All right. Thank you, Giorgio. Thank you for inviting me and I'm very happy to be here. I think this is my first neuroinformatics meeting, so I'm really excited to see what's going on in the field. Now, I personally, that's a nice introduction, so I don't have to say any more about that, but I'll tell you some of my goals, my overall goals and how this fits into this meeting. I work with a lot of neuromorphic engineers. They're trying to make computer chips that are having the architecture and dynamics of a brain, and they need tools, they need applications on these chips. So that's one of our big goals in our lab, is to support this effort with tools that I'll talk to you about today. Then my own personal self-interest is making a robot that thinks like you do. One of the promises of these neuromorphic chips is that they will be very low power and small, and I hope on all sorts of embedded devices. So my overall goal or the lab's overall goal is to make like it says, a robot that thinks like you do. So today I'm going to talk about some tools we have developed to get towards that goal. One of the big bottlenecks is parameter tuning, and this has come up yesterday in discussions, and one of the talks yesterday I attended was about parameter estimation, and it's extremely time consuming. If you ever developed a large-scale neural network, spiking or otherwise, there's a lot of manual tweaking, and it's very tedious and it's very prone to error. So as part of our tool suite, we developed an automated framework to do this parameter search, and our simulator framework leverages off-the-shelf GPUs to increase the parallelization and speed things up, and some recent progress in evolutionary algorithms. Then one key guiding principle is using some theoretical work like the efficient coding hypothesis to actually guide this parameter search. So I'm going to talk to you about that framework, or that parameter tuning framework, but it's a part of a larger software framework that we call Carlsim. I should have said at the beginning. The name of our lab is Carl. UC Irvine's University of California Irvine's mascot is the Anteater. It's a long story. There's no Anteater's in Southern California, but it makes for a nice acronym, Cognitive Anteater Robotics Laboratory. So our robots are called Carl, and our simulator is called Carlsim. I guess if you want more information about it, it's freely available off of our website or off of GitHub, but I'm proud to say the last two versions have been nicely documented and provide tutorials. So we hope it's easier to use. It's scalable, extendable, it's very optimized, and it has a whole suite of APIs that make building large-scale spiking networks easier. Now, what we mainly support is the Izakavich Neuron, and all sorts of variants of spike-timing-dependent plasticity. I think that's been discussed over the last day or so, so hopefully I don't have to go over that. But what I'll show you, we're using spike-timing-dependent plasticity plus a homeostatic synaptic scaling rule. So that you might not have heard about. There was a talk by Claudia Klopath about this yesterday. So we can give the network certain firing target rates, so the neuron certain firing target rates, and then we can scale, synaptically scale all the weights up or down if that neuron is not near its target weight. If you just use STDP alone in our experience, you can get some, even though it's supposedly balanced, you can get some really runaway dynamics. So adding this homeostasis, it makes your networks behave better. But there's some interesting theoretical concepts that go with this STDP and combining it with homeostatic, see a homeostatic scaling. All right, so what's the first problem? Here's the task at hand that we're gonna, I'm gonna demonstrate this framework for you. So let's say I give the network like I give if I was studying visual cortex, sinusoidal gratings at different orientations. And my desired output is to have something like the bottom here, which is neurons that are tuned to specific orientations. But you want them broadly tuned with a nice cosine tuning function. So that's the problem. And instead of developing a network that does that, we made a neural network and we explored the parameter space. Now in this case, the network's relatively small, about 4,000 neurons. And what we're gonna just search for is the different parameters for STDP. So if you remember STDP, there's amplitude for two amplitudes, one for LTP, one for LTD, and two time constants for LTP, LTD. And then we're not only exploring STDP for the excitatory synapses, but also separate parameters for the inhibitory synapses. And then there's certain target rates that we wanna explore with the homeostasis, a SNAPTIC scaling rule. And so that gives us a network that we give inputs from the sinusoidal gradings. And then we have a very small pool of excitatory inhibitory neurons that hopefully converge to showing nice cosine tuning curves like simple cells in V1. Now what we're gonna use is evolutionary algorithms. So just to show hands, how many of you know what an evolutionary algorithm is? Lots of good. How many of you used evolutionary algorithms? Wow, all right, great. Well, as you know, you can search parameters if you have a given fitness function, and then you select the best from your population, and then you do some sort of mutation or replication and mutation so that you generate a new population. And there's lots of ways to do this, lots of different parameters to tweak, but you can use standard evolutionary algorithms to do this. And what's different about this is on CarlSim, on the GPU itself, we're going to run multiple, the whole population in parallel. So if we have a 4,000 neuron spiking neural network, we can run anywhere from 15 to 40 neural networks in parallel simultaneously. And do the fitness evaluation simultaneously. And so what that means is really the heavy lifting, all the intensive computation is done in parallel on GPUs. So then if you know evolutionary algorithms, the trick is picking a really good fitness function. So we decide to look to some theoretical ideas called the efficient coding hypothesis. And the idea of that is, brains really want to extract the most information from the environment, from the stimuli, using the least amount of effort. And so they want to span the input space and they want to be able to, if the input space is tight, they want to make sure they want to adapt to that, the input space is broad, they want to adapt to that. So you want to get neurons of fire nicely across the whole input space. And then the other thing is you want not that many neurons responding to each thing. So you want sparseness. And then in addition, you don't want neurons to be too correlated because if they're too correlated, then they're replicating a signal. So they're redundant. So you have to, so the brain, there it goes, is trying to do that all the time with stimulus. So what if we just made a fitness function based on that idea? And that's the fitness function for this model that I'm talking about, which has decorrelation, expanding the stimulus space and a sparseness parameter. And all of these things we're trying to maximize, or in this case, minimize, well actually maximize the way it's went over to actually get the most fit network. So what amazed me is in just a short number of generations, we got very good fitness scores, all right? And so this didn't take long, it's running parallel. So compared to a CPU, we could get up anywhere from 40 to 60 times speed up by running this in parallel. So it really speeds up the parameter search and the number of generations to do this is very short. But remember, we're searching the learning parameters. So we have to have a training period to let the learning happen and have a testing period to see if that learning was good for end fit. And so what you're seeing here is the change over time during training. So all this changing of the weights is due to changing a STDP as it's running along or learning through STDP. So it's not that we're shuffling the weights, it's actually a much smaller parameter space if you think about it. There's on the order of 20 parameters that we're searching, but we have to let it run for several seconds or minutes per stimuli. But like I said, it's done in parallel, so it really speeds things up. So this is a really nice demonstration that showed it's sufficient to use this method or framework to actually make biologically realistic spiking neural networks. And it was very nice that we're using a theoretical construct to actually guide this search. But these are toy problems. So what about a real brain networks? Can this actually scale up to real brain networks? So we are very lucky to have data given to us from Doug Knitz's lab at University of California, San Diego. And he was recording from an area of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex. And retrosplenial cortex is interesting because it has three types of spatial navigation and coding, route-centric, allocentric, and egocentric. And I'll explain what that is in a minute. But if you look down here, the task was having a rat run this W maze back and forth, back and forth. And then they would move the maze to a different position and have the rat run back and forth on this W. Now, if it's egocentric, then neurons fire every time it takes a right turn, for example. Now, if it's allocentric, the one on the right, it fires in specific places, or encodes specific places in the environment, like a place cell, but they don't really look like sharp place cells. But they can still, neurons in retrosplenial can still encode allocentric space. Now, something different is called route-centric. And that is, you might find neurons to fire on the second left turn of a path. And they call that route-centric. So they find in this interesting area that is connected to lots of areas like hippocampus, parietal cortex, and subiculum. They find in this area, these three types of classes of cells that are important for spatial navigation. So they gave us this data set. They recorded from about 250 neurons. And this is work by my student, Emily Rounds, in conjunction with Eric Siggy Scott and Ken DeYoung at George Mason University. And she'll be presenting this in the next few weeks at PPSN, Parallel Problems Solving in Nature, PPSN. I'll go through quickly, just some of the key results. So, Andy Alexander, Dugnitz's student and Dugnitz recorded from all these neurons. And while they're recording from neurons, they're recording certain behavioral metrics. So they're recording the angular velocity of the rat, the linear velocity of the rat, the rat's head direction, and the rat's position in space. So we took those behavioral metrics that they had that were tied to the recordings, and we put it into a network of about 600 neurons they record from 250 neurons, remember? And it had a 10% connectivity. And we did the similar method that I just showed you before. We searched the parameter space of STDP and homeostasis. And the fitness was just, instead of using the efficient coding hypothesis in this case, because we had the data, the fitness was just how close we match or how close we correlate our synthetic neurons to their real neurons. And we could run 15 neural networks in parallel on one GPU so we could really speed up this process. The first thing is we got really good fitness in a really short amount of time. And really good fitness is 5.5 to 0.6 correlation between the two neurons, between any two neurons. So in like 20 to 30 generations, we're getting really tight solutions. And I'll explain towards the end of the talk why I think this is happening. We have an idea now why it's so fast. But what was nice was you see in red our synthetic spiking neural network, spiking neurons in a real neuron that's firing and here's on the track left, right, left, right, left, left, right, right, left, right and so on. And so it's following the nice spiking of these real neurons. And this is just a mean firing rate of the spiking activity from their data set. So we got really good matches on an individual level. So what about at the population data? So we saw all three types of neurons in our data, in our synthetic data. We saw route modulated turn cells. We saw pure turn cells. We saw turn insensitive cells which are probably doing more of an allocentric concoating. And then if you look at the population on a whole, we see that we can do a reconstruction of the path. So let's say the rat runs on this WMAs, a whole number of trials. You can compare the odd trials to the even trials and say, can I predict where this rat is from one population activity to the next? And this is the experimental data and you can see you can predict very nicely where the rat would be from an even trial where it would be on an odd trial. And this is the synthetic data. So we could have a really nice match. So as a whole, these neurons are encoding allocentric space. Now if you take the, compare, do the same analysis, but you take when the track was in position A and the track was in position B and do the same thing, you do not get that. So it's actually specific to that space. And this is the real neurons and this is the synthetic neurons. So very nicely, we see that it's specific and selective to space. All right, so I think just, this evolutionary framework is quite promising. Not only for just different types of models, but also now actually replicating real data. Given a set of behavioral metrics and some spiking or any kind of neurophysiological data, we can actually use this to match and we can do it in a very efficient way. And it's not just matching the specific neurons, it actually seems to be capturing the population dynamics and the behavioral metrics of the real network. So we're very excited about that. And it's interesting that we can use what in evolutionary algorithms called an indirect approach, right? So a lot of people do what's known as a direct approach so you would actually evolve the connectivity of every single way, but that's a huge space. So actually leveraging what STDP and homeostasis is doing indirectly, you can actually get these matches, which is interesting. And then using GPUs in this and in our other framework really helps to speed up some of these simulations. All right, so I was kind of wondering, I was at another meeting just explaining Emily rounds this data and they were saying, well, how does it do this so fast? It doesn't make sense. Usually when you see evolutionary algorithms, you're talking hundreds to thousands of generations before you get a match. And it was odd to me. And then on a separate line of research that just came out in J Neuroscience about a month ago, another student in our lab, Michael Baylor, was looking at an area of visual cortex called MST. And so this is a totally different area or subject in a way, but I'll show you how they link together. So primary visual cortex has strong projections to an area called MT. So area MT has very strong directional selectivity. So cells are directionally selective to motion and also the speed of that motion. And then they have a strong projection to an area called MST. Now MST is kind of a mystery to everyone. It is originally, you know, there's strong evidence that MST is encoding the heading or focus of expansion as you move through space. But some of the receptive fields are kind of crazy looking. It's probably responding to things that are moving in space, in different positions. And then there's some really wild receptive fields that no one was really sure what's going on. So what Michael did in the lab was that, well, he had made a very detailed model using our simulator of this region, MT. But then he sort of took a step back, said, well, I want to do more of a theoretical model to see if I had responses like MT, what would happen in this area?  So the features were the MT-like responses. So they were like motion directional tuning and speed tuning. And then the stimuli were just a whole bunch of flow patterns, including eye rotation. So how you move through space while your eyes are moving and eyes are in different positions. And then he used something called non-negative matrix factorization. So a dimensional reduction technique called, I'll keep calling it NMF, non-negative matrix factorization. What's nice about this is it's parts-based and everything's non-negative, so it's positive. So eventually this could actually go into a network if you could actually pull out the weights from this method. So it's similar to PCA and ICA, but it has those nice characteristics. And so the idea is to take the feature space times the stimulus space and then look for a set of basis functions that you could use to reconstruct this input. But you want the basis vectors or basis functions to be much less, much smaller, so you get a sparse encoding that can reconstruct the input. And so that's the idea. And he got receptive fields that look like this. He got, I won't go into, I don't have time to go into detail and look at the paper, but he was able to match a wide range of data using this methodology, which I was really impressed. Anything from MST in the last several years was able to match the receptive fields that came out of this. But what's interesting for our point is it fits in with the efficient coding hypothesis. So it's doing a sparse representation so that if you get an original image like this and you have, in this case, 64 basis vectors, which is much smaller, much reduced, you can reconstruct very accurately the response of this optic flow field. And if you look here, these are the basis vectors that are responding the most. It's hard to match it up, but trust me, they're picking out the big features of this particular stimuli. And so it's a sparse representation of this. And we're able to reconstruct and also predict where the focus of expansion is. And it didn't do just that. It also showed neurons or receptive fields that will be responsive to eye position, like you see in real MST and a whole bunch of other parameters. It turns out that cells in MST are not just doing one thing, they're kind of generalizing, but they're also doing it a very efficient sparse way. And then just playing with a number of basis vectors, you see the error goes down as you increase the number of basis vectors and there's a sweet spot, which is somewhere between 32 and 64 basis vectors. And then there's an increase in sparseness as you have more basis vectors. So it's really nicely chopping this problem up and doing it in a very efficient way. And I always forget to introduce who did the real work. So before I wrap up, let me just introduce the team. So this is my long time collaborator at UC Irvine, nickhill.nick. He's been working on this, Carl, especially the neuromorphic engineering portions of what our lab does. Chris Carlson did some of the original work for the evolutionary framework. Michael Baylor, I just talked about his work on MST into some really nice large scale networks on area MT. And Emily Rounds is the one that did the work with the retrosplenial cortex data. All right, so what do I think is going on? Well, first, I think we need these large scale, there was discussion about this. I think we need these large scale complex simulations to really, at least from my idea, get an understanding of the brain that leads to behavior. And especially for fields like neuromorphic engineering or my other field is called neuro robotics. We need to at least explore these dynamics and figure out what principles to extract from it. Now, what do I think is going on with the data I just showed you? I think the combination of STDP plus homeostasis is doing the equivalent of dimensionality reduction. I didn't really believe this. And then Chris Carlson and then Michael Richard, who was a postdoc in our lab at the time, buried this in when Chris introduced the homeostasis rule, had an appendix of this conference proceeding, a proof that said STDP plus homeostasis is equivalent to non-negative matrix factorization. I didn't give it much thought, but I said, yeah, put that in. But now I'm actually seeing it in practice. So I think that's what's going on. Well, that was what he did in that toy model, but with Emily Round's data, I think that's what's going on. I think that it's doing that dimensionality reduction on the types of inputs you get from the head direction system, the hippocampus system, and the parietal cortex. And you see the same types of neurons that are generalizing in a very sparse way, like you saw with Michael Baylor's work in MST, which was really nice. He used not our method, but he used the actual non-negative matrix factorization. I think if he had done the evolutionary framework, he would see the exact same thing, something we want to try out. So I really think that these principles of efficient coding are not only a way to guide the construction of spiking neural networks, but they're also very informative about what's going on in brains and how it's really trying to extract the most by doing the least amount of work. And that's a good point to stop. So I'll stop there. Thank you for your attention. Things that weren't quite being matched by your network. So for instance, when there was some high activity of the experimental neurons, your network didn't always exactly match it. Also in some of the other predictions, you could see that there was a structured difference. Yeah, so you look on the bottom right, for instance, the experimental, you can see there are big peaks which get missed. So do you think your error metric is really capturing what's important about these neurons? I do. I don't think you're ever gonna get a perfect match. And then why I think it's doing things properly is because the population dynamics match. Yeah, because I would never expect to get an exact match. It's apples and oranges. We're using as a cave it's neurons and they're getting different inputs. I was kind of shocked. And actually Andy Alexander who sent, the student that did all the recording was really shocked. I was like, I always was wondering if this was noise but there's a real structure there. So it's capturing the structure. It's capturing the population dynamics. And then what will hopefully come out very soon is we're trying to understand some other things. So we're doing manipulations that they couldn't have done in the lab or they haven't had a chance to do that we're doing to the network. And the early looking at the early results it's manipulating or changing the network dynamics in an interesting but plausible way. So I'm pretty confident about that. And I'm not sure how you could squeeze out like even a better match to that. So can I just ask, does the brain actually learn the way your simulation does? If you take a naive animal and put it into the maze for the first time, does the development of network dynamics parallel to what you see in your simulation? No, I probably not. I mean, because we're doing something different. So maybe with a simple cell, but that was a toy model that you're seeing sort of a development of orientation specificity. But with the other thing, the rats have already been very well trained.  And so we're doing something different. What I like about the method is now we have a way if anyone gives us this data set we can try and replicate it and then we can do experiments in simulation. And then with putting on my robotics hat instead of having to make artificial networks I can actually make networks that are very closely matched to real networks and then do the kind of simulations I like to do with that.


This is actually something that I've tried to explain on my channel too, and I think people have misinterpretations due to just what a PET scan is. You're using a radioactive form of glucose, which when it's absorbed by cells, literally all cells in your body utilize glucose to some extent, especially your brain, very metabolic tissues like your heart, your muscle tissue. So technically in a PET scan, everything is literally glowing, but the final image that patients see from a PET scan is something that's processed. So they actually reduce the background noise from every cell in your body that's glowing to some extent to find the cells that are glowing a little bit more than the other cells in the proximity to find where the tumors are. So those final images that people see of PET scans are processed, but at the core of it, all cells in your body utilize glucose to some extent. We're just utilizing image processing methods to try and find and pinpoint where the tumors are, where the cells that are utilizing glucose more than cells in the neighboring environment.


Hello everybody and welcome to part three in the Apocalypse of Abraham. This might be the final installation. We'll see how far along we get. If we don't finish the Apocalypse of Abraham this week, then we will definitely be finishing it up next week. As always, if you would like to join us for the live reading of the Apocalypse of Abraham on David Zublik's channel, that happens on Tuesdays from 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. So David Zublik is not on YouTube. He does have a channel on Bitshoot and Rumble, but he also has his own platform, the Dark Outpost TV, which a link to that is down in the description box below. And that is the platform that I know he prefers to use. I prefer to use because it is his own platform. Therefore, there is no censorship and we are allowed to speak as freely as we would like to speak regarding certain topics. Now, I know there is a small monthly fee. I think it's like $2 or something a month. It's very, very, very affordable. That literally is just for the upkeep of his platform.  As my channel is still up on YouTube, I can't go into details about what this charity does to support children, but I think most of you get what I'm saying. Now, as always, if this is your first time on my channel, welcome, welcome, welcome. I would suggest going back and listening to part one of the Apocalypse of Abraham in part two before listening to part three so that it all makes sense. There will be links to those two episodes down in the description box as well where you could just click on and watch those first before then proceeding with this installment. So we've left off with Abraham being initiated into the total enlightenment or total understanding of what God is. Now, if you remember from part one, Abraham was born into a family that were polytheistic. They worshiped many gods, which was common at the time of Abraham's birth. And from a very, very young age, Abraham didn't quite understand. He was a little bit more skeptical of his father's faith. If you remember, he had questions, he observed things, he watched things, the fact that within nature we have all these powerful forces like water and like the sun and the moon and the earth itself. But none of these forces are any powerful than the other because the sun can dry up the water. The water can be forceful enough to cause a flood and the moon can then take the power away from the sun. So he's observing that these really powerful natural forces that people tend to worship as particular gods were actually puzzle pieces connected to the same source so that there had to be something behind all of these powerful natural entities that were directing them to do what they do, one singular. So we're coming from polytheism to monotheism. And if you know anything about the history of Abraham, Abraham is the father of three religions. These are the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So once Abraham figures out, he has this kind of epiphany that there's something else behind everything. God reveals himself to Abraham and he does this through his archangel Joelle. And the interesting thing about Joelle is the angel that was responsible for helping take down the Watchers, which comes heavily into play in the book of Enoch, which is a book that we will be covering eventually. This was right before the flood. And he is also responsible for holding back all these demons until the end of time. And we know the end of time as in the actual apocalypse. And again, all apocalypse means is to lift the veil that all these demons would be released. And then they would be taken out for good, where we would then be living in a thousand years of peace, which my opinion that we are right now at this point in our timeline. So Abraham and Joelle have now initiated his initiation into understanding God. He's gone up through the different firmaments, the different layers of the atmosphere. Now I have said this plenty, plenty times. I have no idea at this point in our great awakening. I personally have absolutely no idea what our earth actually looks like. We know for sure that certain government scientific organizations like NASA are dishonest. We know that nothing that comes out of NASA now is the truth at all. But I'm also not 100% sold on a flat earth either. And we did ask Janine that question once, Tom and I asked her like, what is our earth? What are we standing on? And the cards basically said that it's not, it's not time for us to understand that yet. Basically, hold on, we've got some other things to learn first. So this whole apocalypse of Abraham, we're definitely seeing this picture of an earth and an atmosphere that's different from what we have been taught by the official narrative. All right, so let's get chart. So let's get started appropriately with chapter 17. So they're going up through the firmament. This is titled, this whole section is titled Abraham taught by the angel utters the celestial song in prayers for enlightenment. And I am going to be reading some of the notes that have been left here by Professor Box. I am again reading the translation by Professor Box. Somebody asked me in the comment section if this is an old and missing text that should have been in the Bible, then why is it in old English? Well, that's because it was translated from Hebrew. All right, Hebrew actually from Hebrew to Greek to old Syrian to now English. And Professor Box lived in the early 20th century. This translation was released in 1918, I believe. And so he would have translated it, the English that we would have translated it into would have been old English because that was the proper form in translation in his time. Professor Box was a Hebrew professor at King's College in London. So I definitely take what he says seriously. And so I am going to be reading some of his notes though that he has in this text, but that's why it's an old English. It's not an old English because that's how it was found. It was not found in old English. It's just how Professor Box chose to translate it. All right, so Chapter 17.  All right, so I'm going to come down here and read some notes that Professor Box has left. So the divine presence is revealed by fire and God himself is spoken as a consuming fire. But here the fiery chariot, which bore the divine presence, is probably thought of. So we're seeing this presence of fire, which we do see that referenced a lot in the canonized Bible. And we also see when it says a fire like the voice of many waters. We have a note here. This feature is part of a supernatural coloring so characteristics of the apocalypse. The heavenly light is of a dazzling brilliance. The divine voice is like thunder. And I desire to fall down upon the earth and the high place on which we stood at one moment rose upright, but at another rolled downward. So here we have a note. This description is interesting. The seer has ascended as with many winds to heaven and is standing on the height. He experiences a strong feeling of desire to fall down upon the earth because the high place on which he is standing with the angel at one moment rose up and at another plunge downward. The commotion is produced by the divine voice. So he's feeling the vibration of the voice of God. And it kind of sounds like, I don't know, I grew up up here in like North Georgia where I grew up. We're at the base of the Appalachian Mountains. And so there's a lot of hills. There's a lot of hills here in Atlanta. Even when we go like take our dog out, like we're constantly having to hike up and down hills. And when we were children, I had this one friend who lived at the bottom of this hill. Her neighborhood went straight downhill. But it was one of those hills where if you went over it at a certain way, the car would make your stomach go, you know, you kind of would get that like, it was almost like being on a roller coaster.  And so if you are familiar with that kind of neighborhood where you go over those hills, if you had that when you were a child, if you know what I'm talking about, I think that's what Abraham is experiencing. He's experiencing almost like this roller coaster ride because of the vibration of God's voice is causing everything to respond to it. That's how powerful it is. And of course, when Abraham or whoever wrote this, this text was writing this text, they didn't have the word roller coaster, right? But that is kind of what it sounds like to me. If it sounds like something different to you, then please leave me that in the comments below. And he said, so he, the angel said, only worship Abraham and utter the song which I have taught thee because there is no earth to fall upon. And I worshiped only and uttered the song which he had taught me. And he said, recite without ceasing. And I recited and lo, he also with me recited the song. So before we get into the song, let's look at this note that Professor Box has left us only the angels understand how to other the divine song of praise. Though the blessing among mortals may as here be taught to sing thus in a state of ecstasy. Each of the angelic spheres has its own voice. And the angelic language is incomprehensible to mortals. And through the illuminated and inspired seer may be taught both to understand and utter such words. The exalted Enoch in heaven underwent a similar experience. Again, this is coming back to the book of Enoch, which we have not covered yet, but we will be covering eventually. So this is quoting from the book of Enoch. I fell on my face and my whole body melted away, but my spirit was transfigured. And I cried with a loud voice. And also did Isaiah. According to Philo, no beings can adequately express the praise due to God. And that makes sense to me. It's kind of like when we see people undergo a near death experience, like I've talked about my grandfather's near death experience. He now has a sense passed away. But when he was in his 40s, he had a near death experience where he remember seeing a light. And for people who have experienced this, oftentimes they say the same thing. They can only describe it as a light. They always say like they can't really tell you specifically what the light looks like because it's more brilliant than any light that we mortals have on our plane of reality. And so it kind of seems here it's the same thing. It's like they're trying to explain to us what this divine atmosphere looks like, but they can't really do it justice because it's just something that's so foreign to mortals. I hope that makes sense. All right. So here's the song, the mantra, the prayer that they are reciting in this without ceasing. So over and over and over again, like a mantra, like a prayer, now that Abraham has been able to go into the divine realm. Eternal mighty holy El, God only supreme. Thou who aren't self-originated, incorruptible, spotless, uncreate, immaculate, immortal, self-complete, self-illuminating, without father, without mother, unbegotten, exalted, fiery one, lover of men, benevolent, bountiful, jealous over me, and very compassionate. Now this sounds exactly like the Apocryphon of John. If you all remember, I'll put a link to the Apocryphon of John down in the description box below if you missed that, which basically talked about the self-originating God that the supreme God created itself. Okay, sounds very, very familiar. Eli, that is my God, eternal mighty holy Sabaath. So this is S-A-B-A-O-T-H, Sabaath, Sabaath. And he has a note here, the use of a Sabaath alone is a designation of God is unusual, but not unexampled. So basically he's writing here that there is actually a lot of references to God being called a Sabaath in other works of Jewish origin, like the Apocalypse of Abraham. And so we'll probably run across that in other works we study, but that's just his notes there.  And thy heavenly dwelling place, there is no need of any other light, than that of the unspeakable splendor from the light of thy continents. Accept my prayer and be well pleased with it, likewise also the sacrifice which thou hast prepared, thee through me who sought thee. Accept me favorably and show me and teach me and make me known to thy servant as thou hast promised me. So this brings us now to chapter 18 and this is titled Abraham's vision of the divine throne. And while I was still reciting the song, the mouth of the fire which was on the surface rose up on high and I heard a voice like the roaring of the sea. Nor did it cease on account of the rich abundance of the fire. So even though there's a lot of external noise from the fire of the divinity, he can still hear the voice. That's how powerful it is.  And under the throne four fiery living creatures singing their appearance was one each one of them with four faces. So Bach gives us a note here that the idea of these beings having multiple faces is common with the cherubin. We saw that referred to in an earlier section of the apocalypse of Abraham where Jalal was explaining to Abraham that he was there when some of cherubin went bad which is the whole story of the flood and the watchers and Nephilim you know the angels mating with human women. So we're still seeing another reference to cherubin here and that they often have multiple faces. And such was the appearance of their countenance of a lion of a man of an oxen of an eagle.  All with two wings from their shoulders they covered their faces with the two wings which sprang from their loins they covered their feet while the two middle wings were spread out for flying straight forward. And when they had ended the singing they looked at one another and threatened one another. And so Bach has a note here. So he says the underlying idea of this strange representation seems to be that of emulation and rivalry. So that's interesting that he notes that this is like emulation they love God but they're also kind of looking at each other like in rivalry almost like sibling rivalry not necessarily threatening but but just rivalry that's interesting. And it came to pass when the angel who was with me saw that they were threatening each other and he left me went running to them and turned the countenance of each living creature from the countenance immediately confronting him in order that they might not see their countenance threatening each other. And he taught them the song of peace which has its original and the eternal one. So basically because Joel is an archangel he's kind of like the babysitter in my opinion because that's kind of how I see archangels of like all these beings on God's behalf not just man but other angels.  And as I stood alone and looked I saw behind the living creatures a chariot with fiery wills each will full of eyes round about and over the wills was a throne which I saw and this was covered with fire and fire encircled it around about and low and indescribable fire envired a fiery host and I heard its holy voice like the voice of a man. So we are kind of seeing the entrance of God here. It kind of reminds me of some scenes we've seen in movies when huge chariots come in with the king or a queen except for now it's like the ultimate king and queen is God you know. I would love if there are any artists out there listening to this reading I would love if you want to sketch that whole description out that I just read and if you need for me to send you the pdf of the apocalypse of Abraham for you to see the writings so you can sketch it out I would love for you to do that and if you send it to me I will I will put it on the channel for sure because that is quite a sight to behold the way he's described it. Alright this brings us to chapter 19. God discloses to Abraham the power of heaven and a voice came to me out of the midst of the fire saying Abraham Abraham and I said here I am so the week before last on David's show before David went on vacation I was we're kind of laughing because throughout the apocalypse of Abraham we have Abraham going we have Abraham and God or the angels like calling out for each other it's always Abraham Abraham and he always responds here I am so it's kind of like Marco Polo like they're Marco Polo and every time I read that I just see this this game of Marco Polo happening in like the the beautiful chaos of the formament if that makes sense so and he said consider the expanses which are under the fireman on which thou art now placed and see how no single expansion is there any other but he whom thou hast sought or who hath loved thee and while he was yet speaking and lo the expanses opened and beneath me the heavens and I saw upon the seventh firmament upon which I stood a fire wildly extended in light and dew and a multitude of angels and a power of the invisible glory over the living creature which I saw but no other being did I see there so he is on the seventh firmament so he's seven layers above the earth and that's the note that box has here he says Abraham is now presumably placed and he put placed in quotation marks in the seventh heaven and surveys from above what is disclosed to him as existing in the various firmaments below him and in the earth the angel celestial bodies and everything that is moving on the earth so it's kind of looking down and seeing and seeing all of this block also has a note here from Isaiah's story that that matches this he writes it is said that Isaiah saw the seventh heaven a wonderful light and angels innumerable and all righteous from the time of Adam so we know that the angels were created before Adam was created so that makes sense and the seventh heaven contains judgment and righteousness the treasure of life peace and blessing the soul of the departed righteous the spirits and souls yet unborn the dew with which God will make the dead the seraphim the ofamen the hayok and other and angels of service and God himself sitting on the throne of glory no doubt that the dew in our passage is the resurrection dew fire and light are much dwelled upon in this context and i look from the mountain in which i stood downwards on the sixth firmament and saw that there were multitude of angels of pure spirit without bodies who carried out the commands of the fiery angels who were upon the eighth firmament as i was standing suspended over them and behold upon this firmament there were no other powers of any other form but only angels of pure spirit like the power which i saw on the seventh firmament and he commanded that the sixth firmament should be taken away and i saw there on the fifth firmament the power of the stars which carry out the commands laid upon them and the elements of the earth obeyed them whoa guys let's read that again because we have been talking about astrology so much on this channel especially within the missing books of the bible we know that astrology is not of the devil it's not evil news flash if you're not aware of that if your church is teaching you that that it's evil that is not see propaganda from world war two it's called the hess act i've talked about that a lot you can look it up and i actually asked this question when we did our episode with melissa red pill and mickey clan and i actually asked tomorrow this off camera um what they thought planets were right what are what are planets because we don't really know anymore because nasa you know nasa's liar liar pants on fire so we have no idea what the stars and the planets actually are but they do seem to have a uh understanding of consciousness these stars and these planets and these constellations have names and stories associated with them and if you listen to the episode with uh david zublik mickey clan and melissa red culmination that we did a couple of weeks ago on david's channel i will link uh a link to that episode in the description box below for you guys to be able to go watch it melissa and mickey basically break down revelation the book of revelation by reading the stars and it turns out it turns out my friends that the book of revelation is not a scary book at all but it's actually like the best news possible and all the scary things that are talked about revelation are not about us the tribulation is not about us it's about them it's about tana nights the cabal you know the um quote-unquote deep state if you will we know what they do there's a very fine line there between good and evil the cult of the dark versus the faiths of the light and so let's read that again guys you know in the bible it does say asking you shall receive seeking you shall find knock and the door shall be opened unto you and it is quite funny that i have been asking this question and boom here is the answer in the apocalypse of abraham and he commanded so i'm reading this again and he commanded that the six firemen should be taken away and i saw there on the fifth firemen the power of the stars which carry out the commands laid upon them and the elements of the earth obey them right that's astrology okay so it looks like the stars the planets quarius gemini capricorn scorpio all these different constellations are in the fifth firmament all right and they are given commands so they have an intelligent understanding of the commands that are given unto them and they move with those commands they deliver those messages within themselves and then the elements of the earth of our plane of existence obey them as above so below right what is happening up in the heavens is being reflected upon the earth boom there you go all right sorry i got really excited over that because i can't stand it something that has really irks me is how much the church has lied to us the church is just as evil as any of these evil organizations that we talk about they have lied lied lied lied lied lied lied about everything because they don't want us to have a relationship with god they don't want us to know god they say they do but they invert everything so that we don't but we're on to them and we're moving forward now all right so this brings us now to chapter 20 the promise of a seed so this brings us to chapter 20 the promise of a seed and the eternal mighty one said to me abraham abraham and i said here i am marco polo right and he said consider from the stars which are beneath thee and number them for me and make known to me their number and i said when can i for i am but a man of dust and ashes and he said to me as the number of the stars and their power so will i make thy seed a nation and a people set apart for me in my heritage with azzazelle so again azzazelle is the incarnation of evil lucifer satan the devil whatever you want to call that being that is its incarnation that's its name in this apocalypse of abraham we've seen these biblical spiritual for lack of a better word we'll say caricatures have different names throughout these different works in the book of jubilee uh he was mastima and my favorite was actually in the apocryphon of john he was yelled about that's the best name i've heard so far yelled about but it's all the same thing just says shakes pierced a rose of any other name would smell just as sweet it doesn't change who this being is this entity is by changing its name it's still the same entity so as a cell is its name in this book we talked a lot about azzazelle last week with yonkapore and that whole beginning of azzazelle's existence within our own human knowledge so if you missed again part two please go back and listen to it it is in the description box below and so basically god is telling abraham that abraham is going to create many nations we know that abraham is the father of dutyism christianity and islam and through his grandson jake up he has the 12 tribes of israel which then shattered all over the world and so basically god is telling abraham you're going to be the father of a bunch of people over the world that are my children that praise me and we have this heritage with azzazelle this battle between good and evil and they will stand on the side of good with me under your umbrella basically and he said oh eternal mighty one let thy servant speak before me and let not not thine anger kindle against thys chosen one lo before thou leadest me up azzazelle invade against me how then while he is not now before thee hast thou constituted thyself with him so abraham has asked the question that was also asked in the book of jubilee and a question that a lot of us ask like why why does satan exist and a god is so powerful as the god we worship the creator of everything he has the power to squish out satan to get rid of him but we know from the book of jubilee there was a contract between god and satan some agreement that he would let satan or azzazelle as he's called in this in this book serve a particular purpose and this purpose was to give man free will if man does it since man ate from the tree the knowledge of good and evil now understands good and evil the man now has to have the consequences of making that choice between good and evil and as we learned from the gospel of the holy 12 and we've seen that in these other missing books that should have been in the old testament the israelites the seeds of abraham aren't necessarily biological that anybody that praises god anybody that stands in the light anybody that service to others anybody that has empathy and compassion and loves the lord are all israelites doesn't matter what your heritage is through your dna or how you grew up it matters what you choose and so like many people in modern times in ancient times abraham is like why not just not give us a choice and let us live in happiness well we know that the a thousand years of peace is coming where satan will be defeated for a thousand years but this brings us to chapter 21 a vision of sin and paradise the mirror of the world so again as i just said talking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and since we even adam ate from that tree now man has the understanding the consciousness of understanding right from wrong um and so that gives us now now that we we have that understanding between right and wrong we have to live out the consequences of having that understanding between right and wrong and we have to pick whether we're going to choose light or darkness that also means that with that consciousness we have things like emotional pain and empathy and compassion so there's a lot that goes with those consequences so here we go chapter 21 and he said to me look now beneath thy feet at the firmaments and understand the creation foreshadowed in this expanse the creatures existing on it and the age prepared according to it and i saw beneath the surface of the feet the sixth heaven and what was there and in the earth and its fruits and what moved upon it and its animate beginnings and the power of of its men and the ungodliness of their souls and their righteous deeds and the beginning of their works and the lower regions and the perdition therein the abyss and its torments i saw the sea and its islands and its monsters and its fish and the leviathan in his domain and his campground and his caves in the world which lay upon him and his movements and the destruction of the world on his account and i saw their streams and the rising of their waters and their windings and i saw there the garden of eden and its fruits the source of the stream issuing from it and its trees in their bloom and those who behaved righteously and i saw therein their foods and blessedness and i saw there a great multitude men and women and children half of them on the right side of the picture and half of them on the left side of the picture okay so he's seeing now the division and we talked about that in the first episode that we're going to see some of the roots of the gnostic beliefs which were the least between the left-handed path and the right-handed path we also saw this on our deep dive on anton levée i will link that video also down in the description box below where anton levée the founder of the satanic church had his daughter zina baptized to the left hand inside of satan and again many people want to tell you that the gnostics were satanic they were not remember everything we're taught in the official narrative a nothing but an inversion of the truth so the gnostics were literally the first christians and so even before the new testament was totally complete written they had these books so they understood this idea of the left-handed path and the right-handed path the light the darkness all different ways of talking about the two different sides of this battle and we also know that when man fell lucifer did get dominion over the earth that's why the cabal has been able to last for so long that's why we have these monarchs and these corrupt systems for such a long time because he was given that dominion and now his time is up all right so this brings us to chapter 22 the fall of man and its sequel and i said oh eternal mighty one what is the picture of the creatures and he said to me this is my will with regard to those who exist in the divine world council and it seemed well pleasing before my sight and then afterwards i gave commandment to them through my word and it came to pass whatever i had determined to be was already planned beforehand in this picture and it stood before me air it was created as thou hast seen so box does have a um note here that the whole concept this whole concept of the garden of eden is strongly predestination the whole course of creation the rise of evil and the coming of the righteousness is predetermined so we know that we know that we see that in the bible it's all predetermined we also see that a lot in um hindu manuscripts the idea of dharma being like the true path or the path of of your fate a predetermined life path and so it's kind of the same idea that god knew he knew that man would fall he knew it but he allowed it to happen anyway and again that gives more complexity to the conscious of man to now understand right and wrong and to be able to pick their side and i said oh lord mighty and eternal who are the people in this picture on the side and on that side he said to me these which are on the left side are the multitude of people which have formerly been in existence and which are after the destined some for judgment and restoration and others for vengeance and destruction at the end of the world but these which are on the right side of the picture they are the people set apart for me from the people of azazel these are they whom i have ordained to be born of the and to be called my people so basically there are already souls that were on his side that are going to come through very powerful beings i think we can look back through the history of the bible and kind of see who these people are that are already been predestined to fight on god's side chapter 23 now look again in the picture who it is who seduced eve and what is the fruit of the tree that will know what there shall be and how it shall be to thy seed among the people at the end of the days of the age and so far as thou canest not understand i will make known to thee for thou art while pleasing in my sight and i will tell thee what is kept in my heart and i looked into the picture and my eyes ran to the side of the garden of eden and i saw there a man very great in height and fearful in breath and comparable in aspect embracing a woman who likewise approximated to the aspect and shape of a man and they were standing under a tree of the garden of eden and the fruit of this tree was like the appearance of a bunch of grapes of a vine and behind the tree was standing as it were a serpent in form having hands and feet like a man's and wings on its shoulders six on the right side and six on the left and they were holding the grapes of the tree in their hands and both were eating it whom i had seen embracing so let's let's break this down for a second he's saying that adam and eve were of great height we know that even though the nephilim were giants not all giants were nephilim if that makes sense we know that there were giants already on the earth before that there were men that were greatly greatly tall and so it looks like from this book adam and eve were huge people tall tall giant people and as our days have gotten shorter as we have our lifespan has started to decrease as we talked about the book of jubilees so has our density is what i'm seeing in our natural bodies and now as we start to go back into the age of aquarius and our our life our health gets better we might start to see ourselves getting taller again and it's interesting that they describe that the fruit from the the tree is more like grapes we always see it taught to us as the apple but it looks like from this this work it's more like grapes and if you look at the way that they're describing the serpent who tended then it seems like a drago doesn't it it doesn't seem like an actual snake it seems like the lizard as we call the lizard people right very interesting and i said who are these mutually embracing or who is this who is between them or what is the fruit which they're eating a mighty eternal one and he said this is the human world this is adam and this is their desire upon the earth this is eve but he was between and represents ungodliness they're beginning on the way to perdition as a zeal and i said oh eternal mighty one what has thou given to such power to destroy the generations of men in their works upon the earth and he said to me they who will to do evil and how much i've hated it in those who do it over them i gave him power and to be loved of them and i answered and said oh eternal mighty one wherefore house thou willed to affect the evil should be desired in the hearts of men since thou indeed art angered over that was willed by thee at him who is doing what is unprofitable and by counsel that ends chapter 23 so we're kind of going over everything we just talked about about having this plan this greater plan between the battle of good and evil with the fall of man so this brings us to chapter 24 and he said to me being angered at the nations on my account and on account of the people of thy family who are to be separated after thee as thou seest in the picture the burden of destiny that is laid upon them and i will tell thee what shall be and how much shall be in the last days look now at everything in this picture and i looked and saw there was before me in creation i saw adam and eve existing with him and with them the cunning adversary and kane who acted lawlessly through the adversary and slaughtered abel and the destruction brought and caused upon him through the lawless one i also saw impurity and those who lust after it and its pollution and their jealousy and the fire of their corruption and the lowest part of the earth and i saw their theft and those who hasten after it and the argument of their retribution the judgment of the great azzazelle and i saw their naked man the foreheads against each other and their disgrace and their passion on which they had against each other and their retribution i saw their desire and her hands the heavy of every kind of lawlessness and her scorn and her waste assigned to perdition chapter 25 i saw there the likeness of the idol of jealousy having the likeness of woodwork such as my father was want to make and its statue was of glittering bronze and before the man and he worshipped it and in front of him an altar upon it a boy slain in the presence of the idol holy crap you guys holy crap did y'all just hear that whoa i saw the likeness of the idol of jealousy so he's seeing a likeness like the idols that his father made so it looks like one of his father's idol it isn't necessarily his father's idol but it looks like that and there's a father worshipping it in front of the altar and a little boy is slain at the bottom of the altar hello bohemian grove epstein island boom boom boom y'all this is another reason why this book was banned it says it right there in black and white what is actually going on okay but let's go on now but i said to him him what is this idol or what is that altar and who are they that are sacrificed and who is the sacrificer or what is the temple which i see that is beautiful and art and its beauty being like the glory that life beneath thy throne and he said here abraham this which thou seest the temple and the altar and beauty is my idea of the priesthood of my glorious name in which dwelt every single prayer of man and the rise of the kings and the prophets and whatever sacrifice i ordained to be offered to me among my people who were to come out of my generation but the statue which thou saw us is my anger where with the people angered me who are forced to proceed from me from thee but the man whom thou saw us slaughtering that is he who incited murderous sacrifices of which are witnessed to me of the final judgment even at the beginning of creation and i think we're going to stop it there i know i said we're going to try to get through the rest of this today but we just kind of had a couple of like mic drop moments in this piece of literature this manuscript i shouldn't say literature because i actually do believe this should have been in the bible so we'll call it a manuscript um so we're chapped stopping on chapter this is chapter 26 and so we'll pick up with chapter 26 next week because that is a lot to take in for today we know now that astrology isn't of the devil it's an act of god and we're seeing now why sin exists why as is that we've seen adam and eve in the garden they're freaking giants it looks like they're eating grapes not apples and it looks like satan wasn't necessarily a snake a serpent but an actual demonic being and now we see this whole idea of a line being drawn between the left-handed side and the right handed side the children of good the children of evil the children of the serpent the children of man the children of god all this kind of stuff and now we're seeing that the idea of sacrificing actual human beings is being um told to us in this this book at the end of time so we're taking it from the beginning of time we're coming all the way to the end of times and god is saying like the actions of our enemy of as is el has been the same since the garden of eating eaten up until the last days of this timeline which again in my opinion does not mean the world's going to end it just means that satan doesn't rule anymore and we're all going to understand why and most of us on the channel absolutely understand what happens in these ceremonies we'll just say religious ceremonies so we're going to we're going to leave it there and next week we'll pick up on chapter 26 which is titled why sin is permitted because i don't want to skim through this way too fast i want us to sit with this stuff again if you would like the pdf of this book i will be more than happy to email you the pdf just shoot me an email at esotericatlantaandgmail.com because i know sometimes it's nice to have it yourself so just message me there and once again leave me your thoughts and your opinions down in the comment section below please remember to be respectful to each other regardless of whether you think this book is legitimate or not everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion but what you're not entitled to on this channel is to say horribly mean things to people who have a different opinion from you we have to be respectful to each other which most of you are and i greatly greatly greatly appreciate that because we are just all walking each other home and we're all trying to figure this out together because every single one of us on this earth has been lied to it's up to us to unscramble all those lies together all right guys thank you so much once more to josh mckay for doing our opening music if you would like to purchase the full song there is a link down in the description box below thank you so much to Todd Roderick for helping me get this out to you guys today i hope you're all having a fantastic week and i will talk to you soon bye


Components of a Prokaryote A prokaryotic cell is a single-celled organism. Prokaryotes include bacteria cells. There are more bacteria on our planet than any other organism, and they are overwhelmingly beneficial. They recycle our nutrients, produce antibiotics, and preserve our food. A very few are harmful and cause disease. Let's examine the components of a prokaryotic cell. The components include granules, structures that contain chemical storage material, chromatin body, tightly-coiled DNA that contains the genetic information of the bacterium, ribosomes, the site of protein synthesis, cytoplasm, a thick gelatinous solution that contains a mixture of nutrients and allows for cell biochemical reactions. Glycocalics, polysaccharide material external to the cell wall that can have the characteristic of protection and or attachment to surfaces. Cell membrane, a phospholipid bilayer with embedded proteins that regulates cell transport and is the location of respiration and some biosynthesis in bacteria. Mesosome, an extension of the cell membrane that increases the surface area of the cell membrane and may play a role in chromosome segregation during cell division. Cell wall, a rigid structure composed of peptidoglycan that prevents lysis in a hypotonic environment. Sexpilus, a tubular appendage found on some bacteria that allows transfer of DNA between bacterial cells. Thimbrié, short hair-like appendages that can cover the surface of bacteria and allow the organism to adhere to surfaces. Flagellum, an appendage that allows bacterial motility. Let's assemble this bacteria from the interior of the cell to its exterior. We have successfully built the bacteria. This concludes this activity on the components of a prokaryote.


Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Narrated by Daniel Highland. Thomas Hodgskine vs. Herbert Spencer Part 2 Smith continues his series on the thought of Thomas Hodgskine by explaining his belief in natural property rights. As I discussed in a previous essay on Thomas Hodgskine, the purpose of the natural and artificial right of property contrasted, 1832, was to defend the rights of property based on human nature and the nature of society over the legal rights created by governmental fiat, especially as defended in the works of Jeremy Bentham and his many utilitarian followers. We shall first take a look at Hodgskine's general conception and defense of natural rights, chapter 2, and then in the next essay turn to Hodgskine's defense of private property in land, chapter 4. According to Hodgskine, our notion of the right to property, including property in ourselves, lies at the very foundation of systems of government and of theories of political philosophy. So it is futile to seek fundamental political reforms without digging down to the very bottom of property rights. At the outset, however, Hodgskine emphasized his disagreements with those socialists who have asserted that all the evils of society arise from a right of property. Allow me to separate myself entirely from them by declaring that I look on a right of property, on the right of individuals to have and to own for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society. After expressing his wholehearted agreement with John Locke's justification of property rights, Hodgskine quoted a lengthy passage from chapter 5 of property in Locke's second treatise of government. These quotations, it should be noted, contain some textual inaccuracies, but they do not affect Locke's meaning. Hodgskine began with these paragraphs. Every man, Locke says, has a property in his own person that nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are his property. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with it and joined to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For the labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others. He that is nourished by the acorn he picked up under an oak or the apple he gathered from the trees in the wood has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when they began to be his, when he digested, or when he ate, or when he boiled, or when he brought them home, or when he picked them up. And it is plain that if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labor put a distinction between them and common that added something to them more than Nature, the common mother of all, had done. And so they became his private right. Most significant for the purpose of this essay is the passage quoted by Hodgskin in which Locke defended property rights in land. But the chief matter of property being now, Locke goes on, not the fruits of the earth and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself as that which takes and carries with it all the rest, I think it plain that property in that too is, ought to be, acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, cultivates, and can use the products of, so much is his property. He, by his labor, does as it were, enclose it from the common, Hodgskin's emphasis and parenthetical remark. As we shall see, this homesteading principle, as it is frequently called, is extremely important to Hodgskin's defense of private land ownership, for it places a natural limit on how much land each person may originally acquire and thereby makes it impossible for a person to entrench on the right of another or acquire to himself a property to the injury of his neighbors. Unfortunately, this admirable principle has been ignored, indeed egregiously violated by governments which claim dominion over vast areas of land, through conquest and colonization, and then distribute that land to further the interests of rulers, not according to any legitimate principle of justice. Thus, unlike Spencer and other opponents of private land ownership, Hodgskin distinguished between just and unjust methods of acquiring titles to land, and he attributed the current inequities in land holdings to the rapacious actions of governments, not to the notion of private property in land, per se. Hodgskin believed that rulers invariably use legislation to further their own interests, and that the public good merely functions as a cover, a ruse in effect, for those personal interests, so he could not abide proposals for the nationalization of land. All such schemes would merely give even more power to government, the very institution that is responsible for the current injustices in land holdings. Land nationalization would exacerbate and perpetuate injustices, not remedy them. Although Hodgskin believed that Locke's justification for property is clear and convincing, he offered a somewhat different formulation, a defense of property that differs significantly from Herbert Spencer's justification. According to Hodgskin, man is born with wants and the means to satisfy those wants, the latter being labor, both mental and physical. Labor, which is stimulated by the desire to satisfy our wants, is the fundamental means by which we sustain our lives, and this natural connection exists independently of and prior to any governmental legislation. It is because we must labor in order to live, which requires that we be free to consume or otherwise dispose of the fruits of our labor, that we have property rights. Property is the reward that nature bestows on labor. To expropriate the property of another person by force or fraud is to deprive the victim of the basic means of sustaining his life. As Hodgskin saw the matter, Locke's statement that every man has a property in his own person is the foundation of individuality. The notion of that which is one's own cannot be disjoined from the person. We become aware of our personal identity by familiarizing ourselves with our own bodies, after which we understand that it is in fact a contradiction to say that a man's limbs and body do not belong to himself, for the words him, self, and his body signify the same material thing. Philosophers will doubtless object that Hodgskin confuses the descriptive and normative meanings of one's own. Though I think there is a credible response to this charge, my purpose here is to explain Hodgskin's position, not to analyze it philosophically. Hodgskin then extended his idea of individuality to the products of labor. As we learn the existence of our own bodies from seeing and feeling them, and as we see and feel the bodies of others, we have precisely similar grounds for believing in the individuality or identity of other persons as for believing in our own identity. The ideas expressed by the words mine and thine, as applied to the produce of labor, are simply then an extended form of the ideas of personal identity and individuality. Thus the natural idea of property is a mere extension of that of individuality, and it embraces all the mental as well as all the physical consequences of muscular exertion. As nature gives to labor whatever it produces, as we extend the idea of personal individuality to what is produced by every individual, not merely is a right of property established by nature, we see also that she takes means to make known the existence of that right. It is as impossible for men not to have a notion of a right of property as it is for them to want the idea of personal identity. When either is totally absent, man is insane. We see therefore that by dubbing property rights natural, Hodgskin meant that people will naturally develop the idea of property rights as they become familiar with their own individuality and the individuality of other people. A person with no notion of this right would have no sense of self. Moreover he would be unable to function in society, because without a sense of mine and thine, a person would lack the natural impulse to defend himself and what he produces from the predatory actions of others. And without some expectation that he will reap the rewards of his own labor, a person would have little or no incentive to work in the first place. In short, the idea of property arises with the spontaneous growth of every mind antecedent to all legislation. It is therefore quite absurd to claim, as Jeremy Bentham did, that property rights have their source in governmental decrees. Property rights are a spontaneous and inevitable consequence of social existence. Like Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hodgskin vehemently criticized Benthamite utilitarianism, according to which the greatest happiness of the greatest number should serve as the basic standard of legislation. But whereas Spencer accepted the greatest happiness as the proper goal of legislation, Hodgskin rejected the very idea of the greatest happiness as ultimately incoherent. Hodgskin also rejected the notion of a social instinct that supposedly motivates legislators, claiming instead that rulers, like everyone else, will pursue their own interests first and foremost. Hence, laws being always intended to preserve the power of those who make them, their great and chief aim for many ages was and still is to enable those who are not laborers to appropriate wealth to themselves. In other words, the great object of law and of government has been and is to establish and protect a violation of that natural right of property they are described in theory as being intended to guarantee. This chief purpose and principle of legislation is the parent crime from which continually flow all the theft and fraud, all the vanity and chicanery, which torment mankind worse than pestilence and famine. As noted previously, Hodgskin presented his theory of property rights as an elaboration of the ideas of John Locke, viewed from a different perspective. The same basic ideas Hodgskin astutely noted may be analyzed and defended in various ways. But Hodgskin went far beyond Locke in some respects. Whatever the theoretical problems in Hodgskin's account may be, his integration of the right of property with our sense of individuality is highly suggestive and deserves serious consideration. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.


Weeks after the Abuja Kadoona train attack, another women association and interfaith group have organized special prayers for victims of still-incaptivity. They are also second of mind intervention over the worsening insecurity and other challenges with devil in the nation. Our correspondent, Habila Dorafai's report is presented from our studios. Hundreds of women, religious interfaith groups and children have converged here to see God's help for the safe release of the abducted train passengers. On March the 28th, the terrorist attacks the train, killing nine passengers and abducting 62, including a pregnant woman and an 85-year-old woman. The president of the Jama'i Yarmantan Aryawah, JMA Harjirabi Salawa, says women must lend their voices to these calls, considering the pain parents go through with a mass abduction on a daily basis. When we are mothers, we feel the pain of those families that were affected. Anything we have is prayers. So we decided to call the family members and our women and our religious leaders, as you can see, Khan is here, J and I is here. Let them pray for Aryawah. Let them pray for these victims. Let them also pray for our leaders to guide them, to give them the way for them to do what is right. The chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Ken, Kaduna State Chapter, Reverend Joseph Hyab, says the insecurity and evil are on the rise in society, and as such, everyone must come together to fight this cause. People of faith will not give up praying just because evil continues to grow. We believe in God, we believe in His intervention, and we know He is going to intervene. So we are joining the families and joining all others who will wish us to seek the face of God, that very soon our brothers and sisters who have been in this bush for a long time, will come back. The governance is about protecting lives and properties. If you don't protect me, even if you build everything for me, I can use them because they are not useful to me. So protection of lives and property becomes the most ideal things we want today in Nigeria. We need two things, freedom and protection of lives and properties. Also, renowned Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gouni, says the leader are pushing Nigerians into crimes because of the hardship in the lands. He lamented that leaders are busy saking political offices ahead of 2023, while 62 Nigerians are being held captive. We should do whatever we can do to get them out first. These people are in the bush, they cannot run away. They are in the bush, they cannot run away. So we just answer their needs, immediately and free the victims. And we pray that it will not happen again to anybody. And we pray that this nation will unite together and allow bring tranquility in the nation so that we prosper. Because with this insecurity, we don't see any development coming. So we want the government to be proactive, to consult with people who are genuinely looking for a situation. This is no time for blaming other people. It's time to come together and see how we get out of this problem. The edged families of the victims do hope on God, believing that they will be reunited with their loved ones soon.


Quincy Anunwa, who was on the IL, or the IR, with a neck injury, was fined $27,900 by the team for missing two days of treatment, and then he went on a Twitter rant. He said he took his wife, a veteran, out to lunch on Veterans Day, also at a house emergency. He acknowledges he should have told the team beforehand, but the believes the penalty is excessive. He says this could have been handled in so many different ways. He also revealed that he has about a 50-50 chance of playing again. He's got some nerve. Okay? I'm going to tell you why. First of all, he invokes veterans. So his wife was a veteran. God bless her. Thank her for her service. He had to take her to lunch that day rather than go get treatment. He could have taken her to dinner. He could have thanked her. He could have had a candlelit dinner. I'm not going to tell him what to do, but whatever he wants to do, that's a poor excuse for missing treatment that you have to have and not telling the team. I think he'd be called the Jets up and say, I'm going to come in a little bit later. He wants his cake and eat it too. I'm sorry. I'm not a Jetshill.  Luke Faulk also came out, and he has an agreement against them. But this one, I mean, Quincy Anunwa really thinks that he's been wronged. It's a terrible thing if he has a 50-50 chance of ever playing again, but you want to hear what no less an authority than Damien Woody said? He tweeted this out. He said, about Quincy Anunwa, from what I gather, he missed a couple of treatments, let the team know why after the fact, and he got fined. Again, what am I missing here? Exactly. What are we missing here? Michael, you're 100% right on this. And the other thing that's really irritating about it is his wife's a veteran. His wife's a veteran. What does that have to do with anything? Yeah. All right. I mean, it was Veterans Day. He wanted to take her. He's got a 50-50 chance of playing again, so he's trying to go sympathy, and then he's taking it to Twitter. So why do all these players think it's okay? Just take your grievances to Twitter. If you have a problem with the Jets, take it up with the Jets. If you've got a problem with the fine, take it up with your players association. What are you taking it to Twitter for? You know what these players are doing? And it's so weak, they know the Jets are the punching bags. They know they're going to get support from the fans, because right now the fans are hating on their own team. So when Jamal Adams does something, when Anunwa does something, they go to Twitter and they know they're going to get the positive feedback, because it's so easy to support the player and the team. The fact is, you're supposed to get treatment. If you don't show up someplace, I don't care if it's a job, if it's a doctor's appointment. Hey, if I have a doctor's appointment and I decide to take Nancy and the kids out to dinner and not go to the doctor's appointment, I might have to still pay for the appointment. I mean, you see a lot of doctors do that. If you don't cancel within 24 hours, you're still going to get banged for the fee. Sometimes we have to do a little dog and pony show and juggle cats and everything and meet with advertisers, and if we have a lunch meeting set up, say PJ Clark's down the block at one o'clock, and we just blow it off without even calling the salesperson, we should be disciplined. I mean, what is Quincy? He's trying to use, it's insulting to me that he's using the fact that his wife is a veteran as an excuse, and then it's insulting to me that he's using his tenuous situation as a player and moving forward that his 50-50 might ever play again. Well, if there's a chance he might not ever play again, don't you think he shouldn't be skipping any kind of treatment that maybe that could help you play again? And also, Michael, and this is just me making a prediction or thinking about, if he got fined that much, this is probably not the first time it's happened. Alright, so it's probably been a little bit of an issue. And I think you hit it on the nose, though. The Jets are punching bags right now. Of course, but that's what they do. Most of what a lot of people do on Twitter, to me, is they're trying to galvanate their opinion, right? They're going to want people to support them. Alright, so he gets fined $27,000. Oh, I'll just go to Twitter. I'll talk about how my wife is a veteran. I got a 50-50 chance that they're playing again. Plus, everybody's hating on the Jets because they're an awful football team right now.  You tell them you're right. It's so weak to do. File a grievance with the union. Go to the Jets directly and complain about it. He really does not have a kit coming. He's embarrassing himself. And I think that what's going on with the Jets is that Joe Douglas is a no-nonsense guy. He's a rules guy. And although the Jets look awful with the assembly stuff, do we really know what happened? We just know what assembly is saying. Do we really know what happened? Now, the danger with the Jets is that other players always side with players, always. Never side with Madden. Ever. Is that going to hurt them in the future with players? I don't know. But on this one, if a player could defend what Quincy and Inwood does, please call in and tell me how you defend this. My wife's a veteran. I took out to lunch on Veterans Day to honor her.  Well, take her out after the treat. Take her out to dinner. And again, I'm sure... You should thank her every day for being a veteran. You know what? You could probably call the Jets up and say, listen, it's Veterans Day. Can I move my treatment up or back? Michael, I'm sure he's been a pain about it. And I'm completely 100% behind you on that.