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Oct. 19, 2008 - No Agenda

01:40:28

52: Solex

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	Riding the wake of the new Weimar Republic, still free and at large.
	It's time once again for No Agenda, emanating from both coasts of Gitmo Nation.
	From the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
	And I'm in northern Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	Hey John, how you doing on this Sunday?
	Not that well, because my local football team, coached by a guy who obviously can't do the job anymore, lost.
	Oh, so sorry to hear that.
	Talking about the University of California Bears.
	Yeah, I'm a little bit out of whack, just time zone-wise.
	I was in Amsterdam yesterday with the girls.
	We had a surprise party for Bob.
	Who's my stepdad.
	And so between the San Francisco time difference and then that one hour between London or between the UK and continental Europe, that really throws me off whack.
	And of course it's just Sunday in general.
	And I'm coming back tomorrow.
	So you say.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yes.
	So unfortunately, the plan that we had initially was for you to send me a DVD of the CNN side-by-side of the debate along with the audience data from Ohio or whatever.
	And that first was going to be sent on DVD, but then there was all kinds.
	Unbelievable.
	You can't get a DVD overnight to Europe anymore.
	That seems to be impossible.
	Well, there's something to do with at least what we could figure out.
	It had something to do with you couldn't do it because of some restriction.
	You know, I don't know.
	We couldn't do it.
	We couldn't get there until Monday was the point.
	You're kidding me!
	So if you sent it on Thursday, you couldn't get it in there until Monday?
	That's what seems to be the case, yeah.
	DHL, FedEx, and UPS. But you have no idea what the limitation was?
	It was something to do with 9-11.
	No, you're kidding me.
	That's what Maggie said.
	I don't know.
	I didn't talk to these people.
	It had to do with 9-11?
	That you couldn't send me a disc?
	I'm just telling you.
	That's the report I got.
	So then, of course, you had poor...
	Was it David?
	Chris.
	Chris, IT. You had him upload 4.4 gigs onto some fucking server, and then you actually believe, or someone there thought that I was going to download that?
	I mean, we can barely keep a Skype connection going on...
	It does seem unreasonable.
	I got like one megabit down.
	Do you want to do the calculation?
	It took him like one hour to upload it.
	Yeah, he's got more bandwidth uploading than I have.
	Four gigs, that's an amazing amount of data.
	I thought you would have somebody at the office do it.
	It doesn't matter because he uploaded it to a U.S. server.
	And we don't have a dedicated backhaul.
	You're not getting true download data rates across the ocean.
	It just doesn't happen that way.
	Particularly the server that he uploaded it to.
	So you never got the disk?
	I didn't have the 36 hours.
	But anyway, so I thought...
	We could play it a little bit differently.
	An amazing thing happened on my way back from the United States to Europe.
	I stopped caring about the presidential debate.
	It's pretty funny that way.
	Well, that's funny you'd say that because my notes, instead of being on a big giant box, are just on the back of an envelope and it's only like three things.
	And so I arrived Thursday morning, so the debate was still kind of fresh because it took place in the middle of the night, UK time.
	And so I got the summary, which was literally on the BBC, I kid you not, John.
	You see them sit down at the table.
	You hear some blah, blah, blah voiceover, and then they went straight to a montage of, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Plumber.
	And that was their entire report.
	Yeah, they think they're the Jon Stewart show.
	The BBC! It was unbelievable.
	And that was it.
	If you want to do something like that, why don't you just do a montage of Obama saying, look, look, look, look, look.
	Let me tell you.
	Look, my friends.
	Look.
	Joe the Plumber.
	Look.
	So anyway...
	I would love to hear your highlights, because obviously I heard a couple of them.
	I've been reading a few...
	You can't get away from it, obviously.
	There's no way you can be in touch with any media and not pick up some pieces of it.
	I would think.
	So I'd love to hear your notes.
	Well, I'll get a couple of things.
	For one thing...
	About two-thirds of the way through the debate, Obama all of a sudden decided that to heck with this format, I'm looking into the camera.
	Oh, and he went to his teleprompter mode.
	Actually, when he's on the teleprompter, they usually left and right.
	They don't usually keep one on the camera.
	I mean, they probably will.
	But he just looked into the camera and started telling people, look, we've got a blah, blah, blah, blah.
	He started talking to the audience.
	There was a couple of interesting facts that came out in the debate.
	One, I guess they figured this out.
	Which is kind of interesting because Obama is so international and all this.
	He's never been south of the border.
	Hmm.
	And how did that come out?
	He just said, I've never been down to Mexico?
	No, Bill McCain just said it.
	He says, you've never been south of the border.
	You've never been to Mexico or South America.
	And meanwhile, you're trying to do this treaty with, I think it was Colombia.
	There's some bill or something that he's against.
	Oh, interesting.
	He doesn't know what he's talking about.
	Uh-huh.
	And I thought that was interesting, because this is the guy who's supposed to be so well-traveled.
	Right.
	I mean, of course, the thing is that we have to always remember is that George Bush...
	Before he was elected president, was never out of the country at all.
	He didn't even have a passport.
	Right.
	Like most Americans.
	That's 3%, 25% came up again.
	Now, did McCain say anything about that?
	No.
	You want to just explain that briefly?
	Because that is an irker, and I don't know if everyone is listening.
	We have 3% of the world's oil reserves, yet we use 25% of the annual oil production.
	Now, it's a complete specious thing to say.
	One does not have anything to do with the other.
	If we use that 3%, how long would that last us?
	It would probably last us, you know, decades.
	Because that 3% is a lot.
	And the other fact is, of course, if you want to talk about stuff like this, you have to mention that we have 350 years worth of coal energy available to us within our own borders.
	McCain wants nuclear.
	He does want, yeah, apparently he does.
	Yeah, that's interesting.
	Which is weird, because one of the biggest providers of nukes is General Electric, and they obviously don't want McCain.
	But at the end of the day, they're backing him.
	You know, they're backing, come on.
	Oh, come on, they've got MSNBC and NBC and the network.
	Oh, of course, but they've got a hedge.
	You're just talking about what they're, but they've got a hedge.
	They've got a hedge, no doubt about it.
	I saw, just as an interlude, I saw, what's her name, Lynn Forrester de Rothschild was on Fox News the other day.
	And she's now saying, because she was supporting Obama, and now she's saying, I'm switching, I'm supporting McCain.
	Huh.
	Yeah, just speaking of big money.
	She was good.
	Yeah, I don't remember ever seeing her.
	Okay, a couple more things.
	There's not that many.
	Obama did say, I'm sorry, Obama said, look at, we like to look at offshore in terms of drilling.
	And McCain busted him for saying, we're going to look at it.
	Yeah, what does that mean?
	That was cute.
	Obama said, his faux pas that I thought was funny, he said, and this is a direct quote, we're going to enforce unfair trade agreements.
	Yeah.
	Did anyone catch it?
	No, of course not.
	Nobody catches anything.
	Anything that's unfair, I will enforce.
	Here's a couple more gaffes.
	Here's a McCain gaffe.
	It wasn't a gaffe.
	It was just bull.
	McCain threw in Herbert Hoover.
	This is like what you call a callback for people over 70.
	Okay.
	But anyway, so he says Hoover, implying that Obama was going to be the next Herbert Hoover, which, by the way, would be the case based on my cycles.
	Anyway, he says, we went from a deep recession, because of Hoover, we went from a deep recession to a depression.
	That's bull.
	It's not true, right?
	Hoover, when he was in office, when he got elected, there was not a deep recession going on, at least by any standards I've ever researched.
	Anyway, there was a crash during his thing and it just drove into a deep recession and right into a depression after he got elected.
	You know, I'm a little bit younger.
	The only reference I have to Herbert Hoover is the theme tune to All in the Family.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, that's funny.
	So why would Archie Bunker like Herbert Hoover?
	It was just to mock the Republicans.
	Nobody liked Herbert Hoover.
	Anyway...
	Well, McCain had one more kind of a gaffe where he didn't call him, you know, like Joe the Plumber, I guess, became, you know, these are, I was talking to my wife about this, you know, Joe the Plumber, this is the way people used to be named back in the feudal era, you know, you'd be Joe Carpenter, you were the Carpenter.
	Yeah.
	Or, you know, Adam Broadcaster would be your name or something like that, Adam Executive.
	When Napoleon conquered Europe.
	In the Netherlands, you see a lot of this.
	Everyone had to re-register their names.
	And because, you know, typical Dutch, they registered with really...
	So some was like, you know, I'm John the Carpenter, so it would be Tim Ramon, or I'd be the Baker.
	And you still have lots of these very simple names.
	But there are a lot of them that people had to later, you know, centuries later, change their name because it was like some really rank shit.
	Like, I'm Peter the Whore.
	You know, stuff like that.
	Peter the Whore.
	Yeah, there's all kinds of funny examples.
	Well, you know, those guys, they have a dry sense of humor over there.
	Yeah, no shit.
	So, McCain at one point called Obama Senator Government.
	Ha!
	That's Senator Government?
	That's pretty funny.
	Yeah, he said Senator Government, Obama.
	Senator Government.
	Again, you know, nobody's, you know, I never saw any of this written about.
	It's just like nobody does a very good job of any of this.
	Meanwhile, the one thing that I thought was interesting, that nobody, again, you hear McCain had a shot at this.
	Yeah.
	Obama made the out-and-out claim, and you can find it in the transcript, that the average healthcare plan for an individual in this country, anyone, is $12,000 a year.
	What?
	That's what he said.
	That means everyone's paying $1,000 a month in healthcare premiums.
	That can't be true.
	It's not true.
	That's the point.
	McCain has another high number, which is closer to the reality for some people, which is $5,800 a month, and he said that.
	A year.
	I think that's not the average number either.
	No, I think it's lower.
	I think it's lower than that.
	Well, what is the typical cost for an employee at a startup company?
	Our benefits, I think, are pretty good.
	We pay, I think, half dental even, which I guess is good.
	I think it's between $2,000 and $3,000.
	A year?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Where's the $12,000 coming from?
	And nobody calls him on it in the media.
	But to throw out some outrageous number like that, because I've had to pay for my own personal health care every so often, and I know what the figure is.
	It's not cheap, but it's not $12,000 for God's sake.
	Well, I'll tell you, we have private insurance.
	I was afraid to switch, honestly, because then Patricia would have a pre-existing condition, and we've been on this medical before, heart trouble, and we're paying about 4,500 euros a year, and she has had some really expensive shit done.
	I still don't understand where the 12,000 comes from.
	That just makes no sense.
	It comes out of his ass is where it comes from.
	I'm actually shocked that this stuff just flies around and nobody says anything about it.
	I'm not, because this is like Boston Legal.
	You watch it for Denny Crane and for Shirley.
	When they get into the real courtroom stuff and the technicality, they just gloss over it.
	Who gives a shit?
	We're watching the show here.
	Okay, so here's the news this morning, of course.
	Colin Powell's endorsement?
	Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama and everybody runs this as a straight story.
	The interesting thing about that story to me is nobody makes the following connection.
	Except you, my friend.
	Colin Powell, where is he getting most of his money nowadays?
	You know he's a consultant.
	For Kleiner Perkins, which is largely run by John Doerr, who is a major Democrat funder, who also hired Al Gore so they could do their green stuff.
	And so you have this little cabal out here on the West Coast, consisting of Doerr, Gore, and Powell.
	And then he endorses Obama, and everyone's shocked.
	You know, Schwarzenegger's in that group, too.
	As is Bono.
	Yeah, I know, but they're not on the Kleiner Perkins masthead.
	Colin Powell is on the Kleiner Perkins masthead, and so is Gore.
	If you go to KleinerPerkins.com or KPBCB KleinerPerkinsFallFuelAndBuyer.com and look at their partners, you'll find their names.
	And may I just say, to state the obvious, look at who they invest in and they're one of our investors.
	In the Financial Times, the weekend edition, Colin Powell was in the UK just, I guess, Maybe Thursday?
	And he sends a picture of him on stage with a new tune.
	Colin Powell dances with Nigerian hip-hop group at London Festival this week.
	And he's got his fingers sticking out like he's doing an oh yeah, and he's got his sunglasses on.
	I've got to send you this picture.
	I have to blind it.
	It looks like Kanye West is next to him.
	That doesn't look like the Nigerian guy.
	I think it's Kanye West.
	Maybe it's online, but you've got to look at it.
	It's like, yeah, that's the guy that endorses Obama.
	So anyway, so that was fixed.
	That was rigged.
	Of course it was.
	Just imagine that John Doar was strong-arming him.
	But they were already ramping that up, and you were reading the possibility of him endorsing Obama for at least 36 hours.
	Well, that type of ramp-up, the way they were doing it, was obviously to see what kind of pushback was going to happen.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	And they got none, obviously.
	People say, well, what do you expect?
	And so they're probably just going to blame it on the fact that, well, you know, Powell's black and, you know, all the blacks are going to push for Obama and that's that.
	But that's not the reason.
	It's because of this green stuff.
	So I think...
	Are you done?
	Because I want to continue on Obama if you're done with the debate.
	Yeah.
	I think now it's time to talk about Project Oscar Mike November Delta.
	Okay, here we go.
	You don't know Oscar Mike November Delta?
	Oscar Mike November O-M-N-D. Yes.
	That would be the Obama MILF next door.
	Oh, God.
	Do you really want to talk about that now?
	What?
	Do you want to talk about it later?
	We'll keep that a surprise for later?
	Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
	I think we should finish the project before we actually reveal the details.
	Well, there's been a new twist to the project.
	Since you sent me the email?
	Yeah, there's been a couple more emails.
	Okay, well I think we should use that as a teaser.
	You should document this as you can.
	Take a few notes.
	You don't have to get carried away.
	Believe me, I'm taking notes.
	I even have my daughter in on this.
	She's helping me out.
	Dude, this is like a family project now.
	Alright, well, maybe next week.
	Next week will be more appropriate because then it actually might even come to closure.
	As it were.
	Okay, so we're going to leave the audience hanging, even though, you know, although that is kind of an agenda.
	They must hate us for that.
	You know what?
	I don't think so.
	I mean, the fact is, let me just explain to the audience.
	Adam has this kind of amusing project that Unfortunately, talking about it could ruin the outcome, and we don't want to ruin the outcome.
	You see, I don't think so.
	We have too many.
	No, you say that, but I don't take any chances in this kind of a situation.
	All right, because it is a good...
	Well, anyway, let me just say that part of the project is to understand more about the operations of the Obama campaign.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes, you can say that.
	Okay.
	And one of the things that has already come out of this project is that the Obama camp is extremely, not just worried, but convinced that if he wins, it'll be an automatic recount.
	And it's funny because this comes on the heels of the Acorn, Ohio voter registration fraud and all this kind of noise is starting to crop up.
	And I think they might have a good point.
	Well, that's why the other thing that people should know about is the 50-state strategy.
	And you find that, if I go to Berkeley now, to shop at one of the better vegetable stands.
	One of the upscale vegetable stands.
	Well, it's not really upscale, but it's got definitely, you know, when you can buy 10 to 20 different kinds of mushrooms, including chanterelles for $9 a pound.
	You know you're in Berkeley.
	Yeah.
	Well, anyway, the place is crawling with people, just signing anyone up they can.
	I mean, they're still collecting money like it's going out of style, but they have this thing called a 50-state strategy, which is they're going to push to get their numbers.
	They want to get so many, so much in the way of total headcount.
	It has to be a landslide, because they're afraid of the recount.
	Right.
	And there's also a big push...
	To get people to absentee ballot as much as they can.
	They're trying to get everyone to pre-vote.
	They want everyone to vote.
	If you can vote now, vote.
	Because they're worried that people are going to change their mind at the last minute, because that does happen in these elections.
	I'm a little confused about how this pre-voting works, because I already found out that that was one of...
	I didn't know what it was called the 50-state strategy, but I know that they were working on a lot of early votes.
	How can it be that we have people who are able to vote...
	Is that only by absentee ballot that you can vote early, or how does that work?
	Well, as far as I... In California, I think the only way you can vote early is with an absentee ballot.
	In other states, they may have some other process where you can actually go in and vote in advance.
	I don't know.
	Maybe somebody out there knows.
	Some Obama supporter who could tell us.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So, anyway, yeah, we'll talk about...
	Now, one of the reasons I want to put off the deeper discussion about the Oscar Mayer North Dakota is...
	The October 14th fiasco.
	Ah, yes.
	About the alien ship that was supposed to surface somewhere near a place or a thing called Alabama.
	It was to be there for three days.
	Yeah, well, obviously, I'm a gullible bonehead.
	I might as well put that up front right there.
	I will say that...
	Totally.
	I'm a gullible bonehead, no doubt about it.
	I will say that there's a couple of, like three or four, pretty good videos of UFOs and light ships taken around the globe on the 14th, which is actually probably low for a typical day.
	And I still believe that we're not alone in the universe, but yeah, I'm pretty much done with the channeling business.
	That didn't work too well for me.
	No, and you got a bunch of flack too, but...
	Well, it was fun while it lasted.
	But you were actually slightly glib just before the day with the possibility, perhaps, I mean, I find it hard to believe, but with the possibility actually ringing in your head that this could happen.
	Well, yeah.
	I'm young and hopeful.
	Hopefully.
	I'm hopeful we get invaded from Mars and all be killed and eaten.
	I'm hopeful for an invasion.
	No, no, no.
	Now that I know that they're not coming, or at least that the messages of them coming were bogus, now I'm worried about us getting eaten alive here on Earth by the reptiles that run the frickin' place.
	So now I can focus my energy entirely on the world around us and the true reality.
	Because that's getting bad.
	So talking about eating, so we had a dinner.
	Yes.
	By the way, I'm reminded of a show.
	I'm going to try to do these more often, these segues.
	There's a show on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, one of their little sub-shows.
	It's called Awkward Segues.
	And it's just the funniest thing you've ever seen.
	It's very difficult to write.
	But anyways, in terms of awkward segues, we went to a restaurant called ISA. Yes.
	I've decided that we're going to have to drop our target to some restaurants.
	Something a little more certainly affordable, maybe less formal, less sticky, but actually these are the real gems is what we're looking for now.
	It's great food at a reasonable price, a nice atmosphere, and not the Ritz-Carlton.
	Basically, John...
	The expensive stuff has been pretty shitty recently.
	We were disappointed.
	Yeah.
	So I thought maybe going to the second tier, which are places that are considered kind of gourmet-ish, but wouldn't be getting a Michelin star anytime soon.
	Well, not with the rope light around the railing.
	No, I don't think so.
	So we go to this place, ISA, which had kind of a nice front of the house.
	It's where in San Francisco, just so people know.
	Yeah, it's in San Francisco, and it's a little bit...
	Off the beaten track, kind of.
	Well, actually, it's one of the better parts of town.
	It's a part of town where there's a lot of restaurants, Steiner and Lombard.
	And...
	I thought the place, the front of the house, I thought it looked like it could have been in front of a disco.
	It was dark.
	That's what I'm saying.
	It had rope lights all over the place.
	It was funny.
	Yeah, it was like, it wasn't, you know, I didn't think it was a very good taste.
	And the front of the house also was kind of odiferous.
	The smells from the kitchen, which was an open kitchen, by the way, and it looked very clean and looked pretty nice.
	But there was no ventilation in the front of the place near the street.
	But in the back, they had where most of the people were.
	A covered garden.
	Right, it was a covered patio.
	And it was big.
	But it was like being in somebody's backyard.
	Yeah.
	You know, there was wood, like a little porch, and it was strange.
	It was unusual.
	That said, I think overall the food was worth it.
	It was nice and it was very inexpensive.
	And the service was great.
	It was good, and it was almost kind of like a family atmosphere.
	In fact, there was some kind of family reunion with three or four tables shoved together right behind us.
	But yeah, it was good.
	I was actually quite hammered.
	We had a couple glasses of wine.
	I don't know what happened to you, but you were actually what we did.
	We had a glass of Chardonnay because we were going to have oysters.
	They had some very outstanding.
	Good oysters, yeah.
	We got a couple dozen oysters.
	And you were actually, I noticed this by the way, you were actually hammered on the one glass of white wine.
	Yeah.
	How do you know I'm hammered, John?
	What's the giveaway?
	I'm not going to tell you.
	No, I don't want to tell you to tell about it.
	I'm thinking, what the hell, this guy got a completely empty stomach?
	Which I had to assume, because the oysters obviously will not do anything to hamper.
	Not much, no.
	You know, that's not going to help.
	And then we had a really nice bottle of 2004 Heights Cabernet, which you liked, and it was good.
	And the thing is, compared to these other places we were at, where we would have paid probably $80, $90 for a bottle, this was $55.
	which was cheap relatively, even though the wine you can buy, I think, at the store for $30.
	But I think all the prices of the wines, to be honest about it, because I was looking at them, was less than a double.
	Most of these places double the retail markup.
	I think these guys may have been doubling the wholesale price, which is really the old, old-school way of doing things.
	Right.
	You double the wholesale price, or...
	It comes out to be less than double the retail price.
	If you know that the wine is $30 and they're selling it for $55 and all the other wines are matching, they're less than doubled.
	As opposed to the Ritz-Carlton where the prices of the wine were triple the retail price.
	And you find that in most of the expensive restaurants.
	They're tripling the retail price.
	And it was corked.
	And it was corked.
	Oh, the wine at the Ritz-Carlton.
	Yeah.
	So anyway, I would say this is a great restaurant to go with an acquaintance, a friend, possibly even family if it's like four and the kids aren't too young because otherwise they'd be bored.
	Not a place to take a date, really.
	No, no, definitely not.
	It's too funky.
	I don't know what it would be.
	It just doesn't feel like a date place.
	No, I'm not going to include it in Project Oscar Mike November Delta.
	Good.
	My sister loves the foods talk, by the way.
	I saw her last night.
	She lives in Italy.
	And she was there with her kids, and she said, oh man, when you guys talk about food, particularly in Italy, and the wine, I love hearing about the wine.
	And she was actually kind of really complimentary about you, which was unfortunate.
	Huh.
	You know, except for you, the family seems to be pretty bright.
	Speaking of family and food, I have extremely good news for you.
	I'm so glad I came back.
	You know, I had time on Friday to go into the city with Patricia to look at the house.
	Oh yeah.
	I've explained it here.
	Until you've signed in blood on the dotted line, there's no deal in the UK market, which is good.
	And of course the market is tanking and everyone's in terror.
	But I knew that there were a couple things that both Patricia and Christina had overlooked, because I know what they were falling in love with, and it wasn't the right things.
	And there was a secondary place, like a backup, that I knew we had to see, which none of us had seen.
	And so there were a number of signs.
	When we're buying houses, boy, we really care about the actual numbers, not.
	We're basically like, how do you feel?
	Do you want to live here?
	Etc.
	Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing.
	You do have to live in the place.
	And if you're uncomfortable, or if the place has a bad...
	And I'm not the cornball type, but I believe there's a vibe that you go and say, this place is nice.
	Yeah, do you have good vibes or bad vibes?
	So there were a number of things, which I don't even have to explain.
	And then so we went to look at the other place.
	And so, you know, the minute Patricia walked in, she's like, oh, and it's night and day difference in a number of aspects.
	But she was like, oh, wow, this feels really good.
	And so, you know, there's a whole bunch of things just tick, tick, tick.
	And then right there in the kitchen, John.
	Oh, you're kidding me.
	No, I'm not.
	There is an off-white, cream-colored aga sitting right there.
	I'm like, this is the sign.
	This is the hand of God has touched my shoulder and said, this is the one.
	So we've put in an offer, and hopefully we'll be able to get this place.
	That's too much.
	Yeah, because I know how much...
	For anybody who doesn't listen to this show all the time, and by the way, if you do listen to this show, please tell a friend.
	We'd like to get our numbers up to a point where we can actually make money.
	But Adam has a, there's a crackpot stove that I looked at years ago when I was getting, upgrading my stoves, and called an Agha, that has always fascinated me, and Adam's the only person I know that actually has one,
	and now apparently there's, I guess there's more than one in the city, Yeah, that would be the big, you know, it's like that joke where the guy's on top of the roof and the flood, you know, he's in, you know, you make this Katrina flood and he says, you know, a guy comes by in a boat and he says, hey, you You need some help?
	You can get in the boat.
	We can get out.
	He says, oh, no, no.
	God's going to save me.
	I don't worry about it.
	Oh, okay.
	And the helicopter comes up.
	He says, no, no, no.
	Don't worry about it.
	God's going to save me.
	And then, you know, then something else and something else.
	And then the next thing you know, he drowns and goes to heaven.
	And he says, well, I thought you were going to save me.
	And God says, like, shit, I sent a helicopter.
	I sent a boat.
	Exactly.
	Well, the agas aren't very typical in the city as far as I know.
	It's much more of a country home type thing.
	And what's nice about the aga is it actually becomes the center hearth of not just the room, but in many cases the actual house.
	Because it's on all the time.
	Imagine a huge cast iron oven.
	It actually has four ovens and two hot plates on top.
	And the pets lie in front of it.
	You can put your fresh laundry on top of it to keep it warm before you put it away.
	You lean against it in the morning with your cup of tea.
	I know it sounds real dorky, but it's really a lot more than just a cooking device.
	But Patricia's actually making chicken right now in the Aga here, and it tastes better.
	I mean, I know my wife's cooking for almost a quarter of a century, and it's better when it's done in the Yaga.
	Yeah, I think it has something to do with the way the heat is, or the way the infrared rays are bouncing around.
	I don't know.
	It's almost as though you're cooking in a cast-iron...
	It just surrounds...
	I don't know how it works.
	Never mind.
	But it surrounds the product with heat in such a way that it makes it...
	I don't know.
	It's like a slow cooking device.
	It sounds like you're stumped, John.
	I don't know.
	I've never cooked on one.
	I've only even just seen them.
	And it's always fascinated me because I know that people who have these devices rave about the product that comes out of them.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Okay, awkward segue.
	Back to the front page of the Financial Times.
	I know you don't subscribe yet, so it's, once again, just chock full of nuggets.
	And this one, you're going to want to blog this.
	Andrew Lodd, L-A-H-D-E, hedge fund manager who quit after...
	Posting an 870% gain last year.
	He quit.
	And he sent a two-page letter to all his...
	Already blogged.
	Oh, you did it.
	To all of his clients thanking stupid traders for making him rich.
	Idiots, he said.
	Idiots, yeah.
	And actually, what did he say?
	Idiots whose parents paid for the prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA. They were there for the taking.
	He loved making those idiots his counterparty.
	But, of course, the part that I liked is that he then goes on to endorse marijuana.
	Or hemp, actually.
	Right, exactly.
	I have the headline, crackpot.
	I call him a crackpot.
	Of course.
	Of course we're all crackers.
	This is clearly a brilliant guy.
	No doubt about it.
	He knows what he's talking about.
	The innocuous plant.
	Here's the headline.
	Get the headline.
	This is it.
	This is a quote I like.
	The evil female plant, marijuana.
	It gets you high.
	It makes you laugh.
	It does not produce a hangover.
	Unlike alcohol.
	It does not result in bar fights or wife beating.
	So why is this innocuous plant illegal?
	Is it a gateway drug?
	No.
	That would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country.
	Yeah, good on you, man.
	Crackpot millionaire weed-loving money manager calls it quits and thanks idiots out there.
	Weed-loving money manager.
	I love writing headlines.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's excellent.
	Very funny.
	Weed-loving money manager.
	Oh, and I wanted to say something about Obama because we're not going to come back to him, I'm sure.
	There's this PDF file floating out there that if you don't have it yet, I'll send it to you.
	And it's empirical proof, of course, of Obama using neuro-linguistic programming and other hidden hypnosis techniques In all of his speeches and his television appearances.
	And I think there's something to that.
	That's funny.
	Yeah, I like to read that.
	It's like 60 pages.
	And when you read it, and I'm sure you've read up on NLP. I mean, who hasn't?
	Yeah, he is doing a lot of stuff.
	Maybe it's just some kind of training.
	But it's working, that's for sure.
	Yeah, he's got the bots working for him.
	The Obama bots.
	Oh, man.
	Something we didn't talk about last week, which I'm kind of bummed about.
	Jorg Heider?
	I'm sure you blogged this.
	No, I don't know.
	It doesn't ring a bell.
	Do you remember who Jorg Heider was?
	No, it doesn't ring a bell.
	He was the extreme right-wing Austrian politician who people equated with Hitler.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I do remember that.
	Right.
	So I never really looked into it.
	Of course, this was several years ago.
	I'm like, eh, what I'm sure he is.
	You know, if someone coming from Austria that sounds like Hitler, duh, possible.
	So, here's a series of events.
	He was on television in a roundtable debate, and he said, you know, we have to put an immediate end to this banking mafia.
	And he was really going off on a rant, but really calling him the mob and organized crime.
	36 hours later, he's dead.
	A high-speed car crash by himself.
	Right.
	And when you see the picture of the car, there's like this perfectly round puncture right in the roof above the driver's side, almost like an RPG hit it.
	But, yeah, pretty amazing.
	Taken out by a drone.
	You know, I wouldn't even laugh about that, honestly.
	It's possible.
	But, you know, I don't think the...
	I don't know.
	I should look into that and see what the deal is.
	I'll send you a link.
	I've got to send you a lot of links.
	There's so much stuff.
	Bill Maher, you're a fan of his show.
	I know you watch that, don't you?
	I can barely get through it because Maher is so creepy.
	Yeah, he is.
	He had this guy on, the former Comptroller General.
	And the Comptroller General is part of the, I guess it's the Congressional Oversight Bureau?
	Does that sound right?
	I've never heard of any of this stuff.
	I think they're independent from government.
	But they have some kind of oversight.
	God knows.
	But this guy was on, and I saw a YouTube clip, and he lays into the whole bailout.
	He's like, dude, this is not $850 billion.
	This is a $56 trillion deficit that we now have added to.
	He was saying that the actual deficit, if you take all the off-book transactions, is $56 trillion, not $10 trillion.
	And I was kind of shaken by that.
	Like, okay.
	Well, there's a number that the CIA Factbook has on one of its pages showing all the debts of all the nations around the world.
	And it's like we're at some number where the next country, we're dead last.
	We're the worst in the whole world.
	Right.
	And the country that's up next to us, I've got to get this page.
	Zimbabwe, obviously.
	No, no, they're not even, no.
	It's somebody else.
	Zimbabwe can't have enough debt to even get on the list.
	You're right, of course.
	They're just poor.
	They're just poor, right?
	I'm sorry.
	And by the way, I do want to thank Stroh, who sent me a $10 million Zimbabwe note.
	I'm going to have to post it.
	I hope to post it today.
	You promised that last week.
	Yeah, I know.
	I just can't get enough.
	Can't get enough done.
	I can't get enough done.
	It's ridiculous.
	But anyway, so, yeah, the debt's pretty bad.
	But there's a guy that wrote, again in the Financial Times, there was a really good article by a professor that broke down the bailout.
	Extremely interesting ways.
	And with an argument that, in fact, it is a good idea, and it was well-structured.
	So, you know, there's two sides to all these arguments.
	Now, what I wanted to talk about today, since we were talking about greenbacks, is the Green Channel.
	We have on the Dish Network now a new channel that showed up out of the blue called Green Channel.
	And it has some of the most dreadful programming.
	And we've talked about this at Mevio, but is there any real market for, you know, everyone wants to do this green programming.
	And is there anybody willing to sponsor it?
	And it's questionable.
	But this green channel is the proof of the pudding.
	But you can see that the programming is so dreadful.
	If anyone has the Dish Network, you should check this out.
	And you especially want to take a look at this dinner with Tom.
	Tom Fergeron, the guy who does...
	Oh, no.
	He's like some dorky host.
	The home videos guy.
	Oh, that's it.
	Right, right.
	America's Funniest Home Videos, yeah.
	So he brings out, and this is the one I watch.
	In fact, I'm making a copy for you.
	Thanks.
	Because you have to watch it because it's a jaw-dropper.
	It's like a bunch of cliché.
	You know, these people sit around.
	There's a whole group of old Hollywood types.
	And they're all sitting around a dinner table eating this green, you know, everything is, you know, local and all this other crap that's all trendy right now.
	And it's to listen to these guys spew these clichés about one thing or another.
	And this is one, I think, where I heard the...
	The one that just floored me, which is that you'll do more good for the earth.
	By the way, the whole thing, this whole thing is all about...
	The more I watch this green stuff, the more I'm thinking, it's political, veganism, bull.
	I'm with you, man.
	But you know what?
	It's NLP. It's total programming.
	And here's the way...
	Let me give you the meme.
	You do more good, more green comes...
	You produce more green, whatever, balance, you know, or the carbon footprint and everything's improved much more so if you...
	If you become a vegetarian, you make a decision to stop eating meat and become a vegetarian than if you sold your SUV and never drove again.
	Or if you sold your SUV and bought a hybrid.
	I know.
	What is the logic of this?
	Well, look...
	We've been programmed through...
	These people hate cows.
	Well, it all boils down to the horrific images of Al Green's...
	Al Green.
	That would be funny.
	Al Green.
	Al Gore's movie.
	Al Green.
	I like it.
	They call him Al Green.
	Dude, that's an insult to the reverend, okay?
	I cannot do that.
	That is so wrong.
	No.
	Al Gore, he had a great movie.
	It freaked everybody out.
	And it's been embedded.
	In fact, I was thinking about this, particularly in light of this green shit and the carbon credits and all this crap that we're going to get rammed up our ass pretty soon.
	Carbon tax.
	Well, carbon credits that comes along with carbon tax.
	I'm beginning to think that maybe the Bush-Gore election, maybe the whole point was to have it be a close call, Al to bow out gracefully and then come back as a hero to save the world.
	I'm almost thinking it was planned.
	And look at how fast all of these taxes and all this crap came about.
	Meanwhile, the oil is down to 70 bucks a barrel, and flying is still outrageously expensive, mainly because of all these idiotic taxes which keep getting put up on top of the regular fare.
	It's crazy.
	And it's not as though the plane doesn't take off and land with or without the tax.
	Okay, is your show called Planet Green?
	Because it says channel name Green, but the network is Planet Green.
	Is that possible?
	Is it a green dot?
	Is that their fucking logo?
	Yeah.
	Okay, let me just read this description.
	Planet Green is Discovery Communications' global cross-company initiative with a commitment to document, preserve, and celebrate the planet, including the first-ever 24-hour eco-lifestyle television network coming to homes on June 4, 2008.
	Planet Green is the multi-platform media destination with a mission.
	It's the center for the new green conversation, speaking to people who want to understand green living and to those who truly want to make a difference in meeting the critical challenge of protecting our environment.
	Planet Green's unique content, tools, and information will enlighten, empower, and most importantly, entertain.
	Crikey.
	I don't know how much entertainment's involved.
	Crikey.
	Oh, it's like, you know, a jaw dropper.
	And it's all, you know, mostly it's just a bunch of people sitting around on different shows.
	If they're not like, you know, yodeling hippies, singing songs, you know, with a guitar.
	Kumbaya, my lord!
	Or a bunch of pretentious...
	You know, kind of rich screw-ups from Hollywood, you know, that are just seemingly to go along with anything that comes their way.
	You really have to, people should just watch it and see how much of it you can take.
	Maybe you'll like it.
	I thought it was absolutely horrible.
	That's another thing I really hate about this presidential race, you know, the...
	The question that Sarah Palin never answers, and of course it's now been whittled down to, are greenhouse gases man-made or not?
	Which of course is not even a fair question.
	It's annoying.
	It's really, really annoying that people have just taken all of this for granted.
	And they keep throwing the IPCC report back in your face, saying, well look at all these researchers and you know...
	The thing is a total sham, and there's been tons of reports from researchers that have debunked it all.
	Not to say that we're not fucking up our earth, obviously, but the idea of taxing or buying credit so I can still pollute It's ridiculous.
	So that someone else will have to pollute less in the future is bullshit.
	It's almost like your pension, like your Social Security.
	I'm never going to see a fucking dime of that.
	John, you might not even see it, and you're getting there.
	I'll see it.
	I'll see it.
	But anyway.
	Okay, so back on the green.
	Listen, the New York controller is now taking $110 billion of pension money to save New York from the crisis.
	And he said, well, no worries, because of course I'll invest that wisely.
	Bullshit.
	It's gone.
	It is gone.
	In fact, Andrew Horowitz, in one of our conversations that people should listen to if you're interested in the stock market, mentions that, as far as he can tell, New York is broke the way it was back in the Ed Koch days, and nobody wants to talk about it.
	This is what I'm saying, man.
	Right now we're in...
	Look, we've talked about how this has become the nanny pussy.
	Not the state, but the world.
	And there's no losers.
	Everybody's a winner.
	And what no one wants is to accept that we are about to get our asses kicked in real time, big time, by what has happened to the financial structure of the world.
	And particularly in the United States, we all lived above our means.
	You know, 125 to maybe 300%.
	And the credit cards are all filled up.
	It's over.
	It's done with.
	But no one actually wants to go through any pain.
	And so you're not even seeing it on television.
	People getting kicked.
	The guy in London, the real estate agent, just this week he said two people who couldn't sell their home who were trying to rent it out, he went to go get the keys to show up a prospective tenant and the bank had foreclosed.
	On both of them.
	And he had another client who was renting, and he had to find him another place because the bank had repossessed the apartment or whatever it was.
	And he was kicking the guy out.
	He paid his rent.
	This is real pain that's happening.
	It's not on mainstream television.
	It's being held back purposely.
	Now, they're too interested in carbon credits and green and climate change.
	Meanwhile, Iceland, you'll love this, and this is something that was pointed out to me in a Dutch food retailing website, like an industry-type website.
	That in Iceland, where of course the whole country has collapsed, there's been a run on the supermarkets.
	And I guess they have only a couple, it's only 300,000 people that live there.
	So they have a chain of the bonus supermarkets is what they're called.
	Total run.
	Taking everything off the shelf.
	And they produce nothing.
	They have no food.
	You know, I've been in that supermarket.
	The big one in Reykjavik.
	Really?
	It's like, what did they take off the shelves?
	It seems to me that the main thing they sell in Iceland in the grocery store is the most amazing variety of cod liver oil.
	I swear to God.
	It's bigger than any dairy section you've ever seen, and it's all fish oil.
	Different brands.
	What do they do?
	They drink it?
	Yeah, it turns out, and for people who live in northern areas, in fact, you should even consider it.
	Okay.
	It turns out that cod liver oil in particular, but most of these fish oil mixtures, which are being promoted a little bit by health food nuts nowadays here in the United States, is one of the absolute best things you could take for depression in areas where you have a shortened daylight.
	Oh, right.
	Iceland has, of course.
	Yes, yeah.
	So you find that in Sweden and Finland and Norway, Iceland, and the UK should, Scotland for sure, the people who take lots of cod liver oil just as a daily dietary supplement...
	Not only don't have as much depression, because you get depressed in these areas because of the lack of sunlight.
	They don't have much depression, and they also have...
	Apparently, it lessens arthritis, and it's good for the bones, and it has a vitamin D component that's important.
	In fact, I use it in the wintertime here.
	My son, by the way, is the one who turned us on to this.
	He digs all this weird stuff up until he gets to the definitive point of it, and then he reports back to the family with his...
	This survey.
	And it turns out that the documentation for this is really elaborate.
	And this is the kind of stuff that when you...
	What your mom told you to do in the 1930s.
	You know, take your cod liver oil.
	And it's been lost.
	Because, eh, we need to take a vitamin supplement.
	Because the big vitamin companies don't...
	You know, the big drug companies make these vitamins.
	They don't...
	You know, nobody pushes these old remedies anymore.
	I was just going to say, if what you say is true, and I'm looking into it right now, and of course I have no reason to doubt it, if cod liver oil truly is such a wonder miracle substance, particularly against depression, you can bet your ass it's going to be outlawed by the Codex Alimentaria sooner or later, because of course they want to push their drugs onto you, which is like sodium chloride and shit like that.
	That's what's in prosa.
	No, you know what I mean.
	Yeah.
	Sodium fluoride, maybe.
	I don't know.
	Drugs.
	Fucking chemicals.
	Drugs and chemicals.
	Paxil.
	Yeah.
	Paxil.
	They don't want you to have anything good.
	So anyway, but the Icelanders, I mean, as soon as I heard about this from the report about why this is good for you in the winter, and I use it in the winter, it's not a cheap product, by the way.
	Oh, by the way, there's one brand called Carlsborg or Carlsberg.
	That's a beer, isn't it?
	Carlsborg?
	Yeah, it is.
	Carlsborg is the beer.
	Maybe it's Carlsberg.
	Anybody's Carls or Borg, I don't know.
	Carlsborg is also a little town up in Washington.
	But it's Carlsborg or Carlsberg or something like this.
	It's a blue label and it says lemon flavored.
	This stuff, by the way, that brand is the one to get.
	It is absolutely delicious.
	A, you can take it without gagging.
	It's really amazingly good.
	And you don't get this, you know, you don't taste it afterwards, which was always a problem with the cod liver.
	It's the best brand you can buy.
	Carlsborg.
	They should be sponsoring this show.
	All right.
	So people out there who have these, you know, and I'd say if you live in North Dakota, Washington State, you know, Wisconsin, those places is where you'd want to use it.
	Meanwhile, while we're on the subject of weird stuff, I made the error, and we're talking about vegetarianism, I made the bonehead error of not looking at the package of some on-sale yogurt.
	Uh-oh.
	Where they actually were selling soy girt.
	Oh no!
	Did your brain shrink?
	I couldn't swallow it.
	I can't believe...
	We stopped drinking soy milk here.
	Oh good, good.
	This stuff tastes like puke.
	I'm using that on the daily source code.
	That's a great drop right there.
	And it's got a chalky texture.
	You can't swallow it.
	As you go, my God, what is this garbage?
	Did you do one of those and spit it out?
	I did spit it out and I dumped it out and I was disgusted.
	It was so horrible that people eat this stuff and they think it's good?
	Excuse me.
	That's funny.
	That's nasty.
	Nasty is the word.
	I mean, people want to check it out for themselves, but holy, I was just stunned at how bad it was.
	I mentioned this to my wife, and she laughed.
	She said she mentioned this to these various vegetarians, and they always say, oh, you must have got a bad one.
	A bad one, right?
	A bad one.
	It happens from time to time.
	You get a bad one.
	Oh, man.
	Anyway, so that was my report.
	Alaskan glaciers growing for the first time in 240 years?
	Yeah, that's what they say.
	Yeah, that's your global warming, I guess.
	Well, supposedly that's balanced by the lowering of the average temperature at the North Pole.
	Yada, yada, yada.
	You know, these things move around.
	You're also losing our magnetic underpinnings.
	I went to the North Pole once.
	Have you ever been to the North Pole?
	You're kidding me.
	You went to the North Pole?
	Yes.
	Would you like to hear the story?
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	That's impressive.
	No, I have not been to the North Pole.
	This was with OnRamp.
	Before we took it public and changed the name to Think New Ideas, Ron and I were running the company, and we had a client, Molson Ice.
	And there was a promotion that we did with another agency we came up with called the Molson Ice Polar Beach Party.
	And it was a contest, and it was 100 winners, and it was a cool MTV-like contest, actually.
	100 winners would go to the North Pole for a concert with Metallica.
	Actually, it was Metallica, Hole, so Courtney Love, and one other band, I can't remember.
	And we did a cybercast from the North Pole, and it was pretty interesting, because the only way to do it is we took a multiplexer, so we could take 24 phone lines and basically convert that into 150 kilobits per second or whatever.
	And we had that linked all the way down from Tuk to Yoktuk.
	Which is Northwestern Territory.
	Literally, a couple miles inside the Arctic Circle there.
	Well, let's get back to the...
	How did you get to the North Pole?
	Ah.
	Well, it's a combination of many flights.
	And the last one is basically an Otter.
	So an Otter is one of those airplanes with the huge inflated tires.
	And it's a real workhorse.
	You can sit in it in kind of like jump seats, but it's really meant for taking cargo.
	Yeah.
	And, yeah, so you basically land up on the ice near a drilling platform up there.
	And so it not being the dark period, it was light for 24 hours straight, which was really, really weird.
	And, of course, you're up there, you know, we had our crew, and we're sleeping in the oil barracks, if you will.
	And, you know, as is Metallica, as is everybody.
	And so, you know, we're looking...
	There's nothing to do, obviously.
	And it's dry, right?
	There's no alcohol.
	It's forbidden.
	But, you know, we figure...
	We can probably figure something out.
	So we go outside, and it's midnight, but, you know, kids are riding around on their bikes, and it's as if it were midday.
	And some of the kids come over and say, hey...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Let's back up a minute.
	There's a bunch of people at the North Pole?
	Well, it's not exactly on the North Pole, North Pole, but within, I don't know, what is it?
	50 miles?
	75 miles?
	Yeah.
	There's all kinds of villages.
	I thought it was pretty barren up there.
	It was pretty barren up there.
	Oh, okay.
	No kidding.
	You know, the next town was several hundred miles, and that was Inuvik, I think is what it was called.
	Anyway, it was September, actually.
	I remember because it was my birthday.
	I put my toe into the Arctic waters.
	Of the pole.
	I dip my toe in.
	It's a tradition, I think, is what it was.
	So we said to these kids, hey man, do you know we can get something?
	Oh, you want the drug dealer?
	Yeah, he lives in that house right over there.
	Drug dealer.
	I swear to God!
	These kids riding around on their bikes.
	It was a fantastic experience.
	Well, you got me on that one.
	I know another guy who, like a year or so ago, went to Antarctica.
	There's a cruise I guess you can take.
	An icebreaker.
	Icebreaker cruise, yeah.
	I think I've heard about that, yeah.
	Yeah, you leave from somewhere in South America, I guess down at the tip, down in southern Argentina, I suppose.
	And boat over there and crack your way into the...
	And that's supposed to be even worse than the Arctic.
	Yeah.
	Because it's windier, I guess.
	Storms, yep.
	I don't know.
	It doesn't really...
	There's a bunch of things I want to do.
	I still have my checklist of places to see and go to.
	I mean, I have an A, a B, and a C list.
	And I got most...
	Most of the A-list done.
	A lot of the B's just fall, you know, happen to happen.
	But I never have had either the North Pole or the South Pole on the lists, any of them.
	I've also stood on the equator.
	Well, I've probably done that.
	Do you have a picture?
	I have photographic evidence.
	Well, it's a little more...
	You see, in Brazil, you know, it's not a big deal.
	Oh, yeah.
	Where was it?
	I guess it must have been Africa.
	Yeah, I've...
	What country does the equator run through in Africa?
	It's up pretty high, isn't it?
	I don't know.
	I'm thinking it's got to be somewhere near Uganda, because while we were there...
	Well, maybe not.
	Okay, equator map.
	Here we go.
	I'm afraid to pop open Google Earth, because it'll crunch the bandwidth.
	Yeah, probably crunching me too, but let me take a look at this.
	Okay, here's the map with the equator.
	It's not...
	It must be higher than Uganda.
	No, it actually looks like it might be lower.
	Oh.
	It runs through...
	Tells you what the hell I know.
	It runs through the very northern part.
	Let me take a look at where there's some better countries.
	They don't outline the countries well enough.
	Here's one.
	Ah, not found.
	And I have one that's got the country showing.
	Once more, second.
	Yeah, it's not, you know, not quite what I thought.
	Uh, da-da-da.
	That's crazy.
	These websites, you know, the problem that we've had on the internet recently is that there's too many things And you can't get to the good one because all the crap is pushed to the top artificially.
	Yeah, and this is one of the things I complain about when I say, yeah, go try to find, and this is the challenge, who has the absolute best cell phone service package in the United States?
	Yeah, you can't get through all the ads and all the SEO stuff.
	No, it's horrible.
	It's not possible.
	It's horrible.
	I think that's probably where people like the Mahalo project is the right idea, but I don't think it can scale.
	And even that, it's all susceptible to deals and stuff like that.
	And it's impossible, I guess.
	It looks like Angola plows right through Angola and those countries along there.
	Maybe the top of Mozambique.
	It's northern Brazil and...
	Yeah, anyway.
	Meanwhile, in Gitmo Nation East.
	We've got to get our Gitmo Nation t-shirts out to the public.
	I haven't even seen a design yet.
	You keep threatening me.
	I have a design for you tonight.
	Okay, cool.
	You're going to make one up yourself with Photoshop or Paint, Microsoft Paint?
	I was going to just use ASCII text.
	I can see you using Paint.
	I really can.
	Tell me you use it, don't you?
	No, I haven't even seen that thing boot for like 10 years.
	In Gitmo Nation East in the United Kingdom, where we're falling fast and we're falling really, really hard.
	The Times has a report, you'd hate this.
	Looks like they're going to put into law a requirement that you show a passport as identification when you are buying a mobile telephone, even if it's a burner with a pay-and-go card.
	Wow.
	Yeah, that's a big deal.
	Well, here you...
	Yeah, you still go to Target and just buy one.
	Yeah, you just pick one up, of course.
	But here you're going to have to, they're going to take down your name.
	Well, you heard about the big database project, right?
	Where every single email, text, and phone call, everything made, will be stored in a big government database.
	It won't be the content of the email, they say.
	It won't be the content of the SMS text message.
	But who you called and when you called them, or who you text and when you text them, they're going to store in this huge database.
	Which, of course, is for national security purposes.
	Yeah, of course.
	Well, you know, I saw a presentation probably around 1996?
	I'm not sure.
	From Interpol.
	They had been working on the software for a long time, and I think a lot of governments use it, whatever it is.
	But it's a very interesting piece of code that allows you to plug in connections between people.
	In other words, if I'm calling your number a lot, and then you're calling somebody else's number, and then I call somebody in the list, they can put together, and if you get enough data, and the key to success here is to really load up.
	But I think there may be a tipping point where you get too much data.
	but i'm not sure But this Interpol software would allow, and the guy broke it down, and he showed us, here's a bunch of gangsters, and they're friends and associates and families and everybody else.
	It was for mob-related tracking.
	And then they ran the software and all the calls that were made to each other and how long the calls took place for how long.
	And then they could literally create an org chart.
	Yeah, an org chart.
	I'm sure that exists.
	Well, it does exist.
	I've seen it.
	But, you know, I think you can take it to the next level and you can pretty much, you know, if you wanted to.
	And the key, the long-term thing, of course, is that, which is what people should be, why they should be complaining, is that, you know, at some point you can say, hey, you know, we can figure out the entire political structure of the Republican Party.
	Why don't we just start assassinating these people here that show up in this list?
	It actually sounds a lot like the software that OpenTable uses.
	You know, that's a funny idea.
	It's possible.
	Well, you told me that specifically, that there's rumors that there's something going on with their system where they track Silicon Valley executives.
	Well, actually, here's the rumor.
	And it doesn't have anything to do with open table.
	It has to do with the back door that seems to be an open table that people have exploited.
	And here's the whole story for people who want to hear this.
	You know, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be using open table because you get all these bonus points.
	Right.
	Which do expire, so use them quick.
	Even though they don't do anything.
	So there's a...
	And I was skeptical, as usual, when I heard the story.
	Well, here's the deal.
	There's a consulting group that does stock market consulting to try to predetermine mergers and acquisitions, and they do it by taking all the public records of private aircraft arrivals and departures, who they're associated with, which apparently is a database that you can get a hold who they're associated with, which apparently is a database that you can get a hold of, or maybe there's And then they use the open table backdoor, and they can find meetings.
	And in other words, if you flew in, you're a General Electric CEO, and you just flew in for some unknown reason to meet with a little CEO of a small company, it's possible that if you're a secretary, which is very common, secretaries use open table all the time to figure out that organization, oh, he flew into here and then they're having a dinner at this restaurant on this night.
	Something's up.
	And that's the, you know, unless they can prove that they're old pals or something on their meeting for some other reason.
	And so you can then surmise that maybe we have a merger acquisition candidate here, and maybe we should invest in this company or that company.
	You know, so it's basically spook kind of work with the stock market.
	So I'm saying, that's his bull.
	And he said, and the friend of mine who's telling me, he said, well, who do you want to, you know, who do you want to see who went to what dinner?
	And I said, just give me Will Hurst's itinerary.
	The next day, I got a list of the restaurants he went to over the past three or four months.
	He went to Chapeau, and I know Will very well, and I know what kind of places he likes to eat at.
	It made nothing but sense looking at this list.
	And I immediately called the secretary and told her to stop booking.
	Don't use Open Table.
	Unless you want, you know, it to be known.
	I mean, you could probably do just a reverse scam on that, you know, set up phony baloney meetings and book it.
	Yeah, yeah, hype the stock, you bet, yeah.
	Yeah, so...
	But that's just a story.
	I have never proven it one way or the other.
	There's no proof of that, no.
	I could be trying to trick me, but I'm just mentioning it to anyone out there who needs to know.
	For years, there's been talk of a backdoor into, I think it's an Israeli-made, was it banking software or trading software?
	I've got to look that up.
	It even has a name, like FAST or something like that.
	Well, Fast is a search engine from Norway.
	No, that's not it.
	It's something else.
	I can't remember.
	I'm sure there's...
	Look, they're all in it.
	Well, you know, backdoors are needed if you're a consultant and you need to get into a program because something bad happened to it.
	You sometimes have to remotely access the thing because you may be in a remote...
	You may not be there.
	I mean, most software has a backdoor for no other reason, so you can get...
	Because a lot of coders nowadays don't work on the computer that's running the code.
	They have to get into it.
	And if they let somebody else know about it, the next thing you know it's out in the wild and some sneak is out there looking at a database just casually.
	If you don't abuse it...
	In other words, no one's seeing you constantly pounding the database to see who's booked where.
	You know, you can get away with it.
	By the way, I'd say that now is a really good time to be in the IT consulting business if you can do SQL Server and Oracle and.NET and all that Microsoft stuff and some heavy lifting, maybe some AS400 skills or whatever, because basically all the banks in the world are being rolled up into one, And that's a big-ass computer project.
	Somebody's going to take...
	I mean, you can just see that money being stolen.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	And now that the American government owns a piece of every single major bank that was signed over the weekend, I'm sure you heard about that, right?
	Oh, yeah, not that, but everybody was complaining about it.
	And the Wells Fargo guys didn't want to do the deal.
	They were forced into it.
	Yeah, they put a gun to their head.
	Yeah, it was take this deal or take this deal.
	And you know what?
	I heard the interesting rationale about that on one of these talk shows was the following.
	Well, they had to be that aggressive with making every one of the banks do the deal because they didn't want the public to know which banks were the bad ones.
	Yeah, so this is...
	I think the Germans started this first.
	Now they've written almost a trillion dollars now in their bailout package, which of course will rise significantly.
	But every single bank in the world now, not talking about small or local retail banking the way we have it in the States yet, but they're now all partially owned by the government.
	And this is trillions of dollars, not the original amount.
	And this is what they weren't going to do.
	They say, we're not going to do that.
	And then, you know, a week later, they're doing exactly that.
	And everyone's blaming each other.
	But in the meantime, it's one financial system.
	It's all being rolled into one little ball.
	And you can bet we're getting screwed for it.
	This is, here you go, John, historian.
	Okay?
	So there's a lot of talk, even in the intro, I couldn't resist talking about the Weimar Republic.
	And since you like your $10 billion bill notes, Dr.
	Ron Paul is actually getting a lot of airtime, and I'm loving it because, of course, he's a kook, right, John?
	He is a kook.
	He is a kook, right, total kook.
	He's been saying this since 1983 that I've seen on record.
	Hey, you keep saying something for 20 years, it's going to happen.
	Eventually, right.
	So, okay, so he stuck in there.
	He hung it.
	It doesn't matter how you get to the finish line.
	But now he's on CNN all the time.
	Fox News brings him on.
	He's on Bloomberg.
	He's even in some of the more mainstream shows.
	And he's saying, look, you can't write trillions of dollars.
	In fact, it was really funny.
	He made me think of you.
	He said, why should we work in America?
	Let's just print money and give everybody money.
	Excellent line, but I don't think anyone actually gets it.
	But we have to be destined for 20% inflation compounded over the next few months even.
	It's going to happen.
	It's not going to happen for a while.
	When it happens, it'll ramp very slowly.
	And I think the only way we can get out of this hole is through hyperinflation.
	That fixes the problem.
	But that is the definition.
	It ruins everything, but it fixes the problem.
	And the banks have got the problem, and they need it fixed, and they screw the public.
	We'll just go crazy.
	We've never experienced that in the United States.
	We've never had anything close.
	We've had the bad inflationary period during the stagflation era of the 1970s, which was one of those economic downturns.
	Let me ask you a question.
	I've got to interrogate you here now.
	Okay, 1970s.
	Bad thing, stagflation.
	You, I believe, you were out of work for a while, but how was it really in America?
	And maybe you traveled, I don't know.
	How was it in the world at that time?
	Actually, I do.
	It is the weirdest thing.
	The bottom of one of these cycles, which would have been 1973, because that's where things kind of bottom out.
	Actually, in the case of the Great Depression, Buffett had it.
	He says that the Dow hit the bottom in July of 1932, but I'm not absolutely sure that's true.
	But anyway, in 1973, it would be typically a bottom of a downturn.
	I actually went to France for the first time.
	And I remember floating around France.
	In France in the 70s, during this era, you would be in the French countryside and things were so grim.
	Although it was an enjoyable trip, to say the least.
	But things were so grim that I clearly remember, and I've never seen this since, you'd be driving along in a car.
	And there would be, most of the people were traveling on mopeds, a lot of girls, and guys and girls, whatever.
	There'd be these little moped bicycles, or these bicycles that have a little gas motor on the back.
	It's on the front, actually, and it's called a Solex.
	It's called a Solex.
	Solex, right?
	There were Solexes everywhere, and the kicker was...
	Let me explain the Solex, John.
	Hold on one second.
	This is a good story.
	The Solex is essentially a bicycle.
	It has a, I believe it might even be a 50cc engine.
	So you basically have a cylinder head where your front light would be.
	And when you get up to speed, you then push the engine forward with a lever onto the tire.
	It has a rotating wheel.
	And then it fires up.
	And in many cases, you didn't even have a throttle.
	It just has a set throttle because it only will do so much for you.
	I will have you know, just as a side note, that I participated in the 24-hour Solex race in de Kvakel in the Netherlands.
	I did not win, but I did finish.
	And I'd be happy to tell you how we souped up that engine a different day.
	But anyway, total beautiful French invention, the Solex.
	Okay, so the kicker, though, to the story is you'd see these people floating around on these little bicycles, but they'd be pulling each other.
	So one person would have her Solex engaged, holding the hand of another bicyclist and pulling them along.
	Yeah, you know, when I had my moped in the Netherlands, that was actually quite common.
	You'd see a buddy, a buddy who was biking along the road, and you'd say, hey, hold on a second.
	You'd let them hold on to you, and then you'd drag them along.
	Talk about stretching your dollar.
	It's also quite a dangerous exercise.
	I would think.
	It's not really.
	This was common.
	So you think that was really the epitome of grim?
	Pretty grim.
	No, actually, it looked pretty joyous.
	I mean, these people were having fun.
	They were pulling each other around, but no, it just seemed that looking back on it, actually, the grimmest part is you never really improve much, and it never does in a true down cycle.
	It just kind of lingers, bouncing around the bottom for a really long time, as opposed to the short time I'm hoping for now.
	Yeah.
	And so by the time Jimmy Carter got in office, because they had to get rid of the Republicans, because they weren't getting anything accomplished, so they figured they were going to bring in a liberal Democrat who was going to fix things, and things just got worse with him.
	And then inflation took over, and we ended up with, like, interest rates.
	If you wanted to buy a house, you had to pay 20-plus points, or percentage.
	The interest rates were 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 percent interest.
	You know, to get a mortgage, it was unbelievable, and that guy was out in four years.
	So, okay, so, life was very expensive?
	I mean, were there things that you didn't have?
	Did you go without anything?
	Well, here's the kicker for me.
	I was working for the government.
	Of course.
	When I hear my father-in-law talk about after the Second World War in Rotterdam that he would bicycle on wooden tires.
	You laugh.
	On wooden tires, 50 miles to get a sugar beet to eat.
	That's grim.
	That's getting up there in the grim category.
	I will say, I'm totally looking forward to what we're about to go through.
	In fact...
	Oh, please.
	Listen to me.
	In fact, the Financial Times brought this up, and I like this.
	People are responding to the credit crunch by relearning the self-reliance of the post-war austerity years.
	Knitting is having a renaissance.
	Gardeners are planting carrots where once they grew chrysanthemums.
	And home cooking is making a comeback.
	I like that.
	I can't help it.
	I'm a romantic.
	This is a moment of pure decadence the way that's described.
	Thank you.
	Why?
	Home cooking is not making much of a comeback.
	It's like, oh, I think we can cook at home.
	This is all like a bunch of people that don't have to cook at home.
	This is not because they have to cook at home.
	This is not because they have to knit because they can't afford a sweater.
	Many of these people, for example, there's a little group, a little club, and I won't mention the names, but there are a bunch of people you know who they are, and they're the wives of a bunch of Silicon Valley guys who are billionaires.
	No, man.
	This is in Britain.
	This is in the Financial Times in Britain, dude.
	This has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.
	Please.
	I don't buy that for a second.
	And besides, it doesn't matter.
	If the trendsetters are doing it, that's good.
	In fact, Patricia came back.
	She says the official Patricia Curry high street index, because she knows exactly what the high street shopping is like, she says lots less people.
	She says very uncharacteristic.
	Something's going on.
	People are buying less for sure.
	Okay, I think that's a good index.
	That's probably as valid as anything.
	Yeah, but that's part of an economic downturn is people automatically take to these things whether they have to or not because they're preparing themselves or whatever.
	But at the end of the day, I think it's good.
	You know, if we actually cook some meals at home, maybe we won't kill ourselves by eating crap.
	Well, no, I'm not arguing.
	I mean, but I'm a big advocate of this.
	And I love knitting.
	I'm very good at knitting, John.
	You should see me go.
	You can knit?
	Yes.
	My mom taught me that.
	I've always been able to knit.
	That's funny.
	Mimi's first husband...
	Was a big knitter, and she is too.
	Although she's the only knit in a straight line.
	She's tried to do other things, but there are some women that can knit, just sit there and within a few hours have a beautiful sweater.
	So did she divorce him, or did he die in a fiery crash?
	No, they got divorced a long time ago.
	Because of the knitting, or something else?
	No, I'm just mentioning that he's a guy who knits, and there's a lot of guys who knit.
	My mom always used to say, football players knit.
	Well, it's something to do if you're sitting and waiting.
	I mean, if you're in a depression where you're going to be sitting and standing in line a lot or waiting and waiting and waiting for the government-assigned doctor...
	For soup!
	For soup!
	You can knit.
	Might as well knit while you're at it.
	Yeah, because you need clothes.
	If you're up in the Andes, in one of the little villages in Peru, for example, all the women there, because the place is crawling with alpacas and vicunas and all these great animals that have these fantastic...
	Akumba matadas?
	Sorry?
	Akumba matadas?
	No, no, Vicuna.
	That's alright.
	It's a small mama.
	You don't watch Disney movies, apparently.
	I don't get the joke.
	But anyway, what they do, though, these Peruvian women who all look exactly like Incas, they're colorfully dressed, they usually have a...
	Wherever they are, these women, they're equipped with a big pile of wool that's wrapped around their arm.
	And, you know, on the left arm and on the other.
	And as they sit at the benches in the plazas chatting with each other, the two women will be there talking and talking, yakking like two women would do knit to each other on a park bench.
	But they're knitting together constantly.
	And they just seem to be knitting 24-7.
	It's just a cultural thing.
	And it's actually, you know, then you can buy these sweaters for like five bucks.
	You get a pretty nice sweater.
	It's amazing.
	Well, I'm happy all of that's coming back.
	And it will.
	Because we're going to have to change.
	I've just given up.
	I can see what's happening.
	It's clear.
	It's so clear.
	I'm just preparing for it.
	Well, you might be preparing yourself psychologically.
	You're going to tell me it's not true?
	Something has to happen.
	Coffee.
	Here's another one.
	Remember I was telling you about the letters of credit that that's becoming a problem?
	Yeah, why don't you explain to people that are eavesdropping what you're talking about.
	Okay, so if you import a product that you sell in your home country, so it could be certain types of groceries, actually oil probably works the same way, but anything that you're importing, usually of course from China, it's not like you fly to China and sign a check, right?
	There has to be a little more efficient way of doing it.
	And the banks will assign a letter of credit.
	So they act as an intermediary.
	And once the bank says, okay, this money is good, it's here kind of in escrow, you can start sending the goods.
	Then once the goods arrive, then the letter of credit is executed, everyone gets paid.
	It's kind of like a super PayPal.
	And I guess if there's some kind of argument and the bank is involved as well, I mean, I've never dealt with it, but they're the middleman.
	So the letter of credit is exactly what it says.
	It's a letter of credit.
	And that credit is also often taken to credit because that's the way a lot of businesses are financed.
	That's the way a lot of states and municipalities are financed.
	Like, you know, hey, I need a couple million credit here to do this stuff.
	And you'll get it from me when taxes come in, whatever.
	So banks are now cutting back drastically on the amount of credit they're giving to companies.
	So that means companies can import less.
	And coffee, I was just reading, because there's problems with these letters of credit, they've got an oversupply of coffee.
	They can't ship it out of the country fast enough.
	So they're actually talking about stopping production to inflate the price.
	Because if the prices are too low, they're going out of business.
	These guys can't go coffee.
	So this is just the start, I think, of many problems that will actually affect us.
	And in fact, I think it is exactly what happened with that Icelandic supermarket, the bonus supermarket chain.
	They just can't get letters of credit, or people are worried about that, and that's why there's a run on food.
	Besides there being a general food crisis in the world already.
	You look, I think this is going to be a big equalizer.
	It'll be good for people.
	Go hungry for a couple of weeks.
	It'll change your attitude.
	It'll change your outlook on life.
	You can have a big freezer.
	Yeah, but a lot of people are going to get caught without big freezers.
	I think most people are going to get caught without big freezers.
	Most people don't have more than a weak supply of food.
	So I want your opinion on that, because you never have an opinion on these types of things.
	You do, but you never express it.
	Let me put it that way.
	That's not true.
	I'm still pondering it.
	Because I don't have the...
	I mean, I'm not taking, you know, the grimmest possible scenarios that you imagine, which you'd come up with some whoppers.
	But this is not just plausible.
	It's happening.
	These letters of credit are becoming a problem.
	I have first-hand proof.
	Yeah, okay, fine, but I'm just saying, I don't think it's, you know, it won't be a long-term problem.
	It'll be something that'll be resolved, and everything will be better and rosier once Obama's elected.
	Okay, yeah, you're right.
	Oh, man.
	I don't know.
	Once he's in, the market is going to skyrocket.
	Yeah, but I don't give a shit about that.
	I care about human beings.
	I know you care about it.
	It's all wrong.
	The world is now one big socialist banking system, and then we're going to introduce welfare into the United States.
	I mean, really introduce it, calling it a refundable tax credit.
	That's messed up.
	Yeah, it's true.
	They want to make 45% of the public on welfare.
	So here's the kicker to the whole economic financial crisis situation is that apparently, I guess, UBS or at least...
	Oh, yeah, the Swiss Bank?
	How does any Swiss bank get caught up in this fiasco?
	You're seriously asking me that?
	Dude.
	I thought these guys had something on the ball.
	No, it's all in the same game.
	It's all the same.
	It's all the same people running it.
	This is all intended to be this way.
	Please.
	Please.
	Actually, there was a good article in the Financial Times.
	I think that explains it better, which discusses the...
	It really boils down to the...
	See, I do read the Financial Times.
	It boils down to the rating agencies.
	Yeah, that was a good point they made.
	The Brits are furious.
	They're furious about the ratings agencies calling all these securities AAA when they were really just crap.
	And that's a good point.
	But that's what I mean.
	It's all part of the scam.
	In fact, I believe in your book, which whenever you're ready to show me a draft, you know I actually love you enough and I will read it.
	I think you should at least consider including a side note or thread or something about the concept of the Illuminati controlling these cyclical motions.
	Are you checking if it's on again?
	Unbelievable.
	I think you should at least consider...
	Unbelievable.
	You know, I was wondering how long it takes for us to go off the track.
	No, we're not off the track.
	We're not off the track.
	Come on, John.
	You cannot deny that the Goldman Sachs ex-CEO, and he's got his cash-and-carry heel dude in there, also from Goldman Sachs, you know, they hoodwinked everyone.
	They took...
	Under the auspices of only $700 billion, which included another $150 billion of bullshit just to ram it through under basically threat of idiots who sit in Congress, who we elect.
	Fork.
	And basically, they bring in the banks, they put a gun to their head.
	I mean, come on, man.
	This is not America.
	This is the fucking mob.
	I shouldn't say that because I'm going to crash my car.
	But...
	This is not right.
	I just can't be cavalier about it.
	And that's what everyone is being.
	It's a fucking outrage.
	Your cursing quotient has risen for some reason when we bring up this topic.
	Well, because the apathy just slays me, John.
	Well, the apathy, you know, I blame the educational system.
	And who controls the educational system?
	Well, you might have something there, because there's a funny post that I put up on the blog, devork.org slash blog, have a drink.
	Um...
	Where this guy goes to this college, and somebody pointed out this has been around.
	I've never seen this before.
	But a kid, and you can do this anywhere.
	A kid goes around some hoity college that's supposed to be so good, and he goes to all the women and gets them to sign a petition to end women's suffrage.
	And, you know, all these girls sign it happily, you know, because they don't even know what the hell the suffrage is.
	Well, end it with a vaccination.
	Hey, hey, hey.
	So, you know, this is, I don't know what it is, I don't remember when I was a kid.
	What's the point?
	Wait, now you're getting off track.
	What is the point of end the suffrage?
	Where are you going?
	Well, they would say, you know, women's suffrage refers to the right to vote.
	And so you go to some dummy, some girl who's in college, and you say, would you like, we've got to stop women's suffrage.
	And that would mean, technically, that they want to end the women's right to vote.
	And women just signed it, went, oh, suffrage, that sounds like suffering, and they signed it.
	Yeah, left and right, except one girl who wouldn't do it because she knew what it meant out of the whole group.
	But they're just signing left and right.
	And when I see these, you know, the Obama bots around the Andronikos, you know, whole earth storm, people are like, you've got to sign this, you know, people are just signing anything.
	These petitions that are floating around are just, they don't mean anything.
	I mean, people just get rid of the person who will sign anything.
	People will sign these things left and right.
	And I have these people come to my door once in a while, and they're always stunned by the fact that I refuse to sign any petition.
	Look, I'm taking it one step further with you, John.
	I am telling you that people are hypnotized and programmed mainly by television, and they're not watching CNN and CNBC or whatever.
	They're watching mainstream television and they're hypnotized and programmed.
	They're walking zombies and they're just we're blithering idiots.
	And indeed, the Department of Education determines the syllabus.
	They determine the education.
	And it's lame.
	It's lame ass.
	You know, they're making us into dumb fucks.
	Sorry.
	Have another drink.
	Meanwhile, by the way, then when you do homeschooling, it's frowned upon by the state.
	And in California, as a matter of fact, it's almost impossible to do homeschooling.
	We homeschool our daughter, or we did, she's going to high school now, and doing very well and liking it, which is unusual.
	Because, you know, kids, if they go through the public school system, at some point they hate school.
	But the homeschoolers always win the various spelling bees, and they do this.
	They're not under control of some state syllabus that is just a bunch of propaganda.
	I remember one of my kids coming home...
	Years and years ago, he was saying, oh, you know, it's indigenous people's day.
	Columbus Day was indigenous people's day.
	And Columbus was a horrible slave owner who went on and on with all this stuff.
	I'm going, what are you talking about?
	Another one of my kids, sometime even further back, just out of the blue, I said, well, who freed the He was old enough to know.
	And he said Martin Luther King.
	Oh, shit.
	I got one for you.
	In 1975, I entered the Dutch schooling system in fifth grade.
	Very government-controlled over there, but just for idiotic stuff.
	And I barely spoke Dutch.
	And the teacher at one point was talking about how many states America has.
	And then they added Alaska and Hawaii, and now they have 52 states.
	And I think that's probably where my questioning of authority came from.
	So I rose my hand.
	I'm like, dude, I'm like an idiot over here.
	The guy with the wrong clothes and the mild Tourette's who doesn't speak the language.
	There's only 50 states.
	And the teacher got in my face about it.
	Yeah, I can see that.
	And then, so what I did is I went home and I called the embassy and I taped it on a cassette and I brought it in with the Encyclopedia Britannica the next day.
	And I said, well, here's all my evidence.
	And he was like, well, that Encyclopedia Britannica is from 1970, so that doesn't count.
	They wouldn't buy it?
	No, no.
	And I said, well, why'd you count the stars?
	There's only 50 stars.
	It remains a...
	Anyway, so the educational system, but certainly in the United States, it's meant to dumb our children, not to make them smart.
	Interesting you homeschooled your daughter.
	From what age to what age and what was the syllabus?
	How did you do that?
	There's a lot of support, by the way, for homeschooling in the United States.
	It's extreme.
	I mean, there's whole stores dedicated to homeschooling.
	What was the decision, John?
	Was it were you smoking weed?
	What was going on?
	There was some mild bullying going on in one of the schools, and she didn't like it, and she wasn't going to do well there.
	We could see that a mile away.
	We offered her the opportunity.
	The kids have to subscribe to it.
	And so she said, sure, I can do that.
	And so we went, since we have a residence in Washington and where, you know, my wife is technically a Washington state, not a Californian.
	And we registered her as a homeschool in Washington state to encourage homeschooling and you can register your child as a homeschooled person.
	And they give them tests, and they make you take a test, so if you're not keeping up, you have to make the kid work harder, you have to put him in a school.
	And so the whole thing is structured.
	In California, they have none of that, and if you're homeschooling, they try to bust you on truancy because they're not getting their pound of flesh or whatever they get from the...
	To get $800 a day or month or whatever per student, and they don't like losing that income, and so they make a big deal out of it.
	So, you know, we do it in Washington State.
	It's legal.
	And she liked it, and at one point, finally, I guess she got fed up with it.
	She wanted to socialize more and learn less, and so she's now going to a small school in Port Townsend.
	And at your home school, did you have mandatory vaccinations?
	Yes.
	Did you hear about New Jersey?
	Did you hear about that?
	Mandatory flu shots for kindergarten, otherwise you can't attend school?
	Yeah, what a crock.
	That's an outrage.
	Yeah, it is an outrage.
	It's Gitmo Nation, my friends.
	Gitmo Nation.
	So we're talking about people getting it in your face.
	I remember one time, I still remember this, it always baffles me that people are so, you know, piggy-headed about stuff.
	I was given a speech in some, there was some forum or something, and I was, I had to give a keynote later in the night, and there was, but meanwhile I listened to all these little sessions, you know, there's all these Guy's giving sessions at a typical conference, right?
	And some guy thought of himself as some sort of a hotshot, was talking about, you know, new technologies and something like that.
	And he said, he says, the LED, and he was talking about the LED, and he says, the LED, which is a liquid crystal display, blah, blah, blah.
	And the LED, which is a liquid crystal display, blah, blah, blah.
	So after the thing was over, I went up to him and I said, you know, LED stands for light-emitting diode.
	Liquid crystal displays LCD. It's LCD. And the guy looks at me and says, hey, I know what I'm talking about.
	And then what?
	You beat him to a pulp?
	No, if I was just like rolling my eyes thinking, what an idiot.
	And people are listening to this guy as an expert.
	You did the Vulcan thing where you grabbed his shoulder and he just melted to the ground?
	That would have been a wish.
	Are you doing twit today?
	I have no idea.
	You heard about Washington, D.C. moving to the cloud?
	I figured I'd give you that for the Twitch show.
	Why?
	Well, maybe you guys will actually talk about some tech news.
	That's why.
	Well, if they move to the cloud, they're just moving.
	Obviously, they just want to be...
	The NSA needs to listen in, I guess.
	I don't know why they do that.
	This is why it's interesting.
	The District of Columbia is migrating its 38,000 employees to Google Apps.
	Huh.
	Uh-huh.
	That's interesting.
	Say no more, huh?
	I told you, I got the goods for you, dude.
	If it wasn't so late, I'd be on Skype with you during the whole show.
	You know, typing evil messages.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's always good for a laugh.
	So, okay, well, I think we're done.
	We talked too long.
	We could go on.
	We could go on forever, but maybe not.
	It's like we're an hour and a half.
	Yeah, we're done.
	So, next week, hopefully, more information on Project Oscar Mike November Delta.
	Well, yeah, that, and by the way, we didn't talk about Palin being on the Saturday Night Live show.
	What did you think?
	Um...
	You know what?
	Not a moment made me laugh.
	And that was partially because I'd already read about what was going to be on.
	I looked at it on Hulu through our VPN, so I was able to see it.
	Yeah, it was a little stiff.
	I just lost interest in the whole thing on my way back.
	It's like, who gives a shit?
	And I started looking at the rest of the world, what's going on, in my own backyard, where I sometimes live.
	I was like, eh, who cares?
	And you know what?
	People here, they don't care anymore.
	They all assume Obama's going to win, and they're done with it.
	Yeah, I heard some Irish bookies actually paid off all his bets on it.
	Yeah, I read that.
	Like 1 to 1.5 or something, whatever it was.
	But no, I'd say that people completely think Obama has it, and they don't care.
	Right now, you know, the big argument over here is about Gordon Brown that, you know, he's cashing in on the financial crisis by, you know, saying he's a hero and he's saving the country.
	And everyone's up in arms about it.
	As well they should be.
	It's a wacky world.
	All right, so take me to dinner this week.
	Yeah, I got a couple places lined up that would be worth checking out.
	Okay.
	And if you're in the office tomorrow, I'll see you because I'll come right from the airport to the office.
	Alright, what time you land?
	I don't know, 1.30 I think.
	You won't get there until 4.
	Coming to you from Gitmo Nation East, my name is Adam Curry.
	And I'm John C. Dvorak in northern Silicon Valley, the place that doesn't exist but we think it does.

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