 Welcome you to our 17th annual salon. Actually, we started this 18 years ago, my wife and I, and that has remained some family enterprise up to this day. We have no foundation behind us or anything. This is just a private matter that Gülsün and I have done and we continue that as long as we like it and we stop it at the moment when we don't like it anymore. I'm glad to see how many new young people came to this event. On the other hand, I'm also proud of the fact that there are many regulars. There are some people that came practically to every single meeting that we had. In 18 years, of course, lots of things have happened, even to this meeting apart from what happened outside of the world. We will talk about that during the speeches. We started very small with just maybe 20 people and then after a few years that grew to this size, the size is basically limited by the size of the hotel. We have the great privilege due to Gülsün, my wife, that we have exclusive views of this hotel during this week. There are very few other conferences where you will ever have this privilege that you are the only ones who occupy this hotel and there are no foreign intruders of any kind. The other things that happened during 18 years was, of course, that Bodrum grew into a boom town. It was a small town, I think about 30,000 inhabitants. In the meantime, it has probably 200,000 and the entire peninsula has well more than a million inhabitants. Bodrum is the boom town in Turkey. The other things that I should mention in the course of 18 years, when some of you guys were still toddlers, I assume, we also lost a few valuable speakers and participants here in this conference. The first one to die of our speakers was Justin Raimondo. He died in 2019 at the age of 67. Justin Raimondo had been the author of the biography of Murray Rothbard and a book on the American old right, the isolationist or non-interventionist political movement in the United States that formed before World War II and was then smashed in the course of World War II, of course, and he was also the founder of antiwar.com, a website that I can recommend. The next person who left us was Norman Stone. Norman Stone, a famous historian, was a professor at Cambridge, a professor at Oxford. Then he left England and went to Turkey and was a professor at Bill Kent University in Ankara, one of the leading private universities in Turkey. I remember Norman Stone telling me that he offered him a buyout because he was always considered a slightly scandalous person. Bill Kent, at the same time, offered him twice the salary and half the teaching load at Bill Kent. Since Norman Stone did speak Turkish, that was no problem for him to make this move. He came here for many years. Norman Stone, of course, famous for his books on World War I. He is also the author of a short history of Turkey, which I very much recommend. You might even be able to pick it up at airport stores. Of course, not in the German airport, but here in the main Turkish airport in the book store, they tend to have Norman Stone's book on Turkey. It's a very interesting book. He was also a speechwriter for Margaret Satchel for a while. He was a very dear friend. Unfortunately, he died in 2019, also at the age of 78. Then he had Paul Cantor, who died last year at the age of 76. He had been a student as a high school student. He attended Ludwig von Mises' private seminar in New York, then became a big Shakespeare expert and also wrote some books on popular culture. In this year, one of our other speakers who had been here several times, Richard Lindyde, at the ripe age of 91, he was the foremost author on IQ studies. His most famous book is IQ and the wealth of nations, where he shows that average IQ in a country and GDP per capita in a country are correlated 0.7, which for the social sciences is enormously high correlation. He also has the claim to fame to something very funny. He was the first professor I ever heard of from whom they took away the title as an emeritus professor. An emeritus professor, a retired professor who is no longer teaching at the university, because his views were considered to be so politically incorrect. At the petition of the students at the University of Ulster, they decided we will take away the title of emeritus professor from Professor Lind. I somehow expected that that might happen to me at the University of Nevada too, but so far I must say it has not yet happened. And then special mention should be given to my dear friend Yuri Maltsev, who also died this year, who has been here also several times as a speaker. Yuri Maltsev was a former advisor to Gorbachev. He escaped from the Soviet Union because he went to a conference in to Finland, which was one of the places where Russians were allowed to go at that time, and then was approached by Americans to come to the United States. And Yuri Maltsev has given a hilarious speech on his escape from the Soviet Union here at this conference. I recommend that you watch that somehow on videos. I will say a little bit about our videos that we have produced in the course of the years. He became a great personal friend, also visited us several times in Istanbul. So he wanted to come last year, had a little accident last year, couldn't come the last minute, and then all of a sudden I still don't know exactly what happened. He died at the age of 72. So now I am the oldest person here. At the beginning there were plenty of people who were older than I am, but I reassured myself with Tony Daniels. He is a couple of months younger than I am, so I do have the claim here to be the oldest of all people. My wife of course never ages, but in any case, and also fitting into this topic of getting older, I have to mention that Sean Gabb, who had been a regular speaker, had a medical emergency just a week or so ago, and everything is alright as it looks like it. But the doctors and his wife and his daughter did not permit him to travel. Because of that, I will take myself, I use my privilege as the king of this enterprise. I asked my queen if that would be permitted to speak a little bit longer in the morning, and Alessandro Fusilo will take the place of Sean Gabb in the afternoon. He will be the first speaker in the afternoon. Now I should mention that the names that I mentioned indicate already that this conference is an interdisciplinary venture. There are conferences that specialize only on monetary things. There are conferences specialized only on ethnic studies or whatever it is. Here all sorts of topics will be discussed, but always of course from a politically incorrect point of view. That is the requirement that I have for people coming here being invited here that I don't want any politically correct people here. I want people to be able to speak freely and say whatever prejudices they have and let everybody else know about them. Now coming to my speech today, I should make you aware of the following. In Germany as in many other countries, there have been laws passed that make it a punishable offense to delegitimize the state and government and governmental politicians. To tell you one little anecdote, one student in Germany recently said what a country and what politicians, they did not allow me to go to the hospital to see my dying grandmother because of the corona restrictions. So this was considered to be delegitimizing government officials and he was punished with a fine of 1,500 euros just for saying this. Turkey seems to be a free country. There is also one way around it, at least so far, if you declare everything that you say as a satire. This is what I will do now. So whatever you hear from me, just take it that is not meant seriously. It is all satire and this entire event is a clown show that might alleviate a little bit the punishment that otherwise might come down on us. Please keep that in mind that everything here is not meant seriously. And now I start with a serious subject.