Hey Virgo! This is Kelly from House of Virgo doing your next 24 hours love reading. This will be for Virgo Sun, Moon Rising, or Venus. This whole channel is strictly Virgo, so welcome! If you're new please do hit the like, share, and subscribe button. Remember to hit the notification bell and also remember to enable that in your phone so that you will know when I upload. I usually upload around the same time every single day. All right, let's see. If you'd like to get a personal reading Virgo, there's a link in the description box below. And everything you need is down below. You can also check out my other channel, Moonpitero, to get more readings. Okay, let's take a look here Virgo. Let's look at the past.  Okay, present six of wands, five of wands, and the five of pentacles. And in the future we have judgment, the star, page of pentacles. Okay, so Libra Gemini and a lot of Aquarius Scorpio energy thus far. Okay, let's take a look and see what the love messages are here for you Virgo. Virgo Sun, Moon Rising, next 24 hours. What does Virgo need to know in regards to their love life, their relationship? Can we know about Virgo? Okay, separation. Time apart from your partner is on the horizon. Okay, that could be coming up for some of you. It could already be occurring at this time, still ongoing, romantic feelings. Your feelings are real and worth exploring. I feel like there is an energy here of like taking some time out to try to figure out how you feel about somebody or your person doing the same. Okay, getting to know each other as you reveal your innermost selves to each other, your bond deepens. All right, so there is an element here of taking some time out to assess, you know, or just feel the feelings, the romantic feelings to explore. You know, somebody here exploring how they feel about the connection might be an element of getting to know one another, taking that time to reveal. Okay, getting to know the self or connecting with this, connecting with each other. And I just feel an element of revelation here, you know, and judgment is here. So that could be something in the future. Past position, though, the King of Swords page cups in the full, I do feel like there was someone in your past with that King of Swords energy, no matter who it might have been, this person was very strategic, intentional, not an overly emotional, you know, cuppy kind of energy. This is just someone who was more cerebral. But with the Page of Cups, I feel like there was some type of an offer or some communication from this person, light and sweet. For some of you, it might have been an apology, but the fool is here. And I feel like there was someone here in the past that was on board to take some kind of a chance with you or have a new beginning or, you know, maybe this person came into your life from a distance in the past. There was a lot of communication from this person. I feel like there were kind of low on the emotional train, but high on the intellectual train. Okay, so there might have been like a very cerebral type of person, but someone who when they communicated with you sent like kind of a lot of nice messages to you that can be a card of new love, you know, that kind of thing, volunteering or offering up loving communication to you, but I'm going to pull some clarifier cards because I want to look at the King of Swords. Okay, yeah, this person, Page of Swords, this person, some of their communication was sweet and some of their communication was direct and to the point. So I feel like it was a mixture of both with this person and that Page of Swords, this person might have been a little bit gossipy or chatty, you know, very curious about you always, you know, seeking to get the truth about something. Let's take a look at this Page of Cups and see what the energy is. Okay, the Knight of Pentacles. I feel like this person had good intentions with you in the past. I do. I feel like, you know, this person, the reason for the loving communication from them was I feel like trying to move a relationship, you know, putting in some effort trying to move the relationship but slowly, but in a positive direction. You may have, there may have been travel, it might have been long distance or you guys, this person came to you or you went to them or there was like an offer to go somewhere together, take a chance, have some kind of new beginning with you. Let's take a look at the Fool. Okay, the Hermit. Hmm, this person I feel, I was going to say felt, but I feel it's like this person was willing to come out of like hiding. I feel like they have kind of a loner energy, that's Virgo energy there. I feel like this person had kind of a loner energy, introverted, kind of kept to themselves a lot. But with you, or yeah, with you, it seems like they were willing to take that risk to come out of their shell, you know, and try to have something move forward. But they might have had, it feels like there may have been some, like they were spying on you or just maybe there was an element of like, they needed to have truth. And so they may have had like some obsessive tendencies. Okay. This person, I feel like there was some trust issues. This person had some trust issues. Okay. Yeah, definitely. Let me take a look. I want to see this separation because I feel like there's a, there's kind of this like taking time out right now to explore how if there's romantic feelings, if you both know each other well enough to keep it going or to move it forward. Okay. But in the present, the Six of Wands is here, victory with the Five of Wands. This person, they see here that there are challenges to your relationship. Okay. They don't want to be without you, Virgo. And with the Six of Wands, this person really wants to be the winner in this relationship. Like they want to be able to overcome whatever challenges they are that you guys have or had in the past. I don't, there's something here about the separation. Let's see. Why was there separation? Oh, look, Virgo, the emperor is here. So I feel like you're a person separated from you or is going to just remain in that position if there was some type of, I feel like there's a reassessment of their feelings. Okay. Let's take a look at the romantic feelings here. Yeah, the Two of Wands. That's another exploring energy. So the Two of Wands is kind of like trying to make a decision. They are, this person is assessing how they feel about you. If there's romantic feelings, they're exploring their loving feelings for you, like what's there.  I feel like this person is going to reveal. Let me take a look here. Oh, yeah. That's a huge change for this person to open up and reveal how they feel about you and really take the time to get to know you better. Even if you guys know each other, this is like getting to know each other on like the innermost feelings. Okay. To deepen this bond, I feel like this person is really thinking about you and wanting to do this. Let me take a look at the Six of Wands here in the present, this victory card. Okay, King of Pentacles. This person wants to show, show both that they're stable or that they're financially stable. I don't know if that's something that you needed from them. For some of you, maybe you did, but it's not also financially that they're solid, that they're a good leader, that they're someone that you can count on. I feel like this person, that's Virgo Tarris Capricorn, wants to show you this and also express how they feel. Let me see here, this Five of Wands. Because that Five of Wands, you know, there's uncertainty here, but there's also an element of like realignment. There may have been consistency. Maybe they were inconsistent in the relationship. Okay, but it's all about change. It just kind of feels like this person, they want to overcome obstacles and be the winner. Look, the fool's here again, so we have Aquarius Energy. Yeah, this is a risk now, this person, it feels like they're willing to take to start this new, I feel like this person has been trying to start having this, has always wanted to go on, like have a new beginning or have some kind of adventure with you, like take a chance with you, but I feel like they weren't really sure how they felt or asking themselves, like taking that time apart to see if they could give you what you need in this relationship. Let's see, the Five of Pentacles. Okay, the moon, yeah, I feel like this separation is bringing up a lot of dark energy for this person, and the moon can be, you know, all about trusting their intuition. And I just, the moon energy, Pisces, this person kind of has very deep feelings, but there's something here about you guys being, not being together feels uncomfortable for this person. Yeah, ten of wands, it's too much of a burden.  It's like the ten of wands makes me feel like it's very stressful. They feel exhausted when they have to deal with things on their own. It's almost like they need you to help them. There's a bit of dependency on you, emotional dependency. Yeah, they're not really telling me, I don't, let me see, why, all right, so I do feel like there's separation here. It's strange because it's kind of contrasting, right, because it's like this person doesn't want to be without you, but there's challenges. I don't, it's not telling me whether something ended or not. Did something end here? Hmm, hang on man, well it was kind of a stalemate. I feel like yesterday's reading with stalemate was over, and I don't know if that will resonate for you, that Piscian energy again. I feel like this person, there needed to be like a fresh new outlook on this relationship for your person. They needed to be able to see something differently about this. I feel like there might have been a lot of holding on, but no growth in this connection. So going forward, this is beautiful. Judgment, the star, and the page of pentacles. So I am feeling like there's some type of renewal and possible reconciliation coming through. Like there's this total revealing. Your person is, I feel like they're making a final decision. They're coming to clarity, opening up. I just heard Sweden, I don't know what that has to do with Swiss chocolate, Swiss, Sweden. I feel like this person is opening up, will be telling you everything. Coming out of the dark, coming out of a closet, coming out and opening up, bearing everything to you. Yeah, night of wands with passion, so much passion, and there's healing here. The star card, this person could be in the public eye, or there's just a healing energy with the star. And again, with that star energy, there's renewal. Both are renewal cards. There's going to be communication coming from them, going forward. They are going to talk to you, but they want to talk to you about these changes. They want to make these changes and push the relationship forward and have progress, like a turning point. Because I feel like this person is really taking it seriously to explore how they feel and making some kind of decision and looking forward to the future. Let's look at the star card. Okay, yep, karma, that's judgment again. Okay, opening up, healing this relationship, that's Scorpio energy. So this person, it feels like, you know, karma can always be that kind of like what goes around, what comes around, goes around, and so on and so forth. But it really just feels like total clarity that this relationship can work as long as they get into a healing mode and they're, you know, like they save two people up to want to heal it. And I feel like some of you do want to heal this, and I feel like this person does too. It's like a wake up call. And this person is very like passionate about you, Virgo, could be in a fire sign. But this person has like such a strong, like a lusty thing for you, the very free spirited or the becoming very free, it's like freeing themselves to be able to move forward towards you now. Okay, taking action. What's this communication?   There's an energy of like, you know, my dreams, my hopes, everything I would want is Virgo. And telling you this and wow, it's like going to, it's going to be a surprise, I feel. Oh gosh, Page of Cups to sharing their love and their emotions. Yes, along with their ideas and their plans of things that they want with you. Ace of Cups and telling you there's like a brand new beginning happening here. Proposal even talking about it. It feels more like discussing marriage, discussing changes, emotional changes, like a proposal, maybe a new baby, talking about this relationship, bringing healing and hope into this relationship. This is what this person wants. Okay, and this, it's a one, so it's new beginnings, initiation, courage, this person taking the leadership role in the relationship, you know, being courageous, having that willpower. Maybe they didn't do that before. I feel like there was a many attempts, this person made many attempts to take these risks with you. And these challenges, some of the challenge could have a lot to do with either they, like it was like two people being in a connection, but both were lonely in that connection. The fool is like, could be about immaturity, some of the challenge you could have to do with their immaturity. And I feel like this person, that's what I was saying here with the emperor, you know, wants to, you know, really sorting to see if they can really meet your needs that you need from this person, male or female. Mostly their finances, you know, having financial stability is really important to this person. Let me see. I just want to get another card for the fool. Wow, you have this star again. My gosh, I just want to tell you, I don't know who this is for, but some of you are connected with an Aquarius, Sun, Moon, Rising, or Venus because there's a lot of Aquarius here. Okay. Again, healing, growth, renewal, so much reconciliation and renewal and this connection is coming forward that this person wants. Oh my gosh, this person's gaining hope, like hope. I don't know what's going on. What is giving them this hope about your relationship? It's like this person's hoping for a miracle. Let me see. The three of wants, they're waiting. This person is waiting for you. You know, they're willing to put in that teamwork and see if they can, we can, you know, I'm just hearing, can we expand on our relationship and just move things forward? I feel like I want to pull a card for karma, for judgment. Yep, six of ones again. We keep getting repeating cards, so the message is pretty much the same. This person wants to win. They want to win you over. They don't want to be like the winner. They want to be the winner of your heart and there's good news coming here. This relationship, whatever this connection is, whatever is going on, I feel like this person maybe just needed time to understand how they were feeling, to really explore their emotions. I don't know that they ever truly really looked to see how they felt. Maybe they were just doing the day to day with you and never truly looking to see how they felt about both of you or taking it seriously. Okay, I'm going to pull some love cards here and see what the messages are. How this person, what are their feelings that they're exploring? What are these deep emotions? Okay, they did give us a card here. I took the easy way out. Yeah, I do feel like this person did that. They just kind of ignored their emotions and just kept things very cerebral like I was saying, but not much in the way of the cup energy. I feel like if there was any cup energy between the two of you, very light, loving communication, but very light like flirtation, cute texts, cute phone calls, cute messages like the flirtation, but no, none of that deep emotional, you know, what else? Okay, past life love, your soul remembers this intense connection. So you guys, this is a past connection. This is a past lover. You may or may not be with them right now. Okay, or somebody that you knew that, you know, you met them before. Let's see. Okay, I hid who I really am from you, right? Yep. And I feel like this person, your person hid their deepest feelings and emotions from you and either ran or just took the easy way out, didn't want to, didn't want to talk about them. I definitely feel like they don't, they never intended to lose you, but they just really didn't understand that they had to reveal their inner, like how they really feel inside in order to deepen the bond. It feels like this person is coming and making those changes. I remember every detail of that day. I wish I could take back my words. The timing just wasn't right, but now the wheel of the year is here, and this is all about timing and a turning point here. I feel like time, it was just a matter of time. I'm afraid to contact you. Yeah, right at the moment, I feel like this person is still sorting themselves out and still sorting out how they feel. But I do feel going forward, they will contact you and there will be communication about this and how they feel. You speak to me through music, so that might be playing out. I lost myself for a little while. Okay, and that's something they'll tell you in this separation that they were kind of lost. They weren't sure. They didn't know what to say or what to do. You were the best thing in my life. Yeah, I don't really feel like anybody's ever come as close for them to even consider how they feel about a person. Sometimes I stay awake thinking about you. Wow, Virgo, I don't feel like this person has ever forgotten about you. There is a regret for lying to you for something and the lie could have just been hiding. Okay, keeping on, you know, a false mask. I hid who I really am from you and I feel like that's what that person was lying about their authentic self, their truth. There was a fear somewhere that you wouldn't like them or you wouldn't love them or that there would be rejection. Yep, you came closer than anyone. That's what I was saying. And they're really considering it. And if you guys are in separation at this time, they're looking at this like, wow, I don't know what they're looking at, but they're looking at something that's like, wow, I'm starting to understand our connection and see that's what's going on right now. This person exploring their deeper feelings. I feel like in a lot of ways they didn't understand this relationship. What for some of you this person and you connected and it started out as just like casual and then feelings developed. I don't know that this person expected that I want you. So now that's where they're at. Now they can't stop thinking about you. I know I messed up everything. You may not have even expected this to come about. I am becoming a better person. This person is definitely changing. I know that I crossed the line with you and I do feel like they're trying to change those things about themselves and trying to make these beautiful changes here. I feel like they value you and I feel like they always did, but it was mostly like it seems like this person had a hard time valuing themselves or even feeling like they were worthy of a relationship. Okay, but some things are changing here. The table's a turning and it's going in your favor and you know this person, I feel like they come to terms with how they truly feel and there's this communication where you guys start talking again and really try to get to know each other. Not from what's on the outside but the inside. They're coming to a place of understanding and the bond begins to grow even deeper. You know it's not spread out across. It's a dive deep to connect. So wow Virgo, I hope that that resonates for you and you see that coming for you in the near future. I wish you guys all the best though and I will see you tomorrow. Have a great night. Bye.


Welcome back everyone to Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinforce 22, I'm John Furrier. My host Dave Alonzo, we've got a great guest with Cisco, Eric Costelin, technical marketing engineer. Cisco Systems, great to have you on. Thanks for coming. Hi, thanks for having me. Of course we've done a lot of Cisco lives, Cisco events, Barcelona, US. Know a lot of folks over there. A lot of great momentum, supply chain challenges, but you got the cloud with a lot of networking there too. A lot of security conversations, dev sec ops. The trend we're hearing here is operations. Security and operations. What are some of the business realities that you guys are looking at right now are focused on from a Cisco perspective and a landscape perspective? Well the transition to the cloud is accelerating and it's really changed the way we're doing business and what we do. Now this combined with the more and more remote work by remote users and also the consumption of cloud based tools to perform your business functions has dramatically changed the contour of the business environment. The traditional trust boundary has evaporated or at least transformed dramatically. But you still have those requirements for trust, for micro segmentation. So what we've seen is a dramatic change in how we do business and what we do. And this is essential because the value proposition is enormous and companies are able to pursue more and more ambitious objectives. But from a security point of view it's quite challenging because on one hand what we call the attack surface has increased and the stakes are much higher. So you have more sophisticated malicious actors taking advantage of a broader security target. In order to conduct your business, in order to maintain business continuity and achieve your objectives, you need to protect this environment. And one of the... Sorry, just to clarify. So the value proposition is enormous. You mean the value proposition of the cloud is enormous. Exactly. So the business is leaning in big time and there are security consequences to that. Precisely. And one thing that we've seen happen in the industry is as these components of the business environment change, the industry has sort of bolted on more and more security solutions. But the problem with that is that's led to enormous complexity in administering security for the company, which is very expensive to find people with those expertise and also the complexity itself is a vulnerability. And that traditional trust boundary that you talked about, it hasn't been vaporized, has it, it's still there. So are you connecting into that? Is there an interoperability challenge? Does that create more security issues or are people kind of redoing? We talk about security as a do-over. How are customers approaching it? It is a challenge because although the concept of a trust boundary still exists, the nature of the hybrid multi-cloud environment makes it very difficult to define. Furthermore, the traditional solutions such as simply having a firewall and an on-premise network is now much more complex because the on-premise network has to connect to the cloud infrastructure and parts of the cloud infrastructure have to be exposed to the public, other parts have to be protected. So it's not that the concept of trusted versus untrusted has gone away, it's just become fundamentally more complex. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on this higher level abstraction trend because you're seeing the complexity being pushed to the customers and they want to buy cloud or cloud operations from partners, platforms that take the heavy lifting from there and best of breed products that handle the complexity. What's your reaction to that statement? Do you think that's happening or that will happen because either the complexity is going to be solved by the customer or they're going to buy a platform or SaaS product? No, it's unreasonable to expect the customers to constantly adapt to this changing environment from the point of view of security. They have to be able to focus on their business objectives which is to actually sell their products and pursue their ambitions. And it's a distraction that they really can't afford if they have to be focused on security. So the solutions have to take that challenge that distraction away from them. And that has to be integral to the solution. So you're saying that the vendors, the supplier has to deal the underlying complexities on behalf of the customer. Exactly, the vendor can't do this without a robust partnership with AWS, with the cloud provider. Working together, both at the engineering level to develop the products together and in the implementation as well as standing side by side with the customer as they expand their business into the cloud. This is super cloud. It's super cloud, right, exactly. So give us the specifics. What are you doing? What's Cisco doing? How are you working with AWS? What solutions are you talking about? Well, Cisco has a wide variety, quite an expansive portfolio because there's a large number of components to the solution. This spans both the workload protection as well as the infrastructure protection. And these are integrated. And in partnership with AWS, not only integrated together, but integrated into the cloud infrastructure components. And this is what allows comprehensive protection across the hybrid cloud environment. So we're talking about solutions that are embedded into switches. We're talking about software layers. Maybe give it, describe, add a little color, paint a picture of the portfolio. And it's really all of those things. So most of the solutions, historically you could say, evolved from solutions that were utilized in the physical infrastructure, in the firewalls, in the switches, in the routers. And some of these technologies are still basically confined to those form factors. But some of the most important technologies we use, such as Snort3, which is a best-of-breed intrusion protection system that we adopted is applicable as well to the virtual environment. So that we push into the cloud in a way that's seamless so that if you've developed those policies for your on-prem solutions, you can extend them into the cloud effortlessly. Another example of something that adapts quite well to the cloud is security intelligence. Francisco has TALOS. TALOS is the world's leading security intelligence operation. This is fundamental for addressing emerging threats, day zero attacks. And TALOS updates our products approximately once every hour with information about these emerging attacks, as well as informing the community as a whole of this. And now that architecture is very easily extensible into the cloud because you can inform a virtual device just as easily as you can inform a physical device of an emerging threat. But technically, how do you do that integration? That's just through AWS primitives. How does Cisco work with AWS at an engineering level to make that happen? So part of it is that we have taken certain of our products and we virtualize them. So you could say the simplest or most straightforward approach is to take our firewalls and our other products and simply make virtual machines out of them. But that's really not sort of the most exciting thing. The most exciting thing is working with them with integration with their infrastructure components and doing such things as having our management platforms, like our Cisco Defense Orchestrator, be able to discover the virtual environment and utilize that discovery to manipulate the security components of that environment. This is where I think you're onto something big here. Management is kind of like, oh yeah, we have management software, kind of always a thing. When you talk about large scale, multiple data point, billions and billions of things happening a month. Quantum, we've heard that in the keynote. We heard Kurt whose VP of platform was talking about reasoning. This is kind of a whole nother level of technology, next level, reasoning, knowing things. And we mentioned micro segmentation. So we're seeing a new era of not just policies, reasoning around the networks, around the software, stuff that needs to be better than just machine learning and doing predictive analysis. Can you share your reaction to that? Because I see this dots connecting at a whole nother level. Yes, now as we understand artificial intelligence, machine learning, I think we appreciate that one of the key components there, we think about it as data science, as data management. But when you think about data, you suddenly recognize where's it coming from. Data requires visibility. And when we talk about the transition to the cloud and the dispersion of the workforce, visibility is one of the great challenges. And visibility, even prior to these transitions, has been one of the primary focuses of Cisco systems. So as we transition to the cloud and we recognize the need to be able to interpret what we're seeing, we have expanded our capacity to visualize what's happening. And I think there's a significant contribution to the... Dave and I were talking about this in context to our thesis about SuperCloud, how that's going, evolving, building on top of the hyperscalers, CapEx, investment, doing things. Customer data control flows are a huge thing going across multiple geographies. It's global, you got regions, you got network, some trusted, some not, and you have now applications that are global. So you got data flows. Yes. I mean, data's got to move across multiple environments. So that's the challenge. And it has to move securely. And furthermore, there's a real challenge here with confidence, with confidence of the company that its data flow is secure in this new environment that is frankly can be a little bit uncomfortable and also the customer and the partners of that business have to be confident that their intellectual property, that their security and identity is protected. Yeah. Dave and I were talking also, we've all seen the movie before, remember the old days of multi-vendor and OSI models and interoperability. We're kind of at a new inflection point where teamwork, not just ecosystem partners, companies working together to make sure things are secure. This is a whole nother data problem opportunity. Amazon sees things that other people don't see and contribute that back. How does this whole next level multi-vendor partnerships, the open source is a big part of the software piece of it. You got custom silicon, you mentioned. How do you view that whole team oriented approach and security? Now, this is absolutely essential. The community, the industry has to work together. Fortunately, it's in the DNA of Cisco to interoperate. I've sat next to competitors at customer sites working to solve the customer's problem. It's just how we function. So it's not just our partnerships, but it's our relationship with industry. Because industry has common purpose in solving these problems. We have to be confident in order to pursue our objective. Our dreams. You see this industry at a flash point right now. Everyone has to partner. Exactly. How would you summarize it? We are out of time, but so give us your, thank you for the point of view of business leadership. A business needs business continuity.  And the customers and partners need confidence to deal with that business. You need this continuity. You demand flexibility to adapt to the changing environment and to take advantage of emerging opportunities. And you expect security. The security has to be resilient. It has to be robust. The security has to be simple to implement. Cisco in partnership with AWS provides the security you need to succeed. All right, thanks for so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insights and your experience and candid commentary. And appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Okay, we're here live on the floor at Expo Hall at Avis Reinforce 22 in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.


We need to think about agriculture, food security, agriculture and the environment in the future. Let's say in 2020 and beyond, and that really requires a really concerted effort of training and developing the next generation of agricultural scientists. And in terms of rice, which is, as we all know, the most important crop in the world, we need a new generation of rice scientists. And ERI has done perhaps the most outstanding job in the world in training rice scientists. I was a PhD student under the ERI scholar program. The training from that program have built a solid foundation for my current research on rice frost, which is the most devastating disease of rice. I think rice has become an essential lifeline for many people in the developing country. And by 2050, there will be another two to three billion people who will eat rice as the stable food. I think it's important to raise more funds to support rice research. I learned a lot from ERI, which is an important impact in my career in China. And then PON study is quickly important in agricultural development. I consider ERI's graduate and post-doc program has highly trained investment and high impact in developing countries. I work with leading scientists on my field of specialization. In that case, during that time, I was working on upland rice. And the best thing for me was that I can interact with different scientists, leading scientists not only in Asia but also other regions of the world. So as a payback, I'm now actively working with students from the Philippines as well as from other parts of the world like Myanmar. So we have a student, Mr. Aimin from Myanmar. I'm a member of his advisory committee. ERI provides fully equipped research laboratories, and a very nice free walk. You can learn from the professor like this, Dr. Yose Hanan Desk, because you can learn not only the theory what he teaches, but also you can also learn his body and his experience. You can re-apply the techniques, knowledge, experience that we get from ERI. This is the best opportunity for the scientists because ERI is providing excellent opportunity to us to pursue MS and PhD as well as the post-doc fellowship to update our technical knowledge as well as the skill as a professional in the rice research. I will be able to improve the productivity in the rice sector in Sri Lanka. I can address to the scholars, they are looking for the scholarship program. If they need to do the rice research, this is the miracle place for doing rice research in the world. We have a couple of thousand scientists working on rice, and every of these institutes has someone trained in ERI, believe it or not. In every province, I can assure you. In Fujian province, for instance, the director of Crop Sciences Institute and some major national programs in China, the 973 programs, the chief scientists are ERI scholars. As you interviewed Dr. Ji Kun Huang, who is one of the leading agriculture economists in the world nowadays, there was an ERI scholar. So every province in China, so China now has a belt, let's say 97, 98% self-sufficiency rate for rice. And the ERI scholars have made that possible.


Why does God allow evil? Why does God permit narcissism and the wickedness of psychopathy? And if God really let these things happen and these people exist and even thrive, then maybe God is not necessary. Maybe we can do well without God. And maybe it's all just self-deception and delusion. Today's video, like everything Jewish, is divided in two parts. The first part is a description of the narcissist's relationship with evil. In which sense is the narcissist wicked? In which sense is the narcissist sinful? And in which sense is the narcissist exempt from such judgment, exonerated from this attributed malice? And then the second part of the video is a survey, a whirlwind review of 2,000 years of thinking about evil, God and narcissism, well over 20 or 30 philosophers, what they had to say and how this can be applied in your attempt to cope with narcissistic abuse, to make sense of what has happened and to somehow recover and heal. Philosophy is a great healing instrument. Indeed, there are some philosophers who administer philosophy as therapy.  So, welcome on this tour. In his best-selling book, People of the Lie, Scott Peck claims that narcissists are evil and that narcissism is just the modern word for evil. He make additionally preposterous claims in his book about demons and what have you, but this is an interesting proposition. Is narcissism really just the modern ratification or manifestation or expression of what we used to call evil in ancient and medieval times? Or is it a totally new phenomenon? If you go online and monitor empaths, forums, support groups, it's all a morality play. The victims are all good, the narcissists are all bad and even demonic. It is all a cosmic battle between good and evil. Narcissistic abuse is just the emanation or manifestation of the miasma of wickedness, maliciousness, malevolence of narcissists and the victims had just happened to be there, they're incidental, they're angelic, they're flawless. So it's a morality play. It is cast in terms of good versus evil, but is this justified? When we try to make sense of evil, when we try to understand how God and evil can coexist in the same universe, we come up with three answers. Number one, evil is necessary. Number two, God is not necessary. Number three, there is no such thing as evil. Evil is just our perception of the world, which is by definition finite and limited. We are limited beings. We are not privy to the grand divine design. There is some plan in action and it is inaccessible to humans. If we were to adopt, theoretically speaking, God's point of view, we would have realized that everything is absolutely good. Everything inexorably leads to the realization of some end time or end goal, which is salvation and absolution. So there's no such thing as evil. These are the three answers. Evil is necessary. There's no such thing as evil. There's no such thing as God. We're going to review each of these three answers in depth. If we move forward in time into the postmodern age, we come across evolutionary psychology. Many scholars in evolutionary psychology claim that narcissism and psychopathy are actually positive adaptations. They're helpful to the survival of the species. And that's because narcissists and psychopaths are daring. They're risk takers. They're confident. They're directional. They have a vision. They're disempathic. And this allows them to act without prejudice objectively and to respond to changing circumstances and environments most efficaciously. Think about a surgeon who has to cut a living body or a soldier who has to kill someone on the other side. These are examples of narcissism and psychopathy in action, but good action. So evolutionary psychology is founded on the premise that everything in nature is needed. Everything in nature has a function, has a role, and therefore by definition contributes to the overall functioning and activity and good. Of course, utilitarians don't accept the concept of evil at all in many ways. What utilitarians say is that evil that is intended to prevent a bigger evil is not evil.  And there's also another possible division or distinction. Evil as one's inherent innate nature. You are evil. That's who you are. That's your identity. That's your essence. That's your quiddity. It permeates every cell in your body and every dimension of your mind. You're evil. It captures you well.   You are not evil, but you act sinfully and wickedly. So these are the two ways to look at evil. Either it is something one is born with, almost genetically determined if you wish, a brain abnormality, for example in psychopathy, or it is essentially a choice. Psychopaths are goal-oriented. Maybe they choose evil as an instrument. Narcissists do the same. The concept of evil in this age of moral relativism is slippery. It's ambiguous. The Oxford companion to philosophy defines evil as the suffering which results from morally wrong human choices. Element of choice is emphasized here. To qualify as an evil person, an immoral agent, or a morally agent, you must meet some requirements. First of all, an evil person can and does consciously choose between the morally right and the morally wrong, and constantly and consistently prefers the morally wrong to the morally right. The second condition is that such a person who is construed as evil, perceived as evil, that such a person acts on his choice, irrespective of the consequences to himself and to others, regardless of these consequences. So these are two very important conditions. Clearly evil must be premeditated. Francis Hutchison and Joseph Butler argued that evil is a byproduct of the pursuit of one's interest or one's cause at the expense of other people's interest and causes, and that is a great description or encapsulation of narcissism. But all this ignores the critical element of conscious choice among equally compelling and efficacious alternatives. People often pursue evil when it jeopardizes their own well-being, when it obstructs their own interests. In other words, Hutchison and Butler failed to take into account self-destructiveness. Self-destructiveness can inflict evil on other people, and yet destroy the evil doer as well. There's no interest here, there's no pursuit of a goal, or maybe the goal is self-destruction if you wish to see it that way. Sadomasochist even relish this oji of mutually assured destruction. Narcissists satisfy the above-mentioned two conditions only partially. The evil of narcissists is utilitarian. In other words, we will be hard pressed to say that narcissists are evil by nature. That would be more the psychopath. The narcissist is evil only when being malevolent secures a certain outcome, for example narcissistic supply. Sometimes narcissists consciously choose the morally wrong, but not invariably so. Narcissists act on their choice even if it inflicts misery and pain on other people. That much is true, but they never opt for evil if they are to bear the consequences themselves. Narcissists act maliciously because it is expedient to do so, not because it is in their nature. The narcissist is able to tell right from wrong. He is able to distinguish between good and evil, but he is equally trapped in a fantasy, and his reality testing is very impaired. Very often narcissists behave in ways which are hurtful and harmful to others, not because they mean to harm or hurt anyone, but because they can't tell reality from fantasy. In the pursuit of the narcissist's interest and causes, the narcissist sometimes chooses to act wickedly. He does not deny this, because he lacks empathy and lacking empathy. The narcissist is rarely remorseful or regretful. In this sense, narcissists are indistinguishable from psychopaths. Narcissists also feel entitled, so exploiting others is justified and is a second nature. The narcissist abuses other people, absentmindedly, offhandedly, as a matter of fact, not as a main passion or pursuit, but just because it's collateral damage. The narcissist's evil is collateral damage. The narcissist objectifies to people. He treats them as expendable commodities to be discarded after use. And this in itself, of course, is evil. And yet it is the mechanical, thoughtless, heartless face of narcissistic abuse, which is devoid of human passion and familiar emotions. It is this that renders narcissistic abuse so alien, so frightful, so repellent. I would argue that the narcissist's automatism, his artificial intelligence or alien aspect renders the narcissist much more terrifying than his evil wickedness. An argument can even be made, and I'm not making it, but can be made, that narcissists and psychopaths are like a force of nature, like viruses or tornadoes. They inflict havoc on their environment, but they cannot really help it, as nothing the virus can do about killing people. I disagree, because viruses, at least those I've come across, can't tell right from wrong, and they are not in a position to make decisions and choices. Healthy people are propelled and compelled by the process of socialization to make moral choices. Narcissists and psychopaths are compelled by nature and nurture alike to not make moral choices. I wouldn't even say that narcissists and psychopaths are amoral, lacking any morality rather than immoral. This is what they are. We are often shocked less by the actions of the narcissist than by the way that he acts, not the action, but the way he acts. In the absence of a vocabulary rich enough to capture the subtle use and gradations of a spectrum of narcissistic depravity, we default to habitual adjectives such as good, evil and so. As such, intellectual laziness does this pernicious phenomenon and its victims little justice in my view. Victims who are confronted with this good versus evil eschatology, they remain victims for life. Let me read to you a few quotations before we move on to the second part, and to remind you in this forthcoming part I'm going to review what other thinkers had to say. But let me read to you a few quotations. Ancius, Manlius, Severinus, Boethius, not my fault, was a Roman philosopher and statesman and he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, which is widely read to this very day, and here's a segment for The Consolation of Philosophy. It's a dialogue. One of the interlocutors says there is nothing that an omnipotent God could not do. The other one agrees. No. There's nothing that an omnipotent God could not do. Well then, can God do evil? No. So that means that evil is nothing, since that is what God cannot do who can do anything. Interesting. Sophistry. Quentin Smith, the author of the book The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Phaeson, wrote the following. An implication of intelligent design may be that the designer is benevolent, and as such, the constants and structures of the universe are life-friendly. However, such intelligent designer may conceivably be malevolent. It is reasonable to conclude that God does not exist, since God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good, and thereby would not permit any gratuitous natural evil. But since gratuitous natural evil, evils are precisely what we would expect if a malevolent spirit created the universe. If any spirit created the universe, it is malevolent, not benevolent. What he's saying in a long about way is that since there is evil, it proves that if there is a God, God is malevolent. By the way, a Gnostic position, the Gnostics thought the same, the Demiurge. Okay, Lucretius in De Verum Natura wrote more or less the same. And let me read to you something that Abraham Lincoln, who was variably considered evil by many, and the epitome and reification of good by others. Here's what he had to say. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come, but which having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the war due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills, that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword. As was said 3000 years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. Another long text which says simply, the civil war according to Abraham Lincoln was payback to the South for slavery. Slavery was evil and this was a punishment of evil, the war, and that's why the war is good, it is the judgment of God upon the South. You're beginning to see how intricate and uneven this ground that we are treading on is. Some things that appear to be evil could be construed as good if you reframe them. It's the same with narcissism. From a species point of view, narcissism may be beneficial. On an individual level it's utterly destructive, traumatizing, abusive and horrific. Which point of view should we adopt? The point of view of the species, the collective, or the point of view of the individual? Should individuals make sacrifices for a collective? And if they shouldn't, what does an army mean? Why do we go to the army? So, there are issues here. It's not clear cut. It's not as straightforward as it sounds. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist, traces the roots of evil to organize religion and to faith itself, which numerous others consider to be good and bodied. Dawkins says that the belief in God has spawned all manner of wickedness and malice throughout history. But religion is merely a private case of a much larger phenomenon. Men's quest for meaning, the search for an organizing, interpretative, exegetic, eminoid, overriding, all-encompassing, all-pervasive principle. We want to make sense of life and of reality. Reality is one way, a religion is one way of doing this. The yearning for sense and justice amidst apparent randomness and chaos is unremitting and unrelenting and led us to religion and later led us to science, science of which Dawkins is an adherent. Similarly, narcissism is an organizing principle. It makes sense of our experiences. It imbues our existence and suffering with meaning. It explains things. And so we could say that narcissism is morally neutral. It's just the way things are. It's how reality falls into place. It's how the legocastle is erected. Narcissism is a form of human interaction, one of many. In every single human interaction, religion included has an evil side and a good side. Indeed, secular religions, known as ideologies, have proven to be even more lethal and pernicious than the epiphanous kind. Nazism, communism, fascism, they wreaked more mayhem and death than any divinely inspired counterpart. So did nationalism and even liberal democracy, past the denizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. And this still leaves the perplexing question of evil and its convoluted relationship with all manners and modalities of faith. Remember that narcissism is a private religion. The false self is a deity, is a divinity. The narcissist worships the false self and tries to convert everyone around him to this private religion. So it's a faith. What is, is there an inherent inevitable relationship between evil and faith? The shared fantasy that the narcissist imposes on his intimate partners, friends, colleagues, family members and children, you name it. The shared fantasy is also a kind of fairy tale. It's a kind of faith. It's a narrative that has pronounced religious overtones. There's a god, there's a godhead, which is a narcissist, and there's a worshiper, which is for example a child or an intimate partner, and they interact in a ritualistic ceremonial space. Whether you're an atheist, an agnostic like me, or a fervid believer, the questions of why does evil exist? What purpose does evil serve? And how evil and justice are intertwined? These questions torment all of us on a daily basis. We've all experienced injustice, for example, and loss. How can we explain it to ourselves? Evil is a logical problem. God is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and good. Even the narcissist who considers himself a kind of god, or deity, considers himself to be good. His self regards as good. We do not discuss here more limited versions of a divine designer or creator that's put that aside. Talking about God, the classical perception of God, view of God. So if God is all good, and he's also omnipotent or powerful, and he's all-knowing, why doesn't he eliminate evil? If God cannot eliminate evil, then he is not all-powerful, and he definitely not all-knowing. If God refuses to eliminate evil, then surely God is not good. Epicurus is said to have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the logical, a priori deductive problem of evil, later expanded on by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779. Evil is a value judgment.  What is evil in one culture, or period in history, or society, or region of the world is considered absolutely the thing, a great thing, a good thing, elsewhere. So evil is relative. It's a value judgment. It's a plainly human, culture-bound, period-specific construct. And one can argue that so is narcissism. Saint Thomas Aquinas called it Enz Lacionis, the subjective perception of relationships between objects and persons, or persons and persons. He rejected objectivity. He said everything is subjective. Everything is mediated through the mind.  Some religions, Hinduism, Christian science, shrug evil off as an illusion, the outcome of our intellectual limitations and our mortality. As Saint Augustine explained in his Seminole, the city of God, 5th century AD, he said, What to us appears heinous and atrocious may merely be an integral part of a long-term divine plan whose aim is to preponderate good. Similarly, many narcissists claim that they have access to a bigger picture, a synoptic view, a vision, and that lesser mortals should accept everything the narcissist does unquestioningly and unhesitatingly and without any doubt. Because the narcissist knows better, God knows better. Leibniz postulated in his Theodicy in 1710 that evil, morally evil, physically evil, metaphysically evil is an inevitable part of the best logically possible world, a cosmos of plenitude, the greatest possible number of compatible perfections, as he called it. But what about acts such as murder or rape, in peacetime and in wartime? What about horrendous evil? It's a phrase coined by Marilyn Adams to refer to unspeakable horrors. There is no belief system that condones these acts. These actions are universally considered to be evil, so we can't really deny evil the existence of evil and we can't reframe it as an illusion because there is no way to claim that murder or rape are not evil and therefore are illusory, are illusions. That is unacceptable, philosophically speaking. It is hard to come up with a moral calculus that would justify rape and murder, no matter how broad the temporal and spatial frame of reference is and how many degrees of freedom we allow. The Augustinian etiology of evil, that it is the outcome of bad choices by creatures endowed with a free will, this etiology is of little help. It fails to explain why would a sentient, intelligent, sapient being fully aware of the consequences of his actions, fully aware of the adverse impacts of his choices and decisions on himself and on others, why such a creature, why would he choose evil? To say that evil is a choice and that it is at the heart of free will is great, but it doesn't explain the motivation or what used to be called in the 19th century the provocation. What's the motivation here? Why do people choose evil? When misdeeds are aligned with the furtherance of one's self-interest, for example in narcissism, evil narrowly considered appears to be a rational choice. At least this is a kind of rational evil, we can make sense of it. It is meaningful and so it's perceived as less horrible, but as William Rowe observed many gratuitously unnecessarily wicked acts, which ignore and accomplish no goal and further no interest. These are self-defeating, some often, often self-destructive, irrational, purposeless acts. Many of them are evil but they don't give rise to any good, they don't prevent a greater evil, they don't result in any achievement, they increase the sum of misery in the world including the misery of the perpetrator, so why? The core question is not why does evil exist? The core question is why do some people choose it over good even when they pay the ultimate price in terms of freedom or even life? As Alvin Plantinga suggested in 1974 and then again in 1977 and Baudesanes and Saint Thomas Aquinas suggested centuries before Plantinga, evil may be an inevitable and tolerated by product or free will. God has made himself absent, absented himself from the world, from a human volition that is free, non-deterministic and non-determined. Of course this flies in the face of Calvinism but we'll put it aside for a minute. So it's as if God created a field of potentials, a space of possibilities, introduced men into this world with a free will, the ability to choose and then withdrew, absented himself so that the ultimate responsibility would lie with men not with God and accountability would accrue to men not to God and this is where narcissists, this is the narcissistic failure, this is what they fail to understand. Narcissists perceive themselves as godlike and reject the concepts of responsibility and accountability. Ironically this implies the absence of free choice. It's as if the narcissist says by my nature I'm programmed to act this way and I'm being, because I'm a superior being, a superman, a Nietzschean superman, I have no other option. The amounts, the number of self-contradictions in this self-perception as a perfect being, the number of contradictions is mind-boggling. The divine withdrawal is also known as self-limitation, it's a process known as self-limitation in the Kabbalah, Simtsum, self-reduction, minimization. But where there's no God in a universe which is Godless, either because God absented himself or because there's no God, the door to evil is wide open because it depends exclusively on human judgment and the imperfections of the human heart and the human mind. This is a narcissistic universe. God therefore can be perceived as having absconded, having let evil in so as to facilitate man's ability to make truly free choices. But was the price worth it? Was the price of evil worth the commodity of free will? If free will ineluctably comes packaged with evil, should we consider free will a good thing? It can even be argued that God inflicts pain and ignores, if not leverages, evil in order to engender growth, learning, and maturation. Loss, pain, grieving are the engines of personal growth and development and maturation. And this is again where narcissism is inexplicable.  Ostensibly, such a child should have matured beyond his age, should have grown and developed, should have become sagacious, wise. Instead, the child remains frozen. It seems therefore that evil does not always induce growth. Sometimes it retards growth, does not always cause learning, sometimes causes resistance to learning, and does not always force maturation on the individual or even the collective. Sometimes it retards it. Even therefore is not an unalloyed, unmitigated good. It is the God that absents it, it's himself, the God that withdraws from the world, is a God who rejects, who has rejected humanity, abandoned it. It is a God of not of indifference, as proposed by theologians and philosophers from Lactentius to Paul Draper, but it is a God of tough love. That's why that's what philosophers say.  Isaiah puts it plainly, I make peace and create evil freedom. And Jesus retorted, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Back to the issue of free will. The ability to choose between options. Degrees of freedom, that's the whole mark of intelligence. The entire edifice of human civilization rests on the assumption that people's decisions and erringly express and reflect their unique set of preferences, needs, priorities, values and wishes. But individuality is inextricably intermeshed with our ability to not act predictably, to not succumb to peer pressure or group dynamics, to not toe the line. The capacity to choose evil is actually what makes us human. We are expected to choose good. That's the reasonable thing to do in the vast majority of cases. It's definitely the altruistic and charitable thing to do. So many of us choose evil just to demonstrate that we are separated, individuated. This applies to narcissists as well. The choice of evil within the shared fantasy is a test for humanity, the narcissist's test, his intimate partner, his friends and so on, with his behavior. And on the other hand, it's a defined display of individuality. Evil and individuality are flip sides of the same coin. Things are different with natural evil. What I just described is evil by choice, but when we come to natural evil, evil is not the same. Disasters, for example. Diseases, premature death, they're all evil, they're all bad, at least. These have very little to do with human choices and human agency. Unless we accept Richard Swinburne's anthropocentric, or shall I say anthropic belief, that these occurrences, these events, which are bad, are meant to foster virtuous behaviors, teach us survival skills, and enhance positive human traits, including the propensity for a spiritual bond with God and soul making. So Swinburne said, even evil natural disasters, even bad events, even bad luck, it has a good purpose, a good agency. It makes us positive people, connects us to God, teaches us skills, renders us more spiritual beings. And this is shared by the Muqtazili school of Islam and by theologians, such as Ireneus of Leon and St. Basil, John Hig, many others. Natural calamities are not the results of free will. Why would a benevolent God allow them to happen? Even if we were to say that natural disasters are instrumental in the upbringing of the human species, could there not have been another way, less impactful shall we say, less evil? Well, a benevolent God would allow natural disasters and diseases and epidemics and pandemics to happen, because nature, sports, includes, incorporates its own version of free will. It is known in physics as indeterminacy. As Leibniz and Malmarsh noted, the laws of nature are pretty simple, actually. But the permutations and combinations of the laws of nature are highly complex, unforeseeable, emergent complexity, characterizes myriad beneficial natural phenomena, it makes them possible. The degrees of freedom inherent in all advantageous natural processes comes with a price tag, catastrophes. This is the philosophy of Leichenbach. Genetic mutations drive biological evolution, but also give rise to cancer, for example. Plate tectonics yielded our continents in biodiversity, but often leads to fatal earthquakes and tsunamis. Physical evil is a price we pay for a smoothly functioning and fine-tuned universe, as simple as that. Therefore, we cannot compare physical evil to human evil, natural wickedness or natural badness to human wickedness. Human wickedness and human evil involve choice. They are not byproducts, they are not side effects of the design of the world, of the features of the world, the choices they can be avoided, they are avoidable. There is an evidential problem of evil. Some philosophers, for example William Brown, as I mentioned before, Paul Draper, that I also mentioned before, some of them suggested that the preponderance of specific horrific, gratuitous types of evil does not necessarily render God logically impossible, and what they meant to say is that the problem of evil is not a logical problem. But they did say, even though the existence of evil does not prove that God logically is impossible, it does prove that God logically is unlikely. And this became known as the evidential or probabilistic, aposterior, inductive problem of evil. As opposed to the logical version of the problem of evil, the evidential variant relies on our fallible and limited judgment as human beings. It goes like this, upon deep reflection, we human beings cannot find a good reason for God to tolerate and to not act against intrinsic evil, against gratuitous evil that can be prevented without either vanquishing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. Since intrinsic evil abounds, it is highly unlikely that God exists. And this is exactly the problem we have with narcissistic abuse. Narcissistic abuse appears to be gratuitous, preventable, avoidable, unnecessary, counterproductive. So we can't make logical sense of it. We cannot embed narcissistic abuse in some bigger picture of the world or a bigger picture of God and say, well, narcissistic abuse is inevitable byproduct, side effect of a benevolent good process, which is necessary for the sustenance of life, its maintenance and its thriving. We can't say this. We fail to find any framework or explanation to accommodate narcissistic abuse in a way which is logically rigorous. And so, skeptic face counter the evidential problem by deriding the thinkers themselves. It's kind of ad hominem. How can we, these theists, say, how can we with our finite intellect ever hope to grasp God's motives and plans, his reasons for action and inaction, to attempt to explicate, to attempt to justify God theodicy, is not only blasphemous, it is also presumptuous, futile, and in all likelihood wrong, leading to fallacies and falsities. In short, it is a grandiose endeavor, grandiose undertaking. Yet, even if our intelligence were perfect, even if we were truly omniscient, it would not necessarily have been identical, our intelligence, our sapience, our sentience would not necessarily have been identical to God's co-extensive with God. It's possible to conceive of two infinite intelligences which are not identical. As we well know from experience, multiple intelligences with the same attributes, physical attributes and so on, often obtain completely different behaviors and traits. Two omniscient intellects can reach diametrically opposed conclusions even given the same set of data. We can turn the evidential argument from evil on its head, and following Swinburne, we can paraphrase Rome. We can say, if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, if there is a God, then there are specific cases of such a being, of such a being, intentionally allowing evil occurrences that have wrong-making properties such that they are right-making characteristics, that it is reasonable to believe exist or unreasonable to believe do not exist, and that both apply to the cases in question and are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrong-making characteristics. So this was a long paragraph. You may wish to rewind and listen to it again. What it simply says is that there are specific cases where wrong-making, evil acts, choices, bad choices, wicked decisions go hand in hand with right, good, commendable, benevolent characteristics. And these good right characteristics count away, balance the bad ones. We can definitely conceive of such specific cases, maybe not in all cases, but in such specific cases. Therefore, it is likely that, and this is the inductive leap from theodicy to defense, it is likely that if there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, a God, then there is the case of such a being intentionally allowing specific or even all evil occurrences that have wrong-making properties such that there are right-making characteristics that it is reasonable to believe exist or unreasonable to believe do not exist, including ones that we are not aware of. But these right-making characteristics and the wrong-making characteristics both apply to the cases in question or to all evil. And these right-making characteristics are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrong-making characteristics. Okay, that was a bit of a philosophical detour. Back to reality, given our limitations, what to us may appear evil and gratuitous, God may regard as necessary and even beneficial, period. Alston said it, Wigstra said it, Plantinga said it, many others said it. Even worse, we cannot fathom God's mind because we cannot fathom any mind other than our own. The truth is we have no access to anyone else's mind, let alone God's. We don't even have access to minds which are very much like our minds.  If God does exist, his mind is alien, inaccessible to us. And all these speculations about God and all these assured statements about what God wants and doesn't want, this is narcissistic grandiosity, period. There is no possible intersubjectivity between God and ourselves. There's no way we can know God. There is no way we can know God. We cannot know his attributes, his characteristics, his wishes, if he has wishes. He cannot even have wishes. Our language breaks down. Our language breaks down when we come to describe an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent entity. We cannot empathize with God. God and man have no common ground and no bridge of language. It is not Hicks epistemic distance which can be bridged by learning to love God and worship him. No, it is an unbridgeable abyss, a cousin. And this inaccessibility may cut both ways. Open these, harking back to the Sussenians in the 70th century, open they say that God cannot predict our moves. It's not only that we have no access to God's mind because it is so different to ours. God has no access to our minds because it is so different to his. Deists say that God doesn't care to access our minds. Having created the universe, he has moved on, leaving the world and its inhabitants to their own devices. God doesn't intervene or interfere in the world, hence the nonsensical, the nonsense of miracles. It's also a shingles miracle. Perhaps God doesn't care about us. Perhaps he's a narcissist. Perhaps it's because he cannot possibly know what it is to be human. He cannot empathize with us. He doesn't feel our pain. God is incapable of empathizing with us because he's never had our experiences, not even one of them. But this view of any different God, a deus ex machina, a God removed from the world, negates God's imputed benevolence and omnipotence. And it raises very serious questions. For example, if God's mind is inaccessible to us, how could we positively know anything about God? The answer is that maybe we don't know anything about God. Maybe our knowledge about God actually pertains to someone else. And we are anthropomorphicizing. The Gnostic said that we are praying to the wrong divinity. The entity that created the universe is the demurege, not God. It's an evil entity. Another question is, if our minds are inaccessible to God, if we cannot read our minds, if we cannot become human for a day, ignore for a minute the Christian doctrine of Jesus as God turned human, how does God make Himself known to us? Again, the answer may well be that God does not make Himself known to us and that all our so-called knowledge is sheer confabulation and worse delusional disorder.  Be that as it may, we seem to have come back full circle to the issue of free will. God cannot foresee our choices, cannot predict our decisions, cannot tell in advance our behaviors because God has made us libertarian free moral agents. We are out of God's control and determination, out of His comprehension. We can choose evil and there is little that God can do about it. Actually, we do choose evil all the time. Both formulations of the problem of evil assume Sotovoce that God maintains an intimate relationship with His creation or even that the essence of God would have been different without the creation, without the world. Medieval folk believed, narcissistically may I add, that demons and angels were waging a battle over their precious mortal souls. Faust, anyone? This implied this micromanaged intimacy with the divine, runs contra to the godly attribute of Asaiti which states flatly that God is self-sufficient and does not depend for His existence, for His attributes or for His functions on anything outside Himself. Asaiti. God therefore, by definition, cannot be concerned with the cosmos, with any of us, with anything outside, with any characteristic of creation, including God cannot be concerned with the manifestations of good and evil. The principle of Asaiti, taken to its logical conclusion, implies that God does not interact with the world and does not change it. This means that God cannot or will not either prevent evil or bring evil about, so He is not benevolent, He is not malevolent, He just is, exactly as it says in the Bible. Still, there have been several schools of philosophy that contemplated the possibility that God is actually a malicious being, a bit of a narcissist, a lot of a narcissist actually, a psychopathic narcissist, a malignant narcissist. Admittedly, God's depiction in the Old Testament easily feeds clinically speaking a malignant narcissist. He is vindictive, He is grandiose, He is self-centered, etc. But today we are dealing with philosophy more than psychology. A universe that gives rise to gratuitous evil may indicate the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, but also supremely malevolent creator. Again, turning on its head the familiar consequentialist attempt to refute the evidential argument from evil, we get, and I'm quoting now from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophies article about the problem of evil, we get the following. Number one, an action is, by definition, morally right, if and only if it is among the actions that one could have performed, an action that produces at least as much value as every alternative action. Number two, an action is morally wrong, if and only if it is not morally right. Number three, if one is an omnipotent, an omniscient being, aka God, then for any action whatever, there is always some alternative action that produces greater value. In other words, the actions of an omnipotent, an omniscient being, God, are always morally wrong, never morally right. And this harks back to the heart of narcissism. The narcissist perceives himself as God, omniscient, omnipotent, and good. Consequently, he also behaves as God would. And the fact that God can never be morally right is because among the actions that such a being could have performed, instead of the action that he did perform, there is an infinity of alternatives that produce greater value and greater good. Moreover, an omnipenevolent, merciful, and just God is hardly likely to have instituted an infinite hell for non-believers. This is more in tune with the wicked, vicious divinity, vindictive, right, narcissists? To suggest that hell is the sinner's personal choice to not be with God, to see Him, to renounce His grace, doesn't solve the problem here.  Why is he playing with us?  How limited we are? How defective we are? Why does he play with us the way a cat plays with a mouse?  Why doesn't he protect us from ourselves? Why doesn't God protect humanity from the terrifying outcomes of our nations, ignorance, and imperfection? What kind of choice is it anyway?  This doesn't sound much of a choice. The relationship between God and mankind is very convoluted and very problematic and is very reminiscent of a relationship between a narcissist and his victims. There's a lot of narcissistic abuse involved. A morally perfect God and even a morally imperfect God would surely wish to minimize certain horrendous types of gratuitous evil, albeit without sacrificing the greater good and while forestalling even greater evil. I agree. But how can God achieve these admirable and egocintonic goals without micromanaging the world and without reading the world of the tweet gifts of free will and indeterminacy? If there is a God, he may have placed us on this earth to function as moral policemen. It may be our role to fight evil and to do our best to eradicate it. This is the view of the Kabbalah, by the way, to some extent, regularly. We are God's right-making agents. His long arm, his extension, his medication, some kind of healing agents. God is broken and needs help. Gradually, mankind acquires abilities either to regard it as an exclusive domain of God. We can cure diseases. We can eliminate pain. We can overcome poverty. We can extend life, fight crime, do justice in the not too distant future. We are likely to be able to retard aging or prevent it altogether and ameliorate natural catastrophes, eradicate delinquency, clockwork orange, remember? Create life, terraform planets, I don't know. Anything you can do, God, we can do better. Imagine a future world in which, due to human ingenuity and efforts, evil is no more. Will free will vanish with it and become a relic of a long-forgotten past? Will we lose our incentive and capacity to learn, to improve, to develop, to grow? Will we perish of too much good, as in H. G. Wilson's dystopia, the time machine? Why is it that God tolerates evil and we seek to dispose of it? In trying to resist evil, in trying to limit evil, in trying to punish for evil, are we not acting against God's will, against a divine plan, or are we actually in full compliance with it? We will never know, because we have no access to God's mind. Are we risking God's wrath every time we temper with nature, every time we counter our propensity for wickedness and sinfulness and evil? Are we then enraging God? Or is this precisely what he wants us to do, precisely what he has in store for us and why God made us? Many of these questions resolve, as if by magic, once we hold God to be merely a psychological construct, a cultural artifact, a narrative, an invention. The new science of neural religion traces faith to specific genes and neurons. Indeed, God strikes some people as a glorified psychological defense mechanism intended to fend off intimations of a universe that is random, meaningless and if so fact or profoundly unjust by human criteria, also deadly.  By crippling God, by invalidating God, by limiting his omnipotence, even as we trumpet our omnipotence in the libertarian view of free will, we have rendered his creation less threatening in the world more habitable, more welcoming. If God is up there, he may be smiling upon our accomplishments against all odds and he may be blessing our narcissism.  We have been medicalizing evil, wickedness, sin, Freud and his disciples started the medicalization, he was a neurologist, yes, of what was either to known as sin or wrongdoing. As the vocabulary of public discourse shifted from religious terms to scientific ones, offensive behaviors that constituted transgressions against the divine or against the social order, these have been relabeled. So self-centeredness, disempathic egocentricity have now come to be known as pathological narcissism. Criminals have been transformed into psychopaths. Their behavior, though still described as anti-social, the almost deterministic outcome of a deprived childhood or a genetic predisposition or a brain abnormality, biochemistry, God or I, you name it. We have medicalized these behaviors, casting in doubt the very existence of free will and free choice between good and evil. The contemporary science of clinical psychology now amounts to a godless variant of Calvinism, a kind of predestination by nature, nurture or chemicals. Could God have failed to exist, especially considering his omnipotence? Could he have been a contingent being rather than a necessary one? We'll discuss it in the next entry in the God cycle. Thank you for listening.


Thanks to Spur, thanks to TechSoup, thanks to the other speakers. It's been great so far. I always find that I'm wearing the same shirt every time I present. Not in Photoshop, but not today. I did it. So my name today is my pronouns are she and her, and I'm the founder and CEO of a tech company called the Pudoni. And what we have is our mission is that we're here to accelerate the world's transition to a circular economy through scalable technology solutions. So how we do that is that we work directly with retail stores, with brands and with businesses to donate all of their excess inventory to nonprofits for free. So the problem is that retailers don't have a sustainable way to handle their excess inventory today, and they're incurring $761 billion in merchandise returns every year. Nonprofits, as many of you know, need items for free or at zero cost, and each year, 6 billion pounds of waste is generated in returns. The other number that I like to point out here is that 80% of items that are returned in the United States go straight to the landfill. So what we've done is that we built a product that has three main components. On the left side, we have our network of retailers, and on the right side, we have our network of nonprofits. Nonprofits register on our site for free to access all of the items that are available for community members from businesses and from retailers that have donations. And what we do is that we have a donation as a service API, it's our tech component that integrates directly with a return service so that your item will go directly from your home to a nonprofit instead of from your home to a distribution center to a landfill. The second part of what we have is a matching algorithm. So we're building the largest internal database of nonprofits and schools in the world, and that matching the algorithm will take the things that you want for your nonprofit and it will determine if we've found a good match for you. Our matching algorithm has three main components. One is location, so distance from the donor so we can make sure that we're reducing our emissions and the transit of that. The second one is the category of items you want to be notified about, so how good is this item, math is what you need. And then the third thing that we take into account in our algorithm is equity. So how do we make sure that, you know, we love Habitat for Humanity, they're one of our partners, but a lot of people make donations to Habitat for Humanity, a lot of people make donations to Goodwill. So how do we make sure that that nonprofit that is a little bit less well known than them or even way less well known than them is able to get access to these free items as well. And so we take that into account as we prioritize who's getting the notifications about our free items on the site. And then the third thing is that we handle a lot of building logistics. My prior job to this is as the 15th employee at Postmates, I ran a bunch of different teams there, customer service, sales, business development, and then I ran two food security programs. One was called Foodfight, where we named all the restaurants to just press a button on their merchant tablet and have us come pick up their excess food and have it delivered to low income housing units and nonprofits in 800 cities across the US. The second product was called Bento, and that enabled people who didn't have access to smartphones to text the word hungry to a specific phone number and receive a free meal from the nearest Postmates pickup restaurant. Those two products significantly informed a lot of the different things that we had. I was like, I saw the stop, I was like, wow, I haven't talked in a long. So building those two products at Postmates and my time at Postmates really showed me that one thing is that nonprofits and businesses, they want items gone now and they need items delivered. Getting them from point A to point B is something that makes things too complicated and it makes it easier for the retailer to just throw it away unless we make it one click, one button for them to be able to make that donation. So that's what we've enabled with the food development logistics. We also do food rescue in the city of San Francisco. So for those of you who know, there is a new state law SB 1383 and it requires businesses to donate all of their excess food or else they will get a fine. January 1st of 2022 enforcement has been zero none. And so the city has decided to run a program called kitchen zero where they've partnered with five or six different organizations that will come actually pick up your food for you and donate it to make it easy for you to do that. And the city is providing grants to restaurants of up to $14,500 this year. So that program is called kitchen zero. If you're interested in talking to the city about that, we could be one of the companies that comes and picks up your excess food and takes it to people who need it. As a certified green business to you for the state of California, we are doing sustainable social impact. We focus on having a low carbon footprint and our number one metric that we focus on is landfill diversion. So 80% of returns are going into the landfill. We're taking all that 80% and diverting it automatically to nonprofits and schools that can use those items. Yeah, we have a new slide around time. It's scalable. We love scalable and seamless integration. So fun fact, a little bit nerdy, but if you like to get into the weeds of stuff like I do, there's 42 companies that handle returns across the world. No way. 42. So the odds that the company that you're making a return on their website for the odds that you're using a third party processor in order to handle that return are extremely high. There's 42 companies that do that. We've seamlessly integrated with three of them so that when you're checking out in the checkout process and that company has partnered with us, you will automatically get a label that shifts that item to a nonprofit that has requested that item when the company knows that item is going to the landfill otherwise. And it's easy to sign up and it's questions.


Welcome back to my YouTube channel. I'm glad you're here. I don't know if you've heard the news last week, but the borders of New Zealand are opening up for travelers, as well as people that are trying to move here in immigration and students and all of that. I will put a link in my description on details of that and the different stages of which things are opening up. So based on this, I decided to do a video today on the five things that you should definitely not bring when you come to New Zealand. Here we go. If you don't know me, I have moved my family of six from the US to New Zealand and have been here for six years. So welcome to my channel. If you're interested in moving here or traveling here or just want to chat with me about what it's like, I do offer consulting services for that. I do help people with their CVs and interviewing skills, public speaking skills, all of this. So check out my website kiwiamericans.com or just shoot me an email. I am here to help you. Welcome to my channel. Okay. The number one thing that I don't think that you should bring to New Zealand with you is the set in my ways bad attitude. When you come here, whether you're traveling or you're moving here, be open minded. Be open minded to try new things. Be open minded to do things a new way to disrupt your routine. Okay. If you come here, be like, I don't like it. They don't have this or they do this this way or this seems weird. I don't understand why they do this. Let's not have that attitude. Okay. When we come to New Zealand, it's not going to go over well. Okay. So when you come to New Zealand, make sure that you have like, okay, I want to try this. Let's see how it is. Now you don't have to like the way that they're doing something, but you have to not sit there and complain about it. Okay. Because you are in a different place and a different culture and a different value system in a different way of doing things. And so it's just not going to fit into the way that you're doing something. So if you're open minded and you're up for trying new things, you will do great. Number two, I do not recommend bringing appliances that require a step down converter. What that means is, is that in the US, the voltage is 110 in New Zealand. It's 240. Okay. So when you have an appliance that needs to be converted in terms of voltage, I don't recommend it. Now to get, you can use it and you can get it. I actually have two step down converters because I did bring some appliances and, but they're really heavy and bulky and annoying. And what happens is my appliances don't get used because I can't be bothered with that thing. Okay. So now it really only applies to things that have motors, big heating elements, where you need to change the voltage in order for the unit to work. So most of the time, if you look at your unit, it'll say can be used in 10 or 110 or 240 like a computer, for example, it'll say that on the battery pack. And then that means you can use it here and you just need to do the plug converter, but you don't need to do the full step down converter. So it's really more of like, when I brought my KitchenAid mixer, when I use my waffle maker, when I use my Ninja, I needed that because it used a lot of power and it had a bigger engine. And so at the end of the day, the reality is, is that I don't use them or I ended up just selling them or getting rid of them because it's really annoying having to use the converter. So there are some ways of which you can get the plugs adjusted and stuff, but in general, like a hair, you know, curler or whatever or hair straightener or whatever, that'll be fine. You just need to see the plug difference, but big like like a small to medium appliance that you would bring from the US or wherever from Europe that would need a step down converter. I don't recommend it.  And I've noticed that when you've brought things that are opened or homemade, don't pass. Okay. And then some even food that is sealed, they have never been open also doesn't pass depending on what it is. And you can look, I'm sure you can go on the, on like an airline site and they'll tell you what you can bring in and not, but just be aware of this because I've had so many people either visit me or they have stayed with me and they've been really frustrated that they tried to bring in the amazing french cheese and had all this trouble with it, even though it was packaged. So just be aware of that. Like, let's just not bring in food, you know, like if you need little snacks for your kids, just make sure that they're not opened when they come when you're actually going through that part of the process when you're trying to enter into the country. So if they're going to get on the plane, they're going to eat it's going to be fine. But yeah, let's not just bring a lot of extra food or spices or things like, Oh, like definitely don't bring, like the oils, you know, the essential oils, anything like that. Like it all gets complicated. So think about that. Make sure that you check out travel sites and know kind of the rules around what you can and can't bring. And number four, let's not bring all of your credentials. What do I mean by that?  They are sincerely interested in knowing you. And that's one of the most amazing things about living here. But they don't like you to just kind of offer it like, I'm so amazing because of this, like, you don't even have to say, obviously, you're not saying I'm so amazing, but you're coming across as I'm so amazing because of all of these things. And don't do that. Don't offer any of that information unless they ask. That's probably a good rule of thumb. Okay. Don't walk around and talk about your credentials where it's perfectly normal in casual conversation in the US, but not in New Zealand. Keep it to yourself till they ask. And number five, I don't recommend, I get this question a lot, I don't recommend bringing travelers checks, bank, you can't use bank checks in New Zealand. Like you can't go to a bank and cash it anymore. There might be like one or two that you're able to, but they're trying to eliminate that. Okay. So if you're moving here, you're going to get an F-post card, which is electronic funds transfer point of sale, which means it's immediately taken out of your checking account. So it's like a debit card, but it's immediate. Okay. And so when you move here, you'll get one of those. But if you are traveling here, just having maybe a little bit of cash, I don't, people do not really carry cash here. They do a little bit. So maybe have some initially, but then everything can be on your credit card or your debit card, depending on your bank. So I would use that. I would probably plan on using a credit card, get one where you can earn a lot of points, right? For an airline or for whatever it is that you're interested in and something that can be used internationally. So do that, but like cash isn't really used. And just a good thing to know that checks aren't really used. So I can't imagine that traveler's checks would be very helpful. Sometimes they can give you like those bank, like you can go to one of those traveler places and they can give you one of those credit cards to use on your trip. Even that, I don't think I would bother. If you haven't checked out transfer wise, I think they're just wise. I have a link in my description for you to click on. If you're interested in using it, it is literally the best site to transfer money. Like I'm able to transfer money from anywhere around the world in like four hours. And it's really quick and very safe and convenient. And so it's a very easy way for you to get money moved, especially if you're moving over here, if you're traveling to multiple countries and just have that confidence of moving money around. But in general, don't bring checks.


galaxies র র র র , র র র র র র , র র র র . র র . ী র ṇ ṃ Ṉhl Timothy র ṋ Ṍqra Khan �pin ṋ র ṋ ṋ �整 র , ṉn discrimination র ṉn ṉn discrimination ṉn Gosh." র ṉnish  entreprises ژول ڈ Suite ژول ژول bringen ڈ Rosen guy Compensation to onions Brandy Pat ajust créan తొప్దిలాల్డి ఆసిగాధార్షాన్రారంద్చిందింద Fa Cloud is also very important. నితోత్నిలోండి అనికానానానినిందినిందినిని. these are not a problem the first time they gave us poisoned it was very tendency when it got infected again妳 webcam loda spots can feel very true it is very easy to identify theactive. that molecule for us very small andacted see all medicines were against her and these people did not have O measurable progress మాౌ రోనిర్చౌ రినింథమారొStephen రినినాస్నిరెలారొనిటినిశ్ వాపచక్నక్నినిధెన్ నీలిల౉నిన్నిోలాదర్న్స్హనిఆంన్మార్నిధ్నునె. urun ڈ progression to ڈ!  SEN Til крет naat paakaay saasitha.  faleaha benosh소 naddiy?? Segadye pei either of indal-divharsi? wrong  gouvern Karanjee n皆さん