Good afternoon and welcome. Can you hear me? Is it on? Yeah. Thank you all for coming. I was just commenting to Professor Sealy that we have to pull out more chairs. We filled the room, so congratulations and thank you all for coming. I am happy to welcome all of you to the Robert E. Wall Award lecture presentation. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Robert E. Wall Award program, Fairfield University's most prestigious award for faculty research. It honors a senior scholar who, through a competitive proposal process, is awarded a research sabbatical to bring to fruition a particular project and deliver a university-wide lecture on the project. The Robert E. Wall Award represents Fairfield's driving commitment to rigorous scholarship and academic excellence. Our Wall Award recipients signal the Jesuit value of the magis striving for the more, pushing the boundaries of their scholarly fields and advancing creative knowledge. We are so fortunate that today we have many of the past Wall Award recipients over the past 25 years, so I invite all prior Wall Award winners present with us this afternoon to stand and be recognized as we celebrate 25 years of scholarly excellence at Fairfield University.  You know who you are. Our Robert E. Wall Award winner this year is Professor Chris Sealy. Dr. Sealy is an Associate Professor of Philosophy. She works in the areas of Continental Philosophy, specifically Phenomenology and Existentialism, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Decolonial Philosophy. Her work has investigated the metaphysics of human identity, particularly as it operates in relation with the other. Her book, Levi Nass, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, published by SUNY Press in 2013, advances the idea of identity of disruption that emerges from examining how identity is never closed in on itself. In addition to publishing articles in journals such as Hypatia and Critical Philosophy of Race, Professor Sealy serves as book review editor for the Journal of French and Francophide Philosophy. Professor Sealy's scholarship deeply informs her courses on Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and Existentialism. Professor Sealy's service to Fairfield University extends from acting as one of the Associate Directors of the Humanities Institute and Coordinator of the Magiskore Social Justice Signature Element to Director of our Black Studies Program. This afternoon, Professor Sealy will present her project, Crealizing a Nation, a Poetics and Politics of Community Otherwise. This book-length project will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Crealizing the Nation reads the everyday performance of nationness through the conceptual tools offered by Crealization. In doing so, the book foregrounds certain shifts in how we conceive borders, subject formation, and relationality so that the nation can be read in terms of plural and liberatory conceptions of human life. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Professor Sealy shows that properly Crealizing account of the nation establishes national communities as always complex, always constitutive of disruptive creations of anti-colonial resistance, and always in negotiation with certain enactments of sabotage from below. Please join me in welcoming our award winner, Professor Chris Sealy. Come on, can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? All right, it's a lot of people. Kind of nervous. Thank you so much for coming, each and every one of you. My family is here, my good friends are here. One of my oldest friends from high school in Trinidad and Tobago is here. I really can't ask for anything more, so warm heart. So the good news, as Provost Seagill mentioned, is that this book will be published in October of 2020. The not-so-good news is that when we do get to Q&A, and there are questions about all the awful things that I left out, I'm not going to be able to do anything with those comments because that kitchen is closed. So yeah, but I do look forward to your questions. Before I begin, I do want to say a huge thank you to Provost Christine Seagill, who's, it's through her office that I was awarded the award last spring, and that time off was really what I needed to bring this to fruition and completion and ultimate publication. So very big gratitude goes to Christine and her office. So I have just about 30 minutes of comments prepared, and so I'll try to stick to that as close as possible because I do want to give us time for questions and conversation before we get to the reception. So this book project grew out of my reading an ultimate review of Mike Monaghan's 2011 book, and this is the book right here. In that work, Monaghan develops an account of what he names the Creolizing Subject and opposes this to a subject of purity, a subject for whom an inner coherence or wholeness is pitted over against an external world, and that's a quote from Mike Monaghan's work. The Creolizing Subject, on the other hand, is one who understands experience in terms of ambiguity, openness, and dynamic articulations of borders between self and other. In 2013, I offered some speculative questions in response to Mike's work and then continued to obsess over them because that's what we do for the next six years. So on my reading, Mike's book hinted towards how this Creolizing Subject might generate different kinds of orientations towards borders and national identity, perhaps even gesturing towards some anti-resist nationalism. But it didn't do much more than that, and so because of that, I fleshed out these and other related questions in this argument for Creolizing the Nation. I propose that, under the conceptual tools offered by Creolization, the ontological structures of the modern nation form and by ontological here, I simply mean what we imagine to be the being of the nation form. Those ontological structures shift so as to offer conceptions of community, relation, and relationality that allow us to imagine collective national life differently. I ground my claims in the work of Martinican philosopher, novelist, and poet, Edward Glissant. In particular, I use his analysis of Creolizing social imaginaries to bring in frames of Creolization to bear on nationness. We can at least begin to think generatively about how such ontologies might make room for plural and more liberatory articulations of the human. To say this differently, I use Creolization to revisit the presumed finality of colonialism's violence, the terms of which are, more often than not, codified in standard conceptions of the nation. I read these terms, differences allergy, community aesthetic, and borders as closed through the lens of Creolization in order to trouble the assumption that these are the only terms available to us for thinking about things like the identity of the subject, and the constitution of community. Hence, in Creolizing the nation, I have in mind the implications of those everyday disruptive and resistive practices which scholars like Glissant foreground in their analyses of Creol societies. Societies comprising the Caribbean archipelago, and of course its northernmost tip, Louisiana. From the level of the everyday, these practices jostle the colonial and neocolonial totalities that make for the impossibility of free black life, that indeed codified black life as dispensable and even fungible. In so doing, they generate cracks in these totalities so that other possibilities might emerge. My argument here is that the nation is obliged to tell a different story about itself when such cracks and possibilities are accounted for. So, a little bit about Creolization, sorry. Central to practices named Creol is a fluidity of entanglements among fragments, the existence of which defy any claim to authenticity. To say this differently, Creol entanglements precisely do not participate in what in the book I name a metaphysics of the one. Some single and unchanging iconic copy against which all other copies are measured for legitimacy. The plateness in the room might recognize this formation. Sarah. Instead of this metaphysical stasis, Creolizing connections with origin are via misduplications what Heather Smith calls beautiful inauthenticities. Capturing both translations of and movements away from origins. This is very much shaped by historical circumstances that make it nearly impossible to reconstruct linear connections to the past. And so such Creolizing misduplications really grow out of a need as they signal inventions out of which new modes of dwelling and being with emerge. The properly Creolizing accounts of the nation that I develop is interested in these new modalities. Primarily for the possibilities therein of alternative subject formation, community constitutions and alternative relationships to power. It's also important for me to point out that out of these Creolizing practices the cultural artifacts that emerge are new not in terms of creation ex nihilo but are rather entangled patterns among pieces of predating forms. Iterations of which both retain resemblance and resist simple or clear replication. And so the new in Creolizing newness is about beginning again which is precisely what Caribbean and New World imaginaries must do in the face of their constituting catastrophes the rupture of the middle passage and then the necropolitics of the plantation. Given these historical ruptures any project of retrieving the past encounters the drowning of memory. In this slide you see depicted a most common practice of the transatlantic slave trade of slave ships drowning their so-called cargo overboard. He then responds to widespread disease among the ship's passengers or to having to lighten the weight of the ship's load. In Glissant's work he often refers to those balls and chains gone green on the Atlantic Ocean's floor. The balls and chains to which Africans remain shackled as they were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. These are markers of those drowned and unrecoverable bodies. So out of this kind of history faithful restoration of the past is impossible and yet to borrow again Glissant's words the obligation to begin again is also a quote a debt to honor our boats. To begin again not as an atavistic return to origins not as an ahistorical project entirely uninformed by this abyssal past but rather through collective life that transmutes the fragments of memory into something necessarily new memory fragments becoming something otherwise. In this sense this history of drowned memory and fragmented past then also make it possible for the newness of creolizing practices to rupture the terrains of power in which they're located and out of which they mooch. Sidia Hartman's exposition of slave practices is pertinent here. Like my own reading of Creolization's relationship to power Hartman establishes that in the name of redress against the plantation's social death slave practices were and I quote here determined by exploited and exceeded the constraints of domination. It's in a similar vein that my book traces the ways in which Creol entanglements in the context of the new world don't simply translate the violence of colonial domination but rather traffic in a complex relationship to that power. I'm interested in how in attending to and foregrounding such complexities the presumed stasis and homogeneity of national life is always already jostled by its constitutive outside. And so my chapters try to foreground this too easily forgotten possibility of disrupting the nation's totalizing ontology. I argue that such disruptions live in Creolization's translations and misduplications and in its alternative reframing of subjectivity, relationality and ultimately community. To be clear it's not the case that these practices extend their disruptions to the level of state mechanisms. So the nature of the sabotage in question can't be measured by capacities to overthrow state domination. Nevertheless, despite their non-frontal engagement with power there is a political register to these everyday Creolizing practices. A register that tomorrow again from City of Hartman actually asks us to think more expansively and differently about what even counts as political resistance. In my turn to France Fanon later in the book I bring Creolization's Poetics of Resistance into conversation with the squarely anti-colonial politics of resistance that so many of us continue to turn to Fanon for. And I do this to show that the very distinction between poetics and politics slips in the case of Creolizing contestations of mainstream determinations of the properly human. Contestations that produce socialities not completely accounted for by that mainstream. Michelin Kretchlow's language of jostling appears often in my analysis since it provides an apt metaphor for what I find most productive in using Creolizing comportments at the level of the everyday as an argument for reorienting our conception of the nation. The claim of my analysis is that jostled by these comportments the ontologies that support the mechanics of national formation are no longer unaffected by Creolizations otherwise. Hence from the level of the everyday practices that are Creolizing invite us to think imaginatively about what it might mean to live in and with the nation formed differently. What it might mean to enact France Fanon's leap so that invention might enter into collective existence. So though the overall effect of Creolizing the nation is not to undo matrices of power that stitch together the governmentality of the state I do want to argue that through Creolization the organizing coloniality of that power does not have the last word. So this book develops this claim first in looking at conceptions of subject, community and relationality that Glissant develops then in bringing these concepts into critical conversation with Latina feminist critiques. So reading Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones and philosopher and phenomenologist Mariana Ortega all alongside Glissant. And lastly I offer Glissant's Creolizing poetics as potential discursive support for France Fanon's more overtly political demand for a decolonial orientation towards national life. So across these three sections I show that when it becomes possible to imagine community and relationality in ways not coded for by the logics that determine human life as dispensable even if it is the case that these imaginative practices happens through networks below and not at the level of mainstream political structures, coloniality is robbed of the last word.  Speaking of xenophobia. So in all, it's been fascinating to develop this project during the latest resurgence of fascist nationalisms across the globe. Not to mention the renewed traction of white nationalism in this our era of Trump. Writing this in such a political climate has made its constituting argument feel both fundamentally impossible and fundamentally necessary. Impossible since there seems to be nothing to salvage from the idea of nation and nationalism, right? Why continue to work within this frame if at its heart is what Etienne Ballabar identifies as a founding posture of defense that determines difference as threat. But the argument I make also feels necessary. The nation form will more than likely continue to be the organizing frame for the political, economic, and sociocultural aspects of our lives. And so we're urgently called to determine conditions for some other possibility, some other relational living out of which there can be a plurality of futures and plural articulations of the human. My hope is to have offered creolization as a frame, perhaps not the only frame, for thinking through such possibilities. As a set of practices that take us to the level of the intimate and everyday life, creolization names those new ways of being in the world which insert themselves into the liminal folds of the social, so as to jostle our social architecture. This is like what Maria Lugonis conceptualizes as those heterogeneous socialities that are always already part of a social landscape. Plural world orientations coexist precisely because of the need generated by dominant structures of violence to resist life as unfreedom. But these plural orientations also effectively insert traces of and otherwise into these structures. And in so doing, their violence does not have the last word on what it means to be human. So in the end, the book asks us to think about communities as perhaps national and structure and as ever dynamic constitutions of creolizing processes all at the same time. These co-constitutive processes, nationalization and creolization, entangle at the everyday culture in ways that often make those practices of sabotage invisible, or perhaps even unrecognizable to more standard ways of understanding resistance. Nevertheless, through that entanglement, meaning productions take shape in a way that make the political move as it were. Instead of remaining a static and unchanging, fets are complete. I've turned to Glissant's notion of rhizomatic errantry for the conceptual vocabulary to capture this movement. Metaphors of the mangrove here is significant for Glissant. In particular, its rhizomatic root system is one of a horizontal spread instead of a vertical anchoring. The mangrove's rhizome system also anchors in watery ground, right? It grows in a swamp, allowing for motion alongside the anchoring of the plant life. It's what Glissant would name the moored whirling of Antillian life worlds. But especially, rhizomatic errantry, Glissant's conceptual base for developing his model of a composite community, allows us to think of how the all of national, of the nation form, sorry, might be also accountable to the relation of our plural histories. In reorienting our understanding of the nation to include this dynamism, we not only utilize a sense of nationness as already open to different, better and more liberatory constitutions of itself, but perhaps more significantly, make more visible what, to my mind, are radical agencies at the level of the mundane. To return again to Maria Lugonis, attention to the jostling effects of creolization on the nation's formation affords us a view of marginalized subjects as active and resisting agents who, in making a way out of no way, change the course of the political. I make it clear in the book that the possibilities towards creolizing imaginaries lead are to be read as just that in the register of possibility, the political effects of which are not in offering clearly delineated structures or codes, but rather in how these imaginaries contest the telos or purpose of existing power. What emerges through this undoing of power's claim to legitimacy is an otherwise that is opaquely so, radically outside the frame of the power being contested. As Anthony Alessandrini puts it, such possibilities must emerge as, quote, an orientation towards a future that has not yet come, unquote. The radical nature of this decolonial option, its newness, will remain unsignifiable within the power codes from which it gestures a break. And so any political program signifying as perhaps explicitly or visibly delineated in the present would be squarely of the present, not yet an effect of its rupturing, and not yet the kind of break that would signal this otherwise. Hence, would have offered as a properly creolizing account of the nation centers on imaginary or a poetics sufficiently otherwise so as to orient the nation in this way towards a future that is yet to come and that has not yet come. Out of this reframing, closure shows up as premature and stasis shows up as a failure to do what Amy Allen urges in her book to enact, quote, the project of the coupling progress as an imperative from progress as a fact, unquote. And so it's in this spirit that I conclude the book. By signaling its incompleteness and by turning my readers towards questions and problem spaces it generates which in the open-ended spirit of creolization just might take us beyond the creolizing frame. In ending in this way, my hope is to avoid framing a project of creolizing the nation as one with an end, but rather as one through which we encounter decolonizing the nation form as an imperative. This imperative would call for vigilance against narratives of the post-colonial that frame colonialism's past as a past that, to quote Alice Andrini again, can be easily left behind. This is especially urgent given that much of the past practices of colonialism continue to directly inform its post and so it can only be understood as past through dangerous disavowals. Particular to these past but not past practices is the occupation and settlement of lands stolen from indigenous peoples in the Americas which continue to support settler states like the U.S. and Canada. And so the task of creolizing the nation is accountable to the indigenous anti-colonial platforms that emerge in resistance to this ongoing settler colonial violence. Hence, I take a question like Jody Byrd's to be a part of the problem space generated by this book. Jody Byrd is an indigenous scholar and citizen of the Chikotor Nation in Oklahoma. Her work prompts me to ask what would it mean to give an account of creolization that avoids what she names the quote Syllagistic Traps of Participatory Democracy born out of violent occupation of lands. Unquote. To reiterate, taking creolization to the nation form allows us to think against the supposed finality of colonial violence. That thinking against helps us theorize an anti-colonial agency in subversive cultural productions which work to undo colonialism's monopolies on subject formation, world relation and how we ought to think about community and belonging. I'm drawn to Jody Byrd's analysis of what it might mean to critically engage with and perhaps move beyond the totality of colonial violence without deploying its logics. In other words, what would it mean to move beyond coloniality via routes that are themselves illegible or perhaps opaque to those colonial logics? As a start, and only that, I want to take up Byrd's account of a horizontally oriented cacophony. This is Byrd's language. A decolonial option that begins in the plural histories shaped by colonial violence. As I read her, the possibility of decolonial futures rests squarely in the horizontal relationships among colonialism's resisting subjects. Diasporic descendants are stolen Africans and indentured East Asians, arriving from those more recent migratory circuits shaped in colonialism's wake and new world First Peoples who remain despite the past and present genocidal policies of that same colonialism. More significantly, this horizontal relationship is squarely outside of a colonial relation that reduces anything relevant to the history of the Americas to a colonized colonizer divide. What Byrd shows is that when we ground our decolonial resistance in a notion of cacophony, we, to quote her here, dissenter these vertical interactions between colonizer and colonized and re-center the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions, unquote. And so cacophonous negotiations of colonialism's past and present mean that we, quote, bang our heads together in search for cross-cultural understanding, unquote. I'm quoting here the short story entitled The Chaos of Angels by Choctaw Scholar and poet Leanne Howe. The pain and intensity of Howe's imagery is meant to convey the difficulty involved in working towards such cross-cultural understandings. Understandings that aren't simply about different cultural orientations to the world, but rather about real material histories of violence and real material claims to repair. Hence, a question that faces me at the end of this book is what happens to or in creolization when it brings the history of forced transplantation, coerced migratory labor, and diasporic placeness into conversation with what Burr describes as the oppositional place-based claims and experiences of first peoples. Remember, the process of creolization happens out of a history of radical rupture and absence. Intact origins lay recoverable on the Atlantic Ocean's floor, which means that creolization is about having to begin out of a radical loss of the past or rather out of a present absence of that past. However, Jody Byrd reminds us that for indigeneity, quote, there is a long line of continuity between the past and the present that has not been interrupted, that has not been disrupted, unquote. For first peoples, the pre-of colonial conquest remains present. The continuity of the line between indigeneity's past and present marks neocolonialism's ongoing occupation of native land. More significantly, colonialism's anti-indigenous past, right, genocide and settlement, is precisely what conditions the loss and rupture upon which creolization becomes a constituting element of the Americas. To say this differently, the clearing that makes possible the migrations and arrivals out of which creolization grows is none other than the clearing away of the native. My own ancestors, stolen West Africans and East Indians tricked into bondage of indentured labor, arrived in the Americas on the back of this clearing away. That's my mom and dad. So when heads bang together in the afterlife of empire, it seems apt to say that we have arrived at a point in which, quoting Byrd, diaspora collides with settler colonialism, unquote. Where any possibility of decolonizing imaginaries must include a kind of transformative accountability to this collision point. Indigenous scholars remind us that it's often the case that post-colonial aspirations towards this kind of accountability ultimately perpetuate the very settler logics they aim to undo. Case in point are those non-critical or perhaps non-cacophonic goals of inclusion, of welcoming, of hospitality, that blindly assume the settler state to have the kind of legitimacy into which one would even desire to be included or welcomed. On certain readings, creolization might be interpreted as one such post-colonial aspiration towards inclusion and assimilation in a multicultural settler state. However, as I have tried to align and deployed it in this book, the relationality of creolizing processes is errant, rhizomatic, and perhaps more significantly keeps opacity at the center. Taking Glissant as my guide, I have shown that any relational process conceptualized in a creolizing frame would be open-ended in the messiness of the rhizome's routings, would gather singularities in a knowing that is not one of transparency and full access, and would be less about final resolutions and more about the complex communicative enactments of ongoing community formation. And so if, in its encounter with the oppositional place-based claims of indigenous peoples, a creolizing relation does not route itself differently in response, but instead retrenches into, quoting Bird again, a rationalizing of the original historical traumas that births settler colonialism, then the relation is no longer shaped in a creolizing spirit. In that creolizing rerouting, what is hoped for is, to quote Bird again, the possibility of indigenous memory and migratory resistance to forge alliances across historical and cultural experiences in opposition to the competitions upon which colonialism relies. In turning to this critical vocabulary of cacophonous interventions, I purport that acts of indigenous resurgence and self-affirmation also positions themselves to avoid, quote, the pitfalls associated with retreating into an uncritical essentialism, unquote, this is a quote from Glenn Coltard's most recent work, Red Skin, White Mass. Franz Fanon similarly warns against such pitfalls in Wretched of the Earth, and I deploy this centrally in my book. In other words, horizontal negotiations among communities with historical claims against colonial violence would mean that the place-based claims of indigenous communities unfold in active collision with other colonized peoples. Nashnaabek scholar and musician Leanne Simpson reminds us that what ought to be most central to contemporary indigenous place-based claims is neither nostalgia for an untainted past nor the nativism of recalcitrant claims to belonging, but rather certain obligations on the part of indigenous peoples to, quoting Simpson here, to reclaim the fluidity of their traditions and not the rigidity of colonialism, unquote. Framed in this way, indigenous resistance might be called to the kinds of fluid and contaminated world relations not unlike what Edward Gleeson theorizes in creolizing community formations. Likewise, for someone like me, whose own histories are of transplantation and arrival, I am called to understand my own creole indigeneity alongside the particular colonial violence made visible by acts of indigenous resurgence and resistance. And so to conclude, in ending with creolizing the nation as an imperative and not as a fact seems, at least on my reading, quite in line with the implications of creolization. These are implications that center cacophony, critical vigilance, and suspicion towards resolution as they center those everyday practices of resisting subjects who, in Maria Lugonis' words, inhabit the power grid in great resistance, unquote. Creolizing the nation takes our attention to those subaltern agencies, territory, translocated, and indigenous alike, that are always already authoring new ways of relating to the world in response to colonial and neocolonial domination. To think about the constituting totality of the nation in this way, creolizing, errant, negotiating plural histories and struggles is to conceive the possibility of its decolonial future. Never easy, always cacophonous, but the opaque horizon towards which a properly creolizing conception of a nation totality hopefully moves. So these are the questions I'm thinking about right now for my next project. Sorry, family and the audience, but I'm getting ready to start again. But I'll stop here and I very much look forward to your questions. Thank you. So I'm going to help Chris field some questions. I'll run around and do the microphone, and as soon as Chris gets off of that high podium. And is your microphone on, my friend? Yep, there we go. So we're ready. Who's got the first question? Thank you so much, Dr. Sealy, for your inspired and magnificent words and your talk, and for the beautiful family portrait at the end. Could you talk about the playlist? That's a surprise that we have lined up for you. So during our reception at the, on the permission of Associate Provost Jacqueline Borishko, we were allowed to generate a playlist that to my mind consists of a list of artists and songs that capture the spirit of what I want to convey in this book. So you'll be hearing that during the reception. That's all I have to see. Fascinating talk. Thank you, Chris. I have just a quick question, maybe two. So when you are talking about memory, are you thinking more about collective memory or individual memory transmitted through, you know, poetic writings or any literary writings? So that's the first question. Second question. I really like your title, Crealizing the Nation. It seems that you want to emphasize an agency to intervene, because, I mean, in my thinking, nation could be by nature is not pure. So when you are using the word crealizing, are you thinking about as the critics, as scholars, philosophers, you want to do something about it? Or you are calling for people to do it? Thank you. Yeah, so maybe I'll start with a second question first. And so when I first came to these sorts of questions and sort of envisioned this as a thing that I can say and argue for in a book, my interests were really developing a conceptual framework that would allow that sort of impurity to be foregrounded when one thinks of the nation and national life and what it means to have a national identity and to feel part of a national community, right? The fact that, well, to think of the nation is to always already think of a kind of moving, non-static impurity. And to even add this, that really comes from my own personal experience of navigating nationness, right, as an immigrant who has very complicated relationship to home, a national home. And so for me, the crealizing and crealizing the nation is simply a theory that I think does a good job of foregrounding that kind of impurity and movement. And then the second question, the memory question, definitely a kind of collective memory. And so not simply a collective memory, but a collective memory that is collective precisely in its felt absence, right? A radical absence and loss that despite continues to frame and shape how Caribbean-ness and Antillian literature and poetry, we have a poet in our midst, think about what it means to be Caribbean as a very sort of distinct and kind of identity in relationship to the world. So that would be the short answer to that question. Sunil. Thanks for coming, Sunil. Did you bring the baby? This is amazing. Your parents are so gorgeous. I know. I was just looking at them. I don't know what happened. It's amazing. I'm going to ask a sort of historian's question, I guess. I was sort of struck by the way in which you're sort of grappling with two seemingly sort of oppositional regimes of historicity and temporality. There's one founded in a sort of rupture, the abyss and the absence, and that produces a sort of radical futurity, a sort of openness to the future, a sort of emancipation from the past that sort of opens up these sort of new political horizon. And how then this can then be understood in terms of politics of an indigeneity that has a much different political horizon, a sort of different temporal horizon. I'm sort of wondering if these two things can be put together. I mean, I understand the sort of creolization that comes as a way of reconciling these two temporalities into some sort of formation, but are these two conceptions of the political just irreconcilable, or do they need to be reconciled in some way, or do they sabotage each other? Are there sort of pitfalls to a politics of indigeneity in this sort of radical futurity? Because this sort of settler-colonial project is premised on a sort of disavowal of the past. So I don't know. Yeah, and so these are exactly the questions that will probably make me miserable for another six years because that's what I'm about to find out. And so, right, and so, to begin, right, so there are different ways of opening up the what is of creolization, and I have decided to use someone like Edward Glissant, because I think Glissant does a particularly good job of giving a reading of creolization and of creolizing imaginary that is precisely about this radical future, precisely because nothing is left of the past, but also are forging towards a generativity that, to return to what I said, needs to honour its boats, right? So it's not that the past is not felt and not informing the kind of futuricity that he's talking about, right? But at the same time, that rupture is still there in ways that is really diametrically opposed when you try to write. But I feel compelled to bring these two things together because if I'm laying out a platform for what it means to live and be in the world in a decolonial way, how could I not talk about settler colonial violence, right? Exactly, so that just seems to me to be the next responsible question to ask. And so, here I go. Hi, and thank you. According to your vision then on Election Day, how are we to reimagine our local, state, and national governments and communities, and what would the world look like? I'm looking for Gweno Fonzo, who is the scholar of American politics. Yeah, right. So, I mean, actually, good question, right? Because your question prompts me to say again that how I'm thinking about political negotiations, how I'm thinking about the negotiation of politics and political structures, how I'm thinking about how political resistance looks is not necessarily in this frontal negotiation with mainstream politics, right? So what you think of in terms of structures of governmentality and, you know, state mechanisms, right? Which is not to say that those questions aren't precisely important, they are. They just don't figure into the questions that I'm asking in this project. What I am interested in the project is a focus on other more liminal, subaltern ways that human beings, that human subjects manifest political resistance. Find ways in the midst of those state mechanisms to determine options for free life, right? Which could include voting, right? Which could include, you know, doing the Democrat versus Republican, the blue, the red thing. But the kinds of resistance that I'm thinking about and referencing are really resistances to systems of violence that continue with either of those options, right? So it's not about if we vote Democrat, then sort of arrive at a decolonizing way of being Americans. That's not the case, right? So for the purpose of this project, those kinds of options, those kinds of participations in political life is not quite what I'm thinking about and asking about, if that... If you were to realize your vision and follow your thought, what would my world look like? How would we live? Yeah, so I don't know that ahead of time and so the trouble is that in anticipating and saying that in clear terms ahead of time, we precisely foreclose the radical nature of the possibility that I'm referencing, right? We precisely cannot know what it looks like ahead of time and forge towards it at the same time, which is why it's difficult and uncomfortable and not particularly easy. It's supposed to be disruptive. And Frans Fanon does a really good job of that, right? He talks about the sense in which, you know, any sort of anti-colonial revolution will fail because it's always too late or too early, right? It's just impossible to present in legible terms precisely because of its radical nature. So I wish I had a better question, a way to answer your question, but that coming out of this framework, that would be the answer to that sort of question. So we have three more questions that I've seen. I'm going to start right here. Hi, it was a fascinating talk. Keep it coming. So I came in in the middle, so I don't know if you address this, but it seemed to me like, so you're theorizing this kind of fractured, sob-altern set of resistances, right? And so my question is, what is the possibility of solidarities along that continuum of these fractured resistances of sob-altern creolizations, right? Solidarities along the decolonial or non-colonial axes, you know? So among the people who shared that history in different configurations of some sort. And then the other question is, so you've mentioned that there's this opacity and then that there's no goal necessarily or like being with this kind of space, right? This unstable space, but yet you also say that there's an emancipatory project of being free. What does that look like? So I'll start with the goal question. So it's a... It's a... So the movement towards is to be thought of in terms of propulsive but not telelogical, right? So there's a movement towards, but the danger is that the minute we determine we're too quickly in advance, right? With our very limited colonizing conceptual tools, what that thing towards which we're moving, right? The dangers that we reproduce the very logics because that's kind of all we have, right? And so it's... And so I think that such possibilities of being... having purpose that is not telelogical, I think kind of needs to come from the communities that we're talking about, communities that precisely need or have a... There's a necessity with which they... This is their only possibility of living fully human lives. And so how that solidarity... And then I'm going to answer your first question. How that... What that solidarity is going to look like in the book, I turn to someone like Maria Lugones because she uses this language... She uses a language of complex communication. She uses a language of, you know, polyglossia, right? So anticipating in advance that when we sort of bang our heads together, we sort of necessarily will not understand everything or hardly anything, right, of the language of the other and have to figure out how to work with this other group or this other person that for whom we don't have a clear and transparent understanding. And I think that's pretty radical because often, right, promises of solidarity sort of rest in the assumption that... Right, we fully get each other. I understand you, you understand me, and so, okay, let's get to work, right? That's kind of not what Maria Lugones is describing in her conception of complex communication, which I find really productive. Beth? Thank you. Great talk. Thank you, Beth. So many great, you know, phrases and things that I need to go away and look at my notes and think about how they fit together. But part of what I'm thinking about is our shared love of New Orleans, of course, and public memory especially because I'm thinking about the time when you were really, you know, deep in drafting and thinking about this book as a time when, you know, there was the fight over the memorials coming down, the Confederate memorials in New Orleans, as real sites of public memory. And at the same time that there's that, I think public memory as being so much about in the movements of the parades, of the Mardi Gras Indians, of the, yes, you got Wild Chapatulas, right? So we don't think of that as public memory, but I think that is a kind of public memory. So I'm wondering if you can say anything about how you were thinking about public memory in this book or as you're drafting this book or, you know, around that. Yeah, that's a good question because a lot of what, a lot of the places that I, or the instances that I go to in the book are really about these sort of intimate everyday practices of resistance. But I think there are ways to retain what I find valuable in that intimacy and everydayness in those sort of more public articulations of disruption, those more public articulations of imagining community and our shared history and memory in a radically different way without changing too much about what I want to say. So I think that this could pertain to things like that. So thank you. I think we have time for about one more question. Yes, so fabulous stuff all around and I'm sort of following up on Bette's stuff about the Confederate monuments and memory and public memory. I think, you know, and also the question about, oh, by the way, I'm Gwen Alfonso, so I was referring to about American politics. So, you know, the question, Chris, what you're talking about is actually not at all on the same sort of wavelength as we conventionally think about politics. Although the two things don't necessarily have to be completely different, but, you know, they're just not there on parallel tracks as you sort of were talking about. So, you know, I think institutions, like initially I was, because I'm an institutionalist, I was trying to think what is the role for institutions, but I think like Foucault, you're not kind of focused so much on institutions at the center. You're more focused on the margins, right? You're sort of focused on the marginality rather than the institutionality of politics in that way, right? But then what you see is you come up with this tension between what a state has to do, a state has to set standards, as, you know, Foucault tells us with governmentality and stuff, a state has to set standards and sort of normalize certain experiences and make it accessible to others so that they can sort of perform what it needs to do, you know, function and policy and so on and so forth. So, I think, though, what you're saying is transformation is not happening at the part of policymaking and these formal legal artifacts or developments, but transformation is happening in the moment, often, right? In the cacophony of, like, dialogue, for instance, in the present rather than in some kind of solidified entity. Or, I mean, do you want to speak to that? Like, do you see it crystallized in any way? Or do you not? So, yes to all of that, right? And so, and I would add that, you know, alongside, right, so this is not a but but an and, alongside the sort of the marginal focus of the questions that I'm asking, it's both marginal and in between, right? So, in other words, when, as those more formal mechanics of state governmentality are unfolding, we encounter this kind of, like, difficulty in everyday cacophony and messiness, right? There is something productive about that and it doesn't necessarily mean that these state mechanisms are unnecessary, right? Right, so this is not an either or, right? And that this sort of these messiness of the liminal and the marginal, right? What I think, Crealization does a really good job in naming, right? So Crealization is just a conceptual name that I find helpful to use for these sorts of instances, right? So these are not, these are not diametrically opposed, but I want to say that they're always included in these state mechanisms and one does, and so the manifestation of one does not signal that the other one is never always there if, but ultimately yes to all of that, so. So if you would join me in congratulating Chris on an outstanding talk.


bout the NPO. Is there any other, are there any other questions that you've heard the staff report? I'm going to declare this public hearing open. Are there any questions for staff? If not, is there anyone that would like to speak on this item? I see Mr. Bill Ripley is here. Mr. Ripley, are you a proponent or an opponent of this? A clarification and let me introduce myself. Bill Ripley, 511 South Park Drive. Mayor, fellow council members, appreciate your time. I've reviewed the changes in the ordinance and for the most part, I don't have complaints but I do have some suggestions. I know that Mike and some other folks are working on expanding housing choices and there were some things I think the council and others are in favor of as the overview states to often over time zoning rules have restricted development in many neighborhoods almost exclusively to single family dwellings eliminating many of the small scale and often more affordable multifamily options than once existed. Often referred to as missing middle housing, this project will explore ways to eliminate regulatory barriers and expand the choices that people have when it comes to housing types. But part of that same goal is anytime there's changes or to the ordinance that are more restrictive or compound development efforts that increases the cost of housing. And I mostly do small development residential and a couple of things in this proposed change. One I'm most concerned about is CBUs but I will get to that, I will mention two more. I don't know that it matters much but I was curious as to why we have a townhouse development ordinance but we're restricting, we can only have 25% of two unit buildings. We can have six unit buildings, eight unit buildings, four unit buildings but we're restricting to 25% of the total buildings to be two units. I don't know that that's, it's a restriction but I don't know it's any good for the city of Durham or there's any rational planning reason for that. Second, we have to deal with links and nodes on our new streets, new neighborhoods called the SACS connection points. And in doing such, the threshold we have to meet is sometimes hard to do because we can't find enough connections and people won't call the SACS which are somewhat prohibitive by links and nodes. And so the ordinance on page 18, here changes the degree of a road curvature from 75 degrees to 120 degrees which means we don't get credit for a node on a 75 degrees anymore. So it's more difficult in some small infill neighborhoods to meet that criteria. But most importantly is the CBUs and the mailboxes are required by the post office and we will install those. Most developers have been installing them for a couple of years now. The boxes themselves are not an issue. As I mentioned to staff several months ago though, if you have according to this chart, excuse me, didn't know there was, did I have to- I'm gonna give Mr. Ripley another minute. I'm sorry, I didn't know there was a clock here. I should have told you my apologies. Page 26, 5.4C1, the restrictions and the table of parking places for a CBUs is of two houses, we have to have two additional parking places. So if we build a two house community, we have to build a parking space and a second handicap accessible. That's over burdensome for two, but nobody's building two, but even 10 or 20, we shouldn't have to build parking spaces dedicated just for a single street or a small neighborhood. Carry and Apex have rules that accept units of 15 or 20 houses, but they do not require parking. So I would suggest that it be worded such that we can have up to 20 CBUs or 25 CBUs before parking's required. If you got 10 houses on each side of the street and nobody has to walk 350, 400 feet, that's my suggestion. Thank you. Mr. Ripley, thank you very much. I'm gonna ask staff, Mr. Stock, if you could respond to the, were you able to follow Mr. Ripley's concerns? One, as I understood, is the restrictions on the two unit buildings. One has to do with the road curvature and credit for links and nodes there and the third had to do with the CBUs and the parking requirements related to those. Those were the three that I heard. Did I get that right, Mr. Ripley? So for townhouses, right now you don't, you're not allowed any two unit townhouse development. So it was requested through other developers to add some flexibility to that requirement and it started at 20% and there was a request to up to 25% through the Planning Commission meeting, which we felt was reasonable through expanding housing choices. We're looking to expand that even further to create more flexibility with townhouse unit design. So what you're getting right now is more than what is actually on the books now. The links and node methodology, it's actually clarifying the methodology for curvature in a road. Right now it's a 75 degree kind of bend and the details of it are such that we found that actually through discussions with our development review team that developers tend to game the system in terms of where that 75 degree bend really is in a road. The number that is proposed is actually already in the ordinance and was used in a different definition within the ordinance and it was a much clearer measurement methodology to use achieving the same thing. And the third with the CBUs, USPS requires parking access, accessible parking and we developed these numbers based upon other ordinances that we found throughout North Carolina and other jurisdictions actually throughout the nation. The parking numbers that are in there can be achieved. You don't even have to meet them if you're already providing parking. If it's more of a group parking part of a clubhouse and such like that, if you're placing the units there but there would be some minimal parking requirements if you're spreading out the units throughout a single family subdivision. If I can get in with the planning department just to quickly add to Mr. Stock's comment on the CBUs. It's our understanding that there's no minimum size of subdivision that's better exempted from the CBUs by the US Postal Service. If indeed the Postal Service will allow smaller subdivisions like Mr. Rook will be describing three units, six units to be exempted from that requirement. We would certainly be more than willing to look at modifying these provisions going forward to allow for that exemption. We're not aware that one exists based on our consultation with the Postal Service. So that's why you see it like it is as Mr. Stock just said. Could you explain that again? Sure, so the reason we're requiring the parking for the CBUs is that the US Postal Service appears to require the CBUs these common boxes for all new single family developments, even very small ones. So what I was trying to get at was that if the Postal Service will allow an exemption from the requiring the CBUs or requiring parking for the CBUs, we would want to incorporate and reflect that. But we don't believe that there is an exemption for even the small subdivisions. I think we agree fundamentally with Mr. Ripley that we don't want to impose costs on small subdivisions because that does reflect the price of housing. But we are just trying to come into adherence to the US Postal Service requirements. I see. All right, thank you. Any other comments, Mr. Stock? That's all I have. Council members, questions or comments? Just a question regarding, there was a comment in the County Commissioner's notes around something around neighborhood led organizing would be prevented. I'm struggling to understand how that happens. I don't know. So with the MPO process, I'm sorry, I'm moving to a different section. There were some restrictions put in place. The MPO process revisions were removed from this. Okay. That'll come to you at a later date. All right. All right, any other questions or comments? Council members? All right, if not, anyone else would like to speak on Mr. Ripley, go ahead. Thank you. Just for clarification, San Mathews, who's the growth management for the Durham US Postal Service, says there is no exemption, as staff said, but they probably would look at a two to four lot exemption. However, there is no parking requirement required by the US Postal Service. So Durham is asking for required parking. Kerry and Apex have an exemption for 15 or 20 houses or less, not requiring parking. We do have to do the CBUs, but parking is a new thing that's coming up on this Durham changed ordinance, but not required by the Postal Service. If there is parking, they're correct and it does have to be accessible. I agree with that, but there's no parking required. Thank you, Mr. Stein. Our understanding is that there's required accessible parking at CBU locations. Mr. Young? Just to clarify, we're pretty far in the weeds here, but the US Postal Service does not require the parking, it's the accessibility code of the state building code through our inspections department, has said that because this is a location that needs to be accessible, that we need to have parking and that parking needs to be handicap accessible. We certainly, as I tried to allude to earlier, we'll explore our ability under the accessibility code to grant a lot of exemptions for small subdivisions and bring that back to you in the future. Thank you very much. Alrighty. Thank you very much. Anyone else like to speak on this item? If not, I'm gonna declare this public hearing closed and the matter is back before the council. I will need two motions, one to adopt the consistency statement, two to adopt the ordinance. And I'll just say before we have the motions, Mr. Ripley, I appreciate your coming and I appreciate your raising these things. We are also, and I was glad that staff talked about coming back to us with the expanding housing choices where we would be able to be looking at an expansion of the less restrictions on the number of the townhouses. And so we'll look forward to get that. We'll be getting that to spring. I did wanna just say that to you. So thank you. All right, council members, do I hear a motion to adopt the appropriate consistency statement? Second. Madam Clerk, please open the vote. Please close the vote. Motion passes 7-0. Thank you. Is there a motion to adopt the ordinance? If I may, Mr. Mayor, just with the adoption of the ordinance, a reminder to the adoption of the ordinance with an effective date of January 15th, 2019. Sorry, thank you. To adopt the ordinance with an effective date of January 15th, 2019. So moved. Second. Madam Clerk, please open the vote. Please close the vote. Motion passes 7-0. Thank you very much. We'll now move on to item 25, the Unified Development Ordinance Text Amendment for Private Streets. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and council members. Again, Michael Stock with the Planning Department. A text amendment TC-18-0006 is a privately initiated request by Mitch Craig of CEGrew Bank to amend paragraph 12.2.2, other forms of access to allow an additional instance where private streets would be allowed. This application would apply primarily only within the county jurisdiction. Additionally, and the reason why council is hearing it tonight, is that the existing, parts of it with existing text is revised to more explicitly require private streets to meet or exceed public street standards and add specific certification criteria. The original request applied the allowance more broadly and subsequent to the Planning Commission public hearing, the applicant revised the request which substantially limits its application and addresses many of the concerns raised by the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission at that time did recommend denial five to seven of the text amendment at September 11th. Board of Commissioners have already heard this item and approved it at its November 13th meeting. As a reminder, City Council will be required to take two actions. The first would be an action on the appropriate consistency statement found on attachment B and the second would be an action on the ordinance itself attachment C. Just to clarify what I just said, the meet of the ordinance that you're looking at tonight is pretty much a county only jurisdictional issue. The reason why you're hearing it tonight is the introductory paragraph in that section revises and clarifies how private roads are approved and that can happen within the city or the county and that's why you're hearing it tonight. So it's a technical change on that part. Thank you very much, Mr. Stock. You've heard the report from staff. I'm gonna declare this public hearing open. Is there anyone that liked to be heard on this item? Hearing none, I'm gonna declare this public hearing closed. Any comments or questions from council members and if not, I'll accept the motion to adopt the consistency statement. I'll move. Second. It's been moved and seconded that we adopt the consistency statement. Madam clerk, will you please open the vote? Please close the vote. Motion passes seven, zero. Thanks. Motion to adopt an ordinance amending the UDO. I'll move. Second. It's been moved and seconded that we adopt an ordinance amending the UDO. Madam clerk, please open the vote. Please close the vote. Motion passes six, one with council member Freeman voting now. Thank you. Thank you. I believe that there is no more business to come before this body and I'm going to declare this meeting adjourned at 9.50. Thank you all. Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, I need to correct the first. It should actually be a no for some reason it didn't capture it. Okay. On the vote, on the consistency statement vote. Yes. On that last item. Both. Both. But on item 25. Yes. Yeah. So council member Freeman, thank you, Madam clerk.


om fiscal drag. Four concerns, two of them I have to say to me seem quite major, but, despite all those concerns, how can you then sign off the residential LBT as reasonable, given that you have used the term increasingly concerned? In terms of economic theory, you would expect there to be a behavioural response to relatively high tax rates. Given the fiscal drag effects that we document, more and more transactions are being pushed into that part of the distribution. The issue is that we do not quite know how big those effects are. Are they significant, are they small, are they something that we really need to worry about or are we worrying about nothing? There is not enough evidence to tip us against saying that the forecasts are unreasonable at the moment. However, we do wish to look at this and gather the evidence that would then say that, while no, those forecasts really need to take account of this, or that it is not such a big deal as we thought. I suppose that the reason I asked whether it pushes you towards unreasonable is this. When I read the Scottish Government's devolved taxes forecasting methodology paper, when they look at the supplementary charge on LBT, the bit that was announced at the budget, they have looked at the behavioural impact. They accept entirely that there will be a behavioural impact. Their projection for that part of the tax is that they will collect £23 million next year, but they reckon that £23 million has been affected by between £8 million and £13 million due to behavioural impact. On a £23 million tax collection, that has changed by between £8 million and £13 million because of a behavioural impact. That is quite a huge slice of it. My concern is that, if that is how much that £23 million is affected, what sort of effect could there be on a £295 million? If it is of a similar magnitude—that is just a big if—but if it was of a similar magnitude, in my personal view, those assumptions or those forecasts would be unreasonable if you are just assuming no behavioural impact. What needs to happen on behavioural impact? You mentioned it to the Government last year. You have mentioned it at every meeting that you have been at from what I can see. You are now using phrases that are increasingly concerned, but they still say that we are assuming that there is no behavioural impact. At what point does that become unreasonable? In relation to the additional measure, first of all, it is a very specific segment of the market where you would probably expect behavioural effects to be far stronger than the markets as a whole. They are slightly separate bits of the market. We are hoping that the Scottish Government will give us a response in the near future to our recommendations, indicating how they plan to respond to those. I move on to non-domestic rates. I appreciate that Professor Hughes-Hallot is specialising, so there may be other comments that he wishes to make in due course. From what I can see, we are only getting a one-year forecast for non-domestic rates. Is that correct, or have I missed something? A five-year buoyancy forecast is what we evaluated. It takes account of the cyclical pattern that I discussed earlier, so what we looked at was a full five-year buoyancy forecast. On the actual numbers, I can only say a one-year's worth of numbers in the budget. Have you seen five years' worth of actual numbers? A remit tells us to focus on buoyancy, so buoyancy is the thing that we have been evaluating. I am not sure if we saw the revenue implications of those buoyancy forecasts or not, but I cannot remember, to be honest. I appreciate that your remit is different from that. I was just wondering if I literally missed it somewhere, but maybe not then in that case. Your remit is looking at buoyancy, so it is harder for you to comment on the numbers, but in terms of patterns, if one looks at the budget itself, the projection or the forecast for non-domestic rates is lower for the next financial year, in 2016-17, by about £30 million than it was for 2015-16. Given that the economy is growing, given that there are projected increases for the other taxes that you have looked at, although you obviously do not look at the exact numbers, does it not strike you as unusual that non-domestic rates in cash terms are projected to be lower in the next financial year? I wonder if that was discussed with the Government. The reason for that is the cyclical pattern that I discussed earlier. In previous years, there was no adjustment made for the cyclical pattern. The data span was not long enough to allow us to identify that pattern, but now that we have found it to exist, the Scottish Government has adjusted its buoyancy forecasts and, therefore, the non-domestic rates income to account for that. Given the position that we are in the revaluation cycle, that would reduce the revenues that we would get at that point in the cycle. To me, that might have reduced it against the initial forecast, but given the rate of economic growth, are you saying that that buoyancy change could effectively be bigger than the economic growth and therefore in cash terms you collect less? The buoyancy forecast does not take account of economic growth, so that was another issue that we have discussed. Previously, we were adjusting it, but in ad hoc fashion, given broad brush evidence in the state of the economy, what we are asking them to do in our report, what we are asking Scottish Government forecasters to do in our report, is that, once we are completely controlled for the cyclical pattern, we then want to squeeze whatever remaining information that is in that data series and relate that to the economic determinants of buoyancy to take account of those kind of factors. If I wrote it down correctly when the cabinet secretary gave his statement to Parliament on the budget, he said that he was increasing the large business supplement of non-domestic rates and he thought that that would bring in an additional £130 million. Were you asked to look at that at all or was that outside of your... Inside of our remit, yes. Okay, thank you. That's all I'm going to do with that. Into and for by Jackie. Thank you, just for a few short points really. In paragraph 121 on page 4, you discussed the challenging meetings that you have. Is that going back to the kind of relationship that you have with the Scottish Government and your independence? Is that something that, in time... Am I right in assuming that at the moment that's you who are doing that? But in time with staff and so on, is that something that would change? Well, at the moment, the fiscal commission is present and we have two part-time research assistants as well who attend the meetings as well, largely in our observational capacity. And to take away some work assignments following the meetings? Yeah, just so they know that the discussions that went on and that can inform the work that they are doing for us. And when we've taken evidence from the cabinet secretary, he has always, well, two meetings at least, been absolutely adamant that whatever changes you propose to the budget or to the outcomes that are being forecast that he will accept that. Is that what you understand it to be? So whatever you're reading and seem to be reasonable in the figures that you produce or any changes that are made, these changes would be made and presented by the Scottish Government? I think our understanding is, I believe, what he said, looking at some of your transcripts, is that he would want to go to Parliament with a draft budget only when the budget was seen to be reasonable, because now I interpret, why would you bring a budget that was not seen to be reasonable to Parliament to discuss? It doesn't make any sense. That's how I understood his thinking. I may or may not be correct on that. What we are not doing is advising or guiding. We're not doing that kind of work. So all we can do is go in and say, give us the evidence for why you've included these numbers and why you've approached this particular instrument this way and why you haven't looked at such and such, or can you take a look at such and such and come back and tell us whether that makes any difference. At some point, we think, well, they've provided adequate evidence and they've followed their model and so forth. That gives us that judgment of reasonable or not. If, for instance, we were talking about this yesterday, a forecast model might be or the forecast might be judged as being reasonable and then perhaps the next year they would stay with the same model, but a major policy change might actually knock it out of that reasonable space. So we would have to speak to that and again challenge them. That's what we do. We don't say at the end of the day, these are the right numbers. Again, it's this difference between the input numbers and the output numbers. As you might also emphasise, in this series of challenge or scrutiny meetings that we have with the Scottish Government forecasters, at no point do we say, that's it. You've done enough by this point to get a gold star and everything's going to be judged as reasonable. We're critical all the way through.  I think that I said this earlier today, which is that we don't come to a point of agreement with the forecasters. We don't say, fine, we'll sign off on this. We continue simply to challenge at the end of the day. They then create the forecast, if that's helpful. Lady Rice, you mentioned earlier in this response that you didn't come with new ideas or anything. You were simply reacting to the information that you're given at the challenger meetings. In answer to Mark McDonald earlier, Professor Leith said that there were a number of issues that you were thinking about or working on and whether the Government would accept those other issues. My next question is related to that, because it seems to me that one of the biggest change—well, not to me, but to everybody—is the biggest change that's coming down the line as the outcome of the Smith's commission and eventually Europe. How are those issues dealt with in your thinking in terms of Government thinking? Two parts perhaps to that question. I don't recollect saying that we brought nothing new to the table—I mean, the best and cleven paper, which is already just discussed as an example, that was something new that was brought. A lot of the challenge, that's all new to the conversation, so I'm not sure what I was saying at that point. Yes, of course we do, but that's the nature of challenge. We're looking for areas that may not have been addressed or thought about, or sometimes the challenges explain to us what you're thinking as in what goes into it. That's one aspect. We've been in terms of the second part of your question, and I'll give Campbell time to think of more response as well. We've been quite careful to consider and look closely at what might be the future, but we have a present right now, we have a remit right now. What we need to do is meet the exigencies of that remit at this stage, and we can't start developing a report that then starts speculating about what the legislation will mean or what the outcome of the Smith proposals will give to us. We know that there will be changes, and we are starting to plan for those and think about them, but that's really separate from the job that we have to do today. We've felt it was important to focus on what you are expecting from us and to do that as well as we can do, and not conflate those. Your question is correct if the implication is that there's a lot of change to come, and we need to be on top of that. Is that something that you can do independently, or would you be asked, for example—I suspect that lots of people are going to want to know what the financial economic implications are for Scotland in or out of Europe in the arguments that have been made—is that something that the Scottish Government would charge you to do? Assessing the cost and benefits of leaving Europe would be outside of our remit at present. Personally, given the position that I now have in the Fiscal Commission, I'm undertaking quite a wide research agenda myself, so I'm undertaking a number of projects that directly relate to what we anticipate coming down the line for the Fiscal Commission. With colleagues at the University of Durham and a PhD student in Glasgow, we're starting work on building a macro-econometric model for Scotland. We're looking at dynamic laffer curves, so how variations in tax rates affect revenues. We're looking at those calculations for Scotland as well. With another colleague and another PhD student, we're looking at big data analysis of newspaper articles to build uncertainty indices for Scotland vis-à-vis the rest of the UK and things like that. There's a whole bunch of projects under way that hopefully will be of use to our future scrutiny work. There may be others as well, because looking to the academic community is probably a first place that might look for some of those answers. I was curious to your response about when reasonable becomes unreasonable. I absolutely accept the distinction that it's not the figures, it's the method by which this is all assessed. I enjoyed reading your report from last year. I enjoyed reading your report from this year. You're consistent in asking for data on behavioural responses. You're very consistent in asking for that for residential LBTT. In fact, your recommendation is framed in slightly stronger language. I don't know whether I'm implying a frustration that you haven't received it yet or not, but I'm curious as to when you think you've given enough time for the Scottish Government to respond to that. As you described, we all can recognise the behavioural response arising from LBTT and for stalling and OBR. We're now going to get an additional behavioural response from the additional LBTT. It seems as if we've just stuck our finger in the wind to assess that. I'm curious as to when you will become increasingly impatient. I think the forecasters would concur to say that we have been more impatient this year than obviously in the previous year. If you look at their appendix, page 21 of the forecasting methodology and which the Government submitted to you, there they talk about the recommendations we made for the 15-16 draft budget and their response to those. There hasn't been much response to those, and we know that. We've had discussions about that. We know that we see the behavioural factors in particular as being quite important, particularly now that we're in a five-year forecast time horizon. That's what creates the urgency, not that we're personally getting impatient with others on a personal level, but that the forecasts are now not two years but five years. We need just better texture to what's coming out. We would hope to see some changes coming in the next round. That was the language that Professor Leith used, which was hope. Have you got more than hope? You're quite right that the action plan doesn't really tell you much about what they're doing to take forward that. In fact, there's no mention of behaviour under LBT-TT residential action, so I'm curious as to when you get beyond hope. It's up to the Scottish Government to respond, but what I would add to what Susan said is that, as our remit becomes clearer and as our own resources come on stream, we will start to do the analysis ourselves. If we think it's an important issue, we'll look at it. If it turns out to be in our judgment, we then that is a challenge of a very major sort and becomes more urgent because we've got the evidence. That's very helpful to know. I thought the minutes were extremely helpful in describing some of the discussions. What I was less clear about is, for example, in August, you asked for something quite specific on LBT-TT that was in relation to seasonality. You repeated the request in September and I didn't know whether there was anything from the November minute that indicated you got it. I'm assuming you did, but I wondered for the sake of clarity if somebody reading through not being present at the meetings whether that could in some way be recorded. Maybe a list of action points and when they were resolved. Can I look at the helpful comparison between OBR and Scottish Government forecasts in relation to LBT-TT, both for residential and non-residential? Whilst Mr Choate diplomatically didn't want to comment on whose forecasting was better, I note that their forecasting for 2016-17 is considerably lower than the Scottish Government's. 42 million is a substantial amount of difference in the residential forecasting. Is there an explanation for that in your view? OBR numbers incorporated more of the recent outturn data when it came to LBT-TT both residential and non-residential than the Scottish Government did. The Scottish Government also smooths the past few years of non-residential transactions and formulating the basis that it projects forward because of some variability from year to year in the non-residential market. That would tend to reduce things by smoothing. However, as Robert MacDonald indicated, those are not statistically significant differences given the uncertainties attached to those forecasts. They are much of a muchness. I just look at 42 million, and if we have to forego that from the budget, it is maybe quite significant in monetary terms. In terms of you said that the OBR included outturn data, is that not key in measuring what is likely to happen in the future? I think that there are different approaches. It is the part-year outturn data. The Scottish Government forecasters for landfill tax used the two quarters of data that we have on landfill data, and that is the base on which the forecast is then pushed forward. For the LBT-TT forecasts, they used the last complete year of outturn data and not the part-year data that we have been discussing in our previous session. One of the recommendations that we make is that, particularly in a year like this, where a large part of the year's outturn data has already been revealed, it might be useful to update the forecast in light of that outturn data. I was not quite sure where Gavin Brown got his figures from. At the top of page 11, the Scottish Government is forecasting revenue of £45 million to £70 million without accounting for behavioural change and for stalling. That is the Scottish Government's starting figure. The fact that it is now down to £17 million to £29 million is of considerable concern because of the drop. I accept all the analysis that they have done to get there. Does the budget include the lower figure or the higher figure as to revenue generated? The lower figure is the ultimate figure. £17 million to £29 million is what we would find in the budget, not £45 million to £70 million. Two more points, convener. I will be very quick. Non-domestic rates. At paragraph 5.14 in your report, you talk about is not your job to report on the scale of the forecast errors.  They are relatively small, because the buoyancy is essentially a forecast of the increase in the stock of rateable value properties. The revenue itself is generated by the stock, not by that increase. You can make pretty bad forecasts of the increase, but the stock is fairly constant, so the forecast error in terms of revenues is usually relatively small. That is helpful to understand what you meant there. I hear what you say about revaluation appeals happening at the beginning of a revaluation process, but is it not the case that, if you buy a property for the first time, you have six months in which to ask for a revaluation and, therefore, throughout the year, not just at key points, you would have revaluations occurring depending on the number of house sales that there are? The revaluation data that we had access to suggested that those effects were relatively small, but the revaluation cycle itself was a great deal more significant than that. Finally, on the Scottish rate of income tax, it was tantalisingly mentioned on page 57, I think that was your minute of the 23rd of September, as a discussion paper 6, and not mentioned at all in your report other than in the minute. I am curious what you see the Scottish Fiscal Commission's role to be, given that a lot of the assessment is done by the OBR. We will have a role, and we have been given some briefing on the nature of the Scottish rate of income tax. We had that early in 2015, and we have joined challenge meetings hosted by the OBR in talking about this, so we have spent some time when we could in this past year becoming more familiar with the actual tax. Our job is, as current, not future, but current, to scrutinise or assess forecasts made by the Scottish Government. If the Scottish Government produces something in relation to SRIT, we will have a role in relation to that forecast. That is on the capacity for the models that have been developed to take account of variations in regional economies. I am going to be quite parochial here, and Lady Rice, you know the north-east economy well. That is going through a particularly tough and very different time from the rest of the Scottish economy at the moment. I imagine that we have an impact on issues such as LBTT. To what extent, given the fact that this is at a very major difference in that economy, has a big economy in Scotland as an impact across the country, to what extent are the models able to take account of that kind of scenario at the moment? The current forecasting models do not have any regional breakdown at all. For example, the committee last year had evidence that the Aberdeen housing market will not return to its position last year for five years in terms of non-residential property. That is a massive impact that we have heard as well. If that comes through in the Alton figures for this current year, will that be able to be factored into models for the future? It seems to me that it could have a significant impact in terms of the results going forward. The current forecasting approach implies the distributional model of housing transactions across various price bands, but that is for the whole of Scotland. You could construct a similar distribution for a particular region that you thought was going to be behaving differently from the national average and was going through significant changes and subtract one from the other in producing the forecast. There are potentially ways of incorporating such regional effects if they were felt to be imported. The current forecasts at the moment do not take account of what is happening in north-east Scotland. The fund is quite surprising in one sense, given that we know what is happening. There is evidence there about the number of transactions dropping. I guess that I would feel insintively quite surprised if there was not an effect on the numbers next year. I appreciate that point. Perhaps we can take a way to consider it. The other related point is that the additional properties, particularly by-let market, are particularly big in the north-east. We need to think about that new tax, possibly, from that perspective. We will take that away. Thank you very much, Richard. That has concluded questions for the committee members. Some more just want to ask just to finish off the session. In terms of Jackie's question, we talked about out-term data. In 2015-16, it does not feed into the forecast for LBTT, but it does for landfill tax. I think that you said that it appears in the report, but I do not see anything in the report on that. Did I pick it up wrongly there? An explanation as to why that is a situation? It is a choice in the part of Scottish Government forecasters, but it is a recommendation that we make in the report that, particularly in years when a significant span of out-term data exists for the year that is factored into the forecast. You clearly believe that it should. That is the one thing that I always wanted to clarify. In terms of the annex 1, which was touched on, I say that it is a recommendation to the Scottish Government that it has investigated developing alternative models for forecasting house prices and transaction volumes. Examination of the requirements to develop new techniques suggests that it would take a significant period for a Scottish Government economist to produce outputs that are sufficiently robust quality standard. As such, the view is taken that forecast using these methodologies could not be utilised within the budget cycle with any degree of assurance. There is a potential to develop such methodologies over the long term with a view to utilising them in a future forecasting cycle. What kind of time period are we talking about? It is obviously a concern that it would take a significant period to produce output to a sufficiently robust quality standard, does it not? Is the Scottish Government's response in response to us pushing on this issue saying that we could look at this, but it would take a while to develop and build the expertise in house, is the word not there, in order to do this. It could give you a sense of that time frame, but at the beginning, in my opening remarks, I suggested that, in terms of what worries us or the concerns that we have, one of them might be that the Government needs to enhance its forecasting capability. That might cover the subject. You are not concerned that there is no timescale in order to produce such output to a sufficiently robust quality standard, as I have said? Yes. Of course, we have only just seen this report come out with the papers, so we have not had further discussion with the forecasters yet about what they mean. How soon would you want to be able to see that and how soon do you think it is practical to be able to achieve that? Research is always hit or miss whether it works out the way you are hoping it works out. Is this how long a piece of string looks to be the kind of response there? It should not take years and years, the initial round of modelling that we are looking for. We would like work to start on it. I think that that is maybe the most important thing. Yes, the knowledge that there is an issue. I understand that. Obviously, there is one thing that you want to acknowledge. You want to be able to deal with it. I am not supplementary on your point, convener, because I was not quite sure whether I got this right, that you have only just seen that response to your recommendations from last year's report. We have only seen this report. This table, yes. Obviously, we have had discussions about this issue in meetings and so forth, but we have only seen this report just now. I just make the observation that it might have been much more useful if you had seen it much earlier and were able to then challenge that response, because it was of course for last year. However, we have had those discussions in our challenge meetings, so that has taken place. This is the forecaster's summary of their position here. Table 5 of the Scottish Government's methodology paper shows non-residential land-building transaction tax rising by £10 million annually to 2016-17 in 2020-21. However, there is an increase in the forecast of £74 million over that period. I am just wondering if you know why that is. Sorry, which table is it? Table 5. Table 5 of the… Sorry. Is it why one tax is why the revenues from one are increasing more dramatically than the other? The figures seem to add up, basically. This one is increasing £10 million. The reason why there are differential trends between the two is that the residential one is based on this probability distribution model, so that, as prices rise, you are pushing more and more houses into higher tax bands. Those figures assume that you obtain the revenues from that. The non-residential forecasts going over the five-year period are to take the original tax base and raise it by revenue and prices without factoring in any of the fiscal drag that dominates the residential forecast. I know that it seems a bit odd that there is a £74 million increase in one year in the forecast. We are seeing only a £10 million rise increase in the methodology paper. Those two figures do not seem to add up. I am not sure which two figures are you talking about. The seven-year period is from which… 15, 16 and 17, there is an increase in the forecast of £74 million, but Table 5 of the Scottish Government's methodology paper shows non-residential IBT rising by only £10 million annually.  There are various factors for that. It seems that there has been a huge leap. I misunderstood what you were looking at. What the Scottish Government did before was to smooth the tax base for three years of out-term data before beginning the forecast, but it did not take account of the fact that you would expect prices to be rising over that period, so it was not really aggregating like with like when they were doing that smoothing. That would impart a downward bias to the forecast. They removed that downward bias in the new forecast. Also, prices and transactions are a bit higher than they were anticipating when they did the original forecast. Those two things combined result in the increased forecast. That is very clear. In your report on the draft budget 2015-16, you recommended in relation to non-residential land-buildings transaction tax that new data sources should develop as a high priority, and since then, HMRC has begun to publish data on commercial property transactions to Scotland. Does the existence of the new data mean that we can now develop a Scottish model rather than relying on UK-level transactions for the non-residential forecast? There is a reasonable span of data, so you could start to do some fairly straightforward modelling work-up based on Scottish transactions rather than using UK transactions, which is one of the recommendations in our report. Is there any follow-up point that you want to make? Thank you. We will wind up the session there. I would like to thank you very much for your contributions this morning. We agreed earlier on to move into private session, so I will have a one-minute break to allow the members of the public witnesses and the official report to leave.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another video regarding the local CTF for capsule flag competition that I put together as practice for my school cyber team and in this video I want to check out the assumption song challenge that I put together and built and I want to show you how to solve it and how to build it which was pretty simple. Check out my cool new song was the prompt and the hint was I don't hear any music is it really so when you download this you would go ahead and show in folder after you downloaded it and you'd probably want to extract the archive however Archmanger will tell you that whoa an error occurred we actually can't download this early we can't we can't extract anything out of this archive because something is apparently wrong so the ploy is that the assumption song is that you as an individual you as a computer user will typically assume a file is what they say it is although it is it is not I actually just created an image and renamed it to a dot rar file so if you were to actually run file on this file on this in this file it'll tell you that hey this is actually a PNG image data so it's actually a picture not an archive that would supposedly contain music so at that point you would oh no to open it as an image for one thing so I'll use I have known and I'll note to run it on the assumption song dot rar so simply question everything you see today not everything is what it seems so there's our there's our flag very easy very simple but I think it would drive the point home that you can't always look at or like take what you what you are receiving in a CTF challenge and know that it is what it says it is so yeah again that's our flag we'll go ahead and and add that all I'd really done with this as I found this image on Google added the flag into it and then I renamed the file not a hard thing to do I didn't actually create a script or anything to demonstrate that but that's how we solved it and how I kind of piece it together and we'd collect all 100 points for that if very easy and very simple okay thanks for watching guys on next video


Right now at Appalachian Wireless, you can get the Samsung Galaxy S7 for just $99.99 and get a second one Service agreement is required on both devices serving you for the last 25 years with better service and bigger savings at today's Appalachian Wireless Since the 1920s the United States has honored veterans during the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month It is said this marks the exact time guns fell silent in World War one For 26 years, Annie E. Young Cemetery has hosted a Veterans Day tribute High atop the cemetery hill on this honored day Veterans, state and local leaders, community members and family joined together to pay tribute to those who sacrificed all for our American freedom It's just a humbling experience to be able to say thank you to such Such a great group that just sacrificed so much. It's just so important to us to just show our appreciation These men and women don't get recognition enough. They truly give up their lives to better benefit our lives So if there's anything that we can do for them, it's just such an honor And this is one day we can all come together and just Show them the honor that they deserve Guest speaker during today's ceremony was Colonel Roy Downey an Army veteran Who says it was a privilege to be able to thank those who fought and sacrificed and to honor those who never made it home A lot of times people forget that the families make sacrifices, you know a mom that sends her son or daughter off to the military makes a sacrifice the Husband or wife that sends her spouse off or the or the child that You know doesn't get to see their dad for a year at a time, you know They all make a sacrifice the Pye County Central football team Shelby Valley Junior ROTC and Johns Creek disabled American veterans were among the groups assisting with today's Veterans Day tribute Reporting in Shelby, Anna for EKB news. I'm Shelby still