It Could Happen Here Weekly 139

introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. As over millions of the years, these living things have become well suited to their habitats carefully adopts the region's soil, climate and food web. When it comes to to people who're talking politics, they quick some confusion about what it means to be indigenous, especially when questions of land rights,

autonomy and reparations, and the equation. Most people understand that Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but they don't really know what that means. Some might then ask, well, if indigenous just means originating from a place they're on all Homo sapiens indigenous to Africa, why should one group's claim of indigenity take precedence over any other. Others may ask the question, if a group occupies a region for

several generations, does that then make them indigenous? A White Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the founding of the US. A French fupial indigenous to France, and if so, does that somehow justify there's enophobia towards refugees When generations of martialized groups have been struggling to retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations, and liberation after centuries of oppression and attempting annihilation, we

to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for us to understand what it means to be indigenous from what I gather through my research, which was focused on the work of just a few North American indigenous scholars Taiyaki Alfred, Jeff cord to Cell, and Robin wild Chimera. Additionity can be interpreted as a matter of colonial relationship and or as a matter of a land relationship, a relationship to place. These two definitions are, of course, highly overlappened.

You really can't get away from how colonization informed the land and vice versa. Let's start with the first interpretation of indignity. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Gordicell, indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. It is an existence oppositional to colonial societies and states, and a consciousness of struggle against such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike.

Of course, there are significant diversity in their cultures, contexts, and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples may not always be as avoid as they once will, with some noticeably overt exceptions, but the historic and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Indigenous histories, geographies,

and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist. Nonetheless, even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality that Indigenous peoples remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival.

By this understanding of indigenoity, it can be set up without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor of a colonial replacement. There's no need for the concept of indigenous. Without colonialism, there will be no status of indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of people whose very existence and claim to the land is an obstacle.

It is that colonial endeavor. The un work in group of Indigenous issues, drew partially from this understanding when attempting to define indigenous peoples in nineteen eighty six, quote Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which have in a historical continuity with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that developed in their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors the societies

now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They form at present non dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations the ancestral territories and the ethnic identity as the basis of their continued existems as peoples in accordance with their own

cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. By this definition, Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Goods, Syrians, Yazidi, Palestinians, amasaf Sami, Basque, Samei Basques, Hawaiians, Mari, san Guti, Papuans, Chams, and many more are all indigenous peoples. There are layers of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is

not a simple binary of indigenous and colonists. For example, in much of the Americas, Africans who were indigenous to their own homelands were displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime. They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they weren't trivants attla colonial society either. In fact, someone slaved for inditionous people as well. At the same time, some members of the African diaspora would join existing indigenous societies and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of

Saint Vincent, Honduras and Belize. Meanwhile, in modern day Africa, so all African ethnic groups can technically be considered indigenous to the continent. The concept of specific indigenous peoples within Africa refers to those groups whose traditional practices and land claims have been placed outside of the dominant state systems and exist in the conflict with the objectives and policies implemented by post colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies.

Such a definition can similarly be applied to modern day Asia, where governments like Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have infamously refused to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within their territories. These countries, like most countries in the world, did not ratify the International Labe Organization Convention one sixty nine in nineteen eighty nine, known as the Indigenous and

Tribal People's Convention concerning the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in two thousand and seven, would however, be voted on approvingly by most of the world, including the same countries that haven't recognized the Indigenous peoples within their borders. All four

of the countries have rejected that particular resolution. Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand would later change their vote in favor of the declaration, of course, with their own tact on interpretations an emphasis on the declarations legally non binding nature,

as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. There are approximately two hundred and fifty to six hundred million Indigenous peoples around the world today, each facing the reality of having their lands, cultures, and forms of organization attacked, co opted, commodified, and reconstructed by various states, regardless of

their legal recognition. Inditionous peoples themselves have long understood that the endurances of people will continue to depend on their connection to land, culture, and community, which brings us to the second interpretation of indigenity, closely related to the first as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether that be physical as with land, social as with community,

or cultural as with culture and justus. Relationship to land must be reciprocal, with give and take, based on a view of the land and water as a gift that

must be cared for over generations. According to Hodenosuni mythology, as recounted by Robin waal Chimura in Breadain Sweet Grass, the mother goddess Skywoman came to the land as an immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to the land, learn from other species to understand how to live on it, given as she received, and caring for the earth and its keepers for the sake of those

who would inherit it when she passed on. In their view, the land is identity, It is ancestral connection, It is pharmacy. It is a library, and it is home, the source of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which those would observe their responsibility to the world. By this understanding, it can be said that indigenity is born out of

land connection, established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but regardless of where they might find themselves home land or not, even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments, as long as they observed the processes and ceremonies of generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love

for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then the question might arise, why aren't settlers to place if their family has lived in land for generations. The answer lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focus on

exploiting the land and its resources. Without a relationship with the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place. Of course, it goes without saying that every indigenous group or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather destructive and even speciocidal. But if we are to work with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous is something

based on cultivating a long term relationship to place. That indigenity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigenity, much like the trees in a forest are interconnected by subterranean networks of my curacy which enable them to share resources and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous to place, community must exist to sustain that web of

reciprocitude the land so that it all may flourish. Inditionity to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply tied to the land. It develops on cultural ceremonies. According to Chimera, focus attention, attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and

resonate beyond the human realm. Such practices should be reciprocal, as ceremonies create communities, and communities create ceremonies as well as organic, not appropriate and existing cultural celebrations or attending toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and fragmented by the pace of modern life, leaving little room for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions

such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community. When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia, and excitement build in the social atmosphere, hopefully fuel in the conference and strength of those who are going on to pursue their passions. But Kimura wants us to imagine standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as

the salmon margins the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land and all the cycles and seasons of life within it. Now that we have a clearer understanding of these two distinct yet related understandings of indigenity as both an identity formed as part of a cluar relationship and an identity rooted in a relationship to place, I believe that we should explore how this understanding can be applied to decolonization

and social revolution. Decolonization is the process of unsettling clonial power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of inclosure by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through

social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society, economy, culture, philosophy, technology, relationships and politics, an ongoing and heterogenous change in people's powers, tribes, and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive breakdown and transformation of existence, systems and institutions, punctuated by major ruptures and advances or with the aim of self liberation.

It takes confrontation with the powers that be, non cooperation with the established order of things, and prefiguration of new social relations, institutions, and infrastructure and practices in the here and now. If we maintain the interpretation of additionality as based on one's position and including relationship, then the deco organization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as the premise of identity and therefore the abolition of indigeneity

as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power and develop the process of the econization toward mimicking the practices the dominant non indigenous legal political institutions through for example,

land claims and self government processes. What the deconalization movement needs, according to Maya Yucateco poet Fliciano Sanchez Chan, are zones of refuge, places where intitionous knowledge can be guarded, exercised, and sustained. In Mesoamerica, these zones of refuge represent safe spaces where the diverse cultural expressions of the region can persist in spite of state for us to create a

homogenized Mexican national identity. The concept of zones of refuge is consistent of the traditional objectives of cultural preservation and autonomy or the social revolutionary aims of prefiguration, which seeks to sow the seeds of future relationships, institutions and practices in the here and now. To the expansion of zones of refuge and other institutions of resistance and autonomy, we

can realize declonization in reality. But again, this idea of addigenerative econization is just one understanding of the term, waiting to explore another approach to the declonization one that recognizes

the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Globally, the UN recognizes that ADDITIONALUS people to protect eighty percent of the world's remaining in biodiversity, and scientists have shown that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provides the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly. Theclonal approach of conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care

of our most important ecosystems. Over the course of Braid and Sweet Grass, Robin wall Chimer highlights the reciprocal relationship with the earth that many indigenous groups, including her Potwatomi culture, have cultivated over generations. The principles of the gift economy is an essential aspect of this relationship, which forms the basis of indigenity to place. The gift economy is a system of exchange where resources and services are shared without

expectation of remuneration or quit broquo. The gift economy extends not just the people, but also our non human can caring and being cared for. In turn, if we want to restore that relationship, we can start by planting a garden. A garden could be a heathen for native flora, arrested in place for varius fauna, a feast for dangered pollinators, a sustainer of local water table, and a hub of

thriving soil. Not only does it benefit both our health and the health of the planet, but is also anurstry for nurture in a connection that extends beyond that small patch of dute. I don't believe that merely building a connection of the land can make someone indigenous, but not being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding the renewal of the world. Kimer uses the example of the broad leaf

planting or son as the white man's footprint. Despite not being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored member of the plant community because it thrives as a good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader, while other invasive species poison the soil or overrun the land. The white man's footprint to call a strategy of helpful co existence, even sharing some of its healing properties with those who ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has

become naturalized. Quote being naturalized to a place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the strains from which you to build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Hey, you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, To take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it,

because they do. Decononization requires to uproot invasive, irreverent and destructive individuals, capitalist settlers, societies in order to rebuild in a way that treats the land like the home that we share and are responsible for. It will require us to receive an honor the knowledge in the land, to care for its keepers and pass on that knowledge to the next generation. And it is crucial that we elevate indigenous voices, knowledges, and pedagogical approaches in pursuit of this aim or power

to all the people. This has been a graper peace.

I hate it all. And so especially the last several years, I've been trying to read more and it's been great, but sometimes my brain just needs a task for me to do, like with my hands. So I can trick myself to thinking I'm being productive just because I'm physically doing something, and recently that's something puzzles. And look, I like all puzzles. You can't show me a puzzle that I won't at least try physical jigsaw puzzles that can take hours or days to complete, like sign me Up.

But ever since getting a cat, it feels a little too precarious to commit to one of these jigsaw puzzles for the fear of her prancing around on the pieces or knocking them over under furniture to ever be found again, or chewing on them or eating them, and so the puzzles I have been increasingly turning to recently, which I have always loved are word and number puzzles, Sudoku, can can classics, incredible crosswords, cryptograms, code breakers. I can do

those for hours. I will say, though I do find word searches pretty tedious and boring, But if I was completely out of options, I would probably do those two. There's just something really satisfying about physically putting pen to paper and solving something. And yes, I always use pen because I live on the edge, and as I said, I do not like being on my phone. So I've been buying puzzle books so I can have a physical thing to write on. I've had puzzle books for years,

but recently it's become a bit of a problem. I bought four different puzzle books in the span of like two weeks, and not because I completed all the puzzles in them per se, but because I just completed the ones I wanted to do, usually skipping the word searches or long riddles or whatever. And honestly, a much better use of my fricking time could go to something like learning literally anything else, like picking up a new skill,

learning a new language. But no my smooth brain wants to do a fucking puzzle, so I do a puzzle, multiple puzzles.

about things that I like. Wow, incredible discovery, But for real, I think we all need a balance of making sure we're informed about the world and connecting with our humanity, as well as doing things as human beings that allow us to continue to want to be informed about the world and connect with our humanity. So one day I won't need this big preamble before every episode that's not about Palestine. But today is not the day anyways, Because

I love puzzles. I wanted to learn about puzzles. How long have humans been putting together word and number games for the sole purpose of exercising our minds or dare I say, have fun? I needed to know it's truly one of the most wholesome things this species has ever done. So I did some research. This episode is going to be about the crossword. That's where I wanted to start. Most of us would agree that the crossword is the most popular or well known word game or word puzzle.

I will admit that every time I see a random newspaper in a cafe or hotel, lobby or something, I always steal the crossword and I ignore everything else because now is simply not the time. But how did the crossword come to be as this ubiquitous, normal thing. The crossword is a fairly recent invention, born out of desperation. Arthur Wynn is regarded as the inventor of the modern

crossword puzzle. He was born in eighteen seventy one in Liverpool, England, and his father was the editor of the local newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury. When Arthur was nineteen, he immigrated to the United States, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

While in Pittsburgh, Winn worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper, and he played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra We Love a Well Rounded chap He later moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor for the New York World newspaper, and then in nineteen thirteen,

he invented the crossword puzzle. While working at the New York World, he needed something to fill up the space in the Christmas edition of the paper's fun supplement Fun in all caps, so he took advantage of the new technology at the time that could print blank grids cheaply, and he created a diamond shaped set of boxes with clues to fill in the blanks smack in the center

of the Fun supplement. So for the December twenty first, nineteen thirteen edition of The New York World, he introduced this puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, with the letters f un already being filled in. He called it a word cross puzzle, and nearly overnight the word cross puzzle went from a space filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page. A few weeks after the first word cross appeared, the name of the puzzle was actually changed to crossword, but this was only

a result of a typesetting error. However, these puzzles have been known as crosswords ever since. Arthur Wynn didn't necessarily invent word puzzles, though ever since we've had language, we've

played games with words. Crosswords are basically where two long standing strands of word puzzles interconnect, the first being word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't necessarily using deliberate deception, and the second being riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don't necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. Maybe you're wondering what's a word square. Maybe you're not wondering that,

but I'm going to tell you anyway. The word square is the direct precursor of the crossword grid. It's a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its order. While two squares and three squares are easy to create in English, by the time you reach order six, you're very likely to get stuck. An order ten square is a holy grail for those who are regarded as logologists, that is, wordplay experts.

So a word square is a puzzle requiring the discovery of a set of words of equal length, written one under another to read the same down as a cross Apparently, the ancient Romans loved word puzzles. The first known word square, the so called Sadder square, was found on a slab in the ruins of POMPEII. The sadder square, which I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's spelled sat r. It's also known as the rotess square, depending on which way you read it, because rotess is satur backwards.

And I say this because word order apparently doesn't matter in Latin. But this square that was found is a five x five five word Latin palindrome. I'm gonna say it in Latin, but I'll tell you what it means, so apologies on this pronunciation. But satoor a repo, tenant opera rotus the farmer, a repo works, a plow a palindrome. Just a reminder that it's something spelled the same way forwards and deck. So that's not necessarily the English translation,

but in Latin that's what it is. Author Adrian Raffel described the Sadder square as the quote Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire for those who don't know or need a refresher. Not going to pretend I neew this either, but kil Roy was Here was a popular American graffiti

that was seen overseas throughout World War II. The words Kilroy was here were accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a man looking over a wall, and this became a popular piece of graffiti that was drawn by American troops in the Atlantic theater and then later in the Pacific theater. It eventually came to be a universal sign that American soldiers had come through an area and left their mark, and then during the Second World War, Kilroy became so

popular that this graffiti could be found everywhere. It was on shipholds, bathrooms, bridges, and it was painted on the shells of Air Force missiles. Its origins most likely come from a British cartoon and the name of an American shipyard inspector. The myths surrounding it are numerous, and they often center on a German belief that Kilroy was some

kind of superspy who could go anywhere he pleased. Apparently, there are two Kilroy inscriptions hidden in the World War II Memorial in Washington, d c. And these were found tucked in the corners of both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the memorial, and so the Satter Square was essentially the Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. The square was found scrawled from Rome to Corinium, which is in modern England, to Dura Europos, which is modern Syria.

It's unclear why this ancient meme was such a thing. Maybe it was the first meme ever. I guess it depends on what your definition of a meme is. To repeat what the square says. The words in the square are sator arepo, tenant, opera rotas the farmer arepo works on a plow. A repo is what's known as a haypax legomenon, which means it is a term of which only one instance of its use is recorded or can be found. This means that the Satter Square is the only place where the word arepo shows up in the

entire corpus of Latin literature. The best working theory as to why this is is that it's a proper name, invented only to make the square work. But the Satar square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle the letters around the central end, which was in the word tenant, you can make a Greek cross that reads pator noster in both the and This means our father I mean, come on, so clever, and then the four leftover letters, the two a's and two o's. Those stand

for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the square as a discreete way to signal their presence to one another, and the Satar square stuck around for a very very long time. In the Middle Ages, it was regarded as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil apparently gets confused by palindromes, so with the devil not knowing which way to read, a five x five two dimensional palindrome

is an extra powerful devil repellent. The Satar square also appears etched into tablets as a prevention against mad dogs, a snake bite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft. While word squares have maintained their quasi mail magic reputation for hundreds of years to come. Other visual word games also became popular during the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era, visual word games became extremely popular. These visual word games include double acrostics, which paved the way

pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria I guess was regarded as a crucioverbialist, which apparently means a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles. In researching all of this, I have learned many English words. I had no idea or even words to begin with. So crucioverbalist Queen Victoria constructed what's known as the Windsor Enigma to teach her subject how to bring coals to Newcastle. In her eighteen sixty one book Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Cappell a

tribute to the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria. The Queen was known to be fond of riddles and enigmas. One hoax apparently kept her occupied for half a week.

From a passage from the Private Life of the Queen by quote one of Her Majesty's servants, written in eighteen ninety seven, quote, her Majesty, Queen Victoria takes delight in a clever riddle or rebus, but on one occasion she was very angry at having been hoaxed over a riddle which was sent to her with a letter to the effect that it had been made by the Bishop of Salisbury. For four days, the Queen and Prince Albert sought for

the reply. When Charles Murray, controller of the household, was directed to write to the bishop and ask for the solution. The answer received was that the bishop had not made the riddle nor could he solve it.

wasn't saying that with the list. It's not Bosnia. It's spelled Bothnia, just fy. A city in Greece, a circle on the globe. So when you solve these nine clues, the nine letters which are on the left hand side of these answers, it spells out Newcastle, and then on the right side it says coal mines. When you read it from the bottom to the top, as the riddle says to do so, Newcastle's famous for its coal mines. You know what else is famous for its coal mines?

I can't actually answer that question. I have no idea, but here's some ads. Okay, we're back. So. Another old word game, which was a precursor to the crossword, is a game called doublets. It was invented by Oxford mathematician Charles Dogson, who was better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In this game, you transform one word into another of equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using as few moves as possible. All the linking steps also

have to be legitimate words. A lot of modern puzzle books have doublets in them, including a bunch of the ones that I have, and they're pretty fun. As in a crossword, the process of moving stepwise letter to letter forces you to think about all the possible word combinations, and each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini alchemy that keeps the words all somehow related to each other. And Charles Doxon's are Lewis Carroll's eighteen eighty book Doublets

a word Puzzle. There are examples of this where he says to quote, drive pig into sty raise four to five, make wheat into bread. So the idea is that those words become the other one with a couple of changes. A classic classic word puzzle. And we're inching closer and closer to how the crossword came to be, and the crossword came about when riddles entered the grid. Crossword clues

trace their origins to riddles. Riddles have been around since the dawn of time and can be found in basically every religious book, in ar scene, in mythology, in literature for centuries and centuries. The Exeter Book is an eleventh century Old English manuscript and it's the largest and perhaps oldest known manuscript of old English literature, containing about a sixth of all the Old English poetry that has survived until today. That's a lot. And it has about one

hundred riddles of all types. They say there are quote unquote about one hundred because these riddles still to this day drive people crazy. In the ten centuries since their composition, scholars haven't conclusively solved every riddle. There are four basic ways that quote riddle logic operates. One true riddles, two wordplay,

three neck riddles and four anti riddles. The enigma, which is a metaphorical statement that's designed to feel like it has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different than this. The word enigma comes from a Greek word that means quote to speak in riddles. It applies to things as well as people that puzzle one's mind. Examples of enigmas can be Egypt's ancient pyramids and how the hell they were built, Amelia Earhart going poof, or the

Bermuda Triangle being weird. Plenty of enigma occur in modern times too. One example that people point to of this is the twenty fourteen disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy. On March eighth, twenty fourteen, the airplane departed Kuala Lumpur. It was bound for Beijing, China, but thirty

nine minutes after takeoff, the plane disappeared. It quite literally vanished without a trace, becoming one of aviation's greatest mysteries, and over a decade later, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane and its two hundred and thirty nine passengers. But just a few months ago In March of twenty twenty four, Malaysia's government said it may renew the hunt for MH three seventy after an American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane

in twenty eighteen proposed a fresh search. A massive multinational search at the time in the southern Indian Ocean where the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing apart from some small fragments that later won. Nobodies or wregage have ever been found spooky, so that's an enigma. Examples of enigmas with word puzzles could be something like what is the sound of one hand clapping? These are logic knots that want to stay knotted or not solved. Uh huh,

there's another little pun for you or riddle anyway. Riddles, on the other hand, do want to be solved. A true riddle one of these four basic ways that riddle logic operates transforms think a into solution B. True riddles rely on a logical connection that's not obvious on the surface, so you need to think more deeply about it and maybe a non conventional or non literal way in order to reach the solution. When riddles become baked into culture,

they can turn into like inside jokes. Riddles have been around for millennia, and the best riddles have been repeated for just as long. One quote unquote famous riddle, if you will, is the sphinx's riddle in Greek mythology. Just some background on the Greek sphinx, because I personally found it fascinating and very interesting. But the Greek sphinx was clearly inspired by the Egyptian sphinx, but the Greeks modified

the sphinx and made it their own. The Greek sphinx had a woman's face and breasts and a lion's body with bird's wings, while the Egyptian sphinx had a male head which could be either human or animal. The word sphinx is Greek and it means quote strangler, perhaps stemming from the fact that lionesses usually kill their prey by strangling it. Since sphinxes were seen as very intimidating, the Greeks frequently put them on gravestones to frighten a way

would be grave robbers. This use is called apotropaeic, meaning causing someone to turn away. Most of the examples of ancient Greek sphinxes that we have today are from ancient Great Gavestones. So in Greek mythology, there was one famous sphinx who turned up in Thebes shortly after its king Lias had been killed. While on his way to consult the Delphic oracle. This sphinx flew on top of the city walls and asked all the theban youths a riddle. When they could not answer it, she ate them. Feminism

strikes again. At the time, Creon was the region in Thebes since Lias had died, and he was so desperate to get rid of the sphinx that he promised the kingship and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta, who also happened to be his sister in marriage to anyone who could solve the sphinx's riddle. This was the sphinx's riddle, which you may have heard before, which is why I

said it was quote unquote famous. What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening In the myth around this time, Oedipus came into Thebes and he solved the riddle. Oedipus said, the answer is man, because a man crawls on all fours in the mornings of his life, he walks on two feet in the mid day of his life, and then he uses a cane for extra support when he

is old. The sphinx was so upset that Oedipus had answered the riddle correctly that she threw herself down from the walls of thieves and she died. You know what, else, died my soul when I realized we need ads to make money. So here you go. Okay, we're back. We were talking about types of riddles again. There are four basic ways that riddle logic operates, true riddles, wordplay, neck riddles,

and anti riddles. And we talked about the true riddles before the break, and so now let's talk about word play riddles. A word play riddle does this same thing as a true riddle, but it adds an extra layer of trickiness to it. So it's thing A turning into solution B. But there is a slight catch in between that has to interrupt the pathway between those things. First, wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics

to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A ribis is an example of a wordplay riddle which uses letters as part of the clue. A ribis is a puzzle device in which words are represented by combinations of letters and pictures. A neck riddle gives a solution that would be impossible for the solve to arrive at without context, so question mark equals b. The term neck riddle comes from stories in which the hero of the story uses an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge or a monster

and save himself from being hanged. So a neck riddle saves your neck.

it's not meant to actually be solvable. It has to stump the other person or in this case a judge or a monster to ensure that you or the hero gets off scot free. Often that's achieved through over precision, but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick. In the Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins best Scullum in a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable what's in

my pocket? And then there's the anti riddle. An anti riddle is one that tricks the reader because it looks like a riddle, but it's actually not a riddle at all. It's basically a equals a For example, why did the chicken cross the road? Seems like a riddle, but the answer to get to the other side is just the literal answer. So, in conclusion, a word grid and a bunch of riddles. Those two things are what evolved over time and over the centuries to bring us what we

know today as the crossword puzzle. Authorn Adrian Raffel, who wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords of the puzzling people who can't live without them, wrote in The Paris Review in twenty twenty quote, if you're a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword, you'd have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue how to figure out what a clue was saying,

or rather what it's precisely not saying, and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run part of the brain. This is part of the reason why even the best crossword solving AI in the world

isn't yet better than the best human. The AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn't know we had, and yet we've always been primed to solve them. End quote. And that is just a beautiful way to end this episode. So that's it. That's the crossword. I'm going to go

do a cross word right now, because why not. I told you I needed things to do in the beginning of this episode, and this is my thing to do that does not include scrolling on my phone and wanting to die. So will that bye?

Whereas the new five thirty eight polling average, and I kind of have been following their new head of statistics for a while, has it still close to a dead heat. And then obviously, you know, there's arguments that people will make that trumpet or that Biden is actually very far behind, which have more to it than the arguments that Biden that Biden is going to win in a landslide the

kind of democratic like the polls are wrong entirely. I don't think that's likely, but I think we're looking at somewhere between Biden as a definite like underdog, or more or less tied. I guess that's where it seems to me. Like the evidence still is yep.

than Biden. And overall, yes, his number dropped or kind of coasted with what it had been in like, you know, April, March February, and according to Politico, other than Trump in twenty twenty, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in horse race polling since Jimmy Carter's reelection bid forty four years ago, which does not make me feel super optimistic.

But like it is. Definitely things are a lot uglier than they were when we recorded our last horse race episode, right, Like the debate was somewhere between pretty bad and catastrophe in terms of its impact on the polls.

here either. A poll released last Saturday by Bloomberg and Morning Console showed Biden narrowing Trump's post debate lead, specifically in swing states, with only a two percent difference between all seven in swing states, with Biden being ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin. Yeah, two percent is within that margin of error, So things are also starting to level up over time.

People are overemphasizing as opposed to what Trump is because Agenda Project twenty twenty five is basically a blueprint for a Christian fascist takeover of the US, published by the Heritage Foundation, and a lot of people who have been affiliated with Trump, who were in his administration last time, have are on board with it, have talked about it, have boosted it, So people are obviously scared of it.

I think what Trump is actually promised to do in office, which is the Agenda forty seven, we did a whole week of stuff on it, is a more realistic thing

to be afraid of. But either way, I think that some of that tightening is probably a mix of you've got everywhere, you had a bunch of kind of on the fence, voters swing away from Biden because he performed so badly in the debate, and then it has dims have done a pretty intensive job of spreading out a lot of you know, what you might call fear porn over a fascist takeover of the country, and I think that's part of why things might be tightening back up.

kind of get to this a little bit more later. Honestly, I think we had a stronger chance at this possibility a week or two ago. I think by now Democrats have largely kind of closed ranks around Biden, but this is definitely still developing. And I've been keeping up with all of Biden's appearances in the media since the debate just because I've been interested to see how he will

handle this kind of universal flub. I watched his ABC interview and his recent phone calls into various morning news shows. In all of those, he did not perform especially well as expected. They were slow and sometimes kind of like mumbly, But neither have they been like the death blow to

his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate. Instead, we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty regarding the Democratic candidacy, and meanwhile, Biden is just continuing to affirm that he will be the one to lead the ticket. I'm gonna quote from Washington Post here.

record this. We're recording this on Monday, so there's gonna be meetings in the Senate and in the House about kind of this issue. So this is definitely still developing, but you're starting to see more and more politicians fall into rank. AOC just put out a statement saying, no, we're gonna We're gonna all support Biden. So like there was this uncertainty for a while, and now I think people are kind of being told to, like, come on, get on the platform. Yeah, but Biden hasn't been handling

this well like personally either. He's come across like very angry.

very accurate in twenty twenty two. And he's also crediting himself for that red wave not happening in twenty twenty two. So he's been having a lot of weird statements, like blaming media and blaming the elites for trying to replace him on the ticket. I'll include one clip here from Morning Joe, come on, give me a break.

I don't think honestly. Part of what we are accepting here is that, like that's so that doesn't really matter, right, Like we're all kind of acknowledging if you're on team anything but Trump because he might end the concept of democracy in this country, then you're accepting that, like, yeah, I am not. I am voting for a guy who probably can't really do the job anymore, and just assuming that the people around him will not be as evil

like you do. Kind of have to accept that otherwise you're just lying to yourself about the state that Joe is in because he's not all there. He's not all there the way he was in twenty twenty.

CHIP fifty, which is like an analytic project. It's like the Civic Health and Institution Project, So it's like a survey of all fifty US states, And they did a survey on like opinions of voters before and after the debate, and there showed like fairly small movement, like very little was changed at all in terms of like and primarily what was changed wasn't people going from Biden to Trump, but from people preferring from preferring Biden to preferring other right,

like that someone else someone else right. And so that does kind of go back to what we're like, people are not making their minds up about Trump, like, and I think what the dims can do if Biden stays in and he doesn't seem like he's leaving. It seems like the primary thing that will make progress for them is hitting on how dangerous Trump having a second term will be. That seems to be what moves the needle, which.

you do as a politician. You were gonna you were gonna keep insisting it until one day you are no longer doing that, And that's just kind of how politics goes. But he has made continuous, continuous gestures towards the fact that he is he is going to stay. He has no plans on stepping down. He wants to win in November. This Monday, he personally made twenty calls to congressional members trying to convince them that he is going to be the one on the ticket.

to swap him for anyone else. There's a few other people kind of saying this, and I believe that is kind of what is what is happening, that all they need to do is just keep delaying this question, keep this, keep this uncertainty until the convention, and then it's going to get locked in there. And that's all he needs to do. He doesn't need to demonstrate his viability come November. He just needs to make sure that he gets that

he gets the official nomination this August. And I don't know biden supporters reactions to this have been really weird, including we've kind of had like a new upgrowth of

a pro Biden personality cult among liberals. Wcause I feel like largely like a culmination of like MSNBC Russia Gates, like bluing on type stuff that people are just now convinced there's like a secret conspiracy to take down Biden and any attempts to question Biden's legibility as a candidate could only be rooted in some secret agenda to get

Trump elected. So I think this is why they're so volatile about this is that they think like the only one who would ever propagate questions over Iden's like legibility would be someone who secretly wants Trump to be in office again, and that is such a threat to them that they they're lashing out very very oddly and very conspiratorially against anyone raising questions about maybe Biden's not the best guy actually, and they're spinning this into like actually

being secret Trumpers. It's odd because even the way Biden talks about his own drive to beat Trump is kind of wishy washy, certain like more polished statements will be like, yes, this is like a threat to democracy. We have to we have to do this to keep Trump out of office. This is an existential threat. But in that ABC interview, he gave a really kind of soft answer to this question, saying that all that he needs to do is just give it his all.

in himself and the party. This could be like a convenient medical diagnosis, right, although the increasing number of calls for him to undergo thorough neurological examination will probably have the same backfire effect of Biden attempting as much as he can to avoid any in depth medical and neurological testing. He's been making these comments like every day I take an rological test by doing my job, and like, come on, man, we we're watching you do your job. It's not that's part of.

bad strategy from the beginning expressing any kind of doubt. Well, maybe that's right, but I don't know what else people are supposed to do if you don't if you really think that this is he has not demonstrated, Like it's seriously concerning incapacity for the work. Think about how unprecedented having this degree of open challenging of him as the candidate this close to an elections. I've never seen anything like.

last year. There actually is like a decent difference, And I don't know, it seems it seems kind of absurd that he that he keeps harping on this line. For his ABC interview, he declined to take a cognitive test and make the results public in order to reassure voters that he was fit to serve another term, saying that I have a cognitive test every single day doing this job. Everything I do is a test.

new candidate. The last time this method was used by Democrats was in sixty eight at the also Chicago DNC, after the leading candidate, Senendate Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated weeks before the convention by twenty four year old Palestinian man for his support of Israel during the Six Day War. So again, there is a lot of parallels here. And if it's not going to be Biden, then who is it going to be? Right, This was a bigger question last week and it still is kind of a lingering

question in a lot of people's minds. Who's it going to be? Probably Kamala I don't know, Yeah, I.

And also like if you're talking about from a war gaming this out perspective, you know, Kamala does not look bad in the polling and might might in fact be just for a variety of reasons, one of the better choices, Like I can in my head think, wow, I sure wish it was you know, Pritzker and Whitmer maybe, but like I think that a lot of what I've seen in the polls has kind of convinced me that Kamal is probably our best all around bet and if you include practicality and actually like beating Trump.

detailed argument and plan for a campaign. So this doc I was able to get a hold of a copy, and parts of it definitely read like an aaronsor counscript like that is that is the closest thing I can I can describe this thing as But I think it is worth digging into here for our last section. So I'm gonna I'm gonna read some small parts of this doc and Robert, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this. It starts by saying, we are currently losing.

We need to do something different to win. The number one most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump. Nothing is more important, and we need to be very real that we are currently losing. So off to a good start, that is I would I would argue accurate quote. Biden's debate performance, the campaign's defensive response, and the total lack of plan to reassure his base and the voters about his about his capability should shake everyone's confidence that

he can win this election. Now we have three possible options. Biden can take the necessary step to demonstrate that he is up to the job, he can step aside for another candidate, or Trump will win. The discourse around potential alternative candidates in the event that Biden does step down is increasingly detached from reality. Donors, pundits, and democratic elites are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets. This chaos is used as a shield by stay the Course

advocates who frame the choice as Biden or chaos. The swirl over different possible candidates is obscuring the fact that there's a single clear path forward. There's one path out

of this mess, and it's Kamala unquote. And this is one of the interesting things I found about this doc is that the way that they view this kind of current chaos as we win just as a deliberate strategy and as an as a deliberate tactics just to continue this uncertainty all the way to the convention, and a lot of the what this dock advocates for is that we need to call this as soon as possible to give whatever option we're going to go forward with the

most amount of success, whether that's Biden, whether that's Kamala, it needs to we need to decide what it is so we don't spend the next few months doing weird like democratic party infighting and instead actually like lock down what's happening, so there's a cohesive strategy. And they argue that Kamala has the strongest claim to democratic legibility among all other alternative candidates. Quote, she's the only candidate that can take the reins right now instead of in late

August with less than three months ago. To be clear, this isn't an argument about deservedness or why should personally love Kamala. It's about strategy and winning in the face of unimaginable electoral stakes.

to inviting this extended period of chaos. And although Kamala has limitations in polls regarding her name recognition, she currently wins any poll of alternative Democratic candidates by a very wide margin. This doc dos pointed out that Kamala is by no means a perfect candidate. She does have real deficits,

but they are mostly addressable. The doc mentions her Biden level approval, rating her involvement with Biden's immigration shortcomings, and her kind of awkward camera moments reminiscent of a drunk aunt and quote. After years of a relatively low profile, voters don't see her as a strong leader for the country, but running as a presidential candidate will allow Harris to

present herself in a more commanding light. She'll be a prosecutor going up against a convicted felon, a woman fighting against the man who ended Roe v. Wade unquote, and that is a lot of the tight sort of messaging that they are promoting if Kamala does end up being the option. A Morning consoled political poll on the vice president from June reflects a number of advantages she would have over Trump in a head to head match based

on his greatest vulnerabilities. A majority of voters ci Kamala is mentally fit, level headed, and prepared contrast to Trump and even Biden, and a majority of voters trust Kamala on jobs, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Public opinion

is already moving towards Harris over Biden. Forty three percent of voters indicate Harris is fit to run, compared to Biden's thirty five and while the issue is complex and the distance here is relative, she's broadly considered to be on Biden's left on Israel Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities. Kamala also has advantages with the younger and POC voters that the Democrats are currently bleeding in

the dock. Here they contain some stats on this, saying Biden won the twenty twenty election by just forty four one thousand votes, and most of those are votes that he is bleeding. A New York Times cenpol in February found that Harris is nearly ten points ahead of Biden with black voters, and fifteen points up with Latino voters, twenty points up with young voters. These are massive advantages. Now that is older data, but it's probably worth some consideration.

Part of the reason why she's also favored among other Democratic contenders is that she has direct access to the Biden Harris campaign war chest of over ninety one million dollars in cash, which would create a smoother transition.

of party unity and message unity. That's a month where we can and keep the media focused on Donald Trump, Project twenty twenty five and mega extremism instead of waiting in dread for the next Biden misstep or talking about democrats fighting it out to win delicate count fear of racism and sexism is playing an outsized role not supported by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the vote is marginal compared to the potential to make gains in the crucial block that will decide the election.

vote for the Biden Harris ticket. For anyone in the Biden's nominee, we must rally around him camp. It's essential that we project confidence in his selection of a running mate by one pushing the administration to stop sideline and Kamala. By two promoting Kamala as the leader of the party and country. Three be prepared to align with political and financial support, and three debate over and ultimately organize around a new running mate. Consolidation around Vice President Harris will

not guarantee victory in November. No option is free of risk at this point. But this is our clearest path to win. We should take it. And that's how the document ends. And I like some of the arguments they make here. I don't like Kamala as a person. I think she is many many issues both the person and I don't like cops, but absolutely, especially if their messaging will be like Kamala the prosecutor against Trump the felon, which I personally don't like.

accept that at a certain point. I think so I I and I think that's most frustrated to me about the fact that it doesn't look like Biden's going to step down, is that like the smartest thing they could do strategy wise would be to drop that announcement on like Monday of next week and utterly like cut the wind out of the sales of the rnc ye, Like suddenly the biggest story is that and not you know, everything that the Republicans are putting out, like you could

actually really do some damage to them, because there's there's not really anything that they could do in response.

once again on how bad Trump is. And I can understand some of like the Biden camps like upsetedness at at like the fact that currently there is just so much attention on Biden and everyone kind of is ignoring Trump, but that just is due to how poorly he himself has been behaving like that, Like that is ultimately the Biden campaign's fault that they didn't plan for this contingency, And if they want all of that like discourse to stop, they have a very easy option to And it's just

reliant on Biden not being too personally prideful and acknowledging that he's just too old for office and there are better candidates out there. So yeah, that is that is the current, that is the current situation on the rise of the k Hive, something I at this point am very skeptical to think will actually happen. But it may be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party.

going on by the time this episode comes out. We kind of talked about in the last episode how the Saudis have been getting into sports. I mean it sort of starts with soccer, they said, they start to WWE, they get into tennis, they're in golf, they're in boxing, they're in Formula one, and in the last like two years specifically, they've gotten really really deep into esports. In twenty twenty two, they spent one point five billion dollars wow to acquire face It in EESL Gaming, which were

two organizations that ran esports leagues. Esports, by the way, are professional video game competition. Yeah, the people who didn't spend their youth waking up at five in the morning to watch Korean StarCraft tournaments like I did.

very very common. Ry, Brunei another one. Yeah, I raced for Quebec once, which is not not a Petro state.

it's very common in all kinds of professionals sports. Right, because as sports has become more like an entertainment industry, it's become unfathomably expensive to own a sponsor a team for like enthusiasts, and the value proposition isn't really there for brand I don't think the amount that it costs now to even a sport like cycling, which is not a massive sporting global terms, right, it's not football soccer for the Americans out there, it's not worth it for

many brands to sponsoring entire cycling team millions and millions of euros. But like, if you can use that cycling team to launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that cycling team can be what people think of when they hear about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right, And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money, you don't have to worry so much about whether it's worth it.

But most of the money that had been sponsoring this stuff was crypto money, right, Okay, you know, but I wanted to get into why this is sort of happening. Something I think is very important to note going into this is that the sort of league thing that's being run right now is being run directly out of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund,

So this is directly state money. So the Esports World Cup that's happening right now has sixty million dollars in prizes, which is unreal is an extraordinary amount of money split around twenty one esports. There are thirty sports teams involved, and I am going to read the names of every single fucking one of them, because fuck you.

for Real Esports, Loud Team, Falcons, Twist and Minds. Fuck all of you for fucking doing this and doing the super pr thing. There's been a backlash, and the backlash is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state homophobia and you know, I mean the fact that women are not full citizens. Yeah, like miss such Yeah, I mean just are just straight up owned by their husbands, right like that. That's that's how the sort of legal conservativeship works.

a number of reasons. Though technically speaking you can sort of sell oil in other currencies now, but like most oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars, and so around the world, dollars are one of the things that if you are an economy, you need dollars in order to get oil from people. So huge sinks of American dollars from all across the world, you know, from the US of the US imporce, a lot of oil flow into these sort of oil producing countries.

problem that has caused disaster around the world. Is something where I'm fond of talking about on this show, but we're going to talk about again because it's important here. In the seventies and eighties, as sort of Opek realized that it could, you know, use its sort of political power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and gain enormous amounts of petro dollars by controlling the price

of oil. Suddenly they had, you know, that you have hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and because this is capitalism, you can't just sit on that money. You have to find a way to turn that money into more money. But again, you know, I mean just a sovereign wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars, right, and so this is extremely hard, and it means that this money is constantly flowing around the world trying to find

a way to get returns on it, you know. And in the modern era, these are things like people remember

we work, oh yeah, but incredibly stupid dune. From the beginning office space rental scheme that went under that that was a lot of that was funded by Saudi money because Tuddy's had put an enormous amount of money in this Japanese bank called soft Bank, and soft Bank was trying to figure out what to do with this unfathol amount of money, and they were like, Okay, what if we fund the dumbest project of all time?

extremely wealthy nation state. Right, And that being true has structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this for a long time in the tech sector, right, where you don't have to fucking make money, like your revenue stream can just be investor money and you can coast for a decade off of just taking money from the Saudis who are like trying to find some way to turn this money.

So when the vulgar shock hit and the US like massively increased interest rates, the interest rates on these loans like skyrocketed and suddenly you know, you're paying like fifty percent interest on a loan of like cephal billion dollars. And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their economies are destroyed. I mean, David Grab rememorably talks about

this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria. You know, but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination. Like programs are not that expensive, but they are a little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of Madagascar had to like pay off this IMF debt, they had to get.

them is buying a bunch of a military equipment. Mostly what you're doing with that is sort of buying American patronage. If you spend enormous amount of money buying American tanks, and this is you know, something the Saudi has been doing for ages, right, you spend a bunch of money

on American defense contracts. You know, you can sort of buy us protection and guarantees that you know, for example, as it is gonna happen later in this episode, you can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack your capital. But the thing with the Saudis is that they have a lot of equipment but Saudi Arabia cannot maintain a strong functional army, right if they were, if they had an actual serious army, there would be a

coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely well equipped kind of, but it's trained like shit and it's run by like just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks. But you know, so that's like sort of one thing you can do with this money. A lot of this money ended up going into real estate, and there are sort of cycles of this happening. The one that ain't that's of concern to us is what happens after two thousand and eight, in the sort of aftermath of two thousand and eight.

There are bill places in the world where, you know, you can park an extremely large amount of money in real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset. If you have like property in a market that is, you know, where the housing market is really hot and prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly get rid

of it. And you can also there's liquidity. There's sort of financial instruments you can do based off of your ownership of real estate, and this is something that drives the Saudis into a bunch of very very I don't know if risky is exactly the right word, but a bunch of moves in ye Many real estate that really, truly we're about to not pay off.

I mean it's more complicated. It's all of this is enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of the things that happens is that when a government that is hostile to the Saudis, which is like you know, the sort of like unterer a law like that whole coalition is very awso to the saudiast because the Saudis

sucks shit. You know, Suddenly the Saudis are looking at an enormous amount of capital they've sunk in real estate that they are you know, based on these like incredibly corrupt land deals with the previous administration, which have been friendly to them, they are looking at suddenly losing all this land. The Saudis weren't the first people to come into sort of the m many real estate market right on the uae Omah and a bunch of other states

has sort of been in there before. And so part of what a big part of what this sort of this like what was called the coalition is is this like basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect their housing assets. Look, that's a lot of what a lot of wars are. If we're on it, it's people trying to protect xoy assets, right like unfortunately.

All of their ground forces are a joke, but their air force is very very well equipped with a bunch of like incredibly modern US warplanes that we sell them all the fucking time, and so you know, they don't really have good infantry. What they have the ability to do is just obliterate people with air strikes. The kind of like terror air campaign that they're waging is something that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine. But they're doing air strikes on school buses full of children,

and they're taking the American thing. They're doing double tap drone strikes on weddings where they're they're hitting a wedding and then when rescue workers come up, they hit they hit.

importing a bunch of Columbian mercenaries. So these are guys who've been like desk squad guys in Columbia.

of the country. And because the UAE is very very well connected to these one of the ways that the coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops were you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I say troops, I mean child soldiers. What the forces that they are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use as cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably believe,

I mean kind of funnily. A lot of these people end up not fighting because they you know, they get handed a rifle, will get thrown into Yemen and they just immediately sell their guns and I to fight. But like, you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit.

Like again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing with is we are having the guys who did the dart, who did the fucking Darfur genocide, kidnap fucking villagers from Sudan, like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use them as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen, so they can like defend their fucking real estate assets.

But in the west of the country everything is completely different, and you know, they're basically getting their shit kicked in and in that theater, the Saudi's plan is we are going to starve the country, so, you know, and the Saudi, the Saudis have naval assets nobody else really in this war does, right, and they just set up a blockade on like all of the ports on that side of the country. We do not know how many people get

starved as a result of this. The last good mortality figures I could I could find, this war is still

going on, by the way. I mean, fighting has gotten a lot less intense since of twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, but I mean it's it's still going The last good numbers that I can find suggest three hundred and seventy seven thousand dead, and it's probably way way worse than that, because again, we just don't know how many people died in the famines that you know that that the Saudi set off, and this was you know,

this was explicitly there. Their plan here was was to just kill off the population of this part of Yemen by starving them to death. You know, this is the genocide, right, they were trying to do genocide. It doesn't work, and it doesn't work because, I mean there's a number of reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get defeated militarily. Kuthi troops like take several cities like inside of Saudi Rabia, and like they like they march across the border and

take them. And you know, I mean, it's it's bad enough for the Saudis that like the there's a moment where it like it looks like they're going to lose ri Odd and the US has to step in and be like no, like okay, you guys need to fucking.

exterminate a vast part of the population of Yemen. That's I think, like really the true sort of heart of darkness, evil shit, right, Like I don't know, it's like US and Cambodia is shit.

But you know, for for a long time, right, like in the late twenty tens and the early twenty twenties, and this this was an issue in the twenty twenty presidential campaigns because you know, I mean, Trump fucking went and touched the orb with Muhammed bin Salman, who's the Crown Prince of now Well at the time, was known as Mohammad Been bone saw because she just straight up ordered this guy to be fucking bone salved, you know, but like that it was. It was a real sort

of issue. And this is the reputation that the Satuda government has that causes them to kind of go really really hard into the into this esports angle. And there there's one last kind of angle to this, which is like the worst kept secret in the of the oil market is that the Saudis are running out of oil.

It's like it's it's technically a secret, but it's like everyone knows this, Like every everyone knows that a lot of sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Ramco is not their oil, it's their labels and other people's oil. And people have known this for a long time, and the Saudis obviously know it. And so the trick they have to pull right in order to continue to be this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA, is to find something else to base their economy on.

And their plan has been a lot of like they're trying to do just tech bullshit we're not going to get into because that's its own thing.

And part of the reason that it's working is that, you know, the focus is on and like, I understand why people are doing this, but the focus has been on the fact that set like the Saudi government is, you know, is sexist and homophobic.

keeps working like it's going to work, there going to be a country that killed three hundred and seventy thousand people and probably more.

bravest on of the bravest people I've ever seen. And the Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests and fucking keep the government intact. And for I mean years for you, I mean like a decade afterwards. Every once in a while, you'd get a video coming like that came out of like the of these kids dressed in all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting at them with molotovs. Right, I've never seen anything. I've

never seen anything like it. Like, they're some of the bravest people in the world, and the Saudis fucking rolled tanks into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking esports companies, sure, those are the people whose money you're taking, right you you were, you were taking the money of a bunch of people who rolled tanks into the country, whose people wanted fucking democracy.

of my life. Yeah, you make shit money, but like it's so much better to not make shit choices as well, And like that goes way beyond like not cheing in the manifest ways of people cheating in in sports, but also just like you don't compromising to the way more important than like playing right, Like sports is supposed to be fun, and if you allow yourself to be a vehicle for things that are terrible, like you're gonna be miserable in your fucking forties anyway, because your body will

fall apart. Like, don't make yourself feel guilty for this as well.

Since the Civil War began in Syria, which is more than a decade ago now, thirteen odd years ago. So from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti a SAD factions, right, so those are the rebels in Syria. This is a big change. In two thousand and eight, A Sadden Herdigan's family went on holiday together really Yeah. Yeah, they went into southern Turkey and a little little beach holiday together.

They built camps to house them. They were strong backers of the revolution. They spent forty million dollars carrying for their refugees. The Nationally Intelligence Organization, the MIT, actually trained parts of the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, and then later they brought together the SNA. There will be many acronyms, right, like every civil war loves a three letter acronym. And the Syrian War is no different.

Autonomous Areas North and East Syria, sometimes called RISHABA. They have also used the SNA outside of Syria, right in Azerbaijan, Libya and Nizier like just as a private military right as a mercenary army more or less, and you'll you'll hear them refer to sometimes as mercenaries, certainly like when they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue that they're not, and other times, like when they're being

used in Syria. A lot of these folks were previously parts of other groups that have kind of been repackaged and bundled up together by Turkey, and there are still many factions within these broadly speaking Turkish supported Arab rebel forces in Syria. There are some Kurdish groups as well, but not so many, and there are some Turkic groups that are not Arab. So these property forces are really

vital to the Turkey strategy in Syria. I wanted to get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re recruited Jahadis were from other groups, so I reached out to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros. He is a spokesperson of the Kurdistan Communities Union's Foreign Relations Commission.

If you're not familiar with the Kurdistan Communities Union, it's the umbrella organization for the several democratic confederalist political parties North, South, East and West Kurdistan which are inspired by the ideology of Abdullah Asient. So we're going to hear more from Zagoros next week. I have a number of questions about the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the in the Kandil Mountains in the in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous

Region of Iraq. But we're going to drop a little quote here where he talks about the interactions at the SDF and the EPIGAY and the other other units Right hPG have had with the Turkish Army's Arab Syrian elements. When you hear Zagros here talking about DASH, what he's talking about is the so called Islamic State, the Islamic State of Iraq and the levant Right. It's just the Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you went aware that's what he's talking.

ex Nostra Front members, x Alpaider members. They are from many nationalities, according to pu K officials Patriotic Union of Kdistan officials, they say that they have learned the names of three hundreds of these DASH members in the Turkish Army ranks.

group called the Gray Wolves. The Gray Wolves are the military street wing of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey and they've been involved in political violence there since the nineteen sixties, with their primary target being curved Greeks, Alavis, Arabs, Christians, Jews and Armenians. These are all minority ethnic groups, I guess. To understand this further, you have to be able to differentiate between race, state, and nation. Right, which is getting

into things that I lecture about. But the idea of a race is effective biological link, right, This isn't born out necessarily, but the idea of a shared biology. The idea of a nation. A nation is an imagined community, right, which are can have many races. It could have a state aligned to it or not. Right, So the Turkish nation doesn't necessarily align with the Turkish state. There are

like other groups within the Turkish state. You have Turkish citizenship, but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically Turkish. For what the gray Wolves believe is the superiority of a Turkish race, and they strive for a monoethnic Sunni Islamic Turkish nation. They're pan Turkic organizations, so they want to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind

of renewed Turkish empire. Right after clap to the Soviet Union, they called for this revived empire that would unite Turkic people. They like many of these extremely right wing violent organizations have their roots in anti communism right in the Cold War and specifically and something called Operation Gladio, which was a sort of anti communist guerrilla training supported by the CIA and other groups. They began as government condoned and a sort of sort of deny government forced to use

against the left right. I'm not going to be able, like I can't detil every think the Gray Wolves are down, and this isn't what that episode it's about. I do want to explain one incident. It's maybe one of the most heenous things that they're known for, and it's called the Marush massacre. Are you familiar with this? Sharene?

added like hero to the start of the town. But Alavi people don't tend to use that when they talk about the massacre because it seems a little weird to be like a great town where this horrible massare occurred. So you're here both it's mrs, but s has a little diacritical mark, so it's ah noise. The massacre starts in seven ninety seventy eight, when an anti Soviet movie is being shown in a movie theater in town and someone throws a bomb into the theater. Right Communist brouts

were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it really was them or someone who who wanted to start some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes sense, right, So many Alavi's Alavis are a group of kurd Are you familiar, Sharen?

There's a lot of history behind that, and there's a lot of drama and violence, but that's like the most simple way to put it, and it kind of grew from there. The Sufism sect, on the other hand, is a little different. It's described as a contemplative school of Islam. That aims to develop an individual's consciousness of God through chanting, recitation of litanies, music, and physical movement. Maybe you know or you've seen the Sufi like whirling dervishes. It's basically

a form of like physical active meditation for them. So it definitely differs from both Sunni and Sushia Islam. It's more in a way spiritual. Is that is that a decent summary?

A they are Kurdish right, so they're not Turkic, and B they are perceived to be heretical by people with a more conventional Sunni Islam or some people, I should say so. The day after this bomb, guys of a left wing cafe in town is bombed and two leftist teachers are murdered on their way home from school. Later, at their funeral it's attacked by a mob of Turkish nationalists. Right later that week, exes start appearing on the doors of the Alavi homes in this area of town, which

is predominantly Alavi right. They made announcements to the mosques saying that communists and Alavis are burning your mosques. You should attack them and kill them well. And on the twenty thirty December, crowd stoked buying comprised of the gray Wolves rampaid through all the neighborhoods. Children, women and men were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown in the street. Women were raped, an injured people removed from the hospital beds and murdered were burned alive in

the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount of people who were murdered vary from like one hundred and eleven, which is the official government number, to one hundred and fifty which is sort on the British Alaviu society. Five hundred and fifty something houses were burned to destroy nearly three hundred businesses were looted. Writer as is Tunk

my oppointing, I got that wrong. I'll try my best, who's written a book about the massacre, believes that the Alavis were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish language and culture, and he adds occurs to not the only victims of the attack, progressive and leftist Turks who had opposed the official policies of Ancro Wolves included. The trials for this massacre actually continued until nineteen ninety one. So it happened in nineteen seventy eight, right now, it's

a long time. A total of eight hundred and four people were put on trial, which kind of shows you the scale of the mob that you have.

allegation that's sometimes made. Twenty nine people were sentenced to life in prison for this by nineteen ninety one.

with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's doing it right, and they were attacked. You could see videos of this if you scroll far enough back on my Twitter timeline you'll see I've shared some of them. Twenty fifteen, they protested and burned Chinese flags and attacked people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and folks who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese government span on Turkic wigas fasting during the month of Ramadan.

They also opposed Russia due to its collaboration with a SAD and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some Gray Wolves have gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against a SAD right with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their most famous incident in the war was in twenty fifteen when they shut down a Russian plane was shut down and the pirate parachute out and then they machine gunned

him while he was parachuting down. WHOA yeah. So they pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the assad rasion.

on for this long. It's not simple. It's not just like government versus people anymore. It's just too many elements.

you do. We're gonna learn about the solution. So far, if not familiar, your big finger and your a little pinky finger up in the air. Your other two fingers are touching your thumb.

It was a scene. Like people have obviously drawn the comparison to the previous German movement, which thought one race was better than the other races. Right, but seeing a whole crowd of people doing that disturbing. Yeah, it's concerning. They did it in a game in Germany, so the salute's not banned in Germany, but right. And then the Turkish president Rep. Type Herd Gun postponed his plans to visit asba Jahan and attended the game after the suspension

to show his support for the team. Right. He defended the player, saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring. Germany was big mad about this. In the defense, they summoned the Turkish ambassadors to Foreign Ministry to explain what the fuck was going on? And it has resulted in considerable amounts of violence across Europe. Right, we saw in Austria, we saw in Germany, we saw in Belgium where there

is a large Turkish and often a large Kurdish yeaspora. Right, because of the tensions between these two groups, which the football has increased, then we saw like street fighting between these two groups in predominantly migrant neighborhoods. Right. But I don't want it's episode to just be about the football or the Turkish participation in the Syrian civil War. I want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees

in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to recent the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the started the war. Estimates range from three point one to three point five. I've seen four million, evidently, Like they have a land border, right, Turkey and Syria. So some of the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas others will have come in the more formal process and be documented. Right. So whatever, it's millions of refugees, I

think that's what matters. They are largely baselessly and evidently baselessly in some cases accused of causing the economic troubles and include low wages and inflation inflation exceeded seventy five percent in Turkey in May. They have also been blamed for the earthquake that happened if every twenty twenty three, which I'm not quite sure how like who or what the process exactly that they're postulating is there.

and its proxies attacked the SDF and seized territory inside Syria. Right, Operation Peace Spring and Olive Branch. In these areas, Turkey has attempted to resettle Arab refugees.

more than a decade. Their children have gone to school in Turkey, they speak Turkish, they've learned a new language, they've learned a new alphabet. Right, they have lives there. So not all of them are just taking the chance to Yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since twenty eighteen, a cost of living crisis in Turkey has been leveraged by the right to stoke anti Syrian sentiment.

Research found that in twenty twenty, only twenty three percent of Turkey citizens would accept a Syrian bride or groom into their family or consider having a Syrian as a business partner, and only thirty one percent would want to have the child educated in a class with a Syrian in it.

They'll just they'll just fucking say it, which is kind of wild. No, it's scary, Like, yeah, it's very scary.

Cambichelow and just pointed at vegetables and shouted. So I'm pretty pretty good when it comes to like the eggplant spectrum. So I'll greet them in command gee and they will. They only speak Turkish, right, Like, it's not that they could just drop back. And I'm sure that's true for kids who would have grown up speaking Arabic in Syria if they went to school in Turkey.

which trying to act as services. Separate shelters were set up for Syrian refugees, like literally like they couldn't be together, right, Resentment simmered amongst the groups. Yeah, I read some NGO reports. One of the things they say is that like women who were refugees, especially women who run their own preferred not to drink water because they didn't want to go to the bathroom, like they were afraid and they wanted

to stay in their tents. And like, well, yeah, that's something I've seen in other settings too, but like it, it's obviously that's a pretty fuck situation to be in, right, Yeah, in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself.

MNGOS later reported that refugees did not receive mobile container homes until displaced Turkish residents received them, and that refugee women in particular experience violence in these container camps, right, that's when they're they're dropping like chipping containers for people to live in because all the how they's filed down

because of the earthquake. Many Turkish refugees have a sort of temporary protected status, so that temporary protected status only allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in, and many of those provinces are obviously border provinces.

After the earthquake, Turkey lifted those those restrictions on movement, and you saw tons of Syrian folks traveling around Turkey and being like, whoa like is Stumbul, How cool is this like? Having lived there for ten years? Right, But they couldn't leave their province before for this generation of Syrian some of them, like I was reading some of their like social media, Like some folks I think meaningfully became felt more Turkish when they were able to access

so things. But other folks they went back to Syria to visit family, they were briefly allowed to do that. They weren't allowed to do that before. But it also broadened the resentment against them. I think it's fair to say. And in the twenty twenty three presidential election, there wasn't really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. At Agam

was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did the TURKEYEU deals to prevent further migration westward help right, So all of this just continues to turn up the temperature. Between January and December twenty twenty three, over fifty seven thousand Syrians were deported. According to Human Rights Watch, these deportations took place with the authorities quote pressuring the border authorities to list the majority of border crossings as returnees

or voluntary. Turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to quote unquote safe zones that are pits of danger and despair that's quote from Adam Kogle, who's a deputy Mid East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

which is a pretty fuck thing to do. The guy was arrested, the young girl was taken into protective custody I think, along with her mother, but it didn't stop violence exploding. Then the town whard has happened. That night, cars were destroyed, Syrian shops were attacked, and homes were set on fire. The next night, the violence spread in the border city of Gaziantep, which has like a twenty

five percent Syrian population. A man was stabbed. I've seen the videos of like teenage boys, like I don't know if they're dead or unconscious, but they're certainly not capable of responding, and mobs of people are stamping on them, kicking them, and it's pretty horrible stuff.

try and send a million more people back to Syria. Right. Unsurprised, several nights of these programs have led to anti Turkish sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey and its proxy forces. Right. Indeed, there's very proxy forces in some cases turned on their Turkish backers, and you

could see on social media. Again I shared some of them, like numerous videos last week of SNA so that Syrian National Army fighters firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and burning Turkish flags, and even like mobs attacking Turkish civilians in a Frien right, which is one of the cities that Turkey captured from the SDF. You can say in another Turkish occupied areas too, demonstrators tried to storm the

headquarters or Turkish backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their frontline positions to set up roadeblocks and tack Turkish bass. Dozens of people stayed to sit in in the Al Hayya Square in Afrene. Again, these are not tensions have popped up overnight, right, This just happened because mobs in

Turkey attacked Syrian refugees. But this was kind of the cork popping, if you like, and one of the things that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is this sort of detente between Asad and Turkey, Right, So, in response to these protests, Turkey shut off the internet, closed border crossings, and it sent more troops into the area. Masses of people were arrested and people were charged with things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey, which like again

that this is not in Turkey, right, this is in Syria. Yeah, but in the area occupied by Turkey.

One of the videos obtained by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed a child under pressure admitting to quote burning the turkeysh flag and apologizing to the Turkish people before kissing the flags. Chris, Yeah, again, when people kiss the flags on TV, it's not a great sign. I did see videos of some of the SNA who appear to have captured some Turkish soldiers making them kiss their

flag as well, like the Syrian Revolution flag. So I want to talk about these Turkish safe zones, right, so called safe zones, I guess they're anything but safe. They've been seized through military incursions and their rife with corruption in human rights abuse. It is both by Turkish back forces and Turkish forces directly. And you'll be familiar with some of this stuff from what Israel does in Palestine,

specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchids. You can see it like listed on the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights if you go to like they organize the areas by the name of the Turkish Mission, so like Operation Peace Spring Area or Euphrates Shield or Operation Olive Branch is a real fucking on the nose name. And you can see like ten olive trees were cut down and sold for firewood, or like people reselling homes that

were sees from civilians. Right wow. And I've spoken to people who have left a free in my time in KURDISTWN and Syrian Kurdistan and in the United States, and I've spoken to people who were there as part of the SDF and flat backwards, and like a lot of them have confirmed the same stuff, right, destruction and property theft of homes and houses, and then like there's evidence of there's evidence of corruption in these areas today, right,

sexual violence, even torture. So it's pretty bad. There are a ton of links that will be on our sources page if you want to read more. I don't want to sort of traumatize you all on your way to work here. I'll just traumatize Serene. Yeah you're working, that's.

be leaked in the last few days. I can't confirm this, but I've seen this from a few places right that data from a registry of refugees has been leaked, which would obviously be very concerning, like if we look at things like the Marash massacre, we look at like the

totality of this sentiment and the people doing it. Tensions in the Turkish occupied areas of Syria remain high, with people there strongly opposed to the Turkish oppression, seizure and sale of their landed homes, and the potential of at a time between the two countries. This weekd Agan said, we will extend our invitation to a sad With this invitation, we want to restore Turkey Syria relations to the same level as in the past. Our invitation may be extended

at any time. That's a readout of an interview by Turkish media that's obviously translated.

agrees to pull out the troops that it has. Turkey is opposed to this because it doesn't want the SDA, which it believes to be an extension of the p k K, which it considers to be a terrorist group, to have territory along its border, right, And the FDF still does already have territory along its border. Right, Like Cami Shlow where I was, you can go on top of a torp building and look across the border. But that does seem to be kind of a red line

for Turkey. So I don't know where that leaves us, but.

given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate. No, but maybe Turkey has given up on the revolution in Syria and it just wants to join with US at and as long as they can both say fuck the Kurds, and that's enough for both of them, right, But like if they can both get together on a state level and be like, fuck these cords, and therefore, I guess the cost of that would be sending these refugees home for Turkey, which is I guess not because it's to

be a cost by some of them. And that's millions of people, right, millions of people who like something. In some cases, people are worried about having a citizenship removed, like they went there to be safe. And of course it's a violation of international law, and of course that doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns. But it leaves millions of people in limbo, right. Urdigan said he's promised to send another million refugees back, but

that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime. Really, I guess he could just pump them all into like a free or whatever. But he's pumping people into a situation where people are already actively opposed to the Turkish occupation there. Right, if he pulls out his troops, he's going to have to accept that there will be Kurdish forces on his border, which he hates. So it's a question of, like what value does he assigned to the safety of these three million refugees, And it doesn't seem

to be very high. And like every time when we talk about migration, that people are eaving terrible things, right, that that's why people tend to end up as refugees. But there's never been a I don't think a more pronounced global crackdown than I've seen right now. It's not like these Syrian refugees, they can't leave their province, right. I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey

in the last six months year. It's very hard, it's very expensive, and lots of the people who have fled from Turkey only went there for a few months, right, and then kept moving. Every country has made it harder than it ever was to immigrate. Like even you know that we talk about the Syrian refugee crisis in twenty fourteen, twenty sixteen, unleashing three million people, right that they need

a safe place to go. If you try and force them back to Syria, it's either going to be an absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more refugees entering the refugee system at a time when governments all around the world are indifferent at best to the survival of refugees, right, including the fucking buying government in this country. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's pretty big.

forward to that over the weekend. Yeah, I guess I guarantee that there are refugees, probably refugees from Turkeyosyria in the town where you live, or in the nearest big town to where you live, and you can do something nice for them this weekend if you want to.

So it is only you, and that doesn't need to make you desperate. You can do something. I spoke to so many, Like another of our podcast listeners was at the border on Monday and I met them and they were lovely and we drove around and help people, and like, you just need to take that yourself, and like, you can do something. But the first step is, you know, lugging off Twitter and getting out there. And like I promise you you will feel less hopeless if you start helping.

Even though it's only one person, it makes a difference.

it has to start there. And if there are many more of you doing the same thing, then that's how actual change happens. Because yeah, our government is useless. But yeah, listen to Dreams. Dreams is wise and.

and the rest will sort itself out. Like you don't have to argue with people about the mind you share of ideology. It doesn't matter. Like help helping people matters. Making the world better matters. Say do that. It's Friday. Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice for someone.