Okay, move out. In the fight for life, the race against time can make the crucial difference. For men wounded in combat, time has always been an enemy. But in the conflict in Vietnam, a wounded American soldier can receive hospital treatment or surgery in less time than an accident victim on our own highways. This race against time is being won partly by the helicopter and by advances in medical technology, but mostly by the dedication of the men and women of the United States Army Medical Service as they help the soldier in the fight for life. It was in Korea during the 1950s that a major element of the story of today's high-speed medical aid to casualties was written. In that land of treacherously steep terrain, round ambulances simply could not do the job, at least not in time. The helicopter was just coming into its own as a mode of military air-land, and the decision to try using the chopper as an airborne ambulance was one which has had revolutionary results. The practicality of evacuation by copter, direct from forward areas in the combat zone to well-equipped treatment facilities, was dramatic improvement. During the conflict, some 20,000 casualties received medical help in a fraction of the time that would formerly have been required. In a matter of hours, a casualty could be on its way in a long-range transport aircraft, fully staffed with trained medical personnel, for a swift trip to major medical centers in Japan or even the United States. A whole new concept of casualty evacuation was born. The war in Vietnam is fought against the deadly combination of a hostile environment and an elusive enemy. This long, narrow, mountainous country, covered with jungle and brush, crisscrossed with rivers and streams, drenched by summer and winter marmsoons, provides natural hideouts for Viet Cong guerrillas, but presents special handicaps for troops 10,000 miles from home. The battles have no fixed fronts, the adversary knows no fixed rules. To deal with the enemy, our soldiers must go where the enemy is. Through the tall grass, across the unspanned rivers, into the dense jungles, constantly facing hidden dangers, a booby trap, a buried mine, a sniper, a sudden ambush. From the moment a soldier is hit, no time is lost. For the wounded, the burden of an extra minute may just break the thin thread of life. The fight for life begins with the combat medic. Even as the battle is raging, he is there to give first aid. The call goes out for Dustoff, the affectionate code name for the medical evacuation helicopter. A landing area is cleared. The chopper pilot is contacted. The location is marked by smoke. The patient is rushed on board and Dustoff is on its way, all in a matter of minutes. The Medevac pilot considers the urgency of the most serious cases on board. If he has not received advanced information, he will contact the medical regulator located at the clearing station supporting a division or brigade and receive advice as to the nearest hospital that is staffed and equipped to provide the required treatment. Less serious casualties are normally evacuated to the supporting clearing station and when the chopper touches down, medical personnel are ready and waiting. At the clearing station, each casualty is checked by a physician who provides the required care and treatment or directs further evacuation to a hospital. If no time is to be lost in any step of the evacuation, the rapid sequence of events must have precise coordination. The Army Medical Service knows the necessity of reliable communications and streamlined procedures. A vital link in successful evacuation is the medical regulator who maintains radio contact with the medics in the field and relays information to air ambulance pilots. From the requesting unit, the pilot learns the location, number and condition of the wounded, the landing conditions and the enemy situation. Due to the courage, skill and efficiency of the air ambulance crews, the average flight time from any battlefield pickup to a well-staffed and equipped medical facility is one hour or less. Medical regulators direct the pilots to supporting hospitals. Normally, the air ambulance lands at a helipad immediately adjacent to the hospital. When this is not possible, ground ambulances work with the helicopters to bring battle casualties to the doctor. Within the base camps and cities, they shuttle patients between unit areas, dispensaries, hospitals and air fields. Whether transferring patients from air to ground ambulances or from ground to air, the single aim is to get them to the proper medical facilities as rapidly as possible. To the severely wounded, the first few hours may make the difference between life and death or between complete recovery and permanent disability. Yet swift evacuation is only one part of the teamwork. It takes every member of the Army Medical Team to preserve the life and fighting strength of our soldiers in Vietnam. When wounded reach the hospital, the fight for life goes into high gear. It's a fight that demands that everyone be at his battle station. The nurse whose care can alleviate pain and suffering in a way that drugs cannot. The doctor whose hands have the skill to wrestle with death to reconstruct the broken bodies of war. The laboratory technician whose scientific tests may enable the doctor to make a crucial decision in time. The clerk who provides nourishment to bring back health and strength once the initial crisis has passed. The clerk who keeps vital supplies flowing to the right place at the right time. Each one contributes to the saving of life and limb and the recovery of fighting strength. And this teamwork brings results. Among wounded reaching hospitals, the mortality rate is lower than two and a half percent. And for all the casualties treated in medical facilities ranging from the aid station to the evacuation and field hospital, the return to duty rate is high, about 80 percent. This means that as many combat experienced men as possible recuperate in Vietnam to continue fighting once their physical recovery is complete. But there is more to the war in Vietnam than combating the Viet Cong. This is a tropical country, poor in sanitary facilities and full of breeding grounds for hidden dangers to help. The native adults are relatively immune to many diseases which can put Americans out of action. Such an environment demands that the army apply a total medical service concept involving many activities beyond the care and treatment of battle injuries. For the hazards to health are everywhere. Nearly 70 percent of hospital admissions are for diseases such as skin disorders, malaria, dysentery, acute respiratory illnesses and infections caused by parasites. This challenge calls for a good program of preventive medicine. Insect and rodent control must be relentlessly enforced to curb the huge population of mosquitoes, flies, lice, fleas and rats. The busy carriers of malaria, plague and typhus. Water supply must be the object of round the clock surveillance. Probably only one third of the South Vietnamese people have access to pure drinking water. Endless research must be conducted to overcome the most pressing problems of tropical medicine. Research in epidemic control, entomology, zoology and other biological and medical disciplines. In remote areas deep in the heart of Viet Cong territory, a new chapter in the history of military medicine is being written. Today in a village outpost like this, you will find an army team that is unique in the long chronicle of combat. In countries where no conventional units have yet penetrated, the team carries out its mission. Its members are all special forces qualified, but they are something more. Each one is a highly trained medical scientist or technician. They are men of the Walter Reed Institute of Research and their laboratory is the jungle. This is where they do their research. The mosquito-infested swamps and thickets. The home of animals, insects, mites. Carriers of diseases just as deadly as the Viet Cong, who incidentally are never far away. Their unique mission is to go where no large body of American troops has yet come and search out in advance the types of diseases that must be expected and warded against when conventional forces do move into the area. This kind of advanced preparation has never been attempted before. But thanks to the dedication and skill of this special research element of the Army's medical service team, the work is bearing results today. To pick up a wounded man from the middle of the jungle, where there is no room for even a copter to land, has called for the development of some special devices. One of these is called the Flexletter. Completely enclosing the casualties body, it protects him on his journey up through the treetops to the Medevac copter hovering above. For the man with the wound which is perhaps less serious, but still requires treatment beyond what the combat medics on the spot can give, there is a sling-seat device called the Jungle Penetrator. Where no other means of pick-up is possible, it lives up to its name, penetrating the jungle, lifting to safety and immediate medical care, men who learn once again that whenever and wherever they need help, the medical service will find a way to be there. Music In spite of the difficult environment, American troops in Vietnam enjoy an excellent state of health. The low hospital admission rate, less than one per thousand per day, testifies to the effectiveness of prevention and research work. The sick and the wounded in this war are provided with more rapid evacuation and better care and treatment than in any other war in history. For here, there is a concentration of medical skills never equaled in wartime. Skills of all degrees, from the supply clerk to the experienced surgeon. A phased and orderly buildup of Army medical personnel has accompanied the growth of troop strength. Intensive and continuous care can be provided to each patient until complete recovery. There are facilities for treating every type of wound. Even vascular surgery, only occasionally used in the Korean conflict, is now a common procedure to save life and limb. And these skilled men and women are provided with an abundance of supplies, including whole blood. Music Despite the tremendous logistical problems of moving immense tonnages and great varieties of materials over long distances, their supply has been maintained without interruption. With firsthand knowledge of their own needs, medical service personnel have assisted the Army engineers in the design and construction of hospitals. Such large-scale hospital complexes are a major factor in reducing the death rate from combat wounds to the lowest level in history. Carefully spotted as they are throughout the combat zone, they have made it a fact that no casualty, no matter where he is, is more than 30 minutes away from the most complete hospital facilities the 20th century can provide. All operating rooms, intensive care wards, x-ray, and surgical supply rooms are air conditioned, a must in this tropical climate. And the word must has assumed a new meaning to the medical service. It stands for Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportable, a new mobile field hospital concept realized through advanced technology. One of its three main packages is the utility element, which provides electric power, air conditioning, heating, and hot and cold running water. The second unit is a ward unit, collapsed during travel, but quickly inflated by air pressure from the utility element. The double-walled fabric structure is coated with synthetic rubber. Designed for all climates, it can withstand winds up to 80 miles per hour. Its spacious interior can accommodate 20 combat casualties, together with all basic hospital ward equipment. Its controlled environment contributes to the cleanliness and speedy recovery of the sick or wounded. The third package is the expandable element which houses surgery, laboratory, x-ray, pharmacy, and central supply facilities. The most complex and delicate operations can be performed here. By combining a number of selected elements, a hospital facility of any size could be rapidly set up anywhere, completely equipped, and ready to function. The packaged elements can be shipped by almost any mode of transport, cargo plane, helicopter, or truck. Part of the must system is the dental element, which can provide a modern dental clinic in the wilderness, and on very short notice. Inside, every modern facility of dentistry is available. The dental patient and the working staff gain the advantages of a fully controlled atmosphere, despite the tropic heat and humidity outside. X-ray facilities comparable to those of any state-side clinic make possible rapid and exact diagnosis of individual patient needs. So thoroughly staffed and equipped is the dental element, that dentures can be repaired on the spot, eliminating the time loss involved in sending the work out to some separate facility. Whatever care the combat soldier's teeth may need, from a simple cleaning to extensive surgery, the must dental element is ready to provide it. Sometimes an ingenious improvisation, field expedient is the army term, provides an answer to the need of men in remote areas for prompt medical care. This dental clinic on wheels is a case in point. Its creator and army dentist designed the dental chair, which is made from a 55 gallon fuel drum, and worked out the installation of portable dental equipment in the back of a truck. Many a combat soldier on duty in some back country area has had his regular dental checkup on schedule, thanks to this kind of dedication and ingenuity on the part of members of the Army Medical Service team. The development of new highly mobile medical equipment has extended to such things as this portable X-ray unit. A member of the medical equipment family, not until now noted for its mobility. The sophisticated equipment now available in Vietnam includes the artificial kidney, which temporarily assumes the function of that vital organ during an emergency. With superior equipment and a wide range of medical supplies always available, the Army's skilled medical staff has been able to treat all types of casualties right in Vietnam. The total medical service concept extends service in depth as well as in breadth. Aviation medicine, for example, is now a specialized field and has been greatly expanded to meet the particular needs of the Army in Vietnam. The nature of warfare in Vietnam demands extensive use of helicopters and other types of aircraft as an organic part of the Army for combat, for resupply, for evacuation, and for observation. Army aviators and crewmen have an exacting and perilous mission. They require close and constant attention by flight surgeons to keep them in top physical and mental condition, and they get it. The flight surgeon lives with the air crew and knows the men as individuals. He performs a role like that of the family doctor in civilian life, problems related to fatigue, personal protective equipment, sanitation, rest and recreation, survival gear. All these are the concerns of the flight surgeon. Veterinarians are an important segment of the Army medical team in providing the best healthcare possible. In addition to inspecting foods and food sources, and the detection and prevention or control of diseases of animal origin, they provide highly effective care and treatment for the valuable four-legged members of the Army, the Scouts and Sentry Dogs. These animals receive all the care needed to keep them in top fighting trim. Periodic check-ups include a full variety of tests and X-rays to ensure that these canine members of the Army's combat team enjoy a full tour of duty in good health. The Army in Vietnam is also deeply involved in the battle for support and stability of the civilian population. For its medical components, this means medical civic action programs, or MEDCAP. The scarcity of Vietnamese doctors and sanitation measures contribute to a high rate of sickness and death among the Vietnamese. Estimates for infant fatality run as high as 255 per 1,000 births, and life expectancy is said to average 35 years. In addition, the enemy's terrorist tactics cause a great many civilian casualties. Army doctors, nurses, and medics give of their spare time and energy freely to care for and treat the sick and wounded of the civilian population. In large cities and in small hamlets, including mountain villages inhabited by the primitive tribesmen known as mountain yards, they meet the urgent need of the people for medical and dental care. Since 1963, United States Army medical personnel have been helping the military units of South Vietnam to organize and operate MEDCAP programs. And millions of villagers have received the benefits of modern medicine for the first time in their lives. Day by day and man by man, this effort is helping to win the people over to the side of the free world. But until peace comes to Vietnam, the American soldier's primary duty is to fight against the terror and tyranny of the communist enemy. This is the place where our adversary's plan of subversion and aggression is being tested. And he uses every overt and covert means at his disposal to undermine the strength and stability of the young republic. If political upheavals in Asia and elsewhere in the world are not to be precipitated by outside force, no matter how cunningly or persistently applied, the American soldier must stand firm in Vietnam. As long as innocent-looking terrain is infested with devastating enemy mines, or fertile rice paddies conceal caches of deadly weapons. As long as humble villages are harassed by guerrilla terrorists and flimsy huts connected with intricate tunnels, the American soldier will continue to deal with the elusive Viet Cong in a hostile environment, meeting ever-present danger with never-flagging courage. He will do so with the firm knowledge that the United States Army medical units work tirelessly to guard his health and will respond instantly at the time of sudden and desperate need. For in Vietnam, as in any other area of conflict, the mission of the Army Medical Service is to conserve the fighting strength of our combat troops, making every effort at any time in any place to win the fight for life.


Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ interview show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. LGBTQ audience. I'd like to introduce Robin Joy, poet, writer, organizer, community organizer, events organizer. They wear a lot of hats. So let's let's start in by talking about and introducing Robin Joy. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. So I noticed from doing some research on you that you're involved in the writers for recovery, or you were? I still am. You still are. Can you talk a little bit about who's in the group? I mean, not names, but what kind of people and and how has the project worked for you? Sure. I've been writing with that group for several years. I got sober in 2016. So I think pretty early on in my sobriety, I connected with Gary Miller. I don't remember how, but I did. And so he facilitates a group, he does like 10 week blocks once a week. And he does, he'll give us a prompt and give us seven minutes to write on that prompt. And we do, depending on the discussion, we do one or two. And depending on how many people are in the group that night, it fluctuates. It moved to zoom during the pandemic, and it stayed that way. So we get people from all over the country, which is kind of fun, sometimes international. So it's a huge mix of people. It's a huge mix of people at different stages in their recovery, recovering from different things, different addictions. And it's just a safe space to write. And you don't even have to write about recovery necessarily. But a lot of times we hit on those topics. So we write for seven minutes, and then we do a read back. And then we talk about what was just read. And then we, you know, once that discussion is over, we do the next one. It's great. It's been a really great, helpful, helpful for me to process a lot of different things. And it's been, it's helped me as like an entry point into being a writer also. And so that's when you kind of started your writing career was like in 2016 when you joined this group? Yeah, more or less, I would say that that's accurate. I also did a workshop with Marjorie Ryerson. She's a local poet. I think that was a few years later. And that really pushed me into writing about like some deeper, deeper stories that I wanted to process. And I was sort of two or three years into my recovery at that point. So I was ready to think more deeply about other things. And so that those two in combination really propelled me. But we could talk more about the writers for recovery too, if we want to stay on that topic. Well, you know, I was thinking when you were saying that Zoom, I mean, the pandemic was awful, as everybody knows it's still here. But it really opened up a world in Zoom, I found, you know, a world in which we may not have discovered so easily, if it hadn't been for the for COVID. Yeah, bring people to book groups to, you know, recovery groups to any kind of group from all over the world. And I think that expansion is really nice. Yeah. Yeah. So I wasn't working at all for the first six months. And I had a lot of time.  My husband has cancer. So we were being really cautious and pretty frightened, because we didn't know a lot about COVID at that time. But just stuck at home, like literally just like at home, unable to do anything, like getting people to drop groceries off for us at our doorstep. And so I found another workshop that's more international. It's set, the facilitator is in, she was in Louisiana at that time, but now she's in California. The poet that I love named Desiree Dalla Diacamo, her last name's challenging. But she facilitates a workshop every week, where we look at a poem, discuss it as a group, do some, some prompts and some, some little mini prompts and then bigger prompts, and then we write for however much time we might have like 20 minutes and then do a read back. And I write some great poems and I hear some incredible poems from that. So and I'm still doing that. So that's been three or three years, right? How long have we been in the pandemic? I don't even know, it's never ending, but 20, March of 2020, I believe. Yeah. So I've been doing that all along. And that's really that, that I think has shaped my voice a lot more as far as being a writer and, and helped me become better with my handle on language and how to write poetry and how to read it. And did you, do you find that you're writing to a particular audience, like people in recovery, or did it start that way and then expand into different kinds of ways of telling your story, but also reaching an audience? Yeah, that's interesting. Because I think a lot about who I'm writing for, because it definitely is I'm writing for myself to think from, to get perspective on things. I write from personal experience and personal stories, for the most part. Sometimes I write into nature and more existential things. But I write a lot about just stories, things that I've been through or experienced. And and then as I start publishing here and there, I think about what happens to that poem once it's out and who's reading it and if it changes as far as what it's about and who it's for at that point. I think a lot of, not a lot, but I think some of what I write about, it is recovery, a lot of it. But I also write about, you know, relationship circles I've been through, whether that be with my family or with primary relationships, mostly past some current chronic illness, mental illness, sexual identity, traumas I've been through, just all sorts of stuff. And I think I think a lot of that's relatable to a lot of different people. And I think it's also important to give voice to a lot of those things, because not everybody feels comfortable talking about it, but they might really like reading about it to feel less alone in those struggles. Absolutely. And, you know, do you feel like you're, I know you mentioned the woman writer in Louisiana, but are there people that have really touched you as writers or poets that really spoke to your condition, as Quakers would say. So, you know, for me, excuse me, when I was young, it was Sylvia Plath. I thought, oh my God, you know, and it's kind of transitioned over time. And I don't know, is that true for you too? Yeah. Yeah, I really liked Sylvia Plath and a little Emily Dickinson and just those, those traditional writers that we stumble upon when we were younger, Mary Oliver and just others like lovely poets. And then I really gotten into more modern poets in the last few years, Desiree being one of them, the facilitator of undercurrent that weekly workshop. Jeffrey McDaniels is another writer that I really love. He's written four or five books that I have. Bianca Stone is a writer that's more local. There's a musician, Kristin Hirsch, who she's not a poet per se, but she writes lyrics, which are poetry in themselves. And just the way she writes really gave me permission to write more the way words sound, more than what they mean. There is an underlying meaning, but I just, I write, I let myself, I allow myself to write phrases that are more metaphorical and that sounds good in my mouth and in my ears more than that makes sense immediately. Then that's sort of the style that she writes in that I really love. And do you have a writing schedule? Do you get up in the morning and say, oh, I'm ready to write or do you just go when you're inspired? Or how does that work for you? I, well, I briefly did the morning pages exercise. It didn't last too, I think I did it for like six months and it was great, but I have a hard time disciplining myself to do something like that. So that's when you get up and you write like three pages without thinking just whatever's on your mind, just stream of consciousness and just build three pages. And that's it. And it was, it was good. It was helpful and it would help me like get ready for the day. And then sometimes I'd have like these little nuggets of good things that I could use in writing later, but I'm not doing that anymore. I don't really have a schedule. I do have a schedule of workshops. So I do writers for recovery when that's in session and Gary does those quite frequently. So there's not really huge gaps of time. So I am doing that more or less once a week. And then Desiree does hers every Friday. So so I'm doing at least one workshop if not two. And sometimes I take on another one if there's time. So sometimes up to three workshops a week and I always get something out of each one, if not more than one poem. So I would say minimum of one to three poems a week are coming, coming out of me. And then sometimes inspiration. So and in, and you also work. I do. I work full time. And what do you do there? I work in the community relations department. I've been there nearly 20 years, which is insane for me to think about. I, I primarily right now, not primarily, well, yeah, primarily right now I'm doing the social media. So I do like all of our Instagram, Facebook and right now Twitter, but I'm not sure how much longer we're going to stay there. But I've really focused this year on making that more educational. So looking at things like observances and holidays around the world and a different religions and educating about that and different foods and cultures and just like making it more, more of a story and less of a sales pitch. But also integrating like what's, what's for sale, what's good, what's healthy that were that we have in the store to bring people in also. But that's my main focus, because we're not really doing events. And we haven't for since the pandemic hit. And that was one of my, that was one of the things that I was part of before, like workshops and community events and our annual meeting and all those things that are no longer happening in person. So we're working to get some of that back, at least hybrid, if not in person completely. So I think my job will shift a little bit at that point. But it's community relations. So things like where our donations get allocated and reaching out to get people discounts when there's food insecurity and that sort of thing. That's great. And they used to do concerts. Didn't they do it this year? Like concerts on the green or? Yeah, the brown bag lunch series. We did do that this year. So we sponsor that it's through Montpellier live. So we partner with Montpellier live quite a bit. They'll do events and we'll sponsor it. And so we'll push some advertising and we'll give them some funds to make sure that they get underway. And they do. Yeah, they do an incredible amount of work in our city. You know, they do so many different different kinds of community events and things that people love. So we like supporting them. And where are you from Robin originally, Vermont or? Yeah, I grew up in Barrie, so I'm local. I lived in Burlington for a while. I went to college at UVM. I lived very briefly in Arizona for like this little snippet, not even a year. But mostly I've lived in Vermont. I've been in Montpellier for several like, gosh, when did I come back here? Probably in my 20s. So I've probably been here nearly 30 years, if not definitely 20. Yeah. And in addition to all your work, you do community organizing and I know you're doing poetry series at the front art gallery on very street. Yeah, so that's, I just started that I just launched that in November. Um, myself in Tucson, who's a local poet, read for the first one. And then we just did one or no October, sorry, excuse me. And then in November, I had Jeff Hewitt and Samantha Colbert. And then this month is you, which is exciting. And another poet named rain, this and Riley. So I've just been, I really wanted to have a platform for local poets to be heard and not necessarily poets that we see at events often, but poets that we may necessarily not have heard of before that want to show their work and that want to get out into the, into the community. Myself included. There's so many, there's so many. And I want to read my stuff out too.  And I'm pretty introverted and shy and being sober. It's, I don't go out and meet people very much. So this felt like a good way for all of us. Because I know a lot of shy poets. I know there are a lot of shy poets. We don't know each other because we're shy. So this would be a helpful thing for us to network. So I've just been asking people that I know that are writers and then finding, finding new ones along the way, asking them if they know someone that they think that they would like to read in. It's growing organically on its own and I'm scheduled through May right now. And I've just sort of put a stop on that because I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. But I think I think it'll keep going. I don't, I don't see it ending or fizzling out. I think people are hungry for it. So. And that was, you know, what I wanted to do too with the LGBTQ roots. You know, because we're all out there sort of floating around and don't really have a lot of contact with each other. And it's really good to know that that people are out there. And there are people who will listen. So I think all around we should just have poetry parties constantly. Definitely. Yeah, I love, I love that you were organizing too. And just more of that. Let's just keep doing it so we can all go to poetry readings all the time. Especially in the winter when it's like, well, we all know that. But so would you mind reading us a few poems and yeah, I could do that. Great. I picked out a few. This one is just a couple weeks old. I wrote this in the Friday, the undercurrent workshop with Desiree. It's after a poem read by Maggie Smith. And it's called what lives there. My throat is full of blackberry bushes coughed up from the childhood trapped inside plural tissue. My heart is a collapsing house of cards balancing on your chest. My legs are hot snakes winding through the dead battery of my emotional junkyard. My pelvis is a warehouse union on strike. My family crawls in the spaces between my teeth. My melancholy baby sleeps in the butter dish. My fingers tap the temple of the Holy Ghost. My anger crawls across my tongue and swings from my uvula. My wanting never stops wanting, even in the year of dislocations, even in the moment the truth demanded we play by its rules, my wanting never stops wanting. Bravo. Good job. Thank you. And you have another you'd like to read? Sure. I was having trouble choosing this morning, but... I know you never know what spirit's going to move you, right? Right. How do we curate our writing? I don't know. I'm going to do this one. It's called Untitled Fairy Tale. The beans sprouted from their hands when I emerged from fluids and eggs, growing into a stalk I was clinging to until something better emerged from my scalp. And I let down my hair from a top window, but the sting of the feet digging into the split ends was too much. And so I grew taller with it while bees buzzed out rhythms and my hips shook my legs open. And what did I have to say for myself except that the one that said this one makes you small had never worked the way I wanted? So was it really my fault that the rabbit lived in such an old tree? And when the sky really did feel like it was falling, no one believed it because my wolf had already cried so much it drowned all the sympathy. But then the hunters only said they cut out my heart because they were hungry for a chest to pin the shame on. Hey, that's great. Thank you. That's great. I love... I was trying to catch all the references, I'm sure I missed a bunch, but that sounds like it was really fun to write, too. Yeah. Yeah. And I like the wolf, but you know anyway I'd have to see it more closely, but it's great. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anything you would like the audience to know before we leave? I don't know, do you? We have to tell people to remember to go to the reading. And what is that? Absolutely. The reading this month is on December 15th at the front. It's at 6 30. We generally go... I say it's till eight just to give us some wiggle room. Each reader reads for half an hour. So it's probably a little over an hour with like in between. The front is on Berry Street. Right. It's like on Berry in Maine, right? Like sort of on that one. Yeah, it's next to the laundromat. Yeah, near the tattoo shop. Yeah, it's kind of following that. And do you have anything else? Like are you reading anywhere soon or should people...? I'm going to be reading through the Poetry Society of Vermont. They are celebrating, or we, I guess, because I'm part of it, are celebrating the 75th anniversary. So they've been doing readings around the states. And the Montpelier one is on January 23rd. So it's, I guess it is getting closer because we are in December, aren't we? And it's at Kellogg Hubbard Street. And I think that's probably at six or seven. I can't remember the time, but there will be advertising around that. But keep your date book open for January 23rd at the library. All right. And then it'll be Poetry Month. Oh yeah, in April. So there'll be all sorts of stuff happening then. Well, thank you so much, Robin, for coming. It was great talking to you. And I'll see you next week or two weeks. Looking forward to you. Me too. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye. So the legislative session, it's about to start. Might they be doing something that might be of interest to Vermont's LGBTQ plus community members? Well, joining us tonight to talk about just those kinds of issues are Carl Andrews and Brett Hubbard, who have a very interesting proposal of what it is our legislature should be doing this session. So welcome to all things LGBTQ. Thank you for having us. So I want to start with the first time I met you. You told me that you were escapees from Pennsylvania. So could you talk with us a little bit about how you happened to come to Vermont? What it was in Pennsylvania that just didn't feel like home to you and what there was about Vermont that you thought I'm willing to give that a try? Sure. Well, I grew up in Pennsylvania. So we were living near where I grew up. And interestingly, it's not the same place I grew up. So the attachment didn't feel like it was there. But at the same time, after the 2020 election, moms for liberty showed up at the front door to question our vote, which freaked us out a little bit. January 6th happened and very quickly we realized how many Pennsylvanians who lived not that far away were involved in that. And interestingly, you drive down the Pennsylvania turnpike and the FBI had these big signs up on the billboards. If you know anyone, please turn them in. It felt really strange. It was also a place where in the town where we lived, everything seemed fine, but you didn't have to go too far. And it was like being in a totally different place. And when we waited in line to vote in person, we could easily realize that that could become a place where voter intimidation might happen. So start putting all this together and realizing that the legislature, surprisingly, just the house in Pennsylvania just flipped to Democratic control, surprised the heck out of me. Never would have expected that to happen. But Maastriana still got 44% of the vote in Pennsylvania. So put all that together. It just, the question we asked ourselves is, will the state have our back if things go to hell?  And I never felt that way in Pennsylvania. And I sure as heck feel that way here in Vermont. I've only been here a short period of time. So where were you originally from? I'm from Washington state originally. Okay, you're a little ways from home then. I came out to the East Coast, you know, just to see the world and go to school out here. And then as luck and fate would have it, I met this guy and ended up staying here and falling in love. Yeah, so here I am. And coincidentally, falling in love and getting married because we could finally imagine how those things can happen. Okay, so Vermont is not the only state that has tried to work in a very, as we say, you know, inclusive, equitable environment. What made you think Vermont out of all of your options? The New York Times article. Go ahead. Well, I'll tell you, there's a really interesting set of data that is available on the New York Times website. And you can get precinct level data of how people voted in 2016 and in 2020. I mean granular precinct level down to the brass tacks. And when we looked at Vermont, I mean, it was just crazy. It was a color that we really liked, you know, that looked good on us. And by very large margins, we had lived in precincts in Pennsylvania that were certainly light blue, but we're not trending in the right direction. And, you know, we've never lived in a place that was, I think, I think the precinct that we're moving to here in the next couple of weeks is one of the bluest precincts in all of Vermont. And that makes me very, very happy. I was going to say, you don't have to go to the New York Times website for Vermont.  Reporting on, you know, this most recent election, they could tell you how the vote of the statewide went in each town, including the spoiled ballots and the blank ballots. Okay, but you arrived here at Vermont and, you know, I can see that you haven't even bothered to get on that yet, but that's okay. You immediately said, well, there's something that we think we'd like to do. It wasn't immediate. So, so we got here in April of 2022. And it really, it was after the Dobs decision came down. And that had been leaked previously. So it wasn't the Dobs decision itself. But it was Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion. And I couldn't help but read it. And it freaked me out. And I couldn't sleep. So at four o'clock in the morning, after having read Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion, I started writing emails to our state legislators in Chittenden County. And I think I sent them off at four in the morning, but I know they weren't checking their email at four in the morning. But you might be, you might be surprised. I, who knows, who knows? But some were really responsive, not, not quite that responsive. But, but what I suggested was I sort of laid it out and said, look, Clarence Thomas had said, these decisions are at risk. And why not? Or could we discuss the possibility of constitutional amendments or a constitutional amendment to address some of these things that are going to most likely change at the federal level when particularly Obergefell, if it's overturned. And that was our primary focus at that time was purely marriage equality. And so we, well, and if Lawrence v. Texas is overturned, it's also, you know, marital intimacy was, is that issue? So that really got us thinking about, well, what about us? Frankly, it was, it was pretty selfish. And I think it was because I got afraid at the time. Since then, I've gotten mad, but it started out, I was pretty afraid at the time when we suggested it. So we wrote to a number of legislators, met with a few of them. Initially, Jessica Brumstead and Keisha Ram, both from Shelburne, which is where we're moving to. And then Keisha introduced us to Tiff Blumley. So we started to meet people. And it went from, well, maybe not just marriage equality. Why don't we start thinking about something that is more inclusive? And so the conversation then led into a non-discrimination type amendment. And then we learned that Ginny Lyons had put in a proposal for a non-discrimination amendment back in, would that have been 2019, 2018, somewhere in there, which didn't proceed? So we then started thinking, okay, there might be something here. And then particularly Keisha and Tiff started pulling together a group of people and said, you need to talk to this person. You need to talk to this person. Let's get everybody together. And we got together at Tiff's house in September and had a whole great group of people there and talked about some of the options. And then at the same time, well, not at the same time, since then Nevada, which was the only state that had a marriage equality amendment in its constitution passed a non-discrimination amendment in its constitution. So we've got this great model, regardless of how we go. I want to back you up just a little bit, because I want people who are watching to really understand the evolution and the benefits of this. I mean, Vermont has, is always ranked in the top five for LGBTQ plus inclusion protections, et cetera. So we have some very strong statutes that say, we should be protected, we should be included. You can't just overlook us. If we have those type of statutory protections in place, why a constitutional amendment? What will that do either in addition to or more than our statutes? So when you look at, well, all we need to do first is look at prop five, which is now article 22 in the constitution. We already had state protection that covered many of the elements in reproductive liberty. Now we have it in our constitution. It's a right that the state says regardless, this is, you know, reproductive liberty is a right to all people in the state of Vermont. So currently, if we were to lose federal marriage protection, and that could happen if a Berger fell is overturned, if the respect for Marriage Act didn't pass, or if it gets over, or if it gets reversed, which is entirely possible, none of us expected dobs, frankly, way back when. The state would still have its legislative protections. But to put it into the constitution is first a statement that, hey, the state has our back and is committed to it. It is unlikely to be overturned. Legislatively, we only have to overturn something in one session. As long as we have House Senate and Governor approve it, a constitutional amendment takes a lot longer to change back. So if we think this is what we believe and what the state believes in, then let's go through that process. And then if we change our minds, it's going to take a lot longer than one legislative session to get rid of those protections. And it would take a statewide vote. And it would take a statewide vote. So it's more so than just a hostile administration. Exactly. Exactly. So it gives us protections for, well, just like Respect for Marriage does, not only for any marriage between two adults, regardless. And that includes not only sexual orientation, but also race. And we've talked to some folks here who are in interracial marriages who worry about that. And frankly, that's not something I ever thought about until I started talking to people in interracial marriages who said, yeah, I'm a little concerned. So those are protections that we think if a virgin fell were overturned, what would we do? Contraception is something that could be overturned, the right to contraception at the federal level, but that's covered in marriage equality. You know, so the marriage equality amendment did a lot to forestall the effects of jobs. What we're looking at is how do we do the rest? So when you say how to do the rest, are you looking beyond just sexual orientation, gender identity? Because I remember that Virginia Line's Proposition 3 also included disability. So it looked as though Senator Lines had looked at what were the non-discrimination statutes, what were the protected classes that had been created and ensured that they were elevated to the constitutional level. Are you looking at that's a similar type of analysis and possible inclusion? I think so because really we have sort of two options right now. And one is to go either only for marriage equality, which would only focus on marriage and would cover any type of marriage between two adults. Or, and this I think might be a little more likely, is to do something that would put non-discrimination and equal protection into the Vermont Constitution. And the current list that we are working with is the Nevada List, which includes race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry, and national origin. So that's a starting point. And that sounds very similar to the language that Vermont has already been using. Have you have you found much difference? Okay, you said one thing that I want to ask you about gender identity or expression. Or expression is not what Vermont has traditionally used. What was seen as being the need to include it when Nevada was doing it? Or what do you see as being the need to include it here? So that's a really good question. And this is where where I think I could use a lot of help from the community to understand what the implications of that are, you know, not having, you know, having a male gender identity. I don't necessarily understand what's at stake if we don't protect gender expression along with gender identity. So this is where hearing from the community to understand what would be at stake if we didn't include it is really important because that's an area that I can't speak to, not having that experience. So that's where I need some help in order to be able to speak to everyone as to why it's important to include it. And again, and we started with Nevada, because it seems to be the most inclusive that is there. And when we start talking about individual protections, that's where we would need to work with the people to whom that matters who are impacted by that to help us understand exactly what's at stake. So moving along with that train of thought, what have you already done to reach out to the community, get community input, or what are you envisioning in as far as reaching out and ensuring that you're hearing all of the voices that we truly need to hear from? Meetings, lunches, breakfast, coffees, get-togethers, chats, texting. No, I mean, there's a lot of different ways, almost too many, it makes your head swim. But certainly my involvement in Out in the 802 and talking to some of the folks that belong to Out in the 802, and we've certainly started networking with Dana in outright Vermont and want to have more conversations there. And the Pride Center and folks involved, getting folks to the Pride Center involved, there's just, and you, I mean, there's just so many different resources and folks that we want to reach out to and hear from and have conversations with. And we're trying to reach out to the Rutland folks. We're trying to reach out to the folks in Rutland and throughout the state, frankly, to really tell them what we're thinking about doing, understand where the need is, hopefully drum up some support, but also be able to use this as an opportunity for people to get involved as well so that, for example, just with gender identity and gender expression, to have people represent themselves through this vehicle so that we're able to do it. I was reminded by Jessica the other day that if this were to be brought to the Senate, Bill, there would have to be hearings. And if there are hearings, we would need the people who are affected by this to speak. That would be the best way to go because I can't speak for anybody but myself as a gay man married to another man and what this means to me. So we would want people in every other area to be able to speak to the legislature, the Senate in particular, about what it would mean for them. So we need to frankly build allies and talk to people and understand and say we only represent one part of this bill or this amendment and we need to do it together. And I think some of that, oh just really quick, something that's really important that I'd like to throw in there is that it's not just Chittenden County. I mean it's including some folks. We've had some really fun times out in Barrie at the Rainbow Bridge Coalition out there and meeting and networking with folks out there. It's not a big state but sometimes it's a really big state but we're trying to get out there and meet folks and connect with folks that are not just in Chittenden County because it's important. This is a statewide activity. It's not just a Chittenden County activity. Okay, you were going in exactly the direction that I was about to ask you about which is, you know, anyone who is watching this or sort of hears this rumor, if they're part of an organization, if they're part of the social network, if they're a group of friends, they should reach out to you and say, please come talk to us. So, and I understand that you've also reached out to out in the open in Brattleboro to see, you know, what they might be interested in. So as people are watching this interview and thinking about it, they should also be thinking in terms of, well, what else should we be protecting?  But there we go. So we will make sure that contact information is put up and we're going to be checking back in you periodically saying, okay, so what's happening? You know, how can people get involved? And if there are public meetings that are being scheduled, please let us know because we will make sure that people know about them. And with that, thank you for spending this time with us. Thank you for deciding that you want to come to Vermont. And thank you for deciding you wanted to do more than just have a nice front. No. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.


Right, so this is the virtualization and containerization boff. It's up to you what you want to talk about. We at HPE, we are interested in a bit of both. We used to run a public cloud, we don't anymore. So there was a bit of virtualization there. Yeah, part of my day job is helping out support for the virtualization team. The team that supports the private cloud product. We turn our public cloud into a private cloud. We're also just starting getting serious about containerization. It's pretty popular. A lot of our customers are asking a lot about Docker and are doing things already with Docker. And we are starting to look at that more seriously. So what's everyone else doing with Docker and or virtualization? Is there more interesting virtualization or containers? Containers. Containers, anyone else for containers? But not Docker. But not Docker, that might be hard. Yes, I would say a little bit about containerization, but avoid passwords which are just here everywhere. What's good and what's not so good and not... Oh yes, another 50 passwords where I can use my Bingo card. Okay, no jargon. So I've actually got a follow-up question to your talk this morning and maybe this is a starting point for this conversation. One of the questions I am wondering about in the context of containerization is how to handle security updates. And it sounds like there's no good solution in the community so far, in particular when it comes to tooling. I guess the first step of the answer is to provide or use good build tools that actually integrate into building containers and then use CD to actually push out security updates in a timely fashion. But I think if we as Debian kind of provide support for containers by default then this should be a question that should be answered and we should have a solution for users away level. What do you mean by containers by default? Just a few more words about that. Basically what you mentioned this morning that Debian kind of does not lack behind when it comes to containers and provides some sort of support for containers. Okay. It's something I've been looking at for a bit because I unfortunately have to maintain a bit of Docker-based infrastructure unfortunately. And basically the main issue is that you cannot really pass a Docker file and figure out what is installed in that. So I've been looking at using all the tools where I can literally declare a manifest thing. Okay. These are my app sources. These are the packages I want installed. Those are my app pins. And basically based on that take a basically get at the end of the build a list of installed packages and versions and look at basically be able to just pass the manifest, pass that list and check if the thing needs to be rebuilt after the repository changes.  And that's pretty much non-passable in practice. I guess just mostly rephrasing what you just said. I guess like inspection and some way to inventorize what you have is probably an important first step to make this work or it needs to be part of the tooling that is available to users such that they can integrate that into their infrastructure. So it sounds like there's quite a bit of overlap between this and the cloud images. I think it's a step towards maturity when you use Docker for a while and then suddenly realize you can't really download random stuff off the internet and put it into production. You need to, okay, right when you do CI, CD system, build a base image, how do we do security updates? So I think everyone goes through that. After the initial excitement is worn off. So since you are mentioning that we need CI, continuous integration, continuous deployment and so on, let's avoid a bit of a crony overload. Something I haven't seen many people working on is also how do I fetch updates for my containers securely. Docker has been working with Notary on container signing but it's kind of not really convincing right now. So for people who don't know Notary, they're using more or less a specification called the Update Framework to basically sign container updates. The main issue is that they basically consider every different Docker image as a different repository and it's basically at that point they say, okay, the first time you download the Docker image, you are going to trust that you get the right keys and after that also updates are signed. It's kind of as if I told you, okay, every time you install a new package, you can get something wrong, but if you got it right the first time, I'm going to guarantee that all your upgrades after that are going to be right. And it's kind of really not what you would expect because Upt gives you a much higher level of security than that.  And yes, there is like currently beyond what Notary does, I haven't seen anything going on with container signing, which is fairly problematic in some ways. So has anyone here done anything with regards to actually securely deploying container updates and so on? Crickets. Did the ISC do something? No, it seems not. I believe Rocket have some... I don't know. You know, I believe Rocket do some secure, but I haven't looked into it too deeply, but they seem to have considered the issue of security a bit more seriously and upfront than Docker has. That seems to me anyway. Perhaps that's something we can look into. It's fine. So Sam Harbin, Docker is the only container system... Well, okay, Docker is one of the container systems I haven't looked at. I've kind of looked at many of the others. The kernel list is all the same technology, right? So the thing I'm running into is trying to actually deploy containers that I think might possibly be secure, so really trying to lock down the capability bounding set. And I've found that particularly if I'm doing a container on top of a real OS, and I apologize, you may just say, oh Sam, I cover this and I talk this morning, you were not there, so you lose. But particularly SystemD really wants a lot of capabilities in a guest. It particularly seems to really want CapAdmin, for example, where it gets very grumpy about its inability to mount SysFS, even if you've tried to provide it a reasonable SysFS and a secret path S and that sort of thing, it kind of insists on managing that himself. Are there techniques that actually work effectively for getting a container running with a really restricted bounding set and actually pretty locked down? Does anyone have any thoughts on that? SystemD? Yeah, here it is. So don't really have a good answer for running SystemD in containers. I pretty much have the same problem. However, I mean, if you don't mind starting directly your daemon either through the init.descript or through basically by calling it yourself, you can pretty much reduce enormously the capabilities you need, but on the other hand, it means that your container build is much more custom and you cannot just say it's Debian with a bunch of services. And yeah, Yuck, his right reaction, I guess. Why given that, do people prefer containers to... Well, I guess there are situations where you don't care about security, okay, fine. About the init system thing, it seems almost an article of faith by Docker that you do not run an init system, you just run a single daemon in your container. A lot of people disagree with that. It's the subject of a lot of emails, whether that's a good idea or not, and I mean, yeah. But, okay, fine. So let's just say I wanted to do that. So what happens when three years from now, my daemon depends on SystemD services. It depends on socket activation. It depends on being able to get C-group manipulation for its sub-children, that sort of thing. It depends on being able to create scopes. I mean, that's all great for that one daemon today, but what happens as we look at the forward evolution of our technologies? Yeah, I think it's a nice idea running exactly one daemon, but I don't think it's practical for a lot of cases. But it's not even about running... Oh, sorry. I misunderstood you, but as far as I understood, it's not even about running many daemons or one daemon, but also about the one daemon we want to run that would at some point start to rely on actually having SystemD functionality. And it's true that some software is actually starting to do that now. So it seems we kind of have both sides being able to just say, oh, yeah, we can just install a bunch of daemon packages in the container and configure them. And on the other hand, being able to say, if we do that, if we can support that, then we also know we will be able to support packages or daemons in 3, 5 years. I was really having a better answer. That's a long answer. My own? So I guess the question is, if we assume that in a couple of years from now we need all these capabilities, why do we assume that they have to be provided from within the container? The container management thing or container technology could also provide those same features to us. Sure. So if the container runtime provides us something, SystemD like, you know, that we can run things that people would be able to use. Well, the computer, or the microphone, would be better. Oh, yeah, sorry. Well, if the container management thing could provide those features, that would probably work. I guess, I mean, the question is how to implement that. It could be that the functionality would be duplicated, which would obviously be bad. It could be that it's some sort of pass-through mode. It could be that SystemD just knows how to work with the container and something that SystemD from outside the container would provide and then this is passed through or whatever. I mean, I guess that's like an open technical question because we don't know what the future will bring and depending on what the future will bring, this will have to be taken into account, right? Like, going back a bit to the start of that conversation, I'm actually interested why you would want to have like a sort of full operating system in the container. That's something I never quite understood. I guess the only reason that I could see is that it makes some things easier, but that sounds like just something that you would want early doing deployment or experimentation. Okay, so first of all, I will note that it sounds, you know, you talk about having the container management system to provide those facilities. You need to be very careful that you didn't just widen your security attack surface because if I'm willing to widen my security attack surface, I can give the container CAP admin or whatever else it needs and, you know, it'll work today. So there are two reasons why I kind of want those services in the container. First of all, I would like to use containers as a lightweight virtualization instead of running VMs. For reasonably trusted services, you know, I would like to be able to... Containers provide better sharing of a file system and memory resources than VMs do. I like to take advantage of that and still get security isolation between services. But long-term, I mean, the argument, basically, as my daemons, for example, let's say that my web server or some other service starts using socket activations, or services start wanting to be able to run sub-services in C groups, like say my web server forks off some application services and wants to run them in its own C group. And I want to handle the C group management the same inside the container as I do outside the container. Then I'm going to want to use something that looks a lot like systemDscopes. Thanks, Sam. Yeah, I can see a use cases for both those scenarios, one where there's a very hard separation between the guest container and the host, and another one where, you know, there's some... The boundary's a bit more porous and some systemD bits and pieces can get through. In fact, if you start doing that, why would you use Docker at all? Can't you have all the features of Docker kind of integrated into systemD as part of the operating system in general rather than relying on Docker to provide everything? Well, yeah, okay, yeah. No, it's a nice example of... I mean, it's very concrete, so I was using it as an example. Yeah. I mean, I'm more looking at... I'm more looking at systemD's container support and or LXC. They seem to have more knobs that I can tune that are security-related. Okay, yeah, good point. I'll put that down. From the ISE, is that containers widen your attack surface to begin with because you share the kernel with the host, and so you would need to patch your container manager if you are actually worried about that? As I said, from the ISE, not from me. Yeah, that seems to be what people are doing. It's just running... For security reasons, just running Docker inside of VM, which seems to defeat the purpose of the whole... Wait, what? Container inside of VM? Sorry, running Docker inside of VM and then running containers inside Docker to avoid the security, which it seems a bit silly, but it's... I guess that's where... That's where clear containers come in, where we're trying to use some of the hardware isolation features of virtualization to provide more security for containers without having to do a full hardware virtualization. So, I've been looking during DevCon that's a sandbox that is used by Sandstorm, which is... So, I mean, Sandstorm doesn't claim to be doing containers. This is a framework for running web applications in isolation and blah, but it turns out internally, they are doing very tiny containers, and basically they have... At least they have pretty strong security claims, and you can talk to Ashish about that. Yeah, and basically, like, for instance, they did a survey of all kernel vulnerabilities over the last 18 months, and they kind of concluded that 95% of those were completely not relevant inside their sandbox, because they were using syscalls that were forbidden using sepcom, or that they were using the sysfs, which was not mounted and so on. The question is basically, or how is it to get things running inside that sandbox? It seems it's not too hard for the applications that have actually packaged. I talk to them, but it's not completely obvious whether we can reasonably expect people to use that kind of very strong sandbox for general purpose container. I cannot speak English anymore. For general purpose containers, dammit. Yeah, I think that's another step on the journey to maturity after you realize that you need to build your own containers that perhaps Docker doesn't provide... Docker's too restrictive in terms of what it does and security in other areas, and it's easier to step outside Docker for a bit and start implementing the containers with the low-level tools. Sam, we have to provide the tooling. So I will repeat that with Mike. Sam, if we are stepping out of the Docker ecosystem, we have to provide Debian users with the tooling to run containers safely. And I mean, it probably won't happen for stretch, given no closer freeze is, but... There's been a lot of work that's been gone into LXC for Debian. And it's, you know, for example, there seems to be a reasonable second policy. They do a reasonably good job of setting up the device controller C group. You do need to have a fair bit in your bounding set for most OSes. Although interestingly, I will also note LXC is the really awesome mode that I can't ever get to work, but it seems like it would be great if it did, where you actually don't even run the container as root. You have no capabilities. I don't quite understand how that's supposed to work with any modern distro, because, again, because you get screwed by system B. But it seems like that worked for someone once in a major early cool way. You are rapidly running out of my... getting out of my depth here in system D. There are any comments from this side of the room? I don't think... I don't think everyone's been on the other side. Oh, up the back. LXC has non-root with system D, but maybe I'm not aware of something. Oh, please tell me how. It's... I don't know. Talk to me later and then we can discuss it. It seems to be working. Okay, so one possible solution I can think of is running actually a system D user session as a regular user inside the restricted container, but that won't get you far if you need to do fancy things with a kernel, probably. So, since I have the mic and there seems to be nobody else interested, one of the things I really don't like about Docker is that it pushes forward towards culture of bundling everything. So, containers is not a take it or leave it technology. It has different levels. I mean, you have C groups and then you have name spaces and you can pick the ones that fit your needs to actually do what you want. And in that respect, system D is doing a lot better. I mean, I would really like to see services in Debian coming with namespace isolation turned on by default. If they don't need network support then set private network to yes, for example. So, this is not containers in the sense that we treat it in this both, I guess, but it's still a step forward to get people accustomed to the fact that there is no single network namespace in your system. There is no single file system namespace in your system. So, it's a kind of, let's say, a solution in between. So, yeah. If your degree is valuable, I've actually tried to get some, the maintenance of some packages I use to accept patches that do that kind of thing. Problem is that quite a few people seem to not be too fond of the idea of having a service that behaves differently when it's running under system D or not. Or even having anything at all to do with system D, which makes me quite sad in the end because, I mean, we decided to ship system D, so now it's, well, it's kind of difficult to see people just pretending that this thing never happened, but on the other hand, those are system D-specific features to some extent, but they are also, I think, as you mentioned, they are extremely valuable in term of what you can do for security for people who might not be aware of those yet. Basically, you can do things such as making the entire file system read-only or giving the restricting, sorry, the application's access to network or to road devices or and so on and so forth or prevent it from accessing some specific directories like Valog. Yeah, basically, many services we ship today could probably ship with read-only directories and read-write directories, some subset of this, but I think a big part of the problem is also social. It's convincing all the DDs to care about this. This might be an area where we had a roadmap buff this morning. This might be an area where getting that sort of thing onto the Debian roadmap is a good idea. I will notice a maintainer who has done some of that It does generate more bugs for you. It's people whine that when they change their configuration they didn't update the system de-configuration and it doesn't work anymore. Yes, that's true. There is also some work to be done also educating the users about what this entails. I agree to some extent that it's bad to kind of break user expectations but the user expectations also include my system BCQ. It seems to me there's a move towards sandboxing... Sorry. I just said sorry. Oh, okay. No, I was trying to say that there seems to be a move to sandboxing system services more. I know that Mac OS is... I mean, all the app store apps are run inside a sandbox and I think they're trying to roll that out to other system services. Does anyone know if Red Hat or Ubuntu or other distros are sandboxing their internal services? Yes, so Debian kind of is behind the world in this regard. Ubuntu uses app armor by default and Red Hat has put a lot of effort at least for enterprise Linux behind SE Linux and does a bunch of stuff with that. And I do know a lot of people who deploy production Red Hat systems with SE Linux in enforcing mode. So, yeah, we're kind of behind on that front. Yeah, I guess there's a bit of overlap between the security policy tools and putting things in containers. Okay, we're just about exhausted talking about Docker or not Docker. So, thanks.  I think nobody well we are currently... but what do we expect to be happening next? So, I believe things that in five years we say, oh, yeah, everybody use Docker and nothing else anymore? Or do we say, look back in five years and say, well, yeah, Docker was like CVS, it was great when it invented but not so good anymore now. Yeah, basically, what do we expect that might be happening? Several billion testing things for me. It's a totally open question, of course. I like the direction system D is going in terms of, yeah, sandboxing services without running Docker. So, more integration of containers, LXC inside the system itself rather than outsourcing that to another app like Docker. That's what I think is going to happen anyway. So, something I wanted to mention since it's let us somewhat on topic, most of the container-related tools have written in Go except for basically SystemDN, Spawn, and LXC as far as I'm aware. And currently we have no good story about shipping security updates for Go packages. It's simple. Currently in JCS there is no Go packages. If I'm not mistaken. But for stretch, for instance, we need to have this thing solved and the main issues that Go basically uses static linking. There is some experimental dynamic linking but basically nobody uses it like for real and I doubt we want to try to get this in the archive like half a year before freeze. So, basically that's a big issue for stretch because if we cannot solve the problem of how we ship or how we handle security updates for Go packages it means we will have no Go packages which means we will not have Docker, we will not have Rocket, we will not have any of the other fancy container tools except for SystemDN, Spawn, and LXC. And yeah, it's I guess more call for help slash contribution. Yeah, but even then we currently we don't have the tooling to once we have done one library update then update all the packages that ship binaries and transitively depend on them. Yeah. I'm not sure, yeah, I'm not sure anyone has tested the experimental dynamic linking stuff on all platforms. I think there's some horrible bugs hiding in there. So, what you describe about Go is essentially the same problem Haskell has because it also does some static linking and as far as I know the Haskell team has some tools in place that schedule bin and amuse for packages after a library has been updated. So, it seems as common ground there and there could be let's say language agnostic solution to some extent. So Haskell and Go does the same, I think Go lang, DH Go lang does the same uses virtual provides basically with a hash what actually this library version was when it was built. So this might be changing tack in some ways just from a lot of this is going over my head. So maybe coming from a sort of new perspective. Docker is very easy to use and sort of containers at least from my perspective took off with Docker. You know, just Docker make and you know, if you go kind of stuff you have your Docker file and you know, we run Docker in production with Kubernetes and it's very easy to use and it's much easier not to mess up as badly as you can mess up vagrants and getting into the mindset of using machines that you can kill and bring up again and the mindset of containers it's very easy for someone like me to use. So I think that needs to be thought about that it's kind of taking over the world from that angle more than a security you know, having everything right because Alexi is quite hard to use as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I have to admit I've never managed to get Alexi working by hand myself and Docker is way, way easier. Yeah, it's kind of two use cases. It sounds like the development versus production stuff. But yeah, I use Docker all the time for just messing around too and I'm not too concerned about security in that encasement. Yeah, you too. Hmm, which one, Sam, sorry? No, obviously the other one. Oh, sorry. See it true at all right, okay. No, I see it true. That's true. I'm going to get that working anyway. Okay, well, if there aren't any more things to say, thank you for coming everyone and you can have a 10 minute early mark perhaps. So, thanks.


Ladies and gentlemen, now while the names have already been announced, I think this is just the appropriate moment when I should be inviting right here on stage our jury chair, Sri Sunil Arora, former election commissioner of India and former secretary, ministry of information and broadcasting government of India to please join us on stage and say a few words amongst everyone putting their hands together of course. I got a call from Mansi from this organization and said that this is the planning. I was in Hyderabad, our daughter lives there and we go there as much as we can to be with our grandchildren. Then she suggested that we'll have a kind of a zoom meeting and we'll have all the jury together and we can have some discussion. I'm grateful to the jury to agree to come to this mode of discussion which is becoming more and more popular now and for the right reasons. We had, I think about three to four hours of discussion and it was more a kind of ideation amongst people who had met for the first time and one new many people in this audience in this jury, one new people like Dr. Najma Ji, premier academic of the country. In fact, everybody whose name I take in their own fields, in their own respective fields, they are extremely well known people to the entire country and the country is proud of them. Anurag Bhatraji, who is always kind of such a dynamo of Anurag Ji that one feels a bit ashamed of walking by his side because by the time you walk, he starts running. Anurag minister has made many points. I feel I'm slightly qualified to talk about two points out of them. One is that way back, couple of years back, I got a call from the then principal secretary of prime minister to the prime minister that I should join as secretary skill development in 48 hours and I came here and joined. I just take two, three minutes on that or maybe five minutes. Hope you will bear with me. I found in that when I came and the person who was this notification by the government was issued sometime in July 2014 and one of my colleagues was holding an additional charge. He was sitting secretary. So I came here and I found, I told him, is there any office here should I sit? He says you have to find out yourself. So everything I talked gave me two cups of tea but practically he told me that you have to find out yourself. I'll give you one or two PAs to start with on additional basis so that you can give dictation, etc., etc. After about 15 days I decided to divide my time in two parts. About 40 to 50% was inadvertently taken in going to various ministries and begging for your office, your staff, this, that, that. It was not begging, but yes it was begging in the sense. And the other was spent, the honorable minister at that time was Mr. Sonuwal who subsequently became chief minister of Assam. He told me that as sports minister I have some space to sit near the sports authority as chairman. Why don't you start sitting there? I must say that here I found huge difference between my own class in which I had spent by that time almost 30 years and Mr. Sonuwal. He straight away gave me his own office where he was sitting as chairman because other people were giving me only cup of tea. And we started. I have done various jobs by the grace of God but those three, four months I think were the most learning period of life because I realized more than ever how diversified India is and how much many people are doing work in skilling, entrepreneurship. Many of them coming from abroad, settling in India and finding their feet again. I had my friend, my younger friend, Aretha Saikya who unfortunately is no more, passed away very early and very tragically. We have Sandanupal from, settled in Hyderabad, PhD in maths from Michigan and who is into digital skilling at that time. Sitting in Hyderabad having centers in Chennai and having centers in Bangalore. When I start taking names it will probably supplant your award ceremony because each one of them had, at that time, I am talking of the year 2014-15, they had already been doing lot of dedicated work in skills. It was so many islands of excellence. The only problem was the Honourable Prime Minister had started saying in every little meeting also that now how to scale up these islands and create a quality-come-quantity basis matrix which can take skilling activities ahead. Easier said than done, very difficult. But by the grace of God and the help of all our colleagues, bureaucrats as well as young consultants, whom we had taken some young consultants from various places, on 15 July we celebrated the World Skills Day. It was a function held in the Gyanbhavan. Honourable Prime Minister was the, he did the honours and but I am happy to report to all of you such a distinguished audience of ladies and gentlemen that on 15 July all the three or four very basic decisions which still stand like the rationalization of norms, like the new skill and entrepreneurship policy, all these had been passed by a cabinet and only then we all came to the podium. Another thing Honourable Prime Minister said was about information broadcasting. I have at least one or two colleagues of mine in this audience because I got the opportunity to serve an INB secretary of the country. Now INB was and even now it remains a very tricky subject. The definition, media, call it print media, call it electronic media, call it not digital media, they have to be and should be essentially anti-establishment. There are no other choice. In the process of being anti-establishment, they kind of tread on many feet. The feet of establishment, they appeared feel of feet of any establishment. When criticized or trenchantly criticized, they certainly become very sensitive and very delicate. So they have to face all these things combined together. In the election commission, I remain Chief Election Commissioner of India for two and a half years. I had the privilege of conducting the 2019 elections to Lok Sabha conducted. We had, believe me, in that time only in those two to three months, we had about 123 delegations from various political parties and most of the delegations, they would have a cup of tea with us in our election commission room, have a meeting, then go out, call somebody like my friend Anurag here and his colleagues and criticize us to the health. That's their job, we weren't doing our job. That's the essence of democracy. On digital side, we've found and we still find, I think Delhi police representative would know better, that a smallest ember in one part of any district in India can lit the fires which are unimaginable. But I must also say that we started having the first meaningful talk with the digital people. And Mr. Thukral I think was the chairman of that association committee. He and our officers sat couple of times and we all sat together at the full commission and for the first time probably in recorded history, they gave us kind of list of their own do's and don'ts, their own norms which they'll try to follow in the country, which without trying to preen, it was a big achievement in the sense that they were themselves giving a set of norms which they will follow. And as was being said on the screen here before and later on by the young and bright CEO of Amarujala, that this is still an area which we have to tread very carefully. Very carefully in the sense that it can cause riots, it can cause unrest, it can cause kind of social dissonance in the society and especially in a society like ours because we are not a country, we are a subcontinent. With so many caste, communities, religions, sub-religions, sub-castes, etc, etc, the propensity to cause mischief, even though it may be unconscious, though my own belief is that most of the business is quite conscious, it's not unconscious, can cause lot of unrest in the society. Summing up all this because most of the names, especially as the honorable jury members have been taken, I again thank them all, one and all that we had a very interesting discussions and I hope that we kind of on the basis of our discussions and interaction we kind of get repeated somewhere else for some other awards and we'll try to do the justice most swiftly because now we are kind of house trained to do that and congratulate the organizers, can't take every name because Mansi only contacted me and Shweta, these are the two people who contacted me. I hope they are here and they were very meticulous in kind of hand-holding all the jury members including the chairmen. We hope that these areas which we have found for the awards is somebody must have worked very hard on that. But when we were making our discussions, we found that even the most staid academics and others, our emotions rise a bit to be able to shortlist as to whom the award is to be given. They'll be taking all the names here. I would not like to kind of preempt their privilege of taking names and asking them to come and take the awards. We also try to give one or two special mentions, one I can, because she's sitting next to me in Delhi Police Representative, for some of the initiatives they are taking by using cyber tools and take it, what they call it, to track the criminals. Honorable audience, you probably would not believe it, that a place very near to Delhi, I'll not take the name, why I take names, on the borders of Rajasthan and Haryana has already emerged as this cyber crime capital, one of the cyber crime capitals of the country. This was a privilege which was for a very long time, the privilege which was allocated to themselves by a small town in Bihar, but now it is border of Haryana and Rajasthan, Alwar district in particular. And these, this was told to me by a very senior colleague from the IPS who had come to see me just as a courtesy call and this, I happened to be in Telangana in Hyderabad with my daughter as I said and there I found from the DGP of Telangana, again one of the most competent police officers, that the activities of these people coming all the way from northwest, they quells parts of some metropolitan cities including Hyderabad and he himself said, yes sir, it is frightening the speed at which they are kind of proceeding and we need to curve it from both sides and was written this slip, whosoever has written my own handwriting is quite bad but I must congratulate, this is equally bad so I am not really able to make much of it. But anyway, without trying to kind of dilate further some young people are sitting here, if they sometimes want to have, I can give them some inputs of how people of their age now younger to them or slightly younger to them have done wonderful work in skilling in entrepreneurship in the country. How they are doing it, I still have their phone numbers and all that. I congratulate the organizers, I particularly congratulate Ravi Ji who is heading this entire outfit and all our colleagues, I will say again, Ravi Ji, Anurag Ji, Sanjya Diwede Ji, Prasannajma Ji, Jagdish Mitra Ji and Haruna Sharma Ji who has been my colleague also in these services before I retired from IS in 2016 that they spend their time attending the conference and they are spending their time attending the award-giving ceremony. May the Digital Impact Awards and which are being steered overall by the Honorable Minister, they will do well and every year they may bring more and more challenging choices. On the choices made by the organizers, I would just make a small suggestion that the focus is more on the government because government has mammoth programs. I would be very, we would be in fact, I say that we would all be very happy. It's a lot of private sector people also who have done wonderful work, whose choices are made so that jury can have a wider kind of discussion and also see that besides the government and the ministries who all are the people who are outside the government but who have done wonderful job. I am grateful that you found time to invite us, to listen to us and thankful to you that I could exchange. Actually it was not an exchange, it was just monologue, my views with you. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you.


What's up? We're gonna go find a moose. Is that what we're doing? We're gonna go find a moose. Yeah, we completely give up our birds. No more birds. We're making a switch guys. My bad influences are here. They picked me up so no more work getting done for the rest of the day. And we're switching gears from bird hunting to moose hunting. You're allowed to do that once in Maine. One day a year and this is the day we're doing it. We're gonna shoot 20 gauges and 12 gauges bird shot. They gotta be real close. We're going for moose pictures. We're going sightseeing. I'm a guide. That's a big cow. How did she make it up that? I know. I thought she was gonna have to loop around. I thought she was coming for us. Oh yeah, there she goes. That's the worst feeling when you think you gotta shoot a moose with a bird shot. I believe that.  No. Oh, no. I was telling him a story earlier. We were bird hunting me and a buddy up north one time in the Saab. We were on this old bump. In the Saab? Yeah, we were on this old turbo. Oh yeah. Turbo 93. And this bull was tracking us through the woods. His eyes were blown right out of his head. I told my buddy, I said, you gotta shoot out the window because we couldn't get away from him.  He was like 20 yards in the woods by the time he was coming for us. He wanted the red Saab. I've had a couple bad instances but the worst one was my buddy and I got him between a cow and a calf and the mother. She charged me like three times and I was putting my arms up and screaming. On foot? Yeah, and I was getting behind trees. It was at the fork because there weren't much for trees. Keep going, 35 steps. Keep going. Under them green growth. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Can you see him? Yeah, that's him. That's him. Got him. That's where I shot that bird the other day and missed. Oh, another one, another one. Get him. Got him. Well, we just doubled what you guys got. When you pulled up, Chubs, you were like, is that a bird? And I'm like, that's him. Shoot him. Buddy, you can see that white on his breast. That's it. Oh, really? Come on. So you get in here, it opens right up. This is where they fly from, you know. They were doing that walk thing. They walk right to here, then fly. I'd say we cleaned the flock up, wouldn't you? Who did? Yeah, I had you back though. Yeah, usually you just like scare them to death. This guy wasn't that scared. I'll get yours, you get mine. You dumped yours pretty good. I got it. Good as it can be. We're going to take a little break. Oh, deer steak break and cookies. Deer steak and cookies. I guess I was going a little bit longer than I thought. I hooked it up over that hill. Pull the guys associate and just don't disappear. I thought we're going to have to call game wardens. Yeah, we're going to have to call a search party. Want some of that deer? Good. I know, I already ate half a plate. Man, that is good. I will. By the end of this ride, it'll be gone. I'll guarantee you that. Just a road or ride? Ride. Same difference. This is unreal. I got to get up here in the winter. Oh yeah. I bet you this road is tracked so hard that you don't even have to break trail in the winter. I bet you there's a trail already on this road. There's a spike ball. More crotch. She's barely got to look at him. Can you see him? I can't see him. He was looking right at us. That might be the same. Did you see a little spike ball earlier? We saw it with the great big cow. Oh really? But they were together. It's probably the same too. I bet. Maybe all these tracks are just them too. Can you hear them? You see them? I can't see. Hold that up. I got a tree in front of me. Well, another bull moose. Saw another moose.  He's right over there. But that's some thick stuff down there. There's a couple moose up here too, at least two. There's another moose. Yeah, it looks like a small bull. Another moose up here on the road. Looks like a small bull. I don't think he went too far in. He just jumped out of the road. It was definitely not a paddle. It was a small bull. Another moose. That's the fifth moose today. We've seen four birds, five moose. There's a giant cow, isn't it? That thing's strong. It's amazing. He just walked a couple feet. Where'd he go? Oh yeah. That thing is huge. Walk up there? No. No, we'll get back in the truck and see some more. That was number six, right? Keep going? Yeah, let's keep going. Yeah, I didn't know you liked it up here, Sean. You don't get your Milwaukee life, do you? I'm nuts about that. Tub, show the folks that hold me a trick. What trick? You stand on the one trick. That takes about 20 minutes longer than normal. No. I'm not a state record holder. That one weren't good. It didn't go smooth. It helps when you don't blast the bird. I wouldn't know. I shoot the kill. Not to scare him to death. I think I've cleaned every bird this week, haven't I? A couple of. Yeah. I thought so. I think it's going very good. We did. We'll break the wings off, though. Stuff backwards. I don't know what I struggle. Where are all our weak fingers, I guess? But my fingers hurt. Now your back's going to hurt. You just pulled landscape on me. Yes, Joe. You get it? Got it. The bones are hollow, especially though the birds. Bag number three. We'll beat them on Moose Head Lake, come on. I don't know if I got something to say about that. All right. That's as far as I can get with the V-Match for today until I run more wires. I'm going to probably do my intake for my power and my power box right here.  I'm not insulating the interior loft or the interior ceiling. I'm starting on that tomorrow. But that's going to do it for today. Thanks for tuning in today, guys. Had an awesome day. Had a really cool break heading out with Chubbs and Sean and seeing all those Moose and a couple of Partridge. Just awesome being in North Main Woods. Thanks for tuning in. Really appreciate all the support for the channel and make sure you leave a comment and a thumbs up.


Appalachian Wireless has some of the best data rates in wireless on our plans and not to mention an amazing deal on one of our hottest smartphones but that's all the time I have to explain. See store for details, better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. About 24 hours ahead of a planned rally by white nationalists, Pikeville Friday afternoon seemed to be a city quietly on edge. Several businesses in town have chosen not to open on Saturday when the rally by the traditionalist workers party is planned. The group is identified as a neo-Nazi hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And where the controversial group goes, opposing groups have been known to follow. Once such group was in Pikeville Friday afternoon handing out flyers produced by Solidarity Defense denouncing the TWP's white nationalist message. These cats, you know, they want to talk like they're trying to build a friendly white future but they're not playing around and they're violent and we want to oppose them and also want to be smart about it. The group who has not to be interviewed on camera said they are not affiliated with any large anti-fascist group but they support the efforts of those groups. They also said if the opposition against the traditionalist workers party or any other racially motivated groups comes to violence, then so be it. Yeah, I mean, I think that they need to be opposed in any way possible and so that all depends on what the situation looks like and also what they do. You know, they tend to instigate in this kind of situation and so if there are confrontations, if there are physical confrontations, you know, you expect to see that start from them. The spokesperson for the group said their message of anti-nauseism and anti-fascism was well received by people in a nervous Pikeville. In downtown Pikeville, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


I'm often asked what law school was like for me. You have to remember, I was an engineer for years before I went to law school. And as an engineer, answers were definite. Many times I had decimal places in them knew the answer. There was a lot that you could show for your work. And then I get to law school and law school is completely different because now there's differences of opinion and you start using a lot more judgment. So it was a big transition for me as an engineer to go through law school.


Threads is a very interesting plug-in that works with the Canvas LMS, and it allows instructors and students to see what's happening in discussion forums in different ways. Typically the forums are just long series of messages, post, reply, reply, reply, and it's hard to skim through all of those messages. The Threads tool allows me to drop in daily, in fact, and check quickly to see, oh yeah, the engagement that I hoped would happen around this discussion topic that I set up is actually happening. So that can help me focus my feedback to people as I try to engage in the forum to encourage better thinking. I might go and look for those unresponded to students to give them a little tap back. But I also use the data that comes out of Threads reflexively. So at the end of this new course that I've just launched, for example, I'm going to be looking at what kind of engagement network happened in each weekly topic area to discover which questions were most effective in engaging people in discussions, which ones really didn't spark the kind of activity I was looking for, you know, helping me to think about my own design and what can be improved for next time. While I'd never advocate for ignoring content and only looking at engagement, the engagement data actually tells us things that are valuable about how a group is co-hearing whether your class is divided into cliques, for example, or whether there's genuine exchange happening. One of the important things about Threads is enabling the student view also and asking the students to monitor it. You might engage your students in conversation about what would a rich discussion network look like.