Cricut bars. They're like regular health bars, except they've got crickets in them. Hi, so today we're going to tackle putting the carry mechanism back into the frame and we've got all the parts laid out for that. This was in bag seven and the removal was described at the end of video five. So we're going to do that and because that's probably going to be easy. We're also going to go with putting together all the stuff that's in bag six and this is probably going to be the most difficult part of putting the thing back together again, I think. That's my suspicion. So anyway, let's get started. So this is the carry mechanism. We didn't take it apart because I felt that it didn't really require much cleaning and we're not totally reverse engineering the thing, so we don't really need to take apart every single bit and piece. The only thing that you should note is that this part is movable. There's also this other part thing which is movable as well. The gear is basically pinned into place and then we have these things which are called dogs for whatever reason. I don't know why, but they basically move back and forth and they're spring-loaded. So we're definitely going to want to oil those, but first put this back on. So the first thing that we that we were the last thing that we did was we took this bushing off of this axle and I guess it's important to note that the bushing has a thick side and a thin side, so we need to know which side which way it goes on to the axle and the orientation is the thick part goes this way, so away from the mechanism. There's a similar bushing right in here and I can move this bushing. It's a bit stiff, so I'm probably going to put some oil in there. The point is that the bushing goes into these semi-circular depressions over here. So let's go get my oil and put some on the axle here and that's probably sufficient. So now I'm just doing that, distribute the oil. That was very nicely. I'm going to put some oil in here, kind of in the hopes that it'll help. I'm not sure how much help it's going to be. So also this part should be oriented up when we put this in. I know it fits quite nicely in there. Let's see how it goes. Oh yeah, that's important. We need to make sure that the timing marks are correct. So let's see where the timing marks are. I'm going to rotate this until I see the timing mark. It's kind of hard to, ah there it is. There's the timing mark and now I'm going to rotate this until I see the corresponding timing mark which I think is right here on the black end part and they just sort of go together like this just like that. Okay, now the arrows point to each other. So now I'm just going to check these gears okay and I notice that the timing marks don't point to each other which means that I have to use the other timing mark here, this one. So let's put that in again. I hope you saw all that. Oops. So let me align the timing marks on these two gears. Okay and now I can just go ahead these two marks together. I think that's correct. Is it correct? It seems correct to me. Now I'm not sure anymore. Now I'm doubting myself because I mean the the the arrows do align. They don't align at the same time and I'm wondering if that's a problem. What I could do. Okay, I know what I can do. What I can do is I can put the carry gear on and not worry about the timing. Then I can remove the middle gear and align it. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. All right, so not that big a deal. Okay, so let's take a look at the parts. We had two different brackets. One of them had a hole on it. The one with the hole goes on this side. Let's get some oil on the bearing surface. So that would go just like that. And it would get screwed in by one of these screws. We've got four of them. So let's just go ahead and do that. Oil the thread, the screw in, the thread, the screw in. And again, I'm just oiling the thread so that there'll be at least a little bit of protection against rust. Why is it this going in? So I'm not really going to tighten that down. Just fix it in place. Now this one, okay, I'll just put some oil in there even though I think I already did. And then we've got this bracket which goes in here along with the two screws. I'm going to do it this way, fourth screw. Since this is magnetic, I'm just going to do this. I should just be able to tighten it down in this side down. And then this is rotating quite nicely and quite freely as well. All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the clip from the center gear to see if I can lower the camera a bit to get maybe a better angle, maybe even lower. Okay, there we go. So I'm not even sure you can see the timing marks. They're kind of hard to see even in person rather than on the video. So I remove, now my hand is in the way. Oh well. So removing the clip, the clip was very easy to get on. There we go. Okay, so removing the clip, removing the washer, and removing the gear. There we go. So the question is which way does the gear go? I forgot to turn on the light even I can see. Okay, so I'm going to find the arrow, which is really hard to see. Where is that arrow? Here it is. Okay, so there's the arrow. What I should do is maybe move the gunk from the mark. It's easier to see. Okay, so there's this arrow, and this arrow I know is over here. So the question is if I take this arrow and align it, will it, oops, will it align? If I align these two arrows like that, see and there's another arrow that points up, and then I find this arrow that does line up. Okay, so it was a good thing. Oops, darn it. I think that's it. Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that's it. I wonder if I'm off by one tooth. I'm not really sure, but I think that's the correct way. This arrow is pointing up. These two arrows are pointing at each other, and these two arrows are pointing at each other. So the only question is if I'm off by one tooth or not, it's really hard to tell. It's really, really hard to tell, because the arrows don't exactly mark up, line up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull on this and move this down by one tooth, and see. That certainly isn't right. Let me adjust this by one tooth. Put it back. That does seem right to me. Okay. All right. I think I'll leave it like that. So we've got these two arrows, these two arrows, and this arrow points up. So I'm just going to go ahead and clip the central wheel back just like that, and there we go. That should, in theory, move the gears in the way they're supposed to. So when this arrow is up, these arrows are together, and these arrows are together, and that should be that. So let's see. We've got this together. We've got this together. So now let me see. All right. So we've got a section here, and let me just raise the camera a bit. Okay. So we've got this part here, and as well, we've got this other funny part here. And I think they go together. And the idea is that there is this bushing here, which goes on, there's a slot here, and that bushing goes into that slot. The screw goes in this way, and then this nut is on the other side. So the question is, where does it go? Because I see two holes here. Actually, I see a third hole here, but this bushing isn't going to fit there. So it's either going to be here or here, one of these two. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if this screw fits in both holes. Well, okay, so this screw actually screws in, but there wouldn't be a need for the nut if the screw screws in, which means that it must go in this hole here. So let me go ahead and attempt to put the bushing in there. It's kind of tough. Okay, so what I can do is I can sort of put the bushing here, and then put it in and slide it. And now it's sandwiched between the frame and the part. And which hole did we decide it was going into? This bottom one. So I'm just going to take this and move it there. Okay, so the question is, what about this fork thing? I'm going to check the video to see what the purpose of that is, whether it actually goes in here or not. Because if it does, if it does, that means that this goes like this, and then like that. But I'm not so sure. And the answer is no. In fact, the screw does not touch that part. So it's just like that. Just like that. And then I take the nut, and actually before I do that, I'm going to take the oiler and put some oil on that bearing surface.  I'm going to do that. I'm going to screw this on. It's difficult. Oh, there we go. What would help is if I had a small screwdriver, but I don't. So maybe I can just use the bit and just sort of hold on to this side while I tighten this side. That kind of works. All right. So now when I rotate this, you can see that this thing sort of moves up and down. So that is that part. So the next section is we've got bag six to put together with all these parts. All right. So the next thing is that we're going to put this axle together along with all of these parts. And I've laid them out in the same order that we took them off according to video five. So the first thing that goes on is this lever thing. And it goes on this way, not this way. And with the axle such that this nut is facing to the left. So that goes on like that. Then we get a spacer goes on like that. Then we get this plate and the plate goes on the axle small hole. And in addition, this tab goes to the rear. So it's like this like that. And then a spring. So we have spring, lever, spacer, plate, spring, spacer, tab to the back. So after I put this together, I think there's another part that was from the bag. And then it all goes together and then I'll oil the whole thing. Because I think these are all rotational parts. So they will all need oil so that they all move smoothly. Don't rust. The thing is if you look at this, you can see that there's obviously a coating on it. And I don't know what that coating is. I'm pretty sure that zinc looks kind of like chrome. It looks shiny and this is not shiny. So I'm not sure that this is a zinc coating. And the purpose of a zinc coating or some other coating, see this is really dark. It's not shiny at all. But you can see that some of the shiny steel underneath is showing through. And the purpose of that coating is basically sacrificial. I probably mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again. So when you plate zinc onto steel, rather than the iron in the steel oxidizing, the zinc will oxidize first. And the zinc doesn't even have to coat the entire thing. It can just be on a portion of it. And apparently because of the way that electrons move from iron to zinc, even if a part of the iron would normally rust, the electrons causing that will go to zinc. And then the zinc will actually rust first, which is kind of cool. Maybe the other direction. Maybe the electrons go from zinc to iron. It doesn't matter. The point is that the zinc is the thing that gets the rust. Okay, so that's the lever. So the next part, I think there is another axle that has parts that go into these individual grooves. And then we will see where we get to. And here are the next series of parts. We also have this, which actually went on the end of the axle. So I'll just sneak it on there. Okay, so we have seven of these plates, which have small pins. We have one, which has a large pin over here. And we have one, which has no pin. And according to the video, the one with the large pin goes all the way on the left side. Then you get all the ones with the small pins. And then you get the one with no pin. And that goes all the way on the right side. So these things fit in the grooves, just like that. So they're not going to stay on. So I'm just going to sort of hold them on like that. And it's also important to note that the tab faces that way to the right, just like that. So I guess what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and just stick it in like that. Then I'm going to move these parts over. See, is that the right way? And then another thing like this. And then the lever. So I'm wondering, because this can go like this based on the pin. It's probably like this. I think that's the way it was. And yeah, so I'm pretty sure that it went like this. Because in fact, I think this will actually hook onto something else. So let's leave it like this. So let's get the spacer plate. So let's see what we've got. We've got a lever, a spring, plate, and a spacer, which is now spring loaded. So now I'm going to put the plate in here. That's nice. It actually holds the plate in place. Lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate. Lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate. Lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate, lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate, lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate, lever, spring, plate, spacer, other plate with a big pin, and then lever. So I think that's pretty much the sequence. Right? Right. Now according to the video, the pulleys basically go in the spaces between. So the spring goes through the hole like that, and then there's a pulley that goes over the end.  So it seems that there should be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pulleys. I have six, and I know that in the previous bag there were some more. Let me just make sure that that's actually correct. Let's see bag three, bag five. Here we go. In bag five, I'm looking for pulleys, and I do see two. Actually, I see three. Okay. I guess there would be a pulley over here. That makes nine total. So that's good to know. We have all the parts. It's always a good thing. So let's go ahead and thread all of these parts in. It's a little difficult to do. I suppose it would help if I could actually pull there. I can pull the spring through. So now here's a pulley, and then I push, and then I can pull the spring through the next small hole, and then I take another pulley and jam it on to the end, and push it through the large hole, pull it through the small hole, put the pulley on. There's a screw here. Where'd that come from? That's pretty scary. Huh. Where did that come from? All right. Let me put that in bag six, unless it actually came out of bag five. Bag five has a hole in it. So that's not good. So I've got to be careful of bag five.  All right. So where were we? Pulleys. Push it through the large hole, pull it through the small hole, push it through the large hole, pull it through the small hole, and now I have no pulleys left. And the reason that I have no pulleys left is that if I pulled any more on the spring, it would pop off of this end. So we don't want that. So that means that we have to go to the next part. So we have this part and we have this part. Now this rod connects these two pieces like this. And just get these blocks out of the way. And all of these plates basically fit into these grooves.  And they serve to give this plate two positions, spring loaded positions. But the springs won't go in first. So what we need to do is take this rod and put it through this hole. But it doesn't go in immediately. It's actually pretty easy to put it in this one. But it's kind of hard to go into here. Even if I turn it around. So the thing is that you have to force it in. All right, because otherwise the distance between these two axles will not be correct. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to support this and just bang it in. I just want to make sure it goes in all the way. And I think that's probably correct. I'm not sure. It may need to go in a little more. It's really hard to tell. It's not flush with the end. But it is kind of sort of flush with the end of the slot. So anyway, we're going to try it. And if it doesn't work, we can try it again. So the end of the spring hooks on to the rod. And then we should just be able to push these guys together, lining up all the plates. So they just sort of line up like that. Oops, I didn't get this aligned. Get that rod in there. Let me lift up this end there. So basically like that. And you can see that that does appear to be the right distance. Because if you move this guy down, because if you look at this pulley, you can see that it is resting between the teeth of the gear. So the gear has this nice positional setting, this detent springs.  So but the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to put this into the frame. So basically it goes in with the these are the intermediate gears.  And they go in these little depressions right over here. So we can just put them in and fit them in. At least I think that's the way they go. I'm wrong. Sorry. My bad. The intermediate wheels go on the bottom side. And they fit in like this. So I suppose there's two ways that they could go. They could go like this or they could go like this. But they do go like this with the rod holding the spring on this side. Because there is actually, it wouldn't make sense for it to be over here because then this gear would be over here. And well, I guess that could make sense. But there's actually a part here which is getting in the way. Oh and speaking of this part, this little part that goes up and down like this, I realized what this does is that every time the gear cycles once, it actually increments the the counter up here. So it rotates once and it increments this once or actually like that. And if you spin it in the opposite direction, it goes down. So that's one mystery solved I guess. So anyway, we're going to put this right in here. You just have to press it in a little bit. Okay, I think that's almost all the way in. I think there may be a problem with this side a little bit because it's not quite fitting in. So I may have to bang this rod in a little more. So let me, let's see. Okay, so rather than bang it in, I just used an arm of a press to press it in. So I think that this should work. So I'm just going to put it in. Let me just raise the camera a little bit so that maybe there's a better view on this. I don't know if it's a better view, but here, I'll zoom in a little bit. Okay, so there we go. So I've got these seated in their half circles. And these are also seated there.  Let's see. So I think that what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to put the springs in. So the thing about the springs, let's start with maybe this one down here. And we'll see if I can get an extreme close-up of the spring as it goes in. Okay, that might work. So you can see, let's see, that there is this hole down here on the bottom. And can I move this a little bit? Like this maybe? There we go. Okay, so down, let's see. Here, right here, there's actually a groove. And there's a groove that goes in over here. So basically, the spring goes in through that hole and then over here. And that allows this thing to have two settings, basically two to tens, back and forth like that. So I need to put the spring into that groove and then compressed into that little diamond over there. And I need to do that for all of these. So let's go ahead and zoom back out. Okay, so it took a lot of persuasion, but basically this spring is in and you can see its motion is just basically back and forth like that. So basically the idea is just to keep the spring compressed as it goes into those holes. So I will do the next set of them. So that took quite a while, I guess maybe half an hour or so. I just couldn't figure out a method to put these springs in. I just sort of pushed and pulled at them until they went in. But as you can see, all eight of these carry indicators, I guess I'll call them carry indicators, are now properly seated. Okay, so I think that the next thing is we're going to go ahead and start taking the parts out of bag five. Probably almost certainly the very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to lock these axles down with bushings. So also another thing that I noticed is that on this side, if I turn this, there is this gear on this other side. So that meshes quite nicely. So and we've got this lever over here. This lever, I think, yeah, I think that if this lever over here is placed properly, it's going to go into the teeth right here, and it's going to serve as a sort of stop for the teeth. But I don't know yet how that actually is going to be aligned back and forth like this, because it just doesn't look like it can easily line up. So I'm guessing that there's probably something over here maybe that's going to help hold this lever into place in place. Okay, so next thing that we're going to do is go to bag five.


The massive rise of short form videos we are seeing in the country today. By the way, this is not only an India phenomena. You would have heard of a company called Tiktok that is making waves across the globe giving sleepless nights to possibly the big giants of the US because people just can't get enough of short form video.


Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for watching. So in this episode, we're gonna talk about basic sciences in anesthesia. So do you really ever use your basic sciences after med school in anesthesia? Absolutely. Stay tuned. So you'll actually really use a lot of your basic sciences in anesthesia and even some courses from pre-med undergrad. So that's your organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, anatomy and physiology and pharmacology. So in anesthesia, we do a lot of procedures, so you need to know your anatomy. We do work with ventilators, so you need to know physiology of the lung and also physics because some of our vents are using those theories and principles and how they work and how we are able to manipulate them. And then you also need to know definitely some pharmacology because obviously we're giving lots and lots of drugs. So when delivering anesthesia, you will use all your basic sciences. When I'm teaching medical students about the theory of anesthesia, I usually go through some of the physics of it, some of the physiology of it because it's really heavily based on human physiology. So the physiology of the lungs and also of the heart, most specifically, and then always go through the ventilator with them. So that is the most important part of the anesthesia delivery system, is knowing how to manage the ventilator and what is the physics of it and how you actually control a patient's ventilation while they're having surgery. So safe ways to do that and basically the theory behind that is really, really heavily based on your knowledge of lung physiology and some physics. So as you know, in anesthesia, we use gasses. Oftentimes we're using different types of gasses or anesthesia outside of medicine in the hospital. So if you're going to, like, let's say, get your teeth pulled at the dentist, they may use some nitrous oxide. And that's one of the gasses that you can use for anesthesia. But for us in the O.R.A., we're using something in that family such as sebum fluorine. And we also do use some nitrous oxide too as well for giving anesthesia to patients. And then we use another gas that's very commonly called desk fluorine. So these are all related to your halogens or those gasses on the periodic table that are all the way to the far right. So remember that in chemistry, it comes back again. You kind of have to think about some of that as well when you're doing anesthesia. Pharmacology, of course, some medications. We use pharmacology very heavily. So we need to know all about drugs, how they interact, and how they will be beneficial to some patients or harmful to others. So we really need to have a great wealth of knowledge when it comes to that. And we usually use medications in cocktails. So we use not just one at a time, but several at a time. We need to know how they interact with one another and how they will affect a patient. And based on the medical history of that patient, if that's going to be dangerous or safe. So lastly, we do have to know a lot of anatomy. So when we do blocks or regional anesthesia, we need to know all about the anatomy that surrounds nerves in the body. And those are going to be the locations of the injection of local anesthesia. So we give that pretty quickly under ultrasound guidance that helps us. So this is one of our ultrasounds that we can use for blocks. And we are going based on our knowledge of that patient's anatomy to place the local anesthesia in the right location and to numb up those nerves so they don't have pain. If you can imagine, those are pretty much all of the sciences. You will be learning them as you go along in your pre-med courses and also definitely in medical school. And as you're learning them, you know, you're going to be able to realize later on how important they are once you're able to practice them in the clinical setting. When you do any rotations in anesthesia, you will definitely have to call upon that knowledge. So yeah, very important to us and what we do. And if we didn't have a solid foundation in that, we would not be able to practice anesthesia safely. So just know your anesthesiologist has to be really smart, has to know all that information and be able to kind of put it all together to make a good and safe plan for putting patients to sleep and for waking them up. All right, thank you so much for watching. I will see you in the next video. And until then, keep it up, keep going, keep studying, keep reading, and take care. Stay safe.


supplies and other things that they might have to do. The TRV stands for tactical resupply vehicle, and the 150 is the max payload capacity. And the intended purpose of the TRV UAS is to be able to basically carry payload from point A to point B to point C certain distances. So the approximate combat radius is roughly 5 to 25 kilometers combat radius, with 5 being roughly 150 pounds and 25 roughly around 50 pounds in terms of the payload that you can carry. When we started down the research, looking at different ways with tech soldiers, one of the parts of survivability, onion, is really to be not be there where the threats are. So we can really provide technologies and opportunities to the tactical commanders wherever these tools are going to be, to really take things from point A to point B and be able to avoid the threat choke points where snipers might be, where enemies might be. Also now giving local commanders the ability to really do operations 24-7 in more safer environment because they don't have to send soldiers outside of the wire now in order to be simple resupplies and other things that they might have to do.


What is up with these guys? Super bummer, dude. I thought we'd beat Lou 35 to 0 or something. And he honestly added a lot. He added a lot of highlights to my last YouTube clip, my last montage. He added a couple highlights from there.  This is for the love of the game, dude. That's my little, that's my young and Lou, bro. Why would I take his money, dude?  Shit's been bad on the run game. I mean, what type of throw? That's just something wide open. So I didn't really preform it like that. How do you do that? Like, what do you guys, what do these kids do on defense? But let's show you what that happened. What else is there to do out here, you know? I'll be 100% tomorrow. I'm about 95% right now. I don't want to try Tragman.     That's something you guys, that's what you think. I just wouldn't use Tragman. I mean, fuck, man. Why are you guarding that? Why aren't you guarding the middle of the field?    All these kids, bro, I'm going all over the board, but dude, they don't want to. And hopefully I can talk to them because I can't fucking, I can't fucking, I can't goddamn find somebody open without it.   Yeah, I'm getting dotted up, yeah, for sure, definitely, dude.    Oh no! Just audible quick snap. Touchdown. Come on, boys. We got it, we got it, we got to do better there.  He really wouldn't. There's the problem.     Oh my, I just cannot get his user away from this spot. I want to go to ball, bro. Corner routes? I really don't beat man that well. Corner routes really don't beat man that well, dude.  Dude, we're giving up way too much on kick returns. Come on, boys, be better. Like, come on, Derwin, like, fuck! So what I mean about a drag is just the best, bro. God, I don't want to take Derwin with Derwin off my field, dude.  Fuck, man! There's just no way tight end streaks. No, I swear to God, I'm done. I'm done.  I'm done.   It's tight end streak. Now I gotta run man now. I run man, now I gotta run man.  That dude just can't, he can't be over, he can't be, he can't be offset. He can't be, he gotta be on the middle of the field.      Shift over there, man.     Here we go, kicking the ball out of bounds, bro, I swear to God.  I should never kick the ball that way.  Oh my God, W. Come on, we need to return here.   Good defense, Lou.   That shoelace got bigger IQ than this guy. Dude, if I could see my kick meter, I would like this game so much more, dude. I gotta stop kicking the design. I'm definitely gonna start kicking. Dude, Parham is his fucking... Parham is really his God, dude. Dude, we're good. We're focused, we're dialed right now. Everything's looking good, trust me, boys. You like that? You like that, play it. That was cute. That was cute. That was a cute one there, dude. I gotta give it to you.   Right, boys, there's no other reason. Oh, my fucking... No, I swear to God.      Like, you just gotta be a joke right now.   Dog, like, is there anything that's gonna stop this shit? Bro, like, oh my God, I'm... Can everybody catch our breath now together as a unit?  And a tight end streak with that tight end streak. I ain't know what to do. I ain't know what to do when you can't do that tight end streak. Just chuck it at me.  Everybody take their deep breath together as a unit, boys. Come on. Snap the other one in back there. That ain't what you wanted to do. You wanted to get closer? Oh, the boys are blinking? Look at us. Look at us. We're all combos. I mean, we're just all blowing and we dropped that. Nice. Everybody, everybody.   I don't ask much. Do I ask much, boys? Do I ask much?  I got a pass right there, dude. You didn't rush anybody. Good girl, dude.  Good job.  That was it right there. That was the one.  Like, this is like, dude, this is it. This is his offense. Just snap the other one back, bro.  Hey, Lou, play, Lou, play. This is it. And now he's going to flip.  And look at my play hard to see who I'm leaving open.    This is just miserable, man.  The safety can't even be closed. Like, he has to be somewhere over there. And he was glowing, too. I'm like, bro, he don't got to be that close. It's just that third just gets so far out of the way. Dude, my running back just won't get through the line on that play, dude.    As much as I wish I was good at verticals, I'm just not good at that play, bro. I wish I had everybody open there. Go fuck, man. You didn't, like, why would I ever run? Why would I ever run? Why would I ever run? Why ever run? Why ever run?    Like, why would I ever run the ball ever, dude?  Ever. Ever. Yeah, we just got locked up way too much here. I just, you know why I run in those situations, though? Seriously?  That's why I do that shit, really.   You really cannot stop the snap-throw running back.  The dude is manned up right next to him.    And when you do, he just catches it through his body and goes, oh, my. I'm lucky getting locked up, though. I got to slow down, dude. I'm getting screamed at.  Fourth and inches, fourth and one, running out of shotgun is just that L.  They do.  Like, we got to see that. Yeah, I'm just, I'm really just, I don't want to say I'm not good at it, but like, I just, I don't want to throw in there anybody's user, though. There's just no way. Come on, boys. Come on, boys! God, that was such a good play draw. I mean, bro, I learned my lesson, bro. I learned my lesson. I learned my lesson. I learned a lesson. I learned a valuable lesson right there, bro.      Yeah, I know it was passing me.   And like, if I catch a juke right there, I score it all. A juke right there scores.  I played really bad about that. Oh yeah, I mean, I played bad for two drives, though. I played really bad for two drives.


Before introducing our very distinguished guest for this evening, just a reminder about this program, this is the first lecture of this academic year. We started with the series, the globalization lectures last year, or last term actually, in term two of last academic year, which is this calendar year. And after, I mean, the next lectures will take place in the same hall on the 26th of November, with Professor Samir Amin, a very renowned Egyptian economist, and the director of the World Forum in Dakar in Senegal. He will be followed in January, 28th of January, Dr. Ronny Broman, medical doctor, former president of Doctors Without Borders, and he was at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1999, which his organization received. And on the 25th of February, the last lecture of this academic year will be given by Professor, Columbia Professor, New York Columbia Professor Saskia Sasen, a very well-known author on the issues of globalization. Well, I have the very great pleasure of introducing Professor Ellen Maksinswood this evening. As you have probably seen already from the announcement, in case you didn't know about her work, I guess that many among you have already heard about Professor Wood. She is a professor emeritus of political science at York University, where she taught for many, many years, and I think this is the only university where you actually were anchored. Except for visiting here. Yes, but as an anchor. And well, she's the author of many important books, on both the history of political thought and the history of capitalism. You have just three titles on the announcement selected from a long list, but they give an indication of the variety of topics on which Ellen has been working. The origin of capitalism is a contribution to one of the most complex historical debates. The Empire of Capital is also a very important contribution on the actual reality of what we call empire, and the variety of empires throughout history. And the very latest book, which is displayed there, Citizens to Lords, well, from the subtitle you know, you have an idea of what it is, a social history of Western political thought from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and just to say a very few words about that. But before that, just to mention that the work of Professor Maxine Wood has received praise from some of the foremost members of the very famous post war group, I mean of British Marxist historians, people like Christopher Hill, and Herrick Hobsbohm. What she is mainly concerned with in her latest book is the social history of political theory, which is the history of political theory seen through the factors like class and social interest underlying political ideology. And this is an endeavor that she started several years ago with her late husband, Neil Wood. She started focusing initially on early modern English political philosophy. In 1997 for those who are eager to get something on this period, a book called Trumpet of Sedition. And in the meantime, Ellen has been working on ancient Greek political philosophy for initially teaching purposes, which, well, created an important interest, and she felt the need of a comprehensive social history of Western political thought. And this latest book, Citizens to Lords, is just the first installment of a very ambitious and very important project covering, as the title says, the social history of Western political thought. Well, with today's lecture, we'll get, well, what one could tell at least from the subtitle, a synthetic snapshot of the project, the whole project, taking us from where the book that just came out stopped, that is empire from the Polish to the Greek cities to empire, to modern day imperial ideologies, or as she put it in the subtitle for today from Alexander the Great to George II. Thank you, Jean Berre. Thank you. I hope you don't mind that I'm going to sit here. It's terribly embarrassing.  I'm so small. It happens to me very often, so I hope you won't mind. The second thing I want to say is that Jean Berre's summary of what I'm going to do sounds even more ambitious than what I have in mind. And I am indeed going to start with a story about Alexander the Great, but I just want to reassure you that if my title sounds insanely ambitious, it's not quite as bad as all that, I promise you. I'm not intending to offer a comprehensive conspectus of imperialist ideologies from Alexander to Bush in all steps in between. What I'll be talking about is a very particular ideological strategy. What I'm calling here the imperial paradox, which I'll explain in a moment. It was a strategy that was born in antiquity, so I'll start by talking about its ancient origins, in particular its perfection in imperial Rome and in Roman Christianity, but then I'll take a great leap forward to its contemporary incarnations in certain conceptions of capitalist globalization. Okay, let me explain what I mean by starting with my Alexander story. You may know that Aristotle is supposed to have been his tutor. Well, it's said that Aristotle advised his pupil to distinguish between Greeks and barbarians and to treat them differently. He should deal with Greeks as a leader, but when he's dealing with non-Greeks, that is so-called barbarians, he should behave like a master, something like a master of slaves. Well, the story goes that Alexander refused to do this, did just the opposite. He refused to divide men between Greek friends and barbarian foes. Instead, he simply distinguished between good men and bad, whatever their origin. And as a result, he's been credited with inventing the notion of a cosmopolis, a universal version of the old Greek city-state, the polis. The idea of the cosmopolis, which would be systematically developed by Stoic philosophers, rejected the very particularistic and exclusive attitudes associated with the ancient polis and replaced them with a kind of universal community representing the universal equality and fraternity of humankind. Now, there's obviously something odd here because we all know that Alexander was a ruthless conqueror who built a vast empire on the foundations that were laid by his father Philip. And we don't immediately associate imperial ambitions with a doctrine of human equality and brotherhood. After all, stressing the equality of all human beings is not the most obvious way to justify the subjection of some of them to others. So there's something that needs to be explained, and I probably should say straightaway that I can't take seriously the arguments of postmodernism and related fashions, which seem to suggest that even ideas, any idea of universal equality, like all forms of universalism are intrinsically oppressive and imperialist. I don't have time to go into that here, but let me stress that the kind of universalism we're talking about here is in principle egalitarian, and there's nothing at all self-evident about the ideological strategy of defending imperial domination by invoking universal equality. It's a paradoxical strategy, even contradictory, and it depends on some pretty fancy footwork, which has been plausible only in very particular historical circumstances. Above all, it depends on a kind of dualism, which I want to talk about here. What I have in mind is a dualism that allows universal community and equality to exist in some abstract moral sphere while inequality and domination in the real world go on as before. Well, in the history of Western political theory, especially from the early modern period, it became fairly common to defend the right to rule while acknowledging and even stressing the universal freedom and equality of men, and, of course, it generally has been men. What makes Western political theory particularly interesting and even puzzling is that it invented a defense of domination combined with and even based on a notion of equality, which specifically denies any natural division between ruler and ruled, or any justification of domination in terms of natural inequality. You only have to think of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. I mean, here's someone who defends an absolutist monarchy on the grounds of a very radical notion of natural equality and a denial, a very emphatic denial that there's any natural division between ruler and ruled. And he makes his argument for absolute power by invoking the very flexible idea of consent, korej and equal individuals. Now, I don't deny that his is the most supremely paradoxical version of this argument, but he certainly wasn't alone in combining equality with domination. And this is a staple of Western political thought. But let me be very clear about this, because ideas of equality and universal human community aren't exclusive to the culture of what, for lack of a better term, we call the West. And neither is it unusual for such ideas to coexist more or less happily with inequality and domination. I mean, you can find ideas of natural equality in ancient Chinese philosophy, for instance, and these were in no way a challenge to imperial power. And the juxtaposition of empire with ideas of a universal community isn't exclusively Western either. And you can see it in Islam, and even while it was often expressed in an admirable toleration towards non-Muslims, it also coexisted very comfortably with an expanding Arab Muslim empire. But what we get in the Western canon is something distinctive. We're not just talking about the peaceful coexistence of these contradictory ideas. What we're talking about is the systematic mobilization of egalitarian doctrines and ideas of universal brotherhood in the justification of both class and imperial domination. The point is that Western political theory at least at certain seminal moments in its history confronted a very specific problem. It had to find ways of explaining and justifying domination on the basis of natural equality. Or to put it another way, it had to find ways of systematically explaining and justifying domination full stop. In other words, relations of domination couldn't simply be taken as given either on the basis of tradition or divine mandate or whatever. The notion of natural equality became a troublesome issue when and because it was coupled with a fundamental challenge to the very idea of rule and domination. As long as the principle of domination is more or less unchallenged on its own terms whether you regard it as the mandate of heaven or even simply on the basis of tradition or maybe hereditary principles, the principles of royal bloodlines or descent from the prophet or whatever, it can be perfectly compatible with ideas of fundamental human equality. But once the principle of domination itself is thrown into serious question, it's a very different matter. When people invoke natural equality to question authority, some pretty clever thinking is required to overcome that threat and to turn egalitarian ideas against themselves. Now, this strategy would come fully into its own only centuries later, but its history begins in ancient Greece. In ancient so-called high civilizations, the state was typically organized in one form or another as a means of appropriating surplus labor either directly or through taxation, and even when property was well developed, office in the state was likely to be the primary means of acquiring great wealth and something like this form of state on a small scale existed in Bronze Age Greece too, but it gave way to a new and very different form of political organization, the polis. In the classical Greece, and especially in Athenian democracy, a loosely organized property class never had a powerful state at its disposal. Landlords were more dependent on their property as a source of wealth, not on office or judicial privilege, and they were compelled to rely on various political accommodations with lower classes in order to protect their property and maintain social order. And the result was a new kind of civic community, a community of citizens. Of course, social and economic inequalities did continue to exist, but that's just the point. Landlords and peasants, for example, belonged to the same body of citizens, sharing the same civic identity. So the ancient Greek polis was governed by this community of citizens and the principal relation, the principal political relation, wasn't between rulers and subjects, but among citizens. What we're talking about, then, is a social order where the appropriating class did not have unambiguous dominance, where it depended on political accommodations with subordinate classes, and where relations of domination weren't political and economic at the same time. Something like this would later also be true up to a point in Republican Rome. Anyway, this produced a whole new political sphere, and it created a wholly new dynamic in political relations, in relations among classes. In this new political sphere, deep social divisions, and class conflicts in particular, played themselves out in political terms, not just in overt struggles for power, but in the daily transactions of normal everyday politics. This also meant that probably for the first time in history, especially in Greek democracy, there could be a significant tension between economic inequality and political equality. So that's the context in which notions of equality presented a wholly new problem for those wanting to justify domination, and I've argued elsewhere that much of ancient Greek philosophy, in particular Plato's, was motivated by the need to deal with those problems, but I'm not going to go into that here. Here is the effects of this distinctive separation of civic equality and class inequality. More particularly, I want to talk about the consequences of thinking about the social world in these terms. The creation of a wholly new civic sphere and a new identity, the identity of citizenship, set apart from the social realities of inequality and domination. In the first instance, I think this was a good thing, which had real advantages for the lower classes. For one thing, their civic identity spared them the kinds of dependent conditions that have characterized most forms of economic exploitation throughout history before the advent of capitalism, conditions like serfdom, debt bondage, compulsory labor for the state, and so on. And it's certainly true that this created new theoretical problems but it also opened up new possibilities which weren't quite so positive. The notion of civic equality effectively turned the world upside down. I mean, before it had always been clear that the state represented domination. But now the state itself, in fact the state above all, supposedly represented equality, the equality of the civic community. In spite of all existing social inequalities, the idea of equality was expressed in the political identity of citizenship. This meant that relations of domination could be disguised in completely new ways. If only they could be clothed in the mantle of citizenship and civic equality. And that's where we come to Alexander the Great. By the time he set out on his massive imperial venture, the culture of the polis was firmly rooted in the Greek world. And it's not surprising that imperial ideology would draw on it and try to meet it on its own terms. Alexander and his successors employed the rhetoric of the polis in various ways, but for our purposes here the interesting thing is this idea of the cosmopolis. If Alexander really did embrace this idea, he clearly intended it to transfer political loyalties to the universal polis, in this case the empire. By absorbing and adapting rhetorically the principal themes that had emerged from the life of the polis, its notion of citizenship, law of freedom equality, and so on. So we already have the rudiments of the dualism I'm talking about. In the real world of everyday life some are rich and some are poor and all of them are imperial subjects, but on the elevated plane of the cosmopolis they're all brothers and sisters under the skin. But it was the Roman Empire that really perfected this imperial paradox. When Rome was still a republic in the process of imperial expansion the Romans justified it as the result of legitimate conquests by the city state of Rome. But eventually the republic became inadequate to deal with the expanding empire and a new kind of state developed an empire with an emperor and that demanded some pretty significant adjustments in the ideology of empire. The old republican idea rooted in the Roman city state was replaced by a more cosmopolitan idea. The notion of a single world empire ruled by one absolute ruler no longer centered just in Rome. So the Romans found their own ways of converting the old principles of the polis into imperial ideas and the most obvious conversion was in the conception of citizenship. I mean, citizenship of the Roman Empire extended far beyond the borders of metropolitan Rome and inevitably that meant that citizenship couldn't mean what it once did. It became an increasingly passive identity, the identity of imperial subjects. The really interesting conceptual adjustments occurred in the law and here they were truly innovative.  That's the distinction between private law and public law. Private law was by far the main concern of the Romans and private property was right at the heart of it. What's significant from our point of view is that especially as the empire develops, the duality of public and private turns into a very distinctive idea. The division between two modes of control even two spheres of power, the power of property and the power of the state. On the one hand, there's the power of dominium, property which is much more clearly defined and exclusive than it had ever been as conceived by the Greeks or anybody else as far as I know. On the other hand, there's the imperium which first was a term used to designate military command and also the command of civil magistrates and then eventually applied to rule by the emperor. So the idea of two distinct spheres of power was deeply embedded in the Roman view of the world rooted in its very distinctive property relations and a unique partnership between a powerful state and strong private property of a kind that didn't exist anywhere else in any high civilization that I know about. Now this duality had massive implications. For instance, the Romans had inherited the idea of natural law from early Stoic philosophers the idea of a universal cosmic order governed by principles of natural reasons which are supposed to be common to all human beings and in early Stoicism that idea certainly had or could have pretty egalitarian implications but in later Roman adaptations and in, for example, in the writings of Cicero who was influenced by Stoic philosophy the idea was developed in a way that neatly combined a notion of universal moral equality with an explicit commitment to social and political inequality and domination. The Roman elaboration of natural law owed a lot to the duality of state and property impurium and dominium you can see how it works for instance in the way that the philosopher Seneca, I hope you forgive me for quoting a philosophy, but in the way that Seneca explicated Stoic doctrine he starts by demonstrating how all things can be considered common and at the same time remain individual and private property. And to make this point a significant analogy with the rights of the emperor he says all things are Caesar's by right of his authority that is by right of his imperium yet at the same time the sense in which everything is his by right of imperium must be distinguished from the way things belong to him as his own personal property by right of inheritance by his dominium. This is a point that has even more significant implications. He goes on to apply his doctrine to the gods and he elaborates his distinction between two forms of ownership or power in connection with the gods. He says while it is true that all things belong to the gods all things are not consecrated to the gods and only in the case of the things that religion has assigned to a divinity is it possible to discover in the reach of sacred law? So there's a sense in which all things and all power belong to the gods but there's another sense in which they don't. So here you have a way of thinking about property and spheres of authority that made it possible to insist on one universal cosmic logos a universal common natural law the equality of all human beings and even a supreme divine authority and at the same time still declare the sanctity of private property the legitimacy of social inequality and the absolute authority of earthly governments. Now it was only a short step from there to Roman Christianity. It was Roman Christianity that truly perfected this dualistic strategy and I'm using the term Roman Christianity with deliberate intent. What I'm talking about is not Christianity in its original form when it was still what we might call a tribal religion still deeply rooted in Judaism and not the self-proclaimed universal church that it would become. I'm talking about the fundamental transformations in Christian doctrine which happened very early at the hands of Saint Paul had culminated in the work of Saint Augustine. Pauline Christianity in my view is a ideology of empire. We don't need to accept the extreme interpretation that he was a conscious and deliberate ideologue of empire it's enough just to acknowledge that he was very much a product of imperial Rome and that like it or not his doctrinal innovations were far more congenial to Roman imperial powers than were the old tribal religion or other forms of Christianity. Saint Paul's Christianity is a distinctive kind of universalism. This universalism allows the supreme omnipotent authority of one God to coexist with the more or less absolute temporal powers of emperors and kings and it also allows the equality of all humanity before God to coexist with the most extreme social inequalities and rigid earthly hierarchies in a very Roman approach. The Bible itself attributes to Jesus actually to Jesus the principle that we should render unto Caesar the things which are Caesars and unto God the things that are Gods but at Saint Paul really turned this into a defense of obedience to earthly powers. It was Paul who began the process of translating into systematic Christian theology the doctrine of universal divinity and the spiritual equality of all human beings before God combined with the earthly inequalities of property, social hierarchy and absolute political authority. He establishes his universalistic principles by dissociating Christianity from Jewish law. He replaces the particularism of an essentially tribal religion with transcendent moral doctrine that applies equally to human beings. Greeks are Romans, no less than Jews and slaves no less than masters. The righteousness of God manifests itself apart from any law. So far so good but Paul's universalism turns out to be a two edged sword. On the one hand it asserts the equal moral equality of the equal moral value of all human beings. On the other hand it leaves unchallenged in fact supports the social inequalities of the temporal sphere. Paul insists that these conditions should be accepted by good Christians and even slavery is consistent with his universalistic doctrine even if he enjoins masters to treat their slaves well. I mean his Christianity certainly obliges him to challenge the actual divinity of the emperor but he can still insist that earthly governments are ordained by divine providence and he clearly asserts the authority of the secular state. It's worth considering by the way that this kind of dualistic strategy would not be available to Islam. It wasn't available to Judaism either but it wouldn't be available to Islam because that strategy which came so easily to Roman Christianity is excluded by the fundamental Islamic doctrine and this single divinely revealed system of law which encompasses the whole range of human practice secular and religious at the same time. Anyway, Paul's dualistic message to Roman elites and prosperous classes was decidedly more reassuring than were the teachings of the early Christians some of whom denied not only the divinity of Caesar but even his divinely sanctioned authority and some of them preached in egalitarianism that wasn't just confined to the moral or spiritual sphere. They repudiated materialistic values they called upon their fellows to give up their wealth to the community and so on. Paul represents a really striking contrast to that kind of Christianity. Even his essential doctrine of salvation by faith rather than by works had clear advantages for those who stood to lose from a strict adherence to the gospel, the rich and powerful. Now the whole Pauline structure of dual authority depended on the concept of sin and whatever else this emphasis on sin was meant to do it certainly conformed to the requirements of Roman hegemony and the authority of Caesar because it means that earthly government and obedience to them are necessary according to this version of Christianity because and only because human beings are sinful by nature. Now it's true that for Paul Christ represents salvation from the universal taint of sin but in this life if not the next there's no way of escaping human sinfulness and that makes Caesar's authority an unavoidable necessity. Now the principle that human sinfulness legitimates earthly authorities would reach its full development in Augustine and he really took it to new extremes with a particularly unforgiving doctrine of predestination but with Augustine we're in a different stage of Roman imperialism the later empire is going through bad times Rome had been sacked by Alaric the Visigoth and this is after the conversion of the emperor Constantine so it's a Christian empire that's suffering these evils so among the Roman elites there's a growing tendency to blame all these evils on the abandonment of old Roman traditions on the abandonment of Roman paganism and so on and Augustine sets out to exonerate Christianity from the evils facing Rome he tries to explain those evils while at the same time demonstrating that Christianity doesn't represent a threat to the earthly authority of the empire and this obviously requires something very different from a conception of the Roman empire as the fulfillment of God's purpose or something like that in fact Augustine repudiates the whole notion of Rome's Christian mission and the consequence is an even more emphatic doctrine of unconditional obedience to imperial authority in other words a Christian empire is in effect no less sinful than a pagan empire and neither one of them can you have true justice in this life Augustine's most famous doctrine is the idea of two cities the earthly city and the city of God now this is a complex idea that's hard to get a handle on but certain things about it are clear it owes a lot to earlier Roman and Christian dualisms but it's nothing so simple as a distinction between earthly and heavenly realms or secular and spiritual authority the city of God represents the saintly in fact pious and just the earthly designates the impure and pious and unjust and damned but though the two of them are antithetical they are inseparable from each other and all institutions in this world suffer from this conflict so until the end of history when the city of God will finally triumph the earthly city will be dominant and history will remain a tragic spectacle in which harmony and justice can never prevail so every person and all institutions the holy no less than the transparently unholy have to submit to earthly powers and the best we can expect from those powers is not a just or rightful order but a measure of security maybe physical comfort, some relief from the disorder that inevitably follows from the law of human beings who populate this earthly world of course at the root of this pessimism is the notion of humanity's fallen condition and the power of sin and like Paul, Augustine concluded from this that Caesar's earthly power although it doesn't fulfill any divine mission was nevertheless providentially ordained by God but he takes that doctrine much further because unlike Paul the empire already converted to Christianity and he systematically spells out the reasons for obeying a pagan emperor like Julian the Apostate no less than Constantine the Christian if anything the burden of Augustine's argument is virtually all on the side of obedience to imperial authority in fact he does something more he effectively kills the ancient civic idea what I mean by this is that in the classical idea of citizenship some kind of equality was still dangerously rooted in the earthly world now it's true that the idea had been substantially diluted by the Romans but Augustine was taking no chances the equality of human beings before God may have been an essential principle of Christianity but Augustine made sure that this Christian principle was safely and decisively relegated to a sphere beyond this earth leaving secular imperial authority completely unchallenged the old greek principles of political community presupposed some kind of human capacity for self-government so those civic principles could best be challenged by denying any such capacity for civic virtue or self-rule or denying the very existence of a civic domain and nothing could do that more emphatically than the doctrine of original sin so that was pretty much that the strategy of invoking democracy equality or even just citizenship in support of domination had always been a pretty risky business even though there were moments when it could be useful it had limited utility in capitalist societies whose economic powers were so closely bound up with legal, political and military status before the advent of capitalism dominant classes had much to lose by invoking democracy or equality even just rhetorically and once the ancient civil ideal had been completely expunged by western feudalism ideologies of domination tended to be pretty explicit about their inegalitarian foundations but with capitalism the ideological possibilities and the needs of dominant classes changed radically for the first time in history the rhetoric of democracy could become the preferred and systematic ideological strategy of domination, both class domination and imperialism that's what I want to talk about now you'll be relieved to hear we've left the ancient world and we're making our great leap forward and we're gonna even talk about the early days of capitalist imperialism what I'm gonna talk about is the kind of capitalist imperialism that doesn't need to impose direct colonial rule on the whole because it can impose its powerful economic pressures what I like to call market imperatives on the whole world now this fully developed capitalist empire which depends above all it's basically the story of US imperialism the US has preferred on the whole to avoid colonial entanglements and to maintain so called informal empire and up to now it's been more or less successful in imposing market forces and manipulating them to the advantage of US capital now we all know that this hasn't been possible without huge military power but that military power has generally been used for the old imperial purpose of capturing and ruling colonial territories it's job has been much more diffuse than that more open ended basically to police the global system to make it safe for the movements of capital so this new imperialism is something very different from any earlier variety and it has its own ideological requirements in older forms of imperial rule like the ones we were just talking about the economic power of the empire was more or less co-extensive with its military dominance and its political hegemony so the task of imperial ideology was above all to assert the empire's political legitimacy and the obligation to obey imperial authority but in today's so called new imperialism the ideological task is more complicated the economic power of imperial capital doesn't depend on direct political or military rule in general and its global reach doesn't coincide with its political hegemony so justifying and defending the new imperialism doesn't just depend on asserting the legitimacy of imperial authorities and the need to obey them the new imperialism depends on the imposition and maintenance of capitalist economic imperatives and this economic order which is now a truly global order needs its own justification at the same time global capital certainly does need political support and military support the trouble is that for now and I would say for the foreseeable future that political support has to take the form of territorial states and it doesn't remotely coincide with the global reach of capital so the new imperialist ideology doesn't only have to find ways of justifying the global economy it also has to legitimate what are plainly the actions of territorial states including military actions so the new imperialism in other words really has two distinct ideological requirements and these requirements are sometimes in conflict with each other separately and then consider how or even whether they can be reconciled in the new imperial ideology the new economic imperialism really came into its own I would say only in the latter part of the 20th century so this strategy this ideological strategy is still in the process of development and it may have been recently overtaken by events and then the ideologs may be sent scurring back to the drawing board we can at least look at its general outline as it now stands ok so how does the new imperial ideology legitimate the global economic order well the new imperialism like the ancient one invokes some kind of universal order which is supposed to transcend all earthly particularities all differences of time and place but this time we're not talking anymore about the old kind of dualism in which the earthly realities of inequality and domination coexist with a mythical cosmopolis or a Christian brotherhood of equals before God or whatever this time for the first time there's what you might call a real material historical universality capitalism has set in motion a new kind of historical dynamic with a totalizing logic of the modern expression unlike anything the world has ever seen before now for the first time we can really talk about a truly universal history universal both in the sense that it's global and in the sense that one overwhelming systemic logic reaches into every corner of our lives what I'm talking about is the systemic imperatives of capitalism the unprecedented capacity to draw all life into the orbit of the self expansion of capital, commodification competition and profit maximization well that brings us to another sense in which capitalism is uniquely universalistic it can certainly make use of non economic identities and differences differences of race, gender and so on but the relation between capital and labor doesn't ultimately depend on differences of extra economic non economic status from the point of view of capital all that really matters is the commodification of labor power which means reducing all human beings to the universal identity of abstract labor and even in the relation between capital and labor there's a formal equality of a kind that's never existed before a contractual relation between judicial equals supposedly which means that some kind of equality exists at the very base of capitalism so if the universality we're talking about belongs to this earth is it still possible to invoke some kind of dualism like the one I've been talking about to justify earthly inequalities domination and imperialism while still professing to believe in a universal community and natural equality I mean if we've more or less lost the option of relegating the universal community and equality to some extra terrestrial sphere what now? How do the imperial idilocks today make it work when it all has to happen in this world? Well, the new strategy doesn't rely on a transcendent eternal supernatural sphere Instead it offers us a kind of a new kind of natural order But it's a natural order that's no less universal in binding than the cosmic order ordained by God What we get is the global capitalist economy conceived as an impersonal natural phenomenon We get in other words conventional notions of globalization The idea is that globalization in the current capitalist even U.S. dominated sense is the result of two natural processes the impersonal natural laws of the market and inevitable technological progress Now we're given to understand that if only we don't place artificial barriers in their way the laws of the market will embrace the whole world with the help of the new information technologies and so on and there's no point fighting these natural forces I mean of course we could try to resist them but we will do so at our peril But here we run into a new problem what you might call a new imperial paradox It's all very well to talk about a universal economic order but maintaining that order maintaining global economic imperatives does after all depend on political and military supports The objective of this new empire first and foremost is free access for capital and U.S. capital in particular to anywhere in the world So global capital needs an orderly system an orderly global system and in the absence of a truly global political order it has to rely on territorial states So how do the proponents of the new imperialism describe and justify this political and military aspect of the global empire For one thing their strategy is not so much to justify imperial domination as to deny its existence altogether and up to a point it does it in pretty much the same way that capital can deny class domination just as citizenship tends to mask class domination and capitalism legal state sovereignty in global capitalism tends to mask imperial domination but obviously that's not enough in a world of more or less sovereign states it takes something more to justify the new imperialism by the dominance of global capital and the power of the U.S. state in particular this is where the idea of democracy comes in big time to be mobilized in defense of imperial expansion now this is a favorite strategy of the informal American empire the fact that its claim to its mission is to spread democracy of course that's been a favorite specialty of George W. Bush and we all know all too well what it means but the association of democracy with imperial ambitions isn't just the madness of George W it's a deeply rooted American idea Bush Jr. certainly isn't the first U.S. president to justify imperialist interventions on the grounds of a mission to defend and spread democracy and lots of Americans firmly believe that this is their country's manifest destiny so you might want to ask why not just George Bush but even decent and intelligent people sometimes seem to find this plausible how could they allow themselves to believe that freedom, equality and universal human dignity is a convincing justification of imperialism as it happens this ideological strategy seems more convincing than ever before and not just for positive reasons as I said in ancient Greece and for that matter in the pre-capitalist world generally it was a risky strategy because political equality or democratic political power represented a real challenge to exploitative power because it depended on direct coercive force but capitalist exploitation doesn't depend on direct political coercion it depends on economic compulsions so it's made political equality less significant less of a challenge to appropriating classes it's turned democracy into less of a threat to dominant elites for centuries the ancient Greek conception of democracy had been anathema to dominant elites very late in history this was still the case and democracy continued to be a dirty word until the modern age but today everyone claims to be a democrat and even the most rabid imperialist can claim to be on a mission to spread democracy throughout the world so you have to ask what's the difference between then and now why is it possible to do this it's true that ancient and modern democracy have in common the fact that mass and elite share a civic identity and that ordinary working people are citizens it's true that both ancient and modern democracy separate political identity from class or status and that citizenship doesn't depend on class but the great difference between then and now is that Athenian democracy wasn't and couldn't be class neutral in the same way that modern democracy is in a way the whole point of modern democracy is its class neutrality but what this means is not only that people are citizens regardless of their class or status it also means that their citizenship makes little difference to their class it doesn't substantially affect relations between rich and poor elite and mass exploiters and exploited now I don't mean to deny that there are vast differences between say neoliberal capitalism and say social democracy but the fact remains that in capitalism political equality doesn't by itself affect the power of economic exploitation in ancient Greece where there was no capitalist type economic exploitation political rights had immediately far reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor and that's why Aristotle for instance defined democracy not just as ruled by the majority but as ruled by the poor capital can dispense with direct non economic powers so its exploitative powers can coexist with liberal democracy in a way that was never true before I'm not saying that liberal democracy is the necessary or natural state form of capitalism but it can coexist with capitalism in a way that by definition it could never have done with any other system well I've talked and written a lot about this ad nauseam in fact I've talked about how both capital and labor can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere and how much of human life is determined in that economic sphere out of reach of democratic accountability what I want to emphasize here is that the formal separation of the economic and the political in capitalism which goes far beyond the ancient distinction between social inequality and civic equality has given a whole new meaning to the old dualism which permits equality in one sphere to exist with inequality and domination in another I mean capitalism can coexist with the ideology of freedom and equality in a way that no other system can and what this means is that democracy itself has a holy new meaning something that was never available to say alexander the great I mean the new imperialists have a far less threatening conception of democracy to work with something very well suited to class domination and imperial expansion this idea of democracy would never have been possible without the capitalist separation of political and economic spheres but it also owes a lot to the reinvention of the concept of democracy in the US very early in its history as the founding fathers of the US constitution who redefined effectively redefined the meaning of democracy and you can actually watch it happening in the constitutional debates you can watch the federalists first at the so-called founding fathers first attacking democracy understood in its original meaning and then making a clever rhetorical switch just renaining what they used to call a republic now they're calling it suddenly they're calling it democracy and it wasn't just a matter of replacing direct democracy with the representative variety there's absolutely no mistaking their efforts to preserve elite rule in this new kind of democracy one obvious example which is making its way into the news these days one example of their thinking on this score though it's far from the only one is the method of electing presidents the method of electing senators too was indirect but just the other day the guardian referred to the method of electing the president of the United States as something akin to the Vatican's College of Cardinals and believe me the founding fathers made it quite clear that what they had in mind was a property of elite so that democratic citizenship would be subordinate to a hierarchy of economic interests well if capitalism has created a separate economic sphere we might say that the US idea of democracy has created a political sphere to go with it a political sphere to suit the capitalist division of labor between political and economic power and today of course things have gone a lot further than what the founding fathers had in mind today the US model of democracy combines the formal sovereignty of the people with the substantive rule of capital and democracy as it's now understood in the US involves a very delicate conceptual balancing act between popular sovereignty that is government of buying for the people and the dominance of capital the subordination of politics to capitalist markets and the imperatives of profit now people like myself who grew up in the United States are pretty well primed to accept this tricky combination they're well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class they're educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom and they're taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market and the limited conception of equality which doesn't affect the fundamental relations of capital or even the most extreme disparities of wealth of course there are other deeply rooted radical and activist traditions in the USA and we can only hope that we are seeing the revival of them now but the dominant official version is still extremely powerful so most Americans are not automatically programmed to notice the contradictions between imperialism and democracy and to question the idea that their national mission is to define democracy for the whole world and to lead all nations to democratic liberty and we can trace the roots of that idea as I said back to the beginnings of the republic but it probably got its first really explicit formulation with Woodrow Wilson there was a pretty good article in the London Review of Books which argued Wilson's rhetorical achievement which distinguished him sharply from traditional European practitioners of Realpolitik was to present America's strategic and political interests as moral imperatives and its foreign interventions as necessary acts of international responsibility European leaders periodically stressed their civilizing mission but no one before Wilson endowed national exceptionalism with such a modern democracy well at the time that rhetoric gave hope to many people throughout the world who were engaged in anti-colonial struggles and of course their hopes proved to be badly misplaced but even today pretty clever people even people ostensibly on the left have bought into this ideological strategy I mean just take, if I may say so Negri and Hart's Empire I mean they talk about today's US dominated empire in terms that would have been entirely congenial to the architects of open door so called open door imperialism and you know a US dominated empire which is essentially a benign expression of democracy it's open, expansive and inclusive tendencies and so on now what makes the so called spread of democracy a viable strategy for neoliberal imperialism is the fact that this version of democracy puts formal political rights in place of any social rights and it puts a great many aspects of social life out of reach of democratic accountability and you can see how it works as an imperial strategy even just by looking at what happened in Iraq I mean before the first election in occupied Iraq the parameters of democratic politics were set by Paul Bremer's economic directives and his privatization which was clearly intended to leave a very constricted public space for the operation of democracy you could even say that this is the effect and maybe for you know to a large extent the purpose of neoliberal globalization in general I mean if globalization is supposed to be preparing the ground for democracy throughout the world as leaders of advanced capitalist countries like to tell us it's also making sure that much of economic and social life will be beyond the reach of democratic power and ever more vulnerable to the power of capital but there's one further wrinkle and I am coming to a conclusion here one further wrinkle in the new imperial paradox in a sense what's happened is a reversal of the old imperial dualism it's not a question now of a universalistic civic domain or a community moral equals juxtaposed with the particularities of social and economic inequality and domination this time it's the economic sphere itself that has a universalizing force but this global economic domain coexists with and even depends on a political sphere of multiple and diverse territorial states and to make the paradox more paradoxical much as global capital depends on territorial states it of course constantly seeks to break free of the limits imposed by states and territorial boundaries and it also wants to ensure that no local or national forces will emerge to oppose the compulsions of capital either in the imperial homeland or in subordinate economies so an absolutely central principle in the new imperialist strategy is to deny the importance of the territorial state in some standard conceptions of globalization they leave us with the implication that and well they say so the more global the economy the less relevant and effective the territorial state becomes that there's an inverse relation between the globalizing power of capital and the importance of the state that the state is indispensable in this ideological strategy something better left unsaid but what emphatically does need saying in it is that the state not only shouldn't but can't interfere with the natural laws of the global economy the market imperatives of global capitalism and of course in the face of those natural laws oppositional politics is absolutely pointless so it's not enough I guess it's not a question just of reinventing the Alexander's cosmopolis what we have to do is abolish the idea of politics altogether and I'm tempted to describe this new ideological strategy this view of globalization as the new Augustinianism a new way of denying the civic domain and the possibility of political action now this state denying strategy hasn't been an easy trick to pull off after all whatever else we can say about the existing globalization it's clearly been an imperial project led by one unmistakably powerful state and of course it's hard to reconcile this denial of the state and the civic domain with the project of spreading democracy but once you identify democracy with markets once you identify democratic freedoms with market imperatives the contradictions are a little bit less glaring but here is the final little irony a lot of minds seem to have been changed recently about the state in the global economy and they've been changed not by displays of imperial power but on the contrary by a rather dramatic display of economic weakness the recent events in the financial crisis have apparently convinced even some of the most rabid state deniers that global capital is desperately dependent on the state but for me it's not just a question of bailouts for capital or rediscovering the virtues of regulated markets what it also means and this is something I've been saying for years what it also means is that there are real possibilities of political action not to support but to resist the domination of global capital but that's a whole other story


With a heat wave sweeping through the area, many are made uncomfortable by the extreme temperatures and high humidity. The importance of keeping yourself and others safe from the heat is more important than ever. No matter where you're at, you really can't totally escape what's happening from the outside. Those working in the heat are advised to not only hydrate, but over hydrate. If you are in the heat and stop sweating, find a way to cool yourself off immediately as you are approaching overheating. If you do feel like you're starting to overheat some, put a cool towel around your neck, in your armpits, or in the groin area, those are three areas in which you can bring your body core temperature down rapidly if you feel like you're starting to overheat. Children sent outside to play should also exercise caution. Parents should constantly reapply sunscreen to children and provide them with plenty of water and breaks. Given kids activities that they can do in shaded areas, it's okay to be exposed to the sun. Just not do it in prolonged amounts of time. We are Pikeville Medical Center and we are an amazing place to work. Healthcare heroes of all types work here, all who deserve great rewards. So while our heroes are working hard to take care of our patients and visitors, we are taking care of them with top-tier benefits, higher pay rates, and great sign-on bonuses. So join our team today. So what are you waiting for? Apply today! Incredible opportunities await at PMCJobs.org. Those who work outside are advised to take steps to protect themselves with garments such as hats and other clothing items that reflect UV rays. The importance of taking breaks can also not be stressed enough. Just stay vigilant. Check on neighbors and elderly folks as well because a lot of times they don't realize they'll be outside working or out in the heat and not realize that they're starting to overheat. So always check on your neighbors and your relatives, especially the elderly. Pets should also avoid being left in the heat and should have access to shade and plenty of water. Knowing your limits is a big part of staying safe in the heat, but it is also important to watch out for the safety of others. Make sure you and your loved ones stay hydrated and cool in the midst of this heat wave. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsea Dean.