Hello and welcome to another episode of the Private Property Home Shopper Show. Again we are visiting the incredible Stain City and we are standing in the entrance hall of this one-of-a-kind 30 million-rend mega mansion. We've done so many things but we have never done a house this excessive.  But talking about coming up to this house it is an experience. The front facade of this house is all blacked out and it matches so it looks like one full entity. On both sides of the house you will find two car garages, although there's space for five cars within this home. There's so much to show you, there's so much to talk about and I can't wait to get there so let's go through that front glass door and let's show you what it looks like if you want to live in a 30 million-rend home in Stain City. So coming through this massive custom-made glass door there's so many things that are custom here. It all closes off into a full wall of glass but you find yourself in this entry hall absolutely stunning full-on feature wall there that's decorated. We've got stunning decorations throughout this house and on that note if you want to purchase this home with the furniture it's a conversation you can have with the estate agent so don't shy away from it because this home has been decorated impeccably. But just in front of me is a floor-to-ceiling glass wall once again with a sliding door built into it that leads out onto an outside area that I can only describe as completely and utterly zen. This is a place we're going to want to stroll out sit down relax listen to the water feature and just enjoy life and specifically enjoy this new sunny weather. I'm loving it there's also a door right over there that leads out to one of your garages the other garage you'll access just on my left-hand side like I said space for five cars if you're buying a 30 million home we know you like your cars and this home's got space to cater for that but talking about catering let's take a look at where the kitchen is and as I mentioned if we're talking catering this is the home for you we find ourselves now in the kitchen incredibly beautiful white floating island right here chef's sink now this chef's sink there's something special about it and it's not just how nice the faucets are those chef's things made out of a special material that will not scratch when you're washing up when you're prepping your meals you never need to worry about damaging this and I love that now if we move over yeah you'll see there's a full range of melee appliances we've got ovens we've got microbes you've got a built-in coffee machine and you've sold me if you got a built-in coffee machine but there's more right over here in built fridge opening up and you've got access to everything you need obviously storage above and below and over here an inbuilt deep freeze still I mean a home like this you can imagine the dinner parties you having so over here you have a walk-in very loud oh I know so cool fridge how cool is that excuse the pun but I do like having a walk-in fridge you've got stunning lighting above this island I love how it's been designed over here you've got a melee induction cooktop plenty of storage over there obviously I mean it's all soft clothes the name of the game is silence when it comes to high end finishing and around this corner over here you'll find your pantry now your pantry has plenty of space for all of your under counter appliances it's got your double sink it's got places for your fridge as well as whatever other dry goods you want to store so at least you can take that out of your main kitchen but still have it right at your fingertips but there's another room located behind me that I think a lot of you will find very very useful so follow me so coming to this room there's a couple of things I'd like to mention one is all the doors within this house are solid wood and custom made and then coming off of those tiles you'll see the wood flooring is stunning within this room and I love the room placement because it serves two purposes one would make a fantastic office if you need another one a sitting room like it is right now a library or just a sunroom but if you've got children you can put them in here they can play around while you're whipping up dinner while you're sitting watching a movie you know they've got their own place that's close enough for them to feel comfortable but far enough away for you to have a little bit of peace of mind now another thing I want to mention about this home is that it has got a full on every single room except the bedrooms sound system right above me you'll see the inbuilt speakers down lighting throughout beautiful bulkhead ceilings those curtains are built into the bulkhead ceiling and then a sliding door right in front of me leading off into the garden area which we're gonna show you in a moment so don't go anywhere so we've just come out of that room and we've spoken about convenience so what are the convenient features are located within this home the first thing and one of the biggest are these pocket doors right here that you can pull out and what it will do is it will go all the way across and close off your kitchen completely so if you're having a dinner party and you want to close the section of the house off you know that you can do that in this home right over here you've got all of the controls one for your central air conditioning your lights as well as let me pop around this corner to show you over here it's your smart home entertainment system as well as camera to the front door you always know who's visiting you so you're not going to get any of those surprised guests but let's move in to this and just take a look at this space it is incredible we've had tall ceilings we've had three meter ceilings this looks like a 10 meter ceiling at the very least it is incredibly big we've got stunning chandeliers both over the sitting area as well as the dining area yeah we've got a 10 12 seater dining room table that fits in perfectly and really does suit this area so so nicely I can't say enough about it but another really cool thing and we'll show you a bit later is take a look at the runway to the four bedrooms running up there so you get to look down onto this common area I love it but I'm sure you've noticed this and everybody who tunes in often knows I might have a slight problem with taking alcohol every time I come visit so let's take a look at what they've got up for grabs you've got a walk-in wine cellar stunning wine racks throughout inbuilt lighting and then here is where you can show off your best collections obviously air conditioning in yet to keep it cool at hermetically seals so we do like that but I'm thinking of going shopping but before we do that there's so much more to show you let's go off into the lounge area we've got another door right over here that pushes you out into your Zen garden your courtyard area whatever you'd like to call it obviously you've got your feature wall there with the fountain coming out it looks nice it sounds great and it really does add a feature of air and nature to a home this large now I mentioned as well all of the furniture custom-made and you needed custom-made in a house like this I mean can you can you believe it this is incredible right over here huge recess for your TV into this feature wall that's made out of marble and over here as well as over here on each side of this gas fireplace behind me you've got your inbuilt speaker system like I mentioned I mean a lot of the homes we show you are entertainers dreams but I mean I think a lot of us are gonna be asking our companies for razors now aren't we now over here we're walking into the bar area which can again through these pocket doors be sealed off completely from the living room area which we like if you're entertaining if you've got guests over just want to reduce the noise a bit you can do that and also if you want to just make it a bit warmer in this home you can do that speaker systems above us beautiful unique ceiling with the bulkhead recessed lighting again this floating island with the matching countertops to the kitchen bar fridge underneath over here you've got your ice maker over there another one of those repeated chefs sinks with the incredible finish of it not being able to be damaged while you're using it TV space display cabinet under counter storage it is stunning but one of my favorite features of this sliding door over here glass all the way up to the top that looks out onto your fire pit as well as your pool now we're gonna push off into the patio and talk about that but before we do that let's talk about some other cool features you've got electric blinds throughout this home and I'm gonna show you them demonstrated on a really nice section of the house where we go up the stairs but what what a patio I mean your house opens up completely this brings a new meaning to indoor outdoor living you've got the blinds that come down right over here ceiling you're from the Sun if it's bothering you so much space for entertainment so much space for relaxation for outdoor eating and talking about outdoor eating when we come off into this dining area right here you've got a space to whip up a couple of meals you've got another those chef's sinks same quality you've got your gas briar gas fireplace barbecue for your Australians that might want to move here all of this extra storage underneath there and just a stunning stunning view of all of the green vaults in Stain City but we've yet to talk about the garden so let's go take a look at that now moving off into the garden you can see that the client really has utilized the space so well you've got quite a good strip of greenery and it's not something you need in Stain City Stain City has got so many places for your kids to play for them to go out because it is so safe and it is so secure and you can note that by the fact this house is surrounded by fencing which we like we like feeling safe we like feeling secure and there's nowhere else to feel warm safe and secure like that fire pit recessed down into the floor you can sit down and enjoy a bright roast some marshmallows but on a hot summer day maybe you want to take a dip in the pool and this pool is incredible with both a ledge for you to sit down and just soak as well as an easy entrance on the other side it's perfectly placed gets a lot of sunlight and just next to it you've got your lounging area you can plop down on one of those fat sacks relax drink a cocktail now that the alcohol restrictions have lifted and just enjoy life and all of you should be enjoying life because you deserve it but what else do you deserve to see the bedrooms upstairs so follow me let's go back inside the house and let's take a look at what else it has to offer when we journey up those stairs so coming from outside we're walking back into the home and I'm gonna slip this way catch me if you can and yeah we are right by the stairwell we've got the guest bathroom over there another entrance for the other half of the garage is over here now this guest bathroom is impeccably finished like the rest of the home one full wall is clad in white marble just like that feature wall you saw in the living area then we've got the toilet obviously with the hidden cistern soft closed lid huge vanity with mirror on the wall plenty of space to store and it is just such a nice place to be in and perfectly situated to service anybody come in a visit and then we've got this stunning staircase leading up to the second level now as you can see floor to ceiling glass and just above it we've got that electric blind and we're gonna show you how that works but follow me as we walk up this beautiful wood staircase room with stainless steel and glass all of the lighting just leading up and drawing the eye to the first level but another cool feature is each of these steps has a piece of steel in laid into it so you know you're not gonna slip no matter how excited you get to go look at your car collection now once you arrive on the landing just above the staircase on your right hand side immediately you will find your office space fully kitted out with everything you need to run your business from home built in shelving as well as desks and then on the far right hand side of your office you've got a game your floor to ceiling windows letting in every breeze you might need but it is also serviced with your central air conditioning now that we've spoken about the office of yeah let's talk about the first bedroom and it is located upstairs this bedroom has got its very own walking closet just around the corner by the entrance so when you come in you've got access to everything you need but this is beautifully set out again serviced by the central air conditioning plenty of space we've got a queen bed in here that fits ultra ultra easy now moving off to this side you've got your in sweet bottom every single bedroom has its own in sweet bottom and directly in front of me again those unique to this home floor to ceiling windows that fold open and just let in a breeze but also bring in so much light and make it feel so open love the design and I love that this home has utilized it in all of the bedrooms but now it's bottom time soon as you walk into the bottom the first thing your eyes snap to are how many windows are in this bottom all of them are frosted but it is beautiful it makes you feel like you had a spa you've got your freestanding bathtub there you've got a walk-in shower again framed with windows and then you've got those stunning and absolutely enormous white tiles with a gray veining that make it seem even more up close then the finishes already do so coming out of the first bedroom what we're gonna do is we're gonna zoom all the way around to the other end of the house but while we're doing that is I want you to take a look at how this upper level has been designed for you to just look down on to your living area it feels like you're at a gallery it feels like this is a viewing deck and you can just appreciate the design thought that's went into this home it is absolutely stunning and sitting here and looking down really does give you such a feeling of grandeur but here we are on the other side of the house in one of the other bedrooms it is situated and designed much like the rest but there's a couple of really cool features here one not so much a feature but design choice you come from your tiles into your wood flooring this is in all the bedrooms so I love that they've done that gives you a bit of a mix-up changes things up again on sweet bathroom of year those floor to ceiling windows and now all the cupboards in all the rooms have one slat that is a mirror I love that they've done this becomes so useful and also opens up the room then with this bedroom specifically it is access to a balcony that runs the length of the house but before we talk about the balcony because we'll leave that for the last bedroom let's talk about this bathroom your bathroom once again comes fully equipped with a walk-in shower your freestanding bath tub floating vanity with undercounter storage massive mirror and then the windows inlaid on the far end all frosted but let's end so much life so two bedrooms are done we've got two more to go and one of them is a creme de la creme but let's enjoy this walk let's take a look at our living areas enjoy how far we've come in life when living in a home like this and now we find ourselves in the third bedroom again it is almost a mirror copy of the previous bedroom that we just looked at again plenty of space in your beautiful wood flooring high ceilings access to your central air conditioning and then if I come over here and take a look that's where you'll adjust your central air conditioning your lights your heated flooring which is in all the bedrooms and then that remote over there controls your automatic blinds we spoken about the bathroom let's just run through it very very quickly again your bathroom once again comes fully equipped with a walk-in shower your freestanding bath tub floating vanity with undercounter storage massive mirror and then the windows inlaid on the far end all frosted but let's end so much life before we go anywhere I did promise we're gonna talk about this outside the balcony and we may as well do it right now again as I mentioned it runs the length of the front of the home the sliding door opens up and this is actually a really good time to mention all of these doors and the windows are insulated so it's a double pane with the vacuum in the middle keeps you cool during the summer warm during the winter you open this up and I'm standing and I'm thinking it's a bit bright left my sunglasses downstairs what can I do I can just pull this right over here and look at that shading wherever you wanted these run across is one two three four of them so you never need to worry about anybody in the home stealing your specific shade blinds is one for each of the rooms as well as the lounge area upstairs and that is pretty much where we're gonna go next let's go and here we are within the second to last room upstairs that we're gonna be talking about and this is your pajama lounge or your upstairs lounge area again beautifully sized access to that central air conditioning as well as access to your central speaker system or sound system a heated flooring all of your switches built into the wall and then this pocket door right here if you want a bit of privacy you can close it up and enjoy a perfect movie night with a family which is what I think I might be doing right now so I'll see you in the creme de la creme okay so now that movie night's done let's do it the creme de la creme the master suite that we're gonna talk about right now and get ready because this master suite is incredible so here we are within the master suite again it shares that balcony that runs along the length of this home but it is extra size yeah you've got a perfect seating area all your vents as well as access to your central sound system massive king-sized bed here with so much space and then the opening for your balcony area is also larger which we like let's in all that light let's in all that air but this balcony's got something special because it is located in the corner of the home you have unobstructed views of the whole of stain city as well as dainford and golfer state it is stunning and I can only imagine how nice it must look at night but there's more there's always more in the master suite so let's take a look at what a walking closet in a homing stain city looks like and here it is a walking closet with two inbuilt mirrors on my left and right hand side all of these doors slide open allowing you access to your clothes and all your other utilities I love where it's been situated I also like that there's a window right in front of me letting in so much natural light as well as all these down lightings yeah and probably most important we've just hopped out the shower access to your air-con system but we've spoken about showers and we haven't shown you the ensuite and I think it's time let's go so leaving your walking closet you pass a couple of coat racks so conveniently built into the wall and you find yourself in the master suite behind me you'll see more wardrobes and some of you might be thinking wardrobes in a bathroom why the reason being is this shower right here two shower heads walk-in shower as well as a handheld shower head with two different settings so you can always make sure it's a perfect temperature is completely sealed off from the rest of the bathroom so you know none of that steam's gonna escape and again ruin not only your viewing experience with the mirrors behind me but also any clothing you might have there but there's so much more to talk about in this bathroom stunning lighting bulkhead ceiling floor to ceiling windows across this whole wall that's frosted off and basically presents this pebble bath right over here that's freestanding as almost an art piece it looks incredible you've got your double vanities plenty of undercard to storage there mirrors that run the length of the wall and then over here a heater towel rack because nobody's hopping out of shower with cold towels then one last thing is you've got your toilet tucked away and again all frosted off for privacy in the corner in its very own cubicle with a door that you can close and there we have it folks a 30 million rand four bedroom four and a half bathroom ultra mansion in Stain City one of the most exclusive upmarket and sought after areas within Khau Teng so if you are interested in this mansion and I can't see who wouldn't be it is absolutely incredible what I want you to do is contact Salma Kinghorn and she will set up an exclusive appointment for you to view this incredible home in person so do not hesitate all of her details will be on screen right now from myself Chad Rivera's from the team at private property thank you all from joining in guys I love it that you watch every single episode I love all of you that comment I really do appreciate it I'm looking to see more of them so don't feel shy to talk in that comment box and stay tuned Mondays Fridays 8 p.m. we're gonna be showing you everything else that Khau Teng has to offer


One one Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and let's welcome our next speakers for today Tomasz Hosa and Petr Graczek Okay, hello everyone. My name is Tomasz and together with my colleague Peter I'd like to tell you something about the base helper and upstream raise monitoring just out of curiosity How many of you made in some package? Yeah, great we too so Is not working so I Would like to give you a high-level overview of what's absolutely is monitoring in Fedora is talk about Rebase helper if you are not really familiar with this tool It's been here Around for some time, but I'm not sure how used is and then we will talk about integration of rebase helper into Upstream release monitoring service workflow and we'll show you some examples Peter has some demo So hopefully it will work and it will summarize everything in the end So what's upstream release monitoring service? It's a service developed by Fedora infrastructure engineers. It's not by us. We are just like users and it's a service to help package maintainers to keep track of latest upstream versions when upstream releases new version it will it can help you to Like it can notify you that there is new version. So it consists of basically as Ralph said before it's micro service Oriented or how to call it consists of basically two components that are interesting from our point of view And they communicate over Fedora message bus. So the first component is an idea It's like the there's a nice front end where you can add a new project at the URL where the project sources are placed and it basically it then checks all those like latest versions of software and Sends out the message then there is the new hotness that does Some magic and like X upon messages from Anita So let's have a closer look. We have a nice picture where you can see Okay, so so this whole thing is the the service and as I said in Anita You can add a new project provide the URL where the sources are then choose basically What's the type of service where the project is hosted? So it's if it's a github or source for sure that kind of stuff So so I know how to find out if there's a new version and what it does it regularly checks the upstream projects if There's a new version if there's a new version it Basically sends a message on message bus and there is the new hotness which acts upon such messages. So I think as the first thing it Tries to find out is there is existing bugzilla for for the component if it's open and if it's not it will Create a new bugzilla for you for the component in Fedora informing you that There is a new version upstream version and you should You and that you should update the version in your height So after that it tries to trigger it triggers a new Package rebuild using the latest sources in in Koji But this can fail from like different reasons basically Imagine you have a package where you have downstream patches and those Don't apply on the latest sources version then the build will fail also If if your files list in a spec file is like really strict And you don't use wild cards and there is like so name bump or New binary appeared or disappeared the build will fail so when the new hotness Triggers the scratch build or rebuild of the new version it Keeps track of the task ID and waits basically for for message from Koji that the build finished either Either successfully or unsuccessfully in the end it will add the logs and comments into the existing bugzilla informing you that hey, this is the link to the scratch build and Here are the some logs build logs and that kind of stuff So this is an example of how the Bug report from upstream release monitoring looks like I'm sure if you maintain a package you already seen this So what's rebase helper rebase helper. It's a nice project. We started almost two years ago It's got started as part of the RedHack week We had basically it was a week where we could hack the whole week on some new cool ideas and Forget about our regular Responsibilities so rebase helper was one of the ideas to help maintainers to automate and help them with this like boring rebasing of components in Fedora, so it does a Lot of magic and things you should do and maybe not everyone does that so it can download the new sources for you When you run it in the Fedora this git of the component basically in the repository of the component After it downloads the sources it tries to rebase the downstream patches You have for the package on top of the latest version of soft of the sources It uses git rebase for this purpose. So if you had if you have Something like a merge tool merge tool you use for resolving the conflicts with git Rebase helper will use whatever you use with git Every time use use it so after it goes through the process of rebasing the patches with you It will try to rebuild the old version of rpms and the new version of rpms so there are a couple of Like three three different ways how it can rebuild the rpms Either locally or remotely locally using mock or rpm built or remotely using Fed package after Binary rpms are built it will download them or if these were built locally it will just have it already and It will run different Checks on them We support three Different tools that are run basically all the time all three of them because they produce different kinds of output We support package diff rpm diff and a bi package diff basically the idea is that in the To help you notice for example so name bumps and new like new Files of binary header files disappearing and appearing in the new version rebase helper will Compare those two sets of binary rpms and provide you some logs and data So you know you are not surprised and you don't surprise the consumers of your package on the next update So now I would like to give a floor to Peter as he will continue with the new stuff We implemented in a rebase helper and we'll describe the integration more deeply. Yeah. Thanks Thomas well on the last dev conf we introduced the rebase helper to all federal community as Tom I said it is a really awesome project definitely like upstream release monitoring service It helps your packages like It tracks everything. Well, what he did love since last year First of all, we implemented feature called non-interactive mode. What does it mean? It means that if you have a package like PostgreSQL or Systemd The compilation and the rest of the stuff takes a pretty long time one hour two hour days I guess not And we don't want to buffer the developer maintainer user, I guess not and We implemented so that if you enter to the command line rebase helper still does not have a agree Then user is not Interrupted or you cannot take care about the user cannot take care about the stuff like okay, this patch is not working and the idea was first of all to Implement rebase helper to upstream monitor is or upstream release monitoring service. It was an idea But we did it What was changed next was that at the beginning we use a patch command together with melt and after some time we realized that That is not useful Many packages use different mechanisms and we seen that okay. We are using it. Why we should not Use the gateway base command. It works for us. Well and better than patch and we did it and What we implemented next we have a mock We have a RPM build This is local. We need to implement something for Like remote and we have a fat peck pecky g we implemented and the last time or last new issue was We have to find the changes in RPMs like sonam bombs as really great tomah said headers and but We would like to know where sonam bomb was bumped and we have to We have to inform the community. Hey lip PNG was changed take care about it and inform and APP GD does it and I had a several communication with dodgy. He's a clever Smart guy about comparing the AP AP AP checks and he told me hey, we should improve it He provides the new version He provided a new version and we include it in the rebase offer. Well, we have all stuff What is next? upstream release monitoring service is the good place to Inform the user via bugzilla. Hey, you have this change header and so on and I guess that One month ago, we released rebase offer zero point zero like here Which introduced the system for upstream release monitoring service, but it is only for the rebase offer we have to include it in into the upstream release monitoring and I don't know. I did not know who contact Finally, I found the Ralph Bean He's the right person who helped me with a lot of stuff well and Before I will show you what we did Rebase offer can rebase the downstream patches can show you okay. This patches does not work on the new upstreams Rebase offer can inform you and about surname bombs and We were asking hey, we have a very upstream release monitoring service do it and We did it. It is a nice picture from Tomas. It's great Well, this is only the new hotness What it does? It receives from the while fat message the It message that okay, I am here. I am a new upstream and I would like to build but okay This is the same stuff and we say okay We have a rebase offer and we provide the information to them well rebase offer calls is called and we Rebase up a download sources rebase them if it's possible, of course and Create a source rpms old and new and at the end We send wire fat pecky G as I Said before okay, here is and we triggered both Koji IDs and Okay, we have final step. We have a Koji. We have a source rpms. We have And we should write what happened After Koji finish the source rpms task. We does not care if there is a failed start Success state or cancelled state we doesn't care now and fat messages set or sent to the New hotness, okay, I have finished. Okay, we will care In the old version we attach only the build logs Upstream is good, but we need to inform that via bugzilla What's happened and Therefore rebase helper catch old and new triggers. Oh, I'm sorry old and new triggers which regards to the Koji and Download rpms download the build logs and run several checks Which we implemented not only the one we need the both all stuff because each tool provides different informations and At the end if it was success Then we edge to the bug we are we edge to the bugzilla locks Results and other stuff Is it still realistic? Yes well Month ago, I spent a lot of time to integrate it and to redid it and I will show you how it looks like before here You can see who did the this screen from bugzilla new available software systemd yes, cool and it fails from the reason we don't know why and Somebody completed this script build. Okay, but I Already you can see That Sorry, it's my name because I am not running under upstream monitoring service. It is my temporary temporary machine We find okay Over the rebase helper we Check that okay patches were not touched or there are no patches. This is a bug Create the issue to the rebase helper. We include Our rebase helper includes the root lock from Koji of course new only the new sources build lock and What is important for you? That's to the bugzilla picky gd And at the end of course for us Attach the rebase helper debug lock. We need them We need to be sure. Okay, it fails But from which reason and I hope I guess that if this bill be or it will be released officially soon You will send us the issues. Hey, this is not working totally Rebase upper should be redesigned should be Patched or whatever you want and we have to do it and We will do it. Well, we have a demo. I guess that it will work. It's my screen Hey, I Cannot show I see Sorry, sorry No, ah, yes, come on. Yeah, I see This is a bit schizophrenic. I don't know where I have a screen. Yeah Well, this is the real machine Where is implemented the feature rebase helper it is not officially Released because there are still some There are still some bugs Well, we will start a build Yeah, this is that after relative discussion and thank you Ralph for Fixing my problems. It helps me and now I can It was an English mistake. I know This message ID is I guess the message ID from node JS Connie as I are whatever how it's called the component and it sends to the Fed message Information about the new release it is somehow hacked but it will work. Okay, I will send to the Anathia message Okay, I sent and what's happened? You can see that an idea received the message Okay, there is a there is a new upstream release it Calls repo query. It took a time. It takes a time and we will wait Yeah, and what will happen now? Anathia or the new hotness will call rebase helper and initiate a scratch build after a time The new hotness will receive message. Okay, all is success and the states are if old scratch build fails, then we don't care it should not happen because Let's imagine that you have a old federal package and it is not buildable and rebase helper does not care about that It's not my job. It's your maintainer job If it's cancel, then of course, I don't have care. Why you should cancel to the scratch build. Maybe the Koji was down But what in case that old scratch build finished successfully and you knew scratch build How it felt sucks it, let's say then we compare all rpms against old and against the new but what in case that New scratch build failed shall we inform? Yes, of course Because either patches were not success. No, this is a totally because source RPM will not be generated and It failed. Why what happened Built was not correct. Of course, it can be and we should inform the Maintainer. Hey, your package is not buildable from the reason. I don't know that she's not files are missing Licenses missing or you are totally wrong or At the end the scratch build was cancelled and of course rebase helper does not care Okay, from another from any reason you Cancel the scratch build, okay It seems that it took a time. It takes a time. Yeah Yeah, of course, okay Okay, we'll finish and we will see Yes, so also we can use this time for questions if you have any So I'll just summarize I can and then we can jump to questions So I just want to summarize that what's absolutely is monitoring is it just it takes do does nice job by checking upstream Upstream projects for the new releases and notifies Fedora maintenance. It can be not only Fedora I think Anita supports also other distributions, but This time I think only Fedora is implemented. Maybe there's something more. Maybe. Okay. Okay. Yeah, thank you and rebase helper is another great tool that tries to ease the pain of maintainer when doing rebases of component by automating as much as possible and Running some additional checks on the rpm. So you're not surprised and you don't surprise users of your component So rebase helper basically saves time by automating all those boring tasks You have to do again and again and again when new version is released and also The upstream release monitoring Is not Doing all the tasks that rebase helper is doing that can help that can help the new version of rpms to be built successfully and be used so so I on my components, for example, I Regularly see that the scratch builds fired up by Upstream release monitoring fail because those include quite a few downstream patches and these don't apply on the new sources so Using rebase helper to Automatically rebase patches and find out any difficulties is It feels like a natural way to integrate it as natural thing to integrate it into upstream is monitoring Service so I think now we can jump to questions. So that's true. The old one is the current Latest version that's available in fedora and the new one is basically Version that's not yet in fedora, but we we basically download the new sources. We change the version in spec file of the component and Basically, we produce a new source rpm with a new version, but it's just temporary thing and we call this Source rpm and the produced behind binary rpms as the new version basically of rpms or new set Actually, we we don't keep track of we we don't care what's Built in Koji as the scratch build we don't keep track of it from the point of view of rebase helper We just like whatever when you run a rebase helper There is the current version and you want to rebase the component to new version So so the new version is like what we are trying to build with the news Sources we are not like you're using those scratch builds for anything or it's just way how to produce binary rpms So we have something to compare with the old rpms. It's not like we I will And I would like to also note See that when you are doing builds locally, which we cannot do with absolutely is monitoring service When you do builds locally rebase helper can actually try to build the new rpms And it can then if the build fails it will try to inspect the locks before because we can do the rebasing of downstream patches, but It's hard to find out before you build rpms. If there is like new binary or if there is like Soname bump or something like that So if you run rebase helper locally and do the build locally We will analyze also the build log and we'll try to find out if there is like new binary and the build failed when Rpms were composed. So we'll try to add The new file into the file section and then rebuild it again So we'll do this in a loop after couple of times. We may decide that there is going nowhere So but that's not used with upstream is monitoring. Well, sorry. I will show you Here you can see that as we started it seems that there is a magic environment. It works. I don't know why here is that Rebase helper was started from the new upstream release monitoring upstream new upstream release he found the bug in partner bugzilla and He cloned the repo from Fedora download the sources He made the magic via a git rebase and The rebase helper finally built source RPM. I like that program T max And This these are the debug information from us some logs and stuff or stuff Here you can see Pitches were not touched and they are reported to the bugzilla and After a time Again, you can see that there is some status from Koji the task where we're closed from Koji and at the end you see that we downloaded the all debug informations logs and there are the stuff Getting rpms and at the end we are comparing the packages using rpm diff And it fails from another reason. I don't know why I have to check Okay, I am going back. Well, I think we had one question Yeah At the first presentation David Walsh sent this like this Cool Really good point we've we've think about it and Of course, we can automate it so that if all will success then we can directly call git push git build fetch packer build and so on but we No rebase helper made some changes in spec file the rebase helper commands stuff there and if the patches are Somehow modified so that they are applied to the new sources then they are included the patch is included in the this git and push to the Fedora repositories and This you this aim should not be automated because we the rebase are probably include Some garbage and this is not the proper way of course maintainer has the How to say The final decision, okay This is a fine fine final state. This is an okay state The RPM is fine and we can officially build rebase helper is only a tool not the user and He cannot or it cannot Do all automated tasks It can but this is a robot Yeah, sure, I would like just to rephrase But we have all these data. So we have the rebased spec file We have rebase patches and that kind of stuff. So so there should be no problem to make a new repo somewhere With it or new branch or basically create the tar ball including all those files and then you can just Like Okay Yeah, but as Peter said that there is like maybe plan, but we didn't even start yet to Provide you something like now if you just inspect the changes and if you are okay with it just click and you can Automatically we can commit to the This git and create like regular build for you, but definitely user should inspect this before we should not do this You know, we have an issue issue for it on our github really we would like to implement it But I am really scared about it. You are you are right. I think I'll pet question before Generate Yeah, thanks, could you please file issue for it for this people it would be only for tracking poppers and we will see But but the idea with pull request sounds like great. Yeah Yeah, any other question we have At the end, I would like to show some references. We have a rebase out per documents Here is a github. It is all it was already posted as some blog about life journal on the life journal some articles and soon we will have an apple package not over the copper and I hope that during the month not later on we will have a final state and you will receive the hour Modification with all stuff like locks scratch build fails and other You will receive more emails from Godzilla Thank you. I think we have still like five minutes or maybe four questions. So if you have more questions, yeah, yeah, I know about 50 package maintainers Question is really great and I have a discussion with Python Maintainer, you know Sladek Kabada, I guess and he told me a really great idea It does not matter if rebase helper properly merge all But with the non-interactive mode if rebase helper tell me well These three patches fails. This is important for me. I let's say that package has a like rim has a I don't know how many a hundred pages and If rebase helper tells you hey, these three are wrong that it save your time and This is the good good point for you. There are no managers unfortunately, but You know our work is about the time and money and let's say that we have a 500 packages or Sorry, 500 maintainers and you save at least and now then you save a redhead money But there is no any manager. I don't know why the idea is you should be able to To run rebase helper in a window in non-interactive mode or in interactive mode and just keep it running Do your other stuff after half an hour You just open that window and you see if there's something else you need to resolve and you know like there are tasks Those should be for sure automated RDO package Did we we start to rebase helper before they started there? Think so and I'm not sure sure nobody like oh that's her No, no, no currently no nowadays no, but we can share of course basically, we realized they did something like that after They already did it or yeah, like I think we are not looking for another projects like that We didn't see anything for for RPMs and Fedora. So we created one and I guess they did the same thing Yeah, for sure. Also, we are open to you know patches to enable or to add support for for the beyond packages But right now we we heavily like relied on that that's our PM based Distribution and also that you use this get in Fedora because we were trying to solve like our use case But but we are open to You know pull requests for sure Nowadays rebase helper is based or is targeted to the RPMs and we would like to introduce the BM packaging system or something like that But we need a pull request also the beyond packages are like kind of made differently and it's not completely like Mappable from my point of view to to RPMs or to some point. Yeah, and and they also already have Last year we also gave presentation about rebase helper and there was one that be a new user And he told us that they already have kind of like some tools Maybe not single tool but more tools that in combination they do similar thing Maybe also at least for the patches, I guess so they may not be that interested in this as we Yes, we were I Guess that we have a one-minute left the month scarf left. Yeah, okay. Thank you


special day. We are really excited to be able to have Nate join our team, Nate the Great. So he is with us for the next two years at least, Nate. You're always going to be part of the Mustang family. So you are with us from now and forever, okay? So we are really excited. We always tell that to these guys when they come for one year, two years, three years when they graduate from college that are Mustang for life. So you are now a Mustang for life, okay? So I'm going to have Patrick say a few words just to break it up and then I'll come back and talk a little bit about team impact and then we'll have Nate sign his letter to be officially a member of our team. Yeah, I mean, Graham said a lot of it, but I think as a group, we're just super excited to have you as part of our team. Hopefully to help us win a couple more games. And I think you really just raise the spirits for this team. And we're pumped to have you here hopefully forever. Always part of the Mustang. So just wanted to share a few things. So we're working, the program we're working with that is being great is setting all of this up is the team impact. Maria has been great working with myself, Michelle to set all of this up. Team Impact, a national nonprofit organization has developed this unique multi-year program that matches children facing serious illness and disability with college athletic teams like Stevenson. We're fortunate enough right Nate that we also have our men's ice hockey program had a member as well. So we have two wonderful student athletes who are with two teams as part of her program. We obviously are very excited to work with Team Impact and obviously keep this going for the future. I'm excited for it because like Patrick said, Nate's been on the bench for those a few games, you know, you're the way you, you know, positive the way you come, you get the best fist bumps in the world, Nate. And you know, we really, really, really are a special guy for our part of our team. Okay. So without further ado, we're going to make this official. So Nate, this is going to be your big moment. We have the national letter of intent here. You're going to sign right here. Okay. So right on this line, you're going to make it official. We're going to have your signature. So if you want to just put your signature right on that line, right there. Yep. Right next to my finger. Okay. Yeah, you can do it. Okay, we're not watching the basketball game. Sock is the better sport. And you know what we'll do, Nate? We'll bring you to a basketball game. Okay. We're going to bring you to a basketball game to watch. Put your wrist on the paper so you can write it nice and neat. Wrist down. Wrist down. Wrist down. Let's give him a little cheer, guys.


I wrote down some questions that I thought I could get some good answers from you, Michael, but I didn't realize you were quoting from your previous interview, so I don't want to hear that again. So I'll try to keep them fresh. But I wanted to point out for our audience that when you read the book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, you know, it was an extensive renovation of a book written in the 70s, no, the 80s. So you published 30 years ago, this year. And halfway through the new book I'm like, our hero Henry is torn between these two men, you and Grant, and he's like, wow, he keeps stumbling on these sentences about you and Grant. But maybe you, Grant, was on your mind at the time. Michael said he wrote it before you, Grant, was like a thing. And sure enough, you go to IMDB, there was no you, Grant, then. So I congratulate you on predicting a great star. The detective novel is usually considered a distinctly urban literary movement, presumably because its practitioners are all based in large cities. Most, however, arrived in a place like San Francisco or New York or London after leaving their provincial or suburban hometowns. Are you a suburban writer? Can you tell us of your progress into city life and something about why you're now in Palm Springs instead? Well, I grew up in Sacramento, which I think counts as provincial. But I, and I went to school, I went to undergraduate school in a small city in Colorado, and I went to law school at Stanford. So I had no real experience of cities until I moved to Los Angeles when I was 25. And I love Los Angeles, really. And then I moved here in 1996. So, and I live, and we live part-time in Palm Springs because having experienced cities that they're full throttle, I'm tired of them. Yeah, in the way you're sleeping head is very distinctive the way it moves back and forth, maybe to show something about Henry's journey towards selfhood again, or getting out of addiction between the suburbs, which are hellish places, and the cities which at least, they're awful in ways, but they have hope going for them, between San Francisco and, say, Palo Alto. Well, Palo Alto, when I was at law school there in the late 70s, was a very pleasant place to be. This was before it became the capital of Silicon Valley. It was just a sleepy university town. And part of the reason that in the book, Rios remains in that town is exactly that. He has not been able to get on with his adult life. He joined the public defender's office in what would be Santa Clara County. He's trying cases in San Jose, but he continues to live in this little suburban town in the style of an undergraduate because, yeah, he's sort of stumped by adult life outside of work. And then when the work is taken away from him, he has to adjust.  In that both gays and writers are likely to be urban, drawn to the city where they are better able to seek out those of fellow feeling. Do you think a close or interesting relationship between metropolitan living and sexually explicit writing still operates? Or is White rather describing a particular historical moment or even a phase of life? It may be that being gay isn't transgressive anymore. Well, that depends on where you are, I think. I mean, certainly, I think we would have to ask, I'd say the 20-year-olds in the room, but I only know of one and he's straight.  You know, for someone who grew up in a place like Sacramento, staying in Sacramento is now an option. So I think to that extent, White really is describing a particular period of time that I think ended not that far, ended only recently with kind of the normalization of homosexuality in the culture. But I think that's only true in the blue states.  I'm going to look at your career as a whole and ask you, what are the advantages to having established establishing a brand like you did back with your first novel and you had hit after hit featuring that same lovable dick, Henry Rios. And I also wonder what were the disadvantages of having that writing career? Well, you know, I never I had I didn't think about it with any premeditation. I didn't say that to be a mystery writer. The first novel I published 30 years ago from a small gay press in paper was reviewed in the New York Times, which startled everyone. And so my then publisher asked me if I would write another one. And I said, OK, sure. And so he published that and then an agent from New York called me and said, do you have an agent? And I said, no. He said, well, I'll be your agent. And I said, OK. And then and then the next five books were published by Big New York Houses. So I didn't set out to do that. It just sort of happened. And the as a writer, the advantage of writing a series with a recurrent character is you get to know the character inside out and sort of the the other characters who surround him. And so it's it's I think easier than starting a novel from scratch. The disadvantages are you get to know the character really well and you get tired of him, which is why I initially ended the series in 2000 after the seventh book and then spent the next 14 years writing The City of Palaces because it was something new and different that challenged me as a writer. For your readers, the advantages I think in this in this particular case of Rios is that we can see this one fellow going through a particularly extraordinary historical period living in San Francisco during the 80s and 90s, that is through the height of the AIDS epidemic and on until it's aftermath. And that that seems to me to raise it in a different level from, you know, the story of. Kinsey Milhohn or somebody like someone like that.  It was how you're going to write about it. And I think it gave our work a particular intensity, which is one reason I'm going back to the series because, you know, enough time has now passed that that period of time is becoming history. And so I see an opportunity to go back and to rewrite these novels, which were initially reports from the trenches as historical novels with the hindsight of what's happened since, you know, 1995 and also to fill in some blanks that I didn't because, as you know, I mean, you're sitting there on the battlefield and, you know, your fellow soldiers are getting shot and then bombs are exploding and you're scribbling madly, but you can't see past that. But now we can and we know what happened. And it's possible to go back and to recast all that with a broader perspective, which is what I hope to do because, you know, for better or worse, these books are my literary legacy. When I read the City of Palaces a few years back, I was struck by how the one way in which it seemed totally different than your previous writing was that a lot of it is told from the point of view of a little boy and that I said that voice of childhood had never appeared in your writing and that made me wonder, is there something intrinsic about the detective novel that prevents children from playing a big part in it? At least you never had children, protagonists. No, I mean, in the last... And I wondered if that brought you something as a writer that you could explore. Yeah, so... Because he's the most interesting character in the book. Most people like the La Nina.  And because, you know, that allowed me to explore an entire realm of my own experience. I came out when I was 12 years old and I think I knew when I was five years old.  And I wanted to write about that experience and be a pre-puberty difference. But, you know, the detective novels, they're like sonnets. They have a very rigid form. You can do a lot within that form. But ultimately, you know, it's three quad trains and a couplet. I think people like that. That sense of life and the life as we live it is too complicated and too messy. But if you put it inside a detective novel, well, some hero is gonna get the answers and then life will return to a previous sphere of utopia. Right. Now that I have read the rewrite, Lay Your Sleeping Head, I was shocked and disgusted by the amount of raw sex that you have put into the novel.  You were going to lose. What did your publishers have to say? What did you, what did you, what did your family say? Donald Trump's America has a schizophrenic relation to sexuality. And your book might be a shock to some of your fellow Americans. Yeah, well, screw them. I mean, you know, I, when I wrote this book, when I first wrote the book in the mid 80s, I intentionally did not put sex in because I knew if I did, given the culture, cultural atmosphere at that time, any hint of sex would have condemned my book to be labeled pornography. But the sexual, the erotic charge between Rios and Hugh Parris is really what drives the book.  And in the, in the explicit scenes I wrote, I'm not just writing about it. So, you know, it's not just one-handed writing. It's supposed to shed some light on the character of the two men and also on the dynamic of their relationship when, for example, Hugh asks Henry to bottom. You know, Henry is the top. But he understands that the request has something to do with Hugh's need to feel like he's an equal in the relationship, that Henry will take the other role. So, now I go on and describe in some detail what that is, but that's... Yeah, I mean, I'm being ironic. I hope that you hope to figure that out. I love this tendency in the work and I think it does really expand the meaning and the power of the story. And it just changes it in some very, very basic way. I hope it goes on every time you write a new book, you tell us what it was like. Well, I don't know. I mean, the next book, the book I'm working on now. So the first book, this book is set in 1982 and then the second published book was set in 1986. So there's a period of four years during which the tsunami of AIDS hit the shore that I didn't cover because again, you know, at the time I was living my life and doing other things and not thinking this way. But now I'm writing a book set in 1984 in San Francisco which falls chronologically between those books and it's all about the first wave of AIDS.  You know, in 1984 we didn't even have a test to determine who was infected or not. That didn't happen until 85. So Rios, who's three months out of rehab just assumes he's positive.  I wondered also if you had, when you buy the copy of this book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, there's a lot of supplemental material and one of them is a long memoir that you have about how you became a writer.  Well, not the first, but his was the most famous. He published his first book in 1971 called FEDAT and there were a couple of books before then but he actually then published 12 others and he was quite acclaimed in his time and he was a brilliant, wonderful, wonderful writer. If you haven't read him, you should read him. So the arc of his career is very different than yours but I saw that some of similarities in that Hansen himself wrote novels that were marketed in his day as foreign by houses published them because they were so sexually explicit and he too was known for rewriting his books and varying the amounts of sexuality he infused them with to speak to different audiences. Yeah, he made his, before, so Joe, he published his first poem in 1941 in the Atlantic and then he was not published again by sort of respectable press until 1971. So the way he survived those 30 years was by publishing pulp novels, paperbacks, so I'm sure there are examples in the Hormel collection, these pulp gay novels. So he would, and some of them actually, and some of them are not very good because he was teaching himself how to write fiction, some of them are pretty good. He also wrote even a Civil War romance under the name of some woman's name, Rosalind White or something. I mean, it was a desperate struggle. It was very long and arid period. And you met him at the beginning of your career at the end of his, right? Yeah, yeah, at that point I met him in the late 80s and yeah, he was coming toward the end of his career and he was always lovely to me, but he was a very difficult man. Can you tell us more about your use of modern and contemporary poetry in your novels about Henry Rios? Your new book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, takes its title from the opening words of W. H. Auden's poem, Lullaby.  I see Auden wrote his poem in 1940 at the beginning of World War II and it's sometimes thought of as the poet's response to the growing tide of fascism and horror beginning to engulf all of human civilization. Do you feel that happening again at the beginning of this era that we're in now? And perhaps that might be why it comes up here? Well, no, I mean this was before the troll and all of that happened.  You, he addressed, says you, not he, not she. He avoids pronouns but is addressed to a male lover and those lines for me captured sort of the relationship between Rios and Paris. As for my use of poetry, I started writing when I was 12 years old in a self-conscious way meaning that I thought of myself as a writer but I was going to be a poet. So until I was in my mid-20s, I only read and wrote poetry. And it turns out that writing poetry is great training for writing prose because it teaches you how to be concise and how to find the precise words and a certain lyricism. And so poetry is and remains my first love. You know, Joe Hansen gave me Antoine Chekhov's short stories and he said, read these, these are great. And I read them and I thought, I don't really get fiction. When I want to read something literary and profound, I read Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop. In the way you're sleeping, you, the man who's under arrest at the beginning of the story, has a very convoluted family, but one woman and it is an actual poet. And Michael does the daring thing of quoting from her poems and making them sound like, wow, that really is great. Don't you know who those poems are? Now I was going to ask if you wrote them. They're Joan Larkin's. Joan, oh, Joan Larkin's poems. So there's a wonderful lesbian poet in New York named Joan Larkin. So Hugh's mother in the book is a poet and I wanted to quote some of her poetry and I didn't want to write it myself. So I asked Joan if I could use some of her poetry and attribute it to Hugh's mother. And she said, of course you can. So she's, I acknowledged her in the beginning. So the poetry in the book is Joan's poetry. I love Joan and I love her poetry. I didn't know she was so neurotic and crazy. Yeah, well I warned her that the character was completely unlike her. She seemed okay with it. She was my suspect number one. The borrowing from poetry also allowed you to come up with so many catchy and sometimes surreal titles. And one was called How Town from the E Cummings poem. And I wondered how you got away from using that as the name of a book, How Town. But it was a success. Well, my editor didn't object. Again, I mean, so the E Cummings poem is called Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town which is about this beautiful love story that takes place in the midst of this completely oblivious sort of suburban town where no one notices that these two lovers are having this amazing affair and their names are Anyone and No One.  And so I thought that that had some resonance. I also loved that poem. I think E Cummings, he wrote too much and a lot of it's not good but I still think he's underrated. I know that part of your rationale in rewriting these Rio Spokes is that today you are a better writer. But as I go along, as you go along, I predict there might come a time when you stop in the middle of a sentence and you will be saying, shit, this was great. No wonder they gave me all those lambda awards. I'm fantastic. Your books are wonderful from beginning to end and I'm just waiting to see their second growth because I don't know if you're a better writer but the way you're gonna be writing these seems like a significantly different way. Yeah, the Little Death was my first attempt to write a long piece of fiction. And when I got the, so this is how it can be, my books are only available as e-books from a publisher called Open Red which is an international conglomerate. They also held onto the print rights but they weren't gonna do anything with them. So I prevailed upon them to revert the print rights to me because I wanted a print edition because some people still prefer to read books. And so I was just going to read The Little Death and correct some typos. And I started reading it and I thought, oh my God, this is terrible. And I just, and I thought, this, you know, I left a lot of stuff out that's sort of crucial to explaining why this is going on so I ended up rewriting it. And I think the second book, which I wrote in 88, I think I'll probably do extensive revision but by the time I got to the third book, which was How Town, I sort of learned how to write fiction. So I anticipate less revision and more sort of recasting more framing, historical framing. I just have one more question and then we'll open it up to you out there. I probably have tons of them. Oh, where's the bowl? Yeah. Can you tell us something about The Little Brother that Michael's next book has a title taken not from poetry but it's I guess like a gay twist, you might say, on one of the great canonical noir masterpieces of The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler. That was from the late 40s. This isn't a rewrite of an existing book but a completely new adventure for Henry but it takes place in San Francisco that is long gone. Yeah. The 80s. Yeah. So again, I mean, I touched on this earlier. So the first and second published books kind of skipped that whole period when AIDS really began to infiltrate the gay male community, particularly in this town and I wanted to go back and tell that story. So in The Little Brother, Henry, who has a drinking problem, he's three months out of rehab and he's moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco where he's trying to get his life back together and he's desperate for work. So he's offered a job basically as a insurance investigator, investigating death claims which is what Joe Hanson's hero did. So his first case is a gay male couple in the Castro. One of them, the older of the two asphyxiates because there's a gas leak in the apartment and he has an insurance policy that pays $100,000 to the survivor. And so Rios has said, just go verify that this was an accident and we'll pay it out.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And surrounding all of that is AIDS. And surrounding all of that is also though the specter of Raymond Chandler, I suppose. Yes. Yes. So this, I started writing this two days after the election and it opens in November 1984, a few weeks after Ronald Reagan's re-election. And I've actually finished the first draft of it. It's the fastest thing I've ever written. And part of the reason I'm writing it I think was my response to what's happened in November which is partly to remind people that there have been other dark times. We'll see. Yeah, my books are not, my books are pretty intense, right? Yeah, a little bit. I'd like to see if any of you have any questions. Oh, do you want to do this first? No, we can do it at the end. Okay. So we're having a little raffle. The ones who got here, what, too late to fill out the raffle cards?  Who wants to fill the raffle card? Okay.


Welcome to another one of my doctors at their chalk and talks. This time I am discussing a question that was given to me by a student through BU. Here she said what was Descartes's position on God and they said that they try to get some answers out of their own professors but that there was some disagreement between them. And so I want to talk about why I think there might be some disagreement in part because there's an ambiguity in the way the question is put to begin with. When we're talking about views on God we might mean a lot of different things. Descartes definitely has some views about God that are articulated in his various works, the discourse, the meditations, principles, really throughout his work because God is an important part of his philosophical system. Now that's not the same thing as saying that Descartes believed in God in the way that some religious believer out on the street might mean if we went up to him or her and we said hey do you believe in God. Those aren't quite the same set of commitments, those aren't the same set of meanings. So let's think about a bunch of different things that people mean when they talk about views on God or believing in God. Descartes has a metaphysical position, all of us do actually, whether we understand ourselves to or not because we have some beliefs about the nature of the universe, reality, human beings, other animate things. We have all sorts of metaphysical commitments that we're making, whether we're materialists or idealists or whatever you like. So we can talk about views on God in terms of metaphysical position being along the lines of do you believe that there is some sort of being out there corresponding to what people, do you see that as something that can be proven? If so how? Do you see that as something that could be disproven? If so, does God interact with the rest of the universe, in religious terms, with creation? If so how? Those would be metaphysical views as well as being other types of views. We can talk about religious beliefs and we can talk about the discipline that's more concerned with those of theology. You know, once we get to things of a more positive nature, like did God really give the Ten Commandments to Moses Ambulance? Now we're dealing with beliefs that are no longer metaphysical beliefs. They're about, you know, what you might call empirical events. And that's a different sort of question than asking about, you know, a philosopher's metaphysical beliefs. There are also a lot of things, if we want to distinguish between philosophy and theology, in a way that's similar to how people were at the time of Descartes. There are truths that we could know by use of human mind unaided, you know, simply applying natural human reason. And then there are other truths that we could know only by being given them as a revelation and then perhaps using reason to unpack them. So the notion that God is, that Christians have, that God is a trinity, that by most philosophers has been seen as one of those, the other type of truth that has to be known through revelation, so theology would handle that. We can also talk about religious practice. Does, you know, somebody's views on God, or they reveal that religious practice, if somebody believes God to be good, how do they interact with God? If they believe that prayer works, you would expect, which it could be a metaphysical belief, you would expect them to actually be praying, because, you know, if prayer works, why the hell wouldn't you, right? If you are committed to, you know, theological views like God is met through the sacraments, you know, teaching the Catholic Church and actually quote a few of the Protestant churches of Descartes' time, then that would, you know, lead to a certain kind of behavior. We can also talk about Descartes' attitude towards religious authority as well. Does he, does he take religious authority as sort of speaking for God or not? So let's look at each of these in turn. Very clear that Descartes has metaphysical views on God. He tells us what those are. As a matter of fact, we're going to talk through the rest of this, mostly about those. He's clearly committed to the view that God exists. He's clearly committed to the view that you prove that God exists, that you can know certain things about God, that God interacts with other things in certain ways. So, you know, we can put a check in his column on that part. What about more specifically religious beliefs? You know, Descartes is an interesting and cagey fellow when it comes to this sort of stuff. You get the impression that he wanted to keep himself out of any sort of predicaments or trouble. So he refrained from saying too much and rocking the boat. And this goes along with what's often called the provisional reality. Descartes, you know, according to the Great Cartesian Project, is going to supply an ethics at one time. Never actually does that. You know, out of metaphysics and physics should ultimately come. Mechanics, medicine and morals, according to this whole great tree thing. He does provide us with something that you can call provisional ethics, though. And in those provisional ethics, he says, well, you know, whatever the beliefs happen to be of the place where you are, you should probably go along with them. In part, you keep yourself out of trouble that way and you're not likely to lead yourself astray. It's not as if he sees an intrinsic value or truth in doing that.  So I think that when it comes to Descartes' religious beliefs and other scholars think differently on this, most of them say, yeah, he's not really committed to Christianity in any sort of robust sense. And you can see this really clearly when it comes to religion. Descartes, you know, goes to masses when he needs to. Doesn't appear to feel their lack when he's in other places, never really talks much about the sacraments. I mean, there's a few bits and pieces here and there in letters, but it's hard to tell how much of that is actually just trying to show that his philosophy is compatible with that of the Catholic Church. Well, not the philosophy of the Catholic Church because there's no such thing, but the theological views of the Catholic Church. He's not committed to Christianity as a way of life. This is not a central part of who Descartes is. If you compare him to some of his contemporaries or some of the other Cartesians, you know, like you say compare him to Blaise Pascal or you compare him to Nicholas Malbridge, it's very clear by looking at their lives that Descartes is not very interested in religious practice. So his views on God would apparently be something like, well, God doesn't particularly care so much about doing all these religious rituals and things like that. What about religious authority? Well, you know, again, Descartes is very keen on getting his philosophy accepted and he's doing something fairly revolutionary at the time. And he's also keen on not getting himself into any sort of unnecessary trouble. So, you know, his views on religious authority basically end up being something like, hey, I'm just doing philosophy here, natural reason. I'm going to leave that higher up stuff to you religious authorities that are doubtless, better suited to that and have, you know, better access to the divine revelation than I do. I'm just going to stick with this. Now, that sounds like a very humble way of putting things, but since Descartes is sort of claiming to present us with what reason itself would say, how reason itself would see itself, what the right method in using your mind has to be, what all the right metaphysical views are, he's not actually putting himself below the theologians and the church authorities, he's actually in a certain sense placing himself above that. One way of actually making religious authorities and their claims irrelevant is to say, ah, you're so far above reason we can't understand you. We just have to take you on faith because then as soon as that faith has gone, they're down here. Okay, so to sum this up, Descartes is making metaphysical commitments very clearly having to do with God. When it comes to the other stuff, it seems to be fairly along the lines of window dressing. It doesn't appear to be things that were really courted as philosophical product, Pascal. So let's now look at what were some of those metaphysical commitments that he made. Well, first off, he makes arguments about God's existence, and I'm confining myself here just to the two most popular early red works of Descartes' Meditations in the Discourse Method, because he does talk about this in other places as well, but he makes arguments for God's existence in meditations three and five and arguably perhaps even in meditation one. He makes arguments for God's existence also in the Discourse on Method Four. His arguments for God's existence tend to be either what we call ontological arguments based on the idea of God and unpacking that so that it must include somehow necessary existence. You see him doing an argument like that in Meditation Five, also in the Discourse on Method, or they tend to be an interesting variety of cosmological arguments. It's kind of tricky to get your head around this. Made in Meditation Three, where he's saying something essentially along the lines of if God didn't exist, then where did this idea of God come from in our minds? Given that this idea itself has a greater type of reality than those of other ideas. And it's a very tricky proof, and I'm not going to try to do justice to it here, but essentially there's good grounds for seeing as a sort of argument from causality to confine the things that go on in our mind. Maybe also in Meditation One, like I said, in part because he's saying if you think about how I came to be, if I'm not designed by God, if I wasn't created by God, then I have even less likelihood of ever getting to the truth. If that's an argument for God's existence, a fairly weak argument for God's existence, I think. But it might be one nonetheless. What else? He thinks that God is a substance. Substances are the things that are most real. In the Cartesian system, there are three kinds of substance, bodies or extension, physical things that interact with each other that are extended in space and time. Minds, not extended in space and time, connected up with bodies in tricky to explain ways. Again, much more to be said there. And the third one, God. God is his own kind of substance, totally unique, infinite, perfect in every conceivable way, anything that it's better to be than not to be. God is that. And he's also good. Dick Hurt does seem to think of God in a fairly non-anthropomorphic way. He rejects some very crude forms of anthropomorphism. He does think that God is similar to us or at least we are similar to God in having an intellect and having a will. As a matter of fact, he thinks that what it means for human beings to be in the image of God is not our intellect, which was a fairly traditional, say, Thomistic and patristic way of looking at it, but in our will. He thinks that our will makes us more like God. And Dick Hurt's view of God is what we call a volunteeristic view of God. If God wanted to change the rules for how things work, he could do that anytime he wants to. On why are the laws of mathematics or the laws of logic or even those of physics set up the way they are, God chose them. That's the end of the explanation there. God provides in the Cartesian system, God provides the possibility of attaining something that's really important for Descartes, and that's certainty. If you think about the whole project of the meditations, it begins with hyperbolic depth. It begins by rejecting previous opinions, stripping them away, first starting with the senses, then starting with even like to know the truths of mathematics, and finally getting to the point where Descartes can say, well there's one thing I know, that's I exist. And then it can start working out from that. What is this I exist? What is it for me to exist on the thinking thing? Here are these different modes of thinking. But without God, he gets stuck in what we would call solipses, which is where you just have the self, and the self can only have knowledge of the self and what is appearing to it, and it can't be sure that there's anything truly outside. Anything other than the self. God gets Descartes out of that predicament. He allows him, first of all, to think, well there is God, there's something greater than me, so that puts things in perspective. And then he also, by the midpoint of the meditations, is allowing Descartes to say that he can trust that things are the way that he perceives them clearly and distinctly, things that he perceives through his mind, things not through the senses, but through reason, through the intellect. So you can trust that a triangle actually does get angles that add up to eight degrees and it's not going to change tomorrow. And then you can even get to the point where you have an external world that you can more or less reliably believe in. You can be an error about something, but you don't have to be worried about the idea that it's all just a dream. The last thing I'm going to say about this has to do with this use of God, Blaise Pascal, I'm going to let him have the last word. Blaise Pascal was a much more committed religious thinker after living a kind of libertine existence. These things would apply to Blaise Pascal, the ones that don't apply to Descartes do apply to Pascal. And he says, Descartes uses God. He brings him into his system just to set the world motion and then he has no more use for it. And I think that's actually a good interpretation of Descartes' view. So if your view in asking about Descartes when you read all this God talk is, well was he a religious guy? He wasn't really a religious guy. It's possible to have all sorts of views on God or the divine without having very strong or even any religious commitments. And I think that I'm not going to say Descartes had any religious commitments but they certainly were not an important part of his life.


Before we get too far in this course, we want to give you a little bit of a definition of how we understand human rights today. So let's write this down. Human rights are inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply for being human. Now there are a lot of big words in there, so let's break this down a little bit. Inalienable just means that it's a right that can't be taken away from you, so it means it can't be alienated from you. Fundamental just means it's a basic right, a right that, sort of like you stand on the ground, it's sort of a basic right that other things stand upon. And so here writes, we've talked about this in our last video, so you should remember that and if you don't you can go back and look at that video. So inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently, and here we've got another strange word, inherently means it's essential, it's a part of being a human. It's basically just a part of that, and it's a natural part of it I guess, maybe a good way of describing it. And entitled to, and I spelled entitled to incorrectly, we'll take that I out there, entitled means it's owed to you.  Now where does this idea come from? Well really in a way all of this is founded on two sort of ideas. One is dignity and the other is worth. So in a way you can kind of simplify this to the value of individuals and their right to live a dignified life. So that is sort of the way we define and understand human rights today. What are some maybe aspects of human rights that are really important to understand? Well there are three and it actually fits along very well with an African proverb that says two stones cannot support a cooking pot. And we are going to make an illustration to describe this entire thing here. To do it we are going to make something called Wright's soup. So here we're going to make a big soup bowl sitting on some stones. And we've got our Wright's soup in here. It's orange for some reason. There's our soup. Maybe there's like a carrot in here or something like that. So Wright's soup and it's sitting on these three stones right here. And there's some firewood underneath there. We've got a little blaze going which means our soup is warming up. Now if we were to pull out one of these stones the soup would tip over and there would be nothing to eat. So what would we then be basing this soup bowl on are these fundamental stones, these foundational stones. And the foundational stones of Wright's are these three things. We've got universality, so universal. We'll just say that. Human rights are universal. They are inalienable. So you recognize that one up top there. Inalienable. And they are indivisible. Divisible. There we go. So what does that mean? Universal means that human rights apply to everyone. No matter what. Every person, all humans, can't take it away. Across the entire spectrum of humanity. So in some ways that's why there are lots of people out there who try to make a connection between this universality and natural law. And I think you guys might remember that from our last video. Inalienable. This means that they can't be taken away. And this is a part of the discussion which you might hear quite a lot. Which means that you can't take them away just because. There's no situation where you really can say, well we can take human rights away because we have this other thing that's more important at this moment. So a lot of people will call this the Trump card. Human rights trump other sort of priorities because they are more valuable and they are inherently inalienable. Which means you can't take them away. And then we have indivisible. Which basically just means that they are interconnected. So we've got maybe these three here. Maybe there's more rights that we would actually be showing. But each one of them is connected to the other. Indivisible means they're completely interrelated, they're completely tied. And if you take one away then all the other ones suffer. So that means this indivisible nature of rights makes it essential that one is always there with all of its others. And if you take one away then the others will suffer. So there you go. We have these three properties down here. We have our definition. And here we have the sort of the foundation, the sort of foundational ideas. And that is sort of how we understand human rights today. We're going to have a much deeper discussion about these things. And in the next video we're actually even going to talk about the history of how we came to this understanding in the first place.


Recent years have seen a number of severe droughts in various regions around the world, leading to agricultural and economic losses, famine and migration. Despite their devastating consequences, the standardized precipitation index, SPI, of these events falls within the range of observations and simulations from the fifth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project, CMIP5. In terms of magnitude, regional trends of SPI over the past decades remain largely inconclusive in observation-based data sets in CMIP5 simulations, but soil moisture anomalies, SMAs, in CMIP5 simulations suggest increased drought in a few regions, the Mediterranean, Central America slash Mexico, the Amazon, Northeast Brazil, and South Africa. Similarly, projections of changes in the magnitude of meteorological, SPI, and soil moisture, SMA, drought in CMIP5 display large spreads over all timeframes, generally impeding trend detection. However, projections of changes in the frequencies of future drought events display more robust signal-to-noise ratios, with detectable trends towards more frequent drought before the end. This article was authored by B. Orlowski and S. I. Senevirotin.


Video released on November 16 by the Israeli Army, showed what they said was soldiers of the 188th Brigade and Shayatet-13 engaging in combat with Hamas militants in the port of Gaza. Reuters was able to confirm location in parts of the video from the buildings, pier, and layout of the harbor which matched satellite and file imagery of the area. Reuters was not able to independently verify the date when the video and photos was taken Israel began its campaign against Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza after its militants rampaged through southern Israel on October 7. Israel says 1,200 people were killed and some 240 people taken hostage in the deadliest day of its 75-year-old history. Israel has put Gaza's population of 2.3 million under siege and carried out an aerial bombardment. Gaza health officials, considered reliable by the United Nations, say about 11,500 Palestinians are confirmed killed, around 40% of them children and more are buried under the rubble.