It Could Happen Here Weekly 151

Al Zone Media.

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome, Dick.

It happened here a podcast where we're bringing shitty Mayor Monday back to celebrate an incredibly special occasion, which is the unbelievably funny federal indictment of what New York Mayor Eric Adams with me to talk about. This is Garrison Davis, is James Stout and and we have a New York expert, our fellow trade unionist, Yeah, Joey pat who works on what we Love an Afterlives.

Joey. Welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

I hope I can I can provide some insight to New York City and everything that's been happening lately.

The Eric Adams news really is kind of the most positive piece of deuce that we've had the past month. It's been a really bad it's keeping me going, Yeah, I feel like I gotta say.

I found out the news of the indictment. I was at like a gay bar near me, like at a like queer Pool event, and like everybody got the news at the same time, and it was one of the funniest ways to learn that Eric Adams has been a Yeah. That was that was the like the most joy I've seen from a from a group of New Yorkers in a while.

What a beauty.

Yeah, Okay, So I want to I want to open the floor up to Eric Adams stories, but first I need to complain about the fact that so I have I have long as a proud Chicago Wan who has now fled Chicago for Portland. I have long made fun of New York for being a tier two Chinese city that thinks that it's the greatest city in the world. And then I learned they didn't have trash cans, which pushed this at like this is not even like a

Britain the United Kingdom where we got ready to trash cans too.

Oh my god, that's not true though, because luckily Eric Adams didn't make the trash can.

Just what is going on.

The first American city to ever think of this idea for contacts. I am also in a unique position here because I'm from Chicago, and yeah, oftentimes get my friends and family that still live in Chicago confused as to why I live out here.

I do love New York. It is a great detity to live in. But these are the kind.

Of moments we have where I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't. I can't.

I don't know, I honestly. And then I think about this Eric Adams stuff too. It's like the stuff he's so, there's gonna be a second federal indict with more people in it, but the first one it's kind of brush league ship by Chicago standards.

Like like if you compare this.

To like like Rob Lagoyevitch trying to sell off, like trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, It's like, okay, yeah, I've been saying New York.

Wants to be Chicago.

They're starting a second city here too. No, No, there's been adds in the subway, and every time like takes away a part of my soul. Like, I'm like, you cannot claim that that is us.

It just means there's going to be even more insufferable people. That sucks.

Yeah, a second second city has hit the Towers.

Another great Ragadom's moment with Eric Adams hit the Towers. No, no, but he had he had this great interview where he was asked to summarize, like what makes New York great in one word? And he gave the answer new York, which is two words, and that explained it's because it's the only city where you can wake up and have nine eleven happen and also open up a small business.

Wait are we're doing all Eric adams favorite moments yet? Because I have a family, we got to run that.

Yeah, I've already done mine.

Yeah, do you want to hit this with you? As Jerry?

Mine's definitely.

I think the ongoing saga of just whether or not he's a vegan, and the fact that he repeatedly claims he's a vegan and thinks that vegan.

I didn't know this. Yeah, he's a vegan.

He talks a lot about how he's a vegan and all the health benefits and how it's he has a lot of weird like beliefs about health and stuff that have come out over his you know, mayr Oll run. But apparently he's not actually a vegan because he's been seen like eating chicken on camera and like that weird video of his apartment when he was running. That was the Brooklyn apartment that he may or may not live in, Like there was like some sort of meat.

Product in the fridge or something. There's been a whole.

Thing about how like he maybe and he's like admitted that he's like eaten meat sometimes, like he's like, oh, well, you know, I'll just have like a little nibble, like it's it's it doesn't count.

Chicken isn't beacon What do you mean he identifies as a vacant.

Yeah, he's like some kind of like like sixteenth century Catholic you know, where they have all these weird exceptions for fish.

And like right right, that's the repent and then whatever to confass and and then he's getting he gets as we get a card back.

That's a good one. That's a good one.

Yeah, Joe's Jewey's kind of mentioned mine. But the fact that he definitely is from New Jersey, which I think is what allowed him to use a trash can, Like she definitely does not live in New York.

There's there's no way. Like my favorite also relates to him not living in New York, which is when Curb staked out his New York apartment and he came back once parked illegally and then caused a traffic jam. I parking illegally so that he couldn't put out of the pocket. He wasn't in a pocket space. He was in someone's driveway.

I mean, maybe that is like a New York mayor who can't drive, Like I guess that makes sense.

Like yet refuses to use mass transit Oh.

God, that's true. That's true. He does hate public transportation. God, you can just send more cops in the subway. That'll fix it, all right.

Oh god, let's uh yeah, let me, let's let's get into this. Get start. So okay.

So the things here is being indicted for are effectively okay. So he took a bunch of different bribes in different ways. So he took I guess there's two broad categories of bribes that he took, which is the bribes that are campaign donations that he funneled through straw donors, which is the thing where you like there's like limits on how much money you could donate to someone, right, So what you do is you find like ten people and you give them all two thousand dollars so they can still

He's been doing this for like almost like ten years.

Yeah, I kind of love this too, because the like Brooklyn Borough president, it's kind of a fake job, like you don't really do anything.

And I love the fact that.

He still managed to find ways to be corrupt in his like fake job that he adds.

It's stunning because I'm going to read starting with the indictment a bit. By smuggling their contributions to Adams through US based straw donors, Adams oversees contributors defeated federal laws that serve to prevent for an influence on US elections.

You can't do. It's like corporations.

One person, there's like limits on how men watch an individual person can donate and you can't get you can't get donations from like people not from the US. And he managed to both individually and in the same scheme violate every single one of these laws.

It's it's genuinely incredible.

I guess I would like to learn more. I mean at some point, and I'm sure we'll get into it as how like explicit this whole like Turkish funding really is like extremely.

About it. Yeah yet will I'm sure we'll get to this. It's when they're like, hey, Eric, you're not going to say anything about the Median genocide. Arue that Tony didn't happen, bro, don't mention the genocide. Oh yeah, we'll get to that.

So Eric Adams, a defendant, also saw and received other improper benefits from some of the same co conspirators who funded shra altonations to his campaign, In particular, a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishments henceforth Turkish official who facilitated many Charlton nations to Adams, also arranged for Adams and his companions to receive free or discount to travel on Turkey's national airline, quote the Turkish Airline, which is

He's got wanderlust. You know, he was supposed to be like a travel.

Blogger like Girley, like doing tiktoks, and you know, unfortunately he had to become mayor.

So, yeah, a bunt of log forster.

Mayor starting to do the job he wants to.

Yeah, it's very tragic. Okay, So actually the first thing Turkish influence thing that he did. I actually, this is weirdly the one part of this I don't have a

I'm okay with her to one being in a non fire safe building.

Yeah yeah, like fuck them.

Like if the guy who burned one hundred and fifty people alive and Cindy wants to fucking burn a death in his own consulate, then let him. Like I Jennie Whitely don't give a shit about this. She did threaten the job of like the New York Fire Department's fire inspector, which kind of sucks, but like if everyone wants to burn a death in his death trap, let him do that.

This is one of the.

Text conversations that then was was uh, I don't know if leaked is the right word, but yeah, like because it was. It was they were like there was something they said to where they were like, we've done a lot for you, now it's time for you to do something for the Republic of Turkey.

Yeah, yeah, we'll get we'll get to that.

This is yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good.

Ex tolown shit.

That like all right.

After Eric Adams, a defendant, first travel to Turkey in twenty fifteen, the Turkish official introduced Adams to Turkish Airlines general manager in New York City area in twenty sixteen and twice in twenty seventeen. Again, this is all before he's mayor. Adams solicited and accepted free and heavily discounted luxury air travel from Turkish Airlines as part of Turkish officials' efforts to gain influence over Adams on three separate trips.

It's so much money worth of stuff, like just like thousands of dollars.

The exact totals, like all of the gifts he took from Turkish Airlines, it's like one hundred and it's like one hundred and thirty thousand something dollars.

Jesus Christ. Yeah damn.

So, like any time I read a paragraph of this, just assume that in between, like whatever paragraph I'm reading and the stuff I didn't read before it, he's taken another ten thousand dollars of free like first class rides to Turkish airline.

It is a blessing in disguise. I will say that I will never see Eric Adams on a flight because I cannot fly. It was Turkish Airlines.

That's true. There's a very funny line about this, because the Turkish airline provided free travel benefits were tens of thousands of dollars to Eric Adams, the defendants. He flew the Turkish airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenience.

Yeah, this is fucking correct.

For example, for example, dreamed the July and August twenty seventeen trip. Adam's partner was surprised to learn that Adams was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. Adams responded in a text message quote transferring here, you know first stop is always an istanbul spelled very wrong and lowercase is true rather.

Why wouldn't you have a flight from New York?

Oh my god, it Spit's part of the greater Ottoman Empire.

You know, I would take bribes from Eric Canada. But I'm also not running for mayor.

So yeah, well you could run for a Bira president.

That's true. That's true. I could. I could become elected the mayor of South Fulton. That is very doable. Every Similarly, lots of the mayors of South Fulton have had very odd kind of controversies. So what I'm saying is South Fulton is basically Georgia's version of New York.

New York is a South Fulton of America. Have you have you guys seen a video clip of him? Every city he goes to. He says, like New York is the city of America.

It's crazy, It's crazy, it standbul of America.

So this is all very funny.

But this is all happening all of the the tens of thousands of dollars at this point of money that he's taking from Turkey, it's all happening in a period where Turkey is butchering curds across the Middle East, like his first trip there. And this is all again well before his mayor while he's like Brooklyn Borough president is four months before the fire bombing of the city that I talked about where they were again, they burned one hundred and fifty civilians alive in a fucking building. If I'm

I think you could definitely say that, like former ISIS fighters are now fighting for the Turkish against the Kurds in the Rocky Curtis done. Yeah, I've said that before. The Kurds will tell you that.

For I know, David Graebrin anthropologists, you spent actually who smuggled a bunch of drone parts. You had a story about how we talking people like yeah, they would like they would pick up ISIS fighters and they would look at their possessions and they every single one of them as Turkish passports. They all have like Turkish id shit. It's like, hmm, I wonder where these people came from.

Even like I'll just say I have spoken to some people who were part of the fight against ISIS who discovered blank Turkish passports. Uh when taking like ISIS buildings and ISIS strongholds.

Yeah, so there's there's I mean, just this is a period of even by the standards of Turkey, like unbelievable Turkish violence. This is their their invasion of Syria, and you know this is this is the period in which Eric Adams decides that he's going to become an Asian to the Turkish State, and so obviously like he lies about this to the governments, because again you're not allowed to do this. There's a bunch of very funny schemes

In twenty seventeen, Adams sent.

A series of emails to the scheduler directing the scheduler to pay for the free twenty seventeen flights that he and his companions had already taken on the Turkish Airline, but the emails provided inconsistent explanations. In some Adams suggested that the Adams schedulers should pay using Adam's credit card, while on others, Adams claimed to have left cash in an envelope for the Adams scheduler to send to the Turkish airline.

Ah, it's that's how you pay. It's how I pay for all my fights. Cash it an envido.

This is how he tried to cover up for the fact that he's not paying for these flights. And he'll pay like six hundred dollars for a theater dollar ticket.

But he's like.

Sending envelopes to his scheduler to hand to the Turkish air line.

A man who was a call doing an absolutely terrible job of covering his own ass.

You know who else is taking bribes from the turkeysh government. It's not our products and services. It's it's someone else's products and services. Ours are all fine, we are back. So there's actually another paragraph of that part. For example, on November twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, Adam sent an email to the scheduler saying that, with respects to the July trip quote, I left you the money for the international airline and an envelope and your top gest drawer, please send.

It to them.

So the funny one about this, right, So he's supposed to have this like cash dead drop to pay for the airline tickets, then he just like never does it because the tickets are free.

So he just like stops covering his tracks. Yeah amazing and doesn't use signal. Yeah it's it's it really is sounding Okay. So what is Turkish government getting from this in return for travel benefits? The Turkish official provided or range.

No one that I've seen doing reporting on this seems to know which center this was. But but this has to be a Gulinist thing. Yeah, So to people who didn't spend all of their childhoodmired in the of Turkish politics, everyone's the current rule of Turkey.

Gulm was like one.

Of his old old allies, but they had this giant falling out and a huge part of what everyone was doing in the twenty tens was like trying to purge all of the Gulanists from everywhere. Like there was this whole scheme running I think through Michael Flynn where Turkey was trying to get Trump to like the Gulan's like in like a compound and I think Virginia or something, and Turkey was trying to get Trump to like raid the compound and send them to Turkey, which didn't happen.

Yeah, that line's up with the coup they did twenty sixteen coup, right, yeah.

Yeah, So, you know, it's always been unclear to me exactly how much influences people have. But the one thing I will say is that so I had a classmate in college who was in Turkey for a long time, and their line about it was like, yeah, I don't know, like how much of this sort of Guladist deep state shit is true. But also there were like gulanest people who you could go to who had like all the answers to like state exams.

So if you want to be willing to get in bed, whether they would just give.

Him all the answers. So, like you know, they were not a part of this. And I'm pretty sure what happened here was that Adams was like cutting off all contact with these people because this is part of the gool and is split. I'm not one hundred percent sure because there are multiple community centers in Brookly in Brooklyn, like Turchi Media centers in Brooklyn, but I'm about eighty percent sure that's what happens. So that's like one of

Quote.

On July twenty second, twenty eighteen, the same day as this fundraising event, the Adam staffer and the promoter discussed by text message a possible trip by Adams the Turkey. The promoter stated, in part, fundraising Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record. The Adam Stafford inquired, how will Adams declare that money? The promoter responded, he won't declare it or will make the do do an American citizen in

That's crazy.

I feel like you should know who you're working for well enough to be like, hey, this guy is offering a completely illegal fundraising scheme that we know is illegal, and I don't think my boss will take it.

And then the boss turns around to be he's.

Like, yeah, fuck it raised, buddy, it might cause a big stink later on. You don't say, yeah, that's wild.

To be fair, it did.

Yeah, it's so explicit, and I do want to get to some some of the other text messages sooner or later, because it really just shows how like aware everyone involved is of over like what's going on?

Yeah, they're doing crimes.

It's literally just hey, what should I do with the crime money?

The illegal crime? By the way, have we mentioned this illegal?

So partially this is being run through Turkish airlines, Partially this is being run through Turkish university, and partially this is being run through just a bunch of businessmen, some of whom are Turkish, some of them aren't. So here's like the next thing I was gonna read. Although Adams knew that businessman one was a Turkish national who could not lawfully contribute to US elections, Adams directed the staffer

Yeah, it's insane how slapstick they are about this. Yeah, and like you know, they're kind of trying to come from tretch. I think that this part of it is one of the things that I think, like was one of the things that kind of went viral over this. So Adams is trying to arrange another like fifty thousand dollars contribution from a third Turkish businessman.

And in the middle of this, he's saying to the staffer quote to be on the safe side, Please delete capital P, capital D. Please delete all messages you send me, Adams responded, always do. Now, we don't for a fact that a bunch of these messages were simply not deleted, because I have considering.

That you just read.

Though.

Yeah, I do also think It was worth noting that some of these efforts certainly started to ramp up around his mayoral campaign, because some of these Turkish officials thought that if Adams becomes a more like prominent member in politics, never like runs for president, and if they can gain influence over him from like pretty early on, that would be really useful for the Turkish government. That is some of like the reasoning behind this like decades long campaign. Yeah, like puppet Eric Adams.

Maybe the Turkish government had seen Nate Silver's now infamous tweet how it will be the.

Next Yeah, I mean it's all many such cases.

Yeah, Snate Silver who got them to chase us around with drones last last October.

He keeps getting more businessman to donate tens of thousands of dollars.

Oh yeah, it's so funny.

It's like repeatedly, he just keeps getting more and more and more.

Yeah.

And the funniest part is that like by like guy number four he's doing this with he's like telling the guy how to do straw donations where he's like, yeah, no, you can't donate ten thousand dollars to give two thousand dollars to.

Each of your employees and they'll do it.

Yeah, he's doing like instructions for each of these guys, and it's like at a certain point, like some of the early airline stuff is yes, a llegal sketchy, but like you know, it's it's just getting some nice plane tickets by like twenty twenty one. He's just teaching them how to do like super illegal like campaign fraud. Yeah, you've like committed so much that you're just like into deep, like you can't like what's there to do?

Yeah?

You know who else is in too deep?

It's the products and services who controlled this podcast, this podcast support that one.

Yeah, oh wow, wow, so much to say by the Reagan coin people.

It's ump.

They have a very little editorial control.

Are you supposed to delete those tags?

There are so many funny ones.

He also he also is taking money from this construction guy where he takes a bunch of buddy that it like shows up at this like New York's big Pride event to give a speech because he took money from this like antruction guy.

Did he say New York isse s Hee Wasbekistan of America?

Honestly, he probably has said that. That's like, yeah, he's.

Probably said Kazakhstan by accident because he always says the wrong count giving his speech like that.

My favorite moment was the video of him speaking to like the Indian group that he kept saying Pakistani, Oh god, yeah, yeah, oh dear yeah.

I think that went down like a chocolate tipa. He did it like twice too. They corrected him that he kept doing.

It well, they were only yelling over him, and.

He said, stout God.

So there's another kind of funny one where he's he's getting a bunch of money from this university and he actually returns the money because his campaign is like his Mayora campaign is over, but he's still going to go to prison for it because he lied to the government at where he got the money even though he gave it away. Okay, So I want to start reading some of these texts so we can get into like how

Amazing stuff.

The smiley faith of the tax is really throwing off.

It's so good. So he paid about like one one hundred dollars for these round trip tickets, and he was upgraded to business classes. Suck at him, and in actuality these tickets would would again be like fifteen thousand dollars. And this is like the same type of stuff he was doing like eight years ago, except this time he actually is paying some money, whereas last time he did not actually fill up those envelopes with cash. Yeah, but still he's about he's about fourteen thousand short.

He also was this a great one where like the staffers like, do you have recommendations of where he can go to Turkey?

At the airline manager?

Four season staffer, it's too expensive airline manager, why does he care? He's not going to fake his name, will not be at anything either, Adam stafford super super.

Yeah, it's all so super illegal.

I want to meet the person who's sending these taxs.

Yeah, so bad. It's so funny.

Why is this like the cadence with which they're speaking and these tacks, that's just insane.

It's incredible stuff. There's some great ones. I gotta read this one. On the day the Adams fundraiser was scheduled to depart Istanbul, Adams created a message thread between himself and the Adams fundraiser and the airline manager quote, he will try to help with the issue with the form he can see about a hotel or business class lounge.

Fail yourself VIP. That's what we will want.

At another point in the exchange, Adams wrote, quote, thanks a million airline manager, my brother. Which airline managers wanted anytime?

Brother?

Oh?

No?

This on the day he won the election, Like the day after, the airline manager sent the following text message, brother, congratulations.

Adams responded, cannot thank you enough.

So true, so true. That is good, although it's not as good as kind of the next thing when in December twenty one he was putting together his like mayoral like team for like policy advisors and his transition team, and he did not have like people from Turkey on this list, so this air manager said, didn't. It's it's not quite blackmail, but it is certainly like bribery, saying like, hey, maybe you should put me on like your senior on

Yeah, I want to read the exact line because it's so funny.

The staffer sense of the airline manager list, and the airline manager responded, it would suit me well to be lead or senior advisor. Two days later, the airline manager sent a message reiterating, lead please plz please smiley face, otherwise fifty two is empty on the way back.

Seat.

Oh god, oh my god, Lead, please, you don't make me a lead advisor. We're not going to give you free free airplane tickets anymore. Oh my god, it's so funny.

Winky face.

And then uh, I believe he did add someone onto onto his team.

Yep, yep, yeah.

He was added to the Infrastructure, Climate and Sustainability Committee transition team Jesus Christ, which the whole Sustainability Commission is just like a slush. There's another thing later where like he's like a secret meeting of like these Turkish donors, and he calls it like a sustainability transition meetings, so no one will know that he's having this meeting.

Man, you should read what the airline manager wrote after he was added to the Climate and Sustainability and Infrastructure Committee yeah.

So.

On December twenty twenty one, the senior Turkish government official set the airline manager a series of texts noting the airline manager's membership on Adam's Infrastructure Climate Sustainability can be and sending.

Applause about you. Oh no.

The airline manager responded that his membership on the Tradition Committee was in service of Turkey. Quote, thank you, brother. We are doing our best to server country adequately. Your support gives us strength here.

Thank you. You were always there for us, and we're trying to be loyal.

It's amazing.

Oh wait is it. We're trying to be worthy.

Yeah, we're trying to be worthy. Yeah, we're trying.

To be worthy. Yeah. That is so sorry. I'm trying to be worthy of you. Thank you so much for being there.

Please be so good.

I just like want to be worthy of you. Ericata.

So by this point I total that the Turkish airline bribes, specifically that all the benefits total one hundred and twenty three thousand.

Dollars seats general.

Life, which is also just a small fraction of like the total amount of money he received to be fat.

That's probably like the face prices of business class tickets and lounge access which no one actually pays for. Yeah.

Yeah, because like beyond the actual airline stuff because of like the campaign like match like policy deals, like he he received in the end like like ten million dollars right from from like all of this whole ordeal.

Yeah.

So, so so the match funding thing basically is like there's public matching funds for like private donations for for mayoral candidates.

There's like some things you have to go through.

But in order to get that money right, you have to abide by campaign finance law and all of the So all of these like straw donor bribe donations that he's getting are being are also I think it's like eight to one or something like matching funds are being matched.

By the paid government. Say you got like ten million dollars matching funds.

He's not only like doing like campaign fraud by getting this like foreign influence amount of money. He's also just like stealing from from everyone else too by having all of these illegal contributions matched.

Yeah.

So in the end, I think he's like he's like charged with like like basically ten million dollars.

Yeah, of like fraud.

The other thing is like this is this is how he won the election, Like he won the election by spending an unbelievable amount of money and like that money, who's like this like stuff that he defrauded the government for.

And it's ironic that like the campaign funding matching is designed to like amplify the donations made by regular New Yorkers and not make it all like a super Pac game. Yeah, Eric Adams thought he they made an end run around that.

Like I did not realize just because I had been keeping up with like Eric Adams news previous to this, I did not realize how often his house was getting rated by the FBI.

There were so many There's been so many, Like this is all just one angle on the like thirty five, because there's there's so much other corruption he was doing, Like this is just the stuff they gone specifically around him for. But like basic everyone in the circle around

Amazing.

Yeah, so one of the worst parts of this. On April twenty first, twenty two, the Turkish official messaged the Adam Stafford noting that our Median Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching and repeatedly asking the Adam Stafford for assurances that Adams would not make any statements about their Armedian genocide.

Jesus Christ.

The Adam Stafford confirmed that Adams did not make a statement about the Armenian genocide.

Adams did not make such a statement New York, not the Yerevan of America.

Yeah, so he just straight up took money from the Turkish government. Did genocide's nile for them. Yeah, so that's great, that's incredible stuff.

To be fair.

That is that is a mainstay of current American politics.

Oh yeah yeah, and it's the best fund of old genocide denials.

Yes, yes, Well, this Raganams guy doesn't seem like a doesn't seem too good. It is just fascinating to me that out of all the cities, New York is just the one city that you cannot have a normal mayor, just like every single mayor is is weird and fucked up in like a different way. Like it's just impossible.

Yeah.

There was like an onion onion headline on Time that was, it's like the mayor de Blasio like, well, well, well it's it's not so easy to have a not fucked up mayor or something.

Yeah.

I think the exact line was, well, well, well, not so easy to find a mayor he doesn't suck ship down.

Exactly. The Erganta was one hits so much harder because he's like the law and order mayor. Like he's like, you know, like like former cop blah blah blah. He's he's the one making New York worse through all of like the fucked up police stuff. Meanwhile, he's just been doing like major crimes and having his house rated by the FBI like every other month, also having like his friend's house is rated by the FBI having was it like a police chief or a police commissioner who was just rated.

Yeah, and then the interim police commissioner they put in often the first one.

Yeah, it's wild stuff.

We got to talk about his phone password before we finish. Yeah.

Yeah. So the's why I want to close on is like before he goes under, like all of his staffers are getting visited by the FBI, and A you could tell they're all cops and are dumb at shit because they all they all agreed to talk to the FBI and like lied to this so funny, and then we're trying to like coordinate destroying the messages which the FBI got all the data from. On October sixth, twenty twenty three, FBI agents executed a search warrant for the electronic devices

The phone if they tried his birthday.

It's the funniest argument. Yeah, yeah, they like, no, no, no, I changed. I changed the password so that the information was safe and wouldn't be deleted. Also, I forgot the password.

Okay, so like presumably this is encrypted, right, but like I cannot Like, what the fuck is the FBI doing that?

They can't just break into this phone?

Like, I mean, some phones are hard to break into, like it it is it is true.

Yeah, have struggled with iPhones for what Yes, but this is but this is Eric Adams.

Yeah yeah, I mean yeah it might.

Be zero zero zero zero, like they ought to give it the cat. It's try to be honest.

Yeah, Like they've got to have some fucking like spook from the NSA that they can illegally send this phone over to.

Like I'm sure they've tried Celebright. I'm sure they've tried a whole bunch of stuff. It just doesn't always work.

Yeah, Like I don't know it makes you feel wildly better about phone security. Oh, by the way, this is a message about this public safety announcement. If you use a face print or a fingerprint to lock your phone, the cops can just use your face or your fingerprint worlock it, or they can get it with a warrant. But if it's like an actual number, like they can't put a gun to your head and say open it, which is the way that this would normally sort of work. Yeah,

There's a kind of wire fraud.

There's another count of solicitation of a contribution by foreign national. There's subsequently, the fourth is the same as a third count. It's it's solicitation of a contribution by forig national and the fifth count is bribery. So he's like probably going down, going down.

He sounds pretty fucked. I mean, it has been interesting how much the federal government has been cracking down on foreign influence before the selection, both with like tennant media, like a Russian foreign influence stuff like this there's been like some of like Jimmy Dore or like orbiters that have I know, have have been getting looked into by the FEDS for like Russian foreign influence.

Dude.

And this is not a show where we regularly praise the actions of the fedral government. But it's always funny to see my enemies having a hard time. Yeah, And I'm pray I'm praying for that Jackson Hinkle one, which is fea yeah, because it's so it's so obvious, so obvious that he's he's absolutely getting paid by some by some foreign government.

Yeah, Wonda which one?

This one is air to one versus the FBI, which I'm just like just chomping down popcorn and clapping like a seal watching most hated rifles finding yes.

Yes, destroy each other no matter what happens.

I'm okay with it.

Yeah.

Wow.

I will repeat my position here at the end of the show that I am prepared to vote for Joe Biden on the condition that he immediately begins trading Eric Adams for Abdullajan, who does not belong to jail unlike Eric Adams. It's free Ajulan week this week, and so yeah, he shouldn't be in prison. Let him out.

How do you feel about your mayor, Joey?

You know, it sounds like he's he's broken on some shit. He's got to figure out if he really wants you know, see. This is the thing too, is it's like, do I want to be like, Wow, congrats to the FBI on this investigation. No, that being said, it is really funny to see this all go down. I think also just the amount of bullshit that he has done while he's in office.

But both legally and over the.

Table and under the table, and it's kind of funny to see like this meet.

The thing that but takes him down. Yeah. Got other.

One of my favorite tweets about all this was somebody was like, I'm sure Eric Adams all of a sudden it's going to be uh really pro a prison reform all of a sudden, But I.

Hope so, you know that would be a crazy It's like, Alista.

I'm getting flashbacks person abolition arts. I'm getting flashbacks when a when a oh god, what's the same the Blasio, Uh, the governor, the governor, oh my god, former governor. Well like what he was having all of the ship come out and like the last thing he did in office was the legalized weed, and it was like such a like last ditch, like fine.

Here, you guys go like you want, like are we going to get something like that?

Are we gonna get?

Well?

I guess he tried with the trash cans and people rejected that. But uh, it's been an experience. I hope for the sake of the city that uh, you know, he faces consequences for this and it's never.

Back in New York politics. But I guess we'll see what happens. No, I'm not going to cheer on the FBI, but I am pro cop on cop of violence. That's true, and that's true, and that's all this is. That's all this is. So that's fine.

I'm pro irony. I'm pro like like you're getting got by the same like people your bros.

Yeah.

I am interested in what the next New York mayoral election will look like. We're bringing in Lori Lightfoot, let's go, and the small possibility that, depending on how this next election goes, we could have a Trump versus Clinton mayoral race in New York, which I would love to watch.

Maybe Hillary Clinton will finally make her film about the Syrian democratic forces she's been promising to make for years.

I want to close on a kind of slightly more serious struggles are connected note because the thing about Eric Adams is that he was the guy who was brought in black cop like very specifically brought in and his thing was basically to contain the twenty twenty uprising, right he was he was the guy whose thing was we're

Is exactly yeah.

And I mean, I think going back to what I was saying before like the craziest thing about all this, and like this is definitely something that I've kind of had to like step back and be like, all right, Like I obviously am existing within like a specific community, like New York is a huge city.

It's the lowerest city in.

The US, and there's lots of different smaller communities, and I was like, I feel like everybody that I know and everybody I interact with hate Sarah Adams, how like their own list of reasons why, like he has done X, Y Z thing and they're like whether it's like my friends that are teachers or like work for or just use public libraries that he has like really decided to attack and like defund for various reasons, or like friends that have had to deal with like the prison system

This whole thing is just there's something.

It's like, there's so many aspects of this that are so crazy.

This is gonna be like that gets him.

Yeah, Yeah, So someone's gonna do like a thirty part podcast series about this something. I'm gonna listen to every single ex.

Episode and there's gonna be so much more stuff that's gonna come out.

That's yeah.

Speaking of podcasts, Joey, do you want to plug your work for sure? Yeah.

So, I'm right now producing a show called that We Loved, which just on Iheart's network.

It's part of our Outspoken Network, which.

Is our LGBTQ plus kind of focus shows, and you can find that on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartMedia, app whatever, all the places. I also previously had worked on a show called Afterlives. If you are interested in learning more about wrikers and particularly some of the policy that you know, Eric Adams himself has worked to either stop.

From being effective or stop.

From making the reforms it's supposed to be happening regards the whole riker situation, you should check out that show.

Yeah, that's that's where I met.

You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at pat not Pratt.

That's p A T T n O T p R A T T. People get my last.

Name wrong a lot, we'll put them in the description.

Yeah.

Yeah, Joey, thank you for coming on.

And fuck I hope I hope we all get rid of our fucking Beyers because Jesus Christ God.

Yeah.

Future the Democratic Party Lightbook Airic.

Adams twenty twenty eight.

Let's go.

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how people work to put them back together again, because it's the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts, except Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together in the end because there was a bunch of state actors who were trying and really that's not how you usually get things done. I'm your guest host today, Martyr Kiljoy, and with me as my regular host today is James Hi.

James Hi, Margaret, thank you for having me on the podcast that I work for.

I'm glad to have you on your podcast. So this episode is about what I learned about prepping by going down to western North Carolina in the immediate wake of the flooding caused by two storms, one of which was Hurricane Helen. And there's a few things I like an awful lot. One of them is prepping. Another one of them is Ashville, North Carolina, where I lived longer than I have lived anywhere else in my adult life, which isn't actually saying that much because I lived there for about six years.

But it's a decent amount of time. You know a place. Yeah.

Before that, I was fully vagabondie. This is a story about prepping in Asheville, North Carolina, and so I thought i'd bring on another it could happen here prepper James.

Yeah, it's me someone who has been to Ashville, North Carolina. But oh yeah, still lives in San Diego. Yeah. Nice, nice pace to go outside normally.

Okay, but have you ever heard that song though, like I've been everywhere man song, I've been everywhere.

Yeah.

I don't think I'm allowed to sing things on this podcast.

Yeah.

I started liking that song because like, yeah, I've been everywhere. That man starts listening where he's been, and I'm like, no, I haven't been. I ain't been shit, I have never been anywhere in my life.

I've not made it. Yeah. Yeah. It is one of the nice things about my job that people get to go places and meet people. Yeah. Yeah, that is fun.

So, as I assume listeners are aware, about two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene dumped an enormous quantity of water onto the mountains of western North Carolina, which would have been bad no matter what, but another unnamed storm had already been dropping unconscious able unconscious not good amounts of water on the area for a day or so. The two storms together caused the worst natural disaster and recorded history for

Like stuff and specific things in a second good.

But first, when I talk about preparedness, which I do a lot, I talk about how I'm interested in both the individual and community as two different types of preparedness. And I had some hypotheses that these were deeply related and reliant on each other in fact, and that you do one better by doing the other better. But now that I've seen those hypotheses tested, I was right. That's that's my answer.

It's in fact to approven hypotheses. Yeah exactly.

I mean, you know, I don't want to run more tests, but yeah, we probably will.

Yeah exactly, because we ain't doing shit to stop being alas. No, No, we're mostly doing things to make it worse. Hm hm cool.

Basically, we need both individual and community preparedness, and we should stop seeing them as opposing forces. There might be no single false dichotomy that has more wrecked our imaginations than the idea that the individual and the community are two opposing forces that they must be balanced against one another instead of interwoven. Instead of allowing what's best about both things to reinforce the other. I would argue the twentieth century did us dirty?

The Cold War? Did us dirty? In the US?

I grew up presented with the idea that the USSR represented community in that side, and that meant being a cog in the machine, devoid of individuality in thrall to an authoritarian state. If I cared about the individual and individual freedom and liberty, I had to accept capitalism and competition and to see myself in a war against everyone else. I don't know how you feel. I don't want to be a cargon machine, and I also don't want to be in a war against everyone else.

Yeah, this is the This is the sort of false dichultion media were presented with. It's like I'll tell an anecdote here. When I was writing my dissertation, I would describe my politics as left libertarian, and I would describe the politics of the many different types of anarchists in an arcosyndicalis in Spain similarly, because it accurately describes the perspective, right,

Yeah, which is annoying because oh is it Rathbard. Someone consciously stole that word from us. You used to not have to say left libertarian because if you said libertarian you meant left libertarian.

Yeah. This was the pre date to Rothbud. It is something I've written about on my patreon. Wow. But yeah, libertarian began to be used by French anarchists to avoid censorship and persecution of anarchists for being anarchists. Yeah, and then it came to America, where, like many things in America, it was stolen from its original original creators and custodians and fucking ruined by chuds. Yeah, which is a shame. But yeah, there is in fact an option where you

What is good for me as an individual is to be able to express the full range of my possibilities, right, And I'm more able to do that in a supportive community than like alone in the woods somewhere, cut off from everyone else, chasing rabbits with a hatchet and dying of easily preventable infections, Like, it's.

The American dream. Ug, what are you talking about.

I used to joke that I was going to start a YouTube channel called how to Survive alone in the woods of the hatchet eating squirrels that you kill with the aforementioned hatchet.

But unfortunately you died of tetanus before.

Yeah, exactly. The existence of society makes me more free, It makes me more capable of doing what I want to do. I really like I don't remember which old theorist came up with it, but I really like the idea of understanding freedom as a relationship between people, not a like static state. It is something that we offer each other and that we like work to maximize with each other.

Yeah. On the other side of things, what's good for communities is not to be rigidly top down controlled, but instead to allow people free expression, develop new ideas, try new things, to have communities grow organically. We are not actually factory cogs. We do better as a garden. Yeah, And that's been my working theory with preparedness. It's been similar. On one side, are these deals, these goods and services, the ads that interrupt things. Yeah, magnificent, thank you, thank you.

I saw preppers as being kind of a primarily an individualistic bunch of folks obsessed with what I've called the bunker mentality, the hole up and guns and shoot anyone who comes to close mentality that I've got, mind fuck you mentality you've ever seen on like older prepper Reddit and stuff like that, where people like kind of get sad when they realize they're all planning to shoot each other, all their friends after the apocalypse.

Yeah that like, anyone who's able to has more than two weeks of food storges, it's inherently going to kill anyone else. Yeah, who has more than two? Yeah, it's great when they all come around to educationally.

Yeah, and they're like, wait, but I like this community I've built.

Yeah, they're also the only friends because they've alienated everyone else with their weird obsessions. Yeah, fallout.

This is not a good mentality to have. I would argue it's behind a lot of what's happening on the border right now. Actually, I think that the right wing actually does believe in climate change and is not willing to just say it publicly because it doesn't play to their base. But they they're like, we've got ours, fuck you, and want to close down the borders as best as they can in the global North.

Yeah, and we'll move the borders as far from your eyesight as possible. That's what I saw in Panama was oh yeah, listeners will know I was in the daddy and gap. But like Panama without funding you and me, Margaret Home, we pay our taxes, we pay for families to be split out. Hell yeah, deportations to happen, fences to be built in Panama because that makes it further from our site and from our mind. Right. That's what liberty means. Yep.

Liberty is the ability to interfere in other countries' families.

Yeap, domestic politics in other countries by fire hose of money.

I mean, it's funny because it's the same like justification. Every now and then you meet the people who genuinely think Russia is like allowed to invade Ukraine because border security because Ukraine's too close to it.

You're like, amazing, Yeah, Ukraine bad, therefore fuck it. Why not? Like it's yeah, yeah, it's like the Monroe doctrine. But for Russia, like this is my hemisphere. Don't fuck with me.

Yeah, burn down your neighbor's house because you're just like, nah, you're living too close to me.

Don't like it. Yeah, senior yard sign. They've got one of those in this house signs. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, which they've all taken down now because it's no human beings legal and they no longer believe that. Yeah.

Cool.

Well, I would argue this is a fundamentally right wing individualistic mentality, whether it's coming from ostensibly left as tankies or ostensibly center left Democrats, or they admit their right wing individualistic preppers. Yeah, And this was dominant in prepping circles before around twenty twenty, when an awful lot more

You know.

Yeah, I've been operating under the assumption for years that the two can work really well in tandem with each other. If you are self sufficient, you're in a better place to help others. That was my hypothesis. This is really just the Margaret was Right episode of it could happen.

Here, the victory lap Yeah.

Oh wait, it's a victory wrap around bodies. I don't like it anymore. Well, it's people who did do these things getting to have not thrived but did not died. I don't know how to say this.

It's a tricky subject getting credit for being right and putting in the work.

Yeah, and a lot of people were and a lot of people had done that, and it showed really well in.

The disaster response in Ashville, because.

When I went down to Ashville, one of the things that I asked most of the people I talked to is what they prepared, what they wished they'd prepared, and what lessons they were taking away from all this about preparedness. And one of my friends is old Punk, and he was one of the first old He's like my age whatever, it might be a few years older than me.

I don't know. Margaret crushed by moment of reflection live on Podcasts.

Yeah, I'm jealous because I don't have enough gray hair.

They keep falling out of my head.

But one of my friends who does have very nice gray hair, Old Punk, is one of the first people who was out.

On the street cooking food to give away.

He told me that he was able to do that because he knew he was fine by and large during this particular crisis. Every crisis is going to be real different if your house wasn't in the actual floodplain, and since it was in the mountains, that was not most houses. Instead, it was like most roads and some houses. You know, Yeah, the big problems you were dealing with was lack of food,

So just being like getting off prepared vibes, I guess yeah, No. I was real proud.

Like once I was doing this community defense thing and we were like, oh, we need a flashlight. Does anyone hey, Margaret, you're a flashlight right, And I was like, yeah, with.

Any want Yeah, being the flashlight person, Yeah, it's a huge win the moment you get to deploy that flashlight you've been toting around. Yeah.

Well, And that's actually part of my like core argument that I make in the other podcasts I recorded today that's going to come out some sign around now, is that like people want to help people. Oh yeah, like the average pickup truck guy. We even kind of see. I mean, I'm a pickup truck girl, but like we see the average pickup truck guy is the like, ah, good out of my way, limberal, guns, dogs, whatever, you know.

And I like pickup trucks and guns and dogs and as I don't really like.

But one of the main things you want to make a man with a pickup truck happy. Get your car stuck in a ditch.

Oh yeah, there are a whole groups where people love to pull other people out of stupid situations they've got themselves into off road. Yeah it is fun for them.

Yeah, Like because then the fact that you've been doing this thing had a purpose. I carry a flashlight and a knife every single moment in my life, So when someone needs a flashlight or a knife, I'm like, oh, yeah, I am fucking the reincarnation of the goddess. Like, no one is better than me. Yeah, you're the all powerful light carrier.

Yeah, exactly exactly when all other lights go out for me, it's the moment I get to deploy. Like obviously this has been an audio podcast, but I have a leatherman that I like to carry around. Yeah, like where someone needs pliers or wire cutting, you have that capability.

Yeah, you're just like Chad, You're a superhero, You're a mutant, you know. Like yeah, so yeah, this friend of mine had plenty of water and food stored, and you can usually go a couple of days without communication if you don't have any immediate crisis, right.

Yeah.

He told me that what most people did or needed to do, was first they needed to make sure to meet their own needs, you know, like thele to fix your own oxygen mask before helping your seat mate. So it was the people who were the most resilient, the most prepared, who were out driving around in their trucks or cars whatever, giving away food, or were working to

Where Sandy Mush is. I don't bother saying it because no one knows where it is. Hell of a name though I know it's almost British and it's weirdness. I was like two fem for baseball caps back then, and all my landmates were the Cama baseball caps from the local store that says Sandy.

Mush, you know.

And I'm really sad that I didn't get one, especially now because now I have one and I'm wearing it now that has the name of the town I live in. But I can't wear it anywhere because it doses me.

Ah.

Yeah, see that's a fun yea. If you had a Sandy Mush one, you'd be Yeah. Someone send Margaret a baseball cap, yeah, from Sandy Mush, Yeah with Camma.

Yeah.

Oh, I probably won't wear it otherwise I'll be real because I still got to be fem and somehow that is how things work in my subculture. So you need individual preparedness so that you're free enough to help people, and you need community preparedness so you.

Know what to do.

And then you also have all of these people with really specialized skills and tools and these are the kinds of things that I can't say that every prepper needs to go out and do. But like ATVs have been crucial to disaster relief efforts, that doesn't mean that everyone should run out and buy an ATV to keep around in the case of flooding. This is a note for me because I don't quite live on enough land to justify an ATV, and I really want one.

But yeah, scared one of those little ones. Yeah, there's little children ones.

I know.

I'm just a drive around a circle.

I'd like mostly live in the woods and so there's like just not a lot of ATVs. Are great when you got like twelve acres with horses on them, you know.

Yeah you're going out, you can get a sheep dog on the back. Very practical for that kind of thing. Yeah, rifle case.

But that said, A dirt bike friend of mine, who was a quite prepared person, immediately went out and spent days going into hard to reach areas to connect with people and bring them supplies. Yeah, so maybe I can.

Just fight a dirt bike. Yeah, dirt bike, E bike, E dirt bike. Then you can run off solar power, don't need gas, store it sideways.

Okay, we're gonna talk about electronics versus gas later in the episode.

I got a whole part about it. Yeaheah, okay, good.

But first, what we really need for the apocalypse is whatever comes next in the ads. That is what will save you in the apocalypse. If it's a podcast, yeap that is the podcast that will give you the secret to surviving the apocalypse.

Hopefully it's the Reagan gold coins, which will become the currency as soon as the state collapses. I bet it's gambling, and if you go gamble, you're guaranteed to win. That's how I think we legally cannot say that. Oh well then yeah, yeah, I wonder if we can get away with saying don't gamble, it's a bad idea. Yeah. No, I think we actually can't say that. Okay, great, don't gamble it's a bad idea.

Yeah.

And Rebecca, the we're all lesson was that some stuff is and was useful for everyone to have.

We're going to talk about some of.

That stuff, while other certain specialized tools and skill sets only made sense for some people to have. Not everyone needs to know how to repair a chainsaw or even own a chainsaw, but it sure proved to be a handy skill in this particular crisis. Ashville is easily an image of the climate crisis future. I think you and Robert got into that in the episode you did about this.

Yeah, we spoke a little bit about how like this is a vision it was coming from a lot of us.

Yeah, I'm basically doing a like me too. I couldn't be on the call because I was busy. That's what this episode is.

No, we Robert and I have not been there. My house was when I was younger, but yeah, we were not at this time.

Ashville is not okay. It is a somewhat remote part of the country in terms of its raw geography. You're not getting into that city without taking steep, curving freeways or flying into a regional airport. But culturally, and because of the level of infrastructure the United States provides, it is not an isolated city. It is a very much a modern and hip city with about I think one hundred thousand people had I think about eighty thousand when

Like everywhere else a people moved, I know.

And then I'm also like I work remote and lived I actually can't throw the stones here.

Yeah, I have lived here since I didn't work remote. Yeah, fair enough. I'll take my stern throwing opportunity.

Asheville is a very climate stable area. All of Appalachia is, and it's nowhere near the coast. There's not a lot of earthquakes. There are far fewer forest fires than there are out west. There were some forest fires that were there one of the years that I lived there, but you know, they didn't. It didn't impact my life the way it impacts my friends' lives.

To live out west.

Yeah, there are industrial accidents and there's occasional flooding, but no one had any reason to expect anything like this, except that all of us have every reason to exp something like this. Areas hit more regularly by climate disasters have protocols in place for those sorts of things. People in California pay attention to the fires during that fire season. People on the Gulf Coast track the hurricanes. And not that these disasters aren't disastrous, but they're expected. They're part

To flush the toilet. Yeah.

And you know, if you're like super ahead of it, you've got your little rain collectors all the time, right, but yeah, worst case scenario, cut your down spout and throw a trash can there, yep, or anything else that's food safe. Yeah, well, in this case is mostly water flushing.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

But it's funny just as you mentioned this, Like I was in the village I stayed in last week didn't have rain water electricity, and that's exactly what they did. They had a person I stayed with had like a normal toilet, but they don't have plumbed in water, so they just collect rainwater and use that every time they want to flush it. Yeah, every time.

I've lived off gread and dot a busy access running water instead of bucket flushing.

I'm shit in a bucket with sawdust. Yeah yeah, they I think, like there's a hole underneath. I'm interesting, but you have to flush it to get it in. I think this was like a status upgrade to have the physical toilet. Yeah yeah, yeah, no, that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Some of the first water distribution centers that came online after the storm in Ashville didn't have water containers, and this is actually still the case as of recording, so people had to bring their own. One friend only had those big clear water drugs, the kind that you put into like a water cooler and like get refilled at the grocery store, you know. Yeah, and these don't have good caps and you can't really bicycle with them while they're full.

I've bicycled with one when it was full. But yeah, okay, it's not a fun, not a fun. This is where you need a long tail cargo bike, the ultimate prep of vehicle. Fair enough, I would argue, Jerry cans, that's my pitch instead of yeah, yeah, you can also get jerry kNs or like the like big opaque water jugs for storing water. But yeah, or even bags, what are bags like the like MSI drown bags? Okay, ifew says before, there's a pretty robust I've only seen little ones that

I would argue that if you're thinking about getting the stuff, opaque water containers with good lids are more useful than the blue clear ones. But if you have access to the blue clear ones and that's what you got, go get them.

Yea.

And many people lacked any containers at all, so the water distribution site was not as directly useful as it could have otherwise been.

That's tough.

One friend during the storm pulled out all the recycling and filled every jug with water and put it in the fridge, which did two things. One it gave you slightly orange tasting water to drink for a while, and two it added thermal mass to keep the fridge cool longer. And of course, you know story, more water always good.

Yeah.

For the most part, most water people had access to had a boil advisory on it before it went out completely. Oh you're a water filter expert. I want to talk to you about this.

I was about to fucking dive into that shit. I was so I was ready to go. Okay, hold on, all right.

Yeah, floodwater itself is generally an awe, or at least it is in this case too toxic to use a simple filter or boil at home. Things like pesticides are incredibly hard to get out of water. Yeah, and lightweight backpacking type filters, which overall are what I recommend for most things like sawyers and life straws. They don't really

Yeah, you have enough power for an arrow filter. Yeah, it's a nice touch. Also, if you get one, then your home appliance did if you'd have in a hard water area, which is a lot of the West, won't get fucked up by the classification so much.

Oh that makes sense. I use a water softener AM I well, similar approach, but I like reverse osmosis seems like it has some advantages. Maybe I never like reverse osmosis because when I first was looking into it, I lived off grid and reverse osmosis creates a lot of waste water.

Yeah, and I was just like, all of this water was hard to come by. Fuck that. There are some filters that have an activated charchole element, specifically the pesticide runoff and like industrial guitaminates is something I have been really worried about in a couple of places I've been for work. You know. Actually I was somewhat concerned about that on a recent trip, the one, the one in Panama. But it's not so much pesticides. There's human waste and

And so if you're listening as a Nashville or elsewhere, I'm like, I'm trying to think of what I'm like. I'll probably I have some activated charcoal stuff, but I don't like it as much because I don't like I don't like disposable things.

I'm like, yeah, but I yeah, things that you can reuse or always better.

Yeah, but for certain threat models, especially if you don't have the power for reversus messus.

Yeah, and it's not that expensive. Yeah, the MSR ones actually the that's what the US military issues to some of it's like I guess more special people sottimes. They pop up on the surplus market, pretty cheap, okay, and they have a bomber warranty. You could trash it and they'll replace it.

Oh hell yeah, I like that. A lot of outdoors gear is like pretty like they'll stand by their product. Yeah I would.

I keep wanting trying to pitch his story Italy, but yeah, like I have an MSR quilt. This is not like an MSR sponsored episode, but I've used that shit on It's a very small, very light with like an ultralight quill. I've used I think literally on almost every continent in the world. Well, and just through like it's down and through like my body's greasiness, my inherent oiliness gradually down even if you take really good care of it, right, the down gets packed in and there. Yeah, I had

That's cool. Yeah, yeah, no, I like that more outdoor stuff. I like people who stand by the shit they do.

Yeah, and they also fixed stuff, which is cool, Like I like that, and they will ship you the part to fix it well, which is I feel less wasteful when that happens. Yeah. So with food, this one's real simple. People are either glad they stockpiled food or they were sad that they hadn't a stockpiled food. Yeah, that's an easy one.

One friend immediately took about half a stash of freeze dried foods to distribute out to friends and strangers. Most people I talked to did not have any real amount of backup power available to them. On any given street, I would pass only a few houses with generators running, which also, of course, takes gas or propane. Propane has the advantage of storing indefinitely, it has the disadvantage of being substantially more expensive per like kill abot hour or whatever of power.

M h yeah, probably more bulky too to store right, like per energy unit totally.

When I was off grid, I used a dual fuel gener I actually I took it down and I no longer have the generator and gave.

It to some folks.

But I had a gas propane generator, and I ran it off of propane because it also is like cleaner on the engines.

You have to do less maintenance.

Yeah, but you know, if I needed it all the time, it was a backup to my solar. If I had to run it all the time, I would have used gas because it Yeah. Anyway, I talked with one homeowner with solar on his roof about how he hadn't sprung for the house battery because after all, power in the area never really went out for.

More than a day at a time, right.

Yeah, I personally delivered two solar generators, which just means like big ol' lithium batteries with inputs and outputs built in, And those would be my personal primary recommendation for people who want to run lights and charge phones and things.

Like that during power outages for a while.

Yeah, while gas or propane generators more useful for keeping heavy duty appliances going like fridges.

Yeah.

I also passed out a couple different like portable or luggable solar panel setups that can charge phones or other devices. And there were some mutual aid folks going around and helping people with their solar setups. But overall, I didn't see as much of it as I expected.

I expected to show up and they'll just be like outside the mutual aid stations, a big old foldable solar panel with a power brick. I think fewer people had that the night.

Wow.

So what are you doing to go buy?

Oh?

Right, because money is hard to come by, that's the reason. Yeah, you haven't made them self save a little bit, uh that way, but be careful with big blocks of cells and shit.

Yeah, And like I'm always trying to price out the difference between like I build my own solar setups. Yeah, but I also like just get these solar generators. Sometimes, until you're looking at like big systems, the price difference is not as dramatic as you want, you.

Know, because yeah, actually putting in a lot of time and or.

Even like an inverter costs a fair amount of money. And so if you're building a big system, the inverter is like worth the expense, right, But if it's a little system, the little thing that has a built an inverter and be cheaper, right.

Yeah.

And like the charge controller edge controller, Yeah, I was recently building one out for leaving out for migrants. Yeah, or having in the bed of my truck so when I run into people and need to charge their phones, they can just do that without my truck being gone.

And honestly, like my van's off grid setup is I have the equipment to run it off my alternator or solar panels on the roof, I just have a fuck ton of batteries in my van, so I just plug it in every couple of weeks and it's fine, you know.

Yeah, yeah, you end up doing I've tried a bunch of the different solar panels I use them when I'm this company called Pale Blue that I used a decent amount. I left it with someone on a work trip because they needed it more than me. Yeah, it's alsouly useful, But like, if you're really trying to run anything big, you need a lot more solar panel then you're probably gonna you know, carry around on your backpack.

That's what I think people don't quite recognize is that, like I used to have a pretty large array of twelve hundred watts, and you know, I had to go run hundreds of feet of cable to put that in a field and build like a whole structure to hold it and get it to the right angle and things like that. Yeah, and even then in the winter I ran the generator. And this is to keep my laptop and a little tiny super efficient fridge going right and

Which is important. Or if you use a satellite communicator or something, then you can keep that charged. Yeah.

With gas, one friend usually keeps her car half full of gas, but forgot that week because you've been driving so much and started the crisis with only an eighth of a tank and was extra stuck. You need to have a gas can if you want to drive out of the city and get as much gas as possible. Of course, you can store gas in a good container for a while, but it goes bad after three to six months. You store gas that way, So you should set an alarm for yourself. This is kind of telling myself.

Yeah? Crap? Now am I dealing with it? Yeah? You have to take it to real specialized places to deal with it. Yeah, it's hard to get rid of it once you Yeah, let it go bad.

And so an empty gas can actually would have done people in Ashville a lot of good. A full gas can even better, right, But honestly, full tank of gas in your car better in a full gas can, empty gas can allow people to leave and go get gas because they were not. Civilization didn't end. Civilization ended a ninety minute radius, you know. Yeah, So you can set an alarm for yourself if.

You're going to keep full gas and then you put it in your gas tank and then you go refill it again, and then you get annoyed about doing this, and then you stop doing it, and then an apocalypse happens, and then you're really annoyed that you forgot. Don't ask me how I know. Just if you have the money to not let your vehicle get below half full, you'll probably be fine. You can get a long way in a tank.

Well, it's about when you have the money is an important part. But at the end of the day, it does not cost you more money to keep your gas tank at half full.

Right, No, it doesn't because you're and unless you're driving a long way to get the gas, but like you're still driving the same amount, you're just stopping off a little more.

Yeah, empty gas can ended up crucial, and people who stored them were glad, and a lot of them were donated immediately. Volunteers collected gas cans and drove the three hour round trip to fill them up with gas several times a day. You should learn the range of your vehicle. Newer cars will tell you automatically, but if not, it's

I wanted to ask about that. I didn't find anyone who used it. Okay, I found it to be less reliable than what I have is Garment in Reach. I pay for it, yeah, and it works real well. Used it in the dairy and gap. I've used it again every continent part from Antarctica. So you would say that the iPhone doesn't replace the garment in Reach in terms

Okay, Yeah, I have the in reach too, and I've only proof of concept of that. I'm often driving around replaces where I could break our down the middle of nowhere. Actually I broke down yesterday about free my from where I lose cell service in the mountains that I live in.

Oh, that could have been rough. I know. I also broke down in an auto mechanic shop.

I got real lucky with what was otherwise a real bad situation.

If you're getting it in reach Mini, this is my soapbox. Don't trust the crappy little caribiner it comes with by a small locking DMM makes a tiny locking carabiner. It's an important thing to lose it because you didn't want to spend ten bucks on a carabiner. Would be a bad day you mentioned this. I'll end up doing this because I trust you, because your user is more than mine. Mine just is like clip to my hiking bag, but

I know that starlink doesn't work very well during storms. There's this method of internet called starlink that's owned by someone who I don't like and wouldn't like me because I'm a transperson. But starlink is not incredibly reliable during storms. I know that because I live remote and you starlink. I'm on talking on starlink right now. It does not

Frankly, same deal in the Darien. Actually, that's how migrants are first able to contact their loved ones and let them know that they're safe. Yeah, it's an indigenous village where someone has a starlink, unless you personally piss off a particular billionaire, in which case he will personally turn it off for you. Yeah. Great.

Everyone I talked to had a regular like AMFM weather blah blah blah radio at home, which is great. Yeah, people should have radios in their homes. Radio is the main mechanism that the city used to broadcast information about various threats, like evacuations of regions threatened by the destruction of dams or the can tamination in the water. However, how you charge them is you know, I fortunately had some d batteries in my van to give to someone because.

Oh wow, that soul school. Yeah.

No, yeah, some of my stuff I brought like in case someone I knew needed and some stuff I just like brought to give away. Yeah, and my like stash of batteries was just like came with me in case anyone needed you know.

Yeah, you can get wind up weather radios. I have one. Yeah, no, totally.

That's actually I dislike most all in one gadgets for survival, but the wind up radio with the little shitty solar panel is one of the ones that I'm like, no, that's they're thirty to fifty bucks and they work. Yeah, and you don't need much power to listen to a radio, you know.

No, they are a whole potst of world where wind up weather radios or how people get their information.

Yeah, it makes sense for travel. Most people still got around by vehicle, just with limited gas, though I saw more than the usual number of people walking or biking, pulling trailers or wagons. As a general rule, consider floodwaters to be impassable and do not attempt to drive through them. Interestingly, electric cars do better in floods than gas engines because if water gets into the air intake of a gas engine,

Who go out and do this. Yeah.

When I got my truck and I was like, I'm a prepper, I'm going to get those like bullbars or the front cage things or whatever.

Grown. Yeah, and I looked into it and I read about it, and they just murder people. Yeah, as someone who rides a bicycle a lot, those things do.

Not like it's already bad that pickup trucks are so gigantic, but the if you add one of those things to the front of your car, front of your truck, you're just gonna and you have to think about it. Are you more likely to need to push broken down cars during the end of the world or accidentally hit a pedestrian with your vehicle that is taller than a child. Yeah, and I would guess for most people, including me, I

Yeah.

With the three hundred and fifty miles, I can drive my truck before it's useless.

Yeah.

Yeah, using all that gas stooled Yeah, yeah, exactly. That totally lasts a long time anyway. One of the problems electric vehicles with flooding that I think we're starting to see. I think these videos were from Ashville, but I'm not certain, is that electric vehicles if they are underwater for long enough, especially with salt water. This is less of a North Carolina and more of a coastal thing. Yeah, the salt water can cause fires if it hits the battery long enough.

Yeah. On the other hand, moving floodwater goes away faster and on its own.

Yeah.

So yeah, with gravity, don't cycle through it. I've cycled through a couple of rivers once in Iceland. It just picked up the bike from underneath me, and it like not an optimal situation actually, to be swimming down a river chasing after your bicycle in Iceland. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah. Avoid famously warm place Iceland. Yeah. Hm, only one hundred kilometers from the nearest place I could re warm myself. It's a great day.

Roads were washed away in many places, while many many more were blocked by downtrees. Improper chainsaw use is one of the leading causes of injuries and disasters.

Oh I bet.

Proper use of chainsaws has been absolutely essential. Although there were reports of people who self rescued with hand saws. Yeah, and you know, yeah, you got time and people and you got a handsaw, and there's a tree in your way, you can get through it.

Yeah, don't be like the guy maybe Margaret's so there's some like homesteader on. Oh god, that's dot com who I've started war with. Yeah, because he's he's lying, He's not like I'm sorry this guy is. Don't braid their hair. Both of them have long hair and they don't braid it. I do not believe that they work outside regularly if they don't braid their hair. Yeah, your hair will get caught and shit and it'll just tangle. It is not

Yeah.

Yeah, I would say that if you have a saw, keep it, you know, keep it in a reasonable condition. The old sword has been kicking around your shed and it's rusty and blunt. Yeah, likewise the old chainsaw, So don't be dragging that out. Yeah, you haven't used it for a while.

That said one of the things I was expecting but wasn't true, because I brought down a generator that I didn't know if worked right, And I was like, what a jerk move, because if I was going down to like there's like ten people and I'm like, don't worry, I'm here to rescue you.

I've got a generator. I don't know if works. That's not so great.

Yeah, right, there's one hundred thousand people who live in Asheville. There was the Asheville Tool Library and the Western North Carolina Pair Cafe hold up outside the Anarchist Bookstore fixing generators and chainsaws. Oh listen, yeah, hero shit, and it was great.

Of all the various generators people brought, I was like, I don't know if this one works, and they added gas and it worked, and so I was like I brought the best shitty generator, you know. Yeah, but no, Sometimes things can be handy, and knowing how to fix things is always useful.

And there are people around with more specialized skills. You don't have to learn to do everything. For example, chainsawing is a specialized skill. I own a bunch of devices that are scary and dangerous, and some of them are guns, and one of them is a table saw, and the chainsaw is the most likely to hurt me. Yeah, for sure, and I've been to a chainsaw class. I'm very glad. Cutting a downed tree is an entirely different skill than cutting a live tree or a standing tree because of

Yeah, pay someone to teach you and get the right protective stuff like, yeah, absolutely proper detective trousers and things. Yeah.

Also, never cut up trees woven with power lines without ascertaining that the power line is dead. As for how to ascertain it, I asked someone who was on a chainsaw crew how to ascertain it, and he didn't know. So they just avoid those ones. Yeah, I mean mains power is not a joke.

Yeah.

People have been reaching the more isolated communities out there by hiking, by ATV, by dirt bike, by helicopter, and most famously, by a string of pack mules. There are a lot of ways that people have been getting help to people. This doesn't mean you need to go out and buy a helicopter, Like, just get a mule. You don't even need to google how much a helicopter is, Margaret,

I asked. I figured it might be.

This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that North Carolina is a pretty gun friendly state. It's also a pretty culture war ass state.

Yeah.

Where I live in West Virginia, people don't I mean, yeah, you see the punisher skull every now and then or whatever, but like overall, people are like, I don't know, We're all just trying to live, you know. Yeah, in western North Carolina you have intense tensions between strong pockets of blue and red right and a lot of people on both sides that are armed. I have a North Carolina concealed carry permit myself. I'm not anti gun, but it

Yeah, no, it's much more fun they' shooting at them. Yeah. Yeah.

Like talk about shared interests like guns, Yeah.

Yeah, I've had some positive discussions of people who don't pose. Yeah, probably aligned with me because we both enjoy all guns.

And this is not to say the firearms are not a useful skill set for different threat models within the apocalypse, but it hasn't proved particularly useful so far in this particular crisis. And I think overall, I would put this at an overrated skill and an overrated tool.

Yeah, and definitely an overage way to spend a shit ton of money. Oh my god. Yeah. No.

One magazine of bullets is a movie that you can go see at the theater. Yeah, yeah, like a dinner. And I'm saying this, yeah, I'm looking.

At like what that one, two, three, four, like maybe twelve ammunition? Canful of ammunition mainly I buy the I like to go shoot clay pigeons and the targets and stuff, and I buy and it is cheap. But also, if you have a gun, you should know how to use it otherwise you're dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, like, don't don't be buying a gun and then loading it and storing it

Totally more useful, way more useful in the circumstance. And this circumstance is more likely the most and one thing almost everyone I talked to was happy about. No one was sad about just this came up. Everyone was happy that they had extra to share. A random woman who showed up to get water at the Anarchist bookstore saw what was happening and turned and told me, like, oh, I have a chainsaw. I don't really you should I bring it here? And the answer is yes, And everyone

It's good for both of you. You just literally are both happier, Yeah, without a doubt. And like, I remember when my house flood. I think I was seventeen eighteen something like that. My little sister and I were at home, and I remember at first being like, oh no, back in the daily you know, we had a TV that was relatively flat. It's probably six inches thick still, you know, but we thought it was shit, and then being like, oh no, this TV that was so cool, it's being destroyed.

I thought it was going to be thirty minutes and then I forgot I was going to talk about gear with my friend James, where we both separately off Mike often do this for hours of the time. Yeah, and so go out and get yourself three days to three weeks worth of food and water. Slowly build it up. Go out and talk to your neighbors, figure who they are, and uh, is it gonna be okay?

The main reason's gonna be okay? Is we all die eventually anyway, But like that's gonna be okay. Yeah, We're gonna take care of each other as best we can. Yeah, that's what we do. Anything you want to plug, I guess this is your podcast. Yeah, I mean participant in mutual aid anyway, because then you have the structures to

Yep, totally, So do anarchism if you want to support Asheville and the relief efforts there and the surrounding areas. Financially, there's a million different small organizations that could absolutely ease your help. But the two that I think we've been shouting out a lot on the show, and I can personally vouch for it very strongly is Appalachian Medical Solidarity and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. And both of those are volunteer organizations. Every all the little money, all the money

You could ask them and they'll tell you, yeah, And that's what I got. That's what I got to plug. I will talk to you all some other times on It could happen he.

Welcome to It could happen to hear a podcast about ice training guest squads. I guess I'm your host via Wong. I guess I don't know if formerly or better is the correct word, but sometimes also not. As the ice was be destroyed, girl, So I'm mad about this one with me? Is someone else's extremely bad about the existence of ICE, which is James Yep.

I'm here, I'm mad as a waste. I guess just another Monday. Yeah, this shit sucks, This does suck. Yeah, you know, I had this realization.

I get this on Twitter a lot, where I realized that there are people who don't know what ICE is because they're like, they're not from the US, or they're like, yeah, so ICE is immigrations and customs enforcements. The shortest description of what they are is that they are one of the like four American border gestapos.

Yeah. The number of agencies under DHS is fucking baffling, constantly rebranding every time they have a scandal or they kill too many people. That yeah, ICE is kind of their flagship evil program.

Yeah, and they like they do raids on fucking houses, they do raised on businesses.

They suck.

Like if you vaguely remember, there was a whole bunch of protests in like twenty eighteen over this stuff, and that was mostly anti ICE stuff.

Yeah, if someone's getting deported, it's ICE for the most part doing it. Like, Yeah, they also run detention centers where people go, you know, they work with Jeff Bezos on deporting people.

Oh my fucking god. Okay, I just remembered a story I had. I had a flashback to standing in a protest, a very very large protest in twenty eighteen. This is one of like the big pro immigrant rallies. Yeah, and in this fucking protest, I saw a thing for this group called Heartland Alliance. Now PROBA people who probably don't

I didn't think HSI was under ICE. I thought HSI was a different branch of dhs I might be wrong, but they used to be under ICE as far as I know, and then they became HSI.

Okay, I might be wrong about that, because the stuff that I was reading was saying that they are still part of ICE, but they might not be. It's also possible that it's literally has gone back and forward multiple times.

Yeah, this is merecrareck. Things fucking suck.

But HSI also does, like a lot of the times, there's some of the people who like do like physically the people on the ground doing a raid will be HSI, like.

Fucking stormtroopers or whatever. Yeah, they do arrests. Yeah, often they appear in like these Joint counter Terrorism Task task forces, like when they especially when they're doing stuff with like drugs and that kind of thing.

Yeah, the civilian academies are I think really the only way you could describe them, even though this is not how it's being described really is that they're treating random people to like become desk what.

Yeah, it's what's interesting is like the protest that you talked about seem to have been the sort of reason that they started this program, right, Yeah.

We need to rewind this a little bit because they started in the US as a reaction to those protests, like specifically as like a pr thing. But the original version of these programs started in Puerto Rico under Obama.

Look, we don't give Obama or anything like enough shit, right, Like fucking Obama just like in terms of killing people, in terms of deporting people, fucked up. Human being.

Yeah, he was the deporter in chief and like, yeah, part of part of what's sort of brutal about the mom administration is like a lot of his support had been from like the huge undocumented that could have like peaked in like two thousand and six, and he comes in on this and they just fucking deports everyone.

Yeah, as Democrats too every time. Yeah, we're seeing it again with Biden.

Right, It's like it's the same sort of process and and under under Obama, these these programs start. There's specifically as you're talking about, there's specifically supposed to be these like training programs are supposed to be for community out Well, okay, so this is and this is one of these things. Was like, this is what they say that it's for. And given what they're doing, I don't know how much I believe them what they're what they say that it's for.

What if no cage is what do we just leave them out in the fucking mountains and James's friend have to feed them beans or wind?

Yeah, but the thing is in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. It's not entirely clear that the Democrats are going to swing that way. No, And so you get these programs and what's interesting about them, and so a lot of this is coming from that. There's a very very good piece by Barrizio Guerrero indocumented, who got a bunch of Foya documents about this program and what they were actually doing. Yeah, and one of the things that he discovers about this is that it's like a lot of rich guys. Like

Yeah, that was a funny almost, I guess kind of it got through that little social circle or whatever.

Yeah, and like there's this sort of feed in program that sends people into this. And I actually I realized I had vaguely known about these but didn't quite understand how bad it was because he didn't have a bunch of the documents we have now. But this was a big thing in Chicago in twenty twenty one, where there was proposed to open one of these things. It's like these like training centers for these like fucking people. Oh yeah, and you know twenty twenty one was still in Chicago.

We can't let them do it.

This was back with the when like these people like the Democrats were started pretending that they didn't like all of these like federal deportation machine things. But the things that we have now are we have the actual This is like I think with the public most valuable part of this whole thing is that we actually have a bunch of the documents now of what they were showing people.

Yeah, I'd love to see the fucking Foyer fight for this, because I have foyed the Department of Homeland Security a lot and getting any like I have a fire out right now regarding the CBP one and the fact that it doesn't work on non Apple phones, and they very clearly know this, right, Like if I know it, they know it. And I would love to know if that was from the outset that they knew and they just didn't give a fuck, Like I would like to see

But okay, So the shit that's in this one of these things. The first page of this is maybe the most deranged chart I have ever seen in anything, which is it is It is a picture of a naked human body. Is the fronds and back of it, right, And they've labeled all of the parts of the body by and they've been. So we only have a black and white version of this, but they've they've been they've been labeled by how effective it is to hit someone there with the baton.

Yeah, yeah, and they're like green in the in the actual document, they're green, yellow, and red. I guess, uh. And then it says like reasoning for the red one, I'll just read it highest level of resultant trauma injury tends to range from serious to lung lasting rather than temporary, and may include unconsciousness, serious body injury, shock, or death. So I guess like it's saying like, don't hit them in the in the in the red area. No, that's

Yeah.

Is so part of this is supposed to be part of like a force escal thing. But the point of this is that it is actually like they're trying to explain force escalation. And the thing is that like, yeah, you actually can do this, but you can only do this if you're in like the highest level of force.

Escalation or whatever.

Okay, and if any of you have ever been around a cop, you know, but those people jump to the highest level of force escalation at like, yeah, a fucking again, we have literally seen an acorn drop and it can't be able to do this, right, and so and so what they're what they're teaching these people, And this is like I think, like Genny widely horrifying. It's like, yeah, they are teaching these people like the specific technical details of how you like fucking maim someone with a baton.

Yeah, I meant to reading the force escalation this is. And they actually did physical training right, like I think they did weapons training. I think they did a bunch of a bunch of simulation kind of exercises. And then if you if you scroll down, this is like a PowerPoint for those listening at home. They gave an overview of like use of force to include a bunch of Supreme Court cases. I think Supreme Court cases is certainly, yeah,

Yeah, basically, yeah, there are stated reason is like oh so this is this is how you unders and what it's like to like be one of these people, how hot it is to be a cop, and well, like I think the actual reason again is so that you could you're training a bunch of people who you can just sort of call up and be like, we need a bunch of people to come like fucking obliterate a

So this is yeah, like like Trump era ICE, which were where there were open discussions of how many people can we deport, how much will it cost, how easy will it be?

Yeah, and like right now, like Trump is like his big one of his big things is mass deportations. But I think people don't realize that the only reason that this stuff didn't happen under Trump was that pushback to

You need people like this.

Yeah, and the scale of this program is kind of small, but this is something that can be scaled up right, Yeah.

To try and extremely large numbers of people, like fairly quickly.

Yeah. You know what it reminds me of Maya products and services and support this podcast does. Yeah, all right, I hope you enjoyed this. Products and sev suits way back.

Well, let's go do like the other thing they were fucking doing.

Oh yeah, it's more Jesus wept. So I want to quote from the article. Yeah. Quote.

Documents also contain presentations on how to shoot a gun, point at targets, and stand in position to fire. The shooting practices include military style of rifles. Likewise, A training in Atlanta organized drills to shoot at human like manikers and fires M four assault rifles employed exclusively with the military.

The training.

Also included isis guidelines for use of force encompassing deadly force. One presentation suggests yelling drop the gun as potential cover when employing lethal force against someone. So they're telling it and this is definitely supposed to be thinking like, oh if you're in playing clothes, like you fucking yell police and yell drop your gun and then you shoot them

That's what's happening here. Yeah, wild yeah, Like the government's offered firearms trading for civilians, like that's kind of what the NRA wasn't a government initiative, but like, yeah, this is not that. This is not like, No, I would broadly be in favor of the government funding free gun safety classes for people, because I've seen some shit with you know, like that would be one of the useful things. But this is not that.

No, And like and like the reason those specific classes like don't look like that anymore is because, and I've talked about this in some of the episodes on them Okay assassination, it's like, well, yeah, when the government taught a bunch of people how to use rifles, those people use those rifles to like fight the cops in the streets.

Have you read the Graham versus Connor one, because it's one of the more powerful uses of passive voice I've ever seen. Oh no, I haven't seen that yet. Let me read that while you look for yours. This one is just incredible instance of cops speak. Graham Comma diabetic. Comma asks friend to drive him to convenience store for juice. Good like cop sentences here, ran in and out of store. Comma also observed the suspicious activity. What suspicious activity, dear listener,

It's just an incredible use of passive voice here throughout. Yeah, there's this great tweet that was like, the US has a passive voice, in an active voice and a special exonerative voice.

It's only used for.

Yeah, yeah, Israel gets the exerative voice.

It rails in the Greater cop Nation.

Yeah.

Yeah, and like also one of the things that I don't think people understand on the Streme Court is like if you think that like Supreme Court rulings about abortions are bad, like then they are right. But like, if you think those things are bad, look up the Supreme

Just imagining that the you know, the person who I go to at the bank when I need to take out large amounts of cash to go on one of my work trips, learning that I will not die this way.

Okay, So that that that's basically what I have about this program, other than the bleak note that on on a pr level, these people one right.

They didn't They didn't win because of anything they did.

They won because the Democrats decided that they fucking hated immigrants, and because views of integration are largely driven by by party politics, are driven by what your party tells you about immigrants, Like, yeah, all the support that had been built in the late twenty tens has evaporated, and yeah, even.

Like I did a thing for my Patreon yesterday then made me think of this, Like I was trying to just do a sort of listing of Joe Biden's immigration policies right from twenty twenty one to present, and like twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, I was selling stories to NBC, to Slate, to the nation right about Haitian migration, about Title forty two, about remain in Mexico, about especial immigrant visas for Afghans, and after twenty twenty two, you

Yeah, they've achieved their stated aim and they're not moving on to their unstated aim, which is mass deportations. All right, we're back everything I know about the program that you were about to talk about comes from you, and that is oh.

Boy, it's not good. All right. So I'm going to read you a small story here, and then we're going to talk about whether or not it's a good idea for the Border Patrol to have programs for children, Okay, And then I gave a content warning for sexual assault of children. I'm just in kiitch. You don't want to listen to this. In August of this year, Aaron Mitchell, a former CBP agent, was found guilty of a federal

This is also like I know people have done the like connect the border to Palestine things so much that it's like hackneyed, but like that is straight up that could be lifted from a press release, like from the idea Yeah, yeah, about why they shot someone. Yeah, and it's like, yeah, I mean, you shouldn't be teaching anyone this. You especially shouldn't be eating fourteen year olds. Yeah, that someone might throw a rock at them and that's a reasonable way people had gone and shoot them.

Yeah, Like if you back that into your mind at fourteen, I would argue that makes you very unsuitable to carry a gun in public. Later in life. Kids start out by doing this kind of boot camp style academy, and then they pretty much begin doing stuff like drill PT they practice, conducting vehicle stops and tracking Border Patrol. On their website, they claim to have more than seven hundred Explorers, but over twenty eight posts around the country, it's very

Right.

But if there is data on how many of these kids go on to hired by BP, I haven't found it, but I did find one. I think this is again from Morley Music's piece when extremely amusing incident the Douglas Arizona chapters. The Explorers teamed up with a local high school drama club and they had the kids play migrantsios. Yeah, Jesus Christ, many of these people will themselves be like first generation or like a.

Wild anyway, the country cannot be allowed to continue imagine, like, what are we doing at school today?

The theater kids are going to get arrested by the border patrol kids. Jesus Christ. Some of the theater kids got really into character. One of them cried, I guess several of them managed to avoid arrest and give the young agents the slip, and then they got told by the agents overseeing the exercise that they've done it wrong because they outsmarted the junior gobs.

There's a story I can't remember what fucking town it was in like the fifties, that the Army was running these like infiltration drills where they would like have a town and they talk to people to town. They'd be like, Okay, we're gonna like unleash like a communist diversive agent into the town and then you're gonna help the army capture them. And it said, what happens, everyone has hit the agent because I just had a great time like stuff.

Yeah, that is the American spirit. It's it's the people of Dugs Arizona. We salute you. One of the things I found really interesting in in the morning music piece was this idea of like defensive asylum only being for criminals, so it seems like the students learned this very binary immigration law. Where defensive asylum, which is when you claim asylum as a defense against being deported. Yeah, it's only

And yeah, yeah, there was a whole thing in like the last couple of years about this happening in tousion facilities in Chicago, or in facilities things that were supposed to be like now figurant housing, and that got reported. Yeah, Weirdly, Weirdly, the Chicago proces has actually been pretty good on immigration stuff. But it's literally solely because they hate Brandon Johnson, and

That you want to be introducing your child too. Yeah, absolutely not. You know, I would really encourage people to read Todd's book Border Patrol Nation, like he talks about this use of They invented a new slur, which you know is cool. Good for them for expanding the English language. I guess they call people tonks. Oh yeah, yeah, some noise that makes when you hit someone on the head with your torch, your flashlight.

Yeah yeah, just really great stuff. Some of the worst people who've ever lived.

Yeah, don't don't volunteer to be a cop. Don't do it for money either. Like that's what I got for you.

Yeah yeah, I think I think that's all we've got for today.

Yeah. Shit fucking sucks. I don't know.

We gave you, we gave you some less depressing episodes. But yeah, now we're back, we're in your week. Actually, I could promise I could promise tomorrow's episode is going to be a lot brighter for this one. Yeah, come back tomorrow to be less worribly depressed.

Yeah, I got nothing good for you coming up for the near future. To be honest, I'm rite I think about the Darien Gap and having to take little walks outside. Yeah, yeah, dire for a walk.

There's nothing wrong with your podcast feed. This is prop and I am invading that it can happen here podcasts. To the four or five of y'all in the subreddit that can't stand my voice and say I'm the most annoying person in the Cool Zone extended universe, I apologize.

My mama used to say, be who you is, because who you ain't a who he is.

We're gonna talk about some things, specifically coffee and how your children will probably never be able to drink the coffee that you have drank because climate change bounds. But before we do, I'm also realizing how many singers in the eighties was singing the teenagers to children.

You know the absolute banger of a song If I.

Could fly, I pick you up, I take you into the night, great song right and show you love that you live.

See do you.

Know what The first lyric in that song is she's.

Only sixteen years old, leave her alone? Unless he wasn't a teenager just openly singing, what was we thinking?

Freaking bel biv devout.

In dude may babe backstage, underage, gotta leggat.

I fly, I like to do the wild thing.

Oh you're.

We were just openly singing the kids. Let me get back on topic, because not only could.

It happen here, it is happening here.

So you may or may not know me.

I am Los Angeles born and raised our host politics with Prop Coules on media team, and I am your resident coffee nerd, and a lot of that grew out of just a natural passion for coffee, which you will hear me gush about later. But I think I'm going to back into this topic with back that thing up with the story from a few years back.

See a few years back, I had.

A chance to put out a poetry book called Terrorform, building a Liverpool World, and Terrorform also had four musical EP seven song EPs called the Sky, the Soil, the People, and the Possibility. And while I was working on the Soil, I had a chance to partner with one of the I mean really it's like, I don't know if there's a better roaster in America called Onyx believe it.

Or not, in Northwest Arkansas.

And in a collab sort of coffee release we were doing in partnership with Mirror, which is a drinkwaar company I'm also an ambassador for. We had a chance to go to Colombia and if you've if you've been to South America or anywhere close to the equator, it's I mean, you're walking into the Avatar, you know, minus the aliens. It's this raw sort of earth that us in the

So we fly into Bogata.

We go about an hour and a half outside of the city, which normally when you go to Origin it's like you have to like take a rickety a helicopter or traverse twelve hours into you know, an African jungle, which is like not the most plush riding, but it's just it's this beautiful South American you know, Colombian road, and then you go up this small sort of windy road and while it's sunny, beautiful, I don't know what the combination of indigenous African European settlers that just made

This is a multi.

Culture place that this crew called La pama Eltua kan That's who I was with. And all this beauty and vegetation that I'm describing, apparently twelve years ago was not a thing. This place was the textbook like cartoonish level example of deforestation where all of this natural beauty was cleared out for cattle raising.

And the land was dead.

But you would never guess, you would never guess that this was ever an issue, because what I'm looking at is Narnia. So this group of local born and raised brothers came up with a business plan and started restoring this land. I can't overstate the before and after picture, like the land was dying them with their reginative, like you know, farming practices made this a rainforest again that is now growing some of the best coffee on earth. So anyway we come in there, it's beautiful. Just there

It's a whole tell.

You stay in these bungalows that are like up on sticks, and then the shower is outdoors, just covered around bamboo sticks that like hei the thing, and it's got like the what we like to call the anti black shower heads.

You know that those are the I don't.

Know if y'all notice, because Black people don't always like to wet our hair in the shower.

We wash our hair much less than y'all do.

But if you got that waterfall shower head, then that means we got to tilt our heads back a little bit, or make sure we got a shower cap. Because I don't know if you know any black women, but you don't. Don't wet my hair in the shower anyway. But you're showering out there, and it's just beautiful. You're in the rainforest. You can hear the animals and it's just this gentle breeze is blowing. And then around eleven thirty the fog kind of clears out.

You get to sit down.

You're having some breakfasts that's just chopped up papaya and mango that they grew right there right. I can see the mango tree, it's right there. Then the fry up some plantain from the plantain tree right there, scrambling up with some eggs from the chicken nest right there right.

Just it's a dream.

And as we're talking, as we're moving through this thing, the man that runs it, who like I wish I could have his baby. It was just the most gorgeous human I've ever seen, just flowing, flowing, quaft hair, speaking English and Spanish. The guy could play seven instruments. At some point where we're cutting coffee, the dude breaks into a bachata and then some Cumbia and he's just singing these Colombian folklore songs while flipping over a bucket and

I was like, of what he goes of.

Top soil, Coffee's going to go extinct in twenty seven years. Sam to talk about the possibility of a world without coffee, how we got here, and what people are doing to

That's one of the best cups of cofee ive ever had in my life.

You know.

People always ask me, what's what's the best cup of coffee ever had, and I'm like, honestly, it's the one in your hand.

That's the best cup.

I feel like there's like a bell curve where it's like, yeah, you discover it, then you hit this level of snob at then you become like a like a new Christian about it and you're just like one of the evangelize and tell everybody. And then you become just like a theological snob and you're just like, uh, are you putting

You know.

So yeah, so that's Robusticut, which, like I said, most of the world actually drinks that. And then the specialty level, the one that most of us are used to drinking now is called a rabica, and it's kind of like it's the top tier based on and whatever subjective scale we use to say.

What is the best coffee.

But the fertile band, as what we call it around the coffee industry, is this span that kind of belts around the equator. So that's why in Central and South America, in certain parts of Africa and in Asia, coffee can naturally be grown. It takes a particular elevation, right, And you can even follow the transatlantic slave trade. You could follow the transit Lantic slave trade by following the distribution

But anybody that really knows it's it's like.

Dude, it originates in Africa.

I'd be willing to bet too that if you kind of have developed somewhat of a palette for like a good clean cup of coffee, you would probably feel like Ethiopian beans are the best. And mostly it's just because, like, well, that's where it's from, and they have like at least one hundred year head start in cultivating how to make a bomb. Being as a fun aside, if you get your hand on a Yemenese bean, it's a flavor profile

Anyway, So from Yemen it got to Turkey.

You know, this is around the time of like when the Islamic world was really the superpower of the planet. You know, with people like Avaroez. You could do your little history on that, and just all of the most beautiful library science, history, algebra, math, philosophy was all coming from the Muslim world. And it was through the Muslim world that coffee got to Europe. So at first Europe

So this bishop was like, I don't know, let me try it. So I this might be folklore.

But he drinks this coffee and he says, now I'm not gonna quote him direct. This is the part that I think is folks, this happened, but this is the part that says folklore. He was like, uh, if this is evil, let's baptize it.

Because we can make it for good. He was like, this is too delicious to let go.

Watching the devil get all the good drinks. Yo, I'm said, I'm trying to drink good too. We could drink unto the land. All things was made for his glory, including this coffee. There used to be it is argument over which one was better for you, coffee your tea. They even did this test with these prisoners where they gave one of them all coffee the other one all tea to see who would live longer. And of course, since that is like the least scientific thing you could do possible,

There's just the ocean in between it.

So of course when the Africans got there, they would recognize the soil and be able to grow the same things.

Are y'all following me.

We're talking about an industry that makes four hundred and sixty billion dollars globally every year and less than one percent goes back to Africa.

Less than one percent.

Actually goes to those that actually grow the product. You are you following me on this metaphor. Coffee has its own stock market because it's a commodity. It's called the c market like it fluctuates like that, you know when you look on a bag and it says fair trade and direct trade.

Let me tell you what that means.

The price per pound for coffee per pellet is set at what they call a fair trade price. So there's a coffee commission that sets what is a fair amount for that coffee. So you're supposed to it's like a fair market value for a house. You know, who sets that? Germany. Here's the problem with that. Germany can't grow coffee. How are y'all setting up for a farm to be considered organic or meeting specialty?

Called somebody a farmer in Kenya? Oh they die.

Gotta fly somebody from Germany down today farm for them to test their soil to tell them that they soil is healthy enough to tell these people from Germany it can't grow coffee. This was so that's fair trade is if Germany says that this price is right. Direct trade is when me, the American buyer, goes to the farmer themselves and I ask the farmer how much is it

So that's to guarantee.

Not only is this a price that the farmer said, we're gonna pay you even more than that. There's an understanding of value in the fact that we don't have an industry without you. And sometimes I work at this other crew crawled BECKX three sixty, which I'm gonna talk about a little later at the end of this, I'm saying, these are ways for you to be able to say.

Because everyone should be able to drink coffee.

These are ways for which you could say, I am not being a part of the problem.

In these ways, I could be part of the solution.

But yes, a billion dollar industry created on the backs of brown folk, controlled by white folks.

I'm just saying it's a metaphor billion dollar industry.

When's the last time you walked into a coffee shop and thought, Wow, this is something invented, harvested, and nurtured by people of color. No, you don't think that. People think Italy. It's such a metaphor. And now because of harsh conditions, irrosive top soil, and abusive practices, we only got twenty seven harvests left.

Now, let's get to the science and things we can do.

All right, let's go to some sort of ad break, Right, how do y'all do them at?

It could have been here?

Am I supposed to do some sort of like speaking of situation?

I don't know.

So I think the best way to get into the science of it all is to maybe think about it through just the supply chain period. For centuries, the coffee plant or even farm have been just local, indigenous, this rainforest living families. It's your grandma, And I know this from my own experience. This is like your grandparents' house. Like you inherit this farm, you know, or you inherit this plot of land, and you got a couple of

Well, because we can't.

Number one, we have to create a supply chain, and the supply chain is just as industrial as every other thing is. So from the origin, you have a green buyer, and the green buyer is essentially the middle person. So that person has all the relationships with the farms.

So they create these relationship with these farms.

Usually depending on your relationship with that green buyers, you take orders from them that sometimes depending on how big or small that green buyer is. Some of those are like multi state, multi country, like big old corporations that you know, go across the world and they swoop up in a Walmart of it all and like just like

I want a Kenyon airloom.

And I go, oh, dope, they got it at I'm making up this number eighteen cents a pound. It's not like that. It's much more, but okay, dope. So they get the order. On the other end, they see what they got in stock or they got to go to origin, right, So they go to origin, they get the thing, and then some countries make you buy an entire shipping container

Like the cost is too high.

So it's like, yo, you got to buy a palette or not a pal you gotta buy a shipping container.

Right.

So what most small like micro roasters do is they buddy up with other people that are like, yo, let's all do this.

We'll kind of go in on this shipping container.

So you have the farmer, you have the green buyer, and then the green buyer makes the deal with the shipment team. The shipping container gets filled, then you got to pay the nation's tariff. So then that's where the country comes in. Now, why some coffees cost more than others, some of it has to do with the tariffs. It's like Ethiopia charges some like fifty nine percent tariff, as they should because they tired of being raped by white people,

It's just you know mud, you know what I'm saying.

Even the term Americano was because when the American gis were in Europe and they wanted a cup of CoFe, because in Europe day drankon espresso. The Americans was like, this is disgusting, what is this? So they just add water to it. So they called that an Americano because that's the type the Americans like anyway.

So that's first wave coffee.

Second wave coffee is like Starbucks or the coffee spots that like have the ton of syrups in the back and the name of their shop is probably some sort of pun like in Friends, the Central Perk, Java Chip.

It to it.

But the most of the like if you go to like a good coffee shop, you're drinking about an eighty three to a eighty five. But it's not like their whole crop is that. Most farmers are just small plots. So what do you do with the rest of it? Well, the rest of it, which is the most of your harvest. To make the numbers round, Let's just say you have one hundred coffee trees. Maybe ten of them produced an

So I mean, what's your option. You sell the land or just.

Remove the coffee, just yo, get some cows, sell beef right the forests, I mean there's money to make there, or you sell it to a big conglomerate. And what does the big conglomerate do burn down all of the forests and create a monoculture? Right, and a monoculture are like what you would pitch what we do in America for corn or all through the Amazon rainforest.

And if you know, obviously you've seen.

A force monoculture ain't how earth works, right, The diversity of plants becomes its own fertilizer. But if you don't have that, if you don't have chickens that survive off the avocados, and and you know, I'm pulling things out of nowhere. But like the point I'm trying to make is when you create a monoculture, you have to also create a way to sustain that. And the only way to sustain it is destructive. One cup of coffee in this way releases was it eighty grams of co two?

Right.

We're killing the soil, We're killing the land. Everybody knows that.

So the EU passed this law that says if you're going to import any sort of commodity, including coffee, you have to prove that it didn't come from deforestation. Right, So this is them trying to do their best. The only problem is if I'm an indigenous farmer on a small plot, I don't even have access to deforestation. But the only way for me to prove that is, like I said before, with the fair trade, I have to fly somebody down.

It's on my own dime.

It's because the e who doesn't understand regenative practices because they don't know any indigenous people, right, So this is now adding a double burden to the farmers that are actually doing it right, who can't possibly do the volume of the people that are doing it wrong. So the first problem is like the system is not even financially sustainable, Like I haven't even got to the specifics of the

Right.

It's estimated that in thirty years from now, basically fifty percent of lands that can grow coffee will not be able to grow coffee anymore if we don't do anything fifty percent. You think they're making fun of you for your twelve dollars cup of coffee is crazy, now listen. Nestley reports that there are more than six thousand cups of neskfe coffee drink every second? Are y'all following me every second? That's how much coffee we drink. Now, granted

Right.

The problem is our insatiable desire to consume things as fast as we can. And I don't want to blame I'm not blaming the victim here, I'm just saying it's impossible to do the volume is the argument. How do you do this volume that we all want on in this global supply chain and the waight for which we've set this up. How do you do this volume and still keep the price where the price is? And you know what the solution has always been, You just rip

I won't say it's.

Doomed, because God can do anything, but based on the situation, it's already compromised. What these people are saying is like next year's crops already did this. Where we are, y'all, are y'all hearing what I'm saying. He's saying, we ain't gonna have no coffee next year. It's already dead, y'all. Remember when Robert read off his little book, you know, the hole started off the whole. It could happen here

You know what I'm saying.

It's just a name on a spreadsheet, brought into you from an importer.

Right.

Anyway, So there was a panel discussion about about climate change and about ways for which we can do better.

So they had a bunch of farmers. I remember it was a farmer from Kenya.

Who gave us these just heaters, just these heat rocks, these bars during this panel discussion. And after I show you these bars, I'm gonna go for a break, and then I'm gonna tell you about people that are doing things better in ways for which we can maybe save our soil so that your kids can possibly enjoy coffee. Also, so someone asked, I believe it was a roaster from Puerto Rico, was like, hey, so what are some of the ways that you're adapting and hoping to mitigate climate change?

You did. What are you doing.

We're the ones suffering, and not only are we suffering from the effects of climate change in our own life, because of your greediness, you created the climate change that is causing the problems in the very crop that you're trying to get from us. So because of your problems, this is why he's explaining it. I now can't grow something that we've grown for hundreds and hundreds of years, and you asking me what I'm doing for about it?

Now?

What are you doing about it? Ouch?

So here's some things that are being done next.

All right, we're back now.

The wildest thing about how complicated any of these solutions are, which are you going to take many, many decades to actually see the difference in the actual top soil. The most bonkers part is the fact that, like the solutions by and large are kind of.

The same across any world problem.

It's mutual aid, it's collective, communal, collaborative work among every part of the supply chain. It's so in some senses, it's so beautiful that like, really the solution is us. I say that to not grossly oversimplify, but I say that to say that there's hope. So I'm going to introduce you to a couple programs and a couple of farms and sort of some things to look for in your coffee purchasing.

Because you guys want to see the world be better.

Also, first thing is farms, going back to indigenous practices. Now two I know personally, and one I'm going to tell you about from Ecuador. There's a whole documentary on it if you look up on YouTube, it's called How Climate Change Threatened Coffee Production by DW Documentaries.

And I mean right like pretty on the nose.

So a coffee collective in Ecuador called Viilakory.

It's their Kichua language.

It means green gold and their indigenous language, and they're doing something very similar to my friends in Honduras called Kadacha coffee.

Now, what they.

Are are cooperatives on the business side.

So I'm so excited.

I'm going to get to the business cooperative side after I explain to you the indigenous practices.

Even though all of these things are related.

So what they do is something that's so obvious, which is like, you got to stop doing monocultures. First of all, it makes sense financially because now you're diversifying your commodities, So you have your coffee plants. If you see a coffee plant, coffee plants are pretty short, like, they don't grow taller than six foot normally. So since the climate is so hot, what is the natural way to shade them? Well, the natural way to shave them is trees. So if

That's absurd. The land already does what it needs to do.

So what these guys do in Ecuador is the same thing they do in Colombia in Zipa Coln that was the name of the city that they were in. Also, what's happening on doors is like you just let the land do what it does. What I learned on one of these farms is like the quickest way to know a place is not organic is there's no insects. Like, if there's no ants, that means the ground's poisonous.

Right.

The ants come out, they eat whatever waste is on the ground, whatever like natural waste is on the ground. They come back in, they go back into the soil. They're irrigating them soils themselves. You don't need lawnmowers if you have chickens, right, the chickens eat the thing. The shade of the trees keeps the temperature down. It produces fruits like avocado, papaya, like I said before, for mongos, plantains. These trees that naturally grow in this area keep the soil rich and the coffee strong.

So you're keeping the temperature down.

The land does what it absolutely does, so now you don't need pesticides. You also need less water because when the temperature being shaded and brought down, the water's not evaporating as fast. Whoa, and then the quality of the bean is higher. Now here's where the indigenous practices move from just the ground to also the community. Rather than having one hundred small farms compete against each other, they

No, by our beans.

They pull all the beans together, bring all of their crops together, and they say, yeah, maybe I can't produce whatever kilos that this person needs by themselves, but we can produce that.

So that way if there's a.

Farm over here that's got a smaller crop because maybe you know, mother in law got sick so they weren't able to work as hard as they can for those beans. Or maybe collectively, again heat dome was too high, there was too much of a drought. We really couldn't grow that much on our own. Together though we could meet this order. You follow me and when that happens, because again,

Now, the main load goes.

To the particular farm that it was ordered from, but the rest of it goes and it's spread across the entire community.

Following me.

Okay, now back to the soil situation.

I feel like I'm all over the place, but you have to understand because the problem's all over the place, and a lot of these places are connected.

So in Colombia they kind of did the same thing.

So Lapamel tu Acon is the place that everybody comes into and since every individual farmer does not have connections across the world with bringing buyers in and there's no promise that they won't be taking advantage of and ain't gonna be able to sell but maybe five ten percent of the crop. The rest of it either goes to the trash or goes to the sea market. It's just the open stock market. You just hope somebody buys your beans.

We'll buy your coffee, all of it.

And not only will we buy your coffee, because we know you need soil. We're gonna set you up with a business so that not only can you sell your coffee to us, you can also sell your fertilizer to us. And the fertilizer that you're creating, we're going to build that business for you. And how they do this is this thing called biochar. Now it makes so much sense. If you have donkeys and other places at, pigs and other animals that have waste, you can make fertilizer.

Duh, right, So what they do is this.

They have these composts, these big old flat things that they build in front of you.

They basically they build it for you.

They went to all the local farms and they were like, we'll build this for you, right, and then we'll buy the product from you. So they build these flatbed things where you could take all the stuff that you would compost anyway and put it in this flatbed, cover it, and then we're going to give you this stuff called biochar, which is some of the dope. It's like Mother Nature

We'll figure out a way to sell it. You're still getting paid anyway.

We're buying your whole crop rather than the ten percent that would happen, Like I said before, if your beans aren't as good as they're supposed to be. These programs by one hundred percent from these farmers. So these farmers are able to sustain themselves. Right, and now you can pass these farms down to your children, right because we're doing this collectively. Since we're doing this collectively, especially it's what happens in Honduras, a third of the money goes

You have to get lifted as something's wrong.

And since these are indigenous communities, they're the most forgotten oftentimes in these areas. So purchasing these coffees really at a high price, which is what we're supposed to do, guarantees that the individual farmers paid, the community is paid.

They got it.

Who don't have access to American and worldwide coffee buyers meet up with this collective, right, the Karacha collective. That's one of them that I'm that I'm specifically talking about. And Karacha signed up with this thing called bext. And what happens in bext is if you've ever been to developing countries, not everybody ain't got a smartphone. So in this thing, once the farmer harvest is alls beans, washes them and says, hey, I got these many kilos of

No, this lady lives down the street. She's born and raised here.

She opens it up and she says to us who flew in from America to be like, yo, we want to try some coffee. Opens the app and says, hey, this is the farmer, this where it is this how much he wants this, how much he asking for it? Here's our price. But I'm looking at the app that's what he's charging. And then I know she's adding a third of that price because the other third of what she's asking for is literally paying for the hospital that's across the street. So it makes perfect sense to me.

Of course I got to pay for shipping. What did you talking about?

So it's all transparent, it all makes sense, and it's all regentitive financially in climate wise. Once we buy it, I can see if she paid the farmer, because that's also in the app. So once the farmer gets his money, takes a picture, got the money, screenshot received, and then a portion of that money is given in cash so that you could pay the kids that picked your farm.

Click saw that. That's in the app. Right as that.

Stuff is shipped across the country or across the ocean, you can put in all of the roasting notes, which are kind of lame if you're not really into stuff like that. And then finally the sealed bag that says here's one from Denver, Queen City Collective Coffee right that. Hey, look, this is a Honduras being. We bought it this price, and then when you pay it's called a third cost.

It goes back to the farmer.

You know how.

I know because there's a QR code. You could check it and the farmer can confirm if they got they money. It's transparency. It's us taking care of us. So obviously, because the world works the way it works. If this continues to be financially viable, here's some of the things we could do. One is we could start drinking more robustica like everybody else, and it's actually delicious if you could find a good roaster. And Tabby is a great roaster New Yen Supply. She's amazing. She does cold brew

This is not a list of everybody doing this.

These are the listed of people that I know personally and people that have researched.

So in North Caak and South Cak you got Black.

And White Roasters, and you got Bridge City Roasters Denver. There's Queen City Collective up in Sacramento. There's Old Soul Coffee, Onyx, Coffee Lab, Coffee Black that's there in Memphis. All these people you could order their coffee is online don Cavo Hall in New York. The transparency is there and is doing its best to make sure that this being stays

Boy, I tell you that's the first lyric.

Yes, all.

Its it could happen here. It's the podcast.

I didn't write an intro for this because everything, everything incredibly sucks. This is the podcast where bad things happened. I'm your host with me as Garrison.

Yeah, it's been a lot of bad things the past week, past year, but the past week and a half it's been pretty bad.

Yeah, And one of the things that's been very bad is literally everything Israel has been up to, like I mean, since it was founded, but the last three four weeks, somehow things have gotten worse, which is a sort of unbelievable thing to say about a genocide, but it's expanding. So yeah, there is at the end of this one of the most bizarre trunk quotes I've ever seen. So that's why I promise to you to stick with this.

So that's been a big part of what's happening.

Something that used to be like controversial and like widely newsworthy a year ago attacks on hospitals now have become so normalized and he sensitized that it doesn't even make headlines, which that's been one of the most indicative factors that this has gone about as bad as it could have. I remember a year ago, we were like debating whether or not the Israeli military intentionally like struck a hospital, and this was like this was like a week's long

Yeah, And I mean, you know, like it's not even just that that the Israelis are deliberately targeting hospitals, it's that the temporary facilities people have been trying to set up because the hospitals are being blown up are also being.

Attacked, Yeah, which has also been going on for ages, Yeah, almost a year now, like almost immediately as soon as like humanitarian aid and like and like like impromptu medical tents were set up. Those were also the targets, and this is this is all discontinued.

Yeah, And I think the thing that's you know, it's bleak about it, right is like I mean, I mean, it's not the thing. The thing that's bleak about it is that they're blowing up hospitals. But I mean, we've reached a point into this where it's not even newsory but be the Israelis don't even like attempt to justify it anymore. I mean, if you if you remember a year ago when they were doing this, it'd be all of the stuff about how, oh we found Homas tunnels

Was this the one who was killed in those like apartment like carpet carpet bombings? Yeah, yeah, so, I mean yeah, even still, assassination is a strong word for uh or I guess a light word for just bombing. Like it was like what three large apartment complexes.

Yeah, they just obliterated a bunch of complexes with like something like eighty bunker busters.

Yeah.

So this is actually the second time that the Israelis have just straight up killed someone they were supposed to nominally be negotiating with. They killed the head of Hamas like in a ran. So you know, we talked about on this show the initial wave of attacks on Lebanon, which is the sort of the pager explosions, and the fallow up to the pager explosions was that they figured out what bunker that ISRAELA was in and they just

They invaded Lebanon, and Israel didn't do very well.

They were expecting, and I think what most people were expecting Hesbla to fight like, you know, like a gorilla army, right doing hit a run attacks, doing doing the sort of like the whole sort of last century of gorilla hit and run campaigns.

And they didn't do that.

They basically they sat there and fought like a conventional army with a bunch of bunker networks. And the Israelis did extremely poorly in that war. And I think this is influenced a lot of the way that people were thinking about how this how this fight was going to work, and it hasn't.

But you know the fact that Hesbla was able to sort of.

Stave off the initial attack and then the Israelis spent like forty more days doing a bombing campaign and everyone just called it quits was absolutely huge for Hesbela as a political force. Unfortunately for them, I guess they burned an unbelievable amount of that political capital that they they'd gotten from being really the first people in a long time to like actually be able to viably claim that

That doesn't make you.

Popular anywhere other than like extremely weird sections of the American left.

Yeah, I mean, I guess some of the American right.

When you're backing a guy who is just like who was doing a thing the Israelis do, like obviously on a smaller scale, but like shooting up like palsi refugee cans.

He's not going to be enormously popular.

Whenever there's a guy who's like seriously maimed your family members, yeah, it's pretty pretty easy to dislike him.

Yeah, and like whatever things that's going on in the story that like we need a fucking seventy part episode to talk about. But Syria occupied a bunch of Lebanon for a long time, and that also like hasn't made him enormously popular in the region. But you know, Heswal's position is that they like they have the slogan that goes the road to Jerusalem runs to Aleppo, which is just like just not how any of this has worked. It's been a complete fiasco. Has lost performance in Syria

And I mean, like it's.

It's a really terrible decision, both on a moral and a strategic level, in the sense that like it caused a rift between what it's supposed to be the resistance factions in Palestine, and it just killed a bunch of people, and like the Iranians are sending I don't actually know how many people know about the story, but one of the like terrifying things that's happening in this is that that there's a bunch of refugees from Afghanistan, you flee

It's fucking shit show.

And this has been extremely bad for their capacity, and it also really hurt has Blot politically because again it

We are back.

So as this has been going on in the past couple of days, net Niyahoo posted a I don't even know how to describe it, one of the weirdest videos I've seen since, like that insane Kevin Bacon won that's just him threatening Lebanon. He says, quote, you have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. She's just straight up threatening Lebanon as Israeli troops are moving across the borders.

Could you give some context for like why Israel is making moves into Lebanon. We know, like they're targeting has Beila, but there's also like a degree of territorial dispute over where Israel ends and Lebanon begins. Yeah, that Israel has been kind of like wanting to increase tensions over for a while, and it feels like they're just using the war in Gaza as a cover to also try to claim like territory of southern Lebanon.

Yeah, and I mean this gets into so I think there's three kind of reasons, and I think that are all overlapping factors for different groups of people, you know, because like dif different Israeli political factions, different sort of strategic like elements of the military set, et cetera, are

Stops, he's gonna be out of office. He's screwed.

Yeah.

Yeah, So like that that's a personal extendent for net and Yahoo. There's also another one outside of the political pressure from from the northern settlers, and you know, the general idea has Bluffing and nen Yahoo personally, which is like Israeli sodas have always been, it's it's most extreme, like most sort of far right, most genocidal like political

Well, I mean, and this is also what's influenced their continued attacks in the West Bank, specifically in the past few months, where they're similarly using what's going on in Gaza, like hiding behind their own atrocities in Gaza as a cover to like try to actually claim more territory in the West Bank, or at least at least push more of like the Palestinian people out of their homes to expand the Israeli settlements. So I think both of these

Yeah, And I mean also I should say that there's a lot of a lot of the people on the ground are pretty convinced that the Israelis are trying to basically just like completely ethnically cleanse like parts of the strip so they can annex it. And I mean it's not something that we like have, like we don't have like a document from Israeli High command that says we're going to annex all of this stuff, but it's it's something that's very least consistent with everything they've been doing.

And just in the past week and a half, they've killed thirteen hundred people.

Yeah, it's insane, Like that's.

More than the number of people who ever were killed in Israel on October like seventh. Yeah, that just doesn't matter because of like all of the racialized aspects of how of how like israel genocide campaign has been able to operate, Like you're not going to see memorials in the States or the thirteen for the thirteen hundred people killed in Lebanon the same way that we will for October seventh.

Yeah, you might get them on a college campus for the cops destroy it.

But like, that's and that's just in one week.

It's over.

They've done over a thousand air strikes the past week. They've killed all these people, and that's I don't Yeah, I don't know what else to say.

Yeah, I'm going to close by on a slightly lighter note from this one of the like even by Trump's standards, an extremely weird quote that he gave about Gaza.

This is from the Guardian.

Quote asked by Hewitt, which is a guy whose podcast he was on, if Gaza could be transformed into Monaco if properly rebuilt, Trump replied to quote, it could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything it's got. It's the best. I've said for years. I've been there, and it's rough. It's a rough place before all the attacks and back and forth it's happened over the last couple of years. He went on. I mean they have

Yeah, I mean that's in line with stuff that Kushner has been saying for a long time yep. And how they are hoping to turn Gaza into a part of Israel, specifically to do real estate development, to turn it into like a resort, to turn it into a golf course, and they're willing to kill tens of thousands of people to do it. And that is like the primary driver at least like for them, for like Trump's team, for why they are They're very happy to seet Nyahuu just do whatever he wants.

Yeah.

And I think there's something else here too, which is that like a lot of the kind of Marxist analysis of this from like a very sort of kind of Marxist has been about how Palestine has been rendered as like surplus population. This is the population that has been kicked out of the circuit of like capital accumulation. They're not necessary for capital to reproduce itself to make more capital, and so no one cares if you kill them. And I think that's wrong. And I think this quote is

Right.

They have decided that this fucking real estate speculation bullshit on a bunch of land that they're taking by just fucking slaughtering all of its inhabitants is more efficient for them than even doing fucking regular capitalism. And that's an absolutely fucking hideous note. And it's the kind of thing that Biden is saying okay to and Trump fucking loves because fundamentally, like Trump's fucking real estate brain is pro genocide, and Biden doesn't give a shit about stopping them, and

They're going to do something. It's going to make everything worse.

But yeah, until then, this has been an update on the genocide and Palestine and the new invasion of Lebanon.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.