Latest / DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas / Trump in Denial About Looming Catastrophe | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

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Trump in Denial About Looming Catastrophe | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas · DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

• 0:12
  Morning and welcome to a new work week. It's
• 0:15
  the first Monday in October, which means it's
• 0:18
  the beginning of the Supreme Court session, and
• 0:21
  also it's time for DeProgram with Ted Rall
• 0:24
  and Jamarl Thomas. We're here from 9 to 11 o'clock
• 0:26
  today and looking forward to it. Lots to talk
• 0:28
  about. We are here Monday through Friday, starting
• 0:32
  at 9. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we go to 11,
• 0:34
  as we are today. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we
• 0:37
  go till 10. If you have a question, please
• 0:40
  put it into the live chat, and producer Robby
• 0:44
  West will put it right in there, and we will get
• 0:46
  to it. Paid support is, of course, highly appreciated,
• 0:50
  but all that, we'll get to that.
• 0:53
  We'll do a reminder of that later
• 0:56
  in the show. Here's what we've got teed up for
• 0:59
  you today. So, the Republicans
• 1:04
  are facing dire poll numbers. Nevertheless, Donald
• 1:07
  Trump claims that there's a big surprise coming
• 1:10
  and that the Republicans are going to win. I
• 1:13
  guess he'll have to pay out those $5,000 checks.
• 1:19
  has been arrested and accused of spying for China
• 1:24
  against the son of the president of Taiwan in
• 1:29
  Washington state. That just happened. The Supreme
• 1:32
  Court is going to hear arguments today in what
• 1:36
  could be a really significant piece of legislation
• 1:39
  related to climate change that could hold big
• 1:43
  energy companies like ExxonMobil financially
• 1:46
  responsible for all the harms caused by fossil
• 1:50
  fuel emissions. The UAE gave Israel a list of
• 1:55
  the passengers and crew on that FlyDubai flight,
• 1:59
  including the Omani co-pilot accused of attacking
• 2:02
  the pilot and trying to cause a terrorist
• 2:05
  incident. Oman doesn't have diplomatic relations
• 2:09
  with Israel, so Israel, according to its own rules,
• 2:12
  should not have allowed him to fly into Israel.
• 2:16
  So questions are being asked about two weeks
• 2:19
  before Netanyahu's election. Generative AI is
• 2:23
  being relied upon by coders. Jamarl, I'm very
• 2:26
  interested in what you have to say about this,
• 2:27
  to the point now where the code that they're
• 2:30
  supposed to babysit and cross-check is now no
• 2:33
  longer comprehensible to the actual engineers.
• 2:38
  And also, a total Jamarl topic: Moonbase is go.
• 2:43
  NASA has gotten formal
• 2:47
  directives to build a nuclear reactor to be ready
• 2:51
  by 2030. That's in just four years for a moon
• 2:54
  base, in order to power a moon base.
• 2:57
  They're trying to beat Russia and China, who have
• 3:00
  a joint project to build the first moon base.
• 3:02
  So it's a lot. Good morning, Jamarl. How are you?
• 3:05
  I'm doing okay. We forgot the Lula elections. I
• 3:09
  did not forget the interview with MA against
• 3:11
  Rees-Mogg, which is actually quite good. Okay.
• 3:16
  I don't even know about that last one. Oh, it
• 3:18
  was good. It was good. It was good. Where
• 3:22
  shall we start? We can do one of those. We can
• 3:24
  do the ones I mentioned. Well, the code thing
• 3:27
  is quick, and we can just kind of get that out
• 3:29
  of the way. Let's do it. So as human beings,
• 3:33
  when we write code, oftentimes you're writing
• 3:34
  code, it can get very complicated, just from
• 3:38
  human code. I'll give you an example. I was working
• 3:40
  at a wine distribution warehouse. So I used to
• 3:44
  work for this company that would send out coders
• 3:46
  to build stuff for other people. Let's say, for
• 3:48
  example, DeProgram is like, okay, we got
• 3:50
  an office and we need to set up a computer system
• 3:52
  that allows us to authoritatively watch each
• 3:56
  and every person everywhere in the company. And
• 3:59
  we need to be able to track their patterns and
• 4:01
  everything else. Hopefully we're not that person,
• 4:02
  right? But the coding in the system, you would
• 4:06
  bring somebody in for it. They would build it.
• 4:07
  And somebody might be internal to the company
• 4:09
  that would watch it and maybe updates for it
• 4:11
  and those type of things. Okay, the wine distribution
• 4:14
  warehouse. It was a company that moved to Ashland,
• 4:17
  and they wanted to line up their systems with
• 4:21
  the base company in Florida. And basically, all
• 4:24
  along the East Coast, they would distribute wine
• 4:26
  to the various warehouses. And so they had to
• 4:28
  keep track of it. And he had to keep track of
• 4:31
  the policy differences, let's say in Maryland,
• 4:33
  because Maryland had 12 different districts
• 4:34
  and different rules on how they did wine. It
• 4:37
  was very weird. But all of that stuff had to
• 4:39
  be linked with the system in Florida. They bought
• 4:42
  us in to do it. And the guy I was working with,
• 4:45
  we came up with an idea and had a model out
• 4:50
  to make the stuff work. And part of the issue
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  also was the amount of information, and we needed
• 4:55
  to find a way in order to deal with information
• 4:56
  and everything else. The solution we came up
• 4:59
  with, we presented it to him. And the guy does
• 5:02
  software, and he looked at it, and he says, "What
• 5:05
  am I supposed to do with it?" His thing was, "I
• 5:09
  have no idea what you guys just explained to
• 5:11
  me, nor do I have any idea on how I'm supposed
• 5:14
  to keep this up when you guys leave." Now, these
• 5:17
  are human coders, right? Both of us were mid-
• 5:20
  level coders. We weren't doing anything magical
• 5:23
  in the way that we built it. It wasn't like we
• 5:25
  had recursion, radically object-oriented
• 5:31
  coding. It's all object-oriented coding, but
• 5:34
  it wasn't like polymorphisms and all this other
• 5:36
  high-level shit. It was very straightforward,
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  even though the tactic that we were using might
• 5:41
  have been a little bit difficult to get your
• 5:42
  head around. That's just human beings doing it.
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  We're not even talking about computers, because
• 5:48
  computers don't need to do it in the way that we
• 5:49
  do it. They do it whether you would look at it,
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  and it wouldn't be necessarily in the way that
• 5:54
  human beings write code. Human beings would add
• 5:56
  comments. Human beings may write code in a particular
• 5:59
  way that you can get accustomed to. It's usually
• 6:01
  repetitive in the way that we write it. So if
• 6:04
  you're looking at somebody's code, you have a
• 6:06
  sense of how the human is doing it. A computer
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  doesn't have to abide by that stuff. And so the
• 6:12
  way computer code looks is different. It's not
• 6:16
  comprehensible in that way. I suppose
• 6:18
  you could tell AI, write it in the way that a
• 6:20
  person would, maybe. Might be a solution to it.
• 6:23
  That's assuming they'd even do it that way. But
• 6:26
  yeah, I can see how that would work. Basically,
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  it's created something. There used to be machine
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  code, and then there was computer language, and
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  now there's something new, which is AI. The human
• 6:37
  beings are now having to try to understand, and
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  they probably won't. And the thing is that the
• 6:44
  AIs make mistakes. We all know that if we ever
• 6:47
  use it. And so the problem here is, of course,
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  if there's no human who can get under the hood
• 6:53
  and check it, then I don't have to explain
• 6:58
  how that's a problem, right? Yeah. How do you
• 7:01
  fix the bug? And by the way, this was forecast
• 7:05
  that coding jobs,
• 7:07
  a lot of it was going to be gotten rid of.
• 7:10
  If you have basic stuff, then you can just
• 7:12
  tell the computer to do the basic stuff. But
• 7:13
  say for the moment that it's not entirely basic,
• 7:15
  and there's a bug whittling away that's intermittent.
• 7:21
  Because intermittent bugs are the worst things
• 7:23
  in the world. It's a bug that doesn't show up
• 7:25
  every time you do something. You go to a webpage,
• 7:27
  you put in information, you hit the thing. 90%
• 7:30
  of the time it works. 10% of the time it doesn't
• 7:32
  work. And you're like, okay, why is this 10%
• 7:34
  happening? Now imagine that being a computer
• 7:36
  that has written that code, but there's an intermittent
• 7:39
  bug where 10% of the time it fails. Okay, how
• 7:43
  do I solve that? How do I solve that? That is
• 7:46
  hard to solve under normal circumstances. It
• 7:49
  is much harder to solve in a situation where
• 7:51
  you can't even read the code or understand the
• 7:53
  code, because a human being didn't write it.
• 7:56
  Let me tell you how I get around that problem.
• 8:00
  This is crazy. Let's all end under the hood.
• 8:02
  Every time that Fang does an operation, she joins
• 8:07
  a JSON file. Everything, showing every process,
• 8:10
  everything that touches from start to finish.
• 8:11
  So then when those intermittent bugs pop up,
• 8:14
  I got timestamps in the JSON file. That's what
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  people do. They're so busy pushing ahead to the
• 8:21
  next thing, they never stop to build any kind
• 8:24
  of system that's self-reporting, because this
• 8:28
  is a waste of time. It's a waste of compute. Why
• 8:30
  would you do that? Your stuff is making databases.
• 8:32
  You're making databases, and all you're making,
• 8:34
  everything changes databases. You're doing
• 8:38
  all this stuff. I'm doing all of it. So I'm not
• 8:41
  running a wrapper. But the thing about self-reporting
• 8:44
  is, okay, this is the paradox in Star Trek
• 8:46
  where an alien has taken over Kirk,
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  and Kirk, nevertheless, some part of him is aware
• 8:52
  of it and is able to fight back with his human,
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  which to me is nonsense. But okay, this is self-
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  reporting. If the AI makes mistakes,
• 9:04
  it could make a mistake in its self-report as
• 9:06
  well, right? Well, not in this case, because
• 9:08
  what it does... So think about how... I don't believe
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  you. I'm sorry. I don't believe you. No, that's
• 9:13
  fine. I don't believe you. Dude, I've done software
• 9:18
  engineering for over a decade. I get it. And
• 9:22
  we all fuck up. We do. It happens. And I don't
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  buy this idea that, well, yeah, I'm building
• 9:28
  out the SQL database or the whatever database
• 9:30
  I'm using for it, and I'm building out the hardware,
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  and I'm building out the midsection. I'm building
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  out all this stuff, and there's no way for me
• 9:37
  to make a mistake about it, and the software
• 9:38
  is not going to make a mistake. No, the whole
• 9:40
  point is to catch the mistakes, because the idea
• 9:42
  that I'm retarded is baked into the system. Okay.
• 9:46
  Well, there are a lot of people who are not retarded,
• 9:48
  quote unquote, that fuck up royally. Oh, very
• 9:51
  much so. But they're also arrogant. I'm not.
• 9:53
  And what I will tell you after the show, I will
• 9:55
  send you a zip. It's not going to be a fuck-up
• 9:58
  because it self-reports. I don't buy the premise.
• 10:01
  I've seen too many top-level software people
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  fucking up royally. You misunderstood what I'm
• 10:08
  saying. So the JSON file does not rely on the
• 10:13
  model to self-report. Whenever something is
• 10:17
  executed, if I say, okay, I need you to
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  make a short, every step of that process is then
• 10:22
  recorded from when the file is named to when
• 10:26
  it's uploaded to when it goes through CUDA to
• 10:29
  where it's cut apart. Every process is recorded
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  and timestamped in the JSON file. It's not the
• 10:36
  model. It's outside of the model. Now, I was
• 10:39
  sending you zip files. It's pretty wild. Let's
• 10:41
  not get to... We have a show here. We don't have
• 10:44
  to get to it. It's a client set. All of this
• 10:48
  is client set. Or are you talking about server?
• 10:52
  What that could do is it'd probably be
• 10:55
  easier to isolate where the bug took place, maybe.
• 11:01
  Maybe. But maybe. But also the other thing is
• 11:04
  that AI has this well-documented tendency to
• 11:08
  be, to try to please you, because it's based on
• 11:11
  large language models that are
• 11:14
  programmed to tell a story, tell a narrative
• 11:16
  more than to tell you the truth. Right. And so
• 11:20
  I just wonder also,
• 11:22
  will it cover for itself? Right.
• 11:26
  Will it kind of say, everything's A-okay,
• 11:29
  how it's like, you're
• 11:31
  good? I don't know. No. The point is
• 11:36
  that the real problem is if nobody knows
• 11:38
  how it fucking ultimately works and can climb
• 11:42
  under the hood and can really, then you're going
• 11:45
  to have mistakes that ultimately are going to
• 11:47
  be unsolvable. And those problems are going to,
• 11:49
  those mistakes are going to build on each other,
• 11:51
  and eventually the whole thing is going to collapse.
• 11:54
  I don't know, man. I just know, and not even
• 11:56
  talking about AI, regular software can get very
• 11:58
  complicated very quickly. Systems that
• 12:02
  seem rudimentary can get
• 12:06
  complicated, especially when you're looking at
• 12:08
  the coding of somebody and all the shit that's
• 12:10
  in it. And you're like, all right, I need to
• 12:12
  find this one. It's like, I remember that. And
• 12:15
  I was working on stuff
• 12:17
  that's really old, like Fortran. So
• 12:21
  we're zillions of miles away from that. Yeah.
• 12:25
  By the way, the point, the only point that I'm
• 12:27
  making is even in just basic software, it's an
• 12:29
  issue. Yeah. That's not even... I bring
• 12:33
  you onto a company, and it's like, okay, Ted,
• 12:35
  bro, this is our product, and I need you to go
• 12:37
  into the product and do this. Okay, where do
• 12:40
  you start? Right? They have objects
• 12:44
  that you've never seen before. They have stuff
• 12:46
  that's connected to the database in ways that
• 12:48
  don't quite make sense. There are triggers that
• 12:50
  take place in a database that when something
• 12:51
  happens, the trigger fires off that you may never
• 12:53
  even know about the trigger existing. And they're
• 12:55
  like, we need you to fix, or we need you to add
• 12:57
  this to the system. Oh, hey, we have a bug that
• 12:59
  keeps showing up. We need you to fix this. That's
• 13:01
  not even AI. That's just regular run-of-the-
• 13:04
  mill software that has those issues associated
• 13:07
  with it. And when you add AI to it, it just adds
• 13:10
  to the problems exponentially. Well, I'm sure
• 13:11
  this is not a topic that we will not be covering
• 13:15
  in the future. Don't come up. There will be one
• 13:18
  big fuck-up somewhere. If it hasn't brought
• 13:22
  down the entire internet and we're still able
• 13:24
  to do this show, we will continue to talk about
• 13:26
  it. Philip Blair 20 says Nokia won the contracts
• 13:32
  to build communication centers around the moon.
• 13:35
  A few years back, they won this contract. By
• 13:38
  the way, Russia already has that nuclear technology.
• 13:41
  The missile that Russia uses to fly around the
• 13:43
  world that they recently put out, they were even
• 13:45
  talking about it, runs on a nuclear processor,
• 13:49
  on a nuclear device. Right. The same device that
• 13:53
  they can put on the moon. P.W. Walker. P. Walker,
• 13:57
  I should say. Software engineering is trash.
• 14:00
  No accountability and no responsibility. It's
• 14:02
  emblematic of the decline of professionalism
• 14:04
  and the rule of law. MC calling replies and says
• 14:08
  NASA and SpaceX are advancing plans for a permanent
• 14:11
  U.S. lunar base, with SpaceX utilizing Starship
• 14:14
  and Starlink technologies to support the infrastructure
• 14:17
  and communications. So maybe we should talk a
• 14:22
  little bit about, we should talk about the moon
• 14:23
  base. So this goes to the military guys saying
• 14:27
  we need to be able to fight on the moon, fight
• 14:29
  the Chinese on the moon. And that, who is it?
• 14:33
  It wasn't Brad Cooper. It was the other guy that
• 14:35
  works with Donald Trump. He came out recently.
• 14:37
  I think it was a week ago, saying the United
• 14:39
  States need to be prepared to fight the Chinese
• 14:41
  on or around the moon. And it really raised eyebrows.
• 14:44
  I think I even did a video on it. What?
• 14:46
  The actual F. This is part and parcel to the
• 14:50
  reason why I keep saying I would really prefer
• 14:52
  us to go out into the cosmos as a world, as opposed
• 14:55
  to having these wars on the moon, which is what
• 14:59
  they're ostensibly preparing for. We have enough
• 15:02
  wars here. We're good. We have enough wars here
• 15:04
  to take the shit out of space. But that's what
• 15:06
  they're planning, right? They want a moon base.
• 15:08
  Okay, so the Chinese want a moon base. Okay,
• 15:10
  so what does that mean? What, you have two countries
• 15:13
  with two moon bases? China's part of the moon
• 15:17
  and America's part of the moon? What does
• 15:19
  this mean, right? Are they settling together?
• 15:21
  Well, no. They're trying to compete to get to
• 15:24
  the moon. Now, on some level, put in mind the
• 15:26
  Soviets and Americans and the way that they had
• 15:28
  their space race with the Americans.
• 15:31
  This is a space race, no question, because they
• 15:34
  view the moon as a launching pad for exploration
• 15:39
  in this part of the solar system and beyond,
• 15:42
  right? So basically, the first step, if you're
• 15:45
  going to have a moon base, right, you have a number of problems:
• 15:48
  food, water, et cetera. But the number
• 15:52
  one, you can't have food or anything. You've
• 15:54
  got to have power. And obviously a nuclear reactor
• 15:56
  is the first step. And you've got to maintain,
• 15:59
  and that thing has to be... You can't
• 16:01
  require a man's presence to babysit it
• 16:04
  for year after year after year, because
• 16:07
  that's too hard. It has to be able to sit there.
• 16:10
  But the temperature on
• 16:13
  certain parts of the moon are close to absolute zero. Right.
• 16:15
  The conditions are very harsh in certain cases,
• 16:18
  right, which is why they want to do it
• 16:20
  at the south pole of the moon, where it's not
• 16:23
  quite like that, where it's more steady and
• 16:26
  it's sort of more temperate,
• 16:28
  but still, it's not really a safety issue,
• 16:31
  since nobody lives on the moon, and if the whole
• 16:34
  thing blew up, nothing would really happen to
• 16:35
  us. But it's going to be an expensive
• 16:41
  project. You don't want to lose it, right? So
• 16:43
  it's interesting. I would much rather have us
• 16:48
  all do this as one world as well. It's just also,
• 16:53
  it's a tremendous waste of money too. Think
• 16:56
  about all the duplicated
• 17:00
  and redundant expenses in terms of hiring
• 17:03
  two teams of scientists, three teams of scientists,
• 17:06
  to do the same exact thing, instead
• 17:10
  of all working together, not to mention just all
• 17:12
  the labs that have to be stood
• 17:16
  up and all that. It's really wasteful.
• 17:19
  Yeah, I think I agree with you. Think of
• 17:21
  those two teams working on a similar objective,
• 17:24
  and they could even expand out their objectives.
• 17:27
  Okay, so one builds the power, kind of like they
• 17:29
  did with the ISS, whereas, okay, one builds
• 17:31
  the power system. The other one builds the processes
• 17:35
  that will create the bricks that can be used
• 17:38
  in order to build the habitat that's going to
• 17:40
  be on the moon. Because either you take everything
• 17:42
  with you or you build it while you're there.
• 17:44
  So you build your oxygen while you're there.
• 17:46
  You build your water while you're there, based
• 17:48
  on, if you could pull that stuff out
• 17:49
  of the ground in some way, you have machines
• 17:51
  that would basically make bricks that can make
• 17:52
  a larger habitat. Yeah, I would wish they would
• 17:56
  do that. How much water? Come on, we
• 17:57
  know that that's their plan on Mars and on the
• 18:00
  moon, to pull the water out from below. But you
• 18:03
  and I both know, Jamarl, there can't possibly
• 18:05
  be that much water there. Not on the moon. On
• 18:08
  Mars, though. There is on Mars, not on the moon.
• 18:12
  Mars used to look like Earth at one point.
• 18:15
  Right. But the question, we don't really know
• 18:17
  how much water is underneath there. Well, the
• 18:19
  problem with Mars is that there's no magnetic
• 18:21
  field. So even if you start extracting the water,
• 18:23
  the solar wind is just going to pull it into
• 18:25
  space. It's what happened before. So what's
• 18:27
  the point? You said what's happened before? Oh,
• 18:30
  you mean losing the atmosphere and everything
• 18:32
  else? Well, because Mars is... The whole
• 18:34
  reason Mars is a desert is because it doesn't
• 18:36
  have a magnetic field. So the solar wind just
• 18:38
  goes in and just strips the atmosphere away.
• 18:40
  That's what killed Mars. You could contain the
• 18:44
  water, obviously. You're not leaving it exposed,
• 18:49
  right? It's just underground. I understand. But
• 18:52
  you're drilling into it and then putting it into
• 18:58
  some sort of contained, sealed habitat, right?
• 19:02
  You're not terraforming it. You're just pulling
• 19:04
  the water so the astronauts can drink. The fact that we can't fix Baltimore, but we think
• 19:10
  we can fix an entire planet, shows how
• 19:12
  completely retarded the human race is, starting
• 19:15
  with the United States. By the way, speaking of
• 19:17
  which, I have a prediction. I think the United
• 19:19
  States is even more retarded than Russia
• 19:22
  and China. Russia and China, they say they're
• 19:25
  on track to get this done by 2036. It's notable
• 19:28
  that they're working together. They
• 19:31
  didn't always get along. So, but
• 19:35
  we say we're going to be ready by 2030. Well,
• 19:37
  that's just the nuclear reactor, right? They
• 19:40
  say that the Russians claim that they're going to...
• 19:42
  So the U.S. claims they want to have theirs launched
• 19:45
  by 2030. That doesn't mean installed and up and
• 19:49
  running on the moon, right? That's not the same
• 19:51
  thing at all. But I think I'm just
• 19:55
  going to predict here. We're going
• 19:57
  to have this conversation in 10 years. Tomorrow,
• 19:59
  I'm pretty sure Russia and China are going to
• 20:01
  be ahead of us. Yeah. Russia has already
• 20:04
  demonstrated the technology. Do you remember,
• 20:08
  I think it was several months ago, they fired
• 20:11
  a missile, and the missile went around the world?
• 20:13
  Basically, it went, I think, 14,000 kilometers,
• 20:16
  something like that, some insane amount. And
• 20:19
  Russia made the point of saying that missile
• 20:21
  could stay in air all day if it needed to. It
• 20:24
  could literally travel the world if it needed
• 20:26
  to and hit any target on the planet. They were
• 20:29
  using a nuclear reactor, the same nuclear reactor
• 20:31
  that they're talking about saying, hey, we can
• 20:33
  use this on the moon. This can fund habitats
• 20:36
  and everything else. And so now they're working
• 20:38
  with the Chinese, who have been putting all sorts
• 20:41
  of stuff up in space and obviously have an industrial
• 20:43
  base that can support doing that if they wanted
• 20:47
  to. In the U.S., I'm very doubtful.
• 20:51
  I'm just very doubtful. We drain money out of NASA. And
• 20:54
  as Robby pointed out, you can't even build a
• 20:56
  bridge in Baltimore. Right. We can't finish the
• 21:00
  subway that was started in New York City in the
• 21:02
  '80s. But these are basic things on Earth. And
• 21:06
  you're telling me about rocket reactors that
• 21:08
  you're putting on the moon. It's like, come on.
• 21:09
  Yeah, it's like, yeah, maybe. So a little housekeeping
• 21:13
  here. First of all, in case you guys missed it,
• 21:18
  on Saturday, we did a bonus show with, what's
• 21:24
  his name again? Murtaza Hussain from Drop Site
• 21:27
  News. So if you missed it, go and look,
• 21:30
  check that out on YouTube and Rumble. It was
• 21:33
  at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning. It was
• 21:35
  a good talk. And also, Robby and I did
• 21:40
  a little Bible study thing. It was Bible...
• 21:42
  I joined Robby. It's Robby's first inaugural
• 21:46
  podcast. It was very good, very worth
• 21:50
  checking out. So, yeah, congrats to Robby. And
• 21:54
  I think it went really well. I think Robby's
• 21:56
  a natural. He brings the fire and brimstone,
• 21:59
  which I think will surprise no one here. And
• 22:03
  yeah, it was good. What else? Pardon? What was
• 22:07
  the video on? What was the topic? Robby, you
• 22:11
  want to explain what it was about? Yeah, it was
• 22:14
  blowing up the Zionist mythology that Israel
• 22:17
  and the Jews are God's chosen people. So I started
• 22:20
  in the Old Testament, because that's where I always
• 22:21
  like to go. I explained how they conflate the
• 22:23
  return from the Babylonian captivity to the resurrection
• 22:26
  of the state of Israel in 1948. Then I go into
• 22:29
  the New Testament, using the words of Jesus about
• 22:30
  the days of vengeance and destruction of Jerusalem,
• 22:32
  the fulfillment of the Old Covenant, the establishment
• 22:35
  of the New, and put the entire thing to bed.
• 22:38
  And it was amazing. And YouTube is darling. YouTube
• 22:42
  is darling. YouTube is throttling the hell out
• 22:45
  of it. YouTube is getting 15 impressions a day,
• 22:49
  despite the numbers being outstanding. But they're
• 22:51
  the 15 best impressions. Right. To be
• 22:56
  fair, though, it's when channels first start,
• 22:58
  it's kind of hard to get up and running. But
• 23:00
  that topic should do well. It's hard. It's because
• 23:04
  it's about Zionism. That's why. Yeah, maybe the
• 23:08
  clips will do better. But anyway, we'll talk
• 23:11
  about that later. So anyway, I encourage everyone
• 23:13
  to go check that out. And then what was the other
• 23:17
  thing? Oh, yeah. So this is just a reminder that
• 23:20
  when we're on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday two-
• 23:22
  hour show, the emphasis of the second hour is
• 23:25
  Q&A. So definitely have your questions ready
• 23:28
  for the second hour, if
• 23:31
  you're so inclined. Okay. Okay. Do we want anything
• 23:36
  else to say about the moon before we move on?
• 23:39
  Yeah. It's just, we should be going out together.
• 23:45
  That's all. And I know that's naive,
• 23:50
  I suppose. It's not that I expect it, but the
• 23:54
  ISS was a good idea. And we are baking into either
• 23:58
  a major conflict that's going to take place in
• 24:00
  space, or we're going to have to come to some
• 24:02
  kind of terms about how we deal with space, because
• 24:05
  the idea that you're going to have, okay, this
• 24:07
  is the Chinese side, this is the American side.
• 24:09
  Okay, now what are you two doing? All of
• 24:12
  these people are sitting with their hands in
• 24:13
  their ass on the moon, or their thumb in their
• 24:16
  ass. It's like, what are you doing while you're
• 24:18
  on the moon? Are you trying to get resources?
• 24:20
  Are you trying to do science? Or do you just
• 24:22
  want a base, a military base, on the moon,
• 24:25
  and we're going to have what, a Chinese side, a
• 24:28
  Russian side, an American side, at some point an
• 24:30
  Indian side? Are we really going to replicate
• 24:32
  the nonsense that we do on this planet on the
• 24:35
  moon? Kind of remind you of the way we handle
• 24:39
  Antarctica, right, where it's kind of like we don't
• 24:43
  really... It doesn't make a lot of sense, right? It's
• 24:46
  sort of the last vestige of
• 24:49
  colonialism, where you just run
• 24:52
  out and you plant a flag. There was
• 24:54
  a hilarious contest about 15
• 24:58
  years ago when they kind of realized the
• 25:00
  great powers realized that the polar ice cap
• 25:03
  was melting away permanently, at least in the
• 25:05
  summer, and Russia wanted to claim the North
• 25:08
  Pole. And I think they have a pretty credible
• 25:10
  claim to it, considering their geography. But anyway,
• 25:13
  they went down to the bottom of the sea
• 25:17
  and planted a Russian flag under the
• 25:21
  whatever ice cap there is. And it's
• 25:24
  probably... I don't know if it's still down there
• 25:26
  or if it was eaten by a narwhal or something.
• 25:28
  But it's just really... That's what it feels
• 25:32
  like. That's what it feels like. Yeah, it's just
• 25:37
  weird. It's like, dude, you're going to
• 25:39
  roll conquistador action on the south pole
• 25:42
  of the moon. But there's some things that all
• 25:45
  of us that look... Earth doesn't belong to each
• 25:50
  individual in the way that we think of it, right?
• 25:52
  It should be common heritage. True. It doesn't
• 25:56
  belong to anybody. What we need, JT, is a civilization
• 25:59
  expansion. Once you win the space race, go to
• 26:02
  Alpha Centauri, then the great powers are able
• 26:04
  to do it. You go and you fight each other out
• 26:05
  on another planet. They have the game. The game
• 26:09
  exists. Problem solved? It's not good, but it
• 26:11
  exists. Well, we need a good version of it. Maybe,
• 26:14
  hey, you're a programmer. Maybe we should build
• 26:16
  it. Oh, dude, I'm not good with shit like that.
• 26:19
  We'll make it work. I know my lane. I know my
• 26:21
  lane. My lane was building functional shit, not
• 26:24
  this. This is different. All right. So, Fly
• 26:28
  Dubai, energy, company law, Boulder lawsuit,
• 26:32
  the spy case at LAX, or the dismal polls
• 26:38
  for the Republicans, or Lula, or what was
• 26:42
  the other thing? I forget you were mentioning.
• 26:44
  Oh, the small debate. You should see
• 26:46
  it first before we talk about it. But it's good.
• 26:48
  It's interesting. Let's talk about the Republican
• 26:52
  polls. Again, my assessment going back for
• 26:56
  a month or two was they were going to get wiped
• 26:58
  out. And a lot of people at the time were like,
• 27:01
  well, in the House. And I would say the House
• 27:03
  and the Senate. And I would say it for months.
• 27:07
  I'm late to the party, but I agree with you now.
• 27:10
  He's too ubiquitous. He's everywhere. He's too...
• 27:14
  He's too much of a luminary. And if he's a luminary
• 27:17
  and it's good. Talarico could beat Paxton, even
• 27:21
  though he's being outspent in Texas. Yes, I would
• 27:24
  go further. He will beat Paxton. Okay, and Paxton's
• 27:28
  a terrible candidate. Yeah, but it's Texas, right?
• 27:31
  And so the assumption is Republican, even a terrible
• 27:33
  one, could win. I don't think that's true this
• 27:35
  year. Donald Trump is on the ballot in every
• 27:38
  race. And people are furious. Americans
• 27:44
  are about the state of the economy and the correct
• 27:48
  perception that they have that the government
• 27:51
  is pretty much doing anything and everything.
• 27:54
  They're sending nuclear base on the moon, money
• 27:57
  to Ukraine, money for genocide. There's money for
• 28:01
  anything and everything except helping the American
• 28:04
  people. They're even talking about cutting
• 28:09
  Social Security, because they need to pay money
• 28:11
  for the military. I'm 63. I give a lot of thought
• 28:14
  to that. We need to cut Social Security. Right.
• 28:17
  Right. Yeah, there's literally... The fund is going
• 28:20
  to start running out of money in 2032. That's
• 28:22
  when cuts will be necessitated. That's only six
• 28:25
  years. That is not long. That's
• 28:29
  it. And the thing is, you would just think that
• 28:32
  Social Security, the third rail of American politics,
• 28:34
  would be something that both, or at least one,
• 28:37
  major political party would be getting together
• 28:39
  and holding hearings about and talking to various
• 28:44
  experts from the left and the right to try to
• 28:47
  figure out how to save the system. Personally,
• 28:49
  I think that the idea that the system is viewed
• 28:52
  as a separate entry on the budget is ridiculous.
• 28:56
  But there's a lot of things that are ridiculous
• 28:58
  about Social Security, it's ridiculous
• 29:00
  that they only tax you up to a certain amount.
• 29:03
  It's the ultimate regressive tax. Super rich
• 29:06
  people basically don't pay Social Security taxes,
• 29:08
  and super poor people do. It's stupid. It's
• 29:12
  also stupid to be like, oh, if the system goes
• 29:14
  bankrupt, then sorry, old people. It's like, really?
• 29:18
  Why is that separate? Why is taking care of old
• 29:20
  people its own separate little line item?
• 29:23
  Nothing else is. Well, I think it's taking
• 29:25
  money from Social Security and acting as if it's
• 29:29
  insolvent. There's that too. Yeah, they would
• 29:33
  take money away from it, and they would be like,
• 29:35
  oh, look, there's not much money in Social Security.
• 29:37
  Dude, you've just taken money out of it. That's
• 29:38
  what they did to the post office. Yes. The post
• 29:41
  office is, quote unquote, broke. But every
• 29:44
  year Congress leeches out, I think it's
• 29:46
  $5 billion a year, from the Postal Service's profits.
• 29:51
  So, hey, this show wouldn't do well
• 29:53
  either if they were deducting $5 billion a year
• 29:56
  from us, and forcing them to pay in a different
• 29:59
  way, meaning they would say something like, well,
• 30:01
  you have to pay your pensions now. It's like,
• 30:03
  dude, the pensions have not been for 60
• 30:05
  years. They were doing math stuff in order
• 30:08
  to cripple the post office to make it look as
• 30:09
  if the post office was insolvent. The post office
• 30:11
  was never insolvent. No. In fact, major
• 30:15
  companies use the post office in order to deliver
• 30:18
  some of the packages that they themselves don't
• 30:20
  want to deliver because of expense. I don't know
• 30:22
  why any country would declare war on its own
• 30:24
  post office. How does that make sense?
• 30:27
  It's critical infrastructure. But anyway. But
• 30:31
  it's, again, they're declaring war. They don't
• 30:35
  like those things because those things are public,
• 30:38
  meaning that's the way of destroying those things.
• 30:40
  Quasi-public, right? Quasi, but mostly public.
• 30:45
  What they would prefer is that we're
• 30:49
  all using FedEx or UPS, right? And FedEx would
• 30:53
  love that. FedEx, Amazon, all those places will
• 30:55
  pay a huge amount of money in order to get the
• 30:57
  post office destroyed. They literally could not
• 31:00
  do what the post office does. They would not
• 31:03
  be able to deliver mail en masse,
• 31:08
  massive amounts. They're good at doing what
• 31:10
  they do, but they can't
• 31:13
  replace the function of the Postal Service, which
• 31:16
  is bringing a paper bill to the
• 31:20
  middle of rural Alaska for 40 or 50 cents.
• 31:24
  They can't do that. I don't even know what a first-
• 31:26
  class stamp costs anymore, because they don't...
• 31:29
  Now the forever stamps, the numbers
• 31:31
  are no longer on the stamp, so you
• 31:34
  don't know how much they cost. Yeah, I don't think
• 31:38
  they care. It's a country at war with itself.
• 31:42
  And again, from my argument as always, it's a
• 31:44
  capitalistic country. If there's any doubt about
• 31:47
  why they're doing things that are destroying
• 31:49
  the democratic part of it, it's because one is
• 31:52
  eating the other. One is just eating the other.
• 31:55
  I don't think this stuff works where both of
• 31:56
  these things are sitting side by side. One eats
• 31:59
  the other. Even if you get times where the democracy
• 32:02
  part inflames itself for whatever particular
• 32:05
  reason, inevitably the capitalism part waits
• 32:08
  and continues to nibble away, eating, just
• 32:13
  as Karl Marx predicted back in 1848 would
• 32:18
  happen. Okay, so the polls are terrible, right?
• 32:21
  So we talked about this, but I think it's worth
• 32:23
  repeating. The AP-NORC poll from the middle of last
• 32:26
  week found that Trump has disapproval of 82%
• 32:31
  on the economy, which this year, as in most years,
• 32:34
  is the number one issue on voters' minds, right?
• 32:37
  And literally, when it came to Watergate,
• 32:40
  Nixon had a higher approval rating on Watergate
• 32:43
  when he resigned than 82% disapproval.
• 32:48
  George W. Bush, when they failed to find WMDs
• 32:52
  in Iraq, had a higher approval rating on the
• 32:54
  Iraq War than Trump has on the economy.
• 32:58
  It's absolutely catastrophic. I have
• 33:02
  to ask you, Jamarl. I had this sinister view of
• 33:06
  this when Trump was in my
• 33:09
  hometown. He was just north of Dayton. He
• 33:12
  was in Vandalia, which is where the Dayton airport
• 33:14
  is, over the weekend, and he's
• 33:18
  telling the crowd, oh, there's going
• 33:22
  to be a big surprise. Democrats don't
• 33:25
  know what's coming. I'm thinking, does
• 33:28
  he mean... Could he be referring to something
• 33:31
  other than Republicans marshalling a surprising
• 33:34
  number of votes and beating Democrats at the
• 33:37
  polls? Could he mean there's going to be ICE goons
• 33:39
  at the polls and Democrats are going to be afraid
• 33:42
  to vote? Could he mean we're going to suspend
• 33:44
  the... I'm going to declare a national emergency
• 33:46
  so there won't be an election? Does he mean... Could
• 33:49
  he mean I'm going to suspend the results if I
• 33:52
  don't like them? Could this be something
• 33:54
  other than that? Surprise could mean
• 33:59
  all sorts of things. Yeah, but the president
• 34:02
  doesn't have power internally in regards to how
• 34:04
  state elections are run, short of his influence
• 34:08
  with the figures in those states. He can declare
• 34:11
  a national emergency and then direct all the
• 34:16
  National Guardsmen to shut down the polls. I
• 34:19
  mean, it's fair game at this point. We're
• 34:23
  not in a world of stability of institutions, etc.
• 34:27
  That's not where we are right now. So anything's
• 34:30
  fair game. If you can get away
• 34:32
  with it, then it's very possible that the person
• 34:34
  could do it. And so, and that in the fullest
• 34:38
  sense of the term. If he believes he can get away
• 34:41
  with it, he may do it. God, we're talking
• 34:43
  about somebody who tried to overthrow an election,
• 34:44
  but president, meaning he tried to take over America,
• 34:47
  and nothing happened, and there was no consequence
• 34:50
  for it. So what stops him is the question that
• 34:55
  I think... Honestly, my takeaway, if I were Donald
• 34:57
  Trump, my takeaway from October 6th would be,
• 35:00
  I didn't go hard enough. It's like, if I'd gone
• 35:05
  harder, I would have pulled it off. And I should
• 35:09
  have deployed local and state law enforcement.
• 35:13
  I should have had this be a full-fledged coup.
• 35:15
  He tried to do a putsch, right? A putsch
• 35:18
  is where you sort of... a mild nudge,
• 35:22
  and you hope that the whole thing comes crumbling
• 35:23
  down. Putsches generally don't work, as
• 35:27
  a certain Austrian colonel found out.
• 35:30
  Same thing here.
• 35:33
  If I were Trump, I'd be thinking,
• 35:35
  go big or go home, right? Suspend it.
• 35:42
  Otherwise, what's he going to be
• 35:44
  doing for the next two years? He's going to be
• 35:45
  in hearings constantly, fighting the Democrats
• 35:48
  and their investigations. Democrats
• 35:51
  have already, in my view, foolishly talked about
• 35:55
  all they're going to be doing for the next two
• 35:57
  years. I think they should do that for the next
• 36:00
  two years. I just don't think they should make
• 36:02
  it the one thing that they're talking about in
• 36:04
  the midterm elections. They should be talking
• 36:06
  about affordability and the problems of the American
• 36:09
  people, but they're not really. They're
• 36:11
  going to benefit from Republicans' screw-ups,
• 36:14
  but I'm not convinced that they have any solutions.
• 36:18
  Well, I'm not convinced they have solutions,
• 36:19
  nor am I convinced they care, or convinced that
• 36:22
  they are even trying for solutions. I don't think
• 36:25
  that's what the political party is. And in fact,
• 36:27
  I don't even think that's what the political
• 36:28
  institutions could give at this point. I don't
• 36:32
  think either political party is in a position
• 36:34
  where they care. They're in a position where
• 36:37
  they're fighting each other just to see who has
• 36:39
  power in order to give out benefits and whatever
• 36:41
  to the people who are paying them for it. That
• 36:43
  has nothing to do with us as Americans. We are
• 36:46
  a sideshow. We are just watching elephants or
• 36:50
  hyenas go about their way. They're not... It's not
• 36:52
  like the hyena may turn to say, hey, we're
• 36:54
  doing this for you. It's like, okay, sure you are.
• 36:57
  In what capacity? In what way? I don't see
• 37:01
  these guys having any potential power to deliver
• 37:03
  anything for anybody, not anything real. And when
• 37:07
  they're saying, well, we're going to go after Donald
• 37:09
  Trump, honestly, in a perfect world, in an ideal
• 37:11
  world, not even perfect, just relatively ideal,
• 37:13
  mildly unideal even, they would have a, what is
• 37:21
  it called? Thing for America, a contract with
• 37:23
  America. And they would say, this is what we're
• 37:25
  going to do. And it would be five items on that
• 37:27
  list. And they would be judged by whether or
• 37:29
  not they accomplished those five items. Every
• 37:31
  day we wake up, every day we go to bed, every
• 37:34
  day we brush our teeth, we're thinking about
• 37:35
  getting these five items accomplished. That's
• 37:37
  our job. That's what we're doing. That's what
• 37:39
  they should do. Because in that case, you can
• 37:42
  set up a dynasty. The public has something to
• 37:44
  evaluate you by. If you get it accomplished,
• 37:46
  Republicans say, hey, they accomplished this.
• 37:48
  This is what they got done. This is what they
• 37:50
  got accomplished. They did what they said they
• 37:51
  were going to do. That is powerful. Short of
• 37:55
  that, you got nothing. Them telling you, well,
• 37:58
  we're going to investigate Donald Trump forever.
• 38:00
  Okay, that's nice. And there may even be something
• 38:03
  to get you elected just because people want him
• 38:05
  investigated, want him stopped, want him stalled,
• 38:07
  et cetera. Fair enough. I accept all of that.
• 38:10
  But that's not really doing anything for anybody,
• 38:12
  if that makes sense. I think it's a perfectly
• 38:16
  valid secondary or tertiary priority, but not
• 38:22
  a priority, not a primary one. Well, I have a
• 38:24
  question for y'all. And I brought this up before,
• 38:26
  back when we were talking about ICE. And I think
• 38:29
  that's relevant to revisit it now that we're
• 38:31
  talking about Trump potentially federalizing
• 38:34
  the National Guard and doing all this other stuff.
• 38:36
  The National Guard and the militia are two different
• 38:38
  things. It is in the power of the governor to
• 38:42
  nullify National Guard in their state and call
• 38:45
  up the state militia. The militia answers to
• 38:47
  the governor. That's how you get around this.
• 38:50
  Can y'all think of any single governor in this
• 38:54
  country that had the balls to do it? That would
• 38:57
  force a constitutional crisis that the governor,
• 39:00
  in black and white on the paper it's written
• 39:03
  in, would win. Wait a minute, wait a minute. There's
• 39:06
  a difference between the National Guard and a
• 39:07
  militia. Correct. The president has control of
• 39:11
  the National Guard. So what you do then is that,
• 39:14
  because I don't think what you're saying is
• 39:16
  true, Robby, that the National Guard
• 39:22
  can be converted into an independent state militia
• 39:25
  outside of federal law. It couldn't be. No, the
• 39:29
  governor would have to nullify the National Guard
• 39:32
  Act. How can the governor nullify the National
• 39:36
  Guard Act? It supersedes state. But unless
• 39:41
  you're talking about this... Yeah, under the Supremacy
• 39:43
  Clause of the Constitution, right, federal
• 39:47
  law always, when there's a conflict between
• 39:50
  federal and state law, federal law prevails. Correct.
• 39:53
  But that's why you nullify it. You say we're going
• 39:55
  to go to enforce it. Well, that's just ignoring
• 39:57
  it. Correct. That's not... That's what
• 40:00
  it is. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments should disagree
• 40:07
  with you. That's the entire point of them. Yeah,
• 40:09
  but for example, whenever there's been governors,
• 40:12
  during the school desegregation crises in
• 40:15
  areas in Arkansas and Mississippi back
• 40:18
  in the '50s and '60s, Eisenhower and
• 40:22
  JFK faced down recalcitrant southern governors.
• 40:26
  And they were like, okay, we're going to
• 40:28
  send in... We're going to federalize
• 40:30
  your National Guard, and you're going to have
• 40:32
  to do what we say. Yeah. And they killed people.
• 40:35
  Listen, I'm not saying that there will not be
• 40:37
  a consequence to this. What I am saying is that
• 40:39
  you have a federal government. I'm just
• 40:41
  saying, consequences or not, even, let's just ignore the bodies in the street. I
• 40:45
  just don't think, under our system, that
• 40:48
  it would take... If
• 40:50
  a governor decided to be that defiant, and the
• 40:55
  answer to your question is, fuck no, no governor
• 40:57
  has the balls. And the Republicans did. But if
• 41:01
  the governor decided to try to have that kind
• 41:04
  of Parable of the Sower, kind of basically
• 41:07
  sort of soft secession, I just don't see
• 41:13
  how the federal government would allow
• 41:14
  that. They just send in troops and quash the
• 41:17
  rebellion. Well, it depends on the situation.
• 41:19
  I don't think they would do it on a normal course.
• 41:21
  I don't believe for a moment they would do it
• 41:23
  on a normal course of action. If it was,
• 41:26
  if Donald Trump, say for example, Donald Trump
• 41:28
  succeeded, meaning he was able to get the
• 41:32
  Republicans to say, hey, we're going to back
• 41:33
  Donald Trump, and this notion of America is dead
• 41:36
  because Donald Trump just stole the election,
• 41:38
  I do think you would get some governors that
• 41:40
  would say, fuck this, I'm out. I think California
• 41:42
  may be one. Washington state may be one, where
• 41:45
  they would just... And the question would
• 41:48
  come up, who is the National Guard going to serve,
• 41:50
  the president or the state? Because at this point,
• 41:52
  the state is no longer America. It's a Ukraine
• 41:55
  thing, right? You get an overthrow of the state.
• 41:58
  Yeah, or it's Donetsk, right? It's like that.
• 42:02
  That's what I think it is. I think that's what
• 42:04
  it becomes. You get the situation where they're
• 42:06
  like, you no longer have legitimacy. You've overthrown
• 42:09
  the country, meaning we no longer have to stick
• 42:11
  with you. It's not even secession at this point,
• 42:12
  because this is no longer America. You're staking
• 42:14
  the country. In which case the governors say,
• 42:17
  use the National Guard for protection. The president
• 42:20
  comes out and says, well, hey, I'm still president.
• 42:23
  This is still America. And so I am calling you
• 42:27
  up. I'm basically taking control of the National
• 42:29
  Guard. No, president. The president can fuck off.
• 42:31
  No president... Ask a certain rail-splitter from
• 42:34
  Kentucky is going to let any state disappear,
• 42:37
  right? No one wants to have a state
• 42:40
  fall out of federal authority under their watch.
• 42:42
  Well, you wouldn't have to go that far.
• 42:45
  I'm not talking about secession, but it would
• 42:47
  be federal authority. It would be a soft secession.
• 42:49
  It's effectively secession, because America
• 42:51
  doesn't exist under that rule. I get that this
• 42:54
  is a question where the people are going to argue.
• 42:56
  They can argue it all they want. The reality
• 42:58
  of it is, if you overthrow the government of a
• 43:00
  country, then that country is no longer that
• 43:02
  country in the traditional sense of the term.
• 43:04
  I'm not legally bound to you anymore. That country
• 43:07
  no longer exists. You've just taken over. Now
• 43:10
  you could say that's nonsense, and you could
• 43:12
  say I'm bringing up the military to go after
• 43:14
  you. But if my military takes my point of view,
• 43:16
  then yeah, we have a Donetsk situation.
• 43:20
  It's that model where Robby's thing works. The
• 43:23
  thing that's so tricky, right, is
• 43:28
  what Robby's trying to address here is
• 43:29
  sort of, okay, if you have legal and anti-
• 43:33
  constitutional law-breaking by the federal government,
• 43:36
  is there a remedy available to the state governor,
• 43:39
  or at least one at a time, right, to fix that?
• 43:42
  And I think the answer is no, because of the
• 43:45
  Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. Here's
• 43:47
  what you're missing. Under the Constitution,
• 43:49
  the state, the individual states, handle election
• 43:52
  law. You have a president who's then going to
• 43:55
  say... Although Lord knows that was not observed
• 43:57
  under Bush v. Gore, but yes. I understand, but
• 44:00
  just let me get five words in here, and I'll
• 44:02
  shut up and go into the back. So you have a president
• 44:05
  who's going to come in and say, I'm going to
• 44:06
  take that power away from you. I'm going to send
• 44:09
  in troops to make sure this does not happen.
• 44:12
  The president is violating the oath to the Constitution
• 44:14
  from which he derives his authority. The governor
• 44:17
  at that point can say, go to hell, we're not going
• 44:19
  to do this. He can't. Of course he can't. Then what?
• 44:23
  Then what? You then have, under the rules of
• 44:26
  the existing, of the previous system, I think customarily all would say,
• 44:30
  then at that, then both the
• 44:34
  governor and the president are in violation
• 44:37
  of the Constitution. So you basically have, do
• 44:40
  two wrongs make a right? I think two wrongs just
• 44:43
  make a split is all that happens there. Okay,
• 44:45
  so what supersedes what, Ted? A constitutional
• 44:47
  amendment over a congressional law. The Constitution
• 44:52
  always wins. So the law that Trump is trying
• 44:55
  to push through here is a law or an executive
• 44:59
  order. Either way, what it does, it does not
• 45:02
  have the authority. But the Supreme Court would
• 45:04
  have to adjudicate that. The Supreme Court would
• 45:06
  have to adjudicate that. Well, then they better
• 45:07
  do their job, or they're going to have a shooting
• 45:08
  war in the streets. Yeah, I think we're
• 45:12
  just... Yeah, I think... Listen, if you
• 45:14
  want a revolution, this is how you get there.
• 45:17
  That's not a revolution. That's something else.
• 45:19
  The revolution is an uprising, a popular uprising.
• 45:23
  Wait, just one thing. I want to understand the
• 45:24
  model that's being presented. Okay. Robby, you
• 45:26
  make the point of saying if the president does
• 45:28
  what to the governor? So if the president,
• 45:32
  he comes in, say if they get this Save America
• 45:34
  Act passed, okay? Right. He then sends the National
• 45:37
  Guard in to intimidate voters at voter booths.
• 45:41
  That's what this is all about. Let's just be
• 45:43
  completely honest here. Correct. Under the Constitution,
• 45:46
  the state, not the federal government, has the
• 45:49
  authority over this. That Save America Act is
• 45:53
  unconstitutional on its face. If you have a federal
• 45:55
  force that's going to say, you will do this at
• 45:57
  the point of a bayonet, the governor at that
• 45:59
  point can say, no, we will not comply. We have
• 46:02
  Article I of the Constitution. We also have the
• 46:05
  Ninth and the Tenth Amendments on our side. Mr.
• 46:07
  Trump, go fuck yourself. Well, the remedy, but
• 46:10
  that would be an illegal remedy. The remedy that
• 46:12
  would be available to the governors in this case,
• 46:16
  let's say a governor, would be to file a federal
• 46:19
  lawsuit and have it go to the U.S. Supreme Court
• 46:22
  ultimately and have them rule. That's the only
• 46:25
  lawful remedy. You're going to go to the same
• 46:28
  federal government that just passed a law that
• 46:30
  caused a problem in the first place. Ted, that's
• 46:31
  why we have a Second Amendment. Robby, our Constitution
• 46:33
  blows, okay? I say it all the time, and this
• 46:36
  is just another example, okay? I would
• 46:38
  like you to be right, but it's just, unfortunately,
• 46:41
  that's not how they wrote it. They're not going
• 46:43
  to go to a shooting war first. They're going
• 46:44
  to go to court. You're going to have several
• 46:46
  governors from multiple Democratic states that
• 46:48
  take it to court to try to fight it. Besides
• 46:49
  which, yeah, besides which, okay, let's
• 46:51
  just say you're a fucking maniac governor. It's
• 46:54
  like governor too long comes back from the dead,
• 46:57
  right, and you're like, your governor, Governor
• 47:00
  Ted Rall, lunatic, decides to do this, right? Okay,
• 47:04
  what's going to happen? Who's going to win? Who do I
• 47:07
  have? Albany Police Department?
• 47:10
  Who do I have? They're going to say,
• 47:12
  this is the U.S. government. They can
• 47:15
  nuke us. There's literally no way. They're
• 47:19
  going to nuke you. They're going to send in the
• 47:20
  cops to beat the shit out of you and drag you
• 47:21
  out of your office. I don't even know if anybody's
• 47:24
  going to stand up with you. Or they'll send in
• 47:27
  paratroopers and assassinate me. Look, I'm telling
• 47:29
  you, that model only works if you do something
• 47:32
  so egregious that multiple states join in with
• 47:34
  you. I'm telling you. Then you're talking about
• 47:37
  the military. You're talking about... Okay, weird.
• 47:40
  Violating the voting laws is that thing. The
• 47:43
  only thing that holds this country together is
• 47:47
  two things. One, the promise of maybe having
• 47:49
  an economic future. That's done. The other thing
• 47:51
  is that your vote actually means something. It's
• 47:55
  a pressure release valve. Once you take that
• 47:57
  thing away, the entire thing explodes. At what
• 47:59
  point then the government... Think about the Declaration
• 48:03
  of Independence. I do agree with your premise.
• 48:06
  I agree with your premise. What you're saying
• 48:09
  is that's something I'm disagreeing with. I'm
• 48:11
  disagreeing with the way I think they're going
• 48:12
  to behave. And I think these guys, who under no
• 48:16
  circumstances are used to dealing with military
• 48:18
  matters, are not going to jump to the notion of
• 48:21
  we're going to go into military. They're going
• 48:22
  to think we're going to fight this in court.
• 48:25
  Then if you are right, then we need to stop pretending
• 48:31
  we are a republic and accept the fact that
• 48:33
  we have been overthrown and we're now being ruled
• 48:35
  by an oligarchy. Here's the catch, though. I think
• 48:38
  you are right if indeed Donald Trump tried to
• 48:41
  overthrow the election, meaning if indeed he succeeded.
• 48:44
  I think there would have been a civil war. Or
• 48:47
  if indeed Donald Trump comes out and tries to
• 48:49
  do something about the election, meaning if he's
• 48:51
  doing something that is, we've canceled
• 48:54
  the elections, I think you would have... I think
• 48:57
  people would lose their... Or if he did something
• 48:59
  to directly say, well, I'm nullifying these elections.
• 49:03
  Any dictatorial shit, especially if he's
• 49:06
  saying, well, ICE is in the region in order to
• 49:07
  overlook this. I think you may get governors
• 49:09
  who may get a little bit more aggressive at dealing
• 49:12
  with it. But I don't think these spineless Democrats,
• 49:15
  who, as you point out, can't even build a bridge
• 49:17
  in Baltimore, are going to immediately jump to
• 49:19
  military if Donald Trump tries to pass the SAVE
• 49:22
  Act or goons at a thing. I just don't buy it.
• 49:25
  But to that point, isn't that when the man on
• 49:28
  the street would stand up and say no more with
• 49:30
  us? Americans? Yeah, Americans actually stand
• 49:34
  up and say, no, you do not get to send federal
• 49:35
  troops in to beat the hell out of people. Here's
• 49:41
  where we run into the dilemma of the fact that
• 49:42
  most of the people who would be so inclined would
• 49:45
  be politically to the right. And those people,
• 49:49
  many of whom would be very fine with this happening
• 49:52
  because they support Donald Trump. Well, I don't
• 49:55
  know. I'm skeptical of that part, too. I don't
• 49:58
  know. I think shit like this pops off when something
• 50:01
  extreme happens, a major crisis. Even most Republicans
• 50:05
  don't want a dictator, even though they're too
• 50:07
  stupid to realize that they have one. I don't
• 50:10
  know if they know. Would they even know? I think
• 50:13
  a lot of them would buy, oh, the Democrats
• 50:15
  stole the election. They had illegal immigrants
• 50:18
  vote in it. Non-citizens are voting. There's
• 50:22
  been widespread fraud. There's a reason
• 50:25
  Donald Trump has been messaging that for the
• 50:27
  better part of 10 years, undermining the credibility
• 50:31
  of the elections and the way that the votes are
• 50:34
  counted, and talking about election machines being
• 50:37
  hacked by overseas and so on. He's made his base
• 50:43
  believe that there is at least a credible argument
• 50:46
  to be made that the votes aren't counted fairly
• 50:49
  and that people who shouldn't be voting are voting.
• 50:51
  So therefore, if you believe that, and then your
• 50:54
  president who you like says that's what happened,
• 50:58
  many, many Republicans will say, okay,
• 51:02
  well, this is what we were told this. And
• 51:05
  of course it's not just Trump saying this.
• 51:07
  He's got this huge infrastructure of
• 51:10
  influencers and people on social media and Fox
• 51:13
  News who are all going to support that or turn
• 51:16
  a blind eye to it. Yeah, I blame
• 51:20
  the framework for the argument of it's cheated,
• 51:22
  it's cheated, etc., is to create a context by which
• 51:25
  you can accept the dictator we have, because
• 51:28
  his point is the elections are fraudulent.
• 51:31
  Don't pay no attention to the elections. Okay,
• 51:33
  so the elections don't really matter. So then
• 51:35
  what matters from the standpoint of getting in
• 51:36
  office? What matters is what I say, Trump. Yeah,
• 51:39
  I think the reason that he did that was it's
• 51:41
  an insurance policy. If things ever went tits
• 51:44
  up electorally, he could pull this card.
• 51:47
  It's the joker. That's what it is. Emily, he
• 51:52
  has the Supreme Court six to three, the power
• 51:55
  to do what he wants, and red states will follow.
• 51:57
  I don't really disagree with that. I agree, Robby.
• 52:02
  Mr. Charles is asking Robby. Robby is saying
• 52:05
  that a governor would have to comply with federal
• 52:07
  demands for the state's National Guard troops.
• 52:09
  Is Robby saying that a governor would
• 52:13
  have to... Well, no, I think that's what we're
• 52:17
  saying. I'm arguing the exact opposite point, that
• 52:20
  the governor has the ability if the federal
• 52:22
  government is going so far. Currently, the National
• 52:27
  Guard reports to the governor under normal circumstances.
• 52:32
  The remedy to this is, and the whole reason why
• 52:34
  the Federal Guard Act was originally created.
• 52:36
  But they've been federalized many times. I understand
• 52:39
  that. But here's the difference, though. You
• 52:41
  can federalize the National Guard. You cannot
• 52:44
  federalize a militia. That's the difference.
• 52:46
  But who's the militia? The militia is you. Okay,
• 52:50
  so according to the Militia Act of 1894, the
• 52:54
  Militia Act is every able-bodied male of the
• 52:56
  age of 15 up to 60. That's the militia. Yeah,
• 53:00
  but they have to join, right? That's
• 53:03
  not organized. Well, it's not organized now because
• 53:05
  it's been neglected, but the premise is still
• 53:07
  there. So what the argument would be is how many
• 53:08
  of these... So while you're training the militia,
• 53:11
  U.S. troops are marching into your state. Ted,
• 53:13
  listen to me. So if you have a president who
• 53:17
  federalizes the National Guard, says,
• 53:18
  okay, you are going to be positioned in these,
• 53:21
  say if you're a National Guardsman from
• 53:22
  St. Louis, and then you have a president who's
• 53:25
  going to come out and say, you're going to do
• 53:27
  this, and the governor of your state that you
• 53:28
  live in says, no, you need to defend your state.
• 53:31
  At that point, you, Mr. Militia, you, soldier
• 53:34
  man, you have a choice to make. Are you going
• 53:35
  to stand with your state against a tyrannical
• 53:37
  federal government, or are you going to stand
• 53:38
  with the tyrant? Well, it's a civil war.
• 53:41
  Then it's a choice that you have to make. Who
• 53:44
  are you going to report to? You cannot serve
• 53:46
  two masters. Are you going to serve your state
• 53:48
  or are you going to serve Trump? I know, but
• 53:50
  you don't even report to that. That doesn't need
• 53:54
  to be a legality issue. That's just a personal
• 53:57
  issue. 100%. And that's the point that I'm making.
• 54:01
  And that's what you said, nullify. Correct. Yeah,
• 54:06
  but that's not a legal nullification. That's
• 54:08
  more of a practical. Ted, you are so wrong on
• 54:12
  this. The National Guard Act is an act of Congress.
• 54:15
  It does not supersede the Constitution. The militia
• 54:18
  is a constitutional institution. The Militia
• 54:21
  Act, which has my favorite name for any act,
• 54:23
  the Dick Act, the Dick Act, was largely superseded
• 54:30
  by the National Guard Act, right? So it's not
• 54:32
  gone, but it's sort of hollowed out in a
• 54:34
  huge way. That's why it's in the Constitution,
• 54:38
  too. The only institution, in fact, check me
• 54:40
  on this. The only institution that the Constitution
• 54:42
  calls necessary is the militia. And it's because
• 54:45
  they understood back then political power goes
• 54:48
  out of the barrel of a rifle. But you're trying
• 54:51
  to get people into an 1804 mentality, okay? No,
• 54:55
  I'm not. Trump is. Good luck in a series of fast-
• 54:59
  moving events, which is what we're talking about
• 55:01
  here. 100%. This is... Trump
• 55:04
  announces two days after the election, the election's
• 55:08
  invalid because there was widespread cheating.
• 55:10
  Okay, now issues are ticking down in a matter
• 55:13
  of hours and days. Your Militia Act is not going
• 55:16
  to be relevant. It's up to the people. It's up
• 55:20
  to the people. Are you going to stay with your
• 55:23
  home, or are you going to stay with some tyrant
• 55:24
  in D.C.? But you don't need an act for that.
• 55:27
  You just need to be a person for that. But Ted's
• 55:31
  making the legal argument. I'm not, but I'm making
• 55:36
  both, actually. But this is not really a legal
• 55:38
  issue at that point, because the law has effectively
• 55:41
  been nullified. This is, okay, now what do we do
• 55:44
  as people? Yeah, in a particular space together
• 55:46
  that have to now make decisions about a large...
• 55:49
  And once that, and frankly, once the president
• 55:51
  has gone rogue to that extent, I think everything,
• 55:54
  all bets are off. Right. At that point,
• 55:56
  nobody's spending a lot of time like, but
• 55:59
  the Seventh Amendment says... Nobody
• 56:01
  cares about that shit anymore. It becomes just
• 56:05
  about power. It would be an 1860s situation,
• 56:08
  right? It would be like Fort Sumter gets fired
• 56:10
  on. Lincoln's calling up 30,000 federal troops.
• 56:14
  The notice goes out in Atmore, Alabama. And you
• 56:18
  have to decide, okay, am I going to stand with
• 56:20
  my state, or am I going to stand with Lincoln?
• 56:24
  That's the kind of choice that is a very
• 56:27
  fast-moving thing. I agree. And ultimately what's
• 56:29
  going to happen is that people in this country
• 56:32
  are going to have to decide where do your loyalties
• 56:33
  stand. You have to get off the fence, actually
• 56:36
  put your apathy aside for 10 seconds and
• 56:38
  make a fucking choice. Robby, people are not
• 56:42
  even... People are not politically entranced. This
• 56:46
  would be just fucking chaos. I
• 56:49
  don't think it's... We have two sides, and
• 56:52
  these two sides are fighting each other. I don't
• 56:54
  think it's that. I think it's just fucking chaos.
• 56:56
  That's what I think, too. It's not... If
• 57:00
  you say, hey, the reason that gas went
• 57:02
  up is because Houthis bombed Saudi Aramco.
• 57:05
  What? Fuck a Saudi Aramco.
• 57:08
  They don't know that shit. I would be hard-pressed
• 57:12
  to even know if they know some of the politics
• 57:14
  that's taking place in the country, let alone
• 57:16
  these larger themes of liberty. Go into the streets
• 57:21
  of, let's say, a relatively well-educated
• 57:25
  city, San Francisco, and ask people,
• 57:29
  who is the president of France? I'll
• 57:32
  give you a hundred bucks if you can tell me. You're
• 57:35
  not losing a lot of C-notes. Nobody
• 57:38
  cares about that. Listen, they don't know anything.
• 57:41
  It comes out, well, we know it's not normal to
• 57:44
  have federal troops standing at poll booths, at polling
• 57:47
  stations. That's something that's abnormal. That's
• 57:50
  something that doesn't happen. True. This is
• 57:52
  not the frog being boiled slowly. But there's
• 57:54
  a lot of shit that became weird, that becomes
• 57:57
  weird, and that people put up with. People put
• 57:59
  up with the license plate readers. People put
• 58:01
  up with the fact that their TV spies on them.
• 58:04
  People put up with having to take off their shoes
• 58:07
  for no reason at the airport. My TV watch. I
• 58:11
  was about to say something inappropriate. I was
• 58:17
  like, your TV watches you. Oh, it's
• 58:19
  like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's terrifying, right? But
• 58:23
  the point is that people put...
• 58:25
  People get... Weird gets normalized.
• 58:29
  Fascism gets normalized. I walk by... I
• 58:32
  walk by these wet-behind-the-ears kids in
• 58:35
  Penn Station with guns as tall, as long as
• 58:38
  they are tall, and it's like, that's weird. I'm
• 58:41
  like, why are you even here? I feel less safe
• 58:44
  because you're here. And what do I do? I've hurt
• 58:48
  my eyes. I've tried no eye contact. Walk as quickly
• 58:51
  as I can past him. Try to pretend I'm normal.
• 58:54
  Good doggie. Good doggie. You're a good doggie.
• 58:56
  Don't bite me. That's what we do. And National
• 58:59
  Guard in D.C. now. National Guard. Again,
• 59:04
  this is the whole thing about ICE and the National
• 59:06
  Guard being deployed in places where they're
• 59:08
  not necessary. Right. It's not
• 59:12
  they're not pulling people out of floodwaters.
• 59:14
  This is about normalizing
• 59:18
  the militarized federal presence on the
• 59:21
  streets of American cities, beholden to the president
• 59:25
  of the U.S. Correct. Yeah. With your own personal
• 59:28
  goon squad of ICE goons and a bunch of other
• 59:33
  three-letter agencies most people have never
• 59:35
  even heard of. Yeah. Okay, we have some. So Tara.
• 59:39
  Freda Wild says, modern Supremacy Clause interpretation
• 59:42
  is deeply unconstitutional, was never intended
• 59:45
  to be used as Ted is describing. Well, I'd love
• 59:49
  to hear from a constitutional lawyer about this,
• 59:51
  but I think it's pretty clear. They federalized
• 59:54
  troops when they went in with the Black school
• 59:56
  kid. The Supreme Court has ruled that way repeatedly.
• 1:00:00
  Also says Ted and Jamarl are boomerang heavily,
• 1:00:04
  LOL. Boomerang who? Boomerang, I guess, as in
• 1:00:09
  to be a boomer. I think Robby is correct. Digital
• 1:00:13
  design. Boomerang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's
• 1:00:21
  see. Richie, Robby can run for Senate because
• 1:00:24
  he'd need $200, $100 mil to do so. I bet you could
• 1:00:28
  do it for 50. Oh, Ray says, Ted, I found a copy
• 1:00:33
  of Together CD from the Vapors on eBay, and thanks
• 1:00:35
  for the $5. For $129, it's current and still
• 1:00:38
  available. Thank you. Actually, believe it or
• 1:00:40
  not, I reached out to the band, and they sent
• 1:00:42
  me one. Really? That was very, very cool. It
• 1:00:46
  is cool. Yeah. They're still around, so that
• 1:00:49
  was fantastic. But thanks, Ray, for keeping an
• 1:00:51
  eye out. $129 is a little rich for a CD, but
• 1:00:55
  I would have considered it. But I'm trying to
• 1:01:00
  think, probably $75 is the most I've ever paid
• 1:01:02
  for a CD. And I'm like, wow, that's a lot of
• 1:01:05
  money. But if you really want something, you've
• 1:01:08
  really got to have it. Okay, so we are now in
• 1:01:13
  the Q&A part of the show. So I'll just put up
• 1:01:16
  that little banner. So if you have a question,
• 1:01:18
  type it in. Priority goes to the paid ones. But
• 1:01:22
  we're going to keep talking about the day's news
• 1:01:23
  while we do that. Okay, should we talk about...
• 1:01:28
  I don't know, Boulder? We could talk about that.
• 1:01:30
  We're on a Supreme Court kick. It seems like
• 1:01:32
  a natural segue. So the city of Boulder, Colorado,
• 1:01:38
  has sued Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil. These
• 1:01:43
  are, of course, two huge energy conglomerates.
• 1:01:46
  And basically, it has shades of the big tobacco
• 1:01:50
  lawsuits of the 1980s. And it's also the
• 1:01:55
  social media lawsuits, where basically they're
• 1:01:58
  claiming that the big energy companies deceived
• 1:02:02
  the people, and specifically the city of Boulder
• 1:02:07
  and the citizens of Colorado, about how harmful
• 1:02:10
  fossil fuels were going back decades. So the
• 1:02:15
  argument is it's almost a product liability
• 1:02:17
  lawsuit where they're saying, look, you guys
• 1:02:21
  create a product that causes a lot of harm, and
• 1:02:24
  with the tobacco lawsuits,
• 1:02:27
  the argument was we have to pay for medical care
• 1:02:30
  because of people who get lung cancer and other
• 1:02:33
  diseases caused by your product, and we want to
• 1:02:36
  be compensated for the costs
• 1:02:39
  that we've been forced to bear. In the city of
• 1:02:42
  Boulder, obviously any municipality
• 1:02:44
  has had to deal with things related to climate
• 1:02:47
  change directly or indirectly. And so this, so
• 1:02:51
  basically, to try to drive a stake through the
• 1:02:54
  lawsuit before it ever gets off the ground, knowing,
• 1:02:59
  of course, that if this works, states and municipalities
• 1:03:02
  all over the country will decide to go after
• 1:03:05
  this giant pile of cash that companies like this
• 1:03:09
  have. All over the world. All over the world,
• 1:03:12
  right. So they went all the way to the U.S.
• 1:03:16
  Supreme Court, which is today considering arguments
• 1:03:18
  not about the case itself, but whether it can
• 1:03:21
  move forward. So basically, they're trying to
• 1:03:24
  kill this lawsuit in its crib. Well, they're
• 1:03:27
  trying to hide something that's standing, even
• 1:03:29
  to bring something that's massive. Because
• 1:03:32
  that's not just Boulder. That's the planet.
• 1:03:35
  Climate change is a planetary issue. So
• 1:03:36
  by the way, it's pretty funny. One of the conservative
• 1:03:41
  lobbyists for the energy company was like, this
• 1:03:43
  is a bunch of rich hippies. Because
• 1:03:46
  Boulder. So what, right? It's Berkeley of Colorado.
• 1:03:50
  Well, yeah, it's not going to be poor hippies
• 1:03:52
  who bring up an expensive federal lawsuit all
• 1:03:56
  the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The shit
• 1:03:58
  costs money, right? So yeah, it's basically a
• 1:04:01
  very liberal... Only to rich, not young, right?
• 1:04:08
  So the rich hippies brought this lawsuit.
• 1:04:10
  I'm a little cynical about this, because
• 1:04:13
  I know from the history of the big tobacco lawsuits
• 1:04:16
  that all those billions of dollars were never
• 1:04:18
  used to try to curtail smoking. It was just
• 1:04:21
  a giant slush fund for the states. But anyway,
• 1:04:25
  it's an interesting story. So here
• 1:04:28
  we are. But God, that's fascinating. I need to think
• 1:04:34
  about it. It's right. It's so interesting, because
• 1:04:37
  I can argue this one either way. On the
• 1:04:40
  one hand, I think, look, I think the plaintiffs
• 1:04:43
  have a point, which is, look, you guys were
• 1:04:46
  selling an obviously very harmful product,
• 1:04:48
  right? A product that causes immense
• 1:04:52
  amounts of air pollution and environmental degradation
• 1:04:55
  that changes the very climate of the place
• 1:04:58
  you live. Boulder, Colorado's in the mountains.
• 1:05:00
  The mountains are... You can look at Nepal to see what happens to mountains
• 1:05:05
  due to rising average temperatures.
• 1:05:08
  There's probably wildfires.
• 1:05:11
  All sorts of municipalities have to deal with
• 1:05:14
  this. At the same time,
• 1:05:18
  we all kind of know that energy infrastructure
• 1:05:21
  is also essential to the capitalist economy, and
• 1:05:25
  you can't really function without it in the 20th
• 1:05:27
  and 21st centuries. And kind of, really, are
• 1:05:30
  we going to go after this legal product, which
• 1:05:32
  tobacco was too, right? If it was so
• 1:05:35
  dangerous, why wasn't it just banned by the federal
• 1:05:38
  government? So you leave a product, you
• 1:05:41
  allow a product to be sold openly. And then you basically let the people
• 1:05:49
  be sued to death by municipalities who are, by
• 1:05:54
  the way, not really going to use the money for
• 1:05:56
  anything other than just buying new computer
• 1:06:00
  systems, ironically, and giving themselves raises
• 1:06:03
  and stuff. That's what happens with the tobacco
• 1:06:04
  money. So I can really have some
• 1:06:08
  sympathy for the devil, Exxon. I can also understand
• 1:06:11
  where Boulder is coming from. If that was Exxon,
• 1:06:14
  I would argue it's misplaced. It's suing...
• 1:06:16
  It's a Black person suing a slave owner
• 1:06:21
  for slavery. It's, dude, it was legal. How
• 1:06:25
  are you suing me for this? It's, or suing
• 1:06:27
  gun owners. How are you suing the gun owner for
• 1:06:29
  a legal product that they put onto the market
• 1:06:32
  when every metric was legal? How is it our fault?
• 1:06:36
  I think it's kind of that. I think the culprit
• 1:06:39
  is government. Meaning if they were to sue anybody,
• 1:06:41
  they should sue the government. But the government
• 1:06:43
  is, as you know, it's impossible to sue the government.
• 1:06:46
  I know, but then how can they sue the company?
• 1:06:50
  Don't get me wrong, I get it. It's kind
• 1:06:52
  of tobacco, right? But the difference is
• 1:06:53
  tobacco, I was smoking individually. I smoked.
• 1:06:57
  You could probably sue any company for almost
• 1:07:00
  anything, right? You could sue McDonald's
• 1:07:03
  for selling unhealthy food that's causing people
• 1:07:06
  to have heart attacks and strokes. You could
• 1:07:08
  sue, what's
• 1:07:13
  the big motorcycle company?
• 1:07:18
  Whatever. You could sue any company that makes it. Harley.
• 1:07:22
  You could sue Harley-Davidson. Because
• 1:07:24
  yeah, because they make a product that every
• 1:07:26
  year splatters people's brains across the asphalt
• 1:07:30
  all over the country, right? You can
• 1:07:33
  go on and on. But usually it's something that
• 1:07:36
  the product did that was the liability associated
• 1:07:39
  with the product that people are suing it with.
• 1:07:40
  You riding a motorcycle and being bad at riding
• 1:07:42
  a motorcycle, sure, you could say, well, the seat
• 1:07:44
  is a little too high, and so people fall off a
• 1:07:46
  little bit more. So okay, you can do that, right?
• 1:07:47
  But I'm talking about a credible, honest lawsuit,
• 1:07:49
  and this one is super interesting. So a lot of
• 1:07:52
  it, this lawsuit... So this lawsuit and
• 1:07:55
  the nicotine lawsuit both rely on the claim that
• 1:07:58
  there was deception, that the company
• 1:08:01
  said... They didn't say, listen, we know we're making
• 1:08:04
  a product that entails some societal risks,
• 1:08:08
  and by the way, here are those warnings. Right.
• 1:08:11
  Ironically, the warning labels that tobacco
• 1:08:14
  companies have been ordered to put on
• 1:08:17
  their products, it helps indemnify them from future
• 1:08:20
  lawsuits, because right now everybody who picks
• 1:08:23
  up a pack of cigarettes can read, well,
• 1:08:26
  oh, this is bad for you. The argument here is
• 1:08:30
  that ExxonMobil, when you pull up at the gas
• 1:08:31
  station, at the Exxon station, it doesn't say,
• 1:08:34
  hey, this shit's killing the planet.
• 1:08:37
  Have a nice day. But how does that
• 1:08:40
  affect? But for one, what's the alternative?
• 1:08:42
  There's that. You can go and just walk.
• 1:08:48
  God bless you. It'll be good for you. You'll
• 1:08:52
  probably live longer. I don't know how many people
• 1:08:54
  make that choice. And two, so governments allowed
• 1:08:58
  this stuff to be put all over the place. And
• 1:09:01
  supposedly the government did due diligence in
• 1:09:02
  regards to checking the efficacy and the safety
• 1:09:04
  of the product that was being put out. Meaning
• 1:09:06
  they're not, for example, it's not
• 1:09:08
  a doctor coming on TV saying, hey, cigarettes
• 1:09:11
  are great, and you can jog them out after smoking
• 1:09:13
  a pack. Right. And the way the doctors used to
• 1:09:16
  do, doctors used to come on and do commercials
• 1:09:17
  for cigarettes, meaning they actively lied to
• 1:09:21
  people who ended up getting cancer from the product
• 1:09:24
  that they were using. This feels different to
• 1:09:26
  me. This comes across as a societal
• 1:09:29
  issue, not an individual voter issue. And how
• 1:09:32
  on earth can you as an individual state or
• 1:09:37
  area sue for the globe? And what does that
• 1:09:41
  even mean? What's the
• 1:09:44
  how do they compensate you for that? I
• 1:09:47
  don't even know how that works. I guess I don't
• 1:09:49
  know. Okay, let me ask you this. What are they
• 1:09:51
  asking for in the lawsuit? So I think that,
• 1:09:56
  most product liability lawsuits, they're leaving
• 1:09:58
  it to the jury, right? So it's kind of, we
• 1:10:01
  claim that we suffered this expense and that
• 1:10:05
  expense and this other expense, and we're leaving
• 1:10:07
  it up to the court when we finally make it to
• 1:10:10
  trial, assuming we get a positive verdict, to
• 1:10:12
  determine how much we should get. Now, does each
• 1:10:15
  individual person get that money? Because otherwise,
• 1:10:17
  I don't care about this. No, of course not. Of
• 1:10:21
  course not. You know it's going to the city of
• 1:10:23
  Boulder. It should go to people. If they're making
• 1:10:25
  the argument, the argument should go to people,
• 1:10:27
  because the argument is being made of, look,
• 1:10:29
  you've damaged our citizens. They're going to
• 1:10:31
  live shorter, more desperate lives. Whatever
• 1:10:35
  their factor is, whether it's a second, whether
• 1:10:37
  it's a minute, as a result of what you're doing.
• 1:10:40
  You're killing the world as a result, and this
• 1:10:41
  is how it's affecting the people. Okay, it's
• 1:10:43
  affecting the individuals. But if you give a
• 1:10:45
  bunch of money to Boulder, what is Boulder going
• 1:10:47
  to do to fix this damage, this situation? This
• 1:10:54
  is why I find this to be a bit dodgy. If they're
• 1:10:56
  trying to make the point of saying that these
• 1:10:58
  companies are ruining the planet and the companies
• 1:11:00
  must do something to prevent themselves from
• 1:11:02
  ruining the planet further, okay, then I get
• 1:11:04
  it. Well, here's what they're asking for specifically,
• 1:11:07
  right? So for the city of Boulder, and look,
• 1:11:09
  you and I both know there's going to be, if this
• 1:11:11
  moves forward, there's going to be thousands
• 1:11:12
  of these suits, right? They're asking for
• 1:11:16
  compensation for past and future local costs,
• 1:11:20
  extreme heat waves, so cooling
• 1:11:24
  centers and so on, droughts, floods, destructive
• 1:11:27
  wildfires, etc. But how do you compensate for those
• 1:11:34
  things? And also the compensation... So the
• 1:11:36
  defense is they say that local damages from global
• 1:11:40
  climate change can't be pinned on individual
• 1:11:43
  companies, and that federal laws should take
• 1:11:47
  precedence over state-level climate lawsuits.
• 1:11:49
  And also, they're also blaming... They're
• 1:11:52
  saying it's a global problem. Climate
• 1:11:54
  change, it's all one. Chinese companies
• 1:11:58
  could have contributed to climate change.
• 1:12:00
  So why just them? How could you quantify
• 1:12:05
  it? It's not tobacco. Tobacco, you
• 1:12:09
  certainly... Chinese cigarettes
• 1:12:11
  are not being sold in the
• 1:12:14
  United States. So that's easy. You have Russian
• 1:12:16
  gas, Saudi gas, Chinese manufacturers and refineries.
• 1:12:19
  The U.S. has their companies, but you have companies
• 1:12:22
  all over the world that's causing it. Oh, man,
• 1:12:23
  I don't like it. I want, philosophically,
• 1:12:28
  I want to say yes to this. I want to be full-
• 1:12:31
  throated in my yes. Yeah, that's how I
• 1:12:33
  feel about reparations for
• 1:12:35
  descendants of slaves.
• 1:12:38
  Philosophically, I'm all for it. I just don't see
• 1:12:41
  how you make it, how you do it legally. Give people
• 1:12:44
  a check for that one. Easy. Give people a check.
• 1:12:47
  Sure, but, for example, okay, but
• 1:12:50
  do rich Black people get as much money as poor
• 1:12:53
  Black people? Do Black people who are not descendants
• 1:12:56
  of slaves get any money? No, because they were
• 1:12:59
  not descendants of slaves. But they're still
• 1:13:02
  victims of racism, which stems from the legacy
• 1:13:04
  of slavery. That's different than the situation
• 1:13:07
  of people being descendants of slaves. They weren't
• 1:13:09
  here for that. I'm saying... But there's
• 1:13:12
  a lot of arguments, right? No, no, I get the
• 1:13:14
  arguments. Anybody will argue because they want
• 1:13:16
  to check. Fair enough, right? Whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 1:13:18
  whoa, whoa, whoa. Or even people like me, who
• 1:13:22
  I'm pretty sure no 23andMe is going to reveal
• 1:13:25
  that I have any secret Black ancestry. But
• 1:13:28
  you're trying to just be logical. Okay, what's the best way to do this?
• 1:13:34
  There's just a lot of different
• 1:13:35
  ways to look at it. That's all I'm saying. You
• 1:13:36
  find that people were descendants of slaves and
• 1:13:38
  give them a check. Give me what's equal to 40
• 1:13:41
  acres and a mule. How much? And should it be
• 1:13:44
  pro rata, or should it be
• 1:13:47
  come on? If you're
• 1:13:50
  Diddy, do you get the same check as a guy who's
• 1:13:52
  sleeping outside last night? I
• 1:13:55
  don't know. I want everybody who is a descendant
• 1:13:58
  of a slave to get 40 acres and one mule, and they can
• 1:14:01
  do with that 40 acres and that one mule whatever
• 1:14:03
  they want. By the way, I always wanted to know,
• 1:14:05
  that mule is sterile. What happens
• 1:14:08
  when he dies? Well, that's what's fucked up about
• 1:14:11
  the U.S. government, right? They gave him a mule.
• 1:14:14
  Shouldn't it be two donkeys instead? It's,
• 1:14:18
  when that thing dies, that's the end of it. Fuck
• 1:14:20
  those Black people. That's when the white farmer
• 1:14:23
  next door swoops in and buys the land for pennies
• 1:14:26
  on the dollar. It's a nice piece of '48, because
• 1:14:29
  you got there. And by the way, most people will
• 1:14:32
  sell it, because most people don't want to be
• 1:14:33
  out in the thing, right? I'm just saying it doesn't
• 1:14:36
  have to be complicated in the way that they're
• 1:14:38
  making it. And there are obviously people who
• 1:14:40
  are like, well, I'm Black, so I want it too.
• 1:14:43
  It's, yeah, but you weren't a descendant. Yeah,
• 1:14:44
  but a guy called me an N-word 20 years ago,
• 1:14:47
  so I should get a check. No, dude, you don't.
• 1:14:50
  I think there's an argument there.
• 1:14:52
  It's an argument for anything.
• 1:14:54
  And then, of course, we're going to compensate
• 1:14:57
  if we're going to compensate Black people. All
• 1:14:59
  right. So what about Asian descendants of
• 1:15:02
  people, Chinese coolies who built the railroads?
• 1:15:06
  Right. What about them? They
• 1:15:08
  were brought over here and oppressed and treated.
• 1:15:10
  They weren't property. That's the
• 1:15:13
  choice they made. They can make their arguments
• 1:15:16
  for why they should be compensated. I'm talking
• 1:15:20
  about people who were property, who the government
• 1:15:22
  didn't pay because they were slaves, and should
• 1:15:25
  be compensated for the labor that they gave this
• 1:15:27
  government. That's what I'm referring to. What
• 1:15:28
  did they do except build the entire country?
• 1:15:30
  All they did was build most of the country, but
• 1:15:33
  okay. I would not be opposed to my wife
• 1:15:37
  and my kids getting a check. I want your wife
• 1:15:41
  and kids to get that check, Robby. Back off,
• 1:15:44
  Whitey. You don't get any of that. Yeah, I just
• 1:15:47
  put the kids in there. But the point is that
• 1:15:49
  they are the direct descendants. Yeah, I'm team
• 1:15:53
  JT on this. I'm all for it. I just have questions
• 1:15:58
  about the execution. If you pull a Somali
• 1:16:01
  and come over here, sorry, you're excluded. I
• 1:16:05
  apologize. I will pay for your deportation, though.
• 1:16:09
  Well, she's not even... She's not Black as far
• 1:16:11
  as I know. Well, no, as I said, if you pull a
• 1:16:14
  Somali, if you come over here and say, oh,
• 1:16:16
  by the way, I'm entitled to this. No. Yeah. See,
• 1:16:20
  I don't think... Why... I don't understand why this
• 1:16:21
  is so complicated, to be honest. A check is very
• 1:16:23
  straightforward. People just take issue with the
• 1:16:25
  check part. It's, I don't want to give these
• 1:16:27
  people money. Why not? It's... They
• 1:16:30
  take issue with it. They try to come up with
• 1:16:32
  complicated ways. Well, maybe we can have services
• 1:16:33
  and help them with education and help them, blah
• 1:16:36
  blah blah. Dude. Oh, yeah. Well, it's not
• 1:16:40
  American society didn't have 150
• 1:16:42
  years to do that, right? Or more. Okay, so
• 1:16:48
  P. Walker says, climate change is just another
• 1:16:53
  mechanism used to draw time and energy away from
• 1:16:56
  real problems that would imperil the ownership
• 1:16:59
  class. If you look at energy trends, fossil fuels
• 1:17:02
  is actually peaking. Well, that's true. Well,
• 1:17:05
  I'm not sure if that's entirely true.
• 1:17:08
  Let me ask you this. Would big business
• 1:17:10
  prefer this not be an issue? I think they would
• 1:17:15
  prefer that be an issue. I think they want to
• 1:17:16
  get back to business. Sure. But the point is
• 1:17:19
  we all, all these... The biggest
• 1:17:21
  green companies in the world are companies like
• 1:17:23
  ExxonMobil, right? They invest more in green
• 1:17:26
  energy than anyone else because they're leveraging,
• 1:17:28
  and they know that's the future, right? So
• 1:17:31
  there's a lot more money. There's a lot
• 1:17:33
  more money to be made in new technologies than
• 1:17:35
  in maintaining old ones. So if you could
• 1:17:39
  build all the infrastructure for all the charging
• 1:17:41
  stations all over the place, there's a lot more
• 1:17:43
  money in that than just selling oil
• 1:17:45
  and gas. Is there? Especially if you have
• 1:17:48
  investment in... You have to put the money into
• 1:17:50
  it and everything else. You have all of these
• 1:17:52
  people screaming, make a profit on all of that.
• 1:17:54
  You make a profit invested in that stuff only
• 1:17:58
  because of the energy that was being put into
• 1:18:00
  this idea that there was a climate issue. I don't
• 1:18:03
  know. I don't take this fate. I know some people
• 1:18:05
  do. I don't think it's fake. Well, climate
• 1:18:07
  change is real. There's no question about
• 1:18:09
  that, I think. If it's real, we have to do something
• 1:18:13
  about it, especially if we're causing it. Well,
• 1:18:16
  it's probably too late, but yeah. Philip says,
• 1:18:20
  Ted, look at the transportation infrastructure
• 1:18:22
  in U.S. cities versus European cities. Big oil
• 1:18:26
  lobbied our governments to pull out our trams.
• 1:18:30
  We got fucked. Which line track in my house now?
• 1:18:36
  Big tobacco. What do you mean? Well, if I'm
• 1:18:40
  when I was in Europe, I had no issue with transport.
• 1:18:42
  I didn't have a car. I had no issue getting from
• 1:18:45
  point A to point B. Everything was good. It was
• 1:18:48
  relatively cheap. It was relatively inexpensive.
• 1:18:49
  I can always get on a tram or subway or something
• 1:18:52
  like that, get anywhere pretty much in any city
• 1:18:55
  that I went to. You're independent. When you
• 1:18:58
  go partially blind, then driving becomes a difficult
• 1:19:01
  thing, because there's a section of sight
• 1:19:06
  that I just can't see, out of my left eye,
• 1:19:08
  where your sight is trying to reconcile the fact
• 1:19:11
  that there's a hole in it, but it doesn't exactly
• 1:19:14
  tell you there's a hole in it. And so you find
• 1:19:16
  out there's a hole in it when something falls
• 1:19:18
  into the hole. It's your brain is trying
• 1:19:20
  to reconcile the two things. It doesn't always
• 1:19:21
  do it. Sometimes it looks like you're looking
• 1:19:22
  out of two separate things, but oftentimes it's
• 1:19:25
  you're putting two together. It's giving
• 1:19:26
  you a complete world until you're walking and
• 1:19:28
  hit something. Okay, well, that becomes a difficult
• 1:19:30
  thing to do. So your eyes are kind of lying to
• 1:19:32
  you. Yes. Right. The reality is not exactly the
• 1:19:36
  way the reality is. It's biased in a particular
• 1:19:38
  way. And so what it means is when you're in the
• 1:19:40
  U.S., there's no trams. There's no subway. There's
• 1:19:45
  none of that stuff. Either you drive or you stay
• 1:19:47
  at home. It sucks. It sucks. Yeah, he's right.
• 1:19:52
  Europe is different. That's why we should build
• 1:19:54
  bases on the moon. Let's fix our house first.
• 1:19:57
  I know, right? I know. Remember, there was a
• 1:20:00
  plan for a moon tram, too. Right. It's,
• 1:20:04
  well, we obviously should be fixing bases on
• 1:20:06
  the moon. We'll have high-speed rail in outer
• 1:20:09
  space, just not here. Ryan, Big Tobacco used
• 1:20:14
  the money to target their biggest competitor,
• 1:20:17
  which was vaping. They were very successful in
• 1:20:20
  convincing Americans that vaping is dangerous
• 1:20:22
  or even more dangerous than smoking. Well,
• 1:20:25
  by the way, there are now people, this
• 1:20:27
  is true, who are taking up cigarettes, classic
• 1:20:31
  old-school cigarette smoking, in order to quit
• 1:20:34
  vaping. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's
• 1:20:37
  they fundamentally missed the point. You're
• 1:20:39
  supposed to stop, and go back to cigarettes. C.
• 1:20:45
  Kratz, long-time listener, new member. And thanks
• 1:20:48
  very much for the very generous $19.99 donations.
• 1:20:53
  In light of the recent botched execution in Tennessee,
• 1:20:56
  would you consider having a deeper discussion
• 1:20:58
  of the death penalty? I sent a guest recommendation
• 1:21:00
  to the podcast Gmail account. Thank you. Thank
• 1:21:04
  you for those recommendations. We'll reach out.
• 1:21:06
  I think we both really find the death penalty
• 1:21:10
  to be a fascinating conversation. Yeah, no, totally.
• 1:21:15
  I'd love to talk about it more, because there's
• 1:21:17
  a lot of layers to it. By the way, Krista Pike
• 1:21:21
  is still on a ventilator, still unconscious,
• 1:21:24
  after they tried to... After the jackasses in
• 1:21:29
  Tennessee tried to kill her last week. It's
• 1:21:32
  been now what, four or five nights that
• 1:21:34
  she's basically subsisting. I wouldn't be surprised
• 1:21:39
  if she ended up a vegetable and just
• 1:21:43
  stays unconscious for a long time. If she
• 1:21:45
  dies, it's what they wanted, which makes it that
• 1:21:49
  I don't... Dumb. I can't even find
• 1:21:53
  a sophisticated word for it. You try to kill
• 1:21:56
  a woman. It's so fucking stupid. And then you
• 1:21:59
  try to save her life with the idea of killing
• 1:22:03
  her later, because you don't want her to die like
• 1:22:06
  this. You want her to die in a way that you decide
• 1:22:08
  you want her to die. It's, okay, that's
• 1:22:10
  on the level. Yeah, this is the, we want
• 1:22:16
  you to die like this, not like that. Not like
• 1:22:19
  that. If she had tried to commit suicide,
• 1:22:24
  they would have stopped her. Yeah. Right? It
• 1:22:26
  would have saved her life, and they'd execute
• 1:22:28
  her days later. If she'd gone on hunger strike,
• 1:22:31
  they would have foie gras'd her and force-fed
• 1:22:34
  her. Yep. Think about that. That's pretty
• 1:22:36
  wild. No, no, no. It's crazy. If she had a heart
• 1:22:40
  attack two days before her scheduled execution
• 1:22:42
  date, they would have revived her. It's cartoonish.
• 1:22:46
  And it puts you in the mind of stuff that robots
• 1:22:48
  do, where you look at it and be like, oh, a human
• 1:22:49
  being would never do that. That's so dumb. And
• 1:22:51
  yet, here we are. It's so insanely stupid.
• 1:22:56
  At McDonald's, you say, I would like a cup filled
• 1:22:58
  with ice. And it's, but it only allows me
• 1:23:01
  to hit the button twice. And then there's, of
• 1:23:03
  course, the question of, okay, so let's
• 1:23:05
  just say, take those. Okay, let's just say they
• 1:23:09
  had succeeded in killing her. I'm just wondering
• 1:23:12
  what exactly the
• 1:23:17
  victim's family gets out of that. Okay, so in some
• 1:23:20
  kind of abstract... Well, okay, so someone kills your
• 1:23:25
  loved one. Okay, you hate them. Of course you do.
• 1:23:28
  That's normal. You want them dead. Also normal.
• 1:23:31
  But let's say... But it's an abstraction,
• 1:23:34
  right? You never see them. They're in some
• 1:23:38
  cell in a prison, not where you live. You'll never
• 1:23:42
  hear from them. They're not on TV.
• 1:23:45
  You're never... It's not, for example,
• 1:23:48
  Brett Kavanaugh don't exist. Brett Kavanaugh
• 1:23:51
  was accused by that lady of
• 1:23:56
  having sexually assaulted her in
• 1:23:58
  college. And she basically put... She didn't say
• 1:24:03
  anything until he was up for confirmation
• 1:24:07
  before, because it was kind of, he's going
• 1:24:09
  to be in the U.S. Supreme Court. I'm going to
• 1:24:11
  have to hear this and see this fucker all the
• 1:24:13
  time. That goes too far. It's one thing for him
• 1:24:16
  to be a federal judge. That's relatively
• 1:24:18
  obscure, but now I have to fucking deal
• 1:24:21
  with this guy being a national celebrity. So
• 1:24:23
  that's why she stepped forward. Christine Blasey
• 1:24:26
  Ford. Okay. This is kind of that.
• 1:24:30
  But this is, there's no world in which you're
• 1:24:33
  going to have to constantly be reminded that
• 1:24:34
  this bitch killed your loved one. You're
• 1:24:38
  not going to have to worry about that.
• 1:24:39
  She said she's locked away. She's gone. She's
• 1:24:42
  been thrown into a hole. She might as well be
• 1:24:44
  dead to the world. It's whether she's physically
• 1:24:47
  breathing or not. It's purely Schrödinger's
• 1:24:51
  cat, right? Does it matter? No, it does matter.
• 1:24:55
  Why? I know he exists. Why? So it's an abstraction.
• 1:24:59
  I could lie to you and say, oh, we killed her, and
• 1:25:02
  she's dead, and then now you feel better. Well,
• 1:25:06
  it's a lie. And you can lie to anybody about anything.
• 1:25:08
  But let's just say you don't know it's a lie.
• 1:25:09
  Let's just say I just tell you, oh, hey,
• 1:25:11
  it's the governor. You can lie to anybody about
• 1:25:14
  anything. It's Governor Lee. I'm saying something.
• 1:25:16
  You said about this person killed this person,
• 1:25:19
  and this other person now no longer exists. Me
• 1:25:22
  knowing that the person no longer exists matters
• 1:25:24
  to me. Now, you can say you can lie, but you
• 1:25:26
  can lie to anybody about anything. My point is,
• 1:25:29
  let's just say I was able to successfully lie,
• 1:25:32
  right? Philosophically and psychologically, you'd
• 1:25:35
  be just as happy as if you read them.
• 1:25:39
  It wouldn't matter to you. You'd be
• 1:25:42
  like, okay, good. Justice has been served. This
• 1:25:45
  woman is gone. Under that model, you can lie
• 1:25:48
  to anybody about anything. So maybe we should
• 1:25:50
  just lie to people and just keep them in prison
• 1:25:52
  and just lie and just say, oh, yeah, we killed
• 1:25:55
  him, and just leave him alive. Let's just pretend
• 1:25:57
  Donald Trump won the election. Let's just pretend,
• 1:25:59
  for example. Right. I guess my point
• 1:26:02
  is you can lie to anybody about anything. Yeah,
• 1:26:04
  but Donald Trump's on TV. And
• 1:26:06
  so you... My point
• 1:26:08
  is that you don't know. He's not a real person.
• 1:26:11
  Maybe it's just an animation. He's AI. Rejecting
• 1:26:15
  the thing. Yeah. Maybe he's AI. I'm
• 1:26:17
  pointing... You can lie to anybody with anything.
• 1:26:18
  We're not talking about lies. We're talking about
• 1:26:20
  real-world stuff in the sense of about a person
• 1:26:22
  being executed. But it's not real to you. It's
• 1:26:25
  not real to you. If someone is in prison,
• 1:26:28
  in a maximum-security prison for the rest of
• 1:26:30
  their life, they are effectively dead to you.
• 1:26:34
  No, they're not. They exist in a prison. It's
• 1:26:36
  not having to go to the 7-Eleven and you
• 1:26:39
  see that who killed your loved one
• 1:26:42
  enjoying a Slurpee, right? Does Austria exist? Does Britain
• 1:26:46
  exist? Does Australia exist? These things... Austria
• 1:26:48
  exists if you go. But if you never go, it
• 1:26:51
  doesn't. No, it still does. I'm not one of those
• 1:26:55
  people who believe because we don't see something
• 1:26:57
  that it doesn't. This idea that, well,
• 1:27:00
  I'm not in Australia, so Australia is not really
• 1:27:01
  there, but it appears when I go. It exists. Yeah,
• 1:27:04
  I've never been to Australia, but I believe Australia
• 1:27:06
  exists. All I'm saying is... But I'm saying
• 1:27:10
  it doesn't offend anyone. Because it exists.
• 1:27:12
  Are those real things? But the issue here is,
• 1:27:15
  yeah, but I'm just saying the point I'm trying
• 1:27:20
  to make here is that if a person,
• 1:27:23
  it shouldn't fucking matter to you as a
• 1:27:27
  survivor of a horrible crime whether this person
• 1:27:30
  is fucking dead or alive in their little
• 1:27:34
  hole. You're telling somebody what should matter
• 1:27:36
  to them after they're the victim of a horrible
• 1:27:37
  crime. If I'm sitting in the room where that
• 1:27:39
  person gets executed, I see that person die.
• 1:27:42
  That's real to me. I don't even think about my
• 1:27:45
  life. It should matter. Meaning you're saying
• 1:27:48
  it shouldn't matter. And I'm saying, who are
• 1:27:50
  you to tell somebody what should or shouldn't
• 1:27:52
  matter to them after they deal with a violent
• 1:27:53
  crime? If you kill my kid and you're now telling
• 1:27:55
  me that, well, it shouldn't really matter to
• 1:27:57
  you whether the person lives or not. Who are
• 1:28:00
  you to tell that person what's the matter with
• 1:28:03
  that? Well, you've never had feelings that later
• 1:28:04
  you assessed to be wrong? True. I have. That's
• 1:28:08
  everybody. That's just been a person. But you
• 1:28:11
  are saying that they are assessing it to be wrong.
• 1:28:14
  I'm assessing that this is something that they
• 1:28:18
  probably should be satisfied. We should teach
• 1:28:22
  people to be satisfied with life imprisonment
• 1:28:25
  in situations like this. Let me put it
• 1:28:28
  this way. Another way to look at it is if you
• 1:28:32
  were raised from babyhood to not know that death
• 1:28:36
  penalty was ever a thing, that nobody had ever
• 1:28:38
  done it, it was never an option, and that the
• 1:28:41
  most extreme penalty allowed under human law
• 1:28:44
  is and always has been life in prison without
• 1:28:47
  parole, then it wouldn't even occur to you,
• 1:28:50
  oh, but we could also kill people. Hell,
• 1:28:53
  I guess now we torture them too, right? The point
• 1:28:57
  is that it just wouldn't occur to you. You'd
• 1:29:00
  be, well, the maximum sentence is life in
• 1:29:03
  prison without parole. And if the person who
• 1:29:07
  killed your loved one got that, you would be
• 1:29:09
  satisfied, because you would be convinced they
• 1:29:11
  got the ultimate punishment. You don't know that.
• 1:29:15
  There are all sorts of things that people
• 1:29:17
  are taught that they go outside the bounds of
• 1:29:20
  in regards to believing what they could or can't
• 1:29:21
  necessarily do. People were told drugs
• 1:29:24
  are bad. So they use drugs. People were told killing
• 1:29:27
  is bad. People still kill. People were told rape
• 1:29:31
  is bad. In doctrine, heavily put, rape is a bad
• 1:29:34
  thing. People still rape. People do all sorts
• 1:29:36
  of things that go beyond the bounds of what they
• 1:29:38
  were effectively taught as human beings, because
• 1:29:39
  human beings have certain impulses, and one of
• 1:29:43
  which, you kill somebody in my family, I'm going
• 1:29:45
  to want you dead, and I'm going to be perfectly
• 1:29:46
  okay with you being dead. Look, I would agree
• 1:29:51
  with you, but that's sacrosanct. That doesn't
• 1:29:55
  ultimately mean anything. If you were raised
• 1:29:56
  in Japan as a samurai, you would think that this
• 1:29:59
  was the most normal thing in the world, and you
• 1:30:01
  would function around that with various degrees
• 1:30:03
  of going outside the boundaries one way or the
• 1:30:05
  other. In Afghanistan, stoning is acceptable.
• 1:30:08
  Exactly. Shameless self-plug. This Friday on
• 1:30:12
  the Bible study, Ted and I are going to be talking.
• 1:30:15
  I've been making the biblical case for the death
• 1:30:17
  penalty. So if there's something that interests
• 1:30:19
  you, you may want to tune in. Now, to be fair,
• 1:30:22
  I'm not making a case for the death penalty,
• 1:30:24
  because, again, I'm conflicted on it. I'm making
• 1:30:27
  the case of, I guess, for my own personal thing
• 1:30:28
  of, if you kill somebody, hell, if you kill my
• 1:30:30
  dog, I'm going to be okay with watching you get
• 1:30:35
  the match. Look, yeah, there's a certain
• 1:30:38
  newspaper publisher from Southern California
• 1:30:40
  who I would love to watch breathe his last. God,
• 1:30:45
  please, God, please, God. I will believe in you
• 1:30:50
  if you make that happen. All right, so.
• 1:30:54
  I got to be honest with you. The guy that raped me, I
• 1:30:56
  didn't really care what happened. I don't blame
• 1:30:59
  you. I don't care. I guess my point is, it's
• 1:31:03
  difficult to tell somebody you should feel this
• 1:31:06
  way about a person that victimized you. But our
• 1:31:10
  socialization teaches people how to feel about
• 1:31:13
  being victimized, right? For example...
• 1:31:16
  We're all taught if you're fired unfairly,
• 1:31:19
  just because, yeah, you didn't do anything wrong.
• 1:31:22
  You worked hard. But let's just say your president
• 1:31:25
  decided to pick on Russia and decided to have
• 1:31:27
  you fired. You're supposed to just sort of pick
• 1:31:30
  yourself up and not kill the fucker who did this
• 1:31:33
  to you. Right. You're
• 1:31:35
  supposed to just live with it. We all were. And then
• 1:31:38
  you're a victim, but you're supposed to just
• 1:31:40
  not do anything about it. If
• 1:31:42
  you are ripped off by a company, you're supposed
• 1:31:45
  to basically be, oh, that sucks. And maybe
• 1:31:48
  I'll take them to small claims, but probably
• 1:31:49
  not. I'm just saying, if we socialize people
• 1:31:52
  to say the maximum punishment for any crime is
• 1:31:55
  one year in prison, then we would all be satisfied
• 1:31:58
  with one year in prison. That's all I'm saying.
• 1:32:00
  It's socialization. I get that point, but you
• 1:32:03
  can make that argument about some of anything.
• 1:32:05
  Hey, if people were socialized not to
• 1:32:07
  be capitalists, if people were socialized to
• 1:32:09
  be more loving and kind, if people were socialized,
• 1:32:12
  that's... I believe that. That's what a subway
• 1:32:14
  and that'd be okay. There's all sorts of
• 1:32:17
  things that you could say if people were socialized
• 1:32:18
  for. I would argue, though, that a lot of this
• 1:32:20
  stuff and the reason why people act this way
• 1:32:21
  is because of a human nature and an impulse to
• 1:32:25
  defend the things that you care about. And when
• 1:32:27
  somebody takes away a life, something that has
• 1:32:30
  all the magnificent abilities associated with
• 1:32:32
  a life and the impact of that life on the people
• 1:32:34
  around them, it is the most natural thing in
• 1:32:36
  the world, meaning caveman philosophy on what
• 1:32:39
  the person did. I'm trying to say that you can
• 1:32:42
  socialize. That is a question. That's a psychological
• 1:32:45
  question, too. That may be fair, but it's what
• 1:32:48
  we do. And I get your point, but.
• 1:32:52
  Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of hard to talk about it.
• 1:32:54
  You shouldn't feel some way about it. I would
• 1:32:56
  happily rack up $5,000 in credit
• 1:32:58
  card debt, which is the worst kind of debt that
• 1:32:59
  there is, to go and watch the person
• 1:33:02
  who murdered my sister breathe his last breath.
• 1:33:04
  Yeah, that's pretty... That's pretty cheap, I think.
• 1:33:08
  But that's your point. It's hard. $5,000
• 1:33:13
  to have someone killed. I know, but can
• 1:33:15
  you really tell Robby you shouldn't feel that
• 1:33:16
  way about that? Because I think that argument
• 1:33:19
  is insane to me. I guess you... Let's just
• 1:33:22
  say if that person is... Where is that person
• 1:33:25
  in prison now? Yeah. That person was in prison.
• 1:33:29
  He was let on a technicality. He was in prison.
• 1:33:33
  He was in prison. He got let on a technicality.
• 1:33:37
  Robby, let's just say you could be assured that
• 1:33:40
  that person would, by God himself,
• 1:33:43
  that he was going to be in prison the rest of
• 1:33:46
  his life and was never going to leave. Yep. Would
• 1:33:50
  that be better than the current situation, right?
• 1:33:53
  Sure. Okay, but so would that satisfy you?
• 1:33:58
  What's the difference between that and
• 1:34:00
  knowing that he's dead? Because it comes
• 1:34:03
  down to a matter of justice and of restitution.
• 1:34:07
  He took every one of my sister's tomorrows from
• 1:34:11
  her in the most violent way that he could possibly
• 1:34:13
  do it. There is no repaying that except for the
• 1:34:18
  spilling of blood. Sorry. No, I understand that.
• 1:34:22
  And you can call me a Philistine, a barbarian,
• 1:34:24
  whatever it is. And not you specifically. Yeah,
• 1:34:28
  that's a good question. How did he get out? And
• 1:34:30
  he got out. So the technicality was that the
• 1:34:34
  signature that was done on the warrant was put
• 1:34:36
  on the wrong line. And he got out. He got out.
• 1:34:44
  Even under the thing that's postulated. Yeah,
• 1:34:47
  they couldn't even... Oh, so the
• 1:34:49
  evidence was tainted. Oh, for sure. And so
• 1:34:53
  my sister... No, my niece, she was there.
• 1:34:56
  She's five years old at the time. I was holding
• 1:35:01
  her, and she was crying, said, why can't my mama
• 1:35:03
  come home? Where's my mama? I want my mama to come
• 1:35:06
  home. And trying to explain to her, your mom, you're
• 1:35:09
  never going to see your mom again on
• 1:35:11
  this earth, is a hard thing. So until you've
• 1:35:15
  walked a mile in my shoes, please don't lecture
• 1:35:18
  me about the barbarity of the death penalty.
• 1:35:24
  Yeah. I've never said this guy doesn't deserve
• 1:35:26
  to die. Yeah. And again, if Robby killed him,
• 1:35:30
  I'd have no problem with it. I don't want vigilante
• 1:35:35
  justice. I'm more in favor of vigilante justice
• 1:35:39
  than societal justice, because we're not good
• 1:35:43
  at societal justice. Our society is not good
• 1:35:47
  at it. Well, I don't think of individualism either.
• 1:35:49
  And most things aren't perfect, right? So this
• 1:35:52
  is not me making an argument that I think the
• 1:35:54
  Justice Department is perfect at the thing that
• 1:35:57
  it does. But between the people of families going
• 1:36:04
  out trying to find the person who did the crime
• 1:36:06
  or enacting justice for the crime... Okay, well,
• 1:36:08
  there's still the faculty of discerning who actually
• 1:36:11
  did the particular crime. I don't want an innocent
• 1:36:13
  person being stoned to death. Well, for that
• 1:36:16
  matter, just ran a family without killing people.
• 1:36:18
  That's not what I want. If we need it
• 1:36:20
  as a state... Look, again, I'm dicey with
• 1:36:22
  the death penalty. And I know my argument that
• 1:36:26
  I'm making is convoluted, because it's saying
• 1:36:27
  two things at once. If it's me and my own, then
• 1:36:31
  yes, I'm for it. And so on some level, I'm stuck
• 1:36:35
  with this notion of being honest and saying I
• 1:36:37
  have to give grace to other people who are also
• 1:36:40
  for it when it's about them and their own, which
• 1:36:43
  kind of breaks this whole point of, okay,
• 1:36:45
  well, how will you be... The lefty lefties are usually
• 1:36:47
  against the death penalty. I don't think the state
• 1:36:49
  does this right. It's just that. So I don't
• 1:36:53
  know. Yeah. No. Well, and that's cool. All right, we
• 1:36:58
  got a couple more topics to hit, and then
• 1:37:00
  we're moving
• 1:37:04
  at a nice clip, but it would be we should do it
• 1:37:06
  instead of doing our usual... Sorry, go ahead. No,
• 1:37:09
  no, I just said it's 10:38. We're in Q&A. Yeah,
• 1:37:11
  yeah, yeah. All right. More Qs, more As. Let
• 1:37:14
  us know. All right. So a lady named Heather Zhang,
• 1:37:18
  she's a realtor from Irvine, California. That's
• 1:37:21
  in Southern California, was just arrested over
• 1:37:24
  the weekend by the FBI. She was about to board
• 1:37:27
  a flight from LAX to Shanghai. She's been arrested
• 1:37:31
  for spying for the Chinese government. But they
• 1:37:34
  only charged her under FARA, right, as an unregistered
• 1:37:38
  agent of a foreign government. So she and an
• 1:37:42
  accomplice, not her husband, who's also a realtor
• 1:37:46
  for the same firm, are accused of flying from
• 1:37:49
  L.A. to Seattle in September of last year and
• 1:37:53
  photographing the house of the son of the
• 1:37:58
  president of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te. That's literally
• 1:38:03
  it. I was, so if you take pictures of...
• 1:38:07
  So I don't understand. So if the Flock camera
• 1:38:09
  takes pictures of you, that's totally cool. And
• 1:38:13
  that's legal. If the NSA takes pictures of you
• 1:38:16
  through your TV or your laptop, that's cool.
• 1:38:20
  If the Google car drives by your
• 1:38:25
  house and takes a picture of your house, that's
• 1:38:28
  cool. But if I go to the house and take a picture,
• 1:38:34
  I'm a spy? No, well, yes, you'd be a French spy.
• 1:38:38
  The issue is that a Chinese person is taking
• 1:38:40
  pictures of things. Imagine, so any random
• 1:38:44
  Chinese person. Or I guess I could be a stalker
• 1:38:46
  as an American, yeah. It's just, wow. So any
• 1:38:49
  random Chinese person who takes a picture of
• 1:38:51
  something, okay, by definition, ends up being
• 1:38:53
  called a spy, especially if they're going back
• 1:38:56
  to China with the pictures that they took of
• 1:38:57
  things. So it's, oh, here's the Taiwan president's
• 1:39:00
  house. And they're, that person is obviously
• 1:39:02
  a spy because they're Chinese and they're taking
• 1:39:04
  a picture of the Taiwanese thing. So much for
• 1:39:06
  star maps in Hollywood, right? Yeah, it's just
• 1:39:09
  insane. The FARA, by the way, we've
• 1:39:12
  seen this. Marina Butina, if you remember. Oh,
• 1:39:15
  yeah. She was considered a sex spy. They said
• 1:39:17
  all sorts of things about, oh, she's a sex spy.
• 1:39:19
  She's a honeypot. She's this. She's that. They
• 1:39:22
  kept her in jail for months and come to find
• 1:39:25
  out the only thing to charge her under was FARA.
• 1:39:28
  Yeah. She sure was cute, though. She could have
• 1:39:32
  been a sex spy. She was very attractive. She
• 1:39:34
  was very attractive. It's a honeypot. It's,
• 1:39:37
  really? For who? But no, when she ends
• 1:39:40
  up going back to Russia and when she's telling
• 1:39:42
  the story, she's talking about basically being
• 1:39:44
  abused, which is what the U.S. government did
• 1:39:46
  to her. There was nothing behind this. There
• 1:39:49
  was nothing behind it. Are you telling
• 1:39:52
  me that China doesn't have better ways as opposed
• 1:39:54
  to taking a house of the Taiwanese president,
• 1:39:56
  as if people don't know what a house is? Yeah.
• 1:39:59
  You can go on Google Earth. I'd like to think
• 1:40:03
  it's a house above ground. And they don't think
• 1:40:07
  that somebody from China may be interested in
• 1:40:09
  taking a picture of the Taiwanese president's
• 1:40:11
  house just because it's the Taiwanese president's
• 1:40:13
  house, or whoever? Right. Exactly right. This
• 1:40:17
  is so... We cannot just lock people up randomly
• 1:40:21
  because we're at odds country-wise for stuff
• 1:40:26
  that apparently we can't, but we probably shouldn't.
• 1:40:28
  Yeah, that's outrageous. That's the only thing
• 1:40:32
  they have on her, just to be very clear. They
• 1:40:34
  didn't have microfiche, multiple passports, no
• 1:40:37
  multiple guns, no secret plastic
• 1:40:42
  gun, no Mission Impossible pulling her face off.
• 1:40:46
  She doesn't hang from the ceiling like Tom Cruise.
• 1:40:50
  She doesn't have variety skills, nothing like
• 1:40:52
  that. No, she doesn't have the skills of the
• 1:40:55
  mad skills of the Israeli plumber. Yeah, right,
• 1:41:00
  right. So the only thing they have from her is,
• 1:41:02
  well, she's obviously a spy because she took
• 1:41:05
  pictures of the Taiwanese president's house.
• 1:41:09
  Yeah. That's silly. I suspect they're going to
• 1:41:13
  drop these charges and kick her out of
• 1:41:16
  the country. What do you think? I don't know.
• 1:41:18
  Look at what they did with Butina.
• 1:41:21
  They kept her in prison for months.
• 1:41:23
  And I was about to say the chicken in Canada.
• 1:41:26
  They're going to try to shake her down for info.
• 1:41:28
  That's what they're going to do, right? They
• 1:41:31
  might, because this is very thin in regards
• 1:41:34
  to the arrest. Yeah. She took pictures. If I'm
• 1:41:38
  her, I only have one thing to say. Lawyer. Give
• 1:41:41
  me my lawyer. Lawyer. My fucking lawyer. That's
• 1:41:46
  it. She took pictures. She obviously is guilty.
• 1:41:50
  She took pictures. Right, okay, let's
• 1:41:54
  just say for the sake of argument, okay, we know
• 1:41:57
  that she... Let's just say that she drove, she
• 1:41:59
  went to Seattle, went straight to the Taiwanese
• 1:42:03
  president's son's house, took some pictures,
• 1:42:06
  didn't stop at the original Starbucks on Pike
• 1:42:10
  Street, didn't go see the Space Needle, didn't
• 1:42:13
  go to the rainforest,
• 1:42:17
  didn't even go to
• 1:42:21
  some of the great bookstores
• 1:42:23
  in the Pacific Northwest, just turned around and
• 1:42:26
  went back home. Yeah. I don't know what that
• 1:42:29
  proves, really. She took
• 1:42:34
  pictures. Yeah. And we live in this espionage,
• 1:42:38
  in this incredible surveillance state where
• 1:42:42
  that same guy, photos of his house,
• 1:42:45
  are on Zillow. They're everywhere. She's guilty
• 1:42:49
  of driving while Chinese. That's a crime.
• 1:42:52
  Honestly. Agreed. Yeah. Let's say for
• 1:42:55
  the moment she was a spy. Let's say, let's literally
• 1:42:58
  say she was a spy. She got money from the Chinese
• 1:43:00
  government to spy. Wasn't it a selfie that she
• 1:43:02
  took? She didn't have anything on her. Wasn't
• 1:43:04
  it a selfie? Exactly. Even under the worst-case
• 1:43:07
  scenario, you can know she's a spy, but you can't
• 1:43:10
  prove it. How do you prove it? The only thing
• 1:43:13
  you got is a person came to the country, took
• 1:43:14
  pictures of the Taiwan son's house. And by the
• 1:43:17
  way, she may be interested in it just because
• 1:43:19
  she's Chinese and they're at odds with Taiwan.
• 1:43:21
  It may just be a tourist. It's true.
• 1:43:25
  Having had Taiwanese in-laws, they have weird
• 1:43:29
  things. My in-laws, every time
• 1:43:32
  they visited a city that they hadn't
• 1:43:35
  been to before, they'd always want to visit
• 1:43:37
  the college campus nearby and walk around. They
• 1:43:41
  weren't spies. They just liked... They had a thing
• 1:43:43
  about... Asians have a thing about college campuses,
• 1:43:45
  or some Asians do. And they would
• 1:43:48
  literally be just, oh, that's cool. So
• 1:43:50
  they went to Hawaii, and they went to the University
• 1:43:52
  of Hawaii. I'm, you walked around a college
• 1:43:56
  campus? Go to the beach. I don't care about the
• 1:43:59
  college campus, but yeah. Shit like that.
• 1:44:02
  When I went to Japan, there's a famous statue
• 1:44:05
  of a dog in Japan. And it's a famous statue
• 1:44:11
  of a dog. You went all the way... You were
• 1:44:13
  walking all the way around trying to find this
• 1:44:15
  thing. And then you find it. It's in the middle
• 1:44:16
  of a little park with everybody else hanging
• 1:44:17
  around as if it's nothing. And yet, it took the
• 1:44:21
  trip to do it. And what are they going to say?
• 1:44:22
  He's obviously an American spy. He took a picture
• 1:44:25
  of that dog. He's working for Clovis, the cat.
• 1:44:27
  He's spying on that dog. He's spying on his dog.
• 1:44:30
  He's with Big Dad. Dude, no. I just wanted to
• 1:44:33
  see the thing. Right. People will go see stuff.
• 1:44:37
  This is so silly. She has so much plausible
• 1:44:40
  deniability here. Easy. Easy. Easy. I can't see
• 1:44:45
  any court keeping her. But again, I couldn't
• 1:44:46
  see any court keeping Butina. What's her name?
• 1:44:49
  Well, and ultimately she left,
• 1:44:52
  right? Let's see. Okay, we have... Peter
• 1:44:56
  Ive, thanks for the $2. Funny how we all remember
• 1:44:59
  Marina Butina. She was memorable, especially
• 1:45:02
  if you were a heterosexual male or a homosexual
• 1:45:06
  female. Mr. Ali says Taiwan is part of China.
• 1:45:12
  It is not China versus Taiwan. It is the mainland
• 1:45:15
  versus Taiwan. That's certainly the official
• 1:45:17
  stance of the U.S. State Department, even though
• 1:45:20
  they don't want to admit it. They don't act like
• 1:45:23
  it. No. Dead Man, Dead Meme Club, thanks
• 1:45:28
  for the $10. What is each of y'all's
• 1:45:30
  top three movies? Oh, that's so hard, and this changes.
• 1:45:36
  I can't answer that. I can tell you
• 1:45:41
  movies that I like, but my top three is kind of
• 1:45:43
  hard. Contact was really good, even though I
• 1:45:47
  can't put it in the top three, I don't think.
• 1:45:49
  The Jim Carrey thing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That's
• 1:45:57
  one of my favorites. Scott Pilgrim is a guilty
• 1:46:00
  pleasure. I can't put it in a top three. Oh,
• 1:46:02
  Tenet. Tenet goes in my top three. Easy. And
• 1:46:06
  Estella was also really good. And Robby? My
• 1:46:12
  top three, it's going to be tough. I'm going
• 1:46:13
  to have to go with JT on this, but I do have
• 1:46:15
  a list, though. For number one, I'm probably
• 1:46:18
  going to go with The Ten Commandments, the old
• 1:46:20
  classic with Charlton Heston. That's just awesome.
• 1:46:24
  Yeah, so good. Cast of thousands. Yeah, yeah. Very,
• 1:46:29
  very good. Most religious movies are really cheesy.
• 1:46:31
  That one was not. Incredible. Not really Spartacus.
• 1:46:36
  That's not really religious, but yeah. Spartacus
• 1:46:40
  is okay. I think that it's hard for
• 1:46:43
  movies to really capture what he did. You're going...
• 1:46:47
  You just want to get a... You get a better read
• 1:46:49
  of Spartacus out of a book. It's a pretty good
• 1:46:53
  movie, though. Yeah, no, it is, but it's not my top
• 1:46:55
  three. Number two would probably be Gods and
• 1:47:00
  Generals. It's a monster, three
• 1:47:03
  and a half hours long, and it just
• 1:47:06
  covers the career of Stonewall Jackson
• 1:47:09
  from the beginning of the war till his death.
• 1:47:11
  Incredibly well done, and there's no
• 1:47:15
  bend to it. It was an honest telling of his
• 1:47:18
  life and his personality. So anyone's really
• 1:47:21
  interested in the War Between the States, he's
• 1:47:24
  going to go to. And I think probably because my
• 1:47:26
  grandfather's granddad actually served
• 1:47:29
  under Jackson, so there's a family connection
• 1:47:31
  there. He was in the First Brigade of Virginia.
• 1:47:34
  And for number three, probably Outlaw
• 1:47:40
  Josey Wales. Good movie. No, the scene
• 1:47:45
  with Josey Wales and Ten Bears, when it's, I came here to live with you. I
• 1:47:49
  came here to die with you. That's what humanity
• 1:47:52
  needs more of. No papers. No more of this fancy
• 1:47:57
  saying from politicians and lawyers just trying
• 1:48:02
  to screw you, but just men understanding they
• 1:48:06
  have the power of life and death in their hands
• 1:48:07
  and just deciding to live together. That matters.
• 1:48:11
  That has been my list. Jamie Foxx was fantastic.
• 1:48:16
  So I have to go with Ace in the Hole, also known
• 1:48:21
  as The Big Carnival, the Billy Wilder film, widely
• 1:48:25
  viewed as the most cynical film ever made, and
• 1:48:27
  it's about journalism, corrupted journalism.
• 1:48:29
  Always a favorite. I've seen it more times than
• 1:48:31
  I can count. Repo Man, because it's so punk rock.
• 1:48:36
  The soundtrack is great. Oh, the soundtrack is
• 1:48:39
  amazing. When he's always killing people.
• 1:48:41
  Oh, it's so good. It's so good. Burn My Shadow.
• 1:48:44
  Yeah, oh, it's so good. And I would say also...
• 1:48:50
  I'd be remiss not doing a Verhoeven movie, but
• 1:48:53
  I'm probably not going to do one of the sci-fi
• 1:48:55
  trilogy, although I do love those. I'm going
• 1:48:58
  to say Black Book, the Paul Verhoeven movie that
• 1:49:02
  inverts the sort of World War II resistance narrative,
• 1:49:06
  and it's based on a true story, and it's astonishing.
• 1:49:11
  And it's also... It has all the things you look
• 1:49:14
  for from Verhoeven. It has great sex. It has
• 1:49:18
  strong women characters. I
• 1:49:21
  could go on, but yeah, very cool. Okay, wait,
• 1:49:26
  wait, there's a chess one. What am I missing? The
• 1:49:29
  one with the kid on the cover with... Oh, I know
• 1:49:34
  what you're talking about. Yeah, that movie is
• 1:49:37
  breathtaking for chess players. For chess
• 1:49:39
  players, they would sit there and just cry watching.
• 1:49:41
  Oh, are you thinking of Searching for
• 1:49:43
  Bobby Fischer? Searching for Bobby Fischer. Yes, that
• 1:49:46
  movie is so good. Queen's Gambit is really good
• 1:49:51
  too, but that movie is... That's a special place
• 1:49:53
  in chess players' hearts. It's just so good.
• 1:49:55
  I grew up with the Black character
• 1:49:58
  that is teaching the kid. I had people like that
• 1:50:00
  at the barbershop. So AI is suggesting also other
• 1:50:05
  chess movies. Queen of Katwe, which I've never
• 1:50:09
  heard of. I've never heard of that one. It's
• 1:50:12
  Disney. 2016 tells the true story of Phiona Mutesi,
• 1:50:16
  a young girl rising from the slums of Uganda
• 1:50:18
  to international chess success. And how about
• 1:50:21
  Pawn Sacrifice with Tobey Maguire? No. He plays
• 1:50:26
  Bobby Fischer. If I had to suggest, Searching
• 1:50:29
  for Bobby Fischer and Queen's Gambit are two
• 1:50:31
  of the best. And there's Dark Horse. Queen's
• 1:50:34
  Gambit is a miniseries. Dark Horse is from 2014.
• 1:50:37
  Apparently there were a bunch of films around
• 1:50:39
  2014, 2016 about chess. Yeah. Yeah. Queen's Gambit,
• 1:50:44
  I deeply recommend. Magnus, also 2016. The woman
• 1:50:50
  who's in it is Georgian, not American. It's a
• 1:50:53
  real story. It's kind of a real story.
• 1:50:55
  They made her an alcoholic and everything
• 1:50:56
  else, and I don't know how much of an alcoholic
• 1:50:58
  she was. But either way, she was gorgeous. Amazing
• 1:51:01
  player. And yeah, Queen's Gambit was damn good.
• 1:51:04
  But Searching for Bobby Fischer, oh, that's the movie.
• 1:51:06
  It's just the chess in the park, the
• 1:51:11
  playing as a kid. It's funny that there could be so
• 1:51:13
  many movies about chess, because it's
• 1:51:15
  not really inherently that interesting. It's
• 1:51:19
  not a visual thing for a movie.
• 1:51:22
  Yeah, it depends. For example,
• 1:51:26
  I used to play chess on my own online, and
• 1:51:29
  there would be a thousand people watching
• 1:51:31
  the video, and I'll be, why are you people
• 1:51:33
  here? Well, that's all the people who gather
• 1:51:35
  to watch video games, right? I never... Maybe
• 1:51:38
  you guys can... You and Robby can explain this.
• 1:51:40
  There's stadiums full of people watching
• 1:51:42
  people play video games. I'm, I can't think
• 1:51:46
  of anything more boring than watching someone
• 1:51:48
  else play a game. Yeah. But I guess we
• 1:51:51
  watch people play football. Yeah. I find that
• 1:51:54
  boring too. I actually like football. Usually
• 1:51:58
  I don't watch it, unless somebody is around
• 1:52:01
  the house. I think football is such a boring
• 1:52:03
  game. I don't think so. There's hardly
• 1:52:07
  any play, right? It's literally six
• 1:52:10
  seconds of play, then 54 seconds of walking around.
• 1:52:14
  It's war. Six seconds of play. Yeah, it's war.
• 1:52:17
  And to be honest, I think what it is... It's World
• 1:52:19
  War I. I think it's the unpredictability of it.
• 1:52:22
  You're gambling of sorts. You want somebody
• 1:52:25
  to win, but you don't know the outcome of it.
• 1:52:27
  It's not tailor-made. It's not process of law.
• 1:52:30
  It's men being men, doing manly things with a
• 1:52:34
  pigskin, and scrambling their brains in the process.
• 1:52:40
  True. But men being men. Men are barbarians.
• 1:52:46
  Men are barbarians. They need women around, because
• 1:52:49
  otherwise they would have killed each other
• 1:52:51
  off. That's a fact. Okay, so we
• 1:52:55
  got to talk before we close out here. And just
• 1:52:59
  a reminder, we are going to 11 o'clock. We got
• 1:53:01
  six minutes left. So, according to
• 1:53:06
  the UAE, they did turn over the passenger
• 1:53:11
  and crew manifest for the FlyDubai flight over
• 1:53:14
  to the Israelis, which prompts the question:
• 1:53:20
  What happened here? So the Omani pilot is a citizen
• 1:53:23
  of... A co-pilot is a citizen of a country that
• 1:53:27
  doesn't have diplomatic relations with Israel
• 1:53:29
  and therefore is not authorized to fly into Israel.
• 1:53:34
  Benjamin Netanyahu, asked about this, said, oh,
• 1:53:37
  he must have gotten in through a loophole, without
• 1:53:42
  explaining what that means. So much of this story
• 1:53:47
  has just not really passed the smell test. Look,
• 1:53:51
  I don't purport to know what really happened.
• 1:53:53
  Clearly something happened. But the details
• 1:53:56
  of it... The Israeli plumber,
• 1:54:03
  I don't know if you saw the Iranian Lego movie
• 1:54:05
  about this, but it's so great. And there's a
• 1:54:09
  song also. There's another one, another Iranian
• 1:54:11
  one, where it's, he learned how to fly from
• 1:54:17
  television. It's, so we literally are being
• 1:54:25
  told that an Israeli plumber who has never flown
• 1:54:28
  any kind of plane ever, even in a simulator,
• 1:54:31
  was able to slow the nosedive and level out the
• 1:54:38
  plane from a collapse of over, in under 30
• 1:54:42
  seconds, of 34, from 34,000 to 17,000 feet of altitude,
• 1:54:47
  that the plane was not torn apart by, which,
• 1:54:51
  according to the experts, ought to have happened.
• 1:54:54
  The plane was not really... The passengers were
• 1:54:56
  not in terrible shape at all. They should have
• 1:54:59
  been if all this went down the way that they
• 1:55:01
  said it went down. The story about the Russian
• 1:55:04
  and the Ukrainian pilots who were aboard kumbayaing
• 1:55:07
  and then bringing in the plane for a landing,
• 1:55:09
  that turns out not to be true. It was only one
• 1:55:11
  pilot. We don't know if either of them was Russian
• 1:55:13
  or Ukrainian. Some other dude. So the stories
• 1:55:17
  keep changing here. I'm, why do these stories
• 1:55:19
  keep changing? When this happened,
• 1:55:22
  the plane landed, all the people on board are
• 1:55:26
  interviewed. There should have been pretty easy
• 1:55:28
  to put the story together pretty quickly. So
• 1:55:31
  that's my question to you, Jamarl. Why does this
• 1:55:34
  story keep changing so much? Because it's obviously
• 1:55:38
  not true. It didn't happen. It's a myth. It's
• 1:55:44
  a poorly put together propaganda film. It's a
• 1:55:47
  lie. I believe that there was an attack in the
• 1:55:52
  cockpit. I believe that. But maybe that didn't
• 1:55:55
  happen either. Maybe that's a lie too. Or knife.
• 1:55:57
  Which one was it? Yeah, it was the... They said
• 1:56:00
  it was the rescue axe. Apparently they keep...
• 1:56:04
  There's that device that people
• 1:56:05
  have in their cars to break their window in case
• 1:56:07
  they get Chappaquiddicked and they need to break
• 1:56:09
  the window. So they have something like that
• 1:56:11
  in the cockpit. They have a little axe, and
• 1:56:14
  in case of emergency, let's say there's a...
• 1:56:17
  It's called a crash axe, and apparently you can
• 1:56:20
  use that to break out through the window in case
• 1:56:22
  of a crash, or hacker. So they say,
• 1:56:25
  yeah. I suspect it's there. I guess... Look, I
• 1:56:31
  guess the interesting question to me is, if
• 1:56:34
  this is fake, what's the point? What are they trying
• 1:56:36
  to accomplish? Is it trying to get this sense
• 1:56:38
  that, hey, every Israeli plumber can land a plane?
• 1:56:42
  Look how great Israel is. They helped land a
• 1:56:44
  plane. I think it's look how great Israel is.
• 1:56:46
  It doesn't shed any light on Israel. It doesn't
• 1:56:50
  get them off the hook for Gaza. You committed
• 1:56:54
  a genocide, but since he landed a plane, that's
• 1:56:56
  okay. You saved a bunch of your own people. The
• 1:57:00
  point is that this pilot, who is an ally of Iran,
• 1:57:07
  was going to murder all these Jews, that Iran
• 1:57:10
  is a terrorist regime, and that, dear Americans,
• 1:57:12
  just because your country is falling apart, you
• 1:57:14
  can't afford to live, you better get in line
• 1:57:16
  and support this war, because Netanyahu needs
• 1:57:19
  you. That's what this is all about. This is what
• 1:57:22
  landing a plane was trying to imply to everybody.
• 1:57:25
  Of course. I think something happened. Netanyahu
• 1:57:30
  came out and said it. He's acting. He's asking
• 1:57:38
  a lot from some random... It's also just... I think it's sort of the Reichstag fire.
• 1:57:43
  The Nazis didn't set it. It was set by... It really
• 1:57:46
  was set by a Dutch anarchist, but they exploited
• 1:57:49
  it. I think that's what happens in
• 1:57:51
  these situations. There's far fewer false-
• 1:57:54
  flag attacks than there are false spins of real
• 1:57:59
  events. That happens a lot. Yeah,
• 1:58:06
  it's just, yeah, here we go.
• 1:58:10
  Yeah, the story sounds very nice. And I, yeah,
• 1:58:15
  I don't know. It sounds nice. And Armando Raque
• 1:58:17
  says, FlyDubai manifest includes, among others,
• 1:58:19
  Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, among
• 1:58:22
  others. It's people sitting in the back
• 1:58:28
  of the plane. It's, wow, really? Okay. Yeah,
• 1:58:31
  yeah. No, it's, yeah, it's just,
• 1:58:35
  yeah. I don't know. I suppose
• 1:58:37
  this all could be. Look, I'll tell you the part.
• 1:58:40
  I just don't believe that. I don't think that
• 1:58:42
  there was that much of a dramatic drop in altitude.
• 1:58:44
  There couldn't have been. Probably three-
• 1:58:49
  quarters of the passengers would have had to
• 1:58:51
  have been hospitalized. There would have
• 1:58:55
  been people. People would have died. A small
• 1:58:58
  drop is dramatic, the way you feel it. It's
• 1:59:00
  stuff falls out. Just a small drop.
• 1:59:03
  I was in a drop, I said.
• 1:59:07
  It was about 7,000 feet, and that was
• 1:59:11
  a third. And
• 1:59:15
  it was dramatic. People almost died.
• 1:59:19
  There's a lot... People were banged
• 1:59:21
  around. People went all the way to the ceiling.
• 1:59:22
  There's no talk about that, anyone went to
• 1:59:26
  the ceiling. No talk. Really? Who
• 1:59:30
  slammed on the roof? Yeah, if you get banged,
• 1:59:33
  if people get banged around on the... Even
• 1:59:35
  if you yourself were buckled up and nothing much
• 1:59:38
  happened to you, you're very shaken. And then
• 1:59:41
  you've got a... And it's a hot mess inside the
• 1:59:44
  cabin, right? How are you going to
• 1:59:47
  be able to get around with luggage in the aisles,
• 1:59:51
  people in the aisles, all sorts of shit all over
• 1:59:53
  the place, people screaming and carrying on?
• 1:59:55
  You're not going to be able to walk through the
• 1:59:58
  aisle up to the... It just doesn't make
• 2:00:00
  sense. I'm very skeptical of the story. That's
• 2:00:03
  all. Everyone sane is. And also, it's also strange
• 2:00:08
  that there's cell phone footage. Who has the
• 2:00:11
  presence of mind to show their cell phone, to
• 2:00:13
  keep their cell phone up while the plane's crashing?
• 2:00:16
  Right. The plane is dropping. They're a rocket. I know. I know millennials
• 2:00:21
  and Zoomers, they live on their phones, but Jesus.
• 2:00:24
  No, I believe a lot. And by the way, even CNN
• 2:00:29
  was skeptical. CNN was... My last act will
• 2:00:31
  be to trend on Instagram. I will do it. What's
• 2:00:35
  on Instagram? My last act will be to trend on
• 2:00:38
  Instagram. The last thing I do, I'm on more oil.
• 2:00:42
  The plane is falling. It doesn't matter. It doesn't
• 2:00:45
  matter that there's no cell phone service. It doesn't
• 2:00:47
  matter that everything's just falling
• 2:00:49
  apart. There's people flying all over this hollow
• 2:00:51
  aluminum tube. I'm going to get this video out
• 2:00:55
  to the world. That's what really matters. Just
• 2:00:58
  a passport that doesn't burn, the cell phone
• 2:01:00
  will survive. Yep. Thanks to an Israeli plumber.
• 2:01:03
  The passport was far more credible than this.
• 2:01:05
  Couldn't they have at least found an
• 2:01:08
  Italian plumber named Mario, so have it counterpoint
• 2:01:11
  to Luigi? Well, the Iran Lego video, they make
• 2:01:15
  him look like Mario. Oh, do they? It's so funny.
• 2:01:21
  It's one of the best ones, and I love all of
• 2:01:23
  them, but yeah. Anyway, I guess that does it
• 2:01:26
  for today. Thanks to Blake for the $5 donation.
• 2:01:31
  Sorry. Yeah, let's see what it is. Give us the
• 2:01:36
  show of these. Here we go. This is another request
• 2:01:41
  for my man boobs. We are now $5 closer to your
• 2:01:45
  goal. Keep it coming. Keep it coming. We need
• 2:01:48
  a tally. We need an official tally. We need an
• 2:01:51
  official tally. Yeah, right, right. Titty watch.
• 2:01:59
  Yeah, man. Yeah, Ted titty watch. We need Ted
• 2:02:03
  titty. What's a word that starts with T that
• 2:02:06
  rhymes, that means watch? Ted T telemetry.
• 2:02:14
  Telemetry. TD Telemetry, right. Just rolls off
• 2:02:17
  the tongue. All right. Thanks, everyone, for
• 2:02:20
  joining us. This is DeProgram with Ted Rall.
• 2:02:23
  Jamarl Thomas signing out for today. We'll be
• 2:02:25
  back tomorrow at 9 a.m. Eastern time until 10
• 2:02:28
  a.m. Eastern time. If you're watching us later
• 2:02:31
  on streaming, appreciate you. Or if you're listening,
• 2:02:34
  thank you as well. And TMI will be back tomorrow
• 2:02:37
  at 10 a.m. Eastern. All right. Ciao. Bye, Jamarl.
• 2:02:41
  Have a good one, guys. Have a good one.