Welcome to the Resumption of Lunch Poems in 2021. I'm Jeffrey Gio-Brayen, I direct the series along with a tremendous amount of help from Noah Warren. And we're really glad to resume and to resume with this amazing poet, Kiki Petrosino, who's in error just so many different kinds of form and shows the continuity across experimental and traditional form throughout her books and to many kinds of thematic concern as well. And I think to perfectly balanced coordinations between formal choices and thematic concerns. I'm gonna talk really briefly about White Blood, a lyric of Virginia. Kiki's newest book just came out in 2020 in the fall. Yeah, I think so. Spring, okay. So White Blood, a lyric of Virginia, the first part of the title is a legal fiction with all two real and terrible results, both past and present. And the second half of the title, A Lyrical Virginia, instantly partially converts White Blood into a poetic genre and then kicks us out of that into a state of the union, a lyric of Virginia. It's an amazing weaving of the law and of place and of writing that lets us know how contingent and artifice, something like White Blood is, without thinking that poetry has scored any decisive points against it or undone any of it. It opens inquiry rather than believing it does something. And I think that that's a crucial way that Petrosino works in the book as well. Form is there to pry open the past and render its presentness even more present. The book is therefore both a genealogy of the poet herself, of the union and all of the legacies of the slavery on which it thrived for so long. And again, a form itself. There are these amazing erasures. I'm gonna show you what they look like from DNA tests. You can see so that all that's left is that which has not been erased. And it's so satisfyingly multiple even though it seems so simple as a form, right? It indicates how difficult it is to recover history. It indicates how much is erased, made silent, burnt, buried and struck out. It looks like diaspora on the page, but it's also a re-yathering, especially when there's instance after instance of it, right? Diaspora is not only about dispersal, it's also about solidarity and reacquisition. There's an incredible double crown of sonnets in the book in which the 15th sonnet is made up of all the last lines of the first 14, which are of course themselves linked last line to first line, last line to first line. And it occurs to me that incredibly traditional and in fact, archaic form, isn't that different from erasure and reconstitution? One of the things I love about this book is how diverse the forms are, but how you start to see correspondences across them even though they seem to come from different parts of the literary family tree. Anyway, it's so well made. It's so beautiful and moving in its rottenness. And I'm really excited to hear what all that rottenness sounds like when performed. And I think we should do that right now. So please join me in welcoming Kiki Petresino. Thanks so much, Jeffrey and everybody at UC Berkeley. It's really nice to read for you and share poetry over your lunchtime. So I'm gonna read poems from white blood, a lyric of Virginia.  The quiet car is locked with a password you can't decrypt.    As heat expands within the carriage, you escape through a picture window. You climb to the top of the train and your ancestors repel down the sides. You're repelling down one side of the train when you glimpse your ancestors above you. They leap from carriage to carriage as if weightless, as if drifting, as if curling tongues of snow. You cling to the side of the train as each of your ancestors lifts away from you. They float into the cloud of themselves. In the rushing light, you perceive them as hundreds of slow snake doctors. Oh, you begin. What your results mean? Western Africa, 28%. The West African you is a hunter. Try, try, carry this. The West African you has split and expanded a mixture historic as a gene. The West African component of your lineage, the out of Africa event, the new world slave scene in this genetic print. You are likely a mixture, a cluster, a high number. Your DNA has roots that cluster and spread and trade and carry. The West African you spanning more than more. Regions of time in people.  African, you span most of Africa. African America, African diaspora and the Southern African forests out of Africa, East, South and then Southeast within Africa throughout Africa, the historic African world. Well, so, so, well, so. So the next couple of poems will be from a section called Albemarle. Albemarle County is where I'm broadcasting from is County in Central Virginia and it's where the University of Virginia is located and it's also where Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is home on the mountain. That's where it's located probably about a five minute drive from where I'm sitting right now. Instructions for time travel. You must go through Mr. Jefferson along his row of China berry trees behind the ruined smokehouse in unmarked tracks under field stones with no carvings, no monuments with a few leaves shadowing the mulch near scattered weeds in sunken lines while the sun walks in the day at the end of the day in an oval of brushed earth just as the soft path finishes under branches where the dead are always saying what they always say, right about me. La cuisine hier bourgeois. Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost as much as I love complaining. I pick at his recipes and their French alphabets larded in light. We know Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost translucent and gone by July. Didn't the French believe delight and temperance marry in the mouth? I'll hold my peace as much as I love complaining. I pick at the recipes Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost. The next poem takes its title from one of Jefferson's own statements in writing to a friend while constructing the home, the plantation. He describes Monticello as his essay in architecture. And in thinking about the word essay we're of course reminded that essay comes from a French word that means to try. So an essay is an attempt or a try at something. And thus it is true really that Jefferson's Monticello is his attempt of his essay in architecture and all the many complex senses of that word. Essay in architecture. The human face. It's pine doors painted like mahogany. Human face with horses under each veranda. Perfect parquet tetragons of the human face. Human face still legible in old French. Sealed closet of the human face lit by Oculus. Design face, tinker face, factory face. Twine and bare wood comprising a pulley system for the human face. Woodwork face with sunbeams settling in. Revolving buffet supporting the human face. Entire pewter plate collection in the face. Human face as soupdereen, as paint chip as spit jack. Smoke rings textured like the human face.  Human face brushed with olive oil and chovies and parmesan. Green floor of the dome room just above the human face. Floating view of the face. It's quarter farms. Rough cabins dotting a sloped face partly visible. Human face built to resemble a great clock. Great pendulum drawn faces in the air. Terror.  Beside his joinery and within his small ice house till I get down that pit lined with straw where Mr. Jefferson once stacked frozen slabs of river water until summer. Then visitors would come to him to ask about a peculiar green star or help him open up his maps. They'd kneel together on the floor among his books, lavish hunks of ice and melting like the preserved tears of some antique mammal who must have wept to leave Albemarle. Just as I wept when I landed in Milan for the first time. Stone city where Mr. Jefferson began to learn the science of ice houses, how you dig into the dark flank of the land, how you seal the cavity. Leave open just one small hatch through which I might lift through gratings Mr. Jefferson's cold dressed victuals his expensive butter and salads. The sealed jars sweating clear gems of condensation white blood appearing from warm air. As if air could break and slough revealing the curved arc of our shared Milan. There I wore silver rings on each thumb. I studied and spoke in fine houses of ice. I knew a kind of crying which sealed me to such realms for good. Old magic weep, old throb in throat. How much of my fondness for any place is water still bound to darkness. The word to worm of course it's Latin and it comes from another one that's lifted again from another one of Jefferson's writings. There was a moment in his life as a person who enslaved people where there were some young boys that were working in the nail factory that he had created in Monticello. And there had been a fight, something had happened and he decided to sell one of the voice to make him an example in terorum to the others. So the point was to sell this young man who had been in this conflict as an example to strike terror in the other enslaved people who were of course always afraid that they would be sold away from their families, the Virginia housewife. Methodical nicety is the essence of true elegance. To grill a calf's head, you must clean and divide it. When the mistress gives out everything there is methodical nicety, the essence of true elegance in a sauce boat, a spoonful in a sieve, boil it tender, take the eyes out, hole and cut flesh from skull. Cover these with breadcrumbs and chopped parsley. True, essential nicety is the elegant method. Divide a clean calf, then grill its head, the shop at Monticello. I'm a black body in this commonwealth which turned black bodies into money. Now I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me of this fact. I'm a money machine and my body constitutes the commonwealth. I spend and spend in order to support this. I support this mountain with my black money, strange mountain in late bloom, strange mansion built on mountains of wealth. I spend so much I'm late for the tour where I'm a blooming black dollar sign. I look good in the dome room prowling its high gloss floor. It's common to desire such flooring for my own home but owning a home is still strange. My blackness makes strange tools for a living rakes the strangeness like dirt. I like to rake my hands over merchandise. Bayberry votives, English, Hisop and crisp sachets. I like this engraved pewter bookmark so much suddenly I line up for it clenching my upright fist. I pay cash to prove myself no shoplifter. Still I abscond with my black feelings, crisp toast points dunked in fig jam on one hand. I must think very highly of myself to come here. And again, that sounds like something I would say. Leaving Albemarle behind for a little bit. I'll move to the county next door to Albemarle which is called Louisa. Now Louisa County also has a very, very deep history going back all the way to the colonial era. It happens to be the county where my own ancestors lived as enslaved and free people before and after the Civil War. Like I say, it's the county that's right next door to Albemarle. So there's just a lot of resonances and a lot of ways that the histories of these two counties, you know, Jefferson's Albemarle and then my family's Louisa, they overlap and there's a lot of traffic back and forth between the two counties of course. A lot of the people in the same families like owned properties in both counties, things like that. Anyway, my family was focused in Louisa County and you know, I'm gonna read some poems from that section. A guide to the Louisa County Free Negro and Slave Records 1770 to 1865. The first box is for all the good white men, the ones who freed their slaves on Christmas. It's always Christmas in the first box. The day Delphi shall go out, the day Viny shall go out. These good white men only desire the guardian care of those underage. After that they shall go out, just as Winnie shall go out at the age of 21, entirely free from me or mine or any person whatsoever. Delphi, Viny and Winnie shall go out on Christmas day. The first box slides open to show their certificates. The good white men of this county believing that all men are by nature equally free have left many of these. One certificate is for Viny, one for Winnie, one for Delphi, but these good white men can only free the slaves they truly own. One man observes the above mentioned Negroes are disputed in their titles to me, namely Delphi, Viny and Winnie. He doesn't say more about the dispute. He doesn't say what happens on Christmas day. This good white man has said all three should go out precisely on Christmas day, but now it is different. It's very different now, even though Christmas has come. The good white man writes, I only free as to my right and title given under my hand. The box slides open to show certificate after certificate. It's Christmas. So that's up on my road after I visited the library of Virginia, which is located in Richmond. Of course, that's the capital of Virginia. And the library of Virginia collects the free Negro and slave records from the many county courthouses in Virginia. And the reason why the library did that was so that those court archives would be preserved even after slavery was over, for historical purposes. So these records take up a lot of space, certificates of manumission and things like that, records from slave patrols that had been paid out, receipts and things like that. And so it would be so easy, quote unquote, right? It would be comparatively easy to say, we don't need these records anymore. Let's de-accession these records from the courthouse, but that's where the library of Virginia came in at one point and said, send them all here. Send these records here. We're going to keep them for archival purposes. So I was able to go visit and look up the Louisa County free Negro slave records. There were three boxes I found. And that was the poem that I wrote about the first box going back all the way to the period of time in which the, after which the Virginia Assembly had made it possible to do private manumissions of enslaved people that started in the 1780s. This is a poem about the second box, which contained a lot of claims and receipts for people who had, for white men who had worked on the slave patrols on the road throughout this exact same period of time. So this poem is called Louisa County Patrol Claims 1770 to 1863. I pry open the files still packed with liquor and strange brine. Midnight seeps from the cracks, slow pulp of arithmetic. Four or five or six at a time, the white men draw along the Gordon'sville road on foot or on horseback, clustered close.  For 93 years and every time I slip away to read those white men lying the roadway, secreting themselves in the night air, feeding and breathing in their private column. Why belly up to their pay stubs, scraping my teeth on the chipped flat of each page. This dim drink only blights me, but I do it. I'll read some poems about these actual ancestors that I found. The family name is Smith. So I wrote some poems in the voices of the free Smiths. And they kind of speak as a first person plural and kind of, I hear them speaking very much in a choral voice to the genealogist poet in this book. Message from the free Smiths of Louisa County. You want to know who owned us and where, but when you type your searches return no results. Bondage was grown folks business, then old folks. We saw no reason to hum old master's name to our grandchildren or point out his overgrown gates, but you want to know who owned us and where we got free. You keep typing our names into oblongs of digital white. You plant a unicode tree and climb up into grown folks business. You know old folks don't want you rummaging here.  Little child, we're at rest in the acres we purchase. Those days of bondage were old folks business. The grown folks buried us deep, only a few of our names survive. We left you this sudden glimpse in the grass. The rest is grown folks business we say, yet you keep asking who owned us? The origins of Harriet Smith. Old master writes her name in his ledgers or might. It depends on what old master sees, what subtleties he tracks, which gifts. Suki walked to your dome, he writes, but you need to read Harriet walked. You need her to come up from a quarter and step through the narrow bell of old master's attention, a light girl with ears bored for rings. But Harriet is prudent. She never wastes her scant yard of brown ticklingberg or breaks her tools in the field. For a whole page in his daybook, instead of writing about Harriet, old master counts his glass decanters from France. He orders every hand to finish harvest without saying whose. You search for Harriet until the yellow globes of old master's script go dim, gummed like the fallen seed pods about his house. Well, well, it's a good thing you're a finch now. You were born to Gorge. A message from the free smiths of Louisa County. You ask why we didn't register as required, why we failed to appear before the provost marshal, why we avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank. You ask where we sheltered while battles sieved, where our mothers gave birth in which hidden houses and why we didn't register as required. While so many Paris and other counties were rage with Nat and Southampton, how did we manage? We avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank. Whatever we had, we held. Whatever we knew, we told no one who counted. We kept back our names. We didn't register as required. When you search for us now, you find silence. You may trace us back to a moment, no further. We avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank with its clock tracking everyone's time but our own. We chose inward passages. We kept deep counsel. We didn't register as required, which disappoints you. Why do you trust the courthouse, the census, the bank? Moving along here, I'll read another set of erasures. What your results mean, North and East Africa, 5%. For millennia, the Mediterranean Sea was as one. Despite the constant movement of people across people. This component traveled across logical connection, remnants all numb. North of the world, the earliest people saw Africa evident in the eye. Place of first migration, mitochondrial flux, the savanna frequency. This component of you includes a great rift, influx of lists. Mediterranean, Mediterranean most traveled, Mediterranean biological old and in pain. The sea saw, the South saw, the South see. South, oldest home, wide open, high. South of the great valley and west of Lucy, here, the pen. Birthplace as well as departure point, ocean. This is historically where we from. And now I'll read the last poem, last poem of lunch poems and the last poem from the book. This book, I've basically gone chronologically, I know kind of linear way, the way the book is arranged. This is the last poem and it's written very much from the time that I was living in Louisville and during a time when some of the racial unrest that we saw last summer, for example, was just sort of starting to kind of gear up in the city. And there was an incident where a white supremacist came and came to a Kroger that was right near, actually right near my house. And unfortunately he did end up killing, he took the lives of two elderly African-American Louisvillians who were just in the Kroger shopping for groceries that afternoon. And it was really a reckoning for the whole city and it's a process of contemplation and work that the whole nation is going through now. But at the moment, I felt like I needed to write some kind of a prayer for the memory of those who were lost, but also for the city of Louisville and all the work that we needed to do and still do. Psalm. Dear Lord, dear high Remembrancer, dear providential love, have mercy. Have mercy thou surveyor of wildflowers, assessor of royal and exquisite v-realms. Have mercy, ledger, who tracks us in the night, who measures without speaking our dark trespasses. For nothing here survives, not the gold-legged deer, browsing the bleached office park at dawn, nor the minute finch on her branch of long division, but thou, thou, thou absorb it all. O gazer, be kind in thy absorbing calculus. Won't be long before thy reckoning curve arrives at the junction of our error. How, beneath thy mineral eye, we walk abroad forgetting the cartographer of sparrows. Hi, my name is Noah and I work with Jeffrey on the series. Kiki, thank you for the merry delight and temperance of these poems. I'm haunted and moved, and I know our audience is too. And I wanna thank, before we go, our audience for coming and being here. It's the highlight of my month every month. And I wanna thank the Berkeley libraries for their generous support as always. And thank you too to our wonderful AV team. You can review this reading as other readings on our YouTube channel, search LaunchPombs Berkeley and you'll find it. You can also find links at our website, launchpoms.berkeley.edu, where you can sign up for the mailing list as well. We hope you'll join us for our next LaunchPoms, which will be on March 4th with Mary Jo Bang. Again, details on our website. Thank you all.


So we went out to a little rural community of Wirawara and they had just a small community with a whole and a fire station and in there there had been 11 structures that had been burnt down and it was pretty devastating to see that because the area around there isn't too much different to where I live to see that and the fact that it's just fires just torn through there and wiped it all out it was pretty upsetting and like when you can see there's big houses that have been burnt down and then they're right next to other structures that have survived so you can see the people who have stayed and defended and the ones who have left which is great to see that people have a fire plan they put into action early and they're making sure they save their life. They've got resilience beyond what anything anyone could expect. They wanted us to go back to now and now they didn't want us to stick around in their local community so that we could protect a community that was yet to be impacted by fire and be in the right place if the time needed so they were appreciative that we came out but they were more thinking about and wanting to protect everyone else over themselves. Some of the people up there have lost their own personal houses and you know the community's been reduced to rubble so any help they get they're just really really appreciative and happy that the CFA family are there to help them in their time of needs. So I've been on strike teams with Dad before I've never been on one with my brother. When we stepped on the fire ground whether it is on a big campaign fire like we've just gone through or we hop in the car and we go down to the station for a fire call. When we work as a team it doesn't matter if I'm working with my brother or I'm working with any other member in our brigade or local brigades or from anywhere in the state you're going to treat them with the same amount of respect and you're going to want to make sure everyone's just as safe as each other. As a parent I'm extremely proud to have my boys or the whole family is part of the fire brigade. I've been on strike teams before with both of them individually but never together as a crew of three so I'm really really good be good few years time might be able to get my daughter coming along too. I know my girlfriend was very stressed about it and knowing where we were going and that we're going to be up there on a peak day so it was hard leaving them behind knowing that they were both upset. Well mum's had Dad go away for 25 plus years now and she's still gets worried when he goes away but to have her two boys go away at the same time it's a completely different feeling for them so it was something that we like you always make sure we're going to be safe but we made sure we try and kept communications up when we could and let them know that we're safe and all of that.


My role in ROTC, I've just been with the Ranger Challenge team as a team leader, so I work directly with the squad leader and I just help facilitate good quality training. My time in the reserves and all the other training that I've gotten to go and get has helped me in ROTC pretty tremendously just understanding what it's like outside of the Cadet Battalion and kind of having an idea of what's going to be happening looking forward you get a better understanding of working with people, the kind of leader that you want to be you take a little bit from everybody that you meet it's just nice to be able to train up some of the other guys that haven't spent any time in actual training under a field environment. I feel that getting out here and getting after it with other branches really just seeing the best of what they had to offer and racking and stacking ourselves against them is always a great opportunity to remind ourselves that we're all in the same fight we're all a part of the United States military and everybody out here is working towards the same goal. We're doing this first equipment destroyed, moving on to the next target.


Hi everyone, Joe for JazmiesCaseBreaks.com with a one box break of 2020 Panini Contenders Football first off the line, random team break number six, right, big quarterback class here among others, a lot of great stuff here. In first offline, so it's red zone, autographs and red zone parallels that we're looking for in each box. Big thanks to this group for making it happen, appreciate you. There are the teams right there and let's roll it, let's randomize it. Six and a four, ten times each. Names and teams, ten times, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and tenth and final time. And we got Robert down to Mario after ten. Six and a four, ten times for the teams, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. We got the Colts down to the Packers, trades are allowed, the trade at your own risk, remember this is the 2020 draft class, two zero, two zero.  So trade window is open ladies and gentlemen we're gonna pause the video just for a bit and I will see you on the other side of that trade window. Be right back. All right welcome back everybody no deals were done so this list remains the same right here. There you go here on the 25th. Good luck everybody. One box Ram team break number six. Let's select a box. Where's the die?  Be right back. All right welcome back everybody die is found. All right so first of all we're gonna select left or right stack one two three for the left side four five six for the right side two left side so we'll save these for another time and then from top to bottom we'll go one two three four one two three four and I if I roll a five or six we'll just roll again two again so the second box down that's the one we're gonna do and we'll save this for next time all right good luck everybody so that's what we're looking for here and those red zone exclusives are also what we're looking for. Logan's a Packers fan he was just messing thought he was playing fantastic the last seven games he bought my love but if he plays bad against against who I won't like him yeah how much leash does he get if he has three bad games to start the season are people gonna be calling for his head or do you give you give him a longer leash what's the leash Packers fans drift Logan I mean even if Jordan love turns out to be you know these are his proof season I mean imagine the kind of luck the Packers have with their quarterback situation how long did they have Rhett Farve how long do they have Aaron Aaron Rogers and now they're gonna have Jordan love is the cubie of the future while other teams like like my Raiders have struggled to find a franchise quarterback for decades we got Rashad Lawrence first autograph for the Cardinals it's gonna be for Karen and the cards we'll randomize these left and right and then we've got we got de Ernest Johnson rookie autograph for the Brown that's her Allen last spot mojo strikes again and we got another Brown we got a Kaderrill Hodge rookie autograph other one for Allen and we've got a Derek Brown rookie autograph for Carolina Robert J with the Panthers all right that's one two three four autographs there oh no that's the risk with these older products ladies and gentlemen is the expired redemption we'll still ship it to the chiefs it's a red zone autograph too damn but there's a chance you might get this Adam we're gonna send this to you there's a chance they might actually get you that card heard some stories of that being a possibility or they'll get you points in return or something which there is a market a secondary market for those points and you'll get the time in Matthew as well red zone parallel they did not accept yours expired last month yeah sometimes they do sometimes they don't I've heard people with expired redemptions just scratch it off punching the code and it goes through and they've gotten their their cards sometimes they don't all right let's flip back over here let's do the quick little left right randomizer and it's gonna be the side on top after seven one two three four four five six and seven so we'll send you to the right side there you go gang quick little one box break first off the line random team six in the books I'll see you next time for the next break jaskiescasebreaks.com


What's up you guys, Sedona? Welcome back to my channel. Thank you guys so much for joining me today So I'm going to talk to you guys about how to pay off your loans after you've gone to PA school So typically most PA students will get some form of a loan That loan may be like a personal loan from a family or friend It may be a private loan from an actual like bank or a federal government loan And typically that is how PA students pay for school because you're not working usually when you're in PA school Unless you're going to one of those like three-year programs that are actually part-time or you know A hybrid program or something where you can actually still work. There are those options But for the majority of us we get loans and so what are we gonna do? Your loan can be anywhere from like $50,000 plus dollars for your PA program like the full two years mind you which is significantly cheaper than Actual med school so that is a plus, but you still have to pay for it So how are you going to do that? I have three ways that I think are beneficial that you might want to look into that you can actually pay for your PA school Schooling so the first way is going like getting a job that has loan repayments So most jobs offer this at least most of the jobs that I were offered offered a loan repayment And you like you had to stay a certain amount of time like it varied from job to job obviously But after a certain amount of time like on the job They would start paying back your loan which is a plus because that is something that you don't necessarily have to pay For your working you're getting paid. You're loving your job as a certified PA and you're paying off your debt all at the same time So I think that that is a really good option for most of us And that's really the route that the majority of us do take which is getting a job That does some form of loan repayment and there are a plethora of them out there You just have to like search for them really and truly so once you've graduated And you know you've passed your pants and become certified in your whole actual like applying for a job You can also negotiate this as well So even if your job doesn't necessarily offer loan repayment that might be something that you might be willing to Negotiate into your contract if they are paying you like a less than the national average So you can be like, okay Well, you know, this is what the market says for my particular position However, you're offering this so can you also do loan repayment and that is really a good option Another one is getting a loan forgiveness program. So there are many loan forgiveness programs out there and again, it's really not like I mean like It's it's loan forgiveness, but at the same time It's loan repayment if you're like giving back your time. So like those like national health core Scholarships, I guess you could say those programs where you work in an underserved community for like two years or three years And you give them back your time and they will pay off all of your student loan and debt And you like that that's like one of the best things you could possibly do Especially if you were already interested in working in an underserved community So there are those programs out there You really just have to like Google them look into them like for the healthcare professional and specifically for PA school or PA For PA students you can type that into Google as well and they will pop up those you do typically have to apply for But I mean, it's better than not applying for anything at all And then just ending up with a lot of debt that you're paying out of pocket Out of that new check that you're gonna be getting as a PA So those programs are very very beneficial to those that are looking at actually giving back their time to a particular area or a city or or State when you're actually working as a PA.  You can still Live well below your means, you know Get a little like a one bedroom Apartment or two bedroom apartment depending on if both you and your spouse are working You can literally like bank all of your check to pay off the loan while you live off of your spouse's check Or vice versa depending on who makes more money You can bank the other person's check to pay off the loan and then that way that's one less debt that you actually have to pay As you as the years continue on and then you can do a vice versa Depending on if your spouse also has like student loan debt or something along those lines But living below your means although it may be difficult for some people to do because you're like man I just got this new job. I'm making some money Like I was poor all in PA school now I can actually like live my best life You know, you might want to like go ahead and spend that money But I think that it would be important for you to realize hey Like I will be in a better position in the years to come if I'm able to get out of that a lot sooner So those are my three options my three tips for you all If you haven't already thought of them If you have some tips that you've thought of that I didn't mention because I only mentioned three leave them in the comment Section below so that we can all read them and see Also, if you have any questions or comments from me leave them in the comment section below as well Follow me on Instagram. Thank you guys so much for watching like this video. I will talk to you guys next time


So I'm a condensed matter physicist, study various new types of materials that people discovered in the laboratory. And people found about 25 years ago so that there were these high-temperature superconductors that we really wanted to understand. They had a certain way of conducting electrical charge that didn't seem to fit into any of the paradigms of condensed matter physics. And this new state of matter we now understand is really a new type of way of many particles organizing themselves. They're all entangled with each other in a complicated way. That makes it very difficult to describe that by the standard tools of condensed matter physics. So in about, I guess it was 2007, I was looking for just some tools that one could use, or even a simple toy model, as we call it, where you could describe completely the properties of a complex entangled state of matter. And that's when I learned about, well, I knew I had heard about something called the ADS-CFT correspondence that came out of string theory. And this is a tool that allows you to relate, in some ways, very complex entangled states of matter to theories of gravity.  But it was very useful and instructive progress, but it was only for a certain very special types of states of matter, which in addition to having complex entanglement, also have a high degree of symmetry. To really understand the experiments, you have to lower the symmetry quite a lot. And that's something we've been making, I think, some progress on since then. There have also been interesting cross-fertnization between condensed matter physics and mathematics. So there are these topological states of matter, which I've also worked on. And some of my co-prisoners, in fact, worked on even more, where there's a close connection between new developments in topology and mathematics and how you classify different types of entangled states of many particles. And I'm hoping also now, initially, there was certainly a one-way street from string theory of methods affecting condensed matter. But what's happened in the last five years or so, I would say, is that ideas from condensed matter are now influencing how string theorists also think about problems of quantum entanglement, near black holes, and so on. So it's gone both ways. And that's, of course, been very exciting. I mean, it's always great when you're in a given field, you have a certain mindset and a certain way of thinking. And it's very useful when somebody else says something that may seem very obvious to them, but to you then has very non-trivial implications. So if I take an ordinary metal like copper or silver or gold, it has many electrons that are delocalized throughout the entire metal. And that's why they can conduct electricity and heat. And that's why they're so reflective. Now, these electrons, as they're moving around, also repel each other. So they really feel by the Coulomb interaction. And really to do a full theory, you have to account for this repulsion between the particles. But it turns out, in some way, you can account for it very simply in most metals. You simply just assume that what happens is that each electron has a little cloud around it, what we call a screening cloud, which accounts for the local adjustments of the other electrons around it. And this composite object, which we call a quasi-particle, then moves as if it's just an independent free particle. So just by putting the cloud, you take into account all of the multi-particle effects. So that's a very basic tool that's been like step one in almost any paper in condensed metaphysics for 50 years. And it's been incredibly successful. So this is why there was a kind of a crisis when the strange metals were discovered, where these tools didn't seem to work at all. There were a lot of very bizarre things being seen in experiments. So in a strange metal, really, you can't make this decomposition. You really have to treat the Coulomb entanglement and the interaction between the electrons completely, even when you're describing phenomenal microscopic scales. And I don't think we still have a complete theory for it, because it's a very difficult problem. But in a variety of simpler cases, for example, when you have a high degree of symmetry, then you can use methods of string theory. There's another model that I'll talk about in my lecture today, which is called the SYK model, which I happen to be the S, which was something I proposed with my first graduate student, Jean-Louis Yeh in 1993. And that also allows us to talk about complex entanglement but in a different situation. The real world is somewhere in between. And so just by trying different tools, we're trying to approach real experiments. Over the years, I've developed a close relationship with several groups around the world, and I'm constantly in touch with them. If they observe some strange new effect in their lab, sometimes they call me, or I hear about it at a conference, and we have lots of fun discussions. So really, even things my students are working on these days are very much related to things I heard about from my experimentalist friends like a year ago or so. So there's a constant back and forth. Even on the strange metal problem, there was a beautiful new paper by Louis Tyfair from Sherbrooke in Canada. And so that gave us a somewhat different perspective on this old problem, the latest observations. And we've been working with our theories to see if we can understand what you're seeing. I wouldn't say I helped design. That requires a lot of skill that I don't have. I mean, the experimenters sometimes tell me what they observe, and then I throw out some ideas and say it wouldn't be cool if you could also look at something else. And usually they just ignore me. But occasionally, something sticks in their mind, maybe. And then they design the experiment. I knew almost nothing about black holes when I started first looking into the tools of string theory. But yeah, I mean, there was already a lot of progress in that direction by string theorists and something called the ADS-CFT correspondents where they had related entanglement in certain field theories to entanglement across a black hole horizon. And that was a model that turns out you can apply to even to other entangled states of matter, not just those that are related to string theory, and particularly S-Y-K model. I mean, another amazing thing that happens that was first discovered in string theory with the idea of an emergent direction of space. And that's really crucial, in fact, to understanding black holes.  This was one of Hawking's great discoveries. And then string theorists realized that you can understand this remarkable feature by starting with a theory that, in effect, lives in the surface of the black hole. But if the entanglement is complex enough, it ends up looking like a theory of gravity with one extra dimension. So this, I guess, more disain us than the person who is most commonly associated with this insight. But there were others also. And then, so that particular insight served as a model for it. Then we started studying the S-Y-K model. And I realized that there were a lot of similarities to what was happening in string theory. So that led to the idea that maybe even the S-Y-K model could have an emergent direction. And that's something more recently, especially the K in the S-Y-K. Kutayev has played a crucial role in understanding how that actually happens. So there's a lot of back and forth, a lot of guesswork, a lot of wrong guesses. But ultimately, with the benefit of interacting with many people and over many years, something emerges that hopefully is correct. Well, some of the problems I'm working on are still kind of open. Like I said earlier, we have what you would call toy models of strange metals, where you've got the string theory models or the S-Y-K models. They're still not really a fully satisfactory description of the experiments. I mean, what we'd like to do, ultimately, is to quantitatively predict lots of observables. So I see myself chipping away at that problem, making things more realistic for quite a while. It's not easy, but I think every few years, I think, it's hopeless, but suddenly some progress gets made. So let's hope that happens in the future, too. And what's, I think, kept me going and really excited about the field is there always is the experimental discoveries. There's no shortage of experimental discoveries in the high-temperature superconductors of the strange metals. Just last year, there's this very exciting discovery of a twisted graphene. I don't know if you've heard about that. Twisted bilayer graphene, which, to everybody's amazement, was a superconductor. And now it's also a strange metal. So there's a whole new area where strange metals have appeared. And that opens up a whole set of new problems. So I think all of that is enough food for thought for at least a decade, if not more. Yeah.


I missed the talk of my predecessor, the title of which was discouraging everything you want to know about inflation. So I said, well, either he grossly underestimates the intellectual curiosity of this forum, or he overestimates the speed at which he can compress knowledge within 30 minutes. So my talk now is based on the hypothesis that he did not manage to talk too fast within 30 minutes. And we'll talk about the culture of inflation. It's a subject of great interest that has the importance of which has been realized as from the 19th century. So if we read important 19th century economic monetary theorists such as William Goode or Charles Holt, so they always come in and says, yes, these inflationary practices have even important cultural impact on society's consequences that do not concern the prices and the organization of markets and so on, but reverberate more generally on the behavior of the population. But then they didn't elaborate really very much. And astonishingly, in the 20th century, few economists have tackled the subject. Many have said, yes, it's an important subject, but we won't even start going into this. So I wrote a little chapter in my book, The Ethics of Money Production, which was first published in German in 2007 and then the English manuscript in 2008, and added another chapter with some new stuff on the ethics on the cultural consequences of inflation in my German language book, Krise der Inflationskultur, which hopefully will appear maybe next year in an English translation. The translation is already there, but I was too lazy or did not have time to turn it into the final manuscript. So we have the culture of deflation. Maybe it's useful to start with a few definitions. You will forgive me. I'm a professor, so it's a professional bias, so I'd like to say a few words about what would mean by culture and what I mean by inflation. So culture I would define quite generally as the totality of the way we do things, the way we think, the way we talk, the way we behave, the way we go about different things that are essential for human life, the way we dress, different ways to dress, different ways to eat, different things you can eat, what we consider to be problematic, how we go about solving problems and so on, the different ways of doing this and the totality of which reflects culture. I cannot say that the way Europeans dress or traditionally address is in some respect superior to the traditional Turkish way of dressing or Arab way of dressing, but it's just a different way of doing it. So in economic analysis, what can we say about culture? Of course we can, could develop a theory of the production of culture, nobody has done this so far to my knowledge from an economic point of view, but what I'm mostly interested in are the cultural differences that result from government interventions and these can be explained in a comparative way. So we can compare the changes in behavior, the changes in attitude that result from interventionism as compared to behavior attitudes and so on that would exist without those interventions. So you have some dispositions that exist anyway, so people are more or less, more or less strong time preference for example, in government interventionism, interventions not in all forms but in most forms tend to increase the preference for the present, so they increase time preference. Inflation, a second term. Inflation in mainstream economics is defined as a permanent or as permanent increase in the price level, in Austrian circles this definition is not considered to be particularly useful in the US, as a definition it's impeccable, you can define the word in this way, it's perfectly meaningful, but Austrians prefer as a rule another definition at the heart of which is the notion that there can be such thing as a politically induced increase of the money supply, governments can intervene to increase the money supply to a level that is higher than the level it would have reached otherwise. So this is the starting point of theory of monetary interventions, why do government do this? Well as a rule because they themselves profit from this, these are the famous canteenon effects and they justify these interventions in terms of various theories that we deal with at the universities in which they explain why such intervention are beneficial from an overall point of view. Now we will leave this out this afternoon in my talk at any rate, so I'm not concerned about the reasons why interventions might or not be beneficial from an overall point of view. So my point is simply that if we want to talk meaningfully about inflation the most suitable to go about this is to understand this as a consequence of monetary interventions. So what I'm really talking about this afternoon is the culture of monetary interventions, what kind of cultural difference or cultural impact do monetary interventions have. Now there are actually a great number of different consequences and I'm not quite sure what the most suitable way to classify those would be. In my books I just listed them, so it was more of a bullet point, different sections within the chapter 7, 8 major points and today I would like to maybe propose three major types of consequences, I wouldn't say this is a definite classification but one that could be retained anyway, one concerns the consequences that result from the fact that inflation always benefits a special class of beneficiaries. The second group concerns the culture of debt that results under certain circumstances from monetary interventions and the third group concerns the moral or ethical standards that prevail in society. So let's start with the first one, inflation always creates, monetary interventions always create a special class of beneficiaries. Now that invariably is so because if you increase the money supply then some people use these new money units first and therefore obtain a higher purchasing power which necessarily goes at the expense of other people whose purchasing power is thereby diminished. I can buy more, I can bid higher prices for apartments and for nice suits and for vacations in five-star hotels in Turkey and so on and to the extent that I obtain the house, I can buy the, or rent the apartment, I can buy the suit, I can rent the room in the five-star hotel, other people of biological necessity are deprived of the same service. So it's a redistribution game. Now the important point of monetary interventions is that as a rule and I would say this is more than a rule, it's almost a praxeological necessity, the group of beneficiaries is known in advance and fairly stable across time. It would be imaginable that we set up a monetary system, we increase the money supply and each year there's a different group of beneficiaries. So this year it's the bank, next year it's the shoe industry, the year after it's the members of the Property and Freedom Society and so on and so on. So it would be imaginable, but of course you start laughing and for a good reason. It's difficult to imagine that so much efforts be undertaken in terms of justification of the system setting up the system as a whole organization and so on, only so that the benefits then spread out randomly across the site. So the people who make this investment and who justify and hide the hidden costs and so on, of course they want themselves to reap the benefits. So it's not surprising really that the beneficiaries, there's a hardcore of beneficiaries that doesn't really change much across time. Now who are these beneficiaries? Here we, if we look at the history of monetary institutions because the beneficiaries depend on the institutions that you set into place to execute the monetary interventions, we can distinguish roughly before and after, so two periods before and after the 19th century. Before the 19th century, very largely monetary interventions concerned intervention into a precious metal coin system. And so the money of the different countries was precious metals, typically silver coins, to a smaller extent also gold coins and the government intervened in the monetary system, typically by debasing the coinage. That is, it mixed the coins with base alloys of a lower value so as to pocket the difference. One member of this meeting was so kind to give me actually three coins or four coins from Costa Rica. Who is this gentleman? Yes, thank you very much. Could you tell me your name again? Sebastian. Sebastian, what's the family name? Hortis. Hortis. Hortis, okay. So that's what my students were left to learn, Sebastian Hortis, benefactor of economic students in Anjie. So he gave me the coins of recent times with the nice silver coins from the mid-1970s, was a pretty full-bodied silver coin, and then debasement, so the coin becomes smaller, firstly has a higher denomination, and then the same coin becomes smaller. So it's the typical debasement process, even still alive in those countries that have some precious metal coinage. So this was by and large the way things were handled until the end of the 18th century, and so the main beneficiaries were invariably those who were running the mint, which was typically in the hands of the government. The king, the prince, and democratically organized societies was of the government that ran the mints. Now as from the 19th century, an institution that started to become noticeable in the 17th century, namely banking, especially fractional reserve banking, so banks that produce money, tickets, money, representatives based on the precious metal coinage became important and came to dominate the production of money now in the wider sense, including money substitutes in all Western countries. I could show you, I didn't bring my charts and so on because that would have taken longer than to analyze the different movements, but it's very clear if you look at the change of the composition of the money supply in Britain, in the United States, in Germany and so on. In the 19th century, at the beginning of the 19th century, it was pretty much based on precious metal coins, only England is an exception, and then from there it goes precious metal become less and it's important, and bank created money, so deposits, checking deposits and bank notes become more and more important. As you know, and as it has been said by my distinguished predecessor, all of this was represented by a great pedagogical or shall we say propagandistic default on the side of the governments as a great progress. We have these new types of money, so necessarily it must be good, it must be great innovation that benefits mankind. Anyway, my main point is the following. In this process, the creation of money no longer lay in the hands of the government, now we have a distinct group from the government, a private group, that suddenly, just like the government itself, received an artificial source of revenue, a source of revenue that did not spring from typical market activity, productive activity.  So here we have a type of revenue that is created out of thin air, the ex-neuro creation of money and provides revenue just to a group of people without corresponding services just as the government by taxing the population or by using the debasement process before earned additional revenue that was not based on any services or any production. So this is noteworthy and it's certainly a reason for the sudden popularity of fractional reserve banks in the 19th century because it became popular because everybody could become a banker. In fact, we see during the 19th century various crowds of the creation of commercial banks that were created in the hundreds and in the thousands. In the early 19th century in the U.S. and also in Britain and then later on, same thing in Germany, France and so on. Not in all periods, but for example in France it was during the Second Empire, 1850 to 1871, that the banking business was liberalized and pretty much everybody who wanted could set up a bank and so people were enthusiastic. Yes, riches for everybody, the banking profession was a state-sponsored profession just like lawyers and medical doctors and also were under the protection of the government and was by the much-decried trinity from a Marxist point of view of the new bourgeoisie that had served the position of power of the former nobility. So we have a popular activity with incomes out of nothing, special class of beneficiaries. And because of this special class of income, it's not surprising that we have the slow emergence, not from one day to another, but the slow emergence of some sort of a shadow government. And as a further consequence, then the removal of ultimate decision-making in politics from the political scene, from the visible political scene. Because then as a consequence of this new source of revenue that came into existence, which was in competition with tax revenue, it became more or more important for kings, princes, parliaments and so on to have access to this funding and that was not discussed in the public forum. So we have a distinguishing feature of our own day. Sometimes we have the impression, well, every four years and every five years we can elect a new government, but nothing really changes. And the program that the announces is not put into practice and so on. All of this is a reflection of this process, certainly not only caused by this process, but also caused by this process. I come to the second group of consequences, the culture of debt. The age of fractional reserve banking that began in the 19th century, went in hand with an increased fragility of the banking sector. Before the 19th century, banks were fewer in number and they tended to be well financed, that is, they had relatively few debt and important treasuries, important liquid means. Then starting in the 19th century as fractional reserve banking grew large, the banks reduced their equity, that is, they went into more debt and they kept less cash on hand to satisfy redemption demands. So they became more fragile, more vulnerable to shocks coming from their customers and at the same time they also became more interdependent. And if one bank goes bankrupt, it is typically in commercial relations with other banks, either directly because they receive credit from other banks or indirectly through common customers. So a bank that goes bankrupt entails the bankruptcy of other banks, especially if they are not well endowed with equity and so on. So with this fragility and this interdependence, we have the new phenomenon of banking crisis, which in fact is a phenomenon of the 19th, which starts in the 19th century. Before the 19th century, we didn't have any systematic banking crisis. We had occasional banking crisis. So you mean you were unheard of events, right? There was a famous banking crisis in France in the 1710s. There was a monetary crisis in the US, right? The inflationary continentals and the revolutionary circumstances, so exceptional circumstances. As from the 19th century, so starting after the Napoleonic Wars, banking crisis became a regular feature of Western economic development. And it is a fruit of the factional reserve banking system. Now crisis invariably entailed different sort of responses. And there are four major categories of responses that we always got. One was process of centralization. So banks either merged to be able to better withstand the crisis situation, or they were helped out by centralized institutions like central banks. There was greater dependence between them and vis-a-vis a central organization. And they were regulated to an ever greater extent. And because the government in helping banks out felt obliged, morally obliged to what the population to justify this help. And so at the same time they introduced greater banking regulation. So we have a cultural feature of the financial industry, which was always very strongly regulated, increasingly regulated so in the 19th century. Now before World War II, this movement was limited to the financial sector. As we have this movement of ever greater regulation, ever greater socialization, if you wish, going in and with ever greater dependence vis-a-vis a central institution, and going in and with ever greater fragility, but limited to one sector of the economy. So the real sector was not really concerned. Households were not really concerned. Governments were concerned to a stronger extent, but rather limited. Now what happened after World War II was that this type of behavior that we find in fractional reserve banking and the type of consequences were generalized to the rest of the population. Why is this? It was a consequence of the fact that money production, so monetary interventions were pushed to such a quantitative level that a permanent increase of the price that all resulted. Before World War II, roughly speaking, in the 150 years or so before this, the price level in virtually all Western countries had a shrinking tendency. It was a price deflationary movement. Now if the price level shrinks, this provides a very strong stumbling block against debt. If you take our debt today and you know you have to pay the same sum, what about $1,000 or $100,000 tomorrow or next week or next year, and you can expect that the price level will be lower than today, so you have to pay back in the money that is more purchasing power than the money that you lend out today. So under such circumstances, there is no strong incentive for you to go into debt. Quite to the contrary, you have a very strong material incentive to avoid debt as far as possible. It does not mean that companies might not go into debt because even though they have to pay back money at a higher purchasing power, they might earn things to the credit much more money than before. But for a household, it's typically not the case. For a government, it's typically not the case. So what happened after World War II is that money production was pushed to such a level that the permanent increase of the price level resulted in virtually all countries. And as such circumstances, it is worthwhile for people to go into debt. You take out a credit today, if you can expect that the price level always increases in the future, you can expect your own revenue to increase, even if you do not become smarter in the course of time. Of course, we all do become smarter in the course of time. But I think even if you don't, and you stay just as dumb as you are today, thanks to the general increase of the price level, it might be a repercussion on your own revenue, which is likely to increase. Therefore, you will be in a better position to reimburse any credit that you've taken out in the past. So this kind of behavior, or this kind of incentive, exists for all sectors. It exists for governments. And governments can anticipate that their future tax revenue will be higher than today. So they can take out more credits in the belief that their tax revenue will be higher tomorrow so they can pay all this credit back. Plus, they know, of course, that also the central bank is behind them. Households have the same incentives. We can expect our revenue to increase. Therefore, we have a strong incentive to go into debt. Therefore, younger households, as soon as there's any permanent income in the family, take out a credit, buy a house, buy an apartment, and then pay back the debt ever less paying because their revenue increases. And firms do the same thing for the same reasons. So we get the phenomenon of the financialization of the economy. The non-financial agents behave increasingly just like banks. What does a household do that takes out a credit in order to buy a house? In financial language, that would be called a leverage. The household leverages its own current spending thanks to credit. It's a financial behavior. Firms do the same thing. Firms, especially in America, a little less so than in Europe, they did another thing, especially in the past 30 years. They invested an ever greater share of their capital in financial assets. So if you look at the balance sheets of US non-financial companies, you will see that in the case of corporations, about 40% of the capital today is invested in financial assets and not in equipment, machinery, and so on, right, vehicles. It's an amazing fact. So this is called financialization. Financialization is a consequence of monetary interventionism. Marxists call us who are not interested, contrary to Marx and the monetary system, have difficulties understanding this. It just falls from the sky. It's a new mode. It's a new mutation of the capitalist system that somehow drops out of nothing. It's just there because there's always some progress, productive forces that you don't know about. But it is a direct consequence of monetary interventionism. Then we get, in such a world in which debt grows and spreads wide, in such a world in which it ever becomes more fragile and more interdependent in all sectors of the economy, you get various types of anti-fragility behavior. For example, one very non-financial anti-fragility behavior is the great increase of the exchanges on the so-called derivative markets. I won't go into the detail, but it's very clear, right, the growth of derivative markets, which is what works like some sort of insurance against price changes of shares and of bonds and so on, is directly related to this ever-greater debt. Then a phenomenon that is better known to all of us is the phenomenon of urbanization. Why do people increasingly go to big cities? Why do they prefer to live in cities rather than on the countryside, live and produce in cities? Again, sociologists, Marxists, and so on, if difficulties grappling with this phenomenon, of course, there is not just one cause. But clearly, monetary interventionism is a very important cause because it creates greater fragility. And so people must behave in such a way that they reduce the risk for their own household, but also especially for their firm. So they flock to urban centers because for a firm, you have a greater pool of suitable suppliers in the urban center. You have a greater pool of potential customers. And therefore, you reduce the risks related to your current operations. Same thing for a household, you cannot withstand any significant period of time, months, years without income because you need to serve huge debts that you've taken ours to pay your nice house or your nice apartment. So you need to stay close to fairly reliable labor markets. If you live in a little village outside of the country, there are few employers. You're dependent on just one or two of them. And if they go bust or they go out of business diminishes, well, your ability to serve your debt might be impaired. So therefore, you have a very strong incentive to remain close to urban centers. We have access also to medical infrastructure and so on and so on. Everything that helps you keep going. Then one rather surprising consequence that I've discussed in my German language book is that as a consequence of monetary intervention in a debt economy, architecture tends to become more ugly. So this is the economics of ugliness. Why is this? Well, if you have no debt, then you build a house, you set up a house. Then of course you, because it's a long-term investment that will benefit yourself now, but also future generations of your family, you try to build the house up to the best standards, up to your own taste, which because you have money is likely to be more developed than the taste of previous generations of your family that were just peasants and had to live from day to day so couldn't educate themselves and so on. So you have refined taste and you have nice architecture, original architecture, idiosyncratic architecture, but something nice. Now, if you are heavily indebted, then of course it becomes very important for you that your assets, among which is real estate, be as liquid as possible. So it becomes important that you be able to sell your house, your partner as quickly as possible in case there is a financial emergency. Now that means, of course, that if you buy the house or if you build the house, it's no longer your own taste that is primordial, but it's the taste of what you expect to be the average buyer on the market. And so the whole orientation changes is no longer the refined taste of people who have education and so on, but it's what's supposed to be the average taste of everybody who's likely to buy this. So things become more standardized, more marginalized, and less appealing, shall we say, oddly. And of course, to top it all off, the worst, of course, as soon as the government gets involved with public housing projects and so on, then I won't go into this. A last consequence of this that I mentioned is the increasing feminization of the workforce. Now again, there are different aspects here, but an arm is a little bit more speculative because as an economist I'm, of course, not particularly qualified to express myself on, as we shall say today, gender differences, right, sex differences. But I'm just talking from my own observation and what I read here and there. So my own observation, OK, there are differences between the sexes, unfortunately so. And one big difference in which is well discussed in the literature is risk aversion or risk-friendliness. So males are typically much more risk-friendly. Females tend to be much more risk averse, and this for very good reasons, which is also then of one reason why males and females tend to fit good together. It might give good couples. Now, so the point is, if you have an economy that is increasingly prone to debt, in which therefore risk increase, part of your anti-risk behavior is to put risk averse people into leadership positions, among which tend to be more women than males. So again, there's not one, not the only cause, but it's one of the causes that brings about this phenomenon. Finally, Hans, you told me I have five extra minutes. A few words on morals. Now, clearly, in an environment in which money prices constantly increase, there are less incentives to save. Of course, there are no more incentives to save in cash, which has been the traditional, the preferred, way of saving of low income, low wealth groups. So all of these are, of course, disadvantage in such an environment, but nobody cares for them except on Sundays when we come out of churches. So they say something nice about the poor, the working poor. So their form of saving is no longer work. So what can they do? So you can either buy real estate, you can buy financial titles, or you spend more on current consumption, or a combination of all those. But in any case, we have a greater tendency now for current consumption. So the aggregate level of savings diminishes to the benefit of current consumption. The savings culture is undermined. Responsibility, accountability are undermined, because precisely you have a central bank that backs up all major institutions and that the voting citizens expect to prevent any major recession from happening. So personal responsibility, foresightedness, circumspection in one's decision making is undermined because we all hope that somehow we'll be bailed out. Independence is undermined. As a matter of fact, we become more interdependent. Because we become more interdependent, we also have a very perverse incentive to look with an envious or concerned eye on the activities of our neighbors. If a major market participant goes bankrupt, well, this might have repercussions on everybody because the whole pyramid, the whole house of cards of debt might collapse, it might affect myself. So I have a personal material incentive in asking the government to regulate the other guys so that they don't do any inconsiderate move. So we get this very perverse incentive that Thorsten Polites called collective corruption. That's correct. And finally, as far as morals are concerned, it's important to notice that in an interventionist system, we get a very strong presence of what economists call rationality traps. That is, people behave in a behavior that they themselves would admit is unsuitable from an aggregate point of view. But they do it nevertheless because it suits their own at least short-term interests. An example is the flooding of people into the financial sector, right? So people looking for employment in the financial sector. From an aggregate point of view, it's clear that this is not beneficial. More people are shuffling around money because by and large that's what you do in the financial sector. Rather than providing services that you could buy with money, right? So rather than becoming a baker, a shoemaker, somebody who knows something about road construction, engineering, and so on, right? So less people have an incentive to do this and more people have an incentive to go into the financial area. Even though they know that from an aggregate point of view, it's not conducive to grace or well-being, but for them personally, right? They can place themselves in this way among the winners of the redistribution process that goes on thanks to monetary interventionists. So it's a typical case of a rationality trap. These are very wide, very numerous in interventionist economy. Now rationality traps, as you can imagine, are of course debilitating. So they are discouraging for the moral orientation of individuals, right? You say, well, on the one hand, I should be doing this, but I'm really drawn to this other activity. Why doesn't it pay to behave in a moral way? So I've got to become a swine, right? And so in order to earn my living, whereas I should be doing something nice and so on, right? So we have this debilitating effect and which, of course, is devastating from a moral point of view. If it knows morals in the traditional perspective, it's precisely what helps us to be successful in life. And good morals should pay the bills not immediately, but in the long run. Good morals help us to lead a successful life, finally, and ultimately to get us in heaven if it's really perfectly done, right? But in an interventionist system, there's a permanent conflict between what should be done from an overall point of view and what is in your short-term interest to do, right? And that, of course, and that's the last consequence is, of course, it can lead to, well, inner conflicts and depressions. And so these, again, have many causes. One, one are the rationality traps that constantly create inner conflicts within individuals. So to make it short, then the culture of inflation is characterized by greater ugliness and greater depressions and various other nasty economic consequences more than enough to get rid of them. But I cannot give you the full picture. All you need to know and all you want to know about the culture of inflation within almost 40 minutes. So I need to follow up next year or somewhere like this. Thank you very much for your attention.


Welcome, artistic friends to Monet Café.  However, I want to show you how pleasantly surprised I was when I tried this fixative by Sennelier for the first time, and I was so pleased with the results I wanted to share it. Now, I'm going to be bringing a full video comparing multiple fixatives very soon, but I wanted to just show you guys this video. If the full video is on my Patreon page, and if you want to see the full lesson where I give commentary and everything, check that out on my Patreon page. Before starting this painting, I did something I've been wanting to do for a while. I've reorganized my studio, so I thought I'd give you a little quick studio tour before I tell you about the products for this painting and share my experience with the Sennelier fixative. Many of you have probably seen this setup from some of my videos. I love open shelving. It's a place where I can easily grab pastels, papers, acrylic inks, a great place for books, and I have a small studio. It's in my home, so I find a lot of people love to see how I arrange things. I love these little drawers. They're not the sturdiest, but I love the fact that I can just pull them out and set them on my desk or wherever I'm working. It's very convenient. Also, consider repurposing an old piece of furniture. This was a piece of furniture that my husband and I, my mother-in-law passed away, and we didn't keep many of her things. Goodness knows we don't need many things in our small house, but this was a great way to store some pastel sets. Also, I moved my French easel. It used to be in the corner. It would shake all the time when making videos, so I thought, why don't I fold the legs in? Yes, you can turn a French easel into a tabletop easel. What I did is I sat it on top of my adjustable desk. Yes, you can even still use the drawer. On this adjustable desk, I can literally just press a button and raise or lower the desk. Therefore, I can sit or stand to paint so easily. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. It really freed up some room in my studio, and now my easel is not going to shake like it used to. Alright, let's head over to my setup to get started with this painting. For today's tutorial, still focusing on our theme of painting green, I'm going to be using unsanded pastel paper made by Kansen. I like these pads. They have, this one is the earth tones, and I'll be using the sheet you saw that was kind of a brown color is the one that I'll be using for this painting, but it has just a variety of earthy type of colors. I also like using the one that is called gray tones, and it, like the name says, it just has a variety of different real neutral colors. The reference image is from unsplash.com. I will have a link in the description of this video, and now it's time to get started. The pastels that I'll be using is a set of pastels I really like. I like keeping them in their set. They are Giro pastels. They're made in France, and this set is called poetic landscape by artist Elizabeth Mallory, one of my favorite artists. She passed away a couple years ago. This set was not cheap. I think it was around $500. Of course, it has this nice wooden box, but I'll have links to all the products I used in this lesson in the description of this video. And like I said, this painting demonstration is a speed video. As I mentioned, my full tutorial with commentary is over on my Patreon page, but I always like to keep free content coming to Monet Cafe and lots of information to help budding pastel artists. So I just want to mention, too, though, if you want to see this slowed down, you can always click the gear icon at the bottom of my YouTube videos. It's on the right side, and you can choose your playback speed. So I would always recommend turn the volume down, though, because you'll hear my voice very weird and slow sounding. So put on some music while you work. So not only was I creating a painting for my patrons on my Patreon page with this painting demonstration, I was also trying to create a painting where I could test this fixative. I had tried it only one time to fix a little problem I had where a bit of the surface of one of my paintings, the surface came up, and I needed a bit more texture, but I had not really tried it, and people have been raving about it. It's made by Sennelier, and it's called La Tour. And one of the challenges of fixative that everybody talks about, or people want to know, do you spray your final painting with fixative to protect it? One of the challenges is it always darkens the final painting. It, like it changes the consistency of it, too. So I never recommend that. However, I was so pleasantly surprised by this fixative, so I'm going to show you right now. Here it is. It's Sennelier La Tour fixative. Because I'm working on an unsanded surface, you're limited in how many layers you can get. I thought I'd use it like I've used other fixatives and spray the bottom of it to be able to layer a bit more. So I took it outside. I didn't want to breathe it. Can you see any difference? I sprayed the bottom of that pretty heavily, and I really didn't notice a difference. And lo and behold, yes, I was able to add more layers. So the first test was, is it really going to darken things? And a lot of times when I have used fixative in the past, it's always during the working stages, like I'm doing here, of a painting. And I expect it to darken it a little bit, and I know I'm going to cover it up and add a few more lighter pastels. But in this case, it didn't seem to darken it at all. I also noticed it didn't curl my paper like some fixatives will do. So here you can see I am able to get a little bit more layering.  And so I was really pleased with that initial test of this fixative. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I am going to do a full video. It should be coming soon where I do a fixative showdown. I'm calling it where I have four fixatives that I compare and contrast and give the results. And I take a final painting of mine. I took one that wasn't my favorite painting, just in case it didn't work. And I spray it at the final painting. I spray it with this Latour Fixative. And I'm not going to leave you a cliffhanger. I'm not going to tell you how it ended up, but I think you're going to want to watch that video. So that one will be coming soon. I also wanted to share thank you to all of you brand new pastel artists. Often you come from sometimes no experience at all. And sometimes you have experience in other mediums. And you're so curious about soft pastels. And I just love catering to the beginner pastel artist. By the way, because I'm working on unsanded paper here, sometimes it can be a little challenging to work on because you don't get many layers with it. You've got to know what you're doing a little bit. But the great thing about these unsanded surfaces, this Canson-Mittance, it's called, it's a French word. I used to totally butcher that word with my Southern accent. But it's pretty affordable. So that is a great thing. And I think you'll see here by the final painting. I kind of considered this a study. I just wanted to relax and paint and explore. But I think you'll see it really can produce some some nice results. So I like working on Canson paper. I didn't used to when I first started. I thought I can't paint. What am I doing? So don't worry if you doubt yourself starting out as a pastel artist. Oh my goodness, I just I almost quit. I really did. So that's that's how Monet Cafe was born was me just sharing all of my discoveries. It was very hard for me to learn what I learned as a pastel artist because I don't even think there was YouTube back then. I found a few art forums where I was just hungry to learn about soft pastels. I discovered a few artists that I still love and follow today that were generous with their information. But I started making videos just sharing what I was learning. And I think hopefully I'm encouraging to people because I have no formal art education, other than the fact I majored in graphic design. I love art. I do think, you know, because of graphic design, you learn some artistic principles, an eye for composition and color and all kinds of things like that. But if I can do it, you can do it. That's my point with that. So anyway, you can see this painting developing look how many layers I was able to get on top of the the spray that I did of the Latour Fixative, making some fun little gestural marks. And by the way, like I mentioned, this Canson Métant's paper is fairly affordable. Some pastels, especially the good ones, are rather expensive. As a matter of fact, the ones that perform the best are usually more expensive. I don't recommend if you're beginning pastel artists to go out to an art supply store. Occasionally, they'll have a good brand. But often they have these little artist brands or these art crafty store type of brands. And they're what happens is the cheaper pastels, pastels are made almost of pure pigment, the good ones. I mean, it's the pure color with just very little binder binders what holds them together. So that's why the softest pastels are the most brilliant. They don't have a lot of binder. That's why they're so soft. And the cheaper brands, they have more binder to pigment. So that's why they're not so brilliant. They don't have as much pigment. And I people do this all the time, mistakenly call soft pastels chalk. Well, no, they're not chalk because they're almost pure color chalk is almost pure, not color. That's why they're so pale and non vibrant. So there's a little information about that. But the reason I'm bringing that up is I have on my Amazon shop, I have a link to my Amazon shop in every video. I have idea lists where you can pick these categories, these lists, where I have some of the pastels I recommend. There are some sets that are pretty affordable. One set if you start to get a little more serious about soft pastel painting, I think one of the best buys for some quality pastels is a set by Sennelier the same company that makes the fixative I just mentioned. And it's a 120 half stick set I always recommend half sticks whenever manufacturer makes them because you can get more color for your money. And the set is called the Paris collection. And it's on Amazon, typically for less than $150. The lowest I ever saw it was $113. I mean, that's less than $1 a half stick. And that's a really good buy and Sennelier's are some of my favorite pastels. I really love them. These your row pastels, like I said there, the set that I showed you at the beginning is kind of expensive. It's about almost a $500 set. I will share the link Dakota pastels sells this whole set the Elizabeth Maori set it's called poetic landscape. I loved her she was one of my favorite artists. She passed away a couple of years ago. But this set is pretty pricey the one I got was pricey because the wooden box, but there are smaller sets of Giro pastels. Giro pastels are nice because you know the story of Goldilocks, you know, one bed was too hard, one was too soft, and one was just right. Well, that's how I think of Giro pastels. They're kind of right in the middle. They're just right. So another pastel that's kind of like that are Mount Vision pastels. So you can learn a lot on my Amazon shop and check out some of the pastels and the papers I recommend. I have product review videos. So my goal is to have a wealth of information for artists who are wanting to try soft pastels. I tell you what, beware though, you're probably going to fall in love with them. You're probably going to start an addiction. So I apologize in advance for that. And here is the final painting. I'm just going to pull it in a little closer. Notice it's not overworked. I didn't try to fill in every space. I like it when the under painting shows through. I kind of like that nice warm brown color beneath. And also to keep in mind that I will have that additional video coming very soon where I'm comparing four different fixatives. I think you're going to love that video and be so pleasantly surprised with the results. And I really enjoyed this. Would you do me a favor? If you liked this video, it really helps it to be seen by more people. If you click that thumbs up button, if you haven't subscribed to this channel, please do that. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought. YouTube shares this video more when you do those things. And become a patron if you'd like to support this channel to keep more free videos coming to Monet Cafe and to get all the extra content I'm always talking about. And now I would like to leave you with this hopeful message from Galatians 522. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. Don't we need that in our world today? All right, everyone. God bless and happy painting.


We have had before election series of community dialogue and engagement to try to see how do we prevent violence if there are issues that are more prone to bring human rights violation, how do we engage with different local stakeholders to ensure that they don't happen. One of the things that the commission has been very deliberate to do during this election monitoring cycle is very targeted and deliberate partnerships with key stakeholders that we deem are very critical in terms of accountability of human rights violations. So through these partnerships, both with state and non-state actors, we are able to quickly share information. We are able to refer the cases that come to our attention either through our monitors or through members of the public and we are able to get redress and action from the various duty bearers. We have been trying to build more women leadership to get into policy making table to make a difference. For the first time in Kenya in 2022, at least we have so many women coming in this political space to show interest and vying for different political seats. Overtime during post election violence, different cases of violence are reported but there is no particular attention that is paid to LGBTQ people. It has been amazing to see how people are showing up. It has been amazing to see queer people. One of the things we have come to appreciate is that the presence of the international community curtail any plans to incite people against each other. What we have seen is that the investments made in partnerships and in preventive engagement and in dialogue over the past years and more intensively over the past months has really borne fruit. We have also been investing in establishing the linkages in the dialogue between different groups and I think it has been extremely important in particular for the justice and security sector actors to have a good dialogue with civil society and with grassroots movements to be able to build this trust and dialogue. Issues of prevention have been really at the forefront of our deployment through the early warning systems to ensure that the human rights were not violated.


There's a growing threat in our communities of big oil trying to turn California into an extreme oil superhighway. Phillip's desire is to bring in 20,800 fully loaded crude oil trains each year. That's a half billion gallons with a bee of crude crisscrossing through Slow County forever. We know that this is a project intended to carry tar sands all the way from Alberta, Canada down to SLO. So instead of just a few cars, which have always been moving, we're talking massive trains and a high concentration of risk. So we're getting down to the dirtiest, hardest, most difficult to extract sources of fossil fuels. So the entire process of extracting it is incredibly toxic and the transportation aspect of getting it here is very toxic. By bringing oil by rail, that puts the entire coastal corridor in jeopardy. The reason for that is very simply, the oil trains have found to explode, they have found to derail, they have found to spill. So for example, in West Contra Costa County, there's 27 schools of the West County Unified School District that are within the evacuation zones of explosions and fires from the rail line. They would come through downtown, they would come through neighborhoods with a 50 to 100 feet of homes in my council district in South San Jose. We have our entire city built around Union Pacific Railroad lines. Do we know how many fire stations are in the zone? So at least four that I can think of off the top of my head. There's a lack of training, there's a lack of resources that I feel would definitely hamper responding to something like that properly. No community has enough resources immediately available for any large disaster and that's true of large wildfires or plane crashes or rail car derailments. We're already at a crisis moment and so we need to keep all of those fossil fuels in the ground and especially the kind of fuels that this train is hoping to bring through. Do we want to continue to support and invest and create infrastructure and give subsidies to a 19th century dirty fuel? Or do we want to be Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, California and invest and put energy into 21st century clean energy? That is our right to do as Americans. We have that right to speak up and to really express ourselves. And at the end of the day that's the only thing that's going to stop these kinds of projects. Across California this movement is growing. It is led by people who are on the front lines of this issue and we invite you to join us for our communities, for our health, for our safety and for our climate.


All right, we got three ninety-second rounds first three ninety-second rounds first one on bricks.    He don't put a car get it.   Oh, he claimed he G Well, how I'm getting checks to bubble over breaks like an ACG now Don't make me squeeze nigga cuz I'm banging the strap. It's Michael Jackson.  I'm in the jungle. I'm steady grip. What those were s o bars I'm about to bury bricks side north though. Esca bar.  He bang it. It's a homie danger. I keep the stove top lit with the wire hangers You'll see third the green birds on each body laying smack its daughter off the party train Homie player. I ain't got time to bro.    You got a sniff the cane. I'm way too dope It's a different high you switch the vein the fees be nice No, please they sit in days because that white boy be bomb like Tim McVeigh 90 seconds is up and I'm still getting paid dad I've seen visions I heard voices From demons even offering absurd choices. I Can't believe this.    Cicero was rusty trust me. You had it made they coped you with a cyst so you could come here and pass away Skin is shaking with them punches Cash is clay if you was the best powerful power in the bag is gay if you turn them down It's just like the justice system court magic straight So I'm thinking you're Catholic a I Just pray like Pastor break what the nigga to see is killer through the masquerade Masquerade this how I used to write with slight hit the lights to masquerade Worm on the hook cast away now tell him how you beat yourself.   Oh, it's a home cooked man You get a stomach for I'm taping your slide. I ain't investing in Belvedere, but I'm raising a stock.  It was meant to take shots bars What I can't tell that this man's frail you fought use won't fly you off the shelf that fell Belvedere bars We don't buy it because bars can't sell That Angus bottomed up some squeeze in the heat see the wrong body language. I have them read it Then we you think we do see for that ice. I'm cream in his teeth I'll crack your smile on me get teeth on your sweet I got the photo it's photos I photo flashed and keep dumping the can like the photo's trash Then singing it's a solo act dig this I split bricks. This is dojo class Now he's nothing now son is foul hundred rounds gun them down. Oh, right.  I know that y'all tell now Now I need that chicken at least on a large scale. I'm duck taping bricks like the Mexican car Like I said, you ain't top 10 dummy 90 seconds and I'm still getting paid that Money One shot of believe he's cooking But check the flick of the wrist this battle only proves you can't cook a key You can't bet verse rookie me you not seeing I go stop being blind to the fact you not a look for me Boy, you need to stop You know I sell bars Boy, you need a shot My coins is gonna stop only a pyramid but bricks pointed at the top. I did a background check They told me he G From his demeanor eat pussy discharge only mean VD No, this girl do me, baby.  He can't clues. I think no breaks behind the body.  I was kicking these like shack food All the big names went the war with you and you do good, but your stock Horrible verb did you dirty then mop the floor with you ever since he was schooled while he was cooking Corbin blue Now was your excuse. It's a move for the cheddar I've been top tier for about four minutes, and I'm already doing it better It's never a discussion.    I'm a cold fan. You should have took that height because now you're locked past You know the truth hurts and you know the game's nasty, but now let's talk about sir He beat you like he's your daddy. I know that you ain't happy surf watch the way bricks worse than hurricane sandy Oh, you gonna get the devil that click the trigger Olympic sprinters when you get the metal One way some plate bullets traveling one way. It's an automatic dog. You've seen me son, right? Then it's driving ahead reach dog.  I know the blocking. I know it's hot I just bubble in the can like a soda drop. I'm so no steel arms Robocop Getting killed in this whole joint. I didn't put bricks on court.