 Hello everyone. I'm Jim Garrison. I want to welcome you to this session of Humanity Rising as we begin another five-day program. This one on this extraordinary phenomenon of whistleblowers. These closet patriots, as they've been called, who live and work in either major corporations or government agencies who begin to witness all kinds of wrongdoing, do not experience any remedy, as they call it, to the attention of their superiors, and then finally go to the press or to some outside authority to bring to public attention what's happening in the hopes that the public scrutiny and government scrutiny will cause some meaningful change. We're delighted that we're going to be partnering once again with Code Pink and with Jodi Evans, who's in Shanghai as we speak in China. And as we begin our program today, Jodi and I will be dialoguing about the whistleblower phenomenon, but also within the backdrop of world events, because as we all know, since October 7th, the world has literally been upended as Hamas and Palestinian freedom fighters launched a major assault onto Israel with such devastating force that many commentators said it was the equivalent to 9-11 in the United States. And the reverberations of that around the world, what is now happening in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis as they begin their awesome and cataclysmic retaliation is something that every morning I have been commenting on. And I was preparing my remarks for today to just summarize and give a kind of a backdrop so that we're holding the whole. But then earlier this morning, I read Chris Hedges' newest blog on what's happening and he speaks with such lucid fierceness as a journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed reporter who for decades has covered wars for the New York Times, for major news organizations in the United States and Europe. And his writing today is worth repeating. So I'm going to begin our reflections today with a few minutes coming directly from Chris Hedges who's been on humanity rising before, as you all know, and is one of the clearest commentators of anyone I personally know about what's really happening beneath the headlines and in the reality of world events. And then I will have Jodi make her comments from her perspective. And then we'll just dialogue for the balance of the hour. But returning to Chris Hedges, he makes the point that he was there at the siege of Sarajevo. Remember when the Serbs attacked the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and committed essentially a genocidal campaign that was like what we're seeing in Gaza, just a wrenching experience for the world public to see ethnic cleansing and genocidal attempts happening once again in Europe. And he says, during the siege of Sarajevo, when I was reporting for the New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded today. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arm shipments from the US and other Western countries to sustain the Serbian siege of Kosovo. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community. Although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces, we never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves. Although the UN peacekeeping forces sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in Sibronica. He goes on to say that basically the Israeli siege of Gaza is not anywhere like the siege of Sarajevo. It's more like the siege of the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War against Stalingrad, where 90 percent of the entire city was destroyed. On Friday, Gaza Strip had all its communication severed. There's now no internet, no phone service, no electricity. Israel's gold is the murder of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survived into refugee camps that they hope to force the Egyptians and the Jordanians to open up. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the very idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believe that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people whose land they stole a simply go away. Israel's bombing campaign is one of the heaviest of the entire 21st century. It has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers, and UN staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are now homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. By the time Israel is done, Gaza or at least Gaza as we knew it will no longer exist. Not only are the tactics the same as other genocide attempts, but so also is the rhetoric. And it's very important that we all take this in because although much of the carnage is being hidden by the mainstream press or sanitized, the rhetoric is getting through. They're being called animals, beasts, Nazis, for being told that they have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder, and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask the Native Americans. Ask the Indians, the Congolese, the Kikuyu, the Herrero of Nobibia who like Palestinians in Gaza were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps by the British where they died of starvation and disease, 80,000 of them. Ask the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians. Ask the Kurds, the Libyans. Ask indigenous people across the globe. They know who we are. And this is the seminal point. Israel's distorted settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves wanted virtues such as liberty and freedom and democracy. But what we actually do to occupy and besiege people is to deprive them of the right, seize their land and use prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforce poverty and murder to keep them subjugated. It's happening in Gaza and Western civilization has been doing it for over 500 years against the rest of the world. President, and I'll close with this, Netanyahu just a few days ago on Sky News said we're fighting the Nazis. And he has repeatedly said that the Palestinians and Hamas are the Nazis. And Chris Hedges writes this, think about that. A people imprisoned in the world's largest concentration camp for 16 years denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, an air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet. And they are the Nazis. And he concludes by saying genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. That's what we all need to take in. We're watching in Israel, but the United States, Britain, France, Germany and the colonial powers have been doing for centuries. This activity is the building block of Western imperialism. And maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the rest of the world sees it and sees what Israel is doing very clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that the Palestinians largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally prosecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragedy and irony of what's going on. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it. It's hard to take in the enormity of what Chris Hedges is saying, but it strikes me as fundamentally true about what Israel is doing, about what the United States is now backing along with the Western powers, as not an exception to what Western imperialism has done, but the latest exemplification of what Western imperialism has done. And the rest of the world is watching, understanding that, and is yet unsure how to cope with a imperial force whose military might is unsurpassed on the earth. So I thought it would be good just to share what Chris Hedges said. And now I would like to bring in Jody, who I know had read it also as I did this morning, and has very strong feelings. As you all know, Jody Evans is one of the greatest peace campaigners of our generation, I would say. And so it's an honor, Jody, to have you with us, even from China in the middle of the night. So just share with us any reflections that you want to make, and then we'll have our dialogue. Thank you. And good evening, because it's 10 o'clock at night here in Shanghai, which by the way, I prefer to the 8am in California. So I don't know about you, but adding on to what Jim just read are the images that we've witnessed over the weekend of dead children, of cities destroyed, of not only that reading about Jews being attacked, and Muslims being killed, that this violence, we don't know what's going to happen to it. And I just, here we are in a moment of history that has never happened before. Here we are with a tear in the fabric of society, a tear in the fabric of our psyches that has never happened in history. What does it do to us? And I just thought, I'm going to wake up this morning and be with humanity rising. This is the work all of you have been doing for years together. And there's the, you know, Chris Hedge is naming. But the other piece of this is what do we do? How do we respond? How do we be with? Because I would say a lot of what's happening is the discomfort of being with that creates all the name calling and going into corners and that, you know, attacking with calling people names and the heartbreak because someone isn't where you are and sees the world from their own narratives that have been constructed. So we picked this week to talk about constructed narratives, to talk about disinformation and what it does, to talk about who suffers and why it is used and what has been the damage and what happens to those that try to tell the truth into the lies and disinformation. How are they abused and discredited? So here we are living this in a way it has never been lived before. And yes, as Jim Wren, it is imperialism. It is the result of imperialism, colonialism, power over, I love a fair with violence, the capacity to make people afraid. That's what we want to talk about this week. What is disinformation? It's to make you hate other, to make someone an enemy, to make you feel more powerful when we're discussing, you know, the chosen people. Well, you know, isn't that what the United States thinks about itself? Biden, who thinks he's the ruler of the rules-based order. All of that is being splayed open for us to see and respond to in ways that are useful for a future. Obviously, in this moment, we're watching, I'm just going to say Netanyahu and Biden, you know, but it's not Israeli in the United States because there are people inside the United States, people inside of Israel who aren't for it. So like just to name a few names that is bigger than them, but not all of the countries they represent, what they're doing hasn't been witnessed in real time ever. And I just want us to sit with that of this moment that we're living in and that we wanted to talk about the disinformation this week and we're going to lay out today, you know, some of the places where Jim and I have lived through it and what that the result has been. But tomorrow we have two young men who have different ways, lenses they've seen through to talk about the disinformation that they say they're trying to disarm the disinformation that is trying to create the hate towards China that will, you know, if we think this looks bad, as I've watched Netanyahu's behavior over the last 20 years, he just keeps seeing what he can get away with and he gets away with it and he escalates what he can get away with and he keeps getting away with it. So when these tears are opened and no one's held accountable, the, you know, the monsters have to outdo themselves if that's what the drive is to show power to, you know, to be that powerless that they have to consume the world with their powerlessness and their violence. Then on Wednesday we have Danny Sheehan, a whistleblower inside the UFO movement and which, you know, is going to be super interesting because of all the whistleblowers that are coming out right now and the attempts, the desperate attempts to silence and what we know is when there's desperate attempts to silence, somewhere there's truth that doesn't want to be seen, they don't, power doesn't want us to see. So that will be really fresh and interesting and something you're not going to have access to in many other places. And then on Thursday we have Danica and Noor to talk about inside, to hear from a woman from Palestine, to hear from a voice that really speaks from the occupied and what it feels like to be in the midst of the lie. What does that feel like when you live the truth and all that you are given as a diet of lives that are violent every day, all day? And then we finish on Friday with Stephen Donziger who brought, you know, an oil company to their knees, Chevron, with a nine billion dollar lawsuit that he won and then was put in jail by them. So, you know, that goes to not only like pulling out the lies, how long that takes, you know, 20-some-on years of his life as a lawyer, but then wants to reach success to then be slammed back down and put in jail. So that's our week. We're going to stay with what we intended to do with you, even as we're all living through it in real time, right here and right now. And that disinformation is about sowing hate. It is about creating enemies. It is about distorting reality in a way that then allows you to move a person away from reality because it confused if the ground feels unsure and they're looking for something to hold on to and you give them violence to hold on to because that makes them feel safe. And I just want to say that yesterday, a code pink team in the Bay Area, women that have been in the streets for 22 years calling for peace, really courageous, just endlessly generous with their time and resources. They, about almost 20 years ago, did a three-year occupation of Nancy Pelosi's front yard because she was funding the occupation of Iraq and they went back and they've been doing a hunger strike in her house to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. And she came out and she says, oh, I don't listen to you. You're funded by the CPC. So not only not answering the question, but pivoting it to a lie that had nothing to do with the question and everything to do with lies that were perpetrated by the New York Times a few months ago. And so it's like we're seeing the emptiness of those in power that they have nothing to turn to but the toxicity of their lies that fall apart in their hands. And the other thing is, is, you know, as I, I want to feel with you, especially after reading, you know, hearing what Jim had to say and what we've been through and for the past three weeks, that something it could pink because we face and deal with the violence of the U.S. Empire every day is and it breaks our heart and it breaks our hearts and it breaks our hearts is how not to let them win when they break our hearts and make us not even believe in life, not even believe in anything anymore because nothing could be where is life, you know, as so many of the you hear the Palestinian parents say, you know, it's just like everything taken away. And in those moments where we're feeling that devastation, what we do it could pink as we engage because the only recognizable piece feature of hope is action. And I just want to let everyone know that this weekend, the other, you know, what I would turn to after witnessing some other horror that was arising in Twitter or Instagram, I would turn to the marches globally and million in the street in and assemble 500,000 in the streets of London, you know, across the world, I can't even name all the cities this was happening in. We were here before we were here before the Iraq war, people in the streets, and they weren't listened to. So we all must know that it is our tasks to be in the streets, because if the media, you know, it's them, our leaders, the media, you know, the base, they're all in this. It is for us to be visible that if you have a social media account, be posting what you see, so others can see it, find the truth and share it. Let the truth you share, be a voice that knows, be a voice that's speaking from the truth, not from an idea, not spreading hate, not spreading judgment. There is enough just the voices from the streets, the voice of the father, the voice of the mother, let their voices be heard and raise them up because they are being silenced. You know, almost 30 member journalists have been killed. If not them, their families have been brutally murdered. They are trying to silence the truth. So if you know that your task is to not let that happen. So if you can, your task is to be in the streets this weekend. I mean, I will be so ashamed if we don't have 500,000 in the streets of Washington D.C. on Saturday, the fourth, when the call has gone out for everyone to be in the streets outside of the White House, because if we're feeling the pain and if we know that it isn't unjust, sitting at home means we accept it. We cannot do that. We must be in the streets. We must be sharing the truth. This is the moment where you are called on. If you wondered how slavery happened, if you wondered how genocide and the indigenous happened, if you wondered how Germany happened, silence. Good people saying nothing. Here is your choice to act in the face of the violence that you have been curious about all your life. So with that, I want to just pivot to the disinformation. So my coming of age was during the Vietnam War, a war that we went into from lies. But before that, when I was growing up, my stepfather had been in the war in Korea. And it was only recently that I learned the lies of that. But being a young person and looking at the world and not understanding how my friends from high school, their brothers would be coming home on body baths, how grown-ups could allow this to happen. And when I learned it was about the fact that the North Vietnamese were communists, that was even more mind-twisting. Really, we're killing people that believe in equality for all. I don't understand. But that a country could be led to believe they were doing the right thing by murdering people. Let's just think about that. That it took years to build an anti-war movement. It took years to wake anyone up. And it took a very courageous whistleblower to pull off, pull back the curtains. Because even with all the engagement, it was really Daniel Ellsberg's whistleblowing that allowed people in power to have the disbelief that was necessary. Because everyone just agrees to the container to the system that is holding them. We don't even know it when we're doing it. And so that was what really shifted my life, was to watch that everyone could just agree to murder, to violence, to disgusting violence. It was when they still allowed us to see what was happening. But it wasn't even in real time. And it was in little moments. But I will forever be seeing that child running with napalm burns down through a field. I will never not be able to see that photo that was in, I think, Life Magazine. We're seeing that photo 100 times a day right now. Think of where our psyches are right now. And then to learn that the Korean War again was something no one spoke about. My stepfather never talked about it. I did never understand what it was about. And then going to North Korea to walk across the DMZ and learning how many lies I lived inside of. And that nobody even asks. They've been swept under the rug. And instead of understanding the violence that the wrath of violence that was profound, 80% of North Koreans casualties of 80% of North Koreans and the entire North Korea bombed so much that generals said there was nothing left to bomb. That it said the President Eisenhower when he got the reports cried and said, stop this. But they didn't stop it. Instead, they created something else that was violent. Which is a truce that lasted until now, where in Washington, DC, they drew a line across Korea. And Koreans on either side were never allowed to see each other again. Mothers couldn't see their sons. Sisters couldn't see their brothers. I mean, another devastation that is criminal. So these lies have consequences. We're watching the innocent right now bear the consequences. It is in our faces all day long right now. But all of these have had consequences. So let's go to the lie of the Iraq War. The New York Times knew it was a lie. Me and many others told them weapons, really brilliant weapons inspectors, people from the UN. Instead, they drove lies. And the Brown University has just come out with the cost of those lies is 4.5 to 6 million people during the war on terror. I wanted to think about that. But that has happened without accountability. We went to Gaza after the first cast led in 2008, 2009. And during 2009, we took 1,000 people to Gaza. Many of them Jewish. They would come back and not be able to speak for a month in the understanding of the lies that they had been fed by their lives and not being able to find the ground. This isn't new. I've witnessed the horrors in Gaza for a very long time. This is a conspiracy of violence that has been happening for a very long time. But now in the lie, we are witnessing the cost to innocence. And you can almost watch it one at a time. But the number, the number of this violence of the empire, of colonialization, it's ginormous. I mean, it's just, I don't even want to think of what that number is. And somehow in this moment of reckoning, it's really up to all of us. What do you do now that you know? Thank you, Jody. Thank you very much for that. I hadn't taken in to you a spoket that this is the first kind of genocide and ethnic cleansing that's happening live on TV worldwide. And I began to reflect, you know, you go back to what happened in Bosnia, that was before the internet. You think of Rwanda, that was before the internet. And you think of other incidences, they, you know, the Second World War, people didn't even know about Auschwitz till after the war was even over for the most part. So you're absolutely right. This is the first time that the world is witnessing up close and very personally the carnage that genocide and ethnic cleansing entails. And the starkness of that should give us all pause. And to add some comments about the Vietnam War, I was just reading over the weekend, Alexander Mpires, who's a Greek commentator on Ukraine and now Palestine, he just gives a daily video, and he was making comparisons between what's happening now with the US and Middle East and what happened around the Gulf of Tonkin incident in July of 1964. And he showed the striking parallels, where in that case, the United States was within the territorial waters of North Vietnam in a provocative move, was supporting the South Vietnamese armies with weapons and material and support for launching raids against North Vietnam. And then I think it was on July 30 and 31 North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong launched an attack and it destroyed a facility, a warehouse, or something in the US zone, but very little damage was done. And then the Americans used that incident as the pretext for launching what became known as the Vietnam War that left millions killed, displaced, injured, dispossessed in all kinds of ways. And McCuris was noting that the US is now bringing in four aircraft carrier groups, nuclear submarines, launched a strike against the Mujahideen in Syria that had done, like the Viet Cong, they had launched a few rockets and it wounded several American soldiers. And now the response is going to be a regional conflagration supporting the Israelis that almost defies imagination. And he also pointed out that the rhetoric used by President Johnson to legitimate the buildup after the Gulf of Tonkin incident to start the Vietnam War is virtually the same language that President Biden is using to justify the buildup in the Middle East. And so when you take in the duplicities of the colonial powers and the rhetoric that they used, they don't change the rhetoric much. They don't change their tactics much, but their control over the mass media is sufficient to put people asleep and that they're either confused or they're actually believe, well, Hamas did that to Israel and we've got to support Israel. And so whatever Israel is now going to do is somehow justified in their mind, even though they cringe at what is happening. And that brings me just to the final comment that I'd like to make. It was really the Vietnam War was the first war on television with the daily and weekly accounts and the coffins coming home in the airplanes and the reporters on the ground with battalion XYZ as they do this. So in some ways, the public revulsion against Vietnam, where for the first time we started to watch a war literally on TV, is similar to the growing global revulsion against what is happening in Gaza because it's on the internet. People have iPhones and even though the Israelis have shut off all the electricity and all the internet, they're trying to stop that any news, any information coming out of Gaza. Because like you said, I have never forgotten either that little girl just being napalm, completely naked, disoriented, staggering down the road. And that image galvanized millions of people against the war. So of course, they want to eliminate it as much as possible, which is what they've now done as of last Friday. So the similarities in terms of history, in terms of tactics, in terms of rhetoric is history all over again. All over again. And then as you say in the midst of it comes Daniel Ellsberg, the super bright guy promoted. So he had access to virtually all US intelligence. He starts reading what became known as the Pentagon Papers. And he had a crisis of conscience because he understood both the lie and the truth. And was courageous enough to go to the, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post and so forth and the great case that we all know as the Pentagon Papers took place, which we won as it all turned out. So the similarities are striking in our world today. So but you also spend a lot of years going to Russia. And there was a lot of disinformation there that, you know, I think I can still remember when I flew into Moscow for the first time. And I think it was September 1982. I was, I thought that I had penetrated the propaganda about Russia, which I intuitively knew wasn't true. Having gone through the Vietnam War and having been born in China, living in the Orient, traveling all over the world. I had already broken relations with the US government when I was 18 over the Vietnam War and gotten arrested and, you know, civil disobedience and so forth. But then when I, in my late 20s, and I thought I would fly to Russia and find out for myself, I can still remember when I was about the land, I started to kind of look for concentration camps. And I got out of the airplane at the Sheriff Metro Airport in Moscow there. And I thought I was going to go into a heavily armed and everything was normal. And the people were actually friendly. And the taxi cab driver that took me to my hotel was very chatty, knew a little English. And I remember I experienced, as I'm sure you have in different ways, a cellular preconditioning of fear and stereotypes that were broken by the actual experience of the reality of actually being in Moscow. And the liberation that I felt as I went through the next several months, realizing that the Russians were wonderful people, they were friendly. And besides they didn't have the technical capacity to mobilize an invasion of Western Europe. They couldn't even fix their refrigerators or their bathtubs, you know, let alone take on the United States and the NATO alliance. So then once one has those experiences, one gets seasoned in understanding how the news is being manipulated day by day through the subtleties of rhetoric and images that create stereotypes in the mind, which enables us to dehumanize the actual reality of the people and justify whatever our governments tell us they now have to do to defeat the enemy. And it's just whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, now Gaza, it's the same playbook over and over and over. And as you know, and everyone on Humanity Rising knows that the ultimate was when Gorbachev, the communist, made the proposal to the capitalist camp in the Western powers that the cold war was insane and that actually there was a possibility of transcending the enmity and forming a super ordinent security zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And that in order to initiate that, he was willing to withdraw all the Russian troops from Eastern Europe, allow Germany to be reunited. That's how strongly he believed in this vision of world peace. And it was the betrayal on the part of the United States of that generosity and that offer that led to the militarization of Eastern Europe and ultimately to the war in Ukraine. And now we have Gaza and yet the United States is still now bogged down in Ukraine, which is being completely destroyed. And at some point, the United States will walk away leaving Ukraine in the same situation it left the Korea and Afghanistan, you know, 50 years ago, there will be a DMZ and a perpetual situation of conflict for what? For what? Because they like conflict. That's where their power is. I mean, if we get no BB, there was going to be peace in the Middle East and he didn't want it because there's no power in peace. He wanted the disruption, so he empowered Hamas and got them funded because he needed to have the enemy that he could be building up and fighting against because peace doesn't give monstrous power. They can't have power in peace. And so, jinx cat. Since you're there in China, I would love to hear what you're learning because, you know, the Chinese have been leading the global peace effort to get the United Nations and ultimately the Israelis in the United States, who are the only ones refusing a ceasefire to in fact have a ceasefire and have meaningful negotiations toward a two-state solution, which China, Russia, the Middle East, India, Africa and Latin America all agree to. And China is really emerging as a global leader in peacemaking. They had a proposal around Ukraine. They brought the Saudis and the Iranians together. They're very active in the Middle East right now, so I would love to hear what you're picking up and your experiences are of what China's doing right now in terms of the Middle East because it's one thing to protest on the ground, which is what we ordinary people can do, but there's also all the negotiations and diplomacy happening at the United Nations and between the great powers behind the scenes to try to bring peace as well. And so tell us what you know. Well, I have no fingers or ears on the pulse of all the thousands of meetings that must be taking place across Turkey or Iran, Russia. I mean, I doubt China is very much engaged in it. I do because I feel like the Middle East is where those conversations I'm assuming are happening at a furious rate, both for their own, you know, I think certain people in the US government and in the Israeli government have mentioned that they'd love for Iran to get engaged so they can nuke them, you know, so they're they're all on tight ropes and they're also having their, you know, being I don't know what the right word is, but humiliated is a software compared to what's really happening, being humiliated. I mean, just think about this, that one guy, one crazy should be in an institution guy has the whole world in his hand. Think about that. And think about it if you're a Muslim, and you're watching what is happening and feeling impotent and powerless. Because it is clearly a racist. This is racist. And to have Ukraine and Israel Palestine happening right next to each other, we already knew about the racism with Ukraine. We've talked about it. But the starkness of it has just been increased. And also let's just remember that the silencing the silencing of what war looked like around Ukraine, we were not getting the photographs of war that make you turn against it, that make the people in the world say stop, we weren't getting those photos that, you know, that wasn't happening. Because power knows what happens when people see what they can't stomach. So, you know, here we are in a different moment. But this is racist. So, I have no idea. I mean, what's really nourishing here is that the Billy Billy and the Tik Tok is just full of support for the Palestinian people. So, and also that, you know, how progressives are being used, you know, because, well, you know, Taiwan needs, you know, it's freedom, you know, kind of like Ukraine. And we say we don't want to Ukraine, Taiwan, Taiwan has sided with Israel. So kind of tying knots there. So in the sense of, like, if you're working to try to stop the war on China, the all the excuses have been just ripped out from underneath the United States, and the driving of the hate towards China. So, and at the same time to have a US, you know, a US governor who represents the most amount of people in the United States to be so friendly and kind, I think has also been a really beautiful thing. But after the disrespect and the really just embarrassing way that Blinken and Biden deal with China to have such a beautiful coming together in the sense of like, China is not our enemy is about that we need cooperation and kindness and, you know, that alliance to watch it happen. I also have to say that just made my heart happy, because in this moment where we're watching, you know, history is unraveling and needs to be rewoven, it was really beautiful to see the possibility of that reweaving that does have to do that relationship with all the things that can be done together to save the planet. And, you know, just another reminder of what happens with war Ukraine and Palestine, but also that there's like edges of wars happening in like 20 countries right now, that that is a violence to the planet that, you know, is taking with each gesture more people than the wars are taking, not Ukraine, but certainly here and also to remember that I saw a number this weekend that now more innocent people have been killed in the last three weeks in Palestine than the entire Ukraine war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's worth just noting the effect that it's going to have on Israel itself. It's very important, I think, to remember Israel is a small country. And if you look back over the last 75 years, virtually every war they fought, like the Six Day War, it was over in six days. The Yom Kippur War was over in two and a half weeks. All the wars have been really fast. And the economy and the politics political apparatus have been able to endure. And now they're looking at a prolonged engagement that could go months, if not years. And it's involving a whole regional now network of jihadist Iran. And the effect that this is going to have on Israel itself is also worth noting it's not going to be anything like the carnage of what's going on in Gaza. But if you think about the October 7th attack with 1,300 people happening every single day for the next several months in Israel, you get a measure of what's going on in Gaza. And if you think around the demographics, there's about 7.3 million Jews. There's about 7.3 million Palestinians. And so the demographics and the sacrifices that everyone's going to make as this war unfolds and endures over time, the reverberations, the oil prices to the Moody's is already thinking of downgrading Israel's ratings as an economic place to do business. So this is going to, like in Ukraine, it's only going to end in tears at every level for everyone. So even the winner is the loser in this case. Yeah, there's no winners and more ever. It's just casualties. Well, listen, I know it's late for you there in Shanghai in East Asia. But if just why don't you make just the final comment on these matters and then we'll let you go to bed. Well, I think the most important thing is to take care of each other that, you know, at Code Pink, we say, you know, there's the war economy and the peace economy. And we're in witness of the expressions of the war economy that we've been warning about. You know, we've said this was coming and and that, you know, global inequality, global climate change, colonialism, imperialism, too many weapons is fascism. And that's been through history. And and it's it's unfettered violence. And we need to take care of each other. And so now is not the time to be right. Now is the time to be doing what you can do to create a future of respect of equality of justice that pulls us out of the war economy into the kind of structures that nourish peace. Because we're all in a global trauma right now. It's a global trauma. We cannot, if we are still human, which some of us are, and we can see a lot of people aren't, we can't not have watched this and have our psyches be infected. So it's now it's the time to be taking care. It is not the time to be right. It is the time to be listening. It is the time to be caring. And it is definitely not the time to be silent. So, you know, be in the streets. I saw someone, you know, saying they're going to a rally today. And if you can't go to a rally, use your platform, use your voice to not be silent. And to share. Not in a way, you know, this doesn't help. The fight does not help. It's to be disarming. To be sharing information that could be useful when someone, but not that you need to be right. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Might this help you see this in a different way? Not presented as you're dumb and I'm right and I'm smarter? No. That is what's happening is that there's somebody smarter and somebody better. And so, you know, one of the things you can take yourself out of is, you know, we're all humans on this planet that depend on each other. We always depend on each other. And we've been told a horrible lie. And we live in the disease of it in the United States of individualism and narcissism. So, practicing our way out of that into caring and to caring, like, allow yourself to feel what needs to be felt right now. And sometimes we go into these behaviors of name calling and being right and to keep us from feeling all the feelings that need to be felt right now. And including the overwhelm because no, we don't know where the shoe is going to drop. And yes, you're right. It can be very, it can be much uglier. And so, being able to hold that with how do you want to respond to that with your life? That will nourish you and it will nourish the future. Thank you, Jody. You know, it's like Eldridge Cleaver said back in the 60s, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And this is one of those issues, everyone, where we all need to do something. You know, Shannon put something in the chat that she couldn't believe that she didn't think that the American people were going to stand for it. Well, in order for that to be true, all of us have to stand up and say, let's have peace. Let's have a ceasefire. Let's have a two state solution. And you may not be able to go on a march, but you can, all of us have access to social media. All of us. You can stand out outside of a Starbucks with blood on your hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other point that you're making, I think is really fundamental. We've got to support one another. We've got to love one another. We got to help one another because we're in chaos, boy. We're in overwhelm. It's almost impossible to cognitively assimilate all the information. And as one of the people on the humanity rising has been saying, we're all suffering from headline news trauma syndrome. And so in and on and through this, supporting each other and holding hands and hugging each other a lot is critical for just simply our well being. So Jodi, we all send you one big hug all the way to Shanghai and wish you all the best and we'll see you tomorrow here on humanity rising. Okay, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Today we'll be back. Jodi and I'll be back for an ongoing program on whistleblowers for the balance of the week. Thank you, everyone. Bye for now.