Good evening. Welcome to Montpelier Civic Forum and we have another of our forums tonight. This one is on the state senate and it joins the other state senate candidates who've been in to speak as well as the candidates for the house in Washington County and in Montpelier in particular. Bill Fraser is on two episodes. One he's speaking about the sewer bonds and one he's speaking about the parking garage bonds. All of those are excellent shows that I recommend that you watch there on Orca Video of course. And tonight we have Ann Cummings who's running for Washington County Senate. Right. Ann, which campaign is this? When did you enter the Washington County Senate? This is 12. This is my 12th campaign. Every two years I have been in the Senate for 22 years. What's your seniority? How many people are beyond 22 years in the in the state senate? There are several. I'm not the longest. This is a major adjustment for me because Senator Doyle was my seatmate for so long and he was senior in every way and all of a sudden the last two years. Oh I'm now the senior senator from Washington County and it's I've never felt like I was there that long because he was always there a lot longer. What was it like serving with Bill? You know my best story about Bill and I think sets the tone is my first campaign and I'm out of chicken pie supper. Bill set that tone in Marshfield and I hadn't met Bill since I'd announced I was running and I went up and I said hi you know I'm in Cummings I'm running against oh hi he says have you met and he introduced me to everybody that came into that chicken pie supper and that kind of set the tone that Washington County was always very collegial we always work together there were Bill was a Republican he is a Republican I've served with Republicans Democrats progressives and Washington County unlike some other delegations and independence have have worked together there's very few issues that you actually deal with where there's a divergence we work for the county and for all the people of the county and I think I credit Bill was setting that tone of civility and collegiality. When you got in what were you doing before 24 years before? I was doing a lot of things I stayed I was able I was one of the last of my generation who was able to stay home and raise four children they all graduated from up Hillier High School and Vermont colleges and while I was doing that I ran a small business which was a knitwear design and manufacturing business I was on the Montpelier City Council I was on the Central Vermont Community Action Council I was on a couple of other nonprofits and just did a lot of civic work that way was eventually elected mayor and served as mayor for six years during the flood so that was that's not the Irene flood for those of you who are wondering which flood would that have been? I didn't have a name it was the Montpelier flood it was an ice jam and we had six to eight feet of water on state and main street it came up and about eight ten hours later it went out just as fast the ice jam broke but it was a major event for the people that were here you know had their businesses pretty much destroyed. When you were first elected decades ago what was an issue that you felt strongly about that was a state issue now you at that point had been on the city council so you realized as a charter city you know that you were subservient to the state in a number of ways. Yes there was I think the issue we had worked on most was the payment in lieu of taxes. Could you explain what that is? Okay 30% of the city of Montpelier's tax exempt most of that is the state complex state doesn't have to pay Montpelier any taxes but if there's a demonstration it's the Montpelier police if somebody gets sick hurt has a heart attack it's Montpelier's fire and ambulance if there's a fire it's the Montpelier fire department that comes and the state was not reimbursing us we had at that point we have a little over 8,000 people that lived here but we had 20,000 people a day in town that we were providing services for and most of them were at the state. Mayor Romano before me had started working with the state and at that point we were receiving I think it was $35,000 a year. Which seems token. It was pretty token even that long ago and so we really were Ryan Cotton was then the city manager he and I were up in the state house every Wednesday morning at eight o'clock Tuesday morning when the legislators started to there to just make contact with our legislators we started a program called co-pilot. There's a lot of towns that have state. Most notably Waterbury. Waterbury but almost every town has a salt shed if you have a state forest you got some payment for that if you have a state building you didn't and it was interesting because it was you know you'd go up and they'd look at you like you know you had two heads this was crazy but we persisted and it has now become just matter of course that the city of Montpelier gets a significant payment in lieu of taxes. But every time that I talked to a mayoral candidate or every time I talked to Bill Frazer about the budget I hear them talking about the pilot program being insufficient out of out of touch yeah I write it versus simply you know I'm not that you would always hear from Montpelier Waterbury and the like and I've heard you're on the other side I have heard it from Waterbury and you know it's not something that's just going to come your way money is very tight at the state house and it's there's more people that don't benefit from payment in lieu of taxes than do so like everything up there it's a give and take and a negotiation and I think the towns are always going to be pushing and the state's always going to be pushing back and you get eventually you get some equilibrium but you you have to push and you have to work at it. Money is tight now was money tight then in 24 years ago oh yes okay so the money has always been tight no I I think there were a couple years when we actually had money we're very much tied to the the economic cycle I went in in the late 90s and we had just done the adjustment down and I can remember saying to the city manager that year before just we're going to go up this year we're going to say hi just remember us we know things are tight so we're not going to ask you for more money this year but remember us when times are good because walking through the halls you could feel the pain money what turned out to be not sustainable one time money had been put into things like universal kindergarten there was something about cutting it's one of those stories that stays in the state house they had proposal was to cut public tv funding and big bird did an ad and I've had people that were there then saying I am never taking on big bird again well I think the house Republicans learned that about four years ago in the on the federal level yes you know you just but it was it was very tight we came back and there was a real discipline there tried very hard on appropriations I think at that point jeb spaulding took over appropriations and tried to say all right this is a sustainable growth level this is jeb spaulding who now is over the colleges that's right it was the state senator at that time um and we tried to just grow at what we thought was a sustainable revenue level and then anything else went into one time spending and this we we went through the last great recession um we haven't we're just starting to come out of that and just starting to come out in what sense revenues are just starting to pick up um Vermont usually lags behind the nation in economic re regrowth and this has just been a long um slow recovery now in terms of uh when this is being taped um Moody's downgraded our bond our bonds are still excellent they are very excellent but it's one step below very excellent to just excellent plus uh and they if I'm correct and help me if I'm wrong they cited three factors one is our aging population one is our sluggish economic growth which you spoke of and the third was our looming pensions okay um let's start with the looming pensions let's okay because that was one that came up in the legislature late last year uh if if I'm right and that was when there was surplus money available and the question is where should that surplus money be spent and we're back to that same question of one time use or investing in chiseling away to some degree our pension obligations right but you say where you stood on that and why okay that I was right in the middle of it um why were you right in the middle of it because I chair the finance committee and I was right in the middle of it um to start with because I've heard the word debt and pensions come up it isn't a problem with the pension system that we have it is a problem with I believe before my time um the theory was that the pension money is invested in the stock market and that you could use the the stock market was booming and so the money was that we were making in the market was used to cover the state's obligation to put money into the fund I've been told that this was a a gray area in the accounting standards and it's my understanding that we were not the only state that did this then times got tough and we didn't have the money to put in everything without making even more painful cuts and this continued this was a bipartisan multi administration multi legislature um we knew it was there we knew we were obligated to fund the pensions that we had to pay out as well as the future as yes right and um but then the feds changed the accounting standards no when would this have been roughly might have been seven eight years ago okay um they changed the standards and what would have been during recession uh-huh and they came up and said uh what was gray is now black you can't do that that is an unfunded liability and you will pay it out and here is the penalty and here's the interest you're going to pay and here is the principle this is what you owe and we have been paying that painfully paying that ever since and so last year when we had one time money which was approximately how much I think it was yeah it was it was like is it 30 million I think it was 32 something in that range um and we weren't sure we were suddenly getting more business taxes and we thought we knew why maybe but we weren't sure and so the governor wanted to use that to buy down the the property taxes to put it into to lowering the tax rate problem with that is last year we were uh supposed to have a nine cent tax increase and five of that was because we had done what the governor wanted the year before and book savings from teachers health care that didn't materialize so if we put one time money in and covered five cents or three cents we're kicking it down the road we're kicking it down the road it's paying you mortgage on your credit card but that cost is still going to be there next year and the one time money isn't and but if we put it in to pay down our debt and take it off the principle we would save millions of dollars over the life of that debt it's like paying down the principle on your mortgage and since we just felt that was a much more prudent way to spend money that we didn't think would be reoccurring how does the story end um we put the money into the one time um funding most of it at the end we may have made we kicked it down no we put it mostly in to paint on the pension okay so basically on the margin we're still faced the following year with those same kinds of painful choices we the appropriations committee has the payment schedule i've been told that this is this was the worst year that it'll start to ramp down so it's not going to get any worse but that payment has been eating up any increase in revenues between that the school payments and Medicaid there hasn't been money to do anything else how do we clean up the like we had a bill that was passed that said you're going to clean up the lake and is the result of that bill yet another task force or yet another report you know there's there's lots of ideas out there about how we can clean up the lake one bill that went through and got vetoed originally called for a task force to you know and then there was a task force set up and they the governor set one up and they came back and said well we aren't going to make any recommendations because the administration has said we're not raising any new money and we're not raising any taxes we're not raising any fees and it's hard to see how you're going to do a 20 million a dollar dollar a year cleanup without raising any money treasure interject yourself into that discussion the original discussion originally when this came up the treasurer was tasked with coming up for a plan and she came up with a plan that said for the first I think it was two years maybe four we could use some of our bonding to do some of the work it's long-term work we you know we do things with banking and roads and we could do that but it was going to take more and she had several suggestions that the legislature should look at to come up with the rest of the money did they no why not because we were told very clearly that if we came up with any new revenue sources it would be vetoed and we have a very limited block of time and you kind of find your you know you lose enthusiasm for really working on something and you know staying till 10 o'clock at night and putting your heart and soul into this thing and then finding out it's just been vetoed when the next legislature starts now everybody I think the governor I think the legislature I think collectively all of you were frustrated at the end dealing with school finance yes at the very end dealing with school finance at the very beginning and then dealing with school finance at the very end every year is there a way that the process could be improved in in your mind so that it starts at the beginning and systematically ends itself before the 11th or 11th hour it's a very I think the system works as well and it has lasted longer than any other system we've had what would other systems we've had be oh there was the miller miller formula and there were there were several you're talking about the school fund the statewide school funding right that were that were put in but they depended on the state coming up with the money and we didn't always come up with the money and it went on the local tax rates and then we had the Brigham decision which what was the Brigham decision Brigham decision there was a lawsuit brought and it said look we've got ski towns for sometimes the equity decision that it can't cost we had towns with $3 tax rates that were able to raise less money than towns with 28 cent tax rates because of the amount of uh grand list and a lot of the grand list in places like second home towns didn't send kids to the school so you had all this property to tax and not too many kids you had other towns that had nothing you're talking about the northeast the northeast kingdom standard was the the poster child i think they had over $3 tax rates and some of my towns had 28 cent tax rates Brigham said that's kids have a right to an equal education it is based and where it isn't necessarily money but money is part of it the disparity is too large and the state has to find a way to equalize that and the result was act 60 so what we're doing is nibbling around the edges of act 60 is what you're saying except for one proposal that would lessen the dependence on property and have more dependence on on income as it is right now it's it's a mixture of both it's a mixture of both the majority of people 65 70 percent pay based on a percentage of their income and that was by design we call income sensitivity um above that they they pay the full freight on their property there is some feeling that we should put more you know if people paid the full the same percentage you know did like a flat rate um then we would we could lower it probably for lower people and and have more money and do all kinds of stuff with more money the thing that concerns me and that i think we could go more you know do more income into it but as you get to higher income levels um income tax tends to be very volatile that's the state is income dependent and that's why you get our feast or famine okay ups and downs states big we can rob peter to pay paul and get through sometimes peter moves out of the state that sometimes um schools aren't schools have one mission and so we have always as a state tried to have stability in school funding i know in the city um the school sets the budget city council has to accept or approve it but if the money doesn't come in if a major building or the half the city burns down the city has to pay the full freight to the the schools and the city has to make has to swallow the loss doesn't it go through the state though it does now it does now so that if the city were to burn down they would still get there absolutely but that's the level that we've gone to make sure that you can't open school and then say oh but we're ex you know we can't we gotta fire three teachers today because the money short so we've tried we you know you you try and find a system that is stable and the higher you go in income the the more unstable it becomes um and so you you want to you want to find which is part of of the legs of the the three legs that mooney was was talking about which is our aging population our decline well not declining but our sluggish economy we haven't picked up as fast as the rest of the country how do you see us picking up what do you see as vermont economies that we can realistically we're not going to get amazon headquarters too no we are not um we seem to do very well with startups we've done ben and jerry's and coffee roasters you know and web web grocers and um we seem to do that i really think there's some interesting models showing up around the the country um right now we do veggie vermont in yeah economic growth incentive where you get uh it's really a rebate on your taxes but you get money back um you go in you apply and you either are expanding or you and you're in basically you have to increase employment and it has to be at a better than the the going wage and it has to have good benefits if you produce good jobs then the state gives you an incentive but that's a one size fits all and there's models like boston where they've done a real assessment of you know what's their strength what there's weaknesses this is the one area where we tend to get bogged down in partisanship you know it's like you can't power on any corn field and build anything in it and no you just have to do away with you know lower taxes and do away with regulation and we don't really seem to talk to business and i think we really as a state need to sit down and have business of all sizes and kinds talk with us and find a way to tailor make things to help what i would see as startups and once they get big enough they seem to need to move out because we're in a transportation cul-de-sac and they can't get their product to market easily how do you keep kids some in vermont i think when i talk about kids i'm speaking of people in their 20s i'm old enough to call them kids yeah they're kids um you know my kids all went away for a while they went away either to school three of them are back the fourth would have his wife could find a job that pays which he gets paid in montreal um i think i think but i think kids today are on the internet they see the world the you know and i think they're gonna want to go out and they're gonna want to see it i think what we really need to do is market that this is a great place to raise the family to you know we don't need a bunch of you know 20-something's partying we need families that are here that are stable and i don't think we do enough to market how good we are you know we had a governor who every time he spoke said vermont's bad for business now you know it's well we're old and retire who'd want to come here um i think we need to change our rhetoric and start talking about what's good about vermont and why would you it's safe the air is clean we don't have tornadoes and hurricanes and i mean we had Irene but the one before that was a 1927 do we have the housing for those people and what can the what can the state legislature do in your mind to increase our housing stock we did come up with the 36 million dollar bond last year um to increase affordable housing but and part of it is just the housing the price of raw materials it is very difficult i'm in a state with lots of lumber yes i am a realtor um that's why i asked for the next few months i'm in the process of retiring or phasing out you know the cost of raw material you you sell your big house and think you're going to downsize and build a little ranch and it ends up costing you what's your big house you sold for because things like copper was up plywood was up um just basic costs are up and the cost of land in new england is very high what about speaking of land what about act 250 it's been in for a while a long while now um would you see the state legislature revisiting to not to get rid of it but to do a substantial rethink of our land use policy our core of land use policy you know i think act 250 went in it was dean davis a good republican governor that did it um because suddenly in the 60s and 70s there were it was the back to the land movement and people moved here we're now writing books about it and there was a real concern that developers would start building houses and all you know and we'd start to look like long island where i lived as a kid and it was it was potato farms that just had wall-to-wall houses put up on it and there was and we we still have towns that have no local zoning uh we had no zoning we had no planning we it hadn't been an issue um i think it did its job and i think it continues to do its job um i think again this is where we need not just as a legislature but as a state to talk about okay we need housing for people we've got some of the oldest housing stock in the country and outside of chitin and county not very much is going up um housing prices are high and so how do we do that we we are building affordable housing um but how do we help government what can government do without putting its own dollars in is there anything the government can do to ease ease the regulation a tad or to i think is trying to find out what the regulations to ease we have done downtowns we have done neighborhoods continuous to downtowns and given them some break from the regulations you know we i think we need to continue to do that i think one of the things we could do and my experience comes with trying to site a water filtration plant in a neighboring town Montpeliers water sources in Berlin and going through state permitting and there seemed you know you were going through the natural resources department and there seemed to be a lot of people who were very focused on the environment and not making any and the city of Montpeliers was very happy with just dumping chlorine in the water as it came down the hill and didn't really want to have to put up this plant um and so trying to you know and then say okay i've got six weeks to give you an answer and i'll see you know and they said and it was five weeks and six and a half days generally before you get the answer and i don't think they understood that when you're a business that time is money well most of deck 250 from what i gather i might be wrong they get through in a fairly timely manner it's just on the outliers there are a few outliers um and i think i think the you know the word is out that it's very difficult and for most it isn't i think we could be a little more understanding of the of the issues that business you know has they i can remember him saying to me with the you know well um if you draw down more water than this you'll have to make remediation well what are you talking about well we won't know till we get there and i said well are we talking 10 000 or 10 million you know i mean that makes a difference to me i mean i'm not a business so what do you do if you're a profit-making business that is being just kind of well let's talk about the profit-making small business yes health care now there's a national move of what on skin so-called skinny health care plans that would strip off maternal the need to offer maternal care the need to offer psychiatric care so any kind of of of care but you'll end up with a policy that has a monthly premium that's a lot less would you um would now a lot of these are required by state law by the way in vermont yes they are would you favor selling skinny policies that are cheaper and more affordable no why not um when we first moved here my husband's health insurance did not cover maternity so when we were told to get a rider it would be cheaper to save up the money and we did um but we were you know we were able to do that um it used to be my son graduated from high school he was going to go backpacking for a year his sabbatical year yeah um he was out of school so he was off our policy a couple hundred dollars he got a a policy yes skinny policy um but and there were many companies that that's what they did they sold skinny policies to healthy people the minute you reached an age where you might need health care the minute you got sick or had pre-existing or had pre-existing conditions you couldn't you could get health care if you could come up with an exorbitant amount of money i mean a large number of people could not afford it and so what vermont did before my time so over 20 years ago they said look this is you you are going to take vermont as a pool and when my son who is 20 he's going to buy insurance and he's going to pay in and he probably won't use anything for 10 or 15 years but then when he is older and gets sick he'll pay less than he would have you know so you need a big pool we do this with all other kinds of insurance you know you've got a big pool life home okay um yeah fire car but most of us never total our cars burn down our houses you know most of us never put in a major claim and when they do they up your rates um or they let you go but most of us will put a claim in and if we live long enough most of us will put a major claim in to your health insurance system it's a very so it costs more paid parental leave came up before the last it's in the same boat i imagine it is could you explain what the thinking was on paid parental leave on both sides i think on one side it was we can't afford it um we can't afford it or we don't want it no i don't think we don't want it i have actually been putting a paid parental leave bill in for 10 years i i had originally funded it out of the unemployment insurance um and backed off a couple now what would the paid parental bill cover i did this because my son and his family live in montreal my daughter-in-law got a years paid leave it was tied to her unemployment insurance um she didn't take the year and it you know it's a reduced amount but it was enough to help pay the mortgage while she was out and able to stay home with my grandson um and i watched that and i watched the bonding at the same time i am watching young lawyers that work for the state watching their what it's getting near noon i gotta go nurse my baby at the daycare or you'd hear the breast pumps in the ladies room you know and i'm thinking how can you bond with the child when you're so stressed and yet that bonding is so important for the rest of that child's life and that family's life and so i knew you know i knew it wasn't gonna go anywhere i put it in and i put it in because i thought it was something we should talk about and it would be a selling point for younger families that's and i the more i think about it i think yes if we want to attract younger families here say this is what you can do in vermont we set it up as a form of self-employment that's modeled on new york where the employees actually pay in it was like a couple dollars a month and it's expanded to family leave so that those of us that have elderly parents that need to go to the doctors or need someone you know to help them can do that now you got a boost in the last session in term it it passed it passed it did and it's fate it got vetoed and it didn't get overrun it no will it be introduced by you again uh or version of it it will get re introduced and i'll be a sponsor yeah that version will i'm sure what do you see in the next legislature being reintroduced obviously pot is coming up oh yeah what what's your view on that on how to deal with montreal now main messachusetts we're getting encircled we uh and we knew that when we did the first bill i supported the senate bill i think it really worked at getting a regulated system so we knew who was growing what and what the quality and what the quality was um and making sure things didn't get laced with things and it was taxed there will be additional costs for law enforcement there will be you know we we're already doing prevention programs um you know i've been looking for sin to tax for years because it's the only thing you can tax are we going to do um gambling uh sports gambling do you see that coming up gambling is much harder in this state i that would be a much harder sell that's a sin yes that's yeah we could tax that couldn't we but i mean that's that's i mean cigarettes are the one thing you can tax and nobody cares of course the more you tax it the less you you bring in the less well and that has started the the cigarette but we the governor vetoed um we had two bills that went through one was attacks on e-cigarettes because they are becoming a major issue in schools with young people i mean what adult buys bubblegum flavored cigarettes uh they are marketed to young people uh that we couldn't get through my committee put an opioid attacks on opioid producers feeling that they made the money off of opioids um and in some cases knowingly and that they we are looking at decades right of costs um the damage to individuals to families we are going to be paying that cleanup costs for a long time and they should help the drug importation from canada yes how many years were you working on that many um when i first started in finance pharmaceutical costs were we had the new started out as new england legislators uh coalition on on pharmacy pricing uh bernie was taking buses to canada pharmaceuticals are much more inexpensive in canada we got major pushback from the pharmaceutical industry we tried to uh set a contract with i forget the name it was a pharmacy in illinois michigan that sourced from canada so now that is law and we've put into the federal government for the necessary paperwork we're waiting for that possible and probable rejection i'm not holding my breath uh i don't know the federal government has any reason to help from on at this point um you know we keep trying um it is very frustrating pharmaceuticals before the opioid epidemic became a cost pharmaceuticals medicare was set up when going to the hospital was your major cost right and you generally went to the hospital you died um now if you go to the hospital at all it's in day you know in one day and you are treated with pharmaceuticals they are your may and they're coming out with new ones every day and they do miraculous things that's something that's macro well beyond oh yeah vermont it's well beyond vermont and thank you for coming tonight so appreciate and i want to say how much i appreciate you're watching this show and becoming informed about the election please watch the other shows the other state senate candidates the house candidates watch bill's show on the parking garage bond and on the sewer bond but more important than that get out and vote get out and vote on november 6th tell your neighbors and your family to vote that is not only a duty but an obligation thank you so very much


Indirect objects. Indirect objects can be used in several ways. Give some money to John. Give some money to him. Give it to John. Give it to him. Give John some money. Give him some money. Give John it. Not common. Give him it. Not common. In some very informal situations, you may hear people use this one. Example. Angry mother to child. Give me it right now. Note the following. Lend me some money. Lend some money to me. Bring me a cup of coffee. Bring a cup of coffee to me. Get me a cup of coffee. Get a cup of coffee for me. Make me a cup of coffee. Make a cup of coffee for me. Ask him a question. Ask a question of him. Tell her a story. Tell a story to her. With verbs. Let me do it. Allow me to do it. Help me do it. Help me with it. Do it for me. Have him do it. Expect him to do it. Make him do it. Force him to do it. Ask her to do it. Tell her to do it. Request. Tell her to do it. Command. Direct object and indirect object patterns. Pattern A. I gave him an apple. I bought her a car. I asked him a question. Pattern B. I gave an apple to him. I explained it to him. Pattern C. I bought a car for her. I opened the door for her. Pattern A and B. Write, read, show, teach, tell, sell, send, lend, bring, take, pass, give. Pattern A and C. Buy, get, make, find, do, bake, cash. Pattern A only. Ask, cost, save, charge, wish. Pattern B only. Explain, announce, describe, introduce, mention, prove, repeat, say, speak, report. When used with four has the meaning of on behalf of. Pattern C only. Open, answer, close, change, pronounce, prescribe. All patterns. Sing. None of the patterns. Eat, sleep, talk, walk, and most other verbs.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kinsey here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping some personals here for Luke S. We've got two separate orders that we're going to rip all together here for you Luke. We've got a 2022 Panini Select Baseball and um two 2021 Mosaic Team All basketballs as well as a 2021 Panini Illusions basketball. All right we're going to start off with the illusions. Good luck. Here we go. Yeah Riley it sounds like you made good out uh getting rid of Calibri now instead of holding on to. There you go yeah it's probably a good time to move on. We've got Desmond Bain up first nice one there Grizzlies, Josh Jackson, Hardaway, Jay Chontaites, Paul we've got a Cole Anthony rookie he'll be in the shop Wednesday over on the Layton Gaming and Obi-Toppin. We're working some Pokemon with Kayla and Michael Carter Williams and a couple other teammates. We'll be here Wednesday so be sure to check out that stream. Isaiah Joe rookie, Tyrese Halliburton rookie, Joe Engels, we've got Living Legends, Acetate, Dirk Nowitzki, Thomas Bryant, and Lamello Ball rookie. Jeremiah maybe they should have up to eight hours instead of four for college studying. Tray Jones rookie, Tobias Harris we've got red cool color match here Pelicans, Najee Marshall we've got Pelicans, Steve Book, Steve Bay, got RJ Hampton rookie and a Saban Lee rookie. Last pack. Got Jaden McDaniels rookie, Devin Bissell nice one there for the Spurs, Drew Holliday. We've got Clear Shots Acetate of Clay Thompson slash bro number two and a Moses Brown rookie. All right that'll do it for the Illusions. Now Mosaic box number one. Looking for the red and gold waves out of these boxes. Red and gold waves. Here we go. Think uh I think Justin Ripley, a couple of these yesterday too. Let's see what we get you here Luke. Got a Halliburton rookie base, Paul Pierce, and gold wave of Kent Baysmore. I like the gold waves with the uh Warriors jerseys kind of just pop along with it. Isaiah Stewart red rookie, Kira Lewis Jr. Yeah I like these Mosaic boxes for what 110 bucks a box. It's not pat at all red wave Duncan Robinson. Wait really? Yeah the team all boxes and these golden reds sells very well on eBay. I was trying to get a Cole Anthony one. It was like over almost $150 I think it was sold for. Jake Crowder on the red wave. I can get it open. Omar Stevens red wave rookie debut, Emmanuel Quickly. Freddie Freedman's 33rd birthday and B3. Isaac Cora debut red wave, Colin Sexton. Yeah I don't think so either Jeremiah. Especially with how well the uh the chiefs were playing. RJ Hampton rookie, Vince Carter, gold wave of Jared Colver for the T-Wolfs. I had my homes on fantasy in one of my leagues. Oh he got me like almost 35 points I think. Jalen Smith red wave rookie, Reggie Perry. Yeah it looks like you and Terry Goday didn't lose a step. No. There it's like okay. Juju looked okay too. He got targeted quite a bit. Uh National Pride Lamello and red wave Aaron Wiggins Andrew Wiggins sorry. Wiseman NBA debut and red wave Josh Jackson. Played a half yesterday. Got the Amaldon red wave National Pride Russell Westbrook glass pack of the first mosaic box here for you Luke. Got rookie mosaic nice one here Desmond Bain and red wave Calcuzma. I feel like with just this one box how much is it? 110. I feel like you can make your money back quick. Double I'm triple it if you hit one of the big rookies. I'm not a basketball collector but I think you have to do a box. This is the box I take home and rip for sure.  All right here we go. Are you bought fanatics? Nice Dean. Heck yeah man. Red wave Nico Manion.  He's fanatics exclusive. Jay Chantay. Red wave Danny Green. So now you don't have to buy the helmets. You own you own the helmets. Denny Avdia. We've got red wave Trey Burke. Great stuff for everyone. Santa Hurts Jersey. Isaac Okora Rookie. We've got red wave national pride Halliburton. Can I haze red wave Jaw? Cool Anthony Rookie. See my Lillard gold wave of Halliburton on the national pride. Nice one there. Got rookie base Lamello Ball and red wave MVP Shaq. You got Rookie Mason Jones. Red debut Patrick Williams. Got mosaic Shaq Milton and red wave Draymont Green. There it is. Nice Meth Rookie. James Harden and gold wave DeMar DeRosin. Even nice gold bet wave. Devon Vasell Rookie base. Okangu debut and red wave De'Aaron Fox. Last one here for you Lube. Then we'll get into your baseball. Red wave Seth Curry. That's a cool color match there on the Phillies Jersey. All right Luke and select baseball time. 2022 select baseball. Color wheel. Let's see one. It's a black. I don't see a color wheel. Still thinks Sam's one of the only people who are pulling color wheel out of the baseball. Pulled one out of the select football. I was sick. Brooks Robinson Tri-Color. No it was Randy Moss. I think four can pull the Brady one. Yeah. I appreciate it. Hope you're having a good day. Brandon Marsh Tri-Color Rookie of Jake Meyers. Stroes. Yeah. We've got for the reds T.J. Friddle on the Jumbo Rookie Patch. The gold vinyl. How about that? Ivan Rodriguez. Silver select stars. Burger. We've got Silver Rookie of Glenn Otto. The card looks a little faded. It's like it got randomly like a washing machine or something. Is that gold? We got gold here Luke. Let's see what we got. Good luck man. We've got gold of Giancarlo Stanton for the Yankees. Let's go. Been pulling some very nice gold so far tonight. We got one out of Optic, out of UFC and now baseball. Six out of ten. Very nice. Now we need one out of football. Very cool. Thank you. Very nice. Congrats on that one Luke. We got Silver Jose Berrios. Fuego Jazz Chisholm. All the Seahawks fans about to be disappointed that are out there cheering. We've got Josh Hader 66-149. Brew Crew. Series. Silver Liam Hendricks. Again this one looks a little faded too. We've got out of 299. Youth Explosion Auto Khalil Watson.  Youth Explosion. Heck yeah. Sandy Kofak select stars. Magnet. Yeah we'll match that one. We have out of 25 Greg Dieckmann on the RPA. Cracked Ice. Wow. What a box here Luke. Three colored patch there. Red, white, and blue. I love cracked ice out of select. It's 14 of 25 on the Dieckmann. Jared Durant. And last pack here. Cracked ice looks good like no matter where. I don't know about cracked ice. Yeah Gavin Sheets rookie. And red rookie concourse Camilo DeVal. San Fran 170 of 199. All right Luke that'll do it for your boxes. Thanks as always for hopping in. Do a appreciate show and we'll get these right out to you.


Hello, Didier Stevens here. I have a new tool, PDF tool. It can help you with analyzing PDFs. For the moment it supports one command and it's for incremental updates. So PDFs with incremental updates. What is a PDF with incremental updates? Well, imagine that you have one PDF that I represent here. So this is a file, a PDF file with its content, the header and here the trailer, the end. Now we make an update to this PDF. We change it. What will be done often is that the content here of the file is changed, modifying objects, adding new objects. But this can also be done with incremental updates. And with an incremental update, nothing is changed to this PDF file. So I mean this content remains unchanged. What happens is that an extra block is added. So content is appended to the file also with a trailer and this one remains. And here you have new objects or modifications of objects that are in here. So that is an update to this PDF. And these two combined are also PDF, of course. And that gives you the new version of the PDF. So a PDF with incremental updates is a PDF that is modified by appending changes to it, not by changing the original document. Now I do this here in this example with one update. Of course you can have many updates and they are just appended like the first one here. When you run my new PDF tool without any options or arguments, you get the help. And that is because it takes one command and then options and values. This command, there is only one command implemented now. This command specifies what you want to do. And here there is one command for incremental updates. That's the only command that I've implemented up till now. Incremental updates, abbreviated IU. And then for example a simple hello PDF. And then you get this output, the name of the file and then one line. I will explain the meaning of this line in later examples. But just remember if there is only one line here, one output, then you have a PDF without incremental updates. So one line, no incremental updates. Now you can also have a PDF that is linearized. A linearized PDF is a PDF that its objects inside the PDF file. Its objects have been ordered so that it can be rendered while it is being downloaded. If you run my PDF tool for incremental updates on a linearized PDF, you will get two lines. One line, you can see here one object linearized and then the other objects. This again is not a PDF with incremental updates. So if you have one line that is linearized and then a second line, then you are just dealing with a linearized PDF. Now how does a PDF with incremental updates look like? We will see, we will look at an old PDF puzzle here. So now you have two lines and the first one doesn't say linearized. So this means we have a PDF that has incremental updates. So how can we interpret those lines? Well, that first PDF inside, remember version one, that contains six objects and is 933 bytes long. And this is its MD5 hash. Second line, this represents the complete PDF, so version two. And if you just look at the updates that are here in this version two, then there is one object. The total length is 1243 bytes. The difference between this and this version is 310 bytes and this is the MD5 hash. By the way, if you don't like MD5 hash, there's an environment variable that you can set to have another hash type. Now if you do a div of PDF puzzle, you can see indeed 1243 bytes. And if I calculate the hash of the PDF puzzle, this is the MD5 hash. Okay, this is numbered so that you can select it. So I can say select one. And then by default, I get an exadismal ASCII dump of that first version. So the blue rectangle that you saw in the explanation about incremental updates. With here %pdf11, the version, and here at the end %%ef, the end of file. If you select two, then here you have the complete PDF, an exadismal ASCII dump of the complete PDF. So PDF11, here you can see %end of file, and then here another object, and then again %end of file. So 2% %end of files that characterize this incremental update. You can also select just the difference, the delta. And that is by selecting object, sorry, entry 2, D, D for delta or difference. And then you just get here what is different. So this is the orange part. While what we selected before here, let's select two. That was the blue part and orange part together at a complete PDF. Now, why is this interesting? Why can you use this tool when you can use it to recover previous versions? If we take a look at PDF puzzle, here you see the passphrase is xxx. So this was a very old puzzle that I made. And to recover the passphrase, you actually need to go back to the previous version. In the updated version, so version 2 let's say, the orange part, this is the text xxx. So you cannot read the passphrase. While if you go back to the blue part, then there is an object here that tells you what the actual passphrase is. So I can use my PDF tool. I say incremental update. I select the first line. And now instead of doing an ASCII dump, I'm doing a binary dump of that PDF puzzle. See here it is outputted to screen. I can also store it in a file. PDFPuzzleVersion1.PDF like this. This file has been created. Here it is 933 bytes. Remember that's what we had for output here. 933 bytes. This is the hash of that first version. You can also verify that the hash is the same. So with this tool now, I have extracted that first version. And I can just display that, open it with a PDF reader. And then indeed here you can see the passphrase. So that was a solution to my simple puzzle. Back then of course you didn't have that tool. You had to do it manually. But now you can do it with this tool. I have another example, malicious PDF file. So incremental updates here for that malicious PDF file. And here you can see that this is one that has a linearized object. And then different versions, incremental updates. So this is also an incremental update. This is an example of an incremental update that is also linearized. So if you have linearized, but then more than two lines in total, then you also have an incremental update. Now this example here. I also wrote a blog post about it a long time ago. It's about shoulder surfing malware with trying to make his PDF work. Because you can see here in these different PDFs, the different JavaScript versions that he is making. If we go back to the linearized one. So if I just select that one, this is the ASCII dump. So the first line. And if I do binary dump, then you can see here the PDF header, object linearized and then the trailer. So that's typical for a linearized object. That first linearized content until percent, percent end of file. You should only have one object linearized and then a trailer. And then what follows? So the, but the difference and we don't want to complete difference. What difference here? This is actually you see from object for here all the way, all the other objects and also the trailer. So to summarize my PDF tool for the moment, only one command incremental update. If you have just one line, then you don't have an incremental updates in the PDF. If you have two lines, but the first line is linearized, then you also have no incremental updates. But when you have two lines or more or three lines with the first line linearized or more, then you are dealing with an incremental update.


There has been an assumption for decades that as a natural element, calcium supplements must intrinsically be safe. But calcium supplementation is neither natural nor risk-free, but the same could be said for every medication on the planet. Yet doctors continue to write billions of prescriptions for drugs every year, because the hope at least is that the benefits outweigh the risks. So what about the benefits of calcium supplements? Yes, heart attacks and strokes can be devastating, but so can hip fractures. The risk of dying shoots up in the months following a hip fracture. About one in five women don't last a year after hip fracture, and it may be even worse for men. On average, apparently cutting one's lifespan short by four or five years. And unfortunately, these dismal statistics don't seem to be getting much better. So even if calcium supplements caused a few heart attacks and strokes, they prevented many more hip fractures, then it might result in a favorable risk-benefit ratio. So how effective are calcium supplements in preventing hip fractures? We've known that milk intake doesn't appear to help, but maybe that's because any potential benefit of the calcium in milk may be overshadowed by the increased risk of fracture and death associated with the galactose sugar in milk. But what about just the calcium in a calcium supplement alone? Milk intake in general does not seem to be related to hip fracture risk at all. And when people have been given calcium supplements, not only was there no reduction in hip fracture risk, an increased risk is possible. The randomized controlled trials suggest that 64% greater risk of hip fractures with calcium supplementation compared to just like getting a placebo sugar pill. Or did they even get this idea then that calcium supplements might help our bones? It was this influential study in 1992 that found a combination of vitamin D in calcium supplements could reduce hip fracture risk 43%. But this was done on institutionalized women like in a nursing home who were vitamin D deficient. They weren't getting sufficient sun exposure. And so if you're vitamin D deficient and you take vitamin D in calcium, no surprise, your bones get better. So for women living independently, out in the community, the latest official recommendations for calcium and vitamin D supplementation to prevent osteoporosis is unambiguous. Do not supplement. Why? Because in the absence of compelling evidence for benefit, taking supplements is not worth any risk, no matter how small. Now this is not to say these supplements don't play a role in treating osteoporosis or that vitamin D supplements might not be good for other things, but if you're just trying to prevent fractures, women living outside of institutions should not take them. And perhaps even in institutions. In this study, instead of giving nursing home residents vitamin D and calcium supplements, they randomized them to sunlight exposure and calcium supplements. And those that got the calcium pills had significantly increased mortality, lived shorter lives than the sunshine-only group. Although calcium supplements don't appear to prevent hip fractures, they may reduce overall fracture risk by like 10%. So here's how the risk benefit shakes out. If 1,000 people took calcium supplements for five years, we would expect 14 excess heart attacks, meaning 14 people would have a heart attack that they would not have had if they had not started the calcium supplements. So they were effectively going to the store and buying something that gave them a heart attack. Plus, 10 strokes that otherwise would not have happened. And 13 deaths. People would have been alive had they not started the supplements. But that's all balanced against the 26 fractures that would be prevented. Now it's no fun falling down, breaking a wrist or something, but I think most people would look at that risk-benefit analysis and conclude that calcium supplements are doing more harm than good. Given these findings, the use of these supplements should be discouraged in individuals advised to attain calcium from their diet instead. Calcium supplements have been associated with elevated risk of myocardial infarction, heart attacks, whereas dietary calcium intake has not. How much calcium should we shoot for? Interestingly, unlike most other nutrients, there's no international consensus. For example, in the UK, the recommendation for adults is 700 mg a day. But across the pond in the US, it's up to 1200 a day. Whenever I see that kind of huge discrepancy between government panels, I immediately think scientific uncertainty, political maneuverings, or both. Newer data, based on calcium balance studies in which researchers make detailed measurements of the calcium going in and out of people, suggests that the calcium requirements for men and women is lower than previously estimated.  If we eat less calcium, our body absorbs more and excretes less. And if we eat more calcium, we absorb less and excrete more to stay in balance. Therefore, current evidence suggests that dietary calcium intake is not something most people need to worry about. This may explain why in most studies no relationship was found between calcium intake and bone loss anywhere in the skeleton, because the body just kind of takes care of it. Don't push it too far, though. I mean, once you get down to just a few hundred milligrams a day, you may significantly get more bone loss. Though there may not be great evidence for the US recommendations, the UK may have the right idea, shooting for between 500 and 1,000 milligrams a day from dietary sources, unless you've had gastric bypass surgery or something and need to take supplements. For most people, though, calcium supplements cannot be considered safe or effective for preventing bone fractures.


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Welcome to another episode of China, Hawaii and You. I am your ever faithful host Andrew Zimmerman and today we're gonna be talking about Shen Yun to some really, really big theatrical productions coming to China. With me, I'm really excited to bring in our guest who is just Professor Jiang. Professor Jiang, do you wanna give us a little bit of a self-introduction of yourself? Okay, Andrew, good to be with you. Hong Jiang is my name and I teach in the geography and environment department. That's a mouthful at UH Manoa. And my work is on China, cultural geography and some work on tea and culture in Taiwan as well. Yeah, and there's definitely a lot of need to do academic research in Asian geography right now. I understand that you're also a member of the, I might say this wrong, so forgive me if I do. The American Association of Asian Geographers. Is that the name of it? Yeah, American Association of Geographers. Oh, just a member of the Association of Geographers. Okay, okay, okay. And yeah, so we would, that's got a definitely plenty of content that we could cover on its own, but that's not why we're here today. We're here to talk about a really, really fascinating theatrical production of Shen Yun. So for those of you who haven't seen it, I don't know, I don't, I guess maybe you live under a rock somewhere because they have flyers everywhere going on down. And every time I turn on YouTube, I see an ad it feels like.  And some of the, some of the costumes they do are just incredible. The feats of acrobatics are like just on par with Cirque du Soleil. Some of the drama that goes into it, you're just, you can't believe how much you care about these characters after only a minute or two sometimes. But going beyond that, that I think it's a really, really cool show. I wanted to sort of ask you, what fundamentally is Shen Yun beyond the theatrical production? Okay, I should probably clarify a little bit of my connection with Shen Yun. Of course I'm not a dancer. And so I've been helping to support the Shen Yun show since 2008, when it first came to Hawaii to the Blaisdale. And of course the last two years we didn't have any shows at all. It just so happy that they are coming back in March and people are asking me, is that real? That Shen Yun is coming back and Shen Yun is coming back in March. So I want to show you the flyer to confirm it's coming back in March, March 26, 27 to the Blaisdale. So because my work is on Chinese culture, cultural geography, and I remember seeing the show first time in 2007 in New York, I said, this is the show that we have to have in Honolulu. We have a lot of Asian cultural background over here and presence over here. And people would really love the show. So the show, of course, it's a large, you would say kind of theatrical act. But it's really about trying to accentuate the essence of Chinese culture through stories and legends. And they're just common stories from the Chinese culture. And it's a show that's not only about dancing but it has a live orchestra that has this animated background that's just so amazing and so unreal. It's so real that it felt like it's so unreal. It's just amazing feat that they were able to put together. And the Shen Yun show is not produced in China. It's produced by overseas Chinese artists. Shen Yun is based in New York. Mm-hmm. So all of the, it sounds like all of the mini stories, right? Because when I went, at least, they didn't have a one continuous story that was told throughout the performance. It was broken up into maybe about, I'd say, a dozen mini stories, each that had their own unique characters. So when you have this production with maybe these 10 shows and their new shows every year, right? So every year it's like a totally fresh thing. All of these mini stories, they come from real Chinese legend. They're not made up every year. Yes, so they take real stories from the Chinese history and culture. And in front of me, I have this brochure from a program book from 2019. That's when Shen Yun first came. And they had these different stories. One of the stories would be like, a lot of people heard about the journey to the West. The Monkey King story, it's a long story. There's so many mini stories. And the Shen Yun show would take one story each time, different stories, and would play that in maybe five to seven minutes.  So you don't need to, there's no language during the show that you just basically dance. Everybody knows the language of the dance and you can all understand. And also they're just so amazing because the journey to the West, the stories are often about these, I would say fairy tale kind of stories. The Monkey King would go up to the heavens and go down to the ocean. And Shen Yun would use a backdrop and use the music to actually present all that, which is just amazing to see. So we have a, well, actually we'll address the audience question in one minute, but I really, really appreciate the audience questions coming in. And please send us as many of them as you can, because we love engaging with the audience. But there's one thing that I wanted to talk about right before we get to that. And that's kind of the comedy and the sort of establishment of the Chinese folklore. One thing that I've noticed in Chinese comedy, a Chinese comedy form known as Xiang Xiang, which is a really popular form of Chinese comedy where you have like two guys and it's very kind of akin to the American who's on first thing. I forgot who did that, but it's very similar to who's on first, where they'll use a lot of puns and they'll kind of like talk over each other. But the thing that makes Chinese comedy unique in my experience is that you don't have necessarily new stuff every time that people are going on. You very often, the comedy is based on already existing folklore and the appeal that people have to going to these shows for years and years and years is they wonder to themselves like, I wonder how this guy or how this organization is gonna tell that story. I wonder how they're gonna perform this joke, right? Is that kind of something that's also going on within Xiang Xiang? Well, Xiang Xiang is being performed in so many different countries in the world. So the art form that they chose to represent the Chinese cultural stories is dance. And through dance, it's a universal language. People with different cultures and different ages can all understand. So therefore the Xiang Xiang does not have that kind of a vocal based, language-based humor that you mentioned, but they do have humor. And more and more of it, when I see the Xiang Xiang show that came over the years, they have a lot of humor going on. It's just hilarious sometimes. They have these stories of monks in a temple and these bad guys, these were also based on historical stories of different dynasties. These enemies came and how the monks were able to deal with these people through a lot of martial arts and dance type of movements. And you really laugh, there's a lot of humor in those stories, yeah. No, I remember being shocked at how funny it was. I don't remember ever laughing so much in the theatrical production. Like I've seen Nutcracker, I've seen opera shows, but I just never laughed that much and especially when they're not actually talking. I really love how you kind of describe dance as its own language, because I imagine that it might be the case that even many of the dancers don't even speak English. They're mostly like maybe second generation, third generation Chinese with Chinese heritage. Some of them may not speak Chinese, but one thing about the Chinese dance is this. It's very, very expressive. It's different from the Western ballet. That Western ballet has so much techniques, but the Chinese has so much skill and so expressive. And that expressiveness really produced these different effects of humor and drama and excitement and surprise. And all of those will be in the stories that you'll see. So you see all kinds of stories and some people would have tears. I'm sure you'll remember some of the moving stories brought you to tears and brought you to laughter. And yeah, in a show like Shengyu, you can get all of those experiences. Yeah, so it's crazy. We're actually getting a surprising number of audience questions for the show, I think. And we really, really like that, but I think for the flow of the show, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get through as many questions that I had and then I'll save about maybe the last 10 minutes, but we will get every question that's asked unless it's like inappropriate or something like that. So the next thing that I wanted to bring up with you is, and maybe this is not something that you're kind of having your nose to the ground on, but how is Shengyu in considering COVID-19? Because I imagine it must be quite concerning to, like Omicron is on fortunately on a down swing, but I imagine for a Blaisdale production, it must be really concerning to think like, oh gosh, how are we gonna do this without making a super-spreader event? Yeah, so Shengyu was not performing. It didn't come here in the last two years because of COVID. And this year Blaisdale allowed theater shows to come back. And this is the first time, I think they started actually late last year. And right now their requirements will be proof of vaccination or test negative in 48 hours. And that's actually a very common in all theaters in the US if they require anything, it'll be requiring that. So it's doable. And of course you wear a mask during the show and the show would have an intermission that allow people to come out and stretch out. So wear a mask if you don't talk within the theater, which is the air conditioned. It's actually pretty comfortable. Yeah, I think I'm happy about that because let me tell you nobody wants people talking in the theater anyway, especially when you're seeing a really high quality production. So I don't think that's gonna be a too big of an issue, but I'm glad that they're making considerations and following the Blaisdale guidelines. The next thing that I wanted to talk to you about, and this is one of the things that I've been thinking about recently. And I think I've talked to you about this a little bit on the phone, but people have been in large part locked in their houses for work for years now, right? Like obviously we still get out to do what we can. People are variously willing to take risks based on how concerned they are about COVID. But one of the things that I think really bugged me about what are the negative effects of COVID lockdowns, right? Is it kind of turned a lot of our lives into like really screen heavy. So pre-COVID, right? I think Estin that suggested that human being spend like something like eight or nine hours a day looking at a screen of some kind, whether or not that's a cell phone or a TV or a laptop, you can add all these together. And it really makes up a shocking percent of your day. And that's pretty much no matter what you do, right? So if you're a lawyer, then you're going to be spending eight or nine hours a day reading legal documents on your computer. If you're a doctor or a medical student, then maybe you have to spend a lot of time reading up on charts, reading up on medical procedures, reading up on, but regardless, it's almost always going to come through a computer, maybe less than a lawyer, but still a lot.  And so one of the things that I've kind of been wondering about, right, is what kinds of ways can we break this, right? How can we sort of break this dynamic of people being on a screen all the time? And one of the things that I've come to think about, Shenya, and one of the reasons that I'm really excited about it is because I think that getting people off of a screen and seeing something genuinely happen before their eyes is going to be incredible. And obviously real life will never be as exciting as like Star Wars or some imagined fantasy, but the thing about Shen Yun that really blew my mind is it feels like Hollywood level quality of visual effects, but it's happening right in front of you. You know what I'm saying? What do you think about live productions in that way? Definitely, I think it's interesting after this lockdown, we really are thirsty of something that we can be experiencing. And when I talk to people about Shen Yun coming, they say, oh my God, is it real? And you can hear the excitement and people keep saying Shen Yun is a feast to the eye and feast to the heart. And it's even more so now because you are experiencing something that's really colorful that the screen can never ever represent of the experience of being in a live show. Not only the colors, the dance, the dancers, you can see their expressions, just the energy coming from the stage is something that nothing can replace, no screen can replace. And that's where I think it's just a wonderful opportunity. I'm just so happy that Shen Yun is coming here. And it is a feast to the eye, a feast to the heart. Yeah, yeah, nothing is going to make you look like. I think actually I would go so far as to say like, once you see something like Shen Yun, Netflix is boring. Like, you just- Oh, exactly, completely. I mean, I keep saying, describing to people, people see the commercials a 30-second commercial, 50-second commercial. They say, oh, that's so beautiful. I've seen it. I say, you know, after you see the live show, you know it's a thousand times better. If you just can't describe it, you just have to be there. And the colors, the costumes, the stories that's so absorbing, and you're just being part of something so big. And everybody's commenting on, I'm sure you've seen the show, you remember the colors. They're so vibrant and so colorful. And it's a color that you just don't see on the screen or anywhere. You just have to see the live show. Not only, and plus you have all these stories from different periods and different locations of Chinese culture. It's almost like a magical journey through Chinese culture. And I should mention that Shen Yun is based in the US and it doesn't go to China for various reasons. Yeah, so we'll actually, we'll go into that in just a little bit, but there's one last question that I wanted to ask you about and then we'll move into the audience questions because some of the audience questions are actually talking about political implications. So we will go into that. But the very last thing that I had written down that I wanted to ask was kind of on the history of Chinese people and the way that they have imagined theater and the way that they experienced theaters through their traditions. So we talked a little bit about Chinese cross talk, but if I was to see Shen Yun, right? Is there some, and then I went to China, is you're not gonna find Shen Yun there, but are you gonna find like some kind of show that feels like Shen Yun? In other words, like are you gonna find some kind of show that would operate in China that like still has the dancing and the cultural stories and all of those things? That's a very good question. I would say you can find a show like that inside China, like Shen Yun inside China, but you can find components of it. Shen Yun is dance wise, you will find some connections with traditional Chinese forms like a core dance. It's the core dance and also the folk dancing and martial arts. You can see components of a classical Chinese dance in all those components. And of course, you can also see some of the stories being played out. But the music part is something that you don't see anywhere in the world. It's full of orchestra music and it's also combining Eastern and Chinese and Western musical instruments in a whole kind of a complete orchestra. And that's actually Shen Yun's only invention that you don't see it. And to see the backdrop connected that set the scene and set the scenery for the whole entire story and the music and live music and the dance all together in this kind of representation you don't see anywhere in the world. Not in such a way either. In researching the show, I heard somewhere and I have no idea if this is true, that for the music that they hire out because they hire all kinds of musicians, right? I heard that all of the performers whether they're dancers, whether they're playing, like even the Westerners in the orchestra, they all have to in some sense be a part of Falun Dafa. Is that true? I can't answer that question because I'm not part of that. All I know is this, the dancers are what you see, right? So they really focus on traditional Chinese ways and life before the modern impact before the impact influenced from communism. So they want to have a traditional presentation of the stories and their belief in my understanding is that to present the story in the traditional way you live the traditional way. So meditation is part of the dancer's daily routine and that's why they can so focus when they perform. That's part of the meditation from Falun Dafa was supporting them in their dance training. That's what I understand. I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know much about the performers but think about Chinese culture. If Falun Dafa, another name is Falun Gong and if the beliefs of Falun Gong is about being truthful, being compassionate, being tolerant, it's about the Chinese traditional cultural values. I can understand why they would highlight that because again, to present the stories, you need to live that. That actually wonderfully transitions me into the audience questions here.  So say whatever you like and you don't necessarily, you don't have to hold back on my account but you don't have to say anything that you don't want to talk about if that's not okay. But one of the questions is what are the political implications of the Shen Yun show? I know it doesn't play in China but what about other parts of the world? It plays all other parts of the world but not in China and not in China controlled Hong Kong and it plays in Taiwan, multiple shows, many other parts of the world. In Hong Kong, there was once a show plan that tickets sold and the Chinese government pulled the plug and partly because, you know, the implication of Falun Gong being suppressed in China and also the show is showing, oftentimes would show a story of the Chinese Communist government's suppression of a traditional culture and of course that the Chinese government didn't like to see that. And the show also wanted to highlight the Chinese culture before the influence of communism and that's another thing that perhaps you understand that the Chinese government didn't like to have Chinese people see inside China but Chinese people all over the world can see it. Yeah. Yeah, no, even when I went the show, the show was explicitly, I don't know if I would use the, it was definitely anti-party or the anti-government. I remember less so about talking about communism like as opposed to capitalism, for example but it was certainly anti-party but that kind of leads me into one more question that I wanted to ask kind of on that point and then we'll get to our one last audience question and we'll wrap it up. So we got two questions left. And so my question that I would kind of pin on that, right is, you know, when I was in China, one of the memories I have is I'd walk by a church every day and like, you know, it usually was fairly bustling. I always wanted to go but unfortunately I worked Sundays, right? You know, I knew people that were Muslim were practicing like Chinese Muslims, like living outside of Xinjiang. And so what I wanted to ask is, while the Chinese government, right, no one could say that it's particularly friendly to religion, right? That's of course true. It seems to me that Falun Gong seems to have particularly drawn ire from it. So what I would want to know is how is it possible that a domestic Chinese, I don't know if you would call it a religion but we'll use that word in lieu of something else. How is it that it is drawn seemingly significantly more ire than these foreign Western religions would, especially when it used to be quite popular? It's a good question. And one thing, let's just come back about the connection between Falun Gong and the Shengyin show, that the Shengyin show does show a certain act of the suppression of Chinese culture by the Communist Party. But I wouldn't say it's anti anything because that's not what Shengyin is trying to present. It's not about political messages. It's really about the cultural message. And if you talk about Chinese culture before communism, that itself can be seen as a very political. And inside China, how come the Falun Gong drew so much attention? It's really about the sheer number, I believe, because in 1999 when Falun Gong started, when the government in China started to persecute Falun Gong, there were about 70 to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong including party members. You can kind of imagine that the party establishment saw this in a negative way because it could potentially overpower the influence of the party. That's one thing. The other thing is it's a group that's really kind of grassroots and it's so many places you can find them and it's not outside, not inside of any particular organization that the government can control. So those were some of the elements that led to this really kind of a negative treatment of Falun Gong by the government in China. Okay, that's interesting. So we have one last audience question that I'll let you answer and then one question that I'll answer because I happen to see the show and I know the answer to it. So the audience question for you that's left because we have about two or three minutes left is what about Taiwan does the show play in Taiwan? And as you just said, yes, it does. Do you know anything in particular going on about the operations there? Not about the operation, but the show goes to Taiwan in all different major cities there every year. That's all I know. Very, very cool. And then so the very last question is in the Shenyun show, I saw a few years ago they had a very special way of disappearing into the background. The players would jump behind the wall at the back of the stage to then fly off into the background. It was amazing. How did they do that? I happen to know the answers to this question because I was sitting at the front. And so what I saw was that they would sort of jump off the stage, right? But they would time their jump so well that the screen in the background was actually like an electronic version of them, but it was like mere photorealistic, right? And so they would jump off the background and then you'd see like somebody flying over a rainbow or something, but actually it was just the electronic screen person flying over the rainbow. And so they implemented the electric screen background with the stage really, really well. I think that was probably my favorite part, actually. That's like a magical, that's like taking people to this magical realm of a different place, a different time. And it's just amazing. Yeah. It's all happening apparently. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm sure there's a whole lot more we could talk about Shenyun. And then I know the, we could spend hours easily discussing like it's political implications and how they do certain things in the show. But unfortunately we are running out of time. So I wanted to say thank you very, very much to Dr. Jiang for joining us today. And I wanna thank everybody for tuning in, listening and giving out some questions. We're very, very excited to talk to you guys next, not next week, but two weeks from now on another episode of China, Hawaii and New. Thank you very much, Dr. Jiang. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.