No commercial. We're going to go directly to Jeff Holland, who's probably going to get us to think about servers less, his words. That is exactly right. What an amazing transition for the Blazer Power Hour that we're having this morning. I am Jeff Holland. I'm a principal PM on Azure Functions working on Azure Serverless. Today, we are going to continue the amazing conversation and very flashy conversation that Daniel had this morning with his Blazer and his pillow around Blazer, both server side and web assembly. We're actually going to apply that into a very common scenario, which is running Blazer and Azure Functions for serverless web apps. So to start with what to expect for the next half hour, let's start by talking about what are serverless websites? What's some of the architectures that people are using? What are some of the benefits of why people would look into doing this? Where Blazer fits into the story? Whereas your functions fits into the story, we're going to talk about how you deal with things like domains and delivery of that content, and then finally we'll have some time for question and answers. So to start with when we look at a traditional web architecture, like the web app that you probably built before has been the one often talked about as a three tiered web application. It works a lot like this, where you have a client who's got their browser and they make a request to some website. In this case, I've got a cool hip.dev domain. So let's say I want to call jeff.holland.dev. That's the website I want to go to. Well, the browser makes that request, that request travels across the Internet, it ends up landing on some server, and that server is running some code, right? Maybe this is an ASP.NET app, maybe it's a Node app running Express, it doesn't really matter, it's just the architecture I want you to be aware of. So it's going to land on that server and that server is going to process the request, maybe it has some things like Razer files or CSHTML, it's got some assets and images, and the server is going to render in index.html page, and it's going to return that page back to the browser, and the browser pretty much just paints it for you, right? So this is the traditional web architecture. You've got your browser, you have a server that's running some code, maybe talking to a database behind the scenes. This is a fine architecture, but it does have some limitations. One of the limitations is that I need a server there. So in this case, I have a website, jeff.hollen.dev, right? That might be my personal website. I'm not a super popular guy. I don't really need a server running 24-7 to process those requests, but in this architecture, I need to have a server running all of the time ready to process those requests. So I'm paying maybe some whatever a dozen, couple 20, 30, $40 a month on a website that's maybe only getting a few hits a week. But on the other side of it, maybe actually have some traffic that is incredible load, right? Maybe I actually need to scale out. With this three-tiered architecture, I have to scale out all of these servers because as I get all these browsers that are coming, I have thousands of browsers that all need their rendered version of an index.html page, and they need that to be processed in the server, returned back. So I also have to now scale these large servers, which can be a cumbersome process when I need to then serve this for high traffic, right? So now let's talk a little bit about a serverless web app architecture and how you can write apps in a serverless way. It starts the same. You have a user in a browser and they say, hey, I want to go to jeff.holland.dev. But in this case, instead of hitting a server, they just hit some files in storage. So it's like pulling directly from a storage account. You could almost think if I open OneDrive and I get a link and I email it to someone and they click that link, that's all I'm doing here. I'm just routing the request to say go pull in some files. So the storage account is going to return back an index.html page and some code that needs to be rendered on the browser. So in this case, since there's no server that's rendering the page, what I'm actually relying on is the browser to render that page for me. So all of the code, all of the logic to draw the elements to update the elements, now actually needs to run on my browser because I don't have a server behind the scenes. I just have this storage account with static assets. Now, this is a popular architecture because in many ways it's a lot less expensive. I'm not paying for a server. I just need files in a storage account. I can also just have the browser do all the processing. For scale out situations, it's very nice too. But one of the challenges with this architecture in the past is that really it was JavaScript users who were able to benefit from this architecture because JavaScript had frameworks like React and View and Angular that you could do this rich native rendering on the browser. You couldn't run .NET in the browser. But as we've talked about already a lot today in this week, you can now run .NET in the browser. You can have the same architecture but have it be .NET code that's rendering an Edge or Chrome or Firefox. And this is all made possible because of this amazing technology of Blazor and WebAssembly. So WebAssembly is like an underlying universal technology that lets you run compiled binary code from a browser in a safe way. Blazor is the .NET implementation a part of .NET Core 3. So now .NET developers can build these serverless web architectures too. I mentioned here it might look a little something like this and in the case of I do need to call a database while I could write Blazor code that connects to something like SQL or Cosmos DB directly that makes me feel a little bit antsy to be thinking about all these browsers making a direct connection to my database. So the other pattern that we often see in these serverless web apps is that when you do need some code that runs server side like a database connection or anything to deal with data really you can call an Azure function. And these Azure functions are serverless so you're only paying when an execution is actually happening you still get this amazing scale so you get a lot of the cost benefits and the scale benefits but you can still have some code running in the cloud and what's nice about Blazor and Azure functions that I love is I can now write .NET code running in my function I can run .NET code running on the browser it's .NET across the board right even if I need to pass maybe a class or an object from the browser to an Azure function I can use the same class file in both spots I can share code between the server and the client this is really nice and it also gives me benefits that when I need to scale let's say a million people go to jeff.holand.dev all of you watching now are like hey what is that jeff.holand.dev maybe you're poking around it right now my functions just scale automatically and my storage account is super elastic and how it can scale as well and what's nice here is that while I might need thousands of rendered index.html page all of the compute all of the processing to actually render those pages is all happening on the browsers right I'm kind of taking advantage of all the users computers I'm making them do the hard work their smartphones their laptops their desktops are all rendering the page and it's just up to me to make sure that I'm serving that static content so it's a super appealing scenario this is how I personally run my website or jeff.holand.dev because I pay pennies a month for this thing I get amazing scale and I'm running .NET in the browser and .NET in the server as well so I want to take some time now and demo this to let you know how you can get started building something like this so the first one to note I have .NET Core 3 already on my machine and to start using Blazor I just want to make sure I've installed the Blazor templates right so here at docs.microsoft.com I have templates for Blazor right here that I can install in and be ready to go and once that's there I can create a new project so let's start with the client side let's create a new Blazor client side WebAssembly app so I have here a folder already ready to go and I can just say .NET new and I'm going to use the template Blazor WebAssembly or Blazor that's going to run in the browser right so I go ahead and push to create it's using the template to create a Blazor WebAssembly app and let's go ahead and open this up in Visual Studio Code now so that you can see what this app looks like and some of the stuff that it scaffolded for us okay so this is pretty familiar you probably already saw this in some earlier demos this week as well I have things like my startup file which it feels very familiar to me program.cs I'm able to inject in some different builder and configuration aspects I have here some different pages these are razor pages in these cases these are razor pages that are going to render in the client the index.html page is pretty boring it's just some HTML the counter example is a little bit more interesting because here I have some code and it's going to increment a counter using current count plus plus and then finally the fetch data example is fetching some data from an external source my favorite line of code in all of this template too is this line right here and I don't know why but just the fact that I'm using HTTP client and I know that my good old buddy HTTP client is going to be the thing making this request from my browser in my case using edge on Mac just tickles me I love it I love HTTP client I love the fact that I can use it in the browser so here I have some code some basic pages here if I want to as well like let's go ahead and just test this out without even making any changes I can just say .NET Run it's going to compile this Blazor template in this case it's going to compile it along with some web assembly kind of artifacts so that it knows how to run cleanly in a browser and in just a second here it should expose for us a local host that we can actually browse and start to navigate to so right here localhost 5000 if I open that up here now is this C sharp app knows code server side it's not even doing code locally it's just compiled it and handed over to my browser and my browser is now doing all of the work here through web assembly okay so now let's talk about how we can start to call some data from an external source right in my case I said sometimes you might have a database something like Cosmos DB or Sequel that I don't want to call directly from my web assembly app so here let's add in some function information so since we're already at the the Blazor side I'm going to start by creating the Blazor aspects to call a function so let's add a new page here that's called my function dot razor page and here I'm going to type faster than a speeding bullet and paste in some code I wrote before that says hey I have a new page here called functions I'm going to get my handy dandy HTTP client that tickles me as I mentioned before and here when I'm trying to initialize the page you'll notice I'm actually calling an azure function now in this case it's calling a function that would be running in the cloud if I'm debugging this locally I could change this to localhost and actually call a function that's running on my box and then it's it actually even has some information here so while it's waiting for the function to respond it's going to say loading and then once I get back my message from the function it will automatically populate the message so it's going to be dynamic as well and wait for those responses so here I can call that function let's just go ahead into the navigation menu as well and I want to make sure that there's a way to navigate to this new page so I'm going to type that very quickly as well too right so now I have what could be some code to call a function what about my function where's the function that I can call and that's super easy to set up as well let's go ahead here and open up another empty folder called function app I'll just create a new window for vs code I could add these to the same workspace now here in visual studio code I've installed the azure functions extension now I could do this from visual studio 2019 as well but since I'm already in vs code I'm just going to stick with it let's just go ahead and create a brand new function project using that function extension and as I mentioned what I love about blazer is that I actually want to write C sharp client side and C sharp server side or serverless side so let's go ahead and choose C sharp as our language these are apis so they're going to be triggered by hdp requests I want to call this my hello function and I can give it the the namespace and with that vs code is now scaffolding for me a azure functions project that I could use to run on my code in this case server side so here this is the default template it's pretty boring right it's just saying hey get a request look at the query parameter see if they passed in their name and then say hello to their name I could add in here you know connect to cosmos db do a query on sequel return the results in my case though let's just even simplify this a little bit and we're just going to say return new okay object result and we'll just say hello world okay so here now is my azure function when I'm ready to go I could debug this locally I could now publish this to the cloud so I can say actually want this code to be running in azure so it can be called whenever I need to right so I have a function already here called jholyn blazer which is the function that I could publish this to or create a new one and so now this code can be available to run in the cloud right at the URL that I decide so if I actually switch back over here you'll notice I've already published this same app ahead of time at jholyn blazer and I've said hello so let's go ahead and test this out now now that we've actually added some more custom code we'll do the same thing .net run it's going to compile this app create the web assembly bridge pass all those static content files over to my browser in just a second and here if we now open up localhost 5000 again same data before but you'll notice here's my new azure functions tab and when I click this you'll notice it says loading for a second if you caught it it said loading while it was making that call and then as soon as it got the call back it says the message is hello right so it called that function the function to turn some data in this case it was just a string but I could very easily replace this with data from sql as well so for the last part of this I want to show now that I have this running locally how do I get it so that it could actually be accessed from somewhere that's not localhost 5000 right I mentioned before this needs to be in a storage account so how do I go actually get this into a storage account this is actually my favorite part of this entire demo because it could not be easier so I'm in visual studio code already I mentioned before that I have the azure functions extension already installed let me show you one other not tasks sorry let me show you one other extension that I have installed I have a lot of extensions because I love vs code in addition to the azure functions extension I have the azure storage extension which will let visual studio code know how to talk to a storage account and with this extension I can actually get a one-click publish to a storage account so first I need to generate the bits that I need to publish right so right now I've just been debugging how do I actually generate the static content that I need to upload to the storage account so if you're familiar with the .net cli this next command I run is going to be very familiar it's really just .net publish I'm saying publish me a release this isn't for debugging anymore I'm going to define my own output folder in this case just use the publish folder I could use the default if I wanted to and when I run that it's going to compile my app as well it's going to create a release profile for it and it's going to stick it in this folder I just defined called publish so if I come here once this is done compiling you'll notice I have a new folder called publish and I open up publish it's got all of my bits here now you might be wondering what are the files that I need to copy to my storage account there's some web config there's some dll's here the answer is right here do you see this dist folder for like distribution this is the folder that I want to copy and paste into a storage account you'll notice here's the index.html page this is kind of the static content it's going to return it's a pretty boring page it just pretty much says load up all the amazing web assembly stuff I've got some framework things here which have all my web assembly bits my bin folder which has my dll's so this dist folder is the one that I need to get into a storage account and I mentioned this was my favorite part of the demo because check this out I'm going to right click this folder and because I have that azure storage extension in vs code I have this one click gesture right here which is deploy to static website now really all it's doing is it's just going to copy this folder and copy it into an azure storage account for me and it's going to configure the azure storage account so that it can serve web content so I could do this manually I could do it through azure dev ops if I wanted to but for getting started I really like to just say you know what deploy a static website here it's going to ask me to either create a new storage account or select an existing one I already have a storage account called Jay Holland website so I'll just say you know what publish to that one and let's go ahead and tell it to deploy and you'll notice here it's saying copying over those 49 files into the web folder of this storage account so as it copies those files over it just takes a second now all those files have been copied and here I can now go to Jay Holland website dot z5 dot web dot core dot windows dot net that's super easy to fit on a business card but I can browse to that and here I'm just hitting that storage account and the storage account now has returned to me back all this static content that I've been able to render into this blazer page right so this is no longer localhost 5000 this is now my storage account running in the cloud in fact if I come over here to my storage account I can even open up this storage account there's no magic here let's use the storage explorer preview and here in my azure storage account this is just that disk folder right so all I'm pointing to is that I've configured this storage account to do I'll show you all the settings here static website hosting so I've turned this on which gives me a nice endpoint and then visual studio code went and copied all my files into this folder that it creates for web hosting and all that's happening is my browser makes a request to this domain and my storage account returns back this index to html that it can use to render the page right so no server anymore just storage now the last thing I want to talk about again I'm not in localhost anymore but I'm not really at a nice domain right I'm at jhollandwebsite.z5.web.core.windows.net and all of you can browse to this and it will work but it's not the kind of website I want for a blog right if you remember the one I actually wanted was jeff.holland.dev is the actual web page I wanted right and you'll notice here when I go to that I actually do have jeff.holland.dev set up calling my azure function and it even has a beautiful certificate so that it's htdps enabled so the last thing I want to talk about is how did I pull that part off right how did I actually get the storage account to be able to use with a custom domain like holland.dev or jeff.holland.dev so the other aspects here if you're going to go set this up for yourself and there's some great docs and samples as well is that in azure I have a few resources that are helping me out for one I've hosted my dns records inside of azure so I have holland.dev it's a registered domain in my azure account and I've actually told it and I apologize my zoom here is a little bit aggressive as I've been zooming in and out I've actually told it that when I go to holland.dev I've configured this to route to azure front door right so azure front door is a kind of like a cdn plus plus service for azure I could also serve this directly from a cdn but I like azure front door for a few features that it provides I've even had some other c names here too so I can go to like jeff.holland.dev or functions.holland.dev which will call my functions so I have some dns here and then I mentioned the azure front door this is the thing that gives me custom domains right so at my azure front door which is kind of the delivery network resource I've told it to serve resources for requests to holland.dev to jeff.holland.dev to functions.holland.dev I've set up some routing rules here so that it will redirect always to hdps front door gives me free certificates I've also redirected it so if you just go to holland.dev it's going to reroute you to jeff.holland.dev because I'm vain and I want my full name in the url and not just my last name right so there's a few other helper resources that if you're starting to build these architectures again that resource group I was showing you here this is all I needed so I have my function app I have my dns records I have my azure front door I have application insights to monitor the health and that's really everything that I need to get started in hosting my new blazer apps so hopefully you get a sense for how you can get started using tools like visual studio visual studio code create a serverless blazer app and while this is fun for things like blogs maybe we're all finished too is we also see people using this for bigger scenarios right so one of the things I'll leave this page up here on learning more one of the cool scenarios we ran into actually about a year ago is we had a large retailer who was running a massive promotion they need to be able to serve like 10,000 requests a second because they're going to be giving a huge huge deal and they were worried because their website traditionally was this massive wordpress site and they're like we it's really hard for us to scale that out to handle 10,000 requests a second so what they did is they took just the page that was going to be hit with the promotion they made that page into this serverless web architecture where they had azure cdn they had storage they had functions this was before blazer so they were using javascript but the world still lives the same like the the truth are there but they were able to run this massive promotion this page scaled incredibly elastically the only paid for the number of hits that it had and the rest of their site could go be happy as a wordpress site so this is a really interesting pattern to be aware of I'd encourage you to try it out for your own blogs or even if you want to try aspects of your website as a serverless web architecture as I mentioned if you want to learn more about blazer check out blazer.net there's templates and getting started docs there functions pair great with it for the server code so azure.com slash functions and thank you all very much for joining we'll see now set if we have any questions that have come in along the along the way we do actually have some questions I'm glad by the way well done thank you I'm always impressed this dude's such a good presenter let's start with this are you ready no matter what you use with azure functions is still one of the coolest and most amazing texts I just wanted to lob one to you I was gonna say I was gonna say is this my own tweet did I tweet some like adding blazer to it levels up the cool factor it's good to be cool you know every once in a while at least it was for me that one time now here's a serious one because I wanted a lob one to you and now it's a little bit of harder one Jeff Holland doesn't infinite scalability also mean infinite cost ah that's a fantastic question it can mean infinite cost so one of the things with functions that is fantastic is that you can scale per request but there's a term in you hear on the serverless sometimes called a denial of wallet attack where if you just hit this if someone actually did a DDoS right now on jeff.holland.dev you might rack up my bill a lot so one of the things that we allow today only in some of our more premium tiers for azure functions but as a way to kind of set caps so that you can be like look I want to have this be serverless but I never want to be paying more than whatever $500 a month so something to be aware of things like API management are also paired off and with functions so that you can do things like rate limiting and throttles so it can mean infinite cost even then it's whatever .00054 cents per request but it is something to be aware of yeah but if you're racking up that many calls your website is probably racking in more exactly right some ads on that right all right so last question when will .net core 30 be supported in azure functions yeah this is something we're really excited about so we actually made an announcement on github about two weeks ago in October so in a few weeks we'll have a preview of writing azure functions in .net core three it'll become generally available around quarter one of next year so keep an eye out for where you can start using that where we'll rewrite our entire host and let you write code that takes full advantage of .net core three in azure functions as well so I said that was the last question but I lied because people are putting them in and questions are important a question about this tutorial will this tutorial be available for people to look at yes so right now it's scattered in a few docs i'm actually working right now with the learn team to try to turn this into an actual step by step tutorial so there's a few docs both on the blazer page that talk about static hosting and the azure storage page that talk about this obviously it's a recording I kind of did everything step by step so it is there it's more scattered than I'd like it to be so one of the things we're doing before ignite is turning this tutorial into an actual module that people can follow step by step


Hi, everyone, this is Carol Hinkle, President of Triple E. I want to welcome everyone of you to this lecture on this very snowy day. Isn't this a good day to be inside watching a lecture? A couple of things I wanted to mention. When you sign on this year to Zoom webinar, there is a change. You want to make sure you put your first and last name please and your email in case it asks for that. And if you do it the first time you do it, you should from then on not have to repeat that process. Are we hoping? Also, I wanted to let you know that if you do miss one of our lectures for some reason and or want to look at it again, look at the email that Glenn has sent out to you with the link. And it'll show you at the bottom how you can watch it online or on TV, starting the following Thursday. I've done it. In fact, I watched Linda's lecture last year, last semester that way, and it was perfect. So do that. We want you to ask questions during the lecture or during the Q&A period. You can do it anytime. And you just go on your computer down at the bottom, touch it, and you'll see a Q&A button will come up. Type in your question and push send. And if you have an iPad like I do, it's at the top. So that should help and we really encourage you to do that. So now I'd like to introduce Beth Wood, who is our program chair and she's going to introduce Linda to us. Thank you, Beth. Thanks Carol. And welcome everybody to our first lecture of 2022. And I just want to reiterate what Carol said that our speakers really do look forward to your question. So please do submit them anytime during the lecture or during the Q&A and at about 2.45, we will start reading the questions to the speaker and she will reply. I'm very pleased to welcome back today's speaker, Linda Fowler. Linda spoke to us last semester and she received such excellent reviews that we asked her back in the semester and I was thrilled that she was able to accept and we're all thrilled to be here in this snowy day when nobody has to drive anywhere to make this happen. So that's great. Linda earned her BA from Smith College, her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester and she became a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She moved on to Dartmouth where she became a professor of government and now holds also the Frank J. Reagan Chair in Policy Studies, America. Linda also served as the director of the Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences at Dartmouth. Linda has received rewards for teaching at both Syracuse and Dartmouth as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She serves as a commentator on American politics on various media outlets including Vermont Public Radio and BT Digger. Her special research area and area of interest is the US Congress. She's written three books and numerous articles about the subject and this will be her focus today. Very pleased to welcome back Linda Fowler. Well, hello, I'm very glad I didn't have to drive to wherever you convene when it isn't COVID. So this is one good thing that's come out of the pandemic. I'm pleased to be back and also talking about the Congress which is an institution I've studied for about 45 years and which left me breathless last January 6th when I realized I didn't understand nearly as much of it as about it as I thought I did. So I've been giving a lot of thought to the whole question of the dysfunctionality of the legislature. And that's what I talked to you more generally about last fall, but this time I turned my attention to the Senate which is an institution that I started looking at more closely when I wrote a book on congressional oversight of foreign policy. Probably we'll be sharing, I'm trying a new technique to try to make Zoom a little less static and it may or may not work. But while I'm introducing myself, just caution you that mostly you're going to see pictures and slides and when I'm actually talking to you I'll try to let you see my face, whether it works or not, we'll see. But basically when you think about the Senate there are a lot of ways that people have characterized it. US senators themselves like to refer to their institution as quote the world's greatest deliberative body unquote and they view it as a place where the great issues of the day fund resolution. Outside observers have often referred to it as quote the world's most exclusive club. Members of the House, however, disdainfully dismissed the Senate as a group of egotistical show horses who preen in front of the cameras while the lower body does the hard work of legislating. Many political scientists regard the Senate as the most undemocratic feature of the US constitution, working majority rule, promoting unequal treatment of citizens and elevating sectional interests over national ones. And yet they also recognize how often the Senate has played a major role. This is particularly true in the area of foreign policy. In short, the Senate has witnessed many shining moments and depressing defeats at various times in its history as different characteristics become dominant. So I'm going to just share my screen right now with you. This wing over here is the Senate wing, the far wing is the house. And I thought I would share with you a bunch of just different eras in Senate history to remind you of what a prominent role it has played in our politics. So if you look, first of all, this is an old painting, it's actually I think of Philadelphia, but it captures the sense of immediacy and intensity and chaos that was characteristic of the early Senate. And I picked this picture, even though it's not completely accurate because here's George Washington standing up before a group of his colleagues. And in this case, Washington in his first term as president believed that the Senate should be given, playing the role of giving the president advice and consent. And the first investigation in which Washington sought advice and consent was after a stinging defeat in the Indian wars. And he went to the senators to talk to them about it and why the US had been, the soldiers had been massacred. And when he came back, he wrote in his diary that the senators had been extremely rude and disrespectful. And he quote, was damned if he'd ever go there again. And no president ever has gone to test to give, engage and give and take with senators or anybody else other than the state of the union message in which of course they have the floor to themselves. Other times that I think you might find interesting, this is a number of senators have been famous orators. Henry Clay of course was a southerner from South Carolina, was noted for his oratorical skill in trying and an ability to make compromises. This is a cartoon of him tangling with Andrew Jackson and Jackson's in the 1830s as Jackson was opposing the national bank. And so you have Clay engaging in some dentistry where he's basically trying to stop Jackson from saying anything. Daniel Webster Dartmouth, one of Dartmouth's most favorite alum was noted for his rhetoric. And one of the most famous things of his was during the war of 1812 when he basically admonished his fellow colleagues that politics stops at the water's edge. It's also the case that if you look many investigations or featured senators, this one is the Truman committee which investigated profiteering in World War II. This committee did an amazing job of uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud in the procurement process. And it elevated Truman who before that was an obscure senator from the chosen by the political machine in St. Louis before that he'd been a haberdasher. And this made his career and gave him a national reputation such that Franklin Roosevelt chosen for vice president in the 1944 election. Another important investigation were the Fulbright hearings. You see Senator Fulbright on the left talking to a senator from Oregon who was a prominent opponent and the only person who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And on the right is John Kerry who was testifying after returning from Vietnam and famously made the remark to the senators how can you ask someone to be the last man dying for a hopeless cause? He of course went on to become a senator himself and a presidential candidate. It's also the case that when you look at the Senate there have been some fairly nefarious categories. This is Joe McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin who seized on anti-communism and plowed through Hollywood and the state department and the defense department and finally met his comeuppance when a man named Welch who was an attorney representing the Department of Defense basically looked in the eye in front of the television cameras after McCarthy had said there were hundreds of thousands of traders in the U.S. Army. And mind you, this was less than a decade after the U.S. had triumphed in World War II. So it was pretty shocking claim that McCarthy was making and Welch looked him in the eye and said, have you no shame Senator McCarthy? Have you no shame? And that was sort of the beginning of the end of Senator McCarthy who died later in disgrace having lost his bid, having won his bid for reelection but basically having no further role in American politics. This is a group of senators during the civil rights debate of 1960 where they held the floor for 120 hours. They have cuts and they're taking their ease while one of their number was holding the floor. And in those days of filibuster, you actually had to stand on the floor and talk and there were no bathroom breaks. So what you had to do was to sort of tag team with other people who shared your cause. These guys actually look like they're having a pretty good time. And these are the Keating Five who were implicated in the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s when so many savings and loan banks failed. Alan Cranston, Dennis DeCancini, John Klenn, John McCain, Don Regal. So a couple of American heroes John Glenn and John McCain particularly who were caught, they were lobbied by Keating of a wealthy developer in Arizona who basically had defrauded the government and banks of lots of money. And all of them were investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee, but only McCain was reprimanded. And perhaps this, the impeachment trial, please note that I wasn't able to find any shining moments for the Senate in contemporary times. And this trial, which could have been so important, basically turned out to be a bit of a farce because the senators, many of whom didn't take it seriously. That said, I hope you now have the point that there are many consequential moments in American politics that have to do with the Senate. So in this talk, we're gonna talk about the many ways in which the Senate is failing the country and why that matters. We'll turn to the Senate's place in the Constitution and its many anti-democratic features. We'll then consider how informal norms and structures evolved that enabled the Senate to function more effectively as long as the members adhered to these norms and structures. We'll then consider why the norms have failed and illustrate these problems with the filibuster before drawing conclusions about the consequences of America's Senate being so problematic today. If you think about the, wait a minute, if you think about the background of the Senate and now I'm going to stop sharing my screen and come back to me, I hope you can all see me. In most democracies, the so-called upper chamber, for example, the House of Lords in the UK is severely constrained in the influence inside the legislative branch and with respect to the executive branch. In other words, upper chambers in most democracies have maybe an advisory role, maybe a consenting role about something, some upper chambers act as sort of a Supreme Court, for example, because most democracies don't have one. But the US is unusual because the Senate has so much formal power inside the Constitution. The Senate has had its moments of greatness. It's also had its share of pettiness, corruption, and paranoia. But what we see in the 21st century is that the reputation and the power of the Senate has waned considerably in the 21st century. There are no giants in the Senate today, few policy innovators, and little in the way of legislative accomplishment. So let's talk about the Constitution and why the Senate is, the Senate is a very paradoxical institution because it can both be a facilitator of democracy and a great obstructor, and the obstructing powers are written into the Constitution. We have a Senate because of what was called the great compromise. In my view, calling it the great compromise is a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig because basically it was the price for getting small states like Connecticut and Delaware to ratify the Constitution. And it wasn't just that these states wanted a Senate with equal representation for themselves. They also threatened that if the framers in Philadelphia didn't give them equal representation in an upper chamber, they were going to sign treaties with the British government. The slave states, many of which were quite populist at the time, especially Virginia, they went along with the Senate and actually embraced it as well because they saw it as a means of protecting slavery. And in fact, they turned out to be correct because slavery was a predominant issue throughout the, up until the Civil War. And it was Southern senators were able to so effectively protect it from changing norms and changing opinion in the Northern states. The anti-federalists, however, were a group of small D Democrats and they were against anything that put obstacles between individual citizens and their public officials. So they didn't like the Senate because the constituencies were so large as Senator represented a whole state. They didn't like the fact that elections were infrequent and that senators wouldn't have to go back to their state legislatures for approval very long. They didn't like the whole fact that state senators were indirectly elected by state by state legislatures. They saw the Senate as basically weakening the power of the states in some ways by making treaties, approving treaties that would be binding on the states. They lost that argument. And so we have a Senate with equal representation for all states. Washington tried to put a good face on it and he often referred to the Senate as quote the saucer that cools the Republican tea. So back in the day when people were drinking tea they would pour some of it into their saucer and sip it from the saucer when it was too hot. And so the idea was that this small body with long terms and a more diverse constituency of a statewide nature would slow down any of the unimpassioned majority that might come to dominate the House. So when you look at the Senate though what you see is a lot of anti-democratic features. The indirect election until 1913 when we had to amend the constitution to provide direct election, lengthy six year terms which influenced staggered elections. So only a third of the Senate is elected at any one time. And again, this was to prevent a popular mood from seizing hold of the national government. The main thing that's most controversial today is equal representation of all states, the great compromise. If you look today, citizens in Wyoming have 70 times greater representation in the Senate than citizens in California. And this distortion keeps growing. In today's Senate for example where you have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans Democrats represent 41 and a half million more citizens than Republicans do. If you look just at the 41 Senate votes that are needed to sustain a filibuster the number gets even more distorted. The Senate advises and consents to treaties and approves executive branch nominations and judicial appointments. It is a useful check on our only nationally elected official but it also means that when presidents come into office they have to contend with the fact that senators might interfere with the appointment of their cabinets or their appointment of ambassadors. We have that right now with one senator putting hold on nominations for ambassadorships because he doesn't like a particular policy of a president Biden. What this means for example is that we do not have an ambassador in the Ukraine where there's a crisis brewing with Russia. Many democracies have an upper chamber as I noted but the US is one of the few that makes the upper chamber a co-equal branch when it comes to legislating. Bills have to pass both houses. When there are different versions which is usually the case there's a conference committee that reconciles them and then they have to repass a new bill. This is extraordinary. Most legislatures don't do this. And what it does is create multiple veto points to thwart the majority, to protect inequality and to promote sexualism and regionalism in our government. When you have multiple veto points like this it weakens Congress with respect to the president and it also weakens the Congress with respect to the Supreme Court. When the Senate can't function, Congress can't function and basically then the other two branches feel free to pursue their own agendas. So things that were not necessarily all bad because over time as the Senate evolved it developed a lot of informal norms and rules and structures that enabled it to operate in a more effective way. The small size and enable members to get to know each other on a personal basis. And this often fostered friendships across party lines that made it easier for the senators to get along and to work with each other. The rules and also empowered individuals to pursue their own agendas. It was easy for senators to amend bills. It was also easy for senators to obstruct bills using the filibuster, but mostly they were restrained in the way they did these things. The big advantage that senators had was their larger visibility because they represented statewide constituencies. They had long terms to establish a reputation in Washington and they frequently had presidential ambitions. Most important however to the power influence of Senate was a very distinctive culture. And it was that culture that earned it the nickname of being the world's most exclusive club. Basically there were norms of reciprocity that senators would go out of their way to accommodate each other unless it was actually something they were against. They had enormous loyalty to the Senate as an institution which frequently rose above party and also above their own narrow state interests. There was a large respect from minority viewpoints because members were always a well aware well if we are harsh on the minority right now when I'm in the majority, I could be in that situation in the future. And so there was a lot of leeway given to people who were not in the majority party. There was a tolerance for mavericks and there was a lot of opportunity for policy entrepreneurship. Particularly important was the influence of individual senators in foreign and defense policy. This was because the Senate had two very important committees armed services and foreign relations that attracted people of real ability and stature and who then used these committees to be a major, major force in foreign and defense policy. And I always, in the book I published in 2015 called Watch Dogs on the Hill, I tell the story of a senator from, oh, now I've lost his name, Banda, any rate, he was a newly elected, newly appointed chair of the Center for Relations Committee in 1947 after the Republicans gained control of the House and Senate. Truman was president and at that time there was a growing concern about changes that were happening in the Soviet Union. And after George Marshall who sent his famous, George Kennan sent his famous long telegram from Moscow, pointing out that the Russians were really planning domination of Europe. It was Senator Banda, whatever his name is, who went to Harry Truman and had a long talk with him and basically said to Truman, you need to go on radio and address the nation and scare the hell out of the American public. Those are his words. And Truman listened to him, did give that address. And at the same time, the senators took the lead in promoting first an aid to Greece and Turkey to try to help them recover after World War II. And that bill eventually evolved into the Marshall Plan which of course was instrumental and reconstructing Europe. The idea today that any senator would have the stature to go to the president and telling what to do and be listened to and then actually have the senators be the key people that carried out the policy that the administration wanted is just something we don't even think about today. And I think that's a real shame. So when you think about the role of the Senate in foreign policy, they have a norm because of the national stature and expertise that these senators developed, they had the capacity to aid the president as happened across party lines with Truman and Senator Vander something or other to aid the president. But they also had the capacity to check the president. And that of course, what Senator Fulbright did to let Lyndon Johnson in those 1966 hearings. Johnson and Fulbright were old friends from the Senate. They were both conservatives, Southern Democrats. Johnson felt enormously betrayed when Fulbright had those widely publicized hearings. And the hearings really changed public sentiment dramatically, turned the public against the war. And of course, ultimately the war became so unpopular that by 1968, Johnson decided not to seek re-election. So the capacity for chairs, particularly in foreign policy to both help the president in rough patches and to call the president to account when he was out of line has been historically very important. In other words, the Senate became a place where the naughtiest problems were tackled through a process of negotiation and bargaining among individual senators. Now, this picture was not always rosy. Witness the slide I just showed you with respect to civil rights where the Senate developed this reputation for obstruction but basically the Senate had the potential was there. And the real problem of course was that things began to change. So I'm now going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to go back to sharing my screen and hope it works. One of the most important things is that careers have changed. The kinds of careers that senators have before they got to the office. Mostly senators were governors. They were people who had were people of real distinction like John Glenn, for example, the astronaut. They were experienced public figures. They had been in public life. They had made a lot of connections with other people in public life. And that was one reason why they commanded respect and national visibility. Today, the careers of senators before they arrived in the chamber is different. You have a lot of former House members most of whom cut their teeth on the highly partisan ideologically polarized politics introduced by Newt Gingrich and the House in 1995. And when they moved on to the Senate they brought those attitudes with them. And you see people, and it was basically it's better to be right than to get something done.  And that view became more and more prevalent. You have a lot of business people who decided it would be fun to run for the Senate, I guess. And they're often people of real talent and very well-meaning, but they don't know how to get along in a body in which they are one of a hundred. And so very few of them have turned out to be effective and oftentimes they don't last very long. You get celebrities and increasingly you get people who run as outsiders. I should be a senator because I had nothing to do with Washington and national fairs. That would give the framers heart palpitations if they could hear that kind of rhetoric because their idea was that if the Senate was gonna be the saucer that cooled the Republican T it was because you had men of superior experience and knowledge of public affairs who would have the wisdom to do that. And you certainly can't say that about many of the people in the Senate today. I don't wanna imply that everybody in the Senate is a disaster, that's certainly not the case. But the public face of the Senate that we see is not one that commands much in the way of respect. A lot of this came about because of electoral politics. It's primaries now that are primarily choosing senators because many states are homogeneous for one party the other and the competition is happening in the primary. And we all know that participation in primaries is very low. That's not true in Vermont, New Hampshire, but it is true in most of the country. And so the people who tend to get their voters to turn out are the extremists and the ideologues and or the single issue candidates who can attract interest group support and money. Campaign finance, which has become an increasingly disturbing aspect of our politics means that many Senate campaigns are nationalized with interest groups going in and running ads that have nothing to do with people in the state of New Hampshire, for example, where we have a lot of that going on because our Senator Maggie Hasen is viewed as being very vulnerable. So with polarization, what we've seen over time is that the years that were the heyday of the Senate, the Senate with the norms of reciprocity and courtesy and whatever, were the years in which polarization was very low. And those were the years, as you see in this graph, those were the years when Congress actually did things and the Senate did things. And if you look at the blue line, which is a polarization between Democrats and Republicans, that is to say how far apart they are on an ideological scale, you see that for a while the Senate resisted what was the trends that were happening in the Senate. And that's probably because of the six year terms, but increasingly the Senate is as polarized as the House. And therefore the kind of clubby atmosphere has simply disappeared. One of the things that generally has happened is that as senators come from backgrounds where they're not very interested in legislating and have very little experience in legislating, they're not that interested in committee work. And these graphs are from some of my research. And basically the one on the left for defense policy, the one on the right for foreign policy show House and Senate differences in the kinds of committee work. If you look for defense policy, that until basically the 2000s, the Senate was almost as active, or at least often as active as the House in overseeing defense policy. And basically the House, which are the gray diamonds compared to the Senate's little red dots, the House has also shown less interesting committee work, but not as extreme a decline. The same pattern is true with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senate Foreign Relations Committee used to be the most prestigious committee in the House or the Senate, and the most sought after. And now it's basically just sort of going along and members don't invest very much time in it, or certainly as much as they used to. In addition, you see, and this is the thing that disturbs me so much, the lack of interest in deliberating about war. So these very steep dark gray spikes are combat deaths. And when you look, you can see the Korean War, which is the first spike, and look at the number of hearings that were held in the House and Senate committees when combat deaths went way up. The same thing happened in the Vietnam era and the post-Vietnam era. And then if you look at the little, there's a tiny little nub in 1992 where casualties from the Gulf War and then the Afghanistan War. It's really disturbing to me that America's longest war involving Iraq and Afghanistan compared to past wars prompted so little examination on the part of these defense committees. I think the most important thing we need to think about, though, wait a minute, I don't want you to see that yet. In addition to the decline of committees, what that means is that party leaders have taken over the legislative process in both chambers. They control the agenda what gets talked about and the procedures that determine whether amendments are offered and how much people can talk and so forth. And basically, because the party leaders' agendas are so crowded, the quality of legislating is really deteriorated. And you find a lot of bills passed that have a language that is unclear and therefore easily litigated once the law has been adopted. That was particularly true for Obamacare. But I think that, and so the party leaders and are now the most visible, they're the ones that the president deals with and everybody else has become sort of an audience for what they're doing. And these are talented people for the most part and to stand around and not have very much say over what's happening, I think is one reason why you see so many of the more capable lawmakers gradually leaving the institution. I think about Rob Portman, I think about Senator Toomey in Pennsylvania, a committed conservative and one who took the business of legislating very seriously. You see the same thing with some key Democrats as well. So in other words, if you look at the Senate today, you're gonna see very few masters of policy or procedure or very few people who have the chops to go toe to toe with a president. This was disturbingly clear during the Trump administration, but it isn't much better with the Biden years. Although the numbers of the 50-50 split has certainly given a few people like the Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, a lot of leverage. So the president, having ignored him initially and his opposition to the build back better legislation, eventually realized he had to reach out to him, but by then I think it was too late. So in a sense, what I see now that senators are performing politics, they're not actually practicing politics. I think it's fair to say that members routinely evaluate the important norms of comedy, reciprocity, bargaining and respect for minority rights that used to grease the wheels in a fundamentally anti-democratic institution. I think the most important thing is the loss of institutional loyalty in favor of hyper-partisanship. One of the things that I expected to happen in the Senate was that eventually the senators would basically get tired of being bullied by President Trump and that they would basically say they're more interested in protecting the reputation of the Senate than they are in furthering the interests of the president. And in the past, that would have happened. We saw quite dramatically in the Watergate years where eventually Republican senators led by minority leader, Howard Baker, Wendell Richard Nixon and said, basically we don't have the votes to protect you and it would be better if you resigned. And but of course something very different happened during Trump's two impeachment trials. One of the things that is probably symptomatic of the problems with the Senate is the prominence of the filibuster.  This is Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith goes to Washington, film that was very important in 1938 and one that I still show to my students. Jimmy Stewart was asked to fill a vacant seat and he was asked, he discovers partway through the movie because the powers that be in the Senate and interest groups thought he would be a chump and easily manipulated. And when he figures that out, he takes to the Senate floor and he attempts to persuade the country about the wisdom of his position. And he is inundated by a media blitz controlled by his antagonist and finally collapses on the floor in a very dramatic moment. Today, the Senate filibuster we're more likely to see something like this. This happens to be Ted Cruz reading from Dr. Seuss Green Eggs and Ham for 22 hours. He wasn't actually filibustering a bill or even an important principle. He was simply trying to persuade his colleagues that they shouldn't vote for public funding for healthcare. He had no particular bill in mind or anything else. And I think that so we've come to replace our Jimmy Stewart view of the filibuster with basically senators kind of manipulating it for their own particular ends. What is the filibuster? Well, most people are surprised that it's not in the constitution only in that of the constitution allows each chamber to develop its own rules. It was adopted in the very first Senate that senators could speak for as long as they had the energy to hold the floor. And basically that held fire despite or held true until 1917 when rule 22 was passed to allow senators with a two thirds of the majority to vote for cloture that is to shut off debate. Since then, the filibuster has been used sparingly and it was mostly used by Southern senators who felt very intensely about civil rights legislation. And you can be critical if you will but for them, this was a constituency matter of literally of such magnitude for their way of life, they thought that it sort of fit the norm of you only filibuster if it's something of enormous importance to you and your constituents. Eventually, the Democrats were able to invoke cloture and pass the civil rights legislation in 1964 and civil rights legislation in the mid-60s mostly because after Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory a lot of new Democrats came into the Congress. So they had the votes to overturn the filibuster. Beginning with some battles over Supreme Court nominees and this particularly happened when Reagan became president and was confronted with the Democratic Congress that basically Democrats started using the filibuster to obstruct Reagan's agenda. And when there were Democrats in the White House Republicans when they controlled the Senate returned the favor. And so increasingly you had senators using filibusters more and more to accomplish policy goals of obstructing the president. So in 1975, the filibuster was changed that three-fifths of the membership could vote to cut off debate. And then again in 2010 nominations were subject to cloture votes of a simple majority. The thing that's key about this filibuster is the public doesn't actually know how many filibusters are being threatened. You don't actually have to be Jimmy Stewart or even Ted Cruz and have a talking filibuster. And Ted Cruz to his credit did stand for 22 hours. I'm not quite sure how he did it. I think he had colleagues who helped him but many people think that if we went back to the talking filibuster where you'd actually have to hold the floor that that might go a long way to reducing the hundreds of times in which members are using it to block legislation. But even reforming, even going back to a talking filibuster which after all had been the norm until the mid-70s was viewed as a threat. To people who thought they might be in the minority in the future and people who are in the minority right now and so that didn't happen. Basically though, when you have this uninterrupted talking every bill starts with a premise that it needs 60 votes and very few things in American politics have 60 votes. The threat of the filibuster gives a single senator like in this case, the senator from West Virginia enormous leverage to extract concessions. It is a wildly undemocratic thing to permit. And what's interesting is that in state legislatures which have Senate, they don't allow unlimited debate. They don't require two thirds majorities or three fifths majorities. They just act like a co-equal branch subject to majority rule. So this is a unique phenomenon in the Senate and it is totally out of control by almost any measure. So to conclude, let's just talk briefly about why the dysfunction of the Senate matters. The Constitution was set up the Congress to be the most powerful branch and when it doesn't work, the government can't function. Presidents get pressured to act to get something done because legislation is stalled. They use executive orders. They abuse the regulatory process. They engage in unilateral war-making. They become secretive. The Supreme Court drops norms of deference to elected officials. It legislates from the bench. One of the reasons why an activist court is a conservative court is the lawmakers know they can get away with it because Congress is stymied particularly because of the filibuster in the Senate. Interest groups increase pressure to circumvent the legislative process to promote their particular agendas and citizens protest. One of the reasons why you had the protests on the left over Black Lives Matter and a variety of other things and protests on the right about too much government control is that citizens feel that their government is out of control. And one of the reasons why it's out of control is that the Congress doesn't work. The Senate is a major contributor to this dysfunction. Qualified people don't wanna stay. Those seeking to replace them are culture warriors rather than potential statesmen and stateswomen. The only lawmakers with national visibility and stature to challenge an imperial president are the leaders of the two parties. But they are under enormous pressure from their own members to either unite behind the president if it's of their party or to undermine him to demonstrate the president's brand if he's in the opposition. With party control of government so closely divided, everything becomes a battle for the next election. And it's no wonder that people feel that democracy doesn't work in this country any longer. So let me stop there and take some questions. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen here and hope that you can all see me. It looks like there are quite a few questions. I start reading them for you Linda. Yes please. Okay, we have a couple related to Peter Welch and I'll combine those. If Peter Welch is elected to the Senate and what areas could he have a role or the most impact and then a related question to that is just one second here. If Peter Welch is elected to the Senate he could reach age 80 during his first term in office. Given the importance of seniority, would it be better for Vermont to elect a younger person who would likely be more able to build more seniority as a senator? Well, let me start first by saying that I certainly don't want to imply that I think Congressman Welch is a culture warrior or one of the people of inferior credentials. He actually is one of the exceptions to the rule I think of somebody who has been a serious legislator while he was in the house has quite a reputation for working across party lines and will probably bring that reputation with him into the Senate if he's elected. The question of age in an institution now where seniority, the influence of seniority depends a lot on the committee system. And as you move the influence over policy out of committee and into the party leader's hands seniority becomes less important because all of the bills in the end are put to get packaged and passed by party leaders. So seniority has been an advantage. Certainly Patrick Leahy used his seniority on appropriations to help Vermont with it's a number of problems financially. But because of this highly polarized institution now I don't think seniority matters as much as it did when Patrick Leahy first ran for the Senate. Interesting, okay. And again, related to something you just mentioned regarding the fact that Peter Welch has reached across the aisle. Do you foresee any glimmers of bipartisanship in the Senate, perhaps in Ukraine, the Supreme Court nominee, other areas? The potential is always there because it still is a small body. And I think what I was expecting was that after Trump left the White House that the senators would get together and decide that they wanted to change their institution so that they weren't completely dominated by the Senate, I mean by the presidency that as individuals they could see that their power had become very much diminished and that they would see reason, personal incentives to try to restore their institution for their own benefit as well as the benefit of the country. So there are some glimmers that maybe that's happening. The most important ones being bipartisan legislation on foreign affairs to end the emergency declaration on the war on terror, which has been used very expansively by presidents to go adventuring all over the Middle East. And there have been some other signs as well. In many ways, when Madison wrote about our constitutional system, he said, and I quote, sloppily, the interest of the man should be joined with the interest of the institution. And therefore each institution will have the incentive to be jealous of its own prerogatives and its own powers. And that will create a dynamic of checks and balance. So checks and balances was really all about the ambition of individual politicians to protect their institution. And what happened when the senators lost loyalty to their institution in favor of loyalty to their party and loyalty to their president, that whole Madisonian logic fell apart. And I keep hoping that the members are gonna realize that that they can't be powerful individually unless they do something to make the institution work more effectively. Okay. In view of the polarization of the Senate, do you foresee some senators leaving their party to become an independent like Angus King or even changing parties like Jim Jeffers did a few years ago? Well, Jim Jeffers was the last moderate. Before that, we've always had a few Democrats who were more conservative than a few Republicans and a few Republicans who were more liberal than the most conservative Democrats. So you had Jake Javits and Jim Jeffers who were Republicans who were more liberal than many Southern Democrats and Rice Versa. All of those people have disappeared. And the problem is getting on the ballot as an independent. So the ballot access process is really rigged to favor the two major parties. And you can have somebody like Angus King who had developed a reputation of being a very effective governor in Maine, being able to get on the ballot and hold his seat as an independent. You had the unusual situation of Bernie Sanders being an independent as well. This tends to be happened in small states where it's easier for individuals to sort of build an independent coalition. Lisa Murkowski was another one who won her reclaim to her seat as an independent. But for people in a large state, it's really, really difficult. So I don't think that there's a lot of that. What I think really needs to happen is that more centrist Republicans need to run in Republican primaries and more centrist Democrats need to run in Democratic primaries and try to pull lawmakers in both parties closer to the center and therefore closer to each other. And if that were to happen, it would be a lot easier for them to work together and engage and give and take. Okay. Do you believe that President Biden still sees himself to some degree as a senator? And if so, is this a plus or minus? I right now, I think it's a minus because the Senate he served in doesn't exist anymore. And most of the people he knew on the Republican party have gone. There's been a lot of turnover in the Senate. And the few that are left in the Democratic party that he knew probably would have worked closely with him anyway, he didn't need to know them personally. And I think he was convinced that if the old Senate were asked to reconvene itself and work on compromise, that that was still possible. And I think he's learned a very hard lesson. Okay. Regarding the role of Joe Manchin, are there ways that in the future that the roadblocks that we've arrived at could possibly, because of his involvement, could possibly be circumvented? Well, one of the things that was presented to Manchin in cinema was going back to a talking filibuster, and which would have made, we would still have the filibuster, but it would be used less frequently. I think you have to remember that just because all of the attention has focused on a Manchin in cinema, we should also be looking at Republican senators from places like Pennsylvania, where the Build Back Better bill is enormously popular. And because Manchin in cinema had taken all the heat, Senator Toomey has gotten a free ride. So has Senator Portman in Ohio, both Republicans, both serious lawmakers, but basically they haven't had to engage because everybody's been focused on the filibuster and on these two obstructionist Democrats. But it is one aspect of the Senate that individual members can become disproportionately important. My own view is that the Democrats should be very careful with Manchin in cinema. They probably can't win West Virginia with any other Democrat but Manchin. And so they ought to be careful about the way they talk to him and treat him and the same with cinema because they probably would lose the seat and the majority if they are too harsh. So that's a dilemma. And it's tough when you look at Manchin. Trump carried his state by more than 20%. If he's representing his constituents, which is his responsibility, he has to look hard at that number because there are an awful lot of people who voted for a very different vision of the country. But so that's the dilemma that senators and House members always have. Right. Well, thank you. I think that's unfortunately all the time we have, but there's certainly a lot to think about and be concerned about as the time goes on. Thank you, Linda. My pleasure. Take care now. Well, thank you so much, Linda. We really enjoyed that and see you all again next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.


Okay, we're going to start off our morning meeting today by showing how we're feeling. Like we talked about yesterday, we're not going to do clouds anymore. We're going to do rocks today. And we went over three types of rocks that we've learned about earlier this year. Who remembers one of the names of our rocks? Sadie? And the classroom today, you saw what our typical morning meeting looks like. It's usually between 20 to 30 minutes, depending on what all we want to present there. Okay, what is the last rock we talked about yesterday? Nine? Metamorphic rock. Wonderful. Thank you. In the morning meeting, I tried to do two things. One, I tried to give the students an opportunity to process their emotions and to kind of invite the classroom community into that so that we can kind of tackle those things throughout the course of the day. And that's something that they've had to learn over the course of the year. How to first express their emotions, then also how to respond to other people's emotions in a productive and appropriate way. And the second thing that I try to do in the morning meeting is kind of frame where the rest of the day is going. What was Igneous Rock? Sadie? Igneous Rock was a type of magma that was made out of the ground. Something that I like to do whenever I can is find ways to integrate, especially vocabulary from other subjects into our morning meeting for a couple of reasons. And it's because a question that I think is on a lot of teachers' minds is how do I find time to have like a meaningful morning meeting? Igneous Rock. Okay, so it's any magma that's hard and you look at how the act is listening. And so really the way that I can preserve that academic time that we always seem to run short on, but also really focus on that social-emotional piece which is critical is to bring them together.  Yes, I love that. So, sense, sense and all of that. And so, by doing that, the kids are able to review what they know about the different types of rocks in this example and also kind of make a personal connection to it. Do we have another thought for Igneous Rock, Ben? That's allowing them to practice with figurative language. It's allowing them to practice expressing their emotions. Ooh. Everybody go, ooh. Ooh. But it's also a way of giving, just building the snappies around that vocabulary so that they have it at the ready and it's not just another word but it's a word that has meaning and it's a word that's been applied to them. Emily? It could mean that you've been through a lot to get to the point where you are right now because an Igneous Rock goes through a lot to become a rock. There you go. One of the biggest challenges in creating the classroom environment that we have now is equipping them with the vocabulary. So before I could even really integrate the science like I did today and use that vocabulary as a way of communicating the student's emotions, we first had to learn what those emotions are. Think right now how you're doing today. See which of those rocks you kind of match up with and we're going to share. And I'm just going to say the name of a rock and if that describes you, right now you can go ahead and stand up.  Part of that is just providing an environment that's educational like having the posters that show the different facial expressions and emotions but I wanted to go deeper than that. So community theme of our classroom is being a superhero in disguise. And we started off with some key texts in which the characters seem to be something other than they really were in the end.  And so the discussion that followed that was that each of our students are good people and they're wonderful people and they're people that we want to be friends with. But if we don't act and speak in a certain way, we're hiding that part of ourselves from the rest of the world.  Thank you both for your very good report. Adri, what would you like to say? I'm going to cheer. 3, 2, 1. Some of the challenges that I had to overcome as I was learning to and still am learning to overcome as I implemented these strategies really had an origin in learning to take students where they're coming from. We're going to be going to our seats. The students come from very different places. Even within the same classroom and all of that that they bring with them if not handled in like a delicate and respectful way in a way that affirms that student can really impact a student in a negative way. Because if they're willing to really open it up to you, you kind of have to know what's the next step. How can we show the others in our classroom community who we are and what we're dealing with, but also in a way that allows me to move on and be productive with my day.


The study presents a methodology for generating land cover change maps using landsat satellite data which involves addressing challenges such as backdating, maintaining high accuracies, and automating the process. The methodology includes a retrospective analysis to generate training and test data for historical periods lacking reference information, and results in overall accuracies of over 92% for all four maps. This article was authored by Juan Jose Vidal McEwer, a late Zabala, Miguel Niñarola, and others.


Hi, I'm Jean Zavo, I'm president of the Alabama Herb Society here in Montgomery, Alabama. In the year 2016, I entered the internship program to become a master gardener. And that's my first connection with the Alabama Extension. Our group, the Alabama Herb Society, were meeting inside the Crump Center here as our monthly meeting places. And the garden here was developed by a nice gentleman, but he became ill and could not work with it anymore. So the garden became kind of overgrown and such. And we decided that we would try to take it on as our community project. We have several areas in this property here where the really washes real bad. And I contacted Mallory Kelly. She got me in touch with Laura Bell Cooley. And we invited Laura Bell and she agreed to come over to do a rain garden workshop. After that workshop was done, we came out here and looked all through the garden and everything and we decided we'd go for it. And the opportunity to receive a grant came up too through ADEM and we pursued that and we were awarded that grant. The rain gardens, we hope to use them also as a teaching tool and to develop that and make people more aware of the purpose of rain gardens and what they do. People need to discover and know about the Alabama Extension because they have such knowledge.  And they are so well-rounded they can cover so many subjects that people are not aware of it. They do. And it needs to be out there more so that more people can know and get involved with Alabama Extension.


So when did you first know that there was these that these protests were happening and something was really changing? Well, I Because I have a brother young brother in Iran who was born when I was 15 14 as I raised them up. He feels like my own my own son. He he's in Iran. So he Like because of him like I followed the regime that they followed what's happening in Iran I'm never going back to Iran obviously, but because I thought I'm just following it I kind of what was happening there and it's see it really started the current Revolution that's that's going on and I would give you why I think there's a moral revolution later that There was one girl back in 2020. I think it was 2019 2020 Who alone and this wasn't the protest. This was it's a normal day in Tehran like a square Somewhere and she if you search girl of Engelop Engelop Street, E N G H E N G H L E L A B street You will see there's one girl who got on the top of that like a electricity generator on a short way to street city Power and another kind of like a five-foot five-foot Heights and and took her scarf and put it on its sake And I would and she just stands she stood there and someone took a picture of her and she became an icon to the extent of other girls a Other goes doing the same to the extent that they all of those like power generator things that that's already had in a city Probably they control the power grids They like put wires on it. That's something that you can't go on top of it anymore and then they That's that's it's really the current moral revolution. I don't think would have been put what I've been come so soon Without that one girl who chose to go like alone with no agenda She was just put up as she put her Did anything happen to her? Do we know if anything happened to her? They were searching for her for years and later they got her. She's in prison, right? She's in prison. Oh god So So you think so that's when it kind of started or that's when it came in kind of consciousness people started to pay attention Yes Tell us a little bit of how so you were following it and and when did you notice that this time it was different? uh When I saw that Well, so it was pretty sudden it was like that happened and there were probably people people's consciousness But it was very sudden after the death of a killing of Masa Amini in Iran You you explain the situation the story I'll just say quickly that like she was just mind-gorn business and the morality police so I have I have I have I Have I have recollections of morality police how it looks like but I believe it's like you're not you're not wearing your hijab properly You're like you're like you're showing your wrists like you shouldn't that should show I shouldn't show your wrist They should be covered. You know then like get in the van No, and they if you don't get in the van that they will bring leashes to you and like pull you to the van and take you to the to To the police station to like teach you to reeducate you there has been cases of someone family of my friend who she was like a 35 year old woman and because of her was showing they put her in the van and Said read all of these pamphlets gave the pamphlets to her So I'm not gonna read this pamphlet the platform so we're about like how hijab is important And you should cover yourselves and how to properly cover yourself. It's like I'm not reading and they said We're gonna take a test and if you don't pass that test, we're not letting you out of this van Yeah, we don't care like we're gonna keep you girl like so Yeah, so there's something similar probably happened to my side me knee as well and They're and ambiguity because a dictatorship and the free fall of information is and there's no journalism We don't know exactly what happened, but she happened to die Some people are saying that's where someone saw him saw Beating her head on the on the pavements as someone says no, it's okay We don't know exactly what I was she died and if she died the police custody because because of that and There was at that point People in Iran looked at themselves like especially men Looked at themselves like we have been our lives agents of morality police ourselves Like one morality police cannot force like 80 million people to like follow these roads We have been enforcing these on cell onto our sisters onto our wives and to our mothers ourselves and There was a real real moral reckoning real at that And this is we're not talking about their free society when free exchange of ideas on forums and debates can have no It's like in absolute death silence the leadership that was within each individual person and moral reckoning they had Are we on the side of morality police or are we on inside of them and Like when we see like this Has been exceeding this videos that of women burning their hijab and their men clapping for them It has been things like for example, I guess you say this my friend sister She like there's telling us that when whenever she was she went to work at night So when she was coming back at night, and there were always men even though she was like dressed properly Men there were always like oh you pretty lady, you know, they want to get on the car We can give you a ride back home like they were like they're harassing like normal people and That used to be a commonplace, but after my size I mean he's dead They don't see that anymore Like they're not harassing when we normally mention stop harassing women They stopped there because there was a real moral reckon it's like on whose side are we? like and Has been like I also need to say this other story One of my friends she had a sister in Iran and her name is Ava and And I'm giving I'm covering the real name. So so there are any will be safe She was she There were Because theater in Iran basically almost completely banned and So there was a private theater somewhere and there's like hidden and they if the if the police gets to them they were jailed them but there was a play going on somewhere hidden and When like they entered the hidden hidden basement of somewhere so she was selling her like she couldn't believe this Was Iran like like men or act the women were totally comfortable men were not harassing them at all and they're like they were hit by the Girlfriends boyfriends were like kissing and holding their each other's hands and like this is Totally self-started again. This is we don't have any wrong anyone who like tells us no you should be this way You should be that way like she money like every person really did a moral reckoning onto himself I know and the same person the same girl She was in a so in coffee shops You also need to even if you're in private property in stores You need to keep your job if you don't there's like my other place going on and they like close the business Because of that. So that's why the business owners are forced to enforce hijab laws even if they don't agree with it as well and Ava she went to the coffee her coffee place and she took away her job and just put it there as she was studying and Usually what happens is a store owner says like please put it on we're gonna close my business and this time They said thank you. You don't have to pay for your coffee your coffee is on us well and We are on your side like how beautiful and amazing it is it like More moral revolutions are completely real and they can happen at very sudden Suddenly and it could happen even under the leadership Yeah, no, I think we're seeing that in Iran. I think absolutely right. It is a moral revolution and and we're seeing it so From what you're hearing from you on the demonstrations continuing is and what and what do they want? What I mean, is this just about a hijab or is this About the morality of Relationships or is this something broader once the Islamic government gone? Yeah they want a secular government and That's not some of some of them are saying that or some of them are saying no We just want morality police. No, it's a unit. You know, everyone is unified on this one issue That we they want the regime car And it's normal regime. They want a normal regime which they they have a sense of What that means or do they have a positive vision or is it mostly just this they don't want? They want something like Europe. Europe is a big ideal for Iran So they want they want to be able to vote they want to be able to And they want to be able to was it they want to be able to live what we consider a normal life That is a life where you can make choices for yourself. You can interact with wherever you want to interact You don't have to ask permission to hug somebody So that so that's that's across the board. That's what people out in the streets want Yes, yes, and that's unequivocal and to what extent do religious people let's say your parents support that There has been also a moral revolution within my parents and they're not really the same one My mother who had the hardest time getting one strand of her show not because of morality, but because she couldn't Get herself to do it. Yeah, she's she's now Again at the age of 40 something it's hard to change at that age, but the force of this remote reckoning is so Sweeping even her she changed her beliefs and they're not calling you and telling me you were right all along these years. We were wrong That's for all their people especially parents to say that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So And how how extensive do you think this is with any Iranian society that is Is this just in the cities in the in the big cities among more educated people or is this is this more widespread? The protests are going on everywhere erupting everywhere and even even Probably at the same rate, but if I have to pick I would say it's probably more with outside the cities the smaller cities in the smaller towns and All over there. Okay. So I so I mean I Know you're not a procrastinator of the future, but you know, if you had to give if you had to give a timeline for how long this regime lasts Do you think it can last do you think do you think this is this is the end? It's just a matter of time Weeks months That's completely depends on people's we will if always yes, they could they could Why dad? I mean they could let it go that this moment of war where can it go and say? Oh, well, there were those were ideals once we come back to reality or they could just like Not like say the obvious and keep keep on yearning for your normal life and not be Adjusted to the abnormal life that is going on there. I mean that's I mean there seems like and I'm not making these up My friend was anyone like that the types happening.  Like I'm gonna sit down and defend myself. Yeah, why are you going away? and and Like women who like in front of the police like even though they it is huge Incredible amount of my friend anyone like he saw first like in front of his eyes one of the girls Like she was bashed on the head so hard that she like died like she died That's like and her parents image was was spread around as another victim of the Iranian government Again, this is not we're not talking about Normal like protests and some some refer mentioned on this good edges. These are really blood hungry people blood thirsty people and That's that's what happens That's what happens with religion and strong strong ideology when states Becomes religious Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show if you'd like to support the show We make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching Show your appreciation you can do that by going to your own book show comm slash support I go to patreon subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution On any one of those any one of those channels also if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow Please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe press that little bell button right down there on YouTube So that you get an announcement when we go live and for you those of you who are ready Subscribers and those of you who ready supporters of the show. Thank you. I very much appreciate it


Income tax 2023-2024. Pensions and annuities. Get ready and some coffee because we're going to stop the tax man in his tracks with income tax preparation 2023-2024. Most of this information can be found in the line instructions section of the form 1040 instructions taxed 2023 which you can find on the IRS website at iris.gov iris.gov looking at the income tax formula we're focused online one income remember in the first half of the income tax formula is in essence a funny income statement normally an income statement having income minus expenses resulting in net income for taxes we've got income minus various deductions getting to the taxable income typically we would like to be able to exclude income from the income tax equation having income as


Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rostel here. I wanted to do a video review of One of the best video and videography accessory I've picked up pretty much ever and that's a camera backpack I recently acquired when I was in the US. It's called the Ultimax deluxe camera backpack It's product description on Amazon is more like Ultimax extra large camera backpack So I've been looking for a while for a really really decent camera backpack that would allow me to really Move a lot of my stuff when I'm going to shoot interviews or for use it for example at conferences And I had a little backpack. It was a very decent Hori-shelled backpack actually intended for drones But it just didn't have the capacity to Fit as much stuff as I'd like if you really want to bring all the gear you want to bring a couple of lights You want to bring a tripod for the camera? You want to bring the camera and I shoot using a Canon X840 camcorder? So it's on the bigger size for cameras That's not even talking about sound you want to bring a microphone a wireless system It definitely adds up and takes up space So when I was looking for camera backpack on Amazon.com I was overwhelmed with results and I decided to narrow it down by adding the words extra large Camera backpack and that really did make it a smaller selection and one particular Backpack jumped out at me from Ultimax as it just looked so Big and it really early is and that's the Ultimax camera backpack I'm just gonna move back from the microphone for a second so I can give you guys hopefully a sense for how big this thing is It's I reckon probably four times as big as my old backpack and my day to day backpack that I don't use for video It's got three really really nice large hard shell compartments So you can put in everything that you need to protect it even comes with a rain cover You can put on to it even though the material is supposed to be water Resistant and it's just a beast. It definitely is a lot of work to carry it when it's full of gear So it's not the camera backpack I'm taking with me every single time I go out to shoot But if I wanted if I know I'm going to need to use a tripod and Have gear on hand like an XLR cable or and a lav mic a bunch of different Audio and sound options.  So let me show you guys And another thing I really like about it is it's super sturdy Like it's a great feeling bringing this in your back. The straps are really good So let me give you guys a quick tour of the backpack here I'll show you guys some photos and then we'll go and look at the various compartments So here it is. This is the camera backpack and all its glory This is me and this is the tripod at the side It's very very chunky and just very very big in all dimensions. So let's go look now at the compartments This is about $100 on Amazon. This is not affiliate marketing just a genuine recommendation for this product And let's take a look This is again for scale slash comparison how big the ultimax deluxe camera backpack is Next to a pretty normal sized hardshell backpack here And this is how um something I really like about the tripod attachment Is that there's a couple of places to Secure you can see there's one a buckle lock here that can be pulled tight And there's one here and then it finally will fit into this. This is the uh, Manfrotto um compact advanced tripod it fits in here perfectly But the tripod i'm actually shooting this video with a near tripod is too big So it's definitely not going to accommodate every tripod But it will take some tripods and get them on the site now These are the kind of hard cases as I mentioned and they all On zip like so now something really cool. I need to do a lot of work here on my dividers It comes with a ton of dividers in this compartment. It comes with a Internal thing that can go around your waist I actually took mine out and if I take the charger out it's not you can see it's not quite that messy But you can see like how many different audio accessories I can add here this these are some business cards I have a couple of microphones a couple of battery packs. I can keep in that compartment. I have a dead cat for shooting Capturing audio when you conditions I have this is actually a zoom h1n field voice recorder. So just in this bottom compartment I've got a lot of room Then there's a top compartment and there's actually tons of little compartments in addition to these main three There's ones like kind of Organizers within organizers if you know what I mean. So this is the spare battery compartment There's a nice little zip lock in this front compartment and I keep a Have a white balance card there currently I can keep monitoring headphones here camera sunhud a Rain cover and I usually keep a couple of Lights in here as well. Everything is really easy to zip because like these things Just kind of catch your hand really easily I also feel very satisfying to wear this then at the very top You've got a third and final compartment. This is where I keep all my audio gear I've got a couple of lav mics a couple of transmitters a bunch of stuff that just didn't really have It was kind of painful carrying around all these hard cases. So instead of carrying around a bunch of Different shells and in a backpack I can just put everything in this one hard compartment And then I have if I zip that up the main compartment here Which is where you can see I have an xlr cable I have a dynamic microphone usually keep a wireless pair there I have another xlr cable and all these dividers you can play around with Um, I may do and this is usually the main area. I'm going to take out this particular xlr cable This is usually where I put my camcorder itself If you think of the traditional pro camcorder shape it kind of comes up and then you've got the shotgun It fits in here perfectly, but I was able to change these dividers to get it just the way I wanted Um, this backpack is awesome. I'm not an affiliate marketer. I'm not putting links to it This is a totally independent recommendation. I think for $100 it was an absolutely amazing purchase And there's just loads of little things to it like, you know You can keep a business card there and you can there's actually you could totally fit Two tripods because there's one tripod holder on each side. Um, it's really really big It's kind of like a tank and I think for $100 this was such good value because As opposed to kind of fitting half my stuff between two or three bags I can get pretty much everything I might ever need for video into this guy And even though it is big and super heavy and kind of cumbersome There are certain times where you just want to have All your gear with you and uh, this can literally Blow up to be about the size of a suitcase Definitely when it's full like this not carry on friendly Um, I did put this in the back of a car and it was like almost the same size as some of my luggage So I actually put this in stow luggage when I came back from the u.s. So yeah, this is the ultimax deluxe camera backpack really happy with it And I think one of the best video purchases I've made to date. Thank you guys for watching. If you want to get more videos Please subscribe