Excellent. Hello and welcome to the SMI community meeting. Today is Wednesday, June 24, 2020. And welcome to everybody that's been here. I see a lot of new names today, which is fantastic. My name is Lachlan Evensson. I'll be moderating and Bridget is with me taking notes. Bridget has so kindly put in the link to the agenda and notes in the chat. So welcome everybody. We'll get into it. We have an agenda. We have 30 minutes. So we'd like to drive a very quick, productive meeting. But if there's anything that's coming up, feel free to add it to the agenda as we go. If we don't get it today, don't get to it today. We will endeavor to get to it next time. Okay, so right into it stand up discussion items, website, blog post guidelines, Bridget. Yeah, I was going to mention that because we talked about it last week and I said I would do it and I have not done it, but I also have not forgotten and I will actually do it. So hopefully we'll get our blog post, blog post going. The reason I want to talk about it is because people might have felt discouraged about writing a blog post about the things they're doing in SMI because we haven't published the one that we talked about from solo. That's entirely on me. We will do that. And please think about what blog post you might want to put on the SMI website. That is fantastic. Thank you very much. So yes, if you are working on SMI and you have a great story to share, there is a premises that we just added to SMI dash spec.io for blogs, which is a neutral place under the CNCF where you can put your stories about how you are solving problems with SMI or anything. So and we actually have an entry from solo about some work that they've done. Bridget's adding that. Thank you very much. Next up, we have top level spec update almost ready to go needs one more review. Bridget's name is that it is I added it, but it's not really about me. It's more, I think, Stefan and Thomas might have been talking about it and they are, they don't look to be on the call right now. But if there is somebody who is a spec reviewer who reads these notes later or whatever. Yes. By the way, there's a question in the chat about, can there be a link for the blog? Yes, I will add all of that information to these notes when I stop talking, which I am going to do now. I quickly just grabbed it there. I actually had it up easy to find. Okay, so if you are on PR 169, it looks like there were some changes that Stefan has proposed. Thomas is actually LGT and then we need another round. Michelle had LGT and then but Michelle is out at the moment. So if anybody else is a reviewer on the specification or wants to be a reviewer on the specification, we don't mind if you don't have a binding LGTM, please feel free to review it anyway and add your comments about this. So this is looks like changes to some top level fields in traffic access and splits. So I won't go over that. It looks like it's good to go, but if you want to take a look, please do so. Okay, we have a question from Slack. Time frame for 0.4.0 release of the SMI SDK go. Thomas thought it was possible to do it without further delay. What does Stefan think? I don't know if we have Stefan here. Quick inspection. No, and we do not have Thomas either. Does anybody have anything to say about getting out the latest release of the SDK? Would that help them? Do they need to voice any concerns? Nope. I will go and pull the thread on that with Thomas and Stefan in the CNCF Slack channel for SMI. And if this is your first time as well, there is a SMI channel in the CNCF Slack where all these discussions happen. So you're welcome to join that too. Okay. Next one is a question from Slack. Do traffic specs apply to all back ends? Why are matches for traffic split in traffic split back end and not in traffic split spec? Why is the matches type for traffic split loaded type to local object reference instead of string like it is for traffic target? We have Calia there. Calia on the line. Did you want to speak to that Calia? Yeah, I think now regarding the first question for why it's associated with the back ends, just looking at the example for the YAML for that. I guess it didn't make it obvious that the matches would apply per back end I thought it would apply to both. So I was expecting the matches to be in the traffic splits back itself and not inside each back end object. And then on top of that, yeah, I'm just wondering why there's this type discrepancy. Okay. Can you can you provide some links on exactly where the documentation is not concise? Because I would like to raise an issue there or you can raise an issue. Thank you so much about Calia for putting that detailed info in Slack. And if it isn't already an issue, it would be awesome if it could be just so that that way we don't lose it in Slack. Yeah. Okay, there's the traffic split, like the API. Yep. And then we can compare it to traffic target. Okay. And was the documentation as well? Yeah. And then this is the documentation. Looking at multiple windows. Okay. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I know I'm the attendees list. Excellent. Thank you so much. I think, you know, does anybody have any did they want to comment on this now? I know Stefan probably will want to comment. So I think capturing this in an issue with the detail you've provided. And then in the SMI channel in the CNTF Slack, let's go and ask Thomas and and Stefan and then I could probably do some work to make the documentation a little clearer. So are you hoping for making the documentation clear and then or just some background as to why this has been done? I think Michelle would probably offer this up as well. Yeah, probably. Oh, Michelle was also kind. Well, I don't think Michelle knew either. But yeah, looking for background and then perhaps updating the documentation. Okay, it's fine that the types are different. I think it just makes it harder because then we have to reuse code paths pop probably or like I would expect consistency. So I don't know if they're trying to update traffic target eventually. There are lots of questions. So Yes. Well, thank you for taking a look and keep bringing those questions because we want to make sure their answer because if you're coming across this, I'm sure other people will find it too. So let's make it clear. An issue and tags to fun. Yep, create an issue. You can send it to me in the Slack and then I'll kind of fan it out to whoever or you can just tag Stefan, Michelle and Thomas or anybody else who would like to pick it up to feel free to comment on that. Okay, thanks. I know we've done some strange type changes across API versions, which had caught us up in the past, but I think if the APIs haven't changed, it may just be an oversight and we might need to rev them so we don't have typing clashes because that does cause a pain when you're implementing it. Okay. Extremely valid. Thank you so much for raising that Kalia. Anybody else want to weigh in here? Okay, that is it for written agenda. I'll open the floor up to any comments, questions or other discussion. Do we have anything planned for the upcoming KubeCon mid August? Is there any? I know it's obviously virtual, but there anything community wise? I know there was, I thought Michelle might be submitting a proposal, but I'm not sure. So I'd ask her on that. I know in previous, we had planned to do a face to face. I don't know if we pegged out because I think anything in Sandbox needs to apply for a session. Now it's not. Yeah, I think Sandbox doesn't get a session right off the bat. Right, you have to ask. So I would, you know, put an item here. I'll ask Michelle if there was anything submitted. I did not submit anything. Do you have any other ideas on top of that, Michael?  Well, it would be good on the one hand to kind of like give a little bit of a status like where we are and what's the current thinking, direction, whatever. And potentially, you know, there might be others out there who might want to start contribute or have something pretty much about awareness and kind of like showing where we are and what we plan. So I mean, as I said, it's given it's not a physical event. It's a little bit hard. You know, otherwise, you could just say, you know, let's have lunch together or whatever and hang out. But are they doing a project pavilion sort of thing at all? For virtual, for like projects? Well, I don't know if you remember the virtual booth or whatever. Yeah, I know Karen is looking at that for helm. So I'll find out about the virtual pavilion thing, which is some kind of premises where you can put things. I think the other avenue outside of that event is we did do an SMI CNCF webinar, probably about two months ago, that Bridget moderated with Thomas, myself and Stefan. And then even at the camp cloud native yesterday, there was a fireside chat with Bridget and Lee Calcote with the new stack. So I encourage you to also think we're trying to do those kind of outreach things in between cubecon events as well. So if you have other events or you think we should do a webinar and you want to be part of that webinar, Michael, we there are the outlets as well. But I'll find out about the project provision. I can also ping the CNCF and say, is there any room to do an update? Because we could see if their schedule has room, I'm not sure. So how about we ask that question too? Because I think it's good whether we do a panel, or we do an update, or we do a fixed session, I think that all would be good just for awareness. Yeah, we might have an answer on that by next time. Just because they say might because I've been trying to even just schedule the helm session with the CNCF, and they are maybe still a week or two out from actually telling me when my session is. So it's like there's a lot being rearranged flux. Yeah. And so once they get a lot more of that settled, they might be able to answer questions like, is there room for a sandbox project to talk about things? Okay. Thanks for bringing that up, Michael. Do we have any other liaison? Is there any? Any other questions? Hey, this is Dominic from Cisco. I have a question. Hey, Dominic, go ahead. Hey, thanks. And I was wondering about the scope of SMI and just for a little bit of background. We see a lot of interest lately in multi mesh, multi cluster, or single mesh multi cluster. And I understand that that is currently not in scope of SMI. But as a preparation, I was wondering if SMI may take some into the scope, some more self awareness or clear ability. So for example, to be able to ask the Kubernetes cluster, what service mesh instances are currently installed? Could be multiple instances on one cluster as well. So what instances are currently installed? What services do these instances of service mesh know off? And what workloads back these services? So that we have more of a clear ability. The reason why I'm asking is I was checking out solos service mesh hub. And the service mesh hub actually includes code that parses the available objects, right, and does some quote unquote, like reverse engineering, what services are there. And I figured SMI is the quasi standard or the only standard that tells us currently what the proper service mesh is, maybe and maybe the right place for that. Like, I know solo is working on a blog post for at the SMI website about service mesh hub. So I don't know if we'll get more detail there, but there will be a blog post about that soon. Lucky. Yeah, I think I think the scope of SMI can change. So you have that flexibility. I think, you know, when when we initially opened it up, it was to create a common abstraction that provided the value of all service meshes so that you didn't need to be fixated on the implementation and create and hence have an ecosystem of implementations. I would like to add a couple of things. We've had conversations, Edith Levine, who's from the CEO of solo has been part of the conversations. She had a conversation about potentially with me, you know, talk bringing those APIs into SMI. So there hasn't been a formal proposal. I've also seen similar APIs in link ID. They have a multi multi cluster set of APIs which can stat at the moment, which clusters are connected and wire them together. I think the most pertinent things that I'm seeing and this is just my opinion. Obviously this is a community. We can we can bring this up together. Multi cluster, circuit breaker, and rate limiting are the biggest glaring things that are missing from SMI in my opinion that almost all service meshes implement in some form or another. So if you have something, Dominic, that you want to propose, you mentioned solos. We can go back and talk to solo. We can invite Edith here to have that conversation. I think she would be willing to see, you know, if there is value, actually having that spec go upstream. I think for the first, you know, first initial specs that landed in SMI, there wasn't anything. Now we're seeing a lot more tooling in the ecosystem. And if we want to extract those APIs from tools and have them in the spec, I'd be willing to do that. And I don't mind if it's app mesh that brings us that from AWS. I don't mind. I'd be willing to consider those things. And we should be making sure that SMI covers the largest amount of use cases that we think are important for service mesh users. So that's kind of the high level view. As for action items, I could go back and ping Edith on the CNCF and say, hey, there's been questions about whether we could look at multi cluster interfaces and somebody suggested solos service mesh hub. One looks like a good place to start. Would you be interested in having that conversation of either donation or understanding it more? And then we can talk about that. So if you don't mind for me to chime in real quick, I just want to emphasize, I think that the multi multi cluster multi cluster multi mesh, I would think is already step two. Step one, that is what I was currently interested in is the more the self awareness of SMI when it comes to only one mesh instance. So for example, service mesh hub currently parses the deployments and looks for a deployment that has a container and is there the string link at D in that container or is still D in that container and then concludes that this is an instance of an Istio mesh or an instance of a link at D mesh. And I was curious if we should extend SMI with objects that tell us that here is an instance of a link at D mesh on this cluster and here is an instance of an Istio D mesh on this cluster. Basically as a prerequisite or step one to multi clustering, but not jumping to multi cluster right away because that opens up many, many additional questions. And can I can I tag onto the back of that? What would you do by knowing that or what what is your intent to do with that information? Then that comes then to step number two that enables step number two for multi mesh because if you have a if you have an uber control plane similar to service mesh hub, that control plane needs that information. And currently service mesh hub reaches into the implementation of Istio and reaches into the implementation of link at D. But I was thinking if there is a common abstraction on an SMI level then it is of course easier to reach into the spec than instead of into the implementation. I mean this is a great amount of detail Dominic. I think what I would propose is would you be interested in flagging a proposal issue? So at least we can shop that around to the link at D folks, the console folks, we have AWS folks here. They might be looking to solve the same thing. At least then we can have a started discussion and bring that to bear. I don't think it's like a high level. I see value in that. I don't see why SMI couldn't take that. It's not my complete decision. Everybody needs to decide that. But I think it's not it's not a bad idea. And I'd be willing to create the processor at least have people propose new APIs that provide value. Because at the moment we're iterating on the ones that are already there. But what we're losing is context of new awareness or new features that people actually need in service meshes. And we want to make sure that they're represented in SMI. So would you be interested in jotting down just a narrative form like you've given us? What you want to know why this is important or have you already done it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I have one issue on the SMI spec GitHub repo. It's number 170 and a little bit back and forth with Thomas G. Yeah, if you wanted to chime in would be great. I'd be interested if the community as a whole is interested to make those service meshes more self-aware, so to say. For my part, I think this as a spec like having the ability to identify which type of mesh it is that you're interfacing with can make a lot of sense. The implementation of that discovery and that synchronization that's probably beyond the scope of a spec itself. Like the implementation that you're speaking of, Dominic and searching for the container image name inside of service mesh hub is one way to go about that. It is helpful to be a bit more self-aware, being self-aware than enables some of the other use cases that you're describing. Some of which are covered in some related projects that we've spoken about on this call in the past about homeo genius multi cluster and then heterogeneous multi cluster as well. As a on a related topic since we're talking about service mesh hub as much as we are, I'll mention that there's a similar there's another management plane project called Meshary it the community is actively working on enhancing what's referred to as mesh sync, which Dominic is precisely what you're referring to in terms of being continually in sync with the notion that there are one or any number of the same type or different type of service meshes in the environment. And so it might be a point of interest for you. I agree with what Lee said, getting the spec up there and leaving the implementations to decide how they want to fulfill the contract point of that spec, but having a spec that allows interoperability or a tool chain ecosystem based tool chain to hook into that. Much as we've seen with Flagger hook into all the service messes via SMI to do its rollouts. If I'm glad that there are there are some several instances of this converging out there. So it might be time to have that conversation because I've seen a simple similar thing from Linkedee. So yeah, and I'm not sure if Istio has something similar to do you know mesh discovery, but I think having people from all those communities actually come and say here is what the spec should look like. We probably have enough to go off already in what Meshary's done and what Solo's done and what Linkedee's done to converge on something. I think at this point you lead with implementation and then extract specification out of implementation rather than deliberate on something that's never been used before. We're at that point of it now. So if it's valuable to everyone let's just extract where it's implemented and figure out what the spec needs to look like from that. Two minutes left. Anything else? Two minutes left. There's something for me and that is that just we've I mentioned we've talked about the SMI conformance tooling. Well for a long time actually the project is finally in-flight. The design specs of I think we mentioned maybe a month or more ago kind of the call for review of the specs. I'm trying to find where we have the meeting minutes. Yeah, at the bottom of the meeting minutes are right next to where Bridget is typing is a link to this back if you're interested in reviewing kind of the approach to being taken in that project. And what am I trying to say that we're probably on schedule for about a month out maybe from being able to have repeatable tooling where you can define assertions on what conformance of each of the four specs is and then a repeatable kind of tooling to run those tests. What's that I call for feedback? So you're asking us to. Yeah, there has been previously but there's feedback is most welcome now as well. Excellent. That's great. I'm great to hear that. I will take a look. Thank you, Lee. All right, we are at time. Anything we made it through the agenda? Please add any items for the next call in two weeks time from today and feel free to add them or carve out some space in the note stock to add them. Thank you very much to Bridget for taking notes. I would like to ask if anybody would like to moderate the next one before you all leave. Any hands? Thanks, Maria. Thanks for joining. As usually, if there are no other volunteers, happy to. You know, I was coming for you, Michael, if Locky had a job to do. You were like, oh, Locky should have. That's why she didn't try to talk me into it. All right. Thank you. Have a good one. Thanks. Thank you. Have a great day. Thanks for joining.


Hey, hi guys, I debating the baby over to make a little video about this build, but I Decided there's a start here I'm a bit of a zvs draw the zvs zv s zero voltage switches Italian invention, I think all of his own I've got some parts. This is a these are cooker These actually come off you combine from China these zvs drivers They're cooker This one the case got damaged, but I have done the checks on it. It's still okay Well, I've got a couple of these as well to give these a go higher No, they're not they're a slightly four hundred and seventy Nanofarads and 600 volts where these are 1200 volts AC or DC and 600 volts AC resistors resistors 12 volt diodes of course in ducte this one is 90 milliheners I understand anything between 40 and 200 is good Yeah, I'm gonna actually build it onto this board This is where my these two prongs For the Jacobs ladder normally go and I'll just move those down a bit so I can fit the flyback here and Yeah, we'll give it a go I don't think I'm gonna do the build recording it I'm gonna do is just move the stuff out the way and just get on and build it and then put it on Put on the video for the test Let's see how it goes Hey, so what I built it I built it. This is basically a design you find on the internet Schematic you find on the internet and it seems to be the basic So like 10 amp ZVS driver zero voltage switching circuit So all you know is for like Stick a flyback on there give it some power See if this baby actually works I Hope I've got this right You know, I've looked at it's got a few times. I hope I got it right.  I think I've got it right It looks sort of okay as long as I've got this gate Drain and sourcing I got my pal coming into the gate It's got this little zoono diet in this sort of like Just like a voltage lashing system This comes up to the side to the gate And the drains going out via the capacitor Yeah Yeah drains going out to the Why will plug into it will be the coils Which then go on to the fly back in a coil on a fly back And then the source pins Which goes off to negative did this is not color coded as such. I mean it Maybe sort of but this isn't because it's just I run out of I wasn't gonna keep cutting up this Brown wire just to put some Some color coding type thing on there Anyway, honey, I don't think I'm gonna power this right now. I think what I want to do is Actually look at it again in the morning When I stop this I'm gonna go and plan my game now for a little while Put myself to bed So I'll check it again in the morning, and then we took some power through it very things. Okay, let's see what it does by Okay, so I'll build this thing up and It gave me an indication on the power supply that was just shorting out So I'm taking that apart Well, I'm not taking it all completely apart. I'm now This is the bit of an electronic switch Although it's nice to have You know success This is this is what we play for troubleshoot Troubleshoot so now I do just figure out what this thing doesn't work I've looked over the circuit. I've looked over it over it and over it Unless I'm missing something I've got a component down Diodes I Don't know but this is it now. This is the fun part of the troubleshooting I don't know how long this is gonna take me how many times I'm gonna go back to the circuits How many times I'm gonna look at different circuits just to double-check this and I've already noticed a difference on one circuit to this being exactly the same thing Is that the resistors are doing way wrong, but it would make no difference where they are I don't think Maybe what I need to do is check that being at the resistors instead of being here a higher Then there's a definite, you know, we could split it up There'd be a resistor here and the Zener diode here on the other circuit the same as on this side The resistor would be higher up on the Zener diode below Road you don't like but putting this on there and these are my specs on the meter. They're fine Powering up It's just drawing full current Like it's shorting like it's doing something naughty So I'll have to just keep cracking on it and start recording when I've got something new I feel like at least he's plugged back in The circuit needs back down because that's how it wants to be It's gonna be easy enough to put back together. I just got to find out Let's brag. This is the fun part. This is the bit which is the challenge and this is the bit that I like Be back in a bit We got a little baby here And it's testing this diode as a Unknown part damaged or an old part if I test the other diodes I expect And I expect to see that this day is a worker By that it's indicating it's a worker which is good. So What's this for?  Okay, that's what I didn't want.  I was hoping I just found a diode That doesn't prove nothing Because I can do the same test from here to here and then to cathode Everything comes up as a diode Which is Never mind. Let's try again Hey guys, uh, just a little bit of a continuation now One of us tested this out when I when I when I built it. I ended up taking it all apart. Well, I'm not all apart I took the um the MOSFET cells to check see if they're okay Uh, because it it didn't work um And it almost it looked like it was shorting And so I thought oh wow, so I obviously damaged the MOSFET or something or of course I lost the damage and it shone up as a short So I took the I took the MOSFETs off. I checked them and I'm fine. So now I check the diodes. I'm fine Resistors I checked the inductors I noticed that this connection here was giving me a bit of resistance. So I re resoldered that I don't know it doesn't look Uh, it looked a little bit more messy than what it did And it still didn't work And so I was a little bit concerned After finishing work today. I'll come back and I noticed looking at it from this angle. I could see that my wire um It was connected, but I think it was it wasn't connected inside quickly because even though But I'm putting this through my good power supply at the minute, which I really don't want to do It's on 12 volt. I'm giving it a maximum of three ounce Uh, and I'm just gonna flick around. But look we got I don't know if you can see that particularly that long There we go, look Nothing special. Nothing to write a hang about Like you say, that's that's that's it's just uh I just wanted to test the circuit see if it works And it does work I know I need a bit more capacitance. They're on the way. That's only a 339 we'll need a 680 really Um But the capacitors are on the way But everything else should be good Everything else should be good and I did run it for a few minutes I did like a bit of a heat test that everything's cold. That's fine Like I said, it's only three amps. My other power supply at the minute is playing up again I've had nothing but problems with it since I first bought it connections and all sorts, but I'll take it apart again a bit Sort a little and I'll come back with some uh With some 10 amp action Or at least, you know, we'll give it a bit more voltage And a bit more A bit more ampage, but just as the uh As my first cvs We're using MOSFETs It works and I'm chuffed to punch absolutely chuffed to punch. It's a little tiny for now, but we'll get there We'll get there. This baby's got enough potential about it to give out some nice arcs. So So, yeah Next video, I love that power supply fixed under them I don't Everything I buy I seem to have to fix Yeah, this is a this is a new thing I got today Uh 4.5 volt to 40 volts and it gives me five volts And two amps on the output maximum But that's brilliant because I've got quite a lot of these things I have to plug in, you know To want to to my phone charger. I got my music player. I've got my my clocks I've got other ones on build and I've got all sorts of stuff I need five amp supply volt And this is great. It's um It's reading the indication off off the supply of nine volts. It's saying It says 8.6 there It says 8.6 there Uh That seems to be quite good I'm just waiting for my phone to drop a bit more on charge and I'll I'll chuck that in and see how quick it to charge my phone up This is 1.5 amps at five volts and this is two amps at five volts So I'm hoping for it a little bit more quickness there. You can actually turn the power off on this Which is pretty awesome And that there Is to that that that button that switches off the entire thing And then this one just turns off the power output So you've still got the power going in And the indication that that power's going in I think which is really really handy Um, but you've just you can just turn off the output going out because that's a little output like indicator. Yeah Fantastic It's been a good day today A couple of these are turned up And this is working No smoke no nothing It's working and I'm much off Cheers watching catching a bit


Hi, my name is Jeffrey Edrington, and I'm here at CES 2023 here with the ISPU. The ISPU is an intelligent sensor processing unit that we have with our six-axis MEMS architecture. The big selling point is it has a 32-bit RISC Harvard architecture inside the IMU itself. With that, you get 32 kilobytes of RAM to program in C, whatever program or DSP you need. With our demo, we're going to be running the NanoEdge software suite to do anomaly detection. In the anomaly detection, we're going to be measuring the norm and getting samples of the norm. And then when an anomaly is detected, it can wake up the microcontroller and you can then do with that what you want. Right now, I'm going to add a magnetic interference to the motor. And after that happens, the anomaly will be detected, and in this case, we are turning on the ultrasound and the mic and detecting that an anomaly has occurred on the IMU. Thanks for watching. For more information, you can search ISPU on ST.com.


My name is Sanbaknyi. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism-Revisited. The narcissist projects to the world a false self, an image of himself, as perfect, brilliant, or powerful, omnipotent, or knowing, omniscient. But there is an abyss, there is a gap between the self-image and the self-perception of the narcissist, and drab, dreary, and shabby reality, where the narcissist's accomplishments are actually meager, lacking, or non-existent. This difference between self-perception and reality is what I call the grandiosity gap, and it is grating on the narcissist's nerves. The very existence of the grandiosity gap threatens the precariously balanced house of cards that is a narcissistic personality. The narcissist finds to his shagging that people out there are much less admiring, accommodating, and accepting than, for instance, his parents. As he grows old, the narcissist often becomes the target of constant derision, ridicule, and mockery, a sorry sight indeed. 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To his mind, those who pucillanimously fail to recognize his unbounded talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his benevolent nature, his entitlement, his cosmically important mission, perfection, etc., etc., these people don't deserve consideration. The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal, his lack of empathy and compassion, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws and morals, this affinity with the criminal now erupts and blossoms. The narcissist becomes a full-fledged anti-social, sociopath or psychopath. He ignores the wishes and needs of others. He breaks the law. He violates all rights, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt and disdain. He derights society in his code and her codes. He punishes the ignorant ingrates that failed to fully appreciate him.  By acting criminally and jeopardizing their safety, lives and property, he is merely serving their just decisions. He is punishing them for this crime of having ignored and abandoned him. Another solution is the paranoid schizoid one. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives, self-directed confibrillations, which place him at the center of others allegedly malign attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. The narcissist develops persecretary delusions. He perceives slides and insults when none were intended. He becomes subject to ideas of reference. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him, trying into his affairs and cracking his email, etc. etc. He is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention by conspiracy. People are conspiring to humiliate him, to punish him, to abscond with his property, to delude him, to impoverish him, to confine him physically or intellectually, to censor him, to impose on his time, to force him to action or do inaction, to frighten him or urge him, to surround and to besiege him, to change his mind, to party with his values, to victimize or even murder him, and so on. Some narcissists, faced with such awesome conspiracies, withdraw completely from a world populated with such menacious and ominous objects. These conspiracies are really projections of internal objects and processes within the narcissist psyche. But to him, they feel real, they feel objective, out there, so he withdraws, partly in fear, partly in disdain. Such narcissists avoid all social contact except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, from falling in love, from having sex, from talking to others, or even corresponding to them. In short, they become schizoids, not out of social shyness, but out of what they feel to be their choice. They say to themselves, this evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, and I shall waste none of my time and resources on it any further. A variant of this solution is the paranoid, aggressive or explosive solution. Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and rarely, physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean and deride their nearest and dearest. Often their well wishes, their benefactors, their loved ones, they explode in unprovoked displays of rage, indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame. Theirs is an exeget- exegetic bedlam. They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, innocent, inadvertent comment, is designed to provoke and humiliate. They so fear, revulsion, hate and malignant envy wherever they go. They flail against the windmills of reality, pathetic, forlorn sight. But often they cause real and lasting damage, fortunately, mainly to themselves. There is also the masochistic avoidance solution. The narcissist is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply. He directs some of this fury inwards, punishing himself for his failure. This masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist's closest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors, and thus either way to pay him the attention that he creates. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic copout. By undermining his own work, his relationships and his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, avoids negative supply.  He makes the decision, even the decision to fail. Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances which render success impossible, and as Milen calls it, an objective assessment of their performance improbable. They act carelessly, withdraw in mid-effort, are constantly fatigued, bored or disaffected, and thus passively-aggressively they sabotage their lives. Their suffering is defiled by deciding to abort and to withdraw. They reassert their omnipotence. The narcissists pronounced in public misery in self-pity are compensatory, and again, to quote Milen, they reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness. His tribulations and anguish render him, in his eyes, unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, sacrificial, resilient and significant. They are, in other words, self-generated narcissistic supply. Thus, paradoxically, the worse is anguish and unhappiness, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels.


You are told that there are no longer parties among us. The line and the lamb lie down together in peace. Do not believe a word of it. The same parties exist now as they ever did. That was a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin around the time of the election of 1824 and joined as always here on the Liberty versus Power podcast, Dr. Patrick Newman, author of Cronyism, Liberty versus Power in America, 1607, 1849. Patrick, this election is very interesting because for the first time in a while, there's not, it seems like kind of a very clear and obvious error to who should be in this position. And also we have the political process itself changing a good deal while also dealing with the consequences and the environment of one party rule that we addressed in the last episode. Patrick, how should our listeners kind of be thinking about going into the election of 1824? Where is America at politically here? So America in the year 1824 is definitely at a crossroads, at least politically, where is it going to continue on with the National Republicans American system, you know, the Cronyism of central banking, protective tariffs, internal improvements, nationalization of Western territories and aggressive foreign policy. This is the system articulated by Henry Clay, okay, so he's sort of the Hamiltonian of the era, or is it going to go back to something along the lines of the original Republican party, perhaps even as far as what the old Republicans, John Taylor, John Randolph, et cetera, wanted. So this is not the era of good feelings. It's often described as this, the 1820s, just because there's one party. In fact, there was a lot of sectional strife. There was animosity. The panic of 1819 had enormous repercussions in terms of regarding various policy related to tariffs, internal improvements and central banking. And you're starting to see, okay, what is going to happen to the country now that Monroe's gone? Who's going to be the next person that will become president? Will there only continue to be one party, the National Republicans? So you see in 1824, the first time, really in American history, that you see a four-way race, initially five-way race between multiple candidates. They're all vying for this next position of the presidency. But the election of 1824 is very important, which is why I'm very happy that we're talking about it today. Well, that's one of the promising things here, right? As we've been talking about for several episodes now, just how bad this Jefferson Party has become as the Republicans, right? There is very little difference now. You now have the Republicans actively advocating for many of the good ol' Hamiltonian policies. And the good thing is there was a backlash to it, right? And so what we see here is a very interesting and significant political change that happens within this country as a byproduct of the election of 1824 and the election of 1828, some of the successes thereon after. When we go into the election of 1824, we've got four main characters among us in terms of candidates. We've got William Crawford, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. And the interesting one in this and the one that our listeners are probably least familiar of is William Crawford, who is seen as someone who could perhaps restore that romantic Jeffersonianism to the political process. Can you go into a little bit about Crawford in particular, since he's probably the least known of the other three? Yeah, so the election of 1824, initially there was not only those three, there was also John C. Calhoun. Right, right. He later just decided to run for the vice presidency, which he did win. But yeah, you have those five main characters and out of those five, you're definitely right that William Crawford is probably the least well known. One reason for this is just due to historical accident in the fact that a lot of his papers got burned in a fire a long time ago. So there hasn't really been many exhaustive biographies where someone's able to look through all of his correspondence. They kind of had to build it up through other sources. But William Crawford is incredibly significant. He was one of the old Republicans, so during the old Jeffersonian era, so he was at least initially fighting against all of Jefferson's sort of descent into cronyism after the Louisiana Purchase. He was a Virginia native. He did move to Georgia, right? And by the time of 1816, so after the War of 1812, William Crawford was pushed by many old Republicans to at least kind of carry on their ideals, right? Because Crawford, he was a limited supporter of central banking, protective, terrorist and internal improvements, but he still strongly believed in limited government and he was especially being very frugal, so limited spending, which is very important to the old Republicans. And he wanted to run in 1816. We spoke about this. He basically decided not to, and then he did again and Monroe won. And so Monroe became, he won the Congressional Caucus and then he became president for eight years. So during this time period, William Crawford most notably was, he was secretary of the Treasury. And he was running in 1824. He was most championed by someone who was really, I kind of think of the brains behind the Crawford candidacy, more so than William Crawford himself, especially at one point when William Crawford didn't really have much of a brain or he was sort of incapacitated during the election, which is just a great story that we'll get into. And that's Martin Van Buren, the little magician from New York. He's a senator from New York and he's really trying to recreate the old Republican sort of creed because Van Buren is upset at how the national Republicans have become very big government. And this has led to all sorts of cronyism surrounding the American system. He wants to bring back party divisions because this is, Martin Van Buren wasn't perfect. He wasn't a perfect ideologue or intellectual, but he was extremely politically shrewd and he wanted to sort of recreate a faction in favor of limited government. And he was pushing for Crawford as his preferred candidate. Yes, Van Buren, someone I definitely want to dive down a deeper end and particularly his theories of political parties and his organizational structure. But before we get into that, one of the things I think is interesting is that you have multiple members of the same administration going at each other within this election. You have William Crawford who followed Gallatin as the Treasury Secretary. I believe he started under Madison, if I remember correctly. Well, technically Gallatin left and then there was Alexander J. Dallas, right? He was the guy that he pushed for the central bank. Remember he was Aster's, Aster and Gerard's lawyer, right? And then Dallas had to leave I think for health and I'm not sure if someone minor took up that position but Crawford at the end of the Madison administration, he was in charge of the war department and that's where the funny story, regarding the Indians, the interracial marriage and the Irish and all of that. Then he became Secretary of the Treasury under Monroe. And then you have in the position of real power, right? The person you would naturally expect to be the next man up, the Secretary of State position, which is the position currently held by John Quincy Adams. One of the things that I think is kind of interesting in terms of the personality differences involved is that Clay and John Quincy Adams were both part of the negotiations for the Treaty of Ghent. And so they're here in a room together. And within this sort of personal dynamic, on the one side you had Henry Clay who liked his alcohol and liked his gambling and was this very flamboyant, womanizing sort of personality. And then you have John Quincy Adams who was very much a quiet, serious stern man who had these very deep diaries and just kept to himself. And so you have both of these that have experience within kind of their circles overlapping. And then alongside of all this, you have this upstart rising from outside of politics. Now that the great war hero, Andrew Jackson, who after the great success with the battle at New Orleans ends up becoming a bit of a thorn in the side of the Monroe administration. And so between Crawford and Adams and Clay and also Calhoun, all four of these figures have to react to Andrew Jackson kind of as this growing political force outside of this circle. Can you talk a little bit about Jackson kind of going into this and the consequences of some of his adventures down the Florida territories and the international disputes that kind of came about with some of his actions?  So everyone, it was really the election of 1824 initially was kind of wrangling, if you will, between the various factions in the Monroe administration. Who is gonna follow the top boss, so to speak, right? Because you had John Quincy Adams, he's Secretary of State, which was a position at the time that was really seen as a stepping stone into the presidency. Many other, the prior presidents, Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, they were all had all been previously Secretaries of State. You had Henry Clay, he's Speaker of the House, technically not in the administration, but still a very important force. Calhoun was Secretary of War, Crawford was Secretary of the Treasury. These are all important positions. And then you have Andrew Jackson, who's a Senator from Tennessee. He's seen as a military general, doesn't really have too much experience. He was briefly a Senator during the quasi-war in the late 1790s. And he kind of comes across to these guys as, all right, he's just running on popularity. He's the famous general after New Orleans. He's just running on his own popularity. This was the time, the beginning in the 1820s, when many states had started to embrace democracy more and shift away from having their state legislature choose its electors in the electoral college for the presidency. So Jackson, he was a people's man. And initially his record, after the war, he was always a belligerent, you could say. He was very involved in Indian relations and he himself later adopted an Indian child, but he realized that there were some problems between settlers and the Indians and the Indians claiming large tracts of land. Anyway, the long story short, he sort of goes off of, he invades Florida when the Monroe administration clandestinely gave him support. They didn't want to give him outright support. They wanted to do it secret because they knew what type of political backlash this could bring. So sort of, okay, yeah, we're giving you the ability to do this, Jackson goes full hog. He takes over Florida. And the Monroe administration is very upset at this because one, a lot of people sort of realized that, okay, he might be gunning for something bigger than just being a general. Ironically, Adams defended Jackson because Adams, the secretary of state, really wanted Florida and he was okay with Jackson basically invading Florida and he justified it, saying the Spanish can't control their quote-unquote savages, the Indians and we need this for national security. So Jackson, he was mainly known for invading Florida during this time period. We later got Florida through the 1819 Adams-Ones Treaty and he would sort of establish a record for himself in the Senate. He was anti-bank, he was anti-debt, but he had also signed on to the protective tariff of 1824 because it would pay off the debt. His candidacy in 1824 was not very ideological. It was mainly based off of popularity and charisma, but he still was definitely a force to be reckoned with among the other contenders. And one of the things I think is interesting is that the Virginia dynasty, which has controlled politics for a very long time, even as sort of the ideals of what we think about when it comes to Jefferson and those Virginians kind of went away and a lot of propagandizing from Madison afterwards. But even though there's a lot of, you can draw some historical parallels between the Jacksonian era that we're about to go into and some of the romantic ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was not a fan of Andrew Jackson, right? There's a quote, I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson president. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. And so one of the things that's kind of interesting is that when you have these personalities involved, as you mentioned, John Quincy Adams, who's this very stoic, stern guy, was very defensive, what was a lot more defensive and respectful of Jackson than some of these other figures. Whereas Crawford, a Calhoun, even criticized Jackson during that period, which came out later during kind of a breakdown of relations between the two of them. Like it's Adams and Jackson starting off with, have one of the more respectful relationships. And the concern for John Quincy Adams or Henry Clay, Henry Clay, the person they feared was not Jackson, but Crawford. And it's very interesting just, since we know how this whole thing ends, that dynamic I think is very interesting. And of course, one of the reasons why they feared Crawford so much is because of the growing apparatus kind of being developed there. Before, can we touch on just a little bit about Van Buren's background? Because before he becomes, gets to DC, which he, in area, which he doesn't really like what he finds when he gets there. He really cuts his teeth within New York politics opposing the Clinton dynasty, right? And so he's a bit of an upstart. I mean, it's pretty interesting that Van Buren himself doesn't come from a very privileged family. Again, we're now getting into that second generation of American politicians. And here you have a guy who was the son of a tavern keeper who, he's not a war hero, right? He doesn't have anything that he has kind of earned his merit on sort of those historical battlefields and said he's done it by simply being a very shrewd calculator within the legislative process. Him, his group is called the Bucktails within New York politics. And one of the things that gives them power is that he's able to have great loyalty and discipline for those on his side. So they were able to make sure that whatever his little caucus agreed on, even if you didn't like the outcome, you were gonna vote lockstep with everyone else on this issue because doing so was the only way of being able to fight these very entrenched powers. And so when we get to where politics is now adapting, again, this coinciding with the political process itself becoming more democratic with a lot more, a lot more people, largely white men, having the ability to vote now, the necessity of really formalizing the party structure ends up being very important to how these political battlefields go on within the second generation of politicians. Can you touch on a little bit there again? What is Van Buren bringing with him when he signs on with a Crawford in 1824? Yeah, exactly. So great discussion, a good jumping off point we could talk about Van Buren. So Van Buren, he starts off in New York. By this time, the Clinton faction, so George Clinton is dead, he was the anti-Federalist governor in New York, he was Thomas Jefferson, he was the famous vice president who vetoed the bank, at least he didn't veto the bank, excuse me, he cast the tie breaking vote in the Senate in 1811 preventing its recharter. He had gone, his nephew DeWitt Clinton had been, it was in charge and he increasingly supported more and more of the National Republicans program. So DeWitt Clinton was very famous for the Erie Canal, which was the seemingly successful state-run public works program. And the Clinton faction, as you've mentioned, is sort of criticized by the emerging Bucktail faction for basically being too corrupt, too pro-big government, they're losing kind of the cohesiveness of a party organization, it's more about the person at the top Clinton than the actual, any sort of principles that they stand for. So Van Buren organizes what comes to be known as the Bucktails, also the Albany Regency to create sort of a rival faction in New York that will stop Clinton and the state level. And this is kind of a jumping off point for him organizing a much larger organization on the federal level. So this is where Van Buren comes from. As I mentioned before, he's not a perfect ideologue. He is known as the little magician because he can be evasive or he's trying to straddle issues in order to keep his coalition alive. But it's fairly clear that he is still in the limited government direction. And regarding his main usefulness to the reformers, it's that he is the great Politico. He's the organizer. He knows how to get all the people together to create the party so to speak because the actual party as an institutional structure, I think is something a lot of people who are interested in politics now don't know about precisely because the party in the modern era has become so useless. This is why you always hear Democrats and Republicans are always the same. But parties back then, this was this huge thing because not only was this how your patronage was how you got people interested, but it was the ideology that really kind of drove people to one party versus another, right? So it's all about whipping up the enthusiasm in your own group and getting them to come out and vote. So this is where Van Buren sort of coming from. He wants to recreate the old Republican program and he sees Crawford as the best choice for that. At least after putting simply, he sees Crawford as the best choice for it. He's pushing for Crawford to become president in 1824. Two things complicate Van Buren's plan when it comes to Crawford. The first is that Van Buren's strategy was a shrewd strategy. He was trying to just recreate the congressional caucus. He said, all right, well, the Republican party has always nominated its people through the congressional caucus where congressmen just vote on who they want to be their candidate. So as long as I get Crawford to win in that, then well, we win because the federalists aren't gonna actually pose a serious threat. But by this time, because of all the other factions, they're saying, oh, no, no, no, you can't do that. You can vote on this, but that's just you. This is not actually going to speak for everyone, right? Because they knew Van Buren had the strength in Congress to actually pull it off. So Van Buren's main strategy didn't work. And the other thing was that Crawford got sick. He got a stroke and he was basically paralyzed. He had trouble speaking. There was movement issues, et cetera. And Van Buren, which I just find great, he's like, well, we're still gonna run. So I just think of this as sort of a weird- The original Joe Biden strategy. Yeah, it's the original Joe Biden strategy, or it's sort of like a weekend at Bernie. Weekend at Bernie's, right? That's the old move from the 80s. It's weekend at Van Buren's. He's propping up William Crawford and or it's the old Joe Biden strategy where you have someone who probably shouldn't be running for president, but the powers that be are, well, still pushing you to run for president. It was both Van Buren doing, but he was trying to reform the system. So I give him credit for that. And so that kind of hurt the Crawford candidacy or the Van Buren strategy in 1824, but he played a much bigger role after the election of 1824. Yeah, right. And it's interesting because one of the things I love is that a debilitated Crawford still gets more electoral votes in Henry Clay, which considering how much I love Henry Clay, I just kind of, that is something that's good karma just working against the, you know. That is really, that really had to be a blow. Like knowing that Crawford was debilitated, yet you still lost to him. He got third and you got fourth like in the act. That's just gotta be tough. Like that's, you know. Particularly, some of the descriptions that I've read in some of these other books, like, I mean, this wasn't just like a stroke.  Like, no, like, this was bad. He was out. And so one of the things I think is interesting about the way that Van Buren's views politics that I think is part of all of this is that he views this process as being absolutely vital for a republic to have success. I've got a quote here that parties, they rouse the sluggish to exertion, give increased energy to the most active intellect, excite vigilance over the public functionaries, and prevent that apathy which has proved the ruin of republics. And so he, you know, this entire idea that we must infuse, we must create a structure that will engage with the normal people, inform them of the right way of thinking about things, you know, instructing them ideologically, and then organizing them in a way to act afterwards. I think in 1824 is kind of the original run for what's going to become the Jacksonian revolution in four years from now. But I think it's interesting though, because when we think about this Jacksonian party, it really begins not with Jackson, but with Van Buren, with this original run with Crawford. Absolutely, absolutely.  But when it comes to actual popular support, Clay is a distant force within this. Did he carry a state? I think I could tuck you, yeah. Yeah, he did, he did. Okay, but Jackson has support within the South, much of the South and the West. Crawford is supported within Virginia and Georgia, getting the backing of some of those old school Jeffersonians in Virginia and then himself being a product of Georgia. John Quincy Adams, obviously, has access within those old federalist parts within New England and that era. And again, I think it's just interesting here where, you know, for the first time, you know, this isn't a binary process. You have four competing factions with their own regional strengths, you know, now going after this seat of power, which leads us to a solution that is not solved through the election process. Yeah, so it turns into, doubt to be a four-way horse race because once Jackson actually announces his candidacy, Calhoun basically realizes he's out. And this just causes him to run for the vice presidency. And so then you have the results of the election where Jackson commands a plurality in the electoral college and in the popular vote, but he doesn't have a majority. So what happens after that is it goes to a House overtime election. Ironically, when the founding fathers were devising the Constitution, they actually thought that most presidential elections would go into this overtime election where basically each state delegation in the House of Representatives would vote and cast their choice for the presidency. At least as the way the standard narrative goes, they did not foresee the rise of political parties where you would only have like two people running or two major people running. They always thought it would be a lot of people and then the House would always decide. Ironically, the only two times, the only two elections in which the House actually decided the election of 1800 and the election of 1824, the country got very close to getting, the country was enraged and or was on the verge of a revolt in case of the election of 1800 when the federalists were trying to deny Jefferson the election, the presidency and swing it to Burr or in the election of 1824, which a lot of people were upset at over the corrupt bargain, which we'll talk about. So I always just find that funny. It just shows you how much the actual presidential elections now are very different from how they were envisioned to be before. So during this process, Jackson, he's in the lead, but he doesn't have enough. So after the election process was amended in the 12th Amendment, the top three candidates go to the House. So they go to the overtime election where the state delegations will vote on who will be president. In poor Henry Clay, he loses out to a man who has a debilitating stroke. So he comes in fourth and he cannot participate or he cannot at least run. So he lost the playoff game. He's got to watch the rest of it on the sidelines, right? But he does realize he can at least decide who will become president. Because he has enormous influence in the House being the speaker of the House. And he sees that, okay, he hates Crawford and he doesn't like Jackson. So he sees that John Quincy Adams is going to be his preferred choice. So basically what Clay and Adams agree on in late December 24, early January 25 is sort of a, I'll scratch my back, you scratch, excuse me, I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back. Which is, look, make me Adams, I'll make you, Clay says to Adams, I'll make you president in the House. If you make me your secretary of state with the implication that as being secretary of state, Clay will become president in eight years from now. So basically Adams and Clay decided to sort the popular will, so to speak, to choose the person who did not get the plurality in either the popular vote or the electoral college and instead give it to Adams. Yes, again, Clay's able to really, he plays this off very well behind the scenes. The problem is, however, is that in many ways, because it is so obvious what Clay does here, this ends up being a mark against him in many ways. This is not the last time Henry Clay runs for this office, but he clearly kind of obviously outs himself as part of the sort of cabal style politics that people don't particularly like. And one of the things I think is interesting as well is that when it comes down to the congressional votes, the state of North Carolina actually flips from Jackson to Crawford in some of those backroom deals there.  One of the other dynamics to it is that there's a lot to be said about Jackson's view of running for president during this time. Like he's kind of like, while there's always a little bit of this game, particularly during this period, that you're never running, right? It was seen as being beneath you if you actively campaign. Jackson might have been less interested in the presidency than some of the others, particularly someone like Clay. But after this, he now feels that this position was stolen from him in these backroom deals, where Clay in particular was identified as one of the ring leaders too, which kind of, the one person who, you don't really want to end up on their enemies list is Andrew Jackson. He's someone that can actually make you pay for that down the line in a variety of different ways. But so all of this ends and now we have, I think it is the proper conclusion of this era of good feelings that the son of the first partisan federalist president is now the last representative of this old Republican party that had just slowly corrupted into itself. And then kind of right off the get go, John Quincy Adams begins with, we now have the state of the union address and it's a big speech given in front of Congress at the time, it's a written statement by the president to Congress. But right from the get go, while there is something to be said about the, obviously there's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy within the language used by people like Madison and Monroe in the past, there's some of these rhetorical games going on where they still kind of paid lip service to these old school Jeffersonian values while still acting like a Hamiltonian. Well, now like John Quincy Adams goes full mask off and outlines, no, we are going to use the government to make investments for the common good. We're going to build up universities like they have in Europe. And that's another one of these things here that I think is worth noting is that John Quincy Adams is a man who has spent most of his adult life not in the United States. So he's a product of American aristocracy sent off to Europe with a very long and distinguished diplomatic career but very much a product of Europe. And so here he comes and he outlines a very explicit plan to just amplify all of these internal improvements and other cronious projects right from the get go. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the Adams is a firm proponent of the American system. So he supports central banking. He supports protective tariffs, especially now that by this time in the 1820s, New England has fully moved away from becoming sort of mercantile, shipping interests to supporting full-on manufacturing. This is a lot of this is from the Boston Associates, many of whom donated to John Quincy Adams election. He's also a firm proponent of internal improvements to sort of bind the country together. And so he starts off. So not only are a lot of people kind of upset at how that election turned out, that the overtime house election and particularly at the speed, most people thought that it would be something that would take several rounds of balloting. But what happened is basically Adams and Clay, more or less, went to about six state delegations and they were able to basically ply their, the relevant congressman with special favors and oh, okay, if you vote for Adams, then we'll do something for you, et cetera.  And so then Adams becomes president that way. So people are upset at that. And then he, as you mentioned, he gives this speech, his opening speech and he's talking about all the stuff the government's going to do and how they need to, we need to fund national observatory and all these internal improvements. And he has this famous line, I believe it's something along the lines of liberty is power. He says that. So it's like he's contradicting the liberty versus power theory. And this caused Jackson many years later in a veto, he said money is power, which is, I like that. He's sort of commenting on old, old John Quincy Adams getting him after all those years. And so a lot of people were upset at that. So Adams starts off as administration, basically realizing that he doesn't have much of, at least a significant part of Congress's support. People are upset at him in 1826. He loses the midterm elections to sort of this rising Jacksonian coalition. This is the first time that the party in power had lost control of Congress or the sitting president had and in an interim election. So this is pretty big. And Adams and Clay, they're working together trying to continue to enact their American system. But the problem is Jackson's upset, as you mentioned. Jackson was furious at this. He thought that this was the ultimate treachery. He had this famous line, something along the lines of, he said the Judas of the West has closed the contract and has received this 30 pieces of silver. His end will be the same. So he's basically like, I'm taking you out, Clay.  And I'm taking you out, Adams, as well. And so you've got Jackson, who's very upset. He wants to run in 1828. And Martin Van Buren recognizes a profit opportunity because he says, look, Jackson, you know, Jackson, your campaign in 1824 is mainly based off of your personal popularity. Why don't we bring you under the banner of the old Republican creed? You're sympathetic to it. You were very close with the fan you'll make in of North Carolina, one of those old Republicans of years past, your anti-bank, anti-central banking, anti-debt, limited government man yourself. Why don't we run your campaign on these principles which will get even more people interested? So Van Buren starts to embark upon this really, really tough, but I would say, and Murray Rothbard would say as well, a heroic process of organizing this entirely new coalition and doing it in two years. So the Republicans back in the 1790s, they had started to organize in the mid-1790s. Jefferson ran in 1796, he lost that. Then they really started to organize in 1800 and then they won that. Van Buren basically does this all within one election cycle and so he's able to deliver Jackson the victory. And so this is a very important thing that I don't think a lot of people understand because in order to succeed in politics, you have to have the right political infrastructure. You have to have the right party system and Van Buren recognizes this. He recognizes the need to build coalitions. He recognizes the need to bring all of these people together under the banner of Jackson and fighting the American system, et cetera. And this is exactly what he does. So he starts to enlist all of the various factions and he brings them under the banner of Jackson. So Murray Rothbard always spoke very highly about Van Buren's efforts. He was very influenced by Robert Romini, a Jacksonian historian. And I think that Martin Van Buren's creation of this new party is extremely important, particularly because it's still the modern democratic party. The same party organization, the Democrats Now, that was basically created by Van Buren. Now, the party stood for very different things. In fact, probably like a complete 180, it was supposed to be a reform party designed to limit government. But the creation of that party is absolutely Van Buren's doing and he should get an enormous credit for that. And some of the infrastructure that he recognized was important is that you had to have a series of newspapers, because the newspapers informed and gave the partisan perspective of the current events. And if you're not engaging with the common people, if you're not having, they viewed the party process as a two-way street. So you have the party line that's going out there, that's organizing, that's inspiring people within their own communities to get everyone together to make sure they show up to vote. The purpose of the political process was it sort of the most vulgar aspects of politics? In today's parlance, partisanship is like a slur. At the time, it was simply a way of trying to make these things matter, to actually make the ideas a potent part of the political process by having a system of discipline. And this plays out Rothbard's commentary on this process. I know there's some great chapters in the Progressive Era book, discussing it within the context of the third American party system, but sort of similar dynamic there. These aspects I think are really so interesting. And then also with the creation of this broader network of newspapers is when we start having come on to the scene, a lot of these intellectuals that we mentioned a little bit last episode and will continue to play a role within the Jacksonian era where it provides a platform for individuals thinking about economic ideas, thinking about the proper relationship between state and individual. Thinking about these aspects, newspapers were the format to get your ideas out there in a popular way. And so we can take these parties for granted now because this is what we've had ever since Van Buren started. But at the time though, it was a means of getting people that now have the ability to vote to inform them of these things. And that educational aspect is easy to sort of caricature Jackson as just sort of this blood-soaked monster and whatever, but ultimately the Jacksonian success really was a triumph of ideas. Again, with the use of this nationally popular figure as a vessel to promote a very deep and important agenda, particularly from this perspective of liberty versus power. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because my book, Chronyism, I talk about how one these the Jacksonians utilized the newspaper to try and communicate their party ideas to the common man. I'm sure we'll talk more about like the Washington Globe and the other Jacksonian periodicals and intellectuals who were trying to communicate the message to the average person. And really that was how sort of this new battle between liberty versus power would be fought now because Jackson, at least excuse me, before they only had the one party system of the National Republican, so it was just power. And that's why you saw this huge increase in cronyism develop sort of snowball during the Jefferson administration and continue in the 1820s during the so-called era of corruption. But then once you see this democratic party arise, and I know it's gonna be hard for our listeners that the Democrats, they're the good guys, they're the reform coalition. Completely different back then. You know, they're fighting against power, the National Republicans who later morph into the wigs of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, et cetera. So you see this liberty versus power dynamic, right? You have power up here and then the liberty sort of comes back after the election of 1824. And especially in the election of 1828 where Jackson, he's riding on this reform, retrenchment in the economy program and he totally demolishes John Quincy Adams in this election. So you see, thanks to Van Buren, the development of the appropriate infrastructure that allows the Democrats in the succeeding administration of Jackson and beyond to go farther than what the Jeffersonians did and actually start to take down some cronyism in significant ways. So to sort of tear down the American system because I'm very sympathetic to the Jeffersonians. I think that Thomas Jefferson dropped the ball in a couple of areas. His first administration was pretty good, but it quickly went to crap after that. In his second administration in Madison, the Jacksonians get a lot more stuff done. And I think this is something that gets overlooked and this credit should be given to Jackson. Credit should be given to Van Buren. Credit should be given to all the other Jacksonians which I'm sure we'll talk about. They weren't perfect, but they actually did, in the years they were empowered, dismantled the American system. They were by far the most successful libertarian, laissez-faire, free market, political force in American politics, both past and present, probably won't be repeated unfortunately. But so this political process, politics is very important when you're studying economic legislation because that's actually how the economic legislation gets passed. So thanks to Van Buren creating this necessary infrastructure, you're actually going to see the Jacksonians accomplish a lot more than what the Jeffersonians couldn't do in Jackson's administration. I also love this dynamic and I think it is very, again, particularly given the time period. But this really is like your average American saying, we don't need you, you fancy pants, New Yorker, New England elite. Even back then, you still had this dynamic where now that we're in this era and it's important to understand that often you hear the phrase Jacksonian democracy and things like that, the democratic aspect of this was independent of Andrew Jackson. It wasn't that Andrew Jackson came in and made changes to give the common man more power in the political process. The changes that were happening to that political structure helped fuel a Jacksonian campaign where he might've otherwise had no chance if it was the old school congressional caucus, very much controlled system. But I also just love that dynamic going from a Quincy Adams to Andrew Jackson just really reflects the changing of the times there. We're not gonna dive too much into the Adams administration itself. Yeah, I think a large part because it got a lot of the issues with it have been very common themes at this point in terms of the internal improvements and all this sort of stuff. I did want to point out one particular scandal that John Quincy Adams had. He bought for the White House a billiards table, which might be the most interesting thing about John Quincy Adams. That was his man of the people moment right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he was attacked for bringing in gambling equipment into the White House. Again, that will be the strongest point in his favor, in my own opinion. I also think it's interesting that there's this great, great quote. There's a fascinating book on this period called The Birth of Modern Politics, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, the election of 1828 by Len Hudson Parsons, which is a fun read. But going into this dynamic between Clay and John Quincy Adams, and again, when Henry Clay was made Secretary of State, that was one of those decisions that hurt both men because of how vivid the corruption was. But I did like this. It talks about John Quincy Adams' opinion of Clay generally. The quote was, as for Clay, quoting Quincy Adams, like almost all the imminent men in this country, Clay was only half educated. In addition, he had a reputation as a gambler, a drinker, and a womanizer, but Clay had large and liberal views of public affairs and that his principles relative to internal improvements would produce results honorable and useful to the nation. And I think it's interesting only because again, this shows the mentality that someone like John Quincy Adams was operating with during this time period is that they really believed that in spite of, perhaps all the internal failings, what they viewed as personal failings of Henry Clay, the fact that he was someone that would probably be fun to go out with, they really saw that interest in getting over that successful changing of the constitution by the Jeffersonians, at least in the romantic period of making that constricting document. Someone like John Quincy Adams saw someone like Henry Clay being willing to be as enthusiastic within this American system, within this system of internal impairs and internal improvements and all that money funding in. They thought this was vital to the well-being and cohesion of the country. And I think you still see this very similar dynamic play out in modern politics today where you still have a political process. Again, the regime itself believes that it's important to keep funding and fueling all these great projects of the regime because by their power, they can make otherwise backward words, picks and the uneducated and whatever, they can kind of bring them into a more noble and proper way of doing things. They really were motivated by this crusade to keep this system in place. And again, that's why the success of Andrew Jackson with a Martin Van Buren coming in and knocking out this entire process. These two elections are just absolutely fascinating from historical perspective. And I think they are vital to understand, they're vital for us to understand for anyone interested in political solutions to what we have now. Because even though 1824 might as well be 5,000 years ago rather than just about 200 in terms of the way we think about the world, there's still very much is this aspect where a lot of these aspects of this populist politics are kind of just baked into us, it's kind of that kind of inhuman emotion and the way that we respond to things. Some of this stuff is timeless, in spite of how far back we're really going to here in terms of political strategy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the election of 1824 has a lot of parallels with the modern era. Again, a lot of people were complaining about the election of 2020 as being corrupt or stolen, et cetera. And that's a whole separate conversation. Obviously, but it still is in many ways echoing the election of 1824 and how that was a corrupt bargain and the election was stolen, so to speak. Because Adams and Clay, I'm glad you brought up the democratization issue. Adams and Clay drastically misunderstood the situation they were in, that it was in the situation of decades prior where most people didn't vote. This suffrage of your average person was seen as a right and this was very, very much an affront to them that the popular will, quote unquote, would be thwarted basically through this over time election finagling and all of that. And so it is important, I think, to understand the election of 1824, not just from the perspective of American history, but also from the modern era. And I wish more people would understand it because I think history doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme. And I personally think we're due for another overtime house election sometime. And I hope that does happen because the country would probably just get destroyed, but it's a lot harder now in the modern two-party era, but I think some way, somehow it will happen. Who knows? One last thing, just because it does, it's something that does have an impact on Jackson in a variety of ways going forward. When we're looking at the election of 1828, something else that's notable and perhaps very modern in many ways is that it was a very nasty election. The most famous incident, of course, is the attacks on Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel, who was previously married, believed that her husband had divorced her, married Andrew Jackson, then it came out that she was not legally divorced, and so they accused her of polygamy and all this sort of stuff. She ends up dying shortly after here, and so that's something that Andrew Jackson, again, a man you do not want to tick off, obviously is very emotional about. You had attacks, they had this mailer that was just very bold of highlighting coffins and crediting Andrew Jackson, kind of trying to hold him, attack him for execution of deserters, during some of his military crusades. They attacked him with the negative opinions that Thomas Jefferson had of him. So this was also a time where, again, part and partial to the democratization of the political process, we're going from a time where you do not, where you even, it is seen as beneath your dignity to even actively campaign, we very quickly go from that in 1824 to outright mudslinging and dirty politics and all of these sort of tools of the trade going right there from the start, which again, I think it's just interesting and kind of seeing the history of American politics. Yeah, absolutely, the politics could be very bitter then, but bitter back then as it is now, partisanship was alive and well, but you would only see the battles continue on, especially once the Jacksonians were in power and they actually started to dismantle the system. But really with this election, in my own book, this is kind of like the last major election or sort of revolution as I call it, similar to the revolution of 1800, you have the revolution of 1828 because this is when the opposition had taken control and just like the Jeffersonians had the ability to reform the government, now with Jackson at the helm, the Jacksonians have the ability to reform the government. Well, so after several episodes of things getting worse and worse and worse in early America, we are now at something that I think, I know Patrick and I both believe is a positive event with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. I look forward with the next episode of going into some of the highlights of the Jacksonian regime and some of their own political theories and all that sort of stuff. So I tell that our next Jackson filled episode, this has been another episode of the Liberty versus Power podcast. If you do not have a copy yet of cronyism, again, you can get, there's a discount code at the Mises bookstore, which is code LVP. Please rate, review, like and share. We've gotten some good, great feedback about this series. Again, please hit me up on Twitter. If you'd like the show, send me an email, whatever. And thank you for watching. Patrick, any last words as we conclude here? No, nothing. I think he hit on all the points. You know, make sure if you haven't gotten your copy of cronyism, get it. And also make sure to follow both Phil and I on Twitter and comment about it and promote it. We really appreciate all of your feedback. I'm very grateful that there's this many people interested in what both of us have to say about American history. And this is especially the fact that there's a video of us. So if you're not scared with either of us on how we look, then this really shows that we're talking about important ideas. So again, thank you so much for listening to the podcast and I hope you are enjoying it. See you next episode.


So let's get some basic facts about foreign aid. Foreign aid basically comes in two categories. There's the money that the State Department spends on development projects, and then there's the money that the Pentagon gives out in military aid. We give about $30 to $35 billion a year from the State Department and about $10 billion in military aid. The gives and perspective, the total budget for the State Department, which covers all the different diplomatic work it does, is a little over $55 billion. All federal spending last year amounted to about $3.8 trillion. So foreign aid, even if you count the military aid, is less than 1% of the total budget. We do spend the most of any donor country, and over the last decade, how much we've been spending has been going up, adjusting for inflation, to be the most since we rebuilt Europe after World War II through the Marshall Plan. So who do we give the aid out to? Many goes to the kinds of countries you'd expect, largely in Africa, the Middle East, some in South Central America, some in Asia, and a couple of countries in Eastern Europe. Not a lot of aid goes to richer nations, though we did give $6 million to China and $78 million to India. The biggest block of countries together, getting high amounts of aid, come in the bottom half of Africa, with the totals ranging anywhere from $150 million to $600 million. The three countries that got the most aid were Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan, with Iraq also getting a pretty significant amount. As for military aid, in 2015, three quarters of it went to Israel and Egypt, and the rest went to a collection of countries mostly in the Middle East or Africa, with Iraq, Jordan, and Pakistan rounding out the top five. Worst boy band ever. So what do countries do with the money we give them? For the non-military aid, the biggest piece goes to health, mostly to projects dealing with AIDS. And the next biggest piece is economic development, building roads, internet lines, and power grids. The third largest priority area goes to aiding refugees. Some of the aid is for wartime projects which haven't finished yet in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then there's a collection of smaller projects of all kinds which include things like training and eye drug police or environmental preservation. As for military aid, it's spent on weapons and equipment, usually made by US companies. Some argue that this is a way to spend federal money to create American jobs. So what conditions and accountability do we put on foreign aid? There have been criticisms of how much aid we distribute and how we monitor it coming from both parties. One example people use is that Pakistan continues to receive military aid despite suspicions that they have been aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan and that they knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding while we were searching for him. Since 1961 the US hasn't been allowed to give aid to governments which consistently violate human rights, though there's been criticism that this requirement is hard to enforce. Obviously, this is a huge concern when we're giving out military aid. Doing the monitoring and reporting is difficult, especially because the recipient countries often don't want to be watched. So some complain that the State Department and the Defense Department basically either don't do it or do a bad job of it. There are more requirements that come with a sensitive country like Pakistan including having the President certify that the aid is in the national interest, though there are some waivers to the certification when health risks or national security risks are involved. In 2016, a new law was passed to require the federal agencies to develop a way to monitor foreign aid systematically and determine if the projects we fund are meeting their goals. And those reports are supposed to be published where the public can read them. This won't start happening though until sometime in 2017. This 2016 law also created a new website called foreignassistance.gov so that anyone can serve how much money is given out to which countries to do what, though some information can be left off if the agency provides a justification to Congress about how disclosure will harm the health or security of the recipient. And there you have it.