thinking, logic, intelligence, if you wish. Arguably, mathematics presents an extremely broad spectrum of different approaches to achieve these goals. Primarily, I'm concentrating on presenting axiomatic foundation for things which we basically deal every day in school mathematics and complement it with a significantly large number of problems. Some of them are complicated, I would say. And again, the purpose is to develop the students' creativity, not to present them with certain number of skills which they have to memorize. Most of these formulas and properties are forgotten immediately after passing exam. My purpose is to teach students how to think logically, how to approach creatively to solving problems. And I hope that these abilities to solve problems in mathematics would be very handy in the real life where the problems are completely different. It's the analytical approach which I'm trying to develop in students. And basically, I'm trying to use this particular tool, Unisor.com, as a tool to develop minds in as much as, let's say, exercises in gym are the tools to develop the muscles. Students can basically access annual lecture. The site is completely free, it has no advertising. However, the site has certain educational functionality. It introduces the process where a student can be registered and he can have a supervisor or parent actually who enrolls this particular student into courses. And after enrollment, the student not only can listen to lectures but also take exams which supervisor or parent can check the results of and basically mark the topic or course as completed. Also, the site is open with proper authorization to completely new subjects, new lectures, new topics. Everything is possible. Software has been written by me personally, so it all can be arranged. So anyway, this is a tool for high school students who would love to have a challenge and can use the mathematics as a tool to develop their minds. Thank you.


Moral panic, that is me too, is another threat to the Manisphere. Again, I also think that the dilution of our message, sort of watering down, is a threat to us. And I also think that the resistors, you know, resist, the resistance is yet another way of calling the gynaocracy what it is, because when people want to be, they think they're resisting some evil empire when they don't really realize that they are the mainstream, that they are the ones, the gynaocracy is actually the side of the equation that is setting the tone, that is setting all that. Now, before I end this, and I'm going to go to questions, and if anybody wants to talk about threats, that's fine as well, but I was going to use a video here for YouTube, but I figured I'd probably better not because I don't want to get de-platformed. And that de-platforming is the last thing I want to talk about threats, because we've just seen what happened to Roosh. We've just seen what happened to the Red Pill subreddit, on Reddit. And I, when that happened, and I wanted to make this a real point to say, is when that happened, when I saw what happened with Roosh and how he got de-platformed, and how they just basically say one day his books are there and the next day they're gone. Now, from an economic standpoint, I know for a fact that Roosh doesn't do much else except for sell books. He doesn't do much else except for, you know, collect ad revenue from Return of Kings, and now all of that is going somewhere else, and I'm not really sure what he's going to do. So I look at that from a revenue point of view, but for a guy like me, I have other streams of revenue. This is not my day job. And so if I were to say, if Amazon were to say, okay, we're going to turn off the, we're going to turn off the spigot, I would still be okay. I have other skills. I have other talents. I can do other things. I could probably, you know, certainly start something else new if I had to. But what would crush me would be knowing that the people that, the people that had their lives changed by my work wouldn't have access to that anymore. That they wouldn't be able, like the men who would be seeking something like this, the suicides. I mean, we have five men have five times the rate of suicide that women do. What do they have? Again, it's tearing us apart. It's diluting our message. It's devaluing us. And make no mistake, right now, the gynaecocracy or the Gestalt Feminine is paying attention to what's going on in this room or they want to know what's going on in this room. But my greatest fear is losing that engagement that my books have with guys. I have so many guys coming. I mean, how many people in this room have had their lives changed or have had their lives literally saved by any one of my books? That's what I mean. And that's what I mean. It's like, imagine you didn't have access to that. Imagine you couldn't buy it from, imagine you had to go find it on some obscure, you know, website or somewhere. Imagine me trying to, imagine me trying to go to a traditional publisher and saying, this is this book I got called Rational Mail. Let me tell you what's inside of it. Do you think I would get published? Probably not. That is what concerns me the most is this new censorship and it is Orwellian censorship. It is, we're going to crush you and we're going to erase you. And that's what they've done with Alex Jones. You know, say what you want about Alex Jones. The scary part of that is the believe women part of that. The scary part of that is just how easily within, I think, what was it, 12 hours that he was erased? Same with Roosh. It's not that Roosh's stuff was all that offensive. I mean, they sell a book on Amazon called Come for Bigfoot.  The reason I know about this, because she makes like $30,000 a month on this thing, right?  They can sell that, but they can't sell game. They can't sell bang.  They can't sell that stuff. No, it's because they wanted to erase Roosh. And he wrote about this a long time ago. They wanted to take his bread. They stole his bread. They pulled away his capacity and his ability to disseminate. Have they taken away his freedom of speech? No, they haven't. But they've taken away his ability to disseminate it widely so that other people can either benefit from it or even really criticize it. It's a stifling of debate. And I've never been a free speech advocate.  And I think I'm happy to say that it's been well received and it's saved a lot of lives. But imagine some purple hair feminist at Amazon. It says, I don't like Rolo. I'm going to delete all this stuff. Imagine how many people with that one deletion, that one backspace, that one delete key, how many men died because you did that? How many men didn't get that information that they needed? How many men could have changed and bettered their lives because you hit the delete key?


Ever since I made the video asking you guys to roast my dogs, someone in there said something like a hamster might be smarter than marbles and I said I think a hamster is smarter than marbles and then we got ad and people have been requesting that I see who's smarter marbles or hamster. I don't really know how to measure who's smarter so we came up with like some tasks that I think that they can do in an epic chihuahua versus hamster face off because we all know marbles is really not bright at all. Marble come here. Marble come. So these aren't going to be like super exciting because there's not much to do with a chihuahua or hamster right they just kind of exist. The first thing I came up with was do they respond to their name which we know marbles does. Marble. Marble? Marble you get a point for that yay good marble. He's like what did I do fam? Let's see if ad responds to his name.


This show is brought to you by these lovely people. Well, hello there, NPR enthusiast. We have a wholly alluring unrealness for you. Here are the highlights. First, Malt has AOV's support. Second, creating grease pencil ink brushes. And third, Gohanverse Movie. It's over 30 minutes long. Welcome to the BNPR show. A celebration of stylized and non-photoreal rendering. But let us not linger. Here come the gems. Grease pencil line art has a few new features and optimizations. The dash modifier stroke animation issue is solved. Second, the curvature support for the length modifier was added. Third, the line art shadow line in the line art shadow branch now has proper occlusion calculation. So it's very usable now. Fourth, clean line termination at the margin beyond the camera view was added to make multiple render stitching possible. And last, the multi-thread intersection stage is being completely overhauled. And it's still a work in progress. If you want to know more, please check Wu Yeming's development log. The link to that is in the show notes. And here are some exciting Malt updates. Malt now supports arbitrary output variables, or AOV's, meaning you can output any passes as files. This exposes render passes commonly used in anime production for use in external compositors, which is the same way Pencil Plus outputs render results. This development is sponsored by, at PopRec, the lead of Hurray team. Malt now has the industry standard render dock integration. Render dock is a standalone direct 3D, 11 and 12 Vulkan and OpenGL graphics debugging tool. This makes debugging every single stage of the rendering pipeline more visual and easy. Malt also now has signed distance field rendering. Signed distance fields are basically a field that are assigned to a mesh. This can be used in many situations from AO to superfast boolean operations. This feature is sponsored by at Casey basic is. Malt has the initial support for procedural textures. These are noise texture, buroni texture and fractal noise texture. There is also performance improvement for order independent transparency. The option to compute tangents is also added in the pixel shader. You can download these updates on Malt's development branch. If you want to boost NPR development directly or to sponsor a special NPR feature, please contact Miguel on Twitter or hit his Patreon. And now it is tutorial time. City Plants, grease pencil and pixel art experiment by Kevin Dramm. His process video is very well put together, but let's go over the key points. For the midground plants, they consist of pots from mesh objects and the plants are from grease pencil objects. The pot stands and stools complete the furniture pieces. For the background, the mesh objects are the windows. Then the buildings are done using geometry nodes. The grease pencil objects are the clouds, curtains and large transparent grease pencil planes for building atmospheric effects. For the foreground plants, they are all grease pencil objects with a blur effect added. The butterflies are grease pencil objects parented to the mesh, then to an empty for animation. The light streaks are blurred grease pencil lines with hard light blending. Opacity is animated along with a noise texture. And now for the final touches. A rim modifier is added to all grease pencil objects and a glare done in post. For the pixel art version of the artwork, the scale pixel 8 scale sandwich node setup is applied in post. What a delightful scene. A nice color palette choice as well. And also go check out his Final Fantasy teacups ride process video. Tune mouth rig with shape keys by Ape of God. There are times when you see someone making something that looks special. You will ask, what is their special sauce? What is their secret recipe? What is the magic dust? Oftentimes, the secret is just the most common tools less explored. Ape of God's tutorials is one of those. So here are the three secrets to make mouth shapes, be it extreme or within the common limits. There are three major steps. One, setting a shape key. Two, making the bone to control the shape key. And three, making the driver to drive the shape key using the bone. Let's look at each step carefully. The first step is making the shape keys. We start with the basis, which all shape keys are based on. Then we add a new shape key and go into the edit mode to make the shape. If you slide the shape key value, you will see the mesh deforming. You can also refer to a shape key to other shape keys as base keys. The second step is to add a bone control to the shape key. Remember to rename the bones and turn off deformation. Third, now for possibly the most non-visual part, select the mesh, right click on the shape key value and add a driver. A pop up will appear, now assign the bone and which axis transition of the bone will affect the shape key. Now open up a graph editor, change the expression rate by multiplying the variable. You do this so that you don't have to move the bone too far before you see the change in the shape key. Now do this to all the shape keys. For more extreme shape keys, multiply the expression with another variable, which is the base key. Unfortunately, you have to add it via Python expression as shown here. And just like that, you can set up shape keys with a bone as a driver. To understand setting up a driver is to do it enough times to become second nature. If you find that this tutorial is skipping too much information, please seek other tutorials for a more thorough explanation. Traditional ink brush for grease pencil by Sophie Jantak. This is more of a resource than a tutorial. But if you're eager to understand how dynamic grease pencil brushes are made, then you're at the right place. First, the old fountain pen. This brush behaves like a calligraphy pen, meaning the angle of the brush will determine the width of the stroke. The opacity of the stroke is controlled by pen pressure. Second, the old leaky pen, as the name suggests, is a pen with an unpredictable ink output. The stroke radius and jitter is affected by pen pressure with custom pressure curves. The leaky pen is an opaque brush that will bank a big stroke when pressed harder. The blobby pen is more stable when compared to the leaky pen. It works similar to leaky but with milder changes in the custom pressure curve. The old blobby pen works similar to blobby with a twist. The difference is the opacity is controlled by the pen pressure. And the old gel pen brush resembles the real world old gel pen. The stroke will start out very opaque and will create a darker dot.  To reach these effects, at low pen pressure, its radius and opacity is high. At mid to high pen pressure, the radius slowly reduces along with the opacity. If you are into making brushes, please watch this video to see which settings to tweak to create dynamic brushes. There are also stamping brushes. But for that, you have to watch her video for the details. A Dragon Ball Gohanverse Movie, Android 21 by Dai Tomodachi. Here's the summary. In his first Dragon Ball Gohanverse movie, Slick Goku fused with Emo Gohan to battle Android 21. However, unknown to Emo, this event will thrust him deeper into the Gohanverse. This whole production took over six months. Congratulations to the whole team. If you have not watched it, please do so after the show. Magic Sciences Episode 1, Meditation. This is a mock documentary, a mockumentary, in NPR style, talking about the art and the science of meditation. This is fun to watch, so we won't spoil it more. The Dinosauria series trailer by David James Armsby. Yes, we are featuring a trailer. It is good. Dinosauria is an animated anthology, paleo-art series of the short films covering the lives of dinosaurs. There will be five films in the series and will range from three to eight minutes in length. The models are detailed and the color palettes are very nice. Go support his production. Well, unfortunately, the show is ending. But there is more NPR goodness in the show notes for you to chew on. And this show is made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please thank them kindly. Before we go, one final question. What other interesting brushes can be made from the real-world counterpart?