Good afternoon, everyone. You may notice a few conspicuous absences today. First, there is no one to introduce me. Second, there is no me, not in the sense you're used to anyway. I hope you are confused. As some of you may know, today is a national women's strike, a day without women. This brown bag lecture was scheduled months before the strike was planned. Indeed, even before the series of recent events which have brought many in the US to new engagement in the political process and new awareness of the need to protect the rights and freedoms of all human beings in this country. Today, I am striking as a human first and foremost, as a woman by happy accident, as a teacher and writer by choice, as an academic and a graduate student by profession, and as a person deeply disturbed by the positions of the current political administration on human rights, environmental rights, economic rights, and on and on. The coincidence of the strike and this brown bag caused me to reflect on what my labor means, how it manifests, and what responsibility I have to anticipate. The organizers of the strike gave somewhat confusing instructions. One, do not engage in paperwork. Two, do not engage in unpaid work. Three, avoid spending money. The relationship of payment for intellectual work sent me sinning. I considered many options for how to proceed. Simply cancel or reschedule this talk, let the space remain empty, move the talk to the open mic on Sprout Plaza, where, in fact, I am now. Or better yet, to the album involved itself. The purpose of the strike is to disrupt normal day-to-day operations. And any of those options would have done so. But simply removing my lecture from the schedule would not be so unusual. It happened two weeks ago. And moving my lecture might open this work up to new audiences in a meaningful way, but would still be a demonstration of unpaid labor.  For those of you who know my work, a performative move like this might seem like a wound, an opportunity. It might seem like I'm capitalizing on the event of the strike to further explore my interests and performance and the intersection of art and research. The purpose of the strike is to demonstrate the unnoticed or unappreciated contributions of a group of people. The trains will not run, schools and restaurants will close. I am here but not here because striking as a female academic is a risk, as all striking is. The only person set to lose if I didn't show up to work today was myself. So this is the best I have. Please press the right arrow key to advance to the next slide and begin reading. I'd like to open by reading a few excerpts from an essay written by photographers Lewis Balz and Anthony Hernandez in 1995. The essay accompanied Hernandez's Landscapes for the Homeless, a series of photographs and encampments under Los Angeles's freeways. Given the current political climate, I cannot begin a talk about an archeology of homelessness without impressing on my audience the context from which the phenomena of displacement arises. I cannot begin without noting the similarities between past eras and the present. The continuation of a phenomenon. Balz and Hernandez, I think, do it better than I could hope to do, so can I leave it to them. And quote, Californians have always taken a perverse pride in being the initiators of most of the pop culture trends that swept the nation and sometimes the world. And quote. Talas sum qualas eras. I am what you will be. Homelessness as a contemporary industrial scale phenomenon probably began in California in the late 60s when then Governor Reagan closed the state mental institutions and turned the mad loose in the streets. A conditioned vodriard likened to the breaking of a seal of the apocalypse. Not really the dangerously mad, just the weak, the helpless, and the incompetent. Even the word homeless as a noun is reason. The homeless, neither voters nor consumers, the disenfranchised and without economic subjecthood have rather suddenly become a permanent fixture in America's ossifying caste system. Like Iraqi civilian casualties in the Gulf War, their precise number is elusive. Let's say they are many, very many. If one were to turn the homeless as if they were an organized group, a group with rights, a group you belonged to. If one weren't implicated in the common placeness of their existence, that is, if the homeless weren't such a present feature on the social horizon, one might find the distance to inquire as to why such a class exists at all in the United States. One might ask, what sort of poor, shitty country is it that has so little self-respect as to allow its citizens to sleep in doorways and beg for food? Questions like this don't get you very far. It's a matter of priorities. That's how it is. It's a free country. Both the rich and the poor have the right to sleep under bridges. Why don't they just go away? They're already away. They're home. They've been evicted. A word which, unlike homeless, speaks volumes. Homelessness grew exponentially in the United States. The general hardening of attitudes that followed in the 1960s, what Thomas Pinchone described as, the re-institution of fascism in America. In this country, it's hard to reconcile the larger segment of society, which is so ordinary and which would just like the homeless to disappear with the greatness of the country. They're reminded that, however great this country is, the homeless stand for the failure to face the future. Maybe forever homeless is the future. Maybe, how to assume quality is very good. What is striking about Hernandez's photographs of homeless sites is that they don't appear to romanticize, spectacularize, or exploit the inhabitants of these spaces. This is not simply because the bodies and faces of inhabitants don't appear. The power of these images lies in how they reveal the everydayness and humanity of living outside of the city. They reveal this through sensitivity, a particular kind of attention to humanity through material things. I discovered Hernandez's work only recently through a retrospective at SF MoMA, and was taken by the way his images resonate with the approach I have taken in thinking about an archaeology of the Albany Bulb. The archaeology of the Albany Bulb is a project of attention as well to a place in our own community where people have been both at home and evicted in the last handful of years. Anthropologist Robert Desjardins writes in his ethnography of a homeless shelter in Seattle that typically one knows the homeless not by talking with them, but by seeing them. He shares an account of the NYPD arresting 10 people in the subway one winter in the 1990s for appearing homeless. He offers a sensuous ethnographic account in the hopes of tempering the superficial treatment of people experiencing homelessness and homeless through stereotype and judgment, through seeing. Rather than vilifying the practice of looking, however, his caution reinforces the necessity for something like an archaeology of the Albany Bulb, which harnesses archaeological attention, largely a visual, but always multi-sensorial practice in order to know more sensitively the realities of homelessness. More than that, it also reinforces the power of representations of people experiencing homelessness. Desjardins also writes that to describe someone as homeless announces a lasting identity. Homelessness notes a temporary lack of housing, connotes a more lasting career. In considering the materiality of such a state, which is so often described as grabbing identity, archaeology of the Albany Bulb was an attempt to employ the conventional methods of archaeological attention, systematic survey, written, drawn, photographic documentation, in order to complicate the narratives that circulate about a group of displaced, disenfranchised people. Home is here, or it is not here. The question is not how, nor who, nor when, but where is your home? Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar. It can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat, or a tent. So wrote British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Most famous for her term of phrase, there is matter out of place. She also called home a pattern of regular doings, emphasizing the process that makes home. That home is not really where the heart is, it is where the heart does, where it does the kinds of forgettable things that create the worn down spots that make a house a home. Snoozing the alarm, brushing our teeth, leaving for work, school, the store, caring for our pets, our children, our partners and friends. Reading and chatting and showering and thinking and fighting and making dinner. We evaluate others' houses based on what kinds of homes we think they might be and what kind of people might dwell within them. Our values, our assumptions about the right and wrong way to live are wrapped up in what we say counts as a house or a home. I would like to tell a story about home at a place called the Albany Vault. The story is not my own, however, and so I will tell it as I have come to know it. Through a deep attention to things and through the glimpses of life that I have been told by others, I aspire to filmmaker Trinh Minh Ha's idea of speaking alongside. Where voices are absent, I hope my telling opens up rather than fills up a space for them. Through this story, I will introduce the idea of an archeology of the contemporary, a practice which harnesses the observable traces of the recent past to, quote, make the familiar unfamiliar and to address the material realities of contemporary life. I am convinced that one of the most important stories of the Albany Vault is the story of homes. There are others, of course, of land and sea, of morphing urban fabric and shoreline, but at its core, the Albany Vault is built of homes. I'll start the story with bricks and I'll start the story at the turn of the 20th century where bricks were the building material de rigueur of the booming west coast of California. Los Angeles and San Francisco were the epicenter of a clay brick industry to rival your wildest dreams. The mass production of brick requires deep, pure clay sources that can be mined and the clay processed, molded and fired in kilns. These bricks were made by the stocked and enrichment brick companies. Stocked and fired, an old brick company was founded in 1907, supplying the barrier with bricks from a prolific clay source in Tesla, east of San Francisco off I-V-8 between what's now Livermore and Tracy. That very same year, the Los Angeles Press Brick Company opened in Northern California, satellite, to meet the high demand of red-braided paving bricks following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This company would eventually be to be known as the Richmond Press Brick Company. Along with other smaller producers, these companies supplied rapidly rebuilding San Francisco in the ever-expanding communities in the East Bay with hundreds of thousands of bricks a year. A handbook to structural and industrial materials in California, also published in the OTS, said that the Richmond plant, just a mile west of the town of Richmond, made on average 30,000 bricks per day at a patent kiln of its own design in a holding capacity of 800,000 bricks. Using machines and kilns of patented and hotly competitive designs, these companies located on chore-adjacent industrial land turned out the raw material of homes, fireplaces, pathways, storefronts, and civic buildings for decades. The Stockton Brick Company closed in 1943 and the Richmond Brick Company closed in 1966. These bricks were made by those companies sometime between 1906 and 1943 slash 1966. And just by being bricks, they are part of the story of the transformation of the Bay Area of the dramatically changing material realities in the first half of the 1900s. But these are bricks out of place, as Mary Douglas would say. They are no longer part of the fireplace for which they were made. I can safely say fireplace because yellow bricks are generally firebricks manufactured to be better insulators and withstand higher direct temperatures than other bricks. I photographed these bricks on Albany Bowl, a peninsula landform between Point Isabel and the Golden Gate Field's face track on the city of Albany's Bay Shore. The bowl was so called because of the dramatic neck and bowl topography that was created by the dumping of construction debris into the bay as early as 1939. The construction of the right of way for the Santa Fe Railroad and the clearing of land for the Golden Gate racetrack to the south left piles of rubble with nowhere to go in the late 1930s and 1940s. By 1963, the city of Albany awarded a contract that allowed the disposal of construction debris at the site, ushering in two decades of ordered dumping of material from routine demolitions, as well as more significant clearing of the bar right of way through Albany and surrounding East Bay communities. Here's representing that. Subtype between 1963 and 1983, the bricks found their second home as part of the massive tons of debris we now call the Bowl. They lived out their first lives as part of the structural landscape of Albany and came to rest here amongst the traces of East Bay's industrious growth. But not for long. Once the dump at the Albany Bowl was decommissioned, the site became largely unregulated public space. Long after the dump was minimally capped, people from all over the East Bay discovered the joys of the Bowl's view and the riches of its bedrock, the materials of past homes and buildings, rhubarb, brick, concrete, stone, dog walkers, lovers, artists, ravers and trippers found a place amidst the landscape of familiar materials out of place, including the same non-native plant species found in local gardens, yet clipping got mixed in with construction debris. Most importantly to this story, many people began visiting the Bowl in the mid-80s, but some of them stayed. People started calling the place home. Community on the Bowl grew, encouraged by the lax policing of the city of Albany's node-camping ordinance and the wealth of raw building materials under foot. Homes and public spaces like an amphitheater and library sprouted up alongside an active artistic landscape of painting and graffiti, found object sculpture, humor, politics and mysticism. By 2014, more than 70 people lived more or less full-time on the Bowl. I've been told that over the nearly 30 years of occupation there, people camped and lived for days, weeks, months and years at a time. A handful of long-term residents hunkered down from up to 10 to 15 years. Longer than many of us in this room have ever lived in one home. In the summer of 2014, the city initiated aggressive legal action to remove all the residents of the Bowl. The $3,000 settlement was offered to residents in exchange for the dismantling and evacuation of their homes in a one-year stay-away order. Some residents took this deal, while others stood their ground in an attempt to fight the eviction. Ultimately, however, the city's attempts were successful and all former residents of the Bowl have moved on, taking as many of their belongings within as was possible. This is where the bricks come back in. Homes at the Bowl range from simple tent or tarp campsites to elaborate, ever-changing constructions. A multi-story wood-framed Bayview mansion belonging to Boxer Bob, shown here. A complex hole for the hobbit built amongst the roots of a tree. Amber's place with a series of different living spaces adorned with historic architectural ornaments scavenged from the Bowl itself. Stephanie's house, a tranquil, neat overlook with a carefully-tended garden. Mom and Bear's house, just about the amphitheater, where a salon-like atmosphere could take over at any moment. Any number of tents in the wide open field at the center of the Bowl. And Pat and Kerry's place. By the time I arrived at the Bowl in the fall of 2014, Pat and Kerry were gone. I know them through stories and the things they left behind at their home on the south end of the Bowl. From what I gather, Pat and Kerry were long-term residents of the Bowl and lived there for years. They were living together in 2011 when Pat was diagnosed with congenital heart failure and was told he had six months to live. Despite stints in the hospital, he returned to the Bowl and lived there for two more years, even inviting Hostess Kerr to his place on the Bowl once or twice. He lived out the last of his time as a land fillian in this home with Kerry and spent most days in a lazy boy's recliner, according to his friend and Bowl resident, Amber Whitson. After he passed in October, 2013, a group of friends constructed a memorial message in an area known as the Brickyard, just above Pat and Kerry's place that read, we love you, Pat. The Brick Memorial to Pat was a fitting one because one of the striking features of his and Kerry's home was a meticulously laid brick floor, made of yellow and red bricks, made by the historic Richmond and Stockton companies of the early and mid 1900s. This 21st century floor puts matter back in place. Under the tall canopy of the tree at the center of their home, the floor was surrounded by burned earth and was, as I've been told, protected by a combination of salvaged wood and tarps. A glazed ceramic decorative molding was still resting on the floor when I first visited the perfect side table. A switchback path and a brick stairway led to a second living platform on the embankment above. Across from the brick floor, a large open space also protected by the tree canopy was surrounded by brick lined garden beds containing tended plants and chinkets. The floor was one of Pat's last projects and you can feel the labor of love just by looking at each brick and you can feel the perfectly aligned head to foot. Even more so when you stand on it and realize it's a masterfully level platform that is now weathered two years uncovered. I became aware of the Albany Bulg shortly after the evictions were complete and was invited to join a project called the Atlas of the Albany Bulg. Whose goal was to document in a number of different ways the experiences on and the state of the Bulg before development projects began. Atlas organizers Susan Moffitt had been in touch with a number of the Bulg's residents and had started a project to control histories providing the residents with disposable cameras to document their homes and doing walkthroughs to locate as many house and public sites as possible. After a visit to the Bulg with residents and activists and friend of Katz, Amber Whitson pictured here, we all decided that an archeology of the Albany Bulg might be an interesting way to continue this project now that most residents have been evicted and many had stay-away orders. Amber herself had rejected the $3,000 settlement and is still dealing with suits against her by the city but did not have a stay-away order. For the next eight weekends, myself and a group of student volunteers including Berkeley graduate students, Alyssa Scott, Mario Castillo, Katie Kingkopf, Scott Lyons, Wolfgang Alders and Mike Grown continued the survey of home sites and used traditional archeological methods to document what was left of the homes. Spending hours at each site, attending carefully to every left behind object and construction, photographing, mapping and describing the pattern of regular doings that undeniably marks these places as homes. Using a map made by a former resident and a landscape architecture student that marks general areas for home sites and public spaces, we relocated as many home sites on the southern half of Bulg as we could. We identified homes that had been occupied by known residents and for significant periods of time and selected four for detailed sketch mapping and survey. Other sites were documented on a short form and a two-by-two meter test surface unit was inventoried. I never knew Pat, but according to his Facebook page, he considered himself an urban archeologist as does Amber Whitson, who record figures in the community at the moment and added collectors, scrapers and thinkers of material found at the edges of city life. Amber at least knew very well about the deep history of the materials that made up the boat, the deep history of the materials that made up the boat could tell. When she gave me a tour of her camp, she quizzed me on collections of historic marble and steel and uniquely stamped bricks and ceramics. The landscape and history of the boat invite this kind of inquiry. The boat itself is a human artifact that tells of many years of Albany's history. If we understand archeology to be the study of the relationship between people, places and things, following Bill Rathje, then in archeology of the contemporary, like the one we undertook at the Albany bulb, is a practice of paying attention to the formation of the past in the present. A slow and deliberate consideration of people's stories about a place, the things they leave behind and the way histories layer themselves on the landscape. Some have taken issue with calling this work archeology, questioning the pastness of the people who once lived there, but now still living have been forced to live somewhere else. Harrison and Schofield discuss the idea of this contemporary pastness as one that exists within living memory, often including the current generation and one immediately before and after. This definition of the past creates a moving target, which I argue is appropriate for the treatment of something like the heritage of the homeless, where tasks to be perceived as imminent within the present. Most importantly, Harrison and Schofield highlighted the normalizing feature of this contemporary past, and I quote, archeological sites of the contemporary past are places that in some ways we know all about, that in others can seem almost as mysterious and distant as sites of prehistory of the medieval period, end quote. While this verges on the romantic, it is exactly the power of unfamiliarizing that has been the most powerful in the work of the apathy Albany poem. Our hope is that the documentation we created can be used in creative ways to capitalize on the authority of science and the language of heritage. The kinds of descriptions, forms, photos, and maps produced by our work are yet another way the vault comes to be known as a place. Already known through the experience of living there, of making it a home, or through visiting it and interacting with it as a landscape for contemplation, recreation, and art being. You could situate the archeology of the Albany Bowl as part of a small collection of projects calling themselves the archeology of homelessness, but the hominess of life at the bowl challenges this. While it is most certainly a document of the lives of people experiencing homelessness, my hope and those of our landfilling collaborators is that further work can make the information useful to researchers and institutions advocating for the rights of those disenfranchised in living outside. It also, however, represents a heritage project in preserving the history of creativity and perseverance at the bowl, a better option for some of that even supportive housing. But now we've evicted residents of the Albany Bowl who lived there for any number of reasons and had any number of relationships to being called homeless. Attention to the bowl was a place of homes, a place of fullness rather than one of lacking, a place of attention and ingenuity rather than discard and disuse. Challenge is how we judge the experience of homelessness. Many residents of the bowl consider themselves housed, consider themselves lucky in some respects to be living on Bayshore land, largely safer than under highway overpasses and abandoned doorways. While life in the landfill was not without hardship, some of them loved the bowl and they felt more at home there than anywhere else. Unfortunately, it is too late to prevent the eviction of residents from the bowl. And now, as bulldozing has begun, too late to preserve the landform and all its junkyard glory. But it is never too late to share the stories of home that happened here and search for better ways to support the folks in our midst who struggle to find or keep their homes. In light of today's strike, it is important too to note the particular experience of women experiencing homelessness. As some of the project's key collaborators, the women at the bowl built unique networks of support with and without male partners and were some of the most vocal protectors of the bowl. Nationally, however, women and families are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population with 34% of the total homeless population composed of families.  African-American families are disproportionately represented among the homeless population, making up 48% of homeless families. Domestic and sexual violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women and families and 20 to 50% of all homeless women and children become homeless as a direct result of fleeing domestic violence. Homeless women are far more likely to experience violence of all sorts compared to women or not homeless because of a lack of personal security when living outdoors or in shelters. Domestic violence shelter provides, providers are prohibited from reporting client information, therefore estimates likely undercount the number of homeless women and families seeking shelter as a result of domestic violence. Age and sexual orientation also affect one's experience of homelessness. Many adolescents become homeless after leaving home because of conflicts with parents regarding sexual orientation.  Among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons who experience domestic violence, 57% became homeless as a result of domestic violence. I'll end with the words of the residents themselves. From an anonymous open letter painted on three large slabs of concrete on the southern shore of the bulb just months before the evictions. Whoa. This landfill is made from the shattered remnants of buildings and structures that not so long ago were whole and standing, framed in concrete and steel, expected and intended to last. Now through the concrete, the grasses make their way. Eucalyptus, acacia, and palm trees drive their roots down through the cracks. Waves constantly erode the shoreline and wash out the edge of the road. And here and there, in sections leveled and cleared of rebar, our tents are hidden away. We live around and with and in the rubble. Live, not merely survive. Can you see how hopeful this is? The bulb is not utopia. It is not free from strife and chaos and cruelty. But either is anywhere else. It is flawed, but it isn't broken and it shouldn't be treated that way. We too are flawed, but we are not broken. So when the politicians start asking their questions and making their decisions, you can help ensure that we are not treated that way.


It's no secret. An honorable transition from sailor to civilian life can be a stressful time. For many, finding a job after the Navy ranks high on this list. DOD's Skill Bridge Initiative was launched just for this purpose. This program can help you find training opportunities that match your rate and skills. If you meet certain qualifications, you may be able to participate in civilian job training that can include apprenticeships as well as internships. To take advantage of these training opportunities, you must be within six months of transitioning. Check out DOD Instruction 1322.29 to view the general eligibility requirements for Skill Bridge. You can sign up with your Twitter account at DODskillbridge.com. Sign up and fill out an application today.


So my name is Nabil Rizq, I'm the Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center and the Co-Chief of Thoracic Oncology at the Cancer Center. So thoracic surgeons usually treat patients with lung cancers, cancers of the esophagus and cancers of what we call the mediastinum in front of the heart and behind the heart. We also treat a lot of cancers that spread to the lungs from other places and occasionally also do benign types of operations. JTCC, like many cancer centers, has a very focused group of oncologists who are specialized in fairly unusual tumors. I recently treated a patient who was in her mid-twenties with a cancer of her vena cava, which is a very unusual tumor, extremely rare. So not many oncologists have experienced a treating that. JTCC had an oncologist and he gave her the appropriate treatment that then allowed me to operate on her. In addition to that, I needed a cardiac surgeon to help me with the operation because we had to take a part of her heart out as well as her vena cava. That combination of having a cancer center with that expertise and a major medical center with cardiac surgeons and having a thoracic surgeon kind of bridges the gap between the two allowed us to remove this tumor successfully in a way that I don't think many centers around the country would have been willing to tackle. So those are the kind of things we can do. So one of the focuses of how I like to manage patients is to minimize unnecessary steps in order to achieve the best possible outcome from the patient. So we work on aspects of length of stay, for instance, where we've significantly shortened the length of stay of patients after these operations. When we do a segment tech to me for patients where patients traditionally and are expected to be in a hospital for four or five days, we routinely send them home after a day. And we've kind of figured out how to achieve those kinds of results and other types of procedures as well. I interact routinely with our oncologist, our radiation oncologist, our radiologist and non-oncologic surgeons to the benefit of our patients.


Hey Survivors and Thrivers, in this video I am going to be talking about the discard phase and how it isn't real, it's an illusion. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. Click the bell icon so you can receive the notifications for my future videos. If you would like to make a donation, my PayPal link is in the video description. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, you can email me at narksfivercoaching.com. The discard phase is an illusion, you have been discarded by the narcissist, but please do not take this personally.   The new source doesn't know what they are really about, they are experiencing the love bombing phase with the narcissist. So they assume that they have met this amazing person, just as you did when you first met them. The narcissist is excited to have found this new source of supply. A person who has boundaries, energy, self-worth and self-esteem, this is attractive to the narcissist in the beginning, they just want to destroy those boundaries, use up all of their energy and destroy their self-worth and self-esteem. The narcissist used up all of your energy, destroyed your self-worth and self-esteem. So now you are no longer of any use to them, they will blame you for always being tired or never wanting to do anything, you might have become insecure about your locks or your abilities. Maybe you have avoided talking to them, the narcissist will blame you for all of this, even though they were the root cause of it all.  When you put down your back-ended compliments, you avoided talking to them, because they used conversations as a way to emotionally abuse you. The narcissist will not acknowledge any of this, it is too painful for them to admit any faults or mistakes, they are emotionally immature, shame-based people, they are not going to accept responsibility or accountability for anything that they have done, this is something that they have learned from childhood, where they would make a fault or mistake and their parent would take the blame, they didn't have to take responsibility or accountability for anything that they did wrong when they were children or if they did, they would just avoid that parent and spend time with their other parent instead. This was their way of dodging any responsibility for their actions. As the narcissist grew older, they learned to adapt this to adulthood, they will often have a primary source and a secondary source, when the primary source tries to confront them and hold them accountable for their actions, they will leave them to go and spend time with a secondary source, the narcissist hasn't really discarded you, they have left because you are no longer meeting their needs, you are making it difficult for them to obtain narcissistic supply, so they will go and find someone else who doesn't know what they are really about, it makes it easy for them to obtain supply, whatever it was they were getting from you, they will get that from someone else without any arguments or disagreements, without being held accountable for what they did to you, but the narcissist hasn't discarded you, if you are willing to offer those same things to the narcissist again, whether it's your attention, validation, approval, admiration, money, material things, affection or anything else, the narcissist would come back, but they know that you see through their bullshit, they know that you know what they are really about, they know that if they come back to you, you are going to confront them and try to make them accountable for their actions or behaviours, this is something the narcissist cannot deal with, they are shame based individuals, doing whatever they can to avoid shame, the last thing they want to do is to confront those emotions, if they were willing to do that, they would never have left you, they left because you were no longer meeting their but also because they were running from the shame of what they did wrong to you, even if you were not going to confront them, sometimes their shame can make them abuse you even more, it's like a projection of their own self-hatred and anger towards themselves, but the discard phase is an illusion, because they would come back if you were willing to give them whatever it is they need without consequences, without them having to be held accountable for their actions and behaviours, this is why narcissists will hoover you, they wait some time until they think that you have forgotten about what they did to you, or you are no longer mad at them, then they will come back and try to get their needs met by you again, this can happen days, weeks, months, sometimes even years after the discard phase, I saw a statistic somewhere that said they hoover 7 times on average before the relationship is completely over, and that's usually when the victim decides it's over, the narcissists will keep coming back as long as they know that they can still get their needs met by you, you have the power to decide when this is over, narcissists do not take anything that they do seriously, they only take whatever anyone else does that affects them seriously, so if they leave you to be with someone else, it's nothing, it's not a big deal, it's a game to them, it doesn't matter what is happening to you, what you are going through, to them it's still a game of getting what they want and not being found out, when the narcissist was a child, they were never held accountable for their actions or behaviours, so anything that happens to you, that's your fault, it doesn't matter if you are depressed or if you've just taken your own life, the narcissist will not take anything you do seriously, unless it is a direct attack on them, because they were never held accountable for their actions or behaviours as a child, their parent always took the blame, so anything that they do to you, no matter how extreme it may be, it's your fault, just know that the narcissist will return again, if they believe that you have forgotten about what they did to you, or if you are no longer mad, if they believe that they can get their needs met by you again, without being held accountable for their actions or behaviours, they will come back, they will just come back and love bomb you again, like nothing ever happened, this is why they don't give you closure in the discard phase, it makes it easier for them to come back, since they have never been held accountable for anything that they've done, the discard phase really is an illusion, but you have to remember what you experienced with the narcissist, all of the pain and suffering you need to discard them and you have the power to do that, to go completely no contact with them, no contact is not a game, it is not temporary, it is a conscious decision to remove the toxic trash from your life, and rebuild your self-worth, self-esteem, self-assurance, self-belief and self-respect, you gave the narcissist everything you had, your love, affection, energy, maybe money and material things, your attention, validation, approval and admiration of them and all you got in return was abuse, manipulation and disrespect, you now have the opportunity to make a decision in your life, ask yourself, is this the standard I would expect from a relationship, is this fulfilling my needs, is this serving me, is this making me feel good, if the answer is no, you are not in a healthy, loving or fulfilling relationship, I highly recommend going no contact and starting your healing journey, please check out my playlist of videos on healing from narcissist abuse, thank you for watching, I hope this video has resonated with you, please like, comment, share and subscribe, more videos soon.


Let me say it's a huge honor. And let me first thank the academy. Wrong stage. All right. My name is Ilya. This is Z. And today we'll talk to you about the HBO journey to Kubernetes. The journey which began not that long ago from not having a single service running inside the container to hosting Game of Thrones season 7 on Kubernetes. Z and I will split this talk. I'll tell you about why Reasons and Z will cover how we get it done. OK. It's downhill from there. HBO has come to the shows that everyone is talking about, from the groundbreaking series to the documentaries, sports to the biggest blockbuster movies available anywhere. For over 40 years, people who love entertainment have recognized HBO as the original, the first, and the best place to find world-most innovative programming. HBO Digital Products is represented by HBO Go, which is part of your TV programming subscription through cable, satellite, or other providers. And HBO Now, subscription directly with HBO. Both provide unlimited access to HBO programming just about on any device. In broad sense, Digital Products is everything and anything to do with the content streaming. And Digital Products is where Z and I work and platform team. So if we look at the HBO streaming services, this is how they could look like from the mile high view. This is not the actual image, but resemblance is pretty close. And if we zoom in, they could be best described as a mesh of API services written mostly in Node.js. Also, we added more and more services written in Go. And all services were deployed into EC2, into single service instance, single EC2 instance paradigm, all wrapped with other scaling group, which handled both deployment and scale, all fronted with the internal or external load balancers, and routed using handled DNS needs. Overall, it was and still is tried and true set up for running services on AWS. It works for general case, however, if you will see next, that HBO case is anything but general. HBO traffic pattern can be best described as the wall. And this is just a random example of how fast playbacks are started on Sunday night during the Game of Thrones season premiere, a season around 6 PM, known as a prime time. And I think this point in time can be best represented by this image in terms of what our API service is faced with, as well as the emotional state of our engineers. And so looking at Game of Thrones' traffic pattern, episode after episode, season after season, left us with very unsettling feelings about our future. Can we hold on during the next episode? What about next season? And the answers were less unoptimistic because we were running into multiple problems. The chief of them would be underutilization. Running Node.js implies that you can utilize a single CPU core at most. Now, since we're deploying in EC2 instances, EC2 instances with single core typically almost always do not have good network. So to find good balance between network and CPU, we had to select instances which run at least two cores of CPU. So right there, we would not be utilizing 50% of our CPUs across all deployments. Underband scaling is good, however, it's slower in comparison. And sometimes it is inadequately slow to react to spike traffic. Thus, we have to overprovision our deployments, doubling, tripling, or sometimes more to accommodate for unpredictable traffic patterns. So you'll take initial 50% underutilization, buffer up with overscaling, and multiply by a number of regions. That will be a lot of unused CPUs. So as for ELB, it goes that every service communication requires ELB. And again, it's tried and true ELB plus ASG approach. However, even for internal communication, within the same VPC, we're required to stand up ELB for services. Again, that resulted in a lot of ELBs, which led us to problems, limits, or otherwise known things that we run and out of. It's ironic because we were underutilizing more than 50% of our CPUs, and yet we were running out of all other resources. So to keep up with the resource usage, we had dedicated alerts which will fire up every time we cross 80% threshold utilization on given resources, ELBs, ASG security groups. And when we get notified, we'll contact AWS support to increase our quota limits. Of course, things got more interesting when we began to run out of instances for given instance types, or IP addresses for given subnets, when even AWS could not help us with our problems. Then, of course, there are external resources that directly tie to instance count, like a telemetry provider who would calculate the license usage based on the instances. So this brings us to Kubernetes. And rather than going through these bullet points, they're all true. I will tell you my personal story. In fact, this is my second time being on the stage at the KubeCon. First time was in San Francisco in 2015 when I was summoned to stage just like today by Kelsey Hightower, but my great surprise in horror because I was not supposed to present. What happened that, walking through the hallways of KubeCon 2015, I dropped my wallet somewhere. And someone had found it and returned it to event organizers. And he called me to stage to return my wallet. So I cannot simplify. And a better example of Kubernetes saving the day, maintaining services up and running and preventing outages. Otherwise, it would be very interesting to fly home. So I was settled on Kubernetes from the start ago. But we did do a diligence. We looked at the messes. With this year, we looked at SWARM. We looked at ECR. And for us, Kubernetes wasn't still is a clear winner. We were just at the beginning of our journey. And we had a very tight schedule, given that we had to continue all the services first. And containerization and mass scale is a huge undertaking on its own. So once we began conquering that hill, though, we started playing with Kubernetes and AWS. And again, this is the end of 2015. A lot of change since then. So what we started with, with most basic setup available, running QBAP to deploy Kubernetes into our existing VPCs. We had to tweak and make some configuration changes. And what we needed to do, we needed to show to our peers, to our bosses, to ourselves, that Kubernetes is not a vaporware. But more importantly, that Kubernetes can be operated in AWS cluster to host production-grade services. And once we got, we started cutting our teeth with Jenkins infrastructure cluster. And once we got successful with that, we began to provision a home cluster to our streaming services. And that's when we realized that basic setup simply won't cut it, and we had more work to do. And Zee will tell you how we got it done. Okay, I'm going to tell you something we learned from our Kubernetes journey. So we created our own tower form templates for provisioning our clusters. We started before some of the community projects started. For example, our Qube AWS, Kops, or Qube Spray. This allowed us to do something really cool. For example, we can deploy our clusters into our existing AWS infrastructure by providing our VPC IDs, subnet IDs, and security group IDs. We also had high availability in mind. So from the very beginning, our Minions and master ASGs are multi-AZ. The purpose of the ASGs are different, though. So for masters, we want to maintain a fixed number of nodes. So if one fails, AWS will automatically launch a new master. For Minions, we want to scale up and down very fast. So we use ASG to launch and to terminate nodes. Master is also running in HA mode, meaning that API servers are low-balanced. And schedulers and Qube controller managers are running as leader and followers. Despite being homegrown, we keep incorporating best practice from the community. We turn on OIDC or OpenID Connect authentication for a Qube API server. So as long as our developers' GitHub accounts are in HBO organization, they will get a token for their Qube-Cuttle authentication. Terraform modules is a great way to promote reusability and modularity. We created self-contained Terraform modules for both Kubernetes masters and Minions. When we want to launch on the cluster, what we do is we compose a Terraform template like this and we will run Terraform apply and, bam, we have a cluster up and running. Several weeks later, we have had some experience of how to operate a cluster and then we noticed a few problems. So first, we run Prometheus in the cluster to script metrics with a provision IOPS EBS volume as data storage because our cluster scale up and down all the time. Sometimes the minion that hosts the Prometheus part gets terminated. We have to wait a long time for Prometheus part to come back because Kubernetes has to detach and reattach the EBS volume. That process could be very slow and during that time, we were losing metrics. The second problem is for big events like Game of Thrones premiere or finale or simply our regular load testing, we have to pre-scale our cluster up significantly to overcome the war effect Elia just mentioned. And sometimes AWS cannot provide sufficient capacity of our desired instance type for the minions. So these issues led us to an improved version of our Terraform modules. First, we added the instance type variable to our minion module so that all the minions launched from this ASG will get this particular instance type. We also added a tank var to the minion module and passed that as a Qubelet startup flag. So if this var is defined, then all the minions launched from this ASG will register with that particular tank. Again, we benefit from the modularity of our Terraform code. So for regular minions, we pass our main instance type to the module. We added another module to our cluster. We call it backup minion. These minions are exactly the same as our regular minions except that they run on our backup instance type, which is C for the ATX. Another module we added, what we call reserve the minions. So reserve the minions are, again, exactly the same as regular minions except that they are tainted by this tank to reserve equals true. At the same time, we updated our cluster autoscaler so that when cluster scales down, the reserve the minions are excluded. So to summarize, we added two new minion ASGs to our cluster to address the issues we had earlier. First, if AWS runs out of the main instance type we want, we scaled up our backup minion to bring more capacity. And second, for Prometheus, we updated the Prometheus deployment to have affinity to reserve the minions and also tolerate the reserve tank. So in this way, Prometheus part is not interrupted, even when cluster scales down. Flannel was the networking layer we chose at the beginning. Compared to other solutions, it was simple to set up, especially before the CNI came. And it is included in every core S distro, the distro that we use. However, when we were doing our regular load test, we discovered that on the heavy load, there were some problems. First, it was increased latency and timeouts, both between pods and going out of the cluster. And second, there was UDP package drop, which impacted our QtnS lookups and custom metric collection, both of which are UDP traffic. These are just two issues that we saw very frequently during the season. The GitHub links are on the slide. Now let's talk about different types of services that we tried and the different ways we used to get traffic into our cluster. First, we provisioned ELBs for every node port type of service and associated these ELBs with the minion ASGs. So in this way, all the minions launched from the ASGs will be registered with the ELBs automatically. However, there's an AWS hard limit of 50 ELBs per ASG. And also, since we are provisioning ELBs ourselves, we have to keep track of them manually. Next is Ingress, which I think is the most common setup out there.  However, there were some problems with that too. First, when we looked at the CloudWatch metrics for shared ELB and we noticed some 500 errors, but which backend service exactly these 500 comes from? It's pretty hard to tell without scrunching the Ingress controller logs or ELB access logs. And second, we noticed that Ingress controllers seems to struggle against a very burst or spiky traffic that we saw. And this setup produced more connection timeout errors in our load test versus the node port setup on the previous slide. And finally, the publicity of your shared Ingress ELB will determine all the publicity of all the services. And last but not least, we tried low-balancer service type, which is cloud provider-specific. In this scenario, Kubernetes actually handles the provisioning of the ELBs and registered minions with the ELBs. This method is not affected by 50 ELB limits. But first, we noticed there was an AWS API throttling problem. And second, there was some ELB security group customization issue that didn't get resolved into a recent 1.8 release. So at the end, these are our choices for services and Ingress. For production services, we use node port plus individual ELBs. For non-production services, we use Ingress controllers and shared ELBs. In both scenarios, we use the built-in service discovery for making calls between our microservices. QtnS is always an interesting topic. Have you ever looked at the resolve.conf file in your parts? Basically, this is how it looks like. First, you've got a bunch of internal domain names to search for and AWS domain, internal domain names. So this code is actually from a part in default namespace. So you see the default service, the cluster local there. Second, you got your service IP of QtnS. And finally, there's n.5 option. So this option basically means that there will be many invalid and unnecessary DNS lookups. Basically, this is what happens. So for example, if you want to resolve a DNS called pjsql.backend.sql.com, because it has less than five dots in it, we will append all search domains and try them first before an actual DNS query happens. So why n.5 was chosen was explained in detail in this ticket by Tim Hawken for reasons like same namespace lookups, cross namespace lookups, and of course cluster federation. In the next following slide, we will share some of the tunings we have done to reduce those invalid lookups. Okay, these are some of the tunings that we found very important to us. First is the cache size of DNS mask container. I think the default is somewhere around 100 or 200, but you should set it to max, which is 10,000, unless memory is a really constrained in your system. Well, setting it to 10,000 will only cost you additional couple megabytes of memory. Dash dash address flag, it is a really big performance booster. So this flag tells DNS mask to return an IP address for a specified domain name. However, we use it slightly differently. We specify a whole bunch of invalid domain names that were created by n.5, and we do not specify IP address. So effectively, for these invalid domain name lookups, DNS mask will return not found immediately instead of doing an actual lookup. This way, we speed up things a lot. So if you haven't taken a look at your Qoop DNS deployment, I recommend this flag. And finally, if you have some internal name servers you wanna hook up, the dash dash server flag is for you. All your parts will be able to resolve internal domain names without additional changes. And with that, I'll hand it back to Ilya. Thanks. Quick word about telemetry. It's not surprising that we didn't have any container services before. We couldn't take almost anything from our telemetry stack to Kubernetes, except Splunk, and with Splunk, telemetry team did some heavy customization and tuning for Splunk forward to get reliable logs. Everything else on this slide was new technology to us, and I think it was a great thing. Zero dimension special case for reserve instances, for staple service like Prometheus, and we also love Prometheus. However, running EBS with the availability zones and no affinity for Prometheus, juggling of it, it's not fun at all. And speaking of EBS, it can have some interesting mountain and a mountain times. So we evaluated Rook with a great success, and we just didn't risk to put in production before Game of Thrones season. However, we excited to see Rook become a CNCF project. It's been submitted to TOC. Okay, so for C-Advisor is one thing to consume metrics from C-Advisor running your infrastructure cluster with few nodes, two CPU cores each, and a couple Jenkins Cloud deployed. It's totally not to run on the 300 node cluster with 40 cores each and more than 20,000 containers deployed. Consuming metrics at that scale felt like drinking out of the fire hose, and we had to do some extensive metric tuning, filtering, and Prometheus memory adjustments to get metrics in reliable state. So when do you know you are ready? Ready for Game of Thrones season premiere. For us, it boiled down by setting up the bar, and in terms of threshold, viewership, and ramp-up speed, and beating it with a low test. So for about two or three months leading to Game of Thrones season premiere, we ran a weekly mega low test, and first attempts were just beautiful. It left us in ruins, and that's when the real work began. It began on both fronts on services side. Our service engineer did some heroic job investigating issues and fine tuning services to accommodate for new environments. And on Kubernetes side, when we began to look for issues, reporting if none were found and fixing what we could. Slowly, we began to merge in better shape, gaining more confidence in Kubernetes and services running on it. If there is any moral to our story, after successful Game of Thrones season seven on Kubernetes, it feels good. It felt good to be right perhaps for the first time by making the right choice. And if there is any advice we can give is trust yourself, trust your team, succeed at small things, and you'll be well positioned to succeed at big initiatives. And it won't always be a smooth ride, but you and your systems will emerge in better shape than you went in. For us, many problems we found in our services were not caused by Kubernetes. They were there all along, Kubernetes made them more visible. So as mentioned earlier, we looked in alternatives. However, the biggest undeniable most important reason why we choose Kubernetes was vibrant and active Kubernetes community. Without all the GitHub issues and fixes, without C groups and Slack channels, without meetups and KubeCon just like this, there's high chance that a journey would not end well and we most likely end up like these two guys. But likely it didn't happen and here we are at KubeCon telling a success story of Game of Thrones season seven on Kubernetes. Thank you.


So my prosthetic leg here has been squeaking for days ever so quietly like I can hear it no one else can I knew something was going on, but I thought it's fine. What could be wrong?


This is for all of you beta males out there. Stop simping.  It's disgusting.  They love alpha males. Alpha males will never simp. Beta males are disgusting, need to be abolished, and all they do is simp all the time.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's theCUBE, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Back to theCUBE everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We've been covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting, and really it's rebirth. And I'm here with Chris Fox, who's the Group Vice President for Enterprise Cloud Architects and Chief Technologist for the North America Tech Cloud at Oracle. Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks Dave, glad to be here. So I love this title. I mean, years ago there was no such thing as a cloud architect. Certainly there were chief technologists, but so you are really, those are your peeps. Is that right? That's right, that's right. That's really my team and I, that's all we do. So our focus is really helping our customers take this journey from when they were on-premise to really transforming with cloud. And when we think about cloud, really for us, it's a combination. It's our hybrid cloud, which happens to be on-premise. And then of course the true public cloud, like most people are familiar with. So very exciting journey, and frankly I've seen just a lot of success for our customers. You know Dave, what I think we're seeing at Oracle though, because we're so connected with SaaS, and then we're also connected with the traditional applications that have run the business for years, the legacy applications that have been servicing us for 20 years, and then the cloud-native developers. So what my team and I are constantly focused on now is things like digital transformation and really wiring up all three of these across. So if we think of like a customer outcome, like I want to have a package delivered to me from a retailer, that actual process flow could touch a brand new cloud-native site from e-commerce, it could touch essentially maybe a traditional application that used to be on-prem that's now in the cloud, and then it might even use a new SaaS application maybe for maybe a procurement process or delivery vehicle and scheduling. So what my team does, we actually connect all three. So what I always mention to my team and all of our customers, we have to be able to service all three of those constituents and really think about process flows. So I take the cloud-native developer, we help them become efficient. We take the person who's been running that traditional application and we help them become more efficient. And then we have the SaaS applications which are now rolling out new features on a quarterly basis and it's a whole new delivery model, but the real key is connecting all three of these into a business process flow that makes the customer's life much more efficient. So I want to get into this cloud conversation a little bit.  I'm going to ask you about it, I can be last. I was being last, an advantage, but let me start there. People always say, you know, Chris we want to get out of the data center. We're going zero data center. And I always say, well, how are you going to handle that back office stuff, right? The stuff that's really big, it's cranky, doesn't handle just, you know, instances dying or things going away too easily. It needs predictable performance. It needs scale. It absolutely needs security. And ultimately, you know, a lot of these applications truly have relied on an Oracle database. The Oracle database has its own specific characteristics that it needs to run really well. So we actually looked at the cloud and we said, let's take the first generation clouds, which are doing great, but let's add the features that specifically, a lot of times the Oracle workload needed in order to run very well and in a cost effective manner. So that's what we mean when we say last mover advantage, we said, let's take the best of the clouds that are out there today. Let's look at the workloads that frankly, Oracle runs and has been running for years, what our customers needed. And then let's build those features right into this next version of the cloud with the service, the enterprise. So our goal, honestly, which is interesting is even that first discussion we had about cloud native and legacy applications, and also the new SaaS applications, we built a cloud that handles all three use cases at scale, resiliently and in a very secure manner. And I don't know of any other cloud that's handling those three use cases all in, we'll call it the same tendency for us at Oracle. My question is, why was it important for Oracle and is it important for Oracle and its customers to participate in IaaS and pass and SaaS? Why not just the last two layers of that? What does that give you from a strategic advantage standpoint and what does that do for your customers? Yeah, great question. So the number one reason why we needed to have all three was that we have so many customers to today are in a data center, they're running a lot of our workloads on premise and they absolutely are trying to find a better way to deliver lower cost services to their customers. And so we couldn't just say, let's just, everyone needs to just become net new. Everyone just needs to ditch the old and go just to brand new alone. Too hard, too expensive at times. So we said, let's give us customers the ultimate amount of choice. So let's even go back again to that developer conversation in SaaS. If you didn't have IaaS, we couldn't help customers achieve a zero data center strategy with their traditional application. We'll call it PeopleSoft or JD Edwards or E-Business Suite or even there's some massive applications that are running on the Oracle Cloud right now that are custom applications built on the Oracle database. What they want is they said, give me the lowest cost but yet predictable performance IaaS. I'll run my apps tier on this. Number two, give me a platform service for database because frankly, I don't really want to run your database like with all the manual effort. I want someone to automate patching scale up and down and all these types of features like the cloud should have given us. And then number three, I do want SaaS over time. So we spend a lot of time with our customers really saying, how do I take this traditional application run it on IaaS and PaaS? And then number two, let's modernize it at scale. Maybe I want to start peeling off functionality and running them as cloud native services right alongside, right? That's something again that we're doing at scale and other people are having a hard time running these traditional workloads on prem in the cloud. The second part is they say, you know, I've got this legacy traditional ERP been servicing me well, or maybe a supply chain system. Ultimately, I want to get out of this. How do I get to SaaS? We say, okay, here's the way to do this. First, bring it to the cloud, run it on IaaS and PaaS. And then selectively, I call it cloud slicing. Take a piece of functionality and put it into SaaS. We're helping customers move to the cloud at scale. We're helping them do it at their rate with whatever level of change they want. And when they're ready for SaaS, we're ready for them. And how does autonomous fit into this whole architecture? I mean, take it by the way for that description.  I'm sure you're having this custom, this conversation with a lot of cloud architects and chief technologists, they want to know this stuff. They want to know how it works. And then we'll talk about what the business impact is, but talk about autonomous and where that's been. So the autonomous database, what we've done is really taking a look at all the runtime operations of an Oracle database. So tuning, patching, securing all these different features. And what we've done is taking the best of the Oracle database, the best of something called Exadata, right? Which we run in the cloud, which really helps a lot of our customers. And then we've wrapped it with a set of automation and security tools to help it really manage itself, tune itself, patch itself, scale up and down, independent between compute and storage. So why that's important though, is that it really, our goal is to help people run the Oracle database as they have for years, but with far less effort. And then even not only far less effort, hopefully a machine plus man, kind of the equation we always talk about is, man plus machine is greater than man alone. So being assisted by artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform those database operations, we should provide a better service to our customers with far less cost. Our hope and goal is that the people who've been running Oracle databases, how can we help them do it with far less effort? And maybe spend more time on what the data can do for the organization, right? Improve customer experience, et cetera. Versus maybe like, how do I, how do I spin up a table? So let's talk about the business impact. So you go into customers, you talk to the cloud architects, the chief technologists, you pass that test, now you got to deliver the business impact. Where does Oracle consulting fit with regard to that? And maybe you could talk about where you guys want to take this thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so the cloud is a great set of technologies, but where Oracle consulting is really helping us deliver is in the outcome. One of the things I think that's been fantastic working with the Oracle consulting team is that, cloud is new for a lot of customers who've been running these environments for a number of years. There's always some fear and a little bit of trepidation saying, how do I learn this new cloud? I mean, the workloads we're talking about Dave are like tier zero, tier one, tier two, and all the way up to Dev and test and DR. Oracle consulting does really a couple of things in particular. Number one, they start with the end in mind. And number two, that they start to do is they really help implement these systems. And there's a lot of different assurances that we have that we're going to get it done on time and better be under budget, because ultimately, again, it's something that's really paramount for us. And then the third part of it, a lot of times it's runbooks, right? You actually don't want to just live at our customer's environments. We want to help them understand how to run this new system. So training and change management. A lot of times Oracle consulting is helping with runbooks. We usually will after doing it the first time, we'll sit back and let the customer do it the next few times and essentially help them through the process. And our goal at that point is to leave. Only if the customer wants us to, but ultimately our goal is to implement it, get it to go live on time and then help the customer learn this journey to the cloud.  Too important to leave the chance. So they really help us with helping the customer become live and become very confident and skilled so they can do it themselves. I love the conversation. We'll have to leave it right there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights, great stuff. Absolutely, thanks Dave, thank you for having me on. All right, you're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We are covering the Oracle North American Consulting Transformation and its rebirth in this digital event. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.


It's time for the Lorne Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour, brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. A presentation of the Lorne Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Lorne Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Lorne Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Lorne Jean Chronoscope? Mr. William Bradford Huey, editor of the American Mercury, and Mr. Henry Haslitz, editor of the Freeman and contributing editor of Newsweek Magazine. Our distinguished guest for this evening is Dr. Wellington Koo, ambassador from China to the United States. The opinions expressed are necessarily those of the speakers. Dr. Koo, you've been the ambassador of your country to the United States since 1946, I believe, but you were no stranger even then. I don't want to embarrass you, but I think a lot of our Chronoscope audience would be happy to know about your brilliant career at Columbia University. And where you edited the spectator, and I think you ran the debating team and made a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and so on.  You've been an ambassador to France and to Great Britain as well as here. You've served for countries of Prime Minister as an acting Prime Minister one time, I think, and you've had such a wide-ranging experience in international affairs that I hardly know of any other man alive who could equal it, certainly none who could surpass it. So I'd like to talk to you tonight about the state of the world, and I thought perhaps it might be best to begin with conditions around Formosa, where your government has now had its seed and power. There have been rumors that the position of the government there, the Shankeshak government, is deteriorating. Now what's the real truth of the situation there? Well, what you have heard, Mr. Hatton, is not true. It has not deteriorated. On the other hand, it has improved politically, morally, economically and militarily. We have completed a program of the free elections of the local and provincial officials. We have carried almost a budget now, which is a great achievement with the aid from the United States. And we have raised the morale of the combat troops and we have, generally speaking, raised the spirit of the people of Formosa in their determination. Would you be able to protect the country against any invasion? We'd like it to be launched from the mainland, do you think? Are we able to resist an invasion, an attempted invasion? I think we are. We can. Especially as we have the support of the US 7th Fleet and especially as we have been able, as I said a little while ago, greatly improve the quality of the combat troops and raise their morale. Well, would you have the strength to launch an invasion under present conditions? Well, that would depend upon how long the campaign would be. If we are certain of success within a limited period, we think we can with certain increased help. If the campaign should extend over a long period, then it would depend upon many other factors, such as the general international situation. Well, what role has our Navy played in patrolling the waters between the mainland and Formosa? It's been neutralizing those waters, so to speak, hasn't it? Hasn't that had the effect of making it unnecessary for the Chinese Communists to hold large bodies of troops down there? Haven't they been able to divert those troops up to Korea and Manchuria and so on? Well, I think I would call it a very interesting coincidence that ever since the 7th Fleet was stationed there, the Communists have been withdrawing troops from the coastal provinces facing Formosa and sending them north to Korea. Dr. Koo, you, of course, are a distinguished student of the Orient. We've had several many people on this program from Asia who've been there and representatives. We had the distinguished ambassador from Indonesia who told us today that westerners were not particularly welcome in Indonesia. Mr. Bullock told us that westerners were not particularly welcome in India today. Now, is it true that one of the facts of our time is that there is a revolt against the West in Asia? Well, basically there is a very widespread latent feeling that the Asia people should be able to run their own affairs and should not be exploited. But that has not applied to the whole West, though. Well, now let me ask you this. In your long and unsuccessful battle against the Communists in China, could you say that you were handicapped because your forces were generally said to be the representatives or the friends of the West? Wasn't American friendship a real handicap to you in your battle with the Communists in Asia? Well, yes, Mr. Hewitt. That was a great theme on the part of the Communist propaganda that the Nationalist China, the Nationalist government, and its officials and all the anti-communist Chinese were the running dogs of the United States. And you'll say that as a practical politician it was a real handicap for you in trying to combat Communism? Well, certainly that gave the Communists a pretext to, so to speak, to fool the people. Yes, it was a very powerful weapon for the Communists to exploit that anti-Western feeling among the Chinese. Now, sir, our audience, of course, is well aware of the long missionary effort made by the West in China. When did the American missionary effort begin in China? At the beginning of the last century. So it went on for more than a hundred years, didn't it? Well, for nearly about 150 years. And as a scholar, what would you say was the, how would you evaluate that effort? Well, personally, I would say that the service they rendered, the value of their service is really priceless, because they did many things besides carrying the gospel to our people. In the medical field, in the field of education, in the field of science, they were the pioneers. Now, that long and difficult effort has come to an end now, hasn't it?  They've driven out all the missionaries, and I believe they've recently driven out the Salvation Army, hasn't they? Yes, yes. Dr. Poo, I wanted to ask you about this so-called China lobby. You, of course, must be more aware than the rest of us of the charges that have been made recently, and there's something that's been called a China lobby. Curiously enough, it isn't the Chinese Communist that this charge is brought against, but the Chinese Nationalist Government. And I'd like to, or friends of that government, I'd like to ask whether you'd like to comment on these odd charges. Mr. Hathlete, I must be very frank. I personally do not know what the China lobby is, because I never know that there any China lobby exists, except that there is a Chinese Communist lobby, or the International Communist lobby. You're accused of defending your government, is that what the lobby amounts to? Well, I must treat guillotine, that's it. Well, now, Dr. Poo, this government of ours is still friendly to you, isn't it? It's still giving you money. Yes. And to what extent? How much aid, dollar aid are you getting from the United States this year? Well, for the current fiscal year, it approximates $300 million, including military, economic aid, and what is called the impact aid. Are you getting aid? Are you getting aid from any other nation in the world other than the United States? No, Mr. Hewitt. This is the only country that's been giving aid. Is France, in effect, giving any aid by its forces at all? No, Mr. Hewitt. It isn't. No. Well, how about this? Are there any serious guerrilla forces on the mainland fighting on your side, or fighting the Chinese communists, whether they are formally allied with the nationalist government or not? There are very substantial forces on the mainland, the guerrilla forces, you know. At least there are five, six regions where the guerrillas concentrate in the hills, in the mountains, in the woods, fighting the communist authorities. Do they work together or do they work as independent bands, more or less? Part of them, they are linked together. And for most, it keeps a very close contact with them all. Rather regularly? Fairly regularly, yes. Well, do you make any sorties onto the mainland at all? Are you able to do that at all? Well, we've been making what is called raids, and we've been able to occupy coastal towns sometimes for ten days, sometimes for fortnight, not with the idea of holding them permanently, but with the idea of giving supplies and to the guerrilla forces. Well, Shankai Chek offered to bring his forces to Korea to fight against the Chinese communists there, didn't he? And that offer was refused, and that refusal still stands, isn't that the situation? Yes, that is so. Dr. Koo, in your long battle, an unsuccessful battle against the communists, were there any surprises for you? Were you surprised at how rapidly the communists took over China? Have there been any surprises for you as an individual, sir? Well, personally, I think I've been surprised by the rapidity with which they have been able to overrun the mainland. And the communists are destroying what was known as Chinese culture, are they not? They're changing the nation completely, changing the attitudes of the people? Decidedly. They're destroying even the very basic foundation of our society, the family. And as a final question, sir, your principle aim is to rescue China. How long do you think you have to rescue China, or before the communists are able to completely change the character of the nation? Well, we hope we will be able to start on our recovery of the mainland program before too long, before the communists are able to consolidate their position on the mainland. I see. Thank you, sir, very much for being with us. The editorial board for this edition of the Long Jean Chronoscope was Mr. William Bradford Huey and Mr. Henry Haslett. Our distinguished guest was Dr. Wellington Ku, Ambassador from China to the United States. The problem of manufacturing an article of extreme precision such as a Long Jean watch is to deliver it to its eventual owner in the same perfect condition that it leaves the factory. Now for that reason, Long Jean watches have always been distributed directly from the factory through a limited number of jewelers, qualified by knowledge and experience to handle watches of Long Jean quality. These jewelers are our authorized Long Jean Witner jeweler agencies. And through them, you are assured that the Long Jean watch which you buy is a worthy representative of the only watch in history ever to win ten World's Fair Grand Prizes, twenty-eight gold medals, and highest honors for accuracy from the leading government observatories of the world. When next you buy a watch for yourself, for a favorite graduate or any important occasion, see Long Jean, the world's most honored watch, sold under our factory guarantee only at your authorized Long Jean Witner jeweler agency. Throughout the world, no other name on a watch means so much as Long Jean, the world's most honored watch. Premier product of the Long Jean Witner watch company since 1866, maker of watches of the highest character. We invite you to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening at this same time for the Long Jean Chronoscope, the television journal of the important issues of the hour, broadcast on behalf of Long Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Witner, distinguished companion to the world's honored Long Jean. This is Frank Knight reminding you that Long Jean and Witner watches are sold and serviced from coast to coast by more than 4,000 leading jewelers who proudly display this emblem, agency for Long Jean Witner watches. This is the CBS Television Network.


Five English expressions with the word call. Number one, call it a day.  We've written 20 pages of the report. Let's call it a day. Number two, call the shots. To be in charge, to be the boss, to make the important decisions. Sorry, I can't give you approval for this part of the project. You should talk to Diana. She's the one calling the shots. It comes from the sports of pool or billiards and target shooting, where skilled players say exactly where they are going to put the ball or bullet before they shoot. Number three, call someone's bluff. To make someone prove something because you believe they are lying. For example, if your friend is bragging that he has $100,000 in his bank account, asking to see his bank statement would be calling his bluff. You're challenging him to prove that what he is saying is true. This expression comes from poker, in which a player can stay in the game by pretending that he has better cards than he really does. When you make someone show their cards to reveal the real situation, you are calling their bluff. Number four, wake up call. This expression has two meanings. First, a wake up call is when you are staying in a hotel and you ask the receptionist to call the telephone in your hotel room at a certain time in the morning to wake you up. I'd like a wake up call at 7.30 tomorrow morning, please. A wake up call can also mean a sign or signal that alerts you to danger or to a bigger problem. The fatal car accident last week was a wake up call for teenagers regarding the dangers of texting while driving. Number five, a close call. This expression also has two meanings. In a sports game or competition, if the difference between the winner and the others is very small. Currently, 49% of voters support Smith and 51% support Jones. This election is going to be a close call. A close call also means when something bad almost happened but didn't happen. It was a very close call. The firemen pulled her out of the burning car just a few minutes before it exploded. Thanks for watching English Tips from Espresso English. If you liked this video, please share it.


Nigerian Jalof I love Nigerian Jalof Ah, Nigerian Jalof It's non comparable with any dish Nigeria is a country blessed with diverse cultures, traditions, people and history One of the most important factors that make Nigeria unique is the diversity in culture, especially kuisines One of the most important kuisines Nigeria has given to the world is Nigerian Jalof Hello everyone, my name is Ayodele, people call me Chef Ayodele And together today we are cooking Nigerian Jalof rice Nigerian Jalof rice is very tasty and popular And it is a classic cuisine It is enjoyed by all Nigerians And now, these are the ingredients we are using to prepare Nigerian Jalof rice This is my rice Tomato paste Full seasoning Pepper This is my onion Garlic and ginger Vegetable oil And salt to taste Alright, we first boil our rice Then we slice our onions Well, I love to cook Nigerian Jalof rice because it's so tasty And it is enjoyed by everybody And it is very popular Now, the rice is boiled Now, we pour our vegetable oil We wait for the vegetable oil to eat Before we pour our onions We add our tomato paste The next thing is to add our blended pepper And this is thyme This is full seasoning This is salt to taste And now we add our chicken broth Now, we want to add our boiled rice I love Nigerian Jalof because first of all, the taste You know, the aroma, the smell Even the kitchen process You'll be salivating and you'll be expectant And serving Nigerian Jalof It's in Nigerian Jalof The experience, you know You can't compare it with white rice or other rice And the nutritional value that is attached to Nigerian Jalof It's different from other Jalof You have some other country Jalof When Nigerian Jalof You still cannot compare it with any other dish It's different I love Nigerian Jalof rice because it's very tasty and delicious Nigerian Jalof rice is a very common dish in Nigeria Nigeria is blessed with multiple tasty dishes But Nigerian Jalof rice is one dish that unites Nigerians From the east to the south to the north To every other part of Nigeria It's this special thing about Nigerian Jalof rice In any occasion or festive season That you don't see Nigerian Jalof You should know there's a problem Because it's something that you must find in any pattern You will always see it You will always see them serving it Even if you go to a pattern and they will ask you for The first dish that will be mentioned to you is Our Nigerian Jalof rice We have Jalof rice That's the first thing they will mention Before they even bring any other dish along I remember then growing up And the only time we usually eat Nigerian Jalof Is maybe Christmas or New Year Or if there's any festive But now the narrative has changed But now we can't eat Nigerian Jalof Anytime anywhere But because of this uniqueness of this dish It gives us that speciality Set apart from every other dish What I can say now is Nigerian Jalof is my favourite food This food is wow It's really good I love Nigerian Jalof I love to eat it with salad Moimue or chicken