 Good day, May 40 here. So I'm listening to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, and listening to him talk about the rights of the sovereign. So the primary right of the individual is to survive and to maximize his best interests, his his safety, his family, his economic situation, his property, and one of the main rights of the sovereign is the right to go to war. I was just thinking how little has changed, right? The president can send us to war. Right? The president has essentially all the rights that the sovereign had in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century. Right? The president of the United States has all the same rights that King George III had at the time that the American colonists rebelled against the king. So to have a sovereign means to have someone who can send you to war. And they can do it for reasons of ego. They can do it for reasons of history. They can do it for the political advantage of their side. But once you have a sovereign and it's impossible to have a nation state without a sovereign, they can send you to war. And that hasn't changed. Right? We had a revolution against the king of England. But we got instead a president who has all the powers over foreign policy, essentially, that King George III had. And a president can kill foreign citizens. The president of the United States especially has no restrictions in how he treats foreign citizens. He can render them, you know, into prisons through extraordinary rendition. Right? We had thousands of people that we suspected of being terrorists who were put into torture camps and detention camps all around the world, in Eastern Europe, in the Caribbean, and the president can do that. Right? That's what it means to have a sovereign. They can just send you to war. So there's not this big bright demarcation line between dictatorship and democracy. Like all democracies have significant elements of dictatorship as we've seen during COVID. Like all the rights that you thought were sacred can be taken away at any time in the name of an emergency. Right? In the name of a putative emergency, doesn't even have to be a real emergency who judges what an emergency is. It's the sovereign. And if law enforcement follows his lead, then the sovereign has decided that we're in a state of exception and that everything that you've taken for granted until now can be suspended. All our rights are situational. It can be taken away at any time in the name of emergencies. So graduation day here at UCLA. A lot of people wearing their graduation gowns as the UCLA Bruin Bear. If you were getting photos by the bear. I got my second booster shot today. So I've had four shots. So my first one in in May, in no March, early March of 2021. Got my next one three weeks later. Got my first booster shot in October. Now I've got booster shot number two. So I just read over the weekend that the CDC is recommending booster shots for Americans over age 50. So I'm 55. Got got my second booster shot. I followed expert advice, CDC advice. I'd written many contrary opinions with regard to getting the second booster shot. But now we seem to be headed for a second. Oh, I don't know what number of COVID wave. So New York certainly in the midst of another COVID wave. And now one seems to be headed for California. So I thought I might as well get boosted up. Now I got pretty sick after my first booster shot. Not so sick that I couldn't keep working, but I didn't didn't leave the house for about three days. They knocked me for six. But that hit me about 24 hours after I got my first booster shot. Now I've heard people gotten quite sick after a second booster shot. Still seems like a good, a good bet. Compared to getting COVID severely. So I've got a loud helicopter buzzing overhead.