Today, we have really the honor to have Lily Biggan speak to us. On top of that, Mayor Price wouldn't be here, but we have Mayor Pro Term, Mr. Zimmerman, or Mayor Pro Term Zimmerman, I want to thank everybody for being here. We just want to let you know everything that's going on with Steer for War, LYP, things of that nature. When I get up here and speak, I always just want to make sure that all of you have an opportunity to get involved more with these organizations. They're doing outstanding stuff in the city. If you're not currently involved with either Steer for War or LYP, we definitely want to make sure that you ask the questions, get involved. If this is your first time here, this is really what the mayor, Steer for War, created specifically for young professionals, really you, for you to make an impact in the city. Definitely take advantage of that. It's an awesome program. I've been involved with the education task force. Just a lot of task forces out there to do LYP, the same thing. We're doing a lot of really cool things in the community.  That's awesome, but we definitely want you to, if you have questions in regards to the actual organizations, please, please ask. Well, I won't take much of that any longer. Now I'll introduce Mr. or Mayor Pro Tem Zimmerman. He'll actually do the introduction from Ms. Biggan. So, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem Zimmerman. As long as he didn't say Mrs, I guess I'm okay. Well, welcome. Thanks for attending today's Young Leaders Luncheon. You know, I look out at the room. This is the second time today I've been able to look out across a room filled with young people. This morning it was a prayer breakfast at Southwest Christian School. People were a little bit younger than you, but the mayor, when she came up with this idea, we talked after she had gone through the election. And one of the demographics that we noticed was missing was you. The young people were not voting. They were not participating in the city activities. And so the mayor, to her credit, said, I'm going to do something about that. And that's how Steer Fort Worth came to be. And it's been amazing to watch all of you grow and learn more about your city government and how you have a very important part in it. Special thanks to Joseph De Leon and everybody for hosting this. And thanks to the mayor's staff for putting this all together. The mayor's staff is principally the real machinery behind this outside of you. As I've said, this allows you to serve your community and get engaged in Fort Worth. And that's vital. Just to show you how bad the situation is. You probably know this, but somewhere on a good day, 10% and on a bad day, 5% of the eligible voters vote in any given election. Now, what does that tell you? Well, first of all, it tells you that 5% of the citizens are deciding what the other 95% are going to do. And that scares me a little bit. Now, there are all sorts of committees that are put together. And if you haven't gotten on one, Keeman is the man to go talk to.  And the programs that have been put together have been really, really great. You've heard from Matt Rose. And we understand that next month you're going to hear from George P. Bush. Another Bush coming down the road. Today we're here to talk about healthcare, which is one of the new task force. There's arts and culture, health and wellness and homelessness. There are three of the new programs that we put in place for you to go work on. One of the things that people look at when they start to move to a city is the quality of life. And one of the most important parts of quality of life is to make sure that you've got good security, good police forces, and good healthcare. And certainly, here in Fort Worth, we have that.  But to get to that, I've got introduced Joseph De Leon, who is having trouble holding a job right now. He's currently the VP of Business Development and Ambulatory Services. And in about two weeks, he will become President of Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Southwest Fort Worth. I'm really, really pleased that he's taking I'd be more pleased if he was going to stay in my district, but in redistricting, I've got everything across the street from him. So, but I've told him that between Jungus and I, we'll come haunt him as much as we can. Well, yeah, with no further ado, Joseph, you got the stage. It's always nice to shake hands with another ring that looks similar to mine. Well, good morning to all of you. Thanks, thanks again for coming here. Tough weather, we ordered up, we made a mistake and we ordered the weather. We checked the wrong box, but it's my privilege just to welcome you again and to introduce to you my boss and also my friend.  She is a woman who has many years of experience, who has a great perspective, but most of all has a heart that is looking that seeks every day to serve the community. She is all about her community. As you hear a little bit about her background, you'll see that it's not just talk. It's what she does every day. Even this morning, as she spent time over at the Texas Workforce Commission, as she spends days and hours serving on the DFW airport board of directors, now serving as in her second term as the chairman of that board. She has been honored by numerous organizations, including the Renaissance Cultural Center. In 2004, she was given the Living Legend Award. She's honored by the YWCA's Tribute to Women in Business. I've got a list that goes a whole page. I'm only going to give you about four or five of those. Safe Haven Legacy of Women Award in 2012. The president's volunteer, this is the president of the United States, volunteer called a service award, which is the nation's highest honor for volunteer service. You don't get there for serving a hundred hours a year. You get there for serving thousands and thousands of hours over the years. But Lily Biggins is an RN. She became an RN at the JPS nursing school a few years ago. I'm not going to tell them how many. With this, she received her bachelor's in nursing from UTA and her master's degree in nursing from Texas Women's University. She also is an adjunct professor, has been at UT Southwestern and also at UTA over the years as well. Lily has many, many years experience as a chief nursing officer, has a nurse taking care of patients at the bedside, and has been president of this hospital for almost a year now after serving here as vice president of operations for about 12 years. Lily has served the Metroplex from Parkland Hospital to JPS to Plaza Hospital here in town and also as part of Texas Health Resources and Texas Health Harris Methods Fort Worth almost 14 years now, maybe 15 years now. But so without further ado, I could go on forever, like I said, telling you about Miss Biggins, but she is a woman, a leader who leads with heart and that's what is a privilege to all of us here at this hospital. So turn it over to Lily.  I had no idea he was going to be the one to to to announce that I was going to be doing this. He's just an awesome guy and I am thrilled that he will be the president.  So just an awesome upcoming young leader who is going to take this world by storm and it is my privilege to have been a part of his life and his world for the time that he's been here, which has now been eight, almost nine years. And he's always been here for the patients and for the community. So I want to embarrass him by going on and on as he's done me. But I just want you to know that we have another great leader who's going to lead a great organization for Texas Health Resources. So first off, I just want to thank you for inviting me to speak today. I thank Mayor Pro Tem Zem, which is what we call him. So you need some way out, where'd he go? If you need some way out, just refer to him. Is that he loves it? He's up. He loves it because that's who he is. He's just a very personable great leader in the city of Fort Worth. And you know, great leaders don't have a lot of errors about them because that's great leaders are touching the people and that they realize that they work for us. It's much like my role here as president of this hospital. I tell staff all the time, I work for you. You don't work for me.  Just remember that as you get into your roles. And Mr. Zimmerman certainly knows that. As I look around the room, I want you to know that I am very encouraged to see so many of you here because you are the future of the organization and future of this great community we call Fort Worth. And as a native Fort Worthian, I want you to know how proud I am that you're taking part in this great organization and allowing yourself to grow and to learn and to be ready to take over from us because we don't want to do this all the time. We want to go home and pet the dog. Or as I tell staff, watch the squirrels go up and down the trees. So it's very encouraging to see you here and I'm sure the weather kept a few people away but they will be able to see this, I'm told, on CCTV if my information is accurate. So again, good morning to all of you. You know, I was asked just a little while ago, I guess maybe a few weeks ago to appoint someone to serve in the capacity of giving some dietetic kind of input for the group, one of the core group, one of the task forces I guess of this big group. And so we gave just if I believe it was the executive health dietitian is going to fill that role. And the way the reason I mentioned that is because healthcare business is undergoing a lot of change right now. And one of the things I want to talk about as I start is about how Texas Health is a system continues to be at the forefront of many of these changes.  And of course, we're the best. And it really isn't bragging if you can do it. And we can. So we're the best. But we've moved outside of the walls because our mission statement is that we're going to improve the health of the people in the communities we serve. And we haven't done that improvement as well as we need to. So one of the things we're doing is moving outside the walls of the hospital on the preventive care side, which is where the dietitian and being a part of the task force of this group. And then to do some continued health improvement on the backside, teaching people with chronic disease and lots of comorbidities how to stay healthy. So one of the keys to meeting the challenges ahead is to shift our focus from caring for people when they're ill to proactively keeping people healthy. And I know that's one of the things that this health challenge is taking on as well. We're trying to implement behaviors and interventional interventions that can improve health and outcomes over the long term and ultimately improve our overall community and the community's well-being. So I'm going to talk to you a few statistics I'm going to share with you. Companies in DFW areas suffer an estimated $17 billion loss in productivity each year due to employee health problems. Now Texas Health Resources got that number real quick and you won't believe what they're doing to us. Well, I mean for us, they're really infested in the health of the people who work for them and they're about 25,000 of us now.  So remember this number, $17 billion loss in productivity each year due to employee health problems. Personal health behaviors influence 50 to 70 percent, 50 to 70 percent of an individual's health. Yet we spend only 4 percent of our health dollars to impact those behaviors. So those are numbers that you need to hold on to. So we realize that we must inspire change in the way people think about their own health. That's the only way we can improve health as in our mission statement of the people in the communities we serve. And we have to bend that cost curve away from its upward trajectory because right now it's going up and we've got to bend that curve and begin to do a better job of improving the health. To do that, we're transforming from a hospital system to a health system and we're going to continue to focus on patient needs and the hospital will continue to provide that outstanding care that you've become accustomed to. But we're going to do a lot more. Other pieces of the continuum is we're going to, that we will grow is this importance and it's important is primary care and wellness. And we're embarking upon a lot of initiatives that centered around those two issues, primary care and wellness. Post-acute care services is still another area that we're involved in now. So we're aiming to help people improve their well-being. Remember well-being isn't just about the physical aspect of what you have. You know, some of us are round, some of us are thin. I mean we come in all types of packages, right girls? You notice I targeted the women. I mean I love conversations with women. But it has to do with mind, body and spirit. It's the whole person. It's your physical health.  It's how you feel about yourself. It's how you feel about those things that God has enabled you to do. And I'll just, let me just talk about that just for a minute. You know as leaders, you see leaders who are very successful and you see leaders who are trying to lead and nobody's following.  If you think you're leading and you turn around and nobody's following you, guess what? You're not a leader. Leaders have a heart and they have purpose. They live on purpose and they do those things that are important to the gifts that they've been given to be a leader. And many of us do different things as we lead, but pretty much so we're inspired to do what we do. And it's the God in us for the most part that allows us to do that. And we're true to Him and to the gifts that He's given us is when we have that wonderful experience called success, okay? So we're transforming the health system, the health care system to a system of care.  About a year ago, we signed a contract with a company called Healthways. Now I won't tell you we've figured out everything they're going to do with and to us, but they're a national company that have a lot of evidence-based protocols that have been shown throughout the country to improve health of various communities. And one of the things that caught my attention is how in small countries, in smaller communities, they've created things like bike paths.  Hello, tick. But they've also created services for diabetes.  But through Healthways and through the physicians that work closely with Texas Health Resource Hospitals, what they'll be able to do is pull up those patients who are diabetic, pull up those patients who are congestive heart failure or any type of disease process, and then they'll be able to create pathways to improve their health. And that's what we're looking for from Healthways. One of the targets we're looking at initially is diabetes. We know our kids have diabetes, right? They're overweight and they become diabetic. And so we're hoping to get some help from Healthways in many areas where we can improve those individuals' health as well. We believe people with higher well-being are healthier, happier, contribute more to the communities. And they contribute a lot to their jobs as well. The Gallup Healthways well-being index is what they use. And what that does is one of the measures that's being used by forward-thinking employers and communities to evaluate their environment, which is a physical environment, as a first step in making improvements to foster better health care and better well-being. So well-being, as I said earlier, is more than just physical health. So one of the things that we'll be looking at is six areas, which is life, evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behaviors, work environment, basic access to food, shelter. In Fort Worth, we've adopted the homeless initiative and we really take care of our homeless individuals. If they want to be taken care of, we're here for them. So some of those things that we're already known to do in Fort Worth will become even more apparent and more prominent in the way we approach them. By interviewing at least 1,000 U.S. adults every day, every day, this well-being index provides real-time measurements and insights needed to improve health, increased productivity, and to move us to where we'll be able to improve that health. So the goal would be to drop the number of hospitalizations, and Joseph doesn't like to hear that number because he and I won't have a job if we drop it too low, right? But it will get people out of the hospital and into the right environment. And, you know, with the population growth and all the great work that's been done by many of you in this room and certainly our elected officials, we will continue to be the place that top Fortune 500 companies will bring their companies. I mean, they're going to come because we're so good in Fort Worth that they're going to bring their businesses here, so we have to make room so we have additional capacity, is basically what it boils down to. So Texas Health and Health Ways are developing what's needed to connect people with their own health and to make sure that they can get whatever they need and whatever they want from that product. Actual measures of well-being in North Texas using that Gallup Health Ways Improvement Index will certainly get us there. We're also encouraging North Texas to take advantage of a tool called the Daily Challenge, okay? Who is that? Doesn't look like her, but that's what we were trying to capture her on a bike. These are the well-being dimensions I talked about. And here's the Daily Challenge. And I want you to take note of this one because we're encouraging North Texans to take advantage of this tool. Every morning you'll get a pop-up and it's the Daily Challenge. And what they do is they offer you certain things that will improve your health. It's really neat. I've been doing it now for about three months. It's a lot of fun.  And I thought, nah, not going there.  Try this for a little bit. There's the website. It's texashealth.org backslash well-being. And so if you want to participate, it's free. You just log into that website, register for it. And every morning, by 0700, you will get a message. And you earn points for it. So, you know, it says, for example, a challenge one day might ask you to share three things that you're grateful for. And remember, I talked about the well-being, the behavior and the well-being sense. So you think about three things that you're grateful for. And then you name a sport or exercise you'd like to learn and take up again is one of the challenges. And so what it does is it says, that's the question. And then it gives you the reason that that's so important to your well-being. So I wanted to share that with you and bring that to you as an offering from Texas Health Resources. We're aiming to make it easier for people to add doses of well-being to their daily lives, is what we're trying to do. Our mission, as I said, is to make sure that we take care of our community. And for that to do that, it means that we're going to invest in it. So I talked a little bit about faith a few minutes ago and I talked about being servant and being served, you know, how we serve and how we actualize ourselves. This emergency care center is what I want to talk to you about right now. I want to talk to you about little faith and big faith. Okay. This is big faith. This is big. And you know, in today's environment, many people aren't going out and spend a lot of money on emergency departments because the general consensus is it brings in a lot of patients and it brings in a lot of non-paying patients. Well, we believe, we believe as a company that no mission, no margin, not no margin, no mission, which you'll hear both because one says if you don't make the money, you can't fulfill your mission. Our faith says, and we're a faith-based organization, that we have a mission and as long as we're fulfilling our mission and we're trusting the one who can fulfill it, that we'll be able to be successful. So this is evidence and this is big faith. If you think little, you get little. If you think big, you get big. And if your faith is small, guess what you get? So you can tell that we have this enormous faith. And the new emergency care center, we're in the process of building, it's going to be unlike any other. Now, as Zem said earlier, you know, you need to know about what's going on in your community. You need to vote. You need to know what's happening that's going to be a draw and what's important to the 230-something thousand people who moved here from last year to this year. So this is one of them. It's healthcare. People come to communities for the workforce. They come for healthcare, schools, those are the questions they ask. What is it like? And when we go out and get business, the David Buzinos and, you know, the people who work with our CBDs, that's what they do. They're out there trying to figure out how to get big businesses in here. Healthcare being one. So the new emergency care center, which is you're looking at a rendering now, that we're in the process of building is going to be like wow. It's a culmination of years of soliciting input from our community. It's also a culmination of living in 24,000 square feet of space and having patients all in the hallway for a long time and now being able to get out of that situation. This slide shows a rendering of the outside of the facility. It's a freestanding building and basically the reason it's freestanding is because we didn't have enough space in the current footprint of the hospital to add it. So we're going to put it across the street and connect it to the hospital by that sky bridge that you see there. It allows us to keep pace with the growing Fort Worth area population and continue to provide the access to quality at a high level care. We're a trauma center with level three neonatal intensive care unit. The U.S. Census Board, of course, reported that the population of DFW grew faster than any other metropolitan area in the country between those years, between 11 and 12. Texas Health Fort Worth's emergency department is a safety net for many in the community and so we absolutely have to do this. So I wanted to share this project with you so you'll be able to tell others about it. It's going to have beauty. Now if you've been in our ED, how many of you were born here? Ah, look at that. I'll tell you, there's never a group where somebody wasn't born. How about your parents? Were they born here? There you go, more hands. So you're invested in this hospital and we understand that it's a community investment and so we always realize that we're owned by the community. We work for the community and we want to make sure that we're meeting the needs. Does no good for people to go and get companies to move here and bring jobs to this area if we're not doing what we're supposed to do in the healthcare arena. So the emergency department's main lobby will look like this. This is a rendering. If you've been in our ED, you know that nobody's in our lobby. Our patients go back immediately but we still want a nice entrance and so that's what the lobby is going to look like. Our partners in this design is HKS. Now I give you that plug not because of any reason other than there's a lady in the audience that came over a little while ago, a woman, they sent a woman to do the job right and she's HKS, she's on crutches and she came over because they wanted to support this presentation and be here to hear what we were going to say about the new ED center. They're the architectural firm. Where is she? There. We're at the back with the crutch. She just had knee surgery and they needed somebody to come in case we had questions and so they sent her and I thank you for being here. So this is an example of the main lobby and this is the nurse's station what it's going to look like in the exam room. Isn't that pretty? Really pretty. So a few facts about the facility. We broke ground in May. It's a 57 million dollar project and we expect completion by the end of this year probably the middle of the middle of December. We should get the keys. It will be approximately 75,000 square feet by way of a footprint. Right now remember we're in 24,000 square feet so it triples the space and we will go from about 63 beds and that's from Annex and everything that gets empty to 90. You know when people move out you kind of say oh this is my room. I have a purse room. My kids moved out and I put a big purse stand in the room so you can't get in there very easy. So it's like one like you see in the department stores where it has all these arms sticking out. So when somebody move out of a part of this emergency room and all the places that are connected we've taken over the space. So we've taken over enough space to get to 63 and we'll go to 90. And the good news about this is it'll be beautiful for the patients. Right now when we're busy you'll see patients in the hallway in our emergency department and we try to tell them you know that you can go to another hospital because you need to be admitted. We've called the other hospital they have a bed and if you will allow us we'll arrange a transfer. And most of the time they say I just drove past there just leave me where I am. And I think a lot of that's by reputation and even though you're in a hallway doesn't mean you get hallway therapy. We tell them that they're in the express lane to get to a bed and we give them these little eye covers that you get on the airplane. Okay and then we give them the little ear plugs and they just lay there until we can get them upstairs to a room. So this will really help us to be able to better take care of patients. And all of these are all of these are rooms. Right now we have curtains between it so you're going to be really proud of this and hopefully when you see the announcement you will come and tour it with us when we open. So we're incorporating state of the art simulation labs in this building as well. And these simulation labs will be education it's an educational facility for caregivers of all disciplines. I think you may have seen in the newspaper that mad star which is our public utility model just got a huge award as a system. So when they train their paramedics and their EMTs and I used to teach in that program I taught EKG interpretation but when they train they will be able to come to this hospital and through these labs be able to simulate how they take care of patients in the field. So I'll show you a little bit more about that. But these labs are going to be used by nurses and firefighters teachers who are in the community and we have several sem labs throughout the community but we don't have enough.  But a talk in manic and patient will allow us to be able to really train our paramedics and train our staff the staff that's here as well on how to better take care of patients. The scenarios are taped so if you know people who are never wrong you've lived with some of those people right they're never wrong they're always right well they'll be able to look at the videotape and they'll be able to see where they went wrong. So the sessions of videotape so care givers can be debriefed afterwards it's what that said that's a better way of saying yeah we got you you were wrong so you got to do it right the next time. This is the back of an ambulance which is one of the simulation labs so we're taking the actual back of an ambulance putting it into the structure and so you can understand how mad star care flight or any of the EMS providers can stand outside like this gentleman has shown here and this is a nice rendering provided by our architectural firm but it will look much like this and so we're standing outside and then they're doing the stuff they do on the inside of the ambulance as it's going down the street and and then people will be able to critique the actual work so you can actually hook them up to an EKG cook them up to the O2 and get their sats and all in the back of the ambulance and the patient can be taken from the ambulance then into the operating room because here's our OR simulation lab you know one of the things that happen right now is when you get an ambulance in the patient sort of go off into cyberspace I mean the paramedic brings them in get them here safety safely that's their job and then they go into the care of the hospital and so there's no continuity there well with this simulation lab we could take that same patient that same mannequin into the operating room because here's the operating room simulation lab and it will allow the EMS providers doctors and nurses to run scenarios that's all education in nature then there's the trauma simulation lab we get a lot of trauma we're level two trauma center we support our level one trauma center which is JPS in this community and we get a lot of trauma so how do we train people to be good trauma providers well right now people are just in the way they're in the way you get a level one trauma 10 people are standing at the door when you come in so this will allow us to do some of these scenarios up in a simulation lab and keep people out of the way while at the same time training them so I wanted to share those labs with you this is the ICU once they finish the OR procedure they go up to the intensive care unit and so we'll have one of those labs too that looks exactly like the ICU that's in Blocksham Tower the OR looks exactly like the operating rooms that are in our OR and the the resuscitation bay looks exactly the same so you can see if the equipment's here if the boom's there you know exactly how how to work that room so you can see that we've got big plans for the community and in the I see in the ED we're building in some space in between the two trauma resuscitation bays so students can stand in between the two rooms in an in-case space not in the way and watch the resuscitation from those spaces and this is the heart of what I what I'm enjoying about this project I love having more space I love having the academic piece but the Geriatric Clinic is what I'm really wanting to make sure you know about as you leave here today you know we have lots and lots of elderly coming down the pike right and the problem with that is that we have lots of physicians who no longer want to take care of Medicare patients because of the reimbursement lots of people and so it takes a long time to get into a physician's office if you're an elderly person who's who's taking care of an elderly parent now there you go hands there you go my husband yeah don't tell him I said that JD so so we know that it creates issues with getting into the doctor's office I am personally responsible right now for my sister's care and my sister is the older and she really used to spank my honey a lot and you know was responsible to help raise us if you will why my mom and dad work now we all grew up in something quasi to that the elderly always took care of the family you know the older child especially if you're a girl so now she's beginning to become a little demented she's got some heart problems and all and I will tell you I just had a fight with her primary care doctor just the other day because he wants to have her come in on the 20 no on the 19th and she needed to have been in last week and this happens all the time so this clinic is going to focus on the elderly population we'll see patients requiring follow-up care after an emergency room visit and hopefully create a transition for those who either don't have a primary care physician or who need to be seen in a non-emergent environment while they're waiting to get to their regular primary care doctor our goal is to make care this care experience easier for the elderly population and also for the family member who takes care of that elderly person the clinic addresses two issues the growing number of elderly emergency patients and the fact that fuel primary care physicians are taking care of these patients so this is really one of the things that I am really excited about and it's going to have a lot of glitz glamour and magic we don't do anything halfway here and so we're putting in glass tile and I mean all the whistles and bells but this is a rendering of what it's going to look like the colors are warm they'll be your gold and browns and all and you know the clinic will be staffed by geriatrician which is somebody who takes care of older people and hopefully we'll avoid the labeling of people as Alzheimer's patients when they're simply age-appropriate demented and so we we're really hopeful to get a lot of really good work out of this clinic we'll have a lab there we'll have x-ray of capability there and we hope to see patients who have disease processes like COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary disease diabetes hard failure and this is an example of how we're shifting the focus from being in the emergency room and in the hospital to doing some preventive training and then some post-acute care in the back of this second floor where this clinic is in the simulation labs there are huge classrooms being built and we're going to do zoomer classes for the elderly yeah and some Pilates and those kinds of things but mainly we'll have dieticians there we'll have people there who can help them with articulating the health care system so I'm really excited about this one and as I've said to members of our team I'm trying to get this thing perfected so by the time I get there it'll be ready so as you can see you know we're aiming high we're using our faith to do things that we know make a difference to people in this community and I hope that you'll come and see some of this when we finish with it mid-December now what I'd like to do if I could is just stop for a minute here and take any questions you might have see a lot of employers that look as young leaders convince corporations and organizations around how to invest more in their largest investment their human capital yeah and I agree with that pull your data would be where I'd start it's just pull the data and look at the things we talked about look at your productivity look at the days absent you know one of the things that we did is we looked at how do we keep our employees well how do we keep them well so if you do the data do the data dive and see what's in there and then look on the other side and say well how many of those people have diabetes how many of them are hypertensive which is a big population 120 pound people run around with 140 over 80 150 over 60 I mean they have these big high numbers the systolic numbers so I would pull the data just ask for the data and then look for something small I'll tell you how we did it out of the airport because we had really not invested in that there was a big vacant building out there and we began to look at how healthy are the employees and so they took that big through the board took that big open building and put a fitness center in it and then from there went to okay let's get a couple of nurse practitioners to look at doing some assessments so you may not be able to go all the way fast but if you take little incremental steps and we'll bring the mobile unit and help you with pulling some of that data if you want to we have a wellness for life mobile unit in fact we will soon have three do you have three four we'll soon have four and what we do is we go into the Lockheed Martins and those other companies and we do mammograms and we do all kinds of things we do PSA prostrate streamings and all of that stuff out in the field and then we give that data to the company so they know what they're dealing with so you might invite us in too but I just think if you start with the data and ask people if you could do profiles we fill out a profile every year and what it does for THR is it ask us what were your most recent numbers and then they reward and incent us to go to the doctor they reward and incent the females to go and get their mammograms it's $25 but you know we all like money and you know it's a commitment that they have made to us so the real reason we go and do it is because if somebody cares enough about me to try and pay me to go and get a mammogram why wouldn't I go do it because what's important to the company has to be that human capital does that help yes okay thank you other questions yes ma'am in addition to the website that you showed us that we can go and register for what would you say are some additional simple steps that we can take as our professionals to promote health and wellness in the community hmm hopefully your task force is going to come up with something I think Betsy's done a pretty good job of this the bike trails and all I mean there's so many things and and I don't know if you know but we're going to do some bikes throughout the community and we'll have a docking station right here on campus I think that's set to roll out on the 22nd or so some of your city folks 22nd isn't it you know everybody's just into it it's just the new buzz thing you have a you you have any ideas about that JD uh Liz what are some of the things that you guys okay that was my answer too yeah what are you doing with our task force some of the ideas well we we kind of narrowed down on the topic somewhat well um so our task force just recently met and what we determined was as in terms of what we can do in the time frame we have I think probably one of the things that impacts all of our community is we all about to eat and we've seen models in other communities and actually the point system that you talked about is something that we're going to have to talk about but it's a great idea but ways to to encourage restaurants to offer healthy options and even to come up with a grading system that they can be certified as a healthy restaurant and again this this is just a starting point it's good it's a great way to start but that our task force is is just the initial phases of that and working with our restaurant association in order to promote that and again you know throughout the whole community we think it'll be at least been official to promote and the awareness of healthy options if nothing else at the starting point just at the restaurants we all eat at so that's great that's a great idea and then if you'll take this assessment and if you can just roll that out it really it's a good it's a good educational tool tells you why you eat certain foods and why you should and how it works in your body yes why that most uh we'll talk about how everything else uh this seems to come down to dietary what we eat and how we work out on that kind of stuff do you find and this is just a question I don't know do you guys run studies in regards to specific people who look that obviously Mexican food is very sodium and all the best that they're just not supposed to eat but it's just a way of that's a cultural thing so how do you address on that or and I'm just bringing up a question you guys have data that they that's fine yeah this is I mean we know in the Hispanic community diabetes is huge because of diet and everything else but what are some of the things if anything I mean I just find that as being such a because I love the Mexican food well let me tell you moms and I love eating what she makes and all that kind of stuff we all do it's a lot more health conscious and I love that food as well but uh I definitely enjoyed when my mom took so do you have your thought about that either like that or I mean I see that it's a huge obstacle and I've really wondered what are some of the things that we can do to address that depending well of course you know we have our foods as well of course oh yeah oh yeah and my and my kids come to my house for that then they go home and eat their lettuce but um you know I you know it's a part of our culture and I think we can eat anything we want to I really believe that you just have to cut back on what you eat you know don't give up the things that are important to you as an individual why would you I mean that's what makes Fort Worth such a unique place we're so diverse you know and we have so much to celebrate you know when people come to your house you think they want you to give them a salad they come to your house to eat with you because they know your mom's gonna make something that's really traditional when they come to my house they know what I'm cooking so I think what I think the key there for your your group and mine is that we just do you know we eat moderation other than that you know pig out every now and then and it's just a part of who we are and you know I think it's interesting because our genes and I'm not an expert on genomics or anything but I think that I have watched my brothers eat like pigs I mean just eat all day long and they never gain weight so I think it's something about our body so it's not all about what we put in it's about the way we use it as well so just keep eating and I mean just eat moderation you talked a little bit about your mission you talked a little bit about your mission and so one of the things that as young leaders we certainly like to be involved in what's happening in our community so what are some things that we can do to assist you in your mission I think messaging is really important you know I think the community has to care about the community you know what's important to to certain groups of people has to be important to us and and a couple of things come to mind one is our young people who are struggling to find jobs that's why I serve on workforce is because I want to be that constant voice there that says just because a kid got in trouble three years ago don't throw him away you know they've got 30 40 years to live so helping with job creation for the youth and programs and and then the programs that exist making an impact that says when they come and approach you I care about you and I'm here to help I may can't find your job but let me tell you I can be the biggest encourager you have and the other thing is just trying to make sure that that we can promote safe choices with with drugs and those kinds of things you know and that that goes to our homeless people you know everybody has a lot of empathy for the homeless we pass down Lancaster across from the T and my heart just bleeds so because so many of those people are young people but you have to remember and I tell myself this every time my heart bleeds for them you have to remember that some people are homeless by choice okay but the ones who aren't homeless by choice I think you have to support what our elected officials are doing to deal with that especially with our military people those things really make a difference and then we have a huge population of undocumented people in this community now at Texas Health Worth and throughout our system we do a lot of care so whatever the the outcome of the immigration bill comes out we have to help to onboard people and make them feel welcome so they go through the process and become legal if that's a term that we need to use you know you think about some of the undocumented people they came here as babies this is home this is home and so now we we have this thing that they can't get health care they can't get food stamps they can't get they can't get they can't get but look at the population that's growing the most so I think just really just caring about those kinds of things will help us and as young leaders you're going to be the ones when you cast that vote that's them talk to you about you're going to be the ones who will have to make some of those decisions I think we have to have an immigration bill that says this is the basis on which this country was built so come and and let's let's get you set up so you can be entitled to whatever's here we do a lot of surgeries you know nobody will do the surgery we say bring us the surgery we'll do it and we have physicians who do that okay are we there all right thank you for having me well thank you miss viggins I was so excited when we got you to agree to speak mayor when we sat down to think about the the roster for this year she said you gotta have Lily so this is an appreciation from LIP and stir foot worth for speaking with us and thank you so much for having us can we get another round of applause for her


2-051, from 05-12 R-E-D-N-D, Urgency High I hope this gets through. If you're like me, seeing things on the BBC and the New York Times before getting briefed on by staff is doing a number on you. It's over. The only thing left is to tell you what I know. 2 is dead. We only know that because she told us herself. Nice of her to leave a note, I guess. I've established contact with 3, 7, and 13. The rest, who knows. There aren't any protocols for something like this. The best we can tell is that they put on a performance. The man at the threshold, Act 1, 35 years. Act 1, Scene 1 0-943 hours local time, disturbance in the vicinity of Giza Plateau, Egypt Egyptian military mobilized in response to apparent mass gathering in front of the great sphinx based on initial intelligence of a Muslim Brotherhood action. Embedded media present, massive information leak of anomalous phenomena. 0-947 hours local time, spontaneous powerful sandstorm encircling an approximately 100 kilometer radius of the great sphinx. A battalion of the Egyptian army is present to witness the performance. Four humanoids, appearing to be some medic in appearance and clothed simply in white cloth and sandals, appear spontaneously at the scene as well. Several rounds discharged by soldiers present suggest that the humanoids are non-caporeal. The as-yet unidentified beings take no notice of any actions occurring around them. Proteus, I hope that I'm not being improper when I say that I am scared. Melita, we're all scared Proteus. This is the day that our cohort have been preparing for our entire lives. Proteus, three of us will be chosen. Have we made enough of our time here? Will it comfort us if we are cast outside? Agus, just look at the things we've done together. We've mapped an unknown star system. Wrote a song that made us the heroes of the summer convocation. Scaled the shadow past the mountain of ice. I tell you Proteus, if they cast me out today, I can say that no matter what comes after, it was all worth it. Proteus, I hope to be as brave as you when I enter the chamber. Dona Shir, all except what they are given in the threshold. Melita, how could it be otherwise? Agus, how could it be otherwise? 1017 hours local time. Sandstorm intensifies briefly, obscuring all vision in the local area before immediately subsiding. When visibility is re-established, no anomalous humanoids are present. However, the great sphinx has been removed, replaced with a blue light holographic projection, in the appearance of the sphinx and of approximately the same size, with no discernible source. Numerous photographic and videographic records are taken and circulated. Existential threat to consensus reality and progress. Act 1, Scene 2, 1143 hours local time, darkness falls midday in Tyra Square in Cairo, Egypt. No evidence of a solar eclipse, cloud cover, or any other possible source of such conditions is apparent. Nine moons appear to be visible in the night sky. Riots begin almost immediately, and messages proclaiming the end times begin to be broadcast over PA systems attached to several local mosques. Images corresponding to the four humanoids appearing at the great sphinx are projected to be an unknown source onto the side of the Magama building, visible to all within the square. Activity stops as sound begins to accompany the images. The man, this set of four, born on this day 35 years past, are you ready to enter? Melida Aegis Monashir. We are. Proteus. We are. The man, do you see, as it has been intended, how even those cast in the exile may have a taste of our beautiful world, and how those that remain have shared the shadow of death with those that must take their leave now? Melida Aegis Monashir. We do. Proteus. We do. The man, look then, out of this world, on this day, this is the threshold. This is the place where human society is made. It is here that the salvation of the few, so great in its perfection, so sacred in its magnificent beauty, is earned by the fate of the many. It is they who will make the ultimate sacrifice, and they who deserve our love and our honor most of all. Do you choose to pass the threshold of your own volition? Melida Aegis Monashir. We do. Proteus. We do. The man, Melida's snowfall of the shadow peaks, step forward. Melida, I stand ready. The man. You shall dwell on the planet of eyes. Melida, I accept my duty. The man. Aegis Sky Sail, third denizen of the watchcliffs. You shall be taken to the planet of skin. Aegis, I accept my duty. Aegis appears to stumble slightly, close to feigning. The man. Monashir Violent Light, the Lady of the Tower. Monashir, I stand ready. The man. You shall remain. Remember always the great love of your departed sisters and brothers, now and forevermore. Monashir, I shall. Monashir begins to weep. The man. Proteus Hammersmith, the Wayfinder. Proteus, I stand ready. Proteus trembles. The man. You are to come to the planet of hands. All 32 hours local time. Upon concluding with the above dialogue, daylight returns to Tyra Square. Of the estimated 10,000 people gathered in the square, several thousand spontaneously lose vision, and several hundred appear to be instantaneously flayed alive through unknown means. All other persons present in the square no longer have hands after the conclusion of the anomalous display, instead having completely healed stumps. All news networks, in particular Al Jazeera, begin to run coverage despite attempts at coordinated interference with dissemination of information. All nations have put their militaries on high alert, and a few look to have already taken the opportunity to settle all few scores in the confusion. That's the only thing that makes sense now, really. What do you think they're mobilizing against?  The churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. are overflowing. The Abrahamic folks are convinced that judgment is a hand. Everyone else just sort of figures that we're all fucked. The first reports of murder suicides are coming in. Not as many as we might have expected, though. People have options. 001 made sure to let them know that. Act II The Traveler Prepares Act II, Scene 1 1521 hours local time. News emerged from Beijing of the unbombed corpse of Mao Zedong, ambulating under its own power from its mausoleum and in the Tiananmen Square. Visual confirmation emerged on Shenhua News Service outlets several minutes later. An anomalous humanoid projection, similar to that seen in the part of Proteus in the Cairo disturbance, appears in the middle of the square alongside the corpse of Mao, which appears to have assumed the role of the man. The Man There is no sense in lingering. We all have our appointed places. Proteus But there's simply no sense in it. Our world is immense. Our use of its resource is efficient and wise. Surely none of us must live in exile. The Man Problems of the far future become the problems of tomorrow for a race that has no end to its days. Proteus There must be a way to manage it. If all women and men live for as long as they care to, we must have no need for birth. What purpose the creation of life if it is to suffer? The Man I have had this duty for a very long time, my friend. These are not new questions, and my answers are not new. Our kind ascended when we understood the true nature of ourselves. We must always be able to create new life. Our minds, subtly interconnected through the air and through the dreamscape, turn dark and destructive when the act of creation is taken from us. Proteus What is suffering? What is the cruelty that lives on our nine moons? The Man Suffering? Yes, there is suffering. It must be so, and we must know of it, taste of it, build our houses upon its foundations. As life prays on life, so does human enterprise need vast inputs of suffering. It binds us together. The knowledge that there are others that cannot have what we have built affects us deeply. It is a cornerstone in our souls. That is something we discovered a very long time ago. It is vital, and it was this discovery that paved the way to Heaven's gate. The Man But cruelty? No. We do not do these things because we wish to cause pain. We do it for those that remain in the wonder society that we have built. We have given beauty and truth without end to those that are chosen. If even one person may taste of the infinite good, is that not worth any amount of finite suffering? Proteus But why must it be I who pays the price? The Man My friend, come with me, I shall escort you. Fifteen-fifty-nine hours local time. Upon conclusion of the anomalous occurrence, crowds in Tiananmen Square become highly agitated, tearing apart the corpse of Mao Zedong and resisting an assembled cordon of riot police. Leaders of major world governments have begun issuing statements urging for calm among their population to sign to struggle to explain the occurrences in Cairo and Beijing. Thousands are reported to have died in civil unrest and population centers throughout the world. Act II, Scene II Sixteen-ten hours local time. The three gorgeous dam in Hubei Province, China spontaneously disappears. The immense volume of water being held back by the dam previously does not move. Within minutes, helicopters operated by local emergency authorities are on the scene. Humanoid projections appear on the vast surface of the Wall of Water. Proteus What is this place? The Man Do you see our planet in the sky? That wondrous blue sphere? You are on the planet of hands, my companion. Proteus, I don't understand. It looks like it's been on fire. Buildings. Rubble. The Man There was a time when we merely exiled those whose duty was to come here. They built their own societies in a fashion. They were driven by what they could not have. Their slender hope twisted into a sort of vengeance upon their children at the center of this great constellation. They built great structures, vast ships, terrible weapons. The uprisings happened many, many millennia ago. The last conflict our humanity will ever have to face. Now, it's a simple matter to ensure that it never happens again. No perverse hope to tempt anyone to foolish destruction. Proteus By taking away our hands The Man By taking away your hands, the mindset of a planet of those without hands is the proper one for all of us. Proteus, where is everyone? The Man. Come. 1632 hours local time. The waters of the Yangtze River are released, causing massive flooding, widespread destruction of homes and property, and thousands of deaths along the area of the river's banks. The destruction further inflames instability in the People's Republic of China, and the country's ruling Communist Party is overthrown in a popular uprising within a matter of hours after this event. It's all come apart, one. Everything that we worked for, crushed in a matter of hours, and the only thing holding them all together, keeping things from being even worse than they are right now, is one idea, going home, wherever home happens to be. Act 3 To the People of Earth Act 3, Scene 1 2301 hours local time. All notable buildings within the Capital Mall region of Washington, D.C. change coloration, from white to red. The Washington Monument emits a bright column of red light, stretching up into the sky invisible from hundreds of miles away. 10 meter tall holographic projections of several humano, similar to those previously depicted, appear directly over the monument's reflecting pool. Prochius, we have traveled many miles. The man, the planet of hands is vast, but look, we have another. Handless woman. More people? I must be close to the blessed end. Prochius, who are you? Handless woman. I no longer have a name. We have no need for such things here. Prochius, do you remember your home? Handless woman. This is my home. Prochius, I mean the place you came from, to hear. Handless woman. I remember a time when I wasn't starving, but that was a long time ago, it's difficult to recall. Prochius, your ribs are showing. Would you like me to find some food for you? Handless woman. There's nothing to find. This is a place of ash and salt, but the hunger is a blessing. My mind feels clear, my being so light and clean. God speaks to me here. He tells me to lift my stumps to the blue light in the sky, and so I do. And I pray, and I am filled with the knowledge that I am here for a purpose. I am suffused with happiness. Prochius, this place makes you happy? Handless woman. The last gift of the body before it evaporates is divine revelation. I live in truth. I live without fear, without doubt. I dwell in the spirit that had made this place. This is a place of ecstasy. Handless woman collapses. The man. And now her time here is at an end. No torments of false hope, no food nor water to sustain her suffering longer than it must. It is but a little sacrifice when faced with the salvation that it brings. Prochius, how long was she here? The man. A fortnight. Prochius, she did not seem to be suffering. The man. The joy and martyrdom obliterates all suffering. It is a secret known only to those of the outer planets, a gift to those who make this sacrifice. No, she is truly transcended. Prochius, I am ready. 2333 hours local time. Crowds estimated at approximately 50,000 people have gathered around the Washington Monument to witness the anomalous occurrence. Law enforcement authorities were not present at the scene, having been summoned to contain unrest elsewhere in the Capital Region. Act III, Scene II. 2340 hours local time. A large doorway in the center of the Washington Monument opens. Nothing is visible inside but a faint green light. The holographic projections continues. The man. Present your hand, Father of Humanity. The man holds a ceremonial blade aloft in one hand, a torch in the other. Prochius, I stand ready. Prochius holds his hand before the man. The man. Do you accept a gift of sacrifice, for those brethren that shall remain in the light for all of time? The man saw as that Prochius left wrist. Prochius, I do. Prochius bleeds profusely. The man. Do you offer your suffering for the good of the whole, your exile for the benefit of the collective psyche of humanity? The man wrenches Prochius' left wrist, snapping bone and tendon, then slicing the remaining ligaments, keeping the hand in place. Prochius, I do. Prochius spurts blood from left wrist. The man. Do you renounce the unstable reality of the universe outside the system? Commit yourself to the preservation of sanity within the system of planets? The man burns Prochius' left stump with the torch, cauterizing the wound. Prochius, I do. Prochius screams. The man. With the left hand, you accept your duty. With the right, our duty to you. The man clearly slices off the right hand of Prochius in one fluid motion. Prochius, I thank you. Prochius bleeds profusely. The man. Weed the living, shall keep a society of perfect harmony, perfect justice, perfect beauty. Weed the living, shall keep our human natures pure, living in the highest purpose that is possible for our forms. Weed the living, shall transform your suffering into the most divine purpose imaginable. The man burns Prochius' right stump with the torch, cauterizing the wound. Prochius, I am honored beyond measure. Prochius screams. The man. In this holy pact, we shall know love without measure or end.  Prochius, I accept my duty. 2359 hours local time. The humanoid projection portraying Prochius enters the doorway within the Washington Monument. Other projections vanish upon its entry. The doorway begins to slowly close. Several spectators from the closest ranks of the crowd rush into the doorway, followed by increasing numbers of onlookers, until an estimated 3,000 bystanders enter the monument before the gateway closes. No person entering the monument has been contacted or seen since its event. 13 asked me if what we worked to preserve was ever-natural.  What does it matter if the world we enabled was unnatural? It was better than what waits for us. The thing in Washington gave people lots of ideas. People have managed to summon a couple more of these gateways in a few places. They're fleeing into them. It's hard to blame them. We've lost any meaningful ability to control anything. The jig is up. The world knows that science is an illusion, and certainty is a cruel joke. Why not take the chance? Better a refugee than a corpse, or worse. Me? No, I will not. I will not end my life as one of the cattle. It was a pleasure to serve one. Well.


Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular parasite that can cause both acute and chronic infections in humans and other mammals. Two distinct forms exist within the parasite, tachyzoids and bradyzoids, which are responsible for different stages of the disease cycle. Amylapectin, a carbohydrate polymer, is produced by the parasite and plays an important role in its growth and development. Knockout studies on two genes involved in amylapectin production and degradation, UDP sugar pyrophosphorylase, USP, and alpha-glucon water dikinase, GWD, revealed that they play critical roles in the parasite's ability to form tachyzoids and bradyzoids, as well as in the reactivation of chronic infections. These findings suggest that amylapectin metabolism is essential for optimal tachyzoid growth and bradyzoid formation and reactivation. This article was authored by Pu Chen, Song Song Yu, Yi Dan Wang, and others.


Good morning, everyone. I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you, Ira, for that wonderful introduction. I am so lucky to have you as chairman of our board and as a partner, such a giant in civil liberties and drug reform, such a wise leader who is helping me learn all about this organization and be the most effective leader I can be. I want to thank a few other people, starting with Ethan Nadelman, who has done so much to help build this movement into the force that it now is. I first met Ethan several years ago, and I was so blown away by his intelligence, his vast knowledge, his ability to keep so much information in his head, his commitment and his passion for this issue, and I am so happy that we get to keep working with Ethan now as a partner in this ongoing struggle, because his passion remains undiminished. I want to thank my DPA colleagues for having given me such a warm welcome and the transition team and Derek and everybody else who has helped make this process so smooth, and I want to thank everybody who put so many hours and weeks and months of work into making this reform conference the best ever. We have so many wonderful events this weekend. We have Michelle Alexander speaking very soon. We have a collaboration with Afropunk. We have a candlelight vigil where we can commemorate those lives we have lost to this war. We have a town hall to talk about reparations, and we have scores and scores of panels and community sessions and other meetings. I am so excited about the next few days, and I want to thank everybody who's in this room for coming here today. I am so excited to get to meet all of you. We have more than, we have about 1500 people in this room from around 50 countries around the world, people from the front lines of the war on drugs, people who are saving lives, people who use drugs, people who are in law enforcement, we have doctors, we have family members, we have formerly incarcerated people, we have activists, people from all walks of life, all political backgrounds, people who, as Ethan would have said, love drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but are united by our conviction that the war on drugs has to end. I want to tell you a little bit more about why I'm here. I've devoted my career to fighting social injustice and for human rights. I first got my introduction to the war on drugs in a very real way when I was working on Columbia, the South American country, in many years ago. I was the Columbia researcher for human rights watch, and I was in charge of documenting abuses that were being committed in that country by various groups who were at war. There were left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and the military, all involved for decades in this brutal, brutal conflict. And I spoke to people who had survived massacres of entire towns, who had seen their family members raped, tortured, killed, who had lost people to disappearances, who had themselves been forced to flee their communities, becoming forcibly displaced and living on slums on the outskirts of town. And these were millions of people who were being affected by this war. And I also realized, though, that this wasn't just a matter of a conventional war where people were fighting each other for ideological reasons. Everything had become distorted because of the war on drugs, because many of the groups who were fighting in Columbia were funding themselves through the illicit market in drugs. And that meant that the United States, which had identified Columbia as a major cocaine supplier to the U.S., had itself poured huge amounts of money into the country's military. Now, if you looked at it closely, that made no sense, because even if you did want to fight and dismantle the groups that were engaged in drug trafficking in that country, putting the money in the Colombian military was in a way actually helping those groups, because the Colombian military was so often collaborating with the paramilitary groups who were behind so many of the massacres and killings and who were among the biggest drug traffickers in the country. So that raised some really big questions for me about what the point of it all was. And then I discovered something else, which is that whenever the U.S. claimed a success in the war on drugs and the Colombian government claimed a success because they arrested a drug trafficking leader, or they killed one, or they extradited them to the United States, or they claimed that a group had demobilized. You know what happened? Another one came in. Another person stepped in, filled their shoes, and continued doing exactly the same thing as they were doing before. And the reason for that was that the illicit market in drugs is so profitable, that as long as it exists, as long as drugs are prohibited, and there is an illegal market in drugs, you are going to have organized crime that's involved in distributing it. An organized crime is going to engage in violence and is going to commit horrific crimes to keep control of those markets. So again, what is the point of all of this? Then later on, I moved on and I did work on U.S. foreign policy. And I saw the same patterns in Afghanistan and in Mexico, the U.S. pouring billions and billions of dollars into a war that will never, ever end. Later on, I started working on the United States. I wanted to see what was happening in my own backyard. And I discovered that again, the war on drugs was distorting so many systems in this country because the war on drugs here is an excuse for policies that have devastated communities across the United States. It's an excuse for over a million arrests every year of people who have done nothing more than use drugs personally without harming others. It's an excuse for heavy policing of black and brown communities and which sets a stage for the arrest, the disproportionate arrests of people from those communities and sets a stage for police killings of people in those communities. It's the excuse for surveillance on a large scale of people across this country and beyond. It's the excuse for taking kids from their parents. It's the excuse for arresting pregnant women. It's the excuse for locking up 135,000 people a day and stripping those people when they've been convicted of their access to housing, of access to education, of access to food stamps. It's the excuse for deporting thousands of people tearing them away from their families because of old drug offenses. It's an excuse for damaging our democracy by taking away voting rights from millions of people. And I have to ask myself, if all of these people who have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions had been able to vote, what would our government look like today? And all of this for what? To protect health? I don't think so. Prison only offers a revolving door. It doesn't offer solutions. And we're seeing overdose rates soaring in the midst of this war. All of this has brought me to one very clear conviction, which is that the war on drugs may not be the solution to all social justice problems, but it's a huge part of addressing them. And I personally am proud to commit myself to this struggle now. I'll tell you another reason I'm excited. The war on drugs may not be over, but we are seeing victory. We are seeing in the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, how so many changes have been happening. I mean, just yesterday, the news about Governor Brown in California signing the RISE Act, which eliminates sentencing enhancements for drug sellers. This is a huge breakthrough. Thank you to everybody who's worked on that. We saw how the Atlanta City Council voted, and yesterday the mayor signed an ordinance decriminalizing marijuana. Though remember that Georgia still prohibits it. But seriously, marijuana legalization is taking off like wildfire across this country. And we're starting to get it done right with Prop 64 in California last year, which provides for racial justice and reparation and expungement of records. And we're going to continue with that in New York, New Jersey, at the federal level in New Mexico and beyond. We are seeing harm reduction entering the mainstream. So many politicians across the country embracing access to naloxone, syringe exchange, good Samaritan laws, even supervised consumption facilities. Huge, huge change. We're seeing criminal justice reform take off across the country, bipartisan reforms, bail reform, asset forfeiture reform, sentencing reform. And the biggest shift of all, in my view, is the change in public opinion. The fact that today it's okay to talk about drug reform. It's mainstream almost. You have high profile allies like Jay-Z coming out and talking in our favor, politicians, intellectuals, so many people. You see a growing recognition that illicit drugs can be used to treat health conditions like MDMA, which can be used to treat PTSD. People are not just talking about marijuana either. People are talking about all drug decriminalization. It's okay to push for that. And all of these successes are thanks to the work, not only of DPA, but of everybody in this room. People like the way of life, organizations like a way of life in California, Dean Becker, and the Drug Truth Network in Houston, Texas. Vocal in New York. Our partner, the Ordinary People Society in Alabama led by Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, making it possible for drug war prisoners to vote in prison. Yet with all our gains, our work is today more pressing than ever. Soaring overdose rates, huge arrest records, killings from Mexico to the Philippines, these are major, major problems. Drug induced homicide prosecutions are going through the roof right now across the United States. Compounding the problem. We're increasingly hearing talk about involuntary commitment as a solution to the opioid overdose crisis. And now we have Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. And when I look at them, I don't just see throwbacks to the 1980s. I see something much more vicious at work. Because in addition to all the other things that the war on drugs stands for, to me, it's very clear that the war on drugs is a tool for populists, for demagogues, for wannabe autocrats. I grew up under an autocrat. When I was 15, the president of the country I was living in, Peru, shut down Congress, shut down the courts. And he got people to support him by appealing to fear. By making people feel like only he could bring order back to the country after we had faced terrible violence. And people believed him and people went along. And I see the same efforts underway here. I see it in the way that Trump and Sessions talk about black and brown communities as hell holes. And the way they talk about bad hombres who are supposedly bringing addiction and misery and violence across the border. You can see it in Trump telling police not to be too nice to suspects and to take the hand away, don't protect their head. You can see it in the sudden appearance of a new FBI report that labels activists as black identity extremists. Just another way to stigmatize and criminalize communities of color. We know that this is not about protecting anybody's health. This is not about improving safety in this country. This is about finding excuses to go after communities that they don't like, communities of color, communities that are vulnerable and locking them up and deporting them. It's about giving red meat to their base, which includes those white supremacists that Trump has found it so difficult to criticize. It's about intimidating civil society, those who would stand up to him. And it's about distracting and confusing the public. And it has real consequences for real people. It has real consequences for low level drug sellers or couriers, not real drug kingpins, but people who are desperate, who will now be facing steep mandatory minimums in federal prison. It has real consequences for kids whose immigrant parents are now being sent away for decades old drug convictions, and who will now grow up without their father or mother or both.  It has real consequences for people who use drugs and have to do so in secret, and therefore are at greater risk for overdose.   Because I've seen elsewhere time and again, how even against the worst of odds, brave, committed people who insist on telling the truth and stand up for rights prevail. I've seen in my country Peru, how our former autocrat ended up himself tried for crimes against humanity. I've seen in Colombia, how journalists, investigators, activists who risked their lives ended up exposing some of the ugliest truths about their government. The US has its own history of so many movements for civil rights, for LGBT rights, for women's rights, partner movements that are still struggling to this day, that fight never ends, but who have yielded through tremendous effort, concrete gains for our society.  You're our activists. And this is our struggle for truth and justice. And already thanks to your efforts, Americans know better than what their government is telling them. And I know that everyone here is going to keep telling the truth when officials lie, when they give us their alternative facts and claim that the war on drugs is the answer. We're the ones who will stand up and say no, the war on drugs is what got us here. And it has to end. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. This could get much uglier than it already has. But that's why now, more than ever, I am so grateful to be in this room with all of you. Everyone here brings important experience, knowledge, expertise to the table. So in the next few days, please take the time to get to know each other, to forge new connections, to listen to people who work in an area that's different from yours, to strategize, to organize together. I know that if we work together with clarity of vision and understanding the challenges that lie ahead, but most importantly, moving from a place of strength and hope, we will not only build on our past successes, we are going to transform this country and the world into a place where compassion weighs more than stigma and cruelty, where truth and evidence weigh more than ignorance, freedom, more than oppression, life, more than callousness, and justice becomes a foundation for our society. Thank you, everybody.


academic vocabulary quiz 9. For today's academic vocabulary quiz, all the words come from the popular speaking activity, the Alligator River Story. To see words in full context, click on the link below. How many of these words do you know? For the following items, choose the word which most closely matches the definition. For example, definition. A place where people live. The correct answer is house. You will have four seconds to answer each question. These are general definitions. Beware of the context in which words are used. One, put in order. For example, from first to last. Rank. Two, land bordering a lake, ocean or large river. Shore. Three, quick, timely, without delay. Prompt. Four, large carnivorous reptile that lives in water, similar to a crocodile. Alligator. Five, throw, toss or discard. Cast. Six, agree, assent to, approve. Consent. Seven, journey, trip by ship. Voyage. Eight, past tense of seek. Sought. To view with scorn, disgust. Dissdain. Ten, line where the earth meets the sky. Horizon. Eleven, come before. Occur earlier. Precede. Twelve, feeling of empathy. Understanding kindness. Compassion. Thirteen, depressed, brokenhearted, downcast. Dejected. Fourteen, unfortunate or difficult situation. Plight. Fifteen, romantic, sexy, related to love. Amorous. Sixteen, deep suffering, grief or sadness. Whoa. Seventeen, show or prove to be right. Justify. Eighteen, cruel, harsh, severe, mean. Brutal. Nineteen, affair, caper. Adventurous action, usually considered risky or bad. Escapade. Twenty, be filled with overflow. Team. Thanks for watching. If you like these quizzes, please give us a thumbs up in the comment section below. And don't forget to subscribe to our channel.