It Could Happen Here Weekly 95

When do you guys? Solo intro this podcast? James Stout, Mia Wong do y'all? Uh do y'all just like shout atonally ever have you have y'all tried that yet?

the most recent big political news. Unless he's been indicted again by the time this episode drops, not impossible, send another one ready to draw up. But for my last kind, I think he's at like seventy eight charges felony charges at the moment, so honestly.

now he we're looking at him. He's about to be arraigned as we talk about this, for inciting an insurrection at the capitol. So so that's pretty cool. Mia, you wanted to to start us off here, I think.

counting process and it's fine. But Trump like fucked up and didn't do it the way you're supposed to. Yeah, and you know, there's something sort of I don't know. So there's something I was thinking about while I was reading this, which is like the English languish, doesn't I think part of the issue here is like we don't.

this as we go through this case. But I think it's worth remembering that again, like everything Trump is doing in this is based off of like is it is based off of the sort of Bush thing into in two thousand where he had a bunch of well, okay, so a bunch of Bush's political operatives like stormed one of the one of the places that was doing the recount in Florida and stopped them from counting the votes and then they just delayed and long enough that he was able to get appointed.

that he did. The second one is just him being charged for They they finally found a thing the charge him for doing January sixth, which was they charged him with like conspiracy to obstruct an official preceding, and then they got him also with obstruction obstructing the official proceeding, which again seems like a kind of likeas is, I don't know, it's not quite getting out the pop for tax evasion but like you'd think they'd have something like more prow.

so did Nixon. But they did it with enough plausible deniability, right that the elite were that there was not there was not a fear among the quote unquote deep state or you know, the people the elites in this country that like this would obviously be someone overthrowing the government, right, And Nixon's case, fucking LBJ like basically refused to go after him for breaking the law and extended the Vietnam War and committing treason because it would be bad in

his view for the country. Horrible mistake, obviously, and with George w.

they won the election. And so they worked out this like incredibly basically they worked out this compromise where like the Republicans got Rutherford Behayes like in office, but they

also ended reconstruction. But that but and that that that was a period that was long ago enough that like you could do that ship without like involving the courts or involving this sort of like massive state apparatus, and you kind of like can't, I don't know, you can't outside of like Illinois, you can't really be that corrupt anymore. You have to sort of like.

all of the bathrooms out of one of his houses so it wouldn't be classified the house.

something from any like written document. So this this is why like all the like you know, the like abandon all hope you you enter here from Dante's Inferno. That's that's that's the reason. That's when everyone knows because it's in like the first couple of chapters. And in this one, with this case, the thing that everyone got to was there's this very early part in the entire where the guy's like, well, yeah, so like it is legal to like lie about the election, like you have the free

speech right to do that. But then also Trump knowingly lied about the election and use it to try to like fraud do fraud. And everyone's getting really hung up on this thing about like trying to like the court having to prove that he knew he was lying, which is kind of like an incidental thing to the actual like like the actual stuff is getting charged for we'll get into it, but like like it's not just that he was lying that he was like actively trying to

get a bunch of state officials to like appoint him. Yeah, but but you know, this has led to some just like absolutely hilarious shit from Republicans who are like, none of you can prove that Trump knew he was lying, Like there's there's no way to know Trump is Trump is so Trump that like you can't you can't, you can't convict him lying because he maybe maybe you just didn't know.

initial plan to steal the election was that. Okay, So one of the things that happened in twenty sixteen was that like absentee voters like over like not a woman, but absentee voters like swung enormously Democrat, right, And that was one of the things Trump had been using to

prove there was like voter fraud or whatever. And then you know, COVID happened, and so Trump had this, like you know, had a plan which was like on a what he's like, okay, so on election night, it's going to look like I won because they're only going to have counted, like they're only going to have counted the votes that were like done in person, and those are overwhelmingly Trump. And I remember like that night, like having to tell all my friends like no, no, no, these

are not the real results. This is this is this is just the in person votes. The absentie votes are coming.

Yeah stop, Yeah, it was like it was a it was a whole thing. But you know what, once that fails, right, Trump and his coup plotters are like legal people are just sort of like freestyling it. And that's the part where you get to the actual conspiracies that he's being charged with here. But before before we get to those conspiracies, do you know what else is a conspiracy?

in January sixth. He's the guy who like thinks that he's found a loophole in the law that allows like the vice president to refuse to certify the election. Yeah, and so this is I don't want to make something clear at the outset, like he does not have like Pence does not have the power to do this.

basically not have normal elections. But you know so because this is like dog shit, right, Like, it's bad for a number of reasons. The first obvious one is that like this means you the US does not have one person, one vote at all. Like the entire American political system is just a giant violation of the deference of one person, one vote because people's votes are just worth more than

others because of the electors. The second thing that's really bad, right is again, like those individual electors can technically vote like however they want to, So you could you could be an elector who's posted to vote for someone and then vote for someone else. It's actually happened. Although I'm not mattering, but like one of Gore's electors I think defected to what's his name? The third guy who ran I can't remember his name?

voted for face Spotted Eagle. But yeah, okay, So one thing I wanted to talk about, like with relation to what you're saying here, is like the difference between procedural and substantive democracy, because I think it's really important when

we're looking at like what's happening in the US. So when we talk about like a lot of this language comes from the like nineteen nineties obsession with transitioned to democracy that happens a lot in political science, right, like and history to an extent, where we were looking at these like post Soviet countries and post colonial countries and as they like move move towards this like what's considered a democracy in the kind of neoliberal frame we talked

about procedural and substantive democracy. So procedural democracy are things which have the institutions and procedures in place. You vote, there are elections, the ballots are cast, and that results in this case the elector is going to electoral college

and the e actual college deliver as a president. And then substantive democracy is where people have a substantive say, a means of deciding who is in charge, right who runs a state, And the US is moving further and further from substantive democracy, Like it's been interesting to see people bringing that like because of course that nineteen nineties discourse was centered heavily in the US right as like the paragon of democratic virtue, and then it was used

to condescend to other countries and be like, oh, you're not a fully consolidated democracy with them, Lindzen Stepan. If people want to look up Linds and step Kind, if they're reboard, they can. But they talk about like a consolidated democracy being one where democracy is the only game in town, and all of this stuff like was heavily based on kind of aspiring to be the US, right countries in Africa East when you're perspiring to be an

American democracy. And it's very funny now to see that the US doesn't fit most definitions of a substantive democracy or a consolidated one, Like it's not the only game in town for millions of Americans anymore.

country where democracy is the only game in town. Right, They had an attempted to cop it in nineteen eighty one, and so like then they're kind of looking backwards off something because Spain was satisfactorly democratic for them, but it certainly wasn't for a lot of Spanish people. So yeah, not a big fani.

of this bullshit. Where again, like because because it's based on this elector shit, you can like this is how Trump was able to like to try to do all this very weird stuff. And this is the sort of you know, this is the part where we get into like Trump's second plan, which his plan, and this is the one he's actually getting charged for. So his thing was he was trying to get states to just like

ignore the popular vote and decertified. So there's this process where like there's a day on which like the electors that do the electoral votes are like certified, and so his he was he was trying to do a couple

of things before that. He was trying to like get the actual electors like not certified and then have like another set of electors and pointed that would vote for him, and then that didn't work, and so he was trying to get so like on that same day, there were also a bunch of slates of electors that like like did like a fake appointment thing, basically like trying to

claim they were the real electors in a bunch of states. Yeah, I think, yeah, And this one was funny too because like some of the people who were like who like were on these slates, like didn't know that they weren't the real electors, like they had just been told that they were the real so they like unwittingly were like

part of this coup attempt. And so the the indictment, so that that that that's the second part, and so that also was kind of falling apart, and so then we get to the sort of third thing, which is this entire effort to get Mike Pence to not certify the election or so that district versions one was that he doesn't certify the election at all, and the second version of the conspiracy was like, so there were these states set up where Trump had put like a second

slate of electors, and the plan was to like have those are like contested states, and so the plan was to have Pence say that like none of those states had actually voudly selected electors, so their votes don't matter, and then just like say that Trump won the election. And none of this makes any And the reason this is like incomprehensible is like none of this makes any sense, right, Like this is all just gibberish, that's bullshit. Yeah, but

but into this mess drops Danny Quail. Now I think everyone, so you two know who Daddy Quail is. I I'm realizing I was running into people when I when I've been talking about this sort of story I'm about to tell. Who don't know who Danny Quayle is. And I feel I have a moral obligation to introduce this guy.

is George W. Bush's vice president. Right. It's nineteen ninety two, like the like they're on, they're like starting to go into election season, and Quail goes to like this spelling bee that's happening in this elementary school to like promote some random harm. Yeah, and so so kid. He asked this kid to spell potato, and the kid walks up and the kid spells potato correctly. This kid is like eight right, this is like it is like mighty so

and then I Quail looks at it. It looks at the Apparently they had a card that was spelled wrong. But Quail doesn't realize that the card is spelled wrong, so he goes to the board. He looks at the kid and goes but you need to ask someone to the end. And this kid is just baffled because she's spelled it, know correct?

part of the United States. That is an island that is right there.

and so he calls his old friend Danny Quayle. And I think this is a really fascinating moment of sort of you know, like this, I think it's really fascinating indication of like how off the rails everything has gotten since we released to twenty sixteen, but like twenty twenty sort of just like accelerates the magnitude of this, which is that like Quail is like the human symbol of the decrepitness of American politics in the eighties and nineties, right, Like this is a guy who makes like s Nile

Reguan look like a genius. And in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, like Pence is supposed to be one of the like quote unquote adults in the room in twenty twenty and Pence goes to Quail and is like, what I need. I need to do this coup, Like I don't have a choice. I'm under so much pressure. And Danny Quail, the man who can't spell potato, instantly is like, no, what are you talking about, Like you can't do this coup, like obviously can't do this, and

and Pence Pence just like argues with him. He's like no, no, Like he keeps arguing with him, like no, I have to do what I have to do it, and Quails like what are you talking about? Like of course you can't like not certify the election, Like what what are

you doing? And this actually works and this convinces Pence not to not to actually certify the election, And so you know, we we have reached a point in history where like you can make an argument, I don't think it's correct, but you can make an argument that Danny fucking Quail saved the American Republic.

the January sixth stuff. They spent much time listing like all of the random stuff that Trump said about the

election that was not true. They also have a very funny list of all of the people who told him that like this stuff wasn't true, which includes Mike Pence, the leadership of the Justice Department, the Director of National Intelligence, the head of SISA, which is the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Agency, a bunch of White House attorneys, like his own staff at all of his politicians was backing He's like every single person was like this is not real,

and Trump was like, no, no, no, hold on, we can still win the election, you know. Okay. So there's like that stuff, and then there's the stuff that like he like specifically did to like try to pressure these state politicians into like certifying him as president. So like they he had a bunch of calls, and like his

like staff people had a bunch of calls. We were like they tried to get like that the Speaker of the House in Arizona to do this by saying there was voting fraud, and the Speaker of the House was like, okay, there's no we haven't found any fraud. I'm gonna I'm gonna read from the thing co conspirator to concluded that he quote didn't know enough about the facts on the ground in Arizona, but nonetheless told the Speaker of the House to decertify and quote let the court sort it out,

sort it out. So again, this is this is this is the Roger Stone strategy, but done like yes, so unbelievably poorly.

And this is where we get to another part of this whole thing that I this has been getting a lot of press attention and it's interesting, but I think there's more to the story that people haven't been talking about, which is so the guy who's probably Jeffrey Clark like gets into an argument with the deputy White House Council and the wut White House Council is you know, is telling? Is telling Jeffrey Clark, who thinks one of Trumps lawyers is telling him like like Trump can't stay in office.

Like there's no version of this where Trump stays in office after January twentieth, and he says, quote, there would be riots in every major American City. And then the guy who's probably Clark says, quote, well, Deputy White House Counsel, that's why there's an Insurrection Act. And this is where we need to get to another a couple of interesting parts of the story.

twenty twenty one. But like in that last year, he tries to use the Insurrection Act against the uprising in twenty twenty, and his like his Chief of stat like like a bunch of like a bunch of generals and

chief of staff like tell them the fuck off. And that's like part of the reason why this didn't happen, which which is interesting because like I don't know, like there there have been, like there have been times where the US Army like has been deployed against like riots like this, right like this this happened in the nineties, but in this situation, the army just like absolutely completely

refuse to play ball. And we've we've gotten some really kind of interesting So the other thing that's happening here is like just the complete hollowing out of journalism as an institution where all of these people know all of the all these journalists like know a bunch of incredibly important stuff and they won't tell anyone because they they're saving it for their books, yep, and you know, and it's like among the things that we sort of learned

in this period is like there there's basically this like I don't know what you call it, Like you could either call it like a quad um for it basically, or you could call it like a National Unity government which is in power for two weeks basically where Pelosi Miley, who's uh, he's uh, the chief of staff who's a general, like Mike Pence, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell basically are like running the government for two weeks because they've successfully

put together this counter coup where the like the military has refused to like go along with Trump like trying to overthrow the government. And this is very deeply I don't know. There's some very deeply interesting stuff here where there's there's a there's a book called Iolone Can Fix It, which a couple of journalists are coming out with and there's some interesting quotes from it from specifically General Mike Miley, who's like the chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff,

who was appointed by Trump. By the way, this this is this is an important thing because like Trump, there's like seven guys who are like absolute ghouls, like Mike Pompeo, like Cia ghoul who are just like look at this coup and are like no, and Miley stuff is wild. Like Miley directly can like in meetings, is comparing Trump to Hitler. He says, quote, yeah, this is a Reichstag moment. Miley told aids the Gospel of the Fearer, like and.

Democracy because that was big at the time. But it would make sense because he's talking in substantial detail about like he's very you can tell he's very focused in this period on Nazis taking over the government, Like he talks about it a lot.

And he's right about this. And this is a really crucial thing that Trump fucks up about how to do a fascist coup is that you can't actually like fascist coup don't work without the at least passive acquiescence of the state. Like, if the state tries, if the army tries to stop you, your coup is not going to work, right, Like, unless you're someone like Franco who like has control of a huge portion of the army, if you try to do one of these sort of weird paramilitary things and

the army just says no, like you're screwed. And this I think was always part of trump sort of problem was that, like, you know, if he'd sort of spent his time consolidating the kind of like fascist institutions, the neo cons set up, right, Like, if he'd spent his time like you know, actually like actually developing loyalty in the FBI and the CIA and like going through and like turning Department Homeland Security like you know, into like an even more fascist organization.

have a peaceful transfer of power. We're gonna put a steel ring around this city, and the Nazis aren't getting in.

You know, he was not a guy who was interested in staying in office. For I don't say this to defend the man he killed hundreds of thousands of people minimum, But because he was willing, he had a degree of loyalty to the system as it was seen by most people. There was not this kind of rebellion from sort of within it, right like. In fact, that deep state was

largely sympathetic with him. They were willing to go with like the fucking around with the election as long as, you know, the broader structures that had given them a place to exert power and influence remained intact. And Trump was basically saying, if Millie had gone with this, if everyone had gone with this, what you are accepting is that nothing matters but this guy's opinion. Right There's not actually any sort of power in the system that you

have risen to the top of. There's not any sort of power in these unelected structures within the system that you clearly think are important because they are how you why like, where you have seen success, right like, And frankly, you know people aren't willing to do that sort of thing. And also you're fighting against a lot of people who want to whatever fucked up things they are willing to do. They have a lot emotionally invested in the idea that

they serve a democracy. Now is that a morally flawless idea? Are they always? In fact? Like no, of course not like everyone. They're hypocrites to certain extents, But you can't pushed them that far like Bush pushed them about as far as you can push people like that. Right, this Trump didn't have any respect for making it, for dressing it up right, and he didn't have any respect for the thing that they were a part of, and so of course a lot of them didn't go with him.

We've had nine to eleven, and that means the countries in this state were like, we have the power to be like the people inside the system who are out bound by it, you could do whatever you want and like that is descriptively right, like this is you know, both Carl Schmidt, the like Nazi jurists like that. That was explicitly like his model of how you do fascism, right,

and it's as also like something you know. But but the thing is again like that's a very different thing than what Trump was doing, right, Like Trump wasn't doing like Trump wasn't doing this thing where he like you know, uses the as of the state he was, he was doing a different, like different kind of.

But like the problem with this is like Trump is, you know, he wins the primary, like very explicitly by running against a lot of the like like by nay, running against neo conservatives. You can argue the extent to which he actually broke with it in terms of like appointing like gena. You know, he puts a bunch of neo kon gorougles like back in power, right, But like

like nominally he's running against that specific thing. And it turns out that like if if you if your appeal is you know, being like a nominally anti systemic force, and then you have to try to use the system to stay in power. It's like, well, you know this, this happens like now you are getting charged by Jack Smith and you have like seventy eight counts against you instead of you are now the fearer.

where what Yeah, anyway, so there's some infol on this. Basically, on March twenty ninth, he was averaging about forty five percent in national primary polls, which I'm bringing up here because they help show the impact of the indictment because you don't have a lot of national polls from that time a national general election polls. So forty five percent in March, after his first set of indictments. In April, he was up to fifty four percent, So that first

set of indictments did not harm him. They have helped him consolidate power, may have activated a chunk of his base. The second indictment did not work the same way though. After June eighth, when it was reported that he was being indicted for the classified document shit and obstructing justice and getting.

point thirty eight article about his indictment poles here. Although we can't prove that all these shifts happen because of the indictments, the difference in reaction at least suggests that Americans are drawing distinctions between Trump's various legal troubles and

other polling backs that up ing to do. A Yugov Yahoo News poll from July thirteenth through seventeenth, fifty percent of registered voters considered falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star to be a serious crime, but sixty four percent of registered voters consider it a serious crime to take highly classified documents from the White

House and obstruct efforts to retrieve them. Similarly, a June twenty second to twenty sixth pole from the Associated Press NRC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only thirty five percent of US adults thought Trump did something illegal when it came to the hush money payments, but fifty three percent thought he did something illegal with regards to classified documents founded his Marologu resort in Florida. By this logic, this third indictment could be even more damaging to Trump

than the one involving classified documents. According to the same Yugo of Yahoo News poll, sixty nine percent of registered voters considered it a serious crime to attempt to obstruct the certification of a presidential election, and seventy one percent said the same about conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election.

I don't think the data suggests that, but it it there's a I think a pretty good chance that this is a net negative for him in terms of, you know, the election and broadly speaking, you know, we gave the Dims a lot of shit for a couple of years for not doing enough to actually seriously strike back at the Republican authoritarian outreach, and so it would be unfair of me to not say it's good that they're doing this, like it's good that he's facing legal trouble for what

he's done. That's not enough to stop him. That's not enough to stop the Republican Party, but it is good that this has been done.

we're still living in the eternal twenty twenty and everything is still absolutely nuts. But I don't know, it's like there's been this incredible sort of like normalization effort, both by Biden and also like buy the Republicans to make it seem like this was like a normal thing that happened as opposed to like the immediate wake if it, where everyone was like what the fuck? So hopefully not too little, too late, hopefully this does something, but.

like in young people and young athletes. Because, as many of you will have been aware, this has been increasingly an area in which anti vaxxers and conspiracy theorists have been trying to leverage what is an unfortunate but not unprecedented cardiac arrest, like in this case, most recently Bronnie James, but it has happened before in the number of sports, and they've been trying to leverage us as of quote unquote like prove for evidence that that vaccines are killing

otherwise healthy young people, which is nonsense. And I can tell you it's nonsense. But someone who can tell you from much more informed perspective is Glenn so Glinn. Could we start up by maybe talking about how common this sudden cardiac arrest in young athletes is and what we might what hypothethies we might have to what caused it.

but proportion relatively small. But we've known about this for a long time and these numbers actually really haven't changed very much in decades.

of cardiac arrhythmias are known to be increased. Patone study showed that what I guess the year and a half ago by now, certainly early in the pandemic, one of the first signs we were seeing people who were being infected were having heart attacks, developing heart failure, these things, and in cardiac arresk the most common cause or cardiac arrhythmius.

The Patone study showed. And every time I talk about this, I have to go back and look, because the increase was several hundredfold after COVID, and so I've never really seen anything like that before. So arrhythmias are relatively common in terms in the world of cardiovascular disease, and the fact that COVID the infection, actually increases it, but the vaccines do not means that the risk for some cardiac death really would be highest amongst those who are infected, not those who get vaccines.

kardiac issues are most common. And so we've seen in some recent studies that people who are in even what they described as partially vaccinated for one or two doses had a reduced risk of what we call MACE, which is a major adverse cardiovascular event. And so that's an all encompassing term, which would be things like stroke, heart attack, you know, things things like that, those major cardiac events. That's data has come out earlier this year, within the last year, a couple of studies.

point to end of indurance sport. I think the fittest people are not necessarily the healthiest, but very fit sometimes very healthy people have friends of mine have had these issues. Is in those cases and we might not know. I don't know is being an athlete like increasing someone's chance of having those cardiacorists or is it that they have some kind of pre existing condition that's just that's just been underlying for a while.

times the rate that that's groups of athletes. Subsections are actually higher, So we know the radius higher in these athletes, typically these high performance athletes. You know why that is, It's an interesting question. It could be the training, for example, puts a stressor on them. So they may have a pre existing condition. They may have a cardiac orarithm of like long Qt syndrome or even something called hypertrophic cardiomopathy.

Sometimes they know about it and sometimes they don't, and then the training on top is enough of a trigger. So one of the examples I use in my class is Anthony Evenlous, a soccer player I believe it was in the Netherlands. He was playing. He had a known cardiovascular condition so he had what's called it ic D or planet cardiodefibrillator while he was playing, and he suffered some cardiac death on the field. There's actually video of it,

and that shocked him back into rhythm. So you know, some of these people may not know and discover in the course of training, and some may know and opt to take that risk anyway, and then it's the training that or the competition that brings it out.

be your NCAA or college athletes. Some of them are professional athletes, you know, soccer players and the you know, the British League and things like that. So these are people who play at a at a competitive level. Oftentimes they're making a living. I mean, you can argue whether college athletes are making a living out of this, but there's there's some high level of competition in these athletes.

That's generally the people that were that these studies are based on, not the guy who goes to the gym twice a week or something like that.

call it. The list of people that they have on there. For example, they have musicians, they have a Thai princess on the princess from Thailand on there, and they also have people who died of cancer, someone who got an eye injury. So I'm not really sure, first of all, what their definition of athlete is. I'm not sure what their definition of sudden cardiac death is. When you have people dying of cancer or suffering an eye injury like that, those are are not related at all. There was an

earlier list. I think it's related to the Good Sciencing. I wrote about this probably a year or so ago. I went through the list of people that they had on at the time. There was about one hundred, just a little over one hundred people that they cleim died. There were soccer referees on there, there were retired athletes, there were people one guy was out for a hike. He was listed there. Now, you could argue a soccer referee is athletic, certainly, you know, running around the pitch

doing that. I could see that. But that person died at home in their sleep, not in competition. The retired soccer player had been retired for six or seven years. So even in the cases where they have athletes, they're really stretching what we would define as an athlete.

in the US, much higher than other sports. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, basketball is can be an aerobic event and that you're running back and forth, you know, up and down the court quite freely, but it's punctuated by these bursts of of you know, sprints and things like that, which somehow speculated that might kind of be the issue, right that you don't settle into just a simple rhythm I'll say simple rhythm like you know, like

riding a bike is. It's not it's obviously simple as as you describe it, but at least potentially there there's periods of time when you can sort of get into a rhythm and stay there and hear it's it's rest periods punctuated by these rapid bursts. And so there's the possibility that that may be related there.

cause these these issues. And yet the spike protein in the vaccine, which has been designed to limit that injury, somehow overcomes that and actually causes the injury that's not associated with the infection. Like like note that it makes sense, right, you have to work live in these parallel worlds that don't don't ever mix, right.

that their heart couldn't pump it anymore, and that this was causing people to die, and the reason that they died was because they were taking excessive amounts of blood boosters like EBO or exog a CPO. And so, I this wasn't true, at least to my knowledge. I don't think any of these people had tested positive. None of them had like autopsies that suggested that this is why

they had died. But it seems to me that there's this natural desire to try and explain away these deaths of what people who are at the peak of their physical lives, right, people in their in their teens and twenties, are extremely fit, who we can see doing amazing things, and doesn't sort of line up for us when they die. It doesn't line up with what we think a healthy person is and what we think a cardiac patient is. And so it seems to me that we create these explanations.

Is that something you've seen in other areas before the COVID vaccine where there are other sort of conspiracies or just ways to try and explain this away.

something that's going to harm your body. And so that has to be the explanation because it's it's it's easy, that's that's a simple way to get to this. The reality is that a good number of these people have underlying cardiac conditions. Not again, I don't necessarily mean a lot of cyclists have that. What I mean is the people who have these sudden cardiac desks have undiagnosed cardiac

conditions long QT. There's a condition called CPVT, you know, something like that, and so they're relatively i'll say benign. TPVT isn't necessarily but it's triggered. These things are triggered by stressful events like exercise and things like that. And so they may live a good part of their life and to be in our seemingly in good health, and then the first sign for many of these people is death.

That's the real challenge in dealing with these cases that lead to some cardiac death, because that's the first symptom. People don't feel tired, they don't you know, have chest pains like having a heart attack or anything like that. It's simply something happens. The wiring goes off in the heart and you put the exercise on top of it and they die. You know, it's not just these athletes. You'll have somebody who has a change in one of their genes. They're perfectly fine. Do they live into their

sixties and then they suddenly die. Well, what allowed them to live sixty years with you know, no symptoms? We don't really know, but it's not uncommon that the first symptom is death. And these people, so your friends there who you know, it's it's easiest to accuse them of doping because certainly we a lot of us talked about it at the time, as I'm sure you know you knew about it. There's no secret. So we connect those dots, right, we can see that, we can see that, let's connect them.

We can't let's see long cut. So we don't know what long QT syndrome is. For a lot of people, it's hard to make that connection when you don't know.

you know, to speculate like like that. I can talk about what are some things that lead to these these conditions generally in people, But I don't know anything about his health, and so it's not helpful for me to sit here and speculate on that while his family and then he himself is trying to you know, sort of get through that. That's you know, that's I'm sure that's upsetting for them. So I'm not sure why people feel the need to do that, except to advance their own agenda.

do that. Is that something where if there was an underlying one of these underlying risk factors that you mentioned, would would it be spotted on a test like that?

The other test is what we call eco cardiography, which is basically an ultrasound of the heart, and there you can look at function, but you can also look at structure. Because there's a condition called hypertrophic cardiomopathy, it's relatively common in athletes. It's more common there, and that accounts for about fifty percent of these sudden cardiac deaths. And so you can pick that up on an ECG, but you

can also pick it up using ultrasounds. So if you scan the heart you see that it's very large, that would be a diagnosis. So first in Europe they do that. In North America and Canada and the United States they do not. The concern is there's a couple of concerns. One is the price, so you can you're screening large numbers of athletes to pick out a relative small number who may be affected. It's crude, but that is an

argument that people make. So I guess the question comes to how much is life worth to you and how much do you want to spend. So there is that. But there is another issue, which is what they call false positives. So you know, had you been diagnosed as having a condition, then you maybe pulled out of training for a little while while they do more tests and stuff like that that could be very stressful on you.

And so the view in North America's there's an unacceptably high number of those false positives, and so they feel that it's not worth worth doing the other issue. So I'm not sure when when did you do this screening? Was it like twenty years.

of disease. Right. If you took someone who wasn't highly fit and had so for example, if you screen someone's heart and you saw that it was very large and they didn't exercise, you might be concerned. But if you're you know, an elite cyclist where your heart gets very big, it's going to be bigger. And so what we have struggled with for a number of years, is what is normal in the athlete that would be considered abnormal in the general population. Italy has done a really good job

on this. So start going back into the nineteen eighties, they started to collect data because that's what we need, right, we need data from athletes, and they created a huge database which actually used in my class now to teach and say, you know, if you have an athlete and you see these things, these are things we wouldn't be concerned about. Or here's some markers where we might be concerned,

and so we have to look further. And then here's some things where it doesn't matter whether you're an athlete or you know, someone who sits on their couch all day, that's a problem. But without that data, we didn't we didn't have that ability. And so I think the last time is twenty eighteen. The Europeans updated their their criteria. Each time they update it, you know, we add new things or modify things that are in there. So you

would have had abnormal things. You may have had abnormal things on your ACG that the cardiologist would have looked at it and said, well, according to our athlete standards, that's okay, and we're going to ignore it. And we didn't have that until relatively recently.

rates forty two beats a minute. She doesn't do any exercise, and the physicians are like, oh, she must be very healthy. I'm like, no, that's not normal. And so it turned out so the reason they flagged her was because she kept passing out because she was bred a kartick and she eventually broke her nose and was sent to the hospital. They did a genetic test and found that she had

a cardiac arrhythmia. Right, So my what I always teach my students is don't just look at the monitor, look at your patient, right, So when your heart rates forty beats a minute and they're cycling away and you know, he's like, yeah, that person's very fit. As like when you look and they're eighty years old and they're passing out, forty beats a minute is not normal, right, And so we don't need real high standards for some of these things, but some of them we did.

that requires calculations. So for sure, you need to measure things very accurate. Really, when I'm sure when you had your your traits done, you would have had multiple electrodes stuck on your your body. Yeah, we typically do what's called the twelve lead ECG, and so there's there's multiple electrodes and they have to be positioned in certain places in order to measure how the heart basically the heart's electricity is flowing in a certain directions because that actually

tells us something. So when you have I mean, I have a device that I used to teach and to illustrate people, and it's on the back of my cell phone, and they could just you know, you put your fingers on it and you can you can you can measure things and you get an ECG off that and so it looks really neat and it's great for teaching. But I'm not going to diagnose somebody with Goddess syndrome or

long QT or any of those those things. Those are much more in depth, uh to, It's required much more in depth equipment to do something.

certainly do that. You know. In Canada, abouteen years ago now, the Heart instruct Foundation of Canada raised a tremendous amount of money to put we call automatic extrung defibrillators or AEDs in public places. I think they put fifteen thousand of them, plus companies will buy them for o their workplaces and things like that. And so if someone goes down and their heart stops, you take these things out.

There's some patches. It comes with instructions, like it will tell you actually what to do, and you take it out, you put the patches on the individual, you step back because it will deliver a shock and it will automatically shock their heart trying to get it back into rhythm. So knowing where those are, I'll say, knowing how to do them, you don't necessarily need to practice because it will walk you through it. But at least knowing where they are and not being afraid to use them, I

think is very important. These quick reactions in administering care before the paramedics or someone else gets there is super important. If you let someone go five ten minutes without any you know, CPR or anything like that, there's a tremendous amount of damage that's that's done and it can't be overcome.

how to how to do it. Yeah, I'm not sure where people if you just go on the internet and wherever you are and look for first day, a lot of times it falls on the first day. But if you just google your city and CPR, I'm sure something will come up. And I bet there's something this month you could go to NICs.

mean that we don't care. And so you know when a soccer player, a football player, somebody goes down on the court, that we just say, well, yeah, it happens. That's not what we're saying. We're saying we know these things happen, we do care about them. I would actually flip this around the other way and say some of these people, the people who I'm talking about, the people who are profiting off that's not people who are like I had no idea this was happening. That's okay. You know,

not everybody can know everything. But the people who are saying this is increasing and they're making money off these things by selling their movies and whatever. Did you not care when someone you know died in twenty fifteen because they were in twenty nineteen or die and kids were doing it? And if you'd like to come to my class, I can show you, you know, the pictures of these people because you weren't around then. And I'm wondering, I'm not really wondering why you're around now. I know why

they're they're around now. They're they're profiting off of this, and so I would actually flip it the other way and say, you know, have them ask ask them why is this new to them when when we've when the data show this has been happening all.

they get their information. Right. So when I say, you know, the vaccines reduced your risk of these major cardiovascular events, I typically provide a study or something like that to show where I got that information. The people who are less trustworthy will say, you know, either go find it yourself because they don't know, or well, I can see it, I know it's happening. You know, a lot of these things are measurable, so we should be able to to

find those. A lot of us write on things I've written for the Conversation Shi It's two point zero things will be there. But social media is a good place to go because you can interact with people and you can ask those those questions. So yeah, yeah, you can reach out to me and see who I follow on who I interact with if if, if you're interested in that, you could take that as a good or a bad sign. However, if you.

they're doing wouldn't line up with pay reviewed science. So it would be interesting to decrite there.

time we do these. I am not that kind of doctor, and I am not your doctor, and I just wanted to reinforce especially that yes, generally, of you're hot, it's a good idea to drink fluids and get out of the heat. Someone is losing consciousness or really really sick, you need to get better medical attention. Then you can learn how to give on a podcast. Right, So that's when you call someone whose job is to look after people,

and I just wanted to reinforce it. Obviously, pouring water down the throat of someone who's lost consciouness is a very dumb idea, so please, if somebody is seriously unwell, seek medical care. Enjoy the episode. All right, Hi, welcome to It could happened here in a podcast where we someone knows that God, which is what I was doing just before the podcast began. Maybe we'll include that. And today we're here to talk about how God is smiting

us with massive heat waves. And I'm joined today by Margaret Kiljoy and Garrison Davis say hello everyone.

they can't get out of the heat. So I think to start off if I want to talk about things that might make you predisposed, and then I'm going to expend a little bit of how the body cools, and then some of these different stages of heat illnesses and how one might go about treating those or seeking further care if you need to. Right, So to start out with, there are some things that can make you predisposed to heat illness. Right, the biggest predisposition I've come acrossrom my

reading is previously having heat illness. So I can certainly speak to this. Yeah, Like I think I got heat stroke for the first time. It was racing by in Spain, I think, But I then remember getting it again racing bikes in Vietnam, and just like being really bad, like having to have ivy fluids, like vomiting sort of even some like sort of not loss of consciouness, but definitely like confusion and erratic behavior and stuff.

you can die. People do die. Actually, the mortality is quite high, Like I too prepare for this, so I want to look at advanced Weldness Life support course I did, and people can look it up. AWLS University of Utah does one, and you can act as lots of the

stuff online for free. But they would think the mortality is quite high from these like heat illnesses, and I think that's probably especially true in wilderness medicine, because it can be hard to cool someone down right if you don't have means of like if you don't have access to ice, you obviously not got air conditioning out there.

If the best thing you probably have is running water, hopefully you have running water, right, And I think probably it's something that people might not have been concerned with unless they either lived in a very hot place or a very active people, or who traveled a lot before. So yeah, if you've had heat illness before, then you do need to be careful and you will probably know

if you've had it before. But if we go through all the symptoms, you've had them all and never I guess got diagnosed, and lucky you, maybe you just found out you had heat illness. Other things that can predispose you can be a lack of acclimates. Again, like this is one that I think kind of stands to reason for most people. But like if you go from a cold place to hot place, or the place you are suddenly becomes hot having been cold, it's going to take you a few days a week to become a climatized

to that heat, right, and your body will change. Things about your body will change, So we don't need to go into But it's also.

that's the first time I got heat stroke. Was like pre season workouts for like especially like collegiate athletes and things or athletes who are more seasonal athletes, So people who have been parked on their backside for a few months or in class or whatever, and then they come and to start doing a rigorous training regime that can that can predispose you, right, so they can cause you

to be more likely to get a heat illness. And then there are some medications, right, so you'd probably say on your medications, but things like beta block is actually hisstormyines, diuretics, you don't want to be drinking too much alcohol, and some conditions to write, heart disease, skin disease, existing dehydration fever obviously, right, your temperatures high to begin with, and

diarrhea and vomiting which can cause that dehydration. Right, So looking if you have diarrhea and vomiting, it's not a good idea to also be going out and exposing yourself to a lot of heat. Right, So all of those things can make you more predisposed. But you can have none of those things and still get heat illness. I think the way to understand it is like the way we'll talk about the way our body cools, so it does that through evaporation. People will be familiar with sweating.

Most people sweat and so if you the sweating allows your body to cool, right, The evaporation of the sweat allows your body to cool. So people who don't sweat, or people who have injuries which means they don't sweat some of their body again, are at a higher risk for heat illness.

the humidity was so high. So yeah, whether ho humidity is high, you're not going to be able to cool as much, right, so you need to be more careful radiation that that's when your body is shedding heat through, like I guess electromagnetic energy. That makes up most of your cooling when the ambrrient temperatures are less than body temperature.

So once the ambient temperature is above your body temperature, I think in fahrenheit's like ninety six point six, your body's going to be relying on other methods, right, that one's not going to work. Conduction. Conduction doesn't really make up much of It's not really that useful way to cool. It doesn't really make much difference. But like people will be familiar with conduction if you've ever slept without a sleeping pad, if you've been camping, you'll realize how much

colder you get on cold ground. And then the last one is convection, right, So that's heat transfer between the body and then moving gas or liquid. That's why wind chills the thing, okay, because that airs whipping past you rate cooling you down. And that's also the convection is one that we can use to cool people down if they overheat, right, like jump in the create so yes, or if we don't have a creek, we can get

you wet and then fan you. Maybe we can if we're outside and we have those big thermorest sleeping pads, we can get some air moving that way and help you cool down. If we know the ways the body cools, then we can maybe use this right. And we we have to understand, like you said, the relative humidity read. So when our body gets hot, especially when it starts to overheat, it will shd some blood to the skin

right vaseodilation. It will also increase cardiac output and increase catecula means which activate a sweat glands.

think we can probably skip like sunburn. Many of us will be familiar with someburn and it will have been sunburned. Many of us will understand hopefully we're wearing our suncream when we go outside, right or just wearing our suncream and covering ourselves up from the sun, not just like running around with our skin exposed to the sun when

it's one hundred and ten or what have you. So step up from there would be heat cramps, and cramps can come from various things, right, Like, I think not all cramps are caused by sodium depletion or potassium depletion. People sometimes think that it's a potassium thing. Some of them can just be caused wherever exertion. It can be

your body's way of being, like, hey, stop. So, like, if you know it's fifty degrees out and you're trying to run your fastest tank ca and you have cramps, that's not a heat thing, that's just your body being like, okay, you're not ready for this.

of cramps. But you know, if we're exercising it's good to stop, it's good to cool down, it's good to rehydrate. So that's where you're going to start with your ooral salt solution. And generally, from what I've seen, it's a sodium thing, so that that's just like a quarter to a half a teaspoon of table salt and a liter of water.

from the age station to just drinking the water. Yeah, it's never like it's you know, when it's hot, if you're having you know, when I was bi racing, a to do one drink of water and one drink of electrolyte even in the heat, pretty much like one bottle. There are two bottles on a bicycle thing. I think that's a fine thing to do if you're in the

heat and in you're exercising. You don't need to be smashing gatorade all the time because that's a lot of sugar and it might that will also not empty from your stomach. So, you know, a modern sports drink should have the right solution. You know, there are lots of brands. I'm not going to recommend one, but there are lots of different brands which should have a decent sort of four or five percent carbo hydrate solution, and I think

one that tastes nice to you. And then we move from there into a couple of different things, heat exhaustion and heat syncope. Heat syncope is when you'll see people like fall over, and it happens often like the only time I've seen it happen is people stopping after like a long run, like specifically like when they push themselves really hard, right, And it can actually be it can be people who are not particularly dehydrated or hypothermic, but a sort of a long run and heat you're not

acclimated to. It can blood can pull in the legs, and it's it's often people who are elderly are not very well acclimated, and it's normally when they're standing at stationary and that's something that you can treat by elevating the feet where's the personal lies down, and then just getting them out of direct sunlight and helping them rehydrate, right, So helping them cool rehydrate. You're going to see that in nearly all of these cases, cooling someone off it's

the most important thing to do. So next time we talk about heat exhaustion again, like you'll know something is wrong in these situations, right, Like if someone's just just like falling over, you will know something is wrong. If someone's yeah, then in case he's like you'll know like having had heat exhaustion heat stroke, like you yourself will also know. There are certain like like ecstasy is a big one, right when people people quite often get heat

illness when they're like at raves on ecstasy. And that's just because obviously like altered state of mind plus dancing, uh plus plus this drug, which is you know, your body is not not making its usual responses, I guess, and that can be so like, you know, if it's one hundred and ten out, maybe that's not the time to be doing M B M A and raving.

with yoursemble plants. So other signs, right, tiredness, weakness, uziness, headache, fainting, knows you're vomiting, muscle cramps, nausea and vomiting. It's ralph. I remember that the worst heat on this I've ever had was in Vietnam doing a bike race. One of the rules in a bike races that you can't take supplies from your support car in the last fifty kilometers, and it was just so hot, and I remember being like,

I'm baking inside my skull. I'm baking it inside my skull, like and I'd been previously in like a little group in front of the main group, so I also hadn't been able to access water from my car then and then drop, we got caught by the main group, is what happened. And I remember being like, okay, good, Now I can get my eye socks and put them down my back and I can get my cold water. And then I went back and the guy was like, no, no, no, it's like forty nine kilometers and I was like, oh,

this is bad, this is really fucking bad. And it was really bad.

this race? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, going out there like full Look if there's nothing that what is more white man on the left and you know, got white dude with a beard. It's like all of them, right, crook and bacuona marks, and you have to try it. Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that to yourself. We talked about heats and cope and the last one is heat stroke. So what differentiates heat stroke from heat exhaustion is that higher body temperature above forty degrees celsius, which is one

hundred and three hundred and four fahrenheit. If you're seeing one hundred and three, it's time to pick up the telephone and call nine on one if you can, if you're in an area where you can do that. But it doesn't matter. It's one hundred and three one hundred and four. I guess it's that you're very hot. At that point, you're going to have hot, red skin, a fast strong pulse, headache, dizziness, naughty of confusion. People can

also lose consciousness. So this is very serious, right, And the line between this and really serious lasting complications is quite quite small, So you do need to be very

extremely concerned. I will say that, like when you're taking someone's temperature, taking it at the extremities is not necessarily going to give you the best idea of what their core body temperature is, right, and so that's sort of reason that like if if they're hot, if like, if it's hot, they're hot on the outside, right, like an

ear or what have you. And then if you if you've then tried to cool the person and you're seeing like a lower body temperature in their hand or if you're yeah, if their hands been in ice, you know, in ice bath, then you might see a cooler temperature there. And that's that there are like rectal probes are used for this not something to be doing in a sort of non consensual manner. They're not really something to be doing unless you're like a medical professional. But if you're,

if so, just don't don't be relying again. So you know, people have those little heat guns that they like to use and stuff might not be the most reliable source of information.

has become like a heat casualty. You can put them in the groin, armpits, the neck, and you can also if you don't have access to AC obviously you've got a c you can put the person in an air conditioned environment to help them cool down. You can put them in an ice bath. You'll see that like at hot weather events. I'm trying to think there are a lot of other conditions that you'll see a hot weather events.

We don't really have time to talk about. Things like rabdough are very very concerning if someone's exercising in the heat. But you'll often see at the end of hot events in first day tents they're popping people in ice bas to cool them down. They've got some of these symptoms, like fifteen twenty minutes I think is how long you want to put them in there for. But like if you're starting to feel headache, dizziness, and nausea, I guess my big take home here is get out of the sun,

stop exercising if you're exercising, and start hydrating. If you're not hydrating with with that carbohydrate solution and you're looking to drop that cool temperature, that core temperature below that kind of danger zone, right, and I really get it back to where what's to be, which which I think

in fahrenheit's around ninety six point six. You you probably don't want to actively cool someone all the way down because you can overshoot and they can get hypothermic and so like they can they can get too cold if you're like you know, dumping them in a freezer or like you know, actively calling them to aggressively. So that's something to be concerned with as well. And you don't want the person to start shivering because the body's trying to heat yourself back up at that point, so you

can't be uber aggressive. But I think having said all this, like I said, the big take home is like if you start to feel sick, dizzy underwell, when you're outside in the heat, to get out the heat, get some water, get into shade, if you can, get their conditioning if you can. If you're at a job site, you know, if there's like a trailer where you with the sad conditioned, go in the trailer, like it's not worth your life, even if it's your job.

But it's like basic worker protections, like don't have people work outside without enough stuff to make sure they don't.

for all of the people who aren't humans. Different animals need different electrolyte feel formulas if you are going to feed them electrolytes, and for example, dogs need more sugar and less salt because they their bodies don't get rid of salt as much. Right, they don't really sweat nearly so much. Occasional pedialyte or some other like non gator ady thing is fine every now and then, and probably

gatorades probably fine every now and then. But don't be like you can go hiking and just drink electrolytes right, not sugar water, but electrolytes. But don't do that with your dog, even if it's super hot out. There is dog specific stuff and there's formulas you can look up for dog specific making your own. Don't shave your pets. This is the one that I do know if applies to sheep.

cool and magic. Brushing and grooming are very good. If your dog is like slow to its summer coat, or it's summer is suddenly here eleven months of the year, or as I predict, there's going to be two seasons, there's going to be summer, which will last for nine months, and then there's going to be hell mouth, which will replace what was previously summer. Don't take your dog out in the hottest weather. It is better that your dog

pisses inside it gets heatstroke. It is harder identify heat stroke and a dog, but if the dog is like panting a particular amount, there's like other things about looking to the gums and eyes.

style feeders. During a heat wave, the animal needs to be able to get into the get the water easily. For chickens, you might want to bring your nesting boxes down to the ground floor where it's cooler. You also might want to consider insult lading the coop, like with hay bales, for example, you could stack them up next

to your coop. Horses have yet another electrolyte mix. My horse professional friend uses one called Gallagher's Water, but points out that it's like mostly bougie people use it when they're when most people have horses are bougie, but not all of them, right at least where I live. Other places. Okay, so it's only necessary in extreme circumstances. It's only better than water in extreme circumstances. Most animals do very well

with just drinking water. And also you can probably consider if you live somewhere wester than I do, you can consider misting systems if you have the money in the infrastructure. And misting systems is basically just like it pumps water out into a mist, and the mist cools everything down and below about seventy percent humidity, they're fairly effective. Below fifty percent of humidity, they're incredibly effective, and so they and it's not that you get wet it's that they do.

It's like it's like the air is sweating, the air is.

There is no research to say this is how you handle wildfire smoke with outside animals, but that is something that at least one person I heard from is doing, and science backs it up for human animals in terms

of preparedness. Just to run through all this stuff that I've been keeping track of the way that you're going to deal with all this if you're not outside, right, if you're outside and you're dealing with the stuff, you're going to use what James talked about and like keep track of how you're feeling and get into the AC. I mean, the main thing you want to do is get into AC right. You don't want to do strenuous exercise. You want to check alerts on your phone or your

weather radio. If you're a cool prepper and have like a little weather radio, you probably want to use the buddy system outside if it's getting really hot, if you can, right, just like having someone who can keep track of what you're doing. If you don't have another way to get to AC, consider public libraries in other places. This is a very good active time. Look after your neighbors, and some of your neighbors are housed and might not have AC.

Some of your neighbors don't have houses and probably don't have AC unless they live in their vehicles, in which case they might have some AC, but not all vehicles do. And so there's a very good time to look after people, whether it's giving people rides to public cooling centers, or whether it's setting up public cooling centers, or they're just letting your neighbor who like come over because your AC is working and theres isn't you want to I mean, one thing that you want to do is to accept

that what we're dealing with isn't normal. And I'll get to that in a moment. But so if you're a renter, you have fewer options, right in terms of like structural preparedness, there are some things that you can do. Running fans, unless you're a podcaster, running fans is a very good idea. If you have ceiling fans, you want to make sure that during the summer they run counterclockwise and during the

winter they run clockwise. So it's just look and be like I wanted to push air down, and you can visualize the direction it'll turn to push air down, and that's the summer one I want change the direction they spin. Yes, there is a little switch on every ceiling fan. I can see the one behind you.

to cool people. And it's like one of those things where I'm like that rules. And also it's absolutely awful that that's like where we're at. Where we're at, you know, is not like, oh, let's have better labor practices and stuff. And if you have a house, if you have like a place that you can really do preparedness for, there's I mean, we'll just get an air conditioner. Don't run your air conditioner as like low as it'll go. It just doesn't actually make things any cooler. Air conditioners are

generally designed and only cool things. I want to say, was it like thirty degrees below outside temperature or something? Yeah?

your fans. You actually can keep your thermostat up about four degrees and if you don't have it, If you don't have AC, there's a lot you can do with like thermal mass right is your friend, Like if you have a if you can choose which house you're going to live in, living in brick houses is great or adobe houses. It depends on where you live and what

your climate is. You want to keep your curtains closed during the day and open at night if you're trying to keep out the sun, but then let out the heat into the cool night air, assuming that there's still cool night air. Depends on where you live. As we enter into this nightmare world, Reflective window insulation y things like the thing that you put in your windshield can help. There's like stuff you can do when you accept that

it's an emergency and you can okay. But then the other thing is that running AC's puts a lot of strain on the power grid, and we're already starting to see more grid failure, usually in the brown out style rather than the blackout style. But when everyone's running their AC, the grid is not designed to handle it, and there are problems, and so one you get these like city wide text alerts that are like, hey, everyone, please turn up your AC like turned down whatever, make your AC

less cold cold. And this is an example of something that we should do and listen to. But it's really fucking annoying because it's not our fucking fault that the world is heating up, right, And they're not like turning off Times Square. They're telling everyone, you know, they're not turning off the ads. Yeah, speaking of ads, it's a good time to pivot to some some more stuff. Even it is waste, wasting power, and even in the emergency, there's still the ads. Here you go and we're back.

other places. As far as I can tell, in Texas, since mid June, between nine and twenty three prisoners have died from heat, but no one knows because Texas refuses to say that anyone has died from heat. They haven't done that since I believe twenty twelve is the last time they admitted someone died from heat. However, two thirds of Texas prisons don't have air conditioning, and a bunch of people are dying randomly of heart attacks in their thirties because they're dying of heat.

it came up heads every single time. It is like more than a one in three point five million chance.

notice the fear and not let it control us. But it really is time for people to very seriously look at not what's going to happen by twenty fifty, but what is happening now, what is happening now, what will happen in the next three years, the next five years, the next ten years, and start making decisions based on that. That is what I want. I don't want to tell people what those decisions are. I want people to get together with the people that they care about and figure

out what those decisions are. One of the things that I would recommend is building resilient communities is looking at how to build communities right. And there's a lot of ways. A lot of like scenes can become communities, a lot of extended families can become communities. A lot of religious organizations are communities. Okay, how and then how to make them resilient? How to collectively look at how to handle

these things. Whether it's literally just having a plan for like, Okay, if the power goes out, who has the whole house generator where I live? Someone around being has god to have a whole house generator. I don't have one. I want one, but they're expensive. Whose ac is still going to be running when the power goes out?

we fight despair is also part of this? And the answer to that is agency, and when we can find ways to act with agency, that is I mean, there's like studies about like in disasters, people who express agency have like less PTSD right when bad things happen, Yeah, and even if the agency, like I mean, I remember all at one point getting arrested, right and being like, all right, well, I'm keeping track of like I know that cops badge number, I know this, I know this,

I'm keeping track of stuff in case there's a lawsuit later. I totally lost that lawsuit, but like that helped me get through that situation.

There's still a few like cataclysmic scenarios that that probably could be averted, but things are going to get so much, so much worse, and that will be to deal with that, we will have to adopt a large variety of adaptions and it's gonna suck, but it's it's what we're gonna have to do. I don't know, I've there's there's a variety of reactions to this. I mean, I think I should just put together an episode on this sometime in

the future. But like there's as this as the intensity of the situations more and more, like, as as it becomes more and more clear, we're going to get a variety of reactions from especially for people on the right who used to be very much pure purely like ignoring or denying this problem. Some some on the right have like have skipped over the whole part where they've been wrong for so many years and are going to start up applying extremely authoritarian and like nationalist solutions to this.

Others are just doubling down on denial because facing the facts of the horrible situation we're in is more and more like frightening. It's it's it's harder to admit that you're wrong and realize the terribleness of the situation of the most recent example of this is I've been checking on the replies to to CTV News, which is one

of the biggest Canadian like television news stations. They've they've put out a few stories about how July is the hottest month, and the in the replies to this story, it's there's just a shock and honestly shocking amount of of pure like flippant denial of what's going on. And

this has been an increasing problem in Canada. And it's it's which is ironic because actually Canada's economy is probably going to grow during climate change because they're going to take over a whole bunch of agricultural production from the States. They're actually going to become a much bigger economic player. But the amount of just pure denial that that that we're that we're seeing in Canada and we're seeing get like increased is extremely worrying. Yeah, and it's one of

those things that's really hard to deal with. Like it it's also something I talked about it in my hyper object episode. But like it's like it's the same thing if someone's like in QAnon, you can't like you can't like out logic them from qan on. You have to you have to, you have to tell a better story.

that's not how climate works all the time. But like I've certainly I think many of us have have felt the effects of this. And also like the death numbers can't lie either. Yeah.

very sort of discordant to see that. And then you log on when you get home and see someone being like, oh, it's natural variation, or you know, like oh, it's snowed last winter, or you know some something which shows like a name incomplete understanding, but still like just a knee jerk rejection of of like all the evidence we have that the climate is changing and it's it's not coming back.

focus on growing food or like. But just when I see people like just being like, well, there's nothing, so I'm just gonna not take it into account in my decision making. I'm like, even if you're just vision making this, like like I made the decision to move near my family because a climate change. I didn't move to where

the climate is going to be magically stable. I move to where I can spend more time with people I love and be in a better position to take care of them, you know, Like I just I feel so like I don't know, it was whatever.

so I'm just going to completely ignore this. And then that's that's also another way of just like sectioning off this party your brain so it doesn't actually impact you.

can like weather the storm. And like having seen a country which is losing its very minimal amount of land to climate change and how communities have come together to protect each other during that, it's kind of reinforced to me how important community is as opposed to stuff.

so stuff has happened since we lash recorded. And also there was the thing that happened to the middle of the recording, which was the announcement of the tentative agreement, and so to talk more about what's been happening since and what's sort of in this deal because we now know more details about it is once again Rehee Smith and Oliver Rose, who are too rank and file UPS teamsters and once again they do not represent the union,

are speaking as individuals, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, but welcome back.

to be honest. Uh yeah, yeah, it's been wild.

a little little bit confusing. Wasn't until Team Series for a Democratic Union also had their own like press release clarified some language, and then you know we're kind of just like, okay, we'll get you know, we're told we'll be getting the kind of agreement language next week and chance to you know, debrief with the local but really like the the I think it was the following day the actual language comes out, you know, and some of the things where it's you know, there's like a promise

with the uh all the general wage increases going on top of those market rate adjustments we're speaking about, which are basically wages that are that ups can you know add or even remove that's not actually tied to the contract wages and you know, so one of the things was, yeah, getting those raises on top, but there was no contract language you know in there, which definitely caused I think a lot of confusion concern among rank and file members.

And it actually took one of the locals, you know, having a no endorsement before we even saw this memorandum of understanding between the company and the IBT, you know, guaranteeing this was going to happen, you know, that we would be getting those raises on top. It was just kind of one of those things where you know, there was this kind of really vague language that was used and I think definitely caused you know, people to not

really fully understand, you know, what was going on. Specially I think it was about seventy five percent of part timers are currently have a market rate adjustment. You know, that's kind of a very big portion of the workforce.

you can't you can't like trust those people. You can

only trust what's what's coming from the union. And Yeah, that definitely didn't inspire trust from the people that were leaning no, because in between a lot of these like and there is definitely was some misunderstanding about what was initially into the in the contract but there is also genuine critique about certain things that are in the contract, right, and so instead of like substantly, substantively like looking at these genuine critiques, we're all forced in the situation of

sorting out what is quote unquote misinformation or you know, more accurately, people not understanding legalese and also a bad role out of information versus okay, but what is in the contract that really needs improvement? And instead of like substantively getting into the ladder, it's just been a pure focus on the former. And yeah, it's it's been it's been kind of tense. Uh, it seems like, you know, it seems like there's a real mix, it's real kind of even even uh, how rank and vile members are

responding to this contract. You know, some have kind of bought in full sale that this is a historic contract, and others, you know, you know, such as myself, like, you know, there's still things in this contract that to me are unacceptable and it's going to be interesting to see where it goes.

And then also know there's yeah, I mean other people who are just kind of like, no, this seems I mean I was kind of like too little, too late, Like the games aren't quite there. Yeah, it's there's there's raises. They're also kind of done in weird way where they're more or less like kind of proNT loaded towards the first and last year, and everything in the middle is a lot lower to the point actually where and it gets confusing because everyone's kind of at a different rate

with those market rate adjustments. You know, the more you're making from you know, that supplemental pay, the worse this is going to keep with inflation to the point where it's kind of you're only actually going to be just above inflation towards the end of the contract. Especially one of the definitely one of the weaker things in the contract is all new hires or current people without seniority

are going to be on a different tier. And this is where the part timer inside warehouse positions, so you know, the uh yeah, so if you have seniority, it's minimum of twenty one an hour to start, and that goes up to twenty five seventy five an hour versus those new hires or no seniority employees are going to be at one with the progression to twenty three the fifty cent raises, and of course, uh you know, once you know tack on the average you know a little bit

over three percent inflation, you know can kind of quickly see, uh, it's those new members who are getting the worst part of the deal.

them to mostly like inside full time. But so the thing is, yeah, those will all get you know, converted to the package car drivers with that, I believe, with that raid or at least very similar.

And you know, their whole thing is that they just have a completely different wage progression than the rest of us do. But in addition to that tier which was introduced, you know, there are tiers elsewhere. Sometimes it's a tier between the hubs, like all of the hubs are making different MRAs and stuff like that. But additionally, there are some hubs that don't have a daily guarantee of hours

like regular hubs do, like for instance, air hubs. Right, so like that's another basically another tier, because it's you know, people doing the same work but not guaranteed the same things. And yeah, yeah, so there's definitely tiers remaining in this contract for sure, and it's really unfortunate to see that the one existing didn't get addressed and that they just created a whole new one, even though they are adamantly insisting it is not a tier.

you know, across all these decades. And so now with the current contract, provided you're getting paid the contract minimums, Yeah, you're looking at full time inside warehouse, their top rate going to thirty six dollars an hour, I believe, and then you're gonna have part timers who have seniority just below twenty six an hour, and then you're gonna have those people who weren't quite in the door yet at

twenty three. And of course, you know it's doing more or less the you know, the same work the inside. You know, you're doing your loading, unloading, sorting, the other you know, various positions there. And of course, you know, one of the things I've seen, you know, particularly online, I haven't heard this on the shop floor. It's just like, oh, well, you know they're working more, so of course they're going

to get paid more. But it's like, okay, well, yeah, they have more hours, so they would get more paid, but that doesn't mean that they should be at a higher hourly rate. Yeah, there's going to be other things too, like the pension of CRUL and you know, vacation time where you're working more, you're going to get more of that too. It's kind of has its own reward. There's really no reason to have, you know, like a ten dollars discrepancy for that type of works performed.

with this contract. So it's you know, in my mind, it's not really breaking any barriers or like you know, blowing anyone's minds, you know, especially when we have Sean Faine of the UAWD, who is talking about, you know, one of their demands is a thirty two hour work week, right, Like he's he's advocating that every worker needs a forty percent increase in pay because the CEO got a forty

percent increase in pay. And yeah, it's just yeah, our contract just you know, it isn't at that level by any means.

you know, no vote. So you know, that was just completely you know, over overruled by the union, like we're going to do this anyways, So kind of you know, it's good that we righted that wrong. You know, it's good to reduce a tier. Of course, I'm not going to knock that, but just kind of those things where it's like, yeah, but membership already didn't want that, or at least.

So it is it's great that we got rid of it, but it seems like it was somewhat of an easy thing to win. It made mutual sense, right, and yeah, yeah, it's just there were you know, there were bigger there could have been bigger fights over other things in this contract that weren't pursued, right, So.

But again, you know, I don't think it quite goes far enough either on the wage side, you know, on the on the wages or you know, especially one of the issues I've been focused on a lot is the heat protections.

You know, they'll be installing you know, tens of thousands of more fans, which you know, I'm not gonna lie that that will feel really nice because those trailers just get so hot and stuffy. There's no airflow, especially like if it's been sitting for a while, you open the door, it's just like a blast of heat. But the problem with fans is they're only so effective, particularly once it

reaches ninety five degrees. They don't do anything. And so you know, there's a lot of places where it'll probably feel nice and it might help to some degree, but you know, especially like right now in you know, like the Southwest and the south where you've just had these you know, one hundred and ten plus degree days, you know, like over a month, like that's not going to do really do much, especially if you're anywhere depending on if you've got dry heat or you know, higher humidity. In

the latter, fans can and sometimes make it worse. I'm also worried it's going to kind of be like this kind of like a comparison to a like security theater, but like more like safety theater, where it's this appearance of doing something to say like, look, we're doing this thing. It's going to keep you safe. But whether that's you know, actually true or not, well, I mean, we'll kind of

find out. But definitely I'm pretty worried about, you know, what's going to happen, especially in the next five years we already have and I think it was the it

was it. It was the World Meteorological Organization, you know, now has a their researchers have like a ninety eight percent certainty that we're going to reach a high mark for global warming before twenty twenty seven, so, you know, and I'm pretty sure last July was already the the hottest month on record globally, and it's something to read.

There's and I think in that report was like a sixty six percent chance of passing that one point five degrees celsius warming global warming between now and twenty twenty seven. So it's kind of one of those things where you know, I don't think we necessarily have five years to to you know, address this contract language and add further protections. Especially we've got other unions like the International Longshorn Warehouse Union.

They had an article that's talking about their heat protections, which have things like stewards that are equipped with heat monitoring equipment versus the current contract language for us would be they can just use like the OSHA app or you know, like weather service to check you know, like a weather station versus like the actual specific conditions you're working in.

like seven of them. A lot of times they're using the heat index when you're factoring in the temperature and humidity to get the fields like temperature and yeah, with the il WU, you know, they're also getting rest breaks as part of their contract language, which I believe two or three states have those of the seven total that actually have heat protections. And you know, the il WU is kind of talking about even though they have heat protections that kind of match or even kind of exceed

partly what some of the states have. You know, they're kind of saying, this isn't enough for the current extreme heat we're facing.

subvert it. And you know, this is this is the thing we've seen all over the world, even in places that have sort of national heat protection laws, is that you know, even even if you have a law, or even if you have a thing in the contract, even if you have something in your contract, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be enforced. And that requires a you know, it requires like a pretty significant degree of

organization to make sure it stays enforced. And that's you know that that's true both of stuff that's in contract and stuff that's like legally required, and so like if if if if the thing that they're nominally required to do is still insufficient, it's going to end up being way worse than that on the ground.

not as much as it was. Is my understanding. The way the union broke it down for me was like there's a dollar and twenty five cents of that dollar is going to healthcare. Twenty five cents of that dollar is going to the pension and then fifty cents of it is going to wages. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't super understand all this money stuff either, but we yeah, they showed us a thing where like

the contributions are going to keep happening. Other things that have been in the kind of in the like what we've all what people have been thinking about is the full time jobs, which I know we talked a lot about on the last one, and uh, yeah, that's it. I think we we were using the seventy five hundred for newly created jobs, but apparently the contract also specifically requires them to actually fill the twenty two thousand some full time jobs that exist that they just have not

been filling. But even with that additional twenty two thousand, that's still roughly thirty thousand full time jobs, that is for the full time workfor for the whole workforce of three hundred and forty thousand people. And something I learned is that full time drivers can bid into those positions and get them because they will likely have the seniority to do so. Because that's how we determine how to fill jobs. It's by seniority. You know, how long have

you been there? And usually you know, I think that makes sense, but you know that really just contributes to the long long wait of part timers trying to get full time work, right, And yeah, like the thing like kind of related to that. You know, we have these like if you have a market rate adjustment and you get your two seventy five, for me, that's going to be twenty six seventy five an hour, And that looks

great until you remember that we are part time. It is like we are supposed to work half a work week. I work less than because of the hub that I am at, which is not great, but you know, we need the hours and there's not the there isn't enough jobs, and that's stimulated by this contract. I think that there probably could be a lot more jobs.

like obviously, yeah you're not. You're not getting the hours that you know, that that that you that you would norbly you know if you can't just immediately convert that to what would the salary be if you worked, if you got like forty hours a week or whatever, Like, you can't do that. I've seen a lot I've seen

this a lot, a lot, like on the internet. I've seen pundits talking about it like this, and it's just like a incomprehensible misunderstanding of the act of like how how this stuff actually works for you to be going like, oh, look at all this money that people are making, assuming that like you know, and then and then using calculations that are based on like someone working full time, which is most of the workforce, like a significant significant majority

of the workforce is not is not working full time and will not be even after this contract.

am kind of staunchly opposed to the entire concept. But even if I wasn't, this job is not flexible enough to account for a second job, not unless you never want to sleep in your second job. Is when you should be like sleeping because you know, we have our start times, those are given to us a week in advance, but we don't know when our end times are because the end times are when we run out of packages.

So you know, some days, you know, like in my hub, it's always just going to be the two hours, but like in other hubs, you could be there, you know, you could be trying to get your three and a half hour daily guarantee, like employing that when they're trying to send you home, or you could be there six seven hours, and you know, how, how how is another employer supposed to operate with that? You know, you call in like three times saying like, oh, I can't actually

leave my first job. You're not gonna have that second job much longer. So yeah, in addition to the lack of full time jobs, the way this job is makes a second one impossible. So a lot of our part timers really are relying on that on that part time wage to get them through and picking up doubles when they can, which means you kind of end up having a ten hour day because there's like about a two

hour like space of time in between the shifts. So yeah, yeah, it's uh, yeah, those are those are some some of the big issues.

That is that is the worst. You know, it's not quite long enough stretch to like go home or at least you know you have a decent commute to work. And you know, another thing kind of came to my mind a little earlier earlier was that and it sounds like, at least talking with new hires, that this is still continuing, which is kind of this really deceptive hiring practice where

the hours are posted. When I got the job, you know, it was posted as part time for get, it was something like I don't know, nine to four, but you know, had that schedule for five days a week, seven hour shifts, thirty five hours a week times. By the twenty six starting pay, I was like, oh, perfect, I'll be making like, you know, somewhere like mid forty thousand. That's that's livable at least for for my specific you know circumstances. But then of course get there and you know the yeah,

we get two days notice for a start time. It's posted on our either you know, end of the week, so don't know exactly when I'm working, you know, until right before the next week, and you know, at least there an orientation. So when I asked, oh, like, what's actually the end time, I was just like, well, when the last package is loaded. Of course, if you know what when the next shift starts, you can kind of get a better idea of when you'll actually be out

of there. But still it's just kind of it's, you know, it's this claim flexibility, but it's very difficult you know, to actually work a second job or even you know, they offer tuition reimbursement, and there's a number of students who have had you know, a hard time actually like you know, getting the time off to attend their classes.

And I also say, in anywhere that's part time work that offers tuition reimbursement, you know, I would say there's an expected expectation that Okay, well you're going to school and you're working part time. You would think the wages then should at least you know, provide enough for rent, food, gas, textbooks, all that.

have significant others that they're caring for. Like, you know a lot of people look at this wage and one make the faulty assumption that you talked about earlier by multiplying it by forty to get the forty and then they assume that's for just that one person, And like there are part timers of every age, right, and they all have their own their own families and stuff like that that they are expected to care for as well.

So like when you look at all of this and the you know, the rate of inflation and the way the economy is, and you take all of these things into account, like the gains that are provided for in this contract is not enough when you consider the whole of everyone who works at UPS. You know, it's leaving behind families, right, Like yeah, it's it's wild.

like you're gonna get your fucking brain destroyed by just repeated head trauma, right, and you know, so, so there's only a limited amount of time your body can physically handle this. And it's like, yeah, okay, it looks like you're getting a lot of money in a very short amount of time, but you have to, you know, you have to live with the sort of physical consequences of what happened of what happened to you on that job

getting the money. So that money also like not just doesn't just have to get you to like now right, like it also it has to also essentially be compensation to the physical damage that you're doing to your body

by doing this shit. And you know, I think I think it I think like these ways look even worse when you look at like, you know, when you when you think of it in terms of you know, in in in like in like not even not just in terms of immediate rent, but like in in the really long term of having to you know, live with the sort of physical damage that you take from doing this stuff.

are staying more like their you know, thirties, forties. You know, we have people older older than that too on my line, and I think part of that's just like kind of we understand the importance of i mean a gold tier health insurance plan and a pension, but you know, of course with you know, being older, uh, it's going to you know, have even more of an effect on the body.

And yeah, I know, I know. I've heard people talking about this where it's just like, oh, well it's just part time or it's you know, entry level you know, quote unquote, uh you don't need a degree for this, so like why do you think you should be paid more? And it's like, well, it's it's brutal. I mean, we get a ten minute break, we're working up to six hours that is it. Why don't have to do a lunch break. I don't know. It seems like UPS just always gets there their way, and uh that's you know,

like state, local, federal law that they don't care. Yeah, right, even this last contract and there's so many violations. Of course, you know we got to whether you know this is yes or no, whatever the next contract is. You know, that's going to be a big part of the fight is just holding them accountable and to the terms.

awkward to hold. They're weirdly shaped. Like, there are some boxes where, like they tell you about, UPS tells you about methods the eight keys of lifting and lowering that you know should make it safe, but like there are some boxes where it's impossible to follow those. Those methods the absolute bane of my existence, and I recognize them every time I see them. I swear to God, these things must be just filled with lead because you look

at them and it's a very small box. You know, it's not more than like probably twelve inches long, you know, like no, not even twelve inches, probably more like seven inches long, you know, like six seven inches wide, and then like two and a half inches you know deep, And that should be a very easy box, but it's

like filled with lead. And for whatever reason, it can weigh like thirty five to fifty pounds Jesus, And it's like one that box is too small to like have a team lift on because you can't have two people around something like that. And like, you know, when you pick up a box, you're supposed to keep the natural curve of your back, but do not over extend the curve.

And you have to for those like packages like that, right, Like there's not a way to position yourself to lift them safely, and you kind of have to a little bit jerk up, which they tell you not to do, but that's the only way to get leverage on it. And yeah, like and you know, I've been in trailers where like a box like that was loaded precariously, like

just slightly above my head. And one time it came crashing down and I like neoed out of the way, like I was like in the fucking matrix, and I was just like, oh, if I had just been a little bit less responsive, that could have been a very serious head injury for me. And so yeah, the risk of like very severe injury. Like, you know, I busted my face open on a grate outside of where the what we call the cans, which are like the things that have all the packages they bring them to the

bay doors. I was unloading and I had to go between them, and I like there was motor oil spilled. I tripped and I like smashed my open my face open on a fucking grate and had to get stitches. Like it's yeah, no, the safety involved with this job is not extremely guaranteed, and yeah, the risk of injury is high and we should be preemptively compensated for that.

so has been Biden's willingness to get involved in strikes. Earlier, you know, Obama eventually got involved in a couple of strikes during his tenure, but he tended to not get involved until like a strike had been going on for like nine months or whatever. And Biden's been taking like a very very proactive approach to sort of I don't know, strike mitigation. I guess is the sort of of like sanitized term you take you to there, like keeping labor piece.

But he seems to have a sort of you know, he's to be getting very very involved very quickly in

trying to make sure that strikes don't happen. And you know the consequence of this is that we didn't get the rail strike that we should have gotten, and there's been a few other strikes that has sort of been a verdant And I wanted to ask, I guess how you're thinking about this strike, not just sort of in terms of like the immediate benefits, but in terms of what it would actually mean if like another major strike sort of get shut down before we can get going

in a year that is, I mean, still even if the strike doesn't happen, a pretty sort of full year in labor terms.

I disagree. I think, you know, I think a shock to the economy that is brought about by workers going on strike is a reminds them of what they have and what they move and what they create, right, And I think, yeah, the ruling class, you know, our politicians and the capitalists who own our politicians, they they don't

want us to experience that. You know, Like I remember even during the you know, the Trump administration, when you know it was when during the government shutdown and Sarah Nelson got all the flight attendants to do a sick out and stuff like that, and kind of just like that, the government shutdown had ended and they all went back

to do government things, whatever those government things are. And you know, like people on Twitter, you know, they were talking about like, yeah, this is like workers have power to affect not only their own work conditions, but they can have broad implications on society, on the political climate, on what's going on. And yeah, there was absolutely, I think a contingent of centrist liberals that were like really

frightened by that idea. You know. They they like a society in which the right people with who went to the right schools and all of that, like where they are the ones that are in charge and they are the ones that are shaping history with the pen strokes on like, you know, whatever bills they're legislating, and yeah, I think they have a vested interest in making sure that workers don't get to experience that sense of autonomy that they can experience by going on strike and by seeing,

you know, exactly what kind of power they have and what it does, because they don't want it. They don't want it to get beyond what's going on in the workplace. They barely want it there, you know. Like so yeah, yeah, I think there is a vested interest. And yeah, I have not been able to see it confirmed, but I have seen in articles where they will say that, you know, Sean O'Brien had met with President Biden, but then there isn't a link click through, so I can't figure out

what the initial thing is. But I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised, Like, and it's it's a it's a damn shame. It's you know, it's a shame that the president of our local union, you know, should that have happened succumb to it, right.

of agreement. And I think I think this is something that you know, in terms of sort of political repression, Like it's something that's not understood in the same way, but like that is also still like that, Like that that like negotiating behind the scenes and putting pressure on and then you know, eventually Biden does just actively like mandate that the strike can't happen, right, Like that is like that I I I will argue that that is in fact a full of strike breaking.

And but you know, but this this means that they have sort of they have a unique capacity to repress social movements that isn't as obvious as sort of like you know, just like a bunch of strike breakers showing up or the cop showing up, But is there all the same and I think is in some ways more dangerous because you know, like you get these arguments with like with the rail strike, where like technically eventually Biden was able to get some kind of deal through for

some sick time, right, but you know, and you have you have this sort of like liberal conception of what labor is where they're like, oh, well, everyone was wrong to like be mad at Biden for this, like they got the thing eventually. But you know, the problem here isn't it isn't just you know, strikes aren't just about the immediate thing that you're fighting for, right, Like they're they're also about like moving the class as a whole.

They're about the experience of striking. They're about i mean, you know, and they're also about the fact that you will get a better deal if you win a strike.

Then you will if you get like you know, if if you get one of these sort of like negotiated deals like cut in the back room by Biden and like seventeen unions in the Manufacturer's Association, and so I think, I think, I think it's important to understand that, you know, the like there is a fundamental sort of difference between like liberalism sort of conception of you know, you you achieve material gains and it doesn't really matter what the process is, right or you know, the process is like

you go through the legislative domain. There's an actual difference between that and the things that happens Drae to strike, which is, you know, there's there's an actual process of like the building of power of workers and you know, building the economy of the class itself. And I don't know,

I think I think those are very different. And I think I think a lot of what we've been seeing here is an attempt both by unions themselves, by and you know, by by business leaders and also buy like the president and the Democratic Party to try to make sure that this doesn't happen and that they can sort of contain this really explosive labor moments and prevent it from sort of turning into anything more.

class power, excuse me. And you know it threatens your union bureaucrat jobs when workers start like demanding more from like what the labor movement can provide for them.

union organizers. They had purged, you know, like the the CIO, I mean even back as there's always like the forties, like the CIO purged like all of its leftist members, and you know, you got these successive like these these successive sort of iterations of unionism that were less and less militant, and you know, like you can you can you can literally see what the result of that has been,

right like union density down to like six percent. And so you know, if if, if if it keeps going like this and we keep getting these sort of like sustained efforts to make sure that it never redevelops again, Like yeah, like it's we're gonna we're gonna be stuck there.

you know, decade or two. You know, I don't know at all really what what our experiences are, you know, what kind of challenges and struggles and burdens we're facing, and I mean especially and not prepared at all for you know, just world with a drastically changing climate.

getting something done about them, right. And I think you know, that model in and of itself is indicative of a decline of a collective action, right. That reduces the union to Yeah, that's the entity you're going you go to when there is an issue in the enforcement of your contract and they negotiate a new contract for you, and you know, that's that's the service model type, right, And that's like what we're seeing a lot of. That's what like, you know, a lot of the business unions do and

stuff like that. Some of them do it better than others, you know. But then there's also the organizing model, where you use the union as it means to make your members militant, and they do contract enforcement on the floor, and they like you know, organize protests at their work site, and they like you know, they get involved in you know, issues outside of the work site, right, And I think, yeah, like watching the service model kind of prevail over these

last you know, some decades over. The organizing model is just yeah, it's absolutely just another sign of collective action being stamped down wherever it can be.

how exactly well whether the storm. I mean that's something I hear you know a lot on the shop floor. It's like when talking about, you know, our union, you know, it's it's always the union. I know I say that a ton too, but I mean I kind of feel like the language we just use like day to day talking about it, you know, I kind of there's not like inherent separation when it's like, oh, it's the union,

it's the some you know, it's this outside thing. It's not oh, it's a collection of all you know, rank and file members. It's us really yeah, and it doesn't.

And I don't know, I think I think I think it's really I think it's really easy to you know, in this moment where unions are incredibly like you know, with the totally the actual amount of like unions in the US is really small. And also simultaneously, like you know,

we're seeing a sort of resurgence of union organizing. I think it's really really easy to sort of fall into this trap and like be be completely uncritical of the way that unions have functioned, because again, like if the current model of unions that exists right now, like if that stuff worked, like we wouldn't be in in in

the sort of conditions that we're in now. And that calls for you know, like that that that calls for collective action, and you know one of the things that calls for is being willing to go on strike.

won and then you know, delivered us this contract. And you know, Shaun O'Brien did do like they they did in TDU, did do other good things. They got rid of that constitutional rule that Oliver mentioned earlier. But I think, you know, when we talk about like bringing down that barrier between the union and the members, the next most obvious step for me is that we need to get to open bargaining in this union. And frankly, I think open bargaining, or the fact that this bargaining was closed,

you know, is behind it's behind closed doors. You know, there were NDAs signed, there were rank and file members there, but they also couldn't tell us about it because of those you know NDAs. Open bargaining is what's going to solve this because this, like the whole fiasco about this tentative agreement and now all the kind of resulting hostility that is felt between members and leadership and members and

even other members. I think it's you know, like so much of this is due to a failure of comms and the fact that we did not know what was being discussed in this in these negotiations at any time except for the vague highlights that they could tell us about, right, and then you know, they release a highlight reel that has very confusing language. They eventually do release the contract, but not all of the memorandum of understanding that would

help us understand what is actually in that contract. And you know, they they're releasing all of this information in a way that is going to result in people not understanding what's in it. And I really do think open bargaining is the next step that you know, reformers in this union need to be advocating and organizing for because this has just kind of been a real shit show, to be honest, and I yeah, I think it's a Comms failure to be perfectly honest.

may not influence people's votes, like you can do something about that, Like you you have a lot of money, you have you know, a comms team to use it. It's you know, just talk to your members like they're

real people. Uh, you know we can we can understand shit. Uh, you don't got to just you know, get get angry or even kind of like I was saying earlier, where it's just like it's almost just like feels like this framing where anything you know that's a dissenting view or a critique you know, so oh, it's just it's almost information. Don't don't pay any attention to it.

in union leadership whatsoever. Right, Like, you know, you could be a member that you know doesn't understand something, just has a question and then you kind of getting and you kind of just end up being stonewalled, and you know, you're told, well, you know, go to this meeting where we're going to explain things, and dah da da da da da da da da. And it's like, yeah, but you know, I have you on the phone, now, can

you explain it now? And you know, and it's as it's like they're taking all of these concerns as a personal blow to their ego, right, Like they're taking it personally as if people having concerns about what this contract does and does not stipulate is like an attack on their moral character. And it's just really fucking frustrating. I

gotta be real with you. And you know it doesn't say a lot for the overall democratic nature of the union either, right, Like, you know, this is like, you know, you're kind of being told, well, you know, keep your opinions to yourself, accept our word for it. Like you can vote however you want. You know, this is one member, one vote. But you know you can't be going online talking about it. You like can't be going talking to your coworkers about it because you don't have all the information.

You're not understanding it correctly, and it's just like, well, can you get better at explaining it? Can you not react this way? Like can we have like a thing where like we can just like fucking talk about what's in it and what's not in it? And yeah, it's it's just again been real fucking frustrating.

you know, issues of like understanding it. And even you know, one one other thing about like you know, open bargaining, was you know, looking at the IBT press release, you know there's one paragraph and it starts rank and file members served on the committee for the first time. It continues on later saying, you know, our hard work has finally paid or our hard work has paid off, and I you know, and goes on to then say, you know,

this is the most historic contract we've ever had. So it kind of seems like right there where it's like, well, if limited member participation found by NDA has led to this historic contract, maybe it's time to involve all of us.

You know, we elect you know, our officers, most of them, but we don't elect stewards. We don't really we don't elect our business agents or like anything like that. We vote on our contracts and that's it, you know at our union meetings. I've had one union meeting where we did a vote that was introduced by leadership. Right, It's just it's yeah, it's not the most democratic culture. And that's another thing that needs to that needs to change as well.

that they are in favor of democracy or whatever. But you know mean like mean that they get to make all decisions after they get elected, and not mean actual people sort of make decisions for themselves.

they killed at least eight YPJ members. YPJ would be the Women's Protection Forces, who are a unit within the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the armed forces of the ans Autonomous Area of North Easyria. I will come at

you really hard with acronyms in this. I think if people haven't listened to Roberts series Women's War, maybe the Women's War, that would be a good place to start, because like we only have half an hour of forty five minutes or whatever, and we can't explain an extremely complicated conflict which has been going on for twelve years in that time. So I think some grounding in who is who and what is what you can find it there, I guess. But it's that a fair summary of who those people are.

American anarchist thinker named Murray Bukchin. This was largely due to the fact that their leader, a guy named abdulah Ajalon, got while he was in Turkish prison kind of pilled on a lot of these this kind of like fringe

American libertarian ish sort of political philosophy. Yeah, with with this, basically, the gist of it is this this kind of this kind of synthetic this kind of synthesis of a lot of Bukchen's ideas with some of the stuff that Agelog had been had been thinking about for years, kind of culminated in uh political philosophy called libertarian municipalism, which is more less the governing philosophy that these different armed militant

organizations kind of clustered around the PKK in Northeast Syria, because the PKK for years were just kind of like cross the border in the northeast Syria when they were fighting with the Turks and they had to get away, and they had a bunch of inroads with local Kurdish

organizations in northeast Syria. And when the Asad regime pulled out of the area in the early stages of the Syrian Civil War, a lot of these groups that were affiliated with the p PKK were kind of the best organized organizations in the area, and so they took over a lot of civil administration and basing a lot of their plans and you know, functional activities around these ideas that Ajalon had been you know, writing about for years and years, and so you kind of have this mix

of all these armed organizations that are to some extent descended from the PKK, but are now much broader than just sort of a Kurdish liberatory organization. These are the folks who fought and defeated ISIS in northeast Syria. Yeah, that's I don't know, there's there's so much to get into, but I guess that's kind of the the broad strokes and all of these different because there's a bunch of different militias. You know, There's there's militias that are kind

of more traditionalist Arab militias. There's there's Armenian militias in the area. There's obviously these Kurdish militias, the YPG and the YPG primarily Kurdish militias, but they all fight under the banner of the SDF and to the Turks, they're all the PKK.

There is the jayash or al If. I said that right, Uh no, but I can say it if you are please do magical thank you.

But like that that's not the case, right that, That's not what this sort of democratic federalism is about, nor is it what's represented in terms of the composition of the people there people doing the fighting, right, So sometimes these groups will be referred to on masses like quote unquote the Kurds.

the same with like Kurds, Turkmen or whatever. Like, none of these groups are homogeneous. And sometimes yeah, if you do, I get it. If you're doing a five minute piece for TV, that's what you do. But here we are not doing a five minute piece for TV. So this is this has not been like Kurdish history one O. One, please read some more books about that. I'll put some in the sources. But what I want to talk about

today is some of these barakhtar attacks on specifically YPJ. Right, so the YPJ would be the Women's Defense Forces, So that's a women's militia within the SDF that, as Robert said, it's based heavily, I guess on the outlook of Abdulah Oscelin, who's sometimes called Appo, so we might use that for brevity here. So in one attack in April twenty twenty two, three YPGA fighters were killed. Di Lahaleb, who had participated in the resistance of the Sheik Masoud district of Aleppo

in twenty twelve. She become a leading YPGA commander and participated in the fight against isis playing a leading role in the liberation of the city of Mimbic Rahani Kabane. It's worth noting, I guess sorry I stop every fifteen seconds to explain context that you'll hear sometimes place names

in people's names. That's because they're like norm de gear rather than that this is not their legal name necessary, but it's it's standard practice for these people to take like a movement name or a nom de geer, much like Robert and I explained in the episodes on Miamma. A lot of people do this, a lot of places that fair.

Turkish backed Islamist groups. And so part of why you do this is like, I don't want my family like getting caught up in this shit, like if they live somewhere else, like I don't want to like bring that down on them. It's just safer.

fight against ISIS. She she was very young. There are pictures I'll include the report. It's very sad to see someone I think, so yeah.

like not necessarily have to fight either, and you know, could be self realized and whatever way they wanted to. And so to see these people having achieved their goal largely of I guess I still exists, right, and I still continues to kill people. It killed ten people yesterday, but that's the eighth of August because you won't hear this today. But to see these people who have like successfully at least liberated the territory, and then their young

women are still dying but not finding ISIS. But fink Turkey, I can go on and give like there are dozens of examples of this report another one I'll just give. In July twenty twenty two, there was a YPG commander called Raj Kabur and a fighter called Barin Botan, so one of them had been and then another one called

another YPJ commander called Jian Tall Hidden Tall Hidden. So these two women have been involved in the fight against ISIS like from the beginning, having like liberated cities, liberated territory, and then they were with this young woman who was nineteen years old and had relatively recently joined the YPG

right and was killed by a dreat strike. It's like it's particularly galling, I think for me at least two so that the YPG Information Office is someone that I communicate with, like for work stuff, and it's particularly galling to like wake up Brent and see that on your phone, like to get a message and look at a report

see pitch of a car like blown to pieces. At the same time as like the directories to drowne the Turkey hassaulta Ukraine in large numbers, right, which has been hugely effective in destroying Russian armor and like it's.

Turkish defense industry or yeah, defense industry. And for the record, I feel the same way about like the people standing standing you know, different US defense contractors making stuff like you know, long range missile systems, Like no, I'm not I'm not really a fan of that, Like I get it. Sometimes you know, when you're being invaded, you use the tools available, But that doesn't mean we need to celebrate that.

it's someone's nineteen year old fucking daughter. It's someone's mum or sitta or brother or uncle or dad or the binary relative.

into this shit, you lean into this shit. But I don't like the idea of like some I don't know, fucking accountant in Iowa watching hundreds of videos of like Russian soldiers being killed and then like getting a fucking Lockheed Martin tattoo, like the like the like like turning turning your support for people you know in a deadly military conflict into like fandom, treating it the way you treat like a Marvel movie or whatever. I find not great.

but I get it. Like again, if you're some dude in fucking Wisconsin doing the same thing, I find that pretty unsettling, like, yeah, because you don't need to.

dozens of these corone attacks. They really ramped up in early twenty twenty three, along with like a kind of a larger air offensive. Right, they continue to happen like almost weekly. If people want to, I guess keep tabs. YPJ info is the YPG's kind of public facing press website. Rosier Information Center is a good English language resource. Both of those you can find on X or if you you can also search of them website. We just say X.

which is particularly bad. So one of the things that you're often to see the SDF and specifically the YPG and the YPG kind of accused of is having child soldiers, are having recruiting people who are under the aged to fight. Part of a program they've implemented to stop this with

consultation with the United Nations is building education centers. Right, I'm not going to comment morally on who should be fighting at what age, because I think it's one of judgment for us to make when like we GNATALIZI in the fucking street. Yeah, I.

a tank for the US military at age seventeen. And quite frankly, if you look at where like wars in history sixteen to twenty years old, that's most of the people who have fought most of the wars in most of history. That's like the way that it is. It's

not pleasant. But like when we are talking like I certainly I would be very supportive of laws put in place in our country to raise the age at which people can join the military so that they are not young and not getting taken advantage of to as much of a degree. But we are not fighting in any conflicts for our survival.

and sent overseas in conflicts that are not necessary. We are talking about like isis is five blocks away, and like God knows what they'll do to my mom and my sister if they take over, Like I'm going to pick up a fucking.

group of teenage girls playing volleyball. It's very hard to see these education centers as like anywhere in military target right, They're literally designed to divert young people from becoming fighters and to you know, they're set up with the consultation United Nations, with the you know, like with as much oversight as one can expect an area which is in the middle of a civil war and to be drone

striking schools. It's pretty callous. It's also worth noting that, like a phraser constantly gets thrown around a lot in discussion about the Middle East. Right, it's the only democracy in the Middle East, and it's let me tell you, it's not normally referring to this part of the world. It's referring to Israel, and a I don't think that's true Israel, Yeah, it does it what fucking definitely, Well,

democracy is an extremely nebulous concept. So like, this is this scenaria where people's votes have a substantive impact on how their lives lives, certainly more so than people who are Arabs in Israel.

is something that we don't have here in the United States. Right, Like it's it's like we have still failed to have a woman being president, Like it's it's an attack on these things which most decent human beings should be able to get behind. These attacks also don't just affect the

people who are killed, right. They continue to displace families, They contribute to fuel shortages, they create power cuts, they suspend schools, they stop aid organizations working in the area because it's too high risk, or they perceive it to be too high risk, and they stop the SDF continuing their operations against ISIS. Right Like, ISIS, as I said, continue to exist. They have sleeper cells. There was an

attempted prison break last year. Two of the women from the YPG who had fought to stop those ISIS prisoners breaking out of their prison were later killed in the drone strike. It's very hard to see this as not helping that like that ISIS insurgency that they're fighting and hindering their operations. And I'm not just saying this based on sources that are there Roger Information Center, are people in their anes, but this is the policy of the

United States. Right before we started this, I looked up some of the Inspector General's reports from Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the United States operation to lead a coalition which includes the SDF against ISIS, and they were talking about how the sdf's operations are hindered because they keep getting shot by durants, right, and that there's not much

that they can do about it. Right, Unlike like Ukraine, we're not sending a ton of surface to air missiles or like things that you could use to defend yourself against drones, right, not that it's very easy to defend yourself against the drone. So why is Turkey doing this? I think thirsty because, as Robert said, it sees SDF and the PKK is the same thing, right, And so the PKK mostly operates, like Robert said, in the mountains of southeastern Turkey, and it's been fighting this asymmetrical war

against the Turkish state since nineteen eighty four. So Urdigan as Urdigan is the president of Turkey, right. He entered off his in two thousand and three, and he's sort of pivoted on Turkish issues and Kurdish issues. Sorry, he continues to be Turkish. But he was initially in favor

of like a negotiated peace with the PKK. In his early years included like propose for linguistic autonomy, the right to a Kurdish press, and even like the return of Kurdish place names, which is a big deal still yeah, right, Yeah, you'll see like comishlo or al chemishli, like one being Arab their latter being Arabic, that the form of being Kurdish.

to be. And so the proposal of that, I think is significant. But then obviously the follow through is a different story.

it's Turkish, which it doesn't mention Kurds. It's a Kurlish majority province. It doesn't mention the Kurdish language. It claims that it's a Turkish dialect that's spoken there. They changed the name in August twenty twenty one of seventeenth century Mosque from the words translating from the Turkish to the Kurds Mosque, and they call it the Turks Mosque. In

twenty twenty three, Turkey dropped its objection. So subjection is an effective vito right to Finland and Sweden joining NATO when the latter pledged to devote more attention to the PKK and effectively end its decades old tradition as giving

protection an asylum to Kurdish refugees. So if people aren't familiar, Sweden has been a country that's offered asylum to a lot of different groups of people, Like I have a lot of friends from various stories I've done all over the world who have ended up living in Sweden, and Curtish people are among those people, right who have found a home and a safe place in Sweden. So encouraging Sweden to not do that gives people one less safe place to go, right, Yeah, and this was kind of

Turkey's like cost of entry for those people into NATO. Now, obviously there's a reason that Sweden and Finland want to join NATO, right, and that's the Russia is like right there and has been doing some invasion recently, and so they want that as kind of mutual aid, that mutual defense, and so they're being forced to give up this very reasonable policy of offering people asylum. Hi, everyone, it's me James and I am back after what I hope was

a fruitful and enjoyable advertising break for you. It is just me, and the reason for that is that someone outside is currently severing my telephone cable, judging by what I can hear and the fact that I no longer have the Internet. So the second part of this episode will be me reading my script by myself without the interesting and often entertaining input of my colleagues. So sorry about that, but you will just have to make do.

Turkey's been involved in a Syrian civil war since the beginning. Initially, it armed and equipped the Anti Assad FSA, but in August twenty sixteen it began a direct occupation of parts of northern Syria under Operation Euphrates Shield. In twenty seventeen, it facilitated the establishment of the Syrian National Army in

the Syrian Entering Government, which it finances. Turkey has accused of Syrian Democratic forces, to which the YPG and YPGA belong, of quote seizing and ethnically cleansing territories which don't belong to Kurds. There isn't really any credible evidence for this, and the UN has refuted these claims. Some people have have moved right, like as happens in many conflicts, but

the SMI saw was like twenty five families. Erligan has openly expressed a sentiment that Kurdish people don't belong in North and East Syria, saying these areas are not suitable for the lifestyle of Kurds because these areas of virtually desert, deportations of Syrians who have been who have sought refuge in Turkey. Right, so people from Syria who have fled the civil war. But three and just over three and

a half million people are living in Turkey. Right, Turkey has to Cloud's intention to move one million of these people back to Syria, and it has already begun moving these people back to northwest Syria in the area as it occupies.

joined ISIS in Syria. Foreign Policy the Publication has estimated that more than thirty thousand people across Turkey along the so called Jihadi Highway. Later Turkey clamped down on this a bit, but certainly in my coverage of the smuggling of weapons and equipment to ISIS, they were going through Turkey. Turkey was also directly engaged with the defeat of ISIS

right Turk Turkey's troops for ISIS in parts of northern Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey is also enforced an economic blockade of the Autonomous Area of Northeast Syria, and it's even restricted water flowing into the region. Right, So, at some point weapons and humans have flowed through Turkey to ISIS, and at this point water is not flowing in sufficient quantities through Turkey to the Autonomous Area of North and East Syria. And

twenty eighteen, Turkey started what's called Operation Olive Branch. It's a military operation in which Turkish and Syrian National Army forces took control as the city of Afrin. The assault included the alleged use of chemical gas, shelling of civilian areas, and shooting of fleeing refugees. Kurdish shrine flags, cultural and historical sites were targeted destroyed by Turkish military forces. A

hospital was bombed. Reporters Without Borders noted that reporting on the conflict had been handstrung by the Turkish government and more than thirty thousand Kurdish people have been displaced and their homes have been taken by those relocated refugees who we spoke about. Olive arms in the area have been seized and then leased to fund the operation of the

pro Turkish Syrian National Army. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented these forces threatening to be head Kurds, and The Independent, that's the newspaper, has noted that some of the people fighting alongside the SNA are themselves former cardrids of Isis. In its reporting, the Independent reported that and I quote video posted online shows three uniformed Jahadis singing a song in praise of their past battles, and it says, quote how we were steadfast in Grossny, that's

in Chezhnir, Dakistan, and we took the Tora Bora. That's Tora Bora's cave complex, formerly the headquarters of Osama bin Laden, and now Afrien is calling to us. There's the song they were singing, right, that's suggesting that they're sort of a fight. There's casting this in in a long line of these battles that have been fought by these various I guess Islamist groups, just to be super clear on Islamist versus Islamic, because I don't want people to confuse

the two things. One is a political outlook, right of being an Islamist is a political outlook in it it focuses on, It uses an interpretation of Islam, which is certainly not the mainstream one. It's not my place to say whether or not it's a correct one, but it's certainly not the one that most Muslims in the world agree with. And it's the interpretation of that faith that you'll have seen with groups like ISIS and al Qaida. Right, But that is not to say by any means that

all Muslim people agree with this, because they don't. There are Muslim people, many thousand, hundred and thousand of them who have been targeted killed by these people, right, And

just wanted to be super clear on that distinction. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has also noted members of the Turkish fascist group the Gray Wolves, fighting alongside the SNA SO standing in the United States, it is easy to see this Turkish operation as a consequence of Trump's choice to abandon the SDF and the people who defeated ISIS, and to a large degree it is, but it also represents a long term goal of verdigans Turkey, which is

tried without success to get support for its plans to build a buffer zone thirty kilometers deep a long its border with Syria, and to fill that buffer zone with Syrian refugees who increasingly end up in Turkey. In particular, Turkey has objected to plans by the United States train and equip for thirty thousand person strong border force. This went through several different naming iterations. It's don't really matter,

it's a border force. Right before the attack, Russian military officials proposed handing over a freeing to a SAD as

a compromise. So we haven't talked about Russia much. Robert talks about this in his series, But Russia is in Syria as an ally of the Aside regime, and it has sort of acted as a go between between the SDF and the Side regime, and it has proposed in this instance right that the SDF withdraw from a freeing, which is the area that Turkey invaded an operation out of Branch of twenty eighteen, and it said, if you guys put out and you hand us over to a SAD,

the Turks won't invade, they won't directly take on a SAD like that. The SDF refused. Right authorities are in a very tense relationship with Damascus, which is where Asad's government is based. Right, they've both received aid from them, have been attacked by them. After they were abandoned by the US and Russia, and they knew that Turkey Russia. Russia was aware that Turkey had plans to invade right

and obviously didn't do anything to stop it. So they these SDF felt that they were abandoned by US and Russia, with very very good reason to feel that way. The A and E s scrambled to find new ally to protect them, and they found one in the Side government. This wasn't like, I don't think a choice that they wanted to make. I think the rest of the worldn't leave with many options. So I'm quoting here from most Luma Beidi, the SDFS commander in chief. He wrote an

OpEd and foreign policy. It'll be linked in our sources at the end of the month. If we have to choose compromise in genocide, we will choose our people, he said. Numerous fighters who for ISIS and foreign volunteers have died in a so in that initial operation right when the SDF opposed Turkish invasion, numerous people died. One of them was a Britain named Anna Campbell. As she went by Helene Kera coox. I matter fuck that pronunciation of but

not my attempt to be disrespectful I have. She was killed by Turkish Michelle and Afree and her father, Dirk Campbell, has been campaigning ever since tav his daughter's remains returned. His case remains with the courts and has been entirely crowd funded. He submitted a claim to the European Court of Human Rights after hearing nothing from the Turkish courts, and when he did that, the Turkish courtse picked up

the case he'd submitted there. You can also find a link to this in the sources, but it's crowdjustice dot com, slash case slash help Hyphen bring hyphen Anna Hyphen home. They've raised all the money they need her at the moment, but doubtless they will need more in the future. So where does all this leave the people of North and East Syria?

have suffered the same earthquake that Turkey suffered. In February of this year twenty twenty three, four thousand people died in a freed right, which is the city which is now occupied by Turkish and SNA troops, and Turkey pushed a little bit further east in Operation quote unquote Peace Spring, a year after Olive Branch, and currently Turkey is cutting water flow to pumping stations it controls that feed water

to the area. It combines with the impact of the earthquake and the ongoing burden of controlling one of the largest prisons in Earth, which is the Al Whole Prison which holds the majority of the ISIS fighters and their families who were not either killed or returned to the states from which they came. And we'll have more on that Alhole Prison next week. There's infighting between militias in the Turkish areas, which obviously impact Turkish controlled areas. Obviously

that impacts civilians is arbitrary arrests. There's the increasing Turkification of areas like a free right, including instruction in the Turkish language. Like Shurin said earlier, it's one of the things that's integral to maintaining national identity is education.

there for a long time. SDF guerrilla units like Wrath of Olives and a Free and Liberation Front are involved and fighting with a Syrian National Army, and that fighting kills civilians right and throughout a Free and there have been things like car bombs. The a Free Liberation Front goes by HRI from the Kurdish initials right, and they've carried out some attacks on SNA militias in the last few days. You can often see videos of those online and it's the sort of thing you'd like to see.

There are still land mines that kill civilians in the area, and there are still ISIS sleeper cells bombing and killing people. Last week, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria responded to Turkey's ongoing aggresion, bashing a statement claiming Turkey's operations are forcing the SDF to divert personnel away from

countering ISIS and threatening the stability of the area. Obviously, this is all after an earthquake which killed four thousand people in a free people that have access to as many hospitals there. For instance, Dots still have to travel to Turkey to get cancer treatment, right and so IS. This leaves that people of North and Eastyria in a very precarious situation right in which there are. They're now left largely without the solidarity that they experienced when they

were fighting. Isis right, and it's very difficult, Just like in so many cases, I feel this way about Memar two. To see the US and Europe expressing solidarity and solidarity in the form of lethal aid. Right, solidarity in the form of surface to webissiles and tanks and rifles and bullet proof beests and medical aid and all the things that you need to sustain a fight to Ukraine, and they should they should do that. I'm not saying for

a moment that they shouldn't. Right. Ukraine has been invaded by a much bigger and more powerful military and it has every right to defend itself. And I'm glad that we're helping, but I wish that we would help other people too, especially people who we have sort of made promises to that we've not kept, or people who we've encouraged to believe, in the case of Memr right, that they have a right to a better life, and then when they decide to defend that, we don't stand behind them. So, yeah,

that's my episode. I'm sorry for a weird juxtaposition of me doing the love part scripted, but somebody outside is drilling through my phone cable. So yeah, thank you for joining me.