Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1320 on the 18th of December 2025.
I'm your host Harry joined today by Josh and Firaz.
And today we're going to be talking about Australia's reaction and rising up to the Islamic terrorism.
I'm going to be talking about the slow death of the honesty box and rural England's traditions because we have a load of New Britons who don't understand how it works and don't care to try to understand.
And Josh is going to be giving us a roundup of the weirdest news of the year.
It's a Christmas tradition at this point.
Now I've already sat through.
It's not out yet, but I have already sat through some monkey news.
Will there be any added monkey news that's happened since then?
I'm a strict segregationist for weird news and monkey news.
All right.
I'm very hard line on it.
I could add, I could make an addition to your segregation, but I won't because it will be clipped.
As I have been many times before.
Lowbrow, hey.
Lowbrow indeed.
But is there anything else we need to announce, Samson?
I'll give this announcement then.
I hope you're all having a lovely time this Christmas.
Well, a week away.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all of you.
Actually, probably to be properly British.
No.
Take this off.
Happy Christmas.
Oh, no.
He's lost his tiny hat.
What do you know?
It was a miracle.
A virgin birth.
Anyway, let's get into the news.
Talk us through the jolly subject of Islam in Australia.
Well, let's start with France, actually, because it seems just yesterday in Toulon, the police fired at a vehicle that didn't want to stop.
It seems the occupants of the vehicle had stolen it.
The police got one of the thieves in the neck, I believe.
Yes.
And then the driver managed to run away, even though the police were shooting at him.
But the officers were suspended for trying to stop a vehicle that actually hit one of their officers.
So, you know, the regular run-of-the-mill news that has now become normalized in Europe.
So I know that it's normal now that average citizens are basically prohibited from defending themselves.
Yes.
Now the police as well.
Yes.
This is one of the most absurd things I've ever heard.
Yep.
I thought it was too crazy to leave out of the segment, so I thought I'd open with it.
But the theme of the segment is the world a little bit going crazy.
And since we last spoke about the Bondi massacre, we'd mentioned in that segment that the Germans had thwarted an attack in Bavaria that was targeting a Christmas market.
It turns out that they foiled a second one, this time by Central Asians.
The previous one was by, I think, Egyptian, Assyrian, and three Moroccans.
This time it's an unidentified number of Central Asians.
Oh, apparently just one.
And was training as a nurse.
So the nurse to terrorism pipeline is apparently a new thing.
Last year in the attack in Magdeburg, it was someone who I believe was working as either a teacher or a psychiatrist or psychologist.
And so now we have nurses joining in on the act.
It's also worth mentioning, wasn't it Magdeburg that it happened before as well?
And this is another one.
Yes, yes.
That was the one that happened last year by the Saudi guy.
He killed a number of people.
Isn't he a doctor or something?
He was a doctor.
He was a doctor.
You're right.
He was a doctor and he was an atheist, strangely enough.
And Shia.
So...
Wasn't he the one, if he was the doctor who was an atheist, wasn't he the one who they were saying the story became that he was trying to protest Islamic migration into Germany through a terror attack that just happened to have characteristics of Islamic terror attacks?
So...
So he had long been very opposed to Islamic immigration and had been warning against it as an atheist, but he had issues with the German government with his papers and they weren't listening to him.
And the Saudis were watching his social media because of his attacks on Islam.
And they told the German government, look, this guy's losing his mind and he's about to do something.
You should pay attention.
And they let it go.
And then a large number of people died.
And on our radar, he was known to the world.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It keeps on happening.
It keeps on happening.
And before we get into more details on Australia, I just wanted to remind you that when Australians were protesting COVID lockdowns, this was the reaction from the Australian state.
Like armored vehicles, riot police, no dissent, throwing people in camps.
The Australians activated the police fully against anybody who in the slightest way broke some of the most draconian COVID rules in the world.
I know it's a little bit of a meme, but there is some truth to it that because it was founded as a prison island, there's still residual elements of this culture.
And it's a legal structure in Australia.
And so they go a lot harder than a lot of other Anglo-countries because of this.
Well, it seems stricter in some states of Australia, but in some of those states, I remember there was the footage that went around of the father trying to hold on to his daughter who is basically being ripped from him so that they could forcibly vaccinate her.
Of course, it's a federal country, isn't it?
And so they have certain degrees of variation between different areas.
Yeah.
And before we go into the latest news from Australia, let's talk a little bit about what we know so far about the killers in Australia.
So the father of the two gunmen, Sajid Akram and his son Navid, Sajid being the father, first we thought that they were Pakistanis because of the names.
It turns out that they were actually Indian Muslims, not Pakistanis.
Not that it makes a difference because Pakistan exists for Indian Muslims, but you know, just sort of wanted to clarify that because we got it wrong the last time.
But apparently he had bought three identical shotguns in the last year and a half, most recently in September.
And this should have been flagged by authorities because of his son's association with Islamic State and his presence at various protests that were supportive of Islamic radicalism and supportive of Gaza.
Not that the two are the same, but in Australia, they almost are, really.
And he was going around buying a bunch of guns, including the same gun two months apart.
And it seems that he was preparing for this attack for some time.
So this wasn't a spur of the moment attack.
And it seems also that father and son traveled to the Philippines in order to train for the attack.
So people were commenting about the speed with which they were firing.
And I thought that it was noteworthy, but didn't actually prove that they had gone to a militant training camp.
It seems that they did.
And you might ask yourself, well, the Philippines is a Catholic country.
Why would you go train on jihadi attacks in the Philippines?
There's a small Muslim minority in the Philippines, and they run their own insurgency.
It used to be known as the Abu Sayyaf insurgency, and then it became a branch of Islamic State.
And they've been running an insurgency against the Philippine government for jihadi reasons since maybe the 1990s or something like that, mostly in the island of Mindanao.
And this is something that you should note.
There isn't a single country in the world where there is a Muslim minority where there isn't either a jihadi insurgency or a steady stream of terrorist attacks.
Like this is sort of something that we're living with all over the world now.
Because as I keep on insisting, Islam is a religion of government and legitimizes for itself the use of violence in order to become a religion of government.
So actually there is one exception.
The one exception where there isn't a jihadi uncertainty is Ethiopia.
And that's because they all go to Somalia and fight there.
So it's sort of a borderline case, really.
But that's the one country where there's a Muslim minority and there isn't either terrorism or a jihadi insurgency.
So these guys went to train with some jihadis and apparently trained well enough to kill 15 people.
So far there are 22 people still in hospital in Australia out of the 40 who were injured.
So they shot 55 people, 56 people in pretty quick succession.
We also now know that the son was also training with the was also receiving religious instruction in Australia within a street da'wah movement that was linked to what I believe is called Al-Medina Center.
And he was working with a preacher called Wisam Haddad.
By the name of it, he's Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian.
By the name, he's one of those three.
And he was going there as a 17-year-old.
So he's been going there for some time now and ended up getting radicalized in this way.
So he got radicalized in Australia because there are enough radical jihadi preachers in Australia to do this.
So the problem now is so deeply ingrained that, okay, you might have to travel for training, but you don't really have to travel for radicalization.
This can be made available to you in a friendly Islamic center near you.
And this is how the son got radicalized.
This doesn't really explain how the father got radicalized.
And it doesn't explain on a human level how a father would sort of send his son to death or to near death based on this ideology.
But we see that happening all the time.
We see that happening with the Palestinians, with the Syrians, who tend to view this as a family affair.
And if you look at the other side of it from Hezbollah, on the Shia side of it, that is, you see that this is an organization that's built by family members, in-laws, etc.
So this sort of families getting radicalized together is a very frequent thing.
And we also see it here in Britain with the Pakistani rape gangs, which operate as extended family units and extended friendship units.
Of course, it doesn't take that much to sort of radicalize someone into action because lots of opinion polling done in Britain, for example, suggests that even the people who aren't participating actively in violent actions at least tacitly support what people are doing.
You saw people talking about supporting terror attacks or ISIS or things like that.
And an alarming number of people do think positively of their actions.
And so if you think positively of it, it doesn't take that much to then actually do it.
And indeed, in this case, the preacher that helped radicalize Navid Akram, this guy boasts of being friends with people who went to fight for Islamic State in Syria and probably played a role in radicalizing them.
And that's what that gentleman looks like.
And so you see that this is a pretty obvious case of Australia becoming an exporter of terrorism because it tolerates this kind of thing.
And it seems that the tolerance isn't really going very far.
Now, before I go on, I wanted to sort of, I wanted us to hear from the Australian National Imams Council, which is the highest Islamic and religious authority in Australia.
That's a humble claim to be the highest religious authority in Australia.
I would have thought that it would be a Christian country, but I could be misguided about this.
But it goes on about a long rant about how the Muslim world suffered at the hands of ISIS, and Islamic State doesn't represent Islam or Muslims, and that it absolutely condemns this kind of attack and it opposes ISIS, etc., etc.
The problem is, this is only half the truth.
Because from a religious perspective, one of my previous jobs was to go through the propaganda of Islamic State and dissect that propaganda and try to find holes in it and try to see when they constructed their religious arguments, could it be said that these arguments were un-Islamic or were faulty from an Islamic perspective?
And the answer is no.
Well, it goes back to the phrase, the problem with Islamist fundamentalism, the fundamentals of Islam, right?
Precisely.
And this isn't intended to say that all Muslims are terrorists or all Muslims are bad or anything of that sort.
Absolutely not.
This is to say that Islam follows a different moral framework.
And this moral framework is quite permissive towards violence that is intended to further the cause of Islam.
And this violence is called jihad.
And those who die while waging jihad are guaranteed a place in paradise according to Islamic scriptures and according to every mainstream understanding of Islam.
So when going through Islamic State propaganda, one of the things that was genuinely notable was that for every atrocity that dominated media headlines for an extended period, the enslavement of the Yazidi women, the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot who had bombed Islamic State facilities, the various attacks against other Muslims and the beheadings of other Muslims,
Islamic State managed to find justification from two out of the four mainstream schools of Sunni Islam.
Suddenly, Islam breaks into four main schools.
And the way that consensus works in Islam is that if two of the schools find something permissible, then this is mainstream.
And for pretty much everything that these guys did, they did find justification based on analogy with what these clerics had said, these sort of titans of the Muslim faith.
In the same way that we would refer as Christians to the church fathers and what the church fathers believed in order to understand what we should believe as Christians, these guys looked at the fathers of Islamic jurisprudence and found justification within it.
And they were always able to find ways to excuse any behavior that they wanted.
It doesn't mean that there aren't other interpretations of Islam that find this inexcusable, but it does mean that this is plausible enough and that this is acceptable enough.
And they know it.
And you can see from the image of Navid Akram with one of these preachers with a very extensive library full of very mainstream Islamic books and scriptures.
So this claim that everybody condemns ISIS and so on, yeah, but no.
Because if they didn't condemn ISIS, the Americans would bomb them, as they did to Gaddafi and to Saddam.
And so they found it expedient to condemn them while in reality preaching things that would be recognizable to ISIS.
And this has to be said and it has to be admitted.
And you sort of see examples of that in this Facebook page here.
Please forgive me for using Facebook.
I'm not a boomer, but here we are.
This is a picture of the Prime Minister of Australia visiting the Muslim guy, Ahmad al-Ahmad, who had intervened in the shooting and briefly disarmed, oh, I can't access the comments, and briefly disarmed one of the gunmen.
And you find around 20-30% supportive of the man and saying that this is true Islam and it doesn't allow the killing of innocents.
But then there's the other 70%.
And the other 70% are saying, may God never heal him.
We wish he had died.
He intervened too soon.
He should have let them get on with their job.
He should have let them continue, da-da-da-da-da, things of that nature.
And you see this public acceptance of these kinds of attacks targeting civilians, in this case, Jewish civilians.
You kind of expect it from Palestinians given what they've gone through in Gaza.
You expect a little bit of anger.
But at no point do you see somebody saying, well, religiously, killing a bunch of random Jewish civilians who are unarmed is not permissible.
Like, that's never actually argued.
Not in the public domain.
And the people who make this argument and say that there are religious grants for it, they tend to be state-sponsored clerics and are very often mocked and disowned by other clerics who say that you are the clerics of the state.
You are just reciting propaganda that the state wants you to recite.
You're not actually serious about this.
And we know it.
And it's so obvious that this is coming from a different moral paradigm because when Europe does, you know, this sort of thing of targeting civilians, we bring it up for years and years afterwards.
We still talk about Dresden and the United States and the Blitz.
The Blitz and things like that.
The bombing of places like Kosovo in the 90s.
Yeah, these things are still sort of introspected on culturally and there's not this unanimous support and I don't think except perhaps maybe during the actual conflicts within the people that are enduring it.
Maybe then you might have had majority support, but following the fact once people are far enough removed from it, they realize, okay, maybe targeting civilians is not a good thing.
Yeah.
I mean, even the thing is, the traditional warfare up to World War I didn't involve any of this stuff.
And it was clear: this is the army, these are the civilians.
Honor dictates that you don't abuse the civilians too much.
You need to feed yourself, so you end up looting them, but the purpose is to feed yourself rather than just loot them for the sake of it.
So there was always this sense, this moral sense of protecting civilians.
And it goes back to St. Augustine and just war theory.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it goes back to that.
I mean, had any of these societies that we're talking about involved here, had they ever come up with anything resembling like the Geneva War Convention?
No.
Anything like that.
Nothing of the sort.
More frequently, you see people defending Islamic slavery as having been particularly merciful and having been particularly merciful.
Including the castration.
Including castration, including the sexual slavery, including.
The collection of people from perfectly peaceful parts of Europe.
Yes.
So you find that, no, no, one of these guys became a ship captain.
Okay, fine.
But there's 10,000 others who didn't and who died miserable deaths in galleys or being worked to death or whatever.
And, you know, a big part of the work of the church was raising money to pay ransom to save Christians who had been abducted by Muslim slaving parties.
So this is a little bit of nonsense.
But the focus here has been really on, like, if you wanted to look at the reaction from Australian media, the focus has really been on the safety of the Jewish community.
And it's understandable after a tragedy like that.
But I just wanted to ask you if you were to see this clip and then tell me if maybe other people are also unsafe in Australia.
sort of watch this so this is a palestinian activist who sometimes larps as a secularist And he is going on about how Melbourne is ours.
I'm not sure what he means by that.
Could you take a guess?
I don't think he means that it's secular, does he?
No, no.
And I don't think he means that it belongs to the Australians or to the people of British stock who actually built Australia.
Because that would be a pretty inane observation as well, wouldn't you?
Yes.
What's he mean in his bio here?
Settler here, refugee there, desperate for justice in this colony and in Palestine.
So what does that mean?
Well, what this means essentially is globalize the intifada.
Because just as in Palestine, there is no justice, in the colonies, there is no justice, and he is complaining of that injustice.
But he would probably agree with the likes of Ash Sarkar, say, or random other lefty Islamists who are in Britain, who believe also that there is no justice in Britain.
And it doesn't really help the optics of the cause when one of the things that these kinds of people bring up, and I've not really looked into the argument very much, so the legitimacy of it can be argued whatever you want, but they bring up the settlers on the West Bank and the settlements that have been popped up here and there by Israel and the injustice of it, where at the same time that they are cheering on their own people,
basically doing popping up similar ethnic enclaves around our countries that then go on to potentially victimize the local population as well.
In secular terms, the story of Israel is immigrants coming to a country and taking over.
In secular terms, leaving all of the sort of moral arguments from Jewish nationalists about this question.
But what literally physically happened was that a big bunch of immigrants moved into another country and slowly took it over with armed force.
So he's just saying we should do that, too, but it's all right when we do it.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
They're not operating from principles, are they, in the abstract sense?
Because that's more of a Western thing to do in the first place.
They're operating based on group interest, which is obviously the default norm for the entire world.
Precisely.
So it doesn't make you look like you've got a particularly strong case or particularly principled movement.
Yep.
And you hear Australian media going on about how this was cascading hate that was left unchecked and that there must be a strong plan against anti-Semitism.
But when somebody tells you that I'm coming to your country and your country is mine and I'm taking over and that it's all mine and the world is mine also, I don't think this threat is purely exclusively to Jewish people.
And I think if you were to take a moment to sort of look at modern terrorist attacks in Australia, well, they seem to be targeting all kinds of people.
Anharon Manis, Farhad Khalil Mohammed, Yaakov.
Oh my God, he's back.
Kaya, attacker by Hassan Khalif.
I mean, I'm noticing a pattern.
Yeah, yeah.
It's the same as the one in Britain where from 2005, which was the last sort of Irish-related terror attack onwards, 95% plus of the terror fatalities have been Islamic.
Yes.
Yes.
It's pretty much the same thing.
And here we see Australian media talking to the Defence Minister and trying to sort of see what he's going to do about this.
More on that investigation in just a moment, but joining us live now is the Deputy Prime Minister and the Defense Minister, Richard Miles.
Richard, thank you so much for your time this morning under the most trying of circumstances.
If a government's primary job, its first job is to protect its citizens, have you failed the Jewish community?
I want to slightly object to the framing.
What about the occupation is a problem for pretty much all Australians and for everybody in the West.
But that doesn't seem to sort of really factor in here.
And you sort of see that the, Samson, if we could move to the next segment, you could sort of see that these guys are incapable of taking the problem seriously.
I mean, it's the same thing that happened over here where Southport happens.
People go and protest out in the street and they get hoovered up at the side of the road and arrested for going out and voicing their displeasure that this was allowed to happen.
They all predicted that, what's his name, Ruda Cabana, would have been known to prevent prior.
It turned out that he was.
And the government said, no, you're not allowed to go and do that.
But then the synagogue attack happens a few months ago.
And the first thing that happens is Kirstarma, instead of coming out and saying, your concerns don't matter, says we need to do everything that we can to protect this community by coming up with new anti-Semitism laws and cracking down on hate speech.
Yada yada yada.
It's not for us.
The laws and protections aren't for us.
They are for protected client groups, whether that be Jewish groups or whether that be Muslim groups.
Everything is then turned around to persecute the white natives of these countries, whether it be Australia, whether it be England, whether it be in America.
It's horrifying.
It's funny that you say this.
Let's sort of take a moment to listen to this.
Is the move to strengthen gun reform a distraction from a bigger issue, which is radical Islam?
No, I don't accept that at all.
I mean, the reality here is we need to do, we need to act in every way that's appropriate here.
You know, we've been talking about anti-Semitism.
We need to stamp that out.
We do need to make sure that we understand what's happened here in the context of intelligence and policing.
But gun I've never heard a gayer Australian accent in my life.
I didn't think Australians could sound that fae.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you sort of see that there is an absolute refusal to take the problem seriously because they simply can't bring it into themselves, but bring themselves to do it.
What they did do was that in one council in Northcote in Melbourne, they got rid of a mural saying globalize the anti-fabric.
So that's kind of nice.
That's kind of nice.
Very well, though, by the looks of it.
You know, they're working on it.
But it then turns out that just today, a group of seven people in two cars were arrested by armed police on their way to Bondi Beach.
So refusing to address the threat from Islamism and refusing to address, well, from Islam, refusing to address the problem of radicalization in the Muslim community isn't really going very well because here we read that the police received information that a violent act was possibly being planned before heavily armed officers detained seven men in two vehicles as they were heading to Bondi Beach,
presumably on their way to commit some kind of atrocity.
We don't know the full details yet, but that's kind of what happens when you don't call the threat what it is.
If the Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister isn't willing to say that radical Islam is a problem, partly because Islam in general is a problem and partly because immigration in general is a problem, you're not going to get very far.
It's not even been a week.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, here we are.
All right.
And on that, we'll go through a couple of rumble rants.
We've got three.
The chat keeps showing that it might have closed or not, so I don't know what's going on with that.
Samson, I hope everything's all right.
Somehow.
Somehow some tinsel has appeared on my screen.
There we go.
The festive Christmas spirit is just getting everywhere.
Sigil Stone, I think we need to re-engineer the Norm McDonnell quote.
If ISIS detonated a nuclear device and killed 50 million in certain nationality, how would Israel be most affected?
I mean, look at Finkelstein, right?
The day before the Bondi attack.
London's the safest city in the world.
I feel so safe in London.
Bondi attack happens.
Oh, I no longer feel safe in London.
What's happening to my country?
As soon as it's about him and his problems, it's a problem.
If it's about us, who gives a shit?
Objectively, it's not the safest city, even in England, not even in southern England, in fact.
And also, again, this was an attack in Australia.
Why do you suddenly feel if all of these things aren't connected, if it isn't a criss-crossing interconnected network of both your group and those groups of radical Muslims or whatever, like why should you care about, or at least why should you suddenly feel unsafe because of what's happening on the other side of the world, unless it's all connected?
But when we say such things, when we say white birth rates going down, when we say there's massive migration going into America, the European countries, into Australia, New Zealand, all of these historically white countries, we're not allowed to say anything.
We're not allowed to notice anything like that.
The double standard is appalling, and it's more and more noticeable every day because they just can't help themselves but make it obvious.
That's a random name.
All of this just confirms for me that if our side were to ever get power and implement remigration, a lot of these enrichers would turn violent.
Dark days ahead.
That's my concern as well.
Is no matter how peaceful we try and make it, people will try and attack us over it or rise up.
Based ape.
I've been a good boy this year and successfully managed to avoid being featured on Monkey News.
You did manage.
Well done.
Yeah, better luck next year, I suppose.
Yeah.
Josh has got reading.
What's that random names?
Last comment.
Thank you for that.
I enjoyed that comment there.
Yeah, yeah, we all appreciate it, though.
Those watching on Rumble, you can find it and you can enjoy it yourselves.
So they say we have no culture.
They say that we have no history.
They say that we're descended from people who looked and behaved nothing like us until new DNA evidence is re-examined again and it turns out that the English people and the British who are white were also descended from white people.
I assume you saw this while everybody was spreading it around.
It wasn't Bangle Lady, was it?
It was one of the other ones.
I forgot her name now, but she was found on a beach somewhere, wasn't she?
Beach head lady, was it?
She head.
And they were saying that she was a Cypriot, which wasn't true.
She was just British and very bad DNA analysis.
And yeah, they projected that she was very brown, and actually, no, she was white.
Yeah, the new projections are of hers, white, blonde hair, blue eyes.
It's funny how all the mistakes go in the same direction always.
What a shock.
What a shock.
If it was sort of dispersed sometimes to this side, sometimes to that side.
Yeah, fair enough.
We all make mistakes.
We're all idiots.
I'm looking forward to the time when they're examining DNA, sort of ancient DNA in Africa, and they're just like, we found a group of white people here.
So actually, you know what?
It wasn't colonial.
Well, we know after the recent discovery that the first fire was almost 400,000 years ago.
The Arneander Falls were the best.
In Britain, it's the out of England theory now.
England, yes.
We are the seat of humanity.
We're the cradle of humanity.
Sorry, Firas, I interrupted you.
Oh, the Uragas are going to get very angry about that, but please move on.
I don't care about the future.
Either way, so we're told all of these lies.
We're told we don't have culture, but all you need to do is actually go to England, not the cities which are mainly being taken over or turned into a big multicultural brown slop.
Go to the actual countryside, which are English holdouts, their strongholds for the most part, and you'll see British and English culture in action.
And that's a very high trust, very, you could say transactional, but there's a very communal culture that manifests itself in really interesting and quaint, sweet ways.
We've spoken about these before, but these are the famous honesty boxes, and you can see how much people really love them.
Even The Guardian a few years ago did this article just saying eggs, marrows, and chutney, England's honesty boxes in pictures.
And you can get a lovely selection of the kind of scenes that you'll find around the country.
Here's people selling from their farms, the kind of veg that they'll be growing.
It won't even be farms.
A lot of people just have vegetable patches in a group garden.
With this around me at all times.
And in fact, at the end of our driveway growing up, we would have a box.
We would sometimes have, you know, books where people could borrow them and return them.
We would have apples.
We wouldn't sell them.
We'd just say, oh, take them if you want.
And the funny thing is, people were so honest that when it got to the last apple, no one would take it because they didn't want to be the person to deprive someone else of an apple.
Exactly.
Even though they were free.
You think maybe somebody else will need that more than me.
And here's a perfect image.
It's just out in a field somewhere.
There's a carton of eggs and some other things.
And you say, put your money in this little jar and take what you need.
There you go.
And you can see all of the assumptions that this is built on top of.
It's built on the idea that people will be honest enough to actually pay for something without being watched.
It's completely detached from the managerial bureaucratic state because it does not require the panopticon.
It doesn't require the AI eyes on you that we have all the time now.
It's trusting that you as an individual will be honourable enough in yourself to stick to the rules.
It's very, very high trust.
Well, white British people don't really need that much government supervision to have a functioning society.
And this is proof of it.
We can be left to our own devices to run pretty much everything, and it works perfectly well.
In fact, it works much better than many other parts of the world.
Why we can show up in many other parts of the world, and all of a sudden, where there was just desert or nothing, there will suddenly be a civilization sprouting.
The Aboriginals living in the Stone Age, and then you look at Sydney Harbour, and it's, you know, in 200 years, you've created a utopia.
Yeah, and it's all off of the mentality that can support something like this.
And you can see the lovely ways that people do it.
And that communal aspect that I was talking about, like these people here setting up honesty boxes to help out a generous community, boosting fundraising efforts and offering something back for community support.
This is one Laura and Tom Winter from Langley in Maidstone, Kent, another rural part of the country, raising money so they can finance a suitable and safe home with their son Evan, who has Dushen, Dutchin, muscular dystrophy.
So that's really nice for them to be able to give to the community and the community is helping them.
There's this interconnected web of trust and obligations and care for one another that's going on here.
And it can only exist with certain people in certain parts of the world, which is why it forms this kind of cultural fascination for other places.
Do you know if you go out into rural England or Wales or Scotland, to be fair, the Welsh are very good for this in my experience?
I've not spent as much time in Scotland as I'd like.
But you go to any rural area, people say hello to each other on the street.
Sometimes they'll even stop and ask you how your day is going.
Complete, you know, you could be a complete stranger.
You're just in the small area.
You know, where I grew up, obviously people knew me and so they would say hello and ask me.
So steer clear of him.
No, everyone was very nice.
But the general idea is that you've got this nice community spirit and people help each other out.
And, you know, we had an example of we went on holiday and for whatever reason, in the panic of making the flights and getting the bags out, we didn't shut our front door.
And so it was left wide open.
And so our next door neighbours went in, wrote a note saying, oh, we've used our key because we left a key with them so they can keep an eye on our house.
We've shut your door for you.
We had a check.
Nothing was taken or anything.
Hope you have a nice holiday.
And then we came back and it's like, oh, that's a bit unfortunate.
But nothing was missing.
Nothing happened.
Someone went in because we trusted them enough to leave them a key to our house and locked up and all was fine.
There was order.
There you go.
And that's a lovely little anecdote.
And it's that kind of culture which is rapidly vanishing from the world that inspires this kind of curiosity.
Like, here's an NPR article asking how do Scottish honesty boxes work and who uses them?
Other parts of the world, even the ones that are descended from the same people and the same culture, look at this and go, like, how does this work?
We don't have that where we are.
I mean, I still get honesty boxes in my local area, which is nice as well.
This is NPR rights.
There's 14% of the population might have a problem with this honest approach.
Fair play.
Fair play.
But that's culturally, America originally descends from the English and other European settlers.
But even they, as a result of modernity, are far enough removed from it that now you get these articles where you're kind of educating Americans of like, oh, here's how people live in the countries that you come from.
Here's the kind of.
Educating city Americans.
Yes, yes, that's true.
I think you're already whom this experience would be genuine.
It shows how unique it is, that you can have places across the world asking how it works.
Sure, it does go on in the countryside in the US, though.
I'm sure it does, but it comes from here.
Yes.
It comes from here.
And even though right now you've got getting the development of the cashless society, people have pointed out, you know, like they should be dying because people are having to use card more and more often.
People aren't carrying cash.
But they're actually adapting.
They're adapting to the times.
By now, a lot of people have the little card readers.
If you're buying something, well, you can tap your card reader against it.
And again, it doesn't actually need anybody observing you or watching you.
A card reader can, I don't know how expensive they are, but that's another little bit of risk to leave there.
£100 at the very least.
50 to 100 quid on the hopes that people don't steal it.
And a ring doorbell by the looks of it.
Yeah, but there's still enough trust that people are going to be honest with it, that it still works in a lot of places in the world and a lot of places in the country.
But, and again, this is, you are right.
This isn't just England.
It also happens in places with very similar northern European culture, like the Netherlands.
But, of course, this is all not counting that there are new populations coming into these countries that don't have that same level of high trust, that don't have that honesty built into them.
The kind of people that show up, and if they something see something lying around at the side of the road that says, hey, please leave your money here, they just think, what a sucker.
And they take it.
I think it was a story of, I think it was Robert Mugabe coming to England and encountering not an honesty box, but something very similar where Lee Kuan Yu.
Singaporean president.
Yeah, was this Lee Kuan Yew?
Maybe you can...
He saw the people putting in the money for newspapers and taking exact change without anybody sort of just dipping his hand and grabbing a bunch of coins and stuffing his pockets and moving on.
And what he saw basically was that way of purchasing newspapers, which was actually quite common in urban America as well.
Very common all over America.
Urban America, you just leave your change there.
And nobody takes it.
Nobody steals it.
And he was so impressed by it that he wanted to be able to replicate it in Singapore.
Except that Singapore is also a police state.
And it does enforce this kind of honesty.
You can leave your laptop in a cafe in Singapore, but like in Dubai...
It relies on the technocratic panopticon to enforce all of that, whereas the English and other Northwest Europeans have just been able to rely on the honesty of others.
In fairness, in places like Dubai or Qatar, where that panopticon exists, the assumption that there is a panopticon has changed people living there, I would argue temporarily, and I'll explain why.
To the extent that they do behave themselves very properly there.
I say temporarily because you see this phenomenon replicated throughout the Middle East where People are flying to Dubai from the Middle East and they're behaving themselves perfectly as they arrive.
And then on the flight back, it's absolute chaos once the plane hits the tarmac and things return to a very bad norm.
It's like raising children, really, isn't it?
In the sense that if you raise them with only engendering proper behavior through punishment, then as soon as you're absent, they're going to misbehave.
Whereas if you engender it by teaching them the moral reasons why it's good to be a good person and actually imbibe a sense of morality in them, then they'll police their own behavior, at least certainly better than they would otherwise.
And to expand on your point, I think what you're saying is that this mode of behavior for them relies on the panopticon existing.
And if it collapsed, they would go back to behaving in the same way that they always did.
Whereas with the English, if our panopticon collapsed and we just go back to behaving how it's normal for us, well, this is how we would behave.
It'd probably be better if it collapsed, to be honest.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
But of course, this doesn't work for lots of places and lots of populations.
And so you introduce those populations and you get situations like this.
I don't want to hear these people.
And this is a farm stand in the Netherland, which has been left unattended because, again, it's the Netherlands.
They are expecting they can leave things unattended and won't get robbed because they can trust the people around them.
Well, a couple of people who definitely do not look like they're from the Netherlands.
They also don't look like they need the food at all, do they?
Look at the size of them.
No, fat bastard.
Yeah, greedy git.
They just walk in and they help themselves.
And to like everything as well, by the looks of it, just more than they could possibly even consume.
And you've got to remember, for these people running these farm stands, that's a hefty chunk of change they've just stolen from them.
A farm stand and farms in general run on super tight margins.
You can only have this happen to you once or twice before you have to fold or at least shut down this kind of operation.
My inner country boys coming out and it makes me want to go sort of full wicker man on these people.
I think many sympathize.
Many sympathize.
In a place like Lebanon, for example, my village is highly segregated between the Christians who live on one side and two Druze families who also have segregated neighborhoods.
And the way that it actually works is that within the community, there is, to some extent, a high level of trust.
I'd argue subject to numbers, but that's a different conversation for later.
And you do get things like people locking your front door for you or making sure that nothing's taken or anything of that sort.
But within the community.
And it's understood that outside of the community, you know, if you're raised properly, you don't do that.
But it's understood that stranger danger is very, very, very real.
And the assumption is that so long as it's small and local within your neighbors who are also your family, you're fine.
But beyond that, trust breaks down.
And on big financial matters, it tends to be that trust actually breaks down quickly.
Even in a society like that, that's supposed to be tightly knit and very close to each other.
So this issue of trust is very real.
And it's not accidental.
And it does come from a very long period of society developing the conscience of its members and teaching them to be to have a very strong feeling of guilt for anything wrong that they do.
And we tend to find in studies that the more diverse populations become, even within group trust breaks down as well.
As things begin to divide and segregate themselves, as people are, and it becomes more tribal, people, that kind of like mistrust then ends up permeating within your own communities as well.
So, this kind of stuff doesn't just have this negative financial effect on these farmers.
This will also be a massive detriment to the kind of high-trust community these people who set this up already lived in.
They're still stealing.
Yeah, they're still going on.
It's been going on.
It's still going on.
It's been going on for three minutes now.
They're clearing them out and literally clearing the whole thing out.
So, this will be presumably a huge loss for this farm.
I would say so.
That's ridiculous.
And these people feel no shame whatsoever.
Still going on.
There's still stuff left on the shelves.
If it's there, let's take it.
And that's how a lot of these people feel.
Maybe they wouldn't feel that way within their own communities, but this isn't their community.
These aren't their people.
So they just think, well, it doesn't affect me.
If anything, I benefit from this because I can get, what, like a week or a month's worth of food for free if I just take all of this.
They're not like us at all.
No.
They shouldn't be in our country.
And this happens all over now where these people have started to pop up.
Like this.
You get family shut down a 10-year-old's honesty box after egg theft, and that's in Conway.
They don't actually name who did it, but I don't know if they do.
And that's not to say that natives don't do this kind of thing as well, but just at much, much less frequency.
At any scale, this tradition wouldn't have evolved.
Yeah, the fact that this can exist in the first place means that we do this at such alarmingly small rates as to be completely negligible.
And then all of a sudden these people start moving into these countries and then boom, this happens.
Interesting.
We had this example in a I don't know what the music was for.
I think this one was in Ireland, possibly.
And you can see this one just taking 200.
It was reported on by the Daily Mail, taking 270 eggs without paying for them.
This one does have a happy ending because they were tracked down and forced to give them back.
I mean, personally, I would have had them dragged through the streets and shamed and who knows what else, but I won't go on with that particular thought.
I've got a few ideas.
Yeah.
Dadafy.
No.
You're beating my mind.
And it's starting to happen even in the Channel Islands, right?
The Channel Islands, tiny little islands with populations of a few thousand each.
All of a sudden, you're finding that Jersey farmers being forced to close their honesty box after a growing number of thefts.
All of a sudden, not only does it happen the once, it becomes a repeat occurrence and destroys that trust that has built up over generation after generation after generation.
And I thought, you know, maybe things are just changing in Jersey.
Maybe the kids in Jersey are just all of a sudden behaving badly for no reason.
Until you look into and find articles like this one, because of course, I don't know if we've got really standardized statistical breakdowns of migration into Jersey just yet.
But you do have articles like this from The Observer.
The never-ending fear that haunts Jersey's troubled migrant workers.
And this is when I knew that Jersey was over.
Look at how nice it is.
That place does not need any migrant workers to function.
Right.
Here's some statistics that they name in this, right?
Last year, so that'd be 2024, there were 2,432 seasonal worker permits issued to people coming to Jersey, a number that has more than doubled since 2021.
The largest groups are from India, the Philippines, and Kenya.
There should not be anyone from India, the Philippines, or Kenya on the Channel Islands at all.
Why are we giving out seasonal worker permits to a bunch of third worlders, let alone two and a half thousand of them, so that they can show up and ruin the beautiful culture and beautiful landscape of Jersey?
Frankly, under my government, there would be some kind of program for out-of-work teenagers on the mainland in England, in Scotland, and in Wales to go and fill those positions.
You would get maybe your accommodation pay for it, or maybe your local family would be happy to take you in for the summer, and you would go and work those jobs over the summer.
It'd be an opportunity.
I know I would have taken up snow like that when I was a teenager.
Why aren't we offering these opportunities to our own people?
Jersey is associated with Jersey royal potatoes and Jersey milk.
These are things that teenagers can do.
They can pull potatoes and they can milk a cow.
I was milking cows when I was a kid, so it's not that hard.
They can figure it out.
As a teenager, I'm offered the opportunity over the summer.
Oh, you have to work, but your accommodation will be.
You spend some money and you get a summer away in a nice part of the world, and there'll be lots of other people like you.
That's a pretty easy thing.
It takes up your character, and it teaches you responsibility, and it teaches you love of nature, and it helps you make a few quid for the rest of the year.
And the reason we have a summer holiday isn't because it's particularly hot in Northern Europe during summer.
The reason is literally to work around farm calendars so that young people could work the farms when they're needed.
That's the most important thing.
So you can literally adjust the school year to allow for things of that nature.
And it's a wide benefit to everybody.
But already, like we, in 2000, these permits were introduced as a way to help Jersey bring in desperately needed labor.
Again, why don't you just do my idea?
Without having to award settled status in return.
Workers on other visa arrangements, such as bankers or doctors, receive residency and can buy property after 10 years.
Because, of course, Jersey operates under slightly different laws than here.
They have their own visa system.
But still, without having to be awarded settled status, you still have these people all of a sudden popping up in your community.
And apparently, these permits are doubling in number over the course of a few years.
Why is this being allowed to happen?
And of course, the observer's takeaway from this is that these people are basically being used like modern slaves.
And they go on to give this awful, awful sob story about a Kenyan woman.
But it says here, until recently, migrants were not allowed to take on any other work in Jersey without the written permission of their employers, which was frequently refused.
Yeah, why should you be taking that work when you've already got employment?
Unless, of course, you're just trying to take the work from the people around you and subsequently depress their wages as well.
That rule led critics to compare the system to a form of servitude, which would violate both the UK Modern Slavery Act, which does not apply in Jersey, and EU human rights law, which does.
So already you've got these wanker human rights lawyers showing up and going, where's still nice in the world?
Where is still a place in the world that can act as an oasis away from the shithole that we've turned the rest of Europe into?
I know, Jersey.
Let's ruin that too.
Quote, as soon as you fall out with your employer, if they decide you're a bad potato in the sack, they can just go to immigration and say, I'm done with this person.
Based!
Based, good, good.
You shouldn't be there in the first place.
Why do you just show up for a summer to work on a potato patch and then all of a sudden, what, you get the automatic right to spend the rest of your lives there scrounging off of benefits?
Piss off.
That was explained by Joshua Machiri of the Kenyan Jersey Committee.
Exists.
A body that represents the 700 Kenyan nationals living and working on the island.
Why are there 700 Kenyans on Jersey?
Jersey has a tiny population.
Do you understand what putting 700 Kenyans will do to that population?
How much that would change it?
How noticeable that would be?
And how even in relatively small numbers like 700, they immediately form their own committee around their ethnic interests so they can beg for their right to ruin your country forever through their presence.
That's disgusting.
This whole circumstance is awful.
And of course, as soon as that happens, boom, boom, high trust society starts falling apart.
And I'm sorry, these honesty boxes matter far more to me than the well-being of any of these migrants, right?
And do you know what else it reminds me of?
Because there are other phenomenons as well.
Does everybody remember a few years ago this, right?
Because this manifests itself in other ways as well.
Yeah.
Indians, six-figure Indians, this guy, Mehel Prajapati, shows up in Canada and decides that, oh, I earn a good wage, I can afford to eat.
But if I show up at food banks and say that I'm a student, they'll give me food for free anyway.
So I'll just scam the people who need the food banks out of getting their food, and I'll get it for free and even better.
I'll post on social media explaining how I give hundreds of bucks everyone in Purangota.
I'm going to stop that right there.
Like, these people have no shame when they come here.
They have no shame.
They have no honor.
They have no internal sense that am I doing something wrong?
What they need, because the cultures that they come from enforce like this, what they need is they need the authority hitting them with a big stick saying you can't do that.
But when they get here, because the food banks are expected to be used honorably, because the honesty boxes are expected to be used honorably, there is no man with a big stick saying, no, you can't do that.
So they just do what they can take, whatever they can get away with.
Let me briefly correct you.
It's not that he doesn't have honor, it's that his sense of honor is teaching his compatriots how to also benefit from the system in dishonest ways in the way that he does.
So he was sharing this on social media probably because everybody who knows him and everybody who follows him on social media is of his group.
So he was preaching to them something which he thought was good, which makes it much, much worse.
Yeah, and this is an entire genre of YouTube video.
And you are right.
I was looking at it in a far too European way because Europeans have this thing where we abstract out and universalize our principles.
So honor to me is something that I have to apply to.
But it's how we do a larger society, isn't it?
We sort of universalize them outside of our insular community to our nation, which is how we can go to other villages and still slot in nicely.
Yes, so I apply, I see honor and trust and honesty as something that I have to apply to other groups as well.
Whereas you're right, these people see it as only something that exists within their own group.
And so they're more than happy to go and steal food from food banks, even though they've got money to buy the food themselves, potentially depriving people of the food that they actually need, certainly disadvantaging the food banks themselves because they're just having fraud committed in them every single day.
And then they go, you know what?
This is what my people need to hear.
So our systems, our countries, our culture was just not set up for these people.
It was not intended with this level of individual corruption in mind that these people could feel more than comfortable doing this to your local farm stand,
doing this to your local honesty box, coming in for work over the summer and deciding that we need to actually be here permanently because we just have the right, I guess.
And then coming and stealing all of the food from food banks, which are set up for the needy.
It's not meant for these people.
And the more of these people come in, the worse it will get, and the more it will break down high trust society and the high trust within your own group as well.
So there's only one solution for it, and you all know what it is.
Gaddafi know anyway.
I'll go through some of the rumble rants and then Josh can cheer us up with some happy news.
I'll go through the more expensive ones.
$10.
Cute Queen, once a week I run to the farm shop that has an honesty box for eggs, raw milk based, tallow soap, yogurt, pasture, raised chicken, grass-fed beef, and bread.
No cameras, guess what?
We're all white.
I could have guessed.
Sigilstone, it's like that farm stand got hit by a swarm of locusts.
Something to learn here.
Sigilstone, did you see yesterday or so Trump saying the border is secure, jobs are great, the economy is roaring, blah, blah, blah.
The only thing missing was a big mission accomplished banner.
Yeah, it worked so great the first time.
And yeah, those are the ones I'll read through and Josh can go on to his segment.
Okay.
May I have my podcasting utensils?
What are you going to steal it from me?
You're going to fight me for it?
I'm high trust, Harry.
This is true.
You can tell by the fact he goes a little bit ginger in the summer.
Have you ever heard such projection, everyone?
Ladies and gentlemen, I go blunder in the summer.
Ginger.
Ginger in the closet right there.
What'd you call me?
Was that a hard R?
Yeah, I dropped a hard R ginger on you.
Oh my god.
Bigotry.
Wanted bigotry.
So I thought it's about time, as this is my last podcast segment before Christmas, to do the Christmas tradition at this point of doing a weird news roundup, which is one of my favourite things to do after monkey news, which is coming.
And I've basically gone month by month in chronological order, and I've discovered that some months are weirder than others, which is not some sort of weird animal farm paraphrasing.
And here we have one from January, which I don't know why I found it as amusing as I did, but the BBC wrote an article saying, why does a plate of bananas appear on our street?
And then there's just a plate of peeled bananas.
Generous monkeys?
Are you sure this isn't monkey news?
This is to make sure there aren't monkeys in the neighborhood, maybe.
If the bananas are gone, it's like a sign that we're being invaded.
So it says down below.
Oh, I don't know why that's not working.
The box just isn't working.
Is it really?
I blame Samson.
Sorry, I didn't mean to throw at you.
I just saw Samson's eyes pop up behind the bonuses then.
So it says, that is exactly what's happening in a small town in Nottinghamshire.
And no one knows the reason behind the strange tradition.
The mystery plate appears on the second day of every month on the corner of Abbey Road, which, yeah.
Not that one.
Yeah, not the Beatles one.
And residents say it's been a constant in their lives for more than a year.
My guess is they're putting it out for hedgehogs.
That'd be cute.
I hope that's what I'm doing.
I love a good hedgehog.
Why would you feed them just on the second of every month?
And why do you want to overfeed them?
Hedgehogs are actually very small.
They could get fat very easily.
And that's a hefty number of bananas.
Think of the damage you could do to a car tyre if you fatten up those hedgehogs too much.
Would you be able to, I've got quite a few links.
Could you pass me the other one if it's not, or is that not working?
If one's not working, the other one won't be.
Of course.
So here's a cautionary tale for you.
This is from March.
Try clicking and then...
No.
So when a child tells you there might be a monster under their bed, maybe you should listen to them.
So apparently, Kansas Child said monster was under their bed, and the babysitter found a man hiding under the bed for some strange reason, which I think would traumatise me as a child.
And apparently the man once lived as a resident at the property and had been ordered to stay away from the property under an order of protection from abuse.
And apparently he was there anyway.
I don't know.
Probably a mental health thing.
Jesus Christ.
I know.
That's terrifying.
That's genuinely terrifying.
The last thing you want to actually find is someone hiding under your own child's bed.
No, it's so creepy, isn't it?
That would turn me into a child's bed as well.
Yeah.
And speaking of bed, actually, people have been talking about how dangerous XL bullies are.
But one dimension that people have not considered is their ability to shoot you.
Shot by it.
So Gerald Kirkwood reported to the police in Memphis that he and a woman were lying in bed with a firearm for some reason.
Dog got jealous.
When his dog jumped up and inadvertently caused the weapon to discharge, apparently the one-year-old pit bull, Oreo, had gotten his paw stuck in the trigger guard of his owner's gun.
Oreo immediately squeezed the trigger and shot his owner.
Apparently the bullet grazed the man atop his left thigh.
So yes.
Did the pit bull then throw a gang sign?
It threw a gang sign and then devoured a small baby.
See, in my mind, I completely ignore the description that you gave.
The dog just came in on its hind legs holding the gun.
Sideways.
Yes, 13% of pit bulls, 52% of dog bites.
And then we get to April.
And this is again from the United States.
And this is from Bill Track.
And this is, I believe, from Oklahoma, which amends an existing law on cockfighting by adding a specific exemption that allows cockfighting between live fowl and a robot.
So you're going to have robot cockfighting in Oklahoma now.
Provided that the robot doesn't cause any harm to the bird.
So it's rigged!
It's a rigged...
It's a rigged game!
It's a rigged game!
A rigged cockfight.
So you can...
How am I supposed to enjoy cock versus robot if I know it's rigged?
I know.
WWE stunt?
I don't understand.
Apparently, Vince McMahon's book in this.
There's going to be some sort of unlisted underground robot cockfighting going on somewhere, I bet.
That's hilarious.
So here's a wholesome story to sort of cleanse your palate.
This is again from April.
Dog found using the owner's t-shirt after surviving for 529 days in Australian wilderness.
What a basic dog.
And there's the dog.
I don't know how on earth this adaption or a sausage dog, as we call them, it survived in the Australian bush.
I guess it managed to fight off the kangaroos and the emus.
We need to study this dog.
That's crazy.
It is crazy.
So apparently, the wildlife rescuer had been working around the clock to find the dog off the coast of Australia.
Last seen by our owners on a camping trip.
I was going to say it's got a pink collar, so it's a girl dog as well.
Apparently, they left the dog, Valerie, in a playpen at their campsite while the couple went fishing, and when they returned, the dog was gone.
And, you know, credit to them for looking for long after a year.
I would have assumed after a year the dog would have not survived.
But apparently, 529 days in the wilderness, surviving the heat, avoiding, obviously, the snakes and spiders.
And apparently they created a scent trail trap using one of the dog's owners' t-shirts.
So the dog could follow the scent to find their owner and was then caught in a trap, which they were able to capture the dog.
Very impressive.
So I'm impressed by everything about this, to be honest.
Not only the dog's survival skills, but the way they trapped it was all very clever.
So well done, Australia.
There's a part of the dog.
That would kind of hope like the dog has like a scar over one eye now.
It has shrapnel sticking out of its head like snake in Metal Gear Solid.
It's like punished dog.
It has sort of PTSD.
It will see like a tarantula on TV and start barking at it or a snake maybe.
Yeah, start biting its owners.
I'm glad it's alright.
Comes back and it's actually fatter.
It's got like a kangaroo's leg.
Insane muscle.
It's like to see a Dakshin take down a kangaroo at some point.
And speaking of eating things, actually, KFC introduced fried chicken flavoured toothpaste and it's selling out, apparently, which is weird.
I don't know who on earth wants this.
And I imagine a specific kind of person wants this sort of thing.
Fat people.
Well, maybe.
But I googled this story to read a little bit about it before preparing this.
And I discovered something that if you Google fried chicken flavoured toothpaste, the first thing that comes up is watermelon toothpaste.
Which reminds me of some sort of stereotype.
Didn't we do an old video on stereotype accuracy?
We did, yes.
And they're very accurate.
We did an episode of my series Contemplations back in the day looking at the literature on stereotype accuracy and yeah.
Anyway, that's of course informed by cookies and actual search history that it's suggesting that.
So make of that what you will.
I don't know why I'm defaulting to using the box again.
And here's something that's a bit depressing from May.
The man who married a hologram in Japan, of course it's Japan, stereotypes again, can no longer communicate with his virtual wife because the software that allowed the interaction is no longer supported and so he can no longer interact with his wife, which to be fair, a lot of husbands are probably a little bit jealous.
Probably good for him in the long run.
I would say so.
This guy's giving me like Japanese chud vibes.
Yes.
Don't go Elliot Rogers, man.
Just like talk.
I mean, I say talk to women.
I don't know what the situation is like over there.
The annoying thing is I recognised that this was Miku because there's a guitar pedal.
Yes.
The Hakuni Miku guitar pedal where you can make your guitar sound like Hakuni Miku.
I would never buy it.
One of the best inventions of all time.
The thing is, it's really annoying.
I watched a demonstration out of sheer curiosity.
I was like, that is the most annoying.
I watched the old Andertons one.
And for a 20-minute video.
That's the same.
Yeah, like Rob Chapman using it.
For a 20-minute YouTube video, it was very entertaining.
Beyond that, it's just a knick-knack.
Sorry, we only know about this because of guitar pedals.
Sure, sure.
We swear, honestly.
Yeah, yeah.
Check my search history.
Yeah, I come from a low-trust society, so okay.
So moving to July, a parrot was a witness to a murder and it testified in court.
So apparently, I believe it was this lady murdered her husband, this guy, and apparently the parrot was repeating the words, don't shoot.
And it was able to testify in court, and it was treated as a witness to the murder and helped to convict the lady of murdering her husband.
So well done to the parrot.
It was an African grey parrot.
So well done.
They truly are intelligent if they're relied on as witnesses.
I don't know how long that they hold on to particular repetitions for the words that they repeat.
So that's impressive that it held on for long enough to testify in court.
Yeah, it knew its role.
It had to testify.
It had to vindicate its owner.
I imagine she feels like a Jerry Springer moment or something.
The most fictitious story I've said in my head is that she was a cruel, horrible lady.
Obviously, she killed her husband, so she can't be that nice.
And she was cruel to the parrot, whereas he was nice.
And so the parrot remembered that he was nice to it.
Honestly, it makes the most sense.
So moving to August and other weird wound-related things.
In Italy, a man survived for two days with a crossbow bolt lodged in his head.
So apparently the police went for a welfare check to his house and found him laying in bed with an arrow in his forehead.
I was hoping he just opened the door.
I knew he was sleeping.
He was 64 and he survived for two days.
The man had accidentally or possibly intentionally shot himself in the head with his own crossbow.
I mean, that's one way, like, that's a hell of a way of trying to take it out.
Yeah, no.
Also, who thinks that's going to work?
And also, who just is sort of sitting there just like, well, I'm going to live with this for two days.
Maybe he was like, well, it has to kill me eventually.
So he just patters about his house for a few days.
Now, pivoting back to the wholesome, this good old boy was elected mayor in a Minnesota town.
Awesome.
I think there's only like a very small number of people, so they don't really need a mayor.
He won my 12 vote.
He looks more trustworthy than most politicians, to be fair.
Although I have heard he's easily bribed.
And moving on to September, for some reason, all the weird news happened later on in the year for whatever reason.
So apparently, in the latest Great Escape, a bunch of Austrian nuns escaped a care home with the help from a former student and a locksmith.
And both of these nuns, all three of these nuns, sorry, in their 80s.
And then they escaped their care home and moved back into their convent, which was abandoned.
Beast.
And they didn't have any running water or food there, but they managed to make it work.
And now that's where they're living.
Good on them.
Beast.
I like the idea of a sort of like one flew over the cuckoo's nest style escape here.
There was a vegetarian nuns.
There's like an American Indian who helped break a window for them for some reason in Austria.
This needs to be made into a film, I think.
Yeah, that's incredible.
Yeah, that's absolutely incredible.
Netflix, don't touch it.
We know what you'll do.
Yeah, exactly.
And from one part of the manic world to another, Chad slugs have been tormenting Germans.
This was probably my favourite story of the year so far.
Inhabitants of an apartment block in Bavaria, in southern Germany, who called the police to investigate relentless buzzing of their doorbells late at night, were surprised to find the culprit was not a teenage prankster they had suspected, but a slug.
The slug had been sliding up and down the bell plate, creating havoc in the building and tearing angry residents out of their beds long after midnight when they could not sleep for noise.
And the funniest thing about this is that authorities said that they had removed the slug.
So the police came by and took the slug, presumably away in handcuffs.
Jail?
Exactly.
Put it in a thing of salt, executed it.
No.
They moved it to a different area.
I like to think that this was a very, very intelligent slug that knew what it was doing the whole time.
It was telling us something.
It's warning us of the monkey.
Mighty catch it and it's got a tiny little cigarette in its mouth.
I knew it would have come to this eventually.
Maybe it's a reincarnation.
You know, it's someone that the Germans have wronged at some point.
Who knows who that could be?
Anyway, moving on to November.
You're right there, Ferris.
Pope attended a rave in Slovakia.
I'm not going to say the ethnicity of the slug.
Apparently, the Pope, the new American Pope, went to a rave for some reason.
Apparently, they were doing hosted a rave?
He didn't actually host the rave, he attended.
And he didn't attend in person.
He attended on a big screen, which is even weirder, really.
That you're at a rave and the pope's just beamed in on a screen.
Was he like also raving?
Was he breaking it down?
Yes, it's a bit strange.
Okay.
Apparently, it was a religious-themed rave.
It was to celebrate a 75th birthday of an archbishop.
It was a rave to celebrate an archbishop's birthday.
Yes, and here's the guy running it: priest and DJ.
Here he is.
Who claims that electronic music is the path to God?
Was it like old choral hymns blasting with a deep bass beat underneath it?
It's like drum and bass remixes of church choirs.
No, I don't know what it is.
I imagine it was just regular old electronic music, to be honest.
But apparently, the Pope did beam in on the screen for a while.
So technically, he did attend it.
The DJ blended techno music with fragments of the Pope's message and performed an unreleased track, Dear Young People, which included phrases spoken by Leo in his address.
Can we please just stop with this?
I'm this close to bashing the guitar players in churches.
Can we just not go into raves?
Thank you.
I'm a guitar player.
You're not in mass.
Yeah.
Not at mass.
True.
I've never played guitar at church.
Thank you.
I did my song earlier this year.
If you do it, I'll take my vengeance.
People kind of realized before I did that I'd accidentally written a Christian metal song without realizing it's because of the lyrics that Chris put over the top of it.
I was like, huh.
Yeah, but I don't think they'd want me playing it in churches.
There are a few slurs in there that I don't think you know.
There actually are.
I didn't write the lyrics.
Nothing to do with me.
Right, Donald.
Jack Hadfield impressed.
It was of Donald Trump.
So this is an interesting story.
So a Ukrainian man fled the war in Ukraine.
Lucky him.
And now he's a sumo wrestling champion in Japan.
Here he is, lifting a cup.
So this is a bit strange.
He's one of the first foreigners to win it.
He's done a lot of eating by the looks of it.
I think he's like, what is he, 21 years old?
So he's of fighting age, although he's a big target, so maybe it's best he's not involved.
What a strange thing to do.
I couldn't believe this when I saw it.
I'm just like, the world's not real, is it, really?
But anyway, there's also this from the Irish Independent talking about a study that found that golden retriever and human emotions are driven by the same genes.
And apparently, researchers identified specific genes such as PTPN1 linked to dog aggression and human intelligence, ROMO1 tied to trainability and emotional sensitivity, and variations, and this is the name of the gene, by the way, hunk, and ASCC3 connecting dog nervousness to human worry and mood swings.
And Dr. Eleanor Raffan says the findings are really striking.
They provide strong evidence that humans and golden retrievers have shared genetic roots for their behavior.
So there we go.
So just to confirm, one of the genes that connected us was the gene for trainability.
I know, it's a bit weird, isn't it?
So, this implies...
How come it hasn't worked on any of you?
This implies that if I used...
You're not giving me a single dog treat, Phil.
I was going to say, if I tried to train humans in the same way that you would a golden retriever.
It does work, though.
It would work.
Like, conditioning works on human beings.
Not that I would know.
Not that Josh has ever fed any of the people in cages in his basement dog treats to get them to do tricks for him.
It's silly, Harry.
I'm not rich enough to afford a basement.
Oh, that's a the people in cages in his bathroom.
If only it were that large.
Anyway, so in another animal-related story, not as happy this time, a US driver called the police saying, I just had a bold eagle drop a cat through my windshield, and that's what the damage was done.
Could you imagine?
Imagine hell.
Driving, and then that happens to you.
And sadly, the cat didn't make it.
If you can imagine, getting picked up by a bold eagle and dropped from height for a windshield probably doesn't do you any favours.
But just the horror of having this happen to you, I think I'd probably be a bit traumatised driving for a while after that.
Yes.
I don't know what the chances are of that happening to a person, but I suppose you need to be aware that it is going to happen.
And speaking of mortality, this was a story that went around the UK that we didn't cover.
But coffins are becoming too large for people to be cremated amid a growing obesity crisis.
And this is just sad, really.
It's not really fun or weird, but yes.
It's weird.
If you're watching this and you're fat, don't plan on dying anytime soon, go out and exercise.
That's my message for you.
And now on to December, which surprisingly was pretty packed with weird things.
So here's one again from Britain.
So this lady who was a serial thief, I believe it was either in, I can't remember whether it was Tesco's or Sainsbury's or something, but somewhere in Hampshire.
She went on a crime spree stealing nearly a thousand pounds in goods.
Usually, I think it was, I read somewhere.
Was it just beneath the lid?
Yeah, it was dog food, seven bags of dog food, largely.
So she was wearing various wigs to be able to get away with stealing dog food.
Sorry, what was that?
I was going to say, don't we operate in a similar way to shops in California where there's a limit where you can steal under and the police won't be called?
Maybe.
Was she just trying to tread the fine line with dog food?
Well, she's been punished anyway.
She's also been banned from wearing wigs in shops.
So that's an additional charge she's going to now have.
It reminds me of that extra from The Lord of the Rings where Dominic Moynihan pretends to be a German interviewer and he's interviewing Elijah Wood and he's like, do you wear wigs?
When will you wear wigs?
I have not seen it.
It's fantastic.
I implore everyone who doesn't know what I'm on about to watch that.
Even if you've not watched The Lord of the Rings, it's funny.
You've really sold it to me.
And here's another one.
Another ridiculous thing from Britain, unfortunately.
We're seemingly over-indexing on the weird news around the world.
An 86-year-old man was fined £250 for littering after a leaf blew into his mouth and he spat it out again.
Oh, I saw this one.
It's in Stoke as well.
I know.
It's up your way, isn't it?
Yeah, near my neck of the woods.
But much like this next story, this is what I'm going to be doing at Christmas.
Apparently, a drunk raccoon went on a boozy rampage in Virginia in a liquor store, and this isn't the first time it's done it over.
They found their shop broken into with bottles everywhere and product missing.
And they're like, who could have done this?
And they went into their bathroom, and the racket was passed out like this.
Which I just think is...
Which I just think is...
I just think it's brilliant.
There it is.
And the fact that it's a repeat of fancy.
There we go.
Oh my God.
You walk into the bathroom and you're like, not again.
And this isn't the first time, apparently, either.
So to think that the raccoon was breaking in, getting drunk, and then just chilling out in the bathroom.
Cheeky bastard.
I've had many nights like that where I've drank too much and fallen asleep next to the toilet.
I think we've all done it.
But the thing is that this isn't all this raccoon has done.
This one raccoon has also gotten drunk and broken into a karate studio that's the BMV and other places as well.
It's the same picture as well.
It's menace.
It's like his rap sheet.
That is priceless.
I kind of respect it.
This is the most nefarious raccoon I've ever heard of.
Also, a karate studio.
I'm just imagining it drunk doing karate.
It's just like hazily applying for a driver's license.
It's like a sort of Simpson skit or something.
So there was an animated film about this raccoon once.
There needs to be.
So here's a happy story.
This is again in Italy.
They've overrepresented themselves in weird news.
A runaway migrant was captured after trying to disguise himself in a nativity scene.
So this was only not too long ago.
And where is the picture?
Please say there's the picture somewhere.
Please.
Yes.
What an idiot.
One of these things is not like the others.
Oh, they've gone woke with the nativity now as well.
Can you believe it?
He's not one of the wise men, I'll tell you that.
So what makes this funnier is that the town mayor was the one who spotted him in the nativity scene as well.
So standing there for a while?
I don't know.
Pretending to be a statue.
But it says Gala Stone Mayor Flavio Filoni spotted the unnamed 38-year-old man from Ghana hiding in a life-size nativity.
I don't know whether this is the actual image, because I don't know whether the mayor would just be like, well, I'm going to take a picture of this.
And whether he has stood there like a statue for a long time.
I mean, it says view two images.
Have we got another one?
I haven't seen the second one to be fair.
One.
There it is next.
Oh, that's 22.
I'm using my left hand.
I'm right-handed.
Yeah, you can do it.
Josh, come on.
Oh, that was very disappointing.
And my final piece of weird news is a sort of bit of meme magic, really, that the Merriam-Webster 2025 word of the year is slop.
And I have done my best to popularize it.
I've been using this word quite a lot to complain about posts online in particular.
We wasn't slop every day.
There was a three-letter prefix that has been removed from this, but I'm not going to go into that.
There are any number of prefixes that you can put before this, actually.
It's quite fun.
Try them out.
My preferred use of the word slop is basically just low-quality rubbish.
And the funny thing is, I've seen all sorts of people adopting the use of the word slop.
Like one of the BBC Verify people was referring to stuff as AI slop.
I was just like, this is like a total cultural victory.
It's the perfect word for it, though, isn't it?
It is, yeah.
And so that about concludes our weird news roundup of 2025.
I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until next year for the next one.
But I hope you've enjoyed it and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
All right.
Give me that back.
Samson's going to do video commas.
I'll read a few of these.
Sigil Stone, Tweety Bird got real sick of Sylvester's shit and called his cousin.
Apparently, so.
That's a random name, is again trying to get us in trouble.
Flavius Magnus, the parrot story, happened in a video once.
Life imitates art, I guess.
We've got quite a few decent ones from his.
Rural USA has honesty boxes.
There's a video somewhere of a black guy coming across one on a road trip and being tripped out by it and saying, if they were around here, it wouldn't work.
Urban Americans.
Sigil Stone, when Josh did that Google search, did he say she?
I did, yeah.
In that exact way.
And then I started like smacking my lips a bit.
And then he painted the bits of his hair onto his forehead and glued them for some reason.
Dragon Lady Chris, Josh, I remember that English lion sweater from last year.
Still looking good.
When's the next video coming out on the YouTube channel?
It's been months in the last one.
Sad face.
I have been working on a script about how it was Britain that built the British Empire, but at the minute it's 5,000 words and about 12 pages long and it's not even finished.
I haven't even got to Napoleon yet.
So I haven't even got to Napoleon yet.
So I think it's going to come in January.
But it's going to be a very highly polished and long video.
And I spent a lot of time researching it.
I'm excited for that.
Sounds good.
And the last one I'll read, Wesley 1924 asks Banana Bankski.
Yeah, it's Banksy, but the banana version right at the start.
All right, we'll watch some of these now.
Ferris was mistaken a bit about the infamous child forced by his mom and government to be trans.
Jeff Younger is from Texas, but his ex-wife took their son to California.
The Texas courts simply didn't stop her taking him to California.
It is now in California where the mom is now transing her son fully.
This is the most recent interview I found, and I suggest everyone watch it.
Thank you.
Yeah, I'm also noticing some of the books on his bookshelf.
I can see Sam Francis Leviathan and its enemies on there.
So this guy is reading up some good stuff, actually.
I'm always drawn straight to the bookshelves.
I'm sorry, man.
Hey, Lucy says, I'm in Dumb Freeze, and right now I'm at the mausoleum for Rabbi Burns.
Here it is here, looking pretty swanky.
Here's a walk inside.
Robert Burns died 21st of July 1796, aged 37.
That's basically a pilgrimage if you're a Scot.
I remember my grandparents would celebrate Burns Night pretty religiously, and you know, I could recite some Burns poems off by heart.
Great stuff.
Really nice.
I'm a Jew.
I'm married to a Muslim.
I don't seek myself to blame the religion.
In the same way that somebody carries out a stabbing, I don't blame the knife.
Isaiah Berlin wrote that were Jews truly blessed with cleverness, then Israel would be the most intelligent nation on earth.
This not being the case, we must take the wisdom of Jews with a pinch more salt.
Mr. S's expostulation was the kind of high-minded, cold, unsympathetic intellectualism that I hate from people, regardless of their religion.
And to me, it revealed a fundamental want of care in his thought.
I hadn't seen anything from the S's stuff.
Is he actually married to a Muslim?
I didn't know that.
I mean, that's.
I didn't know that either.
Send them over to the Middle East.
He's going to cure all conflict.
No, I thought that was Van Halen that you do that.
Remember that South Park episode?
The talk of drone warfare yesterday reminded me of the Williams Wasp, aka the flying trash can.
It was a little more than a small jet engine with a housing wrapped around it.
Although it did have a flight time of 20 minutes back in the 80s, they didn't think it could replace traditional aircraft, so no further development was done.
That's a shame because it's quite neat.
I've never heard of this.
It looks cool, yeah.
This looks very Star Wars as well.
I don't even know if it's real, but that's amazing.
It reminds me of the little hover things from Metal Gear Solid 3.
Niche reference there.
A couple of years ago, I indulged in a comments argument on YouTube as to which military would be more deadly in a fight, mobile infantry or the Astartes.
Although Heinlein's infantry wore power armour and jump packs, deploying tactical nukes on the battlefield, Astartes have the same kit and the advantage of being genetically modified to be stronger, smarter, and conditioned to wage war without the psychological effects.
Heinlein's book isn't about how superior his mobile infantry may be, but the struggles that made them effective citizens in his world.
Heinlein's book is a masterful discourse that the Black Library will never attain.
I do need to read it, and I need to read some of his other works as well.
Is there anything else?
Oh!
Speaking of AI Slop.
I love curry.
It smells so warm and sweet.
I love curry.
I share it with my friends.
I love curry.
Good flavors never end.
I like how one of the...
That's gonna haunt my dreams.
I like how one of the actual orcs from Lord of the Rings the two towers.
Oh, each it in the middle of the morning.
It was the looks like.
Oh wait, no, it wasn't looks like meatback on the menu, was it?
That was an older.
No, he's the one that goes after Mary and Pippin and chases them into Fangor and they're swashed by Treebeard.
Yes, yes, you're right.
It's been too long since I've watched him.
Alright, is that all of them, Samson?
Looks so.
Get a few written ones in.
Yeah, very, very quickly.
Do you want to read one or two of yours, Firaz?
Yeah, sure.
Binary Surfer says, I predicted this on a stream about five years ago with a few others on the attacks.
We were pre-COVID at monthly attempted attacks across Europe.
We reached weekly attempted attacks around 2022, and we are now almost daily attempts effectively.
Soon it will be weekly in each major country.
I suspect we will eventually reach daily attempts five to ten years in every major country, of which a percentage will always get through, of course.
Yeah, I mean, this is the trend, right?
They're fighting a war, but the government insists that they're not a problem.
It'd be like that opening scene from Children of Men.
Yeah.
Kevin Fox says, I noticed that the Australian government's new hate speech laws they're planning included making claims of racial superiority being a criminal offense.
So leftist politicians speak of far-right speech.
Obviously, it will not be used against Muslims claiming Islam is the only true religion and all other religions are pagan and da-da-da-da.
Say online that Islam is a death cult and Albanizi will have plod on your doorstep in minutes.
Yeah, pretty much.
True.
Pretty much.
Russian Garbage Human with an interesting one, which I will skip, unfortunately.
Michael Drabelbus with also a good one, which I will also pass over.
But thank you.
I'll read some of mine then.
Sophie Liv, man, the honesty box is so sad.
We have them in Denmark too, out of roadsides as you drive through the country and can buy potatoes, eggs, honey, strawberry, etc.
Lovely.
But yeah, we also started having theft issues, especially in the Zealand area, where shockingly the highest migrant population is because Copenhagen is in Zealand.
Well, there you go.
Let's see.
Roman Observer, the secular state can only impose moral behavior only as long as it stands, works, and where it can reach.
Yep.
Roman Observer as well.
All native teams should volunteer for Harry's mandatory summer jobs program.
It'd be good for you.
I'd have loved the opportunity to do something like that as a teenager.
And I'm sure that the actual inhabitants of Jersey would have preferred someone like me to show up anyway.
Maybe lovely.
When there was a kid, it was nice.
Hold on, I have to read one of those.
Sorry.
This was for you, Josh.
I look forward to the John Wick remake called Josh Wick, where he goes around Devonshire and delivers justice to all who steal from the Odyssey boxes.
I would genuinely be.
Do you do the sidekick?
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
All right, then, Josh, do you want to read through some of yours?
Okay, I'm going to go from spicy to wholesome.
Lord Inquisitor Hector X says African grey parrot is the first honest African witness.
Bly me, that's spicy.
Michael Drybelbis says, I remember my first cock fight, quite embarrassing when I walked in and they asked me where my rooster was.
Then Sophie Liv says, hedgehogs are precious creatures that must be protected at all costs.
They are cute and eat slugs.
We need more of them.
And I very much agree.
I've actually taken a few hedgehogs out of roads before.
They're actually quite easy to pick up because they go into a ball and then you just go like that and you can pick some up.
And so if you see a hedgehog in the road, my Christmas parting message is pick it up and move it out of the road.
And with that wonderful message to end on, I think that's all we've got time for.
So thank you for joining us today.
We'll be back again tomorrow and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.