Ep. 1273 - Titanic Sub Key Lesson No One Talks About
Humanity is officially doomed even by the predictions of Saint Greta Thunberg, the Pentagon just discovered over $6 Billion to give to Ukraine, and Elon Musk bans a nasty leftist word that is used to harass conservatives.
Ep.1273
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The end of the world is officially upon us because now, precisely five years and one day ago, Saint Greta of the Blessed Sailboat, Miss Thunberg herself, predicted it.
She tweeted, In a curiously deleted tweet that quote, a top climate scientist, how dare you?
She said, a top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
To be fair to Greta, she did not say that the world would end in five years.
She said that climate change would wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
And those are different claims.
But the practical consequence of them is pretty similar, pretty much the same.
Whether we're already dead, Or merely inevitably doomed, there is now, according to Greta Thunberg, absolutely no reason to try to do anything about so-called climate change.
It's too late.
We could all stop driving our cars and cooking our food and heating our homes and fueling our societies today.
We could turn off the whole thing, which would coincidentally wipe out all of humanity just by doing that, but we could do it.
Let's say we did it.
It would be too late.
Climate change activism is now officially pointless.
So eat, drink, heat, drive, burn up those fossil fuels, and be merry.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Wonderful, wonderful to be back.
Great news coming out of Twitter and Elon Musk.
Elon has said that the word cis, this is C-I-S, will now be banned as hate speech.
You know, if people are spamming the word cis at normal people, then it will be banned.
And I think this is great.
Some libertarian types are upset about this, but this is awesome.
We'll get to that in a second.
Speaking of Twitter, I had to open with Greta today.
Greta, because these guys, the catastrophizing libs, always make predictions that are just far enough in the future that nobody really calls them out on it.
Nobody really remembers when the time comes.
And so they get away with it and then the predictions never come true.
And then they make more catastrophic predictions.
If you don't do exactly what I say, the whole world's going to end in like seven years or whatever.
And then seven years come by, people forget about it.
But Twitter makes it Much easier to refer back to those predictions.
And just remember, it's either totally wrong, in which case there's no reason to believe St.
Greta and the rest of the environmentalist types, or it's too late.
Or Greta was right and it's just too late and nothing we do now can possibly save us.
All of humanity will be wiped out.
But either way, if we are to take Greta Thunberg at her word, It's over.
It's over.
That's a cause for celebration.
We're not wiped out yet, but we don't need to worry now about driving a stupid Prius or something.
We're good.
We're good, guys.
Speaking of predictions being wrong...
There's a little oopsie daisy just came out of the Pentagon.
This will affect you.
It will affect your pocketbook.
A little bit of an accounting error over at the Department of Defense.
Accidentally might have provided over six billion extra dollars for Ukraine.
Oops.
During the Department's regular oversight of our execution of Presidential Drawdown Authority for Ukraine, we discovered inconsistencies in equipment valuation for Ukraine.
In a significant number of cases, services used replacement costs rather than net book value, thereby overestimating the value of the equipment drawn down from U.S.
stocks and provided to Ukraine.
Once we discovered this misvaluation, the Comptroller reissued guidance on March 31st clarifying how to value equipment in line With the financial management regulation and DOD policy to ensure we use the most accurate of accounting methods.
We have confirmed that for FY23 the final calculation is $3.6 billion and for FY22 it is $2.6 billion for a combined total of $6.2 billion.
These valuation errors in no way limit or restricted the size of any of our PDAs or impacted the provision of support to Ukraine.
Just want to use this as an example of why I frequently say that I don't ever trust statistics.
It's all bunk.
Money is fungible and manipulable, especially when you've got strong central governments and you've got cozy relationships with banks.
And it's easy to move all this stuff around, especially when you've got an administrative state that's not really accountable to the people, that just does whatever it wants.
Do you see what she did here?
It's not that the Biden administration is saying, oh, whoops, we misplaced $6 billion.
The government has done that sort of thing before.
But it's not this, oh, you know, you know how you lose your car keys?
Well, yeah, we lost $6 billion.
And now we found we're going to give it back to Ukraine.
That's not what happened here.
The U.S.
said.
Okay, we're going to give a bunch of military support to Ukraine because we're fighting a war with Russia now.
It's a proxy war in Ukraine.
The American people don't really want it, I don't think, but they're going to do it anyway.
Doesn't matter who gets elected.
They're probably just going to keep fighting this war one way or another.
And they say, okay, we're sending over these arms.
We're sending over these munitions.
All right, here we go.
We've given gazillions of dollars to Ukraine.
The Ukraine war is unpopular politically right now, but the U.S.
still wants to fund the war because the U.S.
is, if not the chief belligerent in the war, we're the biggest one by far.
Russia's referring to the Ukraine war as a direct hot conflict with the United States.
We managed to avoid that for all of the Cold War, but now somehow we're doing it over a territorial dispute that's gone on for a thousand years in Eastern Europe.
Now, the U.S.
government wants to keep fighting this war.
It's politically unpopular, so what do they do?
They say, oh, we didn't actually give all the money that we said we gave.
And how can they make that claim?
Well, the way they can make that claim is by revising down the estimates of value of all of the military equipment that we've sent over.
But that's the way to free up the money.
If you say, okay, well, look, I sent you $100.
I sent you $1,000 in the form of 10 nice bottles of whiskey.
Okay, I got you a $100 bottle of whiskey, and I bought you 10 of them, and there you go, there's $1,000 in aid.
But let's say I want to send you some more whiskey.
Well, the way to do that is not just, if you can't find the money in the couch, you're going to say, oh, actually, that bottle of whiskey that was $100?
No, I got that number wrong.
That bottle of whiskey, that was actually only worth $20.
Yeah, so really, I only sent you like $200 worth of whiskey.
So I'm going to send you $800 more of whiskey.
Nothing changed.
You've sent all the same stuff.
We all know what's going on.
It's just you're finding an excuse to send more support over without having to technically Or so transparently disturb what you've already agreed to do and what the American people are already counting on.
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Also, just to get back to the global warming thing for a second.
All those tanks and fighter jets, they're probably burning some fossil fuels in Ukraine, right?
It's kind of interesting.
All those really pro-environmentalist, anti-global warming activists, they seem to be fine burning up the- they're fine burning up fossil fuels for certain purposes.
Like fighting an imperial war in Ukraine.
But not for other purposes, like poor people heating their homes.
Or senior citizens on fixed incomes having a stove.
That, you're not allowed to do that.
Speaking of heavy equipment, probably the biggest Unexpected news story that is taking people's attention right now.
Really awful, awful story.
There is a submersible, it's not quite a submarine exactly, it's a submersible device that is carrying five people somewhere in deep sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
They were on a trip to go look at the Titanic, and the company lost contact with the submersible pretty quickly.
And now they're running out of air.
The U.S.
government's involved trying to recover this but you know they're looking at a search area the size of the state of Connecticut and the submersible is not very big it's pretty cramped and so it's it's just about as horrifying a story as one could imagine in terms of ways to go just in a cramped little Tin can at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the Titanic.
That's pretty terrifying.
Where you don't know, we don't really know what's happened to these people.
There's a chance they're already dead and the way they would have died is if somehow the cabin became depressurized and then the weight of the ocean would have just crushed it all up.
That would have been very quick.
Or they could just be waiting somewhere, waiting for the oxygen to run out, which apparently is going to happen.
Or may have already happened by 5 a.m.
Eastern Time.
Or it might take months and months to find this submersible or we might never find this submersible.
People are criticizing the company right now because the company seems to have cut some corners on safety and seems to have gone a little bit woke and said they wouldn't hire old white guys because that's not inspiring enough or something.
Here's some audio of the head of the company.
When I started the business, one of the things you'll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and you'll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys.
I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational, and I'm not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old who's a sub-pilot or a platform operator, one of our techs, Can be inspirational.
So we've really tried to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we're doing things that are completely new.
We're taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry is related to safety and some of the profoundness of checklists, things we do for risk assessments and things like that that are more aviation related than Ocean related.
We can train people to do that.
We can train someone to pilot the sub.
We use a game controller.
So anybody can drive the sub.
So they use a game controller.
They've used all this new kind of technology.
They've applied aviation technology to the sub.
The critics are saying, you cut too many corners.
This was insane.
Why on earth would anyone get into this thing?
The defenders of this are saying, well, this is the explorer spirit.
This is adventure.
We shouldn't discourage this.
Of course, you've got to be a little bit crazy to go explore parts of the world, and that's a good thing, and we should encourage it.
The people knew the risks.
That seems to be certain.
There's a 61-year-old British digital marketing magnate named Chris Brown.
He had put a deposit down to go on a voyage on this submersible, and then he backed out at the last minute because he said the risks are too high.
He said, the risks were too high in this instance, even though I'm not one to shy away from risk.
And he was buddies with a billionaire, Hamish Harding, who is down there in the submersible.
And Harding said, OK, well, I'm willing to accept the risk.
There's a teenager also with his father.
That's especially sad.
But people at least knew this was a risky thing, and they decided to do it anyway.
I am not on either side of the internet debate over the wisdom or idiocy of getting in this sub.
Some are defending the adventure spirit, some are criticizing the recklessness.
I think that prudence is called for here.
I don't think that the proper response to this is either condemnation or valorization of what they're doing.
Some people are making jokes about it, posting memes, and it's really sad.
I mean, these are human beings who are either dead or could very soon die.
I think the proper response is prayer for the people and also prayer for the wisdom to make these kinds of judgments.
I am not of the opinion that it's always a great and wonderful thing to go climb Mount Everest.
I don't think that's true.
I think sometimes it can be reckless and suicidal and deeply dark and sinister.
And I'm also not of the opinion that it's always a terrible thing to go climb Mount Everest.
That you should just stay in your home and always make the safe choice.
I'm not of that opinion either.
It's a little bit more complicated.
You've got to use your prudence and your judgment and calculate risks and weigh risks and see what's to be gained here.
Some of the people criticizing this company are saying, well, you weren't exploring anything new.
You were just going down to a shipwreck.
That's one of the most studied shipwrecks ever.
So this was just tourism, and it was tourism that cut a lot of corners and was very, very expensive.
But, I don't know, on the other hand, as far as tourism goes, pretty adventurous, it seems to me.
I just think when we make these decisions on all political matters, we are, especially in the digital age where we're addicted to extremism and clicks, we just want to be able to say, okay, here's the solution.
It's always good to go do the extremely dangerous thing.
Or, no, this is never good, this is dumb, and this is stupid, and we should mock these people, and I know a lot more about submarines than this company does.
But that isn't the case.
You see it on speech.
Say, we need absolute free speech.
Or some people say, no, we need to strongly censor the conservatives.
What if there is a moderate middle ground that takes into account all of these kinds of ideas and then exercises prudence?
Moderation is a virtue.
I consider myself very moderate.
I know the libs think that I'm to the right of Genghis Khan, but I'm a very moderate person, you know?
Now, speaking of imprudence, Bud Light, baby.
Bud Light is getting absolutely wrecked still.
Bud Light sales.
It's not just that they dropped in the week after Transizer Bush decided to endorse a drag queen or a transvestite or whatever Dylan Mulvaney calls himself.
It's not just that they dropped and then they went back up.
It's not even just that they dropped and they stayed where they were.
They dropped and then they kept dropping and then they kept dropping and then it looked like they kind of had cratered.
But no, they kept dropping.
They've kept dropping again.
Sales revenue plunged 26.8% in the week ending June 10th.
According to new data, that is a new low for weekly sales revenue.
The previous highest weekly drop for Bud Light was 25.7%.
And now 26.8.
So what is Bud Light doing?
What is Transciser Bush doing?
First of all, I think that company owes Alyssa Hirshenfeld, or whatever that VP of Marketing was, they owe her an apology because she took the fall for this, but this is obviously a conscious decision by Transciser Bush, made at a much higher level than the VP of Marketing.
So why are they doing it?
Why would Bud Light consistently irritate the customers and not just apologize?
Because Bud Light has to keep up its ESG score.
Trans-Heiser-Bush, ESG, the Environmental Social Governance Policies, which is a term that will probably fall out of favor now that conservatives have seized upon it and they'll replace it with some new woke jargon, but what these scores
Mean is that left-wing groups will score companies on a whole host of progressive priorities and then the big asset managers, the big institutional investors that manage tens of trillions of dollars worth of money each.
They could pull their money out of the companies.
And so you say, well, who cares?
Who cares if BlackRock or somebody pulls its money out of AB InBev, Transciser Bush?
AB InBev is a big company.
They're still selling beer.
Who cares?
Who needs BlackRock's money?
Well, what would happen is the stock market would tank.
It would show a lack of faith in the company from the biggest players in the market.
So the company would just go away.
And so you've got a handful of major asset managers, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and others, who are really pulling the strings here.
And they're not answering to their customers, and they're not answering to their constituents, if it were a political body, like a government body.
They're just doing whatever they want.
Now, why would they do this?
Another reason that they would be willing to kill Bud Light, the most popular beer in America, is that Bud Light had not been growing.
It had not been explosively growing.
It was still the dominant number one beer in America, but some of the executives felt that it was stagnating.
And you saw this represented by Alyssa Hirshenfeld, the VP of Marketing, who said, we needed to do something to jazz up the brand.
Why did they have to do that?
Well, because the way that modern capitalism works, it's not enough to be the biggest dogs in town.
You've got to always be growing.
If you're not growing, then you're dying.
And this creates a problem because there's no limit to it.
There's no limit anywhere.
And so what this might be is a controlled demolition of Budweiser because while AB InBev, Transizer, Bush might take a hit in the short run, there are so few major beer distributors that in the long run it probably won't cost them all that much money.
The number one beer in America now is Modelo, which is hilarious that it's a Mexican beer that's now the number one beer in America.
And Modelo is not owned by Transheiser Bush in North America.
It's owned by Constellation, which also has some woke problems too.
But in the rest of the world, Modelo is owned by Transheiser Bush.
And so these conglomerates own so much product, and there are so few of them anyway, that they've just consolidated enough power that, okay, they lose one of their lines.
Well, they've got a bazillion more lines to fill it up.
And the benefit they get from that is they get to advance the social policies that they want.
And those social policies, by the way, were down to even more consolidation and even more control and even more money and even more influence for these handful of oligarchs.
And so the cost to them is worth it.
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Speaking of BlackRock, James O'Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas, who's now doing his own thing, O-M-G, which is the O'Keefe Media Group.
It's a fun little initialism there.
James has caught a BlackRock recruiter on hidden camera explaining what BlackRock really is from the inside.
Let me tell you, it's not who's the president is.
It's who's controlling the wallet.
And who's that?
The hedge funds, the banks.
- And who's that?
- The hedge funds, the banks, these guys want them. - You're paying financing.
- Yep, you can buy your candidates.
Obviously, we have the system in place.
First, there's the Senate seats.
And these guys are f***ing cheap.
You've got 10 grand you can buy a senator.
I could give you 500k right now.
No questions asked.
Yeah.
I'd give it to you.
It's done.
Does, like, everybody do that?
Does BlackRock do that?
It doesn't matter who wins.
You're so right.
They're my clients.
Ukraine is good for business.
You know that, right?
I'll give an example.
Russia...
Great stuff from James.
It's nothing we didn't know.
There's nothing surprising in this undercover video.
Yes, we know people can buy politicians.
U.S.
Senators, I think, cost more than $10,000 to influence.
And there are some politicians who can take the money and then they won't take the phone calls.
And then sometimes the people who previously backed them will back their opponents or something.
I mean, there are some more independent voices.
But yeah, it's true.
And very often what politicians will do in their defense is they will seek out donors who share their priorities so that it's not just that they're being bought off like a cheap hooker or something like that.
It's that they are representing multiple kinds of constituents.
They're representing their geographic constituents.
They're representing interests that they already support.
You know, I make fun of the environmentalist movement that people who say the global warming is going to kill us all in five minutes.
I I mock some of these new technologies, especially the solar and electric technologies that are very often just payoffs to liberal groups.
So I'm pro-fossil fuels.
I'm pro-oil and natural gas.
If I were to run for office, and I received a campaign donation from oil and natural gas industries, I, it wouldn't be that they were buying me off.
I'm already pro-oil and natural gas.
They've never written me any campaign check.
But it's a nice alignment of values.
And sometimes it's a little more corrupt than that.
Sometimes it's just a big corporation that says, hey, I'm, you know, here's the check, do what I want, give me the legislation that helps me.
Okay, yeah, but we already know all that.
What about the Ukraine war is good for business?
Yeah, we know that.
Of course we know that.
Dwight Eisenhower warned about that sort of thing a long time ago.
There's nothing new here.
And this poor schlub recruiter for BlackRock trying to impress some girl on a date doesn't work out well for him.
If you are in a politically, I don't know why I'm giving advice to the libs here, if you are in a politically contentious important position and some like smoking hot chick comes up to you and wants to go out on a date and then is just constantly peppering you with questions about the most controversial aspects of your job, it's on you at that point if you answer, okay?
You are so, the power of women, you'd be so blinded by that, okay.
It's not surprising, but it's disturbing, anyway, to see it, to hear it.
Oh, the political system doesn't work the way that we thought it did.
It's not about a bill up on Capitol Hill and the three branches and the people representing the this and the that and the other.
No, that's not really how the political order works.
And one of the reasons that Trump Was very successful in 2016, and why he might be successful again is he called that out in a way that other Republican politicians hadn't.
There was an attack on Trump in 2016, remember?
I forget which other Republican it was, probably multiple, said, hey, Donald, you've donated to Democrats.
You've written checks to Democrats.
That's why you can't be trusted.
And he flipped it.
He said, what are you talking about?
I've written checks to every politician.
I bought all you people off.
I did business, and I did business in New York and at an international scale, and so of course I needed to buy you people off, and it was easy to buy you off.
So I played both sides of the aisle.
That's how the system really works.
So how am I going to fix the system?
Because I know it.
I've played that game a lot.
Meanwhile, you were just the guys that got bought.
It was very persuasive when Trump was able to convince some people who would be traditionally a little more left-wing voters to come on over to him.
It's because he was talking about a debate between the many and the few, between the people and the elites.
Very different from what we hear otherwise, between the Republicans and the Democrats and the left and the right.
He was saying, no, the system is a little different than you think that it is.
Now, speaking of that political system and how it works, great stuff from Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is really impressing me more and more each day.
Elon was responding to someone who said, hey man, I'm getting spammed by all these pro-trans accounts on Twitter that are calling me cis, and cisgender, and cis, cis, cis.
C-I-S.
Elon responded and he said, repeated targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.
The words cis or cisgender are considered slurs on this platform.
Now some of you probably are wondering what cis means, and I think Norm Macdonald gave the best explanation I've ever heard of what cis means.
You know that you are a cis male?
Have you ever heard of that term?
A cis male?
Cis male.
C-Y-S-M-A-L-E.
So what it means is that you are a man.
You were born a man.
Well, as far as you know.
As far as I know.
And you identify yourself as a man.
Yes.
That's a cis male.
Now, I don't understand.
Is this a new phrase?
Yes, it's a way of marginalizing a normal person.
That's all it is.
It's a way of marginalizing a normal person.
And I saw some self-styled conservatives, some nominally right-wing people, attack Elon for doing this.
They would say, hey, hey, hey, hey, we can't do that.
That's not total free speech.
What's the difference between a normal person not wanting to be called a cis, sissy, and a sexually deviant person not wanting to be called by his real pronouns?
What's the difference?
You know, if you're gonna ban one, you gotta ban the other.
And if you're gonna allow one, you gotta allow the other.
What's the difference?
Here's the difference.
One of them is true and one is false.
One of those is grounded in reality and the other is not.
One of them is normal and one set of standards is conducive to human flourishing and to bringing people into a line with reality and to just like being normal.
And the other set of standards where now you've got to call men she and women he and all that nonsense, that's not conducive to flourishing and that's not normal and it's deviant and false and wrong.
And so when you ban False, wrong, stupid things.
That's not the same as banning good and true things.
It's not the same.
Now, you might say, well, I'm a free speech absolutist and I don't think we should ban any of it.
Okay, fine, whatever, that's your position.
But you can't tell me there's not a difference.
There's obviously a difference between truth and falsehood.
Well, well, you wouldn't say this, but some other people might say, well, Michael, who is to decide?
Who is to decide that a man is really a man?
And that a man can't be a who?
I don't know.
Like everybody.
Like every normal person who knows this.
And we know this because we have faculties of reason and we can perceive the truth.
And if we can't do that, we can't have self-government.
And just, you know.
And who decides?
In this case, Elon Musk.
Because he owns Twitter.
And who helps him to arrive at that decision?
Well, his customer base would probably do that.
And, by the way, in the other direction, the political forces that are trying to push wokeness, they're going to try to help him decide in another manner.
And Elon Musk is going to come to some decision.
In this case, he came to a good decision.
And then we set other standards in other areas.
Sometimes the government sets some of those standards.
Sometimes schools set those standards.
Sometimes news networks set those standards.
Yeah, the sooner we start distinguishing properly between truth and falsehood, and acting upon those distinctions, the better off we'll be.
The sooner that we stop marginalizing normal people, the better off we will be.
Now, some people are a little trepidatious about this more assertive new right that has been coming up.
Out of the ashes of the sort of libertarian platitudes that took over the right sometime in the late 90s and 2000s.
There is a more assertive right that is returning to not even all that much older traditions on the right, which said, no, we're going to stand up for a real moral order, we're going to insist upon some standards here, and we're going to say we should have less of the weird sex stuff, and we're going to talk about virtue, and we're, yeah, we're going to be confident in our beliefs.
We're going to call this a Christian nation, that is one nation under God, and we're going to do that, and I don't want to hear any of your Libertarian Claptrap about it, because by the way, even the old school libertarians would have agreed with pretty much all the stuff that the modern, assertive, new, authoritarian conservatives are saying.
The father of liberalism, John Locke, would not have gone for transgenderism, okay?
Milton Friedman would not have gotten on board with all this crazy rainbow stuff.
Give me a break, alright?
Give me a break.
Okay.
So, not everyone's happy about this.
There is an article that attacked me.
Yours truly, believe it or not.
The article is titled, The Right's War on Fun.
That came after me, which we'll get to in one second.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Devin Rossi 5966 who says, not sure about gynosexual.
A gynosexual is that new term that the libs are pushing for someone who's attracted to a woman.
Says, not sure about gynosexual, but as a man I'm definitely a no-guy-sexual.
I'm a sucker for a good pun.
It's a good one.
I might use that.
So what is The Nation?
I think this was in The Nation, wasn't it?
Here's what The Nation magazine says about yours truly.
They called me anhedonic, you know, opposed to pleasure.
They attacked me for pointing out that demons, the most famous representation of a demon, is androgynous, trans, and opposed to the complementarity of the sexes.
Just likes to jumble it up.
Okay, that's not the main point.
Okay, here we go.
Knowles is... Who wrote this?
I want to give this person both blame and credit.
Chris Lehman.
Knowles is perhaps the most dogged inquisitor in the new right-wing fatwa on pleasure-having.
The same week that Mike Cernovich issued his indictment of alcohol, Knowles took to his podcast to urge the conservative faithful to build a bridge to the 13th century.
And then he goes on to quote this piece.
Of my show from some days ago where I said that I don't want America merely to go back to the days of 2012, I want to go back to 1220 in Western civilization.
So anyway, the idea that I am opposed to pleasure-having, I think, is proven false by my cigar bill and my bar bill and my arts bill and, you know, I got a lot of musical instruments.
I like to, I don't know, I like to have fun.
For some people, Having a good time is not their idea of having a good time.
For me, I like having a good time.
So that part, I think, is ridiculous.
I can show him my cigar bar bill.
That's fine.
But the second part I really liked.
Knowles took to his podcast to urge conservative faithful to build a bridge to the 13th century.
That's what we have to do.
We need to build a bridge to the 13th century.
Bill Clinton in the 90s, he said we need to build a bridge to the 21st century.
We, uh, didn't work out.
We need to build a bridge to the 13th century.
And some libs think this is crazy.
I think this is totally crazy.
And I think, why?
And there are even some squishier conservatives who say, oh my goodness, that's crazy.
Back then, that was the dark ages.
That was terrible.
The 13th century, that was a terrible time.
How would you ever want to go back there?
And the reason that people think that is because they have believed the lies and propaganda of Whig history, of liberal progressive history, which is not based on real history.
It's based on The self-flattery of the very, very modern people who want to pretend that everyone who ever came before us was a big, dumb, stupid idiot.
We're the best people that ever lived.
And we've done so much better.
We're so much smarter.
We're so much more virtuous.
And it just isn't true.
In many, if not most ways, we are much, much stupider.
We are much less capable of pleasure.
And we are much less skilled and talented than our forebears who lived in the 13th century.
What did we have in the 13th century?
We had Thomas Aquinas writing the Summa Theologiae.
That's pretty good.
We were about to get Dante writing the Divine Comedy.
We had the building of beautiful, intricate cathedrals that lifted men's eyes, not just rich men's eyes, but especially poor men's eyes, up to heaven.
We had a lot of leisure time.
People in the Middle Ages often had more days off of work than people do today because there was the liturgical calendar year.
There was such a thing as pilgrimage.
And by the way, these great works of art, they weren't just locked away in a handful of museums in cosmopolitan cities that people would go to.
This great beautiful art was throughout the culture.
And people would regularly get to experience this stuff.
They had a sense of purpose in their lives.
They were near to family.
They were not suffering from the spiking rates of depression that plague not the medieval people, not the ancient people, the modern people are the ones who are suffering from that.
They had children and they carried on their civilization, unlike the modern people who are choosing not to do that at all.
It's ahistorical.
And it's...
Perfect, though.
I mean, it tells you everything you need to know about our era.
That people today who don't know a damn thing, who couldn't probably tell you even what Thomas Aquinas or his predecessors, Aristotle or any serious philosopher were even talking about, Modern people, for whom the heights of satisfaction involve playing some video games and eating brunch and looking at porn, modern people are going to lecture the medievals and the scholastics on a serious, good, flourishing life.
It's just such a joke.
But of course it's the case that those modern people would also fall into the chief, the highest of the seven deadly sins, and that's pride.
Which we're celebrating right now.
We're in the middle of Pride Month.
We think, oh yeah, this culture that we're in.
Where we don't really build anything beautiful anymore and all the art and architecture is just absolutely hideous and degrading and we're now turning a generation of young people into voluntary prostitutes on the internet and we're arousing everyone's lusts and gluttony and chopping up our body parts and just not having any kids and not being near our families.
Oh yeah, it's awesome and great.
We're so much better.
Everyone who came before us was just crazy.
Because they didn't have, like, electric toothbrushes or something, so... Yeah, okay.
I don't want to go back to 13th century dentistry, but in most other realms of life, I think it would be probably pretty good to return.
Return with a V. Return to tradition.
Speaking of banning stuff, I'll just sort of... We've got a little bit of time.
I'll get into this.
The good old Italians.
Who are a fairly traditional people, even after the rise of the modern secular Italian nation state, which had all sorts of attacks on the church, and that country hasn't really been able to govern itself properly since Octavian.
Well, Italy, there's a deep kind of conservatism to the Italians, and they're expressing this now.
Italian lawmakers have begun to debate A proposal to criminalize surrogacy arranged abroad.
It's already illegal in Italy, but they want to criminalize it even if it's done abroad.
This is under Prime Minister Georgia Maloney's ruling coalition.
Couples found guilty of trying to have children through surrogates living overseas face three months to two years in prison, a fine of €600,000 to €1,000,000 under the draft bill, which was submitted by a woman, Carolina Varchi, who's a member of the Conservative Party, the Brothers of Italy.
Great, great stuff.
And the libs are whining about it.
Here's what the libs are saying.
You're saying, there are no countries in which surrogacy is prosecuted if done legally abroad.
Italy's proposal is a unique first.
This is Alexander Schuster, who's a pro-LGBT LMNOP lawyer.
He says, there are instances in which crimes are persecuted also if done abroad, but this is usually only for universal crimes, like pedophilia, or crimes against a state, or sexual tourism.
I think that Creating a child in a test tube with the express purpose of denying that child potentially a natural mother or potentially a natural father or for purchasing that child effectively or for depriving that child of the right to be conceived as a product of the conjugal act between his parents who are married for life.
I think that's a universal crime too.
I think that's quite a universal crime, actually.
At least as much as sexual tourism.
It is sexual tourism.
It's a very deep kind of sexual tourism.
And I don't want to be too harsh on people who have engaged in surrogacy because it's a relatively new technology and people are trying it out and there are Normal married couples who are trying it out, and there are homosexuals who are trying it out, and there are single people, and there are just rich people who don't want their body to undergo the trauma of being pregnant and giving birth, so they just pay some poor woman to do it for them.
And I get it.
It's a new thing.
And I think a lot of people haven't really thought through this.
And now we're beginning to think through this, and we're having a debate over it, and we're beginning to see that the process is just ghastly.
And it should not be permitted, obviously, and it doesn't mean that children who have been conceived through surrogacy are evil or bad or that it's bad that they exist.
They can be a good end.
You know, God turns all sorts of evil toward good ends.
But good ends do not justify our evil means, ever.
Our immoral means.
We can't do it.
So, this is absolutely great stuff coming out of Italy.
The United States should take up a similar law.
We should just ban this.
This is deeply disordered.
There are all sorts of problems that come from it.
It is immoral for every person involved.
And this is a very proper use of the state.
The fathers of liberalism, I promise you, even John Locke, even the libertarian heroes, they would not have gotten behind this kind of thing.
Maybe some of the craziest ones would have, but most of them would not have gotten behind this sort of thing.
And the fact that today the so-called conservatives might be giving this quarter is absolutely insane.
It's not authoritarian to wield just political power to stop evil things from happening.
That's just called just authority.
That's just the point of government.
Okay.
I'm sorry to say there's no Member Block today because I'm on the road and Producer Jacob won't hand me that iPad.
And listen, we've talked about it.
We're probably going to talk about it a little bit more afterward.
