Hey everyone shaper one thousand here today. We're going to try a food review Tapatio Ramen noodles I Never heard of a monkey bought something here a little while back to Do a review on when we was camping, but we never got to for some reason, but Anyway, this one's left This is original, but it's supposed to be hot Picante so We'll get you over here. I got some water already heated up We'll get you over here on the stove so I can point you down We'll see what it looks like smells like taste like I know you can't smile it, but I want to taste it and Let you know what it tastes like I'll let you know what smells like so There's what it does I've seen a lot of reviews on so there's kind of mixed monkey said she It was too hot for her so or too spicy for her So I'm going to give it a shot and see what I think of it stick around Okay, guys, so I got you out here on the stove. I'm gonna go ahead and open these up. It's pretty big pretty good size bowl three ounces Which is 105 grams? so Like I said, it's supposed to be Hot content. I don't know I seen the wolf pit I seen him try it for us the people so He did it, but I never heard of it and Monkey was like We got some of them out there like we do she's like, yeah So I'm going to try this. Let's open it up here here. Let me case you guys want to read that Okay, so There's four hundred forty calories if you eat this whole thing and It's two hundred and twenty per serving so for there's supposed to be two servings in here, but Open this up here. We're gonna go ahead and put I think what is it four minutes? morning water You just Okay, you just oh I wasn't supposed to take the lid clear off Add seasoning from it says open lid halfway oops Remember that if you're gonna make it Doesn't matter add seasoning from flavor packet and boiling water to ends To inside fill line close lid. Let stand for three minutes stir well and enjoy. There's the line right here I don't know if you guys That line right there So It's got stuff in it All right, this is original.  Now we're gonna put this on Cover this up with a fork on it We're gonna let this set for three minutes. I'm gonna set a timer over here kitchen timer three minutes and Start okay, so now When it when it gets to three minutes, we'll come back and we'll give this a shot and see what it's all about Hang tight Okay, guys, so it's been three minutes They shut this off Now I guess you zoomed in a little bit so maybe you can see a little better Take the lid off See what smells like It's got a weird smell to it almost smells like bread I don't know if that's the noodles or to see I think it's seasoning because I had that that smell When the seasoning packet it looks good Of course the wrong manoodles are just wrong manoodles. There's Nothing special about them but That was three minutes and These noodles I don't know they're awful Hard I'm gonna give it another minute Maybe my water cooled down by the time I did my intro or something. Let's give it another minute Okay, it's been one more minute. Let's take this off here. I don't know if that's that looks like onion, maybe Onion it. No, I don't know. Is that an onion? I don't know what it is so Been another minute.  Let me grab spoon. I got my spoon here Let's just go ahead and try this Little bit of this here Well, that tastes pretty good I don't think it's real spicy, but You know my spicy and someone else's spicy might be a little different. So let's give this a shot okay, so I Like it. That is pretty good. That gets two thumbs up for me. How much was these moon? Dollard a buck. Yeah, where'd you get them at you remember? When Dixie, okay now also have them at level one water But there I guess I were a bucket when Dixie She reminded me why we couldn't Do a review on them that night because we were camping and we had them with us But that's the night The last time we went camping Well together not when I went on the boat, but when her and I went camping like pots preserved when we got locked in But it rained all night that night if you guys had watched that that video rained all night so we couldn't Couldn't do it then we kind of spent the rest of the evening in the tent and so Yeah, I like it. In fact, I'm gonna take another bite of this Um, I think did you have chicken monkey? Yeah, monkey says she thinks she had chicken And she thought it was too spicy for her, but this is just perfect for me I think it's perfect. I love it better get two thumbs up for me. Okay guys, so there you go to How did I just pronounce that? Tapatio, I just pronounced it like three times To Tapatio Tapatio So this if you like some spicy foods, it's not overly spicy, but it is spicy I say give it a shot Like I said, I don't have any other flavors to try but I do now and I'll do reviews on them as I picked them up How does that sound? Yeah, monkey said sure I can get them for you So thanks monk She's over here on the couch. So she's getting ready to make her own something to eat. Uh, she's in her underwear So she can't stand up, but What's your face red All right guys, so anyway, thanks for watching. I appreciate it two thumbs up on this one And then I'll get more now. I'll have to have her try the shrimp Because I I won't know if it's good or not because I don't care for shrimp um So but I will try the chicken and the beef. How does that sound? Yeah, if I can find and she loves she loves shrimp. So So she'll be able to tell you whether it's any good or not. Like I said, I don't need it I don't care for it. So I couldn't tell you I couldn't give you a good review because If it tasted funky to me, it's probably because I don't like shrimp and I would say oh, that's nasty And that's not a fair review for the company or for you guys. So Anyway, she better the myth man ledger gone for now. I'm up Bye guys. We'll see you soon. Take care


Why African Americans Are Moving to Ghana Ghana is a sub-Saharan African country that is officially known as the Republic of Ghana. It is bordered on the west by the Ivory Coast, on the north by Burkina Faso, and on the east by Togo, and on the south by the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Ghana spans 238,535 square kilometers and is home to a diverse range of biomass, from coastal savannas to tropical rainforests. With around 31 million people, Ghana is the second-most populous country in West Africa after Nigeria. Accra is the capital and largest city of Ghana. Kumasi, Tamil, and Sekhandi-Takurati are also important cities. Accra, Ghana's capital, is estimated to have between 3,000 and 5,000 African Americans. They are teachers in rural communities in the west or entrepreneurs in the capital, and they claim that despite the challenges of living in Ghana, they feel free and protected. The majority of these African Americans are returning to Africa for a variety of reasons that are only known to them. Others complain about racial segregation, while others claim that educational qualities are undervalued because they work for little or no pay. Today, we'll travel to Ghana to learn more about why African Americans are returning to the country. As we travel, please like and subscribe to Africa Reloaded. Ghana's year of return is a celebration of the country's return to its former. The year 2019 is a government of Ghana initiative to encourage African diasporans to return to Africa, namely Ghana, to stay and invest. President Nana Akyufo-Addo publicly inaugurated it in September 2018 in Washington, D.C. as an initiative for Africans in the diaspora to join with Africans. The year 2019 is notable because it represents 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in the United States of America. The event also recognizes the achievements and sacrifices made by the diaspora since that time. Pan-Afist, Ghana's biannual Pan-African Historical Theater Project has invited African Americans and others from the African diaspora to Ghana since 1992, and it will be a part of Ghana's year of return celebrations in 2019. Acra and Cape Coast, among other locales, host the festival. The festival's purpose is to promote African solidarity, Pan-Africanism, and the continent's development. This festival features performances and work in the disciplines of theater, theater, music and poetry, among other things. There are also trips to a number of important locations, such as the Slay Fortress Dungeons and the Leader's Durbar. Reasons for the Movement, Ghana's independence. The Gold Coast was a British colony on the west coast of Africa. On March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, became the first colony in Africa's sub-Saharan region to gain independence from European colonial control under the leadership of its first president, Kwame Krumah. The newly established nation's image as Africa's first independent republic, as well as in Krumah's actions as president, were important factors in the migration of African Americans to Ghana. 20th Century Migration. Following Ghana's independence in the mid-1950s, a new era of African American immigration to the country began. African Americans, particularly civil rights advocates such as WEB Du Bois and Julian Bond, immigrated to Ghana to aid the country's development while avoiding bigotry in the United States. Some people relocated to Ghana because of the country's cold-worn neutrality. Kwame and Krumah fought tirelessly to keep Ghana free of Western and Soviet influences and black expatriates, particularly revolutionaries, saw this as an opportunity to air their grievances without facing the backlash they faced in the United States. In Krumah, allowed African Americans into Ghana and even brought American civil rights leaders into his inner circle as advisors and political allies, knowing that Ghana's success and the independence of every other country on the African continent would require global connections. African American Perspective of Ghana. Ghana's independence changed African American opinions of the continent dramatically. This is because, for the first time, Africa exceeded America in terms of factual reality as well as what it appeared to represent symbolically. Ghana became the new, promised land for African Americans as a result. When Ghana became a free country, it carried with it the aspirations and dreams of Africans. For African Americans, Ghana was a source of inspiration, indicating that Africa was not the barbaric place that it was supposed to be. It forced African Americans to rethink their attitudes toward post-colonial Africa and its prospects. Ghana served as a haven for African Americans fleeing discrimination in the United States as well as the reaction they got for denouncing the Racist American Society, because they were surrounded by Africans. African Americans believed they may be reunited with long-lost kin in their homeland. However, some argue that African Americans' preconceived notions of Africa hindered their experiences in Ghana. According to Derek Katzum, the African American perspective of Africa has typically been no less warped but has been distinguished by romance, fetishism and nostalgia. African American Involvement in Ganyan Politics. Black American activists who migrated to Ghana to engage with pan-Africanist and socialist ideology under the tutelage of Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah and African Diasporan political exiles. Commander Six were frequently drawn into Ganyan politics, either indirectly or explicitly. Myer Angelou, for example, developed friendships with Ganyan officials and even Nkrumah himself, allowing them to wield political power. They used their voices to criticize and praise Ghana's administration, as well as to influence how the country was run. Ganyan Culture The African American Association of Ghana is one of the organizations established to assist Ghana's Afro-Americans. These institutions provide African Americans with a sense of belonging. They're in a place where they won't be left out. They live in a world where everything is within their grasp. In terms of economy, infrastructure and social development, Ghana is one of the best countries in West Africa. African Americans moving to Ghana will have a significant impact on the economy and stimulate economic development in Ghana and Africa as a whole. If you enjoyed this video, please like, share, subscribe and click the notification button to receive future updates from Africa Reloaded.


I always say, when I start my classes in the early quarter, things don't matter until it hits home front. It's just like, wow, they happen in Syria, not to my people. Somebody died in a car accident. That's somebody, never my family. So then it takes a lot of issues that happen to me and thousands of cuts. They in and out that make me say, I have had enough. I have had enough that I got to speak up. So there's always this assumption of being normal. And of course, then in my early years, when I graduated with my PhD degree, when I was 27, it's like, yeah, it's not my problem. Part of this learning about being in the work of social justice and be able to boldly confront it, I think it takes that fire, that emotions. So that was this time that I brought my son to playground. And he was eight. As I was walking toward the swing, trying to put him down. That was this, I would say, six, seven-year-old white boy who started singing, yellow, yellow, yellow is here.  And my husband asked me, what happened at the playground? Why was it only five minutes? That was a time that I came back, back in academia and say to myself, if I were to teach something, it's no longer teaching people to assimilate and be competent according to some sort of a standard, but really to teach people to stand up and speak for other people who don't have the privilege and other people who don't have the voice. So it's this experience that gave me the fire to say that I want to go back. It drains you, it drains your soul. It hurts you and it takes an emotional toll on you as a person of color that not only I got to teach this and present myself to students, but when I go to grocery stores, there'll be people asking my family and I the question, so what are you guys going to do in Canada this afternoon? I would have to sell. Which part of this that tells you that I'm a Canadian or lining up in grocery store trying to buy fish with my two children standing next to me. There's a white woman and then the person just asks the white woman, so what can I get for you? I will be, okay, my children are watching. I got to say something. So I say, excuse me, sir, you've just cut me. Did you not see me with my two children? Now you probably can hear this anger in my voice. Well, why do I channel that anger and that sadness? My job has given me the privilege that I have nothing to lose when I talk about issues like this. So I think that in order to live a meaningful life, in order to be able to at the end of my life to look back, what have I done? I'm able to say I have done something.  And that's the time that I stood up and say, regardless what kind of pain and what kind of obstacles that I'm gonna face, I will just keep fighting. Now, as I told you, it is a pain to fight and it's a long arduous process. Is it worth fighting? I will probably not be able to see the end results by the end of my lifetime, but if it's for future generations, I think that there's this innate instinct among humans that we got to survive and we got to hope for the best. And this is why I'm here and this is what I do.


That's 1.9% on the NASDAQ, 2% in the S&Ps, 1.8% in the Dow industrials. Gold, gold contracts up to $60 trading at 12.85 an ounce. We have a silver flat, $14.92 an ounce, light sweet crude down a buck at $61.17, notes and bonds, they just want a higher price, lower yield. You have the 10-year note right now trading out at 4.5, 4.5, 2.5, bottom line is that we take a look at this, what you're going to see in the 10 as well as the 30, both pushing higher with volume, closing at the highs of the day. We get the 10-year at $123.30, I expect this thing is going to be popping up to the highs that were generated out here on the 27th of March. That number there is that $124 level. If we give them, we take a look at the 30-year, what you're going to see the 30-year was almost up a full point, you've done 300,000 contracts, you're at $148.19, the last high out here is $150.21, they both want a higher price. Gold contract, gold contract, didn't have a lot of price spread, you got a lot of volume though. We're pushing a swing with 240,000 contracts, up $1.80, if we take a look at this, I think we're pushing it to $279, $279.00, $279.00, we hit $128.30. If you do go over to the GDX and you take a look at the GDX, what you're going to see GDX, that caught a bit out here today, that's up $0.41, $0.20, $0.71, that's got to get a little bit higher, it hasn't really broken the downtrend yet. I want to see this baby get up into about $2110.00, then you get a decisive move that wants to get up into the $23.70 area. What you will see and what you have seen out here is that yes, they're not selling that sector off where the whole market is getting sold off. After the close out here, we're going to have lift come out, you got a lot of numbers after the close actually. If we go take a look at the volume characteristic inside the ETFs, you had a big expansion of volume, we did $127 million inside the spy, that's a big expansion of volume, we take a look at the GDX 100, same setup, we did 56 million big numbers. Stay right there folks with lots of numbers coming out after the close, including the lift, that's their first public disclosure since going public and they have been a mess since going public, coming right back.


Switzerland is ranked between the top countries in research and innovation but it's a continuous challenge to be on the top and institutions like SIV play a key role. But when we prepare the big sharing down of federal money every four years in general, the scientific community plays an important role because if we feel that something is necessary, appreciated and used by the scientific community, then we support it. It's not the top-down process made by some technocrats in Bern but really we'll say the better condition for SIV to be continually supported by the federal money is that the scientific community in this field recognized and testified the relevance of SIV. Thank to SIV was Switzerland's first mover in this field, in the international field and what happens later with Elixir and development in Europe shows first that there was a good example what we made in Switzerland. At the same time it gives to Switzerland a leading role that reflects as well our leading position in the research itself. If you ask which are the main challenges for science in the next years, personalized health and big data will be mentioned by everyone and I think in both fields the experience and the possibilities of SIV are key and especially for personalized health we gave a key role to SIV for the next step that has to be done in Switzerland.


Burke Nyhill is the president and CEO of the Tennessee Titans and he joins us now. Burke, thank you for the time. Thanks for having me, Mike. Burke, why is the serve mission statement so important to Amy Adams strong? Amy is a special person, Mike, and she's a special NFL owner. She has a deep appreciation for what this organization can mean for this community. She loves our fans, she loves this community, and she expects that we will leverage the resources of this community, the platforms of this community, to make this community a better place to live for our neighbors and the community at large. How has service become something so important to this entire team? It's just the people in this building. We set out to renew our mission statement and we did not have any preconceived notions about what we were going to end up with in terms of the mission statement. We let the people tell us why they love working here, what's important to them about working here. A lot of organizations have done similar exercises and they come up with a very commercial or business mission statement. Our staff, our players, our coaches kept coming back to this idea of service. And by the way, it's not just serving our community. It is that, but it's serving ourselves. It's having a service mindset in terms of how we interact with each other. It's a team-first mentality. It's serving our fans. It's wanting to have a great hospitality experience every time somebody steps through our building at Nissan Stadium, but it is also definitely serving our neighbors. We understand that we can have this impact and we're going to live into that mission. We took that 75 or 80-word mission statement and brought it down to three words. The Titans organization exists to win, to serve, and to entertain. In your time with the organization, has there been a moment, a project, or an event that you hope best exemplifies what Tennessee Titans service can be about? I think our response to the Waverly floods, it was a devastating event. 20 people lost their lives and countless others lost businesses and homes. The way that our team responded to me was just a picture of living into our mission statement, of winning, serving, and entertaining. Certainly we showed up with a check. They needed money and we were quick to help support their financial needs. But our staff was quick to get on the ground. People were cleaning out houses that needed to be cleaned up. They were cleaning up fields from the actual devastation. But it was what happened next that I think was just so powerful and an indication of where we are as a service-oriented organization. Our human resources manager, Allie Lesmeller, actually made the suggestion that they need a football field as a high school. And we have a football field and maybe we could blend those two concepts. And it was in the middle of our season, everyone is so busy, right? This is the really busy time for organization. But every part of our organization stepped up to say, how can we help support that effort? We had our partnerships team that partnered with LG to provide washing machines to replace the old washing machines that were lost. Stadium events team that said, how can we put on a great event to host Waverly High School? Perhaps my favorite was actually you, Mike, and the Titans radio team. I remember standing watching as the broadcast was being aired on 104.5 and everyone in that booth was calling that game as though it was the Super Bowl. Snap is good. Dooley looking, firing deep down the middle. Caught! Touchdown! Standfield! How down you are. What a bullet! What a bullet! What a high school football game. And it was just this example of recognizing that we have something unique to offer to our community. And in this case, it was Waverly in the time of need. We were able to bring a bit of a bright light to that community in that time. Finally, Burke, what do you hope that Tennessee Titans service looks like, not just to the people of Nashville, but to the people of the entire Mid-South? Well, we are the Tennessee Titans. We're one of the few professional sports organizations that bear the moniker of a state and not just a city. And we take that very seriously. So what I would say to folks in Chattanooga and Memphis and Knoxville in all areas in between is expect to see the fireball in your community. Expect to see us at your schools with T-Rack and the cheerleaders helping to put on school presentations. Expect to see us putting on football camps in your community. And God forbid if you need us because of a natural disaster or something like that, we'll be there to serve you. We just mentioned Waverly as an example of a time that we showed up. Bowling Green had a terrible tornado incident last year. We've got a lot of season ticket members up there and we got on buses to help with the cleanup and invited our season ticket members to help with that. We understand we have a responsibility and a stewardship to these communities across Tennessee and we will be there. Mark Nyhill, thanks for putting a bow on this for us. Thank you, Mike.


What I would like to do with my time is to discuss a few more of these economic aspects of taxation, because in addition to being unjust, taxes are also very destructive from an economic perspective. And it also happens, as I think Dr. Solano was kind of indicating, that it's often economics that is used as a primary justification for taxation. And so for that reason, we need to examine some of these ideas people have about how taxes and government spending work. So just in general, you can say that taxes are destructive on a couple of different levels. The first, perhaps most obvious one, is that when government taxes money from productive members of society, like entrepreneurs, it prevents them from doing what they do, which is provide people with goods and services that improve their lives. This is the most obvious effect, I think. This is what happens to everyone on tax day, in a way, when you really see what you're paying to the government, and when you really get a clear idea of what you could be doing with your money if you only were allowed to keep it. And it's not hard to see how your life could have been improved with the money that you're paying. So this is bad enough, but in addition to that, there's a second kind of destruction that I want to focus on that happens when the government then takes your money, that it is taxed, and spends it on its own programs. Because then you have an additional series of problems that arise, especially relating to government waste and bureaucracy and things like that, cases where at best they're simply throwing your money away, and at worst they're actually spending on things that actively destroy people's well-being.  And so that's just kind of my general theme today. So let's just think for a minute about the justification for taxes and government spending, because of course government doesn't just keep our money in a vault somewhere, and in fact in some ways that would actually be an improvement, but no, they have lots and lots of ideas about how to spend it. And it's that spending that is often used to justify taxation. There's an idea out there that although we don't always like them, taxes are generally okay, because they're not just costs to us, the government goes out and spends that money on things that benefit us as well. So sure taxes aren't great, they're unfair sometimes, but they're important and necessary because the government needs that money to provide us with some essentials of public services. And this is the universal defense of taxation. So what I want to do today is just explain a couple of the different ways this idea is flawed, and basically I just want to try to convey the idea that government spending is really not benefiting us, even when it's for these services that we are told are absolutely vital. Now you could talk forever about what government spends money on, but I'll just stick to a couple of different ideas that tend to come up in these discussions. The first thing I want to point out is that we should be suspicious about government spending just from the start, because if the whole rationale for taxes is that we need government spending to provide us with some vital services, then we are entitled to ask, well, why aren't we just spending our own money to produce those same services ourselves? Why do we need this, this government middleman to step in and collect everyone's money and then make all the decisions about what gets produced and how and who gets the results? And of course the answer is that, of course, government is not spending our money on the goods and services that we actually want, or at least not in the way that we want them. A point that Marty Rothbard liked to make is just that the simple fact that government has to threaten us with imprisonment to make us pay our taxes shows that they don't really want to use our money for the same things that we do. So this is a basic point now, of course, there's a very common response to this, which is simply to say, well, without a centralized power to tax and spend, people couldn't be convinced to provide so-called public goods, things like roads. The idea is that we could never get together and make a road without government taxes and spending. So when we tax you for projects, for these projects, you really are benefiting, but maybe you just don't appreciate these gifts that the government is giving you. And this to me is an extremely condescending reply to think that without Uncle Sam to show us, we would never think of making a road or we would never be able to figure out how that process works. The idea seems to be that despite the fact that roads are these vital tools that we use every day, without a government to design and build them, we'd just be at a total loss. No one would be able to talk to anybody else and arrange a group effort for some kind of public benefit. Everyone would just be standing on his own little plot of land, helpless to move anywhere, because up to that point, no one has arrived yet with a gun to say, give me 30% of your income so I can figure out a way for you to leave your front lawn. That's the basic argument that people seem to think of. So just in general, it's highly questionable whether these services need to be provided by government and thus whether we need to be taxed for them. And this is of course what kind of Dr. Salero was talking about at the end. There are some very basic services that the market can provide, that the government doesn't need to provide, but that people have traditionally believed must be restricted to government. And the roads are one of these. But even if the government is spending our money in the way we want, taxation and spending still actually wouldn't be a particularly good alternative to just doing the work ourselves. Because remember, of course, it costs money to maintain the government. In order to collect taxes and then spend them, government has to create an enormous bureaucracy to manage the whole system and that imposes a huge additional cost on the tax payers that goes far beyond the production of these basic services. So just in any case, I think it's useful to spend some time on the idea of essential services and how government compares to the market in that regard. As I mentioned already, the classic case of taxation and government spending is the roads. Whenever you criticize taxes and spending, the first question people always ask is, but who will build the roads? If we don't pay our taxes, no one will maintain the roads. How will society function? And I would turn this example around on people and just point to any average public road and say, well, yes, you're right, who would build those roads? These roads that are expensive and always more expensive than was promised, the roads that are constantly in disrepair, always under construction, these roads that always seem to require an increase in our taxes to maintain. It's a good question, who would build those roads? And the answer is, if taxes didn't fund them, nobody would build those roads. What would happen is that entrepreneurs would find creative and innovative ways to build roads that actually do what they're designed to do, which is safely facilitate travel at a minimal cost to the public. But the public way of approaching this problem, because the government lacks the motivation of the market, is to simply spend money without much motivation to be careful or efficient. And instead of benefiting the general public, their goals are much narrower, usually to provide a livelihood for friends of theirs, people like construction firms who have friends on the local city council, or property developers who own the land that the roads will be built on. And if you want to see this market versus government principle at work, just go to a private drive in a gated community, or more importantly, the typical parking lot of a privately owned store. You won't see anywhere near the disrepair or costliness or experience the inconvenience that you do on the typical public road. And the reason for that is obvious. It's because the private business owners are trying to attract people. They're trying to win customers. And they can't do that if people can't get into the store because the parking lot has been under construction for six months, which is what happens on the public roads. But the basic point I'm trying to raise is that taxes are usually justified based on the idea that the government has to provide this kind of service. But then the government can barely even do that. So even in the very basic case of roads that we're told couldn't possibly be arranged among private individuals, the government's not really using tax money to benefit society. What they do is use things like the roads as an excuse to expand their budgets and enrich their friends. There's a libertarian writer, Isaac Morehouse, who came up with a great version of this whole question. He asks, without governments, who would build the roads? And that's a much more honest version of this question. But the takeaway from this discussion is that we have to be careful not to be naive about these fundamental benefits that government is supposed to be using our taxes for. Because even when they're used for the things that we all take advantage of, they're still not as safe or useful or efficient or cheap or practical as the alternatives that the market can provide. In fact, it can be very difficult to even imagine that there are alternatives to basic government programs. Because oftentimes, government has completely pushed the alternatives out. And this is actually one of the very big ideas in economics. The idea of what is seen and what is unseen, what is seen in this case are the government programs, the roads, the schools, and so on. And people find it hard to imagine what the alternatives might look like, although, of course, they all have very old historical precedents. But because they've been pushed out of the market now, the alternatives remain unseen. And so in most people's minds, they must therefore be impossible. In any case, they're very difficult to imagine. Now, the idea of choosing alternatives to the government's taxing and spending is interesting because it highlights the fundamental difference between the services the market provides and the ones government provides. Because if the market provides you with a service that you don't like, you just stop buying it.  But of course, you can't choose not to pay your taxes. As much as we would like to say, look, thanks in everything, but the roads were really awful this year, so I'm not paying you anything, of course you can't do that. And because we have no choice but to pay our taxes, government doesn't really have to rely on providing quality services. Its revenue is guaranteed no matter how well or poorly it performs, and as I'm sure you can figure out, this doesn't result in a lot of efforts to satisfy the taxpayers. And it means there's no real punishment for wasting people's money and no incentive to use it efficiently. And so the results are predictable and universal, namely government spending results in waste and the destruction of valuable resources. But then there's an added twist to this as well, because since the government squanders so much money, that prevents them from paying for everything that they originally planned, and from completing the projects that they're supposed to be using the tax money for. So they're always coming up short due to their own waste, but then they twist this to their own advantage and they say, well look this just means that our budget is too small, we still have all these other projects that we need to pay for that we can't afford. So they then increase taxes to cover the difference. And then of course the same thing happens again. They waste the money, they can't accomplish their stated goals, and that in turn requires another round of tax increases. And so gradually over time, this leads to a larger and larger share of society's resources being sucked into the apparatus of government spending and waste, hence Black Hole. And in fact it's even worse than that, because at every step of this process, the government's bureaucracy is also increasing. Because the more taxes you have, and the more complicated the tax code is, the more people you have to audit and keep track of, and that means you need more government employees to do all these things. Somebody has to bring the money in and then figure out how to redistribute it. Somebody has to monitor where the payments went, what they're eventually spent on, and then when they inevitably waste the money, then there have to be committees to investigate what happened. And of course, just as a side note, what they inevitably discover is that the problems with spending were of course all due to the fact that whenever the project is, it wasn't funded enough. And of course, this inevitably leads to greater tax increases. But all these kinds of bureaucracy and countless thousands more, they require more people, more money to support them, and it's all in addition to the basic costs of the supposedly vital services that the taxpayers are supposed to be funding. So whereas in the market, over time, you would see costs decrease as entrepreneurs get better at serving people, and you'd see quality of services increase, with government of course it works exactly the opposite way. Over time, costs increase, taxes increase, and usually the quantity and quality of services declines. Now, something like roads might seem like a bit of an extreme case, but there are many more common examples as well. One I was thinking of was the post office. Like, why does the post office exist at all? Why do we need, I mean, we do indeed need somebody to send the mail, but why does government have to do it? Usually people try to come up with some kind of justification for these programs based on the idea that the market just can't provide the same services to people. That's what people say in cases like the roads and the schools and healthcare and so on. But when it comes to the mail, we actually already have dozens of successful companies that do exactly what the post office does, but better and more efficiently. People choose to give UPS and FedEx their money, and if they don't like the service they go elsewhere, those firms rise and fall based on their ability to satisfy customers. And if you've ever been to the post office, you know that customer satisfaction is pretty much the last thing that they're interested in. And it shows in the results of their operation. The post office is constantly losing money and has been for decades because nobody wants to use their services. People turn to the market because they know that that's where they'll get the service they're looking for. In fact, the only reason the post office still exists at all is because it has a monopoly on first class mail. It's illegal for anyone else to offer that service or to use official mailboxes for any piece of mail that hasn't been officially stamped by the postal service. And that type of privilege is important because it gives the post office kind of guaranteed business. But even with that legal privilege, the post office still can't make ends meet. And it's because ultimately, they depend on taxpayers for their funding. Now they're supposed to have accounts, like a normal business, they're supposed to be a self-sustaining operation that is guided by its own profits and losses. But in practice, that's not the case at all. The reason is that the postal service's so-called business is backed up with taxpayer money and borrowing from the government, which in a sense amounts to the same thing. The postal service borrows a lot from the treasury. In fact, actually, it's maxed out now. It's reached its maximum borrowing limit at $15 billion in loans. And it's in that hole because it's not a business at all. It's just another government agency and it has all the traditional, the problems that we've been talking about about that stem from being based on taxation and government spending. It's always losing money. Last year alone, the post office lost $15.9 billion, but of course, it never goes out of business because it's a government agency. And of course, because the system is so bureaucratic, bureaucratic, and of course, sort of a law of the universe is that bureaucracies never limit their own power, they never ever come up with useful ways to limit the costs. The only way the postal service can think of cutting their losses is simply to supply fewer services. With that in mind, they're actually thinking of eliminating Saturday mail delivery at the end of this year. They could have eliminated any part of this bloated bureaucratic apparatus that runs the post office. They could have tried millions of different ways to save money, but instead they cut a large part of the service that they're supposed to be providing to begin with. This is supposedly vital service that no one else can provide. But that in turn ends up hurting the taxpayers again because after cutting a part of the actual services, the post office can then turn around and say, well, look, we had to do that because our budget is so small now. We've been starved of our necessary funding so much that we can't do our jobs anymore. We need whatever it might be, a bailout or a bigger budget or more lending from the government just to keep the lights on. Again, they could have done almost anything to lower their costs, but instead they cut out some part of the service that is very public, that's very easy to see, so that they can in turn use that as leverage to be paid more as a reward for failing and throwing away the taxpayers' money. In fact, it's one of the truly bizarre distortions of reality that people seem to think that the post office is some sort of an ideal example of how government services should be operated. This idea goes way back. For example, about 100 years ago, Vladimir Lenin famously said that the socialist economy could be run on the principles of the post office, so I guess he'd never visited one either, but the idea is still around today. I think Michael Moore said at one point that socialized medicine wouldn't be so bad in the US because we already have the post office and look what a success that is. So this is another idea that comes up sometimes. People say things like, well, sure, these government spending programs, I'm sure they're wasteful, but we just have to run them a little bit more carefully. As long as we run them like businesses and as long as they have accountability and profits and losses, then they'll stay within their budgets and they'll provide more useful services just like regular firms do. But what people don't realize is that you can't just simply say to a government agency, act like a business. The market, for example, ruthlessly punishes people who don't make consumers happy, but you can't just invent that. It's a fundamental limitation on the way you behave that the market provides. It's not something that you can just simply turn on and off at will outside of the marketplace. So saying that government agencies can be run like businesses, it's a bit like leaving a starving child in a candy store and saying, don't eat anything, even though I won't be back for a while. And even when I do come back, I won't really be able to tell if you ate anything.  So you can see obviously why that doesn't work. But this is the reason the post office has been repeatedly in crisis over the past few decades because essentially there's no connection between its performance and its usefulness on the one hand and then the size of its budget and the amount of government support it gets on the other. So the post office has not run like a business and as long as it is ultimately funded by taxes and government spending, it never could be run like a business. Without the possibility of failure, without genuine competition instead of government protection and without having to truly depend on profits, no organization can be in quotation marks, run like a business. Those qualities of business are what separates government from the market to begin with. And you might also just ask another question too, which is that if you want to run government spending like this, if you want to organize government spending like a business, well, why not just make government organizations into businesses? If you already admit that using profit and loss is the best way to manage them, if you admit that general market principles provide the outcomes you're looking for, well, why not just step out of the way and let markets do what they do best? Again, why do we need this government middleman? Why go through all this show of having a government agency just to turn around and say, don't worry, it won't be what we just said that it needs to be? It's sort of like people are saying, we need this to be a government organization, although the very reason it needs to be government is also the reason that it's inherently doomed and needs to be more like the market. So this is just another example of how people get confused about how spending works and then why government spending doesn't do what it's designed to do. It's because it can't be run on these business principles. I was worried there for a second. I thought they were coming to take me away for complaining about taxes. Now, another thing, one thing that I've been kind of saying is that we don't benefit from government spending on taxes where the we is sort of taxpayers in general, but it's of course really important to point out that there are some people who do benefit from government spending. That's why taxes exist, of course, is to benefit some people at the expense of others. Only, of course, it's not the public in general who benefits, but only some specific groups of people that the state wants to support. And usually the beneficiaries of spending are government's friends in the business world. And by looking around it, who the beneficiaries are, who's receiving government spending, of course we make this incredibly important distinction that Dr. Salerno raised between the two classes of people in society, the people who pay taxes and the people who consume taxes. Once again, pretty much everybody pays taxes of some kind, but of course there are some people who receive more in government spending both directly and indirectly than they pay out, and these people receive a net tax payment from the government at the expense of the rest of society. So in that irrelevant way, they are simply feeding off the productivity of other members of society who are paying more in taxes than they receive. And so it's the excess wealth of the taxpayers that provides the entire net income of tax consumers as Dr. Salerno was explaining in more detail. But so I wanna take this in a slightly different direction. Of course the most obvious example of the tax consumer would be someone who simply takes payments directly from the government, welfare recipients for example, would fall into that category, or even simpler, the people who just simply work for the government, the politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, and so on. But then of course there are some far more insidious ways to be a tax consumer as well, and the case that's most important is when businessmen are tax consumers, because in that case it becomes very difficult to see that people might be only appearing to be making a productive contribution to society, when in fact they are overall consuming the fruits of other people's labor. What I have in mind here are things like subsidies and bailouts and sort of forms of direct income to businessmen, economic regulation in general really, because economic regulation always benefits some businesses, usually the very large ones, at the expense of others, usually the relatively small ones. But these kinds of government spending can be deceptive because the business world ends up mixing genuinely useful products that consumers want with government waste spending. And it can often become very difficult to tell which is which. And this of course makes things very confusing because it's no longer the case that there's a clear cut distinction between government, which is the problem, and business, which is sort of the oppressed minority. They become very mixed. As an example of this, if you remember, I think it was during the last election, I believe it was Mitt Romney who got in trouble because somebody recorded him at a super secret fundraising meeting of his top supporters saying something like, half of Americans are parasites, feeding off the other half. And this ended up upsetting a lot of people. But the thing is, he was actually right about what he said from the perspective of taxes because that is exactly what happens with this distinction between taxpayers and tax consumers. Of course, what he got wrong was which side he and his supporters are on. As they sat there at their $5,000 a plate fundraising dinner saying, oh, we're all so horribly oppressed by the government, probably crying and wiping their tears with $100 bills. But the point is that it's often these people who are supposed to be a part of the productive entrepreneurial class, who are often the ones doing the exploiting of taxpayers. The sad joke is that they're often the consumers of the tax payments of most other people, which they receive through these various forms of what we call corporate welfare, things like subsidies and bailouts and things of that nature. In any case, this distinction between taxpayers and tax consumers, it's very important because it shows that there is this very fundamental divide in society. It's simply not true that we're sort of all in it together and we all share this common place in political life and that we need not worry because we're all equal in the sight of the law. It's just not true. There's in fact a wide and ever-growing gap between these two parts of society, the taxpayers and tax consumers and it does potentially threaten the very social fabric. So it cannot be forgotten. And that brings me to my last topic, which is that to point out that not only is government spending a black hole in the sense that all the money gets poured in but nothing useful ever really comes out, but government spending is also a kind of memory hole. For those of you who have ever read George Orwell's 1984, you remember this idea of the memory hole. The memory hole is the place where the government destroys all the evidence that contradicts its official stories. And if you haven't read the book, what happens in the novel is that the government is constantly inventing new lies to tell the citizens to control them. But whenever that happens, they end up contradicting the old lies that they told.  So they throw all the newspapers and public records and things down this memory hole to be burned. And taxes are like that too, in a way, because governments and other supporters of new and higher taxes, they love to forget about all the promises and predictions they made about the old taxes. Whenever a new tax is proposed, there are all sorts of promises about what it will accomplish and the awful problems in society that need to be eliminated by confiscating people's money and then spending it. And of course, the implication is that the market could never do anything about these problems. But beyond that, no matter what is initially promised, inevitably the government's spending programs fail. The cost is more than expected. They finish late if they finish it all. And the original problem not only doesn't get solved, but often enough gets substantially worse. And then people forget all about the promises. People who are agitating for new and higher taxes, they conveniently forget that the government has already been spending on virtually every social problem that exists and the results have yet to materialize. But nevertheless, people continue to propose new tax schemes as if they had never been tried before and as if there was not this terrible history of failure involved. The economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that this is in fact one of the great curses of government programs, is that they never go away. It doesn't matter how much they fail or how they make all the problems they're designed to solve worse, the only reply you ever hear from government is, well, the only reason they fail is because we didn't give them enough money. Now I did give a couple of examples of the basic programs that fall into this category. We could spend days just listing the number of government programs that waste money and that actively discourage a healthy economic activity. And many of these have nothing to do with anything that even remotely resembles a necessary public service. I tried to stick to a couple of things that many people imagine, government services that people imagine government must provide. But of course, even those services are just a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount of money the government spends. But to just to just kind of sum up, the overall theme that I hope comes through is that taxes really are an unnecessary and destructive blight on our society. As you probably know, there is this inscription on the IRS building in DC that reads, taxes are what we pay for a civilized society. And the name of this tax day seminar, taxes are what we pay for an impoverished society, is obviously a play on those words. And while the claim that's made in that inscription is false, there is kind of a version of it that is true. I would simply change that to say that taxes are the prices, are the price we pay for this society. The price we're paying for our society that has so many awful things going on and it's so desperately in need of so many fundamental changes. So I would say that we should stop paying this price. I would say we should pay a different price. We should buy a different service and we should pay our money to somebody who has an actual interest in helping us improve our lives. So with that, thank you.


First question is from Heidi Lynn Swisher. How do you do drop sets properly? Ah good old drop sets otherwise known as strip sets. This is where you do as many reps as you can with a particular weight Then it's called a drop set because you would put the weight down or drop it Grab a lighter pair of dumbbells or lighter weight and then squeeze out and then you go down and you can do this You know two or three four times some people do it more than that Well, they'll do down the ladder roll the goal all the way down the dumbbell rack I mean the proper way to do it a drop set first of all form is absolutely crucial With any set but especially with drop sets because drop sets are intensity based Like I explained, you know if you're doing as many reps as you can with let's say 30 pound dumbbells And then you you know you get to the 10th rep and you know you can't perform a 11th rep Then you put them down and you get the 20 pound dumbbells You'll get another three or four reps out And so form is very very important and the one tip I have for drop sets is to drop the weight a little more than you think when you when you go from one way to the other I I the mistake I would usually make as a kid would be I'd go down five pounds Which only gets you like a rep. Yeah, so I figured you know a bigger drop allowed me to squeeze out more reps It's an intensity technique. It's great for an incredible pump It's not something I would do on a consistent basis though And I would save this for more for advanced lifters Yeah, I'd say it for advanced or I'd save it for a hypertrophy phase of your program All right, so like a phase three in a lot of our programs I wouldn't be doing it in a strength phase And I do think that that's the most common mistake when you see somebody doing a drop set is They they drop down to a weight they can still do but then their form kind of goes out the window So it's like kind of defeating the purpose if you're especially if you're trying to target a specific muscle or get a pump In a specific muscle to not drop it enough weight that you can still concentrate on that muscle So I agree. I think that's the one rule. I would say as far as the time and Like the actual percentage of the load like I think that's just gonna depend on the person And yeah, I don't think it's that we're splitting hairs a difference if it's a 15 second or a 30 second difference between getting it It's you're gonna if you do three or four or five drop sets in a row like you're gonna get a pump I can't imagine doing this a bunch of times like it's definitely something you just do Occasionally for fun more than anything. I mean we used to do it just kind of reminds me of some of these old techniques Like even the 21s and all these, you know fun type of like hypertrophy Type of techniques and exercises to throw in but it's it can get sloppy and get away from you really quick That's exactly what happens of it as a kid. I abused it. I did it all the time I was constant if I do it now, it'll look like this where I'm kind of rushed in my workout and I don't have a lot of time and like less volume more intensity Yeah, or like I realized like like let's say I'm you know Finishing up and it's on one of my last exercises. I'm doing you know bench or something and I look at the clock I go shit I got to get out of here in 10 minutes or like that But I wanted to get you know a good lift on my bench And I just don't have the time to do five straight sets with rest periods like you know what I'll do is I'll do a drop set real quick on this and just at least get a really nice pump from it That's kind of how I would like insert it into my workout now if I have the time I'm doing a more traditional type of lift If I was rushed for some reason like that might be like a quick way Yeah, the benefit is you get the higher intensity. It's good for hypertrophy good for the pump You can overdo it very easily Form is where people always screw up because the idea is to get more reps And so you tend to see people do this and then their form starts to get sloppy. I I Probably do drop sets. I would say twice a month. Maybe at most I almost never do drop sets with a barbell Almost never and it's mainly because barbell exercises if I'm doing a bench press or a squat or a deadlift or overhead press I'm not working out with other people So that would I would have to load it with a bunch of tens I guess and throw one off and throw one off and get underneath it again I like a drop set to have really minimal rest dumbbells are better I get my three pairs of dumbbells and I go one two three That's the only instance like I would say you pretty much need a workout partner Yes, you know if you have a barbell and you're doing like a bench press where you're like stripping the weight off But other than that, yeah I probably wouldn't totally and they also lend themselves a little better to single joint exercises than they do to compound lifts I would not do a drop set for an exercise where Like for example with a deadlift the difference between a safe deadlift and a bad deadlift or a dangerous deadlift is small Right if your form is good safe if it's off a little bit it can become pretty dangerous or risky, I should say Unlike single joint exercises where if I'm doing a curl, I'm off a little bit. It's probably still safe So I don't like to do drop sets with complex compound lifts I like to do them typically with Isolation, you know single joint exercises that my favorites are like laterals Laterals are great for a drop set curls are great for a drop set cable exercises tend to be okay So push down try set press downs are good for a drop set You know any isolation exercise in general will tend to be good with a drop set but not Heavy complex I agree. Although I the last time I did it. I actually just did it on a bench press I did it on barbell, but I think something that's important too is that so when I'm doing a drop set I'm not so hung up on what I what I want to do rep wise, right? So if you're following like a you know, you're training 10 to 12 reps I'm not trying to do a drop set and also stay within my 10 to 12 reps I'm gonna take it to where I've the muscle fatigues I can't and I can't do another perfect reform it well So that's what it looks like so I might get under like the bench and let's say I do a set of 225 and then I drop down to say like 150 160 range or whatever and You know, maybe I get seven out and I can already feel my form wanting to go off like that's it I rack it like then I go then I go drop again. I drop down to 90 pounds again I'm pressing it out Maybe only get six of those before my form starts to go and then I rack again I'm not even though I could have potentially got 10 reps You know But I'm gonna roll my shoulder and arch my back and cheated cheated up just to get it up Like that's I'm shutting it down before that. That's how I would do it Also, usually don't drop down more than twice So I have done the run the rack drop sets where you're like you're literally starting at one end of the rack and you're stepping down Mass PED I believe there is there's a run the rack But that's way too much for most people I do I'll go, you know from one lift Excuse me from one way to another way to another way and that's it. Yeah, it's usually three and then I'm done I don't go any more than that. But yeah, the pumps can be intense It's really cool totally can be easily abused and like I said, I still I even now today And I'm trying really hard and consistent Twice a month is that the most that I would you know do them Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe


What's the problem? The pain's gone. But what did you have in pain? Pain in the ear. It can no longer feel it. It's... So why are you crying? God's good. Thank you Jesus. I'm open. I slip and nail it. Because I had my foot yesterday. And it's like... It hurts to like move it. It hurts to like move it. So you can move it without any pain. Let's give Jesus a round of applause. Jesus is worthy.


The work I'm going to talk about today builds on a ongoing project that is funded in part by the Canadian government but is also sought funding from the European Union and a number of other international organizations. The insights drawn some work that we've been doing in part with Rachel Gwisselquist who published a number of important series on failed and fragile states and aid allocation to those countries including a special issue published in Third World Quarterly last year in which we examined state transitions out of fragility and also the sequencing in which countries can undergo successful exit from fragility. So what I'm going to do today is very briefly walk you through some of the current findings from our project. It's a macro level strategic level structural database focusing on countries at risk. We call it the state fragility index. It's the country indicators for foreign policy project which has an affiliated website. Once I've done that and reviewed sort of the current rankings of fragile states in the world according to our assessments, I'm going to walk you through some of the findings regarding those states that we consider to be trapped in fragility and those that have also either successfully exited or are experiencing extreme fluctuations moving in and out of fragility. I'll conclude with a preliminary assessment of some of the causes of the fragility trap and some of the finding findings we've derived from some of our statistical analysis. I apologize in advance if you're unable to make make sense of some of these tables they are quite small for those at the back. I will begin by just simply pointing out our structural database encompasses approximately 190 countries. We use an indexing procedure allows us to compare country performance over time in relation to each each other but also that country itself over time. We use a nine-point scale. It's a global sample so that we are able to assess state fragility on a number of different dimensions encompassing in total about 80 different indicators for about a 35 year period of course. There will be some deficiencies in data for some countries, missing data and so on, some countries that have emerged recently on the scene such as South Sudan for which we don't have complete data. But overall we can get a pretty good picture of how countries are performing over time. We can also drill down a bit and produce what we call composite indices in particular something I want to draw your attention to called the authority legitimacy capacity scores and we can also look at cluster-based analysis about which I'll say a little bit more in a minute. These clusters include not only the authority legitimacy and capacity measures which tap into different dimensions of fragility but also these clusters six clusters of state performance, governance, economic development, security and crime, human development, demography and environment. This is where you would require pretty good glasses if you were to make sense of our rankings here but want to just highlight the the most fragile countries specified here. You can see in orange the high-risk countries that typically score on average above 6.5 and above on our nine-point scale. So anything considered high-risk is that level of performance. The bulk of these countries in 2015 come from sub-Saharan Africa with South Sudan topping the list, Somalia, Central African Republic, Yemen, Sudan and so on down the list. The PowerPoint will be available on the site. You can also access the full and detailed report on our CIFP website which includes a number of different and detailed measures. But what I really wanted to draw your attention to and why we think our project has some value added in the evaluation of state fragility is that we are able to evaluate country performance over time in a number of different ways. So just to highlight that I want to draw your attention to the three years in question 2015, 2014 and 2013. In each instance South Sudan tops our list with Somalia being second most at risk, CAR third most at risk and moving down Yemen Republic changing places with Afghanistan in 2014 and 2013. In many respects what you're seeing here are fragile states that are beset by conflict but one of the advantages of using our framework of authority, legitimacy and capacity is that we're also identifying countries that may not be experiencing extreme conflict and that's precisely why we need a more nuanced and detailed interpretation of state fragility that extends beyond simply conflict equaling fragility or conflict being a cause of state fragility or extreme fragility. In fact what we do is we dissect if you will the overall fragility index into three component parts authority, legitimacy and capacity each of these tapping into different dimensions of statehood. Authority typically specifies how a regime is able to control both its people and its territory. This is kind of the classic Vabarian interpretation of statehood. By and large when we see a government being challenged by a group we see authority weaknesses in that country and those countries that are experiencing conflict typically perform more poorly on the authority scale than others. However the other two I think are important to as a value-added dimensions in understanding fragility namely legitimacy and capacity. Legitimacy is probably the least understood and least well operationalized of the three measures. It's typically an assessment of that state-society relationship in which people respect or accept the governance structures that they are facing. We measure legitimacy in a number of different ways human rights accords, gender equality, environmental protection and so on. Historically we've seen a number of least legitimate countries emanating from the Middle East. At one point Saudi Arabia was the least legitimate country for a number of years and yet this is a country that was working with us in the global war on terror. Capacity most closely is identified with economic development but also service delivery and so on. So there you have it the kind of the tripartite threefold definition of state fragility and this allows us to differentiate ourselves from different kinds of indices that measure fragility. Most indices tap into that conflict dimension or that economic dimension but when you bring in legitimacy into the into the picture you get a different kind of ranking altogether and highlight that. I want to draw your attention to how you can measure countries on these three different dimensions. The authority scores as I mentioned earlier we produce countries that are typically beset by large-scale conflicts so Sudan, Sudan, DRC, Afghanistan, the Yemen Republic, Somalia, even with Syria there as well. And the capacity side figure three we have so Sudan smaller countries but typically these are countries that are performing economically less well than others. But it's the legitimacy scores that I want to draw your attention to. Here we have a grab bag of countries that typically we wouldn't necessarily think are our fragile. Now all that red means is that these countries are performing 6.5 or higher on our scale. So we have yes some countries that that we would identify as being less legitimate than others but also for example North Korea, Swaziland, Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar that don't typically rank that high on overall fragility indices. If we do break it down the ALC scores by region we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the most challenged in terms of these overall scores but South Asia is not far behind in some particular areas of authority and capacity. But then you draw your attention to the Middle East and North Africa see where its legitimacy scores outrank anything else in that in the other three dimensions of fragility. So we believe actually our research has found that the legitimacy was a key driver of the Arab Spring. It wasn't so much lack of economic development or poor governance but rather illegitimate governance that was driving the uprisings in some of these countries. Gender equality being a primary example of that but also access to entitlements, access to influence in the government and so on. Regional clusters, Sub-Saharan Africa performs least well in the six cluster dimensions of governance, economic security and crime, demography, environment and gender. However it does reasonably well on the security and crime side than it does in comparison to South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Now we don't have time to nuance this it may be a function of reporting and so on but you see it's not once we get into more detailed assessments or profiling of these regions we see that performance overall is quite varied. For South Asia the economic performance is probably the most problematic and that's largely driven by Afghanistan to some extent Bangladesh and possibly even Pakistan. To push it even further and again these more detailed assessments can be located in the report. South Sudan is our most fragile country with Somalia if not far behind but you can see by profiling them in this way that they are fragile for different reasons and it's this level of nuance and one can drill even deeper and look at individual indicators where these countries are performing poorly or well that allow policymakers to determine where they might want to allocate their resources. So one can draw a more specific profile for a country over time or a single year and then derive I think more meaningful pulse and implications from that kind of assessment than a one-size-fits-all single rank index. Just moving ahead a little bit in terms of some of the key findings related to this conference on refugees I thought it would be interesting to look we see that in terms of refugees produced some fragile states in fact are producing more refugees than others but the overall trend line here is one suggesting that increasing fragility is associated with increasing refugees produced. We tried also to evaluate intake of refugees or hosted refugees and it wasn't as strong it was a relationship looking at simple correlation but at the present there is a indicative relationship there. So this suggests that fragile states are burdened not only through the departure of refugees but also through hosting them as well. Environmental performance somewhat weaker relationship but nevertheless a trend line showing that in terms of environmental overall environmental performance that would include drought, arable access to arable land and so on environmental protection that fragile states perform not as well as others. Now turning to classification which I really wanted to draw your attention to the fragility trap because this is something that is not well researched there's only one world bank paper documenting the existence of a fragility trap and that paper does not actually specify a model but hazards a guess on what might be the causes of the fragility trap including corruption, extreme poverty, lack of property rights and presence of conflict. The authors of that paper don't actually test that they just assume that those are the key things that are driving fragility traps in sub-Saharan Africa so we're going to take a shot at trying to develop a more accurate assessment of the fragility trap. To do that we need to know something about the countries that are not only stuck in a fragility trap those that have successfully exited and those that are fluctuating in and out of fragility and by that I mean extreme cases. So here we have those countries that are stuck in a fragility trap. Now some of these you might recognize like fragile states from any index but some you may be actually surprised by. For example Afghanistan, Burundi over the last 35 years Afghanistan is ranked in the top 20 almost every single year and it's shown extreme levels of fragility 27 times of those 35 years. Burundi very close behind Chad DRC Ethiopia. Now we come to some an interesting finding Pakistan. Pakistan is a middle income country. Why is it here? It's what we call middle income failed and fragile state has ungovernable spaces or ungoverned spaces but it also performs very poorly on legitimacy scores and to some extent authority capacity scores. So it shows up on our rankings. This is a 35 year period and is considered to be stuck in a fragility trap. This should trigger you to rethink your idea of what constitutes fragility. When you're dealing with countries like Pakistan and to some extent Uganda and Yemen these are countries that are not dependent on aid to the same extent that for example Somalia or possibly Burundi would be or Afghanistan for that matter. Question then becomes how does one engage these countries where aid dependence is not nearly as high. So here we have I think clear evidence of a fragility trap using our data and here's an example of Afghanistan increasing fragility over time trend line upwards overall fragility fluctuating but nevertheless increasing fragility. Now this is from 1980 to 2013-2012. This despite our massive interventions in the billions of dollars notwithstanding what Fintharp said earlier there are examples in which our aid is certainly not delivered the kind of results we expected. To assume that there is a one-size-fits-all policy even for the most extremely fragile states I think would be misguided. We have poor policy environments to begin with in these extremely fragile states and we need to rethink exactly how they can be engaged. More specifically here's a couple of other examples Yemen and Pakistan measuring the fragility trap over time we've evaluated their performance not only on the overall fragility but also the authority legitimacy and capacity scores and you can see that the overall trend lines are upwards so their fragility is increasing over time despite some of the interventions we've undertaken in these countries. Granted there are down so the upward line is obviously increasing fragility decreases are associated with successful interventions. What we don't know and what we want to know in our future research and what we've published with the in the third world quarterly piece is the sequencing in which one has to engage these countries. Does authority generate greater capacity which in turn generates greater legitimacy or is it something else? Here are the countries that have exited or stabilized. Now earlier we just heard that Mozambique is a success story and we've heard earlier that it's also I was on a panel where they said basically it's undergoing a crisis and it's had to devalue its currency so take it as you will is it a country that's successful or is it a country that is going to engage witness in other crisis. Our evidence suggests that it has over the last 35 years been a success story but nevertheless looking at Mozambique you can see that disturbing upward trend in the last couple of years especially on the economic performance measures of capacity and so on but there's upward trends elsewhere in particular in its overall fragility score but lesser so in the legitimacy and authority scores. Bangladesh on the other hand I think one could say is a success story so far we've done the preliminary work on why Bangladesh could be considered a success and it comes down to good leadership making wise decisions at key points or key junctures in that government's trajectory in which decisions could have been taken that would undermine effective growth and we're not instead that countries managed to consolidate some of the economic gains and build on and move out of extreme fragility. And then out countries countries that have typically fallen back into our top 20 and sometimes exit. Mali I think more than any other country in Africa possibly the world is experienced more coups. 50 I think 50 coups. This is problematic but it's reflected in our data where you've got a country that's boom boom boom boom boom boom moving along quite nicely and then undergoes a coup. Pritchett and a few others have described this as isomorphic mimicry where the country emulates the kinds of institutional development that we would expect of a country that's exiting fragility only to fall back into sort of failure or fragility mode. It's an interesting way of assessing it that there's an emulation process going on here or premature load bearing which is another instance where you're putting too much too many resources into a country with high expectations and expecting a quick turnaround. Mali certainly may be an example that Laos on the other hand has shown extreme fragility with some stabilization the last five or six years. So we're now going to move to the final part of our presentation time permitting to an preliminary identification of what might explain the fragility trap and to do that since there's so little research on it we had to go dig around and look at some of the other literature on so-called traps and we identified four related potentially related traps one being the poverty trap which some of you may be familiar with the conflict trap the capability trap and the legitimacy trap each of these are documented in some research each of them are an explanation of why states reach a sort of a status static point in equilibrium in which they're incapable of emerging the poverty trap is simply a situation where people are so poor they can't save to generate enough growth in that country's economy it has been to some extent discredited by Easterly and a few others but we thought we would test it anyway. The conflict trap Paul Colley and others have tested this and there seems to be some evidence that those countries and we heard it earlier those countries that have experienced conflict are more likely a great higher probability of going of experiencing renewed conflict with the within the next five years. So the conflict trap suggests that those if you're stuck in a conflict situation is particular with other facets of your country's structures being undermined you're going to re-experience conflict capability trap taps into weak administrative apparatus and inability to provide proper public administration and service delivery legitimacy traps on the other hand are more difficult to pin down there's only one or two books on this topic including a UNU volume on the on the question but legitimacy traps really relate to strengthened capacity within a state in other words a country has reasonably good economic performance but lacks an effective social contract a binding contract between between the people in a state. Pakistan strikes me as a country stuck in a legitimacy trap it's a country that has performed reasonably well in terms of poverty reduction and economic performance but lacks legitimacy largely because of weak institutions and we always seem to fall back on that argument of weak institutions without actually unraveling. So now we hypothesized that all four of these might inform a fragility trap so we're going to now determine whether or not that's the case so what we did is we lined up all our non-trapped countries compared that to all non-advanced countries in other words the developing countries and compared that to the trapped countries and what we find initially was quite interesting at least from my perspective what we expected to find was the poverty trap would be an overwhelming influence in determining whether and why a country was stuck in fragility in fact that does not appear to be the case what we see here the negative correlations these are simple correlation matrices the GDP per capita is negative for the non-advanced countries as we would expect it to be for the non-trapped countries but it's actually positive for the trapped countries which means that GDP per capita or poverty is not associated with clearly associated with fragility increasing levels of poverty are not associated with low levels of fragility conflict on the other hand has a weak correlation here unlike for the for the trapped countries government and effectiveness on the other hand strongly negatively correlated as is voice and accountability these are proxy measures for each of those traps that we identified earlier the latter two being governance matters world bank data sources the other two being the conflict measure being an UPSLA data source and GDP per capita you're familiar with so what and then there was a more sophisticated regression analysis that we did which confirms our findings so far of course these are preliminary this has takes into account lags fixed effects and so on and again we see that GDP per capita is not strong the relationship there is not strong for the most fragile states for really trapped countries whereas conflict government effectiveness which is a measure of authority and voice and accountability which is a measure of legitimacy are so what can we conclude from this and where might we go if time permitting I'll I'll just take conclude draw up some conclusions from this authority which is a measure of government effective measured by government effectiveness and to a certain extent conflict intensity and legitimacy voice and accountability are the key structural characteristics that correlate the most with fragility for those countries that are trapped in fragility capacity or income per capita and poverty is not significant improvements in capacity do not guarantee that countries will be able to escape the fragility trap especially when corresponding improvements are not happening to authority and legitimacy capacity becomes important once countries are able to exit the fragility trap now that if you look back at our list of the most fragile countries are those stuck in a fragility trap you can see why we get findings like that because we've got the myths in there the middle income failed in fragile states we've got countries that are not necessarily mired in extreme poverty so this gets us to rethinking about how we would would sequence out our entry points into the most fragile states those that are trapped in fragility and shows no sign of exit we need to think more clearly about just putting money into these countries that typically have poor policy environments and suffer from premature load bearing or are simply not capable of absorbing the level of aid that we deliver to them Afghanistan being a clear case of being overrated Haiti as well this suggests that obviously we need to think more specifically about how to more effectively allocate these kinds of resources and target not only just economic development but governance good governance questions of legitimacy and horizontal equality it also suggests that we need to think more specifically how we sequence that out and how they relate to one another for example ours is a strengthening of the authority structure going to ultimately lead to strengthening of the capacity structure you can imagine a state which is extremely illegitimate not being able to govern effectively and not being able to effectively allocate resources so maybe we should start with legitimacy and that I don't think we should equate with elections we need to think more specifically about the social contract and good governance and that's something I think that typically economists are not all that comfortable doing they are very happy to work on GDP per capita but now there's opportunity here to focus on other measures of government performance including things like legitimacy accountability the social contract horizontal equality and I'll stop there


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I bring you another destiny 2 video and today we are going to take a look at a new secret hidden Triumph which I actually believe may be a place holder until the DLC drops It is a little weird But yeah, you know you'll see that a few new epic new mods coming a new trailer and a few other bits and Bubs definitely worth discussing and talking about people but before we go any further guys if you do enjoy the video I want to show you support you can by hitting that like button if you are new around here and enjoy daily destiny 2 videos Be sure to subscribe Firstly, let me apologize for the lack of videos over the past few days my PC kind of had a mount down So I had to build a new one literally only guy today I was sweating I wasn't gonna give it in time for the black arm with DLC I mean I had to make some dirty moves not gonna lie to you guys But I have one and it's a beast and I am effing ready for the black armory people Now I apologize if I'm a little late on anything. I am covering today. Like I said PC problems Okay, so first up we have what seems to be a seriously weird triumph Now the way it's unlocked isn't weird at all. It's extremely difficult, but it isn't weird The medal is called insert medal here. Yeah, I know This is why I'm thinking it may be a place holder item for when the DLC drops I mean, I don't know why when the DLC drops I mean we have had an update which applied to such medals But I just find it weird how it has no icon brain saying that the background to what we see To this medal is different to everything else. So I ain't sure but to get this insert medal here medal You have to get 50 kills in PvP without dying. Yes 50 kills in a single life Obviously including assist too because I don't know assist cancer's kills in Destiny 2 I mean my pal who is a beast at PvP dude has two of these, but for the likes of me it ain't ever happening Along with this medal you also get this.  We knew new medals were being added. That's for sure We just didn't know what they were and how they were obtained, but this is how you get this one Massive thanks to dark arm games for sure anything for with me. Him and his clan are recruiting by the way So if you are looking for a clan and you are a talented PvE or PvP player You may want to check out a link within the video description Clans name is respawn restriction to play with few dudes and they are good lads So you will definitely enjoy your time playing with ease if you do need a clan So do check them out via the link in the video description Okay, so we're going to move on and we have seen a few new mods added into the loot pool Well up on black armors release. These you can see on screen now And I believe these are only a few of what will be coming new to us Quick access sling Swap weapons much faster for a short duration after emptying the magazine I can see it has been seriously useful in PvP that is for sure Surrounded spec increases the damage granted by surrounded bonus damage link is for a brief time When no longer surrounded by three or more guardians Okay, dragonfly spec increases the radius and damage of dragonfly This will be cool. Just depends on the actual increase we see Rampage spec increases duration of rampage What? If you guys have the breakneck, you know what I am thinking And then we have the sprint grip Temporal increases the weapons ready speed and end and sight speed after sprinting another great PvP mod there Now these are all I've seen so far. Not that there are more and even more when DLC drops. I can't wait people Okay, so we're going to move on. Have you guys seen the latest trailer? Here it is right now What we offer guardian is privilege today It would seem our doors are open to you welcome to the black armory One of our finest In a showcase many things which we have seen and already know about new exotics new legendos etc etc One thing I did notice which is definitely a talking point the new exotic sniper rifle there is an argues burden A primary weapon what now if you didn't know And are seeing this trailer for the first time and seeing this weapon for the first time Yes, it is capable of one hit into the body This exotic has a special perk It allows you to stack all four shots from a single clip and shoot them as one You do this by holding down that reload button when you have a full clip of four The next shot does increase damage and is capable of one shotting guardians in PvP to the body. Wow Interesting though always how it's been made a primary weapon with no burn We can see that via this image on screen now. I 100 guarantee though people it will still use this special ammo But even so an exotic sniper with so much potential has no elemental burn type I wonder whose choice that was I'd love to know why we also got to see the name of the new fusion What's known as the arm blast of exotic is called the Joltun pretty cool And lastly guys, we've got a brief glimpse of the last word Oh, baby I cannot wait to be team shot with this thing Fun times ahead people fun times Indeed But guys on that note We have come to the end of video Sure, but sweet If you guys enjoyed leaving a like really helps out if you are new around here Enjoy daily destiny videos like guides top fives gameplays with you It's just about everything make sure you subscribe And if you never want to miss a video I upload turn notifications on by hitting that bell bottom But thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully I will see you on that next one