Podcasts about Walter Scott

Circumstance made him a legend of the quizzing world, but Siddhartha Basu is a man of many parts. He joins Amit Varma in episode 420 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about life, India, the art of asking questions and the answers he has found. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Siddhartha Basu on Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram and IMDb. 2. Tree of Knowledge, DigiTok. 3. Quizzitok on YouTube. 4. Middlemarch -- George Eliot. 5. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 6. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 7. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen featuring Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 9. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi — Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity — Manu Pillai. 12. The Forces That Shaped Hinduism — Episode 405 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manu Pillai). 13. How to Become a Tyrant -- Narrated by Peter Dinklage. 14. What Is Populism? -- Jan-Werner Müller. 15. The Populist Playbook -- Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 16. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea -- Richard Fleischer. 17. The Hedgehog And The Fox — Isaiah Berlin. 18. Trees of Delhi : A Field Guide -- Pradip Krishen. 19. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 20. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 21. Stage.in. 22. Dance Like a Man -- Mahesh Dattani. 23. How Old Are You? -- Rosshan Andrrews. 24. The Mehta Boys -- Boman Irani. 25. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce. 26. Massey Sahib -- Pradip Krishen. 27. Derek O'Brien talks to Siddhartha Basu -- Episode 6 of the Quizzitok Podcast. 28. Kwizzing with Kumar Varun. 29. Ivanhoe, Treasure Island and Black Beauty. 30. Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, TS Eliot and Vivekananda. 31. Ramayana and Mahabharata -- C Rajagopalachari. 32. Paradise Lost -- John Milton. 33. Morte d'Arthur -- Alfred Tennyson. 34. Death of a Salesman -- Arthur Miller. 35. Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Rukun Advani, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Jhumpa Lahiri, I Allan Sealy, Arundhati Roy and William Dalrymple. 36. The Trotter-nama -- I Allan Sealy. 37. The Everest Hotel -- I Allan Sealy. 38. The Life and Times of Altu-Faltu -- Ranjit Lal. 39. Mr Beast on YouTube. 40. The Spectacular Life of Prahlad Kakar — Episode 414 of The Seen and the Unseen. 41. Ramki and the Ocean of Stories -- Episode 415 of The Seen and the Unseen. 42. Adolescence -- Created by Stephen Graham & Jack Thorne. 43. Anora -- Sean Baker. 44. Jerry Seinfeld on the results of the Seinfeld pilot. 45. Scam 1992 -- Hansal Mehta. 46. Dahaad -- Created by Reema Kagti & Zoya Akhtar. 47. The Delhi Walla -- Mayank Austen Soofi. 48. Flood of Fire -- Amitav Ghosh. 49. The Shadow Lines -- Amitav Ghosh. 50. The God of Small Things -- Arundhati Roy. 51. Shillong Chamber Choir. 52. The Waste Land -- TS Eliot. 53. Omkara, Maqbool and Haider -- Vishal Bhardwaj. 54. A Tale of Two Cities -- Charles Dickens. 55. William Shakespeare and Henry James. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Your Time Starts Now' by Simahina.

Marrying in haste is easy, but divorces can be oh so much trickier. Two complicated marriages finally dissolve in the courtroom.October 1933, Mae Murray is on her third attempt to divorce Prince David Mdivani. Amidst their divorce proceedings, she has several other cases related to an unpaid debt and a personal injury claim. Meanwhile Hope Diamond owner Evalyn Walsh McLean requests an insanity hearing for her wayward spouse Edward “Ned” McLean. In other news, more details on potential Lindbergh baby kidnapping suspects pop up. Other people and subjects include:Koran Mdivani, Mary McCormick, Prince Serge Mdivani, Pola Negri, Valentino, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Samuel Insull, Gaston Means, Cartier, Elizabeth “Betsy” Stack, Robert Stack, Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, John “Jafsie” Condon, Cemetery John, Rose Douras Davies, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Dr. Ross Chapman, Dr. Arthur Patrell, Edgar Allen Poe, Reverend Francis Hurney, John Gorch, Otto Hawk – Arthur Young, bridal party, loans, usury, lunacy petition, mental cruelty, controlling behaviors, erratic jealousy, alimony, community property, child support, child custody, trust, financial settlement, freedom, personal injury, leg insurance, extradited, pottery fraud, real estate embezzlement, ransom money, wrestler, racketeer, ex-convict, detective, Hope Diamond curse, morphine addiction, prostitutes, aging actress, flailing career, 1925 Merry Widow, Washington Post headquarters, Pacific Shore Oil Company, Hill, Morgan & Bledsoe, Bricklayers', Masons' and Plasters' International Union, Metropolitan National Bank, Shepard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, L.A. Superior Court, Brooklyn Fox Theatre, Playa del Rey, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Athens, Greece, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, Hopewell, NJ, Youngstown, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Scotland, Paris, Mexico, Latvia, Zelda Fitzgerald, spending sprees, alcoholism, women, dance classes, elope, European honeymoon, trained seal, trained bear, May Dixon Thacker, Teapot Dome Scandal, Elk Hills, naval oil leases, oil tycoons, President Warren Harding, U.S. Secretary of Interior Albert Fall, U.S. Attorney Harry Daugherty, Harry Sinclair, Edward Doheny, Strange Death of President Harding, Liberty Magazine, falsities, inaccuracies, retraction, revenge, Lochinvar, Walter Scott, poem, knight, Helen, laggard, Mdivani-Hutton jade necklace, Duke of Windsor brooch, Victoria & Albert South Kensington, Cartier exhibit, connections, synchronicity, frequency illusion, Baader-Meinhof, coinciding lawsuits, Unsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, History Channel, documentaries, new Mdivani book & Instagram account, scandal, overlaps, large fortunes, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez,…--Extra Notes / Call to Action:Cartier Exhibit at Victoria & Albert South Kensington, London May 27th – November 16th, 2025https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/cartierSearching for the Mikinaak is available via Tubi, Amazon, and YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x-9C9EWur4Share, like, subscribe --Archival Music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance BandsSection 1 Music: Lullaby by Coleman Hawkins, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz ClassicsSection 2 Music: Just A Mood by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz ClassicsSection 3 Music: These Foolish Things by Benny Carter, Album Perfect BluesEnd Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands--https://asthemoneyburns.com/X / TW / IG – @asthemoneyburnsX / Twitter – https://x.com/asthemoneyburnsInstagram – https://www.instagram.com/asthemoneyburns/Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/asthemoneyburns/

Author's Note: This writing was adapted from a series of conversations around race in America and edited as audio, recorded in 2020, right after George Floyd was lynched.. The podcast of this writing is the real thing, as it were.  What follows is edited text to clarify the narrators, absent the audio.  Please consider following the podcast associated with this newsletter and leaving a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please subscribe to support high-impact content like this.The author, David Foster Wallace, described the experience of reading his novel Infinite Jest as intended to feel “tornadic,” like you're in the middle of a tornado. That's what the last several weeks have felt like.Protesters:"Racist ass police! No justice, no peace! F**k these racist ass police! No justice, no peace!""F**k these racist ass police!"Owen Muir, M.D.:I originally tried making this episode a linear narrative, but it wasn't happening. So, welcome to the tornado of racism in America. Buckle up.George Floyd spent 8 minutes and 46 seconds gasping for breath.  Police officers, some of whom were very experienced, knelt on his back...until he didn't breathe anymore. As a psychiatrist, I often emphasize how the words we use to describe someone's death have meaning. So, I'll say, you know, completed suicide, not “commit.” And George Floyd was lynched.Welcome. This is about anxiety, uncertainty, and existential despair. And I recorded the narration in one take because I wasn't, like, going to get it right a second time. So much of what we say about race is calculated, polite, and wrong. So I'm not going to try to do that tonight.Here we go.Sequoiah:"Yeah. My general reaction to all this is a little more, a little more extended. The, uh, f**k".Owen Muir, M.D.:That's my teammate. She is a TMS technician at the mental health practice we worked at together. She also works in the community with patients helping put their lives together, but tonight she's a field reporter on the revolution.Sequoiah:"I am a TMS tech, Winnicott coach, and black woman. Which seems very important right now. George Floyd, Say His Name.  George Floyd, Say his Name.So I just got home from a protest in Flatbush. Police would not let us pass. We were chanting with our hands up. And after a while, they decided to push the line backward. We resisted—we stood there with our hands up. They pushed us and pushed us, and when we wouldn't..."Owen:Now, as someone with a lot of white privilege, I'm outraged at hearing this, like, wow, this is fucked up. So I called another colleague in the special operations community, and I'm not using names in this episode for semi-obvious reasons, and I heard what he had to say.Master Sergeant:“The things that U. S. police forces are apparently fully within their legal rights to do, like, use tear gas, would literally have…been against the Geneva Conventions. It's an actual war crime. We cannot gas a civilian population.”Owen Muir, M.D.:The person I'm interviewing has over a decade of experience in the special operations community. He has fought and killed for our right to do what my other colleagues were in the street doing, peacefully protesting.Master Sergeant:"This is a perversion of what the United States stands for. We invade countries who treat their people the way that our police forces are on camera treating Americans "Sequoiah:"People started to back up, , and run and they then started to hit us with batons. , I fell. And then we reformed the line."Master Sergeant:"It's disgusting in a lot of ways."Owen Muir, M.D.:So when someone whose life has been dedicated to protecting our freedoms tells me they're upset with what they're seeing, I take that pretty seriously.Sequoiah:"Well, the other night, well, last night, when the cops and protestors were getting into, into fights and they were trying to, the cops were trying to push back the protestors, I saw them bring out the batons and, like, start attacking people...and each time they'd tell us to back up and back up and kept pushing us and pushing us. And finally, there was a frustration in the air, and people started to act out."Owen Muir, M.D.:Now, as a psychiatrist, my life has been saved by police officers on more than one occasion. I have been physically attacked in hospital settings.  The police have been called, and I have not died, and my colleagues have not died thanks to them. And this is Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, and these people are black people. The Flatbush, at least the area I was in, is a predominantly black neighborhood.  So, look, Americans love the police.  They are a highly regarded part of society by many people, but that's not the experience for black America I have learned.Master Sergeant:“There are many things you can do in that spectrum that don't involve actively using force against a human being, which makes the process easier across the board. If I don't have to hurt somebody, the only thing that is hurting another person does for me is further endanger my Troops. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Now this makes sense to me because, having run the show in a psychiatric emergency department, where I have to protect myself, other patients, and violent people themselves from getting hurt, sometimes we use violence, but oftentimes we don't.Master Sergeant:"What started this particular instance has been four cops lynched George Floyd. One guy put his knee on the man. We don't do that to terrorists actively trying to kill us. ""George Floyd, Say His Name."Sequoiah:"It was at that point that they called in more backup and started to attack and arrest groups of gathered people from the neighborhood.”Owen Muir, M.D.:Police officers, when they're called to stand trial for the use of force, have a standard called the reasonable officer standard.I feel like I have to make it relevant for me--a white person—to watch humans being murdered by police and then people killing each other in the streets about it. There was an article I read about six months ago about yet another person being slammed to the ground, handcuffed behind their back, and suffocated to death by the police. I was shocked..that the person was white. Until I read several paragraphs down that he had schizophrenia. Oh, that's what made it okay. Reasonable officers can only be judged based on what someone would do in that moment of terror when they have to decide to use force.Sequoiah:"I was so emotionally spent and so exhausted. And then we saw marauding bands of police officers going down the street, just telling people to go home and attacking groups of people on the street.”"George Floyd, Say His Name.  George Floyd, Say His Name."Owen Muir, M.D.:Police officers are represented by unions. Those unions have spent 20 years bargaining for lack of accountability to protect, in their minds, their members. This means police officers have the right to huddle and discuss their stories before speaking to prosecutors. It means many other things.  But importantly, whenever any officer stands trial, the jury is instructed, per Chief Justice Rehnquist, to not use the benefit of 20/20 hindsight in judging their actions, but only what a reasonable, that is, terrified person, would do at the moment.Master Sergeant:"We have an entire job in the US military to validate whether or not we killed someone the right way."Owen Muir, M.D.:The court system is what's supposed to do that for police officers. But it doesn't; it just says, eh, it's okay.Master Sergeant:"That's an actual thing; we have entire organizational structures dedicated to the legality of murder."Owen Muir, M.D.:Killing black or brown people in America, if you're a police officer, has literally never been ruled against the law. Ever.Master Sergeant:"To not call it murder, to call it, to call it killing combatants, that's what a JAG does. Overseas, when they're deployed, they tell you whether or not you can kill this person. And sometimes, even though we can kill someone, we don't because they have a much higher value as an intelligence asset. Or for any number of other reasons. Or they're not actively shooting at us when we go get them. That happens a ton. Because sometimes, when you see 20 or 30 goons show up outside your house, breach your door with a shotgun round, rush in, and then point all their guns at you, you won't fight back. And then, okay, well, he's not shooting back at us, so we're going to take him in, and then... "Owen Muir, M.D.:You don't get to kill someone. In the U. S. military. Deployed in the field. In Afghanistan. Even if someone's a terrorist, if they're not pointing a gun at you and about to pull the goddamn trigger.“Cause one of the things I don't want to do is vilify police officers. And, and ...”Master Sergeant:"I mean, Owen, to be perfectly honest with you,  You may not want to vilify police officers, but the things I've seen police officers do in the past week while they know they're being recorded are actively the actions of villains."Owen Muir, M.D.:This hit me like a ton of bricks. This is not okay, but when people call for help, and the police arrive, they deal with a crisis. A lot of those crises involve people with mental illness, and police officers are being asked to do a thing that like is a whole medical specialty. Like, I'm a psychiatrist. It was 45 000 hours of training to learn how to calm people down when upset and have experiences we don't have access to. And, if you're called to the scene of a crisis, and someone's acting in a really strange and scary way, and you have a gun. You've been told to protect yourself, don't let yourself get hurt or let this person harm you, and you know nothing bad will happen to you if you pull that trigger. You're going to pull that trigger.  More often than not. And that's about a thousand times a year. You're about... God knows it doesn't even matter. The percentage of time you're more likely to be killed if you're black and mentally ill. The fact that we have a statistic for that is fucked up enough. Help isn't helpful for black America. And that's just a fact of life.”Master Sergeant:"You know, I have friends in New York who are talking about the cruelty they see in these police officers' eyes. And what's worse, what's truly evil about this whole system is even in the throes of this violence, they're exhibiting racist and preferential behaviors towards white protesters versus black protesters. Or brown protesters. They're active, you know, taking it easier on white people because they're white. "Owen Muir, M.D.:And this is just f*****g killing me at this point. Ugh. Look, what's happening in the streets is not okay. It's not been okay for hundreds of years. And police officers are part of a system designed to keep order, and order used to mean slaves. That's just why they're there.Master Sergeant:"Things I don't even f*****g think about, man. Like, I'll go for a run or a rock at night. And I'll, I'll like, sometimes I'll go on my own, but if I don't go earlier, like, T. is like, well, I guess I'll go for a run. Like, one day, I just asked, like, why do you only run with me? Why do you only run with me? And she's like, well, it depends. We're in a quiet neighborhood in Florida, and I'm a black woman like I'm; there's a bunch of Trump signs everywhere like I'm not going running on my own. I was like, wow, yeah, I've never even thought along those lines; I don't question my safety when I go places. I'm hyper-vigilant for a lot of other reasons, but like, there's never a question in my mind, like if someone attacks me, it's not, it's an unexpected event, I'm not expecting, That at any moment, someone might attack me for the color of my skin. Because I'm in the neighborhood."William Osei, PhD.:"Hey, I'm Dr. Will Osei.I am a postdoctoral fellow, an African American psychologist living in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. " Owen Muir, M.D.:Dr. Osei is a scholar of racism and multiculturalism.And helped me explain what it's like for the black kids I've treated at Bellevue all these years.William Osei, PhD:"The average African American, this is like... This is a fact. This is not a revelation because we now have better cell phone coverage of these crimes. I remember being in Cleveland the day following Tamir Rice being murdered in the playground. And I was working with 12-year-old boys in the Cleveland school district. And I was devastated that day, and I went into that school expecting those boys to be devastated that their schoolmate, a kid they used to play with at the playground, was just murdered. And to them, it was nothing. It was more shocking because they knew a dozen people that the police had murdered. They knew that was just the latest murder that year. It just happened to be one that rose to the national conversation, but in Cleveland that year, there were probably 30, 50 police shootings.Owen Muir, M.D.:My level of outrage at watching all of this. That's privilege too.William Osei, PhD:"Yes. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Because to understand this as anything other than the rules of engagement would be a misunderstanding.  For a long time, Black America has known to watch out when you talk to the cops because they can kill you. Nothing's going to stop them if they want to. And they do. On camera. A thousand other times every year. And I wish it were as easy as saying it was a couple or even a lot of bad apples, but that is insufficient.Master Sergeant:"As far as privilege goes, I'm a combat veteran in the Ivy League. I'm an Arab Jew, but I look white enough that no one asks that question. I wear a suit, and you can't see my tattoos. And I... I can fit in anywhere from West Hampton to the slums of Bangladesh. Like, I'm good. You know what I mean? I have levels of privilege that people use to run for the presidency."Owen Muir, M.D.:But the magic of America is that white privilege runs out as soon as power wants it to. My colleague's married to a black woman.Master Sergeant:"And a huge part of this is like... It's the knowledge that I'm married to a black woman. My kids will be black, and this is like their plight. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Usually, we'd have credits now. Instead, I'm going to read these names.George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery, Brianna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Iyanna Jones. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Sandra Land, Walter Scott, and a kid on a playground in Cleveland named Tamir Rice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefrontierpsychiatrists.substack.com/subscribe

Curious about how Walter Scott is charting a course through volatile stock markets? In this podcast, Investment Manager AJ Kyle and Executive Director Roy Leckie delve into three critical areas:Stock-by-stock scrutiny: Evaluating the supply chains of companies such as Intuitive Surgical to understand their tariff exposure.Project-based analysis: Identifying both defensive and offensive opportunities arising from the tariffs.New idea generation: Exploring opportunities in sectors such as precision instruments and Japanese IT solutions.Additionally, you'll find out which areas investors might want to avoid during such turbulent times.Join AJ and Roy as they also reflect on Warren Buffett, one of the greatest active stock pickers of all time. Mr Buffett recently announced his retirement as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the age of 94. They share lessons from his illustrious career that can be applied to investing.Listen to the podcast to learn more.Resources-       Tariff Tempests (article) The tariff turmoil has shaken markets, as investors ponder the potentially profound changes to the economic landscape. Roy Leckie, Executive Director, discusses some of the challenges ahead in these uncertain times, but remains confident that the world's leading companies can navigate their way through the current maelstrom.The podcast is intended for investment professionals only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation. Any stock examples discussed are given in the context of the theme being explored, and the views expressed are those of the presenters at the time of the recording.

Jennifer Daiches, daughter of the Scottish critic and biographer David Daiches, was born in Chicago, educated in the US and in England, before moving to Scotland in 1971.From 1978 to 2001 she worked at the National Museums of Scotland in various capacities, including Head of Publications and script co-ordinator for exhibitions. She is a freelance writer and lecturer, writing on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder (having been married to the poet Angus Calder until 1982) and fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. An area of special interest has been Scottish emigration, particularly to North America, and questions of identity. Other key interests include Scottish literature and women writers.Jenni is also a biographer, writing book on Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Naomi Mitchison. See her full bibliography here. Somewhere Else has been longlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Miriam Margolyes is among its fans, saying “I wept and laughed and wished I had written it.” Get the book here or at your local bookshop. Rosa Roshkin is five years old when her family are murdered in a pogrom and she is forced to leave behind everything she knows with only a suitcase of clothes and her father's violin.An epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jenni Daiches's  Somewhere Else explores today's most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement.

Or Marsh Monster, Heisenberg Cyclops, Inconceivable Menagerie, Tomb Plant.

Saladino es uno de los héroes más famosos y celebrados del mundo islámico, también una de las figuras de las Cruzadas más conocidas. Fue el fundador de la dinastía ayubí que primero extendió su imperio por los actuales Egipto y Siria para luego expandirse hacia Mesopotamia, el Yemen, Arabia, Libia y los reinos cruzados de Tierra Santa. Provenía de una familia kurda y su figura es muy relevante desde el punto de vista histórico ya que consiguió imponerse a los cruzados en la batalla de los Cuernos de Hattin, una victoria que le permitió reconquistar Jerusalén en el año 1187 tras casi un siglo de dominación cristiana. Saladino era un ferviente defensor del islam en su variedad sunní. Esa palanca la empleó para unificar desde el punto de vista político y religioso todo Oriente Próximo. No solo acaudilló la resistencia contra los cruzados llegados de Europa, sino que también se concentró en erradicar doctrinas heréticas contrarias al islam oficial heredero del Califato abasí. Su victoria sobre el reino de Jerusalén supuso golpe decisivo para los cruzados. Aquello, de hecho, desencadenó la tercera cruzada a cuyo frente estaba Ricardo I de Inglaterra, más conocido como Corazón de León. El duelo entre Saladino y Ricardo Corazón de León adquirió tintes legendarios que la literatura y el cine han reproducido en numerosas ocasiones. Pero Saladino no era hijo de reyes, no estaba llamado en principio a interpretar un papel tan decisivo en la historia. Pertenecía a una familia kurda que se empleaba como mercenarios de alto rango para la dinastía zenguí. Siendo muy joven, en calidad de enviado de los zenguíes viajó junto a su padre al Egipto de los Fatimíes para mediar en una disputa con el visir del califa. Decidió quedarse allí y fue escalando en la administración fatimí gracias a su cercanía al sultán Al-Adid y a su habilidad con las armas. Se hizo con el cargo de visir y, a la muerte del sultán, abolió el califato y prestó lealtad a los abasíes de Bagdad. Ya convertido en el general mejor valorado por los califas se concentró en ir expandiendo su imperio. Conquistó el Yemen, se apoderó de Siria y derrotó a sus antiguos amos zenguíes. El califa le recompensó nombrándole sultán de Egipto y Siria. Sólo le quedaban los cruzados que décadas antes habían llegado de Europa para establecer una serie de principados cristianos en Tierra Santa. El mayor y más valioso de todos ellos era el reino de Jerusalén controlado en aquel entonces por Sibila y Guido de Lusignan, un noble franco al que Saladino derrotó en los Cuernos de Hattin. Tras ello tomó Jerusalén reincorporándolo al mundo islámico. El reino de Jerusalén como tal siguió existiendo durante un siglo más, pero ya reducido a pequeños enclaves costeros en los que los cruzados resistieron hasta que se rindió la fortaleza de San Juan de Acre en 1291. La figura de Saladino es recordada tanto en oriente como en Occidente. Su tumba en Damasco es muy visitada y para los Estados árabes contemporáneos es toda una fuente de inspiración. El águila de Saladino, de hecho, forma parte de la heráldica de varios de ellos. En Occidente se le tiene como ejemplo de virtudes principescas, alguien piadoso y sabio que hizo las delicias siglos más tarde de los novelistas románticos. En La ContraRéplica: 0:00 Introducción 3:42 Saladino, azote de los cruzados 1:21:14 Antonio Maura 1:26:58 Puy du Fou Bibliografía: - "Vida y leyenda del sultán Saladino" de Jonathan Phillips - https://amzn.to/3F3RkpI - "El libro de Saladino" Tariq Ali - https://amzn.to/3DuP61V - "Saladino: El sultán y su época" de Hannes Möhring - https://amzn.to/3FkFyaj - "El talismán" de Walter Scott - https://amzn.to/4brU1NV · Canal de Telegram: https://t.me/lacontracronica · “Contra la Revolución Francesa”… https://amzn.to/4aF0LpZ · “Hispanos. Breve historia de los pueblos de habla hispana”… https://amzn.to/428js1G · “La ContraHistoria de España. Auge, caída y vuelta a empezar de un país en 28 episodios”… https://amzn.to/3kXcZ6i · “Lutero, Calvino y Trento, la Reforma que no fue”… https://amzn.to/3shKOlK · “La ContraHistoria del comunismo”… https://amzn.to/39QP2KE Apoya La Contra en: · Patreon... https://www.patreon.com/diazvillanueva · iVoox... https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-contracronica_sq_f1267769_1.html · Paypal... https://www.paypal.me/diazvillanueva Sígueme en: · Web... https://diazvillanueva.com · Twitter... https://twitter.com/diazvillanueva · Facebook... https://www.facebook.com/fernandodiazvillanueva1/ · Instagram... https://www.instagram.com/diazvillanueva · Linkedin… https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernando-d%C3%ADaz-villanueva-7303865/ · Flickr... https://www.flickr.com/photos/147276463@N05/?/ · Pinterest... https://www.pinterest.com/fernandodiazvillanueva Encuentra mis libros en: · Amazon... https://www.amazon.es/Fernando-Diaz-Villanueva/e/B00J2ASBXM #FernandoDiazVillanueva #cruzadas #saladino Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Kriget mot det ukrainska har pågått länge. Torbjörn Elensky funderar hur språk koloniserar och frigör, men litteraturen överskrider gränserna. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna. Ursprungligen publicerad 2022-06-07.Det är kanske svårt att tänka sig det idag, men kiltar var länge olagliga, liksom de skotskrutiga mönster, tartan, som kännetecknar dem. Den engelska lagen förbjöd dem under senare delen av 1700-talet, då de förknippades med motståndet mot engelsk övermakt och särskilt det skotska upproret 1745. Det var först 1822, då den skotske författaren Walter Scott, som sedermera blev adlad, tog emot den engelske kungen, som de skotska tygerna och traditionella plaggen blev tillåtna igen – och idag förknippar vi dem med brittisk militär, kungahuset och parader med säckpipor och virveltrummor snarare än med uppror mot centralmakten. Sir Walter Scott var från början poet, innan han tog steget över till att börja skriva något på den tiden så föraktat som historiska äventyrsromaner. I sina dikter hade han ägnat sig mycket åt traditionella skotska motiv. Dessutom samlade han in folklig diktning och var en central företrädare för den romantiska nationalismen redan innan han blev en av 1800-talet bäst säljande romanförfattare, beundrad och imiterad i hela Europa. Samtidigt som han var en skotsk nationalist var han emellertid inte för att Skottland skulle bli självständigt från England. Hans nationalism var kulturell, närmast svärmiskt idylliserande; till skillnad från på de flesta andra håll i Europa efter Napoleonkrigens upprivande av de gamla maktkonstellationerna på kontinenten, där de nationella frihetssträvandena skulle komma att prägla hela seklet.Den ryske författaren Nikolaj Gogol var en stor beundrare av Walter Scott. Eller ryske förresten. Hans förfäder var ukrainska och han debuterade med flera skildringar av ukrainskt liv och leverne, i såväl novellerna med ukrainska motiv som i den lilla historiska romanen Taras Bulba – vilken handlar om ett kosackuppror mot den tidigare polska överheten. Men han skrev på ryska och förknippas numera snarare med 1800-talets ryska nationalism än med den ukrainska. Ryska kritiker kritiserade honom för att han ägnade sig åt ett så litet, marginellt folk, medan somliga ukrainska intellektuella ifrågasatte att han skrev om Ukraina på ryska. Men vad skulle han göra? Att skriva skönlitteratur på ukrainska skulle ha dömt honom till den litterära marginalen. Ryska, fast färgad av ukrainska motiv, uttryck och talesätt, blev hans uttrycksmedel. Både Walter Scott och Nikolaj Gogol verkade som så många författare in i vår tid, i ett spänningsfält mellan språk och makt, periferi och metropol. Och precis som det skotska införlivats och blivit en del av den brittiska ikonografin så har det ukrainska kommit att förknippas med något äkta och ursprungligt ryskt.Ryssland är inte en nationalstat i vår mening. Det är ett rike, snarast, vars självbild bygger på en uppfattning om att man bär på ett ansvar som man givits av ödet, motsvarande den amerikanska idén om 'manifest destiny', att samla omgivande länder i en rysk gemenskap. En kulturell och politisk ordning med en självklar rätt till överhöghet över andra nationer. Om länderna och deras folk själva är med på saken är sekundärt. Ukraina har visserligen en komplicerad historia i relation till Ryssland och inte minst till den ryska statens historiska uppkomst. Men ukrainarnas ryskhet, som de ryska imperialisterna ser som en självklarhet idag, är inte något givet historiskt faktum. Den har tvingats fram genom att ukrainska böcker har bränts, språket har förbjudits och de folkliga sederna har förtryckts. Samtidigt som det ukrainska, inklusive de kosacker som Gogol gärna skrev om, införlivades i det ryska kulturarvet så var det också så att ukrainska skolor stängdes, predikningar på ukrainska förbjöds och ukrainsk litteratur beslagtogs och förstördes ända in på 1900-talet. Denna politik, som syftade till att utplåna all ukrainsk nationalkänsla fördes under flera hundra år, med varierande intensitet, av de ryska makthavarna under såväl kejsardömet som kommunistdiktaturen.Språket är centralt för sammanhållningen i de flesta nationalstater. Konsolideringen av de europeiska nationalstaterna sedan 1500-talet har i hög grad handlat om centralisering inte bara av makten utan minst lika mycket av språket, grammatiken, uttrycksformerna för lagar och religion.Imperier expanderar genom att breda ut sitt språk – det gäller spanska, engelska och franska såväl som ryska, arabiska och kinesiska – ofta i kombination med att personer som etniskt hör till centralmaktens nationalitet flyttar in. Den ryska inflyttningen i ockuperade och annekterade nationer har lett till att det finns betydande ryskspråkiga minoriteter i nästan alla tidigare delar av det ryska och sovjetiska imperiet. I Ukraina utgör de knappt trettio procent. Men att vara rysktalande är inte detsamma som att vara lojal mot Ryssland, lika lite som de människor, inklusive författare, forskare, journalister och intellektuella som valt att arbeta på tidigare kolonialmakters språk i Afrika, Asien och Latinamerika därför är lojala mot dem. Ändå förblir språkfrågan viktig. För hur ska ett land, som varit del av ett imperium i flera århundraden, egentligen förhålla sig om man vill bevara och kanske till och med utveckla sin särart? För utöver de inflyttade har ju vanligen även den inhemska eliten bytt till centralmaktens språk.Tänk om Gogol skrivit på ukrainska, Walter Scott på gaeliska – och tänk om alla de indiska och afrikanska författare som är så viktiga idag skulle välja sina lokala ursprungliga språk hellre än engelska eller franska. Den speciella stil, det laddade förhållande till språket, som bidrar till att göra författare med denna typ av bakgrund särskilt intressanta, skulle vi gå miste om. Men vad skulle vi vinna istället? Provinsiella konstnärskap utan större allmänmänskligt intresse eller en ökad rikedom av uttryck och tankeformer?Språket är alltid centralt för den nationella självständighetssträvan i förhållande till gamla kolonialmakter. Det gäller i Asien, Latinamerika och Afrika såväl som inom Europa. Författare är en del av denna strävan att bygga en egen kultur i resterna av kollapsade imperier. Men litteraturen överskrider också sådana språkliga uppdelningar. Nikolaj Gogol, liksom sir Walter Scott, befann sig i ett spänningsfält där litteraturen fick en särskild laddning och betydelse, just för att den skrevs på tvärs mot de gränser som utgjordes av politiska ambitioner. På det viset går deras verk att förstå som högst aktuella också för att formulera skönlitteraturens potential idag, som en konstform som kan uttrycka den mänskliga erfarenheten just så sammansatt som den verkligen är.Torbjörn Elenskyförfattare och kritikerProducent: Morris WikströmLitteraturNikolaj Gogol: Taras Bulba. Översättning av Carl Elof Svenning. Norstedts, 2015.Nikolaj Gogol: Ukrainska noveller. Översättning av Ellen Rydelius (reviderad av Staffan Dahl). Forum, 1969.Edyta M. Bojanowska: Nikolai Gogol between Ukrainian and Russian nationalism. Harvard University press, 2007.

In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out is from there. We read Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Milton, and Pope. We both love Pope! (He should be regarded as one of the very best English poets, like Milton.) There are also readings of Herrick, Bronte, Cowper, and MacNiece. I plan to record the whole of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes' at some point soon.Here are our lists and below is the transcript (which may have more errors than usual, sorry!)HOGod Tier* Shakespeare“if not first, in the very first line”* Chaucer* Spenser* Milton* Wordsworth* Eliot—argue for Pope here, not usually includedSecond Tier* Donne* Herbert* Keats* Dryden* Gawain poet* Tom O'Bedlam poetThird Tier* Yeats* Tennyson* Hopkins* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* MarvellJMShakespeareTier* ShakespeareTier 1* Chaucer* Milton* WordsworthTier 2* Donne* Eliot* Keats* Tennyson* Spencer* Marvell* PopeTier 3* Yeats* Hopkins* Blake* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* Thomas Hardy* Larkin* PlathHenry: Today I'm talking to James Marriott, Times columnist, and more importantly, the writer of the Substack Cultural Capital. And we are going to argue about who are the best poets in the English language. James, welcome.James: Thanks very much for having me. I feel I should preface my appearance so that I don't bring your podcast and disrepute saying that I'm maybe here less as an expert of poetry and more as somebody who's willing to have strong and potentially species opinions. I'm more of a lover of poetry than I would claim to be any kind of academic expert, just in case anybody thinks that I'm trying to produce any definitive answer to the question that we're tackling.Henry: Yeah, no, I mean that's the same for me. We're not professors, we're just very opinionated boys. So we have lists.James: We do.Henry: And we're going to debate our lists, but what we do agree is that if we're having a top 20 English poets, Shakespeare is automatically in the God Tier and there's nothing to discuss.James: Yeah, he's in a category of his own. I think the way of, because I guess the plan we've gone for is to rather than to rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 into sort of, what is it, three or four broad categories that we're competing over.Henry: Yes, yes. TiersJames: I think is a more kind of reasonable way to approach it rather than trying to argue exactly why it should be one place above Shelly or I don't know, whatever.Henry: It's also just an excuse to talk about poets.James: Yes.Henry: Good. So then we have a sort of top tier, if not the first, in the very first line as it were, and you've got different people. To me, you've got Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth. I would also add Spenser and T.S. Eliot. So what's your problem with Spenser?James: Well, my problem is ignorance in that it's a while since I've read the Fairy Queen, which I did at university. Partly is just that looking back through it now and from what I remember of university, I mean it is not so much that I have anything against Spenser. It's quite how much I have in favour of Milton and Wordsworth and Chaucer, and I'm totally willing to be argued against on this, but I just can't think that Spenser is in quite the same league as lovely as many passages of the Fairy Queen are.Henry: So my case for Spenser is firstly, if you go through something like the Oxford Book of English Verse or some other comparable anthology, he's getting a similar page count to Shakespeare and Milton, he is important in that way. Second, it's not just the fairy queen, there's the Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets, the wedding poems, and they're all highly accomplished. The Shepherd's Calendar particularly is really, really brilliant work. I think I enjoyed that more as an undergraduate, actually, much as I love the Fairy Queen. And the third thing is that the Fairy Queen is a very, very great epic. I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment. There were lots of other epics knocking around in the 16th century that nobody wants to read now or I mean, obviously specialists want to read, but if we could persuade a few more people, a few more ordinary readers to pick up the fairy queen, they would love it.James: Yes, and I was rereading before he came on air, the Bower of Bliss episode, which I think is from the second book, which is just a beautifully lush passage, passage of writing. It was really, I mean, you can see why Keats was so much influenced by it. The point about Spenser's breadth is an interesting one because Milton is in my top category below Shakespeare, but I think I'm placing him there pretty much only on the basis of Paradise Lost. I think if we didn't have Paradise Lost, Milton may not even be in this competition at all for me, very little. I know. I don't know if this is a heresy, I've got much less time for Milton's minor works. There's Samuel Johnson pretty much summed up my feelings on Lycidas when he said there was nothing new. Whatever images it can supply are long ago, exhausted, and I do feel there's a certain sort of dryness to Milton's minor stuff. I mean, I can find things like Il Penseroso and L'Allegro pretty enough, but I mean, I think really the central achievement is Paradise Lost, whereas Spenser might be in contention, as you say, from if you didn't have the Fairy Queen, you've got Shepherd's Calendar, and all this other sort of other stuff, but Paradise Lost is just so massive for me.Henry: But if someone just tomorrow came out and said, oh, we found a whole book of minor poetry by Virgil and it's all pretty average, you wouldn't say, oh, well Virgil's less of a great poet.James: No, absolutely, and that's why I've stuck Milton right at the top. It's just sort of interesting how unbelievably good Paradise Lost is and how, in my opinion, how much less inspiring the stuff that comes after it is Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained I really much pleasure out of at all and how, I mean the early I think slightly dry Milton is unbelievably accomplished, but Samuel Johnson seems to say in that quote is a very accomplished use of ancient slightly worn out tropes, and he's of putting together these old ideas in a brilliant manner and he has this sort of, I mean I guess he's one of your late bloomers. I can't quite remember how old he is when he publishes Paradise Lost.Henry: Oh, he is. Oh, writing it in his fifties. Yeah.James: Yeah, this just extraordinary thing that's totally unlike anything else in English literature and of all the poems that we're going to talk about, I think is the one that has probably given me most pleasure in my life and the one that I probably return to most often if not to read all the way through then to just go over my favourite bits and pieces of it.Henry: A lot of people will think Milton is heavy and full of weird references to the ancient world and learned and biblical and not very readable for want of a better word. Can you talk us out of that? To be one of the great poets, they do have to have some readability, right?James: Yeah, I think so, and it's certainly how I felt. I mean I think it's not a trivial objection to have to Milton. It's certainly how I found him. He was my special author paper at university and I totally didn't get on with him. There was something about his massive brilliance that I felt. I remember feeling like trying to write about Paradise Lost was trying to kind of scratch a huge block of marble with your nails. There's no way to get a handle on it. I just couldn't work out what to get ahold of, and it's only I think later in adulthood maybe reading him under a little less pressure that I've come to really love him. I mean, the thing I would always say to people to look out for in Milton, but it's his most immediate pleasure and the thing that still is what sends shivers done my spine about him is the kind of cosmic scale of Paradise Lost, and it's almost got this sort of sci-fi massiveness to it. One of my very favourite passages, which I may inflict on you, we did agree that we could inflict poetry on one another.Henry: Please, pleaseJames: It's a detail from the first book of Paradise Lost. Milton's talking about Satan's architect in hell Mulciber, and this is a little explanation of who or part of his explanation of who Mulciber is, and he says, Nor was his name unheard or unadoredIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day, and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith, like a falling star,On Lemnos, th' Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,ErringI just think it's the sort of total massiveness of that universe that “from the zenith to like a falling star”. I just can't think of any other poet in English or that I've ever read in any language, frankly, even in translation, who has that sort of scale about it, and I think that's what can most give immediate pleasure. The other thing I love about that passage is this is part of the kind of grandeur of Milton is that you get this extraordinary passage about an angel falling from heaven down to th' Aegean Isle who's then going to go to hell and the little parenthetic remark at the end, the perm just rolls on, thus they relate erring and paradise lost is such this massive grand thing that it can contain this enormous cosmic tragedy as a kind of little parenthetical thing. I also think the crystal battlements are lovely, so wonderful kind of sci-fi detail.Henry: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it's under appreciated that Milton was a hugely important influence on Charles Darwin who was a bit like you always rereading it when he was young, especially on the beagle voyage. He took it with him and quotes it in his letters sometimes, and it is not insignificant the way that paradise loss affects him in terms of when he writes his own epic thinking at this level, thinking at this scale, thinking at the level of the whole universe, how does the whole thing fit together? What's the order behind the little movements of everything? So Milton's reach I think is actually quite far into the culture even beyond the poets.James: That's fascinating. Do you have a particular favourite bit of Paradise Lost?Henry: I do, but I don't have it with me because I disorganised and couldn't find my copy.James: That's fair.Henry: What I want to do is to read one of the sonnets because I do think he's a very, very good sonnet writer, even if I'm going to let the Lycidas thing go, because I'm not going to publicly argue against Samuel Johnson.When I consider how my light is spent,Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,And that one Talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker, and presentMy true account, lest he returning chide;“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”I fondly ask. But patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not needEither man's work or his own gifts; who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speedAnd post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:They also serve who only stand and wait.”I think that's great.James: Yeah. Okay. It is good.Henry: Yeah. I think the minor poems are very uneven, but there are lots of gems.James: Yeah, I mean he is a genius. It would be very weird if all the minor poems were s**t, which is not really what I'm trying… I guess I have a sort of slightly austere category too. I just do Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, but we are agreed on Wordsworth, aren't we? That he belongs here.Henry: So my feeling is that the story of English poetry is something like Chaucer Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot create a kind of spine. These are the great innovators. They're writing the major works, they're the most influential. All the cliches are true. Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. Shakespeare didn't single handedly invent modern English, but he did more than all the rest of them put together. Milton is the English Homer. Wordsworth is the English Homer, but of the speech of the ordinary man. All these old things, these are all true and these are all colossal achievements and I don't really feel that we should be picking between them. I think Spenser wrote an epic that stands alongside the works of Shakespeare and Milton in words with T.S. Eliot whose poetry, frankly I do not love in the way that I love some of the other great English writers cannot be denied his position as one of the great inventors.James: Yeah, I completely agree. It's funny, I think, I mean I really do love T.S. Eliot. Someone else had spent a lot of time rereading. I'm not quite sure why he hasn't gone into quite my top category, but I think I had this—Henry: Is it because he didn't like Milton and you're not having it?James: Maybe that's part of it. I think my thought something went more along the lines of if I cut, I don't quite feel like I'm going to put John Donne in the same league as Milton, but then it seems weird to put Eliot above Donne and then I don't know that, I mean there's not a very particularly fleshed out thought, but on Wordsworth, why is Wordsworth there for you? What do you think, what do you think are the perms that make the argument for Wordsworth having his place at the very top?Henry: Well, I think the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes and the Prelude are all of it, aren't they? I'm not a lover of the rest, and I think the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is one of the great works of literary criticism, which is another coin in his jar if you like, but in a funny way, he's much more revolutionary than T.S. Eliot. We think of modernism as the great revolution and the great sort of bringing of all the newness, but modernism relies on Wordsworth so much, relies on the idea that tradition can be subsumed into ordinary voice, ordinary speech, the passage in the Wasteland where he has all of them talking in the bar. Closing time please, closing time please. You can't have that without Wordsworth and—James: I think I completely agree with what you're saying.Henry: Yeah, so I think that's for me is the basis of it that he might be the great innovator of English poetry.James: Yeah, I think you're right because I've got, I mean again, waiting someone out of my depth here, but I can't think of anybody else who had sort of specifically and perhaps even ideologically set out to write a kind of high poetry that sounded like ordinary speech, I guess. I mean, Wordsworth again is somebody who I didn't particularly like at university and I think it's precisely about plainness that can make him initially off-putting. There's a Matthew Arnold quote where he says of Wordsworth something like He has no style. Henry: Such a Matthew Arnold thing to say.James: I mean think it's the beginning of an appreciation, but there's a real blankness to words with I think again can almost mislead you into thinking there's nothing there when you first encounter him. But yeah, I think for me, Tintern Abbey is maybe the best poem in the English language.Henry: Tintern Abbey is great. The Intimations of Immortality Ode is superb. Again, I don't have it with me, but the Poems in Two Volumes. There are so many wonderful things in there. I had a real, when I was an undergraduate, I had read some Wordsworth, but I hadn't really read a lot and I thought of I as you do as the daffodils poet, and so I read Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes, and I had one of these electrical conversion moments like, oh, the daffodils, that is nothing. The worst possible thing for Wordsworth is that he's remembered as this daffodils poet. When you read the Intimations of Immortality, do you just think of all the things he could have been remembered for? It's diminishing.James: It's so easy to get into him wrong because the other slightly wrong way in is through, I mean maybe this is a prejudice that isn't widely shared, but the stuff that I've never particularly managed to really enjoy is all the slightly worthy stuff about beggars and deformed people and maimed soldiers. Wandering around on roads in the lake district has always been less appealing to me, and that was maybe why I didn't totally get on with 'em at first, and I mean, there's some bad words with poetry. I was looking up the infamous lines from the form that were mocked even at the time where you know the lines that go, You see a little muddy pond Of water never dry. I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, and the sort of plainness condescend into banality at Wordsworth's worst moments, which come more frequently later in his career.Henry: Yes, yes. I'm going to read a little bit of the Intimations ode because I want to share some of this so-called plainness at its best. This is the third section. They're all very short Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,And while the young lambs boundAs to the tabor's sound,To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,And all the earth is gay;Land and seaGive themselves up to jollity,And with the heart of MayDoth every Beast keep holiday;—Thou Child of Joy,Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.And I think it's unthinkable that someone would write like this today. It would be cringe, but we're going to have a new sincerity. It's coming. It's in some ways it's already here and I think Wordsworth will maybe get a different sort of attention when that happens because that's a really high level of writing to be able to do that without it descending into what you just read. In the late Wordsworth there's a lot of that really bad stuff.James: Yeah, I mean the fact that he wrote some of that bad stuff I guess is a sign of quite how carefully the early stuff is treading that knife edge of tripping into banality. Can I read you my favourite bit of Tintern Abbey?Henry: Oh yes. That is one of the great poems.James: Yeah, I just think one of mean I, the most profound poem ever, probably for me. So this is him looking out over the landscape of Tinton Abbey. I mean these are unbelievably famous lines, so I'm sure everybody listening will know them, but they are so good And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.I mean in a poem, it's just that is mind blowingly good to me?Henry: Yeah. I'm going to look up another section from the Prelude, which used to be in the Oxford Book, but it isn't in the Ricks edition and I don't really know whyJames: He doesn't have much of the Prelude does he?Henry: I don't think he has any…James: Yeah.Henry: So this is from an early section when the young Wordsworth is a young boy and he's going off, I think he's sneaking out at night to row on the lake as you do when you with Wordsworth, and the initial description is of a mountain. She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;It's so much like that in Wordsworth. It's just,James: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Prelude is full of things like that. I think that is probably one of the best moments, possibly the best moments of the prelude. But yeah, I mean it's just total genius isn't it?Henry: I think he's very, very important and yeah, much more important than T.S. Eliot who is, I put him in the same category, but I can see why you didn't.James: You do have a little note saying Pope, question mark or something I think, don't you, in the document.Henry: So the six I gave as the spine of English literature and everything, that's an uncontroversial view. I think Pope should be one of those people. I think we should see Pope as being on a level with Milton and Wordsworth, and I think he's got a very mixed reputation, but I think he was just as inventive, just as important. I think you are a Pope fan, just as clever, just as moving, and it baffles me that he's not more commonly regarded as part of this great spine running through the history of English literature and between Milton and Wordsworth. If you don't have Pope, I think it's a missing link if you like.James: I mean, I wouldn't maybe go as far as you, I love Pope. Pope was really the first perch I ever loved. I remember finding a little volume of Pope in a box of books. My school library was chucking out, and that was the first book of poetry I read and took seriously. I guess he sort of suffers by the fact that we are seeing all of this through the lens of the romantics. All our taste about Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser has been formed by the romantics and hope's way of writing the Satires. This sort of society poetry I think is just totally doesn't conform to our idea of what poetry should be doing or what poetry is. Is there absolutely or virtually nobody reads Dryden nowadays. It's just not what we think poetry is for that whole Augustine 18th century idea that poetry is for writing epistles to people to explain philosophical concepts to them or to diss your enemies and rivals or to write a kind of Duncia explaining why everyone you know is a moron. That's just really, I guess Byron is the last major, is the only of figure who is in that tradition who would be a popular figure nowadays with things like English bards and scotch reviewers. But that whole idea of poetry I think was really alien to us. And I mean I'm probably formed by that prejudice because I really do love Pope, but I don't love him as much as the other people we've discussed.Henry: I think part of his problem is that he's clever and rational and we want our poems always to be about moods, which may be, I think why George Herbert, who we've both got reasonably high is also quite underrated. He's very clever. He's always think George Herbert's always thinking, and when someone like Shakespeare or Milton is thinking, they do it in such a way that you might not notice and that you might just carry on with the story. And if you do see that they're thinking you can enjoy that as well. Whereas Pope is just explicitly always thinking and maybe lecturing, hectoring, being very grand with you and as you say, calling you an idiot. But there are so many excellent bits of Pope and I just think technically he can sustain a thought or an argument over half a dozen or a dozen lines and keep the rhyme scheme moving and it's never forced, and he never has to do that thing where he puts the words in a stupid order just to make the rhyme work. He's got such an elegance and a balance of composition, which again, as you say, we live under romantic ideals, not classical ones. But that doesn't mean we should be blind to the level of his accomplishment, which is really, really very high. I mean, Samuel Johnson basically thought that Alexander Pope had finished English poetry. We have the end of history. He had the end of English poetry. Pope, he's brought us to the mightiest of the heroic couplers and he's done it. It's all over.James: The other thing about Pope that I think makes us underrate him is that he's very charming. And I think charm is a quality we're not big on is that sort of, but I think some of Pope's charm is so moving. One of my favourite poems of his is, do you know the Epistle to Miss Blount on going into the country? The poem to the young girl who's been having a fashionable season in London then is sent to the boring countryside to stay with an aunt. And it's this, it's not like a romantic love poem, it's not distraught or hectic. It's just a sort of wonderful act of sympathy with this potentially slightly airheaded young girl who's been sent to the countryside, which you'd rather go to operas and plays and flirt with people. And there's a real sort of delicate in it that isn't overblown and isn't dramatic, but is extremely charming. And I think that's again, another quality that perhaps we're prone not to totally appreciate in the 21st century. It's almost the kind of highest form of politeness and sympathyHenry: And the prevailing quality in Pope is wit: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What often was thought, but ne'er so well expressed”. And I think wit can be quite alienating for an audience because it is a kind of superior form of literary art. This is why people don't read as much Swift as he deserves because he's so witty and so scornful that a lot of people will read him and think, well, I don't like you.James: And that point about what oft was thought and ne'er so well expressed again, is a very classical idea. The poet who puts not quite conventional wisdom, but something that's been thought before in the best possible words, really suffers with the romantic idea of originality. The poet has to say something utterly new. Whereas for Pope, the sort of ideas that he express, some of the philosophical ideas are not as profound in original perhaps as words with, but he's very elegant proponent of them.Henry: And we love b******g people in our culture, and I feel like the Dunciad should be more popular because it is just, I can't remember who said this, but someone said it's probably the most under appreciated great poem in English, and that's got to be true. It's full of absolute zingers. There's one moment where he's described the whole crowd of them or all these poets who he considers to be deeply inferior, and it turns out he was right because no one reads them anymore. And you need footnotes to know who they are. I mean, no one cares. And he says, “equal your merits, equal is your din”. This kind of abuse is a really high art, and we ought to love that. We love that on Twitter. And I think things like the Rape of the Lock also could be more popular.James: I love the Rape of the Lock . I mean, I think anybody is not reading Pope and is looking for a way in, I think the Rape of the Lock is the way in, isn't it? Because it's just such a charming, lovely, funny poem.Henry: It is. And probably it suffers because the whole idea of mock heroic now is lost to us. But it's a bit like it's the literary equivalent of people writing a sort of mini epic about someone like Elon Musk or some other very prominent figure in the culture and using lots of heroic imagery from the great epics of Homer and Virgil and from the Bible and all these things, but putting them into a very diminished state. So instead of being grand, it becomes comic. It's like turning a God into a cartoon. And Pope is easily the best writer that we have for that kind of thing. Dryden, but he's the genius on it.James: Yeah, no, he totally is. I guess it's another reason he's under appreciated is that our culture is just much less worshipful of epic than the 18th century culture was. The 18th century was obsessed with trying to write epics and trying to imitate epics. I mean, I think to a lot of Pope's contemporaries, the achievement they might've been expecting people to talk about in 300 years time would be his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other stuff might've seen more minor in comparison, whereas it's the mock epic that we're remembering him for, which again is perhaps another symptom of our sort of post romantic perspective.Henry: I think this is why Spenser suffers as well, because everything in Spenser is magical. The knights are fairies, not the little fairies that live in buttercups, but big human sized fairies or even bigger than that. And there are magical women and saucers and the whole thing is a sort of hodgepodge of romance and fairy tale and legend and all this stuff. And it's often said, oh, he was old fashioned in his own time. But those things still had a lot of currency in the 16th century. And a lot of those things are in Shakespeare, for example.But to us, that's like a fantasy novel. Now, I love fantasy and I read fantasy, and I think some of it's a very high accomplishment, but to a lot of people, fantasy just means kind of trash. Why am I going to read something with fairies and a wizard? And I think a lot of people just see Spenser and they're like, what is this? This is so weird. They don't realise how Protestant they're being, but they're like, this is so weird.James: And Pope has a little, I mean, the Rape of the Lock even has a little of the same because the rape of the lock has this attendant army of good spirits called selfs and evil spirits called gnomes. I mean, I find that just totally funny and charming. I really love it.Henry: I'm going to read, there's an extract from the Rape of the Lock in the Oxford Book, and I'm going to read a few lines to give people an idea of how he can be at once mocking something but also quite charming about it. It's quite a difficult line to draw. The Rape of the Lock is all about a scandalous incident where a young man took a lock of a lady's hair. Rape doesn't mean what we think it means. It means an offence. And so because he stole a lock of her hair, it'd become obviously this huge problem and everyone's in a flurry. And to sort of calm everyone down, Pope took it so seriously that he made it into a tremendous joke. So here he is describing the sort of dressing table if you like.And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,Each silver Vase in mystic order laid.First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores,With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs.A heav'nly image in the glass appears,To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.What a way to describe someone putting on their makeup. It's fantastic.James: It's funny. I can continue that because the little passage of Pope I picked to read begins exactly where yours ended. It only gets better as it goes on, I think. So after trembling begins the sacred rites of pride, Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and hereThe various off'rings of the world appear;From each she nicely culls with curious toil,And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.It's just so lovely. I love a thing about the tortoise and the elephant unite because you've got a tortoise shell and an ivory comb. And the stuff about India's glowing gems and Arabia breathing from yonder box, I mean that's a, realistic is not quite the word, but that's a reference to Milton because Milton is continually having all the stones of Arabia and India's pearls and things all screwed through paradise lost. Yeah, it's just so lovely, isn't it?Henry: And for someone who's so classical and composed and elegant, there's something very Dickensian about things like the toilet, the tortoise and the elephant here unite, transform to combs. There's something a little bit surreal and the puffs, powders, patches, bibles, it has that sort of slightly hectic, frantic,James: That's sort of Victorian materialism, wealth of material objects,Henry: But also that famous thing that was said of Dickens, that the people are furniture and the furniture's like people. He can bring to life all the little bits and bobs of the ordinary day and turn it into something not quite ridiculous, not quite charming.James: And there is a kind of charm in the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing that poets would necessarily expect to pay attention to the 18th century. I don't think the sort of powders and ointments on a woman's dressing table. And there's something very sort of charming in his condescension to notice or what might've once seemed his condescension to notice those things, to find a new thing to take seriously, which is what poetry or not quite to take seriously, but to pay attention to, which I guess is one of the things that great perch should always be doing.Henry: When Swift, who was Pope's great friend, wrote about this, he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Lady Going to Bed, which is not as good, and I would love to claim Swift on our list, but I really can't.James: It's quite a horrible perm as well, that one, isn't it?Henry: It is. But it shows you how other people would treat the idea of the woman in front of her toilet, her mirror. And Swift uses an opportunity, as he said, to “lash the vice” because he hated all this adornment and what he would think of as the fakery of a woman painting herself. And so he talks about Corina pride of Drury Lane, which is obviously an ironic reference to her being a Lady of the Night, coming back and there's no drunken rake with her. Returning at the midnight hour;Four stories climbing to her bow'r;Then, seated on a three-legged chair,Takes off her artificial hair:Now, picking out a crystal eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her eye-brows from a mouse's hide,Stuck on with art on either side,Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.Now dexterously her plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow jaws.And it goes on like this. I mean, line after this is sort of raw doll quality to it, Pope, I think in contrast, it only illuminates him more to see where others are taking this kind of crude, very, very funny and witty, but very crude approach. He's able to really have the classical art of balance.James: Yes. And it's precisely his charm that he can mock it and sympathise and love it at the same time, which I think is just a more sort of complex suite of poetic emotions to have about that thing.Henry: So we want more people to read Pope and to love Pope.James: Yes. Even if I'm not letting him into my top.Henry: You are locking him out of the garden. Now, for the second tier, I want to argue for two anonymous poets. One of the things we did when we were talking about this was we asked chatGPT to see if it could give us a good answer. And if you use o1 or o1 Pro, it gives you a pretty good answer as to who the best poets in English are. But it has to be told that it's forgotten about the anonymous poets. And then it says, oh, that was stupid. There are quite a lot of good anonymous poets in English, but I suspect a lot of us, a lot of non artificial intelligence when thinking about this question overlook the anonymous poets. But I would think the Gawain poet and the Tom O' Bedlam poet deserve to be in here. I don't know what you think about that.James: I'm not competent to provide an opinion. I'm purely here to be educated on the subject of these anonymous poets. Henry: The Gawain poet, he's a mediaeval, assume it's a he, a mediaeval writer, obviously may well not be a man, a mediaeval writer. And he wrote Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, which is, if you haven't read it, you should really read it in translation first, I think because it's written at the same time as Chaucer. But Chaucer was written in a kind of London dialect, which is what became the English we speak. And so you can read quite a lot of Chaucer and the words look pretty similar and sometimes you need the footnotes, but when you read Gawain and The Green Knight, it's in a Northwestern dialect, which very much did not become modern day English. And so it's a bit more baffling, but it is a poem of tremendous imaginative power and weirdness. It's a very compelling story. We have a children's version here written by Selena Hastings who's a very accomplished biographer. And every now and then my son remembers it and he just reads it again and again and again. It's one of the best tales of King Arthur in his knights. And there's a wonderful book by John Burrow. It's a very short book, but that is such a loving piece of criticism that explicates the way in which that poem promotes virtue and all the nightly goodness that you would expect, but also is a very strange and unreal piece of work. And I think it has all the qualities of great poetry, but because it's written in this weird dialect, I remember as an undergraduate thinking, why is this so bloody difficult to read? But it is just marvellous. And I see people on Twitter, the few people who've read it, they read it again and they just say, God, it's so good. And I think there was a film of it a couple of years ago, but we will gloss lightly over that and not encourage you to do the film instead of the book.James: Yeah, you're now triggering a memory that I was at least set to read and perhaps did at least read part of Gawain and the Green Knight at University, but has not stuck to any brain cells at all.Henry: Well, you must try it again and tell me what you think. I mean, I find it easily to be one of the best poems in English.James: Yeah, no, I should. I had a little Chaucer kick recently actually, so maybe I'm prepared to rediscover mediaeval per after years of neglect since my degree,Henry: And it's quite short, which I always think is worth knowing. And then the Tom Bedlam is an anonymous poem from I think the 17th century, and it's one of the mad songs, so it's a bit like the Fool from King Lear. And again, it is a very mysterious, very strange and weird piece of work. Try and find it in and read the first few lines. And I think because it's anonymous, it's got slightly less of a reputation because it can't get picked up with some big name, but it is full of tremendous power. And again, I think it would be sad if it wasn't more well known.From the hag and hungry goblinThat into rags would rend ye,The spirit that stands by the naked manIn the Book of Moons defend ye,That of your five sound sensesYou never be forsaken,Nor wander from your selves with TomAbroad to beg your bacon,While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,Feeding, drink, or clothing;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,Poor Tom will injure nothing.Anyway, so you get the sense of it and it's got many stanzas and it's full of this kind of energy and it's again, very accomplished. It can carry the thought across these long lines and these long stanzas.James: When was it written? I'm aware of only if there's a name in the back of my mind.Henry: Oh, it's from the 17th century. So it's not from such a different time as King Lear, but it's written in the voice of a madman. And again, you think of that as the sort of thing a romantic poet would do. And it's strange to find it almost strange to find it displaced. There were these other mad songs. But I think because it's anonymous, it gets less well known, it gets less attention. It's not part of a bigger body of work, but it's absolutely, I think it's wonderful.James: I shall read it.Henry: So who have you got? Who else? Who are you putting in instead of these two?James: Hang on. So we're down to tier two now.Henry: Tier two.James: Yeah. So my tier two is: Donne, Elliot, Keats, Tennyson. I've put Spenser in tier two, Marvell and Pope, who we've already discussed. I mean, I think Eliot, we've talked about, I mean Donne just speaks for himself and there's probably a case that some people would make to bump him up a tier. Henry: Anybody can read that case in Katherine Rudell's book. We don't need to…James: Yes, exactly. If anybody's punching perhaps in tier two, it's Tennyson who I wasn't totally sure belonged there. Putting Tenon in the same tier as Donne and Spenser and Keets. I wonder if that's a little ambitious. I think that might raise eyebrows because there is a school of thought, which I'm not totally unsympathetic to this. What's the Auden quote about Tennyson? I really like it. I expressed very harshly, but I sort of get what he means. Auden said that Tennyson “had the finest ear perhaps of any English poet who was also undoubtedly the stupidest. There was little that he didn't know. There was little else that he did.” Which is far too harsh. But I mentioned to you earlier that I think was earlier this year, a friend and I had a project where we were going to memorise a perva week was a plan. We ended up basically getting, I think three quarters of the way through.And if there's a criticism of Tennyson that you could make, it's that the word music and the sheer lushness of phrases sometimes becomes its own momentum. And you can end up with these extremely lovely but sometimes slightly empty beautiful phrases, which is what I ended up feeling about Tithonus. And I sort of slightly felt I was memorising this unbelievably beautiful but ever so slightly hollow thing. And that was slightly why the project fell apart, I should say. Of course, they absolutely love Tennyson. He's one of my all time favourite poets, which is why my personal favouritism has bumped him up into that category. But I can see there's a case, and I think to a lot of people, he's just the kind of Victorian establishment gloom man, which is totally unfair, but there's not no case against Tennyson.Henry: Yeah, the common thing is that he has no ideas. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm also, I'm not sure how desperately important it is. It should be possible to be a great poet without ideas being at the centre of your work. If you accept the idea that the essence of poetry is invention, i.e. to say old things in a fantastically new way, then I think he qualifies very well as a great poet.James: Yes..Henry: Well, very well. I think Auden said what he said because he was anxious that it was true of himself.James: Yeah, I mean there's a strong argument that Auden had far too many ideas and the sorts of mad schemes and fantastical theories about history that Auden spent his spare time chasing after is certainly a kind of argument that poets maybe shouldn't have as many ideas, although it's just reading. Seamus Perry's got a very good little book on Tennyson, and the opening chapter is all about arguments about people who have tended to dislike Tennyson. And there are all kinds of embarrassing anecdotes about the elderly Tennyson trying to sort of go around dinner parties saying profound and sage-like things and totally putting his foot in it and saying things are completely banal. I should have made a note that this was sort of slightly, again, intensifying my alarm about is there occasionally a tinsely hollowness about Tennyson. I'm now being way too harsh about one of my favourite poets—Henry: I think it depends what you mean by ideas. He is more than just a poet of moods. He gives great expression, deep and strongly felt expression to a whole way of being and a whole way of conceiving of things. And it really was a huge part of why people became interested in the middle ages in the 19th century. I think there's Walter Scott and there's Tennyson who are really leading that work, and that became a dominant cultural force and it became something that meant a lot to people. And whether or not, I don't know whether it's the sort of idea that we're talking about, but I think that sort of thing, I think that qualifies as having ideas and think again, I think he's one of the best writers about the Arthurian legend. Now that work doesn't get into the Oxford Book of English Verse, maybe that's fair. But I think it was very important and I love it. I love it. And I find Tennyson easy to memorise, which is another point in his favour.James: Yeah.Henry: I'm going to read a little bit of Ulysses, which everyone knows the last five or six lines of that poem because it gets put into James Bond films and other such things. I'm going to read it from a little bit from earlier on. I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.I think that's amazing. And he can do that. He can do lots and lots and lots of that.James: Yeah, he really can. It's stunning. “Far on the ringing planes of windy Troy” is such an unbelievably evocative phrase.Henry: And that's what I mean. He's got this ability to bring back a sort of a whole mood of history. It's not just personal mood poetry. He can take you into these places and that is in the space of a line. In the space of a line. I think Matthew Arnold said of the last bit of what I just read is that he had this ability in Ulysses to make the lines seem very long and slow and to give them this kind of epic quality that far goes far beyond the actual length of that poem. Ulysses feels like this huge poem that's capturing so much of Homer and it's a few dozen lines.James: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can I read a little bit of slightly more domestic Tennyson, from In Memoriam, I think his best poem and one of my all time favourite poems and it's got, there are many sort of famous lines on grief and things, but there's little sort of passage of natural description I think quite near the beginning that I've always really loved and I've always just thought was a stunning piece of poetry in terms of its sound and the way that the sound has patented and an unbelievably attentive description natural world, which is kind of the reason that even though I think Keats is a better poet, I do prefer reading Tennyson to Keats, so this is from the beginning of In Memoriam. Calm is the morn without a sound,Calm as to suit a calmer grief,And only thro' the faded leafThe chesnut pattering to the ground:Calm and deep peace on this high wold,And on these dews that drench the furze,And all the silvery gossamersThat twinkle into green and gold:Calm and still light on yon great plainThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,And crowded farms and lessening towers,To mingle with the bounding main:And I just think that's an amazing piece of writing that takes you from that very close up image that it begins with of the “chestnut patterning to the ground” through the faded leaves of the tree, which is again, a really attentive little bit of natural description. I think anyone can picture the way that a chestnut might fall through the leaves of a chestnut tree, and it's just an amazing thing to notice. And I think the chestnut pattern to the ground does all the kind of wonderful, slightly onomatopoeic, Tennyson stuff so well, but by the end, you're kind of looking out over the English countryside, you've seen dew on the firs, and then you're just looking out across the plane to the sea, and it's this sort of, I just think it's one of those bits of poetry that anybody who stood in a slightly wet and romantic day in the English countryside knows exactly the feeling that he's evoking. And I mean there's no bit of—all of In Memoriam is pretty much that good. That's not a particularly celebrated passage I don't think. It's just wonderful everywhere.Henry: Yes. In Memoriam a bit like the Dunciad—under appreciated relative to its huge merits.James: Yeah, I think it sounds, I mean guess by the end of his life, Tennyson had that reputation as the establishment sage of Victorian England, queen of Victoria's favourite poet, which is a pretty off-putting reputation for to have. And I think In Memoriam is supposed to be this slightly cobwebby, musty masterpiece of Victorian grief. But there was just so much, I mean, gorgeous, beautiful sensuous poetry in it.Henry: Yeah, lots of very intense feelings. No, I agree. I have Tennyson my third tier because I had to have the Gawain poet, but I agree that he's very, very great.James: Yeah, I think the case for third tier is I'm very open to that case for the reasons that I said.Henry: Keats, we both have Keats much higher than Shelly. I think Byron's not on anyone's list because who cares about Byron. Overrated, badly behaved. Terrible jokes. Terrible jokes.James: I think people often think Byron's a better pert without having read an awful lot of the poetry of Byron. But I think anybody who's tried to wade through long swathes of Don Juan or—Henry: My God,James: Childe Harold, has amazing, amazing, beautiful moments. But yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff that you don't enjoy. I think.Henry: So to make the case for Keats, I want to talk about The Eve of St. Agnes, which I don't know about you, but I love The Eve of St. Agnes. I go back to it all the time. I find it absolutely electric.James: I'm going to say that Keats is a poet, which is kind of weird for somebody is sent to us and obviously beautiful as Keats. I sort of feel like I admire more than I love. I get why he's brilliant. It's very hard not to see why he's brilliant, but he's someone I would very rarely sit down and read for fun and somebody got an awful lot of feeling or excitement out of, but that's clearly a me problem, not a Keats problem.Henry: When I was a teenager, I knew so much Keats by heart. I knew the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, I was absolutely steeped in it morning, noon and night. I couldn't get over it. And now I don't know if I could get back to that point. He was a very young poet and he writes in a very young way. But I'm going to read—The Eve of St. Agnes is great. It's a narrative poem, which I think is a good way to get into this stuff because the story is fantastic. And he had read Spenser, he was part of this kind of the beginning of this mediaeval revival. And he's very interested in going back to those old images, those old stories. And this is the bit, I think everything we're reading is from the Oxford Book of English Verse, so that if people at home want to read along they can.This is when the heroine of the poem is Madeline is making her escape basically. And I think this is very, very exciting. Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,Old Angela was feeling for the stair,When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:With silver taper's light, and pious care,She turn'd, and down the aged gossip ledTo a safe level matting. Now prepare,Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.Out went the taper as she hurried in;Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:She clos'd the door, she panted, all akinTo spirits of the air, and visions wide:No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!But to her heart, her heart was voluble,Paining with eloquence her balmy side;As though a tongueless nightingale should swellHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,All garlanded with carven imag'riesOf fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,And diamonded with panes of quaint device,Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.I mean, so much atmosphere, so much tension, so many wonderful images just coming one after the other. The rapidity of it, the tumbling nature of it. And people often quote the Ode to autumn, which has a lot of that.James: I have to say, I found that totally enchanting. And perhaps my problem is that I need you to read it all to me. You can make an audio book that I can listen to.Henry: I honestly, I actually might read the whole of the E and put it out as audio on Substack becauseJames: I would actually listen to that.Henry: I love it so much. And I feel like it gets, when we talk about Keats, we talk about, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Bright Star and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and these are great, great poems and they're poems that we do at school Ode to a Nightingale because I think The Great Gatsby has a big debt to Ode to a Nightingale, doesn't it? And obviously everyone quotes the Ode to Autumn. I mean, as far as I can tell, the 1st of October every year is the whole world sharing the first stands of the Ode to Autumn.James: Yeah. He may be one of the people who suffers from over familiarity perhaps. And I think also because it sounds so much what poetry is supposed to sound like, because so much of our idea of poetry derives from Keats. Maybe that's something I've slightly need to get past a little bit.Henry: But if you can get into the complete works, there are many, the bit I just read is I think quite representative.James: I loved it. I thought it was completely beautiful and I would never have thought to ever, I probably can't have read that poem for years. I wouldn't have thought to read it. Since university, I don't thinkHenry: He's one of those people. All of my copies of him are sort of frayed and the spines are breaking, but the book is wearing out. I should just commit it to memory and be done. But somehow I love going back to it. So Keats is very high in my estimation, and we've both put him higher than Shelly and Coleridge.James: Yeah.Henry: Tell me why. Because those would typically, I think, be considered the superior poets.James: Do you think Shelly? I think Keats would be considered the superior poetHenry: To Shelly?James: Certainly, yes. I think to Shelly and Coleridge, that's where current fashion would place them. I mean, I have to say Coleridge is one of my all time favourite poets. In terms of people who had just every so often think, I'd love to read a poem, I'd love to read Frost at Midnight. I'd love to read the Aeolian Harp. I'd love to read This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. I'd love to read Kubla Khan. Outside Milton, Coleridge is probably the person that I read most, but I think, I guess there's a case that Coleridge's output is pretty slight. What his reputation rest on is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poems, which a lot of people think are kind of plagiarised Wordsworth, at least in their style and tone, and then maybe not much else. Does anybody particularly read Cristabel and get much out of it nowadays? Dejection an Ode people like: it's never done an awful lot for me, so I sort of, in my personal Pantheon Coleridge is at the top and he's such an immensely sympathetic personality as well and such a curious person. But I think he's a little slight, and there's probably nothing in Coleridge that can match that gorgeous passage of Keats that you read. I think.Henry: Yeah, that's probably true. He's got more ideas, I guess. I don't think it matters that he's slight. Robert Frost said something about his ambition had been to lodge five or six poems in the English language, and if he'd done that, he would've achieved greatness. And obviously Frost very much did do that and is probably the most quotable and well-known poet. But I think Coleridge easily meets those criteria with the poems you described. And if all we had was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I would think it to be like Tom O' Bedlam, like the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one of those great, great, great poems that on its own terms, deserves to be on this list.James: Yeah, and I guess another point in his favour is a great poet is they're all pretty unalike. I think if given Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a conversation poem and Kubla Khan and said, guess whether these are three separate poets or the same guy, you would say, oh, there's a totally different poems. They're three different people. One's a kind of creepy gothic horror ballad. Another one is a philosophical reflection. Another is the sort of Mad Opium dream. I mean, Kubla Khan is just without a doubt, one of the top handful of purposes in English language, I think.Henry: Oh yeah, yeah. And it has that quality of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard that so many of the lines are so quotable in the sense that they could be, in the case of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a lot of novels did get their titles from it. I think it was James Lees Milne. Every volume of his diaries, which there are obviously quite a few, had its title from Kubla Khan. Ancient as the Hills and so on. It's one of those poems. It just provides us with so much wonderful language in the space of what a page.James: Sort of goes all over the place. Romantic chasms, Abyssinian made with dulcimer, icy pleasure dome with caves of ice. It just such a—it's so mysterious. I mean, there's nothing else remotely like it at all in English literature that I can think of, and its kind strangeness and virtuosity. I really love that poem.Henry: Now, should we say a word for Shelly? Because everyone knows Ozymandias, which is one of those internet poems that goes around a lot, but I don't know how well known the rest of his body of work is beyond that. I fell in love with him when I read a very short lyric called “To—” Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.I found that to be one of those poems that was once read and immediately memorised. But he has this very, again, broad body of work. He can write about philosophical ideas, he can write about moods, he can write narrative. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which is a dialogue poem about visiting a madman and taking sympathy with him and asking the question, who's really mad here? Very Swiftian question. He can write about the sublime in Mont Blanc. I mean, he has got huge intellectual power along with the beauty. He's what people want Tennyson to be, I guess.James: Yeah. Or what people think Byron might be. I think Shelly is great. I don't quite get that Byron is so much more famous. Shelly has just a dramatic and, well, maybe not quite just as, but an incredibly dramatic and exciting life to go along with it,Henry: I think some of the short lyrics from Byron have got much more purchase in day-to-day life, like She Walks in Beauty.James: Yeah. I think you have to maybe get Shelly a little more length, don't you? I mean, even there's something like Ode to the West Wind is you have to take the whole thing to love it, perhaps.Henry: Yes. And again, I think he's a bit like George Herbert. He's always thinking you really have to pay attention and think with him. Whereas Byron has got lots of lines you can copy out and give to a girl that you like on the bus or something.James: Yes. No, that's true.Henry: I don't mean that in quite as rude a way as it sounds. I do think that's a good thing. But Shelly's, I think, much more of a thinker, and I agree with you Childe Harold and so forth. It's all crashing bore. I might to try it again, but awful.James: I don't want move past Coledridge without inflicting little Coledridge on you. Can I?Henry: Oh, yes. No, sorry. We didn't read Coledridge, right?James: Are just, I mean, what to read from Coledridge? I mean, I could read the whole of Kubla Khan, but that would be maybe a bit boring. I mean, again, these are pretty famous and obvious lines from Frost at Midnight, which is Coledridge sitting up late at night in his cottage with his baby in its cradle, and he sort of addressing it and thinking about it. And I just think these lines are so, well, everything we've said about Coledridge, philosophical, thoughtful, beautiful, in a sort of totally knockout, undeniable way. So it goes, he's talking to his young son, I think. My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Which is just—what aren't those lines of poetry doing? And with such kind of confidence, the way you get from talking to your baby and its cradle about what kind of upbringing you hope it will have to those flashes of, I mean quite Wordsworthian beauty, and then the sort of philosophical tone at the end. It's just such a stunning, lovely poem. Yeah, I love it.Henry: Now we both got Yeats and Hopkins. And Hopkins I think is really, really a tremendous poet, but neither of us has put Browning, which a lot of other people maybe would. Can we have a go at Browning for a minute? Can we leave him in shreds? James: Oh God. I mean, you're going to be a better advocate of Browning than I am. I've never—Henry: Don't advocate for him. No, no, no.James: We we're sticking him out.Henry: We're sticking him.James: I wonder if I even feel qualified to do that. I mean, I read quite a bit of Browning at university, found it hard to get on with sometimes. I think I found a little affected and pretentious about him and a little kind of needlessly difficult in a sort of off-puttingly Victorian way. But then I was reading, I reviewed a couple of years ago, John Carey has an excellent introduction to English poetry. I think it's called A Little History of Poetry in which he described Browning's incredibly long poem, The Ring in the Book as one of the all time wonders of verbal art. This thing is, I think it's like 700 or 800 pages long poem in the Penguin edition, which has always given me pause for thought and made me think that I've dismissed Browning out of hand because if John Carey's telling me that, then I must be wrong.But I think I have had very little pleasure out of Browning, and I mean by the end of the 19th century, there was a bit of a sort of Victorian cult of Browning, which I think was influential. And people liked him because he was a living celebrity who'd been anointed as a great poet, and people liked to go and worship at his feet and stuff. I do kind of wonder whether he's lasted, I don't think many people read him for pleasure, and I wonder if that maybe tells its own story. What's your case against Browning?Henry: No, much the same. I think he's very accomplished and very, he probably, he deserves a place on the list, but I can't enjoy him and I don't really know why. But to me, he's very clever and very good, but as you say, a bit dull.James: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm willing. It must be our failing, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm willing to believe they're all, if this podcast is listened to by scholars of Victorian poetry, they're cringing and holding their head in their hands at this—Henry: They've turned off already. Well, if you read The Ring and the Book, you can come back on and tell us about it.James: Oh God, yeah. I mean, in about 20 years time.Henry: I think we both have Auden, but you said something you said, “does Auden have an edge of fraudulence?”James: Yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I'm being really rude about a lot of poets that I really love. I don't really know why doesn't think, realising that people consider to be a little bit weak makes you appreciate their best stuff even more I guess. I mean, it's hard to make that argument without reading a bit of Auden. I wonder what bit gets it across. I haven't gotten any ready. What would you say about Auden?Henry: I love Auden. I think he was the best poet of the 20th century maybe. I mean, I have to sort of begrudgingly accept T.S. Eliot beside, I think he can do everything from, he can do songs, light lyrics, comic verse, he can do occasional poetry, obituaries. He was a political poet. He wrote in every form, I think almost literally that might be true. Every type of stanza, different lines. He was just structurally remarkable. I suspect he'll end up a bit like Pope once the culture has tur

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Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Acceso anticipado para Fans - ** VIDEO EN NUESTRO CANAL DE YOUTUBE **** https://youtube.com/live/1JdkG4dxZqs +++++ Hazte con nuestras camisetas en https://www.bhmshop.app +++++ #historia #HistoriaDeEspaña La traición de don Julián, el conde de Ceuta, causada por la violación del último rey godo a su hija, y la de los witizanos, Opas y Sisberto, durante siglos, ha pervivido como un motivo literario, en obras tan emblemáticas como ‘El Último godo' de Lope de Vega, ‘El Pelayo' de José de Espronceda, ‘La Visión de Don Rodrigo' de Walter Scott, ‘Cuentos de la Alhambra' de Washington Irving o ‘Don Julián' de Juan Goytisolo. Pero ¿qué hay de verdad y de leyenda? De la mano de José Soto Chica y Yeyo Balbás, intentaremos aportar algo de luz sobre unos hechos históricos de enorme relevancia para la historia española, vinculados a la caída del reino visigodo, la rebelión de Pelayo y el inicio de ocho siglos de presencia islámica en la península. Podeis ver la serie completa de "LOS VISIGODOS" gracias a la guía de nuestro gran amigo José Soto Chica , autor de los libros “Los Visigodos” https://amzn.to/3xCwGEG​ e “Imperios y Barbaros” https://amzn.to/3ub1bzv​ y con los episodios extras sobre LEOVIGILDO https://amzn.to/3ub1bzv​ y sobre la verdadera batalla de Guadalete. ALGUNOS LIBROS DE YEYO BALBÁS - “El reino imposible “ https://amzn.to/3LCvdoK - “Pax romana” https://amzn.to/3vwyr7p COMPRA EN AMAZON CON EL ENLACE DE BHM Y AYUDANOS ************** https://amzn.to/3ZXUGQl ************* Si queréis apoyar a Bellumartis Historia Militar e invitarnos a un café o u una cerveza virtual por nuestro trabajo, podéis visitar nuestro PATREON https://www.patreon.com/bellumartis o en PAYPALhttps://www.paypal.me/bellumartis o en BIZUM 656/778/825 Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de BELLUMARTIS PODCAST. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/618669

Hoewel kerst veelal geassocieerd wordt met de warmte en gezelligheid van het samenkomen met familie en vrienden, ervaart niet iedereen kerstmis als the most wonderful time of the year. Kerst kan namelijk ook als eenzaam worden ervaren, of als erg stressvol – bijvoorbeeld door de verhitte gesprekken tijdens het kerstdiner. Op welke wijze (kerst)muziek ons stressgevoel tijdens de niet zo hap-happiest season of all kan reduceren, en hoe vaktherapie zich binnen het domein van de psychologie en de psychiatrie onderscheidt van andere vormen van therapeutische interventies, bespreekt redacteur Emerence Kapteijn in deze kerstspecial van Radio Swammerdam met dr. Martina de Witte (University of Melbourne). Zij onderzoekt zowel de effectiviteit van muziekinterventies als waarom, hoe en wanneer muziektherapeutische interventies effectief zijn. Met een column van Job Korte. De muziek in deze aflevering: I'll Be Home for Christmas – Oscar Peterson [1995, geschreven door: Buck Ram, Kim Gannon, Walter Kent; geproduceerd door: Robert Woods, Elaine Martone; bron: Telarc] Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Oscar Peterson [1995, geschreven door: Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane; geproduceerd door: Robert Woods, Elaine Martone; bron: Telarc] Last Christmas – Wham! [1984, geschreven & geproduceerd door: George Michael; bron: Epic] Ave Maria, D.839 – Andreas Delfs, Renee Fleming, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra [2005, geschreven door: Adam Storck, Franz Schubert, Walter Scott; geproduceerd dood: Chris Hazell; bron: Decca Music Group Ltd.] KERST MET DE FAM – MEROL [2018, bron: AMMEHOELA RECORDS]

Este mes teníamos que leer un libro de una autora premiada. Parece que nos hemos puesto de acuerdo y los dos hemos elegido autoras de ciencia ficción muy reconocidas, ambas dos con muchos premios prestigiosos. ¿cual de las dos habrá conseguido más galardones? Luego recibimos a Pablo para otra nueva serie de recomendaciones de lecturas fáciles o adaptadas. Esta es la lista de libros de la que hablamos: - La mano izquierda de la oscuridad, de Úrsula K. Le Guin - El libro del día del juicio final, de Connie Willis - Por no mencionar al perro, de Connie Willis - Ivanhoe, de Walter Scott. Colección Kalafate. Ed. Almadraba - Sanditon, de Jane Austen - Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, de J.K.Rowling - La guerra de los mundos, de H.G.Wells Como siempre, si quieres aportar ideas o para contarnos tu opinión, hacernos sugerencias o preguntar cualquier cosa nos puedes encontrar en: Instagram: @me_lo_leo_podcast Twitter: @meloleopodcast Email: meloleopodcast@gmail.com

On a snowy night in St. Charles County, Missouri, police were called to the scene of a car accident; finding the driver clinging to life. A rookie officer, with only two years on the force, took one look at the Cadillac in the creek, and knew in his gut that something was off. He could have never imagined that it would take years and the mysterious disappearance of a local man to get to the truth. Instagram: @CousinsonCrimePodcast Email: CousinsonCrime@gmail.com Theme Music by AleXZavesa Join our new Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/CousinsOnCrime Check out our merch store! https://cousinsoncrime-shop.fourthwall.com/? Sources: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/54697949/sharon_elaine-williams https://www.oxygen.com/exhumed-killer-revealed/crime-news/exhumed-james-williams-killed-wife-sharon-walter-notheis https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/what-happened-sharon-williams-walter-scott-horror-murder-case-explored-oxygen-s-exhumed-season-2 Forensic Files S7E1: The Cheater

Roy is Executive Director and Co-Chair of the Investment Management Committee at Walter Scott, a Scotland-based firm managing $100B in assets (as of 8/31/24). With a focus on long-term investing, he emphasizes the significance of compounding returns and the importance of a disciplined approach to risk management.

2014: CA man not charged in killing! Calls: Ego? Purpose? Minimum wage, Woodrow Wilson, and Starbucks cultural decline. The Hake Report, Monday, October 7, 2024 AD TIMESTAMPS * (0:00:00) Start * (0:02:33) Hey, guys! * (0:03:44) GREGGATRON: Ego? Doing good work * (0:10:44) 2014: Old man shot female robber * (0:22:18) Shooting unarmed fleeing; Walter Scott * (0:31:01) ALEX, CA: Purpose: Serve others, "Unconditional love"? * (0:38:15) WILLIAM: Miles; Trump rally in Butler, PA; BHI; Police, BLM * (0:50:21) Coffees… hater * (0:57:25) Coffee: Voting? * (1:03:54) You guys are dirty! "Diddy" gossip * (1:11:38) Tye Nichols beating, Rodney King, "police" * (1:16:05) Minimum Wage, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams * (1:22:32) Woodrow Wilson exposed: Bill Lockwood on JLP, Oct 2021 * (1:30:12) Howard Schultz: Work somewhere else! Starbucks unions * (1:40:45) Howard Schultz: Buy shares somewhere else! Gay agenda * (1:50:59) Langtry - "Binderstiffs" - 2004, As Upon the Road Thereto LINKS BLOG  https://www.thehakereport.com/blog/2024/10/7/the-hake-report-mon-10-7-24 PODCAST / Substack  HAKE NEWS from JLP  https://www.thehakereport.com/jlp-news/2024/10/7/hake-news-mon-10-7-24 Hake is live M-F 9-11a PT (11-1CT/12-2ET) Call-in 1-888-775-3773 https://www.thehakereport.com/show VIDEO  YouTube  -  Rumble*  -  Facebook  -  X  -  BitChute  -  Odysee*  PODCAST  Substack  -  Apple  -  Spotify  -  Castbox  -  Podcast Addict  *SUPER CHAT on platforms* above or  BuyMeACoffee, etc.  SHOP  Spring  -  Cameo  |  All My Links  JLP Network:  JLP  -  Church  -  TFS  -  Nick  -  Joel  -  Punchie   Get full access to HAKE at thehakereport.substack.com/subscribe

This week on News Flash, the hosts discuss Macquarie Asset Management's acquisition of Ziton, a Denmark based provider of operations and maintenance services to the offshore industry. Also, Octopus Energy solidifies its entry into the US renewables market with an investment to create 600 megawatts of new solar farms in the U. S. And Berkshire Hathaway consolidates their company operations, opening the door for more renewable projects. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. And this Is your newsflash news flashes brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway energy, the second largest us clean power owner will pay about 3. 9 billion for the minority 8 percent stake held by the family of late board member, Walter Scott. The deal involves 2. 37 billion in cash. The exchange of Berkshire Class B shares for 1. 6 billion BHE shares and issuance of a 600 million one year note. As of January 1st, Berkshire Hathaway Energy owned about 14 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, including 12 gigawatts of wind. And roughly 2 gigawatts of solar and storage. Now, Phil, Berkshire Hathaway Energy has been consolidating operations over the last 6 to 12 months. Is this part of that larger plan to consolidate? Philip Totaro: It sounds like it although this is also obviously a bit of a legacy thing with taking over the stake held by, by Scott's family and presumably in some kind of a trust or something. Like. It's giving Berkshire Hathaway Energy the opportunity, as you mentioned, to just consolidate the, the company's ownership and consolidate the brands under the Berkshire Hathaway Energy umbrella, which theoretically gives them more power. Bandwidth and more capacity to keep borrowing if they need to borrow to go, build out the pipeline of renewable energy projects that they've got. So one thing that we've talked about recently on the show is the fact that there's a lot of investment funds and firms coming into the renewable sector. What they bring with them is capital, or the ability to go leverage the, the capital base that they've got to go borrow money. So for your big utility company owner operators, they want to be able to do a similar thing. And this is going to help kind of bolster the, the company's ability to, to do that. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It's the same thing. Like Phil saying, we've talked about on the show before Berkshire Hathaway backed Warren Buffett, big money is following the same concept as you're seeing with a lot of other big money groups, Vanguard, BlackRock, all these different and, and of course, pension funds and whatnot of putting their capital Into energy infrastructure world, right? So they're helping build up the energy transition, but that's because they see it as good business. So when you see big money coming into a certain sector, you can bet it's going to be around a while and they're betting banking on success. UK Allen Hall: based Octopus Energy has made two new investments in the U. S. green energy market. Following its initial entry just three months ago with solar farm acquisitions in Ohio and Pe...

Helen Mark visits 50 square miles that were neither England nor Scotland. The Debatable Lands, between Carlisle and Gretna, were home to untameable crime families that petrified the most powerful of Lords and Kings. For hundreds of years governments in London and Edinburgh left the region to its own laws and moral codes. When they did intervene, the result was an explosion of violence that's still visible in the landscape of derelict towers and still audible in the Border Ballads collected by Walter Scott.Author, Graham Robb guides Helen through the region's complex history and Ian Scott Martin takes her to the ramparts of Gilnockie Tower- the fearsome stronghold of the Armstrong family, one of the most notorious clans of Border Reivers.The Union of the Crowns in the early 17th century brought the age of the Debatable Land to an end, ushering in a long period of peace broken abruptly in 1915. On the Western Front the British Army was running out of shells. In Westminster the government fell and the decision was made to build an enormous 9 mile long munitions factory, stretching across the region. Rebecca Short of the Devil's Porridge Museum guides Helen around the remains of the industrial landscape in which 30,000 people- 16,000 of them women- worked in the production of the cordite that propelled shells across the battlefields of Belgium and France. The western tip of the Debatable Land reaches out to the saltmarshes of the Solway Firth. This apparently peaceful landscape soon yields its secrets. The land is constantly battered and transformed by the tides while animals and plants have to adapt to survive the harsh and dynamic conditions. Helen explores the creeks, bogs and rivers with David Pickett of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Chris Miles of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.Producer: Alasdair Cross

Spodobało się? Zostań patronem tutaj: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.tchnieniegrozy.pl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Wesprzyj via ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠( https://www.youtube.com/tchnieniegrozy) Dołącz do rozmowy na ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Discord ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠(  https://discord.gg/7jAjbY2  ) Lubisz gry fabularne? Zapraszam na mój drugi kanał, 6 10 12 ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/61012 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Muzyka:  Hideous Hiss, Jacek Brzezowski

Dr. Melissa Burt is an esteemed Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, where her research specializes in Arctic clouds, radiation, sea ice, and climate change. In addition to her role as a professor, Dr. Burt serves as the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering at the same institution. She is also an active mother and a dedicated member of Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are also mothers, committed to educating and empowering moms across the nation to advocate for climate solutions. Dr. Burt lives in Colorado with her husband and young daughter.Episode Summary:Dr. Melissa Burt, an expert in atmospheric science, discuss the pressing issue of climate change and its impact on our planet. The conversation delves deep into how human-caused climate change is exacerbating extreme heat events, the importance of clean energy, and what each of us can do to mitigate the effects of pollution for future generations.The discussion underscores how the warming of our planet, driven mainly by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, is leading to more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Key strategies to combat climate change include reducing carbon emissions by transitioning to electric transportation and energy-efficient appliances, using renewable energy sources, and advocating for policy changes at local, state, and national levels. Dr. Burt emphasizes that individual actions, although crucial, must be part of a broader collective effort to significantly impact climate change and protect our children's future.Key Takeaways:Human-Caused Climate Change: The burning of fossil fuels contributes significantly to the thickening heat-trapping blanket around our Earth, leading to more severe weather events, such as heatwaves, wildfires, and hurricanes.Individual and Collective Action: Simple changes like switching to energy-efficient appliances and electric vehicles, combined with advocating for larger systemic changes, can collectively make a significant impact.Impact on Children and Vulnerable Populations: Climate change disproportionately affects children and the elderly, and proactive measures are needed to safeguard these vulnerable groups.Hope for the Future: Despite the challenges, there is great potential for reversing damage if aggressive and concerted actions are taken swiftly and efficiently.Support The Sponsors who Support the Transform Your Mind podcast!RO.CO The Ro Body Program provides access to the most popular weight loss shots on the market. Go to RO.CO/TRANSFORMShopify - Go to shopify.com/transform now to upgrade your businessSee this video on The Transform Your Mind YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@MyhelpsUs/videosTo see a transcripts of this audio as well as links to all the advertisers on the show page https://myhelps.us/Follow Transform Your Mind on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/myrnamyoung/Follow Transform Your mind on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063738390977Please leave a rating and review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transform-your-mind/id1144973094

Join us in this enlightening clip of Market Mondays as we dive deep into pertinent political discussions with Senator Tim Scott. Hosts Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings engage the Senator in a candid conversation, tackling pressing issues that resonate within the Black community and beyond.

Faites un don et recevez un cadeau : http://don.storiavoce.com [Rediffusion] Le Moyen Âge est bien plus qu'une période historique : c'est un livre d'images foisonnant où artistes, créateurs et cultures populaires n'ont eu de cesse de puiser, réinventant inlassablement selon leur goût et celui de leur temps enluminures, donjons et cathédrales. Si Notre-Dame de Paris est une cathédrale médiévale, elle a été en partie revisitée par le XIXe siècle. Les chimères, monstres caricaturant le Moyen Âge, sortent tout droit de l'imagination de l'architecte Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879). Quand on les regarde, le Moyen Âge nous apparaît sublime, grandiose, fascinant tout autant que monstrueux, fantastique et effrayant. Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc en architecture, Umberto Ecco et Walter Scott en littérature, Games of Thrones à l'écran et le Puy du fou dans ses spectacles. Chacun réinvente le Moyen Âge à sa manière. On parle alors de médiévalisme. Quand est né ce mouvement et comment-a-t-il évolué ? Qui sont les stars du médiévalisme ? Sert-il ou dessert-il l'histoire ? Notre invité : William Blanc. *** Facebook : www.facebook.com/HistoireEtCivilisationsMag Instagram : www.instagram.com/histoireetcivilisations/ Twitter : twitter.com/Storiavoce

From nuggles to brags, the Ceffyl Dŵr to nixies, there's plenty of reasons to be nervous about horse-shaped monsters on the shoreline - but fear not, as Martin is here to demystify Kelpies and mythical water horses in general!Part of the "Three Ravens Bestiary" series, we start by discussing the links between seaweed and kelpies, the first appearances of mythical Kelpies in the poetry of William Collins, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, and how the history of horse riding is inextricably linked with tales of monstrous horses in folklore. It's a galloping ride that takes us from the Highlands to Ancient Scythia and back again, and along the way we're venturing through early French ballads, talking broomsticks, Roman myths, and Dark Age stone monuments, while discussing the Pictish Beast, the Nuckelavee, shelleycoats, and much more!Along the way, we'll have advice on how to spot a Kelpie in the wild, what to do to tame one, and how to kill these naughty beasts if such a thing proves necessary - although, as usual, there's some pretty weird stuff to uncover as we venture down to the water's edge, from Fairy Locks to backwards hooves, the Kelpie's links to Virgin Mary, and a possible battle between an early saint and the Loch Ness Monster... The Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...Bonus Episodes are released on Thursdays (Magic and Medicines about folk remedies and arcane spells, Three Ravens Bestiary about cryptids and mythical creatures, Dying Arts about endangered heritage crafts, and Something Wicked about folkloric true crime from across history) plus Local Legends episodes on Saturdays - interviews with acclaimed authors, folklorists, podcasters and historians with unique perspectives on that week's county.With a range of exclusive content on Patreon, too, including audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?Learn more at www.threeravenspodcast.com, join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/threeravenspodcast, and find links to our social media channels here: https://linktr.ee/threeravenspodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All the world-renowned forecasters are saying the same thing: expect an active hurricane season this year. One of those meteorologists is Dr. Phil Klotzbach. He is a senior research scientist for the Department of Atmospheric Science in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University. He has worked in the department for the past 23 years and was co-author on the Atlantic basin hurricane forecasts with Dr. William Gray through 2005, becoming the first author in 2006. Dr. Klotzbach joins the podcasts this week on the Carolina Weather Group to discuss expectations for the 2024 hurricane season. He explains the weather and climate impacts that are likely to make it an above-average tropical season. #hurricane #tropics #weather

How do you step away from your most famous creation? Mohawk artist Walter Scott is about to find out. More than a decade after creating his beloved “Wendy” series of graphic novels, Walter is taking a long hiatus from his cartoon alter-ego. He joins Tom to tell us how he came up with Wendy — a neurotic young party girl who's trying to make it as an artist — and why his latest book, “The Wendy Award,” is going to be her final adventure for now.

Sasquatch Sunset has been dubbed the year's strangest film, about a family of mythological bigfoot monsters. Ama Gloria is a French film about the bond between a 6 year old French girl and her Portuguese nanny.Avalon is the latest show from Gifford's Circus, currently touring the UK.Peter Bradshaw and Nancy Durrant join Samira to review. We'll also find out who's won the Women's Prize for Fiction and Non Fiction, and the winner of the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. And and as Dame Vivienne Westwood's personal clothes collection heads to auction, Bella Freud and Professor Claire Wilcox give Samira a sneak peek. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Corinna Jones

Today's episode features Jonathan and Sy talking with Pastor Rasool Berry. They discuss:-        The importance of acknowledging and understanding your own and your community's power-        The social and spiritual forces behind the opposition to CRT or DEI (or whatever they're calling it today)-        Pastor Berry's incredible documentary about Juneteenth and Christian faith-        When to leave communities that push back against racial justice-        And after the interview, Sy and Jonathan reflect on the work it takes to pass on a tradition like Juneteenth well, and the truly, literally unbelievable levels of ignorance whiteness creates in people-        Plus, they discuss the Daniel Perry pardon, and the threads that connect it to the Donald Trump convictionsMentioned in the Episode-        Our anthology - Keeping the Faith: Reflections on Politics and Christianity in the era of Trump and Beyond-        An abridged version of Pastor Berry's article from the anthology.-        His subsequent article, “Uncritical Race Theory”-        The documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom-        Resources for screening Juneteenth and inviting speakers involved with the film-        The soundtrack for Juneteenth-        Pastor Berry's podcast, Where Ya From?-        The article on Daniel Perry Sy put in our newsletter-        The Texas Monthly article about how legally unusual Perry's pardon wasCredits-        Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Rasool Berry: There was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day. And when I discovered that, that's when I said we got to get involved in this process. Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, that they understood enough of the story that they picked out this festival, that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth. And in the context of this, of their faith, they saw God doing a jubilee in their lives?[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]IntroductionSy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Sy Hoekstra.Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, hear us talk to Pastor Rasool Berry about his thoughts on the movement against CRT, or DEI, or whatever the term for the moment is right now when you listen to this. We're also [laughs] going to talk about his incredible feature length documentary called Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom, which is available for free on YouTube right now. And then after the interview, hear our thoughts on the pardon of Daniel Perry and the conviction of Donald Trump in our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open?Sy Hoekstra: The 34 convictions of Donald Trump.Jonathan Walton: All of them.Sy Hoekstra: All of them [laughs]. We're going to talk about each one individually…Jonathan Walton: Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: …the specific business record that he destroyed, whatever.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Don't be afraid, we're not going to do that. By the way, I said at the end of last week that the guest this week was going to be Brandi Miller, and then we realized that we had to do the episode that was about Juneteenth before Juneteenth. So Brandi Miller's going to be in two weeks from now. And this time [laughs], it's Pastor Rasool Berry.Before we get to that, just a reminder, we need your subscriptions. Please go to ktfpress.com and become a paid subscriber on our Substack. Your support sustains what we do, and we need that support from you right now. We've been doing this as a side project for a long time, and like we've been saying, if we want this show to continue past this season, we need to get a lot more subscribers so that we can keep doing this work, but not for free as much as we've been doing it.So go and subscribe. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show, which there are many, many of at this point. And then it also gets you access to our new monthly subscriber conversations that we're doing. Jonathan and I will be having video chats with you to talk about all the different kinds of things that we talk about on this show, answer some questions, just have a good time. And if you cannot afford a subscription, if money's the only obstacle, just write to us at info@ktfpress.com. We will give you a free or discounted subscription, no questions asked. But if you can afford it, please, ktfpress.com. Become a paid subscriber. We need your support now.Jonathan Walton: Pastor Rasool Berry serves as teaching pastor at The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York. He's also the director of partnerships and content development with Our Daily Bread Ministries. Pastor Berry graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies and Sociology. He's also the host of the Where Ya From? podcast sponsored by Christianity Today, and the writer, producer and host of Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Let's get to it. Here's the interview.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Pastor, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.Rasool Berry: Oh, well, I'm glad to be here with you all, back at it again, Keeping the Faith.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yes, exactly [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Amen. Amen.The Importance of “Mapping” PowerSy Hoekstra: So, you wrote this fantastic essay for… so, well, actually, it was originally for your blog, I think, and then we kind of took it and adapted it for the anthology. And it was about critical race theory, and you broke down a lot of the history and sort of the complex intellectual background of it and everything. But you talked specifically about something that you said, critical race theory and the Bible and the Black Christian tradition in the US all help us do something really important, and that thing is mapping power. Can you talk to us a little bit about what power mapping is and what the importance of it is?Rasool Berry: Yeah. I first kind of got wind of that framework when we were launching a justice ministry at our church. And two friends Gabby, Dr. Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes and her husband, Dr. Andrew Wilkes, who do a lot of great work with justice, actually walked our church through thinking about mapping power in our church as a way of evaluating what types of justice initiatives did it make sense for us to engage in, in light of what we had in the room. And so for instance, when I was in my church in Indiana, a lot of the parishioners worked at Lilly who's headquarters is in Indiana. And so when they decided to do something for the community, they ended up opening up a clinic in the church building, which still exists and serves the local community, because they all had medical backgrounds.So when they do mission work, they do mission work with a medical component, because that's a effective way of mapping power. Where our church in Brooklyn average age is about 28, 29 and they're more artsy. So we're not opening up clinics, you know what I mean? But what we can do is events that help inspire and help engage with people. And then eventually with our pastor's leadership started something called Pray March Act, which looks to be a place to mobilize churches around issues of justice in New York City. So what is oftentimes overlooked in Christian spaces, and I really am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, for really surfacing the need for us to have a theology of power.That this is something that oftentimes especially evangelical churches, or more kind of Bible oriented or people kind of churches, there's a sense in which we don't know how to think about power. And I believe, I suspect this is one of the reasons why the church has been so susceptible to issues like sexual abuse, to egregious theft in money, is because we are not really conditioned to think about power, which is really ironic because the scriptures really do point to… I mean, we literally have two books, First and Second Kings, and those books are pointing to you have the king, this king was a good king, and it impacted the kingdom of Israel this way. This king was a bad king, and then this is what happened.And so it's wired in the text, right? Amy Sherman in her book, Kingdom Calling, Dr. Amy Sherman points to this when she points to the proverb that says, “when the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” And it's this idea, when she says righteous, she's not thinking about it in the kind of traditional pietistic aspect of righteousness, but she's talking about “tzedakah” in the Hebrew, which has this connotation of justice. Because when people who are put in positions of power and influence, when they do right by the people underneath them when they do right, that people celebrate. Versus when there's somebody who's a tyrant that's in office, the people groan because there's that sense of they recognize we've mapped power dynamics, and somebody who's going to do ill is going to have a disproportionate impact on all of us.And so power mapping is bringing to surface the awareness of what is it that we have in the room. And it's also a very humbling way of being aware of our own power, right? Like how do I show up as a man in a space, in certain things? Like I know if I get up and I'm about to preach that there's some different dynamics depending on who I'm talking to in a room. Like if I'm in a predominantly Black context that's younger, then the locks might actually kind of give me some street cred. Like, oh, that's kind of cool. But if I'm in a older, traditional space, looking younger is going to be more of a uphill climb to say, okay, what's this guy coming at? And if I'm in a White space, versus but I also recognize that when our sisters come up, that there's a whole different type of power mapping situation.And so all of these things are helpful in being aware of how we show up and how that matters. And Andy's kind of thesis is that unlike the kind of post Nietzschean postmodern suspicion and critical view of power that only sees it as a negative, that God has actually given us and ordained us to exert influence and power in redemptive ways. But we can only do that if we map it, if we're aware of it, and if we use it in a way that's not just for our own self or comfort or glory, but for those who we're called to serve.Sy Hoekstra: Can I ask, just for some like to get specific on one thing, because I'm not sure this would be intuitive to everyone. You said if we map power, then we might not end up in the same situations that we are with, like abuse scandals in the church?Rasool Berry: Yeah. Yep.Sy Hoekstra: And I think I… where my mind goes is I think we would react differently to the abuse scandal. I don't know if the abuse scandals themselves would… those happen unfortunately. But I think where the power mapping might come in, is where so many people are then just deferring to whatever the person in, the pastor's narrative is. Is that kind of what you're talking about, like the reaction?Rasool Berry: I think it's on both sides.Sy Hoekstra: You do? Okay.Rasool Berry: Yeah, because for instance, if I am aware, very aware of power dynamics with children and adults, I would see the value in a practice of not leaving an adult in a space with a child by themselves.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see. You might put systems in place ahead of time. Yeah, yeah.Rasool Berry: Right. So there's the sense in which we can put policies in place that recognize… it's the same thing why we put the labeling system on kids when they check into childcare, right? Like you put the little label so that some random person can't just come and pick them up because a kid can't defend themselves. Or they may not have the capacity to understand what's going on if somebody just random comes up and says, “Hey, your mom and your dad told me to come get you,” and then they believe that. And so we have systems that we put in place to recognize those power dynamics. And I think unfortunately, that in a lot of our church context and culture there's an overly naive sense of, and really sometimes idolatrous view of pastors and leaders that essentially say, well, they're good and they're godly people, so there isn't a need for accountability, or there isn't a need for, you know…And so no, it's like, well, in the same way that we have trustees in certain churches, or there's a elders board, depending on what your church polity is, that polity should reflect a sense of accountability and transparency so that there is an awareness on the front end as well as on the backend that when it does come to bring people into account, that there's also an awareness of a power dynamic at play there too.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense especially when [laughs] we throw those things out, all we have are the systems of hierarchy and social dominance that exist to define what power is, right?Rasool Berry: Right.Jonathan Walton: So the train just keeps going.The Social and Spiritual Forces behind the Fight against CRT/DEIJonathan Walton: So leaning into that a little bit, you wrote an essay focusing on CRT power mapping and things like that. But it feels like nobody in the Trump camp really had an idea of what CRT was, and it didn't even really matter to them what it was.Rasool Berry: Right.Jonathan Walton: So what do you think is at the core of what's going on with White people when they reject CRT or DEI or whatever the—conscious—whatever the term would be?Rasool Berry: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: What do you think the underlying concern is?Rasool Berry: Well, you know, after… and it's so funny because when I wrote that first piece, I wrote it as a way… [laughs] I wrote it just to get it off my chest. And in my mind, almost nobody was going to read it because it was like a 20-something minute read, and I just didn't care because I was just like, “I'm getting this off my chest,” and this is the last I'm going to say about it. Like I thought that was going to be just this thing, just so I can point people to, if anybody asks. I did not intend, nor did I think that it was only going to kind of position me as this person that people were listening to and reading and resonating with about it. So that was funny. But then what ended up happening, and especially after I was on the unbelievable? podcast with Justin Brierley, kind of in this debate format with Neil Shenvi, who's kind of been one of the most outspoken evangelical Christian critics of critical race theory. Critics is probably too mild of a term, kind of a…Jonathan Walton: Antagonist.Rasool Berry: Antagonist, even stronger. Like this doomsday prophet who says that, who's warning against the complete erosion of biblical norms because of the Trojan Horse, in his mind, of critical race theory. In the midst of that conversation, that kind of elevated, it was one of their top 10 episodes of the entire year, and it just kind of got me into these spaces where I was engaging more and more. And I kind of sat back and reflected, and I had a few more interactions with Neil on Twitter. And I ended up writing a separate piece called “Uncritical Race Theory.” And the reason why I did that, is I went back and I was curious about what kind of insights I could get from previous instances of the way that there were being controversies surrounding race in America in the church, and how the church talked about those debates.So I went back and I read The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll, who looked at and examined the actual debates during the time of the antebellum period of pro-slavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians, and he analyzed that. Then I went back and I read The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, who looked at the pro-integrationist and segregationist arguments in the church. And what I found was that there was incredible symmetry between what was argued in each of those instances, going all the way back to the 1800s, to the 1960s, to now, and there were two things that emerged. The first was that the primary response from those who were supportive of slavery in the 1800s, or those who were supportive of segregation in the 1960s was to claim first of all, that the opposing view were not biblically faithful, or were not even concerned about biblical fidelity.So this is different than other types of discussions where we could say, even going back to the councils, right? Like when there's some type of, like during the Nicaean Council or something like that, they're debating about how they're understanding the text about certain things. Whereas is Jesus fully God, is he man, is he both? But there's a basic premise that they're both coming at it from different aspects of scriptures. What I noticed in the American context is that there was a denial that the side that was kind of having a more progressive view was even biblically faithful at all.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Christian.Rasool Berry: The second part is related to the first, is that there was this allegation that there was outside philosophies that was actually shaping this impetus because it wasn't clearly the Bible. So in the 1800s that was the claim, “Oh, you're being influenced by these post-enlightenment ideas.” In the 1960s it was straight up Marxism, communism. You see the signs. “Integration is communism.” Like you see the people protesting with that, and of course the new version of that is kind of the remix of cultural Marxism, or these type of things. And so what I acknowledged in each of those scenarios is that part of the problem is that there is such an uncritical understanding of race that it causes, I think especially those in a dominant culture or those who've been susceptible to the ideologies of White supremacy, which can be White or Black or other, There's a tendency to see any claim that race is a problem as the problem itself because there's an underlying denial of the reality of racial stratification in our society, and the what Bryan Stevenson refers to as the narrative of racial difference or what is more commonly known as White supremacy. So when your default position is that you are introducing a foreign concept into the conversation when you talk about the relevance of race in a scenario, then it causes… that sense of uncritical nature of the reality of race causes you to then look upon with suspicion any claim that there's some type of racial based situation happening. And that is what I call, it is really ironically uncritical race theory. It's the exact opposite of what critical race theory is trying to do.And so I think that that's my take on what's happening. And then I think that's more of the scientific sociological, but then there's also a spiritual. I am a pastor [laughter]. And I have to end with this. I have to end with this, because in some ways I was naively optimistic that there was, if you just reasoned and show people the right analogies or perspectives, then they would, they could be persuaded. But what I have since realized and discovered is that there is a idolatrous synchronization of what we now know of different aspects of White Christian nationalism that is a competing theological position and belief system that is forming these doctrinal positions of what we now kind of look at as American exceptionalism, what we look at as this sense of the status quo being… all the things that are moving toward an authoritarian regime and away from democracy, that that is all solidifying itself as an alternative gospel.And I think that at the end of the day, I'm looking at and grieving about mass apostasy that I'm seeing happening in the church as a result of an unholy alliance of political ideology and Christian symbols, language, and values expressed in this kind of mixed way. And that's what is really being allowed to happen with this unmapped power dynamic, is that people don't even realize that they're now exerting their power to kind of be in this defensive posture to hold up a vision of society that is actually not Christian at all, but that is very much bathed in Christian terms.Jonathan Walton: I want to say a lot back, but we got to keep going, but that was good.Sy Hoekstra: We got to… [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, we could talk forever about what you just said, but we could also talk forever about your documentary. So let's transition to that.Rasool Berry: [laughter] You all are like exercising restraint.Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Jonathan Walton: I am.Rasool Berry: Like, “oh, I want to go there.” I just threw steak in front of the lions [laughter].Why Pastor Berry Made a Documentary about JuneteenthSy Hoekstra: But it's because, I mean, the documentary's interesting in a way... It's sort of like, okay, you've seen this movement of mass apostasy and everything, and you've had all these people tell you you're not faithful. And with this documentary in some ways, you're just sprinting on down the road that you're on. You know what I mean? It's like sort of [laughs], you're just going straightforward like we need to remember our past. We need to learn about power dynamics in American history. So you wrote this—[realizing mistake] wrote— you were involved in, you're the kind of narrator, the interviewer of this documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. And you went to Galveston and you went to Houston, Texas to learn more about the history of Juneteenth and the communities and the people that shaped the celebration and everything.And I guess I just want to know how this got started and why it was so important for you to engage in what was a very significant project…Rasool Berry: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: …to teach people about this kind of history that I think the movement against CRT or DEI or whatever is quite actively trying to suppress.Rasool Berry: And these two stories are very much intertwined…Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.Rasool Berry: …in ways that I didn't even fully anticipate in some ways. In some ways I knew, in some ways I didn't. But I grew up in Philly, where there was not growing up a significant Juneteenth awareness or celebration or anything like that. So I had heard about it though when I was very young, the concept of it. I had a classmate whose middle name was Galveston, and I was like, “That's a weird name. Why is your middle name Galveston?” [laughter] He told me that it's because his mom had told him about this situation where there were Black people that didn't know they were free for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. I was like eight years old when I first heard that, but filed that away.It wasn't really until more recent years with the, just massive racial justice movement spurred on by the murders of Tamir Rice and George Floyd and others, Sandra Bland. And so, as that movement started to gin up, conversations about race that I was kind of plugged into, I heard about this 90-something year old woman that was appearing before Congress…Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Rasool Berry: …and challenging them to make Juneteenth a national holiday.Sy Hoekstra: I can't believe you got to interview her. She was amazing.Rasool Berry: Yeah. And I was like, why would a 90-something plus year old woman be like this committed to this? So I started looking into it and realizing, I think both spiritually and socially, that there was incredible potency and opportunity in the recognition, the widespread recognition of Juneteenth. I'll go socially first. Socially, the reality has been the United States has never had a moment where we collectively reflect on the legacy of slavery in our country. And if you do the math, from the first enslaved people that we have documented coming into the States in 1619 until if even if you go to the abolition of slavery in 1865 or 1866 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, that's about 244 years.If you go from 1865 to now, it's like 159 or so years. So we still have way more time in our society that has been shaped by this most intense version of a caste system and brutal slavery that had global, it literally reshaped the globe. And sometimes we forget. I live in Brooklyn where most of the Black folk are Afro-Caribbean. When you think of Jamaica, you think of Usain Bolt or Bob Marley. Do you realize that all of those people are from Africa, like our African descent people. That like the native people of Jamaica would've been Native Americans. So the legacy of slavery and colonialism has literally reshaped population centers in our world. That's how significant it was.And so to not have a moment to reflect on all of it, the implications of how the legacy still shapes us, but also the progress of what we've seen happen and how we are not in that same place is a missed opportunity. But on the contrary, to put that in place is an opportunity for reflection that I think could really help ground us toward being a more perfect union, toward us being a unified people. Because we're basing it on the same story and information, which increasingly in the age of misinformation and disinformation, that the erosion of us having a shared narrative is really upon us. So I think it's interesting and important from that standpoint. Spiritually, it was even more dynamic because one of the… so there was a lot of nicknames and still are for Juneteenth. One was Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, but Jubilee Day.And when I discovered that, that's when I said, “Okay, Our Daily Bread, we got to get involved in this process.” Because you mean to tell me that these formerly enslaved people at a time when it was illegal to read, primarily because they didn't want people to read the Bible, that they understood enough of the story of the Old Testament, that they picked out this festival in Leviticus 25, this ordinance that God had put in place, that on the Jubilee year, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths, I call it the Super Bowl of Sabbaths [Sy laughs]. Seven years times seven, forty nine years plus one, fifty. That on that day that it was this reordering of society, the kingdom of heaven coming back to earth, which simultaneously anticipates the wickedness and the brokenness of human systems in power, but also projects and casts vision about the kingdom of heaven, which would allow for equity and equality to take place. So debts were forgiven, lands were returned, and people who were in bondage primarily because of debt, that was the main reason back then, they would be set free. And in the context of their faith, they saw God doing the jubilee in their lives. So what that gave was the opportunity for us to talk about and reintroduce in many faith traditions the relationship between spiritual and physical freedom, and see that in the Bible story those things were wedded.What's the major account in the Old Testament is the Exodus account. Like it was both physical and spiritual freedom. And in the same way we see that is why Jesus, when he reveals himself and says, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” notice when John the Baptist starts to waver because he's expecting this conquering king. He's still in prison and he says, “Hey, are you the one or we should expect another?” Jesus points to physical and spiritual aspects of liberation in his response. “Tell John what you see. The blind receive sight. The sick are healed. The gospel is preached. Blessed is the one who is not ashamed of me.” So in the sense of that, what we see elements of the kind of seeds of in the gospel is this aspect of the physical and spiritual liberation being tied together.And that is what Jubilee gives us opportunity to explore and investigate. And I think lastly, seeing the role of the Black church in bringing out that insight, I think is particularly valuable in a time where oftentimes those contributions are overlooked and ignored.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to watch the documentary was transformative for me. Mainly because I'm 38 years old and it's being produced by people who look and sound and act like me. It's interviewing the people who came before us, trying to speak to the folks that are younger than us. And each generation I think has this, this go around where we have to own our little piece of what and how we're going to take the work forward. You know what I mean?Discerning Whether to Leave Communities that Push back on Discussions about RaceYou interviewed Lecrae in the documentary and he's taken that work forward, right? And you both say that you've had the experiences of believing you are loved and accepted in these White evangelical spaces until you started talking about racial justice issues.And so I feel like there's these moments where we want to take the work forward, and then we're like, “All right, well, this is our moment.” Like Opal was like, “Hey, I'm going to do Juneteenth.” Where now you're like, “I'm going to do something.” [laughs] So I wonder, like for you, when you have to make decisions about how to stay, not to stay or just leave. What is the effect of constantly engaging in that calculus for you?Rasool Berry: Oh, man! It's exhausting to do it. And I think it is valuable to count the cost and realize that sometimes you're best suited to reposition yourself and to find other ways to express that faithfulness. At other times, God is causing you to be a change agent where you are. And I think how to navigate through that is complicated, and I think it's complicated for all of us, for our allies who see the value of racial justice as well as for those of us who are marginalized and experience, not just conceptually or ideologically the need for justice, but experientially all of the things through macro and microaggressions that come up, that weigh and weather us and our psyche, our emotions, our bodies.And I think that it's important to be very spiritually attuned and to practice healthy emotional spirituality as well as, best practices, spiritual disciplines, all the things that have come alongside of what does it mean to follow Jesus. I was recently reflecting on the fact that in the height of Jesus' ministry, when it was on and popping, he's growing, the crowds are growing in number, it says that he went away regularly and left the crowds to be with God. And then the verse right after that, it's in Luke, I can't remember which chapters, I know the verse is 16 and 17. And then it talks about how he had power as a result of going away to do more. And there's this relationship between our needing to rest and to find recovery in the secret place in the quiet place with God in order to have the energy to do more of the work.And that's a lot to hold together, but it's really important because otherwise you can end up being like Moses, who was trying to do justice, but in his own strength at first when he kills the Egyptian, and then he tried to go to his people being like, “Yo, I'm down!” And they're like, “You killed somebody. We don't want to hear from you.”Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Right.Rasool Berry: And then he flees. Because he tried to do it in his own strength. And then when God reveals himself at the bush, now he's totally broken and not even confident at all in himself. And God has to say, “No, the difference is going to be I'm with you.” So I think in my own journey, I've been one of many people who've had to evaluate and calculate where I've been in order to kind of see where there are opportunities to move forward. For instance, I was on staff with Cru for 20 years and then as the opportunities to work with Our Daily Bread, and I remember specifically the podcast Where Ya From?, that we launched and then Christianity Today got connected to it.They were eagerly looking, or at least supporting the idea of us having conversations about faith and culture and race and all these things. Whereas in my previous environment, I felt like that was not something… I didn't even feel like it, I experienced the pullback of talking about those things. So it has actually, by repositioning myself to kind of be able to be in spaces where I can tell these stories and advocate in these ways, it has been a better use of my energy and my time. Now, even in that other space, everything isn't perfect. It's still the same type of challenges that exist anywhere you go in the world where you're a minority in race and racial difference is prominent, but at least it's a opportunity to still do more than I could do maybe in a previous position. And all of us have to make those type of calculations.And I think it's best to do those things in the context of community, not just by yourself, and also with a sense of sobriety of encountering and experiencing God himself. Because at the end of the day, sometimes, I'm going to just say this, sometimes the answer is leave immediately. Get out of there. At other times, God is calling you to stay at least in the short term time. And it's important to be discerning and not just reactive to when is the right situation presenting itself. And the only way I know to do that is by doing it in community, doing it with a sense of healthy rhythms and time to actually hear the still small voice of God.Sy Hoekstra: Amen.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: Because you really can err in either direction. Like some people, “I'm getting out of here right away,” without thinking. Meaning, when you're being reactive, when you're not being discerning…Rasool Berry: Right.Sy Hoekstra: …you can get out right away or you can have the instinct, “No, I'm going to stick it out forever,” even if it's bad for you, and it's not going to accomplish anything.Rasool Berry: Yup, yeah.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Which I think leans into jumping all the way back the critical versus uncritical.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs]. There you go.Jonathan Walton: Like if we're not willing to lean into the radical interrogation of the systems and structures around us that inform our decisions each day, we will submit to them unconsciously, whether that be running when we should resist or whether that be resisting where we actually should flee. So yeah, thanks for all that.Where you can Find Pastor Berry's workSy Hoekstra: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And so we will have links to both of the articles, to the documentary, which is entirely free on YouTube.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: So you're just wasting your life if you're not watching it, really [laughter]. And a couple other things you talked about, we'll have links. But is there anywhere that you want people to go to either follow you or your work online?Rasool Berry: Yeah. So the other thing that what we did with the Juneteenth documentary, because the response was so strong and overwhelming, really, people wanted to host screenings locally. And so we did a few things to make that more possible. So you can actually go on our website experiencevoices.org/Juneteenth. And you can fill out like a form to actually host a screening locally. And we have designed social media so you can market it, posters that you could print out, even discussion questions that you can use to host discussions. And sometimes people invite some of us from the production on site. So I've gone and done, I've been at screenings all the way from California to Texas to Wisconsin and here in New York.So you can reach out to us on that website as well if you're interested in hosting a screening with the director or one of the producers or myself, and we can kind of facilitate that. Also be looking at your local PBS stations. We partnered with PBS to air screenings so far over a hundred local channels.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.Rasool Berry: And have aired it. Now, the PBS version is slightly different because we had to edit it down to fit their hour long format. And so the biggest version is the PBS version doesn't have Lecrae in it [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Oh no [laughs].Rasool Berry: We had to cut out the four-time Grammy winner. Sorry Lecrae [laughter].Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Rasool Berry: You know what I mean? But it just so happened that way it, that it was the best way to edit it down.Jonathan Walton: You had to keep Opal.Rasool Berry: Had to keep Opal, had to keep Opal [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: I feel like Lecrae would understand that, honestly.Rasool Berry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was so gracious. And actually, the other thing that Lecrae did, I had told him that we were working with Sho Baraka, a mutual friend of ours, to do the music. And he said, “Yeah, I heard something about that.” He's like, “I have a song I was going to put on Church Clothes 4, but I feel like it would be a better fit for this. If you're interested, let me know and I can send it to you.” I'm like, “If I'm interested? Yes, I'm interested.” [laughter] Yes. I'll accept this sight unseen. And so he sent us this incredible song that features, well actually is listed as Propaganda's song, but it features Lecrae and Sho Baraka. And you can get the entire Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom soundtrack 13 tracks, poetry, hip hop, gospel, rnb, all on one thing. And wherever you listen to your music, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere, you can, listen to it, stream it, buy it, and support this movement and this narrative. So yeah. And then personally, just @rasoolb on Instagram, @rasoolberry on, I still call it Twitter [Sy laughs]. So, and we're on Facebook as well. That's where folks can follow me, at rasoolberry.com, website. So thanks for having me.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, pastor, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.Jonathan Walton: Thanks so much, man.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Reflecting on the InterviewSy Hoekstra: Hey, Jonathan, you know what's really useful, is when in the middle of an interview with one of our guests, we say, “Oh no, we don't have time. We'd really like to get into this, so we have to move on to another subject.” It's really useful when we have these little times that we're doing now after the interview to talk more about the subjects than we did with the guests [laughter]. This works out well for us.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Why don't you tell everybody what you're thinking after the interview with Pastor Berry?Passing on a Tradition Well Takes Significant WorkJonathan Walton: Yeah. I think the biggest thing for me that I took away among a lot of the nuggets that he… nuggets and like big things that got dropped on me while we were listening, was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. Like traveling to Galveston. There's a lot in the documentary that reminds me of how much it costs us personally to create things that are moving. To be able to have these conversations, sit down with these people, smell the smells of these folks' homes. That's just a big thing, particularly for me, like not having… I grew up with the Juneteenth story and needing to think through my own traditions and what I'm going to pass to my kids and stuff like that.It's just I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest. And to the folks who listen to the preaching that I give or the stories I write, or the books I'm going to write, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did. So, Sy how about you? What stood out for you?The Literally Unbelievable Racial Ignorance of WhitenessSy Hoekstra: I think what stood out for me was actually right at that point where we said we really wanted to talk more about something, I really did have more thoughts [laughs]. When he was talking about the thing that underlies the fight against CRT and DEI and all that sort of thing. Being just a straight up denial of any sort of racial caste system or racial stratification in our country, I think that point is extremely important. That so much of our disagreements about racial injustice, at least on the intellectual level, not on the emotional and all that kind of thing, the intellectual level that come down to a difference in beliefs about the facts of reality in America. It is literally just do you think racism is happening or not? Because if you do think that it's happening, then everything has to change [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And there's not a lot of room… you'll have to do a lot more like kind of active denial. A lot more having a very active lack of integrity [laughs] to continue in the way that you're thinking when you believe that there is no racism in America if you find out that there is. Which kind of explains why there's so much resistance to it. But I think one story that sort of illustrates how this dynamic works a little bit that just, this is something that happened to me that this reminded me of. I was an intern right after college at International Justice Mission, and I read Gary Haugen's book, The Good News About Injustice, where the intro to this book is about his childhood growing up in kind of suburban, I think he's outside of Seattle, somewhere in Washington. A suburban Christian home, things were pretty nice and easy and he just did not know anything about injustice or anything in the world. Like oppression, racism, he did not know anything about it. And then the book takes you through how he discovered it and then his theology of what God wants to do about it and what the organization does and all that kind of thing. But just that intro, I remember talking to one of the other interns who was at IJM m when I was there, who was a Black woman who was ordained in the Black Baptist Church and had grown up relatively low income. And I was talking to her about this book because I read that intro and I was like, “yes, I totally resonate with this. This is how I grew up, check, check. That makes sense. I understand all of it.”And it makes sense to a lot of the people who support IJM, which are a lot of suburban White evangelicals. She told me, she read the intro to the book and her immediate reaction was how, there is no way that anyone could possibly be this ignorant. It is not possible [laughs]. And I was like, [pretending to be hurt] “but I was” [laughter]. And there's this wrench in the gear of our conversations about justice where there's a large spectrum of White people who are, some engaging in actual innocent good faith about how much nonsense there is, like how much racism there is in America, and people who are engaging in complete bad faith and have ignored all the things that have been put right in front of them clearly.And it is just very difficult for a lot of people who are not White to understand [laughs] that there are actually… the level of ignorance of a lot of White people is unbelievable, by which I mean it literally cannot be believed by a lot of people. And I don't know, that's just, it is a complication in our conversations about race that doesn't really change what you have to tell people or how seriously you should take your conversations or whatever. It's just a note about what you might need to do to bring people kind of into the fold, by which I mean the fold of the truth [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes. This is true of like a lot of White people. And the sad part is that it can also be true of a lot of people of color…Sy Hoekstra: Well, yeah.Jonathan Walton: …who say, “I'm just going to deny, because I haven't experienced.” Or, “We have opted into the system of ignorance and don't want to engage.” And so I'll tell a story. Priscilla was at the airport this week.Sy Hoekstra: Your wife.Jonathan Walton: My wife Priscilla, was at the airport, not a random woman [laughter], was at the airport this week. And someone said, “Yeah, everyone who came to this country, like we're all immigrants.” And Priscilla said, “Actually some people came here as slaves.” Then the person says, “No, that's not true.” And it's like, what do you say to that? When someone just says slavery doesn't exist? And that's literally why we celebrate Juneteenth. So I don't know what this person's going to do on Juneteenth, but when there's a collective narrative and acknowledgement that this happened, and then there's a large group, James Baldwin would say, ignorance plus power is very dangerous.If there's a large group that's ignorant and or like intentionally not engaging, but also has power and privilege and all the things, the benefits of racial stratification without the acknowledgement of the reality of it, which is just a dangerous combination.Sy Hoekstra: So when somebody says something like that, like that didn't happen, people didn't come over here as slaves, I think it is possible that they legitimately don't know that I suppose [laughs], or that they think it's a conspiracy theory or whatever. My guess is, tell me what you think about this. What I would imagine happened there was, “Oh, I never thought about the fact that Black people are not immigrants. And so I'm just going to say no.” Do you know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah. Well, I agree. I think some people even, so let's say like, I write about this in 12 Lies. Ben Carson says that we all came here as immigrants, even if it was in the bottom of a ship. He says that. And I think that is a, to be kind, a gross misrepresentation of the middle passage [laughs], but I see what he's trying to do. He's trying to put Black folks in a narrative that fits in the American narrative so people can, so he's not othered. Because what happens when you acknowledge enslavement is that you have to acknowledge all that. They all come with each other. It's like being at a buffet and there is literally no other menu. Like once you say, once you go in, you can't order one plate. If you talk about slavery, you're opening up all the things and some people just don't want to do that. And that sucks.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Which Tab Is Still Open: Daniel PerryJonathan Walton: It's true. And [laughs], I think this feeds into a little bit of this segment [laughs] that we have aptly called Which Tab is Still Open. Because out of all the things in our newsletter and our podcast, there's stuff that comes up for us and it's just still hanging on our desktops, we still talk about it offline. So for Sy, like for you, which one, which tab is still open?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. We're going to talk about Daniel Perry and Donald Trump today.Jonathan Walton: Fun times.Sy Hoekstra: So I recently had an article in the newsletter that I highlighted as one of my resources, that is about the case of Daniel Perry, which I think kind of flew a little bit under the radar in the fervor of 2020. But he was a known racist, meaning we have now seen truckloads of social media posts and text messages and everything revealing his out and out racism, his fantasies about killing Black Lives Matter protesters, all these kinds of things. Who in the summer of 2020, during those protests, drove his car through a red light into a crowd of protesters. And he did not at that moment hurt anyone, but another, an Air Force vet, Daniel Perry's also a vet, but another Air Force vet named Garrett Foster, walked up to him carrying, openly carrying his, in Texas, legal assault rifle.He didn't point it at Daniel Perry, but he was carrying it. And he knocked on the window and motioned for Perry to roll his window down, and Perry shot him through the window five times and killed him. He was convicted of murder in 2023 by a jury. And the day after he was convicted, governor Greg Abbott republican governor of Texas said that he wanted his case to be reviewed for a full pardon, so that the pardons board could send him a recommendation to do it, which is the legal way that a governor can make a pardon in Texas. And that happened a couple weeks ago. Daniel Perry walked free with all of his civil rights restored, including his right to own firearms.Texas Monthly did some really good reporting on how completely bizarre this pardon is under Texas law, meaning they very clear, they kind of laid out how these pardons typically go. And the law very clearly says that a pardon is not to be considered for anyone who is still in prison, like hasn't finished their sentence, except under very exceptional circumstances, which are usually that like some new evidence of innocence has come to light.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the actual materials that the board reviewed were basically just his defense case where like him arguing that he was doing what he did out of self-defense. He was standing his ground, and that he was afraid of Foster and therefore allowed to use deadly force. In any other case, the remedy for that, if you think that's your defense and you were wrongly denied your defense by the jury is to appeal. Is to go through the appeals to which you have a right as a criminal defendant. And in this case, he became a bit of a conservative cult hero and the governor stepped in to get him out of jail. It was so bizarre. So the weird thing here is, for me at least, for these cases, for the cases surrounding like where someone has been killed either by the police or by an individual, it has always been pretty clear to me which way the case is going.Like if you're someone who's actually taken a, like me, gone to law school, taken a criminal law class, you've studied murder and then like the right to stand your ground and the right to self-defense, and when you can use deadly force, most of these cases are pretty predictable. I knew that the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and Walter Scott and Jordan Davis were going down. I knew that people were going to get off when they got off. Like those were not confusing. And that isn't because the law isn't racist or whatever, it's just the law doesn't take race into account at all. It just completely ignores, it has nothing to do with the cases, according to the law. So it's like this one was stunning.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Because if it had gone to the appellate judges, the judges who actually are thinking about like the whole system and the precedents that they're setting would say, “Hey, in an open carry state like Texas, we do not want to set a precedent where if someone who is legally, openly carrying a gun walks up to you, you can kill them.” That is not a precedent that they want to set. But this is not an appellate case, so we're not setting that precedent, we're just letting this racist murderer go. That's it.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And that is like what effectively Greg Abbott and the Board of Pardons in Texas have conspired to do. And I didn't know this was coming actually. I hadn't heard the news that he was calling for the pardon when it happened, but it's wild. And I just kind of wanted to give that additional context and hear what you're thinking about it, Jonathan, and then we'll get into Donald Trump a little bit.Normalizing Punishing Protestors and Lionizing MurderersJonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I think first thing for me is like this is a PG podcast. I won't use all the expletives that I would like to use. The reality of like Kyle Rittenhouse lives in Texas now. George Zimmerman, after he killed Trayvon Martin, he was in other altercations with people with guns. So this is not a person or a scenario that is new, which is sad and disappointing. But the reality of an institution stepping into enforce its institutionalized racism, is something that feels new to me in the environment that we're in. And what I mean by that is like, I think we now live in a society that desires for protestors and folks who are resistant to the system that oppresses and marginalizes people, if you believe that is happening.There are individuals and institutions that desire to punish that group of people. It is now normed that that group of people can be punished by anybody.Sy Hoekstra: If you're in the right state.Jonathan Walton: Well, I won't even say the right state, but I almost think if you can get caught in the zeitgeist of a certain media attention, then you will be lauded as someone who did the right thing.Sy Hoekstra: Oh yeah. Even if you might still end up in jail.Jonathan Walton: Even if you might still end up in jail, like you'll become a hero. And so the circumstances have been created where protesters can be punished by regular members of society, and then their quote- unquote punishment could be pardoned in the court of public opinion, and so much so you could end up being pardoned by the institution. There are going to be more protests on campus. There are going to be more protests in light of Trump's conviction and potential election. The chances of political violence and protests are very high, highly probable there're going to be thunderstorms. And what we're saying is like, let's give everybody lightning bolts [Sy laughs]. And we all know if this is a racially stratified society, which it is, if it's a class stratified society, which it is, then we will end up with things like Donald Trump getting convicted and becoming president.Sy Hoekstra: And the racial stratification is important to remember because people have pointed out, if there had been a Trump rally and someone had been killed, that like, not a chance that Greg Abbott does any of this, right?Jonathan Walton: The hallmark of White American folk religion is hypocrisy. If this were a person of color, there's no way that they would've got pardoned for shooting someone at a protest.The Criminal Legal System was Exceptionally Kind to Donald TrumpSy Hoekstra: And this is the connection to the Donald Trump case [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: Because despite the fact that he was convicted, he has been treated throughout this process in a way that no poor or BIPOC would, like no poor person or any BIPOC would ever be treated by the New York State courts. I can tell you that from experience [laughter] as an actual attorney in New York state. Donald Trump had 10 separate violations of a gag order, like he was held in contempt by the court and required to pay some money, which is significant, but nobody does that and doesn't spend some time in jail unless they are rich and famous and White. It was shocking to watch the amount of dancing around him and his comfort that the system does. And this is, pastor Berry mentioned Bryan Stevenson, another Bryan Stevenson quote.I've mentioned, we've mentioned Brian Stevenson so many times on this show [laughter]. But it's true. One of the things he says all the time is that the system treats you better if you're rich and White and guilty than if you're poor and BIPOC and innocent.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And, that's the demonstration. So the Trump indictments happened when we're recording this yesterday. Or the convictions, I mean. And in terms of what it'll do to the election, probably not much. In terms of what it'll like [laughs], like Jonathan was just saying, like this is the situation that we're in here. We don't have a lot of political analysis to bring you about this case because I don't think there's much political analysis to do except to continue to point out over and over again that this is not the way that people are treated by the criminal justice system. This is an exception to what is otherwise the rule.Outro and OuttakeOkay. I think we're going to end there. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Our theme song, as always is “Citizens” by John Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess. Transcripts by Joyce Ambale. And thank you all so much for joining us. Jonathan, thanks for being here. We will see you all again in two weeks.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me was like the amount of work that he went through to make this film. I'm challenged to do that work so that I have something substantial to pass on to Maya and Everest, just so I can communicate with the same amount of intimacy that he did.Sy Hoekstra: So now you're going to go make a documentary about Juneteenth, is what you're saying?Jonathan Walton: [deep exhale, and Sy laughs] At least a reel [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: A reel… yeah, those are pretty much the same I'd say. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ktfpress.com/subscribe

Walter Scott, Former ECU Defensive Lineman and Super Bowl Champ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thesportsobj/support

Walter Scott 

durée : 00:35:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Philippe Garbit - "Walter Scott, une gloire européenne" tel était le titre de la grande conférence donnée par Raymond Las Vergnas, le 17 août 1971, sur France Culture. Elle permettait d'appréhender la gloire exceptionnelle que connue l'écrivain écossais auteur de "Quentin Durward" et "Ivanhoé".

What shall we talk about this week? Probably not really about this comic book. How about we talk about a specific organ that is explicitly talked about in this issue? Yes, I am talking about hair.....wait....no....that is not right......I am talking about the heart. But what heart are we talking about?  First of all, I will go ahead and give all credit to Wikipedia for what you are about to read. I am not that original. And I really do not want to be that creative. I think this is just more fun. Heart is an American rock band formed in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. The band evolved from previous projects led by founding members Roger Fisher (guitar) and Steve Fossen (bass guitar), including The Army (1967–1969), Hocus Pocus (1969–1970), and White Heart (1970–1973). Heart is a framework developed by Google to help the products and development teams to make decisions that serve business and user-centered. Heart is a framework for mobile design and metrics. It is an acronym that stands for happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success. Included by Gartner as a design approach that accommodates mobile interface issues such as partial user attention and interruption. Heart is a 1987 American sports drama film directed by James Lemmo (in his directorial debut), from a screenplay by Lemmo and Randy Jurgensen, who also produced the film. It stars Brad Davis, Jesse Doran, Steve Buscemi, Frank Adu, Sam Gray, Billy Costello, and Frances Fisher. A punch-drunk boxer is set up as an easy win for an up-and-coming young boxer in this melodrama. The highlight of the film is the performance of Steve Buscemi as the oily, mob-connected fight promoter Nicky. Eddie (Brad Davis) is the addle-brained boxer Nicky hangs out to dry for quick money. Heart of Midlothian Football Club, commonly known as Hearts, is a professional football club in Edinburgh, Scotland. The team competes in the Scottish Premiership, the top division of Scottish football. Hearts, the oldest and most successful football club in the Scottish capital, was formed in 1874, its name influenced by Walter Scott's novel The Heart of Midlothian. The club crest is based on the Heart of Midlothian mosaic on the city's Royal Mile; the team's colors are maroon and white. The Heart Nebula (also known as the Running dog nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190) is an emission nebula, 7500 light years away from Earth and located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. It displays glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes. "Heart" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their second studio album, Actually (1987). It was released as the album's fourth and final single on 21 March 1988 by Parlophone. The song topped the UK Singles Chart for three weeks in April 1988, becoming the duo's fourth and final chart-topper to date in the United Kingdom. Its music video was directed by Jack Bond and filmed in Yugoslavia. The group had initially written the song for Madonna, though they never asked her to record it, instead keeping it for themselves. Heart Peaks, originally known as the Heart Mountains, is a mountain massif in the Northern Interior of British Columbia, Canada. It is 90 km (56 mi) northwest of the small community of Telegraph Creek and just southwest of Callison Ranch. With a maximum elevation of 2,012 m (6,601 ft), it rises above the surrounding landscape on the Nahlin Plateau, which is part of the western Stikine Plateau. Heart Peaks has been an area of prospecting since the 1980s with the discovery of precious metals. The Heart is a 2014 realistic and medical fiction novel by the French author Maylis de Kerangal. It chronicles the events immediately following the death of 19-year-old Simon Limbres in a car accident. In particular, The Heart focuses on the transplantation of Simon's heart and how it affects those involved in the process, including Simon's parents, the physicians, the nurses, the organ transplant coordinators, the recipient, and the recipient's family, over the course of twenty-four hours.   Check out the pictures from this issue:  https://jeffandrickpresent.wordpress.com/2024/04/18/avengers-academy-33-what-the-heart-wants-part-2/   We also have some merchandise over at Redbubble. We have a couple of nifty shirts for sale. https://www.redbubble.com/people/jeffrickpresent/?asc=u   You can also subscribe and listen to us on YouTube!  Our show supports the Hero Initiative, Helping Comic Creators in Need.  http://www.heroinitiative.org/ Eighties Action by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3703-eighties-action License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Clap Along With Me by Sascha Ende Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/12234-clap-along-with-me License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

====================================================SUSCRIBETEhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNpffyr-7_zP1x1lS89ByaQ?sub_confirmation=1=======================================================================DECIDETE HOYDevoción Matutina para Jóvenes 2024Narrado por: Daniel RamosDesde: Connecticut, Estados Unidos===================|| www.drministries.org ||===================05 DE MAYOUNA BEBIDA ALBOROTADORA«El vino hace insolente al hombre; las bebidas fuertes lo alborotan; bajo sus efectos nadie actúa sabiamente» (Proverbios 20: 1). Las bebidas alcohólicas se han convertido en un ingrediente indispensable en las fiestas, inauguraciones, banquetes, reuniones sociales y hasta en las comidas de cada día. La gente se deleita haciendo brindis y saboreando sus copas de vino sin pensar siquiera en que introduce en la sangre un compuesto químico que afecta el funcionamiento del cerebro pocos minutos después de tomarlas, y que con el tiempo perjudica la mayor parte de sus órganos internos. A continuación, mencionamos algunos efectos perjudiciales de las bebidas alcohólicas. Efectos sobre el cerebro. El alcohol destruye las células del cerebro o neuronas. Aunque el cuerpo puede reparar la mayoría de sus células, no puede hacer lo mismo con las del cerebro. Esto quiere decir que el daño es permanente. Efecto del alcohol sobre el hígado. La grave enfermedad degenerativa y mortal del hígado llamada cirrosis es ocho veces más frecuente entre los alcohólicos que entre los abstemios. Efectos del alcohol sobre la sangre. El alcohol aglutina los glóbulos rojos y dificulta su circulación por los capilares, lo que afecta el aporte de nutrientes y oxígeno al cerebro y el corazón, perjudicándolos gravemente. Efecto del alcohol sobre las glándulas sexuales. El consumo de bebidas alcohólicas termina por producir envejecimiento prematuro (senilidad), incluyendo mal funcionamiento y degeneración de las glándulas masculinas. El gran escritor inglés Shakespeare tenía razón cuando escribió hace cuatrocientos años que el vino «despierta el deseo, pero dificulta su satisfacción», porque el alcohol provoca impotencia. Además de lo anterior, el alcohol daña los intestinos, el páncreas, los huesos, las manos y los pies. El escritor británico Walter Scott decía: «De todos los vicios, el alcohol es el más incompatible con la grandeza». Por eso Dios recomienda a jóvenes y adultos: «No te fijes en el vino. ¡Qué rojo se pone y cómo brilla en la copa! ¡Con qué suavidad se resbala!» (Proverbios 23: 31). En cambio, nos exhorta: «En todo caso, lo mismo si comen, que si beben, que si hacen cualquier otra cosa, háganlo todo para la gloria de Dios» (1 Corintios 10: 31). Al glorificar hoy a Dios con tus acciones, e incluso con la elección de tus alimentos y bebidas, te preparas para vivir con él por toda la eternidad. 

Legend has it that Death Valley Scotty built his castle on top of his secret gold mine that funded this lavish house. But the true story is even more improbable and interesting!Hidden in the green oasis of Grapevine Canyon in far northern Death Valley is the Death Valley Ranch, or "Scotty's Castle" as it is more commonly known.Walter Scott was a rowdy and shady character, with little luck in gold prospecting but great luck in spending investor's money. Albert Mussey Johnson was a well-respected Chicago insurance magnate. The two could not have been more different.Convinced to invest in Scotty's mine, Mr. Johnson gave thousands of dollars to Scotty over the next several years. Unfortunately, Scotty never delivered the gold. Undaunted, Mr. Johnson finally decided to take a look at the gold mine on a personal tour of Death Valley. Scotty took Mr. Johnson on a grueling trek by horseback through Death Valley. Although he never saw Scotty's mine and was most certainly being swindled, Mr. Johnson did not seem to mind. He had found riches in the desert far greater than those that glitter.In 1920 Albert Mussey Johnson built the house as a vacation getaway for himself and his wife Bessie.Walter Scott, known as "Death Valley Scotty," convinced everyone that he had built the castle with money from his rich secret mines in the area. You will find the full transcript at https://interspanish.buzzsprout.comAs always, I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback about the show. You can reach out to me :Email me episode suggestions to: InterSpanishPodcast@gmail.comYouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@interspanishpodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/interspanishPodcast/about/?ref=page_internalInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/interspanish/Listen: https://interspanish.buzzsprout.com/shareTwitter: https://twitter.com/InterSpanishPod

Bianca Bosker, journalist and author of Get the Picture, talks about: The genesis of her deep dive into the art world - working with gallerists and artists, doing art fairs and galleries with collectors, and doing a stint as a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum – which largely came out of her need to learn whether she could learn to ‘see' like an artist, as opposed to a ‘normie Philistine,' as she was called by many (she was also, as a journalist, called “the enemy”); the elitism, opacity and various exclusionary art world rules she discovered from dealers and artists she encountered through her immersion process, and how “dishearteningly little” artists themselves often knew about how the art world works; how parts of the art world use secrecy as part of their survival, to build mystique, among other reasons; how she worked for five different artists in the course of researching the book, but ultimately only wrote explicitly about two – Julie Curtiss and Amana Alfieri – in the book; how Context – everything about the artist (social cache, etc.) EXCEPT the art itself is often overly valued, and something she pushed back against; how she was drawn to working with emerging artists, and wound up working with the painter Julie Curtiss at a turning point moment in her career, in which she was both starting to make a living from her work but also getting bullied on social media for her work's huge price escalation on the secondary market; how brave it was for Julie to let Bianca so thoroughly into her studio and make herself so vulnerable; and why she got so pumped after making sales while on the floor of the Untitled Art Fair with Denny Dimin gallery, without actually getting any payment for those sales (due to journalistic integrity).

In anticipation of our upcoming sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, “Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination,” this week we are re-airing a previous episode with Jason Baxter, our conference's special keynote speaker. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks sit down for a special conversation with Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis. Jason is a speaker, writer, and college professor who writes primarily on medieval thought and is especially interested in Lewis' ideas. You can find out more about him and his books at JasonMBaxter.com. Our hosts and Jason discuss a wide range of ideas, including the values of literature, the sacramental view of reality, why it is important to understand medieval thought, the “problem” of paganism in Lewis' writings, and how to approach reading ancient and medieval literature. Commonplace Quotes: My part has been merely that of Walter Scott's Old Mortality, who busied himself in clearing the moss, and bringing back to light the words, on the gravestones of the dead who seemed to him to have served humanity. This needs to be done and redone, generation after generation, in a world where there persists always a strong tendency to read newer writers, not because they are better, but because they are newer. The moss grows fast, and ceaselessly. F. L. Lucas It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again. Statford Caldecott It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. C. S. Lewis, from “De Descriptione Temporum” What then is the good of–what is even the defense for–occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid in our own person?…The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves…[In] reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. C. S. Lewis Victory by C. S. Lewis Roland is dead, Cuchulain's crest is low, The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust, And Helen's eyes and Iseult's lips are dust And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow. The faerie people from our woods are gone, No Dryads have I found in all our trees, No Triton blows his horn about our seas And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon. The ancient songs they wither as the grass And waste as doth a garment waxen old, All poets have been fools who thought to mould A monument more durable than brass. For these decay: but not for that decays The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man That never rested yet since life began From striving with red Nature and her ways. Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft That they who watch the ages may not doubt. Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod, Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head And higher-till the beast become a god. Book List: Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth Century Minds by F. L. Lucas Transposition by C. S. Lewis The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis The Divine Comedy by Dante Nicholas of Cusa The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius Confessions by St. Augustine Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let's get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Sergio C Fanjul nos presenta El padre del fuego (Ed. Aguilar), su nuevo libro, en el que ilumina la aventura de la paternidad y el desamparo de la orfandad, dos experiencias radicales que en su caso se solaparon en el tiempo. En su sección, Ignacio Elguero pone otros títulos sobre la mesa: el cómic Mickey en el campo de Gurs (Ed. Reino de Cordelia), que se adelantó cincuenta años al Maus de Spiegelman a la hora de retratar el horror nazi a través de las aventuras de un animal, Napoleón, un retrato imparcial (Ed. Fórcola), una de las nueve novelas que Walter Scott dedicó al emperador francés, y Pequeño hablante (Ed. Alfaguara), volumen en el que Andrés Neuman se rinde a la fascinación de los aprendizajes de la infancia. Además, Javier Lostalé nos lee unos versos de Vislumbres (Ed. Huerga y fierro), el nuevo poemario de Luis Marigómez, que dialoga con la fotografía y la tradición oriental.  Luego Sergio C Fanjul se pone el traje de colaborador para hablarnos de Los escorpiones (Ed. Lumen), la monumental novela de la joven escritora Sara Barquinero, que se ha convertido en uno de los fenómenos de la temporada gracias a su ambición y sus múltiples referencias literarias. Terminamos el programa en compañía de Mariano Peyrou, que esta vez disecciona los versos de La amiga (Ed. Pre-Textos), poemario de la legendaria Marina Tsvietáieva que narra la apasionada historia de amor entre la poeta y la también escritora Sofía Parnok y que ahora podemos leer en una traducción de Reyes García Burdeus.Escuchar audio

This week, we're joined in The Crannog by a very special guest, Kirsty, from Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott himself! It's a slightly longer episode this week but we get our teeth into lots of great stories about the folkloric themes in Scott's work

Today's guests are Dr. Melissa Burt and Dr. Emily Fischer, who are part of a group called the Science Moms. The Science Moms are a consortium of climate scientists who are also mothers and who are, in their words, working to give our children the planet they deserve. They aim to demystify climate science and motivate everyday moms to demand climate change plans and solutions.Dr. Burt is an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University with a focus on arctic clouds, radiation and sea ice, and the assistant dean for diversity and inclusion in the school's Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering. Dr. Fischer is an associate professor also in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. She also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the CSU School of Global Environmental Sustainability.A few months ago, we took to social media to see who could talk more about kids and climate change. The Science Moms were recommended by a huge number of folks that we know and trust. So here we are. Enjoy the show!In this episode, we cover: [2:36] Background of Dr. Melissa Burt and Dr. Emily Fischer[7:26] An overview of the Science Moms [9:01] Concerns parents have when talking to kids about climate change[10:47] How to engage kids of different ages on climate [16:39] How to feel confident in discussing climate change without being an expert[20:09] Political implications of discussing climate change[27:31] Myth vs. fact about climate change[29:41] Examples of collective action for parents and kids[33:41] Resources for learning more about Science MomsEpisode recorded on Feb 5, 2024 (Published on Feb 12, 2024) Get connected with MCJ: Jason Jacobs X / LinkedInCody Simms X / LinkedInMCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube*If you liked this episode, please consider giving us a review! You can also reach us via email at content@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Have you ever wondered how a legal luminary deftly maneuvers the intricate intersections of law, policy, and diversity? Buckle up for an exciting episode of the Heart of Law as our seasoned host, Mirena Umizaj takes you on a ride through the professional journey of Attorney Marlon Kimpson, a member of Motley Rice LLC, who much like a skilled driver, knows that "when you've got gas in the tank, you push the pedal." Experience the thrill of exploring Marlon Kimpson's significant litigation experiences as he offers valuable insights into his role as a state senator and the importance of maintaining a diverse legal practice.  As a prominent member of Motley Rice LLC, Marlon Kimpson's practice encompasses a diverse range of legal areas, including aviation, consumer fraud protection, personal injury, wrongful death, securities litigation, technology, and media transportation. Notably, his impactful contributions extend to the realm of opioid litigation, where he played a pivotal role in securing an impressive $500 million for the state of South Carolina. Beyond the courtroom, Marlon Kimpson has a rich history in public service, having dedicated nearly a decade to representing the citizens of Charleston and Dorchester counties as the former South Carolina state senator for District 42. Recognizing his impactful advocacy, President Biden appointed him to the White House Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations in 2023. With a passion for impactful giving, Marlon Kimpson describes himself as "all of that & a bag of chips," actively contributing to his family, law firm, community, state, and the country.  In an engaging opening to their conversation, Mirena dives straight into the heart of Marlon Kimpson's relentless drive, asking, "How do you fill-up the tank?" With a reflective tone, Kimpson traces the roots of his tenacity to his transformative years at Morehouse College, where the inspiring words of African American orators and the camaraderie of a strong brotherhood deeply ingrained in him the ethos to strive for excellence in every pursuit relentlessly. His journey continued with a detour into banking after an initial setback in law school admissions due to LSAT scores, a pivotal period that reinforced his belief in finding one's true calling. This realization propelled him back to his legal aspirations, leading to a federal clerkship with the first African American judge in South Carolina, Matthew J. Perry, and eventually to a defining summer clerkship with a major defense firm, paving the way for his successful legal career at Motley Rice LLC.  As Marlon Kimpson reflects on his experience at Motley Rice LLC, he details how it marked a significant chapter in his career, where he initially 'cut his teeth' on complex asbestos cases, advocating for those affected by industrial negligence. As his expertise grew, he shifted his focus to aviation litigation post-9/11, where he addressed global safety concerns and their impact on marginalized communities. His diverse legal skills were further demonstrated through his involvement in securing a historic $800 million settlement in the Twitter securities litigation. Further reflecting on the firm's progression, Marlon Kimpson underscores the importance of diversity in legal practice, viewing it not just as a facet of inclusivity but as a crucial strategic asset in understanding and representing diverse client experiences.  As their conversation transitions, Mirena engages Marlon Kimpson in a discussion about his impactful tenure as a state senator, urging him to delve into pivotal moments, including his instrumental role in co-authoring the Body Camera Act following the tragic Walter Scott shooting. Furthermore, their dialogue extends to his recent presidential appointment, where he continues interweaving his legal expertise with his dedication to public service and societal advancement. As their conversation nears its close, they touch upon the delicate balance between work and personal life, with Marlon Kimpson emphasizing the importance of diversifying one's personal life, adhering to the principle of "not putting all one's eggs in one basket"—a guiding philosophy that he strives to impart to his children. With an eye on the future, he plans to explore various opportunities, ranging from potential business ventures to writing and speaking engagements. Yet, Marlon Kimpson's determination remains unwavering as he expresses his desire to continue at full throttle, savoring the rich interplay between his law practice, involvement in politics, and the well-being of his children.

Welcome to "The Adams Archive," where we delve into the intricate weave of societal influences and global challenges. In our thought-provoking episode "Foundations and Frontiers," we explore the interplay between the development of political beliefs, the ethical quandaries of cloning, and the complexities of environmental activism. Episode Summary: This episode offers a deep dive into the foundational elements that shape our political ideologies and how these perspectives intersect with contemporary issues like the ethics of cloning and the paradoxes in environmental advocacy. We take you on a journey through these interconnected realms, providing a nuanced understanding of these critical topics. Segment on Political Socialization: We begin by unraveling the layers of political socialization. Discover how familial interactions, educational systems, and media landscapes contribute to the molding of our political identities from a young age. Segment on Cloning Ethics: Venturing into the realm of biotechnology, we examine the ethical implications and societal impacts of cloning. This segment explores the moral dilemmas, regulatory challenges, and public perceptions surrounding this controversial scientific frontier. Segment on Environmental Paradoxes: In our discussion on environmental issues, we confront the ironies and complexities of modern environmental movements. We analyze the actions and rhetoric of global forums and key figures, assessing how their approaches align or conflict with various political ideologies. Call to Action: Dive deeper into these vital discussions by subscribing to "The Adams Archive" on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and other platforms. Join our social media community for ongoing conversations and updates. All the Links: Access all our content easily at https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams, your gateway to our episodes, social media, and additional resources. ----more---- Full Transcription:  Adams Archive.  Hello, you beautiful people and welcome to the Adams Archive. My name is Austin Adams and thank you so much for listening today. On today's episode, we're going to go through some pretty wild current event topics, including the fact that the World Economic Forum in their meeting in Davos has decided that it is now bad for the environment for you to drink. Coffee. Could you imagine that? Flying hundreds of miles across the ocean in your private jet, only to talk about how it is now bad for the environment for you to drink coffee. So we'll touch on that. After that, we'll get into a conversation surrounding how scientists in China have now successfully cloned a monkey for the first time that has survived in good health.  We'll talk about what that means, including the fact that there was 112 failed attempts,  which is only, you know, pretty terrifying to think about. What the other monkeys went through to actually get there. Now, a lot of people are talking about how this is actually going to have something to do with human cloning, obviously, because that's the end result of all of this. And there's some arguments that that's already happening. So we will talk about that. Then we will dive into a conversation about the current situations between Rhonda Santus dropping out of the presidential election, Nikki Haley getting peppered and just chirped. Constantly at all of the events that she's at, including the fact that, uh, there was a recent article that talked about how she had an affidavit come out from a recent accuser of her being an adulterer, uh, to her then active duty husband. Uh, we will also touch on another man who starts discussing with her about how she's not going to be Trump and that she should be spending all of her hundreds of millions of dollars simply. Giving it to homeless veterans, which I guess I agree with. Uh, so we'll talk about Nikki Haley. We'll even talk about the fact that Nikki Haley said that she wasn't allowed in a beauty pageant because she was Indian because they didn't know where to place her, which is pretty comical. All right. So that will be our current events. Then we will dive into the deep dive conversation this week, which is going to be the dark psychology behind voting. Now, that will include a conversation surrounding, uh, political socialization, which is basically the idea of how you got to vote the way that you vote. Now, we all tend to think that we think for ourselves, but a lot of people don't understand the fact that there's a lot of circumstances that actually go into  why you vote the way that you do.  So, we'll talk about all that. And there's some pretty surprising things in that that I found when doing my research. Anything from the music you listen to, to the social media apps that you use consistently, all the way down to the  income class and the city that you grew up in. There's, there's so many little different things in here. And then we'll talk about some different dark arts techniques that politicians use in order to try to gain your  So all of that and more stick around the longer you stick around, the deeper we get. So go ahead and subscribe, leave a five star review, whether you're on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, you can join us on YouTube, by the way. Uh, if you go onto YouTube, type in the Adams archive, you can see all the articles, all the videos that we're discussing here, and I will see you there, but let's. Jump into it.  The Adams archive.  All right, let's jump into it. The very first topic that we're going to be discussing today is going to be that the world economic forum. If you don't know the world economic forum is a meeting of a bunch of. Elites or multibillionaires that think that they can control the general population. They meet once a year in Davos in Switzerland and their fearless leader is the infamous Claus Schwab. And so they got together this year and decided that the hot topic that they were going to discuss is the fact that it is now bad for our environment for you to drink. Coffee,  like I said earlier, they fly hundreds of thousands, thousands of miles to get there in their private jets, just to tell you that you shouldn't be drinking coffee all the while they're the ones who are, I don't know, profiting from your extra, uh, ability to actually do things in the morning as a result. So we have a video here, um, this comes from, uh, let's see, the title of this article is coffee is bad for the environment claims world economic. Members,  and it says the consumption of coffee is causing CO2 to populate the earth to pollute the environment and unelected bureaucrats Attending the World Economic Forum claimed speaking last Wednesday at the globalist Confab in Davos, Switzerland Swiss banker Hubert Keller said coffee drinkers should be mindful They're contributing tons of co2 pollution into the atmosphere  Hmm.  Basically, the coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tons of CO2 per ton of coffee, Cowher said. So, we should all know that. This is, every time we drink coffee, we are basically putting CO2 into the environment. Could you imagine? And one of the reasons is because most of the coffee plantations and most of the coffee is produced through monoculture, and monoculture is also affected by climate change.  Now at this meeting, they are the very biggest topic this year. So you can actually go to the world economic forums website and you can look at, they do a analysis of what are the biggest threats to the world each and every year,  and lo and behold, this year's was. Climate change.  Hmm.  Now, that's obviously the next big money grab after the end of COVID 19. Now, that's to be determined, I guess, when you have the variant X that's coming up and all that stuff. Um, but climate change is obviously the biggest money grab. And so when we look at conversations surrounding them trying to, I don't know, condemn you for drinking coffee.  Just is unbelievable to me. Um, so this is, uh, this is the video. It comes from that Swiss banker and his name is  who cares? Here we go.  For the session and you raised the coffee example. I'd love just to give you the chance to Basically, the coffee that we all drink, um, emits between 15 and 20 ton of CO2 per ton of coffee. So, we should all know that. This is every time we drink coffee, we are basically putting CO2 into the atmosphere.  Um, the other, and one of the reasons is because most of the coffee plantation, or most of the coffee is produced through monoculture.  And, um, and, and monoculture is also affected by climate change. Um, the quality of these nature assets is, uh, deteriorating quite rapidly.  Now that's a conversation for another day is like, what is monoculture, uh, monoculture agriculture is, it is absolutely, uh, a completely ineffective way to, to do things and it actually poisons your food there. There's a whole bunch of our stuff that you can read up on monoculture, um, agriculture, but. Just the idea that all of these pompous assholes go meet up in some mountain somewhere to tell you that you shouldn't drink coffee is absolutely comical. Alright, that brings us to our next article, which says that, uh, this comes from, uh, the Telegraph. And this was something that came across, I had actually like a, a, a notice on my phone about this. And I, I've talked about some of these things before, whether it be the, uh, chimeras that were coming out of China. Whether it was the sheep that was cloned, whether it was like the baby pods that they were talking about, uh, you know, basically taking, uh, the sperm of the father and the egg of the mother and putting it in this like pod that they were going to grow a human out of. Um, and then more recently even creating children from stem cells, which is the most probably dystopian of all of this, but this is just along those lines. And so.  In China, they cloned a monkey for the first time that survived in good health after 112 failed attempts. Now it says that Chinese scientists used the same method that made Dolly the sheep in 1996, uh, but it has lived longer than any other cloned primate. Now they, they, I think that they gave this thing a name, this one, not Dolly. I think it's called Retro.  Yeah, that's the monkey's name. The cloned monkey's name is Retro. A monkey has been successfully cloned by Chinese scientists and in the world's first has so far lived for two years. Researchers have cloned primates before using the same method that created Dowie the sheep in 1996, but none have. Ever lived for long, either dying before birth or shortly afterwards. Now that was a conversation that I brought up last time, when we're talking about the human baby pods and you know, the, the human cloning is like, how many times are you going to go through this, whether it's the stem cell research, whatever it is. How many research subjects, the chimeras  fill in the blank. How many research subjects do you have to go through until you successfully create a clone? Right. And they say 112. I'm sure they would rather not have, have people. You know, beating down their door to shut them down. So I'm, I'm sure that number is multiples higher than what they're reporting there. Just like I'm sure it would be if they started to clone humans, if they started these little weird baby pods, if they made these stem cell babies, chimeras, whatever it is, there's going to be a massive amount of casualties and gross scientific experimentation that goes into it. So to me. Anything and everything that revolves creating life that doesn't have to do with, you know, any scientist that's sitting there with a, you know, two beakers pouring them together or whatever the hell type of stuff they're doing here, um, is just sick. It's, it's, it's sickening to me because the, the, the torture that they put these, you know, even the two days of the trying to clone, uh, these monkeys or the, the chimeras or whatever it is, is just the, the amount of agony and the, the torture that they must go through, uh, as a result of getting this one cloned monkey. And, and, and for what reason, like what, what is the goal of this? Why, why, what is the problem that we have to start cloning things? What is wrong with reproduction current state?  Well, I'll tell you what's wrong with that. You want to get deeper and deeper into that is, is you'll understand the idea that they don't want you and then this was something that I talked about with the baby pods. What's the most concerning to that to me is that that's no longer your property, you, you, you know, you remove the mother and the father from, from the reproductive process. Then you remove the, the hormones that are released when that baby is born. And as a result, you, you remove the protective shelter, the, the, the hormones, the, the, uh, um, You know, the motherly instincts that come as a result of birthing a child, that come as a result of having a child that is half your DNA and half the DNA of your spouse. Now you, I don't know, go to a government center and pay five grand or whatever, and now they get to create a baby on your behalf. Only by the way, it's not your baby. It's their property. They created it. You did not create it. And, and so that is one of the most Dystopian ideas let alone the idea that they can start to interject whatever types of CRISPR technology that they want to to make the the child the the Monkey, whatever it is more agreeable more likely to be and this will actually even lead us into our next conversation To be more agreeable to be less aggressive to have different in more  More  Uh, personality traits that are going to lead them to vote a certain way, that are going to lead them to act a certain way, that are going to lead them to be less or more docile and less likely to revolt, whatever it is, when you, when you take reproduction, and you give that to the government,  right, you have China now cloning monkeys, for what end? I don't think they just want to clone monkeys. That's obviously not the goal. The goal is to clone humans. But why?  Why?  So let's, let's finish this article. It says, however, a modified technique designed to create a stronger placenta has seen a rhesus monkey be cloned,  be born and live healthily for more than two years, making it the longest lived primate clone yet. The animal was labeled retro. Only one birth was successful from a total of 113 attempts.  So, they tortured a hundred and twelve monkeys to create one.  The process, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, involves extracting the genetic information from a standard cell and implanting it into an egg from another monkey that has had its own genetic material removed.  Now they have this cute little diagram  of  how they cloned this monkey, um, but who cares? To me, that's the whole conversation, right?  I think that, you know, even brings up an interesting conversation about surrogacy and, uh, you know, IVF and like, there's, there's definitely more to be talked about there, but I do think to me, this is highly concerning because you see exactly where this is going. We know what the end goal is,  but why is that the end goal? Because we can, and I think that's probably the fair answer to all of these scientists, right? It's like the people who are commissioning these scientists to do these types of experiments. They have the goal in mind, right? They, they have an idea of what, what they want to do this for. And it's going to be profitable,  right? It's going to be a reason that they can make money off of it. Right? And that, that was the baby pods, right? Like imagine Epstein Island having a whole lower layer, uh, underneath his island of baby pods. Like just, just all of the horrific things. And if you haven't heard of like the.  Um, offshore, like, child trafficking stuff is just horrific, and, and they don't have social security numbers, they don't have moms, they don't have dads, nobody's looking after them, and, and, and, just,  there's no reason to open up this box, there's nothing good behind it, absolutely nothing, what, what possibly could come from this that would be good, and then you get into the, the, um,  Philosophical conversations. Does, does this monkey have, or human down the road, does it have a soul? Is it, is it, uh, you know, is it from a religious perspective? Is it, is it a child of God? Is it, is it something that is going to, uh, have similar traits even? Is it going to be sociable? Like, there, there's so much that will go into this. And, and just Why? Why do you want to do this? Right? But scientists want to do it because A, they're getting paid lots of money to do it, but also B, because they just want to see if they can do it, right? Scientists have a certain type of personality where they, they just want to see if they can make something happen, right? You have a hypothesis, you put it to the test, and all of a sudden you're creating an army of Lifeless, soulless, monkey human hybrids.  To me, there's just, there's nothing good behind that wall. And this is just another step towards that. Another step towards whatever it is the reason, right? There's so many different ways that you could go with that, that is completely dystopian. And I can't think of a single good scenario that would come from Human cloning. I just can't. I, I, there's, there's zero, zero scenarios where that's a good thing for humanity. Especially in a world where they're telling us that we're overpopulating, when we're obviously not. The population's on a decline.  If, if we're overpopulating on our own and reproducing  way too much, according to them,  why are you trying to clone humans? What's, what's the point of that  anyways. So let's segue into our next conversation. This one is more recent and about politics and what that drives us from the last conversation into, and what I mentioned earlier is they can change with CRISPR technology, how. You might vote by changing certain personality traits. They make you a little bit less aggressive. They make you a little bit more agreeable. They make you a little bit more creative. And a little bit less, I don't know, uh, productive, whatever it is. There's so many little traits within your genes that are encoded inside of your body. And one thing that I was wondering is what is nature and what is nurture, right? Why do we vote the way that we vote? And do we Um, and I say we just like  Americans do, are we born likely to vote one way or the other? The answer is yes. Um, and we'll look at that in just a minute as to why, but before we do that, let's get a little bit of election updates because Ron DeSantis has officially dropped out  of the presidential race and decided to endorse. Donald Trump,  and this comes from W. M. U. R. nine A. B. C. And it says, uh, it is clear to me that majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. You think  I, uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure he just obliterated every single person, uh, within the primary, um, in the caucus in Iowa. And so, you know, he saw the vague drop out almost almost immediately. We saw it. Ron DeSantis drop out almost immediately. And I think the Ron DeSantis hype train was like pretty good at the beginning. I would, it would be really interesting to look at the political marketing failure that was Ron DeSantis campaign, because he had so much political steam. He had, he had so many people behind him that were so pro Ron DeSantis that loved his ideas coming out of COVID. He was like the COVID king. You know, all the while, while Donald Trump being, you know, was getting flack, was, was being talked down upon for the way that he, you know, gave a medal to, to Fauci, the way that he, you know, boasted about lockdowns and certain things like that is, is, and so simultaneously, Ron DeSantis should have come out of this, like with a ton of steam, with a ton of, uh, you know, traction going into the election, and, and now what we see is that it, as soon as Ron DeSantis opened his mouth on a debate uh, stage, he just got obliterated. Even when we saw Gavin Newsom against Ron DeSantis and I'm not against Ron DeSantis. I think that again, his policies, that his track record during COVID was absolutely phenomenal. He was one of the only people speaking out one of the only people trying not to close down businesses. There's a lot of reasons that a lot of people should have been very pro DeSantis.  I think he shook the hornet's nest with Donald Trump. Right? And I think, you know, the  desanctimonious, uh, tagline stuck a little bit. Um, but, to me, it's like, he should have, had he came out on the debate stage the way that Vivek did, had he come out with the track record that he did and a great marketing campaign, there's no reason that he shouldn't be the only one left.  But out of all four people that were on the stage and on the ballot for the caucus, the only one that's left now besides the obvious of Donald Trump is Nikki Haley, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. She is. 100 percent the Republican Hillary Clinton.  She, everything that comes out of her mouth is just a talking point from a war lobby. And  I haven't heard a single thing from her.  I think she had like one good. Exchange on the debate stage. But all I see from Nikki Haley is a a reoccurring talking point that is everything and anything that the lobbyists want. And you saw the one the one area that Donald Trump I think they said that he lost by one vote and I think that it was even changed that the fact that Um, he he actually ended up winning that area I'm not sure but there was out of a 90 or 100 99 of them were for Donald Trump and one of them was for Nikki Haley and by one vote So what you saw is the democrats in the areas that they were in where they could they actually went and voted in the GOP  caucus and voted for Nikki Haley,  so if  The Democrats want Nikki Haley,  then why would the Republicans, right? And if the war lobby wants Nikki Haley, then why would the Republicans?  And if every big money machine from, you know, I I'm, I'm just surprised she doesn't have a Pfizer tattoo on her arm, uh, that she's showing off to everybody, but you already see her pandering to the left.  So to me, it's, it's a little sad that the only two that we have left, because I do think that both Ron DeSantis and as much shit that I've talked about Vivek and, and all of the questions that I have about his history, whether it be about the Soros Foundation funding his, uh, his, his time at Yale, whether it be about his two years that he was on the world economic forums, young global leaders list only to, uh, tell them that, Hey, I didn't want that. Take that down. The only one that was inconvenient from him and he wasn't using it to, uh, get, it. seed round funding for his pharmaceutical startups. Um, so as much as, as much as I've talked bad about Vivek, Vivek or DeSantis are just absolutely a million times better up  potential candidates than Nikki Haley. So what that tells me, especially if you understand that her husband. Is, isn't some  tech mogul, right? He doesn't have billions of dollars. I'm not sure what her previous employment was, but I just doubt she has hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on one. I think it's New Hampshire, whatever. We're going to see a video where some guy goes and calls her out and says, Hey, you're going to spend a hundred million dollars campaigning against Donald Trump. And we already know you're going to lose. Why are you doing that? Why wouldn't you just go spend that money to help homeless veterans?  Well, the answer is that the political lobby is the one that's propping her up. That's where she's getting all of her money. The only reason that Nikki Haley is even relevant, the only reason she's standing on any of the stages she's standing on, is because she's literally has the, the war machine's hand and the pharmaceutical industry's hand up her ass telling her exactly what to say in every one of these exchanges.  And so it's, it's, It'll be interesting to see how long she sticks around. How long will they prop her up? Because I, there's absolutely zero chance. Like I bet you, if you go look at the, uh, betting books and you look at the odds of Nikki Haley winning the 2024 election is just.  Zero, you know, and if, and if there was any sort of reason, and I think this is something that Vivek said at one time or another that I talked about when he dropped out is the fact that, oh, well, they would never let Donald Trump actually, you know, get on the ballot. Something's going to happen. And, and.  I'm not saying something's not going to happen, this always could be that fact, and especially when you understand that Donald Trump is like one of the most, uh, contentious and hated people in the world to the most powerful people in the world, it's an absolute possibility that something not, not good happens, you know, he's been indicted for like the 115th time, um,  but the idea that Nikki Haley would be the one left in the running, and maybe that's their hope, I don't know, why would you spend a billion dollars to If there's a  1 percent chance, I don't know, maybe if you have hundreds of trillions of dollars like Raytheon, and uh, you know, Pfizer does, so, I don't know, it's very interesting. So there was a few conversations that came up about Nikki Haley. One of the ones that came up as a result was Nikki Haley made a comment. about her history growing up in the deep south, being brown.  Now,  I don't know about you, and maybe my eyes are deceiving me,  but to me, Nikki Haley  does not look brown. She looks like a white Suburban mother.  That's what she looks like. Now, she did grow up in a Indian family. I saw a picture of her family the other day, and her dad was in some traditional type Indian garb. And, um,  you know, but she, you know, if white privilege was a real thing, Nikki Haley would have it.  Not saying that it's a real thing.  But.  Here, here it is. Here comes Nikki Haley saying that she was, she was teased every day for being brown while in the deep south and that she has black friends.  Here we go.  We were the only Indian family in our small southern town.  I was teased every day for being brown.  So anyone that wants to question it can go back and look at what I've said on how hard it was to grow up in the deep south. As a brown girl, anybody can look at my record and see when Walter Scott was shot down by a dirty cop, how I made sure that the Walter Scott family didn't suffer because we put the first body camera bill in the country in place. Anybody can look at the fact that when we had nine amazing souls die in Mother Emanuel Church, I did something that no Republican or Democrat ever wanted to touch, which was call for the Confederate flag to come down because it would take two thirds of the House and Senate and was an impossible feat.  I don't know what you're implying with that, but what I will tell you is, saying that I had black friends is a source of pride. Saying that I had white friends is a source of pride. If you want to know what it was like growing up, I was disqualified from a beauty pageant because I wasn't white or black. Because they didn't know where to put me. So look, I know.  So let me get this straight. Nikki Haley  was disqualified from a beauty pageant because they didn't know whether she was white  or she was black.  Now,  I don't know If my math's off, just like my eyes are off, apparently, because I don't see a  brown woman in the deep south, I see a  white privilege card holding, uh, you know, suburban mom, but Nikki Haley was born in like 1972, I think. And Nikki Haley would have been in a beauty pageant, let's say 16 years later, almost in 1990.  Right, let's say she was 15, would have been 90,  72, 87, right? Like,  was there segregated beauty pageants in 1987?  Cuz I think I'm missing something here and and even if there was  You think they're gonna have a white and a black category and then you're gonna be like, hey guys I would like to participate and then they would say, uh White black are you white? Are you?  Uh, you're disqualified, like, do you think how that that's really how that conversation went? Or do you think that Nikki Haley is a liar?  Because I think Nikki Haley is just a liar. And we see that further shown by her actions, which we will see here in just a second, against her husband, which allegedly.  And I say allegedly because it's just a signed affidavit, just a signed affidavit, which, you know, means that if the person was lying, they would potentially go to jail, but just a signed affidavit stating that she cheated on her husband while  he was, I believe, while he was active duty. If not mistaken, potentially even like deployed. I don't know if that's correct, but I know he was active duty at the time. Um, so we'll go ahead and read that article. And that to me, like if, if you are cheating on your spouse, right? Like your spouse is you're like, if you have everybody in your whole world, and there's one person that you are going to give. All of your trust to one person that you are going to be the most loyal to one person that you're going to Absolutely not do anything to hurt. It is your spouse, right? Like when you get into a Marriage you're doing it because  well for a lot of reasons But you're doing it because you want to be with that person for the rest of your life Now if I'm your best friend and we've been best friends for 10 years 15 years and you cheat on your wife  I know that if you're not loyal to her, you're not gonna be loyal to me  If I'm your business partner and I find out that you cheated on your wife,  I know that the first opportunity that you get to make a little bit of money that screws me and my business over, you're going to do it. So I'm not going to be your business partner and I'm not going to be your best friend.  I know  that if you find yourself in this situation and  you are also running for office, how can I trust you as a candidate?  Right? So to me, that like, that goes back to the idea  that if If somebody, Nikki Haley is absolutely bought and paid for, she's going to do the thing that is aligned with what is in her, her, not even her family's, not even her, her, her  immediate family, but her best interest, Nikki Haley's best interest.  So let's go ahead and read this. This comes from the Postmillennial, and it says Nikki Haley allegedly cheated on her husband with lobbyist and communications consultant prior to  South Carolina governorship.  Yikes.  Uh,  court documents have revealed that Nikki Haley did in fact cheat on her husband before becoming governor, and that one of her lovers was a married South Carolina lobbyist.  She was  Having an affair with a lobbyist.  So not only are you taking their money,  but you're also,  you know,  Haley repeatedly denied that she'd been unfaithful to her husband, Michael. When allegations first broke in 2010, they've been married for 28 years.  And have two children together. According to the Daily Mail, the aforementioned lobbyist, Larry Marchant, Jr. And Haley's communications consultant, Will Foulkes admitted in signed affidavits that they both, they had both on separate occasions had affairs with the then future government. So not one. But two people, both signed affidavits. In his affidavit, Marchant said that he and Haley had sexual intercourse during a conference in Salt Lake City in June of 20, or 2008. I came forward publicly on this matter only after being contacted by the press and after hearing Rep Haley claim that she had been 100 percent faithful to her husband in response to the folks allegations, when I knew her statements were absolutely false.  Yikes. Um, so that to me says a lot, right? And that's not to say that somebody can't change and somebody can't, you know, go through a, a, a transformation and become loyal again. And, you know, I get it. Like,  but that sounds pretty shady. stuff to me, right? And like I said, if you are going into that situation and you have your one person in life that is like, that's my guy, that's, that is my girl. That is, that is going to be the, the mother of my children, the father of my children, uh, whatever that is, if you can't find it within yourself. To  conduct yourself in a manner that would align yourself with that trust that would align yourself It's just how are you gonna run for office and and let alone just even talk about the optics of this That how easy is this for them to bring this up? Now that's not to say that every single person that's been on one of these debate stages Doesn't have a ton of skeletons in their closet, which they do  But  this is one of them  Right? And especially with like a lobbyist. It wasn't even like her personal trainer or something. I don't know.  All right. Um, now I did have one last thing that I wanted to touch on and this is about Donald Trump. Donald Trump sent out a statement on truth and it said a president of the United States must have full immunity.  Without which it would be impossible for him or her to properly function. Now I found this to be an interesting statement. The reason that I think this is an interesting statement is I kind of wanted to talk this through with you guys and see if I agree. And I don't think that I do. I don't think a president should have full immunity. I think that  what, what is the, like,  I believe that there are certain things that a president has to do. I think that the presidential role is inherently a criminal job. You have to.  Murder people  you have to you know engage with shady foreign entities You have to run the CIA and the FBI which just in and of itself is going to come with illegal illicit activities as they've shown a track record for for  you know, however long since the you know, 47 when the FBI was or the CIA was created  But to me, it's like how could I absolutely disagree with this? I don't think a president should have immunity I think that yes, the job would be hard If you didn't have immunity,  that's the job. You have to do it within the guidelines of legality, because if there's no, if a president can get into office and immediately become unhinged and have absolute full immunity for every action that they've ever taken,  then, then, then what's, what. What are we doing here? Like, you just get to murder people, you get with no repercussions, you have no barriers and guidelines to the way that you have to dictate your actions, you don't have to follow the Geneva Convention, like, what would make you think that the president should have full immunity? So, I'll continue his statement, give you the full context, but it says, Without much, it would be impossible for him or her to properly function. Any mistake, even if well intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party at term's end.  I, I think in today's political landscape, that is true. That's what we're seeing here  is that Donald Trump has absolutely been a political witch hunt. Uh, you know, how, how many indictments does he have now? Like 30 or something. Um, how many states has he been indicted under? How many, how much of it is stuck? And really it's more about, to me, the precedence that this is going to set moving forward because then whoever gets out of office next time, same thing. Right. And so I understand the point. I understand the premise, but I just don't see how inaction that's an effective way to run a country. Is there any country that operates that way? Maybe Russia. Maybe Putin has like absolute immunity in North Korea and  China. But like, is that really what we're shooting for? Is North Korea, China, and China. Right.  You know, Russia's  type of, uh, you know, totalitarian regimes.  I don't think so. Um, even if well intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party. Even events that cross the line, quote unquote, must fall under total immunity, or it would be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad. There must be certainty. Example, you can't stop police from doing the job of strong and effective crime, Trump said, prevention because you want to guard against the occasional rogue cop or bad apple.  You can't stop police from doing the job of strong and effective crime prevention. Uh, sometimes you just have to live with the great, but slightly imperfect. All presidents must have complete and total presidential immunity or the authority and decisiveness of a president of the United States will be stripped and gone forever. Hopefully this will be an easy decision. God bless the Supreme Court.  And this says, if anything, presidents and politicians should be held to a higher legal standard, not a lower legal standard. And I think that his, his example of police, uh, just kind of defeats his entire argument there. I just don't see how that holds true because if you give police absolute immunity.  Then they're just gonna, like, I think that cops, people who sign up to be police are inherently good people. I do. I wholeheartedly believe that. I believe they generally have good intentions. But I also believe if you take a big enough sample size of people that there's going to be, as he quotes in here, bad apples. And that doesn't allow you to Just randomly walk down the street and, you know, not follow the, the force escalation protocols that are called for being in the police force. You still have guidelines and those guidelines that police have are far more stringent. And, and they get indicted or they, they get perceived or prosecuted probably at a far higher rate than, than any political person ever  as a result. They literally have body cameras in the middle of their body that, that follows the every move. Right? Like, so, to me, the argument falls apart, and I think it's a little self serving. Um, again, I don't think Trump is going to be found guilty of anything, and I don't believe that he should be. But I also just don't think that the precedent of setting the example that the president just can absolutely do no wrong is a good one. I just think it's a false premise, and that it will cause something horrific to happen, just like if you gave police absolute immunity. Um, the people who hold the positions of power, You know, with great power comes great responsibility, right?  Spider Man.  It's like you, you have to inherently have a microscope on you. And the law has to be in place because without it, you could just turn it into a complete totalitarian regime. You could do whatever you wanted when you get, you could, and especially when you're determining, you know, the, you're the, the head of the entire largest, strongest military in all of history. So  to me. I just don't agree. Um, so now that we've properly set the stage of what is going on in our current political landscape, this is going to bring us to our deep dive of the week and the deep dive of the week is going to be on the dark psychology of voting and political socialization. So political socialization is the idea  that essentially all of the things that happen in your life, all of the people that you've come in contact with, all of the key moments of your childhood, a lot of it has an impact. on your voting and who you vote for and what political party you end up being a part of. Um, so we even have a video that I'll show you by Jordan Peterson, um, but let me walk you through this.  So again, this is the go ahead and pull this up here for you  says, um, so we're going to walk through this and there's a complex intersection of psychology and politics, and we're going to aim to unravel the intricate web of factors that influence our political decisions and voter behavior. Our focus is the profound and often understated role of political socialization in shaping party affiliation and political identity.  Now. Let's begin by understanding what is political socialization, right? Sounds pretty, uh, you know, political science y, like, college, uh, terms that you were supposed to memorize, and it probably was. Um, but it's an important thing to understand. Because you have to see the other, at some point, the divisiveness has to clear. And you have to see that just across the aisle way could have been you. Could have been your, your dad, could have been your mom, could have been your, you know, otherwise things devolve into, uh, you know,  what we saw in the revol or the, you know, things devolve into chaos and violence, right? So, so, I think this is an important conversation. I think it's just an interesting one anyways because there's so many small, minute points, whether it be  the music you listen to, all of those things that, that influence your voting behavior. Um, so, this process, which is political socialization. is which individuals form their political attitudes and beliefs. And it's not a fleeting phase, but a cornerstone in our political makeup. It begins early in life, influenced by various factors. Our families, our education, our peer groups, the media, and significant life events.  These elements do more than just mold our views. They embed deep seated political ideologies and preferences. Consider the family. Often the first and most influential agent in the process. The political discussions at the dinner table. The voting behavior of our parents. The political climate that we grew up in. These experiences lay the foundation for our political leadings. And as we grow, we get educated, and we have peer interactions. Those all come into play, introducing us to diverse perspectives and fostering critical thinking about political ideologies. Now you see with some children, right, some children just are going to do what their parents Raise them to do right. You're, you're in those, those political discussions. You have similar personality traits. You probably are similar in the idea of like aggressivity and passivity and creativity and all of these personality traits that align with your voting behavior.  So let's go ahead and jump into this. I'm going to pull up this video from Jordan Peterson and we can watch it together because I think it properly frames the entire conversation around this and I find it to be pretty interesting. So let me go ahead and pull this up for you and we will watch it  Political belief is determined in large part by temperament and personality, and that's very strongly biologically influenced. And so conservatives tend to be lower in openness, which is a trait associated with creativity, and higher in conscientiousness, which is a trait associated with industriousness and orderliness. They tend to make good managers and administrators and lawyers. They tend to make good conservative business types. That's, that's their forte, that's their niche, and that's a valid Place to be and a valid thing to be and you know Conservatives aren't so good at being entrepreneurial, and they're not so good at being artistic and creative. That's not their niche That's more the niche of the liberal end of the spectrum and as far as I'm concerned for the political system to function properly You need proper representation for all the temperamental types, and they need to be engaged in dialogue So but the thing is is that when the conservatives are saying well, you know especially when they're perhaps Thinking about leading the damn party, let's say, that they're worried about speaking their mind in a conservative manner. That's just not a good thing. That means that something's gone wrong with our political system, and seriously wrong. You know, and the other thing that, another thing that I've noticed it, thing, you know, when, when this all,  Some of you may know, and some of you may not know, that I made a couple of videos back September 27th. I woke up one night, because I couldn't sleep, and I thought, I usually go and write if I can't sleep, because I've got something to figure out. But I've been playing with YouTube videos. I've been putting my lectures online since 2013. And by last April, they had about a million views. And so, I thought, wow, that's, that's really something, man. You know, like, you write a book, and you sell a million copies, you're one happy character. And I thought, I'd A million views is a very large number of views. It really tuned me in to the fact that YouTube was something completely other than what I thought it was. But anyways, that night I thought, Oh,  I'll get up, I'll make a video instead of writing it down. So, okay, what else? Here's some things you might think about if you're a conservative.  These  I'll get up, I'll make a video instead of  These things have become  What would you say?  People are afraid to say them. Here's the first one. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid. How about that? You know, it's not  You think it's an accident? Oh, here's how you find out, okay? Which countries do people want to move away from? Hey, not ours. Which countries do people want to move to? Ours. Guess what? They work better. And it's not because we went around the world stealing everything we could get our hands on. It's because we got certain fundamental assumptions right. Thank God for that after thousands and thousands of years of trying and because of that we've managed to establish a set of Civilizations that are shining lights in the world, you know now  so we said two interesting things which he talked about is  tray openness Right, which leads to creativity. And, uh, you know, and so when you think of all the main personality types, and Jordan Peterson has a really tremendous, um,  personality test that you can actually go take online, I think it's like 6, it'll ask you like 300 questions, and it'll give you a score  on your agreeableness on your openness on your, uh, all of these different, you know, traits, it's like the The, I forget the number of them, but there's, there's essential traits that build your personality profile. And so if you understand that what splits the party divide is essentially to me at a certain stage of the conversation is  personality traits. Right. If you're more creative and you're more quote unquote open, you tend to align on the left side. He even mentioned entrepreneurial being more liberal traits. And you see that when it comes to like Silicon Valley and startups and, you know.  The reason for that, and he talks about the people who are conservative being better managers, they're more structured, they're less creative. But the best and most creative ideas that do well in a startup environment are wild ideas that everybody will tell you are generally terrible. Alright, take Airbnb, for example. Hey, let everybody crash at your house for a night and, you know, you charge them money and then you come back and your house will still be there. It's like, eh. That's kind of a weird idea. I don't, I don't think I'm going to, I don't think I'm going to do that. Or Uber, right? I, I think you should press a button on your phone and then some random guy will show up and you should jump in his car and it'll take you somewhere. It's like, I don't think that's a good idea either, but they worked and they were crazy ideas. They were creative ideas and they were at the right time. And it just so happens that much of the startup space trends. liberal and, and, uh, Democrat as a result.  And much of the higher levels, the C suite of organizations and the, uh, high level managers and the people who actually run the operations of the business tend to be more conservative. And the reason for that is because they're much more structured in their thinking. They, they tend to abide by, you know, uh, rule sets that tend to make things move along. If you're, if you're hyper creative, you can get.  And you get too far out there and now you can't create a successful business. So the, the, the ideal world is you have a large amount of creativity and you can borrow  some structural foundations to, to properly execute and build a idea into something that's great. Like all of the great foundational leaders. And you think of Steve jobs, highly creative. You think of, uh, Jeff Bezos, highly creative.  I don't know if Jeff Bezos would be a liberal per se, but, um, but  they were able to borrow from both sides. They weren't hyper one side. They weren't hyper the other. And so what we're basically looking at when we're voting  into a certain level, cause there's critical thinking and people who change their minds, but to a certain level, I would be really interested in maybe this is something that we can find out is what percentage of people  change. their voting registration from Democrat to Republican. And this is, let's, let's go ahead and find it out. I bet you there's been an answer. So let's go to chat GPT. And I will ask it for us.  Because I yeah, to me, it's like we're almost looking at a spectrum of personality, when you look at the spectrum of political affiliation. And, you know, there will be creative people who Vote conservative, and there will be highly, uh, structured and, uh, Structured people with, with low trait openness and high trait, uh, or low trait agreeableness. You know, I tend to, I was in the 1th percentile of disagree, of agreeableness. Meaning if there's a hundred people in the room, I'm the most disagreeable person in the room.  Who would have thought? Um, I, I would, I, but, uh, surprisingly  Not surprisingly, if you know me, but I'm generally a very creative person. I have a lot of ideas. I'm very entrepreneurial So my openness and creativity was was fairly high So I'm kind of a unique hybrid human  But  I think that that it's interesting to think that through and determine, you know How much of it is personality and genetics, right? So, let's see what percentage  of people  change from liberal to democrat  and vice versa  in their lifetime.  And what  age  does this generally Right? And there's the, there's the old quote is I'll show you a, a, a young Republican and I'll show you a man without a heart and I'll show you an old Democrat and I'll show you a man without a brain. That's the old school. Uh, that's the, because a lot of people trend more liberal when they're young and a lot of people trend more conservative as they get older.  Some would say wiser, uh, but  let's see what it says here. It says determining the exact percentage of people who changed their political affiliations. Um,  It's challenging. Several factors contribute to this complexity. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. Um,  let's see,  give a percentage cause it doesn't want to.  But that's why you see the hyper, uh, successful small startups into Facebooks and Twitters and all this stuff trend, very liberal because in going to these ecosystems very liberal because well one, um, that the person starting that company is generally very creative. And two, the people Operating that company are generally in the tech space and and you're going to see people who are Um more introverted who have certain personality traits that are more creative that are going to find themselves in those coding type environments Um, so again another interesting one Uh, so  I don't think it's going to give us a number here, but it says the terms live. Okay. Don't care Let's see  overall  give a percentage  Geez. All right. So let's, let's finish out a little bit of this video here and then we'll continue our discussion.  You can be pretty damn filthy and still be a shining light in this world, right? Because if you look around the world at the state of governance in most places, it's like the most Pathological corrupt and vicious thugs rule and to stand out as an illuminated light against that background isn't so difficult But nonetheless, you know, we're as good as it's got and unless we can come up with something better We should be very careful about messing around with that So why don't we start with the assumption that we're doing something, right? One of the things we're doing right, for example, is that we actually value the individual, right? The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. Do you know how long it took people to formulate that as an idea? And how unlikely that idea is that poor you, you know, useless, powerless you, with all your damn faults, you're actually worth something. You're worth something to the point that the law has to respect you. Assumption number two, peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war.  In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.  Because it's not and being more than normal and being and being unique and creative and contributing in that way is extraordinarily important But the fundamental point is is that social being requires the sacrifice of a certain amount of individual idiosyncrasy And that's a fundamentally conservative claim It's like you should be you should do what everyone else does unless you have a really good reason  It's a good rule. It's like, you do what people have done throughout time. You grow up, you find a partner, you establish a stable relationship, you get a job, you make yourself useful, you have some children, you do something productive and interesting with your spare time, and you try to act like a respectable human being. That's what you do. That's a conservative ethos.  If you have something spectacular about you that needs to be revealed to the world, then break some rules, man. Go right ahead. I'm dead serious about that. But most of the time, you don't. And even if you happen to be a special person, and you might be, 90 percent of you still isn't special. So most of the time, you're still going to be following the rules. And the rules aren't there to oppress. They're there to keep us at They're there to keep us away from each other's throats. Because human beings are very warlike. And we're very We're very competitive and we're very aggressive. And if we are  fortunate enough to have woven together a social fabric that basically renders us peaceful and cooperative, we should try disrupting that at our great peril.  Next.  No, I think that's an interesting one. What he just talked about is, is essentially like there's a, there's a familiar template for life of, of what is a, a, a fulfilling life template. And we're seeing people stray further and further and further from that. And he said that's a conservative leading ethos, right? The fact that you should, uh, have a family. You should get a good job. You should have a productive hobby. All of those things, you know, you should be a productive member of society unless you're like super, super gifted in one area and you just have to dedicate every moment to it. You should probably have children, right? And the reason that we do that is because, you know, one part of that to me is having children makes you see everybody else from a new lens. It even makes you see you from a new lens. Um,  And this is in a lot of different ways, but the way that I have changed as a result of being a father is, is unbelievable, right? You, you see, uh, uh, even somebody who's your own age, even somebody who's older than you, and you see within that person,  the thing that you realize as a parent is everybody in this world is just A child acting as if they're an adult at any given stage of their life, like, at least that's what it feels like, like, everybody's just trying, man, like, it's, it's, it's,  it's a tough go at life, and every single person is, is,  at least attempting to do what they can with what they've been given. That's not every case and there's some people who, who should probably try harder, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have empathy for them because it could be your child sitting on the side of the road asking for money.  It could be you doing the same thing. If you were given a different life with a different set of skills and a different set of intellect and, and a different level of drive and, and all of these things. So. You start to, you start to see the world and other people and society in a different perspective. And that can bring you to a more interesting religious conversation, but we'll leave that for another day. But another thing that I found interesting is, this is a thought that I had  regarding my children, and  I don't remember a ton of my childhood. I wish I had a better memory. I wish I remembered, you know, the friends I had and how we played on the playground and um, sleepovers and, and uh, you know, time with my family and all of the fun trips that we went on and all of the things like that. And I do remember some highlights and I have it in there somewhere. But it's not as, it's not as vivid as I would like it to be.  And so, when you have a child, You have to realize too, and I think about this, it's like, it's very easy to write off your children's experience because it's like, oh, they won't even remember this,  right? Like, oh, maybe, maybe I shouldn't have acted that way, but they'll probably forget it, because I forgot what my parent did to me in that situation too, right?  But that's a dangerous path to go down.  But if you do, if you look at it from the right perspective, it's your children  are the opportunity to  live your childhood again only through the lens of someone who can actually appreciate it.  And so,  if you treat your child as if they are the opportunity for you to give your own inner self, your own inner child the opportunities in life and  experiences that you,  Wish you would have had or you wish you remembered.  You get that opportunity. You get to experience that thing again. And as a result, the world can open up to you. The, the creative, the, the, the way that you view everything can change. And it's a secondary opportunity to, to, to have that. If you can put yourself in the shoes of your children, and I'm sure the same thing goes for grandchildren and great grandchildren and so on. It's really not that much so on after that, but you get the idea. So to me, it's like when you have children, you get to relive what should be and can be the most illuminating  fun, exciting time of your life. There's magic and there's, there's mystery to everything. And there's so many questions that you want answered. Like, uh, with my daughter,  I'll sit there and she was asking me today, like, how was the world created?  I was like, shit, that's a good question. Well, there's a couple belief systems and one of them is the religious and Christian belief system, which is that God created the earth and all the people in the universe and the stars and the sun in, in seven days. And then there's a scientific perspective, which is the Big Bang Theory. And I tried my best to  explain that pathetically, uh, but I, I explained those to her. And then she, she asked a better question when she said, is there other?  Is there other things like our thing, like is there anything outside of what our, not our world, but our place, like everything, is there another everything? And I said, well, I think what you're talking about is  Like the multiverse theory or even like kind of like string theory, right? Like things can be happening simultaneously in a different reality. And so we got to ask Chad GPT to explain these things and like just the, the interest and, and  mystery to her that is the, the surrounding world. And, you know, I still feel that way that I don't know what the hell is going on. And for all I know, there's a firmament above us. And we, or for all I know, we really did go to the moon, like who knows anything, uh, which is, you know. Another interesting realization as you get older is a lot of history is just fabricated by the authors of large conglomerate organizations that wanted to rewrite history and in their way,  I digress. That's a side note, but to me, having children so important living life in a way that you are. That your ancestors lived, and there's a reason you have children. Your biology changes, your perspective changes, the way that you view the world, the way you view society, the way you view people,  it all changes. Everything, your perspective is so important, and the only way that you get that is by having a child, and having something outside of yourself that is a extension of you, that gets to go off into the world and face their own hero's journey as a result. And so Yeah, you better have a damn good reason, um, in, in all of that to, to get back to the, to the original point, which is that, you know,  even Trending within the conversation that we talked about earlier of like the depopulation of the world and our trending downward spiral of population It's like there's one half of society that is absolutely outbreeding the other half of society there's one half of the political spectrum that is absolutely Having babies, not having abortions, not using plan B and living a happy, healthy, fulfilling life with children and grandchildren. And there will be somebody by their side  with food and flowers and comfort and jokes when they are dying.  And there's another half of the political spectrum that has fallen into the trap  that you are. everything that matters in this universe, right? Go back to like postmodernism, right? Your perspective in your reality is the only reality.  And they fall in for this trap that says like, well, I'm a girl boss. I don't need to be a mom.  Those stay at home moms are just whatever, right? Like fill in the blank. And this culture has been tricked into believing that the mom should be, you know, that the ultimate.  goal isn't to be a, a mother or a father in life like that. That is everything.  And they've been deceived into thinking that that's not the most fulfilling thing that you could accomplish in your life is, is pro creating and, and. Creating something outside of yourself and giving that, that version of you, that extension of yourself, the opportunities and experiences that you weren't given, or maybe you don't remember or whatever, right? It's like such an important thing, but we are absolutely outbreeding the crazy. And eventually, the pendulum will swing right back in our direction. I think in 20 years, we're going to see either a huge wave of non liberal. Uh, ideologies poke their head from the next generation because  a very large percentage of people,  much larger than any other time period of history, are deciding not to have children. And doing so through many means, including, you know, birth control and, and Plan B, but also abortions. And, and doing so after the fact, and, and having, causing much, you know, there's, there's its own psychological effects that even come from that, so.  Anyways, so important, very interesting to see him talk about that, you know, the conservative leaning ethos of creating a family unit and, and the value of that in today's world and And how that kind of even pertains to political ideology. So here we go.  Just a minute. Equity, equity. That's worse, right? Equity means  Equality of outcome. It means that every single organization has 50 percent women and 50 percent men. Doesn't matter whether the men and women differ in their intrinsic preferences, which, by the way they do, the scientific literature on that is completely clear. It was established by the early 90s. It was established in the Scandinavian countries, where they've done most to flatten out the socio economic Differentials, say, between men and women. Didn't get rid of the differences between men and women. In fact, they became exaggerated. The biggest personality differences in the world between men and women are in Scandinavia. Just as the biggest differences in interest between men and women are in Scandinavia. Because when you get rid of the socio cultural differences between men and women, the biological differences don't disappear. They maximize. So,  you hear the egalitarian, clarion call everywhere.  Everything should be equal. Everything should be equally distributed. We should strive for equity. It's like, wrong!  Especially if you're a conservative. Wrong! What we want are just hierarchies of competence.  Not everyone's a neurosurgeon. You know, if your father has a brain tumor, you probably want a hierarchy of competence for neurosurgeons. So you can pick the one that's the best, so that he might not die. That's what a hierarchy of competence is for. For the postmodernists, there's no hierarchy that isn't based on power. Well, because they think the world runs on power. We need the best plumbers. We need the best contractors. We need the best  Alright, so, yeah, and so that touches on another conversation, which, you know, there wasn't as much political socialization aspects within that that I was expecting, but, um, there are some interesting points there, which even talks about gender, right, there, there is a specific divide when it comes to voting percentages that are tied to gender, um, so just pulling up some of my Notes here, and we'll walk through some of those together.  So here are some of the statistics

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 31, 2023 is: futurity • fyoo-TOOR-uh-tee • noun Futurity is a formal, literary synonym of future meaning “time to come.” The plural form, futurities, can also refer to future events or prospects. // The motivational speaker exhorted us to change the way we live today, rather than looking always toward some vague distant futurity. See the entry > Examples: “The 18th floor, two-room suite with a spacious balcony overlooking 27th Street has been transformed by the recent Yale grad, in a project aiming to broadly represent the values of the queer and creative community. ... Standard hotel whites are swapped for neon, patterned towels and bathrobes, with nods to science fiction and a theme of queer futurity continuous throughout the space.” — Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner, Forbes, 31 July 2023 Did you know? For a forward-looking word, futurity has quite the literate past. Its first known use comes from Act III of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, when the downtrodden Cassio, mystified about why Othello has turned against him, beseeches Desdemona to tell him whether his “offense be of such mortal kind / That nor my service past, nor present sorrows, / Nor purpos'd merit in futurity / Can ransom me into his love again.” Centuries later the Scottish writer Walter Scott wrote of events still in “the womb of futurity,” employing a phrase also used by James Fenimore Cooper, among others. Though still in use and very much useful, futurity tends to lend one's speech or writing a lofty tone, so if the situation calls for something more down-to-earth, you may want to go back to [the] future.

We cover the fascinating history of the Stone-Campbell Movement, also known as the American Restoration Movement. Discover the pivotal role played by figures like Alexander Campbell, Walter Scott, and John Thomas in redefining the significance of baptism as a means of grace and assurance of forgiveness. We'll also delve into the later controversies surrounding rebaptism and differing interpretations of baptism within the movement. Gain insights into the evolution of baptismal theology from a Calvinian perspective to a legal understanding and how it impacted the Churches of Christ. Ultimately, this video offers a comprehensive overview of the historical and theological significance of the Stone-Campbell Movement in the context of baptism and faith. New Birth blog: https://www.bendchurch.org/post/a-theology-of-new-birth

The first live concert in 175 years of songs and music written by Eliza Flower (1803-1846) takes place tomorrow. A friend of JS Mill, Harriet Martineau and Robert Browning, Flower set to music some of Walter Scott's romantic songs, composed music for her sister Sarah Flower Adams, who penned hymns including Nearer, My God, to Thee. Singer Frances M Lynch, accompanied on piano by Laurence Panter, joins New Generation Thinker and historian Oskar Jensen and Dr Clare Stainthorp, who is researching the Freethought Movement: Atheism, Agnosticism, and Secularism, 1866–1907. Matthew Sweet hosts. Producer: Torquil MacLeod Flower of the Seasons: Politics, power and poverty takes place at Conway Hall in London on Friday 27th October at 7pm performed by Electric Voice Theatre. Clare Stainthorp will be leading an event - Great and Good? - at Conway Hall on Saturday 11th November as part of the Being Human Festival.

Author's Note: This writing was adapted from a series of conversations around race in America and edited as audio, recorded in 2020.   The podcast of this writing is the real thing, as it were.  What follows as text is edited to clarify the narrators, absent the audio.  Please consider following the podcast associated with this newsletter and leaving a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please subscribe to support high-impact content like this.The author, David Foster Wallace, described the experience of reading his novel Infinite Jest as intended to feel “tornadic,” like you're in the middle of a tornado. That's what the last several weeks have felt like.Protesters:"Racist ass police! No justice, no peace! F**k these racist ass police! No justice, no peace!""F**k these racist ass police!"Owen Muir, M.D.:I originally tried making this episode some linear narrative, and it just wasn't happening. So, welcome to the tornado of racism in America. Buckle up.George Floyd spent 8 minutes and 46 seconds gasping for breath.  Police officers, some of whom were very experienced, knelt on his back...until he didn't breathe anymore. As a psychiatrist, I often emphasize how the words we use to describe someone's death have meaning. So, I'll say, you know, completed suicide, not commit. And George Floyd was lynched.Welcome. This is about anxiety, uncertainty, and existential despair. And I recorded the narration in one take because I wasn't, like, going to get it right a second time. So much of what we say about race is calculated, polite, and wrong. So I'm not going to try to do that tonight.Here we go.Sequoiah:"Yeah. My general reaction to all this is a little more, a little more extended. The, uh, f**k".Owen Muir, M.D.:That's my teammate. She is a TMS technician at the mental health practice we worked at together. She also works in the community with patients helping put their lives together, but tonight she's a field reporter on the revolution.Sequoiah:"I am a TMS tech, Winnicott coach, and black woman. Which seems very important right now. George Floyd, Say His Name.  George Floyd, Say his Name.So I just got home from a protest in Flatbush. Police would not let us pass. We were chanting with our hands up. And after a while, they decided to push the line backward. We resisted—we stood there with our hands up. They pushed us and pushed us, and when we wouldn't..."Owen:Now, as someone with a lot of white privilege, I'm outraged at hearing this, like, wow, this is fucked up. So I called another colleague in the special operations community, and I'm not using names in this episode for semi-obvious reasons, and I heard what he had to say.Master Sergent:“The things that U. S. police forces are apparently fully within their legal rights to do, like, use tear gas, would literally have…been against the Geneva Conventions. It's an actual war crime. We cannot gas a civilian population.”Owen Muir, M.D.:The person I'm interviewing has over a decade of experience in the special operations community. He has fought and killed for our right to do what my other colleagues were in the street doing, peacefully protesting.Master Sergent:"This is a perversion of what the United States stands for. We invade countries who treat their people the way that our police forces are on camera treating Americans "Sequoiah:"People started to back up, , and run and they then started to hit us with batons. , I fell. And then we reformed the line."Master Sergent:"It's disgusting in a lot of ways."Owen Muir, M.D.:So when someone whose life has been dedicated to protecting our freedoms tells me they're upset with what they're seeing, I take that pretty seriously.Sequoiah:"Well, the other night, well, last night, when the cops and protestors were getting into, into fights and they were trying to, the cops were trying to push back the protestors, I saw them bring out the batons and, like, start attacking people...and each time they'd tell us to back up and back up and kept pushing us and pushing us. And finally, there was a frustration in the air, and people started to act out."Owen Muir, M.D.:Now, as a psychiatrist, my life has been saved by police officers on more than one occasion. I have been physically attacked in hospital settings.  The police have been called, and I have not died, and my colleagues have not died thanks to them. And this is Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, and these people are black people. The Flatbush, at least the area I was in, is a predominantly black neighborhood.  So, look, Americans love the police.  They are a highly regarded part of society by many people, but that's not the experience for black America I have learned.Master Sergent:“There are many things you can do in that spectrum that don't involve actively using force against a human being, which makes the process easier across the board. If I don't have to hurt somebody, the only thing that is hurting another person does for me is further endanger my Troops. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Now this makes sense to me because, having run the show in a psychiatric emergency department, where I have to protect myself, other patients, and violent people themselves from getting hurt, sometimes we use violence, but oftentimes we don't.Master Sergent:"What started this particular instance has been four cops lynched George Floyd. One guy put his knee on the man. We don't do that to terrorists actively trying to kill us. ""George Floyd, Say His Name."Sequoiah:"It was at that point that they called in more backup and started to attack and arrest groups of gathered people from the neighborhood.”Owen Muir, M.D.:Police officers, when they're called to stand trial for the use of force, have a standard called a reasonable officer standard.I feel like I have to make it relevant for me--a white person—to watch humans being murdered by police and then people killing each other in the streets about it. There was an article I read about six months ago about yet another person being slammed to the ground, handcuffed behind their back, and suffocated to death by the police. I was shocked..that the person was white. Until I read several paragraphs down that he had schizophrenia. Oh, that's what made it okay. Reasonable officers can only be judged based on what someone would do in that moment of terror when they have to decide to use force.Sequoiah:"I was so emotionally spent and so exhausted. And then we saw marauding bands of police officers going down the street, just telling people to go home and attacking groups of people on the street.”"George Floyd, Say His Name.  George Floyd, Say His Name."Owen Muir, M.D.:Police officers are represented by unions. Those unions have spent 20 years bargaining for lack of accountability to protect, in their minds, their members. This means police officers have the right to huddle and discuss their stories before speaking to prosecutors. It means many other things.  But importantly, whenever any officer stands trial, the jury is instructed, per Chief Justice Rehnquist, to not use the benefit of 20/20 hindsight in judging their actions, but only what a reasonable, that is, terrified person, would do at the moment.Master Sergent:"We have an entire job in the US military to validate whether or not we killed someone the right way."Owen Muir, M.D.:The court system is what's supposed to do that for police officers. But it doesn't; it just says, eh, it's okay.Master Sergent:"That's an actual thing; we have entire organizational structures dedicated to the legality of murder,"Owen Muir, M.D.:Killing black or brown people in America, if you're a police officer, has literally never been ruled against the law. Ever.Master Sergent:"To not call it murder, to call it, to call it killing combatants, that's what a JAG does. Overseas, when they're deployed, they tell you whether or not you can kill this person. And sometimes, even though we can kill someone, we don't because they have a much higher value as an intelligence asset. Or for any number of other reasons. Or they're not actively shooting at us when we go get them. That happens a ton. Because sometimes when you see 20 or 30 goons show up outside your house, breach your door with a shotgun round, rush in, and then point all their guns at you, you won't fight back. And then, okay, well, he's not shooting back at us, so we're going to take him in, and then... "Owen Muir, M.D.:You don't get to kill someone. In the U. S. military. Deployed in the field. In Afghanistan. Even if someone's a terrorist, if they're not pointing a gun at you and about to pull the goddamn trigger.“Cause one of the things I don't want to do is vilify police officers. And, and ...”Master Sergent:"I mean, Owen, to be perfectly honest with you,  You may not want to vilify police officers, but the things I've seen police officers do in the past week while they know they're being recorded are actively the actions of villains."Owen Muir, M.D.:This hit me like a ton of bricks. This is not okay, but when people call for help, and the police arrive, they deal with a crisis. A lot of those crises involve people with mental illness, and police officers are being asked to do a thing that like is a whole medical specialty. Like, I'm a psychiatrist. It was 45 000 hours of training to learn how to calm people down when upset and have experiences we don't have access to. And, if you're called to the scene of a crisis, and someone's acting in a really strange and scary way, and you have a gun. You've been told to protect yourself, don't let yourself get hurt or let this person harm you, and you know nothing bad will happen to you if you pull that trigger. You're going to pull that trigger.  More often than not. And that's about a thousand times a year. You're about... God knows it doesn't even matter. The percentage of time you're more likely to be killed if you're black and mentally ill. The fact that we have a statistic for that is fucked up enough. Help isn't helpful for black America. And that's just a fact of life.”Master Sergent:"You know, I have friends in New York who are talking about the cruelty they see in these police officers' eyes. And what's worse, what's truly evil about this whole system is even in the throes of this violence, they're exhibiting racist and preferential behaviors towards white protesters versus black protesters. Or brown protesters. They're active, you know, taking it easier on white people because they're white. "Owen Muir, M.D.:And this is just f*****g killing me at this point. Ugh. Look, what's happening in the streets is not okay. It's not been okay for hundreds of years. And police officers are part of a system designed to keep order, and order used to mean slaves. That's just why they're there.Master Sergent:"Things I don't even f*****g think about, man. Like, I'll go for a run or a rock at night. And I'll, I'll like, sometimes I'll go on my own, but if I don't go earlier, like, T. is like, well, I guess I'll go for a run. Like, one day, I just asked, like, why do you only run with me? Why do you only run with me? And she's like, well, it depends. We're in a quiet neighborhood in Florida, and I'm a black woman like I'm; there's a bunch of Trump signs everywhere like I'm not going running on my own. I was like, wow, yeah, I've never even thought along those lines; I don't question my safety when I go places. I'm hyper-vigilant for a lot of other reasons, but like, there's never a question in my mind, like if someone attacks me, it's not, it's an unexpected event, I'm not expecting, That at any moment, someone might attack me for the color of my skin. Because I'm in the neighborhood."William Osei, M.D.:"Hey, I'm Dr. Will Osei.I am a postdoctoral fellow, an African American psychologist living in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. " Owen Muir, M.D.:Dr. Osei is a scholar of racism and multiculturalism.And helped me explain what it's like for the black kids I've treated at Bellevue all these years.William Osei, M.D.:"The average African American, this is like... This is a fact. This is not a revelation because we now have better cell phone coverage of these crimes. I remember being in Cleveland the day following Tamir Rice being murdered in the playground. And I was working with 12-year-old boys in the Cleveland school district. And I was devastated that day, and I went into that school expecting those boys to be devastated that their schoolmate, a kid they used to play with at the playground, was just murdered. And to them, it was nothing. It was more shocking because they knew a dozen people that the police had murdered. They knew that was just the latest murder that year. It just happened to be one that rose to the national conversation, but in Cleveland that year, there were probably 30, 50 police shootings.Owen Muir, M.D.:My level of outrage at watching all of this. That's privilege too.William Osei, M.D.:"Yes. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Because to understand this as anything other than the rules of engagement would be a misunderstanding.  For a long time, Black America has known to watch out when you talk to the cops because they can kill you. Nothing's going to stop them if they want to. And they do. On camera. A thousand other times every year. And I wish it were as easy as saying it was a couple or even a lot of bad apples, but that is insufficient.Master Sergent:"As far as privilege goes, I'm a combat veteran in the Ivy League. I'm an Arab Jew, but I look white enough that no one asks that question. I wear a suit, and you can't see my tattoos. And I... I can fit in anywhere from West Hampton to the slums of Bangladesh. Like, I'm good. You know what I mean? I have levels of privilege that people use to run for the presidency."Owen Muir, M.D.:But the magic of America is that white privilege runs out as soon as power wants it to. My colleague's married to a black woman.Master Sergent:"And a huge part of this is like... It's the knowledge that I'm married to a black woman. My kids will be black, and this is like their plight. "Owen Muir, M.D.:Usually, we'd have credits now. Instead, I'm going to read these names.George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery, Brianna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Iyanna Jones. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Sandra Land, Walter Scott, and a kid on a playground in Cleveland named Tamir Rice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefrontierpsychiatrists.substack.com/subscribe

7th grader couldn't "access abortion care." Awesome grizzly fight! Imperfect in knowledge, but based! Jay-Z library cards in Brooklyn! The Hake Report, Thursday, August 17, 2023 AD TIME STAMPS * 0:00:00 Start/Topics: pro-choice story, bear fight, Jay-Z library cards* 0:02:35 Hey, guys! (Forgot to mention my Zion tee?)* 0:04:02 7th grader no access to abortion care* 0:21:50 Awesome brown bear fight (unfindable Twitter source)* 0:36:25 TONY, CA: Trump indicted, white was invented* 0:52:32 WILLIAM, CA: sex and pregnancy in the South* 1:02:01 Gold and Silver - Stavesacre (2000, Collective)* 1:08:47 Supers: Lin on Josh on JLP BQ; Hake's silly science statements* 1:13:41 Imperfect knowledge doesn't mean you're not based* 1:23:51 JUSTIN, CA: racial fragility, Trump* 1:35:34 Jay-Z library cards increase memberships in Brooklyn* 1:41:16 Hassan on Jay-Z rap: The best; Drake's better still!* 1:48:57 RICK, VA: Praying for justice in Trump vs blacks trial* 1:54:24 Closing / Coffees: Bible truth; Walter Scott faked?* 1:56:14 Time to Kill - Left Out (1999)BLOG https://www.thehakereport.com/blog/2023/8/17/the-hake-report-thu-8-17-23 PODCAST by HAKE SubstackLive M-F 9-11 AM PT (11-1 CT / 12-2 ET) Call-in 1-888-775-3773 – thehakereport.com  VIDEO  YouTube  |  Rumble*  |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  BitChute  |  Odysee*  PODCAST  Apple  |  Spotify  |  Castbox  |  Substack  (RSS)  *SUPER CHAT on asterisked above, or  BuyMeACoffee  |  Streamlabs  |  Ko-fi  SUPPORT HAKE  Substack  |  SubscribeStar  |  Locals  ||  SHOP  Teespring  ALSO SEE  Hake News on The JLP Show  |  Appearances (other shows, etc.)  JLP Network:  JLP  |  TFS  |  Church  |  Hake  |  Anchor Baby  |  Joel Friday   Get full access to HAKE at thehakereport.substack.com/subscribe

Eric welcomes Eliot back from Edinburgh where it was not all Walter Scott tourism and Scotch sipping. They discuss the project that Eliot and Phillips O'Brien have undertaken to analyze the failures of Russia experts to correctly assess the run up to and the course of the war in Ukraine, the ongoing state of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the lingering political repercussions in Russia of the Prigozhin mutiny and how it might affect the battlespace, the Biden Administration's nomination of Derek Chollet as Under Secretary of Defense for policy and the current hold that Sen. Tommy Tuberville has placed on the confirmation of senior military and civilian defense officials, as well as the troubling state of Israeli democracy. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Email us with your feedback at shieldoftherepublic@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Dr. Walter Scott Metcalfe. He is an American physician and business owner best known for his appearances on Bravo TV's Married to Medicine series. With over 20 years of experience in the medical field and community service and his growing popularity, Dr. Metcalfe is the one to turn to when you are seeking professional expert opinion on world health issues, Lifestyle Medicine Lectures, Physical Health, and Preventative Medicine. We will discuss his motivation to pursue Medicine, the Joys and Pains of Medicine, and his outlets to reduce stress, such as Family Time, Physical Fitness, Cooking, and Writing. Please welcome to Money Making Conversations Master Class, Dr. Walter Scott Metcalfe.Support the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My guest today is Dr. Walter Scott Metcalfe. He is an American physician and business owner best known for his appearances on Bravo TV's Married to Medicine series. With over 20 years of experience in the medical field and community service and his growing popularity, Dr. Metcalfe is the one to turn to when you are seeking professional expert opinion on world health issues, Lifestyle Medicine Lectures, Physical Health, and Preventative Medicine. We will discuss his motivation to pursue Medicine, the Joys and Pains of Medicine, and his outlets to reduce stress, such as Family Time, Physical Fitness, Cooking, and Writing. Please welcome to Money Making Conversations Master Class, Dr. Walter Scott Metcalfe.   My guest today is Jessica Myers. She is a real estate developer and entrepreneur. As an investor and hotel owner, transacting over $30M in Real Estate assets, she is best known as the Deal MKR. Her portfolio includes hotel proper and developments in Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and the Bahamas. No one wants a boss, but everyone needs a coach. Jessica Myers helps working professionals clarify their vision to connect with their internal GPS to provide a clear route to achieve their dreams.   Please welcome to Money Making Conversations Master Class Jessica Myers.  Support the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 6, 2023 is: garner • GAHR-ner • verb Garner means “to collect or gather something” or “to get or receive something wanted or valued.” // The researchers garnered more evidence to support their theory. // The author's novel has garnered much praise and several awards. See the entry > Examples: “Founded in 2012, the Hidden Genius Project represents that ethos with the value of ubuntu (a Bantu term meaning, ‘I am because we are'), a foundational element for an organization geared toward helping Black youth garner entrepreneurial, technological and leadership skills.” — Zaki Hasan, The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Nov. 2022 Did you know? What do you call a building in which grain is stored? These days, English speakers are most likely to call it a granary, but there was a time when garner was also a good candidate. That noun made its way into the language in the 12th century; the verb garner followed three centuries later with a closely related meaning: “to gather into a granary.” Today the verb has largely abandoned its agrarian roots—it usually means “to earn” or “to accumulate.” And the noun garner is rare in contemporary use. It appears mostly in older literary contexts, such as these lines from Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor: “Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, / The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn.”