Today, I'm going to speak with Mark Chelmers, the CEO of Energy Fuels, and I'm going to preface my questions with some remarks by myself. Mark, I don't think the public understands that there are only two rare earth producers in North America, and that is MP and Energy Fuels, and MP has a mine, Energy Fuels at this point is building a mine, as I understand it in Brazil, but is buying material on the market. Also, the other guy is processing vastnessite ore from their world-class deposit in California, and you are bringing to the United States for the first time the commercial production of separated rare earths from monazite, which in this world is the mineral of choice for producing magnet rare earths. So what I'd like to ask you is, what's your time frame? Because I know that you have generated, I'm in Detroit, you've generated a lot of interest in the automotive industry because you're looking like you're definitely going to be a supplier, and again, there are only two possibilities in the United States, and you're one of them. What do you see as the time frame for your being able to deliver something to the supply chain for rare earth permanent magnets? Yeah, Jack, that's a bit of a loaded question, but yeah, we are making rapid progress, and as you know, we are able to go into small commercial production of carbonate quite quickly with our relationship with Kimors in Florida and Georgia, and then selling that to NEO in Estonia. So now we're advancing that strategy to include a separation of that carbonate at the white mesa mill into NDPR oxides and a Sumerian plus carbonate, which contains the SEG and the heavies, and we plan to have that operable in probably the later Q1 of 24. So we will be in small commercial production, we believe with the sources of monazite securing from Kimors, and we're actively looking to build that stream up over the coming year or two with the addition of the HIA and other projects that we are currently looking at around the world. So I mean, I think that from a small commercial perspective, it'll be 2024 without question. We hope to build that up in 25, 26, 27 at large scale. I mean, large scale being in the order of 1,000 tons of NDPR and then looking at trying to expand that to somewhere north of say 3,000 tons of NDPR in due course and securing additional feed. So we are thinking large, not small. You know, I'm going to say that the US market for rare permanent magnets today without electric cars is about 12,000 tons a year, which would require 4,000 tons of NDPR. If we were to convert the American production to entire EVs, we'd need 40,000 tons of magnets, which would be about 13,000 tons of NDPR. And my point of view is that no matter how much you produce, you'll be able to sell all of it. What's your long term plan as far as entering the rare permanent magnets supply chain? How far down do you plan to go? Well, Jack, we see that you have to integrate as many steps as possible to get the economics. And so, you know, we started with making the carbonate and then we moved to the mining side with the acquisition of Bahia. And then we also decided that we had to also move to separation. We're also looking at metals and alloys as the next step after separated lights and also looking at separated oxides for the heavies in due course. So I mean, I think that in order to have an economic outcome in the rare space, you need to be as integrated as possible. You have to have access to, you know, low cost of feet, and you also have to have each of those steps have got to make as much economic contribution as they can in each step. So I think one of the problems that the Western US has seen is that a lot of people are talking about just participating in a single step and getting their margin. And that really doesn't work when you look at the China plant. The China plant is you secure the molecules and you take them all the way through to a permanent magnet and electric motor to get the economics to be compatible. You can't do each step individually and get an economic outcome, in my opinion. I agree with you 100%. And I'm going to repeat that I only see two companies on this path in North America. And that no matter what they accomplish, you are the other guy. You could never possibly supply the demand in the United States. So I think you're in the enviable position of being in a demand driven industry. And you like you're talking three and four year horizons. And that's because you're a professional mining engineer and developer. But when you when we talk to the end users, they say, well, we want this tomorrow. And then you explained that it takes a little while to develop the all of these technologies and commercially, they just don't know what to say. But I just want to make one more point. I don't know of anyone else in the in the Americas that has your particular background and your degree of success in your chosen field. So if I had to bet who's going to be America's premier supplier of of rare earths or magnets, I'd have to bet on energy fuels that that's that's my position. Do you do you disagree? Gee, you're flattering me here. So I think I think the difference is energy fuels is a company of doers. OK, right. And and you have to have an element of being a part of part promoter to be with these public companies, but but we're a company that goes out and does things and and we pride herself on that.  We're trying to be the biggest doers in whatever we do. And that goes back to my time in the uranium industry globally and also follows on with this this rare earth strategy that we've been advancing for the last three and a half years is to do things, not just talk about things. So everything we do is focused in that regard.   But that's not our intent. Our intent is to continue to show the market that we're taking logical steps with the right focus, the right expertise in the right locations globally. And at the end of the day, if our horse wins the Kentucky Derby, I'll take it. But we're going for a big success. We're trying to be world material. Is it easy? No. But somebody's got to try to do it. And we're trying to do it with our focus on monazite sands. And I want to congratulate you on picking monazite as a feed stop because monazite is the world's original rare earth ore. The only reason we went to Basisite in the United States is that we had a lot of it and we didn't have as much monazite. But the world likes monazite because there's more of the magnetic rare earths in the monazite than there are there is in the Basisite. But of course, there was a problem. Monazite is naturally radioactive and no one no one would touch it in the United States until you came along with the only licensed facility in the United States. I believe that can handle monazite because you can extract the uranium and extract and store the thorium and no one else in North America can do that. Is that right? Well, nobody that's operating right now, and nobody that's it's ready to do so. So I mean, yeah, the key to our story is that monazite contains the same amount of uranium as we typically mine on the Colorado Plateau in the vicinity of the White Mesa Mill. So, you know, we have the capability, the knowledge and the facilities to handle and recover the uranium and also recover the rare earth. You know, using solvent extraction, which we're very comfortable with because it's a solvent extraction facility. So, you know, our secret sauce is the being able to deal with the radioactivity and extract the uranium. That is what we have that others don't. When other people start to bring a feed to me, I say, how much radioactivity does it have? And they say, oh, it has none. And I say, oh, that's too bad because I want more radioactivity to recover the uranium. So so, yeah, our business strategy is completely different than really anybody else's that I know, except the Chinese, the Chinese recover the uranium and they recover the thorny. So, you know, we're replicating the China plan in the United States of America at Western standards, the highest standards out there. And and so that's why our story is a bit different. What last question? Do you think your costs will be competitive with those of China? Again, a difficult question to answer because what are the costs in China? I don't know if anybody's ever told me what the China costs really are. But having said that, we believe that we will be world competitive if we have the integration in place. Does that mean that we're not going to be subject to any type of manipulation of the market? No, because the world is subject to manipulation. But I believe when you look at the value of a ton of monazite and you look at what I know are our processing costs, if you look at all those integration steps, you've got to build together of a model that works in as low cost as possible. And so I think that when you look at those that are actually processing monazite sands outside of China, I think we've got a very, very attractive economic model that we're building upon. Thank you, Mark. That was all very enlightening. And I I hope our viewers are paying close attention to what you're saying. Thank you again. Thank you, Jack.


The Boston Marathon finally took place this Monday after being postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first non-virtual Boston Marathon since April 2019. Since its inception in 1897, the historic 26.2 mile race has never been cancelled or rescheduled. That is, until now. Many BU students celebrated by going to day parties in Alston and on the Marathon route. You know, definitely drinking, definitely starting early. You know, it's probably like, what, 9 a.m.? Definitely definitely drinking a little bit here. Traditionally, the marathon is held on Patriots Day in April. This year's decision to reschedule the day until October 11th was controversial because it coincided with Boston's first officially recognized Indigenous Peoples Day. I haven't seen any recognition of it being Indigenous Peoples Day. So I'm sure the race organizers could have incorporated more awareness, especially because this is such a large public event that it would be helpful for more people to be aware of what has happened amongst Indigenous communities over centuries. Kenyan Benson Capruto came in first for the men's race with a time of 2 hours, 9 minutes, and 51 seconds. Diana Kipyogi, also from Kenya, took home the win for the women's race and finished in 2 hours, 24 minutes, and 45 seconds. Switzerland swept the wheelchair division with Marcel Hoog and Manwala Shar respectively winning the men's and women's race. Reporting from Copley Square with BU TV News, I'm Eileen Tran.


But the Eagles, I was at the last championship where we won. I was at the parade, me and him. So, you know, but this is like, I'm rocking with the Eagles right now. What was the city like when they won that shit? It was off the hook. He was running down the street stripping his clothes off.  It was just unfucking believe.  He's like, you don't know what this mean to me.   I'm like, yo, what if he grabbed the pump?  Oh, you was turnted up like that? He was turnted up. He was bought. All he had on was a pair of Timberland boots and a wave cap.  He was tripping.


This is the last in a series of videos I'm making about Latin, and this one is a sample of actual Latin. Before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about the alphabet.  This is also our alphabet. So A-B-C-D-E-F or in Latin, A-B-K-D-A-F. Now in some Latin texts what you may notice is that some of the vowels have lines over them, and we call those lines macrons, and it distinguishes between long and short vowels. So like here we have E without the macron. Eh, eh, and that's with the macron. Eh, eh, so it's longer. In some Latin texts you'll see the letter I uses both the consonant and vowel, and in some you'll see J as the consonant instead of I. Yeah, another one is U and V, and some of them you will see U and V distinguished, and other people say that you and V are the same letter. That's why you might go to a museum and see on it carved letters M, V, S, E, V, M. Well, it's because capital U, traditionally when carved is a V, so really those are used at some museum and not a mvvvv. But now on to the Latin. The text in front of us is the opening to Julius Caesar's De, De Bello Gallico, and it's fairly famous, you know, Gaulia est omnis du visa in parte tres, so Gaul is divided into three parts. So let's go ahead and give this a look through and talk about some of the things that make Latin Latin. You may hear me try to nasalize the final M's on some of these words, and according to our best scholarship that is what Latin sounded like, so let's see if I can do this and approach something like what we think Latin sounded like 2,000 years ago. Okay, so let's go back to the top and talk about some of the features we see here. So Gaulia est omnis du visa in parte tres. You're not going to see it right here, but I'll point it out as we go on. Latin has case endings in parte tres, so in two, three parts. And what we see here is one, one. Okay, well, let's start with Gaulia est omnis du visa. Gaul is all divided in parte tres, in three, well in parts three. So all of Gaul is divided into three parts. They say Gaul, all, and notice how it's on either side of the verb est. It's literally divided by the verb Gaul, all, du visa, divided. So Gaul is divided, and that's a nice trick you can do with Latin because they have a flexible word order. So Gaulia omnis, so they say Gaul, all, or all, Gaul, whereas we say all of Gaul. Du visa in parte tres, divided into three parts. Quarrum, of which we're referring back to the parts. Unam, incolunt belgai. Unam, one, referring to parts. Incolunt, they inhabit belgai, the Belgians. So we have direct object, the verb, and then the subject, which is running completely backwards to how we do it in English, and in fact you couldn't say that. You'd say, one, inhabit the Belgians. Well, it doesn't sound very good in English, so one inhabits the Belgians and that makes no sense. Whereas in Latin it makes perfectly good sense because we have unam indicating accusative case, nt, the verb, ai, for belgai, indicating the subject. Aliam aquitani. And this is the other, the Aquitanian. So here Cesar says one in one inhabit the Belgians, and here because we're just going to say, aliam aquitani, and you're just supposed to figure that he's referring that the Aquitanians live in the second part, and he doesn't need to repeat the verb incolunt. He can just jump right over it and squeeze that down and compact it down. Tertiam qui ipsorun lingua keltae nostra gali apelantor. And here he does it again. The third, who, of their own language, and this is telling you how it's done, you can't see it, but that a should have a Macron over it, but I didn't use any Macron's keltae. So who, by their own language, kelts? By their own language, kelts what? Nostra, by ours, by our what? Well, by our language, in other words, Latin, gali apelantor. So they call themselves kelts. We, the Romans, call them gali. He omnis lingua institutis legibus interse differunt. These, the people's mentioned in the previous sentence, omnis, these all, by language, institutions, laws, among themselves differ. And this sentence has a pretty standard default word order for Latin. You've got the subject first. You've got stuff in between, in this case, ablative of means is what we call it in the Latin world. We have a prepositional phrase. And then finally, the verb. And that's pretty vanilla for Latin. It goes subject, then the other stuff, and then finally the verb. Galos ab aquitanis. The Gauls, someone's doing something to them, but we don't know what. Ab aquitanis from the Aquitanians. Garum na flumen, the Garum river from the Belgians. We still don't know what. From the Belgians, abel gismatrona et sequana, the Marne and the Seine, duetit divides. Okay. So the Garum divides the Gauls from the Aquitanians, and the Marne and the Seine from the Belgians. It divides the Gauls from the Belgians. And here's the case marking that I'm talking about. So gali here, they're the subject. Galos, there. They are the direct object. So Latin uses this case marking to indicate who's doing what in the sense. And as a result, you can really scramble the word orders. So between the telescoping and getting rid of things that you've already said. So un am incolunt belgai, ali am incolunt aquitani, so you get rid of the incolunt, so you don't repeat yourself. So between that, cutting out of repeated information and the ability to scramble words in a direct object verb subject manner, so that you can scramble the words however you like them. These two things make Latin, well, they give Latin a bad reputation for being hard, because the word order is always changing. There are all sorts of syntactical things and morphological things that you have to keep an eye on. And then just to keep you really on your toes, they don't repeat things they don't need to. They make you the reader do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. And this is kind of what Latin is like.


Three strikes and you're dead, Kano. I only need two strikes to get you. Know what? That was strike three. Fight. Cassie Cage wins.


Hello there everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Armo with the Stock Swoosh and I'm reviewing MMM. This was the Stock Swoosh Show Play of the Day today. It continued way past where I get out of it. Actually set the low of the day. It looks like around 11.30, 94.11. So I like to trade the morning. I find that it's very advantageous to get in and out fast with day trades that you don't have to worry about the overall market. And again, 80% of the move that really happens does happen in the morning. And that was true with this today actually. But if you did a couple trades in this, you could have got in and out a few times. You could have held the down. You could have done an ad. You could have done a lot of things with this today. And I'm really happy that we did it. And it all worked out. So let's go over it. So the stock closed here the night before at 108.02, open in the morning at 186. This was a gap on earnings. It's earnings season. We're in full swing. Busy season is going on today, tomorrow, this week. Very exciting time to trade. Anyways, this open dropped. We got in it, got the drop. We got out. So again, I could have made another $3 plus on this actually looking here. That is hilarious. And actually I could have done several ads. So this is a great example though of what? Institutional selling, the power of the short, the power of the gap. Okay. And again, this was a short. So lots and lots of people want to look at gaps for quote unquote gap fills for the gap to reverse. If you did that today, you got killed. If you went along this today, you lost. It doesn't matter where you went along. This tank today, absolutely tanked. In fact, the extension on the bar is around $6.  You got to understand the stock. It can move. It can move a lot. I'm familiar with it. It wasn't that spreading today though. Actually, I've seen it spreadier than it was today considering the volume was there and it was a great short. So every single day I try to look for the best gap to short. And again, if I don't find a good short that I go long, sometimes I will go long if the best gap is a bullish gap though. I will say that. But anyways, I like to get in that quick. We did the day trade in the room. I called it and it worked. If you're interested in learning how to rate gaps, if you're interested in being in my live trading room, you must take the golden gap course. One, you will learn the system, which is very important. And two, you need to do the class to have access to the live trading room. And then you'll get the calls like this. So everybody made money. This today was a good call. Email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. If you have questions about the golden gap class, the class for January, the first class of the year is actually this weekend. It's hard to believe. I cannot even believe next week is February, January 27th to 28th is the class this weekend. If you have questions, email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. Have a great night, everyone.


A breath of fresh crypto breath is a new kind of mining rig. It generates Monero based on how fast you breathe in. It uses spirometry, a medical technique for measuring lung capacity, to convert breathing into computational processing speed. User's breath doesn't power the computer, but it does determine the computer's hash rate. This defines how much Monero can be mined. One puff per second generates 1,000 hashing operations per second. Not much compared to the Monero network's total 500 million hashes per second. It has made a grand total of less than a dollar so far. But it is not about the money from Max Dovey, the artist behind the project. Turning the act of breathing into an active miner on the blockchain network encourages us to consider more sustainable and psychological methods to maintain blockchains. Japan's Virtual Currency Girls. There is now a Japanese pop idol group that exists only to promote and educate on all things Bitcoin. The Virtual Currency Girls are an eight-piece J-pop band dressed in French freely made outfits. Each member is meant to represent a different form of cryptocurrency. Tickets and merchandise for the group can only be bought using Bitcoin. Their first single, The Moon, cryptocurrency and me includes the lyrics Be careful about your password. Don't use the same one. Only 20 people were at their first Virtual Currency Girls concert in Tokyo. But like Bitcoin, it might be wise to invest early before they blow up. John McAfee loves Bitcoin long time. John McAfee has caused outrage online again, this time by paying for sex workers with cryptocurrency. So much hubbub around my admission to paying hookers with crypto. If you want more reason to hate, I will also admit to buying weed and other illegal drugs, oh and porn. At 72, McAfee shows no signs of slowing down or shutting up. The Bitcoin Dominatrix. Let's take a walk on the wild side into the world of financial domination. Where men, otherwise known as pay pigs, transfer small to large sums of money or tributes to women just to be ignored or shamed. Introducing Theodora, an elite financial dominatrix. She accepts tributes in cryptocurrency as well as dedicating a section of her website to mine for her. It can be difficult for sex workers to get access to bank accounts or mortgages, so Bitcoin is perfect for women like Theodora.  Bitcoin is the economic wild west. In the real wild west, the sex industry was booming. Theodora, modern business woman in the world's oldest profession.


What's good YouTube this your boy Chi world back at y'all again with another art video slash be art video slash dope art Yes, in today's video I will be turning a very successful youtuber that go by the name of Jenny Marbles into a grind You know I'm saying I would like to go ahead and give a shout out to all my subscribers If you haven't already subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that now I got more content on the way more hot videos on the way man Thank y'all for the love and support make sure you leave a like Comment at the bottom when this is done or in between if you got any questions I'm gonna try to get to them all without further ado Let's jump right into it man first thing I do before I get started on the artwork Let's go ahead and set my pen pressure on my pen click brush and Then go to shape dynamics Okay, come to this first drop-down menu and click pen pressure. I already got mine set Click pen pressure again right here on the second drop-down menu and then move all of these sliders to zero You should be good to go man. You should be good Then I make sure I got a smoothing Selected to then you come right out of that. Then you should you should be good If this video reach 30 likes I will be dropping another another thing to leave in the comments of Popular youtuber you would like to see me do next


Hey, what's up, I'm Leonardo with Code Pink. I'm here in a hotel in La Paz, Bolivia, where we're about to meet with the TSC, the nation's electoral supreme court, the highest authority regarding elections here. And we have a full day agenda where we're gonna talk to political analysts and speak with members of political parties and also get orientation as to how to be an electoral observer in the country. I got here on Wednesday, the elections are on Sunday. We've already spoken with a few experts who expressed some concerns already. Among them is the new quick count program that's called Deep Prepe, I believe. And there are concerns that it hasn't been tested and that it's gonna be used to kind of set a narrative in the media about who the actual winner is despite the fact that the full count, the full results won't be known until Wednesday, which is the October 20th, so excuse me, October 21st. Another thing they've expressed concern about is the fact that voting is gonna be timed basically in the sense that if your ID, your national ID ends in a zero, one, two, three, or four, you have to vote in the morning. If it ends in five through nine, you have to vote in the afternoon. People sudden in rural areas is gonna cause a bit of a problem because people in rural areas tend to vote early and hopefully they won't be turned away from the polls. The TSC has already said that nobody should be turned away from the polls for this reason, that the precautions were put in place because of COVID to prevent, you know, long lines and long big crowds at polling stations. And yet another concern we heard is about the fact that in many places in polling stations, some of the political parties won't have representation and there's a concern that this could lead to, you know, small frauds in particular polling centers. So that's one of the things that we're gonna look out for here at the Electoral Observers. Code Pink is here as part of the delegation and our goal here is to follow the law and to ensure or help ensure that the billionaires have free and fair elections. Thank you.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with 2020 Panini Select Baseball. Four box, random team break number seven from jaspyscasebrakes.com. 30 spots, everyone gets a team in baseball. There you go, big thanks to all of these lovely people here for getting into the action. Thanks very much. All 30 baseball teams are in. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. Three and a three. Six times. That's the hard way. One, two, three, four, five, and sixth and final time. After six, we've got Matthew down to Michael. BK, what's going on? Three and a three. Six times for the teams. Four, five, and sixth and final time. After six, we've got the Atlanta Braves down to the Astros. All right. So Matthew with the Braves, Michael with the Yankees, Stephen Kendrick with the Padres, Austin with the Reds, Jesse O with the Cardinals, Chet with the Brew Crew, Peter with the Indians, Bryant with the Tigers, Oscar with the Angels, Kyle with the Nets, Andy with the Rockies, Matt V with the Phillies, Richard with the Bluebirds, Oliver with the Diamondbacks, Rick Barker with my Dodgers, Levi with the Twins, Josh with the Mariners, Stephen K with the Giants, David, Last Spot Mojo star next to your name, White Sox, Zach Paul with the O's, Levi with the Red Sox, Derek with the Royals, Kyle with the Pirates, Tom with the Marlins, Arthur with the Rangers, Michael with the Rays, Austin with the Cubs, Gabriel with the Mets, David with the A's, and Michael with the Stros. Trades are allowed if you want. And while you're considering trades, Mets up for trade, I'm going to pop open this fresh case right here, 2020 Select Baseball, let's see which boxes we're going to do. This build was a four box break, right? So it's a third of a case. Let's build a stack of four right here. Let's build a stack of four right here. And let's build a stack of four boxes right there. So there it is, four, four, and four.  We're going to select that one over there. We'll go one, two, three, four, five, six on the dice roll. And it's two, one, two. All right, so we'll mark these with green Xs so we know that they're all from the same case. All right, Mets up for trade, Tigers up for trade. I'm going to, twins up for trade. I'm going to pause the video when we come back and we see if there's any trades and then we'll have the break, stick around. All right, welcome back folks. There were no trades, a little bit of trade chatter, but in the end, no deals were done. And this little four box break right here, random team, seven. Thanks everyone for getting in, really appreciate it. Fresh case, so let's see, see what we get. Two autographs, two memorabilia cards per box on average. Good luck, everyone. I had eight in the back. Who did the score for Gladier? This is great. Got how great that this is Paul Newman's score. Thomas Newman, I mean, I think he's no longer with us. No, it's Hans Zimmer. Here we go, box one. We got Sean Murphy, Jersey, David Brune to A's, Dullo's 7 to 250, Travis Demerit to 199. That'll be for the Tigers. That's going to be for Bryant. And we got Mike Piazza, Dodger's Edition. That'll be for, who's got my dodgers? Rick Barker with the boys in blue. Game worn material, which is pretty cool. Rex, what's up? What's the better deal? Mosaic blaster or a hanger box? Same price on Jaspie's, just so no way to splurge on. What does everyone think? There's Glass now for the raise. Michael Huck, like that. And we've got Xander Bogarts. Nice. Jersey and autograph for Levi and the Red Sox. There's Nico Goodram, 36 out of 50. White Prison for Detroit, Bryant. And a 10 out of 10. Wow, nice. Bit of a tag there. There's Ronald Bolanos for the Padres. That's Stephen Kay, a little bit of gold. I want the gold. Give me the gold. I want to know where the gold's at. 10 out of 10. Anthony Rendon, AJ Puck. Next box, good luck. Xander was, yeah, it was numbered four out of 75. Rex, you got to look at the different parallels there too. Some of those, maybe I feel like the hangers and the blaster each have their own exclusive parallels, perhaps. It's hard to keep track, but look that up. That might sway your decision. There you go. Michael and Adriana is the right idea. Rex, buy a boat. Cover your bases. Buy one each, just to be sure. And we got a Sheldon Newsy, 138-209 jersey and autograph. Oakland A's, David Bruns, Bobby Bradley, Peter, with the tribe to 149. And we got a Michael King, 61 out of 99, for the Yankees. See that pinstripe right there? That'll be for Michael Huck. Michael Huck with the Michael for Michael. There you go, Michaels. Felt like a redemption for a second. Ooh, and a one-of-one Javier Baez. Woo! Superfractor pattern on the front. The majestic logo, which we won't see anymore, because remember, they're Nike jerseys starting with this year. Poor Nike. Well, not poor Nike, but Nike was looking forward to the 2020 season. But there's the Javier Baez. That'll be for Austin. Austin Moser, and the Cubbies. There you go, man. It's a good-looking card. Out of fives and under, get the all aboard, the big hit express. Woo-hoo! I was like, poor Nike. And then I was like, they'll live. They'll figure it out. Those Max Scherzer to 199. They'll be OK. They'll survive. There's Raphael Devers to 35. There's Davy Gruyon. Phillies, that's going to go to Matthew V. Zach Allen for the snakes, 38 out of 99. Seems like they push that over a little bit, right? That'll be for all of her in the diamond bags. Lime green. All right, two boxes to go for 10, 15 minutes. I guess it would be cool to see, I guess, within a year or two. We'll probably see Nike logos in Panini and top sets, right? It would be pretty cool. I think Nike does all the English Premier League jerseys, too, or most of them. Good luck. Here we go. Keeper Ruiz for the Dodgers. And we've got Matt Heiss, 74 out of 99. Tri-color. Relic. Angels. Oscar. Michael Brantley to 149. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope baseball pulls together a season. Come on, guys. Get it together. 4 out of 15, Jose Abreu, Cracked Ice Jersey and autographed, David Baker, White Sox, Last Spot Mojo. Cody Belanger, 199. Nice four box break so far. Still got a box to go. We've got Tress Barreira. And that'll be for the Nats. Kyle Hoover with the Nationals. And another cub, Chris Bryant. Another one for Austin. 3199, Steven Strasburg for Kyle. Gold food is poison tricking gladiator. That's a good gag. Last box. This is a random team seven. Good luck, everybody. Last one. Here we go. Brock Burke, got a gold, Justin Verlander, 10. And the Goldschmidt, 9 out of 49. Jersey and autograph for the Cardinals. Nice break. Jesse Oh, nice one. Jess Verlander going to Michael and the Stroes. We got Shun Yamaguchi. 35 out of 99 for Toronto. That'll be for Richard and the Bluebirds. Mauricio Dubon, 41 out of 99. Jersey and autograph. It's one of the bigger prospects, I think, for the Giants. Steven Kay with my rivals. Richard, whatever the one that sold out on the side, there's only two. One's a random team and one's a pick your team. I think break number 11 or pick your team 11 or 12. Anthony Rizzo. Relic, nice. Pink Relic, probably Mother's Day. Austin with the Cubs. Dubon's already called up. Maybe it's Luciana Marco, Mauricio. There's Nick Ahmed to 199 for the Diamondbacks, Oliver. And we've got Jonathan Daza. Rockies. Big purple patch for Andy. Andrew Hirsch with that one. 200 out of 250. Kyle Hendricks to 199. That'll be for Austin and the Cubs. Carlos Santana at the end. And there you go. Random Team 7 in the books. 2020. Panini Select Baseball. There should be more in the stores. So check that out on jaspyscasebreaks.com. I'm Joe, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.


that way as well. So, good morning, everyone. How's the DevConf going? Good? Everybody's awake? I'm surprised. Thank you very much for taking time to come this morning. For those of you who haven't caught on already, I'm Medial. Among other things, I've been serving for several years as President of Software and Public Interest. It has become our habit each year at DevConf to have a SPI, Birds of the Feather Session. Mostly, it's an opportunity for us to report on the status of SPI and to answer any questions. We don't have any really significant new information report except for some brief updates on financials and so forth. Out of curiosity, how many of you are not SPI members? You should fix that today. We'll explain how in a little bit. So, what I'll do is I'll just briefly run through who the current board members and officers are. We just had a Board of Directors election. It was pointed out since we arrived here at DevConf that we booped and made a small mistake and forgot to have a re-election or election of officers at the first board meeting after the board election. We kind of lost track of this because while we did have an election of new board members this year, it did not involve an actual vote because the number of candidates and the number of available positions did not require one. We'll talk just a little bit about how SPI came to be and what the history is, what the list current sort of logo cloud associated projects looks like. Probably spending a little more time talking about financial status and then we can take whatever questions people would like to ask. This is the current composition of the Board of Directors and officers list. Those that are italicized are not present. As was already mentioned, Martin Zobelhalos was here for much of the week but he had to leave after the conference center last night so he's not present today. So, I guess here in the room today from the board, I'm here as president, or it's here as vice president and more than as our current secretary and I guess everyone else is not here. A couple of notes as time goes on, the board is slowly becoming more diversified amongst the associated projects. It's not quite as purely Debian looking as it once was and I'm actually really pleased by that. I'm glad that representatives from some of our other associated projects are taking the step to take a more substantial role in SPI. So, what is SPI? Well, it stands for software in the public interest. It's organized as a charitable nonprofit organization in the United States. It was originally created when the Debian Project became large enough that there was a need to have a place that could legally hold assets on behalf of the Debian Project in the U.S. And, fortunately, those who created software in the public interest were forward thinking enough to realize that this was a service that other projects might need to not just Debian so instead of creating it as the Debian Foundation or something like this, it was created as a more generic software in the public interest charity and it should see in a moment we now provide similar services to a broad range of projects in the free and open source software. This is the organization that holds Debian funds in the U.S. and other assets like trademarks, domain names, and among other things, the copyrights. SPI was founded as a nonprofit corporation in the state of New York in June of 1997. In 1999, the Internal Revenue Service recognized software in the public interest as qualifying to charitable status under the 501c3 part of the U.S. tax code. The important part of this is that donations coming from individuals and companies in the United States may be offered some average as tax benefits. That, of course, depends on individual financial considerations. And then, as I already mentioned, while SPI was originally created to serve a Debian need, it does now serve many different significant free software projects. This is the first of a couple of slides I have with the logos of the various projects that are associated with SPI. And one of the things I think that differentiates SPI from other financial and legal hosting umbrellas for various free and open source software projects is that our projects associate themselves with SPI. They're not actually, they don't legally become part of SPI. One of the benefits of this is that it's okay for projects that are associated with SPI to also be associated with other similarly structured charitable organizations in other parts of the world. So in the Debian case, for example, Debian has other organizations in different countries in Europe and in Latin America and so forth that can also accept donations and hold assets on behalf of Debian projects in those places. So when you see the numbers representing the financial assets that SPI holds for Debian, that's not all of Debian's assets. That's just the assets that are being held on behalf of the Debian project in the U.S. Here's another big thing. A couple things you might notice in here. There's more than one last distribution. Arch Linux is also involved, as are some others. We have multiple database projects associated. So this really is a very broadly structured and very diversely connected organization. Any questions about the associated projects list or any of the other things that we've talked about so far? Well, financially, I pulled the numbers from the sort of annual report, treasurer's report, which is through the end of June. At that time, the total money being held by software in the public interest was just over $840,000 U.S. of which more than $700,000 is being held in trust for our associated projects and approximately $128,000 was being held in SPI's general reserves. Honestly, that's the highest the general reserves have ever been. It's half again as large as it was a year earlier. A year earlier, that was in the low $80,000 range. And this is the reason that I'm really quite convinced that we are at the point in time where it's okay for us to spend some of the money from the general reserves taken on more of SPI's routine tasks as things that we acquire some paid professional help to do. And we'll talk about that some more after the final part of the presentation. But as you can see, the vast majority of the funds that are being held by SPI are not really SPI's money. That's only that we're holding interest on behalf of the associated projects. And this is what the balances for those look like. Intriguingly still, something like a third of all of that money is one way or another being held on behalf of Debian and DevCon. As you can see, the Debian Air Market itself, which is right there, is still sitting at something about $224,000. This is at the end of June again. And there was, were funds still associated with the DevCon 14 year mark and quite a bit of funds for the DevCon 15 year mark. I'm sure that by the time we finish with this DevCon and close out the associated expense transactions and so forth, that those balances will be substantially different. But for DevCon, what we usually try to do for this further session is take the SPI annual numbers from the end of June so that we have a way to look at them year to year. And those numbers are slightly up from this time last year, but it's not really a very dramatic difference. And Debian's balance held by SPI has remained reasonable study over the last couple of years. And I guess if we go ahead and look at some of the others, there's substantial balances being held on behalf of other organizations. LibreOffice is another good example. As I think everyone knows, there's now this thing called the Document Foundation, which is the primary umbrella organization for the LibreOffice activities. But what we've discovered in the past is that moving funds back and forth across international borders just to aggregate sums in one place is secret because we end up paying international exchange fees and all of this. So this is another example of a place where we're happy to continue with holding those funds in trust for that project. And when they have things they need to spend money on in the U.S., they can ask SPI to disperse those funds, and we don't have quite as many international funds transfer fees. And in fact, the LibreOffice earmark is down from last year because we paid a couple of bills on their behalf for travel reimbursements from people from the U.S. or something like that. And this is the last of that list. As you can see, PostgreSQL continues to be one of the other projects that we're holding substantial assets on behalf of. And in fact, we have one of our board members who represents that project. And if you look at this list, there are a couple of projects that are essentially defined. And one of the sort of legal challenges that we'll have to address at some point is that in our associated project agreements, we have historically not been good about including any language to cover what happens when a project ceases to be active or disappears. Under the IRS rules, we understand that we can't transfer funds out to anything other than another charity. So if a project, for example, back in the old days, we held funds on behalf of the Genome Project. And the Genome Foundation was formed in a similar IRS tax status. It was easy for us to take the balance we were holding and transfer it to the new charity to continue to use on behalf of Genome, particularly since that was also an organization in the U.S. But if we decide at some point that OSCNX really is dead and gone, what do we do with the $2.92? And because these funds that are being held in trust for their various projects were given to us by the donors with an explicit earmark saying they wanted the funds used for that project, the fact that we lack in some explicit language in our associated project agreements from that era to say that this project ever goes away that will revert to being SPI-generated funds or something like that, I think at some point there's a legal question to be resolved about. And what exactly do we need to clean up some of these little balances? And a couple of cases not so little balances from projects that are just not active anymore. So I asked at the beginning how many of you are not SPI members. I really do encourage everyone to go apply and become a member. Being a basic level member of SPI really requires nothing but an expression of interest. There is a separate category for contributing members and anyone who is here at a DevCon undoubtedly qualifies for contributing number status and should ask for it and probably be granted it. The only real difference is that contributing members have the right to vote and in the past that's primarily been the opportunity to vote each year for who will represent the membership on the board of directors. But one of the things I would personally like to drive forward in the next year is to finally get around to fixing the issues that exist in the organization of biologs. And to do that we will at some point have to actually have a vote of the contributing membership to approve the new biologs. So this year may actually afford an opportunity to vote more than once. And this is where you can go to, I believe that's still the right URL so if that's still the right URL then do somebody type fast and tell me. I didn't think to check that. It's close enough. You can go to members.SKIinc.org Members.SKIinc.org Members.SKIinc.org I'll fix that later. I'll go and find out if I am a member because I might be. If you're not sure you can ask me and I can check. Otherwise if you know what email address it was I will look in and there's a positive reason. The usual things I guess. But since we're all here, yes. Just asking. In terms of getting involved, our board meetings are monthly. The schedule and agenda are announced in advance. The agenda is published on our website under the corporate agenda's part of the website. And those meetings are held in the open on the hash SPI channel on IRC.OFTC.net. So feel free to come and observe our board meetings. We do actually offer the opportunity at the start of each board meeting when the board members are identifying themselves and binding their real world identities to their IRC NICs for the purpose of our minutes. We offer the opportunity for anyone observing the board meeting to also identify themselves and be recorded in the minutes as having attended the meeting. So another opportunity to have your name reported for posterity on the website somewhere. Our discussions are held on several mailing lists. You can learn more about those on the website. There's our general access mailing list. One that's for contributing members only. There's a board of directors list that we use for those little businesses we can get away with because that one is relatively private. But I certainly encourage all of you to use the rest of this session and the rest of the time that we're here at DevCon to reach out to those of us who are present and ask any questions you'd like or bring up any interesting topics directly. With that, the sort of formal part of the presentation that I put together is over and we'll be happy to take any questions that you may want to ask. Yes, I have a question. I'm on race 3 and I, well, with my KSK rollover team right now, and I sent a question at a race by ICANN, if SPI is a traditional authority, could cross-sign the new key-signing key for a user? We much appreciate it. We got the question and I told him that I'm not answering it alone and I need to discuss with people. I sent a mail about that to SPI Private? Yeah, got one or two answers and I'm not here at DevCon that I really want to talk to this parent but I didn't have yet. But the general response I got was that it's positive. We need to talk about a few handings of the SPI CA and stuff but then we should be able to do it. Do you think that you'll get to the point where you have all the answers you need before the end of DevCon? Do you think that you'll get to the point where you have all the answers you need before the end of DevCon? Maybe possibly, yes. So did I understand correctly that SPI runs the same way? Yes, sure. The one one is not in the browser by default because it's a bit above our handings currently, what you need to do for that. At least in Devian instance, we use the CA certificate package otherwise you need to get it yourself. So it's not in the retail store because it's not signed by a public CA? It's complicated, but the short version is we run a CA and it's not recognized by everybody but Devian and I think most Devian derivatives distribute us in their CA certificates back in school. I guess you were at less than quick session. How do you engage in this course signed by another certification authority? We really haven't even thought about that very hard yet. It certainly seems like that would make sense. I would think that somehow I'm certainly personally very excited about Watson Crypt and I would think that as they become ready to sort of deal with the rest of the world, that's conversations we certainly will look forward to. I don't think Watson Crypt is really taking off and getting good because we want to run it completely on CA. Right, because there are lots of constraints and problems coming up if you run it on CA. As you heard in the presentation of the day, and I ran this actually in a similar context related to the UEFI secure boot and the issue there was who's going to be willing to run a CA and in the end the CA that exists for UEFI secure boot is only operated by Microsoft and everyone uses them to obtain signatures and all of that and as long as they continue to run that in a trustworthy sort of way and allow whoever needs it to have access to the service that's just fine but the non-profit organization that was developing specifications realized that it was well beyond their capabilities to be able to run a CA or to afford to have somebody else do a dedicated one. The Watson Crypt thing really excites me because a core group of organizations that are highly motivated to do it and do it well is doing that work. We've been running one because we needed one not because we really wanted to run a CA and so in the meantime let's do all of our things but I would hope that we connect ourselves and what would be a perfect way to do the Watson Crypt one. Peter might have some tips which CA would talk to which we would like to cross-sign the SPI CA Well, as Harris says, once they're online the idea that they might cross-sign us themselves is this is also the question of I don't want them to cross-sign us just because we're a nice charity and we're up to have a very serious conversation about what you mean to run a CA or an associated CA or a cross-sign SPI if we think that's all reasonable, great, if it seems like too big a burden then I think we'll decide. If they're very successful maybe we don't have to take hours to the next level maybe we can use theirs. I don't really follow that through. As Harris says, to be honest, there will be a CA because it's completely different from many CA standards that we are running it. I think we are doing it in a secure way and stuff but in my opinion it's an optimum way you could actually do it. It's good for our project, it's good for the things we are having and it worked and we never had a big problem with it except that we are not in any main browser and we can jump on and let them do something, you will do that. I would submit that there will just be more projects in the future that we've been able to see in this philosophically aligned project that the SPI represents. So, especially true with respect to crowd computing and pockets and crowd computing that are philosophically aligned with SPI. And then I think the question is, do we end up believing we're fully philosophically aligned with SPI, let's encrypt, is running their CA, or does there continue to be some delta and that will have to be part of our decision process in the future. We've been paying lots of attention, looking forward to seeing them come online and I can't wait to start using their services for some of my own personal servers and so forth and therefore I'm sure we'll all have the opportunity to learn how that works and think about how that should interact with SPI. Do you run a CA, unacquiredly, or associate projects, many of them are taking advantage of that? I don't know if they still have any because they've got some stands up but it can be in the past, isn't it? Or if you see it's using quite a lot for all of the servers? So just to finish up the comment, I mean I don't want to beat it today. I have a previous affiliation where they can link all global sign which is in the ring trust store and they're all off all major operating systems which I could probably arrange for a co-signing, I could probably sign or something. Again, that would be great. And again the issue is just that we have to understand what their normal expectations for a cross-on project are and we have to consciously decide if we want to use more groups. Because we're at a point now where the things we really needed to accomplish are well handled with current setup and so with an activity like let's encrypt underway and making progress in what we think is the right direction doing a lot of extra work to beef up our CA might or might not really be a great investment of time but I think we'll get a chance to see that over the next three or four months as they come along. We're certainly not going to abandon our CA suddenly for another reason but the reason it exists is because there wasn't anything like but I think in particular being able to get certificate, wildcard certificates is one of the things that none of the free CA's would want to support in the past and it's on Peter's presentation when I've got something they'll get to but isn't necessarily a part of the initial offering too so I guess we'll just have to see how that works out. Other questions? Yes. In some countries it's easier to create local trust tokenization of the Indian but for example next year we need a lot of support of SPI. What can we get from SPI? SPI can sign SPI can sign contracts in a Bay of South African as long as it's okay for a U.S. non-project to be signing those contracts I mean as long as the person on the other side of the contract thinks that's okay I don't have any problem with it I don't think Michael would either I think we can probably do the right things We were talking before the session started today about handling funds the use of SPI as a way to route funds to a conference that's happening in another country actually started at DebCon 6 when there was a huge problem trying to get a contribution from a major U.S. corporation into a personal bank account in Mexico and the resolution of that in the end was that I suggested as a last desperate measure oh well can you get it to SPI and we'll figure it out from there the we'll figure it out was that SPI reimbursed my personal credit card for the way we handled the rest of the expenses in Mexico all of that ancient history doesn't matter but since then what we've done is U.S. corporations we've offered them the opportunity to make their donations through SPI and then we've suggested that money coming from places outside of the U.S. probably should not route through the U.S. unless there's really some compelling reason to do that and so for example when DebCon was being held in Portland it was easy for those funds to route through SPI when it's being held in Switzerland a little bit harder but it wasn't difficult because they really had a local organizational local bank account because we could do one or two large transfers and not have lots and lots of little international funds transfer fees so the only thing I would ask is that we have a conversation about this with Michael the treasurer and make sure we understand what the best way to handle the actual financial transaction logistics are so that we don't end up paying a lot of international funds transfer fees but in terms of providing a legal entity that can be contractually obligated on behalf of Debbie and DebCon I think it's okay for SPI to play that role again you know we have to look at the terms of any specific contract and make sure they don't violate our legal constraints but I can't imagine that being true for from DebCon Sure Can SPI open a bank account in this target contract? Can SPI open a bank account in the target country? Maybe But I'm not sure it's a good idea The problem is that if SPI does that then all of a sudden those are assets held by US non-profit and that means that the tax rules about it get conflated by the rules of separate countries and I'm afraid our bookkeepers would I'm afraid their heads would explode and I would be afraid we would find ourselves in a situation that really wasn't good locally I don't know I almost would rather see somebody run and manage the primary accounting for some Debbie and activity happening outside of the US I don't necessarily do it through a personal account with good record keeping than trying to SPI open an account there I'm not someone who should be giving legal or financial advice to countries outside of the US maybe not even in the US It's interesting that you talked about the need for SPI possibly to have some pay level I think SPI is certainly getting to the signs and the stage now that would be very useful It's essentially for such an important organization that's holding large amounts of assets for various projects it's having to rely on volunteer effort and basically a group of people is something that may not be the most reliable way of doing it to be useful with if you could sort of give an overview of where we could go with that what sort of things we could look at and how SPI as an organization can help bring us a professional paid help Yeah, so there's been we've gone back and forth on this over the years and I guess three or four years ago we passed a resolution agreeing to spend some money acquiring specifically some assistance with bookkeeping and accounting services and our treasurer did some investigation found a firm he thought could provide services that were useful to make this life easier and began a relationship with them and in all honesty that relationship I think from where I sit has seemed a little bit rocky I don't think it got off really well and then I think the people that were actually doing the work force were not completely meeting their expectations My understanding is that our treasurer recently had a meeting with the leader slash ownership management team of that firm and they've agreed to change the way they're interacting with this and these stuff in a way that's better for them I don't really know much of the detail of what that means or what the changes are So in parallel with this I realized that and this was largely due to inputs from people like Joshua Berfusser for a while was providing us volunteer volunteer assistant treasurer services doing things like managing the documentation trail and logistics for our various associated projects involved in the Google Summer Code which actually for many of our associated projects the largest annual financial transactions are the reimbursements coming through for travel with those mentors summit and the funds that are actually going to the students that are involved working on their projects based on that I realized that we actually have grown to the point where we probably need some administrative hours or a time manpower above and beyond quote unquote just the bookkeeping that I thought we ought to try and address So I thought about two things in my personal history that provided some advice and guidance on this One is that I've been involved with another U.S. 501C3 non-profit charitable organization for many years and that's the Radio Amateur Samoan Corporation and in ASAP there's a full-time paid office manager person that's the only real employee of the corporation and they outsource some bookkeeping and accounting services so that the volunteer treasurer for the organization doesn't actually do anything in the sense of opening envelopes and depositing checks and managing financial transactions and reimbursements that's all done either by the paid office manager or the contracted accounting firm that handles the books What the treasurer is responsible for is getting the reports from the people doing the work and reviewing them and reporting on them in board meetings and being part of strategic discussions about what should happen with the funds that were available and in fact sort of guiding the activities of the people being paid to do the work. So I have that as one model of how a successful large 501C3 in the U.S. operates and then I remembered that at one point I was on the board of directors of the Consumer Electronics Fund, CELF before it folded in and became the Consumer Electronics Working Group at the Onix Foundation and in the early days of CELF, the companies that started that organization actually contracted with a third party management services firm to run the organization and I believe if I remember correctly that was the companies called VTM and they're still around and they're in the business of basically providing a turnkey solution for running a non-profit organization and they did things like arrange for the logistics of the physical twice a year board meetings one in Japan one in the U.S. over here they sent somebody to sit in the room and interact with the venue staff to make sure that the doors were unlocked and lights were turned on and the beverages were there for the break service at the right time and they took minutes and wrote up the minutes and sort of acted as the person doing the work of the secretary and the treasurer of the organization and they had their organization the accounting resources to provide all of that as a service allowing the board members all of whom were there as representatives of different member companies to focus again on sort of the strategic thinking and decision making associated with the project and so with those two personal things in my experience with guidance I started thinking about where could we go to get some help because the one thing I recognized is that I did not want to be as a volunteer to SPI responsible for the process of hiring and managing someone who just works for SPI the overhead of being a people manager for an organization I'm a volunteer to was not a people but I didn't think anybody else on the board was really enthusiastic about this either so what I tried to find was one or more places that we could go and have some kind of a contractual relationship with somebody else who would acquire the manpower to work and be responsible to us contractually and the two places I've talked to recently about this are the Linux foundation and the software freedom and service I reported briefly in the last board meeting and in the conversations on channel afterwards about the conversation of the Linux foundation but the Linux foundation is not a 501c3 there are 501c6 which in the US tax code means that they're not a charity they're a trade association and that means that unlike a charity where you sort of receive donations and then independent of any of those donations you have a board that decides what to do with those funds and what the strategic and the direction of the organization should be in a trade association you have members who pay to play and by paying to be there they help to guide the strategic direction and so trade associations exist for companies to collaborate on activities that support common strategies and development of new markets and so forth so it's a different kind of organization but I decided I do really care because what I have seen as a member of the board and as an observer of the Linux foundation is that Jim Zemlin and his team are really good at hiring high quality people and motivating them to deliver outstanding performance in various tasks and so the notion that I might be able to convince him to take some money from SPI to give us a third or half of a person's time to manage the activities at SPI that I could trust that someone who has demonstrated ability to do good people management would be sort of watching those activities and worrying about human resources aspects of it was pretty appealing the more we talk though the more I realize that there is sort of a this is something I think BLF would be happy to do I think they would give us a good rate I think that they would feel good about helping out a C3 charitable organization but it is absolutely true that there is a bit of a philosophical disconnect I'm pretty confident that if they helped us manage our books we would not be done using free software unless we made that an absolute requirement of a contract for example because while we strongly support the Linux ecosystem you know they run around using Apple products and running proprietary software to run the business supporting free software activities around Linux and that's perfectly okay, there's nothing wrong with that but SPI has historically taken a much stronger philosophical stance on this we've tried very very hard to not use anything that was proprietary in our activities and so I had the opportunity at OSCOM to have a conversation with Karen Samler and Bradley Kuhn from the Conservancy and they pointed out that in fact their needs have been quite similar to SPI they now have I think three full-time paid stuff and their transaction volume is really quite high because of some of the projects that are associated with the Conservancy so they said if you're looking for a place to go contract with to provide just some manpower, why not come talk to us because we are philosophically almost entirely alarmed we also care about using software for everything we do and in fact you SPI were willing in the last year to vote to provide up to $10,000 in sponsorship for our work on financial software and related processes to support our kinds of organizations and even though we didn't get enough of other sponsors to take your money and proceed with that work you know there's this huge convergence of interest here right now is those are the conversations I've had the next steps I think that need to occur are that we need to get Michael and others in it Martin, others in SPI they're involved in some of these routine processes together to discuss and plan what we really ought to do to take the way we operate through some transition to a new better capable handling greater scale situation and so in fact in conversation earlier this week Zodale proposed that maybe what we needed to do is have something like an SPI financial processes sprint and you know maybe there's the opportunity for us to get the right group of people together in one place to spend a couple of days working through this figuring out doing a better job of documenting so that we all understand what our current processes are and how they work what's the heavy lifting what makes it hard for us to continue to scale and purely volunteer way and maybe be able to make some decisions based on that about what to do next so we have no concrete plans about when that might happen who will be involved in the thing but that's my current thinking about how we move forward and I feel good about this because after two or three or four years of thrashing a little bit spending more money, getting more help it feels to me like maybe we are starting to at least have a plan for how to get to a plan so we'll see that anyone here that has any thoughts or inputs or suggestions who wants to help with that that would be great but that's my current thinking other questions we have a couple of minutes left there's time for a little more Neil, feel free if you have another one I think the thing might be useful at some point for us guys to look at payment processes and how we can accept donations and traditionally use flexing pledge I believe and sort of see some issues around there specifically with how well it manages to deal with donations and the financial security behind that things like checks on credit cards to make sure things aren't being used to do I think did SPI have a PayPal account set up or was there anyone or so there has been some movement around there that would be useful to possibly look at that there's quite a bit of consternation about PayPal itself in one of the accounts of guys history I personally and others involved at SPI over time have had reason to have PayPal accounts associated with other activities involved and take money over the Internet and I at least personally have learned quite a bit about sort of the best way to set up commercial bank accounts attached to PayPal accounts and arrange for automatic sweep of funds to get them out of PayPal and into your bank account where you control it and all that sort of stuff and I'm really quite impressed with some of the aspects of PayPal's charge back handling mechanism I think that's been one of the big concerns in the past so I think as part of this whole idea of reviewing maybe having a strength around SPI's financial processes it would be completely appropriate for us to review and consider whether the ways we currently allow folks to give us money is the right set. Another question that's come up a couple of times is do we accept it or not and so far the answer is no I don't have a problem with accepting Bitcoin philosophically but from a practical standpoint there are a bunch of questions and how it would actually be rendered and as assets tracked if someone really wants us to pursue that that's a project we have to engage in to go through that but with that I'm told we're out of time. Thank you very much for your time and attention and if you have other questions please feel free to catch any of us in the halls the next day or so and we'll be happy to talk about other things thank you again


the Spanish Inquisition. It's then and now, including now, here on History is here to help with History Professor Peter Haffenberg. Welcome to the show, Peter. Aloha. You know, the thing about the Inquisition is, and you have to tell me if I'm right about this, is that it's not that it came from Ferdinand and Isabella. It was a political thing as it would be today. What they found was that for 100 years before 1492, there were people out there in the streets, the unwashed masses, who had it out for the Jews, and they would attack Jewish homes and businesses. They would kill people, kind of a Spanish pogrom thing, and Ferdinand and Isabella said, hmm, you know, we better pay attention to this because we can improve our power position if we, you know, bond up with them somehow and support them. Now, that's a wild guess, but I wonder how much of that could be true. Well, I certainly think some of it is true. It's not a complete story, but maybe we can try to fill it in. For our audience or viewers, we should probably provide some dates. So the Inquisition is official starting in the later 1470s. So notice that it prefigures the Reformation. So it tells us that Protestants per se were not targets. Jews were targets. Muslims as quote unquote a great heresy. And then folks who study the period know that around every corner was some kind of heretic or dissenter. So the idea of attacking Protestants comes later. And then officially the Inquisition ends in the early 19th century in the 1830s. And many of us who don't really know much about Spanish history forget that there were significant liberal reforms in Spain in the 19th century. So when Franco comes to power, Franco is a shot to the system. So introducing that, let me get back to your question. Certainly intolerance and violence, murder, burning of religious centers happened well before the 1470s. It happened throughout Europe. I mean, it's certainly in England or Britain as well. I think what folks are struggling with and even in today's examples of genocide or hatred, there's always a balance, right, between what elites and the governments would like to do and are able to do and whether or not there's either public support or public indifference. So your comment about people attacking Jews and Muslims and heretics is absolutely true. But it's also true that at this point in the 15th century, we're just creating Spain. No such thing as Spain. So you could also look at the Inquisition as part of state or nation building. In that case, it's not really dissimilar from a lot of other places. So I would say the answer is yes and. Well, that does really give me confirmation in the sense that here's a king and queen of their nation building in Spain. They're part of a process where you want to galvanize people to support you, where you want to acquire new territories, you want to have the loyalty of new groups. You're consolidating the country. That's the nature of nation building. And so they probably had a lot of things on their plate. But one thing is, hey, why don't we get people to come around and support us and we'll do things that are part of this Inquisition and they will like us for that. They will think we're on their team. And that's one way we can have them become loyal. Two quick things. One is that you're right about the historical narrative. What we want to remind ourselves so is that historical narrative is primarily focused at this period against Muslims. Remember that Spain had been a caliphate. Spain, Muslim Islamic Spain had running water before any other place. My mononies, the great Jewish philosopher. So the part of this is what it's called in Spain, the Reconquista. We always talk about conquistadors in the New World. They're inspired in good part by the Reconquista. So you're right about the cultural consolidation and the nation building. But we're also talking about 400 years of internal warfare, particularly against Muslims and then against Jews. The Muslims were slaves. Spain had slavery in those days. And the Muslims were at the very bottom of the heap. And they had come from North Africa as slaves. They ruled and governed Spain. Spain was an Islamic caliphate. Starting in the later 11th century, it's really difficult to call them Catholics because they're no Protestants yet. But the official church, the Church of Rome and its practitioners in what will become Spain started rebelling against the Islamic governors. And so what you have is really a three and a half century Reconquest. As we know in the end of 1492, not only Muslims are defeated, but Jews are expelled. So it's a long term cultural process. The only other point I would make, and I think probably your viewers would well understand this, is you're right about trying to get support. But these are also exercises of fear and terror. So the target is also what the group you call the great unwashed. It's not just to gain their support. It is to socialize them and to basically instill a kind of fear. So it's not just I get to pick on somebody else. It's also that I better pick on somebody else or I might be attacked or get some kind of suppression from the state. So it's really both, right? It's public support. But the flip side of that is fear if I don't give public support. So that puts a whole new dimension on the notion of scapegoating. Scapegoating out of fear. Scapegoating was essential in those days and maybe that carries forward. You're not a scapegoat just to put the other guy down.  Am I getting this right? I think, yeah, there's a lot of wonderful literature and scholarship on this, but I think that's a good point to consider. And in a way, I don't want to draw a strict analogy. I don't want to get us off target, but there's a lot of discussion right about the American South, where for a variety of reasons relatively poor whites both feared African Americans, but I put themselves above African Americans as well. And that worked for government control and work for social control. So I don't want to get off track, but you could for folks interested in American history, you can see a kind of scapegoating done by people who are certainly not high up in the social hierarchy. And so that serves their interests and also the interests of the government or the elite. I don't think we should forget the power of fear and certainly listeners who observe, you know, either the show at the Holocaust or the fear now in Ukraine. I mean, fear is a very powerful historical force. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. The worry of something happening to you can be as powerful as something actually happening to you. And so in Applebaum wrote her article about the about the success of the Soviet communists after World War II in Eastern Europe. One of the essential elements of their success and the reason that people didn't turn against them was fear. And that's certainly the most important factor. Yeah. Right. I mean, she emphasizes that and I would not disagree with her. I just think that when we look at that example, there were a lot of other factors as well. I mean, some of those areas had suffered under the Nazis and so Soviets were relative liberators and some folks in those regions had been communists or Stalinists for decades. But that doesn't discount fear. It just means that the molecule was a little more complicated, but fear is definitely there. And I think even if we fast forward to today, we look particularly social media, how easy it is for fear as a contagion to spread. So we got to go back in time. Perhaps folks will be familiar with the printing press. That certainly contributed to the ability of the inquisition to instill fear. But even beforehand, there was a considerable power of word of mouth, a considerable power of pageantry, you know, having public trials, for example. So all of that, right, that the technologies of fear are different, but we're still talking about the fear and the general climate that something would happen to you. And therefore, maybe you better get on board and do that to somebody else. Yeah. So that's really great. It's great to know this because it sounds to me like this is a common denominator you can find in pretty much every large scale or every scapegoating, you know, experience, cultural experience, at least in Europe and elsewhere. So, but my big question for you, Peter, is we know that the inquisition was not one year with Ferdinand and Isabella. We know that it was going on for hundreds of years.  And that was probably, you know, I don't know if it was the worst of it, but it was pretty bad. Now, the question I want to put to you is what was the dynamic on that? It started, if it started at zero and it wound up at, you know, the full tilt, auto da fei, you know, murderous inquisition in the late 15th century. How did it change? Was it always thus? Or did it start out in little pieces and get worse? And why? Well, as most cases, things start out locally. So we're talking sometimes, even with the inquisition, the ideological religious reasons we think of, because at the same time there are witchcraft, crazes and trials, are combined or covered for more local or personal reasons. The inquisition left us an incomplete but still very helpful historical record. And when you start looking at it, you realize from the get go, there were the heretics, so to speak. But there were also people who pissed off local elites, or there were people who wanted to grab other people's land or property. And we see that very commonly in all kinds of kangaroo ports in history. We see that, as I mentioned, very commonly in witchcraft trials. So one might say, for your question, is it began primarily as a local enterprise, quite often with the local priest or the local landlord or aristocrat. What Ferdinand and Isabella and subsequent monarchs did was centralize it to a great degree, try to make it more uniform of the power of the state behind it. And I think if we look at incidents, I don't want us to get to upset stomachs or headache, but if we look at similar types of incidents, they often do begin much more locally, more decentralized. And we as historians then try to figure out what were the impulses to centralize it and make it an official policy. So in the case of Ferdinand and Isabella, the argument usually goes that, as every kid knows from the song, they married. And as they married, they did what many monarchs did in Europe at the time. They fused families and regions. So again, we can start talking about a Spanish crown. So some historians say that part of the Spanish crown was to consolidate and centralize. Secondly, we can see, as I mentioned before, that the reconquista is successful, quote on quote, right? Muslims have been defeated. The Jews have been expelled. So this is a way now to preserve that cultural uniform. And again, the Spanish were not unique. You can find examples of this throughout Europe. But other scholars would say it's a matter of, I now have a realm. What is going to make people Spanish? Right? They used to be loyal to these two families. They're loyal to their various provincial landlords. What makes them Spanish? And we think today of elections and national anthems, et cetera. But part of this was that what was determined to be Spanish culture, which was a mishmash, right? Sure. But it reminds me of the Aryan culture in Germany in the 20th century. We want pure Spaniards. And the common denominator between the Jews and the Muslims is they were not pure Spanish. So we have to purify. Exactly. And Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister's father, wrote a very controversial, enormous tome, very much in keeping with you suggested, because he looked at the Inquisition as a preamble to the Holocaust. I think we want to recognize, again, the pseudo use of science in the Holocaust, the pseudo use of Darwinism, but the same idea that there is some kind of cultural purity. And if you can't get a political purity, which usually was embodied by public oaths of loyalty to the crown, that was a very common form of political purity. There's no economic purity because you're dealing with the birth of capitalism. So ideas about property and money and trade are all in flex. So scholars suggest that at this time period, and I don't want to use the word in tube and all the way, but culture matters. So you start beginning to have the consolidation of national languages with the printing press. You have what we just talked about, the consolidation of religion, not just as a political instrument, but ensuring the loyalty and uniformity. The only thing I would add is while we talk about culture, I don't think we want to put culture as a separate realm, because like today we have culture wars. They're really about society, right? Who should be a member of society? What should be our relations? So I don't want us to get off on what seems to be an isolated question of religion or race, etc. It all embodies what kind of society you want. Well, that's the purification thing, isn't it? Right, right. In the 15th century. Or a society that is pure in my vision of the way it should be. Right, but that purity could be a whole variety of things. It doesn't have to be religion or race. I mean, purity could also be the rule of law. For example, it's kind of a civic purity, where I'm not asking your race or your religion or your orientation. I'm asking you to participate on the same terms, equal terms, politically. And that's a kind of purity as well. But you're absolutely right. I mean, most of history is about some type of, well, I guess we call it identity now. That really wasn't a phrase that would be used beforehand, but something that I have, you don't have, but what I have, I am born with. So even if you convert to Catholicism, right? There's still a suspicion that you're not really pure. We need you to be devoted to whatever is the common denominator that brings our social experience together.  We have a common denominator. We share. We have a groupie thing, where we share these views and everyone who shares these views is agreeing to the deal, whatever the deal is in this jurisdiction, this country. If you don't share those views, can't be with us. If you don't share those views, we have to expel you because we are looking for purity and uniformity and agreement on these views. Am I close? I think you're very close. And just a few years after we're our discussion began in the 15th century, at least in the West, there'll be an expression of what you just said in terms of a contract. So a social contract, meaning though, whoever violates the contract, the contract is null and void. So that's taking your philosophical point, which could, of course, be through coercion. We could use coercion to promote. But here, and I think certainly in the West, where the West has gone, the notion of a social contract still binds people. You can see with our problems in the country today, our social contract is free for the United States. The Spanish were just creating their notion of some kind of contractual or coercive relation. Because as I mentioned, there's no Spain. So you couldn't call somebody Spanish, it would make no sense. Now, starting in the later 15th century, and there are plenty of people who still don't want to be called Spanish. We look at the bosses, for example. They don't want to have any part in Spain. So it's still an ongoing, like so many cases, Scotland and Britain, parts of France, the blue states or red states. I remember starting in Carmen, the opera, which was a study of a 19th century French study of 18th century Spanish culture. One of the elements when you study the opera you find is that they looked down on the Spaniards. They looked down on the Spanish culture, thought it was inferior. Those people would never actually be as sophisticated and awkwardly developed as the French culture. That's the way the guys who wrote the opera looked at it. But I think it reflects the French view of the Spaniards at the time. And I think in appreciating what you're saying, I think we have to look at Spain as just developing the social compact, just developing this notion of consolidating under the monarchy, and then figuring out how to exclude the people who somehow threaten you. But what is remarkable, is I would guess from the period where the Inquisition arguably began in the local communities and so forth, it was not, am I right? It was not that violent. By the time it got to Ferdinand and Isabella, it had been mechanized. It had industrialized, if you will, made uniform and really creative, that torturing and killing people wholesale. In other words, as it got more part of the state mechanism, it got worse in terms of dealing with the humanity involved. Am I right? I would say right with just a slight question, Mark, because we don't know a lot about local events. We would like to know more, but we're dealing particularly in Spain at that time period, 13th, 14th century, very low literacy, very low reporting. So we have oral history. The response would be, I think you are right with the addition that, as I like to tell my students, you can do a lot of damage with farm tools. So in other words, you can do a lot of damage locally without the Mel Brooks type torture mechanisms that he made fun of in history of the world. So I think you're right about the consolidation of technology. What you might say is it becomes more of a stage in a theater. And that's part of fear, theater. The only point I would make is I would not limit the amount of violence and hatred and damage that can be done locally. It just may not be done in such a seemingly sophisticated manner. And we see this after World War II, where people take into their own hands whatever essentially war crime trials. I mean, they drag French collaborators out, right? They shave their heads, throw them into pits. It's violent. I don't think we could disagree, but it's more localized violence with the tools you have at your hand. For example, witches in Britain were hanged locally, whereas probably in London they would have been tortured and then hanged. But the end result is the same, right?  There's a good answer for that. And I think, well, I said there's several answers, but let me give you my answer as a historian. During this time period, particularly in Europe, I can't really talk about Hinduism or Buddhism and other non-Western religions. But in Europe, the understanding was that the body is a vessel for the soul.  That doesn't discount, right? Sadomasochism, right? It doesn't discount the need for theater, but there is a religious and philosophical reason to deface the body. So for example, Protestants just a few years later, the reformational start in 1517, just 30 years later, Protestants will very often attack Catholic buildings and burn down churches, because for Protestants, Catholicism was an institutional legacy. For Catholics, they tortured Protestant bodies to prevent those souls from going to heaven. So torture, I mean, I know this sounds kind of absurd and certainly in the 21st century, you wouldn't want to advocate this, but torture made intellectual sense in that world. It's one of the things the Enlightenment argued against, torture. Beclaria, the Italian legal theorists argued against it. I mean, you could say U.S. Constitution, right? Allegedly is against cruel and unusual punishment, right? And the most specific example in the 18th century of that was torture. So you could say we have to get back into the minds of the time period, put aside our very reasonable and hopeful shared morality and ethics, and ask why was torture practiced? And I think we've suggested it was helpful for the state as far as theater and fear, and it made perfect sense. If you had a heretic, you did not want that heretic soul going to heaven. Now, in Catholicism, though, there was an alternative movement. We might see it born in liberation theology in the 20th century, that you cannot torture somebody, because if you want them to convert, for example, you cannot torture them into conversion. It has to be an exercise in free will. So it's like the whole criminal thing.  Right. And in this case, the advocates of that view generally said it was okay to torture Jews and Muslims and Protestants, because they had already made up their mind. But as the transition goes to the new world, and the inquisition deals with Native Americans and the potential for Native Americans to be converted, there's a very powerful argument you should not torture Native Americans. It's not their choice not to be Christian. They never had the choice. They should exercise free will. So the inquisition says, you know, okay, but we have Jews and Protestants and Muslims, plus the blokes and property we want and torture certainly was part of it. I think, again, most historians would say that the inquisition suffered in good part from bad public relations. In other words, there is a legend that came out of the new world called la leyenda negra, which is known as a black legend, which is the Spanish were worse than anybody else. And so the French and the Dutch and the Portuguese and the British and the Scots could all feel, oh, okay, we're doing some bad things, but the Spanish are always worse. And I think the Spanish inquisition and even Franco, while not in any way whitewashing them, have also to a certain degree made those the apex of the movements, and nobody would deny how horrible they are. But the mirror needs to reflect that, you know, the British and the Portuguese and the Dutch all had their compliments or analogies. I mean, certainly the new world, you didn't want to be colonized by any European of any religious strain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So brutal. And you mentioned before that at least part of that was sadomasochism, and I don't believe sadomasochism is an important part of it. It defines humanity in so many, it justifies and explains so many events that have taken place through history, no? I think we should have another show about that with somebody who's a little bit or informed about psychology and psychiatry. I think you're right at some point with some practitioners, it becomes an obsession, it becomes an appetite. That's clearly so with some. I don't think it provides enough of a overall historical view. The easy conclusion might be that each society has decided that some group and individuals are not human, however human is defined. And then they're allowed to do extra human things to those people. But that only opens up the question, right? How does each society, what group is covered?  Like my assigning an excessive matter reading to my students. I don't want to physically torture them, but certainly so. Again, you open up a really interesting question, maybe another show about the psychiatric and psychological elements in what we call intolerance and certainly acting on that intolerance. I met a law professor out of Columbia a few years ago who had the distinction of teaching a course called torture. One last question I wanted to ask you, and I didn't want you to leave this hanging. You said that it started well before 1492, but it didn't actually end until the first few decades of the 19th century. 1834 is the official date. And yeah, that just blows my mind. It means it was going on for 500 years. And what was the dynamic there? How did it wind up stopping? Was it some edict? Was it a change in the views of people? Was it only in Spain that it ended in 1834? Was it elsewhere? Why do you say 1834? Okay, so very quickly, it ebbed and flowed. So like all movements in history that are several hundred years old, it's not the same every day. So it's like a virus? It's a virus and it could be under control. It could be limited, etc. And I think most historians, again, that's an overused phrase, I apologize. The scholarship says that the images we have of the Inquisition are generally late 15th, 16th, early 17th century. And then subsequently, with a stronger Spanish state, an interest in the Spanish state in its colonies and fighting the Ottomans, not internal Muslims or Jews, what we think of the Inquisition either is expressed in different ways by formal royal edicts, but certainly doesn't have the intensity by any means at all. 1834 makes sense because as I suggested at the start, Spain was undergoing liberal reforms late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Spain remains a battleground. Those of us who know about Franco, it's still a battleground. And to a great degree, the liberals never truly won in Spain. But having said that, they made significant reforms. One would say if you're interested in reading about it, you could say that the end of the Inquisition is an example of the enlightenment influencing Spain. Many of these ideas are brought from the French. Some are brought with Napoleon. And so the inclusion really is that Spain becomes more liberal in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It continues being liberal. And by 1898, as we all know, it loses most of its empire. But by 1898, it was a very different Spain than 120 years before. Now, having said that, having said that, it's hard to look at Franco's Spain as not really another chapter in the Inquisition's culture wars. Franco embraced the Catholic Church, the clergy embraced him, common Roman Catholic peasants embraced the regime, and they attacked all the people you had mentioned who would be viruses.  That was another cultural purge which called upon in many ways what was considered the Spanish Golden Age. And the Inquisition was associated in that mythology with the Spanish Golden Age. So that's why I thought then and now as our title because Franco only died in 1975. That's not that long ago. And you see as Spain tries to deal with Franco's regime and the memories of Franco's regime, they're dealing with a lot of the ghosts from the Inquisition. Let's leave it there, Peter. Thank you very much. Revelation area. And I would like to spend some time with you on one offshoot of this discussion. And that is colonialism and how this kind of cultural violence played a role in gaining colonies and in losing them. Absolutely. So much. So much. We have miles to go. Yes. Thank you, Dr. Peter Hopper. My pleasure. Historian at UH Manohar. Take care. Be healthy. Thank you very much.