My name is Paula Newitt, I'm the Dean of Students and I would like to welcome all of you here today for the last lecture for 2014. I will begin though by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land on which we meet today. And we have met here on the final Thursday of the teaching year for every year, but one, since 2006. This has become an enthusiastically anticipated ANU ritual. A ritual of celebration, of thanks, of achievement acknowledged and of relieved gratitude that we've all survived yet another academic year. Some of you here today will know about the origins and intentions of this celebration, but for the first timers, here's the story. Picture, if you will, February 2006, a busload of exhausted ANU people is returning from a university retreat in Threadbow. Most of them are trying to catch up on sleep, but in the huddle down the back rows, three student leaders, Pazza President Brett Baker, Anusa President Laura Crespo and the immediate past Anusa President Aparna Rao are plotting with the Dean of Students at the time, Professor Penny Oakes. The students want a university to have a new teaching award, something organic and bottom-up and authentic and something designed and driven by students. Brett tells everyone about an event he'd enjoyed at the University of Utah where he did his first degree. It was called A Last Lecture and it was to mark the end of the academic year with the lecturer chosen by students in a campus-wide vote. Brett tells the group that this was an important ceremonial event that brought the whole university community together. Everyone had spent a lot of time at that retreat talking about the ANU community and how best to nurture it. So this authentic celebration of great teaching and a community event all in one. This idea had to be a winner and clearly it has been. For that, we can thank my right-hand support, Diana Withey, who's been fluttering around. Where are you, Diana? Wave your hand, please. Thank you at the back. For her unfailing organisational prowess and successive generations of ANU leadership teams, give us a wave, guys. Oh, little waves. For their wholehearted custodianship of this event. And, of course, all of the ANU academics who's inspiring unforgettable teaching energy energises students to nominate them for this last lecture. Vote for them in the final balance and then turn out today on the final Thursday to get one last taste of the winner's brilliance before year's end. Over the years, we've had Chris Ruth Smith, Hugh White, Alistair Gregg, Paul Kerwin, John Hutchinson, Ben Wellings, and last year, Kieran Kirk. That's our roll call for last lecturers so far. It is with great pleasure that I now hand over to Anusa President, Cam Wilson, who will add the 8th name to that list of inspirational luminaries as he introduces the academic chosen by the students to deliver the last lecture for 2014. Cam. Good afternoon, Noel. Today we join together to celebrate the ending of yet another academic year with the last lecture. I've always liked this event because I think it really captures the zeitgeist of the ANU campus life. The last lecture is intellectual and enthused, showing that after a year of lectures students are still eager to learn something that won't be in their final exam. It's democratic, allowing undergraduates and postgraduates, domestic and international, campus or off campus, people from courses, big or small, to have their say to choose the best lecturer. It's grateful. As rather than just criticising, we choose to promote those who've done a great job and to hold them up as an example for others. It's subject to the same standards as other lectures. I can assure you that this lecture will be uploaded, but maybe not to Waddle. But it's not perfect either, and it reflects the blemishes that we have. Since its inception in 2006, we've only had male identifying lecturers. I think this still reflects the structural sexism evident in our community. An issue that ANU Council earlier this year recognised, that as you go higher up in academia, there are less and less female academics at the top ranks, despite their majority at the student level. I would love to see a campaign in 2015 to recognise a great lecturer who also happens to be female. But most of all, I think it's a bit tongue-in-cheek and a reverent. It shows our ability to overturn the traditional power structures and to say to ANU that you may technically hold the power, but we're going to finish this year on our own terms. And what a year it's been for ANUSA. We've fought fee deregulation and higher education cuts. We've made massive constitutional improvements. We've had electoral reform, run an ANUSA review. We're still fighting to get our staff. We've been advocating on internal education matters, met up with thousands of students on welfare issues, supported fossil-free divestment, picked up our own internal policies and procedures, supported more than 100 clubs and societies, gone head-to-head on rogue-sensual motions, investigated post-staff apocalypse, had ongoing GAC reform, run the first ever ANUSA retreat, coordinated the biggest safety on campus campaign ever at ANU, been on the news on the TV, radio and internet, been active on 20 committees and working parties across the university, revived committees, run fantastic O-Weeks and Bush Weeks and had the best-ever handover from the amazing 2014 team who has earned the right to be proud to the new and capable 2015 team who I have no doubt will about to earn the same right. So, I can think of no better way to cap off the year with our very own last lecture. Allow me to introduce the speaker. Dr. Yannis Ziogus was born and raised in Greece, studied classics at the University of Thessaloniki and completed his PhD in Cornell in 2010. After a brief stint at University of Adelaide, which will pretend didn't happen, he settled at ANU and started teaching up a storm. He's written a book which he mentioned received good reviews and upon doing research myself, I can tell you received at least pretty good reviews. And he's finishing up a second book. Dr. Ziogus received an astonishing 85% of votes from his class, meaning that out of all of his students, 9 tenths of them went out of their way to vote for him, which is almost unheard of. I'm expecting to see the same rate of completions from sorts and all of you as well, he intends. Speaking to some of his students who decided to run a campaign for him, they're waxed lyrically about his love of teaching, his wit and perhaps his intentionally humble mantra, Latin is hard to learn but easy to forget. Chatting to him, I was curious to see what kind of letter he had for the lack of better phrasing charmed the pants of his students. From the moment I walked into his office in the depths of the 80 Hope building, I was greeted with warmth. And as we chatted, I found more and more about Yannis, who isn't just simply a great letterer, but someone who truly belongs at ANU. Yannis told me his story about his first week teaching at ANU. He came into a class, started to explain a passage to them and found that the whole class didn't really get it. In his own words, it was kind of awkward. Yannis took this away and realised that he's the people who didn't actually get it as well, it wasn't just his students. He wrote an article on it that went on to be, in his own modest word, moderately successful. In this way, I think he really embodies the idea of research-led education, a phrase that's thrown off and round at ANU. He's an individual who's able to draw from his research to teach, and from his teaching to research. As a student representative who sat in on a million stuffy meetings at the ANU Chancery, being bludgeoned to death by buzzwords, I'm happy to hear that this concept is alive and well. Yannis has an obvious respect for students, which is evident in the way that he teaches and interacts with them. When asked about his pet peeves for lecturers, he told me that he hated when lecturers said that they hadn't prepared, not because they actually hadn't prepared, but because it showed that they were trying to get the class's expectations down. So, since he's made his own bed, we're going to force him to lie in it. I ask you all to raise your expectations to hear a talk titled, titled, Can We Live Without the Classics? I present to you the last lecturer for 2014, Professor Yannis August. Well, thank you very much, Cam, especially for promoting me to a full professor. That was good.  I mean, listening to you, I could barely recognize myself. But I mean, you did a fantastic job. This is what the occasion demands. So, it's customary to say nice things about the speaker so that the audience gets interested and excited about listening to the talk. So, it would be completely out of place, for instance, to talk about the failures and rejections of the speaker. And I'm glad that you silenced what I told you that I had a really hard time learning Latin at the beginning. But if I were to introduce myself, this is exactly what I would talk about. We learn much more about the character of a man or a woman by observing how they behave when they're vulnerable and defeated, when they feel helpless in doubt about everything, not when they're doing fine. Success is relatively easy to handle, but it's the way we deal with challenging situations that makes us who we are. These moments forge our characters and define our future. To quote the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus, a person's character is his destiny. And actually, the Greek word character derives from a verb that means to sharpen, to make, point it, or to scratch. So it's the rough edges of our lives that chisel our characters. So since Paula and Dina basically gave me free reign to talk about whatever I like, this is exactly what I'm gonna do. So I decided to spend this last lecture trying to answer a vital question. Is there life in this world without classics?  All you're gonna get is my entirely biased and subjective view. That's all I have to offer you. So in order to answer this question from my point of view, I'll start by talking a bit about my rough times. So I'll take you back to the time when I was finishing my doctoral studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And as you can see, this is a place that is a bit colder than Canberra. This, as you can see here, a Galwin-Smith hall with its Greek architecture. This is where the classics department is based. And I took those pictures five years ago, and back then things were kind of hectic and it wasn't because of the cold. That was the dawn of the global financial crisis and the prospects for a career in classics looked pretty gloomy. Studying the literature of ancient Greeks and Romans sounding like a luxury our troubled times could not afford. My scholarship money was generous, but it was running out. That year I had applied for more than 80 academic jobs. I got a couple of job interviews, but no job offer. So in sum, I was broke and demoralized and could not see a way out. And besides, I had just received reports of two anonymous readers on an article I had submitted for publication, and they both rejected it. Now, needless to say, that was... All this was kind of hard to stomach. Doing a PhD in classics was a serious commitment. I had left Greece, the country where I'm from, my family, friends, the people I love, in order to go to the U.S. and devote myself to Cornell's rigorous PhD program for five years. Now, I was facing the serious possibility that all those sacrifices were for nothing. So I was stuck and seriously considering giving up classics. I was considering a life without classics. But I had made up my mind to finish my doctoral studies first. So I kept working on my dissertation, which partly dealt with the archaic epic poet Hesiod. And it was Hesiod who unexpectedly gave me courage during those trying times. But who is Hesiod? I'm sure you've all heard of Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but some may not have heard of Hesiod, who seems to have been unable to escape the role of playing second violin to Homer's first. But Hesiod deserves our attention. And he deserves our attention. One of the reasons why he deserves it is that he's the first personal voice in Western literature. In his poems, he tells us his name, his origins, he talks about his hardships and his struggle to overcome his poverty in his cold and barren fatherland. He shares with us his family problems. He recounts his miraculous encounter with the Muses and talks about his humble work as a shepherd in Rokiaskra. His voice, coming out of the depths of what is unglamorously called the Dark Ages, shed light on questions that still haunt humanity. How was this world created? What is the relationship between human beings and those powerful beings we call gods? Is the world we live in friendly, hostile, or indifferent to human life? Does the growing human population pose a threat to the environment? Can we as individuals make a difference in this world? Hesiod is also a poet whose range of vision has no parallel in the ancient world. His diverse interests range from explaining the origins of the universe to giving advice about nail clippings. Now, this extraordinarily broad worldview is why his reception in antiquity was multivalent. In the ancient imagination, Hesiod could be the father of scientific truth, the first philosopher, a religious authority, or a fanciful poet, a fraud responsible for spreading lies and deceptive tales all over Greece. A number of works were attributed to Hesiod in antiquity. The most important were the Theogony, an epic poem which is the oldest Greek source that offers a systematic explanation of how the gods, the universe, and humankind came into being. The catalogue of women, which focuses on the affairs of gods with mortal women, and is the sequel to the Theogony. The offspring of these unions, the heroes, eventually overpopulate the world, and Zeus, the supreme god, decides to relieve Mother Earth of their burden. He causes the Trojan War in order to decimate humanity and then puts an end to intercourse between gods and mortals. Hesiod's works and days deals with our world, a world that followed the separation of mortals from immortals. This is a post-Lapsarian world in which human beings struggle to survive without much divine help. Hesiod is a pessimistic point. He calls his and our race the Iron Age and introduces it with a deep sigh. I wish I were not counted among this race of men, but rather had died before or be born after, he says, in the works and days. This is an age of injustice in which family ties collapse and wrongdoing, hardship and pain rule over the world. All toiling humanity, says Hesiod, will be blighted by envy, grim and strident envy that takes its joy in the ruin of others. Well, now, frankly, this doesn't sound like a point who could cheer me up back in my days of doubt and disappointment. The world is going down the drain, says Hesiod. Labor is humanity's curse. The world is tough. It's out there to crush all of us poor, ephemeral mortals. But strangely enough, it is a passage from the works and days that really helped me get out of my rut. This passage, by the way, is the most often quoted passage of Hesiod in the ancient world. So, here it is. Let's have a look at it. Hesiod admonishes his foolish brother, Persis. You can choose to have evil and heaps of it, too, for its how lies near and the path to it is smooth. But the mortals decreed that man must sweat to attain virtue. The road to it is steep and long and rough at first. But even so, the journey gets easy when you set foot on the peak. Now, this famous passage comes down to us with a multitude of interpretations and variations which it has been accruing for centuries. Some of these readings are shameless distortions of Hesiod's text. Plato, for instance, who didn't like Hesiod, he does not quote the passage in full. He leaves out the last line which says that one can achieve virtue and argues that Hesiod ultimately encourages vice since virtue is so hard to obtain. Now, the poet Tirtius is more interesting. Tirtius manages to make this passage fit in his martial agenda. Let everyone strive now with all his heart to reach this top of manly virtue with no slackening in war. So goes Tirtius' trumpet of war. So, Tirtius emphasizes the epic associations of virtue with manliness, and this is an essentially Homeric meaning. In martial epic, heroes stand out as individuals when they do a lot of killing on the battlefield where men gain glory, as Homer puts it. But one of the most fascinating aspects of Hesiod's passage is that it denies the militaristic value system of martial epic and redefines virtue. The works and days tells us that men do not excel by waging wars in remote lands for no obvious reasons, but by working hard in peace. And what is more, behind Hesiod's attack on traditional notions of virtue lies the socially rebellious message. Virtue was closely associated with aristocracy. Only noblemen could achieve it in the archaic world. But Hesiod tells us that all we need to do to achieve excellence is work hard. Lobility seems irrelevant. This is a revolutionary voice of extraordinary power. Hesiod knows that if we want to change the world, we must start by changing the meaning of words. His faith in the power of individuals opened the way that led to the miracle of the Athenian democracy. So the message of this lesser known archaic Greek poet is part of a sociopolitical change that can make the French Revolution look like a footnote in Western history. Now, part of Hesiod's lasting appeal, part of Hesiod's lasting appeal in this passage is its educational value. Poets in antiquity were not entertainers or reclusive intellectuals. They were the educators of humanity. In order to make his point, Hesiod transfers the abstract concepts of vice and virtue to the physical landscape. The path that leads to the house of vice is smooth and easy while one needs to climb a steep slope to reach virtue. And as any good teacher knows, using visual metaphors and illustrations to represent abstract nouns greatly improves learning. Now, the Sophist Prodicus, one of the first professional educators, also knew this very well. He took Hesiod's didactic strategy a step further. First, he turned the concepts of vice and virtue into vivid personifications. And second, he employed Greek myth in order to convey his moralistic message. In Prodicus's version, the young Hercules stands at the crossroads and faces a dilemma. Two women, vice and virtue, give the young hero advice on which path to take in his life. Virtue is a fair and sober woman dressed in a modest robe. Vice is luxurious. She wears high heels. You cannot see them in the painting, but they are in the text. And she wears a gaudy makeup. She also wears a see-through gown and keeps eyeing herself and looking to see whether anyone noticed her. Now, they both try to entice or rather seduce Hercules to their lifestyles. Vice promises a life of pleasure and an easy life without sweat and hardships. Virtue directs the hero to a career that is full of hard work but leads to honors and distinctions. And in Hercules's case, the steep path of virtue led to Olympus since the hero was defied after his death. So Virtue's road to happiness is arduous and long. Vice's path to pleasure is easy and short. So it is easy to see that this is a version of Hesiod's lines. Xanophon, the author who attests the story, is clear that Prodicus's fable is an elaboration in Hesiod. And Prodicus's version has prevailed and is still the lens through which many read Hesiod. The Sophists' moral reading has become the standard interpretation of the works and days. This is certainly how Plutarch, for instance, read Hesiod or the Roman poet Ovid. In a playful twist of Prodicus's story, Ovid casts himself as a young poet uncertain about what career to follow. Should he keep writing love poetry or should he get serious and compose a tragedy? Two women appear as the young poet is pondering which way to take. The personification of love-eligy is dressed like a prostitute, while the incarnation of tragedy looks like a proper and virtuous matron. But unlike Hercules, Ovid chooses vice, at least at the beginning. So he follows love-eligy first but promises to write tragedy in the future. But Ovid can't have it both ways. In the end, he did them both. He wrote both tragedy and elegy. So thanks to Prodicus, Hesiod has commonly been read as a moralizing poet. He is often compared to the prophets of the Old Testament, if he's lucky, though more often than not, he is cast as a wise grandpa who is blothering his moralizing stuff. An arcane Greek poet who can rest in peace in the quaint libraries of classical studies. But here is the catch. Hesiod is not a poet who is preaching. He is a poet who is giving practical advice. His famous passage from the works and days can be read without resorting to moralizing interpretations.  Now other translators render cacotes as wickedness and arati as goodness. And everyone used to interpret these Greek words in moral terms until Martin West in the 70s argued convincingly that cacotes and arati are not vice and virtue, but inferior and superior standing in society associated with material prosperity. Now these changes are reading radically. Hesiod is concerned with financial prosperity, not with ethical standards. He's not talking about moral fiber, he's talking about social status. He basically says, if you want to have a high quality of life, you have to climb the steep slope of hard work. There is no easy way to excellent.  So the point is not talking about ethics in general, but about work ethic in particular. Glenn Most translation readers cacotes as misery and arati as excellence. So let's have a look at it. Misery is there to be grabbed in abundance easily. For smooth is the road and she lives very nearby. But in front of excellence, the immortal gods have set sweat. And the path to her is long and steep and rough at first. Yet when one arrives at the top, then it becomes easy, difficult though it still is. In another translation that came out just a couple of months ago, Richard Hunter translates cacotes as wretchedness and arati as success. Hesiod's language is witty and paradoxical. He makes the abundance of misery a marker of emptiness. Easy things are plenty and readily available, but more often than not, they lack substance. I confess that I found the material reading of Hesiod more appealing than the moralistic interpretation. It was the concrete economics that moved me, not the abstract ethics. Being poor and wretched is the easy way to go, says Hesiod, while getting out of misery is a tough marathon. And as the specter of unemployment was staring at me, I found Hesiod's assertion that hard work would pay off incredibly inspiring. And I kept wondering, where on earth did Hesiod find the courage to make such a claim? He lived 25 centuries before the Enlightenment. In a world where the concepts of independence, personal progress and meritocracy were supposedly unknown. He struggled to make a living in a poor town, experiencing the injustice of the powerful on a daily basis. He was robbed of his inheritance by an irresponsible brother. Where did he find the strength to say that things would look up if we keep working hard? Well, if he could do it back then, I had a better chance in the 21st century. So as I was having all those thoughts, I realized three things. First, I would stick to my guns and keep working on what I really like.  Third, studying the ancient Greeks and Romans did not feel at all like a luxury we couldn't afford. Quite the contrary, it looked like something we desperately needed in periods of crisis. Now, I said that I preferred the financial to the ethical reading of Hesiod, but the important point is that the passage from the works and days does not make a distinction between the two. Hesiod can be integrated into an economics lecture in a free market, as well as into a philosophy class on ethics. In fact, we can easily follow the thread that leads from Hesiod to Adam Smith. That takes us to Virgil. Hesiod inspired the georgics of the great Roman poet Virgil. In this work, Virgil describes the amazing world of the beast as a model for the ideal Roman society he envisions. Now, surprisingly, Virgil's beasts are not an indistinct swarm, but are driven by personal ambitions. An inborn passion for gains spares on the Attic beasts each after its own work. Virgil's beasts are Attic, a reference to the famous Attic honey, but also an allusion to the Athenian democracy, a political system which made the individual pursuits of its citizens the building blocks of a stable society. Many centuries after Virgil, the Dutch doctor Bernard Mandeville published his fable of the beast, a satire inspired by Virgil. In this funny poem, Mandeville playfully contents that the absolute selfishness of his beast guarantees the harmony of their community. Millions endeavoring to supply each other's lust and vanity. Thus, every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass, a paradise. Now, this work is tongue in cheek. Pretty much a parody of Virgil and Hesiod. Mandeville blows out of proportion the interplay between social morality and individual ambition that we saw in Hesiod. But be that as it may, no other work influenced Adam Smith more than the fable of the beast. So the line that connects the founding father of modern economics to Hesiod is not the fanciful thinking of a classicist, but pretty much an undeniable fact. Now, all this talk about financial times may strike some as surprising given the current debates about the value and future of the humanities. Lectures from the arts are expected to criticize our money-oriented world, the corrosive obsession with wealth that has been destroying the moral basis of our society. A new genre of articles and books lamenting the decline of the humanities in our profit-driven world has been growing rapidly. The authors of this stuff refer a passionate defense of the arts and present a bleak image of the destructive greed that characterizes the current political, economic, and educational landscape. They bemoan the tyranny of the numerate over the literate. Now, I would not dispute that the humanities can very flourish in the current climate. Making a living as a classicist often feels like living exiled in a Hesiodic dystopia. But complaining about the unjust and evil system seems to me like the easy way to endless misery. In my view, the challenge is to show that the humanities are indispensable. To lament their decline is the easy way, the cliché. The steep slope that leads to excellence is to work hard in order to bring the classics back to the core of the academic curriculum, not to sink into a gloomy nostalgia of bygone glories. Now, this slope gets steeper and rougher thanks to several popular beliefs about the classics. Many think of the great works of Greek and Roman literature as obscure, impenetrable, yet strangely enough at the same time it is commonly considered that classical works are defined by their clarity, the straightforward way in which they can express eternal and universal truths. Nothing is farther from the truth than this. The reason why we still read Hesiod is not because he has a simple and straightforward message, but because his language remains mysterious in its simplicity. His concepts of Areti and Cacot is malleable and applicable to diverse contexts. His diction easily appropriated for a multitude of purposes. The magic of the classics consists in their capacity for endless transformation, not in their stability. Those seemingly fixed and monumental texts have the ability to morph into various shapes at the hands of different readers, simultaneously fashioning and changing the readers who engage with them. Metamorphosis is what makes the classics timeless. Now, that's an important point. It's important because the protein nature of classical texts educates those who study them in diversity and tolerance. The defenders of literary studies are often eager, even anxious, to argue about their continuing relevance in rapidly changing world. But in my view, we hardly need to argue about the relevance of classical literature. Those texts have been showing for centuries that they have an almost miraculous ability of adapting to an extraordinary variety of places and times. What fascinates me more is that classical literature brings us in touch with words that are radically different from ours. The works of Homer and Virgil can speak to us directly about times and societies where the beliefs and value systems look very strange from our perspective. This peculiar feeling that what we read is both strange and familiar defines the great works of classical literature. These works are like the stars, remote signs from the past that help us navigate across an ocean of time. Classical literature help us to discover where we stand in our world, but also makes us think about other worlds and opens our minds to accepting beliefs, ideas and cultures that are very different from ours. Reading the classics is like falling in love. We're attracted to a man or a woman not only because we're recognizing them a part of ourselves, but also because we see in them a world we have never encountered before. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, the French literary critic Roland Barth divides the effects of reading into two. Pleasure and Jouissance, a word that is hard to translate in English. Jouissance denotes both intellectual joy and sexual ecstasy. So the French, obviously, can bring the two together, but the English has a hard time with this. So this is a term that unites mental delight with carnal satisfaction. For Barth, there are two categories of texts. On the one hand, texts that treat readers as passive recipients, while on the other, those which compel the reader to take an active role in reading, to break out of his or her position as a subject, to negotiate and re-establish the meaning of texts. The texts that treat the reader as a passive subject are entertaining, but the texts that demand the reader's active participation are far more rewarding. Entertaining texts makes readers feel comfortable and safe with what they are reading. They are readable and readily available. By contrast, the texts of Jouissance impose a state of loss, disturb the reader's cultural assumptions, and break linguistic norms. To read these texts, we need to be inclined to climb the steep slope of haesiotic excellence. These works are challenging, even dangerous, but extremely satisfying. They shape our characters by asking us to reshape their interpretation. Classical literature is full of texts of Jouissance, works that take the readers out of their comfort zones, that invite them to re-act, to re-enact and rewrite what they are reading. One of the biggest failures of classical studies is that it has often sanitized classical literature. It removed its sting to bring Euripides and Novid into safe, sterilized classrooms. We stifle those powerful authors with political correctness and trigger warnings. But Hesiot's works, Euripides's tragedies, Proticus's lessons, and Ovid's poems are not safe texts. These works provoked, enraged and caused violent reactions. They were burned and banned. Their authors reviled, banished, sentenced to death, and destroyed pieces. And here lies the value of classical literature. It does not flatter our prejudices. It does not confirm our assumptions. It is here to turn our world upside down. The survival of the classics is not a testament to their universal acceptance. Their survival is the triumph of resistance. Bard's analysis of the erotic nature of reading is actually thoroughly explored in classical literature. The Latin word Gaudium fully captures the meaning of the French Jouissance and Latin poets constantly draw attention to the textual and sexual pleasure of reading. And no one has explored this exciting dimension of literature better than the Roman poet Ovid. In his works, he exploits the full semantic rage of the Latin word Corpus, which can describe both texts and bodies. Ovid liked to tease the intellectual and sensual desire of his readers. As we read his works, we are constantly invited to construe meaning and thus to control the text and dominate its author. But the more we control meaning, the more we desire to know more. Like the sea goddess Thetis, Ovid's texts shift, change, the tighter we grasp them, the more inevitably they elude us. Ovid empowers his readers only to expose them to the impossibility of desire, the impossibility of finality in learning. In his works, knowledge is the most irresistible temptation and the ultimate aphrodisiac. By contrast, his predecessors, Lucretius and Virgil, these are the Roman poets who followed in Hesiod's footsteps and wrote an adactic poetry, they considered passion the enemy of work. Lucretius wrote a monumental epic on the nature of the universe and from Lucretius's Dererum Natura derives the motto of our university, Natura imprimum cognoschererum. In this work, we can also read the theory of evolution many centuries before Darwin. Darwin pretty much reinvented the wheel. So, Lucretius argued that passion, amor, incapacitates reason and poisons all sources of pleasure. For Virgil, amor is a destructive madness. Against this background, Ovid composed his art of love, a didactic poem that promised to teach men and women the art of seduction. Critics often note the playful and subversive nature of Ovid's art. Instead of the serious pursuits of philosophy and agriculture, Ovid opts for the frivolities of extramarital affairs. Instead of encouraging men to work hard, he teaches them to enjoy love affairs at leisure. And instead of giving moral lessons, he teaches adultery. Now, what have received far less attention are the particularly efficient educational strategies which Ovid employs in his work. In my view, Ovid is the most deductive of all didactic points. He boosts his authority as a teacher by casting himself as a practitioner of the art he is teaching. As an experienced lover, Ovid is qualified to initiate his students into the art of love. Now, even more impressive is Ovid's strategy of teaching love by making his students fall in love with what they are learning. It is indeed an outstanding achievement for teachers to transform their classrooms into a re-enactment of the very subject they are teaching. And Ovid's art, from that perspective, constitutes the pinnacle of educational theory and practice. His teaching philosophy that passion is not incompatible with hard work and systematic work thoroughly subversed the traditional lessons of didactic points, who see amor as a force that distracts men from serious pursuits and ultimately ruins their lives. Ovid would have none of that. Giving up what you like is the easy way. Pursuing your passions and following them wherever they take you, now that's a serious job. That's a Herculean labor. Which brings us back to Prodicus. Prodicus elaborated on Hesiod's paths of misery and excellence. He cast vice as sensual and shameless, its personification a provocatively dressed woman. By contrast, Verdi was modest and abstemious. Prodicus' fable is attuned to the socio-political hierarchies of the Athenian democracy.  So we can easily discern that this fable targets young Athenian men who were Prodicus' students. The students are invited to identify with a young Herculus. And the message is pretty clear.  Other authors such as Diodorus Iculus build on Prodicus' social profile of virtue and vice and shift the moral sense of vice and virtue to slavery and freedom. Giving into temptation makes us slaves, while abstaining from easy pleasures is the hard path to freedom. The Delphic Oracle gave a similar advice to the Spartan law-giver Lycurgus, and we can see that the dilemma between freedom and slavery appealed to the Spartans. Now, Ovidus also very interested in the politics of desire. He actually erred a one-way ticket to the Black Sea as a result of his interest in sex and politics. When the Emperor Augustus offended by the art of love relegated him to the edges of the then-known world. Ovidus always good at upsetting clear-cut moral dichotomies. His art of love boldly challenges Augustus' moral legislation and further problematic is the moralizing reception of Hesiod. Ovidus here to tell us that subjective desire cannot be divorced from scholarly or scientific pursuits. That our passion for progress is both sensual and intellectual, our motivations simultaneously mental and material. Contrary to what Prodigus, Lucretius and Diodorus believed, our passions cannot enslave us without setting us free. But it is time to conclude. Now, a sober way of summarizing my lecture is to say that I offered you a reading of six lines from Hesiod's works and days. That's a sober way but probably not the best way of advertising it. But it's fair enough we saw how this passage changes as it travels through time from archaic Greece to our age. A more attractive summary would probably be to say that it was a kind of a time travel, a trip to the past. I talked about progress, individual goals and action plans, concepts that may strike us as modern but can be found in the work of an archaic Greek poet. I realized that my focus on the past contrasts with the concepts I explored. Concepts that make plans for the future. Yet the way we think about the future would have struck the Greeks as bizarre. We think of the future as something that lies ahead in front of us while the past is behind. So progress is forward movement. In Greek, however, the word that means behind refers to the future. In Homer the human beings that are behind are those who are yet to be born. And when the historian Herodotus refers to the books behind he's not talking about the preceding books of his work. He's talking about the following books. Now this may strike us as strange, even absurd, but it is not. It is just a different perspective. The image is that the images that we have are backs to the future which is unknown and invisible and we move backwards. All we can see is the past in front of us. And in fact the idea of the future as the days behind is not exclusively Greek but it is also found in Hittite and Vedic. So while we can conceive of a dark past and a bright future, other cultures would find those concepts almost incomprehensible. We can see the past but the future lies in darkness. We're all children of the past and shedding light on it on what gave us life reveals who we really are. So let me finish by finally trying to answer the question that is the title of my lecture. Can we live without classics? Can we live without Homer? Without Hesiod? Without Virgil? Without Ovid? Well the answer is yes. We can certainly live without those guys. We can even have a very comfortable life without them. But it is also true that we can never be ourselves without them. Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. I am Kimberly Ashby Mitchell, Communications Officer at the Postgraduate and Research Students Association, PASA. Both our President Ben Niles and Vice President George Carter were unable to bring greetings as a result of scheduling conflicts. And since all the stars were lined in my favor I am here with you to bring greetings on behalf of PASA. Dr. Ziorgas I am certain that I speak for all present when I say thank you for delivering such an engaging lecture full of passion and appeal. I must admit that coming into this hall today I had no idea what to expect since I have no background in Greek mythology. That is the beauty of the last lecture. Others, like myself have now been exposed to new and exciting material that resonates with us. I must also admit that my PhD supervisor is probably now quite nervous that I am expressing such awe and curiosity about your field. Since in a recent Veroni news article Dr. Ziorgas is courted saying that during his time lecturing at Cornell University many students came to study economics and ended up doing PhDs in classics after sitting in one of his classes. It has certainly been a fantastic evening where we have been able to acknowledge the dedication of one of our lecturers and also acknowledge the strong support of students particularly those in the classics. To all in attendance we would like to thank you for coming out and listening to the last lecture. I take this moment to tell you that drinks will be served shortly out on the lawns. In bringing this evening's proceedings still close I will now read the ode to end the last lecture. It seems a welcome journey that we look so gratefully to the end of this academic year we still take the effort to listen to one last lecture. We have no obligation no monetary or assessment like intent to be here but still we fill this hole not afraid to learn and give. We demonstrate respect for this institution of learning and the values that it brings collegiality commitment pride responsibility freedom service prepare to put those books on their dusty shelves and dismantle the study places those nooks and cranny like retreats. Please join me now to thank Dr Ziorgas as he exits this hole and thus ends the 2014 academic year.


Hey guys, how are you today? Alrighty, I am here to bring you this month's design team challenge for my rubber stamp line Which is stickers now in case you don't know. I have my own line of rubber stamps. I wrote a book last year I've got a bunch of digital downloads artwork. There's a set of downloadable prompt cards That you can buy in my all available in my Etsy shop So and there's more things coming out at the filming of this. There's more things coming. I can't talk about yet These are my rubber stamps. These are all 11 different sets that I have currently available at the filming of at this time and We are going to Do some fun things I want to give you some ideas of stuff you can do with these and create some inexpensive cute unique stickers Using these stamps or any others Alright, so before we decide what stamps we're using and I think I kind of already know already, but We're gonna take some stickers now. I know a lot of you are thinking, you know, okay I don't have a sticker machine. I don't have the money to go by like fancy like sticker paper You don't need any of that stuff. Alright, so I'm gonna prove it to you So this is my bought my bin from my shelf behind me That says packaging stickers labels and receipt paper because literally that's what it is. It's actual receipt This is from some fabric. I bought a hobby lobby. They gave me the thing So I stuck it in here. These are rolls of adding machine tape and receipt paper and different kinds of found and Stickers and things I've been given to me. These are luggage tag stickers from a cruise I went on with my husband. These are airline suitcase stickers from the last time I have a few of these from when I've gone on trips. These are the leftover bits and You know, so most of this is just paper. These are from prescriptions The most of it is just paper that can actually be thrown away this part These are actually labels that generally speaking go on your prescription bottle, but not always So I have those that needs to be thrown away. I Have priority male labels, we're actually gonna pull a couple of those out because I'm ready to use those I found a whole thing of reinforcement whole reinforcements in a drawer somewhere. So those are in here. I've got A sticky Label that was from something I ordered in case I wanted to return it They sent an extra self-adhesive label. Well, I never did return it and I have the label So I'm gonna use that so I have all these kind of things I've been saving you don't I have more of those like FedEx labels You don't need to have fancy stuff. Just stuff that you find we're gonna act think use these and I'm gonna use some of these Luggage labels too. Yeah, so let's see if I can So the first thing you want to do with some of these is you want to You can use it as is but I like to put like put a thin coat of gesso on here So that's what this is and I'm gonna actually just do it this way If I can get the top off there we go There we go So I'm gonna just take a little bit of gesso That's plenty that might be too much and I'm gonna take an old gift card And I'm gonna just push some of those barcodes and printing Into the background of the sticker. I'm not gonna try to cover them up completely. That's what I know That's way too much gesso I'm not gonna try to cover them up completely, but I want them to be less obvious This is what you do when you're trying really hard not to make a mess and failing completely All right, okay, so we're gonna do that and then let's give it a dry I don't want to just leave it with the gesso I'm gonna put some color on there. I just grab literally just grabbed some random colors This is distress paint in broken China Gonna put a couple of drops This is Americana neon paint and toured orange. That's plenty This is Claudine Helmus studio dash of red. I Had this little bottle for a long time Whoa Okay, we're not gonna add any more that because it's a lot of that. All right, then we're gonna take the same gift card So use colors that you know we're gonna, you know blend Fairly well and not create too much mud Because for the most part you don't want too much mud. I'm gonna take what's left on here I'm gonna grab my little delusions journal been a blank page Okay, now before I do anything else. I think I want to Take this sponge applicator brush thing And I'm just gonna impress a like a little pattern in the wet paint. So we need to dry that again Okay, we're gonna let that dry a little bit I'm gonna set it aside before we do anything else with it And in the meantime, we are going to take these priority male labels and these have already been painted a long time ago And I'm going to take my art doll set of stamps out Which is set number 10 and let's take one of the doll bodies. I want to use this one I suppose if I'm gonna play with stamps. I actually need to get out some ink. I would probably be helpful I have lots of different kinds of ink, but for this we're gonna use archival ink And the first thing I'm going to do is stamp a doll body And I think I want to stamp it on this one get it nice and inked up And then I'm going to stamp the body then I'm going to take one of the faces And I think I'm gonna do This one Stamp that over here in this little white space that I have then I'm gonna take one of the faces This art doll set comes with faces. I've got one of those Try to get it in the oval Without smearing it, hopefully Then I have a number of different little embellishments that will fit in the art doll body from a couple of different sets and Let's actually see actually I think I want to stick with my original idea.  Now we're going to cut these out Not right on the last stamp line just a hair outside the line and then the face Now if you wanted to do this and you wanted To you could there are a pair of wings on here There are also words in most of my sets of stamps. You could Stamp an inspirational word Let's not forget our little heart Okay, so then I'm gonna zoom in So then we can kind of do a build a sticker now You could do a bunch of these different parts bodies faces and Embellishments of wings or no wings and you could have a sort of build an art doll doll sticker set That you use or gift to a friend. I'm going to peel hopefully I'm trying to do this that my glasses on that's probably not a great idea Just FYI Because I can't really see what I'm doing Or I need a pair of glasses. All right, let's see if this helps. Oh Yeah, I Can see the set edge All right So I'm gonna peel off my face and put it on my doll body I'm gonna peel my heart Sounds really bad. I'm gonna peel my heart Okay, got it. Woo-hoo. So you have to kind of fold back a little corner until you can separate the layers and then you can peel it I'm gonna put my heart here And then she's ready to go You could build the little art dolls and leave the backing paper on them and put it in a Little something with a note to a friend that it's a sticker and they can peel the back off and stick it To an art journal page, but how cute would she be on a tag or on a journal page? Um Cute cute cute, right? All right So I hope that gives you some ideas of what you can do with the stickers The other thing you can also do is make some stickers that are for happy mail. So this kind of luggage tag Thing is really Great, let's see So let me grab this one from this set here. This is from set number six And I lost track of what I'm doing. Okay, so You can use this sort of thing that you've gotten on your luggage from Leftover from a trip. I never throw this stuff away. I always use it to make some kind of custom sticker Because how cute is that you could stick that on happy mail? You can stick it on a journal page You can make a whole sheet of these stickers and this particular set has three of these little Like doodled drawn squares Now ideally you want your paint to be completely dry when you do this I'm doing this and it's just slightly damp. If you do it and you get paint on the rubber red rubber stamp. That's okay Just make sure as soon as you're done that you clean it right away You can stamp with these on With black paint instead of with ink. I have done that again. Just make sure you take your stamp right away And you take a baby wipe and you wipe the paint off and get it out of the holes of the stamp If you need to get a little finger brush in there and clean it up. All right I'm so inspired by these cute little art doll stickers that to make to do a journal page like right here on this page So we're gonna do that really quick just a really quick page This page already has paper on it from just leftover paint that I scraped on here With a palette knife or a gift card, and I honestly don't remember which now at this point. There we go. Got it Sometimes getting these stickers started and getting the backing peeling peeled is a little tough But it's well worth it. They cost you nothing there we go look around in your office and Maybe your husband's office ask permission first if it's not your office See if you have old shipping labels or that sort of thing That you're not using and use those and I found a quote here in my quote box that I thought would work on this page So I just thought we'd toss something together really quick. It doesn't have to be complicated At all now if you're worried about the stickers not sticking well to your page then a little bit of gel medium under and over them or Mat medium would not be a bad idea. I'm not worried about it. These are shipping labels. So they are We're gonna stick really well I'm gonna trim this a little bit so it's straighter and cut the words apart. I think I want to do some splatters I think I think So we're gonna take some white paint. This is just a maracona Craft paint and it the color is white wash. Okay, my other ball it bottles empty. So we'll open a new one Just need a little bit Water we'll do this before we put the words on now. Remember I said I used Archival ink so I usually use archival ink because I can't guarantee what I'm gonna do is not gonna get wet at some point And being able to get in here with the baby wipe and wipe the splatters off is a good example of that So I don't have to worry about the ink moving or going anywhere. So now we're gonna give it a quick dry Hope it's dry We're gonna glue our words on and I'll probably put enough matte medium on here to put a coat over the dolls to ensure that they Stay on there. I'm going to not use that gift card because it's really gross. All right. Let's use a fresh one How cute is that simple page? I didn't do too much to it and it's cute. I really like it. Holy moly So there you have it something sweet something simple something quick With just what I had laying around So I hope that gave you some ideas of what you can do Don't forget to like share and subscribe if you want to buy a set of my stamps or Anything else for my Etsy shop to help support the channel The link is in the description below along with the links to my Facebook groups my Address for happy mail my email address if you want to ask a question anything like that It's all in the description below. Check it out. Don't be afraid either to leave a comment here in the video I do respond to them every day or at least I try to every other day at the most Don't forget though the most important thing to go out and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it I'll see you later. Bye guys


Crafting everything in Wizard101. Today we are crafting the clear hatching slot elixir also known as the Perot's Potion. For this you need 1200 gold, 100 hatch peppers, one glass vial, 25 black coal, and 25 peridot. This recipe can be bought from Dr. Perot in the Pet Hatchery. Hatch peppers can be obtained through the hatch making kiosk by offering your pets and letting other people hatch your pets in the kiosk. Black coal and peridot can be obtained through crafting vendors around the spiral. Glass vials can also be bought from reagent vendors. To craft this elixir you need to use the basic crafting station. Once crafted you can find this elixir in your elixirs tab in your backpack. Equipping this elixir will reset your hatching timer so you can hatch another pet. That's another step and our goal of...


Welcome back. You're still watching Plus Politics, so the 20 presidential aspirants will contest the presidential tickets of the ruling of Congress, APC, and we'll slug it out. Other parties, presidential primary slated for May 13. Now, several of them stepped down when Mr. President Muhammad Abu Hari insisted that any public office holder who wanted to run for the office of the president on the platform of the party had to resign. Now, some of the aspirants who are still in the race include Senator Bola Ahmed Tinibu, former governor of Lagos State, Vice President Yemi Oshiba Joe, and former transportation minister, since resigned, Rotimi Ameichi, also former Niger Delta Affairs Minister, Senator Gossel Papi is also resigned, is in the race, former Minister of Science and Technology and Innovation, former state governor, Senator Ibi Kunle, and most of them and others. Joining us to discuss these aspirants is Heway Samuel, he is a lawyer. Samuel, good evening to you and thank you for your time. Good evening. Thank you for having me. All right.  Everybody's running. Interesting. Interesting. What are your thoughts on the president's stance? I mean, when the whole talk about the electoral act and the provisions and clauses that should be there or not be there, especially that regarding or requiring public office holders disappointed to resign, some people had said it wasn't really even about the law that before now politicians, governors and presidents had requested their appointees to step down if they were interested in elections. I mean, in River State and some other states of governors, like we can't go, had a habit of the tradition of telling the aspirants who are appointees in his cabinet to resign. We've seen that at the presidential level as well. Looking at what Mr. President has said, do you think that that's that ferrari, you know, the opera and the whole drama regarding the controversial section of electoral act was necessary? Do you think it was necessary? Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. So maybe we'll just take a foray into history. Now just like you said, it's not new, all right. And we've seen governors who asked political appointees who have the intention to go for political offices to resign. And the rationale behind that is really the fact that if you are pursuing a political office, you will have that span of attention for the office you have been appointed to preside over. So for example, you are a minister of transportation and you're running for president. Running for president takes a whole lot. You have been given an assignment to run a ministry and now you're running for president. You'll be distracted. So the philosophy behind resigning is very, very, very, very, very good. Now previously, 30 days to the general election, political office holders who intend to contest for elections are required to resign. Section 84, so 12 of the current electoral act has now said if you have an intention at all, not even 30 days before, if you have an intention before you go into the primaries resign. Now I think it's a very good provision because it gives the political space some sort of seriousness.  You would recall that an individual had gone to challenge the provisions of Section 84 and maybe as you say, unfortunately, what I mean, the court ruled that Section 84, so 12, is null and void. The court knocked it off and even instructed the attorney general of the federation to get the section of the electoral act. What interestingly, an appeal was made on that judgment and the court of appeal nullified the decision of the court below. So what it means effectively is that as we speak, Section 84, so 12, which mandates political appointees who have an interest or an eye for political offices, elective offices should resign. And going by that, the president has directed or ordered the ministers who want to go for presidents and ministers who are going for any political office at all to resign. And I think that's the best thing to do, basically, and I will commend the president for that. But the president, Mohamed Buhari, and indeed the attorney general of the federation in the midst of Justice Aburah Malami, SDN, had taken the national assembly before the Supreme Court over this Section 84, sub-12, like you talked of, mentioned, electoral act 2022, the section which passed political appointees, like Malami himself, seeking elective public office. So, I mean, what do you say to this? The fact that this is before the Supreme Court and the case that was adjourned till Thursday? Great. So the president, when he was signing the electoral act, you will recall mid-reservations, had reservations, mid-comments on Section 84, sub-12. So his proposition was that the section itself shouldn't have been there in the first place. And it was on that premise that he himself and the attorney general of the federation had challenged that decision, so the one you refer to as the Supreme Court. Now the president having reservations about Section 84 and still going ahead to direct ministers to resign just shows you the fact that the president will abide by the provision of the law as it is, not as he wants it to be. So as it stands, even though the president's preference of having Section 84 sub-12 struck out, even though that's his preference, but as we speak currently, the position is that Section 84 sub-12 remains. And the president, I believe as a Democrat, is bound to obey the provisions of the law as it's currently stand. So if the Supreme Court hears the president's case and decides that Section 84 sub-12 should not be there in the first place, then the president can say, you know what, this is now the position of the law. To ministers that I have, you can continue without resigning. But as it stands now, the president's preference, going by what he said, when he signed the act, when he signed the bill into law, is that Section 84 sub-12 shouldn't be there. The Court of Appears said Section 84 sub-12 should remain there, and it was on the back of that that the president went ahead and said, you know what, ministers resign. So he obeys the law, not just the way he thinks it should be, but the way it sees as at the particular point you're taking that decision. So you're saying the president has ordered his appointees who want to be president to step down in deference, or rather in obedience to the electoral act 2022. Exactly. All right. Isn't there... So you're saying he doesn't want to do it, but he has to do it because that's the position of the law? Yes. Isn't there a place in law, in jurisprudence, if I can use that term, that would allow the status quo to continue until or would allow a state of execution of any law as far as it's before the courts? Great. Now, you see, the way the issue of state of execution works, you don't just file an appeal and expect that filing or that appeal to act automatically as a state, right? So you need to secure a state of execution. So as we speak, there is no state of execution on the decision of the court of appeal. So you need to file a separate application? You have to file an application for state, to understand. And again, the matter of the Supreme Court is not an offshoot of the matter at the court of appeal. I don't know if you understand that. So it's not as if the president appealed the decision of the court of appeal. So the president filed a separate action. Taking the national... Yes. So the one of the court of appeal now is an offshoot of the one decided by the Federal High Court, where the Federal High Court held that Section 84 should be expunged. So people appealed, some individuals appealed against that decision, and the court of appeal nullified the decision of the court below. So once that is ongoing, the president also has a suit on the same subject matter at the Supreme Court. So the president's action on the Supreme Court is not an offshoot of the one at the court of appeal. And just like I said... But it's the same clause 84, 12 of the Act. Yes, same clause 84, 12. So if we have different judgments, what happens? So as it stands now, if the Supreme Court gives a decision, right, if the Supreme Court gives a decision on the matter currently filed by the president and the attorney general, that will become the position of the law. So if the Supreme Court says Section 84 of 12 remains, that becomes the position of the law. All right? Because the Supreme Court is the final court. So that becomes the position of the law. So what happens to... So of course, the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. So all the courts will have to submit to a decision. All right. Interesting. No. So we have the likes of Senator Christen again, means of labour and productivity. We have the likes of Apokamalami Essayen, who we here wanted to be governor of his state. Now deciding how to stay put. They have stayed put. We have the likes of Rotimi Amici, who resigned. If the Supreme Court rules in favour of Malami and Buhari, as far as Section... Or clause 84, 12 is concerned, what happens to the likes of Amici? Can they be recalled? No. You see? You should understand. Can they be reappointed? Let me tell you. They resigned too early. I'll tell you how it works. Yeah. You see, the position of a minister, it's an appointive position. So the president, at his pleasure, appoints the minister. And it's a matter of policy for the president. The president can as well say, you know what? Even if there was no Section 84 of 12, he can say, if you have any political intention, I don't want you to be here a hundred days before the election, election primary. So you can tell if you know you are not seeing any political ambition one year before the election, just go. Because he appointed them. He can dismiss them. This is his personal choice. It's at his prerogative. Exactly. He irrespective of the law. So he can, irrespective of the law. If I appoint you, let's say as a special assistant. And I believe the job I have given you, you're carrying, you're beginning to do something that will interrupt your concentration on that job. I can ask you to go. So for example, the president has asked the minister to oversee transportation. And the minister is now busy with other things, pursuing his own personal ambition. The president will definitely feel that this man is not going to be serious with the job I've given him. So you know what? Instead of being distracted, you can go. That's not even an issue of Section 84 sub-12. It's at his prerogative. So if the Supreme Court tomorrow says Section 84 sub-12 remains, it's not a ground for the president to say, you know what, don't resign anymore. Because even without Section 84 sub-12, the president could have still asked those who have political ambitions to resign because he appointed them. And he can tell them to go at any time.  Oh, I ask you to go because of the law as they stood at that time. Now the Supreme Court has come to a rescue, looking at all the constitutional provisions that said it's clause 84 sub-12 was flouted, including the African charters that were cited.  Of course. What will you say? No, but you see, as president, you can appoint, dismiss, appoint for five times and above. It's at your pleasure. So he can call them back? He can call them back. What will you say? So for me, what I would advise is, and like I said before, it's a good policy to ask those who have political intentions to resign. And it's just because even in the private sector, if you are a director in a company and you want to contest for the House of Assembly, what it definitely means is that you will not put so much attention on your desk, your job. So what the company will do is either grant you a leave of absence or tell you to resign. You can be pursuing House of Assembly election and be a director in a very serious-minded company. So the same thing, government or governance is serious business. You can't head an agency and you're running for governor, governorship. You'll be distracted because to contest for governorship, you have to meet with the delegates. That means you won't be at your duty post. All right. All right. I mean, some of the ministers or the political appointees in the Buhari administration who have taken a step back and rested their ambitions for now, of course, the big one, we have Avoka Balamiesi and the AGF. Apart from him, you have the likes of the Minnesota State Petroleum Resources, Chief Timmy Price-Silver. Yes. The Ministers of Women Affairs, Mrs. Pauline Tallinn, who all pulled out of the race. Some people have said that these individuals, of course, I can't forget the likes of Senator Chris Ngege, Ministers of Labour and Productivity. Now, some people have said that these ministers who initially were nursing presidential ambitions or governorship ambitions or whatever ambitions in the 2023 elections are imposter and they should not be allowed to continue in their position. So what do you say to this? So well, people have their personal opinions. So whether or not people feel they are imposter, I really can't tell. All right. So people can, people have different reasons for declaring intentions to contest for anything. So we made a joke of me, you are asking whether or not I have collected my form or declared for presidency. I can wake up tomorrow and say, you know what? I want to be president. And I can give posters, e-flyers, post it everywhere just to gain that clout and popularity. Whereas within me, I know I really do not have the intention to do that. But that intention is really within me. So I can't tell. So if the Minister of Labour, Senator Chris Ngege, was if he didn't have it in mind or he didn't have it seriously in his mind to contest in the first place, I mean, that's within his own prerogative to know. I can't say really for a fact that Mr. Ngige was just trying to prove that. Very quickly, let's look at what Fermi Falano Human Rights Activist and Lawyer is saying. He is saying that the likes of Malami and Ngige have exposed the country to what they call the radical with their U-turn. And he is saying that after participating in a farewell meeting, they had a farewell meeting for them, that the two ministers should not be allowed to return to the Cabinet to function as ministers. Okay, so you see what Leonard Silk was saying basically is that, you know, if you are appointing a minister, it has to go through the approval of the nationals of the Senate, right? So if a minister resigns effectively, so we don't know what played out around that resignation, right? So whether or not they actually tender their resignation letter, we did not see any letter, all right? So if in effect they tender their resignation letter, and I think a professor wrote a counter to what Leonard Silk, Mr. Falano, said. So for me, if the ministers wrote a letter of resignation and effectively resigned, before they can get back their position, they need Senate confirmation. And that's the point Mr. Falano was trying to make. Okay. But if they did not effectively resign, they only had the intention to resign because all we see are the things we see on the screen. So it's possible before the farewell meeting, there was actually, the Senate vote, there was actually, maybe that was just for the screen, maybe there was no effective resignation just yet. So but if there was an effective resignation before those guys can come back, they need Senate confirmation. I wish you had more time. Very interesting submissions by you, you're a good lawyer. Thank you very much for your time. Ehieue Sanwell is a legal practitioner, he's been a guest on the second discussion right here on Plus Politics, and we would surely be looking at these issues as we inch closer to the 2023 election. Thanks for staying with us. We've come to the end of today's show, Plus Politics Returns Tomorrow. I'm Kofi Bortales.


The Nigerian military has disclosed that two more Chibok girls, Yana Pogu and Rejoice Sanke, have been rescued in Borno. The theater commander in the northeast joint operation Hadin Kai, Major General Christopher Musa, disclosed this to newsmen in Medugri, the state capital. The general officer commanding seven-diffusion Medugri, Major General Shuaib Wadi, who presented them to the media, said they would be handed over to Borno state government after undergoing medical examination with their children. Wadi said Pogu, who is at number 19 on the abducted Chibok girls list, was rescued on September 29, 2022 with four children, two boys, and two young girls. In Meriri village, Bama local government area by troops of 21 Ahmad Brigade during clearance patrol.


Our first caller is Oliver from Michigan. What's up, Oliver? How can we help you? What's your question? Hey, what's going on, guys? So I've been running Maps Anabolic, the at-home mod, for about nine weeks now. And I'm just looking for ways to improve my deadlift form and was wondering if there's any specific trigger section or body weight exercises that might help me out there. Oh, great question. First off, how's the, because we, maybe people listen and don't know this, but we put dumbbell-only modifications in most of our programs so people could do them at home with just dumbbells. How is that working for you, by the way, otherwise in the past nine weeks? It's been great. The programming has really allowed me to make some gains while being at home. It's also helped with just connectivity and slowing things down and working on form as well. Excellent. Now, in your deadlift, where do you feel like you have the problem? I would say keeping my shoulders rolled back. The hip hinge, not so much an issue, but keeping my shoulders rolled back is a little bit harder, especially without the bar. OK, so a couple of things I would recommend. One is to do prone cobra as a priming movement before you do your deadlift. So prone cobra, if you're not familiar with the exercise, we have it on our Mind Pump TV YouTube channel, but it's phenomenal for what you're talking about, a scapular retraction. And then the other thing I would recommend is to do one-legged deadlifts with your shoulders pinned back. That'll really help you out. OK. I just was answering, literally, a similar question on the forum this morning. So that single leg deadlift is exactly what I recommended. So that's the way I go. I don't know if you've gone through my Instagram, but I was posting that for a while, probably down in the last year or some time. So if you go back enough video, as you can see me showing the technique of it. But it's tough. It's a challenging exercise to get good at. But once you get good at it, you'll see some serious carryover into your deadlift. Definitely. Cool. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. No problem, ma'am. Thanks for calling in. No problem. Take care. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that if they get good at a single-legged deadlift with weight, their normal deadlift is going to skyrocket. I noticed that myself. I didn't think I would have that much carryover, but it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it's interesting. It reveals a lot of the imbalances, especially when you do it with one leg. And that's what I love about that. And two, to bring those shoulders back and everything, I didn't bring up. But just our wall test is great for that as well to work on. Well, I think everybody needs a little hip strength and stability. And I just think that's one of the best movements for it. And I don't care what level you're at. I can regress that all the way down for a 70-year-old woman that's doing it or somebody who is a 25-year-old athlete that can lift 400-plus pounds on a deadlift. You can make that exercise extremely difficult. And you can make it, and you can regress it enough to where you can do it with somebody who's very old. Exactly. But yeah, that prone cobra has got to be one of the more underrated movements. I don't ever really see anybody do it. But what a great movement for people, especially for posture and just to activate that mid-back. Yeah, especially to prime right before you go to do that. Totally.


Okay. Thank you very much. Bogota is not as large as Mumbai, certainly, but has seven million inhabitants and it has a very high density, about 220 inhabitants per hectare. I'd like to first say that if we have private property and market as the best way to manage most of society's resources, there is not much we can do about income inequality, but we can do a lot for quality of life equality, especially for children. Quality of life in terms of housing, of health, of access to parks, recreation, music lessons, sports, education. It is realistic to strive for a city where nobody feels inferior or excluded. I'd like to first mention that in the transition from 35% urban to 75% urban population in Latin American cities, population in Latin American cities grew by more than 1,000%. Population of Indian cities will be, I mean, India now has about 35% urban population, as I understand. Therefore, if the same were to happen, population in Mumbai would be 10 times what it is today in 40 or 50 years. Maybe that will not happen, but at least it will be three times more. But I don't see any reason why it would be very different than what happened in Latin America, but let's say it would be at least three times as much. There are slums in practically all developing country cities. Therefore, these long problems is not because we have had a bad government or a bad mayor or a bad president. The system of private property of land does not work for the case of land around cities, because if it was a matter of a bad government, maybe there would be some cities where the problem would not exist. Clearly, what it does not work is the system of private property of land that is not working anywhere in the world. This is in Dar es Salaam. You see, there are no streets, nothing. It's a very curious case of messiness. Or in Philippines, the Asian type of slums around railroads always. This is in Kenya, in Nairobi. The inputs for housing are land, construction, materials, labor and finances, which can be finally income loans, government subsidies. As countries get richer, all inputs become more accessible, construction materials, higher salaries, higher finances, but land does not increase. Land is as inaccessible as at $8,000 income per capita, and it is at $300,000 per capita, because private property does not work, and free markets do not work in the case of land around developing country cities. Right supply increases when prices go back down. This is the essence of the market of capitalism. This does not happen in the case of land for housing. We can increase prices all we want, and the supply of land, which is accessible to utilities, to jobs, to schools does not increase. Therefore, I don't understand why we still continue to adopt private property as the means to manage most land around growing cities.