Hello, and good afternoon. My name is Sikawis, also Christine Nobis and I'm Plains Chris Salto of the George Gordon First Nation and a Decolonizer with Great Plains Action Society, and I'm very honored today to be introducing Alexis Bunton and Nick Estes along with myself for a fireside chat concerning colonial capitalism and a pathway towards a better future. Alexis, welcome. Thank you, Christine. So I'm going to spend about the next couple of minutes talking about how Indigenous peoples are leading us out of the mess that capitalism is right now. But I want to start by establishing my authority on this subject. Again, like Christine said, my name is Alexis Bunton, and my authority starts from being born as an Alaska Native woman. My tribes are Anangan and Yupik from Bristol Bay, Alaska. And I've worked for tribal businesses, corporations, Native corporations, consulted for them, wrote a PhD on the subject. I've taught economics, and I currently co-direct the Indigeneity Program for Bioneers and serve as a senior advisor with jump scale. So right now what we're seeing is Indigenous-led organizations are making the greatest innovations while proving ROI, while redefining impact to include nature, ecosystems, and ethics. So just a few examples of these is BCGG Crypto is using blockchain technology. Right now, one of the tribes they're working with is one of the first to be approved by the SEC to develop and register a security in the US. And one of the things that they've worked into trading through the blockchain is making sure that nature has a place at the table and that nature is a shareholder in the way that they use blockchains. Ego Coffee has completely indigenized their supply chain, which gives more returns back to the people who roast the coffee. Labukan Solar has built renewable energy in the middle of the tar sands, while providing employment and fighting climate change. Hope Nation Consulting focuses on women's leadership, and while they do their business consulting, they're also addressing underlying colonial genocidal trauma, and you cannot do one without the other. And my own native corporation, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, is dedicated to the fishing way of life first, fish first, and we have consistently led the fight against pebble mine, which is back on the table now, which would be the largest open pit, open pit copper mine in the continent. And we're still, we're opposing that mining, but we are still having record returns year after year. So, I want to say, first of all, I want to dispel our audience of the idea that Indigenous peoples can't be capitalists, that we can't be business leaders and that we can't be extremely successful, and the innovators that everybody else looks to for new ways out of this mess that I started with. So, I argue that we can be, but it's more of an Indigenous capitalism. And if you want to learn more about that, you can read the 2011 article I wrote on this called Indigenous Capitalisms. And I want to define for a minute what colonial capitalism is because this is in the title of this talk of this fireside chat today. And I would say it's part and parcel of this larger definition of capitalism. Colonialism and capitalism are essentially the same thing. And we can use the US as an example of this. So, for example, it requires colonization, which if you don't know the definition, it's basically when a group of people take land by force from another group to permanently live there and control resources and that force in the other means genocide that's ongoing now. It involves privatization. It involves the establishment of needy groups of people, if any of you are economic theorists, talking about dependency theory, having an underclass or people that you permanently make poor, or here we use racism, of course, and structural inequality. It requires partnership with the nation-state to make and enforce laws that protect privatization, exploitation, natural resource extraction and intergenerational concentration of capital. It requires resources taken from stolen land, and it requires perpetual warfare. And one interesting fact about the United States is since the country's inception in 1776, we've been at war for 225 of the 240 years this nation has been around. So, some scholars talk about post-capitalism or late stages of capitalism. I don't know if capitalism is going to go away. It probably will. Mark certainly thought it would, and many of our Indigenous leaders and culture bearers believe it will. I've been told that my whole life, but while we are still in this system and transitioning out of it to a more regenerative world, our Indigenous-led businesses are really practicing this sort of Indigenous capitalism. And I'll just take about 60 more seconds here. One of the features of this Indigenous capitalism, this new way out, is to incorporate Indigenous worldviews and values into your business ethos, thoughts, mission, and practice, and to keep checking it. So some values may include respect, reciprocity, giving back, and relationship, honoring relationship first. So how non-native organizations can get this, can get what we are leading the way in is just if I just want to leave you with a few practical tips. One might be revise your mission to make it truly values-driven first, get Indigenous people on the board, or at least diversify your board to 50% or more, put nature on the board, hire Indigenous consultants, and decolonize your organizational practices. This thing that I call organizational or institutional decolonization, this is something that I've been working on for the last few years, and I've already done it with an organization to great results. So decolonize your wealth, check out Edgar Villanueva's book called Decolonizing Wealth. Some ways to do that, divest all your business activity from fossil fuels in all ways, including the banks you use like Wells Fargo, invest in portfolios that consider a quadruple bottom line, not just people, planet, and profit, but also the spirit or well-being. So learn about and adopt this quadruple bottom line. So I'm going to stop there. I think I've taken up enough time and cue it up for Nick. That's a traditional Lakota greeting that says I greet everyone with a handshake and an open heart. And I'm happy to be here. This is a little bit out of my own comfort zone, as far as talking about these kinds of things, but nonetheless, I think it's an important perspective that I'm going to try to offer. And I'm going to talk a little bit today about our organization, the Red Nation and some of the projects we're working on. We were founded in 2014. We have over 100 different members from different indigenous nations or multi or multinational in that sense, that are even outside of the United States, we're anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. We're also connected with many different global indigenous organizations. Some of them have kind of formal recognition that the United Nations, other are more social movement based, especially in Latin America, like places like Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. But we also center, you know, direct action and mobilization and education as part of our primary kind of orientation towards our politics. And we were at first based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we saw this kind of growing need amongst indigenous people in the city to have access to housing and access to healthcare specifically, but also to combat police violence. And that's really where we were founded and where we do a lot of our work within our community here. And since then we've expanded. So today, you know, today I just got a call, and this is going to be a week from now, but today I got a call about a tent city occupation that was set up by indigenous people in Hesapa, the Black Hills, and we have comrades and relatives there from Red Nation who are on the ground and helping organize with that. So we have quite an extensive reach. We have been doing what we call the no dead natives campaign, which is hashtag NDN.  We've started in Gallup, New Mexico, which has the highest percentage of indigenous people per capita for an urban population that are almost half of the population have zero representation in the city, but nonetheless feed the city's economy, whether it's the Walmart payday loan, payday loan lending, or through any kinds of things such as car dealerships and things like that. We're currently working on a land back campaign here in the city, thinking about indigenous spaces in the city as part of indigenous territories and never have having been formally seated and so what we've been doing without a lot of capital investment but just based on our values and volunteer labor that we've kind of cobbled together and organize is we've created a food sovereignty program to reconnect indigenous youth with the land and with traditional foods and that goes into our outreach campaign every week we have relatives who are on the street low income relatives, it doesn't matter by relative we mean indigenous and non indigenous people who may be in need and we've expanded those services in the time of COVID because in a place like New Mexico, New Mexico has a high rate of childhood hunger right so we're combating that not just by giving out canned food or starchy foods are unhealthy foods but trying to reconnect people with indigenous foods and saying like look this is a viable alternative that you can grow right here in the city. And our final thing that we're working on is red media. So, we actually formed the red nation as a media outlet and a media collective, but we turned into a movement instead which is actually much more beneficial. So we were, you know, movement before we became a media project, but we have four principles. The first is indigenousness is a way of relating, which means that transcends the kind of confines of the nation state, especially several colonialism. We have another one that says by any media necessary, we do media, like formal journalism podcasting, but also we do a lot of infographics with our social media campaigns. The third principle is that we are not a minority.   And what we mean by that is that we're not here to make a profit. We're not here to sell our writing or our products as something that can be bought and consumed. We believe in producing confidence through the stories and through the media that we produce and through our direct action campaigns that things can and will change. And if we are organized not just as indigenous nations but non indigenous people as well and so we believe decolonization is not only an indigenous problem it's everybody's problem, and specifically on a global scale, the way that we're going with climate change, it's decolonization or extinction. I'll turn it over to Christine. Thank you. I just said I was done. Great. You got through a lot and in five minutes exactly. Thank you for turning it over to me. It's nice to back at so cap this time speaker on a main stage. I've actually spearheaded indigenous at so cap for two years in a row so this has been a real passion of mine, because also of my beliefs in what colonialism is and what it what it's doing to our world. And as I said earlier, I'm a decolonizer with Great Plains Action Society, we are indigenous folks of the Great Plains working to resist and indigenize resist colonial capitalist institutions and indigenize the world. I actually referred back to a talk I did last year at Bioneers today, and saw a quote that I stated at that talk by Pia Pia Mocs Mocs who was a Walla Walla chief. And he said, Goods and the earth are not equal. Goods are for using on the earth, you cannot give goods in exchange for land. So the capitalist idea of exchanging lands for goods was a completely foreign concept to indigenous peoples before colonization and genocide occurred on these lands and so this quote is at the foundation of everything I do, because I believe and I know that capitalism is particularly linked tied to colonialism they are one in the same, essentially, as Alexis and Nick have just stated. So I don't really have to go into the details of that because you already did that for me so thank you. I don't ever use these terms separately. I always use them together. And I would even add, you know, Christianity and the to that as well, which is actually the foundation of all of this. But I'm here today to talk about like philanthropy, and about where so cap is headed. And I know that one of the taglines of so cap is where money meets meaning. And I do know that last year, one of the original founders gave a talk about that that perhaps the meaning of so cap has has has left somewhat the space and you know I just, I want to talk about philanthropy rather than impact investing or like social capitalism right now, as I think these concepts. As they're actually practiced are still just a form of capitalism that is still perpetuating colonialism, because in the end indigenous communities are still the first to be extracted from, and the last to be resourced. Regardless of whether or not people right now are trying to change how they do capitalism because in the end capitalism is still capitalism and still colonialism in my in my opinion. And this is, you know, because the green capitalist economy is fundamentally still flawed in its understanding of how profit should be understood right so like what is profit. How do we understand what profit, you know, is what is the meaning of profit. And, and I think that no matter how you look at it with capitalism. It's always you know a soul, soul entity gaining, gaining, gaining margins of something. So if we want to elevate indigenous ways of being in this world to combat colonial capitalism, there needs to be a reckoning with the fact that money profit, if you will, in the in the investment world and the political world and in the philanthropical world, still cycles and white privileged circles. So, like the majority of philanthropic funding right now goes primarily to white led organizations, which of course is still perpetuating injustice. There was a study done by the First Nations Development Institute between 2006 and 2014. And they found that the total share of all foundation funds, going towards a Native American led organizations and Native American causes was only 0.6% of the total. I mean, like so in other words, there's another study that was done by Stanford social innovation review, where they, they saw that like out of like 99 out of the $60 billion in us foundation foundation funding each year. 95% of it goes to white led organizations. So this is happening in the, the, the philanthropical world where in fact, it should be the opposite, right, to like what's happening in the impact investing impact investing world, for instance, right so this goes to show you that this is, you know, very much. I would say that this is a relevant statistic, and that it would tell us that across the board in the, not just the philanthropical but like in the political and in the impact investing world, we probably still are having the same issues. And, and this is important because at this particular moment, and just, you know, before one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history. This issue could not be more apparent right because as Indigenous communities are facing COVID and all sorts of other issues. So we are, we are left like, even more disenfranchised right now at the polls, due to lack of funding, and I want to actually like uplift people's voices and values, even in the political realm. And even though we have grown, you know, 35% more or 35% while the rest of the population has grown 14% from 2006 to 26, 2000 to 2016. And so what I've said to some, I guess you would say heavy hitters in the political world is, you all have to stop putting money towards the status quo.  And, you know, right now there's only a handful of Indigenous led 501c4s in the country, Great Plains Action Society is one of them that can really make that precarious link between nonprofit community organizing and real political change which is a difficult thing to do. So, I just want to say that we need to to understand that in the end. We are the idea of social impact investing, and it is still, I think, very much capitalist endeavor, and people need to start understanding that money needs to flow in a different direction. First, that we can allow people to get to those levels where they can start creating a better economy, an Indigenous led regenerative economy for a better compassionate world. So that will be the end of my little show. Would anybody like to jump in and say anything. I have a lot to say, I mean just listening to both of you talk wheels were kind of spinning in my head when you said Christine that, you know, 95% of this funding goes to white orgs, 95% of privately owned land in this country is on by white people. And if you think about South Africa under apartheid, you know white people made between five to 7% of the population but owned 70% of the land. And so there's a direct translation between who owns the land has the wealth. And then the other thing was that it's not just about voting and I think this is what we're trying to do with the red nation. Like, if you look at, yeah, it's one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history, but it's also the one that has the least alternatives for a way out of this mess, right. And so part of this is like, we're actually trying to build an alternative. And I learned this from my friends in the global south that you can, yeah, you can go to the polls. But if you're not if you don't know how to plant your own food if you don't know how to grow your own food then what are you really doing are you feeding people you know and so this is what we're actually you know we're trying to put into practice and both of you are trying to do this as well because we we don't just see, you know, we're not just out here making demands we're actually trying to build something right and that is part of that transition away from capitalism to a more just and sustainable society. We can't, we can't build if we're not, if we don't have a voice as well. Alexis. Well, I just wanted to offer a couple takeaways from things that I heard both of you say my snapping fingers are sore now thanks a lot. But just some takeaways I have, we could probably do this for another hour, but my minor a capitalism is insanity, we're killing ourselves in the planet, and the planet will survive our species won't capitalism is reliant on another way it's insane as it's reliant on the red queen hypothesis, which is constant growth and if you've ever read Alice in Wonderland those books through the licking glass, the red queen just keeps running and running and running and running to stay in the same place. That's crazy. Everyone needs to decolonize all three of us hit on that in multiple ways. I've really picked up on Christine you saying that indigenous peoples are the last to be resourced. And I'd also like to point out that capitalism is wholly dependent on exploitation, whether it be of natural resources or people. And I was just thinking the other day about how indigenous peoples in the US were the first to be enslaved but what many people don't know is that the Anangan people living on St. George and St. Paul Island in the Pribbloffs in Alaska were enslaved legally enslaved by the US government well into the 1960s. And that kind of information needs to be put out there this is why we need that media voice. I also picked up on Christine saying, and Nick, saying how the green economy is still flawed, it is, it needs that quadruple bottom line, and we do need to redefine impact. And finally about philanthropy. Oftentimes, well intentioned philanthropists who get really excited about indigeneity. They're only skimming the surface they get really excited about about spiritualism really, and I think of them as spiritual tourists, but not actual movements. So, I really want to encourage people to go to what's authentic and real, which is like the Great Plains Action Society and what Red Nation is doing. Yeah, and I think the bottom line is that colonial capitalism is the antithesis to indigenous ideologies and methodologies, which is why indigenous folks around the world have been decided and colonized, because, you know, the colonizers could not have this opposite ideology, you know, when they are taking land, and the resources. And so we do need to absolutely change our mindset. This is where we need to be, we need to change the mindset of the world and over, in order to overcome this climate crisis or to combat it in any way whatsoever. I think, yeah, I think the other just a really quick comment to build off of that is that it's no indigenous peoples care take around a quarter of land based environments right. And with that, they're protecting air that we all need to breathe, whether it's through the forest, or these carbon sinks such as the Great Plains. But also, you know, we, you know, indigenous people are then criminalized for protecting those landscapes, including water, you know, with the Keystone XL gas or Keystone XL pipeline and things that they're trying to build through our territory that they're trying to protect this pipeline, and the slew of legislation that they have passed to criminalize us right it shows that we represent a real threat, because we actually represent a real alternative otherwise they wouldn't be investing so much money and be so well organized and we have to be more organized right we're going against one of the largest most destructive forces in history. And we have to be 10 times as organized and thinking not just about Oh next year about our funding, we have to be, we have to be planning 50 years in advance and 100 years in advance and that's where we're at right now we're at the beginning stages of planning that. So, thank you so much, Nick and Alexis, and I hope everybody out there understands more about decolonizing and combating colonial capitalism with indigenous economies and politics and ways of being in this world. Thank you very much.


Welcome back to why in the morning and if it's Tuesday, it's most definitely a definition Tuesday at Y244Channel is where you can find us across all our social media handles at Michelle Asherah is where you can find me across all my social. In this particular session we dive into an interview that looks at healthy parenting, healthy, courageous parenting. In studio I'm joined with Debbie Dovero who is the publisher. We were supposed to have Miss Joyce Murugi but due to unavoidable circumstances, she couldn't make it and Debbie Dovero is here to represent her. We will get to know Joyce Murugi but tell us who Debbie Dovero is. Well I am a publisher and I have published most of my life. I've been in the book world for about 30 years now and I'm an avid reader but I'm also a parent of now adult children and I enjoy doing that a lot but most of all is just enjoying spending my time with people who have a story to tell because in life we often get amazed at the things we watch around us and the people we watch and are amazed at their stories and many times in life we don't pause or stop long enough to look inwardly and recognize what a big story that we carry in our own lives and it's almost natural in life where people look down on what's in their hands or look down on their lives. You know they're saying grass is always greener on the other side it's more or less like that with stories. The story is always better on the other side. Alright and what's your story?  I think it started with my two aunties. They were much younger than my mom and my mom got married very early so when we my two aunties for example their last born the age difference was between me and them was like six years and the other one eight years so they were in high school when we were growing up and they went to good high schools they were avid readers they would come back with thick novels over the holidays and we thought it was really cool you know the beautiful girls you know in good schools and reading books so we started reading books my brother and I and I mean in primary school you can imagine I read Sydney Sheldon in secondary school I read Robert Ludlam serious books and my my attraction to books started then and so later in life I when I after university although I did the sciences but my first job was in a publishing house at the Nairobi University Press you know just right across and that's how my publishing career began and it's when I was there that I knew that I think what I would like to do is to create a platform for people to tell their stories and nurture them along that process of writing and so you can see what started as a hobby as an inspiration by my young and reading aunties it became a lifetime career and you can see that relationship of impacting when you have somebody you look up to and they have good habits they model to you those habits could lead to a career that's exactly what happened to me yeah yeah you made out you made a career out of something that you love absolutely absolutely and if the strange thing is when I was in high school my English and literature teachers pleaded with me David please do this in your a levels and I was thinking gosh a tough guy like me I was an amateur boxing champion and I'm thinking how does a tough boy like me do literature in a levels and then university sounded rather soft so I went to do sciences pure sciences and his life would have it my life came back full circle after studying all those sciences I went back to the world of literature yeah interesting very interesting and for someone who's watching us having this conversation and they wonder it what does a publisher do like what what what's it like a day-to-day look like in this form of a business space for you yeah excellent question we share the publisher is basically if you look at it you look at the whole spectrum publishing begins with ideas all right you have an idea as Michelle I have a story to tell and I have a story to share with the world I have an idea I want to communicate and how do you do it because you are limited as an individual you can only be with so many people in in time you want to communicate to the rest of the world so publishing is the process of helping you develop your idea and take it through what you call the editorial developmental stages so the idea is suddenly turned in the process of turning it into a book you go through the editorial process you go through design you go through you know sales marketing and distribution through channels and eventually what was an idea ends up in the hands of an individual somewhere around the world in the form of a book now for many years since 1400 AD we've known books only in the form of physical form but nowadays I mean you have even this is in digital format or you know already now but but that process begins with the author's idea the author is the initiator of the idea is the formulator of the words and then the publisher helps them communicate to their audiences effectively packages their idea into a book right yeah and as a publisher from where you're seated how do you decide the best retail space to approach for to stock your clients books well it it happened that you know life is changing so much because as I grew up you could only access books like in two locations maybe three now the first location when we were growing up is the library see we grew up with libraries nowadays libraries are not as popular and I would encourage people to make libraries their friends now the second place that was there is it was the bookshop but again the bookshops were few and first bread and most of them concentrated in in in towns in cities and towns and so the third place that we could access books as we grew up was where was basically in schools if there is a school library and if the school concentrates on encouraging people to read non-text books you know other other general books but the real place that books should always find a place is the home and so the way we decide on on how to and where to place our books is a very crucial decision one is you want the widest spread possible so you need more to make sure that they're in bookshops you want to make sure that they're in libraries we want to make sure that they're online on online channels on our own shopping cart select book talk Africa dot com and Amazon dot com and and and and all those other online channels but in Kenya again Kenya is a very entrepreneurial market as you know and already there are quite a number of online shops for example no ria dot com and places like those and so it's to ensure our our goal ultimately is that good books excellent books good stories are in every home in every village in every town in every city in Kenya in Africa and the world easy access yeah easy access all right yeah so talk to me about book talk Africa yeah what's what is it all about so book talk Africa Michelle you know the tragedy of Africa is that they say if you want to hide anything they claim yeah hide it where on the book in the book and that's a that's for me is a very depressing statement so the reason for book talk Africa is to ensure that we create stories that people want to read because you must incentivize people to want to read something so you must have create good stories so book talk Africa is about creating stories that will have one people we want to read will have an impact on their lives at any age and at any stage in their lives so you will find good books story books colored books you know for children at an early stage you will find you know good books for younger grow younger adults you will find good books for adults and you will find in adults there will be categories women category there is a category for leadership we have fiction we have reference books and so really I think our vision is to see that transformation people engaging with stories local stories every day and providing them with high quality excellent content all right and speaking about children and young adults we're holding a book known as going the distance a mom's steadfast support of her teens dreams by Joyce we reggae so how did this come by how did you meet Joyce well so sometime not too long ago last year I got a message on you know such one of the social media platforms and said David this is Joyce and Joyce is you know someone that I had met long ago in at the university and said look I am not in Kenya I'm in the US but I have a story that's burning in my bones and I knew that the only people that I would talk to as an outlet for my story is book to Africa and and so could we schedule a call you know when it's good time you know good time for you to speak in Kenya and so we scheduled the call and you know we listened to her story her story is a mom who had to make fairly difficult decisions and and and it sounded like a story you know because that's our reason for being as a book to Africa to tell good stories and and so that's how our journey began and and we listened and we knew yes this is something that we would want to publish it's a very interesting book known as going the distance the does that mean or from the title going the distance does it explain or rather tell the story of what she went through just bringing up our kids and probably balancing her career as well see the way I look at this story is in the context of what's happening in not just our country but around the world and not just in Africa around the world I think there's a serious crisis in parenting and the way we see this is because we find kids growing up without models of what they should do you know in terms of values and in terms of the kind of adults they would want to grow to be and we find that because of how society is evolving so fast people are very busy in their careers people are very busy in their social engagements and then people think that to the extent that you provide for the kids and you have someone to take care of them and you take them to good schools and you know people think that they have accomplished the role of parenting what joys does in her story is to change that narrative and to show that is a highly engaged professional joys runs you know a property consulting business which she has done for 25 years she is running a home she has a family her husband and other children and then half child her last-born child had a dream this is what I want to do in my life as a career and it required her to adjust her busy schedule how she ran her office and how she ran her home and she took that courageous decision to go to the US where her son went at a very early stage and support her because when kids are out there alone you know many things can happen and she decided the most important thing in my life is not my career it's not my social life it is my child so she was driven by love to go that distance and it is metaphorical in a sense she moved a physical distance which is like 8,000 miles you know from Kenya 14,000 kilometers or something like that but she also moved a distance in terms of look leaving a business behind and making that sacrifice you know to to to say the only thing that matters now is my child and I'm going to do it yeah so yes the title is so appropriate to both the physical journey and including even spiritual journey interesting it's you know funny enough is that from what I'm hearing yeah it's the fact that any parent can relate to this to Joyce's story yeah from one point or the other so you also a parent David yes tell us a couple of ways or some of their parents can align their priorities to cater for their child's personal growth well excellent I mean yeah you've asked that question as a parent look I am a parent over 25 year old I mean 27 year old and at 22 year old and I would say that it's the best thing that has ever happened to me I consider parenting such a great responsibility look I and my wife we made a decision to bring about children so it must become our responsibility to ensure that they become mature confident highly engaged and you know adults that our responsibility and I think some of the things that we need to make decisions on for example is something that we always like mostly neglect the amount of time you spend on your kids so I made a choice that regardless of how busy I am as a career person as a business person my first priority is my kids so I ensured in all my business my children had me so my kids would say their father was present never would miss any of their events and it's from the smallest whether it is their sports day their awards winning awards days their closing day their parents days if they want to go to be dropped for an event to their friends to a they could always count on their father regardless how busy that I was and I think to answer your question the most important thing as parents that we could do is to honor our kids by giving them time it's not money they need it is not cars it is not houses they need more than all those things they need a parent who cares who models good behavior who models good values and who encourages them to be well balanced adults when they grow up oh I fantastic and for us sit to sit here and talk about the book going the distance about healthy parenting that means there is a crisis when it comes to to this particular space as we said earlier on different parents make different sacrifices for the sake of the kids let's talk about the toxic aspect of it we have manipulation whereby a parent will manipulate their kid to feel that we actually did a favor you know bringing into this world and growing up in that space there's a show of black tax as well another luggage so how can it you know a child or even a young adult just deal with this kind of a scenario you don't show you you've you've you've talked about a major issue yes now that you find many parents either never wanted to be parents in the first place were never prepared to be parents in the first place they never had a model of good parenting in the first place they never had mentoring in the in the first place and and so they end up in situations like the ones you're talking about where they they feel it's either the kid is a baggage or an infringement on their time and they're doing them a favor or things like that and I think what I would say in situations where kids grow up and come to the sad realization that they can't look up to their you know to their parents and sometimes they don't have relatives around to look up to I think there is always there may always be somebody around you in society and unfortunately society has broken down a lot when I was growing up I was a child of society so even if my parents for whatever reason were absent there were uncles there were aunties you could look up to even if they were absent there was a neighbor because remember the neighbor was like a parent you know to me that's how I grew up and even if there is no neighbor who knows you any adult around you was more or less like a pirate up now that's our society has broken down however there is possibly always somebody that around either an older cousin or someone another friend that they can look up to what I would encourage young people is not to live with a victim mentality I was born by responsible parents I mean an irresponsible situation I give up my life I think we all have you know the destiny of our lives in our own hands even at an early stage so I would ask young people to look up to possible mentors whether they may be friends with they may be teachers they may be religious you know people in in church or you know some other religious environment yeah there will always hopefully be somebody who will help hold the hand of the young person and work with them and give them hope and give them courage and help them recognize that even if they have that deficiency of parenting there is a lot of gold within them then they can dig a couple of ways to deal with that kind of a setback so let's go back to the book yes going the distance so there's a book launch happening yes I tell us more about when it's going to happen and more about more in details about the launch well the launch of this book will actually be tomorrow okay which is Wednesday the 4th of August 2021 and it's an evening event and you know what what we normally would do with our book launches is is to make to create a sentimental moment and help people reconnect with their own stories and so we will have music for example we will have artists we have excellent local artists and you know we will have a good program we will have a keynote address from you know someone who's gone through that journey of parenting and has you know in the legal circles very well you know respected and has you know being head of divisions of a high court that you know look after young you know children and and all that and and so we are looking forward to and and look Michelle I think for us the other thing about the launch is that this is a first-time author it's our joy to publish a first-time author like Joyce and introduce her to the world you know through something like a book launch amazing yeah amazing so where will it be happening and what's the time it will be at Serena okay yeah all right thank you very much David for creating time to be with us and talking about matters pertaining a healthy parenting so how can people reach out to book Africa if book talk Africa if they want to be part of you guys yeah yes I mean anybody wanting to tell their stories yeah they can first reach us on our website which is book talk Africa dot com and there is an author's submissions you know page yeah link there they can get us all our contacts are there our books are available in all leading bookstores so if anybody goes to a bookstore like prestige they will find it TBC they will find these books and also the online platforms for sales you can buy the books on on our platform book talk Africa dot com but also on Nouria dot com and other online stores all right thank you very much David we're creating time to be with us we were looking at going the distance by Joyce Murige thank you very much thank you Michelle all right so that's all we had for you right here on entrepreneurship Tuesday on why in the morning at white 254 channel is where you can find us across all our social media handles at Michelle a Shirai so you can find me across all my social so have a nice day to keep yourself and make sure you keep safe and we'll see each other next Tuesday


Hi guys, it's Parker Dillman, the Longhorn Engineer, and a while ago I posted some code for the MSP EXP430, otherwise known as the FRONCHPAD, which has an accelerometer on the dev board. The demo code was for servo control and accelerometer readings, and it read all three axes and then it would output to two servos, and so here's the demo for it. So I have six volts coming from this four-pack of AA batteries, the wire to some test points on the bottom of the FRONCHPAD, and so you have a little header soldered onto it, and this is how it powers the servos. And so this one, top one is a ground, and this bottom one right here is the positive voltage, and so I just soldered a header into those two test points to use for my projects. So I have these guys hooked up. These are continuous rotational servos, and I added some, well I just put some coins on the wheels here so that you can see them rotate a lot easier. So I'm just going to turn this guy on, it's already programmed, and it's going to flash some LEDs and calibrate the accelerometer, and then you can tilt it like this and it will move the servos. So if you do this, that's about it for the demo. You can download the code, sample code, on my website, and I will be uploading a schematic so that you can easily wire this guy up with no trouble at all soon. See y'all later.


Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard, and I wanted to let you know about an exciting event we have coming up on September 23rd in Nashville, Tennessee. One of Ron Paul's favorite lines was, truth is treason and the empire of lies.  The regime accepts no limits to its power. Speaking on this topic, we all have brave truth tellers, including Ted Carpenter, Michael Rectonwald, Jonathan Newman, and many more. Again, this is on September 23rd in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. You can find more about this event and get your tickets at Mises.org slash Nashville 23. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMakin. I'm executive editor with the Mises Institute. And joining me, of course, is my co-host, Stowe Bishop. And we're going to talk a little bit today in the wake of recent calls for Staten Island, his secede from New York City. We're going to talk about the history and the issues behind municipal secession. Now, often this seems relatively uninteresting compared to a country seceding and doing its own thing. But it's actually an interesting thing to explore because there's so little justification for refusing municipal secessions, except beyond, hey, we're in charge and we want to stay in charge and we want your tax revenue. Since there are no national defense issues, nobody's pretending that Staten Island will institute slavery if it secedes from New York City. So what are these issues? If Staten Island voted two thirds or even 55%, we live in a period where all the social Democrats tell us that majority rules is what matters, that democracy is what matters. And so if the majority does vote to secede, what rationale is there to prevent that city from leaving? And my surmise is that they just want money and want to be in control. I don't see any moral issue here at all. It's just a matter of we want to think centralized because we like it that way. And so we'll look a little bit at some other examples and then as well as the issue of how some of these cities got so big to begin with. And we won't talk just about New York City, but there are numerous other examples and some issues in Colorado that I think are relevant as well.  I mean, kind of give us your general impression of the Staten Island thing. And then I know you went in and looked at some other examples, too, that seem relevant. Yeah, I think the Staten Island thing is very interesting because I think it goes to obviously there's an economic issue here, which is tax farming is essentially the argument that is used to oppose all of this. This was also true with a very similar and a very recent example in Georgia, where the community of Buckhead, which is the more affluent part of one of the richer communities within the city of Atlanta, they have sought to separate themselves from Atlanta for a variety of reasons, including just the unrest within the cities there. And that measure was defeated by a coalition of Republicans joining with Democrats in the state Senate. And their argument comes down to, oh, well, if we lose Buckhead, the revenue for Atlanta is going to suffer from it. But of course, the desire that's driving these things are a combination of, for one, taxpayers being upset that their tax dollars are being used in other areas they're not benefiting from, but also you have growing political changes here. And if we see the electoral outcomes in Staten Island relative to the rest of New York City, which is very blue, you've seen some big changes there in just the ideology of Staten Island relative to other parts of that area. And it's natural to want an element of self-determination when these conflicts have arisen. And it's interesting, this is not a new issue by any means, though I think this is something where we're going to see a greater trend too, given this period of polarization. And I think that there's something to be said about the political conversation generally depending on the outcomes of 2024, which if I was a betting man, I would put money on the Democrats in spite of how poorly everything is going just because of the pure sort of power dynamic there. If we get to the point where we get to sort of a post-national America from a political conversation, I think questions about what state governments can do and within that what counties look like, the political makeup of counties is going to be an increasingly important issue there, that COVID has kind of highlighted in many ways. But if anyone out there, if you are living and it doesn't matter what part of the country that you're in, particularly smaller towns, though, this question of city lines lightly played out at some point where I'm at here in Florida, our hub of our county government is in Panama City, not to be confused with Panama City Beach where I'm at. And Panama City was consolidated with a variety of other communities, including the first community in our county, which was the community of St. Andrews. It was consolidated with a backroom deal involving railroad interests and greasing the right palms in Tallahassee with the entire purpose of consolidating where the taxes were going into a government pocket that was easier controlled by special interest groups. So this is a dynamic that's played out throughout American history that has led to the counties and the towns that we are familiar with now. But this dynamic of special interest drawing lines in order to better collect and consolidate tax revenues for specific interests, this is what helped shape the map that it exists. And so now that you have, I think, a lot more awareness of, you know, because this is part of a larger conversation, right, with, you know, we could think about different secessionist movements among states, particularly in the West right now. I think this dynamic of recognizing the importance of political boundaries within the country and the political makeup thereof, I think these sort of conversations are only going to grow going forward. And as you mentioned, this is not simply limited to Staten Island. This is not simply limited to Buckhead. There's a similar situation in a metro area of Birmingham, Alabama, a community of Gardendale that was trying to separate, create a separate school system for their residents so it wasn't piling into the county as a whole and having monies distributed from one pocket to the other. There's other examples of this going on right now where, you know, taxpayers and residents are recognizing, okay, well, you know, we need, yeah, I deserve to be represented at the very least at my county government and the way that these lines are drawn are not reflecting the interests of tax-paying voters. And so I think it's a very interesting dynamic in this larger conversation of political decentralization, political lines on a map, that it's also a lot more feasible because, again, it's a lot easier to organize countywide efforts to change these sort of things. But I think this is really where we're going to see kind of where the rubber meets the road more meaningfully in the political sphere as the national circus becomes increasingly just chaotic, lawless, demoralizing whatever word you want to use there. Well, in order to get a sense of, okay, well, what are the arguments being made against these sorts of secessions that occur at the municipal level? And they don't, they're not very creative with it. They don't come up with much, except, hey, you're the heart of our community or you've been part of our community for a long time or if you don't pay taxes into our city, well, city services will suffer. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated argument. All they're really saying is we want your money.  I mean, obviously the foreign policy issues, irrelevant issues of maybe, what are they going to say? It's against the idea of national unity that we won't be as great anymore. I mean, nationalism doesn't extend down that far. So it's easy to say to people that, oh, America won't be the greatest country in the world, which for some reason matters to people.  But some people value that because they got nothing better going on. And obviously, that doesn't apply at the city level. So those sorts of like patriotic appeals, nationalism's up, doesn't work. So it's just about, let me get your money. So I looked at, okay, who opposed the Staten Island Secession back in 1993? Because I wanted to see, well, what were they saying? And it was a lot of the usual suspects anytime there's discussion of a secession. There were people on fixed incomes who just they don't like any sort of upheaval, you might call it, or change to the status quo because they're just, will they somehow affect my pension? Now if there are people who had some sort of city pension, they were former city workers, certainly they were very concerned about that. Another concern was current city workers who didn't want Staten Island to break off because a lot of city workers worked in Manhattan all day or in Brooklyn, but they lived in Staten Island because it was nicer. And they were afraid that it requires that they live in the city in order to be city employees, that they would then have to move or get a different job or whatever. Of course, deciding these issues based on what city employees think is a terrible idea. But that was certainly one of the groups that opposed the secession. But another big group was simply the school district, the school district employees who were also city employees or state employees, depending on how you want to define them. But it was the teachers union, the teachers union fought mightily hard against secession. They were kind of vague about why that was. They claimed it would lead to tax increases. Kind of funny to hear the teachers union people decrying the possibility of tax increases. But I think they were just grasping at straws, trying to come up with what are these middle-class fools who we despise? What will appeal to them? We'll just say their taxes will go up if they secede. Because a common claim when there are secessions like this is, oh, everything's cheaper for you now because of economics economies of scale. So of course we want to be in a giant city because everything's cheaper that way. As if it was a universal truth that living in a large city made your quality of life better than living in a small city. I would say there's pretty good data suggesting the opposite in that case. And so there were a lot of claims that, well, Staten Island's attacks suck. And so they just benefit from all of our infrastructure and all things like that. But of course they never mention all those tax dollars that flow out and are used for things that don't benefit Staten Island. So it always kind of depends on how you calculate the numbers there. But what was funny is that even after this hysterical attempt to convince everyone that their cost of living would go up if they voted for secession, two-thirds of Staten Islanders voted for secession in 1993 anyway. And then lo and behold, even though a supermajority of voters voted for this thing, the people who said they love democracy said, well, there was a technicality and you didn't fill out this form correctly. So Staten Island doesn't get to secede. And of course they needed approval from the state legislature also, which also strikes me as a bad idea. And so that never happened. Majority rule be damned. And so that's often how a lot of these secession efforts happen. And as you noted, it was the exact same thing in Buckhead. I was reading, you know, just kind of see what was the news that was coming out of Buckhead, the attempted bucket secession. What were the, what was the commentary on that? And it was just straight up, hey, we want your money. And that was it. And but you can imagine the benefits to a place like Buckhead or Staten Island, that would occur from secession in a variety of ways, right? First of all, Staten Island's representation in the city council has been lessened over time. Because of course, population in other parts of the city kept getting bigger. Staten Island wasn't keeping up because they didn't have as dense of development. So they just reduced Staten Island's representation. So now they have even less of a voice on the New York, you know, the New York governing boards, essentially. And and then so then Staten Island founds the victim to a lot of different things and inflicted upon it by the city. Overall, one of them was a huge landfill that went in the late 1940s called the Fresh Kills landfill. It was a great name for a land. I mean, if you're trying to sell a landfill, right? Right now, maybe not call it Fresh Kills. So that was a controversy for decades, for 40 years. Actually, I guess they didn't close it down for 50 years, where it finally went away. But that was a big sore spot for a long time, but there was nothing Staten Island could do about it. But if you could imagine if they were in charge of their own tax dollars, they would have a police force specifically devoted to the city. They could have much more say just and part of what what excited the most recent drive towards the session is the city government in Manhattan just said, hey, we're going to move a bunch of migrants to Staten Island. They didn't ask anyone on Staten Island what they thought they the the local representatives told they didn't they found about it found out about it in the newspaper that the city didn't consult them at all. They had no veto, no saying it whatsoever. The city just shows up and says, hey, we're putting a shelter here for foreign nationals undocumented immigrants. And that's it. There's nothing you could do about it. So even though we're told constantly by the ruling elite that self determination matters, that we need to save democracy everywhere, you having no voice doesn't matter at all, because we're fine with the way things are. So forget about it. So you just have to put up with our homeless shelters that we open, we're going to put landfills on your island if we want. We're going to do whatever we want. And you're going to have like one or two measly votes on the city council. And we just don't care.  And just denying that these people have any right then to self government, no matter how large a percentage of the people there vote in favor of it is just a perfect illustration of how democracy just means whatever the elite says it means. It shall not be allowed unless we decide to let you do it. And decentralizing the police force, decentralizing infrastructure, decentralizing services that are more tailor made to your actual community. There are big benefits to that. And that's why even though they were being told repeatedly that their taxes would go up, people in Staten Island voted for self control over their own political system. Anyway, they were willing to risk the higher taxes just so they could have some say in how those taxes were spent. And that seems to be the choice. You can choose between taxes of a certain level with no say over how they're spent, or you could risk having slightly higher taxes and have some control over it. Interestingly, this was an argument made in the American Revolution as well, which Samuel Adams condemned was the British were always saying, hey, look at all the money we give you. We keep the Indian tribes at bay and we defend you from the Spanish. And we do all this great stuff. And you're willing to give up this money and for independence. And of course, Samuel Adams, with his usual sorts of colorful language, basically said, yeah, I mean, if you want to prostitute yourself for a few pennies from the British, then yeah, continue to live under their yoke. And under the impression that you'll save a few bucks. But I am for liberty. And that's basically the same approach that many people have taken throughout history in terms of getting self determination instead of these hysterical claims that your taxes will go up and that the ruling elite should stay in power forever. And no exceptions made ever. And we'll just make sure the state legislature never lets you go. You can just see how it's built in that the idea of centralization is very, very popular among the elite. And they're always afraid that any sort of movement toward decentralization is going to start off some sort of secession fever that would be splitting up cities, maybe even pieces of the state would be breaking off. And they never want to open that Pandora's box. And so all those considerations are some of why they just refuse to let any successions happen. When, and of course, unfortunately, there's no group in America more eager to prostitute out the people they represent than the majority of Republican elected officials in modern day America. And that this is why the federal government's, you know, the elect was very good at this by placing various requirements and different incentives to various federal grant programs to get even nominally red areas to do whatever their agenda is in exchange for bringing home more bacon back to the district, which enriches special interest groups that finance the Republican politicians while their base ends up getting screwed over on the issues that they very care about, very much care about. And that's kind of the reality here is that one side, you know, the Democrats, this is why I think the issues in Staten Island are only going to continue to get worse as the political trajectory of Staten Island continues to differ from the majority of the New York City political machine and New York City. Generally, you know, you had a great quote in your article from one of the figures pushing for Staten Island's a session talking about how ultimately Staten Island and other overtaxed New Yorkers in this mismanaged sprawling city hate being governed by a Manhattan ruling class that often scorns and misunderstands outer borough residents. I eat those not living in Manhattan.  We are the New York City version of deplorables. And of course, historically, right back when we look at 1993, the majority of these Guido's and Archie bunkers types were voting for the Democrats. Now they are voting for the party of the deplorables.  In contrast, if you look at the example of Buckhead, again, as I mentioned earlier, it was Republicans lining up to squash their own constituents, right? Buckhead residents are more likely to vote Republican than your average Atlanta voter. They're the ones saying, oh, we can't allow our great city of Atlanta, you know, have its heart ripped out by allowing these Buckhead folks to have more control over their money. They, you know, they want to force them Nobody who visits the city of Atlanta considers it some great city. I can tell you that as a former resident of Marietta there. But again, they are more than happy to subject their voters. And I'm sure some of most of these people don't represent Buckhead, but whatever, right? Republicans in theory, right? They're more than happy to subject Republican voters in Buckhead to the insanity of the Atlanta city government if it means propping up this, the sense of importance that they have to this dear city of Atlanta, Georgia. And of course, if we want to look at looking at this Gardendale example, here's how the federal government handles this. So again, this was this was not squashed by the state government here. It was handled through the court system and a federal judge, a federal judge, basically said that the people of Gardendale were being motivated by racial reasons, therefore ruled against the establishment of their own school districts. This is a full succession. This is mainly dealing with how school money is going, but it's the same concept. And then rewarded the NAACP legal defense fund with close to a million dollars paid for by Gardendale residents, right? Yeah, that tax money is coming anywhere. It's coming from somewhere, right? So they're giving the NAACP legal fund almost a million dollars from these poor people that are just trying to have more control over their money is going. Of course, a big narrative throughout all this played out in Buckhead. It plays out in the Gardendale situation. It plays out in a variety of these situations is this notion of racism, that we can allow this white community to have more control over its money because it might hurt minority communities that are being subsidized by this more affluent part of town. And so you have this dynamic where it's the civil rights administrative state that has so much control over so many aspects ranging from voting maps to everything else that the left clearly recognizes for what it is. They will take from the voters that don't vote for them and reward patron classes that are reliable foot soldiers for their goals. Meanwhile, Republicans can't stand up and do the same thing in a state like Georgia, which might explain its current political trajectory. But from a power political standpoint, just another situation of how the Republican party for the most part. Again, this is at a state level. You can't even blame Mitch McConnell and the ineffectiveness of DC Republicans for this where there's this neutered self-defeating and prostituting out of the voter base from the people that elect these people out of their own nebulous concerns about the glory of a city or something that could threaten a special interest group that finances these campaigns. And so again, average Americans are being screwed over because of just the way that the current political system works in this country. Well, I definitely want to come back to the racism issue in a moment because, yes, they have found ways to turn this into a race issue and not just in southern states either. But first, I want to set up a little bit more historical context here. And I would start off by just saying that always remember that the opposite of secession is annexation. So anytime you're talking about secession, you have to keep in mind what is how did this thing we're looking to break up get to be its current size and shape and makeup. And of course, the United States is its current size from a variety of wars of conquest and machinations over a westward expansion, which by the way, some good research showing that the Civil War would have never happened if the westward expansion hadn't happened, that which would have saved a lot of lives and probably kept Americans more free because it wouldn't have set up this issue of direct control of the territories by the federal government. But that's another issue we can return to later. But the issue of municipal annexation is actually a big deal. And it was really your first wave of annexations happened after the Civil War. You had lots of cases of that where in Atlanta, specifically, there was a lot of annexation going on at those times in the 1870s, 1880s. But you had it throughout the West as well, where a lot of these really tiny towns were buying up essentially essentially buying towns around them. But you had in the more modern context, you had a ton of annexation going on in the 1940s and 1950s. It was very much a post-war phenomenon also. And you especially see it, if you consult the literature on it, a lot of it will talk about Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Houston, Oklahoma, San Antonio. You could include Denver in that as well, and a variety of cities. Los Angeles actually got smaller over time because it started out as a humongous county and then shrunk one of the notable secessions being Orange County, which broke off in the 1880s and then LA County sued it multiple times to try and prevent that from happening because it just wanted Orange County's money, but they failed. So now Orange County is free and, of course, much better off than LA County in general. But let's look to a lot of these cities that started out as just mid-sized or small cities and became much, much larger cities, Houston being a perfect example of that. But what happened over this time period? Well, a lot of these cities, they were surrounded by smaller towns or, in many cases, unincorporated areas of neighboring counties. So what they did was just engage in a variety of situations where they would offer a few local landowners, hey, we'll give you some city services if you agree to join our big city. And back in the mid-20th century, the ideology was very, very different. America was infected by this idea of boosterism. Bigger is better. We want to put this city on the map. I want to live in a huge city that's like New York City. And there was this idea that you wanted to live in a huge city that was urban and sophisticated, and there was no realization that that comes with its own problems. And so it was seen by many people who owned the land surrounded these cities or many of these small cities that just said, hey, go ahead and annex us bigger city. All they saw was them getting sewer lines and water lines out of this new agreement. They didn't foresee that actually their parts of the community would be sucked dry to pay for failing school systems, for old infrastructure, for crime, and the rest of the city would eventually become the reality for those cities. And then a lot of those suburbs would actually regret joining. This is actually the story of Buckhead. His Buckhead wasn't part of Atlanta until 1952, when it was annexed. And it actually took three attempts at elections to get the people in Buckhead to agree to that annexation. And of course, Atlanta looked very different in 1952 in terms of crime and in terms of the money spent and the age of its infrastructure and all of that. But what we're told, of course, is that once you join a city, you're not allowed to secede until the sun burns out. I mean, this is how generally annexations work. We annex you, and it's forever until the end of time. And everybody forget that they're just a few decades ago, you were a separate city. You're not allowed to remember that or mention that. And so that's how it is in Atlanta, of course, which is one of these cities that engage in a lot of expansions during that time. But we can point to many, many cities. And what's notable also is that a lot of these expansions, they occurred without local votes. If you look at the literature on this, you can find that many states do not have any requirements that the residents being annexed into a city be able to vote on it, which is I think would surprise quite a few people. There are a lot of provisions in there where if you just get a few key landowners to approve of the annexation, well, then tough luck. In fact, this happened in Atlanta again recently where the city annexed a new portion of town that I believe was mostly owned by Emory University. However, there were 6,000 people living in that area. And this changed their school district. It changed where their taxes went and it made them part of Atlanta. They had no say in the matter because a large portion of the property owners there, by which they mean land owning property, said, okay, it's fine. Now, I know that there's maybe some debate among libertarians. Well, I mean, they're owners, so they should get to decide what to do. Yeah, except land ownership is in the only time of type of ownership. What about the businesses that were leasing their space and the people who were renting there? I mean, renters pay taxes. They pay property taxes indirectly. They pay sales taxes. And they're subject to, of course, all the regulations that occur in these places. And so they just have no say in the matter. As long as the city does some backroom agreement with some little community that has decided to join that city. And so that was very, very common throughout much of the 20th century. Hey, guess what? You're part of this huge city now and you don't get to vote on it or have any say in it. And I suppose one could make the claim that only the richest elites get to determine where city's borders are. But even though we're being told constantly that democracy should have a part in it, that's still not actually a requirement in a lot of these annexation issues. And it's notable that in Colorado, they needed to amend the Constitution to keep Denver from continuing to buy up all the surrounding communities. Because what the cities would do is you would get a successful community that would pull in a lot of jobs and offer a lot of wealth and jobs and good new homes and stuff. And then the city would say, hey, let's just annex that because we're losing tax revenue and jobs to this new community outside our borders. So let's just make some shady deal and we'll annex it. And so in the 1970s they introduced what was called the Poundstone Amendment, which required actual voting on these issues and really limited the ability of the city to expand. So annexation could be a very shady business and it was very much a strategy of cities throughout the mid 20th century to simply deal with any issues of their taxes being too high, of their infrastructure being too crappy, where people were moving out of the city and they're like, oh, you moved out of the city to a neighboring community, we'll just suck you back into the city again. So cities were doing that. And in places though where they limited that, then suddenly these cities had to realize that, oh, maybe our taxes are too high. Maybe crime is out of control and they actually had to start improving their city rather than just buying up nicer parts of the state through whatever means they could come up with. And so that's really kind of the story of how a lot of these cities got big. It's that whole annexation story and it's often a very unflattering tale of a lot of these city governments. And we need to be aware of that before we talk about secession and how apparently I guess people don't have a right to do that because I guess wherever your current cities' borders are, they can only get larger, they can never get smaller for some reason. And I think that's something that is, I think every one of our listeners can take from this conversation is that a lot of these dynamics to how the state works, the cronyism involved in economic decisions, this is happening in our day-to-day life within your own community. And it's a lot harder to pay attention to. It's a lot harder to see this. You don't get the same sort of news coverage. You don't get all the social media exposure. You don't have Tucker Carlson interviewing the opposition to your county commission, railing against these corrupt deals that they're doing, some sort of developer and the like. This dynamics of the way that politics really works, the lack of the way that democracy only really goes one way when it helps consolidate power and elevate certain sort of people. This is the way that this playbook works at various levels of the government. The basic operations of a governing body, more or less say the same, you don't have to worry about the military industrial complex in your community, but you might have to worry about a contractor developer industrial complex where you have the same big wig contractors that end up doing all the major work within the county that end up getting your sweetheart deals. Often there's even a kind of a tariff, if you will, that subsidizes local contractors from competition from outside the area that allows them sort of cartilize their prices and drive it all up. And then all the developers will have nice boats and trucks and things like that. And they'll host all these nice fundraisers for the politicians, kind of keep that machine going and the like. These things play out at lower levels the same way they do it in DC. The difference is that it's a lot easier to actually wrangle up enough people to vote people out of office. Now, again, the problem comes in where the decisions on how a county can organize itself, how a school district can organize itself is then restricted not by the voters of this area, but by the court system, by the state senate, by these foreign powers that come in and interject in any sort of notion of political self-determination that a community might have for itself. But I think starting off with just this consciousness that your community has the ability to out sheisters and corrupt entities so long as they're aware of this aspect can be an example where awareness, understanding, applying, again, all this great Austrian theory that we pontificate about in terms of federal issues or international issues, it's all relevant here in the home. And this is a way of providing the information and the knowledge and the lens that you get from readingmesus.org. It's going to require doing the legwork of following the county commission meetings or your city council meetings and all these sort of dynamics. But you can see exactly the same sort of conflict of liberty versus power that lens that Rothbard has for history. It very much applies at this local level as much as anything else. And you have some more opportunities on dealing with it, exposing in it, and perhaps organizing a secessionist sort of march, because even though we're bringing up examples of where this is not working, it also can work. It also has worked. There are communities that have been able to break away from larger jurisdictions. In fact, one of my favorite examples is another local one. There's a guy who's a good libertarian, James Morris. He used to be actually the treasurer for the Florida Libertarian Party. He had an auto shop, and he would wave the Dixie or the Blue Bonnet flag in his auto shop, and he decided to secede his auto shop from the city into the county that had lesser taxes and the like. And he succeeded in doing that. So he was able to secede his piece of property away from one jurisdiction to the other within the county and because of tax reasons. And so this is not always a self-defeating measure here. The big ones, the big cities, the big pockets of money, you're going to have special interest trying to combat at it. But there have been ways, there have been success stories here. Again, you brought up Orange County, and it's able to break away from Los Angeles. There are examples of success here as well. And so if you're looking for a white pill and something that is not as depressing as some of the other political topics we could talk about, there are patterns of success for these sort of self-determinist movements at the county and local level. And that's why I'm very interested to see, and given this unique sort of period we are with political tensions, how things like the greater Idaho project, the state level, house, you know, seeing how the Staten Island movement continues over time, again, with the prediction that there's going to be more hostility from New York City facing those residents in the future. I think these are areas where you can win, even though the stakes and special interests and the powers that be, they're going to fight back. But these are areas where we have been able to win along these self-deterministic lines in the past. Yeah. And it's also important to keep in mind that these things can take a very long time. It took 20 years for Orange County to get through its secession back in the 19th century when they wanted to do that. It was just a small handful of people that pushed it again and again. It took a very long time. I think a lot of conservatives just give up immediately if they fail something after two years and they're like, eh, it'll never happen, so forget it. But, you know- I'm preference matters. Yes, it does. An actual effort must be expended to fight the bad guys in terms of political things. So, of course it can be done, and I think it's probably helpful just to make it harder for cities to annex places, require local votes, that sort of thing, because if city elites are just kind of determining how big their city's going to be, that puts the regular taxpayers at a very significant disadvantage. But before we leave, let's look at the racial issue. There was one thing I wanted to make sure and bring up, because yes, they have found ways to cast any attempt at limiting annexation or promoting secession as a racial issue. And at least the way that that manifested itself out west was on the matter of forced busing. This was, oh, we need to make the city larger so we can incorporate more suburbanites into our school districts and then we'll do a bunch of forced busing. Let me back up one step. If you're under the age of 40, you might not know that forced busing used to be this big thing back in the 70s especially, and it persisted into the 80s a bit, where the courts, the federal courts demanded that cities desegregate their school districts. So what this meant then was that you take the school district as a whole and you force students in one neighborhood to get on a bus and then, so you got a white student in one part of the neighborhood, they have to get on a bus and then ride 45 minutes to the other side of town to somebody else's neighborhood and go to school in that neighborhood and then they pick up a black student or in the case of LA in some other areas that were segregated on Hispanic lines, pick up a Hispanic student and move them to the other side of that town. So you had children sitting on buses for hours a day so that the school district could be desegregated and it was to completely destroy the idea of the neighborhood school because what mattered then was desegregation, not the fact that you got to go to school with people you lived near or and of course this made it far more difficult for parents to have any oversight over what was going on in their children's school, destroyed communities, it was just absurd, made huge time demands on small children's lives and anyone with the ability to move out of a city would of course do so because those are bonkers conditions to force your children to live under but of course they portrayed it all as racism to not want to participate in this insane system that the federal courts had imposed on the cities so people would move out of the city and then the city would come back and annex those neighborhoods back into the city so that they could continue so it would make it easier for them to desegregate by busing those students all over the place so of course when the woman after whom the Poundstone amendment is named Frida Poundstone who was a Republican from a suburb and wanted to prevent the city from buying up all of the office parks and all of the prosperous areas around around the borderlands of the city of Denver they of course labeled her a racist because she didn't want her children to be bussed 20 miles away to northern Denver and she also didn't want the city just buying up all of the prosperous neighborhoods around her seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do but as is so often it was just cast along racial lines specifically and so that of course has been used and then of course there's just the general idea of how dare anyone want not want to live inside the city or how dare those people in Buckhead want to leave Atlanta overall their only motivation must be that they're racist and they don't want to live with people they regard as their lessors and again they're just they're just grasping at straws to deny people self-determination so that the people in Atlanta City Hall can maintain control over a larger area an area by the way that they did not have control over just a few decades ago or in some areas of the city just a few years ago and that's just their general thinking is that hey we're in control now we should stay in control forever and if you don't like it you're a racist you're greedy and you're a racist and and that's just basically they'll come up with anything they can say in order to denounce you and so even though forced busing is gone they'll still use a lot of the same arguments against you for not wanting to essentially sacrifice your own family's time and money to prop up some badly run part of a neighboring city many miles away and it's the same arguments that they're using now over school choice matters and we have a larger conversation about you know the libertarian perspective on some of the more aggressive school choice matters I understand that but this is a very different argument they're making and you know this this dynamic has just become part of just the standard playbook for for anything the left doesn't like they are going to to make it into a a racial issue to to try to get all of the you know their specific interest groups in a tizzy to provide you know backup and again you know whether it's using the NAACP with the situation with school districts in the Birmingham area you know anything else you know they bring in these forces by able to try to utilize this sort of racial narrative to go against any sort of means of greater political decentralization this is why you know you're trying to give way and trying to play nice on this issue when it comes from a political perspective you know they they're they're underlying agenda is always greater control more control the tax money making sure it goes to their pockets you know their their interest is not the well-being of taxpayers it's it's not about political self-determination it's not about you know any of the values that we would have respect you know out of desiring from any sort of political body and that's just the the nature of modern american politics and then again I think this is why battles like this are worth fighting because I think increasingly given the political situation it's going to be the quality of your county level governance is going to have the biggest impact on the quality of life of you your family or your friends your neighbors you know if you happen to be be fortunate enough to be you know able to to be in the community that you grew up with that you have a particular particular emotional tie to a place that you found later in life even you know being able to preserve what is you like about your community is going to come from having a county that is willing to stand up to the next level of federal oversight the next state imposed you know governors doing crazy stuff and the more that you can have control over where your tax dollars go at your county level you know can can have control over again the nuts and bolts public services that you know kind of make up community government the better off you're going to be with everything coming forward because again we were in very serious political ties uh political times I think the again that the state of national politics is is something that everyone should be very concerned about local action and and local organization I think really does matter and again the value of it is that again the perspective that we have the understanding that the nature of the state in its interest get just as applicable to your your your county commission as it is uh washington dc well with that we'll wrap up this episode of radio Rothbard thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week again with another installment and so we'll see you next time


Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece, and today it's time to talk about a certain blonde-haired chef with strangely curled eyebrows, who, according to everything I've read on the internet, Etchera Oda absolutely hates, and that is of course Sanji, that's his name, a man who, no matter what he accomplishes, perpetually manages to disappoint a very loud and disgruntled portion of the One Piece fanbase. And I want to talk about why this is and how the crazy conspiracy theory that Oda hates Sanji has spawned from it, and of course, why it's blatantly wrong. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that Oda quite likes Sanji, he likes him a lot. But before we praise our blonde-cook monster too much, it is time to play Overcooked or Undercooked, a very simple minigame, the rules of which are as follows. We are going to be having duck for dinner, so we're going to place this duck in the pot, and it is then your job to select whether this duck will emerge from the pot as Overcooked or Undercooked. And if you guess incorrectly, then your punishment will be subscribing to the Grand Line Review, which will result in regular One Piece content being uploaded straight into your YouTube feed, but also no dinner. And if you guess correctly, then you will receive all of the duck dinners. So make your selection now. Will this duck be Overcooked or Undercooked? Let's find out in three, two, one, and it is Undercooked because this is Karu, and we're not going to cook Karu, you sick fiends. But if you selected Overcooked, then welcome to the Grand Fleet, and please do say hi in the comments below. But to begin this discussion, I'd like to very broadly dwell on Sanji's role in the series. There is a strong notion amongst many fans that he is a very combat-focused character. Given that he is a member of the illustrious Monster Trio and all, a term that was very conveniently invented by the fanbase and is never actually mentioned in One Piece itself. But Sanji is also ever so much more than a simple kick machine. He's more like the Swiss army knife of the Straw Hats because he is capable of essentially anything. Yes, he can fight, but he can also concoct and carry out any number of plans that in the past have been just as if not more effective than bringing down any single opponent in battle. He also possesses incredible non-combative skills, particularly in the realm of cookery, which might seem like an obvious and not at all necessary thing to highlight. But I do think people often forget that Sanji's ultimate ambitions in life have nothing to do with fighting whatsoever and everything to do with cooking. And in terms of something more meta, Sanji also falls very comfortably into the category of a comic relief character. Certainly not all the time, but he is a natural go-to guy because he is loud, proud, and absurd. With one crowning character quirk, of course, being anything to do with women. But with all of the above, it should be noted that Sanji is a universal Straw Hat. And what I mean by that is that he can quite comfortably operate in any crew combination. No matter which Straw Hats put together, Sanji will fit and that can't quite be said for everyone. There are certain crew members that have very oddly fitting combinations and some that don't quite complement each other, but Sanji will always complement someone else. Perhaps quite literally when put together with Nami or Robin. But then again, if you place him with Brooke or Frankie, then he will complement their strange pervertedness.  It doesn't really matter who it is, Sanji just fits. That is something that's very important to realize before we get into the hate. Sanji is a complimentary character. He doesn't generally do his best work in the spotlight standing on his own. Some of it he does, sure, but that's not who Sanji is or has ever been. So with that in mind, there are two Countham 2 major complaints regarding Sanji that seem mostly to be referring to the New World Era of One Piece. One is that he has still not been given a quote unquote proper fight in roughly over a decade now. And the other is that he makes a constant clown out of himself and the two of these together have led to the thought that Etra Oda is denying Sanji justice on purpose. Very specifically keeping him away from primary action and making sure that Sanji is almost always the punchline of a joke. And why would that be? Well, obviously it's because Oda hates Sanji. There is simply no other explanation. Now to be as fair as possible, we'll start with combat and Sanji certainly has not had, do you know, the greatest of runs in the New World? This does actually kind of shock me, but in retrospect, Sanji's fighting CV is pretty lackluster and mostly consists of team efforts, pretty crummy opponents, or just outright losses. And to start with, we have Return to Sabotee and here Sanji had the distinction of bringing down a Pasifista, which was pretty cool, although it had to be done alongside Zoro. And it was accomplished in a single strike, so there's nothing to really latch onto there. Next up during Fishman Island, Sanji's main combative focus saw him teaming up with Jinbei to take on Watatsumi, not really the most memorable of events, but it does get worse from here. Because after Fishman Island, Sanji embarked on a long-standing losing streak because his next three most prominent battles would firstly be against Virgo and Pankazet, a conflict in which Sanji decidedly could not have come out on top. Then on Dressrosa, he briefly took on Don Kyo to Doflamingo and was rather unceremoniously destroyed by the Warlord of the Sea. And then after that, his next major fight would not be until Holcake Island where he faced off against his father, Vinsmoke Judge, which also resulted in Sanji's defeat. Albeit by rather shady circumstances, but it doesn't really matter because this losing feeling lasted almost 200 chapters. I mean, yes, Sanji still had some minor victories here and there, like that time he beat Yonji off-screen, but I will admit that he did go through quite a rough period. A rough period of losing that would have lasted just over four years of real-time publishing. And really, that could have lasted much longer actually because the next time Sanji would win a mildly important battle would be against page one on Warner. But even then, people were not satisfied because in the manga, the conclusion of the fight took place off-screen. Once again, seemingly denying Sanji the ever-tasty glory of victory. Meanwhile, in contrast, you have a character like Zoro. Now, the New World has been a bit rough for most of the Straw Hats, but Zoro has managed to achieve a handful of dedicated fights such as Hyozo and Fishman Island, Pika on Dressrosa, or even against Killer on Warner, each of which are seen in their entirety and thus making Zoro a very cool dude indeed. Here's the thing about Zoro though. As my favorite character in the series, I have no issue stating that he is made for pure combat and not much of anything else. If you don't give Zoro fights and he has very, very little purpose in the series, but the same cannot be said about Sanji. Yeah, if we look at Sanji through the lens of a combat-based CV, then he is pretty disappointing. So I guess it's a good thing that we, you know, don't have to do that because doing so would deny everything else that Sanji is. Especially when an arc like Holcake Island exists, a very polarizing arc mind you because there were some pretty grand expectations going into it. And for some context, a lot of this spawns from a comment that Etchura Oda made at Jump Festa 2016, which was as follows. And regarding the original work, I've recently been asked by readers when will Sanji appear? Sanji's voice actor, Hiratsun, asked me this question. When am I going to appear? Don't worry, next year is the year of Sanji. It's finally time to cut into the secret of his birth. This will be the year that the members who were given a break at Dressrosa will play a major role. However, what most fans took from this message were four simple words. The year of Sanji. And that obviously means lots and lots of action and big spectacular fight things. A return to pre-timeskip glory, nay, an elevation to even greater glory. This is, despite the fact that Oda went on to tell us exactly what to expect from the year of Sanji, which was all to do with character history and character mystery, which Holcake Island absolutely delivered on, fleshing out Sanji's story in a way that I never would have expected and somehow making him the centerpiece of a mega arc while still maintaining Luffy's role as the protagonist. It was really brilliantly done. Sanji got to go on this whole journey of betrayal, discovery, romance, and ultimately finding his way back home. Oh, and he also got to put his ultimate skills to the forefront by baking a wedding cake capable of satisfying the hunger of an emperor of the sea, which was amazing. He fought against Big Mom in a way that only an accomplished chef could. And really the only thing that Sanji didn't do was have a classical one-on-one arc climax fight, which once again obviously means that Oda hates him. Despite the fact that Sanji has had more focus and more variance than any of the straw hats aside from Luffy in the post-timescape era. It really does boggle my mind when people say that they're disappointed in Sanji because no other straw hat has been given the opportunities that he has in the new world. It should be the other way around. We should be disappointed in something like, I don't know, Zoro not having been expanded upon in close to what, a thousand chapters now. Not the guy who's had two flashbacks and two whole arcs mostly centered around him. Well, you know what? Give me any other straw hat. Usopp, Chopper, Robin, Nami, Frankie, who of them has had more dedication than given to them post-timescape. The one character I might entertain is Brooke because Holke Kailand made him out to be quite the MVP of the crew, but that was based on action and plot achievements, which I suppose is how we judge things. I mean, sure, Sanji can go on a complex and captivating emotional journey, but it does not matter because you know what? He didn't kick any of the bad guys, bad chef, bad. But that's why I actually think Oda might like Sanji a lot more than most of the straw hats. To take the time to invest into him during the Four Emperor Saga is a pretty big commitment to character. One that I don't think any of the other straw hats are going to see going forward in the series. However, I should also discuss the other major reason for the Oda hate Sanji idea because it's not all about combat, although let's be honest, most of it is, but the rest of it has to do with his abundance of, how shall we say, comic relief. And I'd say it specifically about his interactions with women. And in this case, I will grant that Sanji got off to a very, very rough start in the new world. Return to Saabidi and Fishman Island were way too much. Sanji's insane nosebleeds did very much diminish his presence to me personally. And I don't think that the loosely connected bloodloss plot point really made up for that at all. However, after Fishman Island, Sanji saw something of a return to normalcy. Yeah, people got annoyed when he was clowned around by Viola and Pudding, but that's nothing new. And in fact, whenever I hear complaints like that, I always think back to any slobby to Sanji versus Caliphah and how thoroughly thrashed he was in a great, comical way. Then I imagine what the reaction would be if something like that happened today. Like imagine we're on Wano. We've just begun the Onigashima raid and Sanji encounters, say, Black Maria who defeats him instantly, leaving his broken and bloodied body on the hard, hard Onigashima floor. The fan base would lose their minds.  Sanji is a joke. Sanji never gets a decent fight. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But really as a character, Sanji is just as consistent as he was day one on Baratie. If you don't like how Sanji is being treated now then I really don't understand why you did like him back then. Apart from the fact that he used to kick people, maybe I don't know, once and arc. Really the only thing that's changed is that his purpose is much less combat focused in the new world. And I get that that can be pretty annoying because Sanji fights are some of the best in the series and it is always a pleasure to see him at work.  To say that Oda hates him based on the negligence of one of many factors that can trust Sanji is a pretty narrow view of things. And I guess that goes on to make clear what your priorities with One Piece are which in this case would be action. And that's fine, but maybe try not to project your tunneled expectations onto an author that is trying to do something a bit more and something a bit different. And that's not to say that Sanji has been perfectly handled, but then again, who has? One very real elephant in the room is that all of the straw hats have seen a drop in prominence following the time skip. It's certainly not the kind of intimate story we knew in the classical days and for better or worse, that means that the use of these characters is going to need to change as well. And with that in mind, Sanji happens to be quite probably the luckiest straw hat to have had the incredible time and focus dedicated to him amongst all of this new world madness. Because aside from Luffy, nobody else has even come close. So does Oda hate Sanji? Absolutely not. If anything, it is quite the opposite. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you're keen to see more videos like this then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious One Piece business uploaded straight into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.