Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 6, 2008 - No Agenda

01:27:35

46: Israel to Bomb Iran Nothing to See Here Folks Just Shooting Moose...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Held captive by the invisible bars of the cage we call Gitmo Nation.
	Stranded at the outer markers of society, this is No Agenda.
	Coming to you from the United Kingdom where the Atlantic storms have wreaked havoc on this tiny island, I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. Dvorak here in northern Silicon Valley, otherwise known as Gitmo West or East Nation, depending on the way you're coming or going.
	Which direction you're headed, exactly.
	It apparently makes no difference.
	But it's boiling hot here, so I'm not complaining about the weather, that's for sure.
	Well, I am complaining about the weather, not to mention it.
	But that's because I made you turn off the fans and all of your cooling equipment so we could have a decent sound from you.
	Yeah, well, you know, it'll be fine for a while.
	We've had a hot spell here.
	Yeah, well, it's been absolutely horrendous here, and they're calling it the Atlantic storms.
	This is based on those hurricanes that we're getting down in Florida?
	Yeah, they don't even actually explain what they're basing it on, but I think that's the general idea.
	Well, of course, any storm that's coming off from the west is by definition going to be an Atlantic storm.
	But yeah, I think, you know, how can it not be related?
	There's, what is it now, four hurricanes that have been hanging around there?
	Yeah, they're pounding them.
	You know, last year, was it last year they had no hurricanes?
	Yeah.
	And then I think the, I don't know, when was, I think since Katrina there's really been not much action, and now we're having a slew of them.
	This is all random number theory.
	These things come in bunches.
	Meanwhile, there's lots of earthquakes going on.
	China had another major one, Myanmar, or Burma had another major earthquake.
	Yeah, my wife tracks these things.
	She actually looks daily as a hurricane.
	Hey, I do too.
	Oh, she tracks hurricanes or earthquakes?
	Earthquakes.
	Yeah.
	Now, there's the USGC or whatever it is there.
	USGS. USGS, yeah.
	They have a website and they give you the depth and they give you Google Earth mappings.
	It's very cool.
	Yeah, and they show patterns.
	I mean, there's like hundreds every day that are, you know, you wouldn't know if you're sitting on them.
	But there's a whole slew of them that constantly take place, and there are patterns.
	And she's actually predicted two or three of the ones that hit later.
	Really?
	Yeah, she says that, you know, there's a pattern of this, and she knows what...
	I guess if you look at earthquake data...
	Every day for like 30 years.
	Yeah, you start to develop some neural network intelligence, I guess.
	Yeah, and you get, oh, this is interesting.
	This isn't usual.
	That means something's going to happen, and then it happens, and then you get a feeling for where it's going to happen.
	She's pretty good.
	She's worried, of course, about a whopper.
	The Pacific Northwest gets hit.
	The Pacific Northwest has earthquakes, but they don't have very many.
	In California, we have them.
	Routinely, we'll have an earthquake once in a while.
	You feel it, and it's not a big deal.
	But in the Pacific Northwest, nobody's used to them.
	When they have them, they have whoppers.
	There was a couple really big ones off Vancouver Island.
	Right.
	Like, you know, for a whole week.
	And actually, Patricia had some kind of vision.
	She said, Carmel, Carmel, California.
	I'm like, you mean like where Clint Eastwood's the mayor?
	She said, yeah, yeah, I'm getting something through about Carmel.
	So you're not the only one in the house.
	That's interesting.
	But she's legit, dude.
	Patricia's for real.
	Well, we'll keep an eye on that.
	But Carmel's got no big buildings or anything.
	If they had an earthquake, all it'd do was knock over trinkets from the various stores selling junk.
	Well, maybe she was just talking about the location of some kind of big earthquake.
	I don't know.
	Maybe it wasn't an earthquake at all.
	Maybe it's something completely unrelated.
	I don't know.
	But I did go immediately to my seismology data.
	Let me see what's going on there around Carmel.
	I have a vision about Carmel.
	I sense there's going to be a slew of golfers.
	Have you ever really been there?
	I mean, I went through with Ron and I and Patricia and Marta.
	We went to one of those Kleiner Perkins off-sites at Pebble Beach.
	On the way back, we stopped at Carmel.
	It's like Stepford Wives.
	It's really quite frightening.
	It's a cute little town.
	It's too clean, too pristine.
	Everything's measured and proper.
	It's like the entire town knows what it is.
	It's a tourist trap.
	And that's what they do.
	Unlike a lot of these little towns, I don't know what they're up to because they have corrupt governments.
	Yeah, Carmel is clean.
	So I got a word for you, John, for this week.
	A new word.
	Okay.
	Gazundering.
	Is that a real word?
	Well, it's a word that the Financial Times uses.
	It's the counterpart to gazumping.
	That's a real word?
	I don't know if it's in a dictionary, but it's a word that's used quite regularly, and both of them have to do with the housing market.
	So gazumping, which I learned a couple years ago as we were looking for a property here, Because there's no such thing as a property being an escrow in the UK. You literally exchange money and title on the same day, and it could break 30 seconds before the deal, it could fall apart.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a very, very weird system, so there's no concept of a home being an escrow.
	And what was happening during the housing boom is, you know, you'd make a deal with someone who's selling and then you'd agree on a closing date.
	And then someone else would come behind your back and gazump you and hand, you know, like an extra 50 grand under the table or just above board on the price.
	You know, that's called a gazump.
	Now they have something called a gazunder.
	Gazundering.
	Where, you know, people are desperately trying to sell their houses.
	And so, you know, let's say you have your house, and this is happening with, certainly with higher priced properties, but also, you know, just across the board.
	So let's say you have a house on the market for $500,000.
	Someone will say, okay, I'm going to buy your house where you agree upon the $500,000.
	And then just before their, at closing, they'll say, well, you know, really, we're really only going to offer $400,000.
	And then basically you can take it or leave it at that minute.
	And this is running rampant.
	Up to 30% is being underbid.
	And people are taking it.
	Huh.
	What gets me about the whole thing is the fact that we're in a situation in California where all our prices are down about 25%.
	At least.
	I still think it's bottoming out right now.
	Do you feel that bottom, John?
	Do you feel Dow 10,000 coming, my friend?
	I can feel it.
	You can feel it in your butt.
	Not yet.
	Not yet.
	It's still a big gaping hole.
	Nah.
	It's got 60 more days and then it starts to go up.
	Okay.
	We'll get into that.
	As soon as that election's over.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We'll get into that.
	Tell me about the housing.
	So what gets me is that all these people that, you know, during the housing boom, they're all standing in line, they're overbidding, they're going crazy.
	Houses are on the market for two minutes and then they're overbid.
	And, you know, everybody just needs, you know, there's just, they go nuts.
	The market turns around and these same people are still looking for places to live.
	They pull out of the market.
	Yeah.
	Why do people...
	Of course, this is a stupid question because we know the answer.
	But it's interesting, herd mentality.
	When you have a buyer's market, the buyers, they all disappear.
	And when you have a seller's market, those buyers are flocking to get screwed, to get fleeced.
	It's almost as though everybody wants to get ripped off.
	It's unbelievable to me.
	Right now, you should be buying property right now as we speak.
	No, I think there's still a good six months to go before you even start looking.
	This is going to go so much further.
	It's way too early.
	You have a place.
	I'm talking about people that haven't got a place.
	You're looking for a place.
	You not only have a good price, you have good prices right now, but your selection, you have a selection.
	You can get the house you want, not just any old place.
	Right.
	It doesn't make sense to me that now is the time.
	You don't have a place.
	You've been looking for a place.
	But now it's hard to get a mortgage, John.
	Yeah, I know.
	The mortgage thing is a problem, but if you have it, you can still get a mortgage.
	It's not as though there's no such thing as mortgages.
	No, but it's like most people are up to their neck and trying to get rid of their...
	I mean, how many people have no mortgage, no debts, and are looking for something and can actually get a mortgage?
	What's that market got to be today?
	Huge.
	No, please.
	I'm just saying, right now you have a selection.
	It's casual.
	You can get anything you want.
	I just don't...
	Nobody even cares.
	They're just going to wait until there's nothing left.
	When it picks back up and everything's going up again, then they're going to get in.
	It's just baffling to me.
	You know, my motto, buy low, sell high.
	Yeah, but we're not at low yet.
	We're not there yet.
	Well, you don't have to be at the dead low.
	Well, it'd be nice.
	It's too hard to pick.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, obviously this whole thing was not...
	That's what everybody's doing, by the way.
	That's what they're all thinking.
	They're all thinking, oh, I'll just wait until it gets to the bottom.
	You don't know what the bottom is.
	The bottom could be yesterday.
	By the way, we should thank Bubba Martin for doing our show notes.
	We haven't thanked him for a while.
	And now he mentions this every once in a while with his feelings.
	You guys aren't mentioning me.
	You're not mentioning me.
	That's on the Dvorak.org slash cage match.
	You should go there.
	He's got about half a million page views a month on that site now.
	Yeah, it's doing all right.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	So, the reason why I say we're not at the bottom, John, is this weekend, you know what's taking place as we speak.
	The U.S. government is putting together the bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
	And that'll all be announced on Monday.
	And then we're going to see maybe kind of the direction of where the bottom is.
	I mean, this is so big.
	And, you know, please, let's just not mention the $800 trillion of derivatives.
	That's going to start unwinding.
	You watch.
	Well, you know, I think a lot of it already has unwound.
	No way!
	Not the derivatives.
	That has not unwound at all.
	Yeah, the derivatives thing is an issue.
	John, $800 trillion.
	Yeah, that's an issue.
	That's huge.
	Quiet.
	Yeah, you know, I'm so out of anything that has anything to do with stocks.
	At least the oil is falling like a rock.
	Yeah.
	Gee, really notice that at the pump.
	Not...
	I have.
	My local gas station right around the corner has been going down five cents.
	It's been going down a nickel a day.
	Really?
	What's it at now?
	Every day it goes down a nickel.
	What's it at now?
	What's it at?
	What's a gallon?
	Right now, a premium, the most expensive, obviously, I can get for $4.03.
	Okay.
	Down from $4.90.
	Jeez Louise.
	I suspect by the time we do the show next week, it'll be under $4 and then it'll be down back to where it belongs.
	Well, it's never going to get to the whole joke is it never goes back to where it started.
	I think it'll be around 290 probably within six months.
	Okay.
	325 maybe.
	Yeah, I'm just doing a comparison here.
	It's all messed up because now the pound is so weak all of a sudden.
	Yeah, as expected.
	Yeah, like 10%.
	Well, yeah, I guess you're right.
	But now China's out of money.
	Did you read about this?
	Oh, China's out of money.
	China's out of money.
	Start the printing presses, you guys.
	That's the conversation right now in China, because the sovereign wealth fund has been tapped out, basically, by us.
	And so now there's calls for more cash, and the Chinese are going, yeah, we really want to invest, but we've got no money, so now they're talking about maybe going to the printing press.
	But they already have 12% inflation.
	May not be a good idea.
	I wouldn't think.
	Never is a good idea.
	But it's fun.
	I think Monday is going to be a very interesting day.
	All this news is going to come out.
	It's a weekend deal with the Treasury, with the Federal Reserve, with the two CEOs are already out at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
	We've got a lot of incompetent management people floating around.
	They're out with the golden handcuffs.
	Or parachutes, whatever they are.
	Those guys always make out.
	Of course they do.
	So what's in the news this week besides grim financial outlooks?
	That's pretty much it, John.
	It's all just fucked.
	That's all we can talk about here.
	We just had a Republican National Convention.
	Did you watch it?
	Yes, I did watch some of it, of course.
	Obviously, we talked about the surprises.
	Right.
	Yeah, it wasn't a great show.
	And it was, of course, overshadowed by, probably purposely so, by Gustav.
	Well, maybe to you guys, Gustav was a big dud here.
	Listen to how we're talking about it.
	It was a media dud, that's for sure.
	It was the Kohotek of hurricanes.
	The Ishtar of tropical storms.
	Yeah.
	We'll come up with a million analogies till one sticks.
	That's what we do.
	It was pretty much Gustav.
	A lot about Palin, obviously.
	But really in the news now, it's all about this country being broke.
	The gas companies raised their prices between 23 and 30 percent.
	There is a real looming food shortage.
	Oh yeah?
	Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that the big box grocers can't get.
	Like what?
	Like fruit.
	Particularly fruit.
	Fruit is getting difficult.
	I'm not quite sure why.
	Well, yeah, I mean, on a global scale, I'm not sure where it all comes from, who they're buying from.
	That's all very confusing, but there's a shortage of it.
	Huh.
	We don't have any food shortages here.
	At least not in California, because we grow our own, so it's not like a big deal.
	We're in an agricultural state.
	Yeah.
	But also just the prices of food.
	I mean, it's all over the papers.
	You know, it's up 50%, some categories up 100%.
	I mean, that's pretty significant.
	We don't have that going on.
	Well, we do here.
	And we don't know that, but we don't know that it's going on there.
	And you shouldn't care either.
	Screw ya.
	Screw you, you limeys.
	Huh, well that's interesting.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It is.
	Well, you know, ever since Alistair Darling, who was, what is he, the Chancellor, so he's like the CFO, like the Chief Financial Officer of the country.
	The Exchequer?
	Yeah, the Exchequer.
	Ever since he came out and said, well, you know, this will be the worst political, worst economic climate we've had in 60 years and we're looking at 2 million people being out of a job.
	I mean, that didn't help.
	I'm out.
	Well, that's like these guys who said the gas was going to go to $200 a barrel.
	I mean, what is the point of these prognostications, you know, when it's all just guesswork?
	How long are you going to rub that in my face?
	I think we got pretty close to $200 a barrel.
	You know, it went up quite a ways.
	I'm not rubbing it in your face.
	I'm talking about the guys like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and all these guys.
	Well, they're lying.
	They're probably on the inside.
	They probably knew exactly what they were doing.
	You think they're lying to the public?
	Why would they do such a thing?
	For gain, obviously.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm not going to rub it in your face.
	It's just a coincidence that you agreed with them, but you have a gloomy outlook.
	We do have the news over here that the British economy seems to be in the toilet, but that's about it.
	Not too much detail.
	All of the Eurozone is going into a recession.
	That's really what the big deal is.
	Essentially, what has been happening in the States has been happening over here.
	The European Central Bank has been lending banks, Money for, I don't know, since all this started, 2007 probably, and now the total amount that they've lent out to banks is something like $600 or $700 billion.
	Yeah, there's like 400 billion euros that they've lent out.
	Now the European Central Bank has said, okay, that's it, we're closing up, and now everyone's freaking out.
	And that's in the papers too.
	Yeah, we don't get that.
	It's not really good news.
	Well, you know, I don't know.
	Well, we do know one thing.
	We've been hoping, at least the financial people here have been hoping that the Europeans lower their interest rates.
	And the only way they're going to do that is to get into a recession.
	Lower their interest rates because that moves money out of Europe into the dollar, which pumps up the dollar and gets our dollar back to where it belongs.
	Ideally, the euro and the dollar should be one to one.
	And, you know, the fact that it got as high as a buck and a half, a buck 45 or whatever it got, is ridiculous.
	And now there's something like 50 billion moved out of Russia ever since the Georgian conflict.
	So, you know, they're hurt now.
	They had to intervene to stop the ruble from dropping.
	Oh, no, I didn't know that either.
	That's the front page today of the Financial Times.
	I got to subscribe to the Financial Times.
	I'm telling you, man, they got some good stuff.
	They're paying attention to things like, oh, I don't know, finance?
	You mean as opposed to the Wall Street Journal with all its features and Christmas buying guides?
	Exactly.
	Isn't that a Murdoch property now, though, the Wall Street Journal?
	Yeah, but it was turning into Christmas buying guides way before Murdoch bought them.
	That's nuts.
	So I'm going to put together a Christmas buying guide for the blog.
	Oh, of gadgets or just stuff in general?
	Yeah, well, mostly gadgets.
	Yeah, you know, attachable hard disk for Christmas would be cool.
	You know, we have a new client, was it Brookstone?
	Is that the, kind of like the...
	Yeah, Brookstone, the guys who make the gizmos.
	Yeah, kind of like the outdoorsy sharper image is what I always call it.
	Right, sharper image went broke.
	Yeah, but Brookstone didn't.
	No, Brookstone's got a lot of cool stuff.
	They may have a lot of little tools.
	I consider it less flashy.
	Yeah, it's high-end kind of utility stuff.
	Yeah, it's very functional.
	Yeah, yeah, barbecue stuff.
	Barbecue thermometers, all that really important stuff.
	Grill scraper.
	Yeah, automatic grill scraper.
	And they always have a Roomba, one of those cleaning robots.
	Yeah, Roomba.
	People who have those, by the way, love them.
	Really?
	I've considered getting one, but I always thought it would probably be fun, like, the first 20 times, and then it would break, or I'd step on it, or it wouldn't work.
	Everyone I know that has one, they just love them.
	Really?
	Hmm.
	All it is is a rug sweeper, though.
	I mean, it doesn't really do much.
	I mean, just, you know, it's kind of an expensive rug sweeper.
	Does it clean?
	Well, I mean, how much cleaning can it do?
	It's only so big.
	That's what I mean.
	They have the one that's kind of intriguing to me is the one that washes the floor.
	You know, I'm kind of tempted to get one myself.
	My floors are always so dirty.
	They actually contacted me.
	Remember they came out with their new model maybe a year ago or a year and a half ago?
	Was that the floor washer?
	It might be.
	Either that or it was the upgrade of the original Roomba.
	And they contacted me and said, hey, you know, this is really cool and, you know, you should talk about it on your show.
	I'm like, yeah, send me one.
	I'll talk about it.
	Well, you know, you have to pay for it.
	Yeah!
	Fuck you.
	You don't know how it works.
	This is like a sales pitch.
	Yeah.
	You should be giving us free publicity because we're too cheap to buy an ad.
	In fact, even giving you one is cheaper than an ad.
	What are you, Apple?
	Yeah, well, that's the problem.
	Oh, that's going to be the news this week.
	So, it's perfectly timed, of course.
	On the 9th, new iPods come out, so the whole world press will be consumed with new iPods.
	And the next day, they flip the switch on the...
	On the Super Collider, the Large Hedron Collider in Geneva.
	You think there's a connection?
	Of course.
	Of course.
	What do you mean, of course?
	No, there's no connection.
	I like the idea, though.
	Apple's in cahoots with the black hole manufacturing company.
	Yeah, but the date is good.
	It's the tenth day of the ninth month of the eighth year of the millennium.
	Ooh, yeah.
	Ooh.
	There are actually two lawsuits.
	One American lawsuit, one European lawsuit.
	They tried to stop it.
	What the heck?
	Oh yeah?
	Yeah.
	Why?
	Because of the black hole thing.
	And because there's not enough information.
	The suits claim there wasn't enough information about what could really happen.
	And they sued under the European human rights laws.
	That you have the right to not being hurt by...
	The Luddites.
	You have the right to not being hurt by atoms colliding at light speed.
	There's some protocol in the Lisbon Treaty about that, I'm sure.
	That was actually interesting that Sarkozy, the French president and current, of course they have the presidency of the European Union, he used the Georgia conflict to pimp out the Lisbon Treaty.
	And in this article that I was reading, he said, well, you know, we really need the Lisbon Treaty so we don't stand as a stronger front against big aggressors and really trying to turn that.
	It seems like all of this was so coordinated, but the only thing that messed up is they didn't get to ram the Lisbon Treaty through because then they would have had their European army and everything else just went ahead as planned and Europe is trying to catch up, but they can't because they don't have all the votes in for this European, what is it?
	United States of Europe plan.
	It's just a disaster waiting to happen.
	It's Gitmo Nation, my friend.
	That's what it is.
	The European army, that's a winner.
	Well, and Ireland was right.
	I can see why Russia's getting a little freaky.
	They're going to have to rearm, and then they're going to have the European army, and we're going to be sitting back here.
	We're going to kind of pull out and be kind of laughing under our breaths, except for the fact of the...
	The mess that it's going to end up creating.
	Sorry about that.
	But we should be, or actually, we'll probably be egging them on.
	Come on, you guys.
	You're going to let Russia push you around?
	What do you mean probably?
	Cheney was just, not just in Georgia, he was in the Ukraine.
	He's, you know, they're building this pipeline that surpasses Russia.
	A billion dollars.
	Bypasses, bypasses.
	Bypasses, I'm sorry, yes.
	A billion dollars is being pledged, which of course is all about arms.
	So yeah, we'll give you a billion dollars, which is basically a big credit card, good at Halliburton and Boeing.
	Must be used by 930-09.
	It's like a gift certificate.
	Only, oops, you have to pay interest on it.
	Well, you know, don't read the fine print about defaulting.
	Yeah, it's totally, I mean, Cheney, the Ubermeister himself went there.
	And that's pretty spectacular.
	That's funny, because, you know, we didn't get much reports about that here, because we had the conventions going on.
	Exactly!
	Everyone's all preoccupied with Sarah Palin moose hunting.
	Exactly, exactly.
	We're talking about moose hunting, and who's baby, you know, where's baby Jane?
	Yeah, right.
	And, by the way, what kind of name is Trigg?
	They got a bunch of whack job names for that family.
	Willow.
	Well, hold on a second.
	Hold on a second.
	Excuse me.
	My sister's name is Willow.
	Willow and Bristol.
	I mean, come on.
	These are hippie names.
	We have Adam, Tiffany, and Willow.
	Well, Adam is like a normal name.
	No, it's not.
	It's biblical.
	It's a biblical name.
	And I got pestered.
	Pestered to death as a child.
	I was afraid.
	Like, my name's Adam.
	Alright.
	Where's Eve?
	Where's Eve?
	There it is, John.
	But trig.
	Trig is a little out there.
	Trig?
	What does that mean?
	Is it going to be a math major?
	I'm not getting it.
	Trig, like in trigger?
	Trigonometry.
	Yeah, it could be.
	Hmm.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	But, yeah, so that's what was...
	So while you were watching the greatest show on Earth, meanwhile, behind the scenes, Cheney was...
	Storing up trouble.
	Cutting deals.
	Well, that's what this whole NATO thing is about.
	It's not about...
	Well, yeah, of course, if you're attacked, then we'll all come to the rescue.
	But it's obviously about, you know, here's the weapons we're going to sell you.
	We're not coming to anybody's rescue.
	Well, that's the joke of it.
	We're not going to go into a war with Russia over one of these little two-bit countries that, you know, borders Turkey.
	We're just going to make a lot of noise about it.
	Yeah, well, I think we should.
	You know, you guys got to back off.
	Well, it's all about the pipelines.
	That's what it looks like.
	But the fact of the matter is, setting up this little conflagration, which is going to take place because the Europeans have got to form this big, giant, you know, one big country with their own big army.
	You can just see it's asking for trouble.
	The Russians don't like this idea.
	Of course they don't like it.
	Of course they don't like it.
	But, you know, so typical.
	We have our own hemisphere, so we don't care.
	We can just...
	So it's really big in the news now about what's going on in Georgia.
	You know, because, again, there is actually some good reporting going on.
	Proof now, and they have pictures everywhere of U.S. military training the Georgian commandos months before the attack.
	Two, you know, Virginia-based, not Blackwater, but Blackwater-like companies been in there for the past year.
	Now, it's pretty clear that this was all set up.
	And, oh, here's the best part.
	So, you know, there was rumor of Israeli jets being positioned on one of the two other airfields besides the George W. Bush airport or whatever it is.
	So a friend of mine, he actually trained with a lot of those guys who do those types of missions.
	He says he hasn't been able to reach them for like six weeks.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, so he thinks he's convinced something's going to happen.
	Summers up.
	Yeah, I told you about the Dutch operatives, right?
	Didn't we talk about that last week?
	We must have.
	I don't know.
	Do it again.
	The Dutch Secret Service had leaked out and made the front page of the paper.
	They pulled back some secret operatives from Iran, lickety-split, because they heard that an attack was imminent.
	And so this leaked out into the newspaper.
	And that actually did make some international headlines here and there.
	This was before the Russian thing?
	No, this is last week.
	Oh, this is now.
	So we're expecting another attack.
	Well, no, this would be an attack on Iran.
	The operatives were in Iran.
	Oh, okay.
	I'm trying to follow.
	Okay, so put it all together.
	You've got Israeli jets, you know, guys not reachable.
	I got a $100 bet with a guy that I said that we're not going to bomb Iran.
	And he says, yeah, it's a done deal.
	And I said, I don't think so.
	I think the Israelis might do it, but we're not going to.
	Well, that was the story, is that the Israelis would do it with U.S. markings painted on, but like water paint, and then they'd come back to the base in Georgia, and they'd wash them off, and it would be a big mystery.
	Hello, you're bummed as shit, but you don't know who did it!
	So the Israeli bombers are going to come out of Georgia to bomb Iran?
	Yeah.
	That's the story.
	If I'm not mistaken, what do they have to fly over to make this work?
	Yeah, I looked at that.
	Because Georgia's up against Turkey.
	Well, hold on a second.
	They have to wait at the bottom in the middle of nowhere.
	Now, hold on a second.
	Because don't they have to go over Azerbaijan or maybe even the Ukraine?
	Yeah.
	No, no, Ukraine's north of them, if I'm not mistaken.
	Yeah, I'm bringing up Google Earth, which will probably fuck with the connection, but it's worth it.
	I do this all the time.
	I mean, how cool is it to have Google Earth, man?
	You can just see all this shit, and you understand it so much better.
	People should do that, you know?
	Go look at Georgia on Google Earth, and surf around, and look at some of these places, and then you see it on the news, you'll be like, okay, I get it.
	Yeah, no, people need to do that.
	The geography, especially in the United States, it's almost embarrassing how...
	People don't have a clue about anything.
	I mean, it's almost, like, pathetic.
	Okay, let's see what we got here.
	Yeah, I'm zooming in, too.
	Okay, Georgia's down.
	Okay, yeah, they had to go over Azerbaijan, or they could shoot over...
	No, that's not going to work.
	They won't go over Turkey, though.
	They're going to have to go over Azerbaijan.
	I mean, it's Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran is right there.
	Yep.
	So it's the next country over.
	So they have the one...
	What's this here?
	Yeah, they can go straight from...
	They could go over Armenia, be a little shorter.
	But Azerbaijan looks like a good route.
	Yeah, and then there's...
	Actually, if they could get...
	We can't quite...
	If they could go over to Azure by John and hit that body of water there, what is that?
	The Caspian Black?
	The Caspian Sea.
	And then they could come out of the Caspian Sea and Tehran is right there at the bottom.
	And they could just bomb the crap out of it and then come back.
	But they're going to bomb the facilities.
	Where are those facilities?
	Do we know?
	No.
	No, we don't.
	It's if you go from Tbilisi to Tehran, it's 550 miles.
	That's a no-brainer.
	So that's why they're stationed there.
	So I do think they're going to hit them.
	If it's coming out of Israel, they have to go over too many things, including Iraq.
	Exactly.
	That's why.
	Yeah.
	Interesting.
	But they're not going to nuke.
	There's a big difference.
	Yeah, no, they're going to just probably do bunker busters.
	Yeah.
	Because the nukes don't work.
	You are aware of this, right?
	Tell me.
	Promise not to laugh?
	Alright, go.
	Oh, I know what you...
	Yeah, the nukes don't work right.
	The nukes don't work.
	October 14th, it's coming.
	I thought it was the 18th.
	No, it's alright.
	By the 18th, you'll know all about it.
	Don't worry.
	Nothing's going to happen, by the way.
	We followed up on your flying saucer thing, and there's a bunch of references all over the internet, including some crazy people that have posted YouTube videos talking about this thing.
	Yeah, I've seen that.
	But it's very unclear.
	It says over Alabama in the southern hemisphere.
	Well, I mean, the Alabama thing wasn't clear to me either.
	It may not be Alabama.
	It may be the name of the vessel.
	Well, it could be the name of the vessel.
	There's also, isn't there a space station?
	Oh, not a space station.
	Yeah, isn't there a, don't we have a Alabama?
	Not that I know of.
	Don't we have something?
	So anyway, so this flying saucer that you're...
	Hold on a second.
	I didn't say anything.
	Oh, you mean the ship that's coming?
	Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, on the 14th of October, it's supposed to be over the southern hemisphere someplace.
	It's supposed to hang around for a while.
	According to all the reports that you get from all these crackpots.
	Yeah.
	So, it's not going to happen.
	What are they going to say all these people when nothing comes of it?
	Oh well.
	Oh well.
	I think there's going to be some good stories about why it didn't happen.
	Well, you weren't ready.
	Or some bullshit.
	No, I've been following this stuff for a while.
	This is a pretty strong message that's coming.
	So I expect something to happen.
	Let's turn it around.
	Let's say something does appear.
	What are you going to say?
	Oh, it's not going to happen.
	I'm not even considering it.
	Okay, well, alright, there you go.
	I mean, if something appeared, I would go, wow, that's, huh.
	That would be my reaction.
	Okay.
	How do I spell that?
	Is that G-H-R-M-P-F? Well, who knew?
	So, okay, I'm looking back on the map again, so I'm just thinking what their route would be.
	I think they'd go over the Caspian Sea.
	Of course, they've got to go out over the Caspian Sea and then come down.
	Right.
	Because for one thing, you can fly low and the radar signatures are going to be minimal and the water's going to soak up a lot of the radar.
	And yeah, it's perfect.
	But how much does it suck?
	I mean, this is so fucking stupid.
	Well, we're not, you know...
	Why?
	What do you know?
	I mean, there's absolutely no reason to do it!
	Well, we don't know that they're actually going to do it.
	It may be an exercise.
	Just like the Armada that is now in the Black Sea for an exercise.
	Could be.
	It's disconcerting that they pulled the Dutch secret police out of the area, or the Dutch intelligence, whatever they call themselves.
	How many guys are in Dutch intelligence?
	Both of them have been pulled out.
	There's one guy to carry the magnifying glass, and I don't know.
	Well, there's lots of jokes like that.
	How about the Dutch Air Force?
	They were grounded recently.
	Not a single plane could fly.
	Yeah, they ran out of coal.
	These are the jokes we make about our armed forces.
	Yeah.
	They ran out of coal.
	Yeah, it's cute.
	Come on, you've heard these jokes.
	I mean, we do this with the Belgians all the time.
	It's like, well, you know, the Belgian army, they couldn't go to battle because no one could find the bullet.
	Yeah, the old one-bullet gag has been used a lot.
	Exactly.
	So, okay, what else is going on that we don't know about over here in the USA because we're more concerned about Sarah Palin moose hunting?
	I don't know.
	Let's talk about Sarah Palin for a little bit.
	I'm still totally enchanted by her.
	So the vpilfsite.com, vpilf.com is like buzzing.
	Yeah.
	That was a smart move by that guy.
	I have to bring it up now.
	I haven't subscribed to it yet, but yeah, it is good.
	But there's no really sexy pictures of her anywhere.
	They're all photoshopped.
	Yeah, I know.
	I keep waiting for something real to pop up.
	There was a good article in some...
	I was going to blog it, but then I realized it was a little too...
	Too much, too fey, as it were.
	It was a bunch of fashion designers discussing the three women in the campaign, Cindy McCain, Michelle Obama, and Sarah.
	And they talked about how she dresses down and makes a point of it and doesn't want to put on airs.
	Or dressed too sexy.
	She actually dresses like, you know, kind of the, on purpose, dresses like a Midwesterner.
	Although she probably, you know...
	And they say the only thing that she can do to improve her, she should probably ditch the glasses, they all say.
	No, I like it.
	Oh, here's a funny t-shirt.
	Sarah Palin, Babe Abraham Lincoln.
	Babe Abraham Lincoln.
	That's so funny.
	Yeah, I did catch Karl Rove a couple times on Fox News.
	Man, he's like, he is the wizard, isn't he?
	He's Kaiser Karl.
	I love that guy.
	Kaiser Karl is what I'm calling him.
	I mean, I never appreciated him so much until listening to him dissecting.
	He's a deconstructionist.
	Yeah, he is.
	Breaks it down.
	Which I admire because he'll take apart.
	He did a thing on the speech, which I have.
	I taped it because my son has become kind of a fan of his, too.
	For his deconstruction ability, but he took apart, I think it was McCain's speech, and he did it.
	He says, he did 12 paragraphs about this and three paragraphs about this.
	They had the whole thing broken down by paragraphs, which I don't know how you can do on a speech, but I guess you can.
	And then he talked about what points he hit, when he hit him, and what order he hit him in, and how little he did this and how much more he did that, indicating that they're going to go in such and such a direction.
	And it was interesting.
	He's very calculating.
	Hey, I'm looking at the drop site.
	Have you looked at that?
	Not today.
	Okay, drop.io slash noagenda.
	And there's a San Francisco Union's tax health surcharge on food.
	Have you heard about this?
	No.
	They scanned it here.
	It looks like it's a check for one vegetarian spring roll, one Japanese curry, shrimp stir fry.
	And there's regular tax on it.
	And then there's a health surcharge of 70 cents.
	What is that?
	I don't know.
	We support the new union contract, which brings better health and welfare benefits and pay increases for all union workers.
	These new and better benefits will increase our cost of doing business by more than $10,000 a month beginning September 2008, more than $200,000 over the whole year 2009.
	To partially recover these additional costs, we are charging a 3.5% health and welfare surcharge on every customer receipt.
	This surcharge is already being implemented by most reputable restaurants in San Francisco to help them stay afloat in these difficult times.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	So in a hotel, you're going to get your food bill, your tax bill, your health surcharge, your gratuity.
	It's just going to be half the money.
	It's just going to be in phantom shit.
	Yeah.
	Well, the problem is that where I'm looking at it, it's almost about a third of what the tax is, or more, is that actually it's more.
	It looks like about 40% of the tax.
	I mean, whatever the tax is, another 40%.
	40% of that would be the health surcharge.
	It should be a flat fee.
	It shouldn't be a floating fee.
	It shouldn't be a percentage.
	Because they're not paying the workers on a floating basis.
	There's a flat difference, right?
	Oh, really?
	I don't know.
	I have no idea.
	I'll have to look into it.
	That's pretty wacky, though.
	So did you see the new Bill Gates Vista commercial?
	Yeah, with Jerry Seinfeld.
	Yeah, I was like, I think actually, did you write that, that you were wrong about your prediction?
	Yeah, I was wrong.
	I thought it was just going to merely suck.
	I didn't know it was going to stink to high heaven or beyond that, which I was stunned how bad it was.
	It was quite bad.
	And pointless.
	I think it's an embarrassment to the company to have that ad out there, even though there's a bunch of people that have written comments.
	Oh, I think it's cute.
	It humanizes Bill Gates.
	What are you talking about?
	But Microsoft, that's an enterprise company.
	That's where they make their money.
	This is dumb.
	It's almost like an ego trip for Gates.
	I don't believe that.
	What kind of an ego trip?
	And then he humiliates himself with that clown card.
	Which I actually have posted on the blog.
	No, it's got to be some kind of ego trip.
	It is.
	What does he need?
	He doesn't need, Gates is not the type of person that needs an ego trip.
	I don't know him personally, but doing this kind of stuff, you know, it's not like it's the first, you know, if this were the first time he'd ever broken through the kind of genius boy wall, remember, you know, we're a lot closer to perhaps what he is like and what he does and what he stands for than most people who are going to see this commercial.
	I mean, who is it?
	Who is it intended for?
	Is it intended for the general population who's going to make a choice between Windows or a Mac?
	I mean, is that what this is about?
	And then it's just spinning wheels.
	It's unnecessary and stupid.
	He had the cute little video with Balmer where they're driving around with a Casio song.
	Remember that one?
	Yeah.
	So he already did his kind of like goofy thing, and he's done some goofy things throughout his tenure at Microsoft.
	And he's not even at Microsoft anymore.
	Isn't he gone?
	Yeah, right.
	That's what I keep saying every time he keeps cropping up.
	They ran all these retirement stories about him for a good month before he was quote-unquote retired.
	Well, how come he can't stay retired?
	What was the point of all these media people falling all over themselves to write stories about Bill Gates' retirement, end of an era, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Meanwhile, he's still there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	But it wasn't funny.
	End of story.
	It was like toe curling.
	You know, just like, ugh.
	Just embarrassing.
	It looks like Seinfeld faxed his performance in.
	Well, you've got to wonder about him and the relationship between him and...
	What's the guy you like so much?
	Who I think is probably the real brains behind the Seinfeld series.
	Come on, what's his name?
	You watch his show.
	Larry David?
	Larry David, yeah.
	Actually, I find Larry David, I like Larry David, but I find the show hard to deal with him.
	No, I thought you liked the show, too.
	I like certain ones of the show.
	I mean, there are certain episodes, like the Dead, I think he had some of the Dead Relatives show was good.
	I mean, he has occasionally, but it makes, the problem with the show is it's not really written.
	It's ad-libbed.
	It's a throw, it's like our show.
	If you don't like listening to two guys just go talk about whatever they feel like, you're not going to like this show.
	You are definitely not going to be digging this show.
	But that's kind of what his show is like, and I find it's lack of structure to be bothersome.
	Yeah.
	But I like him.
	I mean, I know he's the genius behind the Seinfeld show.
	Well, that's what I mean.
	I think that, you know, Seinfeld, although he had, you know, look, he has a certain type of humor.
	His stand-up is a certain, you know, observational humor, things that make you go, hmm, which is, you know, and I think that's what he's really good at writing.
	But then coming to the, basically, a commercial about nothing, because I think that's what they were, you know, that's what they were going for.
	I can just hear the phone call, you know, yeah, let's do a commercial about nothing.
	But the payoff, it'll be about Vista.
	And I'll shake my booty.
	They never had a logo for Vista.
	They never show what the commercial's about.
	It was just like a typical, you know, if it was a commercial for anything, it was a commercial for vaporware.
	You know, or false promises.
	Or, you know, dead ends.
	At the very end, there's a Microsoft logo, isn't there?
	I thought it went to black and there was a Microsoft logo.
	Yeah, there's a regular Microsoft logo at the end.
	Not only that, but it's a small one.
	Right.
	So it's just a brand thing.
	Did the stock move?
	Did anything happen?
	I doubt it, but who knows?
	Who knows, man?
	It should have tanked.
	I didn't say move up or down.
	I said, did it move?
	I'd be heading for the, as I like to say, I'd be heading for the exits.
	Oh my God.
	It totally is weird.
	I agree.
	Well, it's definitely into the category of what are they thinking.
	Yeah.
	Which actually shocked me.
	I thought they would at least have something that was promoting a product or selling something.
	There's one thing I wanted to say about a continuing theme on Twit that I heard came up again last week.
	And I hope one day I'll be invited onto the show so I can actually talk about it as well.
	How do these guys, and this is about the bandwidth metering, and I'm completely with you on just meter it.
	It doesn't mean that it has to be a bazillion dollars.
	It should be able to be metered in a reasonable cost.
	But there's such a huge misunderstanding, and I think there's enough smart people on that conversation each time this comes up, that it is not free.
	The speed and the amount is not the same thing.
	So when you have people downloading 50 gigabytes of data of movies or whatever on a daily basis, at a certain point you have to get a bigger router.
	This costs real money.
	These are millions and millions of dollars for these big machines that sit there at these exchanges and that pass off traffic to an ISP's members.
	How come that is so poorly understood by that group?
	It's baffling.
	But not only that, but every time I bring it up, I get a slew of hate mail and Twitters from people saying, you're full of crap.
	Basically, even though I maintain this position, but as I mentioned, I think, on Cranky Geeks recently, I've been maintaining the same position for the last decade.
	I mean, this is not a new argument with me.
	But nobody wants to, you know, I mean, it's a foregone conclusion.
	The one thing that's changing is that at least people are agreeing that it's probably going to happen someday, whether we like it or not.
	Right.
	That we're going to have to meter the net.
	But, yeah, I know that there's two assumptions that seem to be underlying the argument against it.
	One, if you meter the net, your bill's going to go skyrocket.
	Well, see, but that's an incorrect assumption.
	My argument is just the opposite.
	Your bill's going to go down.
	Absolutely.
	Because finally you'll just be paying for what you're really using.
	I mean, John, you and I were there in the early days when, you know, knocks would get filled up and transit lines were bursting at the seams and the whole fucking thing came to a crawl.
	The whole net would slow down.
	And this was built with, okay, granted, all these telcos got subsidized and they stole that money and didn't actually build out the infrastructure properly and just threw it into marketing of free-for-all, come all you can eat.
	I mean, yeah, a lot went wrong there, but...
	It does actually cost money if people are consuming more bandwidth.
	It's not the speed or the perceived size of the pipe that's the real deal.
	That's not what it's coming from.
	It's all of these exchanges, or they're less and less now, but it's the exchanges, the peering agreements between them, the cost of transit where you don't have a peering agreement.
	That's real money that has to be paid there.
	And it's for equipment, you know, big, big, big routers, switches, big machines.
	I've built a NOC. I know what goes into this, and I'm just astounded at this conversation.
	It comes up every month, at least once.
	Yeah, well, the other thing is, of course, and also if you pass traffic through the big, giant sites like May East or May West, the big government sites, you actually have to pay to go in and out, and you have to pay by the bit.
	Yes, hell yeah.
	But I can already predict what's going to happen.
	It's so clear to me that...
	The big ISPs, the big networks, they're going to start acquiring content into their networks.
	It'll be available outside, but even just acquiring...
	So if you have popular content, for them to get that content, there's a cost.
	It may not always be an actual out-of-pocket cost.
	It can be an appearing agreement or some other kind of agreement that is set up between networks.
	But eventually, it's just going to be cheaper to them...
	Without even charging their customers anything, to just bring it inside their network.
	Or expand their network and make that bigger.
	I don't see that happening across the board.
	But they're just going to have to go to that model.
	So they're going to start acquiring these big...
	Big content aggregators or providers or whatever servers are, I think they're going to want them inside their networks.
	Now, will they actually know what to do with them?
	Probably not.
	Other than, hey, at least it's saving us money.
	Because it's going to have to come from both ends.
	It can't just come from the customers.
	Well, at some point, IPTV... I mean, it's like internet telephony.
	Well, you brought this up, and Comcast already essentially does IPTV. I mean, a Comcast cable box is not receiving an analog signal.
	It's receiving a digital signal, so it's already IPTV. Right, but that's the...
	The cable version.
	I'm not sure that's true, but the point is that...
	People like Comcast will have a selection of what will amount to IPTV television that they can meter in.
	Not meter the IPTV stuff, but they can segment off the premium stuff so you can order an HBO movie or whatever.
	In fact, they have all this pay-per-view crap now all over the place.
	Everybody's got it.
	But true IPTV, it seems to me, is an open network.
	Yeah, you can subscribe to all those channels from your Comcast, but you should be able to also go to Sweden.
	Isn't IPTV then exactly what Mevio is doing?
	Aren't we, in essence, an IPTV provider?
	Well, I think everybody who sends stuff over the net is an IPTV provider.
	But the stuff that Mevio's doing is designed to be looked at on a computer.
	It's not designed to be looked at on a TV, which is what the TV is in IPTV. Correct.
	And that's what I'm talking about.
	And I think that will never actually work.
	It will.
	And what's going to happen is I'm going to be able to sit here In fact, I think it's not that far from being implemented.
	Well, actually, in Asia, it's already implemented.
	But I should be able to sit here.
	I should be, say I'm Swedish, and I moved to San Francisco, and I want to keep watching my...
	I should be able to go on the computer and then say, yeah, I want to subscribe to whatever channels the Swedes have, and it should be able to open up a connection, and then I should be able to watch it on my regular television set, just as though I was in Sweden.
	Technically, yeah, but where's the business model?
	There's no way to do sales on that, so you're going to have to pay for it.
	Yeah, you're going to have to pay for it.
	Right, so this is...
	Thank you very much.
	So to see the Swedish chef cooking show, which of course is the only thing of any value you're going to get...
	That's the muffins, for God's sake.
	...anything of any value you're going to get from this wonderful IPTV setup you have in your living room, you're going to have to wind up paying $2.99 to watch an episode.
	And we know that's not going to work.
	It'll work, but it's not going to sustain the production necessary to create that type of programming.
	I'm not convinced of that, and I'll tell you why.
	And a friend of mine who I've used as the model for discussion about Georgia, who are from Russia, and actually from Georgia, I would go over to their house once in a while, and they have the Dish Network Like I do, they get the same dish and everything.
	Well, stop.
	They're already paying.
	That's where they're paying for it.
	So that's done.
	So the business model is clear.
	That's the whole problem.
	But that's because you're paying for the hardware.
	Well, they're paying.
	I don't know why I know the hardware is free.
	It's the monthly charge that they're paying for.
	Yeah, for the whole setup.
	So you're paying a subscription fee.
	So, you know, the way it works is the Swedish company is getting paid a monthly fee from the Dish Network, and the Dish Network goes and tries to sell that to their customers.
	When you're talking IPTV, I just don't see that model, John.
	I don't see enough revenue to actually create that kind of product.
	To be able to create five to eight minutes of an online episodic show, it's still hard work, but it's doable.
	The show's already produced.
	It's local television from Stockholm.
	Okay, so then what's...
	So essentially it's like a sling box arrangement.
	Right, so how many gigs is that going to be?
	To watch that in good definition, you probably want HD. Why the hell not?
	We're going to go there eventually in your scenario.
	So how many gigs is that going to be?
	Let's see, HD half-hour should be around 7 gigs.
	7 gigs, right.
	So if these guys at this Swedish state-run television are going to send that to you, it's probably going to cost them a couple bucks in transfer cost.
	I'll pay two bucks.
	It's not going to be enough.
	It's got to be enough.
	No!
	Do you know what normal CDN prices are before you get into huge volume?
	We're in huge volume.
	We've driven that shit down to a nice level, which is actually a very good level.
	It's so good I'm not even allowed to talk about it according to our contract.
	But most people, if they can get below 40 cents a gigabyte, they're doing really good.
	So you're talking, you know, three bucks right there just to send it out.
	Exactly.
	Well, here's another thing that's going on.
	I was talking to the guy who was responsible for, I have to get his name again, this famous internet architect who's actually responsible for all the congestion algorithms that we use.
	Okay.
	He says that there's a model out there that they're working on, it works as follows.
	He says there's no reason.
	He says right now the problem which you described adequately is not workable.
	In other words, why should me, the provider of the seven gigabytes of content, Have to send, and say we have two customers, John and Adam, why do I have to send a copy to you on a request and then send another copy?
	You're about to invent peer-to-peer networking and the proxy scheme, because I've looked at all of this.
	That's exactly what all these huge proxy server ideas were about, and they just never came to fruition.
	It's never really happened.
	But you're absolutely right.
	What should happen is the content from the Swedish chef should be sent over to Comcast, and Comcast stores it there and puts it into it.
	This is what they're working on.
	This is the only way it's going to work in their model.
	I'm not saying I love it, but it's the only way they know how to do business.
	And they're going to start acquiring that and presenting it to you in a different way, in their own way.
	Because it can't actually, and it's not even a copyright thing, it's just an economics thing.
	And by the way, these guys, I don't know if they still do, but in the early days of the web, man, proxy servers, whew!
	Remember how much trouble they were?
	Because everyone had them to try and cut down on bandwidth?
	Yeah, they didn't work.
	And, you know, you'd wait and suddenly you'd have to call IT, hey man, can you blow out the proxy because I've got to refresh this page for a presentation.
	Yeah, we actually had some of that, it's like...
	It's like that WordPress cache that we play around with.
	You have to use it once in a while because you get too many hits and having to send out a page on every request of all these different little...
	It'd be better if you just had this one thing.
	Boom, boom, boom.
	So anyway...
	Yeah, that's because there's problems.
	I'm not saying...
	If IPTV was a no-brainer, we'd be getting IPTV tomorrow.
	The thing is, John, I'm telling you...
	Not only is it a no-brainer, it's a non-starter.
	It's not about the technology.
	We've got the technology.
	We've got the technology for the programming.
	We've got the programming.
	It's there, too.
	There is no way to connect all those bits into a viable business model at scale so that you can actually sustain that type of programming.
	And even if it's an additional, just sending it out, that's a logistical nightmare.
	Well, you yourself just said Comcast is doing that already.
	Well, no, I said I think that they're probably still doing some proxying, but I don't know if they do it on large files.
	In fact, I don't know if that's done anymore at all because it may just be prohibitive.
	I don't know.
	Maybe the amount of data is too prohibitive to even set up proxy servers for the media assets that we're downloading these days.
	It's huge.
	We're going to have a bunch of people writing in.
	Well, yeah, by the way, please, for the hate mail you're writing to me right now, this is not like I actually want it to be this way.
	I'm just saying this is what I see happening.
	And maybe we'll even get to a scenario where it'll be very analogous to the phone providers, where if you hook up to a certain network, you'll get a certain package, and they're going to do it.
	They're going to do the content packages you watch.
	It's just not sustainable for them anymore.
	All I know is that there's gonna be a way of my, like the woman who watches Russian television.
	They get like 10 channels off the dish, and they have a different menu.
	I'm looking at this going, wow, this doesn't even look like my dish network.
	But think of how beautiful the distribution is.
	It's one uplink, and everyone can download it basically from the satellite.
	It's a very different type of distribution mechanism.
	It's also not cheap, by the way, to sustain that, but it's doable.
	At least there's no real...
	I don't think there's...
	Well, you run out of channels, so there's a set amount of channels you can utilize.
	There is a bandwidth issue.
	But it's for the total offering and not incremental per new audience member.
	That's really what it's about.
	This is the thing that people really don't see.
	And I think Google will do it, too.
	I think Google's totally going to go into the content business.
	Which is going to really mess with their current business model, but they're going to figure it out.
	And I think they probably have enough money to do that, but maybe they'll do it during this recession.
	They're going to get into content, I'm sure of it, because they've got the distribution.
	They've got a fantastic distribution mechanism.
	Well, I don't have any doubt they're going to, or I know they're thinking about it.
	But, you know, the problem is they have to go look at Yahoo, who's been toying with content for 20 years, and, you know, it's just a joke.
	I think even if they could figure out how to get the Swedish cooking show cost-effectively to people, I think even that will make them the winner.
	They don't even have to have a business model to just make it cheaper to actually distribute it.
	They're already going to win.
	Now what are you doing?
	I'm chewing on pistachios.
	Alright, enough of this.
	Alright.
	I'm going to have to rethink the whole thing.
	Let's talk about Hillary Clinton.
	She's dropped off the radar.
	Yeah, because she's going to do what she has in the background to sink Obama.
	You think she's really doing that?
	I don't know.
	What do you think?
	What's her chances of ever becoming the President of the United States if Obama wins?
	Hillary Clinton?
	No.
	The only chance of her becoming President of the United States...
	Well, there's no chance, actually.
	No, there's one long-shot chance.
	Yeah, well, the one long-shot chance is Obama is eliminated before the general election, which would make her, I think, the default Democratic candidate.
	Geez, that's not going to happen.
	I'm just saying that's the only scenario I can see.
	Well, the other scenario is that McCain wins, and he's a one-term president, and she runs in 2012, and then she's got the job.
	Possible.
	Possible.
	But if Obama wins, whether he does a crappy job or a good job, it doesn't make any difference, because he's going to be the candidate in 2012.
	I mean, the last time the Democrats had this situation, when Jimmy Carter was in for one term...
	And then when he came to the convention, Ted Kennedy tried to bump him off the ticket the way Hillary would have to do with Obama because he was doing such a crappy job.
	And it was not effective.
	He still didn't get on.
	And they ran Carter again.
	And he lost to Reagan.
	So Hillary knows she's out at least eight years from today.
	And she's not going to get in in 2016 or whenever the next one is after that.
	So, she has to submarine Obama's campaign if she wants to be president.
	If she doesn't want to be president, which seems unlikely, then she'll help him, but she's, like, not going to help him.
	I can't believe we're already talking about the 2012 election.
	I might as well.
	We haven't even had the 2008 yet.
	Oh, man.
	That just hurts my brain.
	Well, I know, because it's going to get interesting now.
	We've got two months of dirty politics ahead of us.
	I think it's going to be just a lot of mudslinging and a couple debates.
	I think there's three debates scheduled, maybe four.
	Only one for the vice president, which will be the one that packs them in.
	Because everyone wants to see, you know, if this woman can, you know, and Joe Biden can have a fight, because it'd be funny.
	Well, I want to interrupt you, so I totally agree, but I think it's being orchestrated for different reasons.
	I think we are going to see a great two months.
	It's going to be fantastic television.
	There's going to be a lot of catfighting and one-liners and some awesome...
	We know that McCain has some writers now, so we can expect some...
	And surely some of that stuff that Palin had was written.
	I mean, it was...
	Come on.
	The difference between Pitbull and a hockey mom lipstick.
	I mean, great lines.
	And I think we're just going to have a lot more of that because at all costs...
	We do not want to be looking at Wall Street or any...
	There's no warships over here in the Black Sea.
	Just keep on enjoying the show, folks.
	Just keep on looking.
	Ain't that Sarah Palin cute, everybody?
	Hey!
	Yeah.
	Well, there's obviously elements of that.
	Meanwhile, Cheney and Bush get to be stirring up trouble.
	They didn't even show up, man.
	Bush calls in.
	He does a fucking video conference.
	And Colin Powell didn't show up.
	And Cheney didn't show up.
	Of course, he was out there cutting deals in Georgia and messing with Putin's head.
	That's interesting.
	The claim was that they didn't show up because they weren't welcome.
	But you might be right.
	Actually, it may be more sinister than that.
	Oh, it has to be.
	Those guys, they love flaunting their stuff.
	Now, with the distraction of the convention, they can go off and do all kinds of stuff.
	They can do anything.
	They can do anything.
	Well, I won't get into that.
	What?
	Well, the whole hurricane thing.
	Oh, the hurricane was a laughable.
	They started that, man.
	They fired up that harp thing up there in Alaska.
	He comes out and he makes the announcement that this is going to be the storm of the century worse than Katrina.
	I know.
	And they evacuate the whole place.
	Yeah.
	And see how good we've done it?
	They didn't need to evacuate anybody.
	See how good we've done it?
	We've done real good.
	And it's all Blackwater, John.
	It was all Blackwater guys down there doing the evacuating.
	Is that right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Someone sent me an email.
	I should see if I can...
	Hold on.
	Someone sent me an awesome email.
	Well, that means that as they evacuated people, they were putting bugs in their house.
	Who the hell knows?
	That'd be pretty funny.
	If you live in New Orleans, check your house.
	Have it checked for listening devices.
	They were placing thermite.
	Thermite.
	Yeah, right, so they could blow up the town.
	That's right.
	That's right, baby.
	The WTC7 group, they're working there over time.
	Hold on a second.
	All your houses have been rigged for to be blown up.
	Here it is.
	Okay, so here's this email from this Michael guy.
	And I'm going to forward this to you because it's really too long.
	And he actually responds to the LA Times photo of the Blackwater guy leaving the scene of the medical marijuana bust.
	Remember that?
	Vaguely.
	Yeah, well, it was a bust on a medical marijuana shop, and the New York Times had a whole bunch of pictures, and one was a picture of a guy with a Blackwater shirt, you know, armed.
	And so this guy, he's, you know, he...
	I'll just send it to you.
	Hold on.
	We can't even talk about this whole thing.
	You've just got to read this.
	You won't believe it.
	He says these guys are fucking everywhere.
	Everywhere.
	It's a good business to be in.
	And then there's...
	I keep reading about...
	Do you hear about this Gulfstream that crashed?
	It belonged to the CIA and it had three and a half tons of cocaine on it?
	No.
	There's some good stories out there, man.
	Yes, but let's talk about Sarah Palin.
	Please don't notice...
	She hunts moose.
	Please.
	She shoots guns.
	There's no coke on this Learjet.
	Please, pass on by.
	Yeah, it's really true.
	It's really, really true.
	Well, send me the link.
	It's an email.
	I just sent you the whole email.
	It's not the link.
	No, it's like a personal thing.
	He wrote up this whole story.
	For example, in Iraq, when his company is unloading shipments at military sites, the people who offload and manage supplies as well as their disbursements to the troops are not U.S. military personnel.
	These are a bunch of redneck KBRs.
	Contractors who deliberately lose, steal, and overbill the military.
	Oh, he goes on to this whole overbilling thing, too.
	It's crazy.
	It's crazy.
	We're being ripped off by these guys.
	Of course.
	So do you find it interesting?
	I don't know if anyone's ever pointed out that Blackwater is actually named after...
	I'd like to find out when they name their company, because it seems to be connected to the Whitewater scandal.
	So you have Whitewater, Blackwater.
	I mean, it's just like...
	It's a pun.
	I think there was a different...
	There's a different reason why it's called Blackwater.
	I think I looked that up once.
	It lists something else.
	Um...
	I love it when you're typing away there.
	It's eating pistachios, I guess, according to this one.
	Well, that's interesting.
	Blackwater.com goes to yeah.com.
	I can't believe those guys didn't have that.
	They didn't have the URL? No, they have blackwaterusa.com.
	There's a reason I read this somewhere.
	Henry Rollins is doing shows now.
	Have you seen any of those?
	On Democracy Now?
	Oh, you know, I can only stomach Democracy Now for about five minutes.
	Yeah, but Henry Rollins is pretty cool.
	That woman is so dour.
	Yeah, her performance, I would say, is indeed, it's like, we know it's all fucked up, but at least I'm laughing about it.
	Yeah, she's depressing, she's dour, she actually makes herself look even worse by, you know, having this, you know, she looks like she never washes her hair.
	I've never, Amy, whatever the hell her name is, Amy Winehouse.
	No, it's not Amy Winehouse.
	It's Amy something.
	And I bitched about her once on the blog, and I got a bunch of, you know, all these people writing me, yeah, just, you know, no, that's where all the facts are.
	And I have to say, once in a while, she'll have somebody on that's just a fascinating interview.
	And they let it go forever.
	I mean, they let them tell their story.
	They don't cut them short.
	It's not soundbite-oriented.
	And, you know, okay, fine.
	But generally speaking, you know, it's kind of a crappy production that is depressing.
	And it's unnecessarily biased onto one side.
	I mean, it's very progressive left-wing, which is fine.
	But, you know, it's not objective news any more than Fox, you know, in that regard.
	And Fox is more objective, I think, than these guys.
	You should look at some of the news articles they've got on Blackwater.
	Some of the press releases.
	Embassy's contract security staff saves Polish ambassador.
	Blackwater saves 600 lives.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Unbelievable.
	Well, it's the mercenaries.
	Somebody decided to go, you know, say, look, mercenaries are a good business.
	Let's start a company about it.
	Let's do it right.
	Let's professionalize it.
	And let me tell you, they're not the only ones.
	And I've been seeing this commercial on television for the past week.
	And it's of a new video game called...
	Actually, it's Mercenary 2.
	And it's really weird because instead of a huge explosion-like trailer that you would expect, they have a very kind of mundane type song.
	The words are very freaky, of course, if you look at it in context with the images.
	And, you know, it's mercenaries and they're bombing oil rigs and they're, you know...
	In Blackhawk and Apache helicopters, and it's like, Mercenary 2.
	We're totally conditioning the next Blackwater recruits.
	Right, or whoever the competition is.
	There's probably got to be more onerous.
	I mean, Blackwater may just actually be just a smokescreen for some really worse operations.
	Yeah, I have the...
	I don't have it here.
	In the paper downstairs, it had that whole thing about the companies that trained the Georgian commandos.
	Oh, yeah, the Georgian commandos, yeah.
	Yeah, they're probably an interesting option.
	Like the Americans.
	Like us.
	Because they're paid for by the Pentagon.
	It says it right there in the paper.
	What are we doing paying for armaments in Georgia?
	I mean, come on.
	I pay taxes.
	I should get to ask.
	Fucking crazy.
	You know, the thing that bugs me, is slightly annoying, is when you hear about the, you know, the green zone in Iraq, and where, you know, all these guys are living, you know, and the fact that they bring in catering services.
	Whatever happened to the days where the army actually had a cook?
	Oh yeah, you were on KP Patrol.
	That was nicknamed Cookie.
	Yeah, you had KP, you had Kitchen Patrol, and you had to peel potatoes.
	Yeah, those guys had to peel potatoes.
	Now they have a catering service that comes in, and they have a big Donald's, and they have all these different kinds of options.
	You know, I'm surprised they haven't got butlers.
	They probably do.
	Some of the top guys probably do, but they're probably not army butlers.
	They're probably like hired butlers.
	Yes, of course.
	They're from the Hilton Hotel Group, of course.
	I told you about Bosro when I was there.
	McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, huge salad bar.
	Yeah, it's all commercial.
	Coke machines everywhere.
	Yeah, how is this like any sort of, you know, people say, well, we're in a war, we're in a war, we're in a war.
	What kind of a war is this?
	Well, it's the kind of war that keeps the economy going.
	Thank you.
	That's what this is all about, is to keep the economy going by going to war, and then, you know, that's good for a big American industry.
	Well, I don't know.
	There's something about it.
	There's something wrong with this picture.
	When they have, you know, when they don't have KP. Well, they don't.
	Yeah, I know.
	They don't have KP. And once you hear about, you know, something else, some catering truck turned over, you know.
	Here we go.
	I've got the U.S. Army spokesman said the goal of the program was to train the commandos for duty in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led international security assistance force.
	Right.
	The contractors, MPRI and American Systems, both based in Virginia, recruited a 15-man team of formal Special Forces soldiers to train the Georgians at the Vashivari Special Forces base on the outskirts of Tbilisi, part of a program run by the U.S. Defense Department.
	There you go.
	We seem to train more people than we should.
	And they probably had one of those jails over there, one of those Gitmo jails.
	In Georgia.
	That could be.
	That makes sense.
	That would be one reason to protect the place.
	Right.
	But John, just to wrap this up, isn't this also fucking wrong?
	I mean, this has to stop.
	We've got insane psychopaths running the White House.
	This shit has to stop.
	It's out of control.
	You've got a fucked up crazy Dutch guy running NATO. We know about him.
	Trust me.
	You've got...
	Everyone's going out of business everywhere.
	We're so bad that China can't even afford to pay for the wars that we're starting.
	Stop!
	And it's not going to be Obama or McCain.
	It has to come from somewhere else.
	You're a smart man.
	It comes from the collapsing economy.
	When the economy collapses, you end up with it.
	That's just simply what's going to happen.
	If you look at the CIA list of countries in debt, we're down at the bottom.
	We're number one with the most debtors.
	And the numbers are not even close to the guys just above us.
	If you look on their fact list, it's a really funny thing to look at.
	You go, holy crap.
	I mean, the whole thing is just, right now it's just bailing wire and chewing gum and holding the whole thing together.
	So you think when the collapse comes, which I think starts Monday, and I'm going to set my watch by it, I think the collapse starts...
	No, you have to have a boom before you have a bust.
	I keep saying this.
	No, we're just going to have a splat.
	It never happens that way.
	Well, maybe, you know, there's a lot of stuff that hasn't ever happened that way this time around, so it's a new game.
	Actually, that's one argument that there's no defense against, which is if you study all the economic cycles and all the depressions that have taken place in every century, they always have a different twist to them.
	There's no two identical.
	There's some similarity sometimes, but every once in a while it's like, wow, that's pretty weird.
	I think we're going to go into hyperinflation personally, because that's the only way we can pay off these debts.
	Well, all right.
	Okay.
	I think the easier way is just to pack it all in and say, all right, that was fun.
	We stopped this.
	Reset moment.
	Reboot.
	Here's the Amero, everybody.
	The Amero.
	Here's the Amero.
	Yeah, I guess the Amero could save the day.
	No, it won't save the day, but it's like a company going, we have to go into receivership, I think.
	That's what we need, a form of chapter 11.
	And then we come out, except the way we come out is with, all right, now we're all going to give you this new paper.
	Here's the new controlled circulation of that paper, so we're basically just resetting everything back to zero, and we'll start all over again.
	That's what the Brazilians did when they went from the Cruzeros to the Real.
	How'd that work out for them?
	It actually worked out very well for me.
	I mean, now, at one point, the Cruzeros thing, I have some of these notes, because when I first went to Brazil, they were still using these things.
	And I have a couple of 500,000 Cruzeros notes with a picture of some guy's head, and there's 500,000 on there.
	I would like to get some of that African money that's like this.
	Anyone out there can get me some bricks of that Mugabe money.
	I need it.
	Anyway, so seriously, I wish somebody would get me.
	People go there and they're, ah, you know, I forgot.
	So anyway, so they switched at one point.
	They said, okay, we're going to drop this whole thing.
	The banks there, you know, figured, you know, everyone got, and all the ducks were in a row, and they came up with this real.
	Which means real, obviously.
	And it was linked to the dollar one-to-one.
	And it maintained a one-to-one ratio to the dollar for almost a decade.
	Of course, then all of a sudden, it became two reales to a dollar.
	And now I think it's floating around three, maybe, or two and a half.
	I'm not sure.
	Whatever it is, maybe it went the other way with the dollar falling.
	But I have to look it up.
	But anyway, the...
	It worked out for them.
	Considering what they had before, the hyperinflation they were having at the time was, in fact, they always said, do not cash your dollars in, do it within a couple of hours of your purchase.
	Because it was like 2, 3, 4, 5, 10% a day.
	It's just the money which is becoming worthless so fast.
	It can happen here.
	It can happen here.
	It happened in Germany.
	I'm looking for this word.
	It's some phrase someone turned me on to a while ago.
	It was like NERAS or NERAS or is apparently some law or some program that Clinton put in place that could reset the entire economy.
	Have you heard of this?
	No, never heard of it.
	Shit.
	Now, of course, I can't find it.
	But I guess, yeah, I guess so the complete economic collapse, but that could take a long time, man, to crawl back.
	That could take five, ten years to come out of that.
	Ten years.
	Ten years to come out, yeah.
	But that, you know, we did that in the 30s.
	We almost had, we had close to the same thing in the 70s.
	It took ten years.
	You know, you get a lot of good music.
	The 30s were a good era for music, so were the 70s.
	And then you have a lot of good movies.
	Entertainment is quite good.
	A lot of restaurants open up.
	People rethink their lives.
	It's not horrible, but better not to do it.
	There's going to be a lot of people with no jobs.
	We're already at 6%.
	That sucks.
	You have riots, which is no good.
	Food riots, probably.
	That's coming.
	I know that's coming.
	Okay, the real right now is $1.71, so it's actually gone back toward the right way because of the weak dollar.
	That's pretty good, actually.
	Yeah, considering this thing has been in business for a while, and it's better than it was with those cruzaros and whatever.
	I think they changed it a couple of times during that hyperinflation period.
	The Brazilians got the reputation, and people should note this, for having the world's best banking system because the banks had to deal with this hyperinflation thing, and so they essentially are set up to deal with a really flaky economy.
	And to stay in business, they have to, you know, they have a lot of, it's very modern, the way their systems work.
	And, you know, I've always thought, well, maybe it's a safe place to put your money, except for the fact one of the big banks folded.
	But there's two, I think, two major banks in Brazil that might not be a bad place to...
	Put money, if you go into a hyperinflation situation.
	That was kind of interesting that John McCain's son was, had just resigned two months prior to the collapse of the Silver State Bank.
	Did you catch that?
	No.
	Yeah.
	Hmm.
	I thought that was, what was his name, Andrew, I think.
	Yeah, I didn't notice that one.
	Yeah, he was, I think he was actually in, he was like a big kahuna there, and he resigned two weeks ago, I'm sure, sniffing the impending doom.
	Well, yeah.
	It's a good time to get out, you don't want to be part of it.
	Yeah.
	I'm sure that's not going to get a lot of ink.
	No, there's a lot.
	Actually, most of the interesting McCain weird stuff is all on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
	Yeah, here you go.
	July 29th.
	Here we go.
	On the eve of President Bush's signing of the housing bill this week, which will regulate as well as bailout mortgage behemoth Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and create a $300 billion program to expand the Federal Housing Administration's capacity to guarantee mortgages, comes word that Andrew McCain, son of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, has resigned today from Silver State Bank's board of directors.
	The bank cites personal reasons for Mr.
	McCain's sudden departure.
	Yeah, you think, Eddie, any inside info there?
	He's getting out while the getting's good.
	Oh, man.
	Yeah.
	We don't have the right connections at all.
	No, we should be on a couple of bank boards.
	It actually is pretty easy to set up a bank, I found out.
	Why don't we set a bank up?
	Let's not.
	How about just set one up in the Cayman Islands or something?
	That sounds like a really bad idea.
	I don't like that at all.
	Gibraltar.
	I don't want to be a banker.
	That's no fun.
	There's about...
	There's these different places where you're supposed to be safe havens or something.
	There's some islands over there off the British coast.
	There's Gibraltar.
	There's Cayman Islands.
	There's a whole bunch of these places.
	Yeah, but still, you know, the basic business of banking just doesn't appeal to me.
	All right.
	I'll have to go elsewhere to find my banking partners.
	Yeah, you do that, John.
	You do that.
	Yeah.
	All right, what else do we get?
	I don't know.
	Are we done?
	I guess we are done.
	I mean, I think this show was kind of slow-moving.
	There's something slightly depressing about it.
	I think it's these topics that you brought up.
	Then maybe you should come prepared.
	What did you have on your notes?
	All I had was Hillary conundrum.
	What was the conundrum?
	The fact that she can't really want Obama to win.
	That's the conundrum.
	And the other one, I do have this other note, Obama.
	Somebody pointed this out because Obama did the O'Reilly show.
	I saw snippets of it.
	Which took a lot of guts on his part, to be honest about it.
	But O'Reilly keeps smiling and kind of one of these slight smiles as though he got Obama to say something that's coming up next week.
	Although it could be just a teaser.
	But I get the sense that Obama did something, said something stupid.
	But I don't know.
	But the thing that somebody pointed out in analyzing Obama's response to O'Reilly, who's kind of a dick, Was that if you didn't notice, Obama apparently doesn't have the capacity to ever admit he's wrong.
	He's never done that.
	That's because he never is wrong, man.
	Are you crazy?
	He's never wrong.
	So I thought that was kind of interesting.
	Yeah, so that's coming up this week?
	Is that when he's airing that full interview?
	I've only seen, like, little bits and bobs.
	He showed a little bit of it on Thursday, and then he's going to show the rest on Tuesday and Wednesday, I think.
	Right.
	And I'll probably just TiVo it and see what it is.
	It's probably, you know, I don't know.
	Anyway, John, T-4 and counting, I hope that I get to talk to you next week.
	They fire that thing up on Wednesday.
	Oh, right, the Hadron Collider.
	Yeah, which could suck it if the thing disappears into its own black hole.
	I'm going first.
	You'll be sucked in with it.
	All right, so hopefully I'll talk to you next week.
	All right.
	So from Gitmo Nation West and Gitmo Nation East...
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. Dvorak.

▲