You know what's crazy? After finishing the last episode, I got horrendously sick.  For like five days, I was just like dead. And then I started this episode, and the intro is Mary just dying again. What was that? But guys, welcome back to the channel. My name is Jack the Buster, I'm Shinobi. We have a set 313 and 314 of our one piece watch for the day. We are at, what I believe you guys are calling, post any slobby? I'm super excited to get into it, see how all of these loose sins with water seven are tied up. See what we're gonna do about Mary not even being a thing anymore. What do we sail on? If you need a channel job to sub and hit that big wood bell, let's get into it. I was like, I skipped the intro? Mary is burning? If we go back two days, it's a far sale. If we, I was like, if we go back to Mary burning again, I'll just start pushing the right arrow key. We'll go right past it. I'm not sacrificing myself again. God kind of puts in the perspective how big a puffing Tom is, seeing people get off. Oh, I totally forgot about his blade. I thought it was like destroyed. Gonna have to find yourself a new, which one got rolled? That wasn't the cursed blade. Damn, is Luffy in there? Damn, they got a lot of, a lot of positions to fill it. Galila. See like, what happened to CP9? Are we not gonna see like the conclusion of that? Is it just gonna be a loose end? Let's go. My goat. My goat, Polly. That's me for real. He's got a slick new jacket too. Polly, you wanna join the crew? What do you, what do you say? Come on, pal. They're too dependable. Oh, at least the credibility of Galila remains a Frankie house. They're back to work. I love how this was caused by not awkward. I mean, Agua Laguna would have destroyed it anyways, I think. It's nice to see the Frankie family in high spirits. And Sonamangamaru, okay? Let's go. The MVPs of the raid. That stuff. Stuff. And let us apologize. They're like celebrities. Yeah, they kind of do all of them. Ain't nobody can replace those curves. Oh, the Giants. Oh, shoot. Wait, they'd be insanely helpful at Water 7 though. They're no longer like prisoner guards. Look at his face. Oh, wait. No, they're, wait, are they? No, they're not still fighting, are they? Holy, they're gonna stay. Maybe they'll invite Usopp. Yeah. Oh, dude. There's another loose and I didn't think about. Aside from them not having a ship, is Usopp not being a part of the crew? It's crazy, more is resolved on like Robin's side of things than Usopp's at this point. I still think he didn't. I still think it was like a copy. But if he's saying this in private, then maybe he did. Oh, and he's start renovating the island. Yeah, dude. The biggest Aqua Laguna ever. Oh, what? Wait, that's sick. A floating island? Big, a low tier skypea. They'll be the next Tom. Tom could do it. I'm gonna be honest. I know the guy. That's so cool. What an undertaking though. My goodness. Where are the straw hats, bro? Wait, what, he spent all their money on? Oh, no. I thought he bought like clothes. Well, not all their money. They have 300 mil and he spent 200 mil, right? Luffy's recharging, baby. He's sleeping while eating. Now that is a time saver. Two, three days. Denami die? Wait, the 100 mil with an N? Oh, the last 100 mil, aside from the 200 that Frankie took, so it was 300 total. Let's go! It's so nice seeing Robin just like hanging out again. He's a good bodyguard. I guess not even bodyguards. Just making sure she doesn't like slip away. Not all the money? Only 100 mil. I think of how much more you're gonna buy with the 200. I guess we'll see what Frankie bought. I mean, if anything, Frankie will probably feel bad in retrospect and just give them whatever he bought. Guys, listen. Remember all that money?  No, what would Frankie buy? He's all about like showsmanship. I don't know. I genuinely don't. Shimaju no ningen ga shi ni. Machi ga shi ni haikyo to ka son. Ono to mo sezu tachi tsuzuke kyodai nakki. Nani ga okite mo taorene. Oh, Harah? Is that Oh, Harah? Sono saikyou no kinon. Houshou. Adam, the treasure tree. Where is he going? Sono kinou ichibu ga. Gokumare ni ura no wo. Oh, shoot! Ora soitsu ga hoshii ndaga. Wait, he bought Adam one? Wait, can you use the one for a ship? That would be so strong. He's gonna offer to build it. Oh, shoot! Oh, shoot! And it's gonna be for them. Damn. Shouts Frankie. Well, they're just like, nah, I'm good. I mean, listen, I'm still mourning Mary, but like $200 million would sign me up and then the other hundred million killed everything else. Oh, this spruce up the place. What arcade machines on? Oh, Roger ship was built with the same wood. Oh, my God. Wait, this is nuts. It's not going to be any average ordinary everyday ship. One that befits the crew. Let's go. Oh, shoot. Wait, isn't the dog one? What's his name? Wait, is that here? Oh, wait, no. I can't tell if I just got baited or not. The dog ship was that one guy with freaking Kobe and Helmepo that was like training them. Garb. Garb. Is he here? He cornered Roger many times. I saw the pink hair. Oh, Kobe. He has no idea. I don't know. Wait, he wouldn't know if it's the straw hats, if they're out of the straw hats. It is in his Helmepo. Is he going to punch the wall down? Oh, my God. What is happening? This is too soon. Some guys want to have me. That sounds good. Like he's not here to capture him. How do you know Lumi is hopeless? Or maybe he like means like... Maybe he means like meet other officials. Oh. Fist of love. Lumi knows his name? What? This is some kind of prank. This is like a filler episode. It's like a dream. Did he just say that Garb is his grandfather? Dude, I was more fixated at first. I was like, he's saying like he was about to say Garb. Wait, so this is who Alkegi was talking about. Oh, my gosh. The wall is a little disarray now. I'll have to do some customizing. Episode 314. Let's go to the next. And none of them know. Why would he never say anything? Monkey D Garb. Oh, my God. What?  Maybe here. Don't you dare mess with him. Is this like a good in a good way or bad way? What? Okay, but like actually we're like in a playful manner. You know, I kind of see the resemblance now. What? What?  He be opt him. Ah, that's what they all say. Make you stronger. That's just child abuse. True. How'd you train with Ace? Oh, it seems like Ace is a bit nicer to him. Oh, how are you? He thought shanks are so cool. Stop her. I don't think.  That's his grandpa. It's just like how Ace, Ace would just fall asleep at that one bar in albasta. I wonder how he feels then about Ace being a part of Whitebeard's crew. I feel like he would be even more mad at Ace because Whitebeard's a freaking insanely like powerful pirate crew. Oh, Usab spying. He's got to be a part of this somehow. Usab's just me. So his punches actually affect Luffy. The cool one. What's happening? Top four? Is Whitebeard second half of the grand line like... What? Shanks Whitebeard and some other person? The four emperors. Hey, why are there only three then? Oh, shoot. There's four emperors. Hahaha. He gave him the hat. And I haven't forgotten about the piece of paper that Ace gave Luffy and he like had it stitched on the inside. I'm still kind of like shell shocked from the grandpa thing and the emperor thing. It helped. Shanks is the same strength as Whitebeard, the strongest man in the world. Oh my God, he had to help people help him. Oh no, he's going to start fighting. Who are these two? Am I dumb? Who are they? Dude, dude, help Meppo's hair. Oh my gosh. What? Wait, he looks so cool. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well, they're much more competent fighters now at the very least. Sergeant Major and Sergeant? Oh, they've grown up. Has he not realized it yet? He has no idea. Come on, Luffy. Episode one. I like the way they did these little flashbacks. Look how small the boat is. He has no idea how to have a hopeless cry bait. Is that a noose? He hasn't had that scar, right? He didn't have that scar before. Sergeant Major. Damn. Hell, Meppo's like, are those glasses that look so cool? Yeah, he was training them individually. Like that was that feels like even forever ago. Was that during alabaster? Dude, wait, this feels way too chill for how they just like obliterated any slobby. I feel like they're in trouble still. They don't even realize. Yeah. The hair is way better. So got a little ways to go, but oh my gosh. They don't remember. He seems a little bit more normal. I just remember the hair, man. And the chin like exaggerated it. Yeah, the hair is awful. He was just the worst. He watched so that Spandam could run. Honestly, they are not that excited. It was a guy like that. True. They weren't even thinking about that. I mean, Luffy was the one that like first inspired him to actually join the Navy, even though he wanted to be a pirate. I don't know, man. This is so bizarre. Sorry, just punched it. True.  He's actually helping. He's kind of a softy. I think you were born. Well, mom, but... What? Buggy? I'm just kidding. There's no way it's buggy, right? Right? Also, yeah, what about his mom too? He's dropping some bombshells. My goodness.  I wonder how buggy's doing. I hope he's doing okay. I miss that guy. Wait, not Smoker, right? But Smoker was like trying to capture him. But maybe that's why Smoker's been like following him so heavy. Oh, because then Smoker running into Ace would have been a bigger deal, because that would have been both of his sons. Oh, and then the lightning didn't conduct. I never even thought about that because rubber. And then I never even thought about the application with that towards Enoroo. My goodness gracious. Or who? Oh, Dragon, wait. He stopped Smoker. Oh my God. And the people at Marie Joy don't like with the mark on his face. Oh my God, that's Luffy's dad. Oh my goodness.  Everybody knows about him. Then Dragon is the vice admiral's son. Bro, Garb is just like above all these pirates. Ace, Luffy and Dragon. Oh, come on, Luffy. This is humiliating. Oh, shoot.  It's not Koza. It's Dragon. Oh, wow. Most heinous criminal. Oh, wow. So should I be worried about him? Like scared of him or not?  Oh, yeah, yeah, no biggie. Yeah, yeah, no big deal. I like how everybody just knows who he is, but Luffy didn't.  Wait, where's Ace? Come on. All right. Well, that was a lot. Where do I start? First, let me go back. I want to see these emperors real quick. They countless pirates. He's ranked in the top four pirates. Shanks isn't ranked in the top four pirates in the same league as Whitebeard. Okay. These four reign over the second half of the grand line like emperors. So second half of the grand line is a certain area and it's mostly reigned over by Shanks, Whitebeard. Whoever the hell that is, but where's the fourth? Navy headquarters and the seven warlords have joined together. Oh, wow. The Navy headquarters and the warlords have joined forces to defend off the four emperors. Oh my gosh. Is that the fourth down there? If the balance among these three great powers is lost, it could just be...


This paper examines the presence of formate defects in MOF-74, an important class of MOFs with open metal sites. Using multidimensional solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, it was found that these defects were caused by decomposition of N-N-dimethylformamide, DMF, solvent during synthesis. DFT calculations and in situ NMR analysis revealed the location and coordination structure of the formate defects, which partially eliminated open metal sites and decreased the amount of nitrogen and carbon dioxide adsorbed. This study provides a comprehensive strategy for searching, elucidating, and manipulating defects in MOFs. This article was authored by Yo Fu, Ifeng Yo, Alexander C. Force, and others.


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus.  But today is finally Star Wars Day on Free Thoughts. Joining us to discuss the politics of Star Wars is Ilya Somen, Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law. So a couple of episodes back, a few episodes back, we did a show with Tim Sandifer on the politics of Star Trek, which kind of prompted doing this show in addition to, I think this episode comes out the day the movie does. The greatest event in the history of mankind. Yeah. And so he argued that the original Star Trek series had a decidedly classical liberal viewpoint, that the politics that ran behind it were in line with classical liberalism, but that later Star Trek turned away from that to more of a leftist relativism. So is it possible to see, does Star Trek or Star Wars, do the movies say we'll stick to the movies and not to the comics and books and TV shows and other things for now? Do they have a distinct political viewpoint that we can recognize or tease out, or are we in having this conversation necessarily reading in before we even get started? I think it's a good question. I think Tim is actually not entirely correct about the politics of Star Trek, wishing had a relatively left-wing sensibility even in the 60s. With respect to Star Wars, I think the original series of three movies from the late 70s and early 80s, it probably didn't have very much of a strong ideology because it was focused on the few central characters and their personal adventures and relationships. The prequel series clearly does have a viewpoint about the breakdown of democracy and the rise of dictatorship, and it is overall somewhat left-wing, albeit not nearly as sophisticated and worked out as the left-wing viewpoint of Star Trek is. Although you said not to focus on the TV shows, I can't help but note that the TV shows Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, which are now still canonical, have explored these political themes even more, and I think further reinforced the idea that there's a kind of left-wing viewpoint underlying the series. Are we just supposed to accept that the Empire is bad because they are the Empire?  Well, maybe that scary pseudo-Nazi iconography. And they have, you know, bad music calls. There's a standard joke in science fiction that when science fiction movies and books want to portray an evil empire, they call it by its true name. They call it the Empire, whereas if it's a beneficial empire, they call it something like the Federation, such as the Federation in Star Trek. I do think there is some real evidence in the series that the Empire is evil. Obviously, the destruction of Alderaan is the clearest case, but if you recall, again, Star Wars Rebels, you see actually plenty of examples of atrocities by the Empire, including the use of slave labor, censorship, the expropriation of homes, even without compensation, and much of the suppression is targeted people who are not active rebels. So it can't be argued that the Empire only oppresses if you rebel against it. Well, even just sticking to Alderaan, there's a – so one of the novels that's come out recently is called Lost Stars by Claudia Gray, which tells the story of a young man and young woman who are lifelong friends and join the Empire shortly before a new hope and then their relationship going through the three movies when the guy ends up joining the rebellion and the woman sticks with the Empire till the end. That destruction of Alderaan plays a large role in the book, and even there we get from the Empire's side the argument is, yes, it's terrible to have blown up this planet and killed billions of people, but we're on the cusp of a galactic war that would kill substantially more. Alderaan is a seat for the – it's empowering the rebellion. There's a lot of political power for the rebellion happening there, and so by taking them out, we are – I mean, obviously it failed, but we are stopping the war. We're just – it's a shock and awe. We're going to shut down the rebellion. No one wants their planet blown up, and so we're saving billions more lives by taking this necessary albeit awful step. Is there – is that at all a plausible way to kind of save the Empire from its evilness? So it's certainly not what is intended by George Lucas or for that matter by Disney that they've taken over the series from him. Nonetheless, defenders of the Empire have made this very argument most famously in a notorious article by Jonathan Last in a weekly standard about a decade ago. I don't think at least in the internal evidence of the series that this is at all plausible. First, of course, the destruction of Alderaan does not actually prevent the rebellion from going on or prevent this war from happening. If anything, it just angers people at the Empire more. Second, it would seem to me that if you are going to make this sort of argument, which should be sure, was made to justify things like strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II, you at the very least need to meet a very high burden of proof that this really will have the supposed good effects and that it's the only way of achieving them. And I think there is no evidence remaining we see in the series that this burden of proof is even close to being met. I should note just for nerdy purposes because we're going to – it's sometimes as hard to really talk about these questions without looking at the secondary evidence outside of the six canonical films. So this Lost Stars book is as canonical as the films now because it was published by Disney. So we can – I mean, I guess we're kind of forced to use the evidence from it to some extent. To some extent. According to – I guess it's not Michael Eisner or the guy who runs the canon for Disney now. Yeah. So I don't think we're necessarily forced to do anything. We don't have to obey Disney's strictures if we don't want to. And sadly, I'm not that familiar with this book but I do take your point that it has some sort of official canonical status and perhaps I should go and study it more carefully. The iron fist of the hand of Mickey Mouse is the thing we have to understand. They control it very, very – That's the true way of pressing that pie. But it is. I mean, the Empire does see the rebellion as, at least in the beginning, a terrorist operation. And that was my question too because Ilya mentioned it, that it's blow back. I mean, the reaction to Alderaan could be directly related to blow back and their strategies of trying to deal with the rebellion when they're decentralized and hard to find like the Viet Cong, for example, is to blow up large things when you can't actually find the people and that creates blow back. So they do seem very much like terrorists. Yes. Although I think here as elsewhere, a term terrorist is often abused in that the actually morally objectionable terrorism is the kind that either targets civilians, which we never see the rebels do at least in the TV series and movies, or alternatively is fighting in an unjust cause. And the unjust cause point is a bit more controversial here. Clearly, I think the producers of the movies want us to believe that the cause is just – even if you're not willing to take that at face value, it's still far from clear that the regime that the rebels want to set up is as bad or worse than the one that currently exists under the empire. The strong implication of the series is that it's supposed to be better. Though perhaps the movie that's about to come out will cast some doubt on that. What is the moral status of justified rebellions? How would we know that it's justified or not? In real life or in the world of the movie? Obviously, there is a vast amount of literature devoted to this. People like John Locke and Reeve all the way back to some extent to Plato and Aristotle have written about this. I would say that a justified rebellion is one that revolts against an oppressive regime and has a realistic chance of establishing a better regime at a morally acceptable cost. Obviously, we could probably spend all day trying to unpack exactly how to operationalize each of those requirements. But notice that the worse the status quo regime, the more leeway there is for justified rebellions because in those cases, if the status quo is really awful, then setting up even a mediocre, moderately oppressive regime might still be a huge improvement. For example, if you consider the regimes that replaced communism after it fell, some of them were worse than others, but every single one of them was substantially better than the communist regime that replaced because communism was so completely horrible. It seems like they also use the fact, and this is very modern in a very broad sense, but just that we know the empire is evil because at least we've seen the prequels that they have gotten rid of democracy or some sort of thing. I think we don't learn until the beginning of episode four that they dissolved the imperial Senate, but the imperial Senate is supposed to still exist even in the 30 years after the fall of the Republic, correct? Well, no, it's less than that. We're looking at 18 years. This is modeled, I think, on the actual history of the Senate in the Roman Republic, where the emperors never actually shut down the Senate. It continued to exist up until the fall of the Roman Empire itself, or even into some extent a bit beyond. But over time, the Senate was drained of much of its power. And of course, the actual Senate of the Roman Republic was not at all democratic. It was, in fact, a kind of aristocratic, elite club. How democratic the Senate in the old Republic before the Empire and Star Wars is actually debatable. It's probably more democratic than the Roman Senate was, but it's far from clear that they're actually chosen by truly competitive popular elections. Well, what evidence do we have of the level of democracy? I mean, we know that it's a weird Senate because it seems to be made up of, like, say, the chief executives of various planets. So Queen Amidala is the ruler of her planet, and then she's also the senator who gets sent. My understanding, and I could be remembering the second episode, too, in correct way, is that she becomes a senator after her term as Queen is over. She is an elected Queen, which actually doesn't make a lot of sense. So it's like when governors go to the U.S. Senate. Yeah, that's right. So it's like when a governor finishes his term and is elected to the Senate. What we don't know is exactly how the senators are chosen, and given what seems like the very decentralized nature of the Republic, it may well be that each planetary government has its own criteria for choosing the senators. So perhaps some are popularly elected, whereas some are just chosen by the rulers of the planet, which, of course, is not dissimilar from the way that the U.S. Senate was chosen before the 17th Amendment when it used to be chosen by state legislators. But then we've got this weird mixing into this of the Jedi, the Jedi Council, which is not entirely clear what kind of power they hold within the old Republic government. I mean, they clearly have military power, because in the Clone Wars, they're all the generals, which never made a huge amount of sense to me. Why, you know, why did these random people to be leading the armies instead of, you know, people who rose up through the ranks? But they, I mean, clearly the Jedi are not elected. They are sought out by their own kind through this very opaque process, but they do seem to have a fair amount of power. So is that an anti-democratic element in here, or do we not have enough information to make that call? I think it's pretty clear that they're an anti-democratic, or at least an undemocratic element. It seems like they're self-selected from the population of people who have enough Minn-Korians, if that's the way to pronounce it, to use the force- I think it's Minn-Korians, but... And also, up until the Clone Wars, it seems like the Republic did not actually have its own centralized armed forces other than the Jedi. The Jedi were the only armed forces that answered the Republic as a whole, or were part of Republic as a whole as opposed to individual planets. And so it seems like they are a kind of state within a state. They're the only central armed force. They have tremendous autonomy, much of what they do is operating in secret. And indeed, they even began the project of raising the Clone Army in secret without getting the approval of the Senate or any other government officials above them. So a lot of more recent critical commentary on the Star Wars series actually does focus on the role of the Jedi and their undemocratic nature, their elitism, the way in which they're responsible in many ways for the atrocities of the Clone Wars and a breakdown of the Republic. On the other hand is the economist Tyler Cowan point out a few years ago, if you take these series time frames seriously, it seems like the Jedi have successfully maintained a peace for something like a thousand years and only later it breaks down. So you might say this is actually a really good system, but even a really good system will break down at some points in a thousand years, actually not a bad run. But it seems like a good analogy for the Jedi would be something like the clerical class, which doesn't really exist in many countries, western countries today, but it was a huge part of Christendom during the Middle Ages where you actually had a separation of the... Because they're a religion and I mean, here they would violate the establishment clause, I would say. But if you think about something like the Investiture Crisis, which Harold Berman's great book Lawn Revolution discusses, which is a crisis between the Pope and various kings, but particularly in the second of Europe about who control different parts of life, whether the clergy and the archbishop in England control different parts of life, which was different parts of family. So you wonder what parts the Jedi actually control through their religious order in life. I want to push back possibly and I'm not sure this is a good argument, but I'll try making it on the notion of them as... To think about them as a religion and so therefore to think about it as like an establishment clause, which clearly doesn't exist in the Star Wars universe, but will pretend violation in that the force is real in the Star Wars universe. It's not this... So it's not like one of the problems with religions having control now is that... Hokey religions there. Sure, but there are lots of people today who think that science is... His hokey religion and that they have better ways of getting at the true reality, but we don't think therefore science is a hokey religion. So the force is real, manipulating it is real. These seem to be the only people who maybe don't... They're not the only people who have access to the force, but the only ones who seem to be really proficient in its use. It's an important and powerful thing that gives them all of these abilities. And so does it really... Does it... They look less like a religion and more like, say, let's be really charitable technocrats? I don't know, Ilya. I mean, both of those analogies have some purchase. I think if you take the internal viewpoint of the Star Wars universe, it's clear that the force is real and it has a kind of scientific or pseudoscientific basis. The Jedi, of course, will also have a whole philosophy of life built around or use of the force and various precepts such as controlling your emotions, not giving in to anger, living a life of celibacy or at least not having a family and so forth, but it's not clear that that's a religion in the sense of worshiping any kind of supernatural power. It's also, I think, the analogy to the medieval church doesn't fully work and that the medieval church tried to impose its religion on all of European society, not just on the clerics, whereas there's not much evidence that the Jedi try to get anybody who isn't the Jedi themselves to worship the force or to follow the Jedi philosophy or anything like that. I do think it is clear that the Jedi are a kind of elite warrior class within the state that has a lot of autonomy from the official state. In that respect, they may be more analogous to something like the Knights Templar or the other military religious orders of weight medieval Europe, which were eventually suppressed by European governments because they were seen as competitors with the state. Whether you view this as a positive or a negative phenomenon depends partly on your own ideology and partly also on how you interpret some fairly ambiguous evidence into movies and TV series. I wanted to go back to some of the governing structure too because it kind of reminds me of your work on democracy and political ignorance because when we're talking about the makeup of the Senate, which if we're talking about ruling a galaxy, which we are, we have a really- At least a large chunk of it. A large chunk of it. We have a real small government. So if the, excuse me, if the planets themselves are sending representatives to the Senate, it's kind of like the UN. They internally decide how they're going to choose people and then send them to this organization, which it's unclear how much power they have over the planets themselves like the UN. But how much could they have given a galaxy? I mean, don't we want small government in these situations and shouldn't the determination of whether, how democratic this world is, is on an individual planet level because queen of it all is a queen. I don't know what things are like on Corellia. But she's an elected queen. Elected at the age of, I think, 14 or something. Well, there's a problem by itself. This is a bad government structure. Yes. It's an interesting system. So it seems like, while this is not spelled out very well in the movies in much detail, it seems like we start out actually with a galactic republic that where the central government is actually pretty weak. The Senate doesn't have its own army. It does have the Jedi order, but it's not clear that they really control the Jedi that well. And also the Jedi order is fairly small. We're talking about at most maybe a few thousand Jedi perhaps. So maybe they're kind of like the UN blue hat, blue helmet wearing army. Perhaps they're somewhat more potent and effective, but certainly they're small, relative to the size of the problems that they could potentially tackle. With the crisis at Naboo, it seems like the central government starts gaining more power. And of course, it would be Clone Wars. It gains more and more to the point where it becomes an oppressive empire at the end of it. So you could interpret this as saying that we should avoid giving power to a strong central government, particularly in a highly diverse society with many complex factions and the like. I do not think this is the lesson that George Lucas means us to take away from it. What he, I think, wants us to believe is that we do need a strong central government, just one that isn't dysfunctional and one that isn't captured by bad people. And in fact, George Lucas even at one point famously said that the best form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship. So I think what he wants us to feel is that it would be great if there was a strong centralized government which could prevent bad stuff like the invasion of Naboo in episode one, but yet also didn't degenerate intoitarian oppression itself. But maybe we should take lessons also from Alex Jones, who warns us about the UN becoming a despotic force, setting up FEMA camps. Maybe that's kind of what the emperor did. I mean, he led a very silent coup to impose centralized force over it. So this raises the question of world government, which is not likely to happen in the near future in the real world, but certainly is being seriously advocated as a long-term solution to various problems by many people. And one of the issues that you see in the Star Wars universe, again, not the message that Lucas intends, but one that you can certainly take from it if you want to, is that once you have a strong centralized government, if it falls under the control of bad people, for whatever reason, there is no exit from it other than perhaps by war. And even the war might be problematic if that's the only government around that controls most of military force. Whereas in the real world, at least if you have a terribly oppressive system, like say ISIS or the Soviet Union or whatnot, there is some alternative governments elsewhere and the opportunity to flee and the like. So one serious concern I would have about world government is that even if it started out democratic and benevolent and all those good things that people like George Lucas might want, there's no guarantee that it would stay that way. And if over time it degenerated into an empire or an oppressive state of any kind, it would be much harder to get out from under that problem than what an oppressive government has just limited to one part of the world. And of course, in the Star Wars universe, you can say the galaxy is essentially equivalent to the world because with faster and white speed travel, essentially traveling around the galaxy is somewhat like traveling around the world with our current technology. Although we do see in the movies and in the shows a lot of the action takes place in planets in the outer rim and other frontier worlds that do seem to be pretty well removed from the empire's control. And I mean, they don't control everything, right? And so there does seem to be some degree of exit and there do seem to be a lot of people who basically have opted out of that system. So when we meet Han Solo, he doesn't come off as a subject to the empire's whim much. He's just flying from planet to planet and there's quite a lot of people like him. So it's hard because we don't have a comprehensive survey at least in the movies of what's going on in all the outer rim planets, but both in the first three movies and even more so in Star Wars Rebels, we do actually see a substantial imperial presence in the outer rim oppressing people. We see what happens to Cloud City and the empire strikes back. We see the imperial presence in Tatooine and so forth. So while the outer rim planets are seemingly less under the imperial control than the inner planets, it's clear that the imperial control does exist to a substantial degree and may well be increasing especially since we remember that the empire only came to power I think about 15 years or 20 years before the events of Episode 4, the original Star Wars movie. So it seems like it's well on its way towards greater tyranny even in these outer planets. That's what I mean. The timeline is one of the things that seems oddest about all of this because we are talking about from the collapse of the old republic to the rise of the empire to the empire's domination of most of space. We are looking at probably less than two decades and to the eventual collapse less than three decades and during this time like if the Jedi were the primary peacekeeping force of the old republic and everyone has forgotten about them by like that they're just they're basically a myth a handful of years later. Is this timeline of governmental change and rise of new regimes and their fall and their replacement by other regimes within such a short period of time plausible at all? Well setting aside what I think is just a plotting consistency of people not remembering about the Jedi which occurs because of course at the time the produced the Star Wars movie 1977 Lucas hadn't yet envisioned the whole previous history of the Jedi a set of rapid transitions and conquests as far from unprecedented in history if you think about how Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander the Great and other conquerors took over very large parts of what was then the known world or the world around them within even a shorter period than we see with the empire so I think that's not at all unprecedented. You can also see the rapid rise and fall of different regimes in countries like 19th century France or Germany and Russia in the early 20th century so none of that is all that historically unprecedented. I think you can argue about whether the empire has the military power and technology to take over the galaxy as quickly as it does but remember in many cases it doesn't actually have to take it over because they simply are the successor to the previous regime and therefore a lot of people simply just obey the empire because they view it as the new instantiation of what they already viewed as the legitimate government just as when Augustus became the first emperor many people ended up just recognizing his authority without a fight particularly since he portrayed himself as continuing the traditions of the republic rather than making a sharp break with them. If anything one of my beefs with the way this is portrayed in the Star Wars series is that if Palpatine is a smart politician which elsewhere it seems like he is he probably would not announce when now there's an empire and no republic anymore it would be more reasonable and more intelligent to do what Augustus did was to say I'm just the first among equals I'm saving the republic and continuing it and I'm maintaining all the forms and the like a few years later Augustus even officially resigned of his offices and just maintain his power more or less informally behind the scenes so it would seem to me that Palpatine would do better to remain chance where but just continue various emergency powers that he had gathered to himself during the Clone Wars. I mean he does seem to go out of his way to announce that his regime is evil. Just dressing the way he does and the way we mean the ships like Star Destroyers and the Death Star and these aren't the kinds of names that you give to the good guys. Oh do remember it's not clear that the iconography of Nazi like uniforms has the same connotations in that universe as it would for the audience. Sure, sure. Watching the movie. But the names of the ships are scary and the individual names of the Star Destroyers are all like bad mean things. They're not protector or they're like vengeance. So the British Navy has ships called Vengeance and the like and I think they even had a ship called the Devastation at some point so and we often have scary names for our own weapons systems. So if you're an Imperial Patriot so to speak you might view Star Destroyer as just not a name that's supposed to scare us, the good guys but rather to scare the enemy that the Imperial fleet is fighting. I wanted to go back to Aaron's question about the frontier because this is something that I've written about and spoken about in terms of the interestingness of frontiers from a political theory standpoint when you think about things like Firefly and which is about the frontiers of the space which are the outer planets which are very Old West like and the idea of the Old West is the frontier and the frontier has usually been synonymous with where the government where people go before the government where the government sort of stops trying to move as fast as the people and it's where it's power kind of ebbs and so a lot of people who try and live free lives end up trying to live them in the frontier where it's less hospitable or on places like Hoth where you can bring a rebellion because sometimes the power of government is just it's co-exensitive with technology and whether or not it wants to deal with people living on the frontier. You see some of this in the Hunger Games too because when you see centralized cities in these sci-fi stories you see them very metallic, very glassy like the capital in Hunger Games like the Coruscant in Star Wars whereas on the outer rims people are more living closer to the earth and you also see it in work of people like James C Scott who wrote about the art of not being governed which are the hill people of Southeast Asia who move away from government with technology to try and stay out of their way and so in the frontier do we know much about the use of the frontier in Star Wars and whether or not it's a kind of similar kind of thing as Firefly or other series? So I think it's definitely true what Aaron suggested earlier where in Star Wars you do see somewhat less imperial control in places like Hoth and Tatooine and the like. At the same time it also seems much more clear in Star Wars than in a series like Firefly that the Empire can easily assert great control over these planets whenever it wants to so as soon as it deploys its forces to Hoth the rebels are defeated pretty quickly and the Empire can work its will same with Cloud City and Empire Strikes Back and other episodes we can name whereas in Firefly it seems like the oppressive central government has much greater difficulty asserting meaningful control over core planets so I think when you look at frontiers there can be variation both in science fiction and in real history about the extent to which the imperial metropole can actually assert control when it wants to. I think also the frontier argument is a little bit pessimistic in some ways if you take it seriously it implies either you can live in poverty and fear but relative freedom on the frontier or you can live in greater technological luxury and with less crime but with political oppression at the center and obviously hopefully what we would want to achieve is a free society that also has urban spaces and high technology and the like. Well maybe that's the way to interpret the Death Star that it's basically trying to deal with frontier and the control that's needed when with the government to be able to exact its will it needs to have technology to be able to do that. So certainly the Death Star seems like an effort by the empire to assert control over recalcitrant planets obviously as we discussed before there's a question of whether it turns out to be overkill in that many people who might otherwise have been willing to tolerate the rule of the empire or even actively support it feel like if they can do this to Alderaan maybe the same thing will happen to us and therefore you know we need to revolt even though previously we thought that you know it wasn't so bad. But you've written before that it may be the case that the empire should have built more Death Stars that they had a problem dealing only one or two. Yeah so there is also a subgenre of literature criticizing the empire's military strategy and if you take seriously some back of the envelope calculations that economists and literary critics have done it seems like the empire has sufficient resources to build a substantial fleet of Death Stars and then they could almost certainly crush the rebellion because even if one or two are destroyed by lucky shots or force wielders are the like you still have a whole fleet of them left just like they have a large fleet of star destroyers. So it's a little bit like instead of having just one or two nuclear bombs which are vulnerable to a preemptive first strike you can have an entire nuclear arsenal in which case you're much more secure potentially. But we can't have a Death Star gap. That would be the worst problem. How would having multiple Death Stars have defeated the rebellion differently than the way they went about it with just the one and then later the half of one because their problem doesn't seem to be that they lack the military might to take out all of the various worlds their problem through at least the original films is that they can't find the rebellion a lot of the time like the rebellion has bases set up on places like Hoth which just you know it's not like that's hidden among the normal population that's just a planet that had nothing on it and then they hit a base there once they find it they have no trouble taking it out with their conventional means and similarly the bases at like Yavin I mean they threaten that with the Death Star but they could have taken that out quite quickly from orbit. Which one's Yavin? Oh, but Yavin's the first Death Star. Yes, that's when it's coming around. One of my jobs here we're going to make sure we don't use jargon. But so like having lots of Death Stars would allow them to do what to blow up lots of planets but if they're blowing up lots of planets aren't they doing significant damage to their own resources and causing more problems than it's worth? So this gets into the question of the relationship between Star Wars and counter insurgency and the viewpoint that the series takes on it. In the real world there's a lot of literature on this but it seems like there are two possible approaches to counter insurgency that might work. One is the sort of nice approach relatively nice approach advocated by people like David Petraeus which say you win the cons of the population you provide them security to slow gradual process you exercise great restraint in your use of force west you antagonize civilians and there's some evidence that that can work in some cases like the surge in Iraq in 2007. On the other hand there is the mean nasty approach to counter insurgency which also has a history of working where you wipe out any areas that seem to support the rebels where you're willing to engage in overkill and where you make clear that you're not going to be deterred by any you're not going to be deterred by losses in the like and that approach also in quite a number of cases is successful it worked pretty well for the Soviets for example in suppressing the various insurgencies trying to resist the communists after they first took over and also in the 1940s after they recaptured the Baltic states in Ukraine in the like so it seems like if the empire had a whole fleet of death stars they could quite easily adopt the nasty approach among other things they wouldn't have had to attack hot with their conventional forces as soon as they found out that there's a rebel base on hot they could have just sent a death star to vaporize it and most of leadership rebellion might well have been wiped out and if a number of planets that seem to be harboring rebels are wiped out by death stars other planets will get the message you'd be west way could be willing to host rebels it would be more willing to turn them over you might not be able to suppress all rebel activity completely into such a vast galaxy you probably never could but you might well get it to the point where it's just a minor nuisance and certainly has no real chance of overthrowing the empire so i'm not saying such a policy would be just or desirable but from the standpoint of the rulers the empire might be workable yes it destroys some resources but if even 10 or 20 percent of the planets ruled by the empire get wiped out in this way and it probably wouldn't require that much destruction you still rule 80 percent and that's more than enough to assure a comfortable lifestyle for the imperial elite although arguably they're the strategy they had of first build one and then build just a second death star was working just fine i mean they were they all the evidence points to they were winning the struggle against the rebellion right i mean we don't we don't see them losing massive numbers of ships and fleet engagements we don't see their power sliding at even after the it's rising in all the way up till they make the mistake of putting their top guy on something that then gets blown up but that could happen no matter how many death stars you had so outside of that rather stupid error their strategy seemed to be working pretty well yeah you don't see any diminution in their power after the maybe episode four it's it's complicated in that you see two things first you see the fact that the rebels actually have a larger and larger fleet themselves so it seems like more and more resource are coming under control otherwise they wouldn't have the industrial base to build a big fleet secondly you see the one of the emperor's finest regions as he calls it himself defeated by an army of stone age teddy bears with a small number of rebels supporting them so this suggests a significant diminution in the power and efficiency of the imperial military i guess the teddy bears would be again but what they're bigger fighting force than people i guess we expect to that of them but i think erin's question too about the building the second death star because i always wondered if there's just a empire military industrial complex that it just wants to build these things and i mean they're not highly maneuverable and and and they have all the problems the military industrial complex because they also build them quite poorly like the f-35 with an exhaust port that can blow up the entire thing so maybe the death star is like the military industrial complex of the empire and the f-35 is just a huge cash sink job project maybe they're unionized maybe they all vote and this is a huge problem to cite that lost our book again because it's just got a terrific line about this they there's the question of why have we why are we building another one of these things when the first one blew up so easily and the argument that gets given there by people is look we had this big thing that had lots of people in it and the rebels flew some planes into it and blew it up and if we don't rebuild it then the terrorists have won yeah maybe there might be other evidence for a dysfunctional military industrial complex under the empire i don't think the death star really counts because it's pretty clear that the death star project is not being pushed by some shadowy contractors somewhere it's clearly the emperor himself and Darth Vader that really wanted to be built and they repeatedly say that so unless you want to go back to the sort of old communist explanation of a rise of Hitler which says that Hitler was just a tool of a german capitalist and you want to argue to palpatine is really just a front man for military contractors or something it seems like he personally is the one who's pushing the death star there might be other military industrial complex type problems that you see as in the fact that the members the imperial military seem not to be able to shoot straight they can't hit anything plus they're all wearing body armor that doesn't seem to actually keep out a blaster fire or any kind of damage so it seems like that armor the purchase of many hundreds of thousands of suits of it seem to just be benefiting whoever is building it but it doesn't actually benefit the imperial military and there might be other examples like that but the death star seems to be primarily palpatine's baby to some extent perhaps also that of dark vader and grand moff tarkin and outside of the i mean we don't get a lot about the economic system in as soon as to the original trilogy there's not much about commerce or how the economy functions i assume they get their money through taxation but i'm not sure but in some of the other in some of the novels and in some of the tv shows you do get there are instances plenty of instances of others call it crony capitalism or corporatism or at least deep connections between politically connected businessmen and the empire who you know they these businessmen are able to use the empire to drive out competitors or take over areas or prop themselves up so i mean it does feel that there's there's a fair amount of that going on behind the scenes certainly in the clone wars tv series you see a good deal of it where it's implied that both military contractors and banking interests are in many ways at least in part behind the clone wars and trying to perpetuate the war moreover it's even implied that or even stated at one point that insufficient regulation of banks has caused a financial crisis like the 2008 financial crisis in our world this is obviously intended as part of the left-wing mesh of the series so while you certainly do see corporate and business interests having this impact in the clone wars and a little bit in the prequel movies as well i think the message that is being conveyed is more a left-wing message in the libertarian one the idea of being that what you want is real representatives of the people to take control of these interests rather than to get the government out of intervening in the economy if that's true i mean star wars shows up a lot on you see lists of libertarian movies it's not uncommon to see star wars listed often just because it's showing people fighting back against an oppression regime but is it is there any reason to think that star wars is at least nominally libertarian maybe just a little bit or is that just completely misguided to stick it on those lists so i think the original three movies are at least compatible libertarianism in the sense that they're fighting against a clearly non-libertarian impressive government and very little bit said about what it is that they're fighting for except some vague restoration of a republic when you see the prequel movies even more so the clone wars series i think it's pretty queered at the ideology animating it is non-libertarian in star wars rebels there is some greater evidence perhaps of some incipient libertarianism it remains to be seen whether disney has a a more libertarian or at least a less non-libertarian sensibility than george wukas did but i think it would be a mistake to say that any series where the good guys are fighting against something that libertarians would also oppose necessarily means that that movie or series is libertarian in nature you would also want to ask what it is that they're fighting for otherwise you could say well stalling during world war two was libertarian because he was fighting against Hitler and libertarians opposed Hitler as well obviously that's an extreme case but i think it you know it's highway to more general point that as libertarians we're welcome to enjoy and like non-libertarian works but we should be a bit more discriminated about saying well really they're a libertarian well this brings up the opportunity then to talk about one of the truly morally troubling aspects of star wars and one that seems to go directly against libertarianism which is the status of droids because everything we so everything we see about droids in the star wars universe and they're everywhere in that universe is probably not all of them but certainly a lot of them are sapient rational thinking beings who are effectively enslaved are i mean they're at the very least they're an oppressed class is but we but we're not the movies don't portray it that way the movies that don't seem to raise any questions about whether it's okay for Anakin to own C-3PO or for the droids to be bought and sold as you know salvage effectively like we're just supposed to accept that but it seems rather troubling yes and i think it's troubling even if you're not a libertarian a number of non-libertarian commentators have focused on this such as the famous weftling science fiction writer Robert G. Sawyer i think this actually represents a moral blindness not just on the part of the characters in the star wars universe but on the part of the producers the movies as well in that there's a sense that with something is mechanical it and it's not a biological being then we can use it purely as a means to an end we can do what we want we did not worry too much about the morality of treating it the way that we do and this is certainly true of the computers and robots that exist in our own world which are not sentient don't really have a will of their own but it seems not to be true of at least many of the droids in the star wars universe who are effectively enslaved and it's not just the bad guys who enslave droids in this world in this way but the good guys people like Luke Skywalker and others uh as well and none of them seem to be troubled by it i think this moral blindness on the part of the characters and the producers and also i think much of the audience there's an obvious historical analogy to the moral blindness about slavery in the real world for many centuries so in the world of ancient Greece and Rome even great and insightful thinkers like Plato and Aristotle took the justice of slavery largely for granted and they've thought that it was just a part of the nature of society that we're going to have a situation where there's this enslaved class and even more recently if you watch a movie white gone with the wind it seems like not just the characters but also the audience is intended to take for granted the idea that the enslavement of blacks was if not necessarily right and just at least not all that bad or just part of the natural way that things were now this is this is struck me as we were talking about this because it goes back to our discussion of the political alignment and realities of the of the republic which is that if i remember correctly Anakin and his mother at the beginning of the movie of the first movie are slaves and it's unclear it seems fairly open that their slaves it's unclean mean they're still slaves in the world today but it's unclear whether slavery is simply legal i mean my guess would be the slavery is legal on tatooine and it's a it's a member of the republic and this is pre fall so it's a member of the republic so what one thing we might want to conclude from that is that the republic has sort of a pre civil war kind of political system where they don't get inside of planets and overturn oppressive laws like slavery if we can conclude that slavery is legal on tatooine at the beginning of the first movie episode one it's a good question it's hard to say whether slavery is legal on tatooine or whether tatooine is simply a government or a planet that doesn't have much in the way of a functional central government so it may be that the central government does not recognize slavery but local rulers of various kinds don't care and still continue to practice it it also does seem to be the case that at least pre clone wars the republic has very little ability to intervene in the governance of the member planets and therefore things like slavery could go on particularly in these frontier planets even if your average citizen of course and probably wouldn't approve it would think that it's a bad thing well we also have the huts which is interesting maybe that says something about what the fat the tatooine's a little bit like say Somalia or maybe the huts are kind of like i mean like a political machine like Tammany Hall or or Louisiana and we do long days we do have evidence that slavery is slavery of biological beings is rather looked down upon i mean one of the you don't you don't see it in the in the movies so much but it shows up in like the second episode of star wars rebels maybe the first i can't remember which one with wookiee slaves like the empire has you know after the empire defeated the wookies and took over Kashyyyk it enslaved the wookies and that is presented as a horrible thing and there are other instances throughout comics and books and other things where they encounter people encounter slavers and it's not clear it often comes off as it may be legal in certain areas it certainly isn't legal in others but nobody likes them yeah so it seems like the empire is a large and relatively diverse universe and there are certainly some entities that regard slavery as permissible like perhaps the huts and some people in tatooine into like but it also seems likely that your average more cosmopolitan citizen of Coruscant or other such planets would be horrified by that just like in our world isis believes that slavery at least of non-muslims is morally permissible and just fine but most people even including many other muslims are horrified by isis and regard them as beyond the pale of legitimate civilization because they have such practices but just as we can't always easily suppress isis because they control these sort of lawless unstable regions so similarly the central government of the republic may not have been in a position to suppress the huts or stamp out slavery and tatooine in like but this shifts that that moral blindness is not about slavery per se because it doesn't seem like it's a moral blindness about droids right just as status of them yeah just as the average american in 1850 would have been horrified by the enslavement of whites but many people thought it was perfectly fine to enslave blacks for at least a necessary evil to do so so similarly your average citizen of the star wars universe and by the way your average producer of the star wars movies they think it's horrible to enslave humans or other intelligent biological beings but the enslavement of droids which they would not even call enslavement perhaps is seen as perfectly fine so shifting gears a bit one of the issues that we have a handful of pieces about on libertarianism.org that has caused a fair amount of controversy and like so many others we can see versions of it in the star wars universe is is secession we have articles about whether the south was justified in seceding whether the north was justified in preventing them from doing so and in the star wars universe this issue comes up the the clone wars are all about the question of secession. Yeah so in one sense the secession movement is a kind of fraud because it's manipulated by palpatine and count doko and others for the purpose of starting a war but in the clone wars series we do see that there are a lot of people who have genuine grievances that may lead them to want to secede and the question arises of maybe the republic both the secessionists and the those who stay in would have been better off if they had simply let the secessionists go and indeed in the real world there's some evidence from political science research that multi-ethnic diverse societies which have provisions for secession actually experience less ethnic conflict and perhaps even less actual secession than those which simply say unity at all costs and will suppress secession efforts by force. Now I don't think this means that libertarians or anybody should say all secession movements are justifiable if you have a secession movement that's launched for the purpose of perpetuating institution like for example slavery I think that's a different case but that's not necessarily all secession movements and in the case of the Star Wars universe it is far from clear that the secessionists most of them at least were trying to set up governments any worse than those that existed before so on balance it seems like the republic could have saved an enormous number of lives an enormous amount of treasure and also prevented the rise of the empire if they had simply wet many of the secessionists go when they said they wanted to this might have actually to some degree diminished incentives for further secession by others because people would have known if I get to a point where I have really serious grievances I can succeed in the future so there's no reason necessarily to roll the dice now. So what are your hopes and expectations for the new movie which this will is being published on the day of the release of Simultaneous. This is the most important release on 1218. So this is the part of the episode that becomes dated almost immediately but we'll risk it and strive ahead. So I hope at the very least it's fun to watch and it's better made than the prequel movies if it does address political issues which it's hard to say for sure whether it will or not based on the trailers that I've seen I hope it tries to do so in a more sophisticated way than was done in the prequel movies and it takes more seriously these questions of if you do want to have a strong central government how do you ensure that it doesn't itself become oppressive and perhaps it will have a less moral blindness with regard to things like the droids as well you see a little bit of diminution of that blindness in the Star Wars Rebels TV series which takes the droid situation at least slightly more seriously than the previous movies and TV series that Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Hey Virgo, welcome back to the channel. This is Kelly from House of Virgo. If you're new, please smash that like button and do subscribe. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome, welcome, welcome. I am here every Sunday through Thursday, 10 30 p.m. Eastern time. Readings generally begin at 10 25 Eastern. They go live at 10 30 so you can pop in the chat five minutes prior to the reading beginning. You should chat with everyone if you want to get a personal reading with me. There's a link in the description box below where you can book a reading. You can also join my only fan. Go ahead and click that link and that will take you to my socials and everywhere else you need to go. You can also become a member of my channel. So thank you for being here. Now, let's get on to your reading. Hi, Virgo. Let's get into your reading. Okay, that is, ooh, what's going on? Alrighty, that quick. Oh, the Phoenix. New phase, rekindle, renew, transformation, growth, and a changed mind. Okay, that was quick. Okay, what's going on with you? Changing your mind about something? Entering into a new phase. Are you going to relight that candle? Rekindle something here. Some kind of idea. You got something, something on your mind. I feel rebirth, renew, transforming an idea. I'm gonna do something different, put a twist on something, a little, a little plot twist. You got a little plot twist. Okay, that's, that's, yes, that's what you're doing. Okay, let's see.  Now you've got an engagement ring here. Okay. Hmm, engagement, partnership, commitment, eternity, completion, union. Okay. Okay, okay, you also have mirror. Mirroring each other, self-image, relationships reflect our wounds, introspection. All right, I want to talk about this for a minute. Okay. Well, real quick. Okay, so listen. Okay, let me just make this real. Let me, first, let me just get this out of the way. You can go back to, I think, was it Sunday? Maybe a little bit yesterday. I think it was like engagement, reconciliation. This is a continuation of that. Okay. Some of you are just like point blank period. You're getting the ring or you're proposing. You'll be offering marriage. Okay. And no, I'm not talking to those of you who do not have a person. That would not make sense. So you don't have to post it in a comment and say, well that, that, how's that even possible? That's, it's not, that's not going to happen for me. Well, no duh. If you don't have anyone at all, you're completely single.  I'm talking to the, because listen, it's a general reading. So there's a lot of people talking to those of you who are already partnered with someone and you're wondering if your relationship is going to go to the next level. I'm talking to you guys. Yes, there's an engagement. Okay. Coming. Because you two are mirroring each other. There is you know, a lot of introspection.  I was talking about mirroring kind of energy and even yesterday's reading. So I will go over and check that out because that's for the collective. Okay.  Okay. Definitely in the future for sure. But this Phoenix here, I'm telling you, you've got something going on here in your life, right? And this is profound. This is amazing. Okay. Even more so than this. I feel because this is like major shift in change. When I say the Phoenix is rising. I'm talking about a major growth in change. You're going to something huge. Some type of idea or some kind of plan or something that you're doing or thinking about doing going forward is going to turn into a huge. It's going to turn your life around. That's what I'm saying. Okay. It's going to turn your life around. So I don't know what you're working on. I don't know what you're planning to do. This feels like a snowball.  And the more it keeps rolling, keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and turns into an avalanche. Look at that. You've got the lovers. This is like a partnership of some sort. It's either a business partnership and it's all surrounding this. Okay. This is some kind of a partnership that I feel is going to be like blessed. You know, partnership can be about love, but this is a deep union. And you do have that here. You are engaging. And I feel like you're coming into some kind of union or partnership that's going to be transforming and life changing. And it doesn't necessarily have to just be romantic. Life changing where you come into contact with someone that has a profound effect on your life that causes extreme growth. You know, these types of scenarios and situations can occur where you meet someone in the grocery aisle and they tell you something. Are you just briefly past someone on the street and they say something to you? They don't have to be in your life at all. And that plants a seed or a thought or something gets your gears going and something happens, you know, or you see something somewhere. This is what I feel like this energy is.    That's what I feel like is going on here.  It'll be have a profound effect on the direction that the water flows downstream. Do you know what I mean? You're not you're not going to have an effect on the water flowing down the stream. You're just going to have an effect on the direction it flows because we don't have the kind of power that kind of power to make the water flow. You know, we just have the power we have. We have enough to direct the power of the water, but we can't make it flow. You know, that that's God. That's universe. That's what we do with the water. So anyway, I'm not going to get into all that Zen stuff, but yeah, you basically you will be given some type of a tool or some type of way. The tool is the water you will be given and the tool is the rock or the tool is the wood or the tool is the metal. You will be given a way to direct the flow of this energy and it will have a profound effect. That's what I'm trying to say. And there is some type of partnership. It will affect your life. It will affect this partnership. Yeah, that's pretty profound message going forward. So I'm not really sure what it is that you're going to be doing or that you have happening or that you're working on right now. It could be a theory or an ideology or something that you're writing down or something that you're thinking or you've been kind of just rummaging through that old cobwebbed brain of yours that you've been trying to figure out or putting the pieces together in your mind of how to make something happen here. Maybe you're building rockets up in your attic or you're digging tunnels to China, whatever you're doing, you're trying to figure something out to try to make something happen here. And I feel like you're going to come into contact with someone who is either going to help you along the way or they're going to introduce the tool or the items you need to get there. Okay, so I think that's like pretty freaking cool. Happening for sure in October. Happening for sure in October. Okay, so one of the messages there here for you. Yeah, look at that. Look at that. Just when I was talking about all that water, stirring up that water. Look, there's a lot here to do with making waves. Yes, whatever you're doing here, you're going to be making waves. In society, you're going to be making waves in your local area. Yep, stirring up the waves, making waves, taking some people with you. That's for sure. Doing something. I feel like it's very unorthodox. I just heard the name Gabby. Gabby. Making waves. Yeah, you're going to be making waves. That's all they're giving me with that. It's either you're going to be or they're saying tell Virgo to start making waves that it's okay.  Don't be afraid to mix up the pot, mix it up.  Don't be afraid to make waves. Come out of your comfort zone. Tell Virgo to come out of their comfort zone. Don't, we got Virgo's back. Don't worry about what other people think. People will want to ride in your ship. I just heard, if you build it, they will come. I said that, Spirit didn't say that. People will want to go along for the ride with you. Whatever you're creating, whatever you're making, whatever you're doing, whatever's unorthodox. Oh, that's funny. You have a six and a six. That's crazy. You have two sixes. Somebody's praying for you. Somebody's like, yes, praying for you right now. Somebody's like, seriously, oh my gosh, is wishing like all the best for you. Oh my God. This person, truly angelic. I don't know who it is. I'm picking up a lot of air energy here. But there's somebody here who's like, okay. So first of all, you have someone who's got your back. Like they are hoping and praying so much that you will do so well. That you will just do so well. My gosh, this is something. Oh, they just said this person is yellow. I don't know if they're ill. Yellow people. Yellow skin. John this maybe. This person is praying. Okay. That was tough. Sorry. Or has yellow tone in their skin. They are praying that you will do. Look, see how the yellow that you will do so well that you will be blessed. That you will get to where you need to go. That you will be. That you will have the courage to succeed. They're like praying for your success. Like legit praying. They lay in bed at night and they dream and they talk to spirit. They talk to God. They say prayers for you. Seriously. But they're also praying that you two will be together. So if this is a romantic person, like a romantic partner. They're also praying for reconciliation. I have to put that out there. That you want to be with them. Or that's a separate message. Okay. That you too can overcome your difficulties here. I got to put that out there. I see it. That you will come to them. Okay. There's a couple of messages going on here.  You've got mirror. There's two people here who are mirroring each other. Very similar. Could be like an air sign male, female. Who reflect their moons to each other. See each other in themselves. In their eyes. Reflecting in their eyes, I heard. Loves you very much. Yes, yes, yes. And praise for your well being. Praise for your well being. Praise that you will. Praise for healing. They're silent. This person is silent. Doesn't say very much. Not really talking. Not saying anything. Either they can't talk. Or they're just silent type of person. Four swords, the six of swords. Skipping over the five of swords, which is the card of fighting and arguing. This person doesn't want to talk because the five of swords is not here because they don't want to argue. They just want to silently wish you well and silently send prayers and well wishes and good thoughts. They want to bypass talking because they're afraid there will be... I don't know if it's fear, but they don't want to fight. That's what I'm hearing. They're bypassing the five of swords. Okay, totally. I mean, I feel like this is such a simple message and it's gone on for 17, almost 20, close to 20 minutes. There's so much well wishes and blessings here being sent.  You might not listen. You might just be cleaning your kitchen dishes, whatever, doing your laundry, going to work, nine to five, doing whatever. Something happens in October that sets you on a new trajectory. I don't know. Something happens. You get to be in your bonnet about something. An opportunity arrives that just gives you these feelings of happiness and joy. This is such a healing energy. This is like rainforest healing. You know what I mean? Water, hope, the spring, the cleanse. This is like a cleanse. It's like a refresh. I feel like you're getting spiritually cleansed or spiritually bathed. Everything changed. You just completely transform and you're led into a whole new life. It's like a spiritual awakening of some kind. It's not a spiritual experience. It's an awakening, which is completely different. Spiritual experience is like an experience. When you go to a concert, like, wow, that was a great experience. But awakening is like, you're changed. It's totally different. You might be going through this now, but love, you awaken to new love, new feelings, new... Everything just looks and feels and tastes and just hear differently. It's like a blind person seeing for the first time. That's a spiritual awakening. It's like a deaf person hearing for the first time. What was that movie called many years ago with Robert De Niro? Oh, it was called Awakenings. Do you remember that movie? So old, but they were all like senile, I guess. They were all senile. Yeah, there's your sign. Or they all had dementia or, I don't know what, they were all elderly. And they were all given their ability to remember. They were all like in an old folks home or something. And they all got their youth back. That's a spiritual awakening. Oh my God, it was such a lovely movie. And it was so sad at the same time when they all had to go back to being old and stuff. I don't know you guys. Listen, I'm all about serial crime. And I love all the hard documentaries and stuff. But a tear jerker gets me too. And if you never saw the movie Awakenings, I know you guys did because we're pretty much all Gen Xers here. But I know the younger crowd probably hasn't. But man, that's a movie to go watch again because that's exactly what I'm talking about.  And I know you're not all elderly here. But that's what I see happening here. But it's some kind of transformation. Like just not even just in love. I don't know. Whatever this person, I don't know. And I feel like a lot of it's coming from this person. I don't know who this person is. But they've got some kind of, all I can say is that whoever they are, I don't know who they are. They may not be a lover. I don't know who they are. But their prayers or their positive energy is working on you. They might be like, for some of you, this is like an angel that you don't even know about. You know, like Nicholas Cage and City of Angels. You know, where he was walking around McGryan.  I feel like that's a sign. I swear, like the City of Angels, I'm telling you. This is so profound. I don't know. I look right when I was saying that. The Five of Swords is down here. I'm telling you, this person does not want to argue. They want to bring peace and love and healing. I mean, could you possibly have an angel who's in love with you? You do. You do. I don't know you guys. Look, there's the King of Swords. I was just saying that. I don't know if your King of Swords is the angel. I'm not saying that. You know, I just know that the Lovers is at the center of this reading and I just feel like this is a tremendously profound reading and I feel like it's very spiritual and I feel like yesterday's reading was very spiritual. So I don't know what kind of spirit is with me right now, but I know you keep getting these little whistles. Every time I mention it, something's going on. And I think you need to be aware. Every once in a while, something like this will come out. All right, you've got trust. The situation is calling for you to have faith. Okay. Yeah, this is definitely profound. I'm looking at this card and I'm trying to figure out why is that guy trying to keep the cherub from... Why is he holding that stick up to the cherub? Like, is he trying to say, wait, don't put the arrow in her. I want her to trust me. I don't want her to fall in love, I don't want her to mess with me. I want her to learn to trust me first. That's what I feel like he's trying to say. I don't want her to fancy me for all the wrong reasons. I want her to trust me first for all the right reasons. Yeah, look, she has that red bow. She's a walking red flag. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Keep your arrow to yourself, Mr. Cherub. That's just going to make her not see me because she'll have her rose-colored glasses on. And the minute I do something wrong, I will fall from grace in her eyes. No, no, no. I want her to see me for who I am. I want her to see all my imperfections. I want her to love my imperfections. Don't want her to be disappointed in me. Stay optimistic about your love life. I'm thinking in face will bring you romance. Hmm. There's a lot of Greek. I feel like this is very Greek. There's a lot of Greek energy in this card for me. So I don't know if someone here listening is going to Greece or is from Greece. A lot of cherubs too, of course. In this deck. Keep an open mind. Your soulmate may differ from usual. Type in expectations. I'm probably going to retire these cards, you guys, because maybe I'm just not digging them as much anymore. I don't know. Do you guys like them? I don't know. There's something. Oh. They just said French. And then they said Victorian. Okay. French. Is that it? French Victorian? So, yeah, something about France or the French and Victorian era, French era, French Victorian era. Okay. That's interesting. Oh my God. Something about that chair. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I don't know what it is, but I love it. It almost gives me a sense of like, they're just telling me, but I'm seeing Asia as well. But it's a little reminds me of like Asia decor, Asian decor, then it also kind of like a mix of French and Asian. So I don't know why, because I've never seen anything like that before, but that's the vibe. And then there's a little bit of, there's a harp. Now they're showing me a harp. I don't know what that's symbolic of. Maybe somebody here knows. I'm calling something out here that I'm not really sure what I'm talking about. But yeah, let me get a couple of charms. Skipping the numbers and stuff today. Well, you know what? I'll do a couple of, I'll just do a couple of numbers. I just feel like the reading was very spiritual. I really didn't want to kind of water it down with anything else, but I'll give you a few to just see what comes up. Okay, August 31st. We have the number 55. We have the number 20. We have 84. We have the letter J, the letter T. I'm going to give you all of them. The letter M, the letter K, the letter H. We have W, X, the letter N as in Nancy Y, and then Z. The letter L, letter G, I. Okay, you guys. Now, if it's not you, that's fine. Oh, you know what? They just said, do get some Chinese signs. Okay. Well, we'll throw those in as well. We'll throw in some Chinese signs. You or whoever this person is who's praying for you. Okay, year of the dog, year of the goat, year of the rat, year of the monkey, year of the snake, year of the rat again, year of the snake again, year of the rabbit, year of the rooster, year of the horse, and year of the pig. Wow. Okay. Two. Wow. Okay. Two charms. They said two it is. Okay. You've got Chanel number five. All right. I don't know if you wear Chanel number five, but there you go. So if you wear that, that's a message for you. Significant. This is your message.   If you're out or see it somewhere. I like Chanel number five. My mother is from Europe and all of her sisters. So whenever they come visit, they all smell like Chanel number five. They don't wear anything else. So they're very European. And then you also have, well, it's like, it's funny. So it's kind of like a little saying that says made with love. Let's see if I can get it to show up here. Hold on, you guys. Probably won't really focus. Do you see it made with love? But I initially felt like it was like bread. I don't know if someone's making bread. Pounding out some dough for pie or cookies or needing some dough. I feel like someone either did that or does that, makes pastries or baked goods for someone and makes them with love. Doesn't really make them, maybe makes them to sell. But I feel like somebody makes them to give to other people with love. Like it's like a little, likes to cook or bake. Either maybe you had a family member who did that or I used to do that for you or did that for other people or maybe we'll be doing it for the holiday season. It could be that person who's, maybe it's an angel that's watching over you. Someone that might have passed away. Are you kidding? Alright, I just randomly picked up another charm right when I was talking and there it is again. I can't believe this isn't gonna, let me see if I can get it to show up. It says again, made with love. Just randomly. I see how many charms I have. Yes, there's somebody definitely. Everything, okay. It's related to that. I feel like there must have been someone in your past or someone that's passed away who, I feel like there's a message there for you that they're watching over you that they used to do things or they used to cook or make things or they're crafty. I also feel like they had a cat or a little kitten or something. They might not have had to. They could have had a lot of stuffed animals as well. Watching over you. It could be this person. It doesn't have to be. Or they're there if you have a cat. They might be there with your cat as well. So cute. Or they made a kitty for you, maybe. A little stuffed kitty where you're taking care of their cat. They might have, maybe someone, that person has passed away as well. They're watching over you. Okay. Very spiritual. Very, very spiritual message, but it's getting a little too much. So I have to purge my energy here and I don't know, go drink a Pepsi. So I'm going to leave that there for you guys. I hope you enjoyed that. And yeah, I'll be back here tomorrow. Don't forget to go over to my other channel, MoonPieTarot, and you can get the daily messages over there. And yeah, don't forget to book a reading with me for the Spooky October special. And let me see what else. Thank you for the coffee. Don't forget, too, you can also donate to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children fundraiser that I have going. And we try to raise all the money that we can. Also, to try to find those kids. And I super, super appreciate any donation that you can offer, even if it's just one. One amount, one dollar, one penny, whatever you can give, always appreciated. All right, you guys. So I'll see you again tomorrow. Same time, same channel. All right, take care. Bye.