I was given the really difficult task to talk about a very odd species, the homo-Austriacus, and let me start with some famous last words of an Austrian politician. Frezinovac, a socialist, it's all very complicated. And I think the first defining characteristic of an Austrian is, you could say, complexity, but usually it's just too much complication. So let me see what's an Austrian, what's Austria. Not even that is quite certain. It's maybe a Latinized version of a Germanic word for the east. So usually it's referred to Osterich, the eastern March, or Margrave, a borderland in the border region, a small territory about a thousand hectares. But for some Swiss upstarts it became the power base due to a forged document. And those Swiss upstarts of course are the Habsburgs, and they created one of the largest most important empires in Europe. So Austria is much more important than it seems nowadays, in particular for European culture as always being in the borderland region. And I tried to figure out what are the defining characteristics of this Austrian, and then of course I tried to deduce something about Austrian economics, and what's so Austrian, what may be Austrian, about Austrian economics. Now the first thing that one realizes when visiting Austria, of course it's that now it's an alpine state, beautiful mountains, and I've talked many years ago about the traditional liberty of mountain peoples and mountain cultures, and I think some of that implies still, in particular to the countryside of Austria, but there is difference. Even those mountain Austrians are not just a recluded mountain population defending their old traditions, but they've historically always been at the center, and even at the center of trade routes. So I think it's a very interesting mix anthropologically between this kind of mountaineering culture and a culture of trade, which goes back quite a long time. It's a long tradition of metal production and of international trade. The Danube is one of the very few rivers which flows to the east, or the main rivers which flows to the east in Europe, and through the mountain passes already since Roman times had a lot of trade, and the Celts already were big in metal production. So there is a long tradition of kind of merchant entrepreneurship within these mountains. We have the tradition of the Himmler Lords, so-called Himmler Lords, which are basically entrepreneurs running big production facilities, which have been powered by water mainly. So there's an interesting kind of industrialization long before the steam engine going on in parts of Austria, in minting and metal production, which I think gives it a particular kind of mindset. I've traveled those Alpine regions a lot, I've written a book about them, and that's really one of the aspects I like a lot about modern Austria is I have the impression that there's a certain mentality surviving, kind of realism, honesty, directness, and a no-nonsense attitude, which I find usually in stark contrast to the more urban settlers of modern Austria and nowadays. Most Austrians, ethnically, seem to be Bavarianized Slavs, so the Bavarians, of course, southern Germans, so we're in a way Germanized, and this Macha Orientalis or Macha Austria was kind of Eastern from the Bavarians, of course, to the Eastern Borderland region, and there's even a hypothesis that Austria might go back to a Slavic term, which is Ostragora, a steep mountain, so that refers already to the mountains, even though the region of Ostariche is not very mountainous, but you can still see the mountains in a distance, maybe. And I think this kind of intersection between trade, production, and mountain cultures produced a kind of anti-collectivist mindset of some residue still survives in the mountain regions, and it's anti-collectivist in the sense that it doesn't really, as the flat plains of the state, it doesn't lend itself easily to organization. We have all these recluded valleys with the different dialects and so on, and I think there's still a stark contrast in particular to the flat plains up to the north in Germany and Prussia in particular. The survival in the Alpine region still needs cooperation, so there is a strong tradition of non-state cooperation, still surviving until today with a lot of cooperatives, you have water cooperatives, you have valley cooperatives, and those are overlapping, so they are not just exclusive nation-like, state-like, courageous, but more kind of bottom-up cooperation between smaller-scale farmers who basically are entrepreneurs, of course. We have a tradition of dispersed farms in large parts of Austria, so I think that's one part of it, but of course I think that's the nicest, maybe the most unique part. And of course for political and religious reasons, Austria has been severed from the German political units for a while, and one of the religious regions, of course, Catholicism that the Counter-Reformation was successful in Austria because the Hubsburg Catholic family, and it's a kind of top-down imposition, of course, but still large parts retain the Catholic culture, and what's a Catholic about the culture and what makes it unique? I think it's the Baroque style, and Baroque meant in the beginning something strange and bizarre, even the word Cortesque comes from the grotto in the Baroque garden. So what's so strange and bizarre about the Baroque culture? I think it's in stark contrast to the Puritan classicism, which once have orderly forms, and the Baroque culture is more dedicated to the dynamic forms of life and death. So you have stark dynamic contrasts, and I think it has affected a bit the mindset. The human form is considered as divine and Catholic thought, so you see a lot more reference to the human body, to the human form, and to the sensual, as opposed to the more abstract, idealized approach to art, and then, of course, you have the universality of Catholicism and the interconnectedness, so it was the Baroque culture combined many different art forms, in particular opera, music, and sculpture, and paintings, and I think that's contributed to our unique mentality, which, until nowadays, is a bit different from the German. And then, there might even be a link to the Austrian school. Some philosophers claim, as a philosopher, Mr. Krasl, has tried to point out that as Aristotelian realism has survived due to Catholicism, to a larger degree in Austria, throughout the schools and the universities, and interestingly, one of the few philosophers, Carl Mengersides, frequently is Aristotle in his principles. So there might even be a link to that realism in a philosophical sense, which I like to see as defining, in particular, an age where reality doesn't seem to be that important, and understanding of reality doesn't seem to be that important compared to your idealized, utopian visions of what should be and what could be. So then, of course, it seems like Austria is German, but not Germany, and I think that's one of the best points about it, to be German, but not Germany. And it meant usually to not be Prussian, so Austrian could be defined as the not or non-Prussian, and that was the view of one of the most important poets and writers of Austrian literature, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and he even set up a table. He started comparing the typical Austrian and the typical Prussian, and I think it's quite insightful. Of course, the only way to speak about the Austrian is in an Austrian way, which means with this claim that you shouldn't take anything too serious of what I'm saying, that is quite important. I think it's all full of prejudice, but of course, contrary to popular prejudice, calling something a prejudice doesn't mean it's wrong. But still, it's a list of prejudices that Hugo von Hofmannstahl offered in a table. He contrasted by saying the Prussians are bond together by state mentality, whereas the Austrians are bond together by love for the homeland. Now, what does that mean? I figured out the love for the homeland in the Elpine region is something completely different. It doesn't refer usually to a closed border that you control or a closed border region that you try to control. Usually, if in the Elpine countryside people refer to their high muds, their homeland, they are referring to mountain tops, to pinnacles, as points of orientation. So it's a kind of attachment to the place you've grown up or you feel a longing to, and that's a quite different bond, I'd say. Hugo von Hofmannstahl claimed that the Prussians show more virtue and more efficiency. It seems obvious, but the Austrians more piety and more humanity. Thus, Prussians are strong in abstractions and great in execution. The Austrians are quicker in perception. The Prussian acts by the book, and the Austrians acts according to decency. Of course, that's a very positive look on the Austrian side. The Prussian is more consistent, but may show cowardice. In particular, when being part of a group, a coward is in standing out, being afraid to stand out, whereas the Austrians show more ability to find one's way in life individually. The Prussian shows more self-confidence, whereas the Austrians show more self-irony. Whereas the Prussian tends to hard exaggeration, the Austrians tend to us irony until self-dissolution. So it might even be looked at as a point of characterlessness or lack of character, whereas the Prussian has a built character according to Hofmannstahl and the inability to think oneself into others. He tends to be self-righteous, presumptuous, cool masterly, whereas the Austrians tend to be shame-faced, vain and witty. Of course, as I said, full of prejudice, but I think maybe a bit enlightening. The German says Hofmannstahl is accustomed from his cool days onwards to show this stain for healthy human understanding by being satisfied with words that have been raised up to the noble standing of concepts. And of course, we had this impression of idealist, abstract philosophy on Germany, which Austria has not been spared, but a little bit, only a little bit. Then, of course, Austria compared to Prussia was an old empire and not a progressive nation state, and that tended to be the most important political difference and I think the link between culture and democracy is just as Hans has stated in his introduction to the democracy that got that failed. He gives the Austrian empire as an example. And I think I have a reason for that, of course, negative correlation between culture and democracy. So as an old empire, of course, it was always lacking in democracy, whatever that means. And I think the reason is that culture is produced by an elite of geeks. And in a democratic state, this elite of geeks is, to a large part, absorbed by politics. So you have all these policy wongs which would concentrate on the more aesthetic, scientific, cultural endeavours to prove themselves, to become upstarts. And of course, the reason for this aesthetic passions of the Austrian bourgeoisie was to imitate the noblemen, but they couldn't imitate them politically, so they had to imitate them as patrons of culture and science. And I think that's one of the reasons for the flourishing of culture in Austria. So not being progressive was actually quite a strong point in having a quite progressive and flourishing culture, which still defines Austrian steel. I mean, the main capital surviving which we've been living off quite comfortably for a long time is this huge cultural capital that's been amassed over quite a long time. In Austria, of course, there were reforms and even democratic reforms, but it tended to be a top-down thing with a small state elite, which is usually referred to as Josephinism, and Carl Peter will talk about more later on. And this kind of Josephinism which goes back to the enlightened absolutism of Joseph is, of course, I think it's the stain on the liberal elites of Austria. So most thought about liberalisation as being a top-down process, which needs to get rid of the old traditions and cultures, which are obstacles to being a progressive state. But in Austria it was just a small elite, and I think it failed in a tremendous way, and it was obvious in Austria. The failure was obvious. When the liberals were successful, they disappeared. There are a few places where it's that obvious that the kind of wiggism or liberal wiggism was a big failure in Austria, and I think that reflected upon the political mentality of Austrians, a kind of scepticism, a kind of pessimism, even I'll talk more about that later on. So being an old empire, interestingly, even though it was borderland against the Avars, and the Huns, and the Turks, and the Mongols, and so on, later on the Ottoman Empire turned out to be an ally, because it was one of the remaining old empires, and both the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Empire nationalism was the major danger of foe, in particular the new language-oriented and exclusive nationalism that was emerging, linked to democracy later on. So it was more like the Ottoman Empire than Prussia, of course, and early on there was a kind of direction towards the east, given the Danube, the old trade links, and for a certain time Austria was really important in Oriental trade. Most of the mail was done by Austrian ships in the Ottoman Empire, and Austrian harbours became centres of cotton trade, and that was the main reason why a new kind of entrepreneurship emerged in Austria. It was mainly in the textile industry, which created private riches, and I think then with having this orientation in trying to be patterns of the arts and cultures is the main reason for this flourishing, and I would call it kind of late enlightenment in Austria, but of course we'll have to distinguish enlightenment. I think if one can talk about an Austrian enlightenment it's much closer to the Scottish enlightenment than to the French enlightenment, and I think the main difference is that you really have that exchange between the academics and the artists and the merchants, and then I think we can see in Vienna, out of all places, in the private atmosphere of the salon or the coffee shop, it's a more private exchange of people from different walks of life. It's not an exclusive academic or exclusively political project, this kind of enlightenment, so it's really a flourishing of merchants who have the money and the time to be interested in scholarship and scholars and artists who are funded by and helped by these patrons of arts and sciences, and I think that's a unique mix, so I'm quite fond of this description as late enlightenment, and I totally agree with my Swiss friend Robert Neff, who counts the Austrian school among those representatives of the late Austrian enlightenment. The orientation to the east is also reflected in the saying by Metternich that in Vienna the Balkans begin, and Vienna of course is quite old, it's not alpine in any sense, it's a contrast, even in its music you feel that there's an eastern touch, it has a more sentimental feeling to it, and it sounds a bit like crying, it's not that happy alpine folkloric music, so I think in Austria there was really a meeting of different souls and as a historic bridge between, so it's maybe the easternmost part of western Europe, I'd say, with crucial importance to Europe as a cultural area, and then of course Vienna became a center in Vienna early on, even Maria Theresia started a school, which is now a diplomatic academy and started as a school to learn Turkish interestingly, Turkish Persian and Arabic for reasons of trade, and of course it was mercantilism, that's a tainted aspect of Austrian entrepreneurship, as Josephinism in economics as well, we had a top-down approach of a small era of almost complete economic liberty, but reserved to a small minority, and they were called the k'un k'a priviligierte Großhändler, the privileged great merchants, and it was really just a small number of people who got amazing economic liberty, no taxation, no regulation entirely free to do as you like, be based in free harbors like Trieste and Fiume, totally exempt from any state over side, more or less, and of course that led to increase of riches and abelated, but very quick industrialization of Austria, but it led to reactions as well, and they were very stark in Vienna, so you had this kind of late enlightenment, lots of people having time and passion to think about the world, and you have a tiny elite controlling a lot of this economic process, and then of course you have the typical pattern of inflation, the founders' era in the 19th century, the phase of the strongest economic development ended in the founders' crash, and it's a typical boom bust cycle early on, quite a classical example of that, and the reaction was very strong, so in Vienna you had all kind of lunatic reactions against the market economy, against capitalism, and for a while in the Vienna coffee shop you could go there and you could meet a young Stalin, a Trotsky, a Hitler sitting there and thinking their schemes, of course everyone was ignoring them, and it wasn't obvious what they were up to, but it all started in Vienna unfortunately, so I think it's quite apt to describe this small Austria as Karl Graus has done as a kind of laboratory for global lunacy, that's the way he termed it, and I think that was very prophetic at the time, and that shows of course the importance of Austria, another famous saying is it's the kleine Welde in der die große Ere Probe hält, it's a small world in which the greater world holds its rehearsal, of course rehearsal for lunacy, the lunacy of the 20th century, but that of course means that Vienna was the best place to study the lunacy in its beginning, so that's why Vienna produced this profound tradition of understanding lunacy, criticizing lunacy, and trying to fight lunacy, but of course when trying to fight lunacy you realize that you need a certain mindset and that was developed in Vienna, and now I'm talking about the gay apocalypse in Vienna, it's the certain mood where you understand that processes of desilization are going on, and you as an individual of course you are part of historical patterns, it would be quite foolish to exaggerate your importance and to take it too hard that sometimes the world doesn't seem to follow the Wiggish pattern, but a pattern of frustration and of things being built up falling down, so it's a particular mindset which is a bit gloomy, but still full of irony and humor, and I think it's the only way to take it, and I think it's the only way to take the modern world, and this art was perfected in Vienna how to live through times of desilization and how to keep your good spirits at a time like that, in the Fledermaus, there's a famous line, the operator, glücklich ist wer vergisst, was doch nicht zu ändern ist, you are happy if you stop thinking about what you can change, just I mean you can conclude, focus on what can change, that would be quite positive, but of course you can also just conclude a very pessimistic outlook as it's obvious in Nestroy another very important writer of Austria, he says for example of every human I believe the worst, including myself, and I've hardly ever been wrong, so it's a kind of gloomy, but maybe realistic, no nonsense approach to human nature, you don't expect too much, you've seen the utopian ideas and experiments, you've seen the lunacy and its infancy, and if you're an intelligent person you've learned something, and Nestroy again he says I think the major characteristic of progress, it always seems larger than it really is, and it's kind of no nonsense approach I'd say, which I really like in Austrian literature, and in particular in this phase I would call the late enlightenment, so I think quite obviously it was the right setting for the Austrian school of economics to emerge, and there are some parts that are really really Austrian in that sense among it, now let's look at modern Austria just briefly, I have a hate and love relationship of course with the country, Erik Greta von Kühnel Lidin has described as the Republik der Neidgenossen, so it's a Republic of which the last remaining bond is Envy, it's not like the Eidgenossen in Switzerland, it's the Neidgenossen in Austria, which means comrades in Envy, and of course maybe it's linked to having been great in the past and being reduced to being quite small, and stuff like that, I mean of course that should do something to our cultural mentality, so the typical Austrian today is a bureaucrat in the beneficiary of redistribution of course, and he thinks it's all trust, and it's an amazing miracle that has happened in Austria due to socialism, Vienna is still listed among quite a few rankings as the best place in the world to live, the highest quality of life, so it looks like an amazing success story that we have, of course there are other reasons than socialism for that, but they are quite complicated to look at, those rankings are mainly done by asking expats, so if you are living on a U.N. salary tax-free in Vienna, it's great, in particular because the competition by Viennese spenders is reduced because they are taxed so highly that you can get a lot for your money, and then of course you live in a city that was among the five top cities in the world already in the last and center in the century before, so it already had 2 million inhabitants, and you see that of course in the city as a huge cultural heritage and architecture and buildings even outside of the small city centers where most tourists are concentrated, so you have a lot of high quality buildings already built for 2 million people city, this rich culture and this rich cultural heritage and most of the value now this is created by tourism, so that's of course a bit concentrated and transitory, so if you don't have to earn your money in Vienna or you don't have to earn it honestly in Vienna, it's a great place to live certainly, but then also you can have a great life in France of course, if you don't depend on the France salary and are not taxed by the French, French is a bit like that I'd say, the quality of life in Austria, it's still I mean what's positive about Austria, of course we had the German Wirtschaftswunder as well, but kind of piggyback, so even in Germany they don't understand anything about their economic miracle and in Austria it's even less understanding, so most Austrians are pretty sure it's redistribution that made us that wealthy and will keep us that wealthy, so I'd say 90% of the population are convinced, this kind of redistributed system and the purport system we had in Austria that had so probably about the social peace and harmony where everyone gets along and we all get wealthy mysteriously and of course there was a lot of historical luck being the major trade partner of Germany and being on the right side of the iron curtain, just historical luck I'd say, because it was quite close, it was fairly close and if Mises is correct in his memories he was quite crucial in avoiding Soviet and socialist experiments in Austria by convincing the socialists of the time who were real thinkers at the time of course in Vienna and so he had, he made some impression apparently just by argumentation on them in the coffee shops and in the salons which I think is great. So what is positive about Austria nowadays I think the best thing about it is relatively small, not as small as it should be or could be but still relatively small compared to other countries, as I said it's part of German culture but it's not Germany and I think nowadays that's really a big plus and it's less urban than Germany so you still have these counter whaling powers of the countryside, this alpine culture I mentioned before so I think that's that's one of the reasons I'm still living in Austria and I enjoy living in Austria and of course the tendency is obvious but we always say in Austria we're five years later than the Germans so we can always watch in consternation what the Germans are doing and then have enough time we hope to react or flee as it turns out. So what is so Austrian about the Austrian school? I'd say it's a realist approach, a non-sense approach to the world, it's interdisciplinary which of course much of this spirit of the late enlightenment in Vienna where most of the scientific progress happened not at university, that was quite obvious, it was not the major academics, most of the important representatives of Austrian schools and there are various Austrian-Viennese schools never got full professorships, it was usually the more I mean mainstream colleagues so a lot happened in the coffee shops and the salon atmosphere where there was also an exchange with the practitioners, the entrepreneurs, the merchants and so on and I think that shows in the Austrian school as well I think the Geistkreis of Hayek and of course the Miseskreis were really the places where most scientific progress happened for a school and influenced a lot of different disciplines which we may not even know because it's hidden, there are no transcripts of the sessions of the Miseskreis but it's hidden in the influence of very important thinkers of their time. I think what's Austrian about the Austrian school as well is it respects complexity, diversity and individuality which of course was the only way to survive in this complicated pattern of the K and Ka monarchy, a mix of ethnicities and religions in particular in Vienna that showed this kind of complication so it really doesn't lend itself to idealize political projects because immediately you run into practical difficulties of how people settled historically and what their links are and they're all very paradoxical so the kind of ethnic cleansing that happened also of course happened later with the wars and the landscape before was totally different and extremely complicated so you can really draw lines on the map and it's most obvious I think in this region. I think there's what's Austrian about the Austrian school is it distrust in the great ideals even the ideal of democracy. I think that it's not wiggish in the sense that at least there is some experience, I mean we still see some wiggisms, some hope in progress which I don't think is bad at all and Mises and other representatives but we also see in Mises over his life of course he becomes more gloomy and the same thing happened with Menge, he became very gloomy, he even stopped writing so I think that's too much that's not the Viennese way to really take it to your heart and so I think we see that there was realization that civilization is fragile and de-civilization is a constant danger so a Dutch historian Mr. Dekker has described the members of the Austrian schools as students of civilization I would add that they are also students of de-civilization and that tends to be overlooked and maybe even be more important to look at this darker side of human trends with a more nonsense approach as well and not this idealized politicized approach but just more bullshit approach trying to understand what's going on without putting up your pink classes while doing so and I think there's quite a reason to see that that's typically Austrian or Viennese about it and shaped by the time and the mentality at the place of the time nowadays there is some trend by academics to claim that the modern Austrian school is not Austrian at all it's an invention by Americans and there's a lot of blame heaped nowadays a few works have come out recently who study the history of the Austrian school by academics mainstream academics and they of course they point towards something that happened in the US tradition and I think unfairly Hans gets a lot of blame as well for being a representative of an un-Austrian Austrian school and I think that's totally mistaken and but I think the mistake is an easy one to make and the mistake comes from this tiny little phase at the end of the 19th century where the representatives of the Austrian school were also part of a liberal state elite that was a very short time but it was it's conspicuous of course if you look at history how many ministers the Austrian school produced and what they did and how many excellencies they produced so major representatives of the Austrian monarchy so you see very established part of the establishment and part of a liberal, vigorous, progressive establishment with some Josephinist leanings of a top-down bureaucrats trying to impose liberty upon their unknowing and uncultivated population and I don't think that's the best part about the Austrian school I think it's just a biographic accident I don't think it's too bad neither I mean they had some influence but I think it's overrated and overstated and I think the mon-driving force behind this recent interpretation of what's Austrian about Austrian economics tend to look at the status of a mainstream established liberal elite and conclude that the Austrian school in the United States is not part of the establishment it's not part of the academic mainstream so someone must have done something wrong maybe by having too low standards maybe by being exaggerated ideologues and so on and by sidelining the gatekeepers in media and academia and so on so on the surface it looks as if there's a story to tell and I think it's the totally wrong story to tell my impression is if you really look and of course you have to change with the context and it's quite obvious when Mises moved from the context of his old Vienna he somehow he realized it's gone that age is gone and he reinvented himself and new surrounding a new era with new geopolitical challenges with new ideological challenges and he changed a bit his style which I think is obvious in in human action as compared to national economy there's a little change in style and there's a change in focus and there's a change on yeah what you focus on what you leave out but I don't think it's a change in mindset I'm pretty confident that Mises has remained true to himself and has now somehow turned into a different person but the context of course changes I mean we cannot just continue the discussions of the 19th century in Vienna the Austrian school if it's a tradition must be a living tradition so in that sense I'm quite sure that this property and freedom society is the most Austrian gathering in that sense that I know of because it really and that was the idea of Hans in the first place to have a salon and what's a peculiar Austrian about the salon it's really it's not the public pretense that you have it's a private gathering of like-minded people who have the absolute liberty to speak their mind and the absolute liberty to show a no-nonsense approach to the world without thinking about sensibilities and all the political considerations of real politics and so on and I think that's defining about the Austrian school and I think that's the main reason the Austrian school has survived that made it special because it's not just a merchant marginalist tradition that has become part of the mainstream as it's usually told but it's a real an approach of students of de-civilization maybe or have it both ways of the trends of their time we are willing to understand them in an interdisciplinary and no-nonsense way so I think in that sense I can really close by saying thank you for your attention my fellow Austrians


Hello! This final lecture is about groundwater. Groundwater is a very important source of water. This is because it is relatively reliable. A lot of groundwater bodies have a long residence time. It is often available locally and therefore it is distributed. It has a widespread occurrence and it is not affected by evaporation loss if deep enough. This is a picture of a simple groundwater system. We have groundwater recharged due to deep percolation from the hydrological cycle that feeds the body that can contain the groundwater, the aquifer. And the aquifer has, as it were, a little hole from which the base flow is constantly released. The groundwater is connected to the surface water through the base flow somewhere downstream. If the groundwater is not connected to the river water, we talk about fossil water, which is not part of this lecture series. Humans use groundwater and it is said that if they consume and pump groundwater at a rate that is smaller than the recharge rate, then we think that we are in the sustainable zone. We can abstract groundwater at a certain rate, which is less than the recharge rate. Question. What is the impact if groundwater is indeed abstracted as in this case? Let's say at half the amount that the groundwater is recharged. Would it affect the base flow? Yes, of course it would. Because we have the law of the conservation of Mars. If we take water out of the groundwater by pumping, it cannot become base flow water in the rivers. So groundwater abstraction will always have an impact on the base flow water in the river. What if groundwater is abstracted at a larger rate than the groundwater recharge rate? What will be the impact? The impact would be, of course, that slowly the groundwater body is mined and slowly the groundwater will be depleted as well as the entire base flow in the river. This is a situation that happens in several parts of the world where consistently the amount of groundwater pumped from the groundwater is higher than the natural recharge rate. Eventually this will have devastating impacts. Some challenges with respect to groundwater. The use of groundwater is generally an energy intensive and therefore expensive because of the large pumping cost involved. Groundwater may naturally have chemical elements that may be harmful to humans, for example arsenic and fluoride. Groundwater is also sensitive to pollution and it may take a long time once the groundwater body is polluted that it is clean again. This again is related to the residence time, the large residence time of many groundwater bodies. They may have residence time of 10 years, 100 years or even more. Therefore groundwater exploitation has often long lasting impacts. If we over abstract now, it may take time before the groundwater body is recovered from the exploitation. Also, and we have seen that in many places of the world, including for instance in Mexico City or Jakarta, that groundwater exploitation may cause land subsidence and or salinization. Furthermore, it is challenging to manage groundwater because of its invisibility. Do we actually know how large the groundwater body is and how much the recharge is and how much the various different users who have all kinds of pumping stations spread all over, how much is being used. So this also causes a collective action challenge because we have to manage the resource as a collective. But then if there is no joint and collaborative efforts and understanding, we may over exploit the resource. And just a warning, be careful with the notion of safe yield. The safe yield of a groundwater body is the amount that you can abstract from the groundwater, but it will always have an impact on the area downstream of that groundwater body. Now let's go back to our simplified groundwater system. We have an aquifer and there is somewhere a little hole in the aquifer. And slowly the groundwater seeps back as base flow water into our rivers. It becomes surface water again. In the beginning, if the aquifer is full, the base flow will be a bit high. But if the base flow is a bit high, the aquifer will quickly empty because of the pressure. But if the aquifer is getting emptier, the pressure in the vessel is less and the base flow decreases and further decreases and further decreases. As a result, we see often that the depletion, the outflow of a groundwater body has an exponential function, a depletion function, which can be expressed as such. The E is the number 2.71, which is an important number in nature. And the T is the time, which is expressed here in the horizontal axis. And the K is the characteristic factor for groundwater body. This can be expressed like this. But I don't want to scare you with these exponential functions. But you can see it in the hydrograph. This is a random river. This is the time on the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is the runoff. And these are hydrological years, year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4, etc. So you have a rainy season when the flow in the river is high and you have a dry season when the flow in the river is low. And that repeats every year. And some years are more wet and some years are more dry. Years are devastating throughout the year. What is interesting is the shape of the depletion curve of this river. It has more or less the shape of this. And they look alike. And this shape is related to actually this function. So the base flow depletion rate in the river during the dry season seems to follow a very nice exponential function. And we can simulate this also in an exercise. Let's do an exercise. You simulate groundwater seepage flow in a very simplistic way. In this exercise we simulate the flow of water out of an aquifer back to the river known as seepage flow or base flow simply by using a leaking bucket with water in it. See this video and replay as many times as needed. Hope you liked the video. Make a table of the volume of water stored over time. This on the horizontal axis the time and the vertical axis the volume of water stored. Note the time at each centimeter or half centimeter decrease of the water level. Make a graph for instance in Excel. What do you see? Find a trend line that best fits your data points. Does this conform to the theory? Success.


I'm Matthew Schuchman. I'm the founder of WarDrivingWorld.com and I'm here to talk to you about war driving hardware and how to build some if you want to war drive. Firstly, can I ask a question?  Can you raise your hands? Okay, so the rest of you are interested in war driving and the ones who have already war driven want to do some new things. They're great. Mike? Better? Okay, that's better. Okay, sorry. What is war driving? To start off, if those of you who haven't done it, war driving is the sport. The name was coined by Peter Shipley. The act of driving around and looking with a laptop computer and locating access points for wifi networks. You don't necessarily need an antenna. You can use an internal wifi card on a laptop, but you can only go so far with that. There are a variety of pieces of software that have been shared by their authors or in the public domain including packages like Maurice Miller's Net Stumbler, which allow you to record the access points that you find and record some information about them. And there are also packages like Kismet and that variety, which are crap, wifi packets, and then you dissect them a bit and do little bits of surgery on them. First question, is it legal to war drive? Okay. That's a word for all of you. Is it legal to war drive? Good question. And it's one that I'm going to be covering more in tomorrow afternoon. There'll be a session on the legal and ethical aspects of war driving. I'm the chair on that. And Frank Thornton will be there. Robert Hale and Renderman. And the four of us will be having a panel discussion on some of the current legal issues and some of the ethical issues in terms of war driving. You can join us there. Yes. They've moved the time a few times, but I think it's at 1 p.m. tomorrow. I guess they'll let me know tomorrow, but look forward to seeing you there. Okay. Simply put, the construction of war driving tools is legal. And war driving is legal as long as you don't try to access a wifi signal that you don't have permission to access. Simply detecting the signal so far, all the cases that have come forward have shown that at least accessing the signal is a problem, potentially. But simply detecting the signal is not. The problem comes in when you have a typical case of, let's say at home, I have a link sys router. I pull the link sys router out of the box. I configure some security there. And what do I use for an SSID that is the name on the router? Default. Okay. This seems unique. I now have my Windows XP laptop configured that when it sees default, it knows it's my home network and it links to it. Well, I drive around town. You're going to find a lot of links sys routers configured with the name of default. And what does Windows do? And when linked up with links sys, it simply goes and connects to the network. And it thinks it's yours. So, actively you haven't done anything. But the software and the hardware have combined, the software and the firmware have combined basically to allow you to have access to that network. So that's when the question becomes a little tricky. So we'll be discussing that more tomorrow. Yes, next slide. No, hold on a second. Thank you. The original war drivers were those IT folks who were asked to perform site surveys for the design of Wi-Fi systems. Their purpose was to see where the signal was emanating from, where it was strong, where it was weak, and where it needed to be changed. This is certainly a legal form of war driving because they're working with signals that they've been contracted to work with or they're working with signals in their own company. Yes, there have been a few arrests of people for war driving. Don't be scared. So far, there have been no cases of anyone arrested for war driving that wasn't associated with some other nefarious activity. That is, they committed some other crime. Most of us, I think, would agree if you're using... I'll take questions later. Thank you. Most of us would agree that if you're dropping in on somebody else's Wi-Fi signal and sending out child pornography as spam, that that's a crime and that has nothing to do with the fact that they happen to be war driving while doing it. Or going up online on Wi-Fi and stealing people's credit card numbers that are coming across from a retail store, the crime really is not the war driving. The crime was stealing the credit card numbers. So far, there have really been no yet recorded arrests for war driving. So, to start doing war driving and performing Wi-Fi site surveys, what do you need?  The first time I went war driving, I lived in South Florida. I drove in a four-mile square, four miles on each side around my house on major roads. I detected 83 access points. Approximately 15% had some form of protection. All of the others were naked. The SSIDs that is the name given to the networks that were naked included a local hospital, two law firms, one of which was named Law Firm, and the other one which was named by the name of the law firm, so certainly they weren't trying to hide, and one bank and one local city agency. Obviously there's a lot of people that are unprotected out there, but enough said about the vulnerability of Wi-Fi, one of the reasons in a sense that we all appreciate war driving is that we're trying to improve the security that exists within Wi-Fi. But again, I don't like to place the blame on the consumers who purchase the equipment which accesses it, or the consumers who have the equipment in their offices. I think that something is up to the responsibility should be in part with those who design the operating systems and those who design the hardware. They want to make it so easy to use they make the lack of security a default rather than security a default. There are different cards to use for Wi-Fi for different purposes. Internal Wi-Fi cards. People come up to me with one of the most common emails we get is, I bought a new Dell 8600. It has great internal Wi-Fi. What do I need to hook up your cantana to it? And I say, it's not going to help you at all. These type of laptops, their Wi-Fi is not upgradable unless you want to open up the screen, solder in a connector that's going to avoid your warranty and I don't want to sell the parts for it because I don't want to get involved in the problems. So I suggest to them what you need generally is an external Wi-Fi card that you plug in which has a external connector which allows you to hook up a variety of antennas. They're more power hungry than the internal card. They are going to draw power but most people's batteries are in pretty good shape these days. Not all external Wi-Fi cards PCMCIA or Cardbus that have external antenna connectors are created equal. They run the full gamut but there is no one Wi-Fi card which is the best. Some people prefer the two chipsets that are most commonly used are the ones based on the Hermes or the Orinoco classic gold and the other one is the ones based on the Prism chipset. Again, they're both different cards. The Orinoco gold classic was manufactured by Orinoco it was related to Loot but it was part of Lucent and when it was made it was not only manufactured for Lucent as an Orinoco card it was manufactured under private label for Antaresis, Twowire, Dell True Mobile Compact, Toshiba. At one point just about every Wi-Fi card you picked up was really an Orinoco. It was a very nice design. Proxim bought the hardware licenses from Orinoco and a company called a Jerry bought the software licenses. So when you use a gold classic card these days most of the time you're ending up putting a card in if it's a new one it's manufactured by Proxim and the software still comes from a Jerry. So people often ask me when they get a card here's a real Orinoco. Is there any difference between this and the Compact? There are about two bites of difference but from a performance basis there is no difference and they'll both run the same drivers. The Prism 2 based cards come in a variety of packages. Many Linux users prefer it. In particular there's a Cisco version which is a 100 milliwatt card. The Orinoco cards are only running at about 35 milliwatts. There's also an SMC version which is at 200 milliwatts and I think they've now come out with a 300 milliwatts version. So if you want power the Prism is a good card to go to but if you try pumping out 200 milliwatts on a continuous basis you'll certainly drain your batteries quite quickly. One of the important issues when working with a card and you want to do serious war driving and serious war driving would involve accepting some packets and examining their contents. This is what we would call promiscuous mode. Promiscuous mode is not as naughty as it sounds. It relates to networking where you have a Wi-Fi card which is able to recognize and accept all the network traffic which comes along. Passively. So it's basically somewhat stealthy and it's just sitting there and listening. Generally you not only need a promiscuous mode, a card that will do it, you also need a driver that will allow you to do it. I put it this way. If you want to listen to the music of Wi-Fi and you want to look at the notes that are being played with promiscuous mode, one of the important factors in terms of choosing a card is receive sensitivity. Receive sensitivity indicates how faint an RF signal is that can be successfully be received by your card. The lower power level that a card can receive the better the receive sensitivity. In Wi-Fi equipment, receive sensitivity is generally stated as a function of network speed. It will generally tell you at what speed your sensitivity is. For any given receiver, the higher the data rate, the less sensitive will be the receiver because the more power that is required to support that higher data rate. So people often ask me, I'm at a distance, it's dropping down to 2 megabits. Yes, that's what's going to happen. That's why you put an antenna in to increase the amount of signal that you're getting even though you're not increasing the sensitivity so then you can boost up your speed again. Next slide. I'm not going to do too much math here. Just briefly, receive sensitivity is frequently a confusing issue for people. That is because it's expressed in decibels. It's not generally a unit that most of you are familiar with if you're not working in RF or you're not working in acoustics. A decibel is a ratio expressed on a logarithmic exponential scale. So a 10 to 1 ratio is 10 dB. A 2 to 1 ratio is 3 and a 1 to 1 ratio is 0 dB. While ratios of less than 1 to 1 are expressed as negative numbers, for example a 1 to 2 ratio equals minus 3 dB. Received sensitivity when you look at a card and the specifications is expressed using a version of decibel employed in measurements of radio power. The dBm scale. 0 dBm equals 1 milliwatt. That's perhaps the end scale. A power of 100 milliwatts equals 20 dBm and 1,000 milliwatts equals 30 dBm. Power levels below 1 milliwatt are expressed as a negative number. That's just what happens when you're looking at something logarithmically. But when you need to compare the received sensitivity, for example, 0.01 milliwatts would be minus 20 dBm. And so when taking a look at it, what you really have to look at is the absolute value. What I mean by that is a signal of minus 98 dBm. Sensitivity is much better than the sensitivity at minus 95 dBm. Let's take a look at antennas for a moment. The simplest antenna, and what I'm going to tell you when any of you came to the booth and everybody wants the biggest antenna. It's an American tradition. Bigger is always better. In wood driving, bigger is not always better. And many of you I encourage to buy a lower-gain antenna. Why? The radiation pattern of a theoretically perfect omnidirectional antenna is a sphere that's called an isotropic antenna. However, that only exists in theory. A real antenna cannot have an isotropic, a perfect radiation pattern. The field propagates in a direction perpendicular to the radiating wire. So for a vertical antenna, the field isn't going to propagate up and down as much as it is sideways. That means that a 5 dB antenna is going to go to a certain range, but it will also go up, let's say, to the 15th or the 20th floor if you're in an urban area. If you suddenly go up to a 7 dB or an 8 dB gain antenna, you will get the additional range this way, but you will suddenly maybe not be able to retrieve a signal above the 10th floor or the 8th floor. So, that's why if you're in an urban area, bigger is not always better. Directional antenna. The two I'm going to talk about are the Quentena and the Yagi. The antenna we're looking at here on the top is a Yagi. Okay? Using a variety of elements that collect, reflect, or radiate the signal, antennas can be constructed, so the transmission and reception isn't always equal in all directions. The definition of what a directional antenna is. The first antenna we're going to consider here is the top one. It's called the Yagi Uda antenna. It's antenna in which the gain of a single dipole element is enhanced by putting a reflector behind it, a reflector behind it, and then directional elements in front of it, so that you can take a signal and push it forward, have a gain from all the reflected power and keep it directed on a narrow path. This antenna was invented in 1926 by H. Yagi and S. Uda. Uda's name dropped out along the way, but from what I heard from someone, he's the one who got the original patents. But a Yagi Uda antenna is a long time favorite. Any of you who are ham radio enthusiasts, any of you who remember what an old TV antenna looks like, anybody ever see a TV antenna? The days before cable? Right. Those were Yagis, okay? And they were very directional, and that's why you frequently put a rotator on them to rotate it in the direction of the signal. The next antenna we're going to show you is a Cantena. This is the original Heath Kid Cantena. This is not an antenna. I only show this to you because some people ask me how did it get the name Cantena. In the 70s and 80s, this is a product, which is basically a one gallon tank can that was filled with oil. It was used to test radio transmitters. It would dissipate the power up to a thousand watts. So you put an antenna for the transmitter on it and dissipated the power out of the transmitter if you didn't have an antenna on it. That name came along. And what happened was in about 2001, Andy Clapp presented a novel design for a very simple antenna based on a Pringles can. Many of you have heard of it. The Pringles antenna showed a great potential for a simple, low cost, less than $10 high gain directional Wi-Fi antenna. At this point, the other high gain Wi-Fi antennas that were anywhere near it were several hundred dollars a piece. I don't exactly know who to credit, but along the way, someone simplified the design and came up with what we have for a current tin can wave guide antenna or Cantena. Since it was much easier to build, the Cantena became very popular. This is an example of a commercial Cantena. Here's what a Cantena looks like inside. Essentially, a Cantena is constructed out of a can that can range from about three to five inches. You can go lower, you can go higher, but if you want reasonable gains, stay within that range in diameter. The most popular one uses a total can length of approximately 12 inches, which on a three, three-and-a-half inch Cantena results in a gain of about 12 dB and a beam width of roughly 30 degrees. You can build a Cantena yourself, and that's the whole basis for this talk. There are professionally manufactured Cantenas. We sell them. There are plenty of them available on eBay and online, but you can very simply build your own Cantena, and that's how I started off in the sport, so I want to share that information with you. The tin can wave guide antenna basically acts as a collector, and the closed end on the back here acts as a reflector. What happens is that the 2400 megahertz signal that's coming in is reflected off the back, and it intersects with the waveforms that are coming in. As these incoming signals and the reflecting signals meet, there are certain points where there are troughs and there are certain points where you have a maximum signal. It happens, the trick is that if you place the collector at about a one-quarter wavelength position from the rear of the can, you're on one of the tops. You get the maximum signal collection.  Anywhere along in the middle, you're going to get a different signal. The optimal position is about one-quarter wavelength along the way. I'm going to diverge momentarily off the Cantena because you can't really use a Cantena very well without a pigtail, and I want to explain a little bit about pigtails briefly. Firstly, you don't need a pigtail to use a Cantena. Simply by having a Cantena in proximity to a Wi-Fi card, since it's tuned at the same frequency, there's a certain amount of signal strength that will radiate over, and you will get an increase. It's minimal, and going through the air, you lose a lot of that signal. So although you don't need a cable to connect the two, I strongly recommend it. What's a pigtail? What's a cable? An extension cable is simply a cable which has two of the same connectors, one at each end. A pigtail is one which has two different connectors. That's the only distinction. The nomenclature isn't that firm, but that's at least how most of us use it. Why are there so many varieties of connectors? There are three up here. One, not all connectors are designed to operate efficiently at microwave frequencies. 2.4 gigahertz, which is Wi-Fi, is microwave. It's the same frequency approximately that your microwave oven operates on, except that's running at 4, 5, 800 watts, and we're talking here about milliwatts. Manufacturers want you to purchase their accessories for their product, so they use a custom connector, of course, to use their antennas with their Wi-Fi devices. But it also originated with the FCC. Part 15 of the FCC code says that the frequency we're working in at around 2,400 megahertz is in public domain. However, you're limited to an effective radiated power of about 4 watts. The way the FCC managed to limit manufacturers was to say that if you had a D-link antenna and a D-link router, D-link had to go and admit approval for the antenna and the router in combination together. And until last year, 2004, summer of 2004, the FCC came out with a new ruling which said you could mix and match. Technically, before that summer ruling, if you took a antenna and put it on a link-sys router, you were doing something not permitted by FCC Rule 15, because you might have increased the power above the limit that they wanted to. To comply with the FCC, each manufacturer came up with somewhat of a custom connector and got it approved by the FCC. Some took the popular SMA connector and they reversed the ground and the signal and you came up with an RP, which is a reverse polarity SMA cable. Others came up with a custom connector called the MC, which is what Orinoco uses. It's somewhat of a fragile connector, but again, we didn't design it. They came up with it, so it was customized for them. Samsung took the SMA connector and reversed the threads on the connector and you have something called an RT-SMA. So, when you get to the point at which you're looking for pigtails, be very careful which pigtail you're looking for. An SMA is not an RP-SMA, it's not an RT-SMA. Look carefully, talk to people you know. Go up online, there's some tables for each one of the types of equipment so that you can find out which type of cable you're going to use. The other important thing to keep in mind with connectors is people say to me, I'm a CB enthusiast. I have a PL259 connector. It looks about like an end connector. It does. It, however, was never made to operate and microwave frequencies, so you're going to see a lot of loss. If you use a connector, preferably an end, that is efficient at microwave frequencies. Cables. What makes a good cable? People are always calling me up and saying, I want a really, really low-loss cable. A really, really low-loss cable is about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It takes two people to carry it down the street. But, yes, it works. The thicker the central conductor on a coax cable, the stronger the shield, there's almost a direct correlation, the lower the loss of the signal along the cable. However, the thicker the cable, the less flexible. The cables you're generally going to run into are an LMR400, and that's about three-quarters of an inch, sometimes almost an inch thick. It's very heavy. It's very bulky. But if I'm running a 50-foot span up to the roof and I know I'm only going to lose 6 dB over 100 feet, here's a piece of LMR400. This is not the type of thing you want to plug into your little laptop. This is what we call equivalent to about an LMR200 cable. It's a lot lighter weight. It's a lot more flexible. If you're going to do a run of 20 feet or less, this is a great cable to use. They call it LMR240, they call it LMR200, they call it low-loss 200, great cable to work with. This is an LMR100 cable, very thin. On the other hand, if I'm trying to connect this into a card that I plugged into my laptop, I certainly couldn't plug in that LMR400 into it. One, there's no place to put the connector. Two, the weight of it would break the connector. So we use pigtails to connect from one side of the connector up to another. Just be careful in a sense, when you're looking for a cable, you have to decide how long it's going to be. Now that you know a little bit about cables and you know a little bit about connectors, the next step is you want to build a tin can wave guide antenna. That's what you all came to hear. What are the parts and tools you're going to need? You're going to need a tin can. You're going to need an end connector. You could use another microwave connector. I'm going to use my example using an end connector. The example stays the same. You're going to need a drill or device to make a hole in the can. You're going to need a short piece of wire. You only need about one and a quarter inches, but I would say start off with about six inches so you can make a few mistakes. You're going to need a soldering iron and solder. A little flux doesn't hurt. My partner here, King Tuna, makes and he says if you've soldered, put a little flux on it and it's going to make life a lot easier. And most importantly, you're going to need a ruler. Don't do it by law on the site. Sorry, by site. Choosing a can. You could choose many different types of cans. This helps in the build process. Yes. King Tuna says I build better can tunas when I've had a shot of Jack, but we've used coffee cans work. You can eat beans, baked beans cans work great, particularly anybody here from England. The baked bean cans are a lot wider there and they're much better for a cantona. Or you can use or drink scotch at holiday time and it comes in a nice little metal commemorative can which happens to be almost perfect for a great cantona. Stoly also provides them. You can download plans for many of the cantonas. We're going to distribute one plan here off of the internet. Some of them will have very exact measurements of how to build it. Relax, you don't have to be that exact. You can be within 10% and still make a good cantona. There are some dimensions which are important. You start off by having an end connector. This is an end connector. You're going to take this end connector, it has a female end on one end and it'll have a little stub on the other side. You're going to be soldering a piece of copper wire to that. We have, in my business, we happen to use a little brass tube that we have pre-soldered. You can use a brass tube, you can use copper, you can use a copper piece of wire. It'll all work about the same. You need 1.21 inches for a radiator to be effective. What? Let's go to the next slide, please. Okay, now, they've just told me I only have 10 minutes because we started a little late, so I'm going to try to go briefly. The first thing to determine is based on the width of the can, the diameter of the can that you have, will determine what the length is for a wavelength. You need to position the collector one-quarter wavelength from the end. That's the optimal point. That is the distance that you have to be careful on. Anywhere, if a little further, a little less, the cantina will still work, but you'll get lower gain. The other important measurement is what we call L over 4 here, which is the length of the radiator, which is going to collect the signal. It's going to be as close to 1.21 inches as you can. Using a ruler to make a cantina, here's an example of one that my partner, King Tuna, made. It took him about 15 minutes this afternoon. This is made from a 13-inch coffee can, 13-pounds coffee can. It's not necessarily the optimal can to do it, but it shows you can do it with any can. That's CVS you bought it. You take this can. We've got some plans. You can go up and there's some calculators that will give you that are on the internet, which, based on the diameter of the can, will tell you the distance out from here that is one-quarter wavelength. Cut a hole. In this case, we just used a screwdriver and a mallet to cut a hole that's about 5-8 inches around.  You don't need it to be a round connector. If you've got a square connector, you can use that. You can screw it in place. The other dimensions are not going to be that important. For an optimal cantina, you want this length to be approximately at least three-quarters of a wavelength. For this particular can, which is four inches across, three-quarters of a wavelength works out to be 5.15 inches. This happens to be 5.25 inches. The 13-ounce coffee can just happens to work well.  All there is to building your cantina. Essentially, the only part that you're going to have a problem finding is the end connector. You can get it from radio supply houses. We may even have a few left at our booth. There are places to buy them on the internet. That, a 1.21 inch radiator and a good tin can. Take that. This particular one is four inches, a hundred millimeters. Four inches across. I could go over the math, but basically, the distance that you're going to measure from here to there is going to change based on the diameter of the can. If you want, you put a pigtail on. Pact it up to your card. A simple cantina like this, which took about 20 minutes to build, will give you about somewhere between 8 to 10 dB gain. We haven't fully measured this. If you're a lot more careful about the calculations, if you're a lot more careful about the length of the can, you can probably get 12 to 14 dB gain. If we make this shorter, we will get less gain, but then again, we'll get a wider signal coming out of it. Some people have made them about four inches or so, and they get about a 50-degree signal breath. If you make it about 12 inches long, you're going to drop down to about a 25 or a 30-degree signal breath. That's what you use in your cantina for. We find it very useful to go to Home Depot, pick up a little tripod, thread a 1 quarter by 20 inch, 1 quarter by 20, threaded, bolt, put it on there, screw it in, and now you don't have to take your coffee cup and try to measure it and get it off and left to focus it. You can put it on any camera tripod. It's really very simple to build a cantina. Again, the two calculations necessary, the length of it is 1.21, and go and find either use of plans that we've got for working with a simple coffee can, or go on the web. You can go to a calculator and measure this out for this 1 quarter wavelength. Any questions? The optimal radiator is a trapezoid. Actually, a cone. But it's pretty hard to make a cone like that. So, by making a rod, we end up trying to get in the middle channel. See me afterwards. What you want is a trapezoid I think it's 6 millimeters at the bottom and 1 millimeter at the top. Again, 1.21 across. That's optimal. Yes. No. We tried it with copper. We tried it with bronze. We even tried it with aluminum. They all work well. We didn't see a significant difference. Yes. Thank you very much.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards, and I'm ripping some personal boxes for Justin H We've got to 2022 tops F1 chrome sapphire Alright, good luck Justin. Let's see some big photo variations. Come on. Come on All right, all of these will get sleeves and top loaded for you to Lando Norse future stars of cordial Lewis Hamilton and a Jostepito. I had an undertaker last night. Well, who's that sick? Got a chartreuse coming up Ocon future stars per share our chartreuse future stars is gonna be a Kailin Williams for Trident on the F2 racer 20 of 199 and Fernando Alonso. I suppose a number two Shumacher Lewis Hamilton Grand Prix winner Sergio Perez and a Yuki Sonoda and a Cody Rhodes redemption. Nice There you go. Let's see a purple he says Come on be black and white here Magnuson You've got Charles Lecler Oh, it's aqua. We got a aqua of Esteban O'Conn on the Grand Prix winner of Hungary 33 of 99 on that aqua Roy Nassani Albon a Daniel Ricardo and Atheo Pusher another chartreuse here Esteban O'Conn chartreuse of Lewis Hamilton on the portrait. Nice So 199 there 186 of 199 total wolf and Piaf Street. Why is that one who's curious Jack Duhan, we've got a sepia of Alexander Alvon for Williams Sure, I'm sorry not chartreuse. Sepe has their beautiful looking cards 15 out of 100 Very sharp of her sure future stars and raconian driver of the day of Abu Dhabi Science we got gold here that'll gold in the last pack of the first box stands how her future stars So Donald appreciate it. See let's see F1 For Williams is gonna be a Nicholas Latifi on the gold there you go Justin Nice way to end that first box that is 14 out of 50 on the Latifi Alright box to come on photo variation. I gotcha Realize that can Push redemptions back and things like that. That's interesting to know All right box to Justin. Come on. See you big one. Yeah, sepia Alonso Sato a Carlos signs We've got sepia of George Russell nice one there Mercedes That is 69 of 100 on the sepia Sounds good Donald have a good day Thanks for stopping in real quick and saying hi Fernando Alonso. You've got green for sure Pierre Gasly Green now of Alexander Alvon for Williams Nice Alvon Does not have a variation 63 is 75 on that one Nice Alvon got Lewis Hamilton Gunther Steiner Nicholas Latifi and Verstappen on the Grand Prix winner got gold again Lewis Hamilton Future stars Fiti Pauly gold F1 Red Bull pit stop award for Red Bull Three out of 50 nice gold there Sergio Perez future stars JQ's future stars Ollie Caldwell and a Sergio Perez Future stars Marcus Armstrong Chartreuse Lewis Hamilton nice got two of these now Justin 46 of 199 this time Future stars of Liam Lawson and Lando Norris driver of the day of Austria Latifi Lewis Hamilton and make Schumacher and Verstappen Grand Prix winner Abu Dhabi All right last pack here for you Justin last pack Esteban O'Conn a Max Verstappen and That is a variation There you go last pack and we get a variation here for you Justin congrats on that one get this one in a mag for you No, there's still time ADM there is still time nice variation there Grats on that Joe Guanyu rookie and a Botas on the Grand Prix winner Alrighty Justin now we'll do it for your boxes again some nice color coming out of there as well as the Verstappen Variation thanks as always for hopping in we'll get these right out to you


Hey there friends. Thanks for checking in at the range now today We're looking at my Magnum research baby Desert Eagle 3 9 millimeter pistol with an all steel frame This thing is a beast now It's been a while since I shot it and I was going through my safe and said I really miss that baby Desert Eagle 3 So we're out with it today wanted to bring you guys along a hot Sweaty day, but it's worth it 49 ounces loaded with the 15 round mag and the additional carry around 16 rounds 49 ounces carbon steel 4.4 inch barrel Check that out Now it is the CZ 75 copy However, Magnum research added some of their own flavor to it check out the slide cuts there It resembles a full-size Desert Eagle and then it does have a slide mounted de-cocker Thumb safety all right, and it is ambidextrous. So it's called the teardrop It kind of looks like a teardrop and that will disengage the trigger and will not allow The hammer to be cocked back, but once engaged this thing is beautiful now It's got a 12 pound double-action trigger pull. All right, it is heavy But the single action is four pounds So let's take a few shots and Check this baby out. I miss it What a great gun this is It has all the features that the CZ 75 does okay full-length slide rails It has locking lugs on top of the barrel very 1911 ish CZ 75 ish You know, we know that that is the most copied handgun next to the 1911 and This has everything that does but with the magnum research brand or in the magnum research brand does have a full pick rail right there three dot sights All right, and the baby Desert Eagle 3 actually has a slimmer grip They slim down the grip they slim down the slide to 1.3 inches So I do love it. It's been a while, but I miss it For a full-size handgun now. They also make this in a Polymer frame model and that has finger grooves. This does not all right It does have some serrations on the front strap and back strap all steel though you feel this thing and It's pretty awesome. I've always enjoyed it now. This is a CZ mag It's actually a metgar mag made for CZ works just fine with this It does have the plus two base plate so it packs in some rounds And I'm gonna take a few more shots and then I'll turn the camera around you can see how there is no recoil And I mean none With this big heavy steel frame, let me turn the camera around I Think I have a couple rounds left. Let's see Well, too I'm gonna load it up again All right, I have seven rounds loaded up. I want to keep the camera at this angle I want to mention though that this gun could be carried in half cocked most of the CZ models are Quarter cocked. This is half cocked, which I think would be a safe way to carry the gun So you don't have a full double action just a a partial double action if that's a thing But check out the lack of recoil with this heavy frame All right All right, let's add a little distance here with the baby Desert Eagle 3.  I have the same model in 45 ACP. I love that one as much and They're great shooters. It's been excellent for me. I got this in 2016. I put some Good rounds through it a decent amount of rounds through it, but it's been a little while. I had to get it out I had to share it with you guys and Get your thoughts back as to what you think about the baby Desert Eagle 3 If you like videos like this, please subscribe and share. I always appreciate thumbs up button Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


ya mawa kama nดibato. Nariwa na kama niha watamina, meza kufu splitno kakama, hwa kuchu na kaa. So miwa kwa wakandu. Right here at the CBD, sewami na mawa kwenya K200 envibi kwenya Kwa wakandu Kwenya knoza. Thank you, Shikwa. Tata ka heja. So nami ka mawa kwenya So, stand up against the femicide that's been happening, stand up for our sisters, for our mothers, for our cousins, our daughters. It just has to end. This sort of new spirit of violence, it has no place in Kenyan society at all. It's beautiful to see men joining in the march and I want to hear from you because a lot of people online especially have been probably thinking each time a man heal. Do you think the issue is mental illnesses about everything that is happening? Well, I definitely think there's a lot of mental illness going around and a lot of stuff that we need to talk about but it's no justification for violence. I think, like my wife always says, where will we learn democracy if in the house the father is always right, if at school the teacher is always right, if in church the pastor is always right. So, we need to learn how to, first of all I think some of these relationships are very extractive, people are getting killed because they're not giving sexual favours or anything like that. This is not how things work and we need to make men understand that women are equal, women can lead and we can, some of those things that I'm saying them but they are so obvious to me, I don't understand why it's such a problem for men to understand that. There is no superiority over women and if we can get that into our heads then we won't have to do this and there won't have to be people dying.  Do you think men are taking advantage of the economic stakes of women? Okay, first of all I don't even know how much I want to go into that. Do I think that men are taking advantage of, first of all I don't think that women are doing what men are saying. I don't think that women are there like okay I'm going to sell my body because times are tough, times have been tough and continue to be tough. If we want to talk about the fact that we are having more mature sexual conversations and that women are being much more free about talking about sex we can have that conversation. But it's not that women are out there selling themselves. I think that we just need to be careful and not approach this thing with too much judgment. I'm talking about how young people are addressing issues of sex and sexuality right now.  You have to understand that. But we've been raised to that thing that men can do whatever they want and that if women do then they are loose. That's a completely wrong narrative. Let's talk about the video that went viral yesterday because we had some women at Jivanji who were protesting against Femiside. But we had these two men who are now against the march and they say wanaume pia wanaumia kwenyemi kondoya kina dada awana wake.  You saw that video? I did see the video. Those two men are not representative of men in general. And I would like to encourage any young man, any man who has seen that. Don't take that as an example. I think there is a lot of violence in the way people are speaking. People in leadership positions, people at home etc. There's a lot of matusian violence in the way we speak. But that is not what being a real man is about. And maybe I'll even look at the camera and tell your people. Young men at home, don't believe that thing. That's not how true men are. True men talk, true men negotiate. And true men understand that women are equal to men. Eric, your music has been like the unofficial Kenyan anthem of helping with activism, help... For example, your song, Inche Akituki Dogo. Do you think the government and the entire criminal justice system, that is the police, the judiciary, are doing enough to make sure these cases and victims get justice and the perpetrators go to jail? I don't think enough is being done to make sure that the perpetrators of this kind of violence are being dealt with accordingly. I think Bonnie made a very good point about a case that happened in the country and the people went off scot-free and up until the efforts of activists like Bonnie was any attention paid to it. We have to be much more serious about punishing sexual crime and violence against women. And it needs to be clear that no one can get away with it. No one is above the law. And that... there are no sacred cows. And maybe, looking at the cameras, please talk to men and also women. Women are encouraging you to continue speaking for your rights. This society cannot function without you. It sounds like such an obvious thing to say. I believe that women should be in positions of power. I believe that women should take the lead in the house as well. It's the best idea that wins mutual respect, mutual understanding. And we can work out any problems that need to be worked out. To men? To men, be careful about the role models that we choose. The loudest voices that we are seeing on the media all the time are not necessarily the voices that we should be listening to. We are guided at all times by justice and by love. That's all I can say. Thank you so much Eric and thank you for showing up. Thank you for coming.


Are you reviewing Lifeline? Yep. Aren't you worried? Why would I worry? A lot of people are annoyed by Lifeline. This could be a controversial review. You could get trolling in the comments. No way. My viewers are the smartest and most reasonable viewers on YouTube. If there's one thing I've learned from my years of producing videos is that I can trust my audience. I don't expect to have any trouble in the comments section. Hello everybody, hoodedCoverCommander788 here. It's time for another vintage GI Joe toy review. And this week we are looking at a somewhat controversial figure, Lifeline. If you're a GI Joe fan, you already know why he's controversial. I don't even have to tell you. But I will tell you later. People have strong feelings about Lifeline. The character rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I understand that. I don't hate Lifeline nearly as much as a lot of people do. But I do understand why some people don't like him. Why does Lifeline annoy people so much? Let's find out by looking at the figure. HCC788 presents Lifeline. This is Lifeline, GI Joe's rescue trooper from 1986. This figure was first available in 1986 and was also available in 1987. It was discontinued for the year 1988. However, there was a mail-away variant that was available through an offer in Rice Krispies cereal in 1991. This variant is often called the Rice Krispies Lifeline. We will look at that variant in this video. There were a couple other versions of Lifeline in the vintage era. The second version was released in 1988 in the Tiger Force sub-team. It used the same mold as the first version, but with wildly different colors. The last version was released in 1994, the final year of the vintage GI Joe toy line. They finally gave Lifeline a new look. It's the only Lifeline figure in the vintage era that wasn't based on the first version. As a rescue trooper, Lifeline serves as a medic. GI Joe's lineup of medics is sparse. The first medic was Stalker, who had medic as a secondary military specialty. At that time, the GI Joe team was too small to have a dedicated medic. The first medic specialist was Doc in 1983. Doc was a full-fledged medic, complete with a stretcher and a flare launcher. He's probably the most remembered GI Joe medic. After Lifeline in 1986, 1987 Falcon had medic as his secondary specialty. In 1989, the second version of Stalker was released, and he still had medic as a secondary specialty. In 1991, we finally got a dedicated medic stretcher. He was called a medical specialist, but that's close enough. He's more of a traditional medic in the vein of Doc. There were gaps in the line with no dedicated medic. Kids may not have considered a medic to be a very exciting character. Did Cobra have their own medic? Well, Dr. Meinbender was a dentist. Other than that, Cobra didn't have dedicated medics in the vintage era. Given the design of their vehicles, it seems Cobra wasn't very concerned about the safety of their personnel. Cobra did eventually get medical specialists after the vintage era. Scalpel was introduced in 2003 and Mediviper in 2005. Here is that Mediviper figure. It's pretty much just a recolored scalpel figure with a different head. This figure was sent to me by Larry Laura. Thank you, Larry. I'm reviewing a vintage figure, so I don't want to focus too much on it, but I thought you might like to see it. We don't do a lot of modern figures on this channel. While we're going through figures sent to me by Larry, here's another one that's relevant to this week's review. This is Med Alert from 2005. Even though this figure is not called Lifeline and doesn't have Lifeline's filename, they were clearly trying to copy Lifeline's look. Lifeline has a character trait that many fans consider annoying. If you're a GI Joe fan, you probably already know what I'm talking about. We'll cover that thoroughly after we look at the figure. Let's start by looking at Lifeline's accessories. Starting with this big thing that he's carrying. The card contents call this an EMS kit. EMS stands for Emergency Medical Services. It's a white case with a handle that can fit in the action figure's hand. It has an oxygen mask and it's looped around the handle right now. I'm going to remove that for the time being and we'll look at that later. It has plenty of molded-in detail. On one side it has a red emergency symbol and the word rescue. They are molded in the plastic and painted red. This EMS kit is a remarkably elaborate accessory. It has two clips that snap onto two knobs on the top. And if you pop those out, you can open it up. And inside it has a silver plastic piece with molded-in oxygen tanks. On the side there's a hole for the oxygen hose. There's also a hook on that side, presumably for hanging the oxygen mask. I don't find it works very well. I usually loop the strap for the mask around the carrying handle. On the opposite side there's a small peg. It almost looks like this is intended to connect to another accessory. But Lifeline doesn't have anything that connects to it. The EMS kit is easy enough to close back up. Just press those clips back on the top knobs. Next we have that oxygen mask. It is in black, soft, flexible plastic. It has a thick, ridged hose that pegs into the EMS kit on that hole right there. Plugs right in fairly securely. The oxygen mask is designed to fit over the mouth and nose of a figure. And the strap has a loop buckle so you can secure that mask on the figure. Here's what that oxygen mask looks like on the figure. There is some similarity to the oxygen mask that came with the 1984 Ripcord. But Ripcord's mask covers the entire face, not just the mouth and nose. Next we have Lifeline's pistol. The card contents call this a Browning Double Action 9mm pistol. This is probably a Browning High Power DBA with DBA standing for Browning Double Action. The high power is a Belgian pistol introduced in 1983. The pistol is in silver plastic. It's often mistaken for the 1985 Keele Hall pistol, also in silver plastic. Keele Hall's pistol is rare and expensive while Lifeline's pistol is common. If you're looking for Keele Hall's pistol, make sure you get the right one. For fans of GI Joe, this pistol stands out as an unexpected accessory for Lifeline. He should probably not be carrying a gun. We'll discuss that more when we talk about the character. Finally, we have his backpack. This backpack is in silver plastic. It has an antenna and lots of technical detail. It looks like a communications backpack and is similar to the backpack that came with 1986 mainframe. I could see how these backpacks could get mixed up. With the accessories out of the way, let's take a look at the articulation on Lifeline. He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures by 1986, so he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could swing his legs apart about so far. He could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at Lifeline starting with his head. On his head, he has a helmet, a red helmet with white stripes and a white band around it. It has silver goggles on the forehead and a red chin strap that goes under his chin. This helmet is non-removable. I usually prefer removable helmets, but they probably could not do a removable helmet like this with multiple paint applications and the chin strap that goes under his chin. He's wearing green glasses and this is a callback to the green glasses on the 1983 Dock. In the back we can see Lifeline has black hair. He has a slightly expressive face. He's kind of smiling. It's not a big toothy grin like Duke. It's more of a Mona Lisa smile. In a lot of his media appearances, Lifeline is shown to have a microphone attached to his helmet. That feature did not make it to the figure. I will say something in favor of this head. Besides the Caucasian skin tone plastic, this head has four additional paint colors. That's four paint applications just on the head. On his chest we can see his skin color just over a slightly open zipper on his shirt. His shirt is very red. On the right side of his shirt he has three white pockets. If you look closely at those pockets, they have little rings on the zippers. That is impressive detail. There's no denying that. On the left side of his shirt he has that same emergency symbol that's on his EMS kit. It's a white square patch with a red circle that is broken up into three vertical sections. Also on the right side of his shirt under that emergency symbol he has a white empty pistol holster, presumably for the accessory pistol. But that holster is much too small to hold this accessory. Around both shoulders he has silver straps. Those straps continue around to the back where they meet kind of in the middle of his back. Those straps would be for his backpack. I do appreciate that they made the straps silver similar to the color of the backpack.  There is a lot of very minute detail on this chest. You may not like the red color. I may not like the red color, but they did put a lot of effort into it. On his arms he has red sleeves with white cuffs and bare hands.  Both arms have an unpainted V shaped detail sculpted onto the upper arms. I've seen this detail on some other figures like Cross Country also from 1986, kind of has that V shaped detail on his upper arms unpainted. I don't know what this is supposed to be. It's not a fold in the cloth. It's not rank insignia. Does anybody have any idea what this is? On his waist piece he has a white belt with a silver buckle. He has an unpainted pouch on the left side of the belt so that pouches the base red plastic color. On both the right and the left side he has vertical straps that are in white that lead down to details on the legs. His legs are red like the rest of his uniform.  On his right leg there is a silver painted flashlight and there is a white strap for that and a vertical strap that goes up to the belt. On his left side he has a white pistol holster with a black pistol. This is Lifeline's second pistol including the accessory. This pistol is on his left leg implying Lifeline is left handed but the pistol holster on the chest is on his left side in a position for the pistol to be drawn with his right hand. So maybe Lifeline is ambidextrous.  It goes all the way down to his knee. The letter E at the end is actually on his lower leg. And finally he has white boots, pretty plain boots but he has a silver knife strapped to his left ankle. This is a good opportunity to look at the Rice Krispies Lifeline. This figure was available as a mail away offer in cereal boxes in 1991. The overall look is very similar to the retail release. In fact at first glance you might not see the differences between these two figures. The mail away variant comes with fewer accessories than the retail version. The EMS kit is almost the same as the retail one. The red coloring on the emergency symbol and rescue is a little bit lighter than the original release. The EMS kit still opens up and still has the silver oxygen tanks inside. But it does not come with the oxygen mask and hose. The backpack is almost exactly the same as the original release backpack. The plastic color is the same. The only difference that I can see is there's a slightly longer peg on the mail away backpack. The pistol is not included and this figure did not come with a file card. The figure itself reuses mostly the same parts as the retail release. But the legs are different. The Rice Krispies Lifeline reuses the legs of 1985 Frostbite. That means he does not have the pocket, the flashlight, the pistol holster, or the ankle knife. Frostbite's legs are pretty plain so Rice Krispies Lifeline's legs are also pretty plain. He does still have the word rescue in big white letters running down his left leg. But as you can see, the font is different. They did not just reuse that old tampo, they redid it. Even though this figure was only available through a mail away offer, it doesn't seem to be very rare. You can find them, even still sealed in the plastic bag, for reasonable prices. Before we move on, let's step back and look at the figure again. This guy is red. Really red. Any part that isn't red is white. This is a guy who wants to be seen. If he were a civilian emergency rescuer, that would make sense. As a combat medic or a combat search and rescue troop, it doesn't. When you look at pictures of modern medics and rescue personnel, they look like soldiers. A lot of modern combat medics have even abandoned their non-combatant markings. This is one of the reasons I didn't have much use for Lifeline as a kid. I couldn't send him on a combat mission dressed like this. He'd give away the position of the whole team. Let's take a look at Lifeline's file card. His file card has his faction as GI Joe. It has a portrait of Lifeline here. And in that portrait you can see the microphone detail that is not on the figure, but does appear in the artwork. His codename is Lifeline and he is the rescue trooper. His file name is Edwin C. Steen. His primary military specialty is medic. He has no secondary military specialty. His birthplace is Seattle, Washington, and his grade is E-5. This top paragraph says, Lifeline was a paramedic with the Seattle Fire Department for five years before he discovered that EMS and parentheses emergency medical service personnel who were disabled while giving aid off duty were not eligible for pensions. In his mind, rescue personnel were never off duty. He decided to make his status permanent by enlisting in the Army as a corpsman. As far as I can tell, corpsman is a Navy specialty. The Army uses medics. I'm open to correction on that. All the references I found for corpsman were for the US Navy. This first paragraph could be taken two different ways. He joined the Army so he could always be on duty, or he joined the Army for the pension. He's either selflessly greedy or greedily selfless. The file card doesn't mention the most important thing about Lifeline. In all his media appearances, he is described as being a pacifist. He is opposed to violence. That is something worth putting on the file card. This is why Lifeline is so controversial. A lot of people think Lifeline is a poor fit in G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe is an elite combat unit. Lifeline is opposed to combat in any form. I don't think it's necessarily a bad fit. Lifeline would have been selected for the G.I. Joe team because he is the best at his job. For someone who is committed to saving lives, Lifeline will want to be where his skills are the most needed. And regardless of his personal beliefs, the Joe's would want the person who would do the best job with their lives on the line. The bigger problem with Lifeline is not that he's a pacifist. G.I. Joe's first medic, Doc, was also a pacifist. But Doc does not engender the negative reaction that Lifeline does. No, Lifeline's problem is that he never misses an opportunity to remind you he's a pacifist. He's like your vegan friend who mentions that he's vegan every five minutes. Looking at Lifeline's appearances in G.I. Joe media, he first appeared in the animated series in Arise Serpentor, Arise Part 1. That episode introduced most of the 1986 G.I. Joe and Cobra characters. Lifeline didn't like the idea of arming the tomahawk. The cartoon series put Lifeline's pacifism front and center. And it was all downhill from there. He was the focus of the episode Million Dollar Medic. And again, Lifeline refused to fight, even to rescue the woman who was in love with him. And what is Lifeline wearing? I did notice the animation model didn't include the pistol holsters. That's a good change to fit the character. The best appearance of Lifeline in the animated series, and best is a loose term in this case, is the episode The Most Dangerous Thing in the World. In that episode, Cobra hacks the Department of Defense Computers and promotes Lifeline, Shipwreck, and Dial Tone to the rank of Colonel. With General Hawk out of town, that put them in command of the G.I. Joe team. That went about as well as you would expect. Lifeline stops the team from doing anything violent, which is a problem for a combat unit. Lifeline is super annoying and useless. If your perception of Lifeline comes from the animated series, I can understand why you'd think he's annoying. The Lifeline in the animated series was written to be as irritating as possible. My Lifeline doesn't come from the animated series. He comes from the comic book. He first appeared in the Marvel Comics series in issue number 56, but it was only a cameo, and his uniform was miscolored. I like the grayish color they used. I wouldn't mind seeing that on the figure. Lifeline didn't have much to do in the main comic series. He's mostly known for one issue of the Special Mission series, issue number four, he was on the cover. In that issue, Lifeline's pacifism is on full display. A small squad of Joes are trying to retrieve the black box from a cobra firebat before the Russian October Guard can get to it. Lifeline's nonviolent convictions irritate Leatherneck. That's a brilliant move. Leatherneck is a gruff Marine who would prefer to solve most of his problems with violence. Lifeline is not helpless or useless in that issue. At several points, Lifeline is able to find nonviolent solutions to problems that arise during the mission. Both the GI Joes Squad and the October Guard are captured by river pirates. Lifeline is forced to fight the biggest and strongest October Guard member, Horror Show. To everyone's surprise, Lifeline wins the fight, and he wins without fighting. Sort of. Lifeline is a black belt in Aikido. Aikido is a martial art that allows the practitioner to defend himself without injuring the attacker. It consists of throws, joint locks, and redirection of the attacker's momentum. This makes sense. Lifeline knows he's going to be in combat zones. He's there to save lives. He won't fire a weapon at the enemy, but he would still want to defend himself in a way that doesn't violate his convictions. He mastered a martial art that would enable him to do that. This is a great issue. I enjoy rereading it. It gives me more respect for Lifeline. He's not the annoying, useless guy he is in the cartoon series. Except for one thing. At the end of the issue, Lifeline bargains to save the lives of the October Guard. He gives away the Firebat Black Boxes, which was the mission objective. The river pirate queen dumps them into the river. Leatherneck erupts in anger, and he's right. The mission objective wasn't Lifelines to give away, even to save people. However, I choose to believe that Joe's returned to the river and retrieved the Black Boxes. There's no way the mission ended on the last page of the comic. Lifeline just bought them some time. Looking at Lifeline overall, eh, middle tier. I'm tempted to put him in the bottom tier. I really don't like the red. Lifeline wears this uniform to announce as loudly as possible that he's a non-combatant. The red says, look at me, I'm a non-combatant. This is why I didn't have much use for the figure back in 1986. I couldn't send him on any ground missions. He would give away the position of the whole squad. He could ride shotgun at the Tomahawk on rescue missions. He could stay at the base and patch up injured Joe's, but he couldn't go anywhere else. Another reason I didn't use Lifeline back then is because my play scenarios did not often involve giving medical attention to the wounded. I wasn't playing mash, I was playing GI Joe. I didn't use Doc that much either. Although I do like the Doc action figure much more now than I did as a kid. The figure does have some good points. He would work well as a civilian rescuer. The red would work perfectly in that role. His accessories are pretty cool, especially the EMS kit. It's a surprisingly complex accessory. I'm impressed. I don't have a problem with Lifeline's pacifism. He has his convictions and he sticks to them. He maintains his convictions in the face of open hostility by his own teammates. That takes guts, not everyone can do that. Lifeline would have to be very strong-willed to do his job. People mistake pacifism for weakness or cowardice, but in Lifeline's case it's exactly the opposite. He'll put himself in the same danger as his teammates, but without shooting back. Saving lives in emergency situations is not a wimpy job. And it takes a particularly strong and courageous person to do it under enemy fire. Lifeline carries on the tradition of the combat medic. Lifeline runs toward the screams of the maimed and the dying, and he gives them a chance to live. If we can't respect Lifeline, then are we respecting the people who do Lifeline's job in real life? And that was my review of Lifeline. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week's review won't be quite so heavy. No philosophical discussion in that one. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter. This channel is funded through Patreon, so check that out if you want to help. I also have a website, hcc788.com. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next week for another vintage GI Joe toy review. And until then, remember, only GI Joe is GI Joe. And in honor of Lifeline, peace.