Standing forces exercise to demonstrate our capability to deploy as an alert contingency magtaf within two to four hours and seize key terrain within a contested maritime environment. The ways that we're showing our lethality with the Marine Corps is being able to fight as light infantry unsupported for three to four days in a contested maritime environment. We're conducting EBO to dominate the contested littoral spaces, and what makes it important is, near-prear competitors want to take those spaces and we're going to prove them that they can. It doesn't matter what the next future fight looks like, Victor 1-2 specifically is going to be ready for that fight. At the drop of a hat, we could be called and we are ready. Standing force exercise just showcases some of the key skills and functional areas of warfighting maneuver that are going to be required to infiltrate some of those environments in order to set conditions for naval tasks to come through or lodge a land force to conduct actions inside of those regions. Since I've been out here in 3rd Marine Division, I think that every operation we've done does exactly that. Every single thing we do, no matter if it's platoon going to the field to conduct and distribute operations, if it's conducting aerial inserts, aerial resupplies, maritime operations with our boat platoon and boat company, SIFX itself, those other operations, they're just showcasing that the Marine Corps is ever evolving that we're going to be ready for the next fight no matter what it looks like.


All right, there we are at 35. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for coming to my talk This is called keep your heads in sync content delivery across a decoupled presentation fleet Everything here is kind of obviously gonna revolve around decoupled Drupal which maybe you stop by my talk at triple con global it's something that I talked about a lot here when I do speak in triple camps and things like that and In this talk, I guess I'm going to be expanding a little bit on some of my past topics where instead of just having a single site consuming content from Drupal sort of what goes into maybe the something a little bit more realistic where you have multiple applications that are all consuming that content API So let's go and get started tangled in cords a little bit here. So hi, I'm Chad Carlson. Here's picture of me. I'm a dev rel engineer at platform.sh where I primarily work on our public documentation and a lot of our example projects and templates that you'll get started with when you deploy with us for the first time. One of the topics that I spent a lot of time with is this decoupled and headless sort of space that's been getting really popular in the last few years. And so Drupal and Gatsby has been one that I've worked with quite a bit. And so that's what I'm going to touch on in this talk. So we're going to talk about decoupled Drupal and in particular what this sometimes will be referred to also as headless what that pattern really means You'll probably be familiar but if not we'll take a look at some of the basic ideas in decoupling Drupal and what that looks like for deploying decoupled Drupal on where I work at platform.sh And we'll take a look at how it opens up these content APIs like I said to be consumed by more than one presentation application. So we have less of a headless situation than a kind of Hydra mini headed situation. And then we'll finish up with some of the things that you can change on the Drupal side of this fleet that we're going to start building and how we can keep all of our presentation apps in sync with the same content all the time. Since that's got to be got to go hand in hand with this entire situation multiple presentation apps with the same content but we don't ever want them to be out of sync for when things are published. So let's go ahead and quickly take a look at decoupling itself. So if we have Drupal proper to start with we use it to manage our content and then we can customize the front end to have we see fit with things we write ourselves or community themes and plugins. And anytime a user visits our site they're only looking at our Drupal site they we have our content managed in the back end by our editors and authors and everybody in our editorial team, but our users are actually visiting the Drupal application itself. And there's nothing wrong with this approach it's powerful and super extensible and but it can get labeled as monolithic in this conversation in comparison to decoupled. And that other way of doing it, it's pretty popular now it's been getting more and more popular. It's the way it's sort of this subset of the microservices pattern so instead of offloading all of your responsibilities to miniature applications that are taking care of some aspect of your larger application of payment processing or of handling some aspect of the API. We're really just concerned with two apps of front end that is controlling presentation responsibilities. And that will usually be something that's written in JavaScript a popular framework like reactor angular or in this talk I'm going to focus on Gatsby just because that's what I have the most experience with. And then we have our back end application that is managing all that content so we're going to have Drupal in the back end. And we are not going to rely on themes or any part of Drupal itself to present that content to our users they're never going to visit this Drupal site. They're only going to go through that dedicated front end application to view the content we write on the back end. There's a lot of touted advantages to this pattern. You can have dedicated teams for the front end and back end sides of your site with fewer responsibilities that each of them have to be concerned with you know can better able to track down a bug on the front end side if that's all that they're concerned with it's very clearly a front end bet front and bug as opposed to something that might be going on with the API itself that's being served on the back end. And ultimately the idea would be we have dedicated teams they don't have to be as concerned about what each of them is doing only the common language that they use to speak with each other through the API that Drupal is serving and that Gatsby is expecting and so that each of them can collaborate together and build a lot of cool things together by by having that segregation. And that does depend on this API being abstract. And what I've become interested in is you can keep it abstract enough not just to be able to switch out your front end at will which you know Gatsby is very popular but something else might become popular or better suited for what you're trying to do on that front end and you have an abstract enough API you have the ability to switch things out. But you can also have a lot of different kinds of frameworks for many many different presentation apps on the front end that are consuming the same API. So I think I said this already becomes less of a headless situation in a many headed situation. It seems a little bit closer to what the goal of this seems to be I could have very I could have a lot of different teams that have very different concerns about how my content is presented it could be on a lot of different types of devices whether that's just the desktop mobile distinction or some Internet of thing device or gaming system or it could be as simple as I have a bunch of content that I'm serving up for a company but I have a lot of regional divisions for my company that their site has to look a little bit differently and they have content specific to just that region but otherwise they're going to get releases and information from this central in this case is central Drupal content store. In that case they can be segregated by a lot of different sites consuming that content. And it's something that people here are interested in it's it's becoming a bigger thing with Drupal if you did attend Drupal con global there were I think 11 or so different talks and summits all around this decoupled concept and topics around deploying it what it's like actually managing a to application decoupled situation many front and apps like I'm talking about here at scale. People are interested and are coming up against new kinds of problems as it becomes more popular and also during global became a new strategic initiative. Specifically around exposing menu items in this API that you're building out for Drupal and just all around becoming a better place to support all of these different JavaScript frameworks and libraries that people would like to use so it becomes an attractive experience over choosing something like a WordPress backend or a a a dedicated headless version of this API and there's a lot out there in all kinds of different languages PHP JavaScript. What is it that's going to be needed to make Drupal as good as it can be to to handle this new found interest in decoupled. So it's relevant it's going to grow and hopefully this this talk can shed some light on what's so interesting about it and how it fits into this many head perspective on it. So I work for platform as H what's it like what's it look like deploying this decoupled pattern on platform. A lot of the times that you'll see decoupled things will be completely segregated I mean that's kind of the the heart of the concept right is to have responsibility separated so we're going to have these applications in two entirely different places. I'm going to have my Gatsby app on Netlify and I'm going to have my Drupal app on anywhere else that but just the concept would be that they're not interacting with each other other than let's say hard coded environment variables on each of those apps that they know where they are. At platform we have a kind of configuration setup where it supports multiple applications in a single project. So essentially the way that we recommend people set up decoupled is we have a single repository that contains the code base for let's say two apps to start with both my Drupal app and my Gatsby app. So I have a sub directory called Gatsby everything to do with how I'm handling my dependencies and the application code for Gatsby in there and then I have a completely different sub directory for Drupal that's everything contained there. But when we deploy them based off of our configuration they end up becoming two separate application containers on this virtual cluster that can then communicate with each other over an internal network. And that becomes great because you could do things like I don't want Drupal accessible publicly at all I want it to only be accessible over this internal network to Gatsby or a lot of what we provide people when they deploy any kind of application is that each time you create a new branch you get an exact copy of those same infrastructure configuration and code on that new branch, you know, or associated with pull request. So, as both of these teams are developing Gatsby and Drupal alongside each other. They're getting an exact copy of both the front end and the back end in their little environment they can play around with. And it's all in one code base so everything is highly visible and as collaborative or, or maybe the wrong word but it's it's isolated and segregated in terms of responsibilities but everything is very visible between what both teams are doing because it's in one repository. So here is the example that file structure here, most of our configuration, or sorry, all of our configuration revolves around these types of files these three here in the dot platform hidden sub directory. So roots handles how requests are handled. And services say I want this version of this database accessible from this string this this service name key. So the application ZMO file allows us then to define each applications build and deploy for each of these apps here, and I think I have a snippet for Gatsby hopefully you guys can see that have it named Gatsby, it's going to be part of my library that in that app container I want no JS 14 so I will always have the same version of no JS every time I branch off that environment and work on that same application. And I have my build and within this internal network I have access to my back end Drupal application my Drupal container over this relationship called Drupal so anytime Gatsby needs to pull that content during its build. It can look at that relationship there and access that API. And inside this configuration file I say how I want Gatsby to start so it's going to be similar across all these JavaScript frameworks, I can do a normal build and start what I have built into my public sub directory. Or I can set a live development server or a development server on one of my development environments so that gives us some of this live preview and incremental build functionality that's also becoming pretty popular across these across these frameworks, and you end up with something like that so this is my Gatsby front end displaying the same article on my Drupal content back end being served by the Drupal API. So that's pretty quickly the decoupled idea how you can start to do it on platform SH and still we're restricted to depending on who you ask it's decoupled or it's headless or it's a single head. But let's try and direct this to the many heads idea that I brought up earlier. So it's not headless it's many headed is what you're opening up to. Because my, my, the reality of the situation is I probably don't need that content just on one site. The app, the use case is going to be a little bit different depending on who you're building a site for. But if you have either the examples I said before, many different regional sites, many different devices that have different needs in terms of how that content is presented. You potentially have 10s of different sites that all need to have the same content presented for your users in this different way. You need to support all these different teams collaborating together, working on those individual apps. And in the end, one thing that I've seen as people do stuff like this at platform or customers is it becomes a really good model for experimentation. So if we say the example of a company that has a lot of regional sites, they have a lot of content on their back end Drupal site, and each of these front ends is consuming it. So let's just say in the first in the simplest case because it's little I'll talk about a little bit. They're all Gatsby front ends. And one of these regional sites is getting content and there's some upstream template for how they build that Gatsby site. But then they try out some experiment in their region of presenting the data in a certain different way, or exposing newly added content in a banner, whatever the experiment may be. So if this is a goal made to that region, it can create this feedback loop where they say, hey, we've we've measured and observed that this campaign really worked. And the rest of the company or the company up above them says, yeah, this did work. This is a part of the upstream and now each of the ones in this fleet of Gatsby site is going to implement same strategy, because we have this measure to it, and it can be leveraged by this sort of pattern amongst this fleet of presentation apps. And that's great. That's obviously a great. It's great to have any sort of source of feedback to experiment like that. The challenge becomes, okay, we're displaying the same content. How do we keep everything in sync across all of our presentation apps? Yeah, I can get the data but let's just say I don't want to create a situation where one regional site has a new post with some essential customer information on it, but the rest of my apps don't. So how do we control the fact that a new piece of content gets published? I want all of the apps to now display that content, no matter device, region, whatever the case. So in the configuration I showed before I could keep adding sub directories to my repository for all the regions, all the front ends that I want, but we might want to enforce some greater segregation and we might run into resource issues as we keep adding more of these applications. So the approach I'm going to show here is more what you're traditionally used to. I'm going to have a Drupal content store on one project and it serves up the API. And then each time I want a regional site, something for each new device, it's going to get its own project and it's just going to continually look at an environment variable, see that's where the Drupal site is and continue to or it's going to consume that content during its build. And so that gives me a fleet of Gatsby sites. They are entirely independent in this case. They have their own teams and everybody's working together to do this experimentation feedback loop I talked about, and they're serving the same content. So this is just a screenshot of what that looks on platform, named for high visibility, you know I have two Gatsby sites that act as my front ends and I have a Drupal site as my back end content store. So we want to keep them all in sync. So platformer sage exposes this API that you know our API is public and that allows you to do things like use our CLI to create new projects and initialize them with an upstream template, but you can begin to form your own tooling to get all these projects to communicate communicate with each other over their webhooks. So let's try piecing something together. One of the interesting things that we've added recently is this thing called source operations. So if we look at the middle snippet here, you see my mouse. This is the syntax for this and this exists in the same applications YAML file that I showed earlier for how Gatsby gets built and how it communicates with Drupal. And so what this is going to do is in a separate sort of build container, when this is triggered, it is going to, in this case, force a rebuild of Gatsby. So if any of you guys are familiar with that, if you have a development server for Gatsby you can ping a refresh endpoint and it'll get the latest content from whatever you decided is the source for it. But on platform rebuild these read-only file systems, we build these build images based off of your configuration and your app code. So we kind of need to trigger a full rebuild to get the latest Drupal content. So this would be one way to do it. Inside this separate build container using this source operation, which effectively kind of extends our API. You know, you can't just add a variable to your project with our API. Now you can trigger rebuild. So that's what this operation does. And so we add a variable that includes this Drupal backend URL. And at any time we can use the CLI and run that source operation to get the latest content from Drupal. So we've got the trigger across our fleet because this command can become part of the upstream that every new front end is based on. So I can trigger at any time my whole fleet to update to the latest content that I have on Drupal. Okay, so that's our dummy commit to do that. And the simplest way to do something like that is take our Drupal app and give it a cron job. It's not completely real time when there's some new content, but I can say, hey, every day at 10am is my published date. You know, there's, that's what I'm going to set it as every one of my front end applications is going to get the latest content. They're all going to say, oh, it's published at 10am every day. And so I can put this in that same fml file for Drupal in this case. And every day at 10am run this little script here that says here's my list of projects. You know, I have two project IDs, and I'm going to trigger that source operation on each of them and rebuild those sites. And so that's not a bad way. I mean, it's like I said, it's not a complete trigger for when a publish occurs, but you at least have a publishing schedule.  It'll be out for tomorrow. So this is one way to do it. And this is what I have here is the cron publishing method. Another way would be to include the trigger in Drupal itself. So we can create a custom module that uses this hook entity type update to then get a CLI token from the environment and read in the same way I have a list of projects here in this bash file that's just in an array inside this script. I have instead a, where's my mouse, a fleet JSON file with the same list of prop. Sorry guys, the same list of projects in that JSON file, and it's going to go through that and say hey for each one of them get the project make sure it exists, and maybe on a dedicated environment if we'd like it to work that way. So this gives us like a more effective trigger for making sure that all of our fleets every site in our fleet is in sync. This one's pretty cool. My, my colleague actually came up this one it's not actually in the blog post article that I included there this is a recent development here. I can verify the project and the environment trigger the operation. And now I have this fully coordinated content presentation fleets make my edits on the back end Drupal app. And each time that update occurs, I'm just going to trigger rebuilds on my front end apps. And of course, you might want to have some greater control on this one too. But here I have an environment check. So a good way of making sure you don't have some unexpected rebuild on your production front end app would be to say hey I only want to call this source operation on a update content environment that we didn't update occurs we can merge. And otherwise it just kind of stays open and sinks from production all the time. But we won't have unexpected rebuilds on production but we'll have some alerts set up like we have another notification system that we can use to send slack alerts for when an activity completes. So we can say hey when this source operation completes on this branch, send me a slack message for the individual team that's responsible for that presentation app. And then they can kind of go oh yeah this is just the normal rebuild that I was expecting anyways. So I'm going to go ahead and merge. So this is sort of how I see the multi headed situation. We have editors and authors that are free to focus on content. And the same promise for each of these decoupled front ends but in this case, many many front ends we have many teams have a lot of different people working together to present the same content to feedback on each other on best methods of how to do that for the different regions or devices that they have all supported by this common API setup by Drupal. And from there we can just focus on our jobs. We can trigger updates in the background and everything can kind of be kept in sync the whole time. And, oh, in the collaboration upstream. So yeah, that is, I believe the last slide here. Thank you all very much for coming. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about platform or about this idea in general. I think we have a Q&A section on the chat here. But yeah, thank you very very much. So yeah, I get what you're saying, I think that's that's a lot of what gets opened up for this source operation thing because it creates an endpoint to make a modification on the code base which we would normally limit to, I mean, any any change that happens on these environments has to be done through commits. So we do that through an integration or a direct commit up to our remote. But this then gives you an endpoint to do things like hey I want a source operation that triggers dependency updates on this project so you can have a lot more control over what all these fleets do that may not have anything to do with content but this becomes another fast set of changing that front end site. Thanks Evan. We got any questions in here. How would this differ if they weren't all Gatsby is the source operation, the same. Yeah, so like I was saying, our building an application gets tied as a per commit build. So the idea then would be if I have my master environment, the only way to change that image that deployed site is to make a commit on it that controls unexpected things happening in a lot of different ways and so we would recommend you open a new environment, you get a clone of production data and of that production code that then gets deployed to its own site and only through a merge does that go into production I mean we're pretty familiar with this idea. So if I had a front end react site or anything else that was consuming that content, so long as a part of its build stage, there was a step that pulled content from that back end Drupal application. So long as it requires a rebuild this is a totally generic command that would allow you to do that. You just trigger rebuild on the front end, and it makes that same call to Drupal I don't see why. It couldn't be used for whatever your front end happened to be. Hey Peter, no we're not using Docker for deployment at platform all of our containers are based off of LXC, and we don't have Docker support. But you should check us out. It's, it's, I think a lot greater simplified configuration for handling all these environments and setting up builds for a lot of different kinds of applications. So you had a root of gamlify I was wondering if you had an easy and smooth way to root the back end you preview. Are you saying giving you a preview within like if the normal builds in Drupal preview situation. For that question, you would have to set up a specific start command to enable that kind of incremental build, and it would just be in that case, getting in there to figure out how that preview builds or that preview redirect happen inside of Drupal itself to get you there and pulling it from the current environment. It's not hard at all to say I'm on this current environment. I'm on the URL of the current front end, in which case you could very easily set that up for any environment you created. No problem. Yeah, but nothing about this is something we're offering a platform other than this support for multi app but I'm happy to talk to you more about it if you'd like. Yeah, come by the booth I'd be happy to talk about it. Thank you everyone for coming.


For Saturday, we'll start off morning with temperatures in the 50s. Throughout the day, the temperature will increase until we reach a high of 69 degrees Fahrenheit in the early afternoon. Humidity will remain around 60% with some wind blowing from the southwest at nine miles per hour. We'll have a mix of both sunshine and clouds in the morning with increasing cloud cover overnight and no precipitation throughout the day. The pressure for Saturday will be around with 1014 millibars, lowering to around 1002. On Sunday, as the low pressure system passes by, can we go to the next slide? On Sunday, temperatures will start off in the low 50s, only increasing to a high of 55 from noon to the early afternoon. Temperatures will drop down to the low 40s overnight, and humidity will be around 64% with winds blowing from the northeast at 12 miles per hour. Okay, next slide. The sky will remain cloudy throughout Sunday, as we can see these clouds coming over Massachusetts from the northwest. We also have some coming from the slow pressure system off the shore. There's slight chance of rain Sunday with showers coming in the evening. Overnight these showers will stop, but the cloudy skies will continue. Okay, next slide. This is a portion of the jet stream over the United States. As you can see, we have this curved shape here, sandwiched between two low pressure systems. And this is what we call the no megablock, and it's what has been causing our cloudy weather and slightly cooler temperatures recently. Over the next days, this shape will slowly start to shift as the block moves and allows the jet stream to return to its more normal shape. Next slide. Looking forward to next week, Monday will be cloudy with a high of 52 and a low of 44. The sun will start to come out on Tuesday, where we remain mostly behind the clouds for the remainder of the week. We'll see highs in the upper 50s Tuesday through Friday with lows in the mid 40s and even dropping down to 39 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday. On Friday, we will have some rain in the morning, which will soon, which will mostly stop as we head into the afternoon.


Most of this information comes from the Form 1040 Instructions Tax Year 2022 Instructions for Schedule 1, Additional Income and Adjustments to Income. You can find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov, looking at our income tax formula. We're down on the second line, adjustments to income, remembering that the first half of the formula is basically an income statement where we have income minus the equivalent of the expenses, those being the deductions, getting us down to the equivalent of net income, that being taxable income, everything's topsy-turvy. It's flipped on its head in terms of the objectives because we want the taxable income as low as possible as opposed to normally where we want the net income as high as possible. Remember that this line can be called the adjustments to income. You might call it above the line deductions or Schedule 1 deductions. In other words, you might characterize it as a deduction or basically like a contra-income account because it's going to take the income line minus these adjustments to income to get down to the subtotal of the adjusted gross income or the AGI, an important number because that's the number that's usually used when we think about phaseouts due to income limitations for deductions and credits. Also note that there's no hurdle we typically need to clear with the adjustments to income as opposed to the hurdle we need to clear when doing the itemized deductions, that hurdle being the standard deduction. When we're looking at the first page of the Form 1040, we're focused on the adjustments to income from Schedule 1 and on Schedule 1, page number 2, we're down here on the jury duty pay. The jury duty is fairly straightforward because if you go to jury duty, then you might get paid for going to jury duty. In that case, you'd say, well, if I got paid, I might have to include that in income because the IRS basically says that everything is income unless they say that it should be excluded for whatever reason. So if they force you to do jury duty, if you're, you know, you have to do jury duty as your civic duty. So if you did the jury duty and you received money, you would think you would have to include it in income. However, oftentimes your employer then has the situation of are they going to pay you for the time that you went to jury duty or not. So if the employer's paying for the time that you went to jury duty, they might then say, hey, look, any money that you got for going to jury duty from the court or whatever, we want you to give that to us and then we'll just reimburse like your normal pay. So that means that you didn't really get paid for going to jury duty. You basically got paid your normal salary, which will normally be better than going to jury duty. So that means that you might have to include the money that you received as income because once again, that might be money that got reported to the IRS and you want to make sure that it's not mixed up that you just didn't report the income. Because that could cause problems in a similar way as when you get a 1099, for example, if it's not correct or you think you need to adjust it, if you don't report the amount of the 1099 or greater, then it's likely that you're going to cause a problem. So in this case, you might have it included in income and then have the jury duty pay as a deduction, which gets us to that net income number that we looked at here.


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What a delight it is we get to hear from David Stockman now. He was elected Michigan Congressman in 1976. He joined the Reagan White House in 1981. And while he was budget director there, he's one of the key architects of the Reagan Revolution. And they're planned to reduce taxes, cut spending, and shrink the role of the government. So, he left there in 1985 to join Salmon Brothers and later became one of the early partners of the Blackstone Group. So we're looking forward to hear from David Stockman. Thank you. Well, thank you. Speaking of the Reagan Revolution, it was a plan. Unfortunately, we ran into a few obstacles along the way. Quite a few as a matter of fact. But at the time, it did make a difference. It did stop the momentum of big government and stateism and all the rest of it. So it was one of those intervals in history where there were great possibilities. They didn't really materialize. And so I'm here today to tell you, all you hardcore libertarians here, that the time has come for something big to change. And I'm pitching the candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. as the instrument of that. And of course, Robert Kennedy has supported every single scoundrel that the Democrats have put on their tickets since George McGovern in 1972. He likes regulation so much that he spent his whole career as a class action lawyer trying to make regulation even tougher and more extensive in the APA, more powerful. He drank such big gulps of the Kool-Aid on the so-called climate change hoax that he actually at one point said he thought the Green New Deal would be even greater than the original New Deal, which we all know is not something we would want to emulate. And so with all of that history, I'm here to tell all of you libertarians that Robert Kennedy is our man. Now that tells you about where we are in the history of this country. Then again, I have to admit that I've always been a contrarian. And lately I've gotten so contrary that besides a few of my private subscribers that I have, there are only four publications left in the whole country that will publish my work. LouRockwell.com, the Ron Paul Institute, the antiwar.com, and the Kennedy Beacon, which is the house organ of the super PAC that's been organized to support his candidacy. I mean, I couldn't get a piece placed in the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or CNBC or the rest of them for the life of me, but the Kennedy Beacon has been publishing my stuff on and off for the last few weeks because somehow issues are coming together and the confluence that I think is totally unique, totally different from our recent decades of history and will make a big difference, I hope, as we go forward. Moreover, that's not really the half of it. I have to give a full disclosure. I've kind of mentioned it, but I have actually been in steady conversation with Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, off and on now for several months after he declared his candidacy, and it all started one day when I got a phone call and there was a voice on the other end and said, hi, this is Bobby Kennedy. And I said, what fruitcake is calling me? I couldn't believe it. And then I heard the gravelly voice after 30 seconds or so and I realized it was him. And he said, well, I just want to say right up front, I've spent three decades denouncing everything you ever did in public life and everything you've ever written, everything that you stand for, but I've noticed lately that we're coming into substantial agreement on a lot of issues. And I said, well, I'm glad to hear that. I want to help, but where have you seen my works? I mean, I only get published in obscure libertarian journals way on the marginal edge of the world. And he said, well, I've had your article sent to me by Bill Bonner. I said, oh, my God. If you all know Bill Bonner, he's more of a screaming libertarian than I am. And so I'm saying to myself, what is Bobby Kennedy doing, talking to Bill Bonner? And it turns out that he was sending Kennedy a lot of things I'm writing on war and peace and the Fed and all the other bad things going on. But still, it seemed a moment to me to have the son of the first family of big government in America, which goes all the way back to Joe Kennedy, who a lot of you know was a new dealer. In fact, he was Roosevelt's big supporter and buddy, and Roosevelt put him as a head of the SEC on the theory that take a crook to find all the rest of the crooks. And so that's how Joe Kennedy became part of the New Deal and head of the SEC. But in any event, why is the scion of this great big government democratic multi-generation family wanting to talk with a guy who spent the last 30 or 40 years denouncing the New Deal, the Great Society, all of the works of the Nanny State Regulators on issues across the board? And why is he contacting me through another guy who's even a more vociferous opponent of all that stuff than myself, which is to say Bill Bonner? And so it kind of brought to mind a ballot I liked. Back in the 60s, I was a radical. In the 60s, anti-war, SDS. I was one of the founders of SDS, actually. I've never admitted that before, but might as well say it among friends. But we had a, there was a great ballot that Bob Dylan put out. And some of you may remember the tune, but it basically went, there's something going on here, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones? Well, it was Mr. Jones then, but I would say it's Mr. Uniparty today. In other words, what is happening, I believe, is the Uniparty finally, the two parties that essentially have constant fights but support on the core, the Fed, the warfare state, massive debt, big government, and endless meddling inappropriately in our lives.  That happened in a big way in the last couple of weeks, as the House Republicans threw out a speaker for the first time, and I don't remember how many decades, and they can't even seem to find one that they can elect or who will even volunteer for the job now. So they're starting to come on stock, and I think that what can really happen here with the independent candidacy of Robert Kennedy now, especially on the issues that he will be driving, is that we could end up with an election that ends up in the House of Representatives because no one gets a majority in the Electoral College. He would only have to win New Hampshire or a couple other states, which I think might be possible, for the first time since 1824. Now, I think there is likely to be a lot of refugees from both parties who are sick and tired of their party's role, the Republican wing or the Democratic wing of the Uniparty on some fairly big issues, and we kind of have a moment where the candidates, as it seems at the moment, of the two wings of the Uniparty are truly pathetic. Okay, I mean, there's no other way to say it. Trump is not remotely a Republican or conservative. I'm going to give you a little data on that for a moment. In a moment, and Biden may not be even compostmentous, as far as we can tell from day to day. So when you have that set of choices with kind of the mystique and the power of the Kennedy name and then the issues, people are sick and tired of wars, they're sick and tired of inflation, they're sick and tired of Washington games and paralysis that accomplishes nothing, that it might be possible to kind of wean away, chip off from the totals of both parties, enough votes to make a real big difference. Now, before I give some of the math that I think is involved in that, I do, you know, I have to take my swipe at Donald Trump. I'm sorry, Trump has one redeeming virtue. He had all the right enemies, okay? When you have CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times, the guy can't be all bad when you have enemies like that. Unfortunately, his policies were really bad, and I don't even think the full extent of how bad those policies were has yet been, you know, fully laid out. So I have just finished, this is where all of these two sides of the political spectrum coming together strangely happens, but I've just finished the draft and it will be out soon of a book called Trump's War on Capitalism, and basically I'm trying to expose him as a policy fraud from a, you know, free market, conservative, sound money, fiscal rectitude point of view. But the only reason I mention it is that my publisher in this case is Sky Horse Publishing, who is the owner of Sky Horse Publishing, Tony Lyons, is the chairman of Robert Kennedy's campaign, okay? And he actually published that great book that Kennedy wrote a year ago on the reel at Anthony Fauci. I mean, that was a blockbuster, that book, and it actually sold millions and millions, and I think it's partly responsible for the, you know, the public waking up to the status disaster that was underway during the lockdowns, all of which Trump was wholeheartedly for back then. But in any event, not to give away all the content or get off the track too far, but I just want to tell you the facts and the data are overwhelming. And in the book, I go through every kind of measure you might want to look at. And I put it all, by the way, in constant $20, $23, so it's all apples to apples. I used wherever I could ratios to the larger economy, GDP or personal income, other things of that sort, and compared all the presidents going all the way back to Truman, and I'll tell you when you see the book on every one of these measures, when you go from good to mediocre to bad, Trump is on the bottom of the list, or if you like to talk about excess growth of things, he's on the top. When it comes to total spending, when it comes to increase in the debt, when it comes to the deficits as a size of GDP, and especially when it comes to monetary policy, there has never been, as far as I can tell, an interest rate that was low enough in Donald Trump's estimation. It was terrible what he did during the period where there was at least a slight chance that the Fed might attempt to retreat from the nonsense that Bernanke unleashed in 209 through 212, but as they tried to shrink their balance sheet and get interest rates back to normal, he was on their case constantly, you know, really in a way that we haven't seen in decades. And how can you have a Republican president asking for the Fed to print money like there's no tomorrow? But the data that comes out of the book, just to hit it quickly, that really struck home to me. I've got all the presidents listed, and I put Kennedy Johnson together, and Nixon Ford, and so it's all pretty fair. But what really struck, stood out to me was the comparisons between the Trump period and Jimmy Carter. And the reason I mention this is that I sort of cut my eye teeth as a congressman fighting tooth and nail against the Carter energy program, the Carter budgets, Carter macroeconomics programs and so forth. And as far as we felt back in those early days of the 1980, Carter was the worst. Big spender, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Well, here's just a taste of it. I want to give you a couple of the metrics in here to give you some idea. One thing I looked at was constant-dollar spending growth per year for each administration back to Truman. In Trump's case, it was $365 billion, same dollars now. In Carter's case, it was $70 billion. So that was like six to one. And these are constant $20, $23, so it's not playing with inflation. When it came to spending growth, 7% a year in real terms under Trump, 3.5% under Carter. When it comes to the deficit as a share of GDP, it's one good metric about how far off the deep end we are. Trump's deficits averaged 9% of GDP. Jimmy Carter, the big spender, the big borrower, the guy who was ruining the country, his deficits averaged 2.3% of GDP. And when it comes to the ultimate problem here, our national debt, which is really ultimately sinking the economy, Trump added an average of $2 trillion a year. Jimmy Carter, and these are constant dollars. Again, I'm not playing with inflation, added $100 billion. So that's 20 times. And you can go through this. There's a lot more where that came from. And then that's just the fiscal, the monetary I've mentioned. The lockdowns were a horrendous attack on the Constitution, on economic sanity, you know, they can't be forgiven for that reason alone. He shouldn't be the nominee. And the trade protectionism, you know, it was so primitive and unhinged, the border walls, we need immigrant workers. We should have a, yes, worker program. It should be orderly and organized, but we shouldn't be building walls, et cetera. So if you put all that together, it adds up to something that isn't really an alternative. So the question is, if we're heading towards in, you know, in 19, or in 2024, something that looks like 1824, you know, why am I saying that and is that possible? Well, there's plenty of votes to peel off from both wings of the Uniparty, but let's just think of what happened in recent times. You know, Ross Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992, and TR, Teddy Roosevelt, going back to 1912, got 28%. If you put it in today's size, today's context, that would amount to 35, that range, would amount to 35 to 50 million votes in a 2024 election that we can expect about 170 million voters. Now that would be a message. That's the first point. That would be a thundering message. The second thing is, you know, the way the 12th Amendment is written, if someone doesn't get a 270 electoral votes, it goes to the House of Representatives. And in the House of Representatives, they vote by state, not by numbers or not by, you know, a proxy for U.S. population. And that's where I would like to see this end up. In the House of Representatives, there would be a hell of a battle. And we would finally have a chance to get on the table all of the issues that are now being swept under the rug by the Uniparty and its pretension that it's actually competing with each other. Now, why is Robert Kennedy the man to do this? Well, if some of you remember your history, you might recall that John Quincy Adams won, became president in 1824 in the House of Representatives, even though he didn't have the largest number of electoral votes. And he basically famously said something which is the heart of the issue that we're confronting with today, I think. And that was, remember, he said, America should be a friend to all, an ally to none, and it should never go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That's the essence of the current foreign policy of the United States. That's the essence of what the Uniparty in Washington is all about. They're constantly looking for monsters to destroy. The latest one, of course, is, well, forget about the events of the last week, but before that was obviously Putin, who got demonized because the mainstream media said that Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 due to Putin's little minions sending messages out on Facebook. I mean, that is really one of the stupider things that have come down the pike in terms of our political discourse in this country. But the thing is that Trump derangement syndrome that came out of that is the reason why the Democratic Party, which used to be the peace wing, the peace party, is now dominated by neocons and war hawks and servants of the military industrial complex. And when the Democrats are on board and the Republicans are more or less dominated by the neocons, you have a pretty bad situation. Now, I can't emphasize enough how out of control the warfare state is. And by the warfare state, I mean not just the DOD budget, but all the international security assistance, state department operations, national endowment for democracy, the international broadcasting operations, which are really propaganda operations, you put all that together and today it amounts to 1.3 trillion. That's what's embedded in the budget today. And if you put that in context of history, I think I can give you a pretty easy example that tells you how far off the deep end we've come. In 1961, when Eisenhower gave his famous farewell address, he was confronting the Soviet Union that still had some industrial vigor. It still had 50,000 tanks on the central front. It still had thousands of nuclear warheads pointing in our direction. So it was a perilous time in the world. But Eisenhower said even then his final budget of $50 billion was more than enough to provide for the security and safety of the United States. Well, that's dollars of those days. But if you put it in today's dollars, that amounts to $400 billion. And if you put the rest of it in for the veterans and international security assistance and so forth, it's $500. So in today's dollars, Eisenhower said we are secure, we are safe, we are doing what we need to do with $500 billion. And these clowns in Washington today in the Uniparty say the 1.3 trillion that's already in the budget isn't enough and they're having these rearguard fights constantly for even more. Now, the point about this is not simply that that's way too much. It's like some kind of huge economic waste, which it is. The point about this is that it is a very insidious corrupt system and you have $1.3 trillion flowing into the economy, into the Beltway, into the think tanks, into the NGOs, into the military industrial complex contractors. It creates an enormous force for self-perpetuation. I call it the self-licking ice cream cone. In other words, you don't even have to ask what the policy choices are for this monster national security establishment because it's already paid for its next budget in the form of all the loose change. When you're spending 1.3 trillion, far, far in excess that anything that's even remotely rational, there's dollars dropping everywhere that are being spent basically to create the case for perpetuation and for continuing even more. What you have then is a system that is self-perpetuating and that brings to the top in both parties people who, you know, for ideological reasons or philosophical reasons or psychological, demented reasons, think that our job is to rule the world. Our job is to be the hegemon. Our job is to be the gender arm of the world economy and political system. And so you get people like Lindsey Graham who's nuts.  You know, he said the most important priority we have today when they were having their last phony crisis over the continuing resolution, the very most important thing we're doing today is Ukraine. Well, I mean, is the guy ever looked at history? Is he ever looked at the map? Does he understand that in Russian, Ukraine means borderlands? Does he understand that that whole territory for hundreds and hundreds of years was either a vassal or part of the greater Russia? That the country is divided between Ukrainian nationalists and Poles in the west and Russian speakers and Russian identifiers in the Donbas in the south, which was called Novo Rusya, and that they don't want to be together. This was a state not built to last. There was no borders of Ukraine until 1922 when Lenin said, we're going to put Novo Rusya into Ukraine as a matter of, you know, administrative convenience. And then Stalin came along and they were busting up Poland during World War II and he said we'll grab, you know, the territories of the west around Lviv and make that part of Ukraine. And then the big one that I like is Khrushchev came along, big fight for the succession after Stalin died. He got some important support from the Politburo members from Ukraine. So he said, okay, your door prize is you get Crimea. So we're supposed to have a World War III to help the Ukrainian government get back Crimea that's 89% Russian and has never been part of the Ukraine anyway throughout history except the Presidium in 1954 went along with Khrushchev in his, you know, political process. So that's kind of what's built up in the culture and you have all of these leaders of both parties. If you look at them, I remember when I really truly was, I didn't make this up when I was in SDS. We looked to all those great doves in the Democratic Party from Fulbright and Church and all the rest of them as leaders of the peace movement and now you can't find one including Bernie Sanders. They ask him about Ukraine and he double talks and ducks and runs away.  Now the second reason why it's so bad, and by that I mean the warfare state, the consensus in favor of searching the globe for monsters to destroy, the consensus, the deal con consensus that were the hegemon of the world is that it creates a mighty log rolling process that is destroying this country fiscally. And I'll give you a couple of points, data points about that before I finish but there was an event in recent years that I think tells you how bad this really is. Now the heart of the fiscal problem, of course, is the entitlement of Social Security, Medicare and all the rest and the Republicans have become total chickens on that. In fact they're even now saying, you know, we're not even going to touch it. That's the Donald Trump line. We don't touch Medicare. We don't touch Social Security. Well, if you look at a 10-year budget horizon, which is how they commonly look at it, total spending projected is 80 trillion, 34 trillion of that is Medicare and Social Security. And they're giving it a pass and they want more defense and they have to pay the interest and they have to pay for the veterans that they've put into the position that they're in, disabled or needing government compensation. And yet they're going to give a complete pass to Social Security and Medicare including not even talking about means testing when the fact is there's a huge transfer payment element in that people didn't earn in their payroll taxes and shouldn't be getting now because we can't afford it. Anyway, they do nothing about that but you would think in this one little 15% corner of the budget that you hear about all the time called non-defense discretionary spending. And this is, you know, things like the Education Department, community development grants, housing subsidies of one type or another. You would think at least there the Republicans would go to town to try to pay for some of their massive defense spending by reallocating some dollars. Well, here are the facts. In 2017, this is the last Obama budget, fiscal 2017, we spent $610 billion in non-defense discretionary. In 2021, the last Trump budget, we spent $900 billion in non-defense discretionary. In other words, it went up 48% in the very part of the budget where these Republican fiscal chicken littles should have at least taken a swipe given the fact that they controlled the veto pen during that period and given the fact that they controlled one or both houses of Congress during that period of time. So if you want a confession, a de facto confession written in budgetary ink, look at that. During that four-year period with all the leverage that you could imagine, they ended up raising that part of the budget that half of them say they're not four anyway by nearly 50% and why did they do that? Because that was the trade-off with the Democrats and the domestically oriented people to get these massive defense budgets. Now, the fiscal situation as a result of this dynamic and obviously there's a lot more to it, but the fiscal situation has gotten so bad that I didn't, you know, I was going to bring a bunch of charts for this screen here today, but it has gotten so bad that I don't think a chart is going to, you know, do the job anymore. It's not, you know, everybody's jaundice from seeing this. It goes up and up and up and up and somehow nothing is done. But I've come up with a few numbers riffs which I think you can almost remember. You can almost memorize that in a very succinct and powerful way to tell you how bad this is gone. My first riff is 1 trillion, 33 trillion, 55 trillion, 100 trillion. So, 1, 33, 55, 100. What is that? When I became budget director, the first fight we had was to try to prevent the public debt from going over 1 trillion and we were petrified that that was going to happen. It was almost like, are we going to turn into a pillar of salt? You know, if the public debt goes over 1 trillion, that was then, 1981. Today it's 33 trillion in the bank. It's happened. It's being serviced 33 and a half trillion. The 52 trillion number is what CBO says at the end of the current 10-year horizon the public debt will be. And that's based on Rosie's scenario. They say for 10 years, no recessions. For 10 years, nothing goes wrong in the economy. For the next 10 years, the weighted average cost of interest on this towering public debt will be 3%. Do you believe that? Because today, trade rebuilds are 5%. Today, 10 years in the 30 years, 4.5 to 5. So, where are they coming up with 3? In other words, if you reprice this for all kinds of things we won't go into here for the real world, it's going to be far more than 55 trillion baked into the cake by early in the next decade. And the 100 trillion is where I'm certain will be long before the turn of this century. So what you can say is we've gone to 100 from 1 to 100 in less than 70 years. Now that tells you, in some very graphic way, how far out of control this is but that's where we're heading unless we have some kind of huge breakdown of this uniparty system. Another example that I think indicates how seriously out of control this is and the Fed, of course, is the enabler of all of this. If they hadn't monetized trillions and trillions of debt, we wouldn't be nearly, I don't think we'd be nearly in the soup that we're in today. But here's what happened in the last two decades. If you go back to 207, right before the financial crisis, the public debt was about 5 trillion. If you go to late 2019, right before the COVID crisis, the public debt was 17 trillion. And notwithstanding almost tripling of the public debt during that period, the weighted average cost of yield, interest on the public debt from 30-day bills to 30-year bonds was 2.5%. Now does that sound like the real world? It doesn't sound like the real world to me. That was the Fed world. That was interest rates that were steered, pegged, forced lower by the massive bond buying of the Fed. But my real point is this. After 2019, when we went into this crazy, lockdown COVID mania, 6 trillion worth of relief spending, at the end of that period, we had actually spent 9 trillion dollars. We had added to the debt, I'm sorry, 9 trillion dollars. And guess where interest rates went as we added 9 trillion dollars to the public debt? Instead of going way up, which is what the market would normally do when supply and demand intersect in that way, interest rates by March 2022, right before the Fed finally pivoted and said we're going to got a little inflation problem here, interest rates on average on the treasury debt, the whole damn thing, were 1.5%. Now how in the world do you ever expect that politicians are going to do anything about the public debt or about the size of deficits when the cost of carry is 1.5% which is totally, you know, unreal world, not sustainable, a violation of every economic principle there is. So that's, you know, part of a dimension of the problem, but I want to give one other number which I think is quite striking and that is we just closed the books on fiscal 23, 2023 a few days ago and it turns out that the deficit came in roughly at 2 trillion if you take out some of the Mickey Mouse in the numbers and that was the culmination of a four-year period. Now I'm talking about fiscal 20, 21, 22, 23, four years in which 9 trillion was added to the public debt in those four years, 2.5 from Trump, 1.5 from Biden, but 9 trillion in four years. Now how do you even, that actually adds up to 6.5 billion of red ink every day if anybody's got their hand calculator it's 2.4 million of red ink every minute for four years running, weekdays, Sundays, holidays, snow days, all the rest of it and to put it in historical perspective the question I had as I was writing the other day is well how long did it take us to get the first 9 billion or 9 trillion, I'm sorry if we got another 9 trillion in this four-year period at a rate of 6.5 billion a day the answer is it took us 220 years from the opening of the US government it took 43 presidents to get us to 9 trillion of public debt in July 207 and here we are now adding a 9 trillion in four years and it's actually getting worse as we look into the future. So then the question is who was the enabler of this? The answer is the Fed. We were talking before that Milton Friedman for all his genius and all of his correct views about free markets and the price system and a lot of things was dead wrong about money. But he basically paved the way for Bernanke to do what he did in 207, 208 because it was all based on Friedman's view of what happened in 1930, 31, 32 none of which was accurate. But in any case, even if you give Milton Friedman the benefit of the doubt he said well the money supply should not grow more per year on average over time than the growth capacity of the economy. Well that happens to be let's just say 3% to take an arbitrary number I think most people would say that's not bad. Well if we go back to the time that Greenspan and he's the great enabler became Fed chairman the balance sheet of the Fed was 250 billion dollars it had taken from 2013 to get there to 250 billion had they grown that balance sheet which is really a measure of the printing press you know how much Fed credit is being produced had they grown that at even Milton Friedman's rule of thumb the balance sheet of the Fed today would be 800 billion not 8 trillion so they overshot the mark by 10x in fact when they were at the peak at 9 trillion they overshot the mark by 8 trillion dollars. What happened? Well it flooded into the world market. It forced all the other central banks of the world to print money or otherwise their currencies were going to appreciate too much for their mercantilist view of the world and so the foreign central banks all became Keynesian money printers just like the Greenspan Bank here and that basically got us to the huge mess in the world that we have today. So the question is I would say that right now we're at a juncture we're at a tipping point we're at an inflection point and there is what I call a high noon agenda what really needs to happen and the first thing is if this scenario I've been painting about the 2024 election happens the first thing is we need to revive and this is one of the things I've been talking to Kennedy about a lot the idea of a Fortress America defense budget in policy which happens to resonate because old Joe Kennedy was an advocate for Fortress America and the real articulator of Fortress America was Robert Taft Senator Great Mr. Republican Senator Taft even in the 50s the height of the Cold War he said we protect the mainland we use the great Pacific and Atlantic Ocean moats to secure our territory and we don't get ourselves involved in becoming the global hegemon and bases all over the world and alliances and so forth that was the Fortress America idea and it turns out I didn't even realize this that when John Kennedy wrote his famous book Profiles in Courage some of you have probably come across it over the years or know about it one of the eight profiles in Courage was Robert Taft in John Kennedy's book so I find this pretty interesting because I've talked to Bobby Kennedy a lot about putting together a defense budget based on Fortress America that could actually save a half trillion a year that could cut this 1.3 trillion back to 800 billion or the defense per se proper 900 billion back to 400 billion by getting out of the business that we're in today the global hegemon business who needs 11 carrier aircraft carrier strike groups if you're protecting the shores of the United States you don't need carriers they're sitting ducks anyway the carriers will cost 1 trillion dollars the 11 carrier battle groups with all their escort ships their suite of planes and electronics and all the rest of it will cost 1 trillion over the next decade or 100 billion a year you could dispense with most of that the Army's budget is 2 trillion over the next decade 500 billion a year you could cut it by 2 thirds if you're protecting the shores and the coast and the North American continent and not mucking around in the Middle East and everywhere else in the Far East that we are in today so that's the first point the second point is that you could then couple that with a 500 billion dollar savings in the domestic budgets by going back to the principles of federalism believe it or not even someone like Bobby Kennedy is now beginning to realize that when you pile everything on the wagon and you make, centralize everything and you make Washington put Washington in charge of one size fits all for everything in terms of our domestic economic process in governance you're asking eventually to so over tax the system that you end up with paralysis, failure the fact that we can't even elect a speaker of the house for the first time in our history so you could put that 500 billion on the defense side 500 billion on the domestic side add another 500 billion because the automatic savings of the interest on this massive debt and you could work your way to fiscal balance to fiscal sustainability by the end of the decade that's something that could happen that's something that will take a candidate who says enough of the forever wars enough of the warfare state enough of the global policeman we're going to come back and protect Fortress America only now the second thing we need to do and this is again where I've been able to engage Bobby Kennedy is he doesn't like the fact that Wall Street has made such massive gains and the top 1% has made such enormous asset gains asset value gains since Greenspan took over and so we were talking the other day and I gave him these numbers and he was even shocked if you take the top 1% of the households they had 4 trillion a net worth in 1987 they have 44 trillion a net worth a day so there's been a 40 trillion gain over a period when the GDP only doubled so how do you get 11x gain in the value of securities and net worth when the GDP doubles or maybe triples during that period you don't unless you have a central bank that's drastically continuously and artificially inflating the price of financial assets on the other hand if you take the bottom 50% they had a net worth of 300 billion in 1987 it's only 2 trillion today so one side gained less than 2 trillion the other gained 40 trillion the 1% the 50% he doesn't like that I'm trying to convince him the Fed the Fed is the source of it and I think he's open to that possibility where the mainstream Republicans they're all on board and they don't even think about these monetary issues so that's another opening so if you can get and of course he was very strong and very firm on the COVID lockdowns the mandatory vaccinations and all of that he's understanding because he has been censored by the whole media the whole danger of to free speech, constitutional liberty so if you put constitutional liberty the Fed problem, the fiscal problem the warfare state problem together you can get a program that actually would make sense and that could be supported by the third party candidate who's in the business of blowing up the system it can't come soon enough thank you


A really brilliant German philosopher once said that technology is not what we seek but how we seek, and that was 50 years ago. And now it's so true that sometimes we're looking at technology as if technology is the purpose of something that we're doing. But technology is a tool where when the tool becomes the purpose and then it becomes overly powerful, right, it becomes toxic. So basically what is happening is that we have to look at technology and say well this is the way that we find things but we still, you know, what we want to find as humans is happiness, right? It's really quite simple. Happiness, flourishing, contentment, you know, those kind of universal things. And technology can help us find contentment and happiness but it is not that it is happiness or contentment. That's completely different. So if I get liked on Facebook, makes me happy for about two and a half seconds, right? That's not the same than having a friendship and a relationship in your life. That's not what technology does. Technology is a multiplier, a catalyst, right, and it's a tool. But if we take the tool and we put it inside of us, right, like with a brain implant or genetic engineering, which is a big debate about this, then we essentially change the very nature of who we are and we're trying to bypass a human process of doing things with the machine process. So rather than actually solving a problem, we invent an app and then we talk about the problem. Or rather than building a relationship, we talk to our screens and we have fake friends. And that's only the beginning because technology is now so tempting, so powerful, so cheap, and it will only get better and better and better. So then we have to remind ourselves, is this really how we're going to be in love with a robot because it's more convenient? It's very important to remember that technology is not the purpose and it's the way that we get it to the purpose.


Hi, this is Mitch Mitchell and I got a story to tell you that is eventually going to end in a motivational point So here we go with the story I'm down in Memphis, Tennessee and this past Saturday I decided that I was gonna head down to the river, you know and do what I was just calling a river walk the Mississippi River runs basically between Tennessee on the Memphis side and Arkansas on the other side I don't know what city actually I think they call it West Memphis and I've never gone across the bridge one of these days I might but I haven't done it yet So anyway, I go down there and I get to the end of the street main street and there's a parking lot So I go across the way and I go to park the car and the lady says are you here to go to the Mud Island River? Museum said I don't know She said well, this is really the parking lot for that She said it's across the way you park and then you can go over using the monorail And I said oh that sounds cool and she said you can go look at the museum of the museum closes at four So if you're going now, you're probably want to go to the museum first And then you can walk around take a look and then take it take the monorail back and have you ever been to Bale Street? I said well, I drove by it once but I haven't really been there She saw we ought to take a trolley of the trolley bus and go down I said why I thought the trolley's had been shut down She says yes the trolley's have been shut down, but the buses haven't so you know you should take a bus So the first thing I do is I decide okay? Let's go see Mud Island now folks who I've been working with said you need to go check out Mud Island If you can touch the mud because it's a different grain of dirt than you've ever touched in your life It feels like silk. I Don't know so I said okay sure so I take the monorail It wasn't all that cool It went really slow It just basically takes you over the river, you know to the other side and there you are you sitting there Okay, well this was that yeah So anyway, I go to the museum and I took a ton of pictures the way they set it up It's like you're on an old riverboat So you know you saw all these different things you saw what a room looked like you saw what the room looked like where the Captain would have been with the the steering wheel or whatever they call that thing all the stuff I took just a ton of pictures and then what they have Outside on the grounds there is a full size. Okay. I guess that makes no sense But a replica of the Mississippi River and it's a huge thing. I mean it's pretty long walk And then they have different things here and they're telling you like the different access points and the states it goes through and New York and one of the states it goes through so it happens So anyway, that was kind of neat There were some families there with their little kids and the little kids had their shoes off They were walking through the water and it's one little boy. I said so the water Kind of cold or is it kind of warm? He says this in the middle I thought that was kind of a cute answer for a kid. So anyway, I did that and I'm done looking everything and taking my pictures and so I get back on the monorail go back across I said, you know what? I think I'm gonna walk down to Beale Street now I'm one of those people who will just do stuff on the spur of the moment And so walking to Beale Street was my spur of the moment thing What I didn't realize was just how far away Beale Street was going to be So I walk and I'm walking and I'm walking and I'm walking and whoa boy. I start getting tired So there was a place on whatever street I was on. I'm not sure if it was Front Street or something else It was called New York Pizza. I said, okay. Yeah, right. Let's go in and find out So I go into the place and the guy there Okay, he wasn't Italian so you know, I'm thinking okay This isn't gonna be true New York pizza and it wasn't it was horrible. It just always is Anyway, I walk all the way down finally get to Beale Street and there's the Orpheum Theater and There's no people around I said, okay here. I'm on Beale Street again And there's no one here So I look down to my left and I see what looks kind of like a denser. You said I'm gonna walk down there So I since I'm that far I start walking down and the further I go the more people there are and Eventually like three blocks down or three or four blocks down There's tons of people and now I am officially on Beale Street and there's this music coming from both sides of the street and All these different restaurants and it was just like every single restaurant had its own musician And so it was just this cacophony of sound and there were all these people who are merged around and they were all Having a good old time and listen to different musics and they were the stores Selling things with ever and there was this guy who was selling things on his little cart And he becomes important to this story because he was the only guy who was selling stuff on a cart And they had these barriers set up and there was no one in the streets and I thought well, this is interesting I didn't think that Beale Street would you know Take care of the people like this and keep people segregated make sure that you know, they would be safe on the street Come to find out. There's gonna be a parade.  I Truth of the matter.   So I see the FedEx Center where the Memphis Grizzlies play So I go over there. I take some pictures of that. I Sit down for a little bit just to rest because I've had this long walk And then I noticed that traffic on this road across from the FedEx Center starting to back up So I said, oh, I guess the parade has started that I realized I'm on the wrong side of the street How am I gonna get back on the other side of street to walk back?  I'm just like that. So This thing starts going on I've seen these people a lot of men dressed as women men being all flamboyant and everything these groups of people walking with their banners Women just being women the women weren't flamboyant at all You know, they were just there marching some women were holding other women's hands And I should have picked up on that earlier because I saw a lot of that and they see any guys holding hands But I saw definitely saw women holding hands and we're in the same clothes and I just being me thought Okay, this is just family members don't want to lose each other or good friends Never occurred to me. It was anything else And then I thought back to the guy who was selling stuff Like I said, he comes back in the story because he was selling all the rainbow stuff They had the rainbow flags and some rainbow shirts and the head beads which really threw me off because I thought that was a New Orleans thing I was just oblivious. I missed it all Anyway, I was there about 30 or 45 minutes watching people and waving back at people and some of the people who were with me Weren't necessarily as happy to see it but some of them were You make your own fun, right? So anyway, I wait for a little while and I say, well, okay, you know, it's time for me to get back So now I've got to walk all the way back Because as I said on the street where the orphan theater is there's nothing This is not like New York City where there's cabs all over the place No cabs and I never saw a bus. I did see some horse-drawn carriages Which I know sit in front of the Peabody Hotel I saw a couple of those while I was walking the Beale Street But I didn't see any walking back and let's face the facts here The end horses don't get along so I was not going to get in any kind of horse-drawn carrots So I had to walk all the way back and it was a long walk and I walked past this Park where I took a picture of a cannon and then they had a statue of Jefferson Davis And I was going to throw something at it and I said, okay, we'll just let that go Hey, they lost the war, right? So Northern bias. I know that's so wrong, but there you go So anyway, I finally make it back to the car and I go back, you know to the hotel and the next day My hunches were killing me.   I'm over in the What do you call it the clubhouse of the hotel before the front desk is also where they serve meals They serve meals in a homework suites from monday through thursdays And I almost never eat there but tonight they had these little mini meatloaves Which I initially thought was salisbury steak But still they were good with mashed potatoes and corn. Are you kidding and gravy? So I ate at the hotel for once and I enjoyed the meal So after that I'm talking with some of the people and there's this young lady there who's probably been there Maybe a month and a half. I've never really had much of an opportunity to talk to her So I'm talking to her About stuff because she had been singing initially and I was talking to her about that and Different things and then I was telling her what I did and she said, well, you know, I'm doing this here But this isn't my dream. She said I had to drop out of college My first year because my dad passed away and then I really didn't have the money or the you know I really didn't just want to go back to school because my mind was elsewhere But I do want to go back to school and it's my dream to be a counselor for troubled kids And I also want to start a program to help kids who are having trouble at home and do do all kind of things I said, well, that sounds like a nice dream. I said that's a lot of hard work But that sounds like a nice dream.  Anyone who has never done anything has no right to tell anybody else what they can or cannot do You never base your life off of what other people expect of you I said unless you want to be the center for the Los Angeles Lakers and you're only five foot six There's there's a dream that I'm sorry. I will even jump on that and tell you You can't be the center for the Los Angeles Lakers But you can be anything you want to be if you really want it If you want to go to college and get that degree you can do it If you want to modify something else later on you can do it. I said, you know, you take your chances I said here. I am now. I said I Went into business for myself in 2001. I got incorporated in 2006 by law I am the president and ceo of my corporation Said I haven't had a vacation since 1999. I've had some down years, but I've had some great years And since I've been in business for myself I have traveled All over the country done all kinds of things that I never would have thought possible Had I still been working a basic nine to five job With my three to four weeks vacation every single year and earning my sick time and basically Making money for the man, but not making any money for myself. Just letting them basically control me So don't ever let anybody tell you what you can and cannot do you work for it You study for it. You get yourself prepared for it And then if you want to you go for it you take your chance And you know what if it doesn't work out you can always go do something else But at least you'll be able to say to yourself you gave it a try But don't ever let anyone else tell you what you can or cannot do So this is what I'm telling to y'all and I had to build up with that story because that led to be talking to these ladies here You've never let anyone do that So this is my tale and I love being able to tell stories and then get back to something else that has a positive message So let me know what you think. This is just me rambling on And by the way, when you see that image because I was getting ready to do something else and I got distracted I started to look over here and then I was taking the picture at the same time I said, I'm just gonna leave that there. So that's my what do you call that the little thumbnail so to speak Anyway, this is Mitch Mitchell. Hope you enjoyed my story. I hope you enjoyed this little message of positivity And let me know your thoughts y'all take care


A lesson plan to practice speaking with ESL adults. When it comes to teaching adults with higher levels of English proficiency, it is quite complicated to create lessons as most of the students usually have very specific needs and challenges. In this blog post, I would like to share a sample online lesson, that I taught to an adult group of advanced EFL learners to train conversational skills. For presenting my materials online, I used Prezi for visual clues. Our class took place on Zoom. The whole lesson was structured in the form of a speaking club under the general topic of feeling ashamed and uncomfortable. Engaging people into a lively conversation. Engagement is the most important part of any lesson. Advanced level adults are no exception. To build rapport and a comfortable environment, I started the class with a simple conversation activity. Remember an embarrassing situation. Your reaction. Other people's reactions. I asked students to share their stories and experiences. If someone was not participating, I asked about their opinion but at the same time, didn't force them to talk. As that lesson was in the form of a conversation club, there were mixed abilities participants from different countries. Some of them felt intimidated because of their English level, others were not sure about their pronunciation and simply had lower self-esteem because of that. Thus, it was extremely important to be more of a peer than a teacher. This strategy works great with teenagers as well when you deliver lessons to a group or single individual. Studying without realizing that you actually study. For this stage, I chose to work on pronunciation as it is essential for communication skills. Tongue twisters are great exercises for training pronunciation, so I chose one for practice. To make this activity more fun, I created a card game on word wall with different characters and asked students to open the cards and read the tongue twister as the character on the card. Wrapping up. To finish the lesson, I asked the students to give me feedback on what they liked or disliked about the class. Asking for feedback is beneficial as it both helps you understand if you achieved your goals or not, and also motivates students to speak a little bit more. Do you want to teach English abroad or online? Take a TEFL course. That's it. This online class takes about 60 minutes with a group of 5-6 people. Make sure that you give enough examples and your instructions are clear, especially if your students are of various English levels. You can use the same lesson plan both for online and real life classes.


Hello and welcome to the session. Let's work out the following problem. It says a man starts his job with a certain salary and earns a fixed increment every year. If his salary was Rs. 1500 after 4 years of service and Rs. 1800 after 10 years of service, what was his starting salary? What is his annual increment? So let's now move on to the solution. We have to find the starting salary and the annual increment of the man. So let the starting salary be equal to Rs. x and the annual increment be equal to Rs. y. Now we are given that his salary was Rs. 15 year after 4 years of service. So the increment earned in 4 years will be Rs. 4 y since the annual increment is Rs. y and number of years are 4. So increment earned in 4 years will be Rs. 4 y. Now we are given that after 4 years his salary was Rs. 1500. So after 4 years the salary was 1500 that is the starting salary plus the increment earned in 4 years is equal to 1500. Similarly increment earned in 10 years will be Rs. 10 y and we are given that after 10 years of service his salary was Rs. 1800. So the starting salary plus increment earned in 10 years is equal to Rs. 1800. Let's name this as 1 and this is 2. Subtract equation 2 from 1. Equation 1 is x plus 4 y is equal to Rs. 1500. Equation 2 is x plus 10 y is equal to 1800. Now we have to subtract equation 2 from equation 1. So when we subtract sign will change. Now plus 6 gets cancelled with minus 6. 4 y minus 10 y is minus 6 y. 1500 minus 1800 is minus 300. Now minus sign gets cancelled on both sides. So we have y is equal to 300 upon 6. So this implies y is equal to 50. So the annual increment is Rs. 50. Now to find the value of x we will put the value of y in any one of the two equations. So we will put y is equal to 50 in 1. So x plus 4 into 50 is equal to 1500. So this implies x plus 200 is equal to 1500. So this implies x is equal to 1500 minus 200. So this implies x is equal to 1300. Therefore, stopping salary is Rs. 1300 and the annual increment is Rs. 50. So this completes the question. Bye for now. Take care. Have a good day.


An 11-year-old girl suffering from left-crossed fused renal ectopia and sacral hypoplasia was referred to the gynecology OPD at Karachi, Pakistan in February 2019 due to abdominal pain. Upon examination, it was discovered that the patient had a septum covering her vagina. This was later identified as hematocalpos, a condition caused by incomplete development of the hymen. The patient underwent incision and drainage, but this did not resolve the problem. Further investigation revealed that the patient had multiple complete and partial transverse vaginal septae, which were causing recurring formation of hematocalpos. To manage this, the patient underwent ultrasound guided needle puncture and drainage, followed by post-operative tampon used to maintain patency. This article was authored by Marine Yousaf Rana, Saeeda Heeranakvi and Rubina Hussein.


It's time for the Laun Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour, brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. A presentation of the Laun Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Laun Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Laun Jean. Good evening, this is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Laun Jean Chronoscope? Mr. William Bradford Huey, editor of the American Mercury, and Dean Nelson Hibschman of the Pratt Institute. Our distinguished guest for this evening is Dr. Henry T. Heald, Chancellor of New York University. The opinions expressed are necessarily those of the speakers. Dr. Heald, it's a pleasure to have so distinguished an educator as you tonight on the Chronoscope. I believe, sir, that you've been president of New York University for only about six months. Isn't that correct, sir? Yes, I came to New York University in February of a few weeks. And prior to that, you were in Chicago, weren't you? I was in Chicago as president of Illinois Institute of Technology.  That's correct. Well, sir, I suppose that a man who is president of what I believe is the largest university in the world, one of the largest, that one of your problems is the problem of military training today. Isn't that correct, sir? The problem of military training is a problem that faces every young man in the country, and of course faces college students. Well, what is the attitude toward those two years now that a young man must give to the military? Is there resentment toward it on college campuses? I think there's no resentment toward it. I think the college students of the country, like all the rest of us, are not very enthusiastic about a set of world conditions which require that we have to maintain a large military force. Nevertheless, realize it has to be done. How many young Americans are in college now, Dr. Heald? Well, our total college enrollment this fall will probably run 2,400,000 men and women. And what percentage of that people of college age is that, sir? Well, of the people of the college age group that perhaps represents one-sixth of the total population of that age group. And in short, one American out of six who is of college age is now going to college, and five out of six are not going to college. That's probably a rough approximation, I should say. Would you say that that's too many Americans in college? Well, the percentage of our population going to college has steadily increased every year since 1900. We are, of course, at a higher percentage than we've been before, but I don't think it's too many. Well, there's a great shortage of engineering and scientific personnel today. What is being done about that, Dr. Heald? Well, the engineering societies and the employers of engineers and everyone else interested in that problem is trying to make it clear to young people that this is a field which offers opportunity for qualified young men. Is it true that every engineering graduate today has the choice of a dozen or so jobs? Certainly there's great competition for all of the engineering graduates today. What causes that, sir? Is it a decline in the supply or is it an increase in the demand for engineers? It's caused by both. There has been a considerable decline in the supply because of smaller freshman enrollments in the last three or four or five years. And, of course, the high level of employment and the defense program and mobilization is taking a very large number of engineers. Well, you are, of course, our distinguished engineer yourself, sir. Is it a sign of the times that an engineer like yourself has been chosen as president of the largest university in the country? Well, engineering is important, but I suspect that I was chosen because of the shortage of university presidents. With the rising costs of higher education and the general feeling that it should be available to all, some people think that higher education should be subsidized by federal funds. How do you feel about that? Well, in general, I think higher education should not be subsidized by federal funds, but then there are good money qualifications which one has to apply because higher education for individuals such as the veterans is subsidized by federal funds. It's been on that, sir. It's now been seven years since the end of the Second World War, and I know that our viewers would be interested in your opinions as to what's a proper judgment of the government's large-scale entry into the field of paying for education. I think almost all of the educators and certainly some millions of young men who have taken advantage of that would conclude that the expenditures for, as an aid for GI education, have been well justified. Are the Korean veterans returning to college now? The veterans are returning, but in very small numbers. The total number of veterans demobilized there isn't very great, and I would guess that only a relative handful will be enrolled in this fall term. Now, how is inflation affecting cost in college? How much does it cost an average young American to go to NYU for a year now, sir? Well, it varies, but if he has to pay board and room and living expenses and tuition, perhaps a couple of thousand dollars per year is a fair figure. About two thousand dollars a year for the man who has to pay board and room. Now, what's the size of the student body at New York University, sir? New York University has about 45,000 students full-time and part-time in all of its various branches and divisions. And how is it supported? Is it state supported? It's not state supported. This university was founded more than 120 years ago as a privately supported, privately endowed university. It has never had any state support. Your experience in Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology was such as to indicate that you were able to bring education and industry together. How do you feel about the responsibility of industry for the educational, the private educational institutions in its community? Well, I think industry, corporations, businesses have a responsibility for citizenship, which extends into the area of education, just as I think education has a responsibility to business and industry. There's a mutuality of interest, and there are a great many areas in which they can cooperate, one of which, of course, is in the problem of support for private higher education in order to make sure that it will be strong and continue to take its right for place in the total educational structure. You mentioned, Dr. Hill, that New York University is supported by gifts. Now, how are taxes affecting those gifts today? How much money was given to the university last year? Well, the university last year received gifts of a little more than six million dollars, a fairly sizeable sum, but not very large compared to the size of the university. Well, are gifts falling off, or was that six million an increase over previous years? It turns out that that was an increase, but the university's need is also increasing, and all privately supported educational institutions have that factor in common. And that, I believe, is one of the things, one of the chores that the presidents of these institutions has, isn't it, to help raise money and to induce people to give money to schools? Well, that's one of the problems that presidents have. There's no doubt about that. Do you see a future for television and education as a tool of general education? Television is one of the most exciting tools that has been made available to education. Most of us haven't discovered exactly how to use it yet. Do you think the universities and colleges will make wide use of the opportunities afforded by the FCC, for instance, in this new allocation of UHF? The universities and colleges of the country are tremendously interested in it. They have the practical problem of, first, how to find money and have to get the stations on the air, and then after they get stations on the air of supporting the programs. I'm sure our viewers would like your comment on this, sir. It's been said that college students today are considerably more serious-minded than they were in the past. Do you think that's true? I think college students are somewhat more serious-minded than they have been in the past. Certainly that was true of all of the veterans that we had, and that's conditioned the students in the years since the veterans. And pursuing that same thought, it's also been said that, as a matter of fact, young men have been criticized from some directions for being more security-conscious today than they were in the past. Someone has jokingly said that the young man is more interested in the pension plan of some business now than he is in how much money he receives at the start or what his opportunities are. Is it fair to say that they are more security-conscious today? I'm afraid this whole country has been somewhat conditioned to be more security-conscious, but I see no particular evidence that that is limited to college students. As a matter of fact, I see a good deal of evidence that college students are still interested in the same kind of things that they were good many years ago when I went to college. You don't think that it's a proper indictment of the young people today? Certainly it's no indictment of the young people. It may be an indictment of our older people as well. Well, Dr. Heald, I believe it was Mr. H.G. Wells who said one time that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. I'm sure that many of our viewers have an idea that catastrophe is winning in these days of the atom bomb. Now, what would you care to predict as to whether education is going to be able to defeat catastrophe in our time? First, it's no question of what we face extremely difficult and complicated problems today. But I'm perfectly confident that education will win that race. I'm perfectly sure that the kind of young people, young men and young women whom we have in our colleges and universities today, will be capable of solving these problems, which sometimes look a little insurmountable to us. Well, thank you very much for being with us tonight, sir. The editorial board for this edition of the Laun Jean Chronoscope was Mr. William Bradford Huey and Dean Nelson Hipschman. Our distinguished guest was Dr. Henry T. Heald, Chancellor of New York University. The traditional gift to symbolize achievement, honor or respect is a watch of truly great prestige and the watch of greatest prestige for every presentation purpose is Laun Jean, the world's most honored watch. Now, throughout the world, no other name on a watch means so much as Laun Jean, for no other watch has won ten World's Fair Grand Prizes and twenty-eight gold medals for excellence and elegance and so many honors for accuracy in fields of precise timing. For your personal use, for any gift occasion as well as for formal presentation, a Laun Jean watch brings unique satisfaction for into every Laun Jean watch is built, the greater accuracy and longer life for which Laun Jean watches are world honored, and yet you may buy and own or buy and proudly give a Laun Jean watch for as little as seventy-one fifty. Laun Jean, the world's most honored watch, premier product of the Laun Jean Witner watch company since 1866, maker of watches of the highest character. We invite you to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening at this same time for the Laun Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important dishes of the hour, broadcast on behalf of Laun Jean, the world's most honored watch and Witner distinguished companion to the world on a Laun Jean. This is Frank Knight, reminding you that Laun Jean and Witner watches are sold and serviced from cruise to coast by more than four thousand leading jewelers who proudly display this emblem. Agency for Laun Jean Witner watches.