No Parking in Parking Lot Podcast

This is the second of a two-part conversation with Victoria Jaqua and Adam Popanda at Glia, a Canada-based company that develops and manufactures open-source medical devices.Part one is available here and on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and any other podcast service.I would like to again share Glia Medical Director Dr. Tarek Loubani’s first-hand accounts of tourniquet deployment in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations in 2018-2019. If you want a comprehensive account of the Gaza tourniquet’s development, that’s where to find it. Dr. Loubani has since wrote about tourniquets in Ukraine.More information about the Glia Tourniquet Project can be found here on their website. Here you can support their work generally and their specific campaigns in Gaza, Ukraine, Kenya, and Zambia. No Parking in Parking Lot is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to No Parking in Parking Lot at nopark.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first part of a two-part conversation with Victoria Jaqua and Adam Popanda at Glia, a Canada-based company that develops and manufactures open-source medical devices. These devices were designed in part for manufacture by resource-restrained individuals and communities that otherwise cannot afford or do not have access to these sorts of devices. Part two of our conversation will be posted Tuesday.This conversation focuses on their tourniquet, which can be manufactured cheaply with just a 3D printer and a sewing machine. All the tourniquet’s design documents, along with those for their other products, are available on Github for free to anyone for manufacture and modification. They have also made their tourniquet testing system public so users can test the tourniquets they make.I mention in the introduction to this episode, as Victoria discusses in more depth in the conversation, that Glia’s 3D-printed tourniquet was field-tested in Gaza during the Great March of Return demonstrations in 2018-2019.Glia Medical Director Tarek Loubani was there in 2018 and honestly details here and here the team’s failures, the challenges encountered, and the progress made during the tourniquet’s first real-world deployment. This work allowed Glia and colleagues in Gaza to further refine their design and methods to the point where its tourniquets are being reliably utilized today by first responders in Gaza and elsewhere.Loubani’s posts are extremely informative, but I also think they can give you a better appreciation for the literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into developing this life-saving device.More information about the Glia Tourniquet Project can be found here on their website. Here you can support their work generally and their specific campaigns in Gaza, Ukraine, Kenya, and Zambia. This video from April details Glia’s other work in Gaza:No Parking in Parking Lot is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to No Parking in Parking Lot at nopark.substack.com/subscribe

The work of 1420 inspired me to reach out to Dr. Bar-Tal for this discussion. The people behind 1420 have conducted hundreds of interviews with everyday Russians on sensitive political subjects over the last few years. It's a great project and is worth supporting. Check them out on Patreon and YouTube. Get full access to No Parking in Parking Lot at nopark.substack.com/subscribe

I recently sat down with scholars Nate Moir and Calder Walton to discuss clandestine warfare in Ukraine. Both Nate and Calder recently published books on their respective expertise. Nate’s Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare examines French writer and journalist Bernard Fall’s study and analysis of Vietnam’s 20th century conflicts, the development of his concept of “revolutionary warfare,” and how his own experience as a resistance fighter in World War II shaped his thoughts on war.Calder’s Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West is a history of the intelligence war between the USSR and the West in the 20th century and beyond. Calder talks to primary sources on both sides of the conflict and explains why the East and West fight their clandestine battles the way they do. For more, see Calder’s recent interview on PBS NewsHour.Ukraine’s security services (SBU, SZRU, GUR) have proven themselves extremely capable in their fight against Russia. The SBU has claimed a handful of actions since the beginning of the war, including last October’s attack on the Kerch Bridge, but has clearly been involved in many more military operations. Ukrainian intelligence was almost certainly involved in the bombings of Russian figures in Russia itself since the start of the war, or at least U.S. officials believe so.SBU head Vasyl Malyuk said himself in July that there have been “many different operations, special operations” in the last nearly two years, including some the SBU has no intention of ever claiming.“We'll be able to speak about some of them publicly and aloud after the victory, we will not talk at all about others,” Malyuk said.They are also involved in partisan warfare in occupied territories, carrying out their own operations and supporting grassroots partisans behind Russian lines. Everyday Ukrainians in occupied territories have put up stubborn independent resistance to the Russians and collaborators and are supporting military and intelligence operations by sharing information on Russian activities.Nate and Calder helped put these actions in a historical context, a context that many Ukrainians are very familiar with, as one Ukrainian government intelligence official told Foreign Policy last year.“Putin clearly didn’t read his history books, or he would have learned about our partisans,” he said. “Stalin got to know them quite well.”Intro and outro music is “Oh Uncle, Uncle, In Your Yard” by Drevo, provided by Origen music at https://www.origenmusic.com/folkmusic.html. Get full access to No Parking in Parking Lot at nopark.substack.com/subscribe