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If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. All right. Welcome to. It could happen here, a podcast that is about 50% of the time introduced. Well, at about 50% of the time us talking about how we're bad at introductions and today it is. It is just me, Christopher, but with me is. Hadley and Mike from Lobelia Commons who are here to talk about. Many things. One of which is there is, is the 1st edition of their Earthbound Farmers Almanac. Hey. Hey. How are you doing today? I heard. I heard there's maybe a thunderstorm rolling in. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Gonna be glad for the rain, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be good to have it. We're going to talk a little bit 1st about Lobelia Commons. So how did that project start? I know I know something from the beginning of the pandemic, but had you all been working on this kind of stuff before? And yeah, just when it runs to a little bit of that. Yeah, so it kind of started last year during the pandemic, basically. This is at the beginning of the pandemic. We had this like a surge of interest and these like kind of mutual aid groups. And the the largest of which that formed in New Orleans, specifically, which some of us helped form, was called the Orleans Mutual Aid Group, which was doing. Like food distribution, it it kind of stemmed out of a project that was already running like a food share, basically getting excess produce that was coming into the port and distributing it for free in front of like one of the gentrifying grocery stores, but within, like I want to say, like a couple of weeks. There was such an A surge of interest in doing that type of like volunteer or whatever and work that there was like a ton of Labor to make it happen. And that basically meant buying tons of produce eventually because the ports eventually shut down and there wasn't any produce coming from anywhere at the beginning of the pandemic. And does that mean basically buying tons of produce from like Costco and all and that labor meant like waiting in lines for? You know, wrapping around entire like massive, like multi city block warehouse stores. And so that was basically doing like food distribution. So we took the opportunity to since there was so much labor happening that we could go and and start to address the question of like food production specifically and and try and do that in interesting ways. And so we felt like it was pretty important to start like experimenting and different forms of food production and like, like ways of relating to food production. And so I mean this. This first started with like a we were basically just starting tons of seeds and delivering them all over the city. Just driving around from we had like 1 centralized nursery that was run out of a warehouse and that was a ton of Labor was a really time consuming. It was super centralized and so we moved from that into a a number of other projects. Short shortly thereafter, we put together like a like a collaborative mushroom production group where we were. Getting people who have been growing mushrooms and teaching folks and she like doing skill shares to produce oyster mushrooms out of buckets and we started doing some like woodlot production of shukis, which is like since expanded pretty dramatically. And yeah, just like kind of like. Things that that draw people's interests like that and and and think about like how you can grow food in an urban or peri urban scenario fairly interestingly and like with joy. Also, you know, after this we we. We've reached out to by folks that were like, well, I want to grow herbs and rather than specifically getting like a lot and covering it in different herbal medicines, we. Reached out, had already had folks reaching out to us and to someone came up with the idea of, well, let's just all grow in like our backyards, tons of herbs and let's find herbs that already grow abundantly around us to kind of collectively share the experience of harvesting and and and turning those into medicines and and so now there's like this herb Commons group that the labor is distributed. It's distributed geographically. But there's these like meetups where they're bulk herbs are given up, yeah, given out, just like in a communal space and. Yeah, like this Skillshare is happening, they're in, and so there's kind of some community being built around that. That that that happens in a very decentralized manner. Yeah, it's definitely very decentralized. There are working groups that are part of Lobelia Commons that I'm like, not entirely sure what they're doing in any given day or, you know, what's going on. I'm involved in like a couple particular projects within it, and I think that it's really flexible for folks who are trying to get involved. They can kind of be involved at whatever level they want, like if somebody doesn't want to go to a bunch of garden work days or a bunch of meetings or something, which. You know, our have been a great way for us to, like, see each other and see our friends during the pandemic. And stuff is to get together for these work days outdoors or whatnot. But if somebody wants to just, like, do nothing but sprout plants at their own house and then somebody will come pick up those seedlings and and, you know, bring them to one of our decentralized nursery spots, that's great. That's one of the other kind of projects we have. We call it the decentralized nursery. And that's kind of like just something that people already do. At a certain time of year, you know, gardeners will regularly start more plants than they need and then just kind of give them away to friends and neighbors and stuff. And we tried to just make it a little bit more of an intentional thing. And this was also kind of growing out of like at the very beginning of the pandemic, and we were actually doing seedling deliveries to people, which made sense at that time, but it was like very labor intensive. So we kind of moved to this model of having just like 3 stands in front of houses. Street corners in different places, you know, there's already like a bunch of free fridges around New Orleans and things like that. And so this is kind of like the free plant version of that, and it's really easy for somebody to just set one up. And then that kind of also allows us to, like, work on this other aspect of, of decentralizing food production because, like, that's definitely one of our goals, right, is to, like, not have a tiny percentage of the population be the only ones who know how to grow food and doing it under the control of a tiny number of corporations that own all the land. And, you know, obviously we're trying to get away from that food system. And so one of the ways we can think about doing that is finding ways to really decentralize some of the skills that are. That are necessary. So for example, like if somebody's growing avocados for our nurseries, the thing about growing an avocado from a pit actually is that that. Tree probably won't produce fruit, it actually needs to be grafted. So we can have people starting pits and then we're also, you know, sharing the knowledge of how to graph these things. Because we kind of like see a future in which a lot more people will need to be involved in food production, but also, like Mike was saying, like we want this to be not like a job that it feels like people have, but this joyous kind of thing that's just a part of everyday life. Yeah, one of the other things that I was interested in is. You know so so part, part of what? I think if the the the beginning of the the the Earthbound Farmers Almanac is about as talking about how. I guess people have this tendency to sort of focus on climate change. It's just like the only sort of climate thing that's happening. And you know, I mean there's obviously, yeah, there there's there's a bunch of sort of stuff that is climate change but isn't the weather that are sort of you know, things like the phosphorus cycle, things like the nitrogen cycle that are breaking. But simultaneously, I think it's it's also true that. You know that that that kind of stuff and and this is something that's talked about in there is is going to have a large impact both on sort of. Like even just what what kind of biomes exist in in a very short term? And, you know another product of that is. You know is is is that the the sort of increasing rate of storms and I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what happened after Ida and how both just sort of in the short term and long term that the the increase of just hurricanes. And I hesitate to call natural disasters because you know that there's there's a whole thing about how these disasters are sort of manufactured in a lot of ways. But how how that's been affecting how y'all I think are sort of thinking about and working with these kind of mutual aid. Projects and food production. Yeah. So I think with Ida, it's kind of complicated because you could almost look at, look at it as like two different storms. Because what happened in New Orleans versus what happened in say like Houma or the river parishes, these areas that are, you know, generally South and West of New Orleans. Are are are kind of like two different animals in some ways, like what happened in New Orleans specifically relates to infrastructure. So like what you're saying like the kind of quote UN quote natural disasters thing. That's, you know, that's a pretty commonplace way of looking. I mean, it's not a very radical conception that, like, these aren't. Natural disasters, or whatever the disaster is, is created as soon as there was the attempt to create a colonial New Orleans in the 1st place. And so this became honestly part of like national discourse as a result of Katrina, most famously because of the Army Corps of Engineers failure and 2005 and so. What happened this year was with with Hurricane Ida was the one of the main transmission towers for the Energy Energy Corporation in New Orleans is called Entergy. Areas that are outside of the Gulf S are familiar with. So the Entergy Tower fell into the Mississippi River and you had that happening at the same time that thousands of power lines fell down. The the power lines are are are on poles and very prone to getting knocked down even just. During the during any day of the week and and so there wasn't actually much flooding that was happening. It was it was primarily wind damage so that the tower falls into the river power lines down. You had something like I believe 55 barges in the port of South Louisiana falling into the. They're falling off their moorings and floating around just crashing into things, just crashing and like there's like several ferries that connect the east and West banks of the city and those fell off their moorings so. Like the physical infrastructure of the place and and how that relates to beyond New Orleans is New Orleans is located at the very southern reach of the Mississippi rivers port of South Southern Louisiana, which is like a 55 mile port, I believe in 52 mile port. And that process is like 60% of all US grain going to export. So it's like a massive really, really important piece of American capitalist infrastructure. That when when those votes fall off their mornings, it's not like, oh, there's like, whatever, quaint, like, Bayou problem. It's a very serious imperial problem. But so for the average person living in New Orleans, and this looked like, I think, I think it ended up being for most people around a week and 1/2 without power. Which if anyone's lived, even with air conditioning in New Orleans for a summer, it's it's extremely difficult to live. Here during the summer, it's it's obviously not impossible when you have modern amenities, but when you're when you're without those, when you without the refrigerator, when throughout, without your freezer air conditioning, it's it's really, really, really hot, you know. So that's what was happening in New Orleans. There was some, some damage to people's rooms. There was some, you know, fairly, fairly substantial damage to the structures. But what happened to the West? In cities like Laplace. Which is about 2530 miles West of New Orleans. That's where you started to see like very severe flooding, very severe damage to structures, places like Homa, Lafitte. Cortesian all these places that are closer to the coast, that's where you saw the real heavy destruction. So a lot of people have been framing what's happened down the Bayou and in the river parishes, as we would say, as like those places, Katrina and because it's it, the destruction was, was so total in that way. So the way that you relate to that? Is important on a scale that I don't think people understand. Like you know, it's just for the background for listeners, so. When when all of the sort of giant like free trade agreements went into effect, you know so so the free trade agreement are like OK, you're you're not supposed to be able to like have government subsidies of agricultural products and there's there's a couple of carve outs that were put into this now almost all of them they're exceptions for. There's a couple of like weird manufacturing stuff in like Italy and Germany that have carvels and the other big one is that. The the the US government's allowed to just do enormous levels of agricultural subsidies that no one else, like really in the world is allowed to like. Match or I mean do it like, you know, you know, if if if you try to have grain subsidies rise like you, you know the IMF will come after you. Like you, you, you know you're not allowed to do it. But then. You know, sometimes you have the US producing all of this, like. This. I mean it it's, it's not, it's not really cheap, right? But it's it's, you know, this enormously subsidized grain that nobody can actually compete with. And and I think that's that's like an interesting. I was wondering what? Like how, how, how do you guys think about that in terms of? You know, trying to do decentralized. I guess agriculture in a place that's. To a large extent, this sort of like. Conduit of grain to the rest of the world, but in in a way that like also inhibits. But those places from actually, you know, having their own kind of like decentralized agriculture. I mean, I can speak a little bit about like what that kind of does to our context of like. Making it like, especially when I see people in the kind of organic gardening, farming world trying to go on this model of like, oh, we're going to make, you know, regenerative agriculture profitable and we're going to make it somehow compete with conventional agriculture. And I guess I just don't really think that that is is feasible in that in that terrain. Like you know if if we're trying to compete on that same terrain and we're competing with these absurd subsidies, it definitely just the same problem that you see around the world where people aren't able to afford to grow their own thing because there's no way they can they can sell it as cheaply as, as US grain. So I think it's more important to sort of like look at like there's there's a piece in the Almanac. Actually that sort of gets into this, this issue of like, well, are we really growing enough food in, in this regenerative way? Like you know, we we don't even hardly grow that many grains or that many high calorie things. A lot of things are just focused on vegetables and things like that. And like, I think that's a really important critique. And also I think that the way out of it isn't just going to be us trying harder or something or. Like the the future I envision for us like really changing the food system kind of involves like really large scale expropriation of that land where the grain is being produced. And of those huge machineries, those huge like satellite power or satellite directed, you know plows and and tractors and whatnot that are that are doing this stuff. And so like when I'm trying to think about like the impact that a food project. Have anger like a food justice project. I don't try to think like we're trying to replace. Agro business on its own terms, I think like we're trying to be an ally or an aid to any kind of antagonistic sort of social movement that actually is going to create the conditions where like we can all get together and start to actually address these problems without being hindered by, you know, things like private property. So I guess that that that that's a good point to to jump into the Almanac from, I think, yeah. Do you want to just introduce the project a little bit and then we can talk about some of the stuff in it I thought was really interesting. Yeah. So the Almanac kind of came out of like a little bit of a like partially is like a joke, you know, we like everyone gets the. The Almanac and kind of, you know. It doesn't really relate too much to to like most of us what we would be growing. And so we, we had, we had posited something like different, you know, something that that does kind of grapple with some of the questions of, you know, growing food and kind of the the conditions we live in. Maybe you can speak on it more. Yeah, I can even just, I'll actually just read the back of it because I think it speaks to it pretty well. This is a farmer's Almanac for the end of the world. Growing food used to be a lot more straightforward when you plant your okra. At the same time every year like your grandpa did, now we've got to be ready for anything late spring freezes freak heat waves that bring plants out of dormancy too early. Fire season longer every year, the polar vortex. And if that wasn't enough, we've also got to contend with the fallout from breakages in the global supply chain when millions of gallons of milk get poured down the drain and mountains of potatoes are left to rot. It's a world that calls for a new kind of farmer's Almanac. Today's crisis has roots in the earliest moments of land theft against native peoples, a process that has continued alongside hundreds of years of slavery and colonization. The way forward out of this mess will mean grappling with the crimes of the past, as well as charting a new course guided by black and indigenous knowledge, creative experimentation and food production, and paying attention across generational and species divides. So I mean 11. Like, very concrete example of like, how this farmer's. On the neck is different than what you might see just from the standard Almanac is you know we we don't have like oh it's it's may it's time to plant corn or whatever because I mean first of all that that was never that useful. As for a publication that's meant to be used across this vast continent, you know it's going to be different everywhere where you're going to plant things at which time. But also like those standard resources that we would go to like for here for the Southeast, for example, or wherever, like if you're looking at something that is made a few decades ago, it's not going to actually be accurate or it's going to give you undue certainty about where the seasons line up and things like that. So, you know, instead of telling people exactly when to plant their seeds, we have a chart that has the actual germination temperatures of like all the major annual vegetables that people would want to grow. And then we also have like the monthly notes from this local farm in New Orleans. So, you know, located in this area, you can you can also get a really precise view of like, oh, they were planting this then, they were harvesting this then. Yeah, I think that we hope to make something that was, you know, our original focus was something that was specific to New Orleans in the region and you know in the Gulf S and the SE generally because we are so aware of the the, you know, the differences or or what have you between growing through here and growing food in Ohio or something or whatever. And and we all get these same seeds, you know out of Walmart, Lowe's or whatever and try and grow the exact same plants all over the place. So trying to hone in on some of that local perspective and with me in terms of like getting some like folk tradition getting some you know anecdotal evidence about you know things that work through things that people are trying and but I think that that was that was fairly successful. I think, I think a aside that we weren't really expecting as much was just the amount of national and even international kind of grasp that it had, I think a lot of people like. Could could use something like this in in their area and it's fostered some really interesting connections for people that are experimenting in New York for people that are are growing things or thinking about maybe food systems and how they relate to prisons in California or. Even you know as far away as Brazil it it's kind of began to foster a connection between Lobelia Commons and a group called Povos which translates roughly to like the web of peoples in Brazil, so-called Brazil where it's kind of like experimental agro ecology project that's very specific, specifically focused on you know sovereignty, land stewardship. Kind of following a little bit in the tradition of the Landless Workers movement. If anyone's familiar with MST, it's kind of following in that tradition a bit. But is is heavily stewarded by black and indigenous knowledges. Yeah, so it was something, I think of a like a kind of pleasant surprise out of it. Yeah, I thought that was that was really. Interesting way of looking at it, because I feel like there there's this tendency. In the US to. You know when when we talk about sort of our relationship to the land, which is something that comes up a lot in in the sort of essays that are in all neck is about. You know, like there there's there's a piece that I related to a lot, which is about someone from Guam trying to sort of. Deal with, like, I mean particularly like legacies or Japanese imperialism and being driven from their home. And it was like, oh, hey, look like this. This is. Yeah. You know, is this is this is someone who experienced with you when Japan went West and I was like, Oh yeah, my family had this basically very similar thing when they went E. And you know but but there's there's I think yeah and I I think it's very smartly you you get to you get to a point very quickly where. You're trying to grapple with, you know, how, how do you build connections to land, but then also how, how does that work in a context in, you know, in a context that's basically defined by settler colonialism and defined by by this, by this occupation. And I think looking at the MC, looking at a lot of stuff happened in Latin America, I mean, there there's very. Similar to what you guys were talking about. In Brazil, there there was a huge movement like this that was indigenous land reclamation, sort of agroecology in in Colombia, for example, too, in the 90s. And they, they, they run into this problem of. You know, there's there's a civil war going on in Colombia and the a lot of them getting murdered by sort of state paramilitaries in the army but. I I think it's it's a. It's a really interesting way of of. Of looking at what? What does, what does Lampak actually look like and how do you deal with interacting with? And also, yeah, the Lance workers in particular, they use a lot of methods, but you know, they they actually do just take a like an enormous amount of land. Like back from the state and sort of back from corporate things. So I'm interested in how we all started talking to a lot of these, a lot of the Brazilian groups and how that sort of like that perspective has shaped the way that like this whole sort of project turned out. So we specifically to dispose. Some previous connections that some of us had in Brazil had. When talking about what we were doing and just kind of keeping up a an exchange of you know just like kind of updates from from the Gulf and they would exchange send updates from things going on down there. They kind of drew the connection for us and and put us towards them. And I reached out through these problems and was like hey you know we're doing this thing and and I you know and and inspired by what you're doing personally and. And, you know, I'd be curious to see what what? What kind of relationship, whatever we can Foster and they they took it. You know also with with some inspiration seeing that is very clear connection in terms of relationship with land historically, dispossession historically between the two continents across the Caribbean. The implementation, on a wide scale, of plantation monoculture. That was fueled entirely by slavery and genocide and and and I think that having that kind of like shared common history, I think gives us a good bedrock to like exchange notes about where we are now, kind of multiplied by the fact that the way that. The so-called emancipation happened here versus in Brazil. Radically different the the. Like the, for instance the existence of PT or the Workers Party in Brazil being such a force after the dictatorship and and having that like strong populist movement that was you know rooted, very traditional left that that fueled MST. Well, you don't have anything like that here. You know that that happens at the same time that here actually the workers movement in the US was, was kind of getting defeated. I mean the up in the 70s. So with respect to like land backed specifically? You know, I don't know if you. I don't know if you will see it in the same forms. I I doubt at least obviously would totally be there cheering it on and and and happy to see it. But I think it looks a lot more like during the uprising last year you saw in Chicago, for instance, the when when like the trains were being expropriated as they were moving, taking goods out of these box cars and just expropriating tons of goods, taking, you know, taking goods that would normally be going. You know, just commodities normally going to court just cut off in the middle of line or you know, these, these, these, these kind of like more. Uh. I don't want to say small scale, but. Focus more on like infrastructural choke points rather than necessarily. Having thousands of people swarming, you know, a massive industrial agriculture set up in in Kansas or something, you know, yeah, I think it's great to imagine that. I think I, I really love sharing the history of MST with people in America who've never heard it before because I think it's a great way to kind of expand the imaginary of like what is possible, like what kind of actions are actually at our disposal, like and and it surely is. Not, you know, look exactly like that. And I think it's also really important for us to like not forget a lot of the similar histories here, like. Part of the inspiration for the Almanac or what kind of drove us to to make it, was some of us were doing a reading group of this book called Freedom Farmers that's about kind of like various. Black projects in the South for food autonomy after slavery, and a lot of it is about Fannie Lou Hammer and freedom farms. And, you know, we're definitely inspired for some of the Lobelia things by Fannie Lou Hammer's Pig Bank, which was a really cool thing where they just, like, started with a bunch of pigs. And if you were in the community, like, you get, you get your pigs from, you get a couple of piglets from the pig bank and then the interest on that. Is a couple years later you got to give them a couple pigs because you're producing your own pigs. And so the pig bank is like self-sustaining. And another thing from that book that was inspiring to us was reading about George Washington Carver's public education projects out of Tuskegee University that were just really inspiring in terms of like he was doing all of his own kind of independent research about soils and pests and all these different crops and everything and. Creating these farm bulletins that were then being distributed to black farmers throughout the region to kind of, you know, share better practices. And a lot of the stuff was like agroecology before people had that word. Like he was very far ahead of his time in terms of understanding soil dynamics and and passed and things like that. So yeah, we we definitely try to try to lift up all that history as much as possible. Yeah, I guess whenever. The other thing I thought was very interesting that you alluded to briefly. In this was yeah, because there's a session of this that's talking about food in prisons. And I wonder if you could talk about that part a little bit more because that's a connection that I that I really don't think it's drawn very often here. Let me flip to the piece right there. I mean, one of the things that it's kind of hard to describe, I, I do love the visual that that we have for this piece. But yeah, I mean it's just like the, it's a striking image. You know, it's got like in the center there's a picture of a really high density chicken operation and there's somebody wearing sort of like a full Tyvek suit suit and just walking through this. Massive herd of chickens and then that's superimposed over this just like really nasty looking close up photo of a prison food tray and just like the canned veggies and the everything and like, I mean, I don't. I've. Been to jail a number of times and the food is always terrible. It's always one of the things you talk about or you can bond over whatever. It's just how bad the food is. But I think people who haven't experienced that don't really think about just how much. Systematic, like starvation is going on and malnutrition is going on. Where it's like the only way you could possibly survive in these places is spending a bunch of extra money on commissary to get stuff that also isn't healthy. But at least you can get more calories and stuff and like, I think that that there's like a lot of parallels between kind of the structure of prisons and the structure of our of our food system. I mean, one example that I used to talk about this is like the banana plantation. Where like. The, you know, we have an entire variety of banana that's like basically extinct, or it's it, it can't be grown commercially anymore because the banana industry, you know, functions by putting like warehousing these bananas together and these like super tight plantation formations, you know, which really only makes sense if you're just trying to maximize your profits and get as much out of a small space as possible. But what it does is, is the exact same thing that happens in prisons during COVID. Or with any kind of. You know, pathogen like tuberculosis or whatever, you know it. It's like the the trees are so close together that the fungus spreads so rapidly. And then they're also like pumping all these things into to fight that and they're actually breeding super funguses all the time. And at some point the banana that we eat now is going to also stop existing because of this. And I guess I don't know if I can draw anything deeper out of those similarities other than the fact that there's this like overriding logic of capitalism that is just like has no respect for these beings, like whether it is a person or a banana tree. Like. It's all just. Commodities and things to be warehoused. Yeah, I I I think to add on that I mean this this. I think the piece in there which is called the struggle for good food across walls. I think it does a nice job of of talking about how like. You know, if we're talking about, quote UN quote food, food justice or or what have you like. Like? How can we talk about that on the outside while forgetting about just the most deplorable? Food conditions on the entire continent. And I I think that that it's it's really good at that. I think I would really like to see in the next year all the ways that. The imaginaries of of inmates kind of go in and like attack that. The like the logic of of prison food being completely deplorable. Like, you know, you have all these forms of creativity of, like making tortillas and stuff and, like doing wild things with like stuff that's in the commissary and, you know, contraband kind of ways of, of making kind of life a little bit more livable in there. And and if anyone has spent time in jail or prison or or kept up a relationship with someone on the inside or what have you. Everyone has a story about a way of making making food more interesting and joyful and like there becomes whole cultures around them. One of the things that we're starting to do in one of the farm spaces we work with outside of the city is is. Through preexisting relationships with inmates in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, which for those that don't know was a plantation. Civil war happens. Two years after the Civil War, it becomes a Louisiana State Penitentiary. It's still a plantation. It's, you know, this many times, this descendants of the same enslaved folks who were on that plantation prior. And, you know, it's a, it's a guard on a horseback riding around. Of pulling cotton and and so. So through some of these relationships with some of these inmates who are like kind of clandestine organizers, we're starting to come up with ways to like grow food collaboratively with folks that are behind walls and and find ways to get food to either their family or maybe sell and get that into their commissary. Kind of just like trying to. Spitball ideas about like different ways of producing food despite peoples incarceration. Yeah, that that seems that seems like a really I guess the only way you can really say is necessary way for for this sort of food politics to go if it's going to actually deal with sort of both the the the land conditions and the conditions of just. You know, the fact that we have a note that there's still just an enormous slave population in the US and I think that kind of resistance and creativity, I think, is how. Yeah, you are. You're on the right track with, with pushing it that way. Yeah. That this is, this is sort of a bleak note to end on, I think. But I don't know, I think it yeah, it's it's a it's a hopeful one too and where can people find? But basically all of you also work and then also you talked a little bit about trying to get submissions for everything. So can you, yeah, talk a little bit about how that, how that's going to work? Yeah. So we're, we're it's it's kind of been on hold a little bit because we've been like very active after Ida. Yeah and you know trying to make sure our people are all good and and supporting. In various places and kind of doing like different workshops and stuff and and because our focus isn't just on food production, it's also like neighborhood survival or whatever. So we've been working with an old neighbor of one of ours who. You know, she's already been kind of doing this mutual aid stuff, you know, by any other name for decades, you know, letting people stay in their house and feeding people. She's like kind of like a block Mama, and she's really one of the last black homeowners in her neighborhood. So we're really trying to, like, help her achieve some autonomy. One way that we've been putting it is when all the air BNB's, like, lose their power because they're still reliant on the colonial world. Well, Miss Sophia could still have her lights on. Because she's gonna be totally autonomous from the system. So and I think that that link is on our Instagram page. If you click on the like and the link or whatever, there's a go fund me. That is where we've been putting a lot of our effort and really working with her on. And then also like growing, growing a garden like adjacent to her so that their people in that community are are footed as as food, autonomous as as we can get. We can put that in the show notes. Yeah, and the the handle for both Twitter and Instagram is at Lobelia Commons. And the Almanac. You can find links to the Almanac PDF on through either of those if you want to just read it for free. And then there's also copies for sale on emergentgoods.com and for submissions. I mean, yeah, like I said, we've been really behind on this just because of all this stuff, but for submissions, we're really looking for folks. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope. There isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about? I should have asked you if you'd like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Thinking particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. To contribute throws a pitch, and I think if you've seen the first one or you've listened to this, you probably get something of an idea of what we're looking for. And we're happy to like talk to people about like, you know, different ideas and bear with us if we're a little slower to respond because we're, you know, kind of still waist deep right now. But the the submission for deadlines is the end of October and you can e-mail ideas or pictures or whatever to Lobelia Commons at protonmail.com. And lastly, the project that I'm most focused on is the front yard Orchard initiative. Where basically we just propagate as many fruit trees as cheaply as possible. Things that are really easy for us to grow from cuttings like figs, mulberries, things that are easy to grow from seed like papaya, moringa pecan. And we basically just have some nice fires that we put up and we advertise a bit on social media and also just kind of go door to door in neighborhoods where we already have gardens or connections. And offer to give free fruit trees out to people, and we're also happy to plant them for people. And then kind of offer a consultation on how to take care of it or whatever. And also, if folks want to hear some of the pieces from the 2021 Earthbound Farmers Almanac read by some of the authors and then some interviews with those authors, you can check out this podcast called Partisan Gardens that did a really good episode that's kind of like an audio exploration of the Almanac. Cool. Yeah. Have people, people definitely, definitely go read the Almanac. It is it's, it's, it's a, it's a really good. It's a really good piece of work. Yeah. Thank. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having us. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of eating wall broke podcasts while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official Princess of Compton, Asia, kidding and Asia is the professor. We're here on 80 wild broke and today I'm gonna break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union hall. I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Doctor King. On April 4th, 1968, Doctor Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right, James Earl Ray. Was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade all we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Doctor King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 9021 O. From the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode you get your podcast. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210. From the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As 90210 Super fan and radio host, Cincinnati sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment. From Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates, you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 9021 OMG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You suddenly wake up to the loud growling of a tactical vehicle must have left your window open. A few streets away you can hear the troopers doing their morning patrols. This is closing in on week four of the All day curfew. Cops and state troopers have put checkpoints at every bridge and on all major streets for about every 10 blocks. Your friends and the city's local liberal majority are now calling this what it is. Your city is functioning as a full on police state. National establishment media has been more hesitant to use that term, but your fox watching conservative family from out of state has been texting you about how good it is that someone is finally establishing law and order and taking back the town after months of senseless looting and destructive riots. You've been mostly stuck in your downtown apartment. You quit your job when the recent bout of protests started up, which now means you don't qualify for the working hours exemption of the curfew. You've got enough money saved up for another month, but you're looking to get a grocery delivery job, which would have the added benefit of allowing you to go outside during the day. Luckily, you've been able to sneak out at night to do rooftopping and surveil the police's checkpoints and patrol routes in your neighborhood. You've noticed that the cops rarely look up. You've been feeding your Intel into a surveillance database shared on a telegram channel ran by some various activists. After lying in bed gathering your thoughts for a few minutes, you finally roll out and pick out your clothes, dark loose pants, a plain shirt, beanie and a high vis jacket. Ordinarily, you'd break into your Red Bull stash for morning caffeine, but you've already got plenty of energy. Today it's your boyfriend's birthday, and for the past week you've been planning to surprise him. You think there's finally enough information in the surveillance database to plan a trip across town with little to no law enforcement interaction between the in person reconnaissance and hacking into the city's traffic cams, which was surprisingly easy. You've been able to figure out a route using city buses and on foot that should be able to avoid checkpoints and the regular patrol routes. From what you've seen online, bus drivers won't ask for your work authorization card, and you're hoping the highest jacket will make it look like you belong. Lastly, before you leave, you grab your small yellow messenger bag and jam in a water bottle plus a tin of 1/2 a dozen cupcakes. Deep breaths. Slowly twist the handle of your door and stare down your apartment hallway. You're on your way. You keep telling yourself, just act like you belong. After taking the stairs down to ground level, you make your way St side. This part you feel more confident about, you've been able to study the patrol patterns around your immediate area more carefully. The bus stop you're going to is just four blocks away. You can zigzag through 2 streets and to avoid the main drags. As you walk through the sidewalks, you keep your head down, but your eyes are darting side to side to get a lay of the land. Don't walk too fast or too slow. Match the people around you. Obviously not many people are out right now, but there are enough to mirror their movement and pace. It feels like it took forever, but you get to the bus stop without incident or seeing a single cop. Waiting at bus stops always feels like an eternity, but today it's worse. Within a few minutes, the Blue Metro bus does pull up. The bus driver gestures you on. The electronic ticketing system isn't turned on. You peek up to the driver, you'll look in her eyes. Is telling you just to head on back. At least you know she's probably on your side. You picked this bus not because it's the most direct route to your boyfriend's place. It's not, but because it gets you close enough while avoiding the checkpoints you and your Internet buddies have mapped out. It's a slower, more jagged route, but at least you get to relax for a while and enjoy the ride. And hey, you can get an in person look at the rest of the city under the curfew and police occupation. The rides now closing in on a little over half an hour. About 10 more minutes until you get off your hearts racing. You might actually do this in your flash of nervous excitement. You look up ahead on the road and your face drops. About half a mile up ahead you spot a checkpoint. **** no, this. This is wrong. This wasn't on the map. The checkpoint on this street was supposed to be further up the road. After you get off, your mind flashes through different possibilities that the cops change to the checkpoint this morning. Wait, did the police find the database map on Telegram and are feeding it false info? You stop yourself from thinking because you realize you need to act now and think later. You jump out of your seat and Sprint up the bus towards the driver you blurt out. I need to get off this right now. Please. The driver looks ahead, looks at you and tilts her head down and pulls over. Quick, that's all she says to you. You dart out of the bus and into the half residential half retail labyrinth, and as you're running, you hear sirens. **** they saw you. Your head swivels around to catch a glance. One car from the checkpoint is headed your way. You hope the bus driver doesn't get in trouble, but right now that's not your problem. You think first thing you need to do is prevent the vehicle from pursuing you so off the big streets. You take a second to tighten the messenger bike around your body and here we go. To your right you see a walled courtyard for a small two-story apartment estimate the wall is 8 feet tall. Doable. You turn off the street and run towards the wall, slowly gaining speed. Jump up and plant your foot on the side. Then your arms reach up and grab the top. It's a bit of a struggle to pull yourself up. You got some stuff weighing you down and you're a bit out of practice, but you get up. You hop down onto the other side and keep going. For now. You barrel through some dense. Rushes and Volta few small railings as you traverse the side streets. Soon enough you're far enough away from the car, with plenty of obstacles in between you and it, that you feel like you can catch a quick breather. Now you have a choice. Hide it out here for a bit, or figure out a way to your boyfriends. You still got a decent sense of where you are. The destination should be only about 10 blocks away, now in a diagonal direction. You'll get plenty of time to rest your boyfriend's place, so you figure you should continue on. As you're about to head on your way, 2 armored state troopers turned the corner on foot. You remember you're still pretty close to the checkpoint. One look at you with your hands on your knees as you pant. The cops know you're out of place. Stop, yells the cop. You're being detained. ****. Time to book it. Going to have to think as you run. Good news is, is that they're in armor. Bad news is that you're tired and your outfit is blown. You can change clothes once you get to your boyfriend's. So you decide the best course of action now is to make it hard for two people in armor to follow you. Time to put some obstacles between you and them. You're already mostly out of the retail area, which means it's time to hop some backyard fences. Ferris Bueller's Day off ****. You make a sharp left turn behind a car and into someone's yard and up and over their fence. One hand grabs on top, one hand goes to the far side, and you flip your body over. Next few fences are shorter. Regular speed vaults will do. The sound of the clunky, tactile boots chasing you gets quieter as you traverse through the yards and zig zagging around blocks. Before you know it, you're on the Back street. Your partner's place. Only a few more steps and you can see their backyard in the distance. You could turn your head and look around. From what you can see, you've lost the state troopers. You scurry through four more yards before you reach your target. You let out a sigh of relief. You jogged past the side yard towards the front. You probably should use the front door. Before you knock, you take a look inside your messenger bag. You unclip the latch and inside the Liza smushed pile of cupcake crumbs with pink frosting coating the insides of your bag. Huh? Well, at least I made it in one piece, you say out loud. After an exhausting trek, you finally knock on the door. Woo. It could happen here. Podcast Robert Evans. Sophie is not here today, so I get to open the episode with atonal grunting because she was unable to stop me. Welcome to the podcast that this is talking about. Things falling apart. How to, you know, make it not maybe my guest today. Well, my my co-host today first is is Garrison Davis Garrison, how you doing today? I'm doing good. Good we have a little bit of a fun update. This actually happened last week, but this will be the first episode we're recording since it happened last week. We put up some links to a go fund me and a couple of different episodes of ******** and of it could happen here to try to help a woman named Ruby, who lives in Portland and is a community activist, save her house. When we started the fundraiser she'd raised about 28 grand to to you know, get basically keep her home and. It's up to the 50 grand she needed yell did that in about 3 days. So you've you've you've kept a woman in her home and allowed her and her family to stay where they are and I'm just extremely grateful to everybody who donated, who shared. It's just awesome you know this comes after earlier in this year you all funded the Portland Diaper Bank. I just continued to be very impressed with with how how much people who listen to these shows are willing to. Throw down to help people out. So thank you all. And now I'm going to hand it off to Garrison. Garrison, what are we? What are we? What are we? What are we? What are we, what are we talking about today? So today we're going to be talking about and discussing 2 of kind of. My favorite practical skill sets they been training for, I don't know, 788. I think I almost eight years now. And it's, yeah, one of my favorite interests. It's useful very practically. It's also useful for fun. We talking about parkour, which people may have heard me discuss before, but also just kind of like stealth in general and how to be kind of mindful of your presence among other people. As a big clumsy guy who's worked extensively with you in aggressive situations, I can confirm that your parkour is very, very effective because you are a fast little *** ** * *****. Very good at getting away from the cops and getting to where you need to be to film things. It was always. Kind of amazing, as frustrating as it was sometimes when you would when you would dart out ahead of everybody. But yeah, can't argue with the results. So, and to help us kind of talk about parkour and stealth, I have brought on a friend of mine who is the person who mostly taught me parkour and stealth. My friend Rick, who has been teaching parkour for a long time. Say hi Rick. That that that's right. Rick is very not super social. So it's I think it's amazing that I was able to convince him to come in a podcast. Pretty funny. First off, Rick, do you want to kind of just like give your definition of like parkour and general, you know, whenever we say parkour, everyone just thinks of the office, which I know you find frustrating. But yeah, for people who maybe aren't as into it as us, don't just give kind of a brief overview of of parkour as like a concept. Parkour is a really annoying concept to actually pin down. But basically speaking, it's movement with purpose. You are somewhere, you want to get somewhere and you're trying to find the best way of doing that. When we're training, we kind of focus on efficiency, safety, speed and. The the reason behind the movement. Yeah, yeah. I think that's thinking of it more as like the movement with purpose or like like intentional movement is much better than thinking of it's like parkour isn't like flips, like flips and that kind of stuff is is more of what we call like a free running. It's more of like a creative expression. It's more of like a kind of like a sport where it's like parkour is more usually. I mean, there's always people that are going to fight you on this in the in the parkour community, but it's generally parkour is kind of more based on utility. So like last summer at the protests I, I, I, I used you know parkour in a lot of different ways both to like you know get somewhere specifically or parkour is great is like a recovery tool. Like if you get pushed over by cops, parkour can be very useful for like getting up very fast. You know, it's like all that kind of more practical side of things and I've used parkour, you know before I was doing filming at different kind of activism related type things. It's just it's a super useful skill to have and today I wanted to talk a bit about like. Our course practical application in you know conflict ish scenarios, but also wanted to touch on stealth. As you know sometimes you don't need a parkour and if you can avoid a scenario where you have to use it would be kind of great. So I've, I've asked Rick to kind of prepare a few things on stealth which then we'll kind of you know bounce off each other and talk, have kind of a general discussion of parkour and stealth in general and how it relates to kind of conflict scenarios. So Rick, where would you like to start for, you know, stealth overview well in conflict with other people. There's like 3 different levels of the conflict and all of these get trained in different places. Usually there's the actual. Like conflict, the combat, which is more of a martial arts or gun training or weapon training of any kind is what prepares you for that. Beneath that is the parkour level, where you can avoid getting into the conflict in the 1st place. If you can get away from the situation, yeah. If you're more of an arms length away, then you can create more distance between you and someone that's trying to hurt you. And in 99.9% of conflict situations, that's going to be a better self-defense option than literally any weapon you could carry. Just getting the hell away is always the preferred. There's there's there's a really good comic. It's it's like, it's like, it's like a like a, like a. Comedy comic of like someone someone trying to get into like a knife fight and you're just like, Nope, I'm running away because there's no, there's no winner in a knife fight. The only way to win a knife fight is to be ohh far away from someone with a knife. Yeah, I mean, literally. Again, the only justified situation I can think of to physically getting into a knife fight is like what happened on the Portland Max train. When someone else can't get away. Yeah, you're stuck in a space. Them and the two guys who did that died. They died. Yeah. Yeah. Not that they did the wrong thing, they did the only thing they could, but that's what a knife fight is. So yeah, it's being able to get the **** away is the best self-defense. Yeah, I carry weapons with me wherever I go, but I don't want to ever use them. My first response is always going to be look for an escape path. Yep, yeah. A weapon is only for if you can't get away or if someone else can't get away so much. Like, yeah, we're. Yeah, I've always been interested because again, I've watched, you know, Garrison hop away from cops over fences where I had to like you know, fall over the fence essentially because I've not nearly as good. I'm someone who exercises, but like #1. Is it even possible to like learn this stuff without ******* your 33 year old body up a bunch in the process? That's one thing I'm scared of is like over 60. And he's good, very good. He's actually like one of my high, intermediate, low advanced students, honestly. And he started when he was like 50. How do you uh, I mean, like it it just seems like injury, I guess, because my, my, my stereotypical view of it is like a bunch of jumping up on buildings and leaping over stuff. Like, yeah, it seems like injuries would be a pretty common fact, so I I guess that's kind of like, always been my first concern there. Like, how do you? How do you, how do you train people to do this stuff with the minimum of risk? Well, that's kind of always the focus of my teaching. There certainly are other instructors out there, but like the guy who taught me parkour was basically, this is a Kong vault, this is what it looks like. Do it. My training, like I sucked at parkour when I started, so my teaching method has been coming at this as a sort of OK. I'm going to try to break this down into as many pieces as I can, and I'm going to try to keep you completely safe. Bumps and bruises do happen when you're training parkour, that's just unavoidable. It's learning how to do walking, but fancy so you get bruised when you're learning how to walk. You get bruised when you're learning every technique in parkour. But I've been doing it for 14 years now and I've never broken any of my bones. So if you do it right, you shouldn't be able to stay safe when training you. Definitely, if you can get someone who's more experienced, getting them to break down steps for you is very useful. Whether that be like a park or gym in your area or just like a friend. That that's that's been that's been like messing around. Trying to like train with somebody is probably one of the most important things is to have someone else there, both if you like. One like get hurt and need help, but two to kind of prevent to, to help prevent that from ever happening in the 1st place because there's a lot of like very simple moves. That can be introduced in very safe environments. I've, I've, I've been wanting to get Roberts down to the gym for like over a year now just to go over like a few basic kind of stuff that's just really, really useful and pretty and like, pretty easy. Like, we're not, we're not jumping to like, you know, doing like rooftopping right, where like jumping from one room to another. We're starting, we're starting by being like here's like a concrete barricade. What's the safest way of getting over this if you're under pressure, right. It's it's that kind of stuff that's specifically useful, like conflict scenarios, right. Because like. When we're, when we're facing in a riot line, I'm not gonna be doing like flips and cartwheels to like, get over fences. I'm trying to be like, what's the safest, fastest way I can get over this thing? Well, making sure I'm not going to get like shot with a rubber bullet, right. That's kind of, it's it's it's very different from what you see on, like, YouTube, right? YouTube is very, like, showy. People are like, trying to like basically what you see on YouTube is people are doing, people are doing like a choreographed performance, whereas parkour from a utility standpoint is very different from what you see online. It's improvisation. Yeah and that's one of the things that we try to train too when we're training parkour is we just give our people have been moving like this for thousands and thousands of years. It's only in the past few 100 years where we've like kind of lost this ability or it's like become it's become less necessary. So like we we know how to interact with our environment in creative ways like we we we know how to do this. It's just that, you know we the past the, the the the past few centuries, it's been less important and I think parkour is really fun because you can kind of rediscover. Interacting with your environment in these kind of more wild ways, it's something that we all do as children. Just like evolutionarily, for some reason as children we do this as play, we climb trees and we try to go over fences. It's just that something in our society has made a shift so that when we become adults, it's suddenly not acceptable for us to do this anymore. Yeah, I mean, I can remember when I was a little kid growing up on the farm, we had a bullpen because we kept the bowl away from the cows. And my, my cousin and I would hop over the fence and we would throw stuff at the bowl and then when it started to charge, we would hop back over the fence. Like, I mean, obviously I'd never do that today because it's mean to throw things at a bowl. I was six, but also I couldn't physically hop over the fence that way today. But I'm I'm guessing within like I don't know even just like a few hours of practice you could figure out a lot of ways to get it could be back to ******* with bowls is what you said exactly you you you don't need to kiss. Kiss the bull ******* goodbye. You can we can we can go back to this. We could go. I could I could return to tradition. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. What is the degree of this that can be done without again, like you know we have we have a wide variety of income levels that listen to this show what is the degree of this can be done without like paying for training, you know? Like, like, how is it even possible to, like, start on this kind of thing if you're in reasonable shape, you know, on your own without paying someone because that that seems like a recipe for breaking something to me. But I, again, I don't know. I don't know. ****. It is very much about knowing yourself and knowing what you're ready for. This was something. I mean, I say that I never broke a bone in my training, but there were a couple times I started pushing myself further than I should have, and it would have been really good to have someone there to say, hey, you're probably not ready for this yet. Let's break this down into little pieces. But if you come at it methodically and you don't. Endanger yourself too much. What I started out with in parkour is I would just put a piece of tape on the ground and another piece of tape and jump from one piece of tape to the other. And went out to parking lots and jumped from just an arbitrary Pebble to the curb on the parking lot and found some just railings and learned how to go over those railings safely and gradually just started building up to higher and higher things. You always want to start at ground level when you're training parkour. Don't go up to high places for your first thing. Yeah, there there's a lot of, like instructional videos on YouTube too, that that are not just like showing off. It's people trying to like, break down movement. So you can like, get find a specific video, be like, OK, I wanted to, you know, bring this on my phone, go out into like a playground, a parking lot. Like it's like a a wooded area and be like, OK, this is, this is this one vault and watch the video and I'm going to try to replicate it myself. That's really the, the kind of easiest, cheapest way to kind of break that down. Without having to, you know, pay someone tons of money, you know, if parkour classes aren't the most expensive thing. So that's if if you do have a little bit of disposable income. I, I, I, I, I like parkour classes. I did them for a long time, but there was a certain point actually, that, like, I couldn't afford classes anymore. And luckily I've been doing parkour enough at that point that I was able to become an assistant instructor. Which means I've got like a free, I got like a free membership in exchange for, you know, helping out in classes. Like a few hours a week. So that's that's what I did for years when I couldn't afford classes is is just help is help teach which I mean eventually I got leveled up to being like a full time instructor so that is kind of the other way is you know once you get enough stuff there are you know there's there's ways to like make friends who know more parkour than you you can do you know outdoor training with them which can be free. But if you if you do really want like a like a gym environment there is this ways of making classes not the most expensive thing. So there's online groups that schedule. Meetups every now and then, so if you can find an online group in your area, you can go to one of their meetups and ask for advice. Not everyone's going to give the best advice. There are some people in the park or community who are always pushing their boundaries. They'll be in a cast half of the time. The the more advanced people, yeah. They they generally, so always take advice with a grain of salt. Not everyone knows everything and no one knows your body as well as you do, so you you got to keep yourself safe above everything else. You can't get better at parkour if you break both of your legs. Yeah, that's always. So a couple of questions here. Number one would be, obviously, I don't expect, you know, like somebody's in Michigan or whatever. I don't expect you to know the best parkour instructor there, but if somebody is looking at going the gym route. Are there kind of some hard and fast rules for determining whether or not these folks know what they're doing? Like, is there any kind of advice you have in terms of picking a gym, or is it just kind of like go into Google Maps and see where the parkour will be? That's a little bit tough because especially since COVID, there's not many options for parkour gyms out there. My best advice would be go and if they let you just watch a class and see what's going on. See? How many people have casts? Yeah, yeah. Back when I was learning parkour originally, we would have basically two people in a cast all the time. Just realizing the class. Yeah, I didn't know that. The guy that I was trying to keep up with the whole time spent 3 stints in a cast. Yeah, just funny because I've never got a serious injury ever. I I was. I was always more careful in my training, but like the most I've gotten. It's like, it's like, you know, like bruises and stuff. I've, I've, I've and and I I got to a relatively high level of of parkour, like a a few years ago. Only took classes from me. Always on breaking things down and making them accessible and safe. True, true, yeah, yeah. But there is a there's definitely people who are more who are more carefree with their body and OK with hurting themselves to do something cool, and some people get away with that. So for folks who either don't have the financial means to go to a gym where there's just nothing in their area because as you've said, there's a plague if people are going to, you've given some advice on like, how to start training yourself. Are there any specific online resources you would recommend to folks who are? You know, looking to get on unless on their own. Dip their toes in. UM, you know, YouTube channels or or or people who you know do good. Like writing breakdowns, anything that you would, you would push folks towards. I haven't been up to date on it recently. A lot of the videos out there are garbage. What I recommend you look for is you look for, first of all, explanation. Second of all, if you can find videos of someone who's training something. And they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly, and they fail to do the move that they're trying to do correctly. They fail and fail and fail and fail and then succeed. That's an honest video. That's one that I would listen to more because they understand the process. The other videos out there are sort of greatest hits compilations and you don't get to see the whole process that goes into that. So I don't have a lot of sense. I don't have any specific person or channel to recommend, but when you're going out there and looking for resources, just make sure that the person is. Bring some understanding into the fact that this is a process of training and it's not just this is how it's done. Do it now. You can do it. There is, there is a, there is like a parkour wiki which was like you know, parkour.fandom.com that you can you can find like just like lists of all of the moves and they give you very like simple explanations of them and they and they link to some videos and generally like if you just want to learn more about it then that's then that can be a good resource just so you're familiar with all the different types of movement. But yeah, like. Make sure you take every video with a grain of salt and, you know, watch other watch other people's explanations and be like, OK, I kind of like the way this person describes it versus this person because you know, everyone teaches differently, everyone teaches for kind of, you know, different, different body types for different like, you know, body like performance models. So you know, because you can't just apply the same thing to everyone because everyone everyone's different. But you know, the the the parkour wiki is a decent resource and then you know, there is. YouTube is, especially since since the 2000s there's been a plethora of content. Most, most of it bad, but you know, there's lots to at least look for. All right. Anything else you wanted to get into? Yeah, I wanted to kind of branch off of like the parkour discussion into kind of like the more kind of. Stealth based discussion of of kind of being aware of your presence in relation to other people. And Rick, I know you were talking about like the different like levels of stealth, yes. So you've got the combat training which prevents you from getting killed or captured in the worst of scenarios. And then you have parkour that you can use to prevent the combat in the 1st place and stealth is what you use to prevent the chase from happening. In the first place, it's kind of a tree of. I really don't want to have to fight someone, so I'm gonna run away instead. I really don't want to have to run away from someone, so I'm just going to try not to be noticed by them instead. And that's been a lot of what my training and parkour has been focused around is just staying deescalated as possible with everything. Yeah, because, yeah, we, me and Rick, have focused most of our parkour training on, on stealth as opposed to being, you know, super strong or super powerful. And stealth is a really hard concept to talk about because it's kind of like nebulous in nature, because, like, stealth isn't being invisible, right? It's not. It's not being totally unnoticed. It's one. It's it's it's wanting to craft the way you're seen in a specific way. Yeah, it's always been very difficult for me to explain what stealth is. The most recent definition that I've given for it is that everything that you do, everything that you are, gives off a certain amount of noise and a certain type of noise. So the way that you dress, you can dress in a very loud way with a high VIS vest. Dayglow colors something that makes you really easy to notice, but if you're in the right environment, that might be the right type of noise to be making to blend into a crowd. Like a three piece suit is also a very loud outfit to wear, but if you're on the streets of New York, that's normal if you come into a parkour. Even wearing a three piece suit, it's very abnormal, so that's not the right type of noise if you're trying to blend in there. Yeah, a lot of it's about kind of constructing the way people see you based on what environment you're in and and who you're trying to remain undetected from, right? Because, I mean they were like, not even necessarily undetected, but just detected in a specific way. Because people eyes, peoples eyes can glaze over a lot of a lot of stuff. If if just that the right puzzle pieces are put into their brain, then it's like nothing, nothing to see here. Everything's normal. Nothing, nothing, nothing to be alerted, right. Because what you're trying to do is prevent someone from. Being like alerted to your presence, that is kind of the main thing. So you can be within someone sight lines, but the way that you're dressed, the way that you're moving, the way that you hold yourself fails to get their attention. Their subconscious registers that people eyes, peoples eyes can glaze over a lot of a lot of stuff if if just that the right puzzle pieces are put into their brain, that it's like nothing, nothing to see here every everything's normal. Nothing, nothing, nothing to be alerted, right. Because what you're trying to do is prevent someone from. Being like, alerted to your presence, that is kind of the main thing. So you can be within someone sight lines, but the way that you're dressed, the way that you're moving, the way that you hold yourself fails to get their attention. Their subconscious registers that you're there, but it doesn't register consciously to them that you're there. It's the the Gray man stuff that we were talking about with Chelsea, which again, there's like a very frustrating Chetty dimension to it, but the the original idea before it got taken over as an entire. Fashion aesthetic was if you're prepared, if you're if you're going to make yourself prepared for bad situations, you don't want to wear a bunch of tactical gear you don't want to be dressed in, like 511 combat pants. You don't want to be carrying like military backpacks and like the cargo pants with the, you know, clearly bulging with weaponry. You don't want to be open. Carrying a gun you want to be dressed, however, is going to least. Really set you apart from the crowd. And that is, as you said, gonna vary. No, it's not a matter of like, wearing all Gray or wearing all black. Now, if you're in ******* downtown Salt Lake City, you know, a black hoodie and jeans might stand out more than it does if you're in like, downtown San Francisco, in which case you're going to look like a million other people. I mean, and and generally, if you're trying to avoid being seen, I recommend against wearing black basically at at all times, especially if you're trying to remain like actually invisible at night. You don't want to wear black. As black is usually too dark you you you want to wear like darker Blues or darker greens, yeah, generally black is should be avoided. Of course, like Black Bloc is a whole separate thing because black bloc are trying to remain anonymous within a crowd context. But you know, in a lot of cases you don't want to be in black bloc at protests or you want to be able to switch from Black bloc to what we call like Normie Block very quickly. So, like, you know, quick changes are another kind of form of stealth. That you can like practice like you can you can just practice doing quick changes like in your apartment, like how fast can I get from this outfit to this outfit in like a small space, right. You can you can practice these even like outside, but specifically for like black bloc changing both in and out of is a skill that needs to be practiced. But overall, I think like there's a lot of other ways of being anonymous at a protest besides actually black bloc. Like there's a lot of other kind of methods like black box is very specific tactic, but it's not a tactic that needs to get applied all the time. It's it's it's very. You should be mindful that it has a lot of downsides, and based on what you're trying to do, there's a lot of other ways to dress that would maybe be better, yeah. Yeah, it's this, you know, it's a little bit like angles of it are kind of what we talked about even in, like the last week when we were talking about like storing, you know, food and canning food and like the value of paying attention to the cycle of like what is in stock and what is not stock in stock during what seasons. It's kind of the same thing. The value of paying attention to how people dress and how people move and like, what is a normal way to move about in wherever you live as opposed to like what stands out? Like there's a lot of value and a lot of self-defense value and just kind of paying attention to people wherever you live. And getting an eye for what will stand out and what won't stand out if you're, if you, if you are someone for whom being able to blend in is something you see value in, you know? Yeah. Rick, do you have anything that's kind of on that side of things or any, like, exercises people can like do to improve their own personal stealth? Yeah, it's very, very situational. You have to sort of study many different environments. The biggest advice that I give people for stealth all the time is. Pay attention. You have to pay attention to the smallest details. When I'm even just moving around my house, like the the bathroom door lock, when you twist the lock, the button pops out and makes a huge noise. I actually place my thumb over it and deaden the sound as I'm doing it, and I pay attention to the kind of noise that I make in every situation and try to minimize that as much as possible. I pay attention to which parts of my house. Make noise when you step on them and avoid those places. I basically just pay attention to every noise that my body makes that my environment makes as I'm moving through it. Also, you have to pay attention and study other people in different environments. You can go to a grocery store and watch the the body language of the moms who are shopping with their kids so that the people that normally you wouldn't pay attention to pay attention to them because they're doing a good job of blending in if you're not normally paying attention to them and then try to start mimicking their body language. What I'll do when I go out is I don't directly look. Anyone but I'm paying attention to. If I'm being paid attention to give myself that, own that a conscious feedback and say, hey, I wasn't all that stealthy this time, I kind of stuck out. Yeah, practicing your peripheral vision is definitely useful for that. I mean, in terms of like exercises, yeah, just go into like parks or other places where a lot of people and like people watching and trying to figure out who does your eyes glaze over the most and what are they doing to cause that. I think one thing that me and Rick have talked about before is like every part of your body points somewhere, like, whether that be your eyes, your nose, your chin, your arms, your hips, your chest, your hands, all of these things point in a direction. And if you can figure out which direction you can point them to make people Payless attention to you. That's kind of one of the easier models of understanding how to like, walk and move in a stealthy manner that I think. Like out of all the different ways of thinking about it, I think that's the way that's helped me the most. Thing like, you know, if if my head is pointed up and my nose is pointed out and I'm moving my arms around a lot, that's people are gonna like like, look at me more. You know, people if if if if I contact is made, that is like a failure. So you know, if your head's pointed down, your arms are more slouched, they kind of move with your body. But that's not super exaggerated and it's not super stiff. These are different kind of ways of pointing your body to make you seem more like introspective and less external. Also walking around with earplugs or like like like. Earbuds your phones. Those are ways people will pay attention less to smart device looking at your smartphone. Yeah, one of the back when we back when I took classes with you and and taught classes, we would have like a weekly, a weekly games class where we'd have different, you know, games and related to parkour. And, you know, stealth would always kind of be something I would try to do. And you could survive so long in stealth games by just like looking, like pretending that you're looking at your phone, like, not even actually doing it. Just like walking in like a circle around. Like walking in a circle around the arena as people are trying to like tag and stuff. And if you can just like walk with your head down kind of slowly, you can survive a ridiculously long time because people are looking for people that are like running around and being like and being super energetic. And if you're not, people aren't detecting you as much. Another thing to practice would be a quiet walking, which is we kind of mentioned before. It's like learning how to move your foot and interact with different surfaces. That makes your walking basically silent, which is very fun because you can use this to scare your friends. It's it's, it's, it's. It's very exciting to to to to to like try to figure out what's what's ways I can hide in my friend's house to like jump scare them or like kind of like how close can I get behind someone with with without them noticing. There be times I can just like walk up behind someone and wait like I kid you not like 10 minutes before they notice I was there. It's hilarious. Even better when I can do that to their pets, because generally the animals are paying more attention to everything, so if you can successfully sneak up on someone's cat, you're doing it right. Yeah, oh man. I I do really enjoy stealth, and I'll be happy to practice it more regularly once the plague is over. If it's over, any other kind of stealth notes that you would want to kind of bring up for, if someone's trying to like, get into stealth or start thinking about detection, you know, more often in their everyday life, it's very important that you engage in indirect observations. Yeah, I was looking this up. You you were talking about how everything points and one of the things that we. Subconsciously notice the most is people's eyes. We're kind of programmed to notice eyes, so if you're looking directly at someone, they're probably going to notice that you've noticed them. But if you're using your peripheral vision, or if instead of watching them you're watching a reflection of them, or if you're watching their shadow, or you're not even looking in their direction, instead you're tracking them by sound. It makes it so that you have a. Big one up on everyone around you. Yeah, in indirect observations one of the best tools that you can use if you get really clever at it. Now this is harder because it actually if you do this wrong, people will pay more attention to you, but you can get good at it to start using like your phone camera or even just your phone screen because like your black phone screen is pretty is pretty, is pretty reflective in nature. So you can use this as like a mirror. Yeah yeah. Using like phone cameras and phone screens as a reflective surface or or just has like a camera can be used in indirect observation. But you you you do have to be careful because if if if it looks like you're filming somebody, they're going to pay so much more attention to you. So you have to be very careful with this method. But it is possible. This is how I kind of this is how I this is how I like documented different like. Not sees at rallies if I don't want to be like super obvious that I'm taking a picture of them. There's ways of doing indirect observation with my phone that I can like get pictures of them from certain angles to be like, OK, so now I can put you, I I can add you to my, to my folder of Nazis that have showed off that method. You have to be super careful if you're surrounded by potentially hostile people. Anyone who's behind you is going to see that your phone camera is on. So it's something that you only want to use if people are on one side. Of you or you know you keep you you you use your body as a shield for certain for certain like angles be tricky for hoodie and increase your odds of success with that. But but but most often I would recommend against this method, especially if you're just starting out because it is. It is a lot more risky, but when it does work it can come in very handy. But more often than not using using like reflections like windows mirrors you know like a car windows, puddles on the ground, shadows. Sound. All of these different methods of observing someone without looking directly at them are generally much, much safer. And they can be very useful for trying to track someone or just be aware of what they're looking at without looking directly at them. Kind of more similar to like what I talked about in like the fictional opening we did for stealth is very dependent on what you know is trying to watch you, right? Like, like how you need to be aware of the ways people are trying to detect you. 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Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Different than just being, yeah, than being like chased down on foot or, you know, like security cameras, of course, like online tracking, which we're not really getting into today, but you know, like being aware of where security cameras are mapped out. Can be can be very useful. Learning to, not learning to figure out where they are without looking directly at them can be useful as a lot of cities have websites that like map out where where all the cameras are. I know there's one for Portland that can like map out all of the cameras in downtown and then you can like plan like a route through downtown that has no cameras watching, right? There's only, there's only very few routes that that actually have that, but but they do exist. So learning to move in ways that make cameras. Less able to spot you. Those that's definitely another kind of method of learning about stealth and learning about like how surveillance works, never looking directly at the camera. But that's that's that's definitely useful. Which again, attention to where they are. Yeah, which plays into which plays into indirect observation. But I mean this gets more tricky. We know when police are using like thermal drones, this is it's whole whole whole other side of things that it's very hard to. I mean in the info sex side of thing is hard to combat and it's. Yeah, yeah. There there will be a point in time in which it becomes effectively impossible to there's editor for cameras. Yeah, there's like, there's there's like a hierarchy of worry cause yeah, if because if like the NSA wants to find you, they will. But most often they're not. Like most often people are dealing with their local law enforcement unit. Most often people are not dealing with the FBI. Most people usually aren't dealing with FBI, CIA, or NSA. If if they want to find you, they will. But if you can learn to only interact with your surroundings in a way that would only concern your local Police Department. That's much easier to that's much easier to kind of combat against, yeah, because it's way easier to hide from, you know, your local department than it is from the NSA. Alright, anything else? I think that pretty much covers everything you do try to be a virtual ninja. All right, well I'll plug something. One of our fans is putting together a graphic novel about the famed anarchist militant of the Spanish Civil War, Buenaventura Durruti. So if you just go to type Durruti into Kickstarter, you'll find the the graphic novel Kickstarter. Check it out, it's cool. Yeah, and I guess the other things I'll close with is. Learn to walk quietly. Learn to observe. Learn to observe your surroundings. Keep these things with other people. If you practice, practice, practice with other people. Don't, don't don't do this alone. It's really useful to have stealth be a collaborative process, because stealth isn't stealth isn't. Stealth by itself isn't just about you, it's about you and your whole environment. Collaborate with the CVS clerk when you Rob the CVS stealthily. That is, that is a different podcast I'm working on. Is is is that how to shop the shoplifting cast? I mean, I'll yeah, that is something I I will pitch very soon. Anyway, I've had trouble getting sponsors for the shoplifting podcast. I will tell you that it is difficult if you could actually get CVS to sponsor that big shoplifting. We are giving them a lot of free advertising. If, if, if it does. If it does happen. Yeah. Anyway. Most people who shoplift also spend. That's true. That is, one of the best ways to shoplift is to buy other things in the store. I'm seeing I'm already giving out advice that that is how I always shoplifted back when I shoplifted. Yeah, back when I did that 20 years ago. That's when that's how I did it as well. I feel like if Sophie were here, she'd be trying to backpedal right now and stop you guys. No Sophie support shoplifting. This is a very pro shoplifting podcast. Anyway, that's the podcast. This is Roxanne gay, host of the Roxanne gay agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of Your Dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne gay agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing and books and arts, food, pop culture, and, yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music or a comedy set. Something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary original podcast, the Roxanne gay agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of Your Dreams, Every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world. It is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Ohm. Listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Give us your attention. We need everything you've got fast. Waiting on reparations would be the endless podcast TuneIn every Thursday. Politics and word play. We fight for the people because they got us in the worst way. From the hill to Brazil, Bombay to Kanye from the left enclave to what the neocons say every Thursday. Cop the heady conversation and break us off with some bread cause we waiting on reparations. Listen to waiting on reparations. IHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You were out of town when the last cop left Seattle. It had been unseasonably cool that week. The 70 degrees of old and not the 97 you had come to dread every summer. But you had already promised you'd visit your family in Montana, and so when the riots started and the National Guard opened fire into the crowd, you watched it on Twitter from your couch like everyone else. The second Battle of Seattle they were calling it. You wondered briefly what the first one was. They've been fighting in Portland, too, some kind of massacre in Oakland, and no one was quite sure what was happening in the Napa Valley. Couldn't be anything good, you thought. But it was Seattle everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city and the helicopter when it became clear the police were losing. After that, the cops had simply broken and retreated across the Cascades. No one knew who was running the city now, and you sure as hell didn't want to be the one to find out. But after two weeks, you'd burned through every vacation day in every favor you'd ever accumulated at the hospital. And besides, the rent was due. No one was sure of the Postal Service was even still functioning, and with the eviction moratorium lifted, you weren't going to risk getting evicted because you weren't there to hand your landlord a check. So with weary resignation. You pile into your battered car and head towards Snoqualmie Pass. What surprised you most when you hit Seattle was the art you've been expecting. Burnt out buildings and streets filled with burning cars. And there were some a few streets were still blocked by what looked like improvised barricades. But every surface of every building, it seemed, had some kind of mural on it. Someone, and no one seemed to be quite sure who had first come up with the idea had blocked off an entire St U near Capitol Hill, and people were painstakingly painting portraits of every protester killed in the fighting in Seattle on it. As you walk past, they were discussing doing the same for the dead in Oakland. The second surprise came when you tried to pay your rent. A woman you'd never seen before was sitting at the office's reception desk. When you tried to handle your check, she laughed and handed it back to you, explaining that after the cops fled, the local tenants union had taken over most of the apartments in the city and placed them in something it called a Community Land Trust. You didn't quite get the details, but no one was going to evict you, so you decided to just take the win. Besides, your friend had convinced you to do some childcare for the tenants union in college, and they always seemed like a decent source, so didn't seem to be any immediate cause for concern. The hospital was another matter entirely. From what you could gather, there had been some kind of Labor dispute between the chaos. Management seemed to have fired a group of nurses for giving injured protesters shelter from the police. Your ward had already been understaffed due to COVID and budget cuts. Now situation was intolerable. Were still many of the senior administrators had fled the city with the police. No one seemed to know who was in charge. Supplies were starting to run low. And with so many administrators missing in the insurance situation completely up in the air on account of nobody being entirely sure if Seattle is even still part of Federated States, it wasn't clear if anyone was going to get paid. So when the coworker pulled you aside and asked if you'd be interested in doing something about the management problem, you figured, what the hell, maybe it was time for a change. Wasn't like it could possibly make anything worse. The fired nurses, it turned out, had started to set up a community Health Center with the help of the local neighborhood council. But some of the nurses still working at the hospital had another idea. Why not just turn the hospital into the Community Health Center? After all, the hospital already had more equipment than any new center could possibly assemble. All they needed was some help from the community, and the whole thing could be run by a Council of the hospital workers, insurance companies be damned. Besides, if all the hospitals started pulling their resources together, they might be able to solve some of the shortages. At the mention of solving the supply shortages, even the more skeptical workers started to come around. By the next morning, the Seattle Hospital Workers Council was marching on the hospital. The remaining management found out somehow and tried one final lockout to hold onto their property. But as you saw yet another column of protesters joining the crowd surrounding the hospital, you knew. This wasn't their city any longer. On April 18th 2001, military police in the Kabylia region of Algeria shot an 18 year old high school students. Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of people took to the street chanting you can't kill us, we are already dead at the lines of policemen assembled to attack them. The police would kill over 100 people and severely wounded 5000 more in the months long battle for control of the streets that followed. But protesters burned police stations, government offices, courts and the offices of Islamic fundamentalist parties until the government agreed to give ethnic minority groups language and cultural rights. The hated military police were driven from the region entirely, and so few regular police stations survived. The uprising at the regular police likewise ceased to function across broad swaths of Kabylia. They were replaced on a local village level by self organized security committees which would assemble on the rare occasion trouble emerged. Contrary to the expectations of the state, crime plummeted. But the Algerian governments otherwise continued to function as usual for over a decade, until the local government in a small region, Cupper Botcha, attempted to rig their local elections. After banning the most popular political party in the region, they installed an unpopular coalition governments. The people of Rabacca responded by storming the City Hall, seizing control of it and setting up a Democratic General Assembly inside the newly dubbed House of the People to replace the existing government. This was dual power in its original sense, a Council of the people facing off against an increasingly illegitimate parliamentary representative in a struggle for control over the fate of a new society. If you Google dual power, you are likely to encounter a pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin entitled The Dual Power, describing the conundrum of the situation following the first Russian Revolution in February of 1917. After the overthrow of the czar's, political power was split between two competing bodies. On the one side, a new professional government of liberal and Social Democratic politicians, holdovers from the Old Duma from the previous regime. On the other side, revolutionary social forces rallying around assemblies. Popular power called Soviets, which were councils of delegates sent by directly Democratic factory soldiers and sailors committees. Lenin saw this as a situation to be overcome by the seizure of state power by Socialist Party. For Lenin and his Bolsheviks, dual power was a problem, because after the tsarist state ceased to exist in the middle of the World War, the new provisional government failed to fill the vacuum left in its wake by its collapse. To Lenin the solution was obvious. Fill that vacuum with Lenin. For the peasants, soldiers and workers who made-up the majority of Russia's population, however, dual power was their first fleeting taste of freedom and autonomous control over their lives. Lenin used the Soviets to seize power, but almost immediately began to turn on these democratic assemblies of popular autonomy. Over the course of the Russian Civil War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks Strip power away from the workers, peasants and soldiers, sometimes by bureaucratic Fiat, often at the point of a bayonet, until the Soviet have been stripped of all meeting in the very state named after their democratic form and became synonymous with dictatorship. Dual power today draws from the potential of that post revolutionary crisis from the bottom up, direct democracy that was so threatening to the social order that Bolshevik revolutionaries and czarist police spies alike. Inspired to wipe them from their historical record. Just as Russia was haunted by the memory of the French communes, so was America today, haunted by a memory of dual power that against all law that refuses to die. We are, after all, still ruled by a greedy, bloodthirsty and out of Touch Elite who have chosen to March us to our deaths by the hundreds of thousands by forcing us back to work during a plague. But the Russian Revolution is as far away from us today as Napoleon and his brass cannons were from the Russian revolutionaries and their machine guns. Times have changed. There is no Bolshevik party waiting in the wings to seize power as the state crumbles, the vacuum that the state leaves in its wake as its power deteriorates, we filled by any number of organizations most even more hostile to the working class and the Bolsheviks had been. It could be warlords with the personal allegiance of the remains of the military. It could be organized crime. It could be religious fundamentalist militias. Most likely. It will be an uneasy combination of all of the above. Or it could be you. It could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, the person you wave to every morning at the bus stop when you're on your way to work. The path to that World world, run not by capitalists in their cops or by warlords in their armies, but by autonomous communities free to decide for themselves what to produce and how to best use their resources to care for each other, is dual power in the 21st century. At its core, dual power is about creating a counter power against the state. Between the Russian Revolution, this counter power was formed essentially by historical accidents as two governing bodies emerged from the course of the February revolution. But modern dual power does not arise from the whims of the course of revolution or from an innate instinct to the working class. It is something we built together by creating organizations that resist the power of the structures of violence. Capitalism, racism, homophobia and the state name a few that control this world. Dual power organizations can take many forms, from tenants unions to debtors councils, childcare cooperatives to land occupations, workers councils to rank and file labor unions, mutual aid networks to community self-defense organizations. These organizations seek to build autonomy from and against capitalism in the state alone. They are no match for the states where all power to inflict violence and corporate control over our resources. But by joining together to form federations and pooling their resources and expertise to coordinate their efforts, they can become a powerful enough force to challenge the state both directly and indirectly. These dual power organizations are designed to be the state's successor. As the industrial workers of the world famously put it, they formed the structure of the new society and the shell of the old. In order to fulfill that task, they take the shape of the new society this week to create academics called this prefigurative politics organizing that employs the values and organizational structures that they seek to create in the world. As we will discuss in the next episode, there are right wing forms of both dual power and prefigurative politics. But for most of the people who employ it, prefigurative politics means creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, managers, bureaucrats or party apparatus. The means of creating the new worlds are thus the same as the ends. Dual power organizations serve multiple purposes. Their long term goal is to replace the state and the corporation with free and autonomous forms of organization, ones organized and powerful enough to protect themselves and manage logistical challenges of a new world where previous forms of organization and power no longer exist. But even reaching a point where this is remotely plausible requires not just the painstaking construction of counter power and organization out of a fragmented American population. It requires a profound cultural transformation in how we make decisions. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it. It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say. It's true that most Americans think of themselves as living in a democratic country wompus the last time that any Americans actually sat down and came to a collective decision. Maybe if they were ordering pizza, but basically never. Dual power organizations thus also serve as schools for democracy, where people can learn, experiment with, create and spread their own forms of democracy and collective decision making. When these spaces of democratic experimentation are functioning properly, they're very organizational structure serves as the kind of recruitment tool. This was the original theory behind Occupy Wall Street that democracy and the experience of autonomy were contagious and would spread rapidly as more and more curious people experienced it for themselves. That experience, in turn, would create a new generation of people trained in democratic practices who could go forth and transform the world. Obviously, this didn't quite happen. Occupies model of democracy was limited in many ways, not the least of which was that it required a public physical meeting space that could be closed down by police violence. But the initial premise worked. Occupy itself, of course, have been inspired by the mass democratic assemblies in Spain and Greece in 2011. And the direct democratic co-ops and factory occupations that engulfed Argentina for the better part of the 2000s. At the most basic, short-term level, however, dual power organizations are designed to meet people's needs. The cornerstone of this effort, Mint Mobile, offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract, you're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet. Very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about or? I should have asked you, liked to add. That seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. For this mutual aid, probably the most famous example of such a project was the Black Panther Party survival programs. Former Black Panther Jonina Ervin describes them in detail. The Black Panther Party survival programs were in fact an example of an effort, a successful effort. While it lasted to create dual power in the United States, the Black Panther Party had a school, it had free food programs. One of its most respected survival programs was a breakfast for children, which was overall a response to hunger and poverty in the country, particularly among poor low income. Black people. We had free medical clinics in Winston Salem, NC. We had free ambulances, free pest control, free shoes. We had free busing to prison programs, legal aid programs that help people get attorneys who needed them. And we had a program that was called the safe program, seniors against a fearful environment in which we provided free transportation and escort service to senior citizens who needed to get out and take care of their errands, their business. They were often being attacked, so this was a form of protection for them. The Panthers were able to grow their influence by keeping their communities safe, healthy, cared for and increasingly autonomous from the state. But most importantly, they were able to keep people alive. As Black Panthers co-founder Huey P Newton famously said, these survival programs satisfy the deep needs of the community, but they are not solutions to our problem. That is why we call them survival programs meeting survival pending revolution. The existence of the survival programs themselves reflect the necessity of keeping people alive. Especially people who the state would rather kill or leave to die for building any kind of power. These programs are also necessarily insufficient. No mutual aid program, no autonomous project, no liberated territory can provide for the entire community, while the corporations, capitalists, and states maintain their stranglehold over the resources and production capacity at the working class collectively created over centuries of grueling labor struggle. Dual power, more than just survival, is about building the counter power to take it back. Building powers withdraws the line between what is and isn't dual power. Growing food for you and your friends may cut down on bills and make some killer pesto, but it's not necessarily challenging the capitalist system. Autonomy for its own sake is not necessarily dual power. If it doesn't actively aid in struggle, or better organize the community, then from the perspective of building counter power, that autonomy is meaningless. Making food for striking workers to allow them to stay on strike longer is building dual power. We're simply producing it for general consumption is not while dual power organizations necessarily serve the needs of the Community, they must also be able to pivot and attack the state and capital and provide solidarity and mutual aid to those in their community who are already in struggle. Or they simply aren't dual power organizations at all. The simplest solution to this problem, of course, is to organize around a specific side of resistance. Organizations that build up the capacity to fight can emerge from almost anywhere. The Symbiosis Research collective described how dual power organizations emerged from Palestinian prison organizing during the First Intifada and uprising against the Israeli government in the late 1980s. Most discussion of the First Intifada focuses on the role of mass protests in making Palestinian society ungovernable for the Israeli occupying forces. Less discussed is the role of community organizations of mutual aid and confederated participatory democracy in making such mass protests possible. Organizing from within the political system was a political incubator. Of the Palestinian resistance movement and offers a microcosmic example of the developments of dual power. In the much larger prison of the occupation with hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions for their own self administration. Within the prisons, they assembled structures of political organization and representation, forced prison authorities to recognize their representatives, and developed a division of labour around hygiene education and other daily tasks. Palestinian prisoners described this arrangement as internal organization, similar to the concept of dual power. Even the least free of circumstances. These prisoners carved out space for self governments and created the preconditions for revolutionary struggle. Prisoners taught and studied everything from Palestinian history to Marxist political economy, often from 8 to 14 hours per day. As freshly educated and trained political activists were released back into society, the resistance movement was galvanized. Illiterate teenage boys arrested for throwing stones. We entered the fray months later as committed, competent organizers who had studied movement, building, strategic resistance, and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, the organizing context outside of the prison transformed dramatically. Saleh Abu Laban, a Palestinian political prisoner from 1970 until 1985, stated when I entered the prison there wasn't a national movement. There were only underground cells that performed clandestinely. When I got out, I found a world full of organizers, committees, and community institutions. Central to this new world of Community organizing was the Palestinian labor movement. Unions were formed out of workers places of residence rather than workplaces because migrant labor was prevalent and Palestinian unionism within Israel had been criminalized. Unions then form strong alliances with local organizations at the national movement. With rapid growth in the early 1980s. Labor unions found it necessary to decentralize and democratize their structures to become more resilient as Israeli repression intensified against union leaders and organizers. These local unions were networked together through the Palestinian Communist Party and the Workers Unity bloc, creating a web of Labor organizers and community groups that linked their class struggle to the larger projects of National Liberation. This wave of resistance, carried out largely outside the purview of the major Palestinian political parties, showed that even communities in the most dire circumstances can assemble astounding levels of organization and resistance. As was also true in the United States. Although today the memory of these prison radicals is largely forgotten, Palestinian organizing emerged from the sites of deepest depression in their society. But this kind and level of organization is not just the property of the left. And in Part 2, we'll see what happens when the right gets hold of it. From cavalry audio comes the new True crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. Wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody, and he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer servant, picking up these girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability. When he got ahold of their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Ossorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. One time, just one time, he started fantasizing about having sex with his mother and he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go into the woods. Kind of strange. You know how he feels about prostitutes. Listen to the shadow girls on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Doctor Sex Reese show. And every episode I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues. And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she she made mistakes too. She did. She kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me. Won't you listen to the doctor sex Reshow every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts? Hi, I'm Robert lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the Science podcast stuff to blow your mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe. Like if sci-fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would an interplanetary civilization function? Does free will exist? Stuff to blow your mind examines neurological quandaries. Cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you, you ask the weirdest questions, it is time to come. Join us in the place where you belong, the stuff to blow your mind podcast new episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been three months since you and your coworkers took control of the hospital. Things aren't back to normal yet. You're not even really sure what normal is anymore, but the days have fallen into a kind of routine. It's Thursday, which means it's your turn to go. Report back to what a friend jokingly referred to as the endless meeting assembly was now forever known as the EMA. The EMA is technically the closest thing left to a central government in Seattle. It was formed as a sort of coordinating council between the various organizations and workers. Councils that had emerged were simply emerged from the woodworks in the wake of the collapse of the police. Two things have become clear very quickly. One, there was need for some kind of coordinating committee between the different bodies. 2 The only people who had any idea what was going on in their portion of the city or in their workplace were the members of the local council, which meant there was no way in hell any kind of central apparatus could dictate to them what actually needed to be done. There just wasn't a way to move the information around. The solution had been decentralization. Let the Councils do their work. Let them work out who they need to talk to, but make sure there was some kind of daily council that people could show up to. With the various groups, we do report backs and what they were doing and what they needed. The structure was messy, but it mostly worked, and at least someone had had the idea to make sure that the delegate to the EMA rotated so one person wasn't stuck spending half their life showing up every day. The problem really was the same problem you've been dealing with for months now. Even with the pooling of resources and people donating their last precious American dollars to paying people to import more supplies, the blockade was taking its toll. Nobody wanted to try to force their way through the blockades in the Cascades. There have been some attempts to get in touch with groups in Portland, but the control map was so ugly there is no real chance of getting any assistance besides. The real problem was the port. When the cops had fled, the ship should simply stop coming. They rerouted further S, many of them to Oakland, or so you'd heard. The logistics lines were collapsing faster than anyone could piece them back together. What the long term consequences would be, no one knew. But something was going to have to change the calls to start engaging in piracy. We're only half oaks now. A week later, an answer of sorts arrived. It wasn't precisely what anyone had been expecting. You'd heard about negotiations between workers councils, shipping companies, and a couple of governments to try to prevent a bloodbath that docks with the port of Seattle already out of Commission. No one could afford another stoppage. You hadn't really been sure what to make of it, but the representatives were here now. What they proposed, in front of the largest assemble you'd ever seen, was a kind of under the table deal. In essence, the port workers would go back to work in both Oakland and Seattle in exchange for seeding part of Oakland itself to a newly formed federation. No one was sure how any of this was actually supposed to work, but it was the first chance you'd seen in months to start solving the supply problem. That didn't mean everyone else would agree to it. Democracy is still democracy after all. But maybe, just maybe, with a toehold in Oaklands, the Councils would start to spread, and that so-called government in California was looking shakier every day. Who knew maybe next time you wouldn't be negotiating at all? In March of 2004, American occupation forces in Iraq attempted to shut down the newspaper of a Shiite cleric named Matado Al Sadr. The Americans had expected Sader to simply fold under the weight of the coalition's pressure. Instead, they triggered mass protests that quickly turned into an armed uprising. This was a new force in Iraq. The American Occupation force, who've been expecting to be fighting al Qaeda and maybe the rump of the remaining Baathists, were stunned to suddenly be facing a working class uprising among Iraq's Shiite population, this new body army. As it began to call itself. Was extremely well organized and were initially able to route coalition forces. So what was this body army that so thoroughly rewritten the rules of Iraq? Shortly after the US deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, Butyral Sadr, the son of another famous Iraqi Shiite religious figure, both Sauders had been famous for this support and care for the poor. So when Sadr returned to Iraq, he began to build a political base among Iraq's working class, particularly in Sadr City, a working class suburb of Baghdad. He uses organization to redistribute wealth, providing form of welfare states in in almost completely shattered country water, and his allies also began to set up a network of free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers. They use these clinics, which were enormously popular, to build a base of support. It is, after all, extremely difficult, no matter what your ideological or political disagreements with the group, to attack them. When they're running free clinics for pregnant mothers. They protected these clinics with militias. Which allowed them to transform the community organizations and goodwill that they'd gained from the clinic into the military power necessary for self governance and eventually for resistance against the American occupation. Strategy proved enormously successful. Matadero sadder is still today one of the most important political figures in Iraq, despite sustained coalition and occupation force attempts to stamp them out. But for all their working class support, the solidarist were by no means leftists. In late 2019, massive anti austerity, anti imperialists and anti sectarian protests erupted in Iraq as a reaction to the murderous incompetence of the Iraqi government who among other crimes managed to poison 118,000 people in Basra through the mismanagement and subsequent contamination of the water supply. Al Sadr initially backed the protest but turned on them in early 2020, at which point Sadrist militias began to carry out a brutal campaign of repression against the protest camps. That culminated in outright massacres of protesters. These massacres became semiregular features of soldiers, mass mobilizations. And alongside state and paramilitary disappearances of activists, the attacks essentially crushed the uprising. The violent homophobia and sexism of the SOTERIS may seem at odds with their anti imperialism and concern for the poor, but right wing organisations have often adapted specific policies, positions and organizational structures from the left, and in this case the soteris mobilizations have been extremely effective. Indeed, writing organizations are often more effective at utilizing dual power tactics and organizations and leftist. Movements. This is partly because of a fundamental asymmetry between the right and the left. Right wing organizations can almost always depend on financial support from wealthy political backers who, when push comes to shove, can simply create a movement with pure money, as the coaches did to create the Tea Party. Leftists, the ravings of right wing conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, have no such backers. This funding and support can go a long way towards explaining the success of groups like Hezbollah. It is certainly true that without Iranian support, Hezbollah would not be the movement that it is today, but a great deal of their success is simply attributable to the tactics themselves. This is not escape the notice of the US Army Joint Special Operations Universities. Major James Love wrote a monograph entitled Hezbollah Social Services, a source of power. In it he writes most important branch of the Hezbollah organization. As a social service section, which can be demonstrated by the allocation of an estimated 50% of Hezbollah's 2007 budget troll service efforts, it is through the work of the Social Service section that all party activities are possible. Hezbollah Social Service Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts. Fees there's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. This fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about, or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This section was designed to influence all aspects of Lebanese Shia society. The original intent of providing needed services to an oppressed people appears to have been manipulated by Hezbollah as a vehicle to bolster its ranks, provide humanitarian shield to the organization, increase influence within the Lebanese government, and combat its Shia rival Ambal. The Social Service section serves as an equal arm within the organization. And is used as much as the military and political wing in terms of leverage. Hezbollah's deputy Secretary general describes the purpose and intent of the Social service section in the following passage. Hezbollah paid particular attention to social work. Not one aspect of aiding the poor was neglected as the party worked towards achieving joint social responsibility, answering their urgent needs and introducing beneficial programs. Such work was simply considered party duty and concentrated effort towards raising funds and making available social service resources serve towards achieving these goals. The party worked the best of its capacities, cooperating with official institutions to respond to societal needs. Hezbollah has provided medical aid, reconstruction assistance, education programs, and particularly programs that take care of veterans and widows, which have served to solidify their base. These organizations were critical to Hezbollah's meteoric rise from a political nonentity to arguably the most powerful fractionated side of Lebanese politics, Hezbollah. State within a state as it's become known, it's capable of even resisting the Israeli army. Major loves frustration with the inability of the American army to either deny Hezbollah. Donate efforts or replicate them in a way that could strengthen American power or testaments the effectiveness of such a technique. And the dangers they pose to the American Imperial and State project, one of Love's major concerns is that American aid programs are simply caught up in red tape. They're unable to respond as fast as community LED efforts, which means that those efforts will get off the ground faster, get to the scene faster. And thus reap the political benefits. When the state is unwilling or unable to provide services, especially in the wake of disasters, it leaves a power vacuum for organizations to exploit. May not have heard of the RSS before. It's a paramilitary group affiliated with India's ruling party. The BJP counts among its members India's Prime Minister Modi. It's also probably the world's largest fascist organization. The RSS was founded in 1925, the group nominally dedicated to protecting and promoting Hindu interests. What this means in practice is that the IRS is dedicated to creating a Hindu state and maintains and promotes violent hatred of Muslims. That results in RSS members being at the forefront of anti Muslim pogroms. The RSS is pre World War Two leaders were open admirers of Hitler and Mussolini and while they eventually abandoned those positions at the start of World War Two. The Rs politics have remained thoroughly fascist in the intense communal rioting that both preceded and followed the partition of India and Pakistan after independence. Which saw mass population transfers of Hindus and Muslims and the death of somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people. The RSS established itself as a protector of Hindu refugees against Muslim violence, provided protection and aid to those trying to survive the chaos. The goodwill is generated, however, collapse after a former RSS member did the single most famous thing anyone associated with the RSS has ever done, assassinated Gandhi. The IRS was almost immediately banned, but in light of the terrible PR you get when you're associated with killing Gandhi, the RSS became increasingly involved with disaster relief. Over half a century of painstaking organizing. It created schools and youth programs to spread its influence and use them to fuel further anti Muslim violence. In 2001, the organization gained national acclaim for its response to a massive earthquake in Gujarat. The RSS heavily emphasized the nondiscriminatory nature of their aid work and their propaganda. But in reality, many of the villages the RSSS had rebuilt after the devastation. Have been transformed into miniature versions of the fabled Hindu state that the RSS seeks to impose on all of India. Strategically, this should look familiar to us now. It's essentially a fascist form of prefigurative politics. The RSS used earthquake to build the structure of the new Hindu society in the shell of the old. The BJ's dominance over Indian politics while led by a member of the RSS and the brutal crackdowns body carried out in Kashmir. Are a bloody testament to the success of their strategy. Christian fundamentalist organizations have also been extremely effective in utilizing their own form of right wing prefigurative politics. So, in a somewhat different way than the Rs, their new world is defined above all by theocratic patriarchal authoritarianism. Like the radicals that occupy the religious right was operating off of a form of contagion theory. Theory that exposure to their social organizations and forms would essentially be contagious and spread, but the Christian rights preferred form. As the patriarchal family, which serves as a microcosm of the kind of hierarchy and patriarchal violence that dominate their long dreamed of theocratic society, the Christian right would instill these values into their children and send them off into the world to propagate their ideology. Eddinger, an expert on the Christian Right, wrote this about the second phase of the strategy. In 1975, several church leaders came up with a new approach, identifying 7 spheres of culture to focus on one after another to try to bring about the lasting change and have a significant impact on the superstructure of American culture. Lauren Cunningham, founder of Youth, was the mission. A Christian missionary group Coordinating International and national mission trips for young Christians. Describes these seven areas as such. These are the areas you can go on as missionaries. Here they are. First, it's the institution set up by God. First the family. After the family was church. Or the people of God. The third was the area of school or education. The 4th was media, public communication in all forms printed in electronic. The 5th is what I call celebration. The Arts, entertainment, sports, where you celebrate within a culture. The 6th would be the whole area of the economy, which starts with innovation in science and technology, productivity, sales and service. The whole area we often call it business. But we leave out something, we leave out the scientific part, which actually raises the wealth of the world. Anything new, like making sand and chips for a microchip, that increases wealth in the world. And then of course, prediction, sales and service helps to spread the wealth. And so the last area was the area of governments. This is indeed encapsulation of the rights for figurative politics. Start first with the family and then with the church. Then reshape school and education and mass media in their image, and from there you can begin to take the entire economy. Churches have also long used aid programs to proselytize and also expand their control over the population, which becomes dependent on their aid. In the places where the left has failed to provide for their community, the far right has stepped in and has been able to rapidly and effectively reshape the political landscape. This does not mean however. That they can't be beaten cooperation Jackson has offered one of the most powerful visions of dual power in the modern US. A product of the new African People's Organization and the Malcolm X grassroots movements Jackson Kush plan cooperation, Jackson has put forward a radical and democratic model of dual power with the aim of turning over control of the land and the means of production to Jackson's black working class and allowing it to achieve its own self determination. Cooperation Jackson is formed mutual aid networks started an incubator program to help workers cooperatives get off the ground, and formed a community Land Trust that purchases abandoned buildings in Jackson and turns them over to the community. They've also, somewhat unusually, wound up engaged in the electoral process after the untimely death of ally and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, which led to the election of his son Chokwe Antar. Lumumba displaced the movement in a somewhat awkward position of having allies, even if constrained by the realities of state power. In this state itself. But politics in the real world is never as clean as the models we create to describe it. It is only in our ability to adapt to the changing conditions of struggle while maintaining our political principles that we can build the new world in the shell of the old. And we can build it. The question is simply, will we? When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to grim and mild presents an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the Always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye, so step right up and get in line. Listen to grim and male presents now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grim and mild.com/presents. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times Bestseller Fair play and find your Unicorn space activists on the gender division of Labor attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Edina Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time out, a production of iheart podcasts, and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the. Value it deserves, so take this time out with us. Listen to time out a Fair Play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Ohio look well. That wasn't very good. I'm Robert Evans, host of the podcast you're listening to and ashamed of. Probably because I that was Jesus Christ. Garrison, come in here. You know I refuse this. Fix this to fix this. Scarce. As it could happen. Here, a podcast about the fact that the world is falling apart, as embodied by me falling apart when I try to introduce the show. See? I tied it in. Yeah. Good job. Uh-huh. Thank you. Thank you. Well, rhymes. It is. It is. It has to rhyme. It's like it's like the Star Wars movies. That's what I was doing. Our guest today is Melissa Acedera, founder and director of Polo's Pantry, a mutual aid food distribution project in Los Angeles, CA. A Melissa, thank you for coming on and talking to us. Thank you so much for inviting me a pleasure to be here. I apologize for the introduction, but I honestly, it's better. It was better than I usually do. So if you can back that up, yes. OK. So I'm an LA native and I've been doing community organizing for probably like close to a decade, doing a lot of community work for a long time. And a few years before the pandemic, actually, I started to organize with a lot of grassroots. Organizations in LA working with a lot of houseless folks all over LA. And kind of clock pretty early that a lot, you know a lot of a lot of groups were burning through their budgets spending it on food. And so since I worked in kind of the the food industry, I started to kind of poke around and figure out that we could get a lot of these things donated to us. And pretty much started building a roster like, building. Kind of like a rolodex of. Other organizations, nonprofits. Food banks that we could rely on, so almost kind of created sort of like an alternate system. For these groups who are working with houseless folks to get food every week. I just wanted to figure out a way to make a steady and reliable system so that our unhoused neighbors would get food and that organizers across LA wouldn't have to worry about it. And so that's pretty much how polo started. Officially started in 2018. I was organizing with a group called Ktown Feral, and they do a lot of political advocacy and mostly rooted in like. Kind of, you know, human rights for our health, neighbors. If you don't know Katelyn Ferral, look them up. They're awesome. Follow them. Fantastic organization. Yeah, and you know, I actually was because I was already doing a lot of mutual aid work in Skid Row around that time and. Really kind of felt at some point that, you know, like I yes, it was great that I was going out there with teams getting hot meals out and hot beverages, whatever people needed to people but. I just was so down on what are the conditions seeing all the conditions that they were living in and I just wanted to meet other activists and other folks who could really figure out how you connect people to services and and just really you know anyone working in policy that's that's really changing things for people out there. And so I I wanted to take sort of my advocacy and like my work a step further and connected with activists all the world. So that's sort of like my my org is really rooted in the lot of. Activism and organizing. So I see. I see a lot of. I'm not sort of your standard kind of. Are nonprofit. I really see things in the lens of as a community organizer. And so that's why our our work is pretty much. Exploded during COVID. So I'm kind of interested for for starters, because you, you, you know this is a mutual aid project as opposed to kind of a charity project and what do you what do you see as being the dividing line there? Yeah. Well for you know for a lot of for us, you know it's very easy for for folks to kind of see the work that we do as part of the kind of charitable food system because obviously we're you know mutual aid. It's the difference really is that obviously you know there there is a, there is a reciprocity between the two of you between, between neighborhoods, between individuals, between organizations of sharing. Resources with each other. Umm. And charitable obviously is like, there's only one way, right? There's only like one person giving. But for us, the way we picked our partners, I mean, we were, we were already part of this nucleus of kind of a coalition of orgs doing this work. And so it was really very easy for us to kind of share resources with each other. So I was doing food and some folks were doing hygiene kits, other folks were doing tents, other folks were doing tarps or whatever. And so there was so much. You know kind of mutual aid and activity going on and so that that's why we're we're we're really kind of rooted in that in that thinking as far as like as as opposed to charitable orgs that basically just set up somewhere and give you know give give stuff out to people and so we have. Looking at part and part of my advisory circle are a lot of houseless neighbors, houses, leaders in our community. I also take a lot of advice from indigenous organizers, black community leaders in different neighborhoods that we work in. So our work is really informed by the community. And so we basically asked folks, hey, you know, like, what can we do? And plug into to work that. That already exists in those in those areas. Hope. I hope that makes sense. But that's kind of how I feel about what we do and and as an as an organizer because I think we get a lot of questions from people who are interested in starting mutual aid projects in their own areas. And one of the questions we often have is like, well how do I how do I do that right. And yeah I'm interested in like like if you could kind of walk us through the steps when when polo's pantry got started like what is, what was the kind of order of operations that you had to go through to get this this up and running, I think the first thing. Do is really to. For me it was already kind of being part of grassroots org, so I was part of a few of them. And so it's really important to to. To kind of identify the needs of the Community first before setting up your org. So I feel like I already had an idea of you know of of what certain orgs needed, which areas, how many and so kind of identifying the needs first, kind of #1 and and and to do that you really have to connect with grassroots organizations, local ones in your area. So you know, I recommend really just kind of doing research is always folks doing that kind of stuff all over. If you're into political advocacy, there's folks that do that. If they're folks who are more food justice oriented like I, I would recommend going to a local food bank or soup kitchens too. Have also like I've been doing that for years and I've met a lot of people with kind of similar values mine, so just kind of. Pretty much identify one what you'd like to do, what you're good at and then essentially research you know kind of opportunities to to tap into a local org doing that work and then essentially start organizing with them, right? I don't, I don't recommend to build like to build an org prior to not having this kind of knowledge because I feel like it's really crucial to sort of kind of map out first. What the Community needs instead of you building mutual aid organization based on you know, whatever. Because I feel like it's. It's important to work through things from the ground up. That way you feel like the work is impactful. That way the the community is leading and informing your work. And so that's that's kind of like how I I approach the line. So look for local org. So kind of sit in organizing for a little bit and then from there we'll see once you guys identify what it is. And start to kind of have an idea of of the demand or the need in that area. Then start to reach out to say for me for for food a lot of local. Local chains will will will pretty much if you if you tell them what you're doing. A lot of them will support you, so I actually have. I started with just going literally to my local Ralphs and telling the manager there like, hey, this is what I'm doing. I'm starting this. You know, wasn't Ralphs being a local grocery store in like, Yes Angeles area? Yeah, sorry, a lot of I didn't know what Ralphs was before I moved to LA. So I just wanted to be like, she's not just like rolling over to where buddy Ralph's house and be like, guess you got some food. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, Ralph, out here in LA, so most places. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One is down for that kind of stuff, but you somehow you'll you'll really end up on one that's really, you know that is really unkind. I think most folks have to realize that at this this this kind of work is not it doesn't happen overnight. Like building, like building a, you know, like a a reliable network of people to donate to you is, is. Takes time so but I think if if you hit kind of larger chains you you will get, you know you'll you'll you'll get, you'll start to get a steady supply from them. Do you have any kind of advice for when you're actually approaching you know, manager at a Ralphs or something somebody actually who works for like what do you have like I don't know, like a script but kind of a rough guide to like, here's how I try to start these conversations. Here's some ways I try to phrase for things because that could be useful for folks. You know, I actually have like a form letter so I could share later. Maybe you can share it to. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. That you know that they can use to, you know if they're, if they're going to solicit folks with that. Stuff. And I think a lot of mutual aid organizations do have that kind of. Kind of the chair that kind of forum. So I think just. Basically kind of letting them know who you are, who you're serving, how often, which demographic is going to. That's usually really important. What would help me though was I I was as I started to get more serious about about doing the food work, I connected to, you know, some some community partners and I actually turned polos into a fiscally sponsored org. So we moved from being just fully grassroots to being fiscally sponsored. That basically means we're operating under the 501C3 number of of another organization of a larger organization. So that that was that open. So, so many opportunities. It really allowed us to be able to access larger amounts of food and really help out a lot of a lot of a lot of smaller orgs that needed to get their food programs off the ground. And so that is something I recommend if you're if people are serious about it. To find a community of Community partner who who is in established 501C3 that they trust. To see if they if they you know, if they can sign on to to be a fiscal sponsor. That I think is one of the quickest ways to be able to to really kind of establish yourself as as far as getting larger amounts of food then and by that I mean getting pallets of food, not just cases but literally pallets of food delivered to wherever you are. As soon as we did that, that completely changed the game. And and I think I did that because I knew I had so many friends who were doing mutual aid that needed so, you know, just so much stuff from, you know, from groceries to. You know, fresh produce and it wasn't and it wasn't, it didn't stop in food we we were getting. You know, hand sanitizer. We were getting tense. We were getting all sorts of stuff, you know, and so, so, yeah, that's what I recommend for folks who are serious about food is to really. Again, start to build a relationship with local businesses. That they that they like the businesses and really telling people, this is what I'm doing if you are, if you know, if you're, if you're you know, if you are willing to support us. You know like this is, you know these are these are the days that we need food or whatever. These are the times that we'll need food. And just let them know that, you know, you're you're happy to like pick it up or that you're happy to because there's there's I think at least for California we're we're starting to change law. Elect policy and law behind food waste and so I think something's going to change in January of 2022 where? A lot of food waste basically going to decrease because it's going to be much more difficult. The city is going to make it much more difficult for for businesses to just carry this stuff they're they're really pushing them to. To separate them. But anyway regardless you're helping the business really move you know move food waste and and most of them and a lot of employees too that I've talked to just you know just are heartbroken every time we have to clear out you know a full a full tray or just trays and trays of of of of you know of a perfectly fine food. So yeah there's there's a video going viral on Twitter right now of of like someone working at Dunkin' Donuts. Just like dumping just like hundreds and hundreds of Donuts into the garbage. Yep. And then that happens. That happens every single day. You know, I have, I have friends who used to work at Whole Foods and they would tell me just, just how heartbreaking it was just the amount, the just the massive amount of food that's being wasted out there. It's evil. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's it's a thing that in the more difficult days ahead, as you know, things like, well, like we under in a lot of areas like the crop. Is half of what it normally is this year. That's going to continue. One day we will look at videos of Dunkin' Donuts. Dropping an entire day's worth of doughnuts into the trash and use it as a pretext to bring executives to trial. And it's going to be like, like, like a war crime, yeah. I mean honestly though, as someone in food and you know, like the food system is changing massively and so many ways I feel like the one kind of good thing that happened in the pandemic is that. Lawmakers were able to identify that the the way snap or or calfresh, pretty much food stamps were not enough really to, you know, to feed families and feed people. It's not nearly enough, though, but at least it kind of pushes the needle to where we need, where we need it to go. And I, I think, I think having having been so focused and so, like in the center of mutual aid work in LA, I'm able to kind of broadly tell, you know, tell, really tell lawmakers to that, hey, you know that there's so much, there's so much need out there, but the community themselves have built alternate food systems to be able to care for themselves. I feel like my hope really is to. Be able to to kind of hyper localize our food systems that way neighborhoods and really like communities are are essentially dictating their own you know their own needs. They're basically bringing the resources that they want they're bringing in the the kind of food that they want you know and and really just working towards the real kind of food sovereignty where people are are able to you know to to get the resources themselves and. And for me, I feel like mutual aid scares a lot of people because again, it really is just sort of like the reason why we were able to a lot of communities were able to to survive COVID, you know, we're still doing it and we're still, we're still are so deep in it. And and even, like, I try to tell students too, like, you know, mutual aid isn't just food or whatever. It's also like, say your dad has a pickup truck and your neighbor needs to move. I don't know. Their dining room table across town like that is a form of mutual aid. Or like there's there's so many things that. Especially a lot of immigrant communities that I that I work with. Miss this form of care community care, you know, has existed forever and it's just somehow elevated itself during the pandemic because, as we know, the safety net just wasn't enough. It it didn't, it didn't. It really didn't help. But, you know, it didn't really help a lot of communities and so this system. Essentially kept people afloat and now we're trying to figure out how to. Really create better ways to sustain it and to really create better ways to get the resources directly to communities that need them. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm working with other folks trying to figure out how to, how to keep this sustainable and really have more agency over what kind of food and what kind of aid you want. How have people that have been needing to access the mutual aid in the food? How have they been learning about your organization? I think honestly all this stuff really happened by word of mouth, I think because I was, I was already part of this huge coalition that's part of of the Sophie knows like Dayton for all. There's a group called St Watch, there's a group called ground Game, there's a group called like this. There's all these different folks that basically are in our wide coalition. I haven't had to really advertise much like people just sort of like just kept telling others like hey you know, like Melissa Polos and her team were doing this and. Also, as a COVID response, I created another. Like COVID initiative called homemade meals and and that is in partnership with another organization called. EX. And so as of today, I think we're close to 75,000 meals. Wow. That's all community led. Yes. So we so we so this March of 2020, we essentially created a system where we, we work with people who are, who are cooking homemade meals in their homes and connecting them to drivers. And so we have about 6 different org partners. So one of them is obviously it's the same people Cape Town. Street watch. A covenant house. They work a lot with homeless youth. Ellie can, they're in Skid Row. And a bunch of other mutual aid groups in different areas of LA. So I I recognize at the beginning of COVID a lot of my houseless neighbors were telling us that they were scared, like. Because a lot of a lot of businesses are closing, a lot of corner stores, restaurants. That the the food access completely shut off for them during the the beginning and. I started to freak out. I was like how we're going to get food to people. And so some friends who run. Basically, you're kind of look at youth kind of youth focus or. Wanted to activate their, you know, activate their community, they're like, hey, how can we help, what can we do? So we created this program basically that you know figure out like, OK well. A lot of people want to volunteer, but they can't leave home, so why don't they cook meals at home and then we'll just pair them with drivers who could pick it up safely? And so we just started doing that. We created a system to and and I think. We honestly, I thought we were going to do it for two months, but now we're what, like 19 months later, 70? 25,000 meals over 1000 volunteers like it's been wild, actually. Jamie, a friend of Jamie Loftus, friend, friend of the pod and Hot dog expert, should be angry if we didn't state that. Jamie actually is is one of our OG like, like cooks like she started with homemade meals from the very beginning and she's kind of one of our, that's kind of how we know her. It's because she found, she found that program. And it's been a while it's been it's been so amazing to to really activate so many people across LA to cook for our houseless neighbors. And so I haven't even fully digested our team has even fully digested that. The real impact of that, but it's been 75,000 meals. About community for our, for our houses neighbors. So, so, so that's yeah. So I don't know, like I feel like. And I truly believe there's just so much. Just so much power and and the people and really trying to figure out ways to continue to, you know, to create better systems where where we can redirect those resources, you know? To us and, you know, like really kind of break down these systems where, you know, because even people were telling me, like folks who are like, you know, these sort of big institutions, food institutions have been around for decades or even folks from like, yeah, like running food dogs since the 80s were like, you know, how are you able to move so fast? I'm like, that's mutual aid. That's like, that's mutual aid. Then our ability to not have to run through so much bureaucratic crap, you know, like really kind of break down these systems where, you know, because even people were telling me, like, folks who are like, you know, this sort of big institutions, food institutions have been around for decades or even folks from like, yeah, from like running food dogs since the 80s were like, you know, how are you able to move so fast? I'm like that's mutual aid. That's like, that's mutual aid. Then our ability to not have to run through so much bureaucratic crap and red tape is a reason why we were able to, you know, to to to, to create such huge impact. Because. People believed in what we did and, you know, and helped support us, funded us. And we essentially just, you know, just hit the ground running. We're able to figure out what people needed on the ground and just just got it to them. That's not that's it, you know, and we'll figure out if if we don't have it, we're going to keep it. We'll ask around for folks who have it like, like, Umm, there's a group called Cilla. They're in Silver Lake. And my friend Kat, who's one of the cofounders she they also work with with with houseless folks. And they do. Incredible work like, you know, providing showers, providing hot meals, providing wrap around services for folks. She she was great at getting hygiene kits. And so that's that was for me too well between each other. Like she needed hot meals. I gave that to her on Saturdays and then I needed like hygiene kits. And so and that's kind of like the basis of mutual aid is like, I literally will give her 200 meals, she'll give me 200 hygiene kits. And that was like that throughout the pandemic. Like, we just would share resources and people thought we were this huge org. But essentially it was just, you know, we really like. My friends and I talking to each other like, hey, what do you have today? What do you have coming in today? And we just we essentially kind of built this sort of cloud like sort of inventory, right. So it's like Polos has 1000 meals and like Silas got 500 hygiene kits and like you know St watch. As like 50 tents and like 100 tarps. So it's like we all were like, hey, you know, there's there's a house this man on the corner of like sunset or whatever that needs like, blah, blah, blah. And so we essentially just, you know, just grab and go like Poles has meals and like street watch has tents, like K towns got like the tarps. So you all just, again, beautifully just sort of started to like build this sort of, sort of cloud, like inventory of stuff and. This works and it's still working. So. Consistent, like is what what you're bringing up or at the beginning is talking about how consistent you're able to, you're able to have done this work, which is, yeah, if you're an LA resident, you know that, you know the city support is never consistent. So, so having that consistency is so vital. Yeah, right. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's it's a lot of hard work. There's so much that people don't see. Obviously, there's so many, so many things that people don't see. There's a lot of organizing behind it, just literally a lot of community building, a lot of meetings. Yeah. I think the like, again, like the bulk of mutual aid is relationships and trust. You know, like that that's that's really it. That's how you breathe life into your system. And it's like, you know, you have to, you have, you have to continue to like nourish relationships. You know, between yourself and other organizers, between yourself, if you're running an org between yourself and another org. And and really, that's how we've been able to you know, to to reach so many people is because we focus on making sure that, you know, it's so easy to to burn out in this work. But again, we also have to make sure that we take care of each other. And we we focus on making sure that we're we're checking on each. Other two and so I. You know, it's, it's hard to fully explain what, how to even teach that you know how to, how to, how to, how to properly build relationships. But I feel like that's such a key part of creating a really robust mutual aid network, and that's at least experience that we had, you know, follows. The work that you've done and what you been able to accomplish is very impressive and is is something that people can aspire to. Is there any like resources online that you can point to if someone's wanting to get into this type of work or any, any. Yeah, like any kind of like advice to get started in your own city or to like look for stuff that's doing this similar that's that's doing a similar thing? Ohm? Uh, wow. Let's see. Who has? Gosh, that's a really, really, really good question. Well, well, first I hope that people have read mutual aid by Dean Spade. That's a really good book. And and from there I would read, I would read the Black Panther social programs. I I got a lot of I got a lot of my my inspiration from there and really that's that's really those those two things to kind of start as a sort of like your. Your primers. And then if you want to kind of get deeper into food justice. There's a really good book. Are you get ready. Years ago, it's almost, it's. I think it's literally called food justice. one-on-one. OK, let me see. It's like just this one. Yeah, there's there's quite a few but but one, that's one and then there's another. There's one book I read called more than just food and then it's it's by, yeah, I'll give you guys my top five and that really kind of help sort of. Like shape my thinking on food dresses. So it's, it's written by a guy named Garrett Broad and he essentially like kind of lays out sort of how the industrial food system kind of created this huge crisis that we're in and you know, like how there's this really kind of an abundance of food everywhere. But, you know, obviously it's not getting distributed. Yes, exactly. And so and and and it also kind of lays out how food justice activists who are and mostly low income. Communities of color help really build community based kind of solutions to these problems. And so that's really kind of where my thinking and my my lens comes from is. Because I am a child of LA, I'm able to understand what different neighborhoods need based on because I either grew up there, worked there, have family there, you know what school there, or just have friends or other organizers who live there. And so say if, you know, I I didn't grow up in Boyle Heights. But I have friends who did. And so like if I'm trying to build out a food program or mutual aid program in Boyle Heights, I'm not going to just walk in there and be like, alright, we're going to do it at you know you're not going to take over their, their their thing exactly. But I think that's one thing I think I I really want to to for people to really, especially for for for young people who want to get to food justice is like, you really have to really honestly do your research 1st and let the media leaders. Lead. Leave. Leave your program with you. Right. And there's a difference between, like, making community connections and then trying to, like, take over. Right. You know, there's a very, very, two very different things. Exactly. Yeah. You don't want to be extractive, right. You don't want to be extractive. You don't want to be coming in and, you know, and and and really, like, you know, try to like, show up with, like, you know, solutions where there they weren't informed at all by the community. And I I keep trying to stress that. Is is there anywhere that people can support or at least follow you online to keep up with the work? Yes, I'm very active on Twitter. It's we're at Pollos Pantry, so it's P0L 0SP, ANTRY, and then I'm also tweeting as myself as an organizer. It's under SME smelling music, so it's MELE music. And that actually that handle for me everywhere, like my personal so I. I I tweet from there a lot. I tweet a lot about food justice work I feel and all our all our work in LA I tweet, I retweet a lot of our movement work and coalition work. Yeah. They just thank you for coming on to the show to talk about through justice and the work you've been doing. It's great to hear more examples of people from around the country and then hopefully you know around the world getting involved in in this type of work. Anyway, I think that wraps up us today. You can follow this show on Twitter and Instagram at happened here. Pod and Cool Zone media subscribe to the feed, leave a 5 star review, whatever. Anyway, that's that's that's the show. Bye bye everybody. Say bye everybody. Bye bye everyone. Bye everyone. 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