The cultural explosion of human interests can never be underestimated. When a people are inspired or dramatically influenced, the human touch and mind creates extravagant works to show faith and appreciation, and this doesn't always pass from person to person as the great invisible divide keeps us in disagreement. Before Islam reached Afghanistan, Buddhism spread. This wasn't part because the religion was not location specific. Believers did not need to worship at a particular temple or at a particular site as part of their practice. Worship could take place anywhere and at any time. This freedom resulted in the emergence of Buddhist cave architecture throughout Asia, and indeed, if you visit Afghanistan's Buddhist statues today, you will see nearly a thousand Buddhist caves carved along 1300 meters of cliff face, and it is against this backdrop of carved caves that the two monumental Buddha images were carved. In March 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered Taliban forces to demolish the Bamiyan Buddhas. The direction to destroy the Buddha image was motivated in part by the Taliban's extreme iconoclastic campaign as well as their disgust for Western interest and funding that had gone to protecting the images while there was an intense and growing need for humanitarian aid in the region. The Taliban's claim that destroying the Buddha sculptures was an Islamic act is belied by the fact that Bamiyan had become predominantly Muslim by the 10th century and that the sculptures had up until 2001 remained intact. The destruction of the Buddhas was a huge loss for our understanding of human history. However, even in darkness, light has a way of emerging. Wait, do you hear this? Since their destruction, several new discoveries have been made near the sites of the Bamiyan Buddhas including the discovery of fragments of a 62 foot long reclining Buddha. The whole area is now listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in danger and debates over how to restore the site connect to both national and international issues around what constitutes proper preservation, interpretation, and remembrance at former sites of violence. The two large Buddha images built in the 6th century reflected the international environment of the Bamiyan Valley and were influenced by the art and culture of India, Central Asia, and even ancient Greek culture. For example, both Buddhas wore flowing robes and have been described as having wavy curls of hair. This hairstyle and the flowing drapery are elements rooted in the early Gandaharan Buddhist imagery that combined Hellenistic Greek traditions of representation with Indian subject matter. Much of what we know about the monumental Buddha sculpture comes from the Chinese monk Xuanshang who traveled to Bamiyan in 643 and documented his travel in the text The Great Tang Records of the Western Regions. As the earliest text describing the Buddha images, these writings provide us with remarkable descriptions of the sculpture and the vibrant communities that inhabited the region, he wrote. When merchants coming and going happen to witness visions of heavenly deities, whether as good omens or as predictions of disaster, they worship the deities to pray for blessedness. There are several tens of monasteries with several thousand monks who follow the Hineyana teachings of the Loko Taravata school. To the northeast of the city there is at a corner of the mountain a rock statue of the Buddha standing, 140 or 50 feet in height, a dazzling golden color, and adorn with brilliant gems. To the east there is a missionary built by a previous king of the country. To the east of the monastery there is a copper statue of the Buddha standing, more than 100 feet tall. It was cast in separate pieces and then welded together into shape. Buddhism flourished for a thousand years before the rise of Islam and at this important place which is located on the Silk Road, the area had frequent contact with the Mediterranean, hence the Buddha's Hellenistic features. Nearly two decades after the destruction of the wonders, conservation experts are now working with the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, one of the world's foremost research centers on the civilization of the Middle East, to bring the collection back to life. Supported by cultural heritage preservation grants from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, O.I. researchers along with Afghan colleagues are painstakingly cleaning, sorting, and reassembling statues from the more than 7,500 fragments left behind, which museum employees swept up and saved in trunks in the basement. When they were broken we lost part of history, an important period of high artistic achievement which these objects represent, said the director of National Museum of Afghanistan. They are the only pieces remaining from the archaeological sites. Hada was burned and looted during the 1980s, so these pieces at the moment are all we have left. By reviving them we are reviving part of our history which is currently lost. The statues are beautiful by all accounts and first excavated by French archaeologists in the 1930s, and spanning 500 years of Afghanistan's history between the first and sixth centuries. They are an example of a rare art form unique to the region, often called the Gandaharan style. Some stand alone and others in tableaus, ranging from life-size to others that can fit in the palm of a hand, but the task of reconstructing them is more than a puzzle, it is monumental. The materials these ancient artisans used, such as limestone, tend to crumble and disintegrate under duress rather than simply crack. It's more like trying to assemble pieces from a thousand different jigsaw puzzles that have all been dumped together and without the pictures from the boxes, said Gil Stein, professor at the Oriental Institute. Stein heads the project which is part of the OI's ongoing work with the National Museum of Afghanistan's Cultural Preservation Partnership which began in 2012. The partnership has helped restore the museum's infrastructure, including developing a bilingual database to document the first full inventory of the museum's collections as well as training conservators in the latest techniques for preserving and restoring objects. Each piece is photographed and then carefully treated with the latest preservation techniques by Fabio Colombo, the OI's head conservator in Kabul. Next they're sorted by color, texture and mortar, then starts the big puzzle. Some of the objects have inventory numbers from the 1960s and 70s written on them, so they can try to match them with remaining records but most of the museum records were lost during a fire in Afghan's civil war but earlier this year they discovered a trove of overlooked records hidden in an old office which contained photos and numbers of artifacts and by a stroke of luck the surviving cards happened to focus on the Hada collection. So far, Gallego Lopez said they've been able to reassemble about 50 statues. He hopes they will have almost 150 in the end. It's really exciting work, especially when you get a few different pieces together. It's very rewarding to bring them back to life, he said. Once the work is complete the museum will exhibit them. He is excited to show the history of Afghanistan to younger generations who may not be aware of it and also to older generations who may remember the art. I see a lot of reactions from people when they see the statues. The cultural interest in the ancient masterpieces is a key part to understanding the development and movement of people in the past and the tremendous effort to construct these enigmatic monuments that was undertaken in the 6th century may be retraced through conservation efforts in the 21st century. Today, Afghanistan projects a hologram into the setting that Buddha was served, a reminder to the world that culture will prevail over the hatred that some would have a spread. But what do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.


what is going on guys it's your boy dpj here today with another destiny video and in today's destiny video i asked the question of whether the thorn should be nerfed while giving it guys my personal opinion and also solutions as to how to nerf this weapon while still keeping that massive punch this thing packs now in the description below is a straw poll where you guys can vote yes or no and whether you think this weapon should be nerfed or not and i'll give it a few days and i'll send it straight to bungee personally so be sure to check out that poll and vote yes or no and whether you think the thorn should be nerfed okay so get into the video the thorn is a weapon you can obtain by completing the light in the dark exotic bounty which you can obtain randomly when cashing in them daily bounties steps to these bounties which need to be completed to obtain this weapon are as follows step one complete the summoning piece on the moon step two earn 500 points by killing hide on the moon step three use void damage to defeat guardians in a crucible step four obtain an infusion of light from the speaker and step five kill exile the unwed so to be honest it isn't too difficult to obtain once you have got the exotic bounty a natural fact i don't think i play with anybody or no anybody who don't actually own the thorn hand cannon making this thing very popular and easy to come across now please guys do not get it twisted the thorn is a weapon i do use and do actually quite good with my opinion has nothing to do with how much i enjoy or hate this weapon now in the past i've had countless people tell me this weapon is too powerful for what it is but the major hate towards this weapon i noticed came about when the trials of psorias started and 50 percent of people soon realized the thorn is a monster for this game type and started using it and now the trials of psorias is basically ran by thorns to the point for me where at least one person in every single game i have played over the past three or four weeks has been using a thorn whether that be on my team or the enemy team for me personally it isn't my first choice of weapon but will 90 of the time pull out my thorn when i get annoyed by somebody else using it i mean if you can't beat them you join them it's as simple as that now let's take a look at this weapon and the punch it packs in that pvp slash trials of all psorias now this weapon will shoot three bullets per second meaning it shoots 180 rounds per minute capable of emptying its entire clip in 3.15 seconds now the damage this thing dishes out is remarkable now not including find around or mark of the devourer here it does 56 to the body on average and 84 to the head if you include mark of the devourer which only comes into play once every chain of bullets you land on an enemy until it wears off it will do 98 to the body and 126 to the head easily making this weapon a two-shot kill with final round and mark of the devourer this thing does 117 to the body and 154 to the head which is absolute massive power damage per second without mark of the devourer is 168 to the body and 252 to the head and it reloads as standard in three seconds the thorn also has incredible range and great stability easily making this weapon able to compete with scout rifles and sniper rifles across map which really shouldn't be the case so you guys can see by its status thorn is a monster of a weapon and in my opinion and this is coming from someone who actually likes and enjoys the weapon i think it does need a nerf and i actually think bungee may have something planned if they don't they are planning it i can guarantee that trials of a source has become unbearable to many people because of this one weapon yes a lot of people complained about final round and how cheap it is which in my opinion it is pretty cheap but people will use what they need to use to win trial of a source is a competitive knockout game mode you'd be stupid not to use the weapons which help you win the game and this goes for the thorn the thing about the thorn is it's capable on every map final round snipers ain't and people know this so they take advantage and you cannot blame them whatsoever but this is the very thing that makes a game mode become stale really quickly the point of everyone using the same weapon it doesn't allow other people to use other weapons either because they just don't stand a chance and will always find themselves coming back to the thorn and it's this very reason i believe bungee have something planned for this weapon like they did with auto rifles and pulse rifles pulse rifles were useless at one stage where auto rifles absolutely owned because auto rifles were being overused bungee nerfed them to the point of them being absolute garbage and because pulse rifles were nonexistent in pvp bungee buffed them to the point of them being the best type of weapon to use in pvp and this is the case with the thorn they know it is being overused and i believe they will take action to balance it out but like what they did with auto rifles i don't think they need to ruin a weapon with a nerf this is what i think they should do lower critical damage from 84 to 75 and lower damage caused by mark of the devourer 230 from 42 this way two critical hits won't kill even with mark of the devourer but three headshots will lower body shot damage to 45 from 56 this way it will take four body shots to kill also making it so that landing two body shots and one head shot still won't kill even with mark of the devourer maybe only have mark of the devourer coming to play if you land a headshot but i do think they definitely need to nerf that range maybe decrease it by 25 to 40 percent that would be fine applying my ideas to the thorn i believe will make people with that true gun skill stand out and still own people with the thorn but that's just my personal opinion but guys that is what i think of the thorn but like i've said i do think bungee have got a nerf planned for this weapon let me know what you guys think about the thorn down below in that comment section do you enjoy using it do you think it's overpowered let me know down below don't forget guys if you want to vote yes or no on whether this weapon should be nerfed check out the straw poll in the video description like i said in a few days i will send it directly to bungee but guys i hope you enjoyed the video do drop a like i do appreciate the support if you guys want to get that dpj apparel there is a link in the video description and you can rock my sexy ass claws thanks for stopping by as always and peace out till next time peace


It must have been so empowering for Peter when he began to sink in the water. Without that moment of failure, he might have believed that it was Jesus who was doing the work, but when he began to sink, he was validated that it had been him doing the work all along. Stephen Pressfield writes that nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure. Peter is validated and powered. Peter walked on water.


I found the top 10 most desirable careers for young people. Yes, somebody out there actually did a study where they surveyed a bunch of young people and asked them what careers they wanted to get into in the future. Now a lot of these careers are exactly what you would expect but some of them are really surprising. And number one on the list is actually my career. Well, sort of. Do you want to get paid to argue? Do you want to be able to wear a suit all the time? And do you want to make sure everybody else follows the rules while you don't follow them yourself? Well, you might want to consider being number 10 on this list which is one of the most popular careers that a lot of people want to get into which is lawyer at 6.4%. That's right, 6.4% of young people want to be lawyers as their profession. Now I'm not surprised to see this one here. I mean, if you think about it, there's lots of movies about lawyers. There's lots of TV shows like suits. And on top of that, this used to be considered a prestigious career so parents tend to kind of push their kids into going into this type of career. But with that being said, I made an entire video about why being a lawyer is overrated. It's extremely competitive. There's not nearly as much opportunity as there was before and it's also saturated. And on top of that, you are going to work ridiculously long hours for a very long time before you are even able to secure a decent job. And one great quote by Charles Dickens is if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers. But yeah, being a lawyer is kind of like being a quarterback for legal football. You get to make strategic moves to score a win for your clients while dodging any legal tackles. Now the next one on this list is a career that's extremely appealing to introverts. Now a lot of us grow up reading our favorite books like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. And some of us imagine that when we get older, we can become writers ourselves. And the next one on this list appeals especially to people who are introverted and love writing. And that is of course becoming a writer at 8.4% of people who want to do that when they grow up. Now traditionally, this wasn't always one of the best careers. What did he say? In fact, there's a quote that goes, the freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. And that's because a lot of the time writers are not paid very good money. But with that being said in recent times with the rise of the creator economy, this career has been making a massive comeback. And the reason for that is because all good content, whether it's a video or a podcast or of course a blog, something that's written originates from good writing. That's right. Almost all successful YouTubers script their content. Even if it's a vlog that seems really spontaneous, usually they think about what they're going to do beforehand. And the reason for that is because they're trying to tell a good story. So although I would almost never recommend getting an English degree or a creative writing degree, I do think this career is making a comeback and there is a ton of opportunity. And I know what you're thinking, oh, chat GBT is gonna take away all the writer's jobs. And I completely disagree with that. I think chat GBT is going to make writing even more valuable. The next one on the list is going to be for those people who can't do anything other than either playing sports or dreaming about playing sports. And a very, very small percentage of these people get to play sports professionally. But a much bigger percentage of people can make a living by teaching others how to play sports, AKA athletes and coaches. And about 11.9% of people dream of becoming either an athlete or a teacher. So this is another one of those where unless you're in the top 99.99th percentile, you're probably not going to be paid to be a professional athlete. But with that being said, if you really love baseball, for instance, there's a good chance you could get a job that is baseball related. And another thing you could do is you could start making content about baseball. So there are a lot of opportunities out there for you to make money, following your passion, doing what you love. But a lot of the time you are gonna have to think outside of the box. Now I personally have a massive amount of respect for athletes. I'm also a huge fan of just about all sports out there. My two favorite sports are probably MMA and boxing. And I have a ridiculous amount of respect for anybody who does that stuff professionally. They're basically like the modern day gladiators. And there's a great quote, an athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head, right? You kind of have to be a little bit crazy, in my opinion, to do boxing or MMA professionally. And the next one on the list is also very tough to get into.  And that is going to be a TV presenter. I think there was a survey done that 80% of Americans do not trust the news. And yeah, probably for good reason. But with that being said, about 12.5% of kids want to be TV presenters. Now I would say with this one, if you want to do a job that's very similar but has a much higher chance of success, I would consider becoming an independent journalist. So you would be covering the news, but you would be doing it in video form on YouTube, as well as your own blog. And journalism is kind of a lost art that used to be all about exposing corruption and making sure that people are playing by the rules. And in recent times, journalism is more about actually covering up corruption. So because of this, there is a massive amount of demand for independent journalists who actually cover it. A great example of this is Coffeezilla. Coffeezilla is absolutely blown up in recent years by covering different crypto scams. Now the next one on the list is one that has probably about 100 different TV shows and maybe a thousand different movies that were made about it. And this is one that's actually very realistic for you to get into if it's something that you want to do. And if you get into this, you'll get to save lives, wear scrubs, and play with a bunch of cool medical gadgets. And that is of course becoming a doctor or a nurse. And about 13.5% of people want to get into this. Now this is one, especially the doctor part, where I personally think for most people, it's pretty overrated. This is another one where parents are constantly trying to force their kids into it. There's lots of different TV shows. It's always glamorized in movies and the news. And for that reason, I think a lot of people get into it for the wrong reason. And that's why medical doctors have some of the highest depression rates as well as some of the lowest job satisfaction scores. But I definitely can see why getting into the medical field in general is so attractive. And that's why I myself went into the medical field. I actually ended up getting a doctorate and I became a pharmacist. And if you look at medical careers, they do have some of the highest meaning scores. And meaning is basically a long-term indicator of your overall happiness in the career. But medical doctor actually has some of the lowest scores out of all the different health careers. So this is definitely one where you wanna do your research before you go into it.   Now the next one on the list is one of my absolute favorite subjects. There was a short period in my life where this is what I wanted to do as well. And this is also one that until recently it was incredibly difficult to get into. And that is becoming a filmmaker. About 13.5% of young people want to get into this. Now Hollywood is notorious for being known to be incredibly difficult to break into.  And a lot of these gatekeepers were people like Harvey Weinstein. And there are countless examples of extremely talented writers, directors, et cetera that never made it in Hollywood. Now recently, because of the rise of the creator economy and the internet, there's been a lot more opportunity in filmmaking. And there have been many talented people who have found success in indie films or on Netflix or by just starting to create videos and then put them up on YouTube. A great example of this is Jordan Peele who started his career out by making comedy sketches and then uploading them to YouTube on his channel Key and Peel. He then leveraged that to become a Hollywood director and made some great films like Us, Get Out, and No. So it's definitely getting better but there's still a ton of gatekeeping. And I think I speak for most normal human beings out there when I say that we're really tired of all the woke propaganda and virtue signaling that we're constantly seeing in Hollywood. But with that being said, the Hollywood monopoly is breaking and there's a lot of great alternatives that are popping up. So I think the smartest way to get into this would be by starting to create content online and building a personal brand. Now the next one on the list is in the same industry and a lot of the same thing goes for it but you're gonna be the star of the show, right? You're gonna be the person that the camera is on like 80% of the time and that is of course becoming an actor. And this one comes in at about 15.7%. And a good quote with this one is if you're an actor, even a successful one, you're still waiting for the phone to ring. So I would give all of the same advice that I gave to filmmakers, to actors. A smart move would be to start building your personal brand and making content online. Now the next one on the list is also going to be content and it's gonna be the kind that probably evokes the most emotion out of any type of art and that is of course becoming a singer. So about 16% of kids want to become a musician or a singer of some sort. I've heard people say that music is the one thing that makes life worth living. And there's one quote, without music, life would be a mistake. Now this one I give the same exact advice. You would want to start making content and this is exactly what Justin Bieber did in order to get discovered. And even if you don't wanna be a pop star you can still make money by making music for a living. Right, so there was one school teacher who went from being deep in debt to making millions of dollars within a few years. And this is Miss Rachel who owns the YouTube show Songs for Little's. And she basically uses song in order to inspire and teach children. With the next one on the list, you can get paid to share every little detail of your life with other people. From your mundane morning routines to your deepest thoughts and musings. And this is exactly what Casey Neistat did in order to become a worldwide known brand and that is of course, blogging or vlogging. And this one is at 18.1%. Now blogging is where you would share your thoughts with the written word so you'd either have a blog or a newsletter. And then vlogging is where you take people through your day-to-day life, but you do it with video. And this is kind of like planting a seed of creativity that grows into a tree of expression. And the next one on the list is very similar but it comes in at 34.1% of people wanting to get into it. And this is of course what I am doing but I do have a little bit of a problem with calling this a job. And that is of course being a YouTuber. So being a YouTuber is kind of half job and half entrepreneurship because technically you are getting paid by YouTube to do this in the form of AdSense. But there's also a lot of stuff you can do on the side to make money in other ways. But over 34% of young people want to be YouTubers when they grow up. And I'm gonna be honest with you, it's a lot of hard work and dedication. But with that being said, this is a very realistic goal. It's much more realistic for instance than becoming a filmmaker or an actor. And this is truly a job where you can literally make money doing your passion. And as somebody who's tried a lot of different jobs out there, this is definitely my favorite job that I've ever had. But with that being said, I do have some pro tips for you if you want to try to get into this. First of all, the smartest thing, like the biggest brain thing you could possibly do in order to maximize your chances of being successful as a YouTuber is to get paid to learn how to do YouTube. Now, how the heck do you do that? Because you're probably thinking, Shane, it costs a lot of money, you have to buy a camera that's gonna be $1,000, then you have to learn how to edit and you have to learn how to make thumbnails and it's a lot of work. Well, you can actually get paid to learn YouTube by working for a YouTuber. And this is one of those opportunities that I talk about quite a bit on this channel. So there are positions out there where you can get paid really good money to work for big YouTubers. So for instance, Scriptwriter is one. Another really good one is becoming what's known as a retention editor. And then another really good career you could get into is becoming a content strategist. And I'm telling you right now, if you work for a successful YouTuber, that is like the smartest way to learn the business of YouTube and how to be successful on here.  Now, if you don't wanna work for a YouTuber, you can still be successful on YouTube but it's gonna take a lot of time and effort. You're probably gonna have to upload at least 30 videos before you finally have one that pops off and does really well. So yeah, YouTube absolutely changed my life. It's incredible.  And after realizing that counting pills for a living wasn't going to be my calling, I traded in my white coat for a camera and I helped thousands of people find their dream careers and land jobs. And I actually made a list of the best remote jobs and I ranked them from S tier, which is the best to F tier, which is the worst. And you can check that out by clicking right here.


And my guest today is Dr. Matthew Breel. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jason. It's good to be here. Honored to have you. Today, I wanted to touch upon a topic that is kind of misunderstood. I'm sure more than one or two of us in the audience have taken a Western civilization class. You hear the term, you have the Roman Empire, then you have Byzantium after you get past the sixth, seventh century. So I wanted to touch upon this misconstrued empire that we call Byzantium. Are we being fair calling this entity Byzantium? Do we do a disservice to the people of this time by disregarding their identity? Well, in fact, I would say a couple of things. I mean, if you know it's Byzantium, that's a great step. Because I was applying for a loan, and the mortgage officer said, well, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a professor, and da, da, da. And so what do you focus on? I said, well, Medieval Greek religion, he said, well, I love Zeus and Hera. So if you know Byzantium, that's a great step. So Byzantium was the city where Constantinople was founded. And so it's this really interesting place. It's about the seventh century. So this is the modern day Istanbul. And the name sort of stuck in 325, I think, somewhere in the early fourth century. Constantine moved the capital from Rome in Italy to the east. For a lot of reasons, one of which was to be closer to where the dangerous borders were. The city's name was New Rome. Shortly afterwards, people started to call it Constantinople. But this New Rome is its official title. So even today, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople is Greek Orthodox patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople. So the name New Rome is actually still there. So the Greeks or the Byzantines, as you said, Jason, called themselves Romans, though. As we were talking about at some point, Edward, given the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so it's a lot of detail in those early centuries. He starts around 200, if I remember correctly, 200 AD. Claims that much of the decline is due to Christianity, which certainly has a point to it. But he follows it all the way up to 1453 when Constantinople fell up to the Turks. But there's this great scholar named Anthony called Delos. And he's in Ohio. And he has a book on just this question. And he's written on it widely. And a lot of people say, look, we've got to call them Romans. So sometimes they call them Eastern Romans, or this, then, the other thing. But no, they were the Romans. And after Italian Rome, the Western Empire fell, this was the emperor, was in Constantinople. That was in the 5th century. And then in the West, there was a new emperor crowned several hundred years later, Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne was crowned emperor, Holy Roman Emperor, in St. Peter's in Rome. So there's this tension. But we're Westerners. Most of us are. We live in this Western culture. It's interesting because the Byzantines had a great historical sense, much better than the medieval Latins did. But starting in the Renaissance, and especially during the Reformation, Westerners developed a very acute historical sense, which we inherit today. The first, let's say, critical historians of the Eastern Roman Empire were actually, it was a German, I'm forgetting his name, in the 16th century. And that's where the term Byzantine started, actually, was a scholarly habit. And it just sort of took off from there. So it was never known as Byzantium. Only rarely would you hear somebody, only if he was from the city. Not if you're from the Eastern Roman Empire, but only if you're from the city would he call himself a Byzantine. And of course, the Byzantine Empire was much bigger. It was half, it was the Greek speaking and Syriac and other languages, Coptic speaking, part of the earlier Roman Empire. So Anthony called Dallas, has convinced me, we need to call them Romans, but nobody understands what you're saying when you say Romans. You know, so it's a sort of quandary rant. I agree with you that it really is a shame that we don't call this group of people what they themselves called and what they were called by others. I think the scholar you were trying to remember was a Heronimus of Wolf, is that it? Yes. What his name was? Yes. Yeah, so we have this term really created in the 16th century. It's kind of a neologism kind of like, when we say neoplatonism or we say Gnosticism, it's kind of like a catch-all universal term. Maybe it was good for simplicity's sake and for getting everybody on the right hermeneutical page, but maybe like you mentioned there, like these people had an identity as Romans, as a continuation of Rome. It's important as well that we acknowledge that. I hate to beat this, but I think it's so important. You know, the Turks were calling them Romans. They were called Romans. A lot of this has to do with old stereotypes. And so these Westerners who were writing largely in Latin, no, were the real Rome. They're not. Some of these stereotypes that are very old. I mean, I was just reading the Aeneid written in Latin, 20 BC or something like that. And the crafty Greeks, right? Odysseus is this crafty Greek. They're not really strong like the Trojans. I mean, of course, Achilles is an exception, but in the later 9th, 10th, 11th century and later we have these Westerners thinking of the Greeks, the Romans, excuse me, I just fell into it myself, the Greeks. The Eastern Romans as effeminate, as backward, as, you know, so it's really a very loaded term and I don't know how to overcome it. I don't know if one could have a favorite stereotype, but the stereotype that I always found very amusing from Greco-Roman literature was the idea that everybody from Thessaly was into witchcraft or a witch into magic in some way. Like you see that in a Leucopy and Clotophon, you know, the Greek novel and other things.  She's like, okay, well, can you make me a love charm? You know, you're in Thessaly, right?  If I could just briefly touch upon what's happening with the formation of Constantinople being founded, we have a general before and after. We have Rome basically taking over a huge swathe of land, more than they had before, especially in the third century. And this all comes to a head with what Diocletian was trying to do with his reforms when he created the tetrarchy. So I didn't know if you could touch upon what that meant, what it meant for the emperor in terms of where he is versus where he was stationed before. So the problem was, it's interesting because emperor Imperator in Latin, Stratagos in Greek means general, right? The guy who's in charge. So that's the emperor, which now we understand to be something else, kind of like a king, a king of many lands. The emperor had to be close to where the important things were happening. There were wars far away. And if it takes a month by sea to get from Rome over to Syria or Persia or whatever, wherever these wars are going on, that's a problem because these generals might be sort of careful and I'm not sure what to do. So Diocletian, as you said, split the empire into four. And there's actually this wonderful in St. Mark's, there's this porphyry cornerstone that was stolen from Constantinople of the two Caesars and the two Augustus, right? So it's this wonderful image of that if your viewers want to look that up. But this was to manage things better. So you had two emperors and two Caesars, the Eastern half and the Western half. And this was really to help control things better. It was also, it didn't really work, but it was an attempt also to provide some stability, after all these civil wars. I mean, in many ways, more Romans probably died in civil wars than in battles with foreigners during this time. So there was a movement eastward, Byzantium was perfectly situated as a city in terms of a harbor, natural defenses, water, drinking water, there were planes for growing crops. And so Constantine knew this very well. And so he chose it as the site for the new Rome. It really seems ironic in a way, because of the rise of the Sasanian Empire in the early to mid third century, then you have what Diocletian is trying to do with the tetraarchy towards the end of that period of time. But as a result of this increase in military power, it really changes the power structure from who chooses the emperor to, from the Senate to the military. And that was one of the big consequences of this, wasn't it? Absolutely. You were no longer really raised to be an emperor. These people could be self-made men. And now their children would be imperial, and then the people around them would become sort of aristocratic members of the court. But the emperors themselves often came from very humble beginnings. And it's interesting because race didn't really have much to do with this. You could come from Africa, you could come from the Balkans, you could come from France, you didn't have to be a Roman to become emperor. You didn't have to be particularly educated, but you did have to have skill to rise through the ranks. I mean, physical martial prowess and then real practical intelligence. This is really something that comes to a head when Constantine is effectively crowned emperor by his father's troops. It's very odd and almost terrifying in a way. Emperors are more and more chosen from these ranks. And in Constantine's case, directly from the military, within the military ranks, you have a lot of emphasis on chenotheistic cults at this time, whether it's Sol Invictus or it's... Mythras. Yeah. Mythraism, Christianity. People think, oh, it just happened. It just happened to be something that Constantine chose. I mean, it really makes perfect sense. If you're... I hadn't thought about that. I haven't delved very deeply into that. There's a great Polish poet called Czeslaw Miloś, and he talks about Constantine, the cox comb. But there are all these different gods. Why would you choose this one? But it's interesting. I haven't delved more deeply into that, but I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah, there might be something there. It's just something that I've kind of looked at throughout my studies. Another thing about the emphasis on staying in the East in these Syrian provinces, is that you really see the differences between how somebody who was maybe raised in a Western Latin Roman culture views the emperor versus people in the East who are used to having an autocriter, somebody who's all seem divinely inspired, and it seems like the emperors at this time really emphasize that. I forget this in Shakespeare with Julius Caesar, but we know this is Julius Caesar, that he kind of wanted to be king, but he knew he couldn't call himself that, right? There are these times where he would secretly say to people, offer me the crown and let's see how it goes. But he never could pull it off because there was this allergic reaction to kings in Rome. And so the first real emperor, his adopted son, Octavian Augustus, called himself the first citizens, right? Princeps, right, the first, what we call prince. And in the East, of course, as you say, there was a long tradition of worshiping your king as a god. Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, all those, they really laid into that. And I think that, you know, it just seems to be almost an indirect consequence of moving so much of the infrastructure East, because that seems to kind of radiate back from the East to the rest of Rome in a way. And also laid more emphasis on, you know, Greek is the lingua franca. So everything is being transcribed and everything's being preserved, primarily in the Greek language in the East, you know, and Byzantium and in Constantinople. So I was wondering if you could kind of go into the kind of book culture that they had. The official language of law in the military remained Latin. Now, Greek's vocabulary is 10 times the size of Latin. So there's just a bigger vocabulary to work with. There's more precise language, both philosophically for describing nature in literature, emotions. It's just much more precise and frankly, many would say beautiful.  They're much older, their literature, you know, went back to 750 at least BCE. Romans might have gone back to 200 BCE. So 550 years. The Romans had an inferiority complex with the Greeks, right? When they had Homer, the Greeks did, the Romans were, you know, running about naked with paint on their faces. You know what I mean? Like they were not riding in a deck, till a hexameter. So the Greeks always had this sort of sense, but it was slowly being translated. The elite Romans always knew Greek up until the fifth century or so. You know, Augustine from North Africa was very well-educated Latin, but he was one of the first ones who could be very well-educated without really mastering Greek. So that tide was turning in the fourth and fifth century, but you know, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Octavian, Salas, all these people knew Greek. Marcus Rilius, of course, this great Roman emperor wrote in Greek. And Greek was the, as he said, lingua franca of the Eastern half the emperor from Alexander the Great. As he said, he conquered all of this and established Greek culture, Greek amnesia, the Greek language. So yeah, but it's interesting the official language did still stay Latin as the centuries progressed. So their coins actually up until seventh century have Latin in the Byzantine coins. You know, by the time Justinians there about 200 years after Constantine, there were law codes issued in both Latin and Greek. So the Greeks never learned Latin as well as the Latins learned Greek, right? Because they sort of scorned us. Justinians, I wanna return to, but if we could just touch upon briefly what was the consequence of Constantine his successors, you know, his sons, favoring and increasing Christian aristocracy for the offices in the city of Constantine, up along throughout Rome. What does this do for things like education and the administrative aspect of the Empire? So I'll just make some general observations. Constantine created a new Senate, right? All the money for Roman citizens, I mean, you know, you have this money handed down from generation to generation. You have these expanding farms run by thousands of slaves that give you these massive fortunes. So the senators, you know, by Constantine's age had people who were the equivalent of our president or king, the consul, right? There were two consuls over a year, the leader of the Senate and of the state. From 200 BC, right? You know, so this is 500 years even longer of just enormous wealth. So Constantine wants to create a new capital over in Byzantios. And first of all, he has to get Romans to go over their senators, right? Who used to rule the Republic. And so he sort of makes them rich, but they're not as rich as the ones in old Rome. But there's sort of nouveau rich, he gives them houses. You know, there's kind of a gauche quality to these new senators, right? They don't have the old traditions in these deep family, the Scipios, for instance, you know, that go back that are in the history books. These are new men who are very, might not be very good at war, but are very good with numbers and public speaking, good bureaucrats. That's another thing that's starting to change under Constantine is the court system, which you had tied into the sort of king, the Basileos system in the Greeks, the Greek speaking kingdoms, the Ptolemies you brought up, but it's combined with a huge administration. You know, so you have all these secretaries and these people climbing the ladders, bribes working to climb these ladders. So Constantine favors Christians for sure. It's interesting because the wealthiest, the most powerful senators hold off. They sort of resist Christianity.  So it's a very slow process and it isn't until, you know, even at the end, 75 years after Constantine, some of the most powerful senators are still pagan. So it's a slow process and New York should be the capital of America, right? It sort of is, but they made Washington DC.  Where's the power? In many ways, it's in New York. So I think there's a similar dynamic going on between old Rome and new Rome or Constantinople. I think it's interesting that you mentioned just the influence of New York versus the influence of Constantinople and these nouveau rich types at the time. I was talking to Dr. Ed Watts about his book, The Final Pagan Generation and he was talking about how these people were born at a certain time, you know, before the tetraarchy, but they were still alive when all these changes happening under Constantine and his successors, his sons, like Constantius II.  We have a paideia that is steeped in pagan mythology. Whether you're Christian or pagan, you're using, you're going through the same kind of paideia and this is a social glue that bound pagan and Christian aristocracy together, regardless of your belief. I think what we see is even in a place like Athens, you know, wherever, however far you could get away from Constantinople or Athens, right? You know, you see the influence of these changes slowly, but surely. Constantine kind of leaves it alone, you know, but then you start seeing like Constantius II favoring, in the instance he used, he talked about this teacher named Pro Hieracius and Pro Hieracius was a Christian, right, teacher, but he was still using the pagan classics and all this. And then you have Julian who's kind of like throwing a wrench in those plans that Constantine said in motion for, you know, a little while there and- That struck a nerve Julian did. I mean, the number of speeches against Julian for 50 years, I mean, I think Cyril of Alexandria who died in 444 was writing against Julian. Yes, if Julian died, three, that's, you know, 80 years. Julian, honestly, if you look at him, he's only in power for maybe a total of a year and a half, right? Total power, he had some for a year and a half, right, yeah.  Christians were new, you know, and they were very proud of their achievements and they were very smart and all that. And Julian just says, look, you guys did none of this. You know, if this is all pagan achievements, you know, it's sort of insecurity complex. Julian is really, I mean, in my estimation, he's kind of like the, I mean, don't get me wrong. He saw Constantine and his successors do awful things to his family. He has every right to rail against that, but I think Julian is also still a product of his time, of his Christian upbringing, because he views paganism in this kind of organized way that he saw Christian ecclesiastical tradition going and he wants to kind of remake it in that sense. Absolutely. I found that very interesting, you know, he's railing against it, but he's using the same kind of building blocks of the culture at the time. He wanted his priests to be more committed to the poor, right? I mean, he had all these sort of ways of imitating the taking care of the poor, hospitals. Yeah, that's interesting. I wanted to touch upon a figure you mentioned briefly before. He's one of the more important figures that we learn about when we first start studying Byzantium. That is the figure of Justinian. I wanted to see if you could briefly touch upon who he was, why he's important, why should we care about, you know, Justinian in 2023? Justinian was an interesting guy. His uncle, if I remember correctly, they came from a pretty simple background. His uncle climbed and was made eventually emperor. I think his uncle's name was Justin. Justinian got a great education. Justinian ended up falling in love with a circus actress. His uncle had to bend the law so that he could marry her. He and his wife, Theodora, if I'm remembering correctly, were Christians. And Justinian really thought himself theologian, which he sort of was. The Roman Empire, much of the West had been lost.  And so he wanted to do all kinds of things. He wanted to build a great church, which we is called Saint Sophia Hagia Sophia today, still in Istanbul, was for a thousand years, the largest church in the world, one of the largest buildings in the world. He wanted to organize the law because Roman law was very complicated. Like today, with American law, you have all these judgments of the Supreme court and precedence. And in Rome, you had rulings of emperors and all sorts of things. So he came up and he hired Trebonius, I think was his name, to put together a law book, the institutes and there's a digest as well that covers everything. And it's now a Christian law book. And this is done in both Greek and Latin. So this is one of his major cultural achievements. The other is he sent his general out West to reconquer Africa, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Italy, because they had been invaded by barbarians. So they conquered Italy, but none of this really was gonna last, was the sort of tragedy of Justinian. St. Sophia did, the law did, the law codes, but the empire was shortly lost after this. But he wanted to bring Rome back to its glory and he had a long reign. He also emptied the coffers, right? The treasury, I think was full of cobwebs when he died. One of the things, I'm a theologian, I studied Christian ideas and culture and he was very concerned about right Christian thinking, Christian philosophy, Christian theology, doctrine, dogma. And so he called a council to help clarify the nature of Jesus Christ. Is he God? Is he the same way that the father is God? Can you really do that? And then there was this great thinker from the early church who died around 254, I think. His name was Origen and he had, he was maybe the most powerful intellect in Christian history, one of the top four, I'd say. Absolutely, Origen is up there with Clement of Alexandria for sure. It's hard, you can't really compare geniuses. Each genius is his or her own type. But in terms of the power, Augustine was genius and a great powerful intellect, but Origen knew a lot more. Origen had read everything in Greek and of course, there was a lot more than we've lost so much since then. But he had these, especially when he was younger, he had these odd ideas, you can go up to heaven but then if you get bored, you can fall down again. So it's this odd idea of reincarnation and some other kind of funky ideas that hadn't really been clearly defined. And this had an influence on certain figures later and Justinian cracked down on this. Origen was condemned at the council. I think it was Constantinople in 553. So yeah, great achievements, theologically, law, cultural expansion of the empire, but at a cost, at a cost of pushing some out of the Orthodox church. Yeah, it has an effect not only on the church, it has an effect on the remnants of the philosophical schools, right? This is the closing of the final shuddering of the academy, right? And these guys get so flustered by this that they start to view the Sassanian empire as like maybe that's the place we need to be. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and they came back but it was just very interesting. Lots of things happened under Justinian and I think that, yeah, he does a lot of great things but I also think that in a way he's the last of the emperors who had the kind of resources to have that impact. Oh, absolutely. Well, not too much longer. I forget when Justinian died, 560, something like that. He was alive in the 550s, but not too much longer. So I mean, Justinian was in some ways genius to accomplish all this, but once you have Islam, I mean, you know, they take over so much. Islam is going to come to help the Byzantine empire define itself in a way, you know, because you have so much going on there in terms of like them losing their land and then, you know, Constantinople is kind of like considered after a while after they lose the literal Jerusalem. Constantinople is considered the new Jerusalem. So that reinforces that kind of Christian identity. One of the things about Constantinople is they brought so many relics there, right? So body parts of Christian saints, largely martyrs. There's this wonderful collection of books which of course I owned and lost once. It's published by Dumbarton Oaks in the 80s. It's old church, Slavonic texts. There's great translation to English, wonderful notes of visitors from Russia in the 14th and 15th century and just how amazed they were praying at these relics, which, you know, Latin stole most of them and then the Turks destroyed.  Yeah, it's a tragic history, so many things lost. I don't really glamorize the past too much, but I think if I could spend like a day anywhere in the past in a time machine, I actually, I would go and visit Clement and Origins Library, just see what they had. You know, Justinian had so much of origin burned. Fortunately, a fair amount of it had been translated into Latin. So most of what we have of origin today is actually from a Latin translation. There are some Greek things. I love me some origin, love me some Clement. And those are guys, those are the reason we have Philo to begin with. All in Alexandria, they're all in the great, the center of learning, you know, more than Athens at that point, Alexandria was the center of learning, the library, right? The library of Alexandria. Yeah, Alexandria was certainly the place to be. You had Hepatia there, Clement of Alexandria, Philo, all these, all these, you were talking about geniuses. They're all like amazing intellects, but they're all extremely different from each other and doing really interesting things. But my final question has to do with the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. I really look at it as one of the strongholds of keeping classical culture alive in a very volatile time. Absolutely. Yeah, you see a lot of things that are quote unquote lost in the West, preserved in Byzantium. Anything from the classical world that survives is thanks to Byzantium. We don't have what Aristotle wrote down in the piece of Papyrus. We have copies of copies of copies. The Byzantines, the Eastern Romans preserved these things and it was a part of their education. It's thanks to them. Some things actually the medieval Muslims, Caliphate preserved, some Greek writings were translated into for Syriac, then Arabic, and then into Latin. So some of ancient Greek culture is preserved that way, but no, it's all preserved. You mentioned Paideia, the training, the education of the whole person that they had, but also just scholars interested in these things. There's so many. One of the wonderful things about Byzantium is different religious culture than in the Latin West in some ways. In the Latin West, mostly it was priests who could read occasionally and none or two. There were so many, you know, Photeus, whom I'm writing on now in the ninth century, was a great scholar and interesting. There were lay theologians, non-priests theologians in Byzantium, but there are several people who were just immersed in the Greek classics and they imitated their writing, sometimes in the kind of precious ways. It's a little bit of the top. You know, the first book that Greeks learned in school was not the Bible. It was the Iliad or Byzantines, I should say. Yeah, well, Greeks too, so. Right, Homer, you know, Homer is like, I don't know if it's fair to say he was the Bible of antiquity, but he was certainly close to it. Well, Dr. Breel, did you have anything you wanted to plug before we go tonight? I'm really stuck in the ninth century right now. I shouldn't plug that. I think I wrote a book. I'm not gonna plug the book, but it's the period. It's called the Paleologian period. So this is from 1263 to 1453, 1460 or so. Fascinating period, they're all Greek. They have a lot to do with the West, which is interesting, but there are Greek pagans, there are Greek Christians, the frescoes that we have from them, the manuscripts, the renewal of ancient Greek culture. You know, there was a Renaissance in the West which started with Latin texts and eventually included Greek. At the same time, there was a Greek Renaissance, in fact, a little bit earlier. And so, you know, if nothing else, if you're interested in paganism, I would encourage you to look at pletho or pletho, P-L-E-T-H-O. There's a very good book on him by Woodhouse. It was interesting, it's an amateur.  This guy wasn't an academic. He wrote the best book there is on pletho in the 80s, Woodhouse. If you're interested in Christian things, if you're interested in the Renaissance, there's a guy named Theodore Mendoquitas. The church he built still exists. And then if you're interested in theology, I guess I'll recommend three people. Not much has been translated. Bessarion, who became a Catholic, some of his things have been translated into English. Scalarius is the guy I wrote on. Mark of Ephesus, who was Scalarius's teacher. So if you're interested in Christian theology, I'd say that. You know, just right there, all the texts that you recommended, it just goes to show, you know, how much the Eastern Roman Empire had an effect on the world at the time. You know, it's not just the Christian classics. It's the pagan classics. We wouldn't have the Corpus Hermeticum or the Orphic Hems without Byzantium. We wouldn't have anything. We wouldn't have Sophocles, Homer, Escalus, nothing. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, I don't know if I could live in a world without Aristophanes, so. Right, yeah. But Matthew Reel, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope to have you again sometime. You have a pleasant evening. Yeah, thanks. Oh yeah, absolutely. All right, take care. We'll have you again soon. Take care. Thank you. Bye.


Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of the People's South Dispatch. Today we are looking at what's going on with health in Palestine as Israeli attacks continue for more than two weeks. We are joined here by Leit, who is one of the health activists in the People's South Movement, war and conflict group and he's a Palestinian living in Palestine if I'm not mistaken and we're going to talk today about the situation report but also about the broader context of health in Palestine. Thank you so much for joining us and maybe yes just to jump right in perhaps we can start with a little bit of a situation update on Gaza because that has been top of the news for the last days and then move on to the rest of the occupied territories. Yeah of course and that is completely the right place to start. The situation in Gaza is unbelievable and it's horrifying and when we think that things can't get worse or things can't continue because of how horrifying they are we are shocked by even more brutality. We are talking now about nearly 7000 Palestinians who have been killed by the bombardment. We're talking about half of the houses in Gaza being damaged or destroyed. We're talking about people being told to flee 1.1 million people being told to flee and then being bombed in the places that they have fled to under the instruction of the Israeli army. We're talking about 40% of the casualties being children when 50% of the population in Gaza are children. This is indiscriminate but I think it's also very important to emphasize that it's not random. It is very purposeful. Israeli politicians have made their intention to wipe out Gaza very clear. The dehumanizing language that we've seen calling shutting down any discussion about the fact that there might be civilians in Gaza talking about human animals. All of these dehumanization tactics are where it relates to a genocide and so what we are seeing today is an attempted genocide on the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. It is truly horrifying to see this and it's truly horrifying for the world to be collectively gaslighting the Palestinian population as it describes this and talking about nuances and talking about the need to understand the various perspectives at play here. We are talking about an Israeli regime that has always been intent on wiping out the Palestinian population. It has acted over the decades to do that and we're still stuck in the need to prove our humanity. To focus more on the health situation which I know listeners will be particularly interested in. We're talking about hospitals in Gaza reporting that they are getting through a month's worth of consumables in a day. We're talking about demand that is 30 times higher but working with what the Ministry of Health in Gaza described as a third of the usual health personnel. We're talking about the supply of consumables being completely cut off because even before the 7th of October Israel severely limited access of goods and people in and out of Gaza through a blockade that had been going on since 2007. For the last two weeks Israel has imposed a total blockade. That means nothing and no one getting in or out. That includes water, that includes fuel, that includes electricity, that includes food, that includes medical supplies and medications. We're talking about doctors treating wound infections with vinegar. That is something that's happening. We're talking about explosives being used and fires being set to houses and doctors not having burns dressings to use. We're talking about people being treated on the floor and their relatives holding up the fluid banks for them. We're talking about 12 hospitals, one-third of the hospitals in Gaza already being out because of either damage or because they've run out of fuel. Even the UN Relief and Works Agency is expecting to run out of fuel today. They are talking about already having made choices about whether they share the little fuel that they have with hospitals, shelters or bakeries. That is the situation on the ground at the moment. Every time I ask any of my colleagues in Gaza or every time I communicate with them, they say things like it is hell.  They talk about things getting worse and worse. When I see them, they're being interviewed on the TV. You see the exhaustion, you see the disbelief, you see just the sheer being in the middle of this and it not stopping day after day. Absolutely. There's no right or wrong thing to say after what you just shared. It's the situation in Gaza that we've been observing for the past weeks is something truly horrifying. While most governments in the world have sided with Israel very clearly, we have seen also people around standing in solidarity with Palestine. I hope that's an attempt that's going to last and that's actually going to find more practical ways of supporting the struggle of the people in Palestine. But before we move on and maybe talk a bit more about that broader political analysis, I was wondering if we can spend a couple of minutes talking about what's going on in the West Bank, both in health and otherwise, because that's something that we've heard significantly less of. But we do know that it's also very worrying what you're seeing happening there. Yeah, thank you for asking that because not only is it being ignored, I think the other thing to bear in mind, what Israel subjects Palestinians to in the rest of Palestine and outside of Palestine also helps us understand what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip. It is all part of the same package of settler colonialism of this policy and intention to eliminate the Palestinian population. The killing, the dispossession happens to Palestinians regardless where they are through different means at different paces using different methods. So just to maybe take a few specific bits of information about what's going on in the West Bank. I think that it's important to first of all talk about the total control that Israel exerts in the West Bank. And so on a normal day, Israel is able to erect checkpoints, roadblocks, whatever, anywhere that it really wants a moment's notice. What it has done since the 7th of October is make it incredibly difficult for Palestinians to move beyond that kind of immediate localities. So that means that, you know, the flow of people and goods and of course, even patients has been restricted by the imposition of strict checkpoints, many of which are completely closed, and some of which will subject people to delays and long searches, which means that even if there are, there is a way, for example, to get from the city of Nablus to the city of Ramallah, which is on a normal day, a 54 kilometer journey, there's a long kind of detour to take in order to get to the checkpoint that's open where people would face delays and where people will also be going between Israeli settlement where even if the settlers aren't soldiers on duty, they are heavily armed, they are extremely violent and they are being egged on to be even more violent by the Israeli state. So those Israeli state is delivering 10,000 rifles, 10,000 rifles to Israeli settlers in the West Bank and is doing so so so so harmoniously, you see the videos of them distributing them and they're just, you know, handing over these huge guns to fanatic settlers who live right on our doorsteps and who are kind of participating in that total domination. And so that's kind of one of the most noticeable things that you see is that lack of movement from because of the actions of the Israeli army that's shutting the routes and checkpoints between localities and the Israeli settlers who are subjecting anyone who passes through to violence. That has extended to, for example, if we just take one example, the village of Khusra has two settlements that sit on top of its lands and the settlers from those outposts were, for a week before the 7th of October, shutting off the entrance and exit to Khusra village, they were attacking residents and trying to burn houses and cars and whatever. And then a few days ago, I would say it was exactly after the 7th of October, they descended again on the village of Khusra and opened fire alongside the Israeli army which came and usually kind of says that their presence is there to protect, you know, the Palestinian civilian population in case of any attacks on them actually participated in the shooting. The Israeli settlers ended up killing three people that day and the Israeli army killed one. So four people were killed by Israelis with settlers and soldiers working hand in hand. The next day at the funeral of the people who were killed by the Israeli army, the Israeli army and settlers came back and killed two more Palestinians, a father and his son. That's the type of violence that we're seeing and it's there to kill but it's there also to intimidate and subjugate and keep people within those faculties and squeeze the Palestinian population further, which of course also gives the Israeli army and settlers a green card to just take over more lands and, you know, we're now entering the olive harvest season, people aren't able to access their lands and that makes them vulnerable to take over by the settlers and soldiers which are stated calls of the settler movement and of the Israeli state. So we're talking about this possession taking place in the West Bank as well as we speak, which is a continuation of something that's been going on since 1967. We're seeing also obviously with settlers and soldiers being even more violent than they are normally, a rapidly increasing rate of attacks on healthcare. So ambulances being obstructed. We're seeing, you know, military searches of healthcare assets where, you know, we're seeing people being injured and ambulance is not being able to reach them, which also comes alongside a massively increasing rate of Israeli rates on Palestinian towns to imprison and kill Palestinians. We've seen airstrikes in the West Bank for the first time in a long time. You know, there was a horrific one in Janine refugee camp just a few days ago at a mosque and we're seeing martyrs and people and injured and people being imprisoned in the West Bank every single day. We've seen the number of political prisoners almost double in two weeks. There were 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails on the 6th of October. We now don't know the number. We don't know the number of people who are imprisoned. It's estimated to be 10,000 and that's because the Israeli military is severely restricting lawyer visits to Palestinian prisoners and has completely withdrawn all family and Red Cross visits to Israeli prisons and has withdrawn every one of the rights that prisoners have have hard won through protests and hunger strikes over the years. So, you know, we're seeing, you know, televisions being confiscated, radios being confiscated, all electrical outlets being shut off, water access to water being restricted, can teams being closed. So only the food that's being supplied by the Israeli prison service, which is completely inadequate in both in quantity and quality being the only food that's available for prisoners. We're talking about all belongings being confiscated. So the only thing that a prisoner has is their clothes that they're currently wearing. And some prisoners don't even have mattresses because Israel has suspended the rule about limiting the number of prisoners in a particular cell. And so the prisons are now being overcrowded, they're opening new prisons and we don't even know which ones they are. So we're talking about a complete crackdown and that has has led and we believe it's led directly these conditions and the lack of oversight of what's going on in the prisons led to the death of two prisoners in Israeli prisons this week. One was being held in administrative detention and one was not even charged with anything yet. He'd been in prison for two days, not even brought charges or to administrative detention. So the expectation is that he was likely tortured to death. Well that's, yeah, again it's very disturbing to hear the extents to which the occupation is kind of cracking down on people who are just trying to live their lives in their own land. So I mean it's again I'm sorry if I'm not making much sense but of course it's very difficult to talk about something that I think we all agree is very and just wrong. And it's kind of hard to contextualize it in this way and make a sense of a conversation that is just showing what you've been living through for the past you know decades and almost a century now if we look at it in the whole in the whole scale. So it's truly amazing and I think that to come back to what we mentioned before you know it has been also truly disturbing and amazing at the same time to see how the West has reacted to that and how corporate media is still reacting to it and essentially just gaslighting everybody about what's going on in Palestine and the extent of the horrific, horrific life conditions that people are forced to live in. At the same time you know in speaking from a Western point of view we've seen a major crackdown on protests in support of Palestine which again is showing something about the government that we have in place here. But on the other hand the banks actually did not make the people back out back away and I think that's a good sign we have seen massive rallies in major cities across the US across Europe. And of course these rallies mostly focus to support what they're hearing from the Palestinian people and want to support the demands of the Palestinian people. So maybe to close off maybe we can just you know walk through in addition to ceasefire of course which we have seen top of the agenda for the last couple of days people calling for immediate ceasefire now. But I think there are also other things that are worth highlighting and pushing for by both movements in Palestine and across the world so maybe just a brief overview of that. Yeah of course so yeah as you say it is of course important to address kind of what is happening now but it's also incredibly important to put this in context because if we only have a ceasefire as an example then we're not saying you know we're not talking about we're not addressing the siege not just the siege that's going on since the since a couple of weeks which is cutting off completely water and electricity and fuel etc etc but the the siege that's been imposed on Gaza by Israel since 2007 we're talking about you know Israel exerting that control what we should be looking at is one how to stop the immediate damage that's happening so of course we absolutely need a ceasefire two weeks ago we needed two weeks ago but that basically as soon as it is possible to impose a ceasefire we need an end to the siege but we also need to completely reverse the control that Israel even has over a Palestinian population so it is that so and that requires you know looking at that broader picture that Israel doesn't have the power to control whether Palestinian enters their land or doesn't enter their land whether they live a healthy and fulfilling life or not and that's where that that demand for Palestinian self-determination comes in and that self-determination absolutely cannot happen with Israel being as powerful as it is over the lives of Palestinians and so of course that would include then so then within that framework then we include the you know the end of the end of the siege and the end of the occupation of the West Bank the end of the occupation of the lands that were stolen in 1948 that dispossession that started as long ago as that which would allow Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands and and country that they were kicked out of 75 years ago you know a population that has its rights only on paper from from UN resolutions and so on but which has not been realized and that no one is working on a concerted effort to ensure that those rights are fulfilled and that requires so all of those things would require a complete shift in the power which means that the resistance to Israel needs to look at how Israel draws its power and we're talking about here cultural political and economic power that Israel is able to leverage internationally and so it's the responsibility of every single person to look at their doorstep and think you know it's the job that I'm in serving these colonial interests is the other products that I buy you know are the institutional links that we have so looking at academic institutions you know we know that there's academic whitewashing of Israeli crimes we know that there's environmental greenwashing we know that there's queer pinquashing and we need to resist those efforts because they are central to how Israel kind of propagates its power by you know putting forward for example like innocuous academic and health partnerships but then actually when you look at a lot of academic and health institutions and even the projects themselves then go on quite often to serve Israeli military purposes we see it really clearly as well in the agricultural industry so when we look at you know Israel you know it's things that's kind of almost miraculous coming out of the bible like we get water from thin air but those things are often actually a product of military research that then is used in agriculture or the other way around it's a revolving door and so when we talk I mean Israel keeps loves talking about dual use equipment that goes onto the Gaza Strip they're the best at the dual use story right the the dual use of basically everything in their society even people right the hundreds of thousands being drafted to invade Gaza in the next few days that entire population is dual use civilians when they feel like they want to be civilians and then you know hard combatants when they want them to be so so that's the fate that you know those are the two faces of Israeli colonialism but they're there to create that image for Israel which is kind of quite innocuous but actually has this other face behind it which which serves that it's colonial interests so it's really important to be to recognize that Israel does um kind of leverage that power from cultural institutions from academic institutions from health institutions all around the world then it's important to boycott all of that until Palestinians are free and that means full self-determination and the final thing I would just say as well is um reparations for all the damage all the destroyed houses all the people who've been killed all the pain all the suffering that's been caused that doesn't go away even if Israel likes to pretend like it's over as soon as it achieves its managed free goals thank you so much Lee and I do believe that we'll see each other again here sometime soon and yes thank you again so much for joining us and for making time to do this thank you Anna thank you


Hey everyone, it's Mike from When I Work. Today, I'm going to show you how to create positions on the web app. Positions are used to tag employees and shifts to a particular duty, skill, or qualification. To add positions to be used on the scheduler, go to the gear icon at the top and click Positions. Next, you'll click Add Position. Type the name of the position, select a color using the color wheel, then click Add Position. Your position will be added to the full list and you may add as many positions as needed. Adding your positions is an important step in building your When I Work framework. Once they're added, you can get started on the schedule, ensuring you have the right people in the right places at the right times.


If you or a loved one has information as to the whereabouts of House Danager, please contact Megathorities. That was a chilling note that was found for a very chilling backroom's level. Barnaby's Bun Funn'nporium is an enigmatic level in the catalogue of the backrooms and it's been classified as a class integral due to its really strange phenomenon and these varied realities that are inside of it. It's very confusing and very uncanny and I'm about to go over all of it right now. Across wanderers inside of the backrooms, Barnaby's Funn'nporium is probably one of the most horrific and strange levels that we found as of this date. The level resembles an abandoned early 80s era children's party restaurant. The history of the restaurant itself is not fully known or understood but there's notes and there's marketing from around it that appointed to a few facts. We know for sure that the company that owned this restaurant went bankrupt in the year 1990 and that the restaurant's name is Barnaby's Bun Funn'nporium and Barnaby seemed to close in 1989. The level's existence has brought forth several theories about the backrooms and how it relates to real life and the concepts of heaven and hell. There are several just strange demonic items and images that have been found in this level as well as some very dark concepts and themes too. There's been several items of interest taken from this level to be examined by Meg and those are Barnaby party decorations, expired ingredients, expired soda and party themed merchandise like balloons and confetti and then finally frozen pizzas. All of these items have been taken by Meg employees to look further into and to try to examine and deduce how they got there. Now if you noticed all of these items are pretty much what you would expect to find in an old arcade diner from the late 80s. It's been heavily noted that you should never under any circumstance eat anything on this level. No matter how good it looks, no matter how fresh it looks do not eat anything here. The level is not fully explored but as of right now, we just have this rudimentary description. There's a lowly lit dark restaurant area with booths and tables and chairs and empty staticky aura resides over the entire level. If you ever went to Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, it kind of looks like that. The level feels as if it's stuck outside of time and nothing has changed since 1989 when it closed. It feels like it's been abandoned though but nothing's changed. There are remnants of a party that's been held here at one point in the form of strange decorations, streamers, happy birthday balloons and all that stuff being hung up. It feels like there was something happening and then everybody left all at once and the entire area feels so strange and eerie to be inside of. Only one entity has been documented to exist within the level's confines and it's been described as a large lepority-like figure which is the company's mascot, Barnaby. Now a lepority is a type of rabbit so you can kind of imagine an uncanny rabbit animatronic mascot thing. That's what Barnaby looks like. Now from this description, we also get the little tidbit that the logo for Barnaby's Fun Emporium has this rabbit's face in it. That's pretty much all the information we know about the business itself. We know that it has a bunny face on it and we know that it's named Barnaby's Fun Emporium. Who knows if that means something but it's cool nonetheless. The behaviors of Barnaby and its aura have been described as the following. Barnaby rarely shows itself to visitors and when or if it does, it'll slowly appear from the darker corners of the restaurant with an unbreaking and piercing gaze. It's pretty much just staring holes through you and if anybody else is there. Barnaby almost never speaks or vocalizes and any audio that comes out of its suit is very staticky and unintelligible gibberish. It just kind of sounds like a robot talking but a broken one. Its attitude and treatment of wanderers that visit the level will change depending on who's there. Sometimes Barnaby's passive and they don't even acknowledge that you're there but other people will get attacked instantly by Barnaby without hesitation and these attacks are very ruthless. Barnaby will bite and claw and scratch and pretty much tear its victims from limb from limb and what Barnaby does with these victims afterwards is unknown. We don't know if it consumes them or stores them somewhere, we have no idea. There have been numerous attempts and investigation to find the bodies of missing people here, however none have succeeded. Barnaby is incapable of leaving the level's restaurant or escaping the level at all. Even though it's displayed a high level of intelligence and it seems to be fully aware of its surroundings Barnaby's existence is still unknown. It can't tell us why it's there and we also don't know why it can't leave but what I just explained to you is literally all we know. It's a strange rabbit like mascot animatronic thing that may or may not attack you if you come here. Now you cannot harm Barnaby and any use of weapons that has been used in the past has not worked at all to be frank it's actually done worse for you because then Barnaby will get mad and this just makes the creature that more dangerous as if it could have gotten scarier than a giant animatronic bunny. There are no basis here of course I doubt Barnaby would enjoy or appreciate that and if you come to the Fun Emporium the only known entrance is from level four the office building. Now you might run across an elevator with the Barnaby-Bond Fun Emporium logo on it and if you do in level four you open it up and you'll enter inside here from a janitor's closet. Now exiting the level is as simple as getting back in that elevator that you used to enter. The only problem is occasionally the entrance to this elevator will not open it'll just be stuck closed and it's been known to change itself into that janitor's closet for extended periods of time before turning back to the elevator. So you better hope that when you're trying to leave Barnaby isn't fed up with you and chasing you around cause you don't have time to wait for the elevator then but this exit is not guaranteed to appear instantly. Barnaby's Fun Emporium is not very well understood and even the information I just told you took forever for Meg to catalog and describe. As of right now it's a very, very dangerous thing to get sent here since your safety cannot be guaranteed because Barnaby has his own mind it's been kidnapping people for years. Theories on this level range from it being a forgotten real-world diner from the front rooms from the 1980s and it somehow ended up here to it being a diner from another dimension from the multiverse to other things like Barnaby being the creator of the level and it kind of functions as a trap for Barnaby to consume people as their prey. Who knows, whatever it may be, it's a very dangerous place and it should not be trifled with under any circumstance at all. You've been warned by me, you've been warned by Meg. Don't go, it's that simple man. Me personally, I could probably, you know, take him in a fight but that's just because I'm me. You're not me. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this level. It's super OG and honestly, I don't even know how it took me this long to go over it. I meant to do it last year, but oh well, better late than never. Drop a like if you did enjoy this explanation and check out the description for all my socials if you wanna see cool pictures of me and my friends and my life. If not, then that's all I've gotta say. I'll see you in the next video. Peace and love. I'll see ya. I'll look for my 7-1-4.


Non-native bees are widespread and can have both positive and negative effects on ecosystems. Some species are intentionally introduced for agricultural purposes while others are accidental introductions from other countries. Non-native bees can compete with native bees for resources, pollinate invasive plants and cause structural damage to buildings. However, some non-native bees can also provide benefits such as pollinating crops and providing opportunities for scientific research. This article was authored by Laura Russo.


This 2016 Chevy Silverado 2500 Crew Cab Short Box LT1 with the Z71 packages stock number 12079Z. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used heavy duty truck headquarters. This 2016 Chevy Silverado 2500 has the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel with the LML engine which pumps out 397 horsepower. This truck has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. Summit White is the color. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone, or television turn them on right now because it is your best way to check out the quality and condition of the truck before seeing it in person. And the options. And if you like the video and want to subscribe to our YouTube channel, the lower right hand part of the screen is a subscribe button. Click that and then click the bell notifications, you'll get updates every day we do videos here at Summit Auto. Comes with the painted alloy rims and it has Bridgestone Duravis M700 LT265 70R 17 tires. The tires have right around half the tread left on them, frame and under bodies in very nice condition. And you can see it does have that Rancho shock, part of that Z71 off-road suspension package. Front fender is in pretty nice shape. It does have the projector lamp headlamps, headlight lenses are nice and clear, factory fog lights, and the front bumper is absolutely perfect. No dents or dings on there and the lower valance is in very nice shape as well. The hood is very clean and the passenger side front fender looks really good too. No dents or dings on there and the passenger side rim, no scuffs or scrapes. Going down the rest of the side of the truck. Take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by, just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle. You can see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you may be watching the video or shopping from. This back rim is in nice shape as well. And the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. The rim and underbody is in very nice shape and you can see it does have the B&W probably a gooseneck hitch in this truck. Has all the remaining factory exhaust and the lower rockers all look really good. I didn't see any corrosion starting on that.  Rear bumper is in pretty nice shape, does have the rear bumper steps, full towing package which includes a receiver hitch, four pin, and seven pin wiring and that tailgate is in really nice condition. Does have a backup camera and a locking tailgate and there is your gooseneck hitch. Get seven pin wiring back here as well and it does have that factory drop-in bed liner. Now I don't know if you saw that but this tailgate is kind of on a shock assist so it's never going to slam down on you and as you go down the driver's side just as clean as that passenger's side, box looks really good, I didn't see any dents or dings on there and this back rim for full disclosure, no scuffs or scrapes. Now the rest of this side of the truck looks really good. It does come with the telescopic tow mirrors with the built-in directional signals, LED side lights, they telescope out like so, they also fold in like that. The 1LT package or LT1 gives you the black cloth interior, there are no rips, there are no tears on the seats, they are in nice shape, power driver seat, factory all-weather floor mats, auto headlamps, turned-out four-wheel drive, and the factory brake controller, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, note that you do get that kind of diamond-plated Z71 trim on the doors, it's also on the dash right here, we'll turn the ignition on so you can check out the miles and then we'll check out the radio, you can see that this one is 23,894 miles and do note that you get that Z71 instrument cluster, instrument cluster is very nice and clean, comes with the leather-wrapped steering wheel, Bluetooth and information center controls on the right, cruise controls on the left and you do get audio controls on the back of the steering wheel, this one comes with the Allison 6-speed automatic transmission with the optional tap shift, and it does have the Chevy MyLink radio, so you get AM, FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here, now while this one does not have the navigation system, you do have a projection manager where you can project your cell phone to the screen via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay so that you can project a nav system onto there through your phone such as Waze or Google Maps, and then you have nav on your screen, so that's pretty nice system to have dual climate controls there, factory stability control, that's for your cargo lamps, that's how you turn on those LED side lights in the mirrors, downhill assist control and that's your factory exhaust break, this one does have a 12-volt power point and it's kind of hard to see but underneath there there is a 110-volt 150-watt plug-in and because of my gimbal I cannot get down that low to show you that, passenger side, floor mat and seat are in excellent conditional rips or tears, the headliner is in nice shape on this truck, I didn't see any rips or tears on that and you do get map lights up there and on-star SOS buttons in that really mirror. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll check out under the hood, back seats are just as nice as the front seats no rips or tears back here, it does have the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have, fixed glass rear window with the built-in rear defrost, once again those seats are in really nice condition and you get the factory all-weather floor mats and carpeting is very nice back here as well. Side curtain airbags, bombs of the doors all look pretty good on this truck, there are those LED side lights they are extremely bright and we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. Starts right up, no check engine lights or anything like that. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you'll been able to tell just how clean this truck is all the way around, verify its quality and condition and under the hood we have the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel, LML engine, 397 horsepower this truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off and this one is 100% ready to go. There's your emission sticker and I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, halftones, 3 quarter tons, one tons you name it we got to go to that website right there www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com and if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto number two like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there click the bell notifications you'll get updates on the videos we do each and every day here at Summit Auto. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left the link to more Chevy 2500 truck videos like this one in the upper right link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right click those check us out and we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean 2016 Chevy Silverado 2500 crew cab short box one LT Z71 in summit white thanks again remember to like subscribe and share