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Aug. 16, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:28:31

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #459

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 16th of August 2021.
	This is podcast number 459, which I never thought I'd be saying, but that's gone quite a long way.
	So, what are we going to be talking about today?
	We're going to be talking about...
	Donald Trump being threatened with the death penalty, what China doesn't want you to know, and state-induced droughts.
	And of course, I'm joined by Connor.
	Hello.
	And I'm Josh.
	So, tell me about the death penalty for Donald Trump then.
	Well, tensions have escalated continually in the United States.
	We've had Tucker Carlson calling for calm on Fox News the other night, but it doesn't seem that the deep state are willing to acquiesce, and we've now gotten to the point where a former CIA director has called for Donald Trump to take a big seat in old Sparky.
	Yeah, utterly ridiculous.
	Speaking of the Great Orange Hope, we have a video on lotuseaters.com from our very own Carl, who has said why Donald Trump should be the nominee for 2024.
	If you go to the website and subscribe, you'll be able to watch this.
	Obviously, we over at the Lotus Eaters appreciate what Ron DeSantis does, for example.
	There are other great contenders who are throwing their hat in the ring, like Larry Elder at CPAC a little while ago.
	But even though he was the man that set me on my red pill journey, it has to be Trump just for pure memetic synthesis.
	As Carl says in the thumbnail here, complete the story up.
	I mean, that is very true, that you can't leave this unresolved, that the state has basically persecuted Donald Trump, made him out to be this fascist dictator that's a danger to everyone who he comes into contact with, when we know that that's not true.
	Yeah, their illegitimate judicial overreach is making him look like the president in exile, and so he needs to ride back in on a golden horse.
	Speaking of illegitimate judicial overreach...
	So, last week's coverage on the podcast, just to give you a crash course on that, you can go and see all the sources.
	All that happened was the FBI broke the lock on the door for the confidential documents boxes at Mar-a-Lago, which they themselves placed there.
	They asked the Trump family to turn off all the security cameras, face the wall...
	The Washington Post claimed that Trump was holding nuclear documents, even though the nuclear codes get changed, implying that he was going to sell them overseas or post them on truth or something.
	And then Merrick Garland confirmed he had personally authorized the raid, which was signed off of, of course, by a judge who was formally prosecuting Epstein, then quit and switched sides to then defend Jeffrey Epstein, also Obama and Jeb Bush donor.
	So just some interesting stuff, yeah.
	So the updates that we have, that we're covering today.
	So Trump claims that his passports were confiscated during the FBI raid.
	What rationale is provided for that?
	Because you'd think that that's just a petty inconvenience to get on his nerves.
	Well, two were expired, but one is his active diplomatic passport.
	So I would assume that hobbles his ability to engage in overseas dealings or escape the country if they were to, if they were to try and properly persecute him.
	So does that essentially function as a means of him getting out of the country, say they revoke his regular passport for some reason?
	I would assume so, because otherwise, as you said, it would sound very arbitrary.
	Now, there was a CBS News anchor called Nora O'Donnell, and she ran interference with the FBI, saying that they had, oh, we had no passports in our possession whatsoever.
	But then there was an email, if you scroll up, Michael, that From the National Security Division's Jay Brat, corroborating Trump's claim they took the passports, saying that they are in possession of two expired and one active diplomatic passport.
	So the FBI clearly took it, and the news media have not caught up with their recent MPC programming, so they haven't changed their script yet.
	At least they're too incompetent to get away with lying.
	that's something oh they're definitely trying to be very opaque and their opaqueness does mean that even trump's more reasonable critics shall we say i mean we had francis foster in last week who thinks he's very divisive i think he's more the coroner than than the gunman to the american republic but even they can say right by by the pure overreach and opaqueness of the investigation you can't stand with the democrats at this point even if you're a bit tepid on trump on either sides of the aisle um
	I'm very much not, and I think that this is a catalyst for hopefully waking people up to the fact that his presidency was...
	Well, this seems like the Russiagate stuff, doesn't it, all over again, in that they're trying to push a story which they simply don't have the evidence for, and then once the damage is done, all of the evidence is going to come out and say, yes, this is all...
	A fabricated thing that damaged the reputation of Donald Trump.
	And I hope that this time around there are actual repercussions for this kind of nonsense.
	So I'm just going to read a quote here.
	The Justice Department noted in a filing with a US District Court that the search warrant and a receipt for items seized from the Mar-a-Lago have already been made public.
	The department said there remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security.
	It said the government had a compelling, overriding interest in preserving the integrity of an ongoing criminal investigation.
	A.K.A. We just want to keep this under wraps.
	Not excellent.
	So, then there were some procedural failures by the FBI, which Fox News reported on.
	Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News on Saturday that a set of documents, all seen on the final page of the FBI's property receipt, contained information covered by attorney-client privilege.
	The FBI seized these reports from Trump's Palm Beach home during its unprecedented Monday morning raid.
	The former president is disputing the classification, saying the records have been declassified.
	Trump's team asked the Justice Department for their position on whether or not they would support a third-party independent special master to review those records.
	Sources told Fox News that the DOJ had notified Trump's team that they would oppose this request, and the Department of Justice declined to comment.
	And the FBI as well.
	So again, to use the old Patriot Act phrase, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
	Well then, why are the DOJ and the FBI being so opaque on their persecution of the former president?
	The warrant and property receipt were unveiled on Friday afternoon.
	But the Justice Department are sort of kicking and dragging their heels on this if we go to the next one.
	The Department of Justice was ordered on Wednesday to respond to motions to unseal the warrant using the FBI's raid of Donald Trump's home.
	Eric Trump said in an interview with DailyMail.com that the FBI did not hand over a copy of the warrant to the lawyer on the Florida property at the time of the raid.
	So this is a kind of equivalent of not reading your Miranda rights if you're arrested.
	Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the one connected to Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly signed and approved the unprecedented search, said the DOJ must file by Monday a response to motions to unseal the document from the Albany Times Union and Conservative Group Judicial Watch.
	So, we've got people from non-profits getting on the side of this and trying to make this a little bit more transparent than it actually is.
	Appointed to his current position in 2018, Reinhart had recused himself in June from a lawsuit between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
	Interesting.
	I wonder if that's to do with Epstein's flight logs.
	So, as you brought it up, these things are all interrelated.
	And it seems like the Democrats, even though they know that they're not going to face any reputational damage from this that has any lasting effect on the ballot boxes, particularly because things are often fortified in their favour, it's likely that they're thinking, okay, if we can character assassinate our opposition in the press, we can kneecap his potential third campaign, and then we also have the Clinton lawyer having a mask-off moment saying, okay, There's a particular part of this 2017 statute that means that if Trump is prosecuted, he can't run for office again.
	We're hoping to get him hooked on that.
	So it's just a political assassination effort.
	So we've got a little bit of Republican backlash.
	There's actually a bipartisan request for information on the search, because obviously it wasn't handed over at the time.
	Well, yeah, it's an inherently political act, isn't it?
	The FBI are clearly acting on behest of the Democrats, and it seems to me entirely evident, particularly with the background of the Hunter Biden laptop stuff, That people within the FBI were actually deliberately suppressing information to help the Democrats in an election.
	The fact there hasn't been a purge of the FBI to clear these clearly partisan people out of there seems to suggest that the Democrats are happy with the status quo and they're willing to use the FBI to their own advantage as demonstrated here.
	Well, the FBI was originally meant to be a temporary institution, but it seems that the Democrats, almost like Stalin's party, this was written about by George Frosh Kennan in Sources of Soviet Conduct, his sort of assessment during the Cold War, that you had to redefine perpetual enemies in order to justify holding onto the organs of state power and increasing their size and scope.
	And the Democrats, in order to expand the IRS, etc., well, of course, income tax was originally a temporary measure too, to expand the powers and the reach of the FBI to ensure that they can remove their opposition to their political profiteering and their sort of uniparty running of the country.
	They've had to re-identify new enemies despite the very flimsy grounds on which they were charged.
	I mean, we remember Roger Stone.
	Peter Navarro was arrested on the tarmac, put in leg shackles, strip searched.
	Meanwhile, you've got the Hunter Biden laptop story, where the tolerance only flows in one's direction, of course.
	You've got multiple intelligence officials signing a document ahead of the 2020 election saying it's Russian disinformation.
	with zero foundation for that belief.
	It was just an outright lie.
	And they knew it was a lie so they could get their guy in power.
	But it's 100% right that the justification for all of these actions or the rationale behind them, should I say, is that they want to justify their power.
	And it seems self-evident in their actions And I think the best way to actually understand politics in general is look at actions and then trace it backwards rather than listening to what people have to say because you can't really take people at face value.
	But with the Democrats' actions, well, everything indicates exactly what you're saying here.
	So just a really tiny bit from this.
	Marco Rubio from Florida, Trump's former opponent in the 2016 campaign, so it's nice to see at least a little bit of integrity from some of the Republicans.
	And Mark Warner, Democrat, again, very rare you see some integrity from the Democrats, sent a private letter on Sunday to the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the dwarf that he is, Regarding the FBI's search of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago home last week.
	So Rubio's office told Axios this.
	So we're just waiting to hear back from what amounts to this bipartisan effort to get the transparency on this matter.
	So all of this sounds fairly reasonable in terms of the processes that are trying to repeal this level of opaqueness.
	And then suddenly an NBC News contributor wades in, alleging that Donald Trump has sold nuclear secrets to Russia.
	Ugh.
	Really?
	Yes, the place that Trump literally threatened to nuke off the map if they stepped out of line, he's going to be selling the nuclear codes to them.
	I mean, this is just an obvious example of them ramping up the narrative, so trying to sell a bigger lie so the small lie looks better, doesn't it?
	Yeah.
	It's just escalation.
	So in a completely unrelated tweet, he tweeted out this photo, if we can go to the next one.
	The Rosenbergs were convicted for giving US nuclear secrets to Moscow and were executed on June 1953.
	Huh.
	Pretty flagrant advocation for Donald Trump being executed, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	So he's suggesting they get the Rosenberg treatment.
	Mind you, it looks like even if the Democrats were to go this far, an obstruction of justice charge would be more likely than treason.
	That's up to 10 years in prison.
	So it doesn't look like the don's going to be sitting on the three-legged chair that Ted Bundy also occupied in the state of Florida.
	However, this didn't stop a former CIA director endorsing Trump's execution with sounds about right in response to that tweet from Michael Beschloss.
	So this is Michael Hayden, General.
	Hayden was one of the intelligence staff names who actually signed the letter calling Hunter Biden's laptop Russian disinformation during the 2020 election.
	So a literal liar saying that these are secrets from Russia is now comparing Donald Trump to two people who, at least one of them, definitely sold the secrets of the atom bomb to Soviet Russia and were executed for it.
	And you have members of the deep state in the mainstream media, which Trump reportedly demonized forever, but it seems like he was just telling the truth in that they want to kill their political opposition.
	Well, these people don't realise that what they're doing is essentially pushing America to a direction where political violence is somewhat of an inevitability.
	That's not an endorsement of it, it's just an observation of the lay of the land.
	Well, retaliation to tyranny is endemic to the foundation of America.
	And if you have a uniparty regime that are saying we're going to persecute on spurious grounds and ultimately push for the conviction and killing of our political opposition...
	You are pushing regular, run-of-the-mill patriots towards a position where they say, the only way we can get recourse is to take up arms.
	And that's obviously not what we want.
	But if you censor people, you take away their one method of conflict resolution, you take away the legitimacy of the courts, it's not hard to see, we don't endorse it, but it's not hard to see how people will resort to violence.
	And we just don't want people shot.
	But these guys clearly do.
	I just struggle to...
	To understand the mindset, I know that they're trying to win political points, but don't they realise that they're pushing America to the brink of its own demise?
	Yeah, they do.
	They just think they're going to win.
	They think their tribe's going to win out.
	Which is the most depressing outcome of all, really, isn't it?
	Because they're happy to destroy America so they can be the king of its ashes.
	Yeah, but obviously all progressivism is an outgrowth of historicism.
	So it's this belief that we're always marching towards the utopia.
	It's the mangled quote that MLK inherited.
	I forget who originally said it a bit.
	The arc of history is long an avenge towards justice.
	And if they believe that they are on the right path, on the right side of history, they're working towards utopia, then you're not the principled opposition, as we would say in this country.
	You're just an impediment to utopia.
	You're a speed bump and they can drive right over you.
	And that's the kind of mentality these people have.
	I've always been of the opinion that they hold these opinions, they voice them, but then it's another thing to then go through with it.
	That's like a...
	A psychological threshold almost that most people are unwilling to cross because you sacrifice your humanity doing so.
	I think in ascending these certain state-funded apparatchiks, you have to be the kind of person that is willing to take a life with no remorse because you just have to be that ambitious and callous and able to lie openly and Because all of your compadres are also lying, but you have mutual dirt on each other.
	I'm so depressed about the state of the United States at the minute.
	I feel very sorry for the patriots.
	That's why I'm so glum and glib about it, is that there are so many people that don't deserve this in America that actually are reasonable people, just want to live their life.
	Yeah, I agree.
	This is being basically forced upon.
	Speaking of undeserving as well, the comparison isn't even warranted for the Trump side or for one of the Rosenbergs, it seems.
	Some of the actual conviction might have been put on spurious grounds for the wife.
	So just a little bit of information for those who don't know about the Rosenbergs.
	The New York couple stood trial on May 6th, 1951, and they faced charges of selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. We're good to go.
	The evidence has sealed her fate.
	Her brother's testimony that she had typed the classified information to her husband and he had handed it to the Russians was false.
	Her brother, David Greenglass, admitted in a 2001 interview that he'd lied to protect himself.
	So, it could be, if Trump were to be prosecuted, he could be an Ethel Rosenberg of where he did sweet sod all...
	But they still want to sit him in the chair anyway.
	Now, this is all hyperbolic, of course, but it's less indicative of Trump is going to be killed for some ginned-up charges and more a statement of the Democrat and Deep State's intent.
	And this is a very dangerous period to be in.
	Yeah, it's so harrowing that most people think that this kind of stuff just doesn't go on.
	And this isn't going to get talked about in the framing that we're talking about.
	People aren't going to give it the gravity that it deserves.
	They're setting Trump up, more or less, to be a traitor to the country and therefore worthy of execution.
	Yeah.
	And also, it's not going to solve anything, even if you are a raging Democrat, because all you're going to do is make a martyr of the man.
	And so you're going to ensure civil war, 100%.
	So...
	Either way, your plan is stupid.
	Stop it.
	So, let's look at the backlash to this, shall we?
	First of all, we have the resident Varys to the regime, Brian Stelter, the little eunuch creature that he is, going on CNN and bemoaning the fact that the Republicans object to their republic being incinerated by the unelected media class in front of them.
	Let's take a look.
	The House passing that historic climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the components of the bill is a lot more funding for the IRS to hire tens of thousands of more IRS agents in order to try to make sure people are paying how much they're supposed to pay.
	What was that called on the right?
	It was called a terrifying overreach by the government.
	The reason I'm bringing it up is Let's just call it what it is.
	MAGA Media's hatred of government is reaching a new high.
	When you have a combination of these FBI stories and the IRS getting a lot more funding, this is a new peak in terms of that anti-government sentiment.
	So it's no wonder that there's concern with inside government about security and about threats.
	I can only hope that the MAGA media's peak of anti-government sentiment continues to climb.
	Well, yeah, it's a perfectly valid thing.
	Isn't the entire United States built on anti-government sentiment in that it was the British government?
	Well, it's anti-tyranny.
	It's not even necessarily anti-tyranny.
	I mean, of course, all taxation is theft.
	But the entire point of that as well is it shows where the interests of the regime converge.
	They would like you to believe that the New York Attorney General's office...
	That the IRS, the Democrats' House Committee, and the Department of Justice and the FBI all came to the same conclusion on the same days about their investigations.
	Oh, we're just going to look into Trump's business dealings.
	Oh, we're just going to hand his taxes over.
	Oh, we're just going to invade Mar-a-Lago.
	No, no, no.
	If the pundits, if the dumbest of the pundits, the least watched of the pundits over at Fake News CNN, can decide that all of these matters are interlaced, well, believe people when they tell you who they are.
	Do you know that Brian Stelter finally admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story is actually real?
	I saw that, yes.
	And he did immediately say, and that's a good thing afterwards.
	No, he wasn't quite as on the nose about it.
	We haven't reached that stage yet.
	It's going to happen.
	I guarantee what happens is they're going to give Hunter a sort of tragic thing of he'll ride off into the sunset, commit to going to rehab.
	Isn't this just wonderful?
	And that's...
	This is Republicans demonising drug addicts.
	I'll put money on that being the narrative, sir.
	I really hope not.
	It's going to happen.
	It's absolutely going to happen.
	And they're going to blame it on, oh, underfunding in Republican areas of drug treatment centres.
	Meanwhile, people are overdosing on the San Francisco sidewalk on the route to school.
	I saw horrific footage from Philadelphia.
	I can't remember the name of it, but it's an avenue underneath a train line.
	And they're like zombies.
	It's like an apocalypse is going on.
	Yeah, it's like the vampires from I Am Legend just scuttling on the ceiling.
	Anyway, enough of making fun of the victims of Democrat policy.
	The FBI raid has also exposed Washington's double standards, so there's some interesting historical analysis here about Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, versus how President Trump has been treated for the presidential privilege of declassifying and holding documents.
	Trump is accused of violating the Presidential Records Act.
	Congress enacted this law in 1978 after former President Richard Nixon claimed his secret Oval Office tapes and other records were his personal property.
	The law asserted, the United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of presidential records.
	So, I just want to interject there that that's a strange severing, and it's very Wilsonian, this is what Jack Posobiec said on Tim Kars recently, between the separation of branches of powers, because the President is the executive branch and he is meant to supersede the unelected deep state.
	But now it's almost the President is appointed, and he has to ask the permission of the deeply entrenched civil servants there before he can get anything done.
	And what you see here is the sort of beast biting back that Trump didn't really respect this as a businessman.
	Do you think they're foreboding that they anticipate Trump winning the next election?
	Absolutely.
	100%.
	And to set him up to be able to do nothing.
	In the same week that he publishes, well, he speaks about Schedule F and the big expose in Axios, where he's going to fire 50,000 deep state employees.
	They suddenly go after him after this.
	It's awfully convenient, isn't it?
	Absolutely.
	It's just naked power.
	Yeah, it's just the slow actions of the Justice Department trying to be cracking down on that evil President Trump who wants to plead the fifth because that's his constitutional right.
	In reality, the Presidential Records Act is a presidential damn near perpetual secrecy act.
	Former presidents pocket multi-million dollar advances for their memoirs while their records are mostly quarantined for decades from citizens they often misgoverned.
	So the point being is that even though the Democrats are hiding behind this saying we must achieve transparency, every other president that's acted under this act has had a level of impunity and has been able to profit from their personal records.
	Whereas Trump didn't even profit during his time in office.
	He lost billions of business worth and donated his presidential salary to charity every year.
	So it's not like he's even in it for the money.
	It's ridiculous.
	He's in it because he actually cares about the American Republic and no good deed goes unpunished.
	So the Obama White House lawyers repeatedly invoked the Presidential Records Act to delay the release of thousands of pages of records from President Bill Clinton's White House.
	Isn't that odd?
	That's funny, isn't it?
	It's the Clinton White House.
	Isn't that really strange, just when Hillary has an email scandal?
	Politico reported at the end of his presidency, Barack Obama trucked 30 million pages of his administration's records to Chicago, promising to digitize them and eventually put them online, a move that outraged historians.
	More than five years later, after Obama's presidency had ended, the National Archives webpage reveals that zero pages were digitized and disclosed.
	So complete opaqueness by the prior regime.
	So are those 30 million pages now evaporated, do you know?
	Don't know.
	We don't know anything about them.
	But apparently Obama has the power to declassify and profit from this, but Trump doesn't even have the ability to hold documents in his basement that the FBI knew were there, protected by their own padlock.
	Insane.
	So then, this is why President, well, I wish it was President, Ran Paul, Senator Ran Paul of Kentucky, has called for a repeal of the SBNRJ Act.
	He tweeted, President Trump said that the documents were taken by federal agents were all declassified.
	Number one, it was all declassified.
	Number two, they didn't need to seize anything.
	They could have had it any time they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago.
	It was in secured storage without an additional lock put on as per their request.
	They could have had it any time they wanted, and that includes long ago.
	All they had to do was ask.
	The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?
	Hmm.
	It's very telling that they didn't ask, actually, isn't it?
	Because you think that a former president, they don't want to make a fuss, draw the FBI into the ire of politics again, which they seem to do perfectly well on their own.
	But you think they'd say, oh, you've got some documents that are classified, can you hand them over?
	At least approach it with good faith, not just raid...
	The Mar-a-Lago immediately.
	But that is assuming that the FBI and DOJ are not being weaponised as instruments against dissenters.
	Well, of course they are, yes, but that shouldn't be the standard.
	I agree, I agree.
	It should be more congenial, even if you are, again, the principled opposition.
	So then this comes down to probably the best policy position I've heard from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	Well, she's drafted articles of impeachment against Merrick Garland, and also she said abolish the FBI, which I have to agree with.
	Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said Friday night that she had drafted articles of impeachment against Attorney General Merrick Garland.
	Reminder, Garland was the guy who used the Patriot Act to spy on parents who were protesting things like, oh, I don't know, Loudoun County School Board, where a girl was raped by a boy in a dress which had been covered up from a prior sexual assault from a prior school because they were afraid of offending pronouns.
	He's a disgusting little man.
	He is a piece of work, yeah.
	Yeah, so I think he'll be the first to go, and then hopefully if the Republicans do decide to get off their backside, stop being so apathetic and limp-wristed, the red wave materialises soon for the November 8th midterms, and it seems that they're polling even never so slightly ahead.
	But I hope they use their power to...
	Finally go after Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and the like because this is basically an act of war by the deep state declared on President Trump and you cannot pretend that you are willing to not persecute your opposition when you say that they should deserve the death penalty for doing nothing measurably wrong.
	Well, that was incredibly depressing.
	I'm sorry.
	That's okay.
	However, what's not depressing is this next segment, somewhat at least.
	Okay.
	So, there's been a lot of discussion of China in the news lately, and surprisingly, a number of commentators, both from the mainstream media and the online political commentary sphere, quite often people that I quite like and their commentaries normally on point, Have got things wildly wrong about China.
	And I wanted to talk about some of this stuff, as well as kind of foreboding their incoming problems and the impact that this is going to have on the rest of the world, and also the Taiwan situation, which to me is not nearly as dire as most political commentators are making out.
	So, obviously there were people talking about World War III when Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan to make lots of money, as we covered in our podcast last time, because the Chinese carried out exercises in Taiwanese waters, but they do this basically on a weekly basis.
	This isn't really...
	But because Nancy Pelosi was going there, all of a sudden the spotlight was put on it, and everyone was paying attention to it, and all of a sudden people were just like, yes, World War III, the world's going to end, Nancy Pelosi's going to destroy the world.
	I was crossing my fingers hoping for a very timely airstrike, but unfortunately Silicon Valley herself returned.
	But yes, this is not really the case, and I wanted to use this as a sort of vehicle to talk about...
	Even people who have well-established positions within the mainstream sensationalising for their own political gain.
	So here we have an article from the Daily Mail titled, America is on the edge of war with Russia and China, says former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and blames US leaders having trouble defining a direction.
	Have you seen the Twitter account that said, is Henry Kissinger dead yet?
	Notifier.
	I suggest you'll go follow it and put the bell notification on.
	Well, yes.
	I feel like there will be a party.
	A national holiday.
	But yes, this is nonsense, obviously.
	Never mind the fact that, you know, China's military spending is one-tenth of that of the US's, and their military vehicles are just cheap knock-off made-in-China versions of Russian and American vehicles.
	So yeah, along with the United States, all of Europe, it's not even close.
	Well, the only concern is obviously a nuclear standoff.
	And you do have the old mentality that Mao said, and this is a translation, so it won't be an exact quote, but it's in Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravid Century.
	And it's that Chairman Mao had the idea that even if half the world died in nuclear holocaust, the remaining half would be socialist, so we'd win in the end.
	And so if you would take that interpretation, you could say, charitably, we could be concerned that they are willing to sacrifice half the planet in order to try and have this ideological goal of conquering the world.
	But there isn't going to be much of an ash heap left to conquer.
	I'd be very surprised if they went down that route, because Mao was a lunatic, and although I disapprove of Rossini, he's not that mental.
	He's not mad, he's just evil.
	Yes.
	Malevolent, but not insane.
	But yes, the main thing that makes me want to dismiss this pretty much out of hand is that the economic situation in China is...
	Probably one of the worst it's been since the time of Mao, actually, in terms of the direction in which things are going.
	And, of course, there is also lots of political dissent, which really gets swept under the rug.
	You really have to go looking for it to be able to find it, because I've seen videos on YouTube covering it, and then the next day they disappear.
	Mysteriously, even though YouTube isn't shown in China, I don't know why they're removing stuff for problematic content or what have you.
	And it's been a lot of work actually finding stuff.
	But if you want to know a lot more about this incoming disaster in China, I have a video on the website which I put a lot of research into, titled China's Incoming Economic Crisis, which we're kind of in the midst of now.
	And this talks about it for an hour.
	Outlining all of the areas, all of the sectors of their economy, which are basically on the verge of collapse at the time of me making this video.
	And things have developed and they haven't got better since.
	So it's worth mentioning that China's economy is often touted as so large and is used as a looming threat over people as it has a 14.7 trillion US dollar GDP. However, if these figures are to be believed, of course, there's the potential that the Chinese are amplifying their figures.
	The US is still larger with 20.95 trillion US dollars.
	And if we look at the breakdown of how that wealth is distributed, if you look at the GDP per capita, the United States has 63,206 US dollars per person in GDP per capita terms, whereas China has 10,400, which puts it ever so slightly below the world average.
	So what this means is that the money that they're generating is going to far more people than it is in the United States.
	Obviously, the United States has, what, 350 million people roughly, whereas China's 1.4 billion.
	So the fact that it's spread out means that a higher percentage of the money distributed is going to people's subsistence living.
	So it's going to things like food, to their utilities, these sorts of things, accommodation.
	Yes.
	And there's not this surplus wealth that's being invested into the economy in the same way of the developed world.
	And that is how these things can be overstated.
	So, moving on...
	I would argue that the Chinese economy is one great big pyramid scheme, more or less, in that the way it's structured is that it needs perpetual growth to keep on coming in because they're borrowing lots of money to keep things going and that's dependent, the ability to pay it back is dependent on them having this high level of growth because anything below about 5% and they're in trouble, basically, and that's where they've sat for the past two years, more or less.
	And yeah, it's the most persistently low rates of growth in recent Chinese history.
	And whether this is going to lead to entire collapse is debatable.
	I would say probably not.
	However, more likely is that these problems are so serious that it's going to take them many years to deal with these problems, and they're going to have their focus directed entirely internally.
	And I'll I'll cite my evidence later on down the line for that view.
	But yes, they're not going to be a serious economic player for many, many years to come.
	And the true danger for the Chinese is the middle income trap, which I'll get onto a bit later.
	That is what they should be worried about.
	So, first problem is that they have a serious problem funding their local governments which run basically the day-to-day lives of the citizens.
	It's not necessarily as much of a centralised system as you might think.
	It's, say, the state or the city's government that levies a lot of the money to be spent on the ground.
	And very few people actually pay tax.
	it's been estimated as low as 2% of the population actually pay any tax.
	So they get lots of their money elsewhere.
	It tends to be that the lower economic status people do cash in hand in the so-called shadow economy, whereas the upper classes avoid paying taxes entirely.
	And this is actually a deliberate thing by the CCP because this allows them to then say, when someone falls out with them politically, they can say, you've not been paying your taxes and persecute them.
	So they can have this millstone around their neck where they can have the best of both worlds.
	The business people can't avoid it because they have to stay competitive to the others that are loyal.
	But at the same time, they're giving themselves a means of being blackmailed by the state.
	Yeah, it's a pretext to keep their oligarchy ideologically in line.
	And we've seen lots of cases where this hasn't necessarily worked.
	Like Jack Ma, for example, stepped away from his senior position to be able to actually speak more freely, sacrificing more or less billions and billions of dollars in money to do so.
	So the local governments get most of their money by taxing business profits, although that's a small amount compared to the amount they get from leasing land to property developers to build property.
	However, they cannot create these new land leases.
	They're created by the central government and also there's a limited amount of land.
	So they have used state assets as collateral to get loans through private companies that they have created to get it from the private sector to fund local government.
	And this is obviously inherently unsustainable because they're borrowing loans which they can't repay just to keep the wheels rolling so they don't get in trouble.
	And there is also the fact that the property developers themselves are in a spot of bother and unable to start new projects because the housing market in China has massively crashed, which I'll get onto in a second.
	So yes, one way they could get around it is they introduced a property tax, but this was a very unpopular time to do it because China's economy is not looking good.
	So if we look at this graph here, we can see the breakdown of China's GDP per sector, and you can see that industrial obviously is a large part of it.
	However, one third of that is things to do with property development, both in the financing, selling and construction of it.
	And this sector is basically collapsing along with the finance, which is a significant part of it.
	And you compound onto that The increasing cost of manufacturing with fuel costs and things like that, lower demand.
	Well, China's in a bit of a difficult situation.
	I even saw earlier today that they're rationing electricity to factories.
	They're in such a bad situation.
	Yeah, I saw last year, late last year, around the time of COP, funnily enough, is that the renewables plan where you see the rolling hills coated in solar panels hadn't quite worked out for the very dense urban areas.
	And so they reopened 252 coal-fired power plants and told them to exceed capacity.
	And that would increase global emissions 16% by 2030, whereas obviously the UK is only 1%.
	So they're realising that some of their investment and some of their technological gambles, which they thought they'd be able to have a monopoly on and export it to the West, haven't quite worked out as planned.
	Absolutely.
	So yes, even places like The Guardian are reporting on the fact that their economy is slowing.
	They blame this due to COVID outbreaks and the property crisis.
	It couldn't be the socialist economics whatsoever.
	Yep, nothing to do with that.
	Moving on, Bloomberg says that China factory orders drop in ominous sign for global outlook.
	So there are obviously, as I alluded to earlier, there's a massive drop in demand for factory production in China, which is going to harm them massively because that is, they are kind of the factory of the world, aren't they?
	We were stupid enough to have COVID unleashed by a Chinese lab right next to a wet market, of course, on us and reward them by in 2020 and then all the way through to now, displacing Germany, not that we're fans of those at the moment, but displacing Germany with China as our leading trade partner.
	So we've economically incentivized them to use cheap slave labor and immiserate us with viral weapons.
	Yeah.
	So yes, there's also the fact that next door to China is Japan, and as the CNBC article points out, the Chinese market is mixed, whereas Japan's GDP is expanding, and therefore the safer thing for foreign investment to do is to invest in the neighbours of Japan rather than China.
	So they're not going to get their money from abroad, their industry sectors are being throttled, and we're going to get into, right now, their problem with property.
	So this is quite a shocking figure that in Beijing, it would take someone with the median household income 50 years to be able to afford the average apartment.
	In London, that's 15 years.
	And in New York, it's 10.
	And we complain about the cost of living in London.
	Could you imagine it being inordinately larger?
	And on any day, at any moment, in any of those 50 years, if you say the wrong thing on WeChat or Weibo, then your ability to even rent the property in the first place gets confiscated.
	Yes.
	So the reason that the cost is so inflated is that because private companies in China, private companies, don't really make very good returns to their shareholders.
	Everyone has invested in property instead, which has obviously pushed up the price of property because everyone is investing their money into it.
	However, since a series of property developers have been in financial troubles, they have been unable to finish building properties that people are prepaid for or there have been significant delays.
	So people are losing faith in things like construction and property to invest their money in now.
	I know as well that China are uncensored, and I think Sobi spoke about this before as well.
	Loads of the Chinese economy is basically based on digging ditches and then filling them in.
	In the same way, there are loads of properties being built, but they're kind of shell properties, so the utilities aren't activated, etc., and just nobody's occupying them.
	There are massive ghost cities in several places in China.
	So yes, just to emphasize how significant this is, sales of new homes plunged by 47%.
	In April, compared with the previous year.
	So that's massive.
	In the course of a year, halved.
	Again, we said, you know, our first-time buyer rate only stagnating at 1% is a terrible tragedy for everyone in this country not being able to own homes.
	If half of the buying rate is knocked off the market, that's terrible.
	So, part of the blame for the demand for these urban homes as well is the HUCO system, which tracks citizens' primary residence.
	And citizens can only use things such as healthcare in schools, in places where they are registered.
	And in places like Beijing, a third of all workers have moved there from rural areas, meaning that they cannot use the public services until they own a home there.
	So there's this massive incentive, both it's the safest investment, And you can't use any infrastructure unless you've got a home there.
	So they've really put themselves into a corner here.
	And as Bloomberg says, China home prices fall for the 11th month as mortgage crisis deepens.
	Also, JP Morgan points out in this next Bloomberg article that Chinese developers have reported a 30% year on decline in the first half earnings, which is, again, massive.
	And what people have been doing in China, which is very brave if we move on to this Business Insider article, China's mortgage protests, why people are refusing to pay their housing loans and what it means for the country's 8 trillion economy.
	So apparently tens of thousands of people are refusing to repay their mortgages simply because...
	Of the terrible situation, sort of a political protest.
	We're seeing similar sort of thing here of where quite a few people were refusing to pay their energy bills when the price cap goes up.
	But of course, and I know COVID restrictions are bad, but you're not going to get a tank rolled over you in Tiananmen Square in the UK. That's true, yeah.
	So, I mean, God bless all the Chinese that are trying to dissent, I suppose.
	It's also worth mentioning that all Chinese debt is rated either AA or AAA, which is exactly the same as the mortgage-backed securities markets in 2008 that created the financial crisis of 2008.
	They've got that on the way as well, on top of all of that other terrible stuff.
	And they've started doing these expensive infrastructure programs that encourage growth, but also they make the deficit spending much worse.
	So they can look good, say, oh, we're not harmed at all, we're carrying on as normal, but in reality they're digging their hole even deeper.
	Well, so then to play devil's advocate on the problem of Taiwan, this was exactly one of the catalysts for Hitler's expansion.
	I'm not evoking Godwin's law here, but Hitler's expansion with Lieben's realm into other countries where you needed to expand the borders to extract resources.
	And it was under the pretext of Germany's so prosperous, we need more living space.
	but it was actually because you'd amassed so much national debt in the recovery from the 1929 crash that you needed to just appropriate other people's stuff because socialism as an economic system doesn't promote growth, it doesn't work.
	So could this not be a pretext?
	I know they've entered into bricks and they've gotten more gold than we do, oil, precious metals as part of One Belt, One Road, etc.
	But could this not be a pretext for them at least trying to snatch up territory from the neighboring places just to try and ail their economy?
	I think that the cost in sanctions would be too great for them, that it wouldn't be worth it, because everyone's eye is on China and we could, well, do a similar thing that we did with Russia, where we carry out these sweeping sanctions and then that would harm the Chinese, a lot would where we carry out these sweeping sanctions and then that would harm the Chinese, a lot would harm us as well, but Well, they were already more self-sufficient than the Chinese.
	The Chinese are very dependent on global trade.
	So what I alluded to earlier, the main threat for China is this middle-income trap.
	And there's actually a surprisingly well-articulated wiki quote defining what it is.
	So it's, a country in the middle-income trap has lost its competitive edge in the export of manufactured goods due to rising wages, but is unable to keep up with more developed economies in the high-value-added market.
	As a result, newly industrialized economies, such as South Africa and Brazil, have not, for decades, left what the World Bank defines as the middle-income range.
	Since their per capita growth per capita Capital gross national product, sorry, has remained between 1,000 and 12,000 at a constant.
	They suffer from low investment, slow growth in the secondary sector of the economy, limited industrial diversification and poor labour market conditions and increasingly ageing populations, which sounds very, very similar to the situation in China.
	They have a burgeoning middle class now and they're more or less getting to this point and there is an economic crisis about to hit them, but one of the worst That they've had in many, many years at a critical moment where they need to get out of this middle-income trap.
	And thanks to the one-child policy, they're also having a demographic crisis that's speeding towards them, so it's coinciding at the same time.
	On top of that, there is also political stuff which is making the economic situation even worse.
	So there are lots of protests around banks seizing assets about the COVID lockdowns.
	And if you actually listen to the videos, there's lots of language of freedom and rights and sort of Western democratic values being talked about.
	So it seems to me that there is the understanding of a potential system that doesn't have to be run by the CCP.
	So, of course, Xi Jinping posed lockdowns as his flagship policy and was very proud when the world adopted them.
	However, the true nature of the brutality of the Chinese lockdowns has more or less damaged his reputation because it not only hasn't worked, but it's tyrannized people to the point where they've gone out of their way to protest in many, many different ways.
	And we'll see some videos of that.
	But in him basically saying this is my policy.
	Well, you can't avoid accountability for that.
	Yeah.
	And it's going to weaken his political position significantly.
	So, if you want to know a bit more about the methods that they've used, we had a video, I think it's one of the weekend segments, titled The Dystopian Horror of Communist China, where we talk about all the different methods in which they're getting people to obey the lockdown restrictions.
	Yes, just the drone saying, suppress yourselves, urge the freedom.
	But I do have a new clip of basically a COVID litter.
	So if we go to this, this person is at Sanya International Airport.
	If we could play it, please.
	Which is in...
	At Hainan, and this is taken on the 6th of August, you can see in the middle there a person in what looks like a medieval litter being carried by a bunch of people in hazmat suits.
	Looks like the Witch of the Waste from House Moving Castle, which is a reference you're not going to get.
	No.
	And yeah, they're using these mobile cells to contain people who test positive at the airport, and then they're held in mandatory quarantine for three months at their own expense.
	Right, okay.
	Three months, that seems sane.
	Mm-hmm.
	There also have been protests to do with banking.
	So a number of prominent banks recently locked billions of people out of their life savings because of basically a scheme which allowed them to steal lots of people's money.
	Originally the Chinese state said that these were not ordinary bank accounts, they were financial schemes, and therefore the citizens were not covered by the state, however they have since U-turned after there were violent protests against it.
	So if we have a quick look at a video of these violent protests...
	Those are the protesters on the screen side, and these are all plainclothes police officers coming in and disrupting it and trying to arrest people.
	Right, okay, so nothing like this would ever happen with people protesting banking and agent provocateurs show up and start fulminating more.
	These are obviously the police, though.
	And yes, they violently broke up the protest, which before then was peaceful.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, if they glowed any harder, they'd solve the renewable lighting problem.
	So yes, the government finally agreed to repay people's savings in a couple of installments, but this also means that they're going to have to source billions and billions...
	Of Chinese Yuan to pay for this, which they don't have the capacity to do at the minute, and they've bound themselves into a difficult situation.
	Here they are marching them off for arrest.
	This is obviously not just political violence.
	So yes, China has also tried to shore up smaller banks with a cash injection of 47 billion US dollars.
	So they are going to be very strapped for cash.
	So let's have a look at some videos of the protests to play us out.
	This first one is from Amnesty International.
	This is the protest outside Hainan Bank again.
	They're covering this, one of the few places that actually have.
	But we don't necessarily need to see this...
	For too long, because we saw a similar thing, this is, I think, just a better angle of it, where it's clear that they're just dragging people off.
	New York Yankees top there as well.
	Nice.
	So, it's also worth moving on to the next video, which is armed police next to mandatory testing facilities.
	And the question I want to ask you is, why do you think they've gone to the effort of having armed police there?
	Do you think that maybe...
	There's been some resistance here.
	Yeah.
	And they feel the need to have security there at all times.
	Well, I remember there were COVID centres where they mass quarantined people in the same room and they were all singing and things like that.
	And they started cracking down on people even talking.
	Yes, it's horrific.
	I wouldn't be surprised if some people were planning on showing up and protesting the draconianism of the regime.
	The tyranny isn't just confined to China itself.
	Let's have a look at just this link on Twitter.
	Someone has shared...
	Someone using their father as a hostage to silence them.
	I'm not sure if we have it here.
	But there was a clip that I saw that had a woman talking to the police over the phone about a Twitter account which she supposedly ran that was critical of China, and they brought in her father, and when she asked, why are you here, he was just like, I have no idea.
	But the obvious implication is that if you don't behave, we're going to hurt your family.
	That's entirely obvious, because they pan the video call over to her father, just sat there, and when he's talking to her, she's like, one-word answers, clearly indicating that something is wrong.
	So, pretty horrific stuff.
	And if you want something pretty horrific, let's have a look at this next video of Chinese special police robbing and harassing some street vendors for selling vegetables without a permit.
	And this is appalling.
	It's also owned by an old lady, which makes it even worse.
	So, they were actually stupid enough to record this themselves.
	Right, so they thought it made them look good.
	Yes.
	Wonderful.
	So it's always nice to view things from the perspective of a tyrant.
	Yeah.
	Here we go.
	They just run out, don't say anything, just start nicking it, more or less.
	And then a guy comes over just like, what are you doing?
	Tries to stop him.
	And this makes them really angry, and rather than dealing with things professionally, they do things punitively.
	Right.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	He took his jacket off, didn't he?
	Yeah, he took his jacket off, so in any footage, it's not going to look like he's a member of the special police.
	No.
	Interesting.
	No, they are just kicking stuff.
	For no good reason, really.
	And look, he looks like he's moving his colleague away, so it looks like the guy with the arm looks like he's calming the situation.
	Yeah.
	Very interesting.
	Yeah, this is the kind of thing that regular Chinese people are experiencing.
	That's brave sitting in front of a vehicle.
	Yeah, in China.
	There's not a tank and a bridge, but...
	Yes, and as if all of that wasn't enough, there was a massive storm in Henan province, as if all the economic stuff, the political stuff.
	So, look at the state of this.
	So yes, it's massive chaos.
	And when you think of China, you don't necessarily think of these sorts of disasters.
	It's not necessarily like Japan, where...
	You get extreme weather and things like that.
	This looks like the biblical rapture.
	It does, yes.
	Holy hell.
	I mean, I remember hearing a while ago that some of their infrastructure was quite badly built and people were terrified of a dam near Wuhan, funnily enough, breaking and flooding the entire area.
	And so I knew there was stuff like this that could happen in China, but dear God, this looks like the end times.
	Yeah, it's pretty horrifying, isn't it?
	So yes, that's more or less all of the stuff I wanted to cover, except there's a new virus.
	Oh, for God's sake, it's all of the horsemen of the apocalypse, is it?
	All at once, yeah.
	So there is something known as the Langya virus, which thankfully we're not entirely sure.
	We think it's unlikely that it can be transmitted to humans, but it's found in shrews, I think, and But there's potential that there could be many more, as CNN points out, one of their surprisingly salient points is that these new viruses could be the tip of the iceberg for undiscovered pathogens in China.
	Yeah, I was going to say, I'm sure EcoHealth Alliance will find a way.
	But yes, I want to conclude with the fact that overall massive government deficit spending, poorly structured economic systems and political oppression are a unique combination of factors that are putting a lot of pressure on the CCP to either restructure or potentially even lose their grip on power entirely, although I don't think that's necessarily likely.
	They're certainly going to lose some potential of having a hegemonic position because other political movements are going to spring up organically just by people on the ground being treated so poorly.
	However, let's not be too hasty to celebrate the hardships of the Chinese because our economy is so integrated with theirs that we will be feeling the price of more expensive goods just as much as they will, unfortunately.
	Ooh.
	God, it's a bit bleak, isn't it?
	Wonderful.
	Okay.
	Talking of bleak, let's talk about some droughts.
	So, we at the UK weren't content to just inherit Commie Fournier's awful politics.
	Turns out we've inherited another thing that's unique to America's worst state, and that is incessant water shortages.
	It's raining already much in the south of England, despite that heatwave being...
	It does seem funny to be talking about water shortages when it's been pouring with rain since yesterday.
	We are notorious for having Britain always talking about the weather, but everyone was scaremongering, and I remember you did a segment quite a while ago talking about the imminent heat death of the UK and the climate catastrophizers.
	Well, this has been applied here, but it's actually quite strange that there's something more nefarious going on with our water shortage because it seems to be...
	Foreign-owned businesses and also mass migration interests that are conspiring to undermine the UK's resource security.
	Speaking of foreign interests, if you'd like to subscribe to Lotaces.com, you can go over and watch Thomas's article, not article, video, rather, on the march of neoliberalism for all our institutions.
	And yes, it did germinate in Thatcher.
	She solved the 1976 issues and the winter of discontent in 79, many of which we seem to be repeating here with endless strikes, plagues of flying ants rather than ladybirds this time, and heat waves, which have been rather uncomfortable.
	They haven't been as endless as they were in 76.
	It's been nice, actually.
	I'm used to rain most of the summer.
	I've seen your shirt after you sat in that chair.
	It looks like a Rorschach test.
	I wouldn't say it's nice to be sharing an office with you.
	But funnily enough, neoliberalism has caused these kinds of disasters to happen again.
	So go and look at exactly what Thomas's gripes were with that.
	So in the UK, we're facing down hosepipe bans.
	Despite the heatwave seeming to be waning, these seem to be staying in place for a little while because it's England's driest July since 1911.
	That's rolled into the start of August.
	Thameswater, which is where I am, and you're on as well, It said it plans to announce a hosepipe ban if the hot, dry summer continues.
	The company supplies 15 million customers across London and the Thames Valley with water, and it became the latest company to signal it will bring in a hosepipe ban in the face of the summer weather.
	The water company said, given the long-term forecast of dry weather and another forecast of very hot temperatures coming in the coming weeks, we're planning to announce a temporary use ban in the coming weeks.
	They...
	Repeated themselves twice, so that wasn't me.
	Southeast Water and Southern Water have already announced a hosepipe ban after the driest first half of the year since 1976.
	Saw Southeast England clocking up 144 bans, clocking up about 144 days with little or no rain so far in 2022.
	It comes as 10 fire engines and about 70 firefighters have been called to grass fires between Junction 26 and 25 on the N25, which is the large motorway around London.
	And we've not found any magnifying glasses strapped to poles in any of these.
	Or fireworks or cigarettes or, you know, the exact kind of things that burn down Notre Dame.
	And people with black masks haven't been seen doing this.
	No, exactly.
	But don't worry, Josh, it's climate change that is causing heat waves in all of these dry situations, even though we've had spotty conditions over the last couple of years.
	Remember the snowfall in late March?
	Oh, wait, hang on a minute.
	It's not global warming anymore.
	It's just climate change.
	It's the catch-all.
	I said that record temperatures are made 10 times more likely because of global warming and virtually impossible without it.
	Research shows.
	The 97% consensus rears its ugly head again.
	We have some footage here recorded by, of all people, my dad, who was driving fast on the M25. If we can play this.
	So, for our audio listeners, the flames are rather high.
	They're over the trees, and they're not very nice.
	I edited out his commentary because, of course, it was just two working men just speculating at it.
	I don't want to out him.
	Thanks, Dad.
	But did it seem as bad as Australia or California to you?
	It seemed relatively contained.
	There were a few cases of property destructions, of properties that are on the edge of more rural areas, but I've always struggled to see where the people are coming from.
	I feel like it's normally city dwellers that have this perspective that...
	Having rural fires is somehow some sort of disaster.
	In many parts of the country, it's a key part of the ecosystem that it helps new growth and get rid of dominant vegetation.
	It's actually a good part of the cycle.
	And also the fact that a hosepipe ban has only just been brought in in August, towards the end of the summer, kind of suggests that it's not really as bad, because I remember hosepipe bans as long as I've been on this earth, so it can't be that bad.
	Well, I'm glad you've actually mentioned the sort of city dwellers making the issue worse, because one thing that I did during my time in environmental policy was do the government's national tree strategy consultation.
	And I wasn't telling them, you know, how many trees should you plant, etc., because the answer is always more from all these kinds of people.
	But I did point out, oh, we recently had, during lockdown, Australia and California catch light.
	Why was that?
	Well, it wasn't because of climate change.
	It was because of climate policy.
	They'd massively densely packed the forest.
	They'd stopped dieback burning, as you said.
	It's crucial to the revivification of vegetation.
	And so that meant that a bunch of dry, dead wood had built up, and especially in California as well, they'd imported a lot of the Australian trees.
	That's all eucalyptus.
	So the hydrocarbon-dense, flammable, oil-thick trees.
	So by increasing forest density and cutting back on forest fire prevention, you're making your entire landscape a tinderbox.
	And lo and behold, no new forest fire prevention policies were contained within the UK government's National Tree Strategy when they wanted to massively increase forestry by the magic year of 2030.
	And you wonder why we've got increasing wildfires.
	It's not just because of hot spells, it's because of sometimes arson, but also bad forestry policy.
	So speaking of bad government policy, we have the Environment Secretary here, George Eustace, whose last name I'm not convinced isn't just a misspelling of useless.
	He says, saving water is not about reducing unnecessary consumption, not restricting essential use.
	I agree.
	So then he says, the onus must be on water companies to do more to reduce leakage, building on the progress made in recent years.
	Sorry.
	I was going to have a drink to spite him quickly.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I'm just going to spit to make myself dehydrated.
	Hmm.
	That's interesting.
	Because if we go to the next article, they've got really bad leaking problems.
	Well, yeah, this is known pretty much nationwide that, particularly Thames Water, they always have leaks in their pipes.
	Yeah.
	So, why are we kissing the backsides of the water companies who have done relatively little to improve the state of leaks over the last 25 years or so?
	They've spammed me with loads of text messages, is what they've done.
	I've had about eight texts from Thames Water telling me how to save water.
	They're like, don't...
	Don't water your garden.
	I'm just like, I don't have one.
	Well, don't you love the massive expansion of HR and social media departments and everything, and we wonder why nothing's working.
	Daily demand for water in England and Wales was 14 billion litres in 2018, but each day for the last 25 years, another 3 billion litres was lost through leakage, according to a National Audit Office report.
	We can see the graph here.
	Thank you very much, Michael.
	Looking to some of the other bigger suppliers, Thames Water's target was 644.3 million litres of water leaks every day, and it lost 635.
	United Utilities' target was 443.5 million litres of water, and it lost 438.8 million.
	Seven Trent's water was $418.2 million and it lost $414.6 million.
	These companies that missed their targets were Northumbrian water, South-West water, Southern water, and Affinity water.
	Doesn't seem that there's many penalties for that.
	You're still forced to pay for this because, of course, it is a monopoly because there's only one set of pipes.
	And as you can see by the graph, if you're not watching this and you're doing the audio-only version, from 1996, The golden era of the Blair years, which we all definitely never want to return to.
	It's basically been a constant non-innovated level of leakage at about 300 million litres a day, which is 3 billion.
	So why has there been no improvement?
	Well, I can imagine.
	Because there are almost certainly materials that exist now that are better to transport water, and this is where you need John Wheatley.
	He's the materials expert.
	There's got to be stuff that's better than the old piping.
	Some of it's still Victorian, which is ridiculous.
	So no wonder it's leaky.
	Well, thank God for the Victorians, because we haven't upgraded our infrastructure since the population massively increased, but I'll pre-sage that for later.
	So what are the water companies doing instead?
	Well, Thames Water have decided to tell its users to not take showers.
	That's wonderful.
	Let's go to the next one, please.
	In a message sent to customers, I'm sure you got this text as well, Thames Water told people to squeeze that shower to help avoid the taps running dry across the city.
	The water firm said showers make up 25% of a household's water use, on average.
	So shave a few minutes off your shower and save loads of litres.
	Yeah, go around with stink lines above your head.
	Fantastic, lovely for the country.
	As hosepipe bands are imposed across the country, people are also urged to use a watering can instead of the hosepipe and let the grass go brown where they can.
	Because God forbid you have a nice-looking garden.
	But I seem to remember that That it was also heating water caused climate change.
	Because of course your boilers are evil.
	They're on gas, right?
	So thank God the World Economic Forum came in and said people who have regular cold showers take 29 fewer days off work.
	Apparently it's really healthy.
	I have cold showers.
	I couldn't imagine it.
	It's lower carbon and it's really healthy.
	But hang on a minute.
	Have we memory holed something here?
	Don't cold showers cause heart attacks?
	I seem to remember that sudden adult death syndrome, which has absolutely no cause in recent times, of course, things like gardening, sport, and cold showers caused heart attacks in the healthy.
	So why are the World Economic Forum telling us to kill ourselves to save the planet?
	I couldn't imagine them saying such a thing.
	It must be terrible.
	I hope there's a medical intervention.
	To be fair, I'm still here.
	I've had a fair few cold showers in my day.
	Despite my best efforts.
	So, let's look at the state of British utilities, shall we?
	Now, I don't particularly like the framing of this from The Independent, because they say how the world gets rich from privatising public services.
	I don't think privatisation is a problem.
	It's outsourcing the ownership of the country's utilities to other countries who have no stake in our national well-being.
	So they list here our railways and energy sector, specifically being owned by Holland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, and Belgium.
	The gigantic dragon in the room not mentioned is China.
	There's no mention of China in this, unless you're a CCP apologist and you count Hong Kong as a Chinese constituency.
	But the interesting thing is China owns a lot of our stuff, which we'll go onto in a So just so you know, they're claiming through University of Greenwich research in the next article from the Financial Times that privatised water costs have costed £2.3 billion more per year for consumers.
	So, a University of Greenwich report says that they've calculated the cost of privatisation to each household as over £100 a year.
	So, I would say it's not privatisation.
	It's inefficient and incompetent privatisation more than anything.
	The National Audit Office in 2015 said household water bills have risen 40% more than inflation since 1989, the year they were privatised.
	Three companies, Anglican, Severn and Yorkshire Waters, have paid out more in dividends than their total pre-tax profits in the past decade.
	So, that's just utterly unsustainable.
	Actually, some guy said, Dr.
	Bayless said this was economically unsustainable.
	Shock, great minds think alike.
	So who owns the water?
	Ten regional water authorities were auctioned off by the state in 1989.
	Investors paid $7.6 billion for the water and sewerage companies, but the UK government took on the sector's entire £4.9 billion in debts.
	And gave the new private corporations 1.5 billion of public funds.
	So this isn't privatisation.
	It's state subsidisation, where they make sure that you're too big to fail and the taxpayers have to foot the bill for the inevitable losses.
	This is exactly what me and Harry say, that all of these problems were in...
	Private markets are created by the government interfering in them.
	Because there's no incentive to operate efficiently.
	Hence, why they haven't fixed any of the leaks and why they can feel happy to take out more in shareholder dividends than their actual pre-tax profits.
	So I wonder if financial malfeasance is endemic to the sector because if we go to the next one, it turns out China have bought into Thames Water for £500 million and they've got about 10% stake in them.
	Why are the Chinese interested in the London water firm?
	Well, I can give you many reasons.
	One, it's a reliable investment.
	And two, they have leverage over us.
	They can just be like, oh, sorry, turned off your water.
	Bye-bye.
	It's very fifth-generational warfare, isn't it?
	So China has made the first of unexpected flurry of investments into Britain's ailing infrastructure, buying nearly 10% of Thames water.
	The estimated 500 million deal follows talks in Beijing this week at the time of writing with Chancellor George Osborne, who is looking to overseas investors to finance massive reconstruction of the UK's infrastructure with the added benefit of boosting the economy.
	Didn't really happen, did it?
	We've got terrible infrastructure at the moment.
	It hasn't been expanded.
	The capacity has stayed stagnant while we've had massive population increase and still transports exponentially unaffordable.
	Our energy goes out, etc.
	But the interesting part of the story is it actually followed, and there's links in the description to this.
	I didn't pull up the articles on screen, but you can go and read in your own time.
	This followed Thames Water in 2004 pulling out of the first private water processing plant in China.
	They were going to fund it.
	And they said the Chinese legal system is too difficult to navigate.
	So it seems that they've bought their revenue stream at the source, having been spurned about the fact that they backed out of investment.
	Good bit of a pun there as well.
	Oh, God, I didn't even intend that.
	So, George Osborne said at the time, It is a vote of confidence in Britain as a place to do business.
	This investment is good news for both the British and Chinese economies.
	This deal, financed by the China Investment Corporation State Investment Fund, fantastic, try saying that when you're drunk, marks the next phase of China's quest to global economic dominance.
	It is expected to unleash a series of infrastructure investments in the UK and across Europe, with the High Speed 2 High Rail link planned between London and Birmingham, So, at this point it seems like we're basically a Belt and Road constituency.
	I don't understand why, for example, we couldn't use desalination, considering we're an archipelago surrounded entirely by water, but it turns out that Thames Water opened the first desalination plant in Beckton in 2010, but is currently closed around the same time they were bought.
	I think desalination can be quite expensive because when you have as much fresh water falling from the sky as we do, it tends to be cheaper just to dig holes and catch it.
	Oh sure, but in times of shortages you would have thought, oh, or at least the technology would have come leaps and bounds in the time to desalinate the water to make it a lot more affordable.
	But they haven't fixed the leaks, they haven't improved desalination, they aren't willing to fire it up, and they're currently owned by China.
	Very suspicious.
	Chinese involvement has also continued in HS2. That's basically a giant expensive railway project the Tories have kept promising to the North to try and win votes, even though it's cutting journey times by about four to eight minutes sometimes.
	It's utterly ridiculous.
	It's a black hole of public funds.
	So even after COVID, the state-owned firm China Railway Electrification Engineering Group have bid for a £300 million contract to fit cables for the project.
	But the total cost of the project has ballooned from the time they signed on here from £32.7 billion to now £98 billion.
	It just keeps going up, but the promise hasn't waned.
	So, if we look to who got us into this mess, I suppose I've presaged it.
	George Osborne has hailed a new golden decade in Sino-British relations.
	I suppose in opinions that age like milk, this is the one for the day.
	George Osborne arrived in Beijing on Sunday to proclaim the advent of a golden decade.
	The main purpose of Mr.
	Osborne's mission is to persuade China that no economy in the West is as open to Chinese investment as the UK, as witnessed by his offer to China to take a big stake in Britain's nuclear power revival.
	Definitely not a national security risk there.
	Again, speaking of taste that takes the age like milk, we see the lay press try and push and propagandise in saying that in the next piece from the Telegraph at the time, most people support this.
	We've got the charts to prove it.
	Yeah, so...
	It very much smacks of the YouGov 71% of people agree that we should sell our entire economy off to China.
	It's the classic managerial incrementalism.
	If you can find a study to support at the Tory party, back off their principles and just say, oh, well, you know, if it keeps me in politics, if it keeps me going to fancy parties, it doesn't matter how we do it or when we do it.
	It just matters that we do it.
	Well, always ask about the morality beneath policy, please.
	But...
	This has just not come into consideration.
	I'm glad the lexicon at least is more critical these days of minerals coming from China, etc.
	The slave labour taken to make solar panels.
	However, we still have Chinese investment in our nuclear power plants.
	So we've got water shortages, partially caused by Chinese half-owned companies, or part-owned I should say.
	But also, our nuclear power stations seem to be quite a crucial piece of our energy infrastructure, and unfortunately, as I reported quite a while ago, Chinese General Nuclear owns a 33% stake in Hinkley Point C, currently being constructed, a 22% stake in Sizewell C, and shares in the future Bradwell B1 and B2 nuclear parts.
	Our government has also pledged $50 million to co-funder a cutting-edge Chinese General Nuclear Research Centre housed here in the UK. That's not worrying at all.
	No.
	It should be worrying because in 2016, Nick Timothy advised then-Prime Minister Theresa May that China could use their role to build weaknesses into computer systems which will allow them to shut down Britain's energy production at will.
	So, to Americans who were worried when, on day one, Joe Biden repealed that executive order that Trump passed to stop Chinese transformers from being used in your energy grid system because they could have done a smart grid and then turned it off remotely and left America entirely vulnerable to blackouts, we're doing it worse, turns out, because these things can't even be easily replaced.
	We've just got...
	We've got domesticated nuclear meltdowns waiting to happen.
	I love that!
	Absolutely fantastic.
	We should expand nuclear capacity, but we've got to stop buying from these idiots.
	So just on the last point, the artificial demand has absolutely been driven by population density as well.
	Because, shockingly, and Tom Holland told this story at a Conservative Environment Network conference that I attended, and he was actually the most conservative person there.
	He was quoting Scruton, despite a bunch of other conservative politicians being very tepid.
	And one guy actually, and you'd hate this as someone who hates MMT like I do, one guy who is an economist at Oxford University, when I asked him, why aren't you using tax cuts to fund anything environmental, he said, well, tax cuts are a form of redistribution.
	Because he believes the government progenates the economy, and if you put taxes back into the system, you're going to worsen inflation.
	How can you call yourself an economist, let alone a teacher at Oxford?
	Yeah, I think you should just be called a saboteur, but if we look at the statistics from the Office of National Statistics here, it turns out that population density has, like, migration has doubled births in recent years.
	So the native British population is a rate of knots, not replacing itself, not conferring the same values onto itself.
	But also migration, where people live in ethnic enclaves, essentially, they want to live in the cultural satellite state.
	In certain places, like London specifically, And this is where Tom Holland's story comes in.
	I got slightly derailed.
	Loads of water has to be diverted there from the neighbouring towns.
	And so Tom Holland's town in, I believe he said Stratford, he had a little river.
	It's historic.
	The Romans have written about it.
	It goes back gears.
	It's completely dry now.
	Entirely dry.
	Because since the Victorian times, the sewage capacity, the infrastructure hasn't been properly upgraded in London.
	And so because we're still using the old pipes for a massively higher population...
	We're having to drain all the resources from neighbouring places.
	It's no wonder the reservoirs are running dry.
	No wonder nothing works.
	No wonder that we're being faced with punitive nanny state measures like hosepipe bans and rationing our heat of our water when it's just the water companies have fallen down on the job.
	And it's either that it's a fifth-generational warfare tactic by China or just mass migration policies seem to be worsening all the shortages that we've experienced.
	Is there much chance of an alleviation of at least the inflated demand here, do you reckon?
	I don't think so.
	I think there's certainly a chance of an increase in supply, judging from looking out the window.
	Yes.
	Imminent British weather seems to solve all our problems.
	Unfortunately, the imminent British Prime Minister is not going to.
	If we can just play from where I sent you, Michael.
	Final yes or no?
	Cap on immigration?
	No.
	I think we should have the skills we need in our country, but I don't believe in an arbitrary target.
	And when we had one before it didn't work.
	Oh, it didn't work because you didn't enforce it.
	If you had an arbitrary target, as you so call it, a cap on immigration, rather than having a skills-based system, rather than allowing untold numbers of people, a million people last year, to come in, it might do something to just alleviate pressure from our ridiculously underfunded at the rate of use for people that don't fund them public services.
	I mean, the NHS keeps going up endlessly, but it's because people never pay into it.
	So I've got a couple of solutions and I'll just run them by you to wrap up.
	Ban on foreign ownership of British property and utilities.
	If you don't have citizenship here, you don't get to pay it.
	I think countries that are potential political enemies or explicit political enemies, absolutely not.
	But as I said before we started recording this, if someone is, say, like Iceland wanted to own part of Thames Water, I don't think they're going to go out of their way to try and go to war with us.
	I think you're going to see our allies have their systems exploited with things like shell companies and they're just going to be bought up by those kind of billionaires anyway.
	So I just think flat out ban at that point.
	Hard moratorium on immigration, illegal and legal alike.
	And anti-lockdown level media pressure, by the likes of us, of course, against climate change policies which are designed to impoverish us.
	I think we need some sort of referendum or say on net zero and things like this clearly are just making the situation worse.
	And with that black pill, onto the video comments.
	Howdy, Josh and Beau.
	Just wanted to say that I really appreciated you guys doing the section on the weekend about the James Webb Telescope.
	I'd love it if you kept doing stuff about space.
	Josh, don't worry about what anyone else says.
	They're very, very good.
	I'd love you to talk more about what's happening in the cislunar space with regards to development there, and also if you might want to have a look into what China's plans are with regards to the Moon.
	All right, guys.
	Cheers.
	Thank you very much for the comment.
	And I'm glad you enjoyed our conversation about space.
	I thought it'd be a bit left of field, but people actually really enjoyed it.
	And I know you come to us for politics, but I think it's very important to talk about the aspects of our culture, not only that are overwhelmingly positive, like the James Webb Space Telescope is.
	But we need to understand what's worthwhile preserving if we are to defend it in a culture war.
	We need to know our culture to better defend it, and what better way than to understand all of the significant things and the really positive things that add to all the reasons that we want to defend it in the first place.
	There's something very existentially beautiful about all of those images.
	Sorry, I know I was fiddling about that.
	I could not hear that comment in the slightest.
	I don't know what's...
	They're all very quiet at the moment.
	I had that during the actual podcast as well.
	I don't know which switch is mine either.
	That's okay.
	Didn't make a difference.
	I'll only adjust a little bit.
	Okay, sorry about that.
	So a common argument I keep on hearing supporting the left and their stupid antics where, like, they tape themselves to works of art and whatnot is, well, they wouldn't be doing that if they didn't have strong beliefs in it, and it's obviously worth doing it if they're gonna go to that length.
	And I'm like, well, the Jonestown people all believed in what they were doing, and we all agree they're f***ing morons.
	Conviction in your beliefs is not an argument in and of itself.
	What I caught of that?
	Yes.
	No, I very much agree with that.
	So you can read it down there, I think.
	Right, okay.
	Yeah, so I'm assuming he's basically just saying, the way in which you convey does not make your argument any more valid.
	So just because you're forthright and have some arrogance with what you're speaking doesn't necessarily mean that you're correct.
	I try and portray a certain amount of uncertainty about everything because that is generally my position that the world is so complicated that one person can't possibly understand everything and you've got to be humble in your understanding of the world otherwise you're going to be mistaken and you're going to act on those faulty assumptions and end up far worse off.
	Yeah, I think I've been told that my tone has apparently been misinterpreted as conceited sometimes, but I only speak forcefully on things I've genuinely researched and have a position on, but it might just be where I come across as flat.
	I mean, I'm not saying that comment was in indirect towards me.
	I'm just, yeah, anyway, I'll skip that.
	That's a very nice video.
	I'm not sure if there's meant to be audio.
	I don't know if there is meant to be audio.
	But it's very pleasant.
	I love a nice log burning fire.
	Okay, on to the written comments then.
	So, on the segment about Donald Trump facing the death penalty.
	Donald Trump sold nuclear codes to Russia.
	That's from Baron von Warhawk.
	That's why you should hate the Orange Man.
	Ignore the fact that we lied to your face that Trump was friends with Russia for two years.
	Trust us, this is the real deal.
	Hate the Orange Man, eat the bugs, live in the pod, go back to sleep, blebs.
	Yes, they don't exactly have the most trustworthy record, do they?
	Alpha of the Betas.
	Ah, your favourite nickname.
	Josh has to understand that progressives do not care if they destroy America.
	They hate America.
	They hate Americans.
	I do understand that.
	And I agree.
	But I was just lamenting the fact that...
	Americans don't deserve that.
	No, I agree.
	The actual law-abiding Americans.
	I'm trying to remember, I think it's Howard Zim's People's History of the United States.
	It's just the most outright, incorrect way of interpreting U.S. history and settler.
	I mean, I think it was one of the places that progenated that Christopher Columbus used blankets with smallpox to wipe out the Native Americans in a genocide, even though they had no germ theory at the time.
	And this is what a lot of leftists have based their worldview on.
	And so there is an endemic belief that the United States at its founding has an original sin of being, and this is why you see, you know, Protestantism and the hard work and that on the Smithsonian's chart.
	It's all these things have been conflated with whiteness, because it's not about white people, clearly, because, you know, we English and the Germans are very different, but it's because there is something endemic to the founding of the United States that is irredeemably awful, and so they've just got a set revolutionary dynamite underneath it.
	Nord Nerevar.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	They threatened the death penalty for Trump?
	Isn't that supposed to be reserved for serial killers and violent rapists?
	Are they actively trying to spark a conflict at this point?
	This is one of the most outrageous stories you've ever covered, I think.
	And he adds, in purely self-defense fashion, of course, keep your rifle by your side.
	I agree.
	Great song.
	Well, I agree that it is every American's right to own a firearm, and I wish we had the same thing.
	Baron Von Warhawk.
	Josh, when it comes to pushing the American public to brink of the Civil War, keep in mind they are not just poking the bear, but jabbing it as hard as much as possible.
	So when the bear finally strikes back, like on January 6th, they can see, see, I told you the bear was dangerous.
	All of our lives are actually true.
	The orange bear and his friends are dangerous, and we need to put them down.
	I like the image of Trump as Winnie the Pooh.
	S.H. Silver, in the five years of constant investigation, they couldn't find a single thing to pin on Trump.
	That's a very important point.
	I think they actually know they won't punish him.
	They just want to be as loud and bombastic as possible with their phony investigation to excite their own voters in time for the midterms.
	Yeah, this is just an electoral strategy.
	Clearly, they don't have as much faith in fortification being able to be pulled off this time around.
	Free will, 2112.
	I hope Trump is not the coroner to a republic, because if the US is lost, we're all lost.
	I agree.
	There was that sign, someone was a protester, and this sign said...
	Oh my god, it was something like, we're the United States, no one is coming to save us.
	And it's like, okay, everyone else in the world does rely on the United States, including us, despite us founding you.
	Yes, we've become a little bit weak and decadent over here.
	But if the US decides to fall, then there's no one to help.
	And that's a very, very important point.
	Bald Eagle, 1787.
	Democrats need to be careful about how they handle Trump.
	About two-thirds to three-quarters of the country don't like what's happening and are voicing their displeasure.
	All the Democrats are doing is encouraging 30 to 35 states to pull their cynicism representatives from Congress and no longer recognize the government.
	Several states are already taking steps to charge federal agents with crimes for their unconstitutional actions.
	The U.S. is going to erupt in massive waves of violence after the midterms.
	The Democrats are now trying to burn down the House before they're kicked out.
	I thought they'd already burned down the house in 2020, but there we go.
	Callum Dayton, there's an old Terran saying, which is the less of two evils?
	There's another saying, there's a flip of that, which is the greater of two evils?
	Trump may be as divisive as some say and believe, but I believe he's the less of two evils, and the deep state does not represent the citizens of America, and is the greatest of two evils.
	That's very true, yes.
	They are clearly the personification of shadowy forces if you were going to write a spy thriller.
	Shall I move on to...
	Go for it.
	So, Baron Von Warhawk.
	Wow, the way those Chinese police beat up the old woman and seized her stuff without a warrant was truly horrifying.
	I'm so glad we don't have those kinds of political police that believe stamping on your rights is morally correct in America and England.
	O.S. So, yeah.
	I mean, that is the way we're going, isn't it?
	Yep.
	Ignacio Junqueira.
	Depending on building perpetually to generate growth is one of the things that killed the Spanish economy back in the 2008 crisis.
	Absolutely.
	And there are lots of parallels between the two, actually.
	To see China do the same, but on steroids, is just funny.
	It's quite long.
	Where's it gone?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Amar Awad, brave as hell to protest in a country where the government might lead to them not letting you pay for anything at all.
	Anyway, that's enough about Canada.
	I hope we don't get the same kind of authoritarian rule here.
	As China, I roll.
	Regarding the amount of Chinese income that goes to basic necessities, how does that compare with the current day for us in the West?
	All our costs seem to be rising, thanks to government policies.
	Well, because our wealth is concentrated in fewer people, because we have a much lower population than China does, the basic necessities can still be more easily covered, and then there are still more surplus capital to be invested elsewhere.
	Although the cost of living is still larger, we still have significantly more distributed.
	Remember that the difference between the GDP in China, it was about 10,000.
	The US it was 60,000 something.
	So it was over six times larger.
	So, that's pretty resounding.
	You okay to move on to some of yours?
	Yeah, that's fine, yeah.
	PR, remember that Chinese investment comes with Chinese workers and Chinese construction practices.
	That's very true, especially considering over here in the UK, it's about, what, 40% of all students are Chinese nationals now?
	It's something insane like that, and it's because they prepay for their accommodation.
	A lot of the times in cities you'll see, especially Manchester, there's a giant development ring road of...
	Mega City One is moving towards the actual city.
	But loads of these places that are being constructed are either hotels for migrants or year-long hotels for students.
	And the accommodation prices are massive.
	They're very unaffordable.
	It's like a studio in Oxford because there's so many prepaid international students.
	It's something like £14,000 to £15,000 for a year's lease.
	And it's a studio flat.
	And it's because they've got so many wealthy Chinese students coming over.
	They can pay up front and it's just...
	Dissipating opportunities from...
	It's a license to print money, though.
	Yeah.
	Unfortunately so.
	Northern Erevar.
	Let's not mince words around this water shortage.
	It's training.
	It's preparation for the advanced stages of their plan to turn us into serfs.
	We useless eaters are being forcibly accustomed to making do with less.
	We'll own nothing and it will be miserable.
	I hope useless eaters isn't your nickname for us, by the way.
	Yeah, well that's the, what was it, Yuval Harari who said that in his opening speech to, I covered this with Dominic Frisby, it was to the WEF, I think it was 2020, and he said we're going to have a class of useless persons rendered by the fourth industrial revolution.
	So it's basically people that haven't been transhumanized and can't sync up to the matrix.
	They're just going to be useless eaters.
	We'll have to find out what to do with them.
	That's such a horrible way of putting it.
	You could say people who can't compete in the economy, you can euphemise it like that, not just say, oh yeah, useless eaters.
	It literally says in there, the digital economy is going to give rise to digital dictatorships in cyberspace, and there is a never-ending queue of people looking to become the new Joseph Stalin.
	And that's off the back of talking about a whole class of useless eaters and what to do with them.
	I was like, oh great!
	Wonderful.
	Can't wait for a digital holidomore.
	Fantastic.
	Free will, 2112.
	These corporations want the profits, but none of the responsibilities or costs.
	That explains why they're so into feminism.
	Alex Hiley.
	A hot day is confirmation of climate change, but a snowy day is dismissed with the reasoning weather doesn't represent climate change.
	I thought science was about consistency.
	Sorry for your discipline.
	Free Will 2112.
	Greedy Western oligarchs are selling us out to Chinese China for a buck.
	In other words, water wet, though we're not drinking much of it these days.
	Mr Tucker.
	I always find it funny how government can create a massive problem and then with a straight face turn around and claim that the solution is for everyone to listen to them in every other aspect of their lives.
	Caffeinated sentry gnome.
	I just had to read that out because of the name.
	The biggest troll Australia has pulled on the US is convincing them to grow extremely flammable trees that explode when they're on fire.
	I love that.
	I can just imagine as well, convict nation, just elbowing and going, watch what we're about to pull here.
	They're not going to know a thing.
	And he's finished off with, Meanwhile in Australia, we're experiencing a really wet summer.
	Ah, that's hot girl summer finally coming to fruition after lockdown's been lifted, isn't it?
	That's all for me.
	Okay, well, thank you very much for watching.

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