Thank you. And welcome to the 1979 Libertarian Presidential Nominating Convention. This is a great year for Libertarians and for the Libertarian Party, a year of great challenges and of great opportunities. Look across the room, thousands of people gathered here in Los Angeles today and throughout the rest of the weekend are here to celebrate the growth of a dynamic new political party and a dynamic new political movement, Libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. We have come a long way in the last eight years, a long, long way. Beginning in the minds of a handful of visionaries, the Libertarian Party began with a small group of people gathered in Denver, Colorado. We came from our roots in the tradition of the American Revolution, our roots of a great classical liberal tradition, a tradition dedicated to opposing tyranny in all forms, a tradition dedicated to individual liberty for all men and all women, black and white. The Libertarian Party has indeed come a long way and I think we should here applaud, take this opportunity to applaud three of the people who have helped to make this possible. David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party and the first national chair, Dave, you have our love and our gratitude. Let us also thank the two succeeding national chairs who have helped make this party into the mighty political force that it's about to become an American politics, Ed Crane and David Berglin. Soon, Nolan, last but not least, let us give a little thanks to two men who carried our banner and held it very high indeed in our two previous races for the presidency, John Hospers and Roger Lee McBride. Those are our roots, those are where we have come from. But ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun. This next year and our race for presidency of the United States, we are going to be on the ballot in anywhere from 40 to 48 states. We have in state after state begun to capture people's attentions. We have in county and town and city after town and city begun to capture the attention of the American people who are sick unto death with the two party system in this country and who want a real political alternative for the first time in their lives. So we have people's attention and I believe that we have the answers to the problems that the American people face. Do we have the will to victory? I say yes, we do. I believe that we do. Strongly and my faith and confidence is strengthened. Every time we hold a convention, a meeting, a conference, and faces like those in the audience before me come to pay homage to the spirit of individual liberty and to fight for the victory of the libertarian ideal in this country. The Cassandras of our age cry out, no, no, there is no chance. They see that government stands today as everywhere hostile to human liberty and happiness. That it leads the people, that loads the people with taxes and with debts.  But they think that the American people have lost their will to resist and to fight for their own futures. But they are wrong, ladies and gentlemen, all the evidence from the victory of Proposition 13 to the massive surge of sentiment against big government in this country over the last few years shows that they are wrong. The American people know as we know that when tyranny is nearing, submission is a crime. We stand today in a crossroads in American history, badly in need of a new leadership and a new direction. And what are we offered by the Republicans and the Democrats? Who do they offer up as leaders? And what are their programs? Let's begin by looking just for a second at the Republican Party, hopeless shell that it is. We have running for president in the Republican Party, such towering figures as Robert Dole, who has said that he is running for president to get people, quote, to believe in themselves again instead of relying on Washington, a noble libertarian sentiment. Except the next day he went into the United States Senate and became one of the main forces pushing for the extension of the food stamp program. This kind of petty hypocrisy, which Bob Dole is only one of many representatives in this country, is only one of the many reasons why the Republican Party stands today as bankrupt, having no vision and no alternative to offer the American people. Shall we then turn to Jerry Ford, who Lyndon Johnson called correctly in one of the only correct statements that Lyndon Johnson ever made? One of the wooden soldiers of the status quo.  Well, I think Jerry Ford is a decent enough man and we can leave him rest in peace, one hopes. Shall we then turn to Ronald Reagan? You guessed my answer. Ronald Reagan postures as a conservative opponent of big government. But what is the record, ladies and gentlemen? The record is that since 1964, when he made his famous television speech for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan has progressively accommodated himself to the status quo and become one of the staunchest defenders in practice of big government of our time. In a recent press conference, he was asked his position on national health insurance. You know what this great defender of liberty said? That he hadn't made up his mind. While in office, this great defender of individual liberty opposed legalizing marijuana, vetoed several bills to reduce the penalties for marijuana possession to a misdemeanor, during his eight years as governor of California, the state budget more than doubled, from $4.6 billion to $10.6 billion. In eight years, that puts him on the level with Nelson Rockefeller, ladies and gentlemen. And this great advocate of cutting taxes and cutting government spending, when does he raise his voice? He raised his voice to protest aid cutoffs to Brazil and Chile. If this is individual liberty, I for one want none of it. Shall we then turn perhaps to George Bush? The former head of the CIA, who promises us a new candor. This man is one of the true monsters of American politics today. He is proclaimed that the country can't go back to a laissez-faire Adam Smith economy at the same time spouting Republican bromides against big government. He has criticized the Carter administration for failing to give stronger support to the Shah of Iran. He's proclaimed that we've got to get off the backs. Get this. We've got to get off the backs of the FBI and the CIA. And he not only favors this great opponent of big government and aren't they all these days. He not only favors registration for the draft, but one one raises the question of what he might use drafted men and women for when it's forced to take a look at his foreign policy position, where he said that it is not intervention in another country's affairs to support friendly governments facing revolution, like the Shah of Iran. That's not intervention Bush said. That's helping. So I think we have to ask the question here. Mr. Bush, if he had been president and we had had a draft and we'd hand the standby manpower, whether or not hundreds of thousands of American boys and American women might be today in Iran dying and killing for the sake of a repugnant creature like the Shah of Iran. I think, ladies and gentlemen, that the fact that such a man could be running for president of the United States in this country is a real symbol of political bankruptcy that we face in this country. Turn to the last of the major Republicans, a man who I particularly find most contemptible. John Connolly, the turncoat Democrat who manages to become a protege of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Recently, Big John was asked who he thought the greatest president of the 20th century was. And this master opponent of big government, as he postures this week on the cover of Time magazine, proclaimed Lyndon B. Johnson. But he was equally a supporter of Richard Nixon. Nixon noted in his memoirs that when he unleashed the Christmas bombing of Connolly in 1972, quote, one of my strongest supporters was John Connolly, who called daily to report some new and positive sampling of public opinion. Very conscientious. And certainly, as an aside here, to me, as certain were celebrating a certain split from Yath last night, there's certain a bitter irony in the fact that Richard Vigory, the kingpin of the new right, has recently joined the Connolly for president camp. Vigory, many of you may know, got his start with Yath, Young Americans for Freedom. While Connolly, of course, got his start as a protege for LBJ, Yath, of course, in the mid-1960s was one of the bitterest enemies of LBJ. It just goes to show you what a certain kind of ugly corruption is undertaken, the right wing in this country in the last 15 years when Yath can move in the camp of Lyndon B. Johnson. I agree rather strongly with Steve Chapman's assessment that Connolly is reminiscent of John Randolph's comparison of a political enemy to a rotten mackerel by moonlight shining and stinking at once. But this is not the end of Connolly's villainies. It is only the beginning. According to William Sapphire, the Nixon speechwriter, was John Connolly, who persuaded Richard Nixon to impose wage and price controls by showing him where he could find the hidden support of big business. This is our great free enterprise. And according to National Review, he fought his way up, John Connolly, from the hand-scrabble farm to genuine wealth in the Lyndon Baines Johnson tradition, which is to say that he used political power to amass and then to secure his economic power. Now, this great enemy of big government, in order to provide a discipline for young people, it has endorsed compulsory national service, which would require every 18-year-old to work for some level of government, a plan which the great Milton Friedman has properly called a Hitler Youth type of program. This masterful enemy of big government endorsed Nelson Rockefeller's plan for a $100 billion federal slush fund to bankroll the private energy industry. He has endorsed the guaranteed annual income, the re-establishment of the New Deal Reconstruction Finance Corporation to bail out cities like New York. And he offered up this advice to New York that it ought to blackmail the federal government into giving it bailout funds by threatening to dump the federal bonds that it held on the market. This Reconstruction Finance Corporation would channel loans to government-approved businesses. He has approved government loans to Lockheed and to Penn Central. He is a strong supporter of increasing federal milk price supports. And he told Nixon during the Nixon administration that this should be done to make the very lobby, quote-unquote, more loyal. In the next election, he opposed Jerry Ford's minuscule proposed tax cut in 1975. And he then both called for a 5% across-the-board tax cut, including defense and, after that, endorsed Carter's 3% increase in the defense budget. John Connolly has said that he wants to get a partnership going between government and private industry. And he said that it would be unwise during wage and price controls to think that we can go back to where we were before. American business and labor may have to get used to the idea of living within certain parameters, he said, in the middle of these terrible controls which drove business after business into the dirt, which saw American labor as not being able to pay for their own homes and for their own cars and for their own lifestyles that they had fought so hard to win. Ladies and gentlemen, you ask me, these are the parameters of fascism. Now, the last thing I'll say about big John is that he once said something very true. Declared recently, quote, anytime you start looking for a central government for favors, you sow the seeds of inevitable deep-seated corruption. It can't be any other way, unquote. Well, he ought to know. If you ask me, this man is the veritable symbol of political corruption in this country today. Now, if you ask overall what the real problems with the Republican Party is, you'll get an answer if you ask Governor Thompson of Illinois, you know what he said? He said the problem with the Republican Party is it sticks to principles too much. Indeed, if you ask me, it's hard to find any principles there at all. Now, if we turn from the Republicans to the Democrats, we simply take one more lower rung into hell. There are three prominent people running for president, potentially, and among the Democrats today. Jerry Brown, Edward Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. I don't have too much to say about any one of the three of them. Brown, of course, is a great enemy of big government as they all are. I sort of think of Jerry Brown as sort of a Hindu mystic version of Richard Nixon. He supports a new space program to get this country moving again. You might conclude from this that he's a little bit spaced out, but he supports compulsory national health insurance. And the plain fact is that while Reagan's budgets grew at twice the rate of Edmund G. Brown's, Jerry Brown's budget have grown at twice the rate of Ronald Reagan's.  He is a big spender for his sewer energy authority, for shale oil, for renewable resources. He called for no new taxes when running for office, then turned on a dime and advocated a windfall proper tax, and he said it's not a tax, it's a revenue raising measure. Wow, all that you can say about Jerry Brown as far as I'm concerned is that when he proclaims that small is beautiful, one has moved to suspect that he is referring to his own integrity, consistency, and brains. For those of you who don't live in California are not bombarded by this mumbling mystic day in and day out, there is a very special kind of eeriness to this man, a very special kind of eeriness indeed, and I think that's that kind of creepiness that he projects. I mean he does less harm than many other people, granted, but that kind of creepiness that he projects, which is responsible I think for the fact that Californians heroically would prefer many other candidates for president other than Jerry Brown. There's nothing much to be said about Ted Kennedy, he looks right now as a formidable candidate, and in fact I hope he runs and he'll probably win. If he does it just might cure the American people of their infatuation with the Kennedy clique and with the mystique of New Deal liberalism. Seems that many of the American people yearn so much for strong leadership in the face of people like Jimmy Carter, but they're willing to take even the most ardent apostle of big government in the United States Senate today. He is a man who wants to impose a bone crushing level of taxation on the American people through his national health service plan. He is a man who supports big government in area after area. If you turn from Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, well all I can say is it's another step down. And I was sort of fishing when I was doing this speech for sort of a certain symbolic thing to pick up about Jimmy Carter and his administration. I mean what can you say about the Carter administration at this point that anyone else hasn't said? Well I came across the front page item in the San Francisco Chronicle about Carter's hair raising tail. It seems that while canoeing Jimmy Carter was attacked in the water by a killer rabbit. He was the only one in the canoe but the reporters along the side of the creek and his staff saw him standing up and whacking away at something with an oar. Later he insisted that in fact he had been attacked by a charging killer rabbit and he was beating it off to save his life. That it came after him with teeth barred. Well if you really want to symbol the Carter administration here, he had pictures blown up, they had pictures known that could see him hitting with the oar, they could see him moving around on the boat but they didn't see any rabbit, I'm not alone a killer rabbit.  But they're not going to release any pictures, that would be demeaning. Look, there's a double-edged logic to this, it's rather charming. On the one hand, on the one hand we have Carter being attacked even by the rabbits and on the other hand there's the sad symbolic spectacle of the Carter administration, the president of the United States beating a rabbit off with an oar. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the Republicans and Democrats. Are these what the American people deserve? Let them hear you in Washington. Are these what the American people deserve? Think too little of the American people. Jimmy Carter said he'd give the American people a government as good and decent and honest as they were and I think he slandered them. These are the candidates who are trotted before us. These are purveyors of privilege, promoters of political pull, puny demagogues who pounce and pray upon the American people. Ladies and gentlemen, compared with men like these, Clark and Huncher loom as giants. If we move from there to the only other political alternative offered the American people to the citizens party proposed and headed by Barry Commoner, we take one step even lower. Every solution the citizen party calls for offers us a call for more and more government power. They offer a cure for the disease of government by proposing that we move toward ranked socialism, nationalizing our energy industry to give the government even more power over our energy needs. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the final struggle of the new class for dominance in this society. It is the hand of power reaching out to clutch and to seize. It's enough to make one wonder whether this is a political party for our citizens or against them. What have these two parties that we have been faced with low these hundred years done? For 100 years now we have been ruled by the Republicans and the Democrats united against the people, pursuing folly and policy indiscriminately always to the detriment of liberty and a prosperity and a peace. They launched the civil war to fight the consequences of a slavery they had sanctioned and promoted. They launched a wicked inflation, income tax and the slavery of the draft to turn brother against brother treating black people first as slaves then as lepers, then as mere boats. Individual human beings treated as anything except human beings. They launched against us the protective tariff setting up a war of victimized consumer against privileged business, wrecking free trade and promoting the economics of nationalism and empire. They have divided the American people by massive grants of privilege to some, subsidies to some and opposing special burdens on others. They have hurled at us one regulatory agency after another, choking the American people in every area of their lives. And ICC, Interstate Commerce Commission first promoted our railroads at the expense of the liberties of our people and has finally seen our rail system threaten on the edge of its grave. It has turned trucker against trucker with the ruinous arbitrariness of its regulations which have led to not but waste and corruption. They have impressed upon us an antitrust system of cynical cast, permitting first one business and then another to use the force of law to shackle competitors, forcing all but the most privileged businesses to tremble and bow down before government bureaucracies of power at once frightening and incomprehensible making the state the master of our people's economy. They have stimulated the growth of powerful interest groups better to manipulate them in the service of power, better to foment that creeping internal corruption which better serves the governing elite as it fastens its control over every segment of our lives. The Republicans and Democrats have brought us jingoism and imperialism, the Spanish-American war and its gloomy legacy, the heritage of imperialism and militarism. They have fastened upon us the Federal Reserve System with its continued monetary exploitation of the American people. They have brought us the income tax, lied us into World War I, imposed upon us, prohibition, our vicious drug laws and to secure their own power, they have continually set one ethnic group and racial group against another there to set in motion those ugly clashes which benefit none but those in power who feed off hatred. They have together brought us racist immigration laws differing only on which group was to be more despised and scapegoated at the moment. They have shackled the American farmer, humbling these proud independent souls before petty regulations and demeaning subsidies. They have launched a public education system which today sees our children without knowledge or independence or spirit or hope. They have brought us the Great Depression using tragedy always as a pretext for more and more and more power. They have lied us into World War II, Korea, Vietnam and more. They have used American use as fodder in their wars, slaughtering foreigners abroad across the globe for momentary political gain, never caring about the lives they have ruined or the future of the countries whose land they have stained with blood. This is the legacy of the Republicans and the Democrats, ladies and gentlemen and we have for too long been silent beheld with silent indignation the cruelties and injustices that they have imposed upon us. And now when we stand at a crossroads in American history, badly in need of a new direction, they trot out leaders with feet firmly planted in the past. Is this what the American people deserve? Do they deserve to be continually harassed by ever mounting taxes and inflation by an energy crisis made in Washington by a threatened return of the slavery of the draft or by a veiled threats of waging yet another war? This one, undoubtedly in the Middle East to secure the oil which our own price controls prohibit American businessmen from producing? Is it any wonder that we are gathered here today, September 6th, 1979 in Los Angeles to declare that we have had enough? Is there any doubt, any longer that to pursue another course that we need a three-party system in this country? And that the new party, that party of hope and of progress must be a party dedicated to securing that simple system of natural liberty for which our own forefathers fought and died only to have their vision betrayed by a bloody power? Or that that party as a libertarian party dedicated to individual liberty, peace and prosperity? Isn't this what the American people deserve? Don't they deserve to be treated as human beings to live their lives in dignity and in liberty? For us, these are more than platitudes and slogans trotted out in election years to win votes than to be put upon a shelf there to gather dust. For us, these are principles, principles of individual liberty which stand as the fountain head of a new program and a new political party ready to make its mark upon the American people, all the American people. In the area of energy, we face crisis after crisis after decades of controls and planning, subsidizing first one form of energy and then another. We mean to solve, we libertarians mean to solve our energy problems by the simple move of deregulating the American economy. Freeing prices and ending our decades long subsidies for nuclear power, our encouragement of dependence on Middle Eastern oil, our monopoly grants a special privilege to public utilities. Let us repeal Price Anderson and establish strict liability for nuclear and other forms of power. And the next time a near catastrophe like that at Three Mile Island occurs, let the utilities pay for the $300 million in cleanup costs. And let's stop them from soaking the taxpayers and the rate paying public. Let them not try to evade responsibilities for their actions again. In the field of education, let us begin the long and difficult but necessary process of getting the government out of education. We must repeal compulsory attendance laws and permit once again competition in education by tax credits and massive tax cuts. Let us end inflation by stopping the monetary exploitation of the American people.  In the area of civil liberties, let us repeal all victimist crime laws. Let us end the drug laws and vice squads stopping once and for all police harassment of gay people in this country. In the area of unemployment, let us end the racist minimum wage laws and our vicious labor legislation which pits one group against another. Let us end protective labor legislation and licensing laws which discriminate against women, minorities and the poor. In the area of foreign policy, let us fight the draft and any other form of slavery. Let us end that bipartisanship foreign policy of global intervention which is wreaked havoc across the globe and make no mistake about it. We mean what we say. Let the governing classes be put on notice that we mean to change the course of history. We're tired of being regulated and controlled by bureaucracies without limit. We're tired of being brainwashed by a public school system without dignity, decency or freedom. We're tired of a foreign policy which divides us into victims and executioners scattering victims across the globe. We're tired of being beaten down by the bone crushing level of taxation in this country. We're tired of black people and other minorities being treated as political footfalls without dignity or rights. And we're tired of being trampled on by the iron feet of oppression and neither are these for us or libertarians mere abstractions. Because we know that behind every oppression there lies a face. Sarah Bart, 16 year old widow, kicked out of her home for non-payment of property taxes in California two years ago. The bitterness, the pain. 68 year old Lois Faulkner, nicknamed by her friends and neighbors Grandma Marijuana. An old woman in a wheelchair sentenced to prison for selling marijuana to neighbors. John Singer shot in the back in the battle of state authorities because he refused to send his children to public schools. An Argentinian exchange student in a New York City gay bar when the bar was raided.  Don't these people too, ladies and gentlemen, deserve to live in dignity and in liberty. Ladies and gentlemen, in August of 1857, great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his passionate campaign against slavery said that quote, the whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to our August claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing and for the time being, putting all other things into silence but it must do this so it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate, agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you will find out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they are resisted. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress. Ladies and gentlemen, the American people have reached the limits of their endurance for we are a proud people. A nation built on struggle and on achievement. Our ancestors came to this country because they would not bow down before kings and before tyrants. They came to this country to build new lives for themselves and their children. Lives unfettered by chains and political cruelty but the chains and the cruelty of cross the oceans now threatening us all. Everywhere on this planet, the hands of power have clutched and have seized governments horrible and destructive, fierce and inhuman have been founded in blood and supported by barbarity. Ladies and gentlemen, tyranny is here and submission is a crime. We have had enough and we are going to resist to resist the stale politics of the status quo which daily drains our lives of wealth and of joy and of hope.  Let us rise up each and every one of us, men and women, white and black and issue our declaration of independence from the two-party monopoly in this country. And moved by a love of liberty and of justice, let us build a new and decent party, a party of hope, a party of the future, a party based upon the inalienable rights of men and women, one and all, to live their own lives as they see fit, free from the dead hand of coercion and of violence. Let us proclaim to all within earshot that the libertarian party is the party of progress, that we are the new humanitarians come to resist the tyranny which has the American people by the throat. And if they ask us by what right do you resist, we shall answer them, that we are the American people and we will not bend before the power of the state. The libertarian party has come of age. Let's go to work. Thank you deeply.


ought it belonged to them and it is now the history of global capitalism and it's destruction of the earth and where are we on that story and how are we as people of color complicit in that narrative so that's my thank you that was awesome so I can kind of relate to that just so when I started doing my show it's almost been like five years now this summer I was told the exact same stuff by a lot of people I was like I'm gonna get an audience nobody really cares about solo work in fact I met with a Broadway producer and she's done really well she's producing on Broadway still and she was like oh honey nobody solo shows about your life nobody really cares it's so funny she hadn't even read it my show is not about my life it's actually based on interviews I conducted in the New York New Jersey area with a lot of people and I play a range of like six year old to a 65 year old woman none of them are on shows until I went out and got my own audience and did it and the play has toured all over the world and it sells out almost always wherever we've taken it so like you know you have to kind of prove yourself first so I've been there and I don't know what that's called either and then I've also been on the other side of things you know where other people are telling the story for you and it's very frustrating I don't have an answer I think we do have to engage we do I mean I'm currently working as a Muslim American consultant on a play and it's a white playwright and it's through a grant and I get it because this theater has always worked with these people so you know they brought them over and they needed a consultant it's at least a step in the right direction I wish that they had actually gotten some of the Muslim American playwrights to contribute to the play as writers and not just as writers so you know it's frustrating having these conversations with people and it's like you know oh what if this girl wears a hijab and she has a conflict with her father and her brother I was like why you know again like showing the Muslim male as an evil it's very frustrating because I'm constantly fighting to show the opposite of that which is what I grew up with my father is the biggest feminist I know and he's a Muslim man who also comes from nothing and was eight kids and the only one to go past like sixth grade level education you know so it's important to tell those stories yeah so sorry I'm like going on and on again I finally have a lot to say about this because it is very it is very frustrating because other people tell and even within this kind of cross-section of being Muslim American I think there's a misunderstanding that you know a lot of Muslims are Arab when in fact I think 90% of the world's population that's Muslim is non-Arab you know and there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan and so who's telling those stories there are also Muslim Bosnians and Puerto Rican Caribbean's who I've met here so yeah absolutely there's this huge kind of misunderstanding of what that looks like and I remember early on when I was first there's a character in my play who covers her hair who talks a little bit like a valley girl and that was very important for me because it was based on somebody very real who I know and I remember there was an interviewer from backstage who was really into us into the play you know she was very supportive but she sat through a rehearsal and at the end of the rehearsal white woman she goes well but you know that character I mean somebody covers their hair they really wouldn't talk that way I mean I hear things like that all the time if like you do acts then you couldn't be why you know and it's just this I it's frustrating it's like we have to fix this and we have to keep telling the stories and we need many more voices especially from the Muslim American community you know to tell those stories yeah I love it when people tell you about your own culture and ethnicity and they know better oh I've been I've been asked in an audition to do an Indian accent and then told how to do it by a white person so you know I mean I could tell you so many stories Jeff you know thinking about the question I have so many complicated what feel to me like very complicated relationships with with even the not with the phrase of cultural appropriation but just different ways in so one piece when I was very young I was studying to be a director and I was going to Columbia College in Chicago and it was my graduate project and I really wanted to direct the glass menagerie I loved it I had just a deep deep deep connection to the play and I could feel at the moment of proposing oh I want to do this thing I could feel the tension in the room I couldn't quite identify why it was there because I was younger and I wasn't so smart about the world but I could feel it and because I was younger and not so smart I asked is there a problem with me directing the play and I worked with some very frank people on the on the faculty and they're like well actually yeah like why don't you want to do fences why don't you want to do and it was when they started listing the plays that I realized oh damn I totally I I believed the for myself at least in this program that anything was possible and you know when you go through program you've been there for a long time so this was now the end of a journey and it's like wow you've actually always thought that for me a certain set of things were possible and I didn't believe that so I had to struggle very hard to get to direct that production and then I did and by the end of it oh wow you really had something to bring to that it's like well of course of course and what I had to end up saying actually which was very complicated but I had to sort of disavow I was put in a position where I had to disavow sort of all of black theater and like I don't have anything to bring to that or at least nothing that you haven't seen before because a lot of those experiences in those plays don't they don't resonate for me that's just real so I didn't I just didn't have anything to bring to fences for sure I bless it but I just didn't have anything to bring to that um so that's one piece the other when I think about how I was raised in my community and in my family there's a kind of cultural cultural appropriation that was promoted there are ways you want to speak there are places you want to go maybe you should go to the museum and not to and and saying this is complicated because it suggests that these are things that belong to a majority I'll be very I'll be very kind ah but it was definitely a part of my my background my childhood so when I hear contemporary folk um say things like pull your hands up and do that like those things I I hear those with a kind of suggestion that you must appropriate the ways of being and speaking um of other yeah that's a great point and also the exactly like the other extreme is when you are asked to represent the whole culture race or ethnicity right like you know we are all one uh Chris do you have uh something I guess um yeah this is great it's it's these are such huge topics um I mean I guess okay so two things so personal story I'm looking at notes I wrote them that's why I'm looking at um uh so personal story I mean I guess the only really sort of personal applications I can think of as early on in my career and I think it still happens to some degree but you know when your work gets primarily sold as you know the Latino play for this year or it gets primarily sold as the female play or the whatever that is and that becomes the main selling point and often to the detriment of what the work itself is doing becoming accomplishing I think you you know you start out having to have a slightly different conversation you have to have this this this primary conversation before you're allowed to go to the second conversation you know you have a play on Broadway I don't but if someone you know one has a play on Broadway and the conversation becomes I mean it's happening right now although this is a good problem to have like with Eclipse right so the the conversation around Eclipse is the first all black female cat or the first all female production first all about all these these various firsts of things and I'm dying to hear the conversation about Eclipse as a play good bad and different like just be able to talk about the thing so on some level this cultural appropriate this this well-intentioned cultural appropriation can be really problematic where you don't get to view the piece on the terms of the piece and and marketers or or producers will sell it they'll say oh we're going to do the Latino play right now let's we'll put it out to the world and then the Latinos will come and I was in a theater a theater organization where they were holding a Cinco de Mayo organ I think a Cinco de Mayo party and they had a salsa band and I went over to the to the artistic director and I was like you know maybe not a great thing maybe not the right match of ethnicities and the associate artistic director of this organization said our audience won't be able to tell the difference and so it was like all right fine I don't need to be here anymore but more importantly you know matching being able to talk about what the thing actually is rather than the sort of qualifiers on the outside can be sort of problematic but hand in hand I think with some of the stuff that was going said earlier I think it just also speaks to this need right now I mean we have a lot of playwrights and we have a lot of folks people of color who are becoming actors increasingly more and more but we don't have is critics and journalists and administrators and there are opportunities and spaces in those realms for folks to contribute to the conversation on those levels as well so that when you go to see a work by Muslim American female that you're able to engage with the work on the secondary and tertiary levels and actually engage with the work on its own terms you know be able to understand all of the signifiers be able to understand all the references but also be able to understand you know be able to place things in a slightly different context it's not so subsumed by that mainstream that we talked about in the first place so I think you know just these appropriation often has to do with ignorance and I don't use the term ignorance in as pejorative a way as it sometimes comes off but just you know folks who grew up in different perspectives it's important that those perspectives be shared on all sides of the conversation Thank you Grace, Jeff I love what you said we need many more voices and I would I wrote that down and underlined it I love that and as a educator or teacher and a producer I totally believe that and actually that's really what I love about NoPassport so thank you Caridad for continuing this amazing conference because every time I come here you know watch it or come I learn about so many more voices voices that I need to include in my canon and in my keep them close to my heart so I want to read you know young your plays and read about your one woman show and you know have my students do them in classes because we they need students need to expand their repertoire of the human heart and really learn about the wide wide capacity for the heart and your different stories and embody different stories in terms of a cultural appropriation two things as again as a teacher I have the ability to have students work on fences black actor and a white actor no well because because you mentioned fences before you mentioned fences before right that's why I'm mentioning it but you know you don't want to work on it I did want to work on it with my students I did want to have a white actor and a black actor work on that because well it was actually right those characters were right for them as people and it expanded their hearts it really opened them up and actually something that opened me up I was reading Jeffrey's blog that you were in a theater an oppression or something yeah and one of the questions to you was what is your attitude towards the police and reading your answer to that really moved me deeply because again I just recognize yet again yet again what privilege I have you know I won't speak for you in terms of what your answer was but you know I don't have that experience with the police I don't I can't remember your exact words the fear and the apprehension and reading that opened me up and made me realize okay I have to pull off the blinders and as a teacher that is what I have to do I have to shut up I have to listen listen to students listen to their experiences and give them these profound texts to push against learn from and learn all the human dramas which is why this you know whole sense of we need many more voices and we need students young theater people to experience different voices and to expand their version of what humanity can be so when I had students work on defenses you know they were you know they were in Australia so first of all they didn't really know much about what August Wilson was writing about and they had to learn about a totally different culture and learn about different kinds of ways of growing up and hopefully learning more empathy my only other connection or another deep connection I have to cultural appropriation is I performed Bouto for many years Japanese Bouto and I won't get into too much because I don't want to take up too much time but it's about you know how can one dance another person's culture if I am performing Bouto am I actually appropriating and ripping off someone else's experience in culture and the answer sometimes is yes sometimes no and I think the for me the issue about cultural appropriation or cultural translation or if it's like a blood transfusion it's cultural transfusion and you actually take someone the blood and the tongue and the story of someone else and you actually really go through a deep transfusion into your soul, into your heart I think sometimes it can work I think there have been times when I performed Bouto in the past when I really wasn't digging deep enough and I was merely ripping off the signs and signifiers of someone else's story and then I think when I went deeper with it I actually made it my own story so those are my connections Thank you Jeff, actually along the same lines about working with students I need to share my little story because I'm in rehearsals right now at Ithaca College with a device therapy about microaggressions and macroaggressions on college campuses and after a whole semester, last semester of protests and the vote of no confidence against the president of Ithaca College I thought that we cannot do anything else we cannot stage a play, I need to use my little workshop production slot to devise a project with the students and we are featuring 14 students one of them is a spoken word poet Gerelle Jerome and it's really important to learn from the students and to work together to shape this script and this piece and that was my little thing of what I'm trying to do right now with young people but the other issue as I'm speaking about Romania now wearing my Romanian hat because back in Romania I used to be a talk show host and I was having a TV talk show called Necessary Polemics and I'm really now I'm realizing that I'm back with that hat on me, I'm like I need polemics in my life so that's why this panel so back to the issue of cultural appropriation because with this panel I really want to open it up to questions from the audiences I think the most important thing that we can do is to have this kind of conversation so I like to open it up to questions, if you guys don't mind yeah, Randy I couldn't hear a thing Is your work as more than a spoken word rather than a spoken word given where you're from Can you ask this microphone to everyone? Because so far it's anti-white anti-this, anti-whatever is what I'm hearing but on the other hand killing is like the personification of somebody who's writing work at least in my mind that's Joanne and Korean and American so as a writer how do you see your work building on your own culture? please okay so I'll start so I think I saw a great documentary last week and I'll use it as an example to sort of explain what I do it was about Boyle Heights and the history of this community in LA that over the years for the past, I don't know, 40-50 decades has really changed in demographics with new influxes of immigrants but really maintained this very strong sort of activist nature and you can see it with the Japanese population being taken to internment camps and shifting to this African American community and from this African American community becoming a Jewish community becoming this Latino community I mean, identities are really permeable and I feel like I carry many in this country because it's so racist it just wants you to pick one and you can't when you fit so many so I just check multiple boxes and part of the work I do and what I love doing is to just short circuit that thing that makes you just want to be one thing because it's so inhuman to try to do that and I don't understand why the stereotypes are perpetuated in our culture or why we need this so my point of attack is to just confuse you so much that you just realize you don't know anything because it is the only way there's some humility to talk about who we are and it's been really hard to get to that point because most people just want to laugh it off and ignore you and dismiss you so you really have to get on people's faces and short circuit their brains you know you have to do both things right, do you want an answer from Chris as well? Chris Ren you need an answer yeah, well I think because I missed sort of the setup I'm a little uncertain on exactly the best way for me to answer but I probably gave the wrong impression by using the term because I don't think that I am anti I don't think I'm right anti I don't think I really know how to write anti I think I know how to write my own stuff my own experience in my world is a very, very diverse I guess for lack of a better term world because of where I grew up and how I grew up like I said in Puerto Rican I grew up in the suburbs I grew up on hip hop and professional wrestling and at the same time theater and high culture, role of culture and you know I think it's funny hearing part of the question because when I had just written down here on this card right here is advocacy for I don't know if you can see it but advocacy for as opposed to always against and I think that there's this sense of like this is about sort of what are you and this is changed as I've gotten older but certainly the big question for me right now is what is it that you're advocating for what are you pushing for who are you speaking on behalf of what groups are you giving body to and to me it's less about saying like I am anti it's even less about saying like I am anti white power structure because I work in white power structures I work in most theaters I work in these big mainstream theaters and I want to continue to work there but actually that's probably B B and A because that's where I came of age I grew up in the public theater and in Manhattan Theater Club and at the Roundabout and at Databricks USA and in all these institutions and then regionally later on so it's not so much to me about completely like dismantling or disregarding what all that is as much as it is campaigning for my own voice and for the voices of people you know who's work I did to be heard in sort of a similar way that entirely speaks to that question but it does it does that was my question I think actually that indeed we all have all kind of strategies to deal with these issues and bring nuances to the conversation I was just talking last week with a Cuban scholar and she was really upset that you know each time when the Cinco de Mayo happens she's being you know everybody tells her Happy Cinco de Mayo and that all Latinos celebrate Cinco de Mayo they don't even know what that is you know so I feel that we are all of us put in some sort of like stereotypical boxes and how do we get out of those boxes it's actually my main question and we all have strategies but questions from the audience so I came in on the tail end but I heard something that to me was very disturbing from the gentleman on the end should I put your shirt it's a long story to tell about me and August Wilson it's a funny story but there was this time where this old man used to buy me dinner every night in a diner he used to go to this diner every night and this old man would buy me dinner and he would he was a writer he would buy me dinner and he would say he would talk to me about all his plays they had nothing to do with me and he would read my poetry my work he said it's brilliant but it will never sell and it's going to go on and then one day I saw a paper and I saw a picture of this guy and the headline said August Wilson dead and I thought that was really funny but anyway all of these remakes if you really want to reach people and do something why don't you just produce a new play a new coming of age story instead of recouping all of this crap that people don't really like actually they want to teach like hip hop now everything's got to be taught in hip hop it's a bunch of people who hate hip hop you know they want to make it like a school thing to teach hip hop it's ridiculous just like they want to teach hip hop if you really want to help get a black voice a spanty voice that's not like a hip hop or whatever voice and produce it something new isn't it strange you want to blame Scott Rudin but it is a little strange that every movie that comes out is was a slave wanna be a slave the slave walk the slave dance adopt a slave do you dare slave I mean come on there's no coming of age story what do these kids do do they put on change and do a slave dance before they have sex and their first kids I don't think so so forget all that find something new that the people are seeing We used to beat us up. Everyone can Google now. The Ramones time. This is a video with me, the Harlem Boys Squire. Filmed in the West Ford Street Church. One of the first videos ever made when they wouldn't let blacks on rock and roll out. They used to beat us up because we were punk. Now they come up with Adropunk 40 years later. Why didn't they just embrace us then? Embrace these kids now, don't they?  It sucked the first time. Thank you. Do you guys have any comments or answers to that? I just wanted to clarify because I'm not sure if it was misunderstood. When I said I worked had my students work on that play, it was in class. It was never in production. So I would never, for example, I did one of the issues that we were going to talk about was doing the mountain top with the white actor. I would never produce something like that. It was a classroom experience, but I very much hear your story. Let them write something new in that classroom. Yeah, I support that as well. And get it produced.  But one of the challenges that I found sitting in those seats working on new play development and really advocating for new voices and working to make space for a diversity of voices or working to push against the obstacles so that we would have more inclusive spaces. One of the things that you encounter is a belief. And I don't think it's real about what you can sell. Well, that's what August Wilson used to do. Every day I think this thing is real, but it is powerful. It is a powerful narcotic. It's like nobody wants to see that, or I can't sell that. What I can sell is that thing that was already popular. What I can sell is that thing that has someone in it who is or was all the way possible.  And these are powerful obstacles. There's a thing that Kyung said, though, that I feel like each of us are talking in various ways about strategy, and there's a thing that Kyung said that I sort of want to underline because it feels like a powerful gift. She used the words overwhelming whiteness. So it seems like a really powerful provocation to all of us, to find those ways from where we are, to overwhelm it, to just really push it out. Thank you. The lady with the hat. Hi. I just had a comment. One of the things I thought that Christopher Diaz said that was really interesting was about, I think he said it, was about getting people of color in administration and in theaters because it's not that people aren't, there are no new voices.  That's what we sort of need to focus on as well. If you go to any of these theaters, and we're doing this new playwrights initiative in L.A. the Templars because when we focus on L.A. theater right now, a lot of people, they're bringing New York theater writers in to L.A. because they think that is a viable economic equation that translates into dollars. And we're a diverse group of people who are out there trying to prove that wrong. Theaters want to make money. They think their audience is white. If you go to a lot of these theaters in Broadway, $150 tickets, et cetera, yes, they are white because people of color don't spend $150 on said Huey, 55 minutes of Boris Whitaker, would. A great play, but who has that type of money? What we need to focus on, I think, also. Who has that type of money for theater? For theater, exactly. But what we need to sort of also focus on is audience development. How are you getting these young people into theater so that they see that as a viable career construct for themselves? Why do you want a kid who's 12 years old to go into theater when they can't even see themselves on stage? They can't see their stories, and they don't know how they're going to pay their rent with it. So it's not just a matter of, it's the typical, it's changing the narrative of what theater is for us. And something the two of you both said in the middle about like, I don't know what the opposite of culture appropriation is, it's theater. That's what it is. We're all just doing theater. We just have to take away what we've been told, what that construct really is. It's not something that's put on us. A lot of us have different backgrounds. You were talking about the majority culture of going to museums. I'm obviously black, too. A lot of my friends went to the museum. We went to the library. We're told that we don't do that. So that's not true. That's not a majority thing. We're actually the majority of people of color. It's not necessarily a minority of minorities.  But we have to change how we approach what we do and stop believing what people tell us is the construct that we operate in. Because we won't change theater if we keep approaching it in this sort of traditional narrative. Yeah, can I jump? Why aren't you? I'm still here. For people of color, particularly young people of color who are out in the house today, let's come over here. Let's see what the mayor will say. Come over to the camera, too, if you'd like to say. So you belong in whatever space you find yourself in. Period, punto, that's part one. You belong in those spaces. You belong in those spaces as audience members. You belong in those spaces as creators. You belong in those spaces as administrators.   You have as much right to those spaces as anybody else does. So on that note, you have as much right to be participating in the conversation about what gets done in that space and what is art there as anybody else does. You may not have as big or as president of the voices of people who've been, whose families have been doing it for 30 years, 40 years, multiple generations, but they need you. They need you in that space. If you care about the kind of thing, they need you in that space. So don't be afraid, A, that advocating to make notice for the stuff that you want to see up on those spaces, on those stages.  That's what Chiara Luzis is doing. That's what Dominique Grisso is doing. That's what Vin is doing. That's what McDonnelly is doing. That's what Lisa Moore is doing. I'm looking at you all now. That's what the people who were in this room when you were doing, and it's sucked because it's hard to get produced and it's hard to get done. It's hard for everybody to get produced and it's hard for everybody to get done. It's hard for us.  But like, the thing that you can control most at the core of it all is to just keep making the goddamn work and keep making the work that only you can really make. And you deserve to be in those spaces. I forget why I jumped in at a disagreement. In addition to all these other sort of larger conversations, they work. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Actually, because we are approaching, you know, our time limit, I'd like to give the chance to our panelists to give us a few closing remarks. That was mine. That was mine. No closing remarks? So, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, sort of cultural institutions as these predominantly white spaces that now are becoming increasingly diversified. And the need for these institutions to diversify because without those new audiences and those new artists, those institutions are going to die. But I look at sort of the power and privilege that exists within mainstream theaters or stages like Broadway and I keep imagining neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly gentrified by people of color. And the thing I really fear is that people that are white are going to get scared and fly white, white flight. And how do you create a neighborhood that is diverse but is connected and that doesn't lose the whiteness it had? Which is why I feel like we can't pick each other and I don't mean to be anti-white when I say this. I'm just trying to understand how do we all become closer and more together and a real community that genuinely cares about each other's histories and not, you know, become another urban space that becomes depleted when all the white people leave and then you're stuck, you know. And these narratives of people of color telling you and now we've been abandoned by the whole system and there's no one here to help us, you know. It has to be a real collaborative effort and I struggle to find the metaphors to really say this but yeah, that's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Yeah, I think I already said this earlier. It's just important to create spaces for telling our own stories and back to what Chris was just saying. You guys were sitting here telling your stories and I promise you if you tell your story and it's specific and it's honest and it's truthful you will find an audience for it. Don't let people tell you that you know it's not going to sell or it's not nobody will relate to it. People will tell your story. That's what I'm saying.   You know, I was talking to the one who runs the studio museum. I said, Miss, why don't you have any pictures of punk rock and stuff in the exhibition.  But she lets the white kids do it but she doesn't let her own black kids show that type of work at the studio. And that needs to be addressed as well to be fair in what he's saying.  Thank you so much.  Thank you for that. One of the things that I focused on a lot in my work when I was inside the institutions and now outside really focusing on audiences is trying to make space and to promote inclusive spaces to do what I can from where I am. So to really recognize what is this position that I have, what space do I occupy and what power is possible here. So think about where you are and what you can do from where you are. And for anyone in the room who's working inside an institution, get out of the building.  Get out into those conversations that are absolutely happening outside the building. Sure they're happening inside, but they're happening outside too. This is one of the things that we focused on a lot in Chicago at Victory Gardens. There are a lot of things that we wanted for that theater and a lot of those things are happening right now. But we had to get out of the building. The only way we were going to know about the Latino community or any other community in the city is to actually get out into that community. We had to get out and talk to you and learn from and elevate and support and recognize. Thank you. Jeff, do you have a last comment? I'm a student here right now. I feel like I'm learning from all of you. That's why I'm taking so many notes. And my job is always to listen. And I feel privileged to have listened to such a great dialogue right now. Chris, do you have any last, last comment? No, I'm good. I think, yeah. Just benefit a lot of voices. You have to listen to all the voices that are in the room. Thank you guys. Let's continue the conversation of our wine. We just have a breakdown of 50 minutes at 4.55 when we turn.  She's been in quite a few positions all day, but she's taking a lot of notes I can tell. Right now we have a wine and cheese break. They'll be outside in the lobby for those of you on our round. Create your own wine and cheese break. And we'll come back at 4.55. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello, and welcome to this episode of Farming Matters. I am your host, Erin Schneider. I'm a farmer and I work with the North Central Region SAIR program. And I am excited to be here with you all today. And I'm joined by Marie Flanagan. Hello. She's our Farmering Matters producer. And viewers, you are in for a treat. We are here with a farmer rancher grant recipient, Christine Williams. She is with Pepperberry's Urban Farm and Agape Grow Education Center outside of Kansas City, Missouri. And Christine, I am delighted and I hope I have a feeling our viewers will be as well to learn about ground cherries. Thank you, Erin. So I am excited to be able to share this with everybody. I love ground cherries. In fact, we just did a ground cherry tour this morning. Now our beds are not ready yet. We're kind of clean the hill. But everybody that comes to our farm, we share the ground cherry system, the hillside system. And I just tell everybody about it because it is a super food. It is such a good crop. It's so high in nutritional value. And it's a long lasting. I don't understand why, except for harvest. It's really hard to harvest. I think that why we don't see them in the stores and the farmer's markets because they last forever. I mean, you can harvest them and they'll be good a month, month and a half later in the fridge still.  So I mean, they've got mango and pineapple and a little bit of, sometimes I get a coconut flavor but not very often, but the mango and pineapple and a little touch of tomato every once in a while. So they are in the night shade family and very much related to Tomatilla. It has the husk around it like a Tomatilla does. When they fall to the ground, that's when you harvest them. And when you first harvest them from the ground, they're green or starting to turn orange, but you want them to turn a bright orange or a yellowish orange color before you eat them. So it takes a couple of days after you've harvested because they're in the night shade family. They're very frost sensitive. And so that's why we don't put them out until Memorial weekend. Even though our time here, we're in zone 6A, really September and October is the high point for around here when we harvest them, but we will start getting some in July and August. And sometimes if we don't have a frost until November, they'll keep going. We started doing this about four years ago and we had an area that we had to mow and it was a pretty steep hill. And we thought, well, what could we grow on this that we could get more production for our farm and turn it into an added value product or fresh crops. And we had already been growing the ground cherries on the ground like the traditional way. And it was good, but as a farmer, it was the last thing that I would ever get harvested because by the time I got all the other production done to get down on the ground and harvest them, I just couldn't do it, my back would not do it. And so this hillside system was just a perfect thing for us to try and figure out if we'd be able to get more production, be able to get ground cherries to our farmer's market and out into the public. So this is a few pictures of the ground cherry hill. You can see my grandson there at that time was seven and he can handle those panels with no problem. So we made them three feet wide by four feet long or something like, I think it was three feet by four feet. And so they're not heavy at all. They, we had very little wind pickup and we get a lot of wind here on our farm. And so they are really tucked in there pretty good. And but just easy to pick up. Control of weeds was wonderful. The third picture here on the side of the ground cherries and that one is, you see the first or second year when we decided we needed to raise them up higher we don't have the raised bed in between and that's where we changed it and put it much higher so that they were not touching the panels because here they're touching the panels and they just weren't rolling down. And so you can see on the other picture we've got one of the gutters in one getting ready to go in and everything is very movable. And so it worked very well. We could pick them up and this pretty well what we've done every year is pick them up at this time of year, get our beds rebuilt kind of and put all of our nutrition back into the hills the areas that we're planting in and then put it back down and weed control the only weeds we'd have would be between the panels there the rest stayed nice and clear of weeds so we didn't have that major problem. And so we started doing it four years, five years ago this would be the fifth summer of doing the hillside system. We first started out with making panels and running the panels up and down and we used the vinyl house siding and to use the panel so that we'd have these long panels to be able to let the cherries hit the panel and run down into a gutter system. And we made the panel small enough that a woman could handle it. I didn't want great big six foot long ones or anything like that. I wanted to be able to do set the system up myself. Every year we've changed our system quite a bit. This year we're gonna be changing it again and I'll tell you about the changes we'll do this year but we did two types of systems one with the panel and then one with black canvas and just to see how it worked all on the hillside. And so with the whole idea that the cherries hit the ground and roll down either the vinyl sidings or the canvas and into a gutter system and then we could take a little broom and sweep them all up into the edge and harvest in one bunch. The first year we did not take into account that it was the plant grew so short to the ground and so we still had to harvest up the hill and move the branches and so it'll roll down. Then the next year mounted it up where we planted the transplants and so that it would not do that. It still went down a little bit more than I liked. I wanted it to be really a good space in between the branches and the vinyl siding. And so this year is where we're changing that part. We are gonna put some cattle guard under it so that it puts it up above it. It's also we're gonna be adding a spring release to it so that we can hit the spring like a bed spring or something like that and shake the cattle panel and it'll shake all of the ripe ones off and they're not totally ripe. When they hit the ground it still takes another couple of days for their totally ripe. But it would take all the loose ones off and then roll down and we can go on and harvest it from the gutter system. The only thing that I would probably change is using the vinyl siding. I would probably go with one of the metal sidings instead because we had some breakage from cold weather and even though we left them out all year long in the sun and so the sun would bake them, the snow would be on them. And we had a few just get damaged from that. If I was to remake them now, I would probably cut them to a two by four instead in the size of the panel itself because we really don't need that whole three foot across the beds and then we could get more plants in. Harvesting, they do fall to the ground. That's when you pick them up and that's why we wanted the hillside system so they can roll down and be easier for us to pick them up. This is a picture here of my husband cleaning them and cleaning them, it just means taking off the husk. They store really, really well in the freezer. So we put all of ours up in the freezer till we have time to go on and make them up into jams and jellies or the salsas. So there's a ground cherry jam recipe of the coffee cake. One of my very favorite ones is doing, it's basically a yellow cake that you're putting some ground cherries in there. So that's a really good one. The salsa, love that one. And which is really easy to make. What drew you to ground cherries at first? Like, do you remember the first taste of ground cherries you had, Christine and that? Yeah. Well, I'm a chef also, okay? So that was kind of probably my first curiosity when I discovered them through Breaker Creek seeds. And I was like, oh, I'd like to try these. And I planted them in the wrong place because it wasn't, I did not know that they would come back there every year or I would have put them somewhere else. And so it was just, I mean, it would have been nine years ago when I first discovered them. And when you take them to market, you peel them before you take them to market? No, we do not. We leave those husks on and we tell them because they're gonna last longer if they are not peeled back. We don't just sell fresh produce at our market. We sell jams and jellies. We sell ferments. And but we will give anybody the recipe of anything that we make. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're giving, yeah. Because I would rather them eat healthy. And your project report, I remember you highlighting how you're bringing people together through your ground cherry festival. Our ground cherry festival, I love. Because they can come out, they can see the system. They taste the different stuff. We, you know, they're just, we're trying to make it a community. We are located in one of the worst communities in Kansas City, the worst in crime and drugs and stuff in Kansas City. And we are trying to change this area from the inside out by teaching people how to garden. The ground cherry festival, we don't just have people from our community come in. We really don't have that many from our community yet. But we have the surrounding communities coming out to it. The other urban farmers, some of the farmers that are not urban are coming to it because they're trying to learn too. And so we're just trying to create this community and acknowledge that there are farmers here in Kansas City right in the city. And that if everybody does a little bit, then we can provide food that we all need here. What would you offer to other farmers who are maybe wanting to try ground cherries? I mean, you've made it so generous with your information shared and recipes and how to grow, but it also sounds like you have a growing network. If you're a farmer just maybe starting and maybe they don't have that network, but what were some advice you'd offer to them to get started there? I would just say try it, put them in. They are so easy to grow. And I have not found very many people that don't like them, but even if you put them in, put them in a place that if you don't do the system, put them in part of your garden that you're gonna know, this is ground cherry area and they come back and then share them with everybody, even if you don't like them, let other people try them because they are a super food. I would probably get on Facebook and search for some farming groups that are in your area. And then just, if they're trying to find some ground cherry seeds, there's gonna probably be somebody that is willing to give a few seeds and try it that way. Even though they're in the nightshade family, we don't have a lot of problems growing them. I've never seen any disease on them. We have ants, ants like them, because it's that sweet sticky syrup that it puts out sometimes. But other bug control, we just have never had really any problems with it. Christine, thanks for being really generous with your time and your knowledge of recipes and your materials on our Project Report website, but then also just in your community more importantly and just growing food and building the ground cherry love from the soil. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. I appreciate you guys thinking about us for it. Oh yeah. And you guys get to Kansas City, you call me so you can come see us.


When Vladimir Putin started saying that he's going to take over Ukraine, you know, the market started tanking very aggressively. Last week we talked about, you know, buy the rumors, sell the news setup. This is almost like an inverse of that setup. It's almost like buy the news. Over the past, you know, couple weeks, markets started selling off very aggressively. So it almost was like everyone was shorting, the smart money was shorting ahead of time.


Today we will introduce and demo our work of an open-style testing controller named as DC Fabric and the efficient OpenStack Networks based on it. First, please let me introduce of BNC, which is the Public Research Institute at Shanghai of China. BNC starts the testing research since 2012. We are one of the earliest testing players in China and took part in most of the testing research projects supported by the government. One of the projects gave us the birth of DC Fabric and our work today. Since there are a lot of testing controllers, why we have to start a brand new one? The answer is that we want to develop an efficient testing controller for cloud computing data centers. The three design principles, which are language-based, concise architecture of four layers and cloud computing oriented, make DC Fabric be unique compared to the other testing controllers. Over the past two years, we have released three versions of DC Fabric. We use the names of the Chinese entities to name it. Since the third, Joe Washington, we have implemented all the neutral APIs and have been deployed in some real OpenStack environments. This fabric uses S-Fabric algorithm for packet routing instead of flows based on hosts. S-Fabric adopts tagged aggregated flows based on the switch IDs, which can result in a very small number of OpenFlow flow entries. Since most of the commercial physical SD switch can only support a limited flow space, which is several thousands, so a small number of flow entries is very important for SD networks that contain physical SD switch. Another feature of the S-Fabric algorithm is the two steps in flow storing. There are only two OpenFlow entries needed to be installed when constructing the communication paths for two hosts. These two features make the S-Fabric algorithm very suitable for SD networks in OpenStack. Benefit from the efficiency in network management and the unique packet routing algorithms, we can use DC-Fabric and the physical SD switch to provide a bi-mental SD network for OpenStacks. In this network, the OS is connected directly to the physical switch using network wires, so no tunnels are needed. All the packets are routed using the OpenFlow entries. Therefore, any encapsulation and decapitalization are not needed, so we can achieve very high network throughput. In our experiment, under the default OAS and KOM settings, the maximum network throughput of OAM can reach up to 15 gps, and the total network throughput of physical storage can reach nearly 35 gbps. It is a very high network throughput compared to OLA networks. When used in OpenStack, an SD controller has to control the OS in every computer node. Therefore, supporting a large number of switches is very important when deployed in a large OpenStack cluster. Over the past years, we have done a lot of refactoring and optimization for supporting a large network. Today, we are very glad to announce the first Qin washing of DC-Fabric, which can support 3,000 switches for one instance. We used data serialization to improve the efficiency of thread synchronization, and we reduced the database for the master sleeve clusters of our SD controller. Also, we added some new functions such as the reverse ANT. In summary, Qin washing of DC-Fabric is much more powerful and stable, and is ready for commercial applications in OpenStack. Next, my colleague Jianqing Jiang will give two demos to show the efficiency of the SD controller and the networks based on our controller. Hi everyone. First, I will demo that DC-Fabric can control 3,000 switches. In this demo, we deployed DC-Fabric on a physical server with two Intel G-Zon CPU and 16 GB memory. We used the minnet to create 3,000 switches on 10 physical machines, each of which has 300 switches. And here I got a video for you. Let's begin. First is the initialization process of the minnet, which will start 300 switches and some hosts. And here is the DC-Fabric GUI. 3,000 switches can be discovered by DC-Fabric. And here is the technology. You can see 3,000 switches on the DC-Fabric GUI. And you can see some details of the open-v-switch. And we use pin-or to test the reachability of all the hosts. And we have to interrupt it because it's too long. And at first, the 10 minnets are isolated, so a host can't reach hosts from the other minnets. But if we add a VXLAN to two switches, the hosts can reach the other one. And the second demo is that the high network throughputs between VMs. We create an open-stack environment containing two nodes, each of which have a 4DG network card. And we create five VMs on each computer node. And then we use iPerf to test the maximum network throughputs between five pairs of VMs that are at different computer nodes. And here I got another video. And this is open-stack dashboard. And we can see five... Before, you can find the five VMs are running on controller and five VMs are running on computer. And here is DCFabric GUI. You can see two OVS can be discovered by DCFabric. And each OVS connected by five hosts. And then we can see five hosts connected by the OVS. And then we use iPerf in five pairs of VMs which cross the physical machine to test the throughputs between the two OVS. And this is the iPerf tool to test the throughputs of each pair of the VM. We have five VMs, five pairs of VMs. And I use the top to see the CPU usage and it's pretty low. And here is the floor table of the OVS. And then I use the top to see the throughputs of the VMs. And you can see each pairs of VMs, the throughputs and the total VMs, the throughputs is reached more than 60 gigabits. 30 gigabits, throughputs. The two OVS. Okay, this is our demo. Do you have any questions? Yes, bottleneck. Maybe the bottleneck is the OVS, the efficiency of the OVS because we use the default OVS. We do not use the DPD card. So the network throughput of the OVS can only be 30 gigabits. But if you use the OVS network, for example, we transfer our GRIs, the network throughput cannot be higher than 10GPS. So our solution is much higher than the OVS network. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you very much.