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Jan. 3, 2009 - No Agenda

01:31:43

64: Carbon Credits and the CIA

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	Well, we made it up until 2009 and we're not dead yet, so hey, I guess there's another year worth of no agenda.
	Coming to you from Gitmo Nation East in Southwest London, I'm Adam Curry.
	Oh, sorry for stepping on you like you did with me on the end of the last show.
	It's alright, I deserve that one.
	I'm John C. Dvorak here in Silicon Valley North, also known as Gitmo Nation West.
	And so I get Monation shirts, by the way.
	Our t-shirts are through.
	We're not selling them anymore.
	We've got a new design coming next week.
	Oh, okay.
	So they're now officially collector's items.
	Yeah.
	I don't even have one myself.
	Well, you're probably not going to get one now.
	Also, because the shipping to the United Kingdom is a mere $45.
	It's ridiculous.
	Well, you know, I had to ship off all my editors.
	I had to send them some stuff.
	It cost like...
	Five times more to ship it to the United States.
	I don't know why.
	I mean, I think I could have FedExed it cheaper.
	Do you think that has anything to do with import on textiles?
	Is that the main reason?
	There must be some reason.
	It must be taxes, not just shipping.
	Oh, yeah.
	It must be.
	Now you mention it.
	Makes nothing but sense.
	Because there's lots of stuff that if you, you know, Patricia does this all the time.
	She used to order from linens and things.
	Oops, that doesn't happen anymore.
	Now they're out of business.
	And they should be like, oh, look at all these.
	Because it's very hard to get sheets for a king-size 2-meter 20 bed or whatever it is that we have.
	And she'll order it and then, you know, it'd be like really cheap.
	And then, you know, it shows up.
	It's like, oh, you owe, you know, 35 pounds on a linen set or something.
	So it has to be something like that.
	Hey, man.
	I'm in the new place.
	Oh, you are?
	Do you have your new collection?
	I'm sorry?
	The new connection.
	You're breaking up.
	Yeah, it's the new connection.
	It's the new studio.
	It's, as of about half an hour ago, I would say complete.
	It's audio, video production, all built into one.
	It's kind of like a floor wax and a dessert topping.
	And for the first in a long time, all my routing, all my connections are actual wires.
	You sound good.
	Thank you.
	It's also, I got a different microphone.
	What are you using?
	Oh, okay.
	I'm using the...
	The hell if I know.
	This is the...
	Coming from a pro.
	Yeah.
	It doesn't even say...
	This is a mic that we...
	It doesn't even say...
	It does have the Radio Shack logo there.
	It wasn't realistic.
	What was the other...
	Realistic?
	I know, but they had another one.
	They had like an upscale brand name.
	Maximus or something like that.
	It was something else.
	It'll hit me in a second.
	It's an MXL2010. I have no idea who makes it.
	It kind of looks like, you know, it's a studio mic.
	It's a condenser, by the way, so it needs external power.
	And I'm running it through my Yamaha NG12, no, NG124CX mixer.
	The cool thing, though, is I've got good processing now, so I've really enhanced the Skype connection.
	You sound really, really much better than you've ever sounded on the broadcast right now.
	Hold on a second.
	I'm typing this code in here to see if there's any...
	So I'm running your...
	You said it's an MX02010? No, it's a 2010.
	MXL2010. MXL? MXL, Mike, X-Ray, Lima.
	So I'm running you through a...
	What is it?
	Marshall.
	Oh, it's a Marshall?
	Or no, it could have Harmony, it could be an MXL. It's an MXL. Exactly!
	From Radio Shack.
	MXL. MXL microphones, products, microphones, MXL. So I'm running you through a compressor, limiter, gate, and an Apex 204.
	Are you using an Apex?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	The big bottom Apex?
	Yeah, the big bottom.
	Yeah, big bottom.
	I have one of those, but I never hooked it up.
	You don't have to, because I've hooked it up on my end.
	It sounds beautiful.
	And we've got the NiceCast running.
	Now, I was all ready to hook in calls.
	Just so you know, I actually have Skype running on a separate machine now, so it's using its separate audio in and out, and that's actually the preferable way to set it up, so you don't have all this crap jacked in virtually.
	And I wanted to set up my SIP client, Gizmo, so I could dial into the phone bridge so we could take calls.
	And so about 45 minutes before we started, I set it up, and the very typical problem with voice over IP, and of course, this is on the BT line.
	I'm sure they have their own VoIP solution they want to sell.
	When you call a number...
	You can hear what's coming in, but they can't hear you.
	And that's because all the ports or the network address translation is messed up, and so I've got to go and configure the hub.
	You know what?
	We'll do that next week.
	So the MXL mic's a cheapie.
	Really?
	Yeah, $169 on Amazon.
	Yeah.
	Sounds good for a cheapie.
	Yeah, it does.
	You sound good.
	You sound just as good as you do with that lavalier hanging.
	Yeah.
	Your scotch tape.
	Yeah, with the gaffer tape to my forehead so it's positioned ideally.
	Actually, that's a funny idea for a photo.
	No, not really.
	Happy New Year, John.
	Well, Happy New Year to you.
	How's things going?
	Yeah, I'm doing good.
	How's things going back there in the UK? How did Boxing Day go?
	Well, Boxing Day, as you pointed out on the last show, it was very filled with boxes for us.
	So the stock market went up, and I have one of the listeners who says, oh, you should talk about it.
	Talk about the stock market.
	What do you think?
	It went up significantly.
	It didn't go up 290 points?
	260 or something.
	And the day before, it was also up 150.
	Yeah, it was up a couple of days before the end of the year, and then it was up on...
	The one day we were open on low volume, which of course leads...
	There's a thing that...
	There's kind of a piece of superstition that seems to come true a lot, which is that if the market goes up in January, then the whole year reflects that and it keeps going up.
	And then as the market goes down in January, the market just goes down.
	And so it seems to me that it's up a little...
	It started January up...
	Now it's 9,000.
	The likelihood of it going up Well, you did predict that.
	Yeah, and some wild swings.
	Hold on, people are saying that we sound like crap on the stream, that we're over-modulated, and I turned it down, so if you can Twitter and let me know if it sounds better now, that would be appreciated.
	You know, this feedback loop with this...
	With the Twitter?
	Hey, you guys, you can't do that with the real radio.
	Hey, you guys sound like crap.
	You sound crappy, man.
	Turn it down.
	Turn it down.
	Well, hopefully we're recording it in high fidelity so you can always turn it off and listen to it later, but the feedback is good.
	I guess I got busted because I guess I must have said just casually that the oil is going to 200.
	Yeah, dude.
	And some guy busted me for it.
	He said, you're always changing your mind.
	I made the point that I'm a bandwagon jumper, but I'm talking about sports mostly.
	I'm a huge fan of Utah.
	People who watch football think that's hilarious.
	Anyway, so even though I never invested, I mean, I was short oil.
	Well, hold on.
	Let's just take it back one step because it's a little confusing.
	Actually, I've received a lot of emails from Dvorak fans who were saying, wow, man, you know, You're kind of right about it.
	In fact, your East Coast Research Division, you know who I'm referring to?
	Kerry Lutz.
	He just said, please refer to me as the East Coast.
	Oh, sorry.
	He said, please don't mention my name.
	He sent me a nice long email.
	I said, wow, man, you're absolutely right, and John is so wrong with all of this stuff.
	About what?
	Well, so here was the thing.
	So there was another person who emailed us and said, oh, you know, you really, you know, Dvorak is a, what do you call it, a bandwagon jumper, and he was all talking about $200 barrel oil, and then you on email said, no, I didn't.
	Prove it, prove it, prove it.
	Find the episode.
	Prove it, prove it.
	I guess some complete nutball decided to listen to all these episodes to find the one lone example of my suggesting that it could go to $200.
	Yeah, here it is.
	And meanwhile, the price of oil is $126 a barrel.
	Yeah, I'm still thinking...
	It's going to $200 before the end of the year, baby.
	$200.
	I'm thinking $200.
	There it is.
	Well, I was just agreeing with you.
	Well, if you follow the next episode of the show, I was getting more skeptical.
	Yeah, but it's about the bandwagon jumping thing.
	And I'm amazed that people are only now just figuring this out.
	Well, you know, things say you get on the bandwagon, so it's not a bad thing.
	I'm a huge Obama fan.
	Oh, man.
	So, here's the news out of the United Kingdom.
	Big protests, of course, around Europe at Israeli embassies, of course, regarding the huge conflict now in the Gaza Strip.
	And we have two celebrities, two celebrities who have stood up and saying, we're not taking it anymore.
	You want to wager a guess as to which two superstar celebrities they are?
	Let me think.
	Amy Winehouse?
	No, she's got enough of her own problems.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Two celebrities.
	Are they British celebrities?
	Yes, both of them are British.
	Internationally well known.
	No, no.
	And the thing is, they're female and they are over 50, which is...
	Dame Edna.
	Female, I said.
	Female.
	No, you'll never guess.
	Bianca Jagger and Annie Lennox.
	Bianca Jagger and Annie?
	What is this, the Has It Been Club?
	I'm telling you, man.
	Jagger?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	I haven't heard that name for ten years.
	But it's pathetic that that's the only people who are up in arms about this, about this tragedy that's taking place.
	Because it really is.
	This is messed up.
	And meanwhile, of course, my wife Patricia's sister is here, Yvonne, who's been great helping us unpack for the past week and she's been fantastic.
	But the two of them will sit down reading the paper and they're like, oh, it's so, you know, ah, Jet Travolta, you know, John Travolta's son died tragically, seizure, hit his head on the bathtub, I think, which is terrible.
	And then just like, dude, there's like a hundred kids who are dead and still lying underneath rubble in the Gaza Strip.
	How can you obsess about Jet Travolta?
	At least we know him.
	Yeah, well, they know him?
	Well, because they know John Travolta.
	I'm just saying, they don't know him.
	He's closer to home.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Think local, act global.
	Yeah.
	Right, Annie.
	Act global, think local.
	I'm not sure what it means.
	Talking about what that means, this reminds me of another topic, so we're probably going to jump around a little bit today.
	That's all right.
	Let me find this.
	I had my...
	Of course, I can't find it when I want it.
	My daughter's been working on this paper, and she's apparently using this computer.
	Don't you hate that when the kids use your computer?
	Well, this is the computer I use.
	This is not my normal writing computer.
	Still, doesn't she have her own computer?
	Does she have a laptop or something she can use?
	She likes this machine a lot.
	You'll wind up giving it to her eventually.
	I might, because I have another machine that I just got from the...
	NPC Noise, the Silent PC folks in Vancouver, Washington.
	I got a new machine from them.
	Just to plug a company, if anybody's buying, it's the same price you pay for a Dell or anything else, maybe a little more because you're going to get some better components.
	But these guys, it's like a hot rod shop in the olden days.
	You could take your car to a rod and custom shop and they'd fix it up.
	They'd just modify it and soup it up.
	That's the word.
	So these guys build these machines that are architected.
	They use mostly standard components, but they've redesigned a lot of the stuff and they architect it.
	So you have like a quad core killer machine with a good graphics system in it.
	I have one with dual SLI, you know, NVIDIA stuff.
	Dead silent.
	Mm.
	Dead silent.
	I mean dead silent.
	You have to actually...
	You don't even know...
	When you turn it off, there's no evidence.
	You have to look at it to see if the fan stopped.
	How do they do that?
	The thing is they've got the air going through a certain way and they have big giant fans because you can turn those and move more air with less noise and they're using some Antec cases and it's just engineering is what it is and they've got a lot of soundproofing in there.
	Excellent.
	So you get this machine.
	It's the same price you pay for any other machine.
	And it's dead silent.
	So, I mean, it's very nice because I'm finally sick of these.
	What set me off was a number of years ago, AMD had wanted to show off one of their new chips or something or other.
	They sent me a machine.
	AMD does this every once in a while.
	They send out these sample machines so you can look at their chips.
	You send them back?
	Generally, they become worthless over time, and so you don't send them back usually.
	I mean, you can if you want.
	They're not expecting them back.
	But anyway, you turn this thing on, and it sounds like you're at the Moffat Field Jet Testing Center.
	It's just unbelievable.
	I mean, just holy.
	I mean, it sounded like the world was coming to an end.
	And I said, this is ridiculous.
	These machines are too noisy.
	And so I tracked these guys down.
	Anyway, that's a plug for them.
	Did you see that someone loaded Android onto a netbook?
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	I told you that was common.
	I've also found that there's a whole community of people who are loading Mac OS X onto or OS X onto netbooks.
	Yeah, Apple's got some mechanism to brick those.
	Oh, no doubt, but still, it's pretty cool.
	Apparently, there's one...
	What is the netbook?
	It's like the WinEye or something.
	Does that sound familiar?
	I don't know.
	Maybe there's a couple of them.
	The EPC is very memorable.
	I think HP is the HP 100 or the HP 1000, which is kind of neat.
	I saw one at Costco and played around with it for a little while.
	I could use that machine.
	The keys are a little bit small, but man, the portability, and if it actually ran OS X, I think I would go for that.
	Yeah, the keys are just, but not so much that you can't type on it.
	And it's not like a phone.
	Anyway, back to my daughter.
	She's working on this thing for a school on the world's water crisis.
	You know, they always want to get these kids involved.
	So I ran into this one thing on the browser here that she has a million tabs open with a bunch of different things about water.
	But this is unbelievable.
	I ran into this one.
	Because it's almost as though, you know, you can't win, or it's like as though, you know, the definition of a reactionary, which I always like to give the right wing, the true definition of a reactionary is someone wants to go back in time.
	And it seems to me that the American left, or the liberals, they want to go back in time to a day when there was no distribution, there was no roads, everyone walked and rode bicycles, and this kind of idealistic thing.
	And so everything that's remotely modern is somehow contributing to, you know, everything that's going wrong.
	Now, let me just read you this.
	This is from the Trouw, T-R-O-U-W Daily, in the Netherlands.
	Oh, Trouw, T-R-O-U-W. Trouw.
	Trouw, I believe, was started as an underground resistance newspaper in World War II, I think, in Amsterdam.
	Here we go.
	Hydropower disaster for global warming.
	Large dams have dramatic consequences.
	Ecosystems are destroyed and numerous people are made homeless, often without adequate resettlement.
	But it is yet little known that large-scale hydroelectricity is a major contributor to global warming.
	The reservoirs could, despite their clean image, be even more devastating for our climate than fossil fuel plants.
	A few years ago, I spent my money and it goes on and on.
	And I'm thinking two things.
	One, is this guy serious?
	Or, and by the way, let me go down two graphs or three graphs.
	He says, Mega Hydro has an atrocious record.
	The World Commission on Dams, WCD, consisting of experts.
	to produce an independent review of large dams.
	The WCD estimates in 2000 that 40 to 80 million people have been displaced worldwide.
	80 million?
	Anyway, it seems unlikely.
	I mean, just the number doesn't sound right.
	Maybe in China.
	Whatever the case is, this could be a piece of propaganda put out by the oil industry, obviously, to keep people on the right track to using fossil fuel.
	But I don't think so.
	I think this is actually just some typical reactionary in the sense of, you know, we can't do anything.
	Let's just cover ourselves and put ourselves in a cave somewhere and ride it out.
	Yeah, if it's not the hydroelectric power, it's bovine flatulence.
	Oh, that's the flatulence.
	See, the thing to me that this whole global warming thing always boils down to is veganism.
	It's, at some point, you don't care what nutball you're watching, if you're watching the Green Planet, they have a whole channel now on the Dish Network and elsewhere called Green.
	And it's just a bunch of horrible shows that are self-serving, except Emerald's is actually pretty good because he's still just cooking.
	You know, Emerald Green.
	Get it?
	Yeah.
	And then they have the guy who does...
	I got a disc for you.
	I'll send you with a couple of these shows on it.
	Just like...
	Just like all the other ones you sent me.
	But at some point, it always becomes vegetarianism.
	I mean, it's always related.
	There's always a vegetarian angle, and then it gets kind of to veganism, and let's get rid of the herds of cattle, and let's just eat, you know, oats.
	Let's eat dirt.
	It's always that element.
	I've never seen anybody that doesn't have that element in it.
	Let's eat dirt and chalk.
	I believe they're behind the whole thing.
	PETA, the vegans, and, you know, the crackpots at Whole Foods, the whole...
	I've got to tell you, I don't talk bad about PETA at all because those people frighten me to death.
	Those are the ones that will wind up actually killing you.
	No, I'm very afraid of really radical, and look, I love animals, but there are some very, very radical elements out there in the animal activism space, and they kill people.
	Yeah, because people are meaningless crap.
	Yeah, it's all about the animals.
	So, along the lines of global warming, you want to hear some earth-shattering news?
	Right.
	Scientists from the United Nations, IPCC, have now determined that the Earth will be cooling for the next three decades.
	Now, these are the same people that brought you global warming, now known as climate change.
	Quote, addressing the Washington policymakers in Seattle, Washington, Dr. Don Easterbrook said the shifting of the Pacific decadal oscillation, that's PDO for short, from its warm mode to its cool mode, virtually assures global cooling for the next 25 to 30 years, and means the global virtually assures global cooling for the next 25 to 30 years, and means the global warming of the What?
	Yes, the announcement by NASA that the PDO, that's the Pacific decadal oscillation, has shifted from its warm mode to its cool mode, is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes, and there's some references, and is not an oddity superimposed upon in masking the predicted and is not an oddity superimposed upon in masking the predicted severe warming by the
	This has significant implications for the future and indicates that the IPCC climate models were wrong in their prediction of global temperatures soaring one degree Fahrenheit per decade for the rest of the century.
	Ba-da-da!
	Doesn't matter.
	No one else will hear about it, John.
	It doesn't matter.
	Well, I'm blogging it.
	That's what I mean.
	No one else will hear about it.
	Yeah, bada bing.
	I'll send you the link.
	You're kidding me.
	No, of course not.
	I missed that one.
	When did that come out?
	These guys are just unbelievable.
	This is December 7th, actually, is when this came out.
	It came out December 7th, and it hasn't been...
	I didn't catch it until just now.
	Uh-huh.
	But this whole shifting of the poles and the solar winds and the diminishing of the magnetism of the poles, all of this goes back to 2002.
	So this is before Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
	NASA and other scientists were saying, oh, this will change the climate.
	It could make it warmer or cooler.
	But they were literally saying, it's that that is the cause, not man-made.
	It's all over the news now.
	It's mainstream publications.
	No one's doing anything with it.
	Yeah, maybe.
	But we're still all going to die if we don't stop our cows from farting and stop generating power from the ocean.
	Stop eating meat.
	That's basically where it boils down to.
	Stop eating meat.
	Because there are animals.
	I mean, these are people, of course, who anthropomorphize all animals.
	My wife has it there is because they watch too many Disney cartoons with all these talking animals.
	Usually sounding a lot like Eddie Murphy.
	Well, they sound like this sometimes.
	Oh, speaking of Mimi, has she mentioned, because she's an earthquake nut, right?
	She tracks the USGS website, USGCS, whatever it is.
	Yeah, she hasn't said anything to me about the Yellowstone thing, which is what you're going to bring up.
	That's exactly what it's going to bring up, yeah.
	Nothing at all, huh?
	No.
	I don't know why.
	She's just finished her Spice book, which I'm in the process of editing.
	She's a Spice girl now.
	You should tell her that.
	That's hilarious.
	I never thought of that.
	It's a good joke.
	So anyway, so the spice book is done.
	So we'll get that out in the next, hopefully.
	So people are being warned to not go to Yellowstone.
	Oh, I didn't know it was that bad.
	Yeah, they have about a hundred earthquakes a day now at Yellowstone.
	Yeah, I heard that.
	Those tremblers.
	That's not good.
	No, that's extremely bad.
	Yeah, Yellowstone is one of the great giant calderas.
	I mean, it's the size of Krakatoa.
	And it's one of the three or four, I guess, around the world that if they go off, we have serious issues.
	Yeah, I mean, this could go all the way from, it could go up to Mount St.
	Helens.
	I mean, this thing is huge, right?
	It's huge.
	It's just about, the size of it is about a quarter of the size of the state of Wyoming.
	And if it went off, it would, the problem is when it goes off, it's a mega volcano, which is the kind that ends up, you know, killing like 90% of the life on Earth.
	Yeah, because essentially it spews shit into the atmosphere, the sun is blocked, and then we all die.
	Well, we don't all die.
	Just you in America.
	No, actually, if it went off because of the trade winds, it would blow most of the crap to the east, and people on the extreme west coast would have something of a chance.
	But probably not much of one, because I think the Southern Hemisphere, if I'm not mistaken, the mix is such that you might be able to move to Brazil and eke out a living during the food riots.
	Exactly.
	Anyway, this wouldn't be a good thing.
	Let's hope there's a correction.
	Is there any mainstream reporting on that in the States, or is this another one of these...
	Yeah, no, it crops up, but it's not like anybody's, you know...
	It's not like the Art Bell, you know...
	Overnight, whatever that show's called.
	Overnight, whatever it is.
	You know, that show where you have all these crackpots on.
	It's not as though it's picked up.
	I mean, that group is into it.
	You know, there's the group of worry warts.
	The general public, I think, is oblivious.
	But they're oblivious for the fact that, you know, we don't have an educated population anymore.
	And they can't keep up with anything except, you know, I'm sure John Travolta is well known to everyone and that's about it.
	Exactly.
	And so another thing that happened that I also looked into which became very interesting to me is the leap second bricking the 30 gigabyte Zoom MP3 players.
	And it's not so much about the...
	About Microsoft and Zune and all that, whatever.
	That was an unanticipated programming mistake.
	What was interesting is how these leap seconds came to be.
	The U.S. Navy started this in 1972.
	And the reason why is to compensate for the irregular rotation of the Earth to keep, you know, Earth time or solar time, I guess we call it, in sync with atomic time.
	But it's willy-nilly.
	So the last time they did it was 2005.
	They didn't expect to insert a leap second until 2010.
	So they just said, oh, we should do it this year based upon, I guess, you know, someone sitting there looking at the Earth's rotation, counting it out.
	But this just goes to show, when you fuck with time, man, you can screw up a lot of shit in the world.
	And this time it was just...
	Wait a minute, what has a leap second got to do with bricking the zune?
	Because on December 31st, it had one more day to go.
	And based upon the internal clock, I guess it has some kind of clock that is synced up.
	This is not working for me.
	This is what Microsoft themselves posted.
	They said this is what happens.
	That's their excuse?
	I believe that.
	Yeah, because basically you get an extra second, and so it didn't know what to do on the rollover, and that's why it happened.
	The minute it saw that this next day would have, you know, whatever the equivalent is of 24 hours plus one second in seconds, and that basically put it into an infinite loop on boot up.
	But I don't care.
	I mean, people who have a Zune should be shot anyway.
	What I'm interested in...
	Actually, the quality of the Zune sound is better than the iPod.
	Yeah, whatever.
	But this messing around with...
	The same thing with daylight savings time.
	It bugs me.
	It bugs me that we're doing this stuff.
	There's no energy efficiency.
	That's all offset by air conditioning in the summer and extra heating in winter.
	There's got to be some evil scheme behind this time change and adding leap seconds.
	It just doesn't sit right with me.
	Alright.
	Don't you have any information on that?
	Weren't you a timeologist at one point in your career?
	I was never a timeologist.
	I've always wanted to be.
	I'm trying to find something.
	Here's the Yellowstone Visitor Center.
	There's nothing here about anything.
	No, there's a webpage.
	I have a webpage for you.
	Where is it?
	It says that they don't want people to go in there.
	I think now's the time to go.
	There's nothing more thrilling than little shakers.
	Well, right now they have Volcano Alert Level Normal Activation Color Code Green.
	But that was an update from yesterday.
	It's Volcano...
	Yeah, that's the USGS site.
	I just don't think it's a good idea to go.
	No, I think now's the time.
	Should I book you a ticket?
	Here's the reason.
	The place is always crowded.
	Everyone's going to be scared off, so the place will be really dead empty, which is great.
	I doubt it.
	I think there's a lot of people who are going to go exactly for the reason you just outlined.
	Well, I could be wrong.
	But generally speaking, I think people are more, you know, no.
	I mean, it sounds good on paper what you said, but the fact of the matter is most people are very skittish.
	I mean, I was watching this thing on 60 Minutes a couple weeks ago, the show that had the explanation of the TSA, and the guy heads the TSA. And the guy, he's just worried.
	He's just worried, oh, they're out to kill us.
	They want to kill us.
	We're at war.
	And I'm thinking, well, you know, where's the...
	What kind of a war is this?
	I mean, they killed a bunch of people a decade ago, and then now we're waiting for...
	I mean, this is a very poorly...
	This is not like losing millions of people during World War II. I mean, this is...
	But anyway, there seems to be a level of fear that is hand-wringing.
	Yeah, you think?
	You think?
	Yeah, so they've got a bunch of hand-wringers that are afraid of their own shadow.
	This is the Americans that used to be the leaders, and now they're all frightened.
	So I don't think they would be going to Yellowstone.
	No, if it's not terrorism, we're fearless.
	We're very afraid of...
	I think we're completely afraid of everything now.
	Global warming?
	Everybody's afraid of that.
	It's not the afraid part.
	It's a part of being politically correct and caring about the earth and doing your part.
	That's what that's about.
	No one's just afraid of the earth burning up.
	They don't give a shit.
	They know it's not going to happen for another 100 years.
	You need to move to Berkeley.
	No, I'm thinking I don't.
	But I hear what you're saying.
	Here's a funny thing that I ran into the other day.
	I mean, I was actually stunned.
	I'm listening to the radio and there's an ad for the CIA. I've heard this.
	Yeah, they go on and on about Tosuyo, and they had the guy with kind of a deep, kind of a voice you couldn't identify.
	I think the voice was tuned with one of those little thingies, you know, that you can adjust sounds with.
	A vocal guy going, you too could be a useful member of the Central Intelligence Agency in clandestine intelligence gathering.
	And I think it was the word they used, clandestine intelligence gathering.
	And then they said, go to CIA.gov slash jobs.
	And I'm thinking, why are the CIA... The CIA is generally a recruiting company.
	They go to colleges and they find kids with high grade point averages and they make them offers that they can't refuse.
	Yeah, here it comes.
	Here it comes.
	You know, Gina Smith, she was offered a job at the CIA. Hold on a second.
	Here it comes.
	Some of our bugs have been, well, real bugs.
	Is this the one?
	No.
	At the CIA, our scientists and engineers create and apply innovative technology to meet intelligence needs.
	Care to join them?
	Technology so advanced, it's classified.
	U.S. citizenship required.
	U.S. citizenship required.
	Boy, we're prohibited by law.
	No, that's not the one I was listening to.
	That's actually better than the one I'm thinking about.
	That's a TV ad, actually.
	Oh, that's a TV ad.
	Oh, my God.
	Anyway, so...
	I can't believe they're doing this because besides it's like a sole secret agency.
	And by the way, if anybody out there wants to get involved with the high tech stuff, try to find a job with the NSA. At least if you want to be with the computers.
	Anyway, no such agency it's called amongst the people who don't want to have their phone tapped.
	I'm thinking it's a honeypot.
	To suck people in?
	Yeah, just to see what kind of screwballs.
	For one thing, if you're a terrorist, the first thing you'd want to do is get a job with the CIA. Absolutely, yeah.
	Did you read about the reporter who took...
	First, she printed out a fake boarding pass at home on her computer.
	Yeah, you can do that.
	And then she had three bottles, which she put in her little plastic baggie.
	Each bottle was 100 milliliters.
	One contained charcoal, one contained sulfur, and one contained saltpetre.
	And each bottle was labeled as charcoal, sulfur, saltpetre.
	She says that she completely drenched it and made him wet to really make sure nothing could happen.
	Those three elements, people, is gunpowder.
	Put her bag through TSA. A little baggie with everything clearly labeled.
	She even put the labels out so they could read them.
	They didn't look at that, but they were very, very concerned with the pan flute that she had in her luggage.
	Pan flute.
	I would be too, by the way.
	Anybody boarding with a pan flute is suspicious.
	So she got through with a fake boarding pass with all the elements for gunpowder, and get this, here's the kicker, they swabbed her bag with one of those white little discs, and it was negative.
	I don't know what that little disc is looking for, but I suspect there's specific things.
	If she had been carrying ammonium nitrate, she may have been busted.
	I mean, that seems to be something more likely to be caught.
	It has more potential.
	I mean, to mix gunpowder by yourself, I used to be a chemist when I was a kid.
	I used to do all these things when I went to the University of California.
	In chemistry, I was warned away from it.
	But from one of my professors, I said, look, I can name a thousand guys with one finger missing because of the stupidity of doing some of this stuff.
	And so I wouldn't, you know, go work for a dynamite company and learn how to do it right.
	But still, the point is...
	I can never make gunpowder work.
	Well, Kirk was able to do it.
	Captain Kirk.
	Yeah, well, yeah, with that thing going after him, yeah, Captain Kirk.
	Yeah, and didn't he use, like, bird poop or something?
	I can't remember, but it was the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
	The likelihood of getting it to fire by clicking on some flint is zero.
	Okay, but still, you get the point.
	Yeah, no, I get the point.
	You know, the problem I have with it is that every time somebody pulls a stunt like this, then they just crack down on everybody.
	So it inconveniences us all.
	I think we know that the TSA and the rest of this is kind of a sham, and the whole thing is just for show.
	So why do you do this?
	I mean, I condemn this woman.
	Interesting take.
	Good point, actually, now I think about it.
	Well, I guess that's the only, instead of really doing some writing and really making some real trouble where it matters to stop the idiocy that is the multi-billion dollar TSA, that's what she chooses to use as a weapon.
	Yeah, and they end up giving her even more money.
	The CIA has a kids page, John.
	Welcome.
	We're glad you're here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency.
	And then it should say, wait while we install this Trojan horse on your computer.
	10, 9, 8, fine.
	Now you can continue.
	This is pretty amazing.
	Unbelievable.
	So, are you ready to learn more about the CIA? Yes.
	Hmm.
	Let's see.
	Games.
	We have games.
	Puzzles break the code.
	Aerial analysis challenge.
	Oh, this reminds me of the movie Last Starfighter.
	So the kids go on the site, and then they crack the code, and then they give them another second level, and then a third, and then by the fourth level, the kid cracks the code within a certain amount of time.
	Some...
	So knock on the door and they're hauled off and cold breaking for the rest of their lives.
	Oh, man.
	That is just frightening, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Somebody's got to do something.
	I think they...
	I don't know.
	I don't know if they...
	We need a better CIA or a worse one.
	I'm not sure.
	I'm trying to find the radio commercial that you heard, but I'm not...
	It wasn't video, it was audio.
	Yeah, radio.
	That's why I said the radio commercial.
	Oh, they said video, sorry.
	I meant radio commercial.
	You'd think that someone would have that around.
	Oh, well.
	Yeah, they're talking about clandestine, which is like, what does that mean?
	Well, I know that...
	I mean, there's covert.
	Apparently, they're not seeking anybody to go in and murder people.
	No, but what I've seen them do is, particularly with kids, is they can send you a little kid, and you're supposed to be an environmentalist undercover agent, and if you see your parents doing something that is not green, then you have to bust them, and then you should report them.
	Then you have to torture them.
	Waterboard your parents.
	Oh, that's disgusting.
	It really is.
	Farmers, uh...
	You got something?
	I got plenty of stuff.
	You tell me if you want to talk about something.
	Well, I was just going to go on with that.
	I never finished the Gina Smith story.
	Oh, sorry.
	Okay.
	So she, um...
	Apparently, it was graduating from college, and they, you know, by the way, I brought this story up with different people, and they were like, that's bull.
	And then, my favorite one was somebody, maybe it was you, said, that's bull.
	They used to do that.
	Maybe it wasn't you.
	And they said, they used to do that, though.
	Always like that.
	They don't do it anymore.
	So the thing was, Gina was supposed to, the CIA was going to place her in a high-paying reporter's job at a newspaper.
	Oh, yeah.
	So she would just be writing whenever they wanted her to write.
	Yeah, every once in a while they needed to do some disinformation or some, you know, they needed to feed something and then, you know, she would write it up and that would be, that's all she, maybe once in, every six months or who knows, but she'd be on the payroll the whole time and then she'd come in and this is the kind of thing, of course, I think you can identify if you're a smart reader.
	You can find, you can see these kind of planted stories that, um, My favorite example is the Confessions of the Economic Hitman.
	You can read the book or not read the book, but what you want to go do is look at the reviews.
	That blasted the book.
	Ah, right.
	And I found this one guy, I can't remember who it was, but I think he was with the Boston Globe or the Washington Post, maybe the Washington Post.
	And he blasted the book as bull, and he went on and on.
	But then when you see that guy, then you click on all of his articles.
	And it's all the same, right?
	It's all the same kind of apologetic malarkey.
	That is like, oh, this is interesting.
	So then if you can reverse engineer the whole process and figure out who these guys are, these stooges, you can read their material to see exactly what the litany is.
	What's the memo for the day?
	How are we supposed to be thinking?
	What's the right way of thinking about things?
	Well, so you can actually see that right now.
	You'll see very few...
	There's journalists really, really, really condemning Israel for their part in the conflict in the Gaza.
	And then from time to time you'll see one that really sticks out and really defends Israel.
	And you've got to believe that that's all.
	I mean, that just doesn't make any sense.
	You can't defend either side of that.
	Right.
	So yeah, you can spot these guys, but what I recommend people do who want to be smart readers is that when somebody sticks out like a sore thumb, look at their past work.
	This is kind of like using Yelp in real time.
	Yelp is interesting as a reviewer site and people around the world...
	Right, and then you look at the reviewers and see what their other reviews are for other things.
	Right.
	So you say you've got, you know, Cynthia here who likes or dislikes this restaurant you think you're going to go to, and you click on all of her reviews, and then you can see if you're in agreement with her on the stuff that you have common, you know, where there's common knowledge.
	In other words, I've been to this restaurant already, and I liked it, and she hates it.
	I'm thinking, well, this woman is not in agreement with me, so I'm not going to take her advice.
	And so you find another reviewer who's in total agreement with the way you think in terms of taste for restaurants.
	And so you can say, oh, okay, then she liked this new place.
	I will go there.
	You can do that in real time now that we're on the net with all this information because these writers, their stuff is all archived.
	I mean, you can go to MarketWatch, for example, and you can read my stuff for the last four years.
	And then quickly never read another article, because this guy always does the same thing.
	We don't want to read this shit.
	That's the problem.
	Except for that.
	Would you mind breaking something down for me, John?
	You've not responded to the three times I've now brought up Gaza.
	What's going on there?
	What exactly is the problem?
	Why is this?
	I think the Israeli, I have this, for some reason I haven't followed it this closely, except for the fact that the way it's portrayed is the Israelis are sick and tired of having these missiles lobbed into their country constantly as a terrorist mechanism.
	It's kind of like the buzz bombs over London.
	They didn't do as much damage as the Israelis ended up doing.
	Well, these are like bottle rockets they're sending off.
	I mean, I'm not saying that they don't cause destruction, but it's nothing compared to...
	Well, they keep doing it, and they won't stop.
	Right, but why are they doing it?
	That's what I always say.
	Why do they want to do that?
	A lot of people think they're doing it.
	It's because the whole thing is funded by Iran to get the attention away from other issues in the Middle East.
	Let's break it down a little bit further.
	What is the history of the Gaza Strip?
	Well, the history of the Gaza Strip has always been an area of...
	The problem with the Gaza Strip is it's too close.
	It's in a situation where you can easily attack Israel.
	And so the Israelis had to take it over some years ago.
	And they're now...
	Because it was originally not designated as...
	As Israel.
	Doesn't this all stem from after the Second World War?
	Didn't the Brits draw up these lines and said, here you go?
	The Brits are responsible for the whole thing.
	Would you mind just filling me in just so I have the story?
	I don't know the history that well.
	I mean, there are people that are...
	Well, that's a travesty.
	We should know the history.
	We know the history.
	After World War II, they had to put all these Jewish refugees someplace, and they wanted to have their own country, and they wanted to go back to Jerusalem.
	And so as the spoils of war, which is not uncommon, because the Arabs and that whole group were on the sides of the Nazis, we could have taken over the whole place.
	We took this little chunk and gave it to the Jews, and they've been pissed off ever since, the other people, when in fact we could have taken over the entire Middle East.
	That's the time they've taken over the oil fields.
	I mean, they were essentially the enemy.
	Right.
	So, that's, you know, basically where it starts.
	Well, it's pretty messed up.
	But I can see both sides.
	Of course, lobbing of missiles is not acceptable.
	There's so much going on there, man.
	That whole area has been perpetually screwed up.
	And even before World War II, I mean, it's never been a good area.
	I mean, it's always been nutty.
	So, you know, you'd expect the office of the president-elect to at least say something, which he refuses.
	He doesn't know what to do.
	He's befuddled.
	He's too busy extending everybody's employment agreement.
	No, he's too busy making arrangements for this big party he's going to have.
	This is going to be a party administration.
	I mean, that's going to make Kennedy's look like a joke.
	I mean, we're starting off already with this giant party of his inauguration, which is going to be, you know, that's going to be worse than anything ever done in Nazi Germany.
	I mean, people are just flocking to go there.
	And they're going to be a massive...
	It's going to be like two million people live.
	I mean, hopefully, you know, they're asking for trouble in one of these situations.
	If there's a riot breaks out or something weird happens.
	But let's just say that nothing does.
	And then we go from there to the inauguration balls, the plural.
	And they're all like, now it's like a big deal to be in this one or that one.
	And there's all the, you know, there's going to be more chit-chat about these.
	Balls and who saw who and who's in and who's out and who's on the Obama A-list and who's on the B-list and what can you do to get from the C-list to the B-list.
	And this is going to just continue throughout his administration, this kind of weird kind of social craziness.
	It seems like, I think you're right, he's just going to shut up until the inauguration and then...
	Yeah, and then it's going to be just a bunch of, you know, I think he's going to be a lot of empty phraseology.
	You know, he's going to come out, ra-da-doo-da-doo, da-doo-da-doo, da-doo-da-doo, and it's going to be, you know...
	Da-doo-da-doo.
	It's going to be just a lot of, you know, he's going to continue.
	What's worked for him in the past, campaign speeches.
	He's going to keep giving them.
	It's going to be an endless campaign speech.
	We've got to change the problem.
	You know, we've got to blah, blah, blah, blah.
	You know, and it's going to be...
	It's never going to be nothing.
	It's going to be a do-nothing administration.
	They've got no money.
	He's going to print up a trillion.
	That's the key.
	If it's a feel-good administration, I think it's going to give the stock market a boost and people will get back to work.
	No one's going to get back to work.
	Are you kidding me?
	There's no jobs, but you'll feel good about it.
	This guy is great.
	I like that Obama guy.
	Yeah, at least he's trying to change something.
	He's changing and he's hoping.
	Changing and hoping and hoping and changing.
	That's about it.
	Savings accounts now get 0.1% interest in the United Kingdom.
	The interest is now lower than inflation.
	Yeah.
	That's, I don't know.
	What can I say?
	And the bank, you know, a lot of people have tracker mortgages.
	Do they have that in the States, tracker mortgages?
	I've never heard of it.
	Oh, and in the United Kingdom, and a lot of people in lower housing have them.
	So it tracks to, as an example, LIBOR, the London Interbank Overnight Rate.
	Oh, no, that's an adjustable, we call it.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, here they call it a tracker.
	And of course, those people's mortgages have been going down.
	Yeah, but that's what we've had.
	We've had adjustables the whole time.
	It's just laughable.
	Oh, let's refinance.
	And then they get fixed and it still keeps going down.
	I'm thinking, you know, it's never going to stop going down.
	Well, it stops now because the banks in the United Kingdom have said, oh, those of you with tracker mortgages, this is it.
	It's not going any lower.
	Even if the rate goes down, your mortgage will not go down.
	Well, that's not what it says in the contracts.
	It's not going to work here.
	Yeah, but they're forcing that.
	They're absolutely forcing it.
	They can force whatever they want.
	They're going to get their ass sued, and if it's in the United States, they pull a stunt like that.
	We don't put up with that crap you guys put up with.
	Oh, you mean like outsourcing the big email telephone trap database to a private company?
	You mean stuff like that?
	Stuff like that.
	We don't put up with it.
	What is the world coming to?
	Why do people...
	You know, I was talking to the movers.
	With this move, we had like 15 guys around us for a total of four or five days, packing, moving, unpacking.
	Did they talk like this?
	Yeah, well, they're all like Cockney guys, one or two from the north.
	And I asked them all kind of the same question.
	I said, hey, you know, when did you guys just stop taking it up the ass?
	And I say, well, you know, we're getting pretty close here.
	I said, what, you tell me that I'm going to see pitchforks and torches in the street?
	He said, you know...
	Angry mob.
	I said, the guy said, I believe within a year that's going to happen.
	And he said, I'm taking all my lorries up to Whitehall.
	He said, I'm going to go block this shit off.
	So it's brewing.
	There's something going on.
	The French would have done it a year ago.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, the French did do it a year ago.
	And the year before.
	And the year before that.
	Yeah, all the good it's done them.
	But at least they feel good about it.
	And people always know that the French can, you know, screw up the whole place really fast.
	Hey, would you like to know the top Chateauneufs from 2007?
	The top Chateauneuf de Pop?
	Yeah.
	Why?
	Because they're announced in the Financial Times.
	Oh, by Jancis?
	Yeah, Jancis Robinson.
	Yeah.
	She's no good?
	No, she's outstanding.
	She's a little full of herself, but she's got a good palate, more or less.
	I mean, I don't think she's more of a book writer than she is a professional taster.
	She's become the big expert because she had this best-selling...
	Killer book, by the way.
	I think it's the Encyclopedia of Wines or something like that.
	It's a big Oxford Press thing.
	Everyone should own a copy.
	And so there's my plug for her.
	She has the perfect face for radio.
	She's a British-looking woman.
	She's pretty harsh-looking.
	Oh, man.
	She's a British-looking girl.
	And...
	Lively.
	And she's smart.
	And she's an academic.
	And she, you know, knows her stuff.
	But I don't know that her wine palate, per se, is as good as some of the...
	Well, I have to be honest about it.
	It's not as good as some of the real pros out there.
	But she does, you know, get things that plug things like Chateauneuf-de-Pape, which has become an overpriced, trendy wine.
	It's just...
	Well, here's what she's plugging.
	She's plugging Perrin.
	I'm sure it's overpriced.
	Well, there's no prices.
	Perrin.
	Hommage à Jacques Perrin.
	Yeah.
	Chateau de Beaucastel.
	Yeah, well, that's a standard.
	Stéphane Védeau.
	Yeah, I've never heard of that one.
	La Ferme du Mont.
	Yeah.
	Claude de Pop, of course.
	Dôme la Barouche.
	La Barouche.
	Dom de la Charbonnière?
	Yeah, okay, whatever.
	Not that I don't like talking about wine.
	It's just a list of Chateauneuf-du-Pape's is not the most interesting thing in the world.
	Oh man, I can't wait until you come over here.
	I think it's because Parker picked up on it because he was trying to get some more market share.
	So he had one of his minions get into Chateauneuf-du-Pape and start ranking them.
	Now you see these Chateauneuf-du-Pape's for...
	The $100 is ridiculous.
	I think it's an overrated wine.
	I like them, by the way.
	I think they're really tasty.
	There's a sameness to them that doesn't make them that interesting.
	I'm sure someone's going, oh, that's a bull.
	No, there is.
	There's a sameness.
	They taste very similar.
	It tastes like Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which they're supposed to, but the variation between the $95.150 Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a $24 Chateauneuf-du-Pape is minimal, right?
	It's not profound.
	Right.
	Hey, I'm coming out at the end of the month, dude, so you better line something up.
	So I went to Shea Spencer the other day.
	I was sorely disappointed.
	No, surely you just...
	No, I think they lost their chef or something because, I mean, this wasn't anything.
	I mean, this was like, what are you doing?
	So that's off the list.
	Really?
	Wow.
	Yeah, very much of a...
	Did you ask them?
	Did you inquire what was going on?
	I will inquire because one of the girls that works there also works at Fringal.
	And when I'm over at Fringal, I'll probably grill her.
	She says Ferengal has a new chef that may have stabilized the cuisine there, so we have to go check it out.
	You know, they've gone through a bunch of guys.
	We'll have to go back.
	Well, I'm going to be out for, you know, was it four or five days maybe, so we should probably try a couple different places.
	Yeah, we should.
	Well, let's plan at least two dinners because it'll be a while before I'm back.
	All right, there's probably a couple of places.
	Oh, yeah, you know what's happening now in San Francisco is these...
	There's a bunch of these...
	I don't know where they got this one from, but I think there's at least three of them.
	Extremely trendy Peruvian restaurants.
	High-tech, New York-style decor.
	Some sort of supposed Peruvian cuisine.
	I've been to Peru.
	I don't know what they're talking about.
	But the...
	But they're extremely, and these are very talented guys, you know, they're super chefs from Peru that have been trained in Paris or something like that.
	So we should probably get two of those and we can do a thematic thing with this Peruvian thing going on.
	What is a typical traditional Peruvian dish?
	Well, as far as I can tell, when I was in Peru, I mean, I was taken to what the Peruvians really eat.
	But if you go into the mountains or you go into the middle of nowhere, you know, the peaks of the Andes and go to some villages, you know, they eat a very pretty moderate meal of, you know, just meat and potatoes, literally.
	I mean, they have 10,000 kinds of potatoes they grow.
	It's where potatoes came from.
	So there's a lot of potatoes.
	If there's not a lot of potatoes in the dish, then you know it's not Peruvian.
	But there's a thing that I ran into that they said, oh, this is what the Peruvians like the best is my guy taking me around.
	And it's a thing called Chifa.
	And it's C-H-I-F-A. And you look at it, and if you just squint your eyes a little bit, it says China.
	And it is in a font that is always that Chinatown font.
	If you say Chinatown font.
	It's an audible font, clearly.
	So it's a Chinatown font, and the food, you go in and you have it, it's kind of a, some sort of a faux Chinese food, chifa, and it is, from what I can tell, it's almost a dead-on copy of a much meatier version with potatoes often, which you don't get in Chinese food ever, but of chop sui, which was an invention of, I thought chop suey was an American invention.
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
	It's an invention from America.
	But it seems to me that the idea that somehow chop suey developed independently in...
	Peru, from whatever the Chinese food was, because, you know, chop suey evolved, I believe, I mean, if you think about it logically, and it's hard to get the history of chop suey, but chop suey, I think, evolved when Chinese from the 1860s came over here to build the railroads, and they brought their cuisine with them, and at some point, they couldn't get the ingredients.
	I mean, you know, they didn't grow any of this stuff, so they, kind of a mock Chinese food.
	I think I've made chop suey two or three times over the last ten years for the family as a joke.
	Oh, we're having chop suey.
	It's very tasty.
	It's not bad, but it's not something you'd ever have in China.
	You just couldn't find it there.
	So anyway, this chifa, as soon as I had it, I'd go, this is chop suey for God's sake.
	And these Peruvians are loving it.
	So I don't know what these restaurants are about, but it's obviously not about chifa.
	You are familiar with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, he used to be a busboy turned chef.
	And now a very successful chef.
	Yeah, huge.
	A while ago, and he's come back with a retort while I bring it up, he said, British people...
	Are drunks with diets worse than those found in the poorest slums of Soweto?
	Soweto.
	Yeah.
	And so what was wrong with that?
	Are you kidding me?
	People went apeshit.
	And his retort is, the people I'm telling you about have huge TV sets, a lot bigger than mine.
	They have state-of-the-art mobile phones, cars.
	They go and get drunk in pubs at the weekend.
	Their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves.
	I found the cooking of the inhabitants of the slum in Soweto in South Africa a lot more diverse than ours.
	It's true.
	I'm going to be harsh, but I think a lot of English people's food lacks heart.
	It's bland.
	Yeah, it's spot on.
	He nailed it.
	Yeah, he nailed it.
	You know, I've never heard that about British food being bland, huh?
	Let me write this down.
	We got a great restaurant around the corner.
	In fact, there's a number of very, very good restaurants.
	And we went to a place called Grafton House last night.
	It's in walking distance.
	Fantastic.
	Beautiful place.
	You know, really, it's new.
	Is it ranked in the Michelin book?
	Who owns it?
	Who's the owner?
	I don't know.
	Because there's about five or six of these superstar, you know...
	I'll find out.
	I'll find out.
	What's his name?
	Gordon Ramsay.
	Ramsay.
	Gordon Ramsay type operations.
	You know Gordon Ramsay is in deep shit.
	Certainly you've heard about that, right?
	No, I know nothing.
	Oh, turns out he was cheating on his wife with another woman for five years.
	Oh, that's not good.
	No, it's bad times.
	He's being ripped apart because, you know, you know how he is, Mr.
	Family Man.
	I'm working so hard and I'm saving the restaurant industry, restaurant by restaurant.
	So the papers just love this.
	Oh, yeah, the papers there.
	Picture evidence.
	Oh, man.
	Because he's so full of himself.
	I mean, he's like, you know, the big shot, you know, and he's cussing everybody out for being a dud or being, you know, a bad person or whatever.
	But this is show business, people.
	This is how it works.
	You go up, you go down.
	It's a roller coaster.
	That's just the way.
	You stay in it long enough, you're going to get slammed down, and then if you can hang in long enough down at the bottom, you can move back up.
	That's the way it works.
	Celebrity Big Brother has started again, John.
	Oh, great.
	Would you like to know who's in the house?
	You don't have to watch it.
	I love watching it because Celebrity Big Brother I'm very interested in because I want to know what LaToya Jackson really is like.
	And she's in the house?
	Because it's interesting.
	So who's in the Big Brother house?
	Okay.
	In the Big Brother house...
	I had it here.
	Hold on.
	How come I can't find it?
	Well, Latoya Jackson, Coolio...
	He's a rapper...
	A couple of girl band singers.
	Oh, Mini-Me, Vern Troyer.
	Wow, that's funny.
	At least there's humor there.
	He was already hammered last night.
	Yeah, I'm sure he is.
	Have you heard of his porn tape?
	No, I don't even want to think about it.
	I don't want to ever see.
	I'll burn you a DVD. No worries.
	No, I'll just throw it out.
	I won't look at it.
	I'll put something else on.
	I'll say, Ed, this is a documentary you've got to watch.
	No, you've given it away now, so it's not going to work.
	He had a girlfriend.
	They were really in love.
	There's a lot of girls that are kinky.
	But then he cheated on her.
	Let's see.
	Ex-Sugar Babe, Mutaya Buena.
	Sounds like a real name to me.
	Tina Malone, best known for playing Mo in Brookside.
	Oh, that's a UK show.
	Ben Adams of the boy band A1. Coolio, of course, Gangsta's Paradise.
	Lucy Pinder, a conservative-supported model who hates, quote, bleeding-heart liberals.
	That would be interesting.
	Oh, yeah.
	That would be fun.
	But Latoya Jackson is just fascinating to look at her face.
	I can look at her for hours.
	It's like, man, what did she do to it?
	Her nose is all chopped and reshaped.
	I love it.
	She definitely is what Michael wanted to do, but I guess they used different doctors.
	I think he has a whole host of doctors that he's used.
	Did you hear the story that he's down and out and broke?
	I don't buy that.
	I don't buy that at all.
	It doesn't make sense to me.
	No, I don't buy that.
	Look, he definitely has issues.
	He was in Dubai for a number of years, and he's all around.
	And he's like, guess what?
	He's a normal guy.
	He goes to normal places and stays with normal people.
	And then all of a sudden, oh, he's living in a piece of shit house.
	I don't know, man.
	Just on royalties alone of the stuff that he's done, ASCAP, BMI, the guy, he'll never have to work a day in his life ever again.
	And I think if you have such a huge financial empire, you know, stuff like Neverland Ranch, you know, I was like, ah, fuck it.
	You know, I got to deal with that.
	I got to, you know, whatever the mortgages do or whatever the issue is.
	You know, people turn that into weird stories.
	So I don't buy it.
	I don't buy it.
	On the other hand, I heard Marla Maples is just living in some apartment in Phoenix.
	Yeah, isn't she shacked up with Fergie?
	Was that right?
	No, but I put her at the same level.
	Something like that.
	The former duchess.
	Not Fergie the singer.
	No, no.
	Fergie, formerly known as the Duchess of York.
	Yeah, where is she now?
	Well, she did Jenny Craig for a while.
	Yeah, that didn't work out.
	There was a very successful documentary that they did here on Channel 4, I think, or maybe it was ITV, and it was like a reality show of her at home.
	It was off the scale, 7-8 million viewers, which is big for the UK. So I'm sure she's just doing gigs, getting money, getting paid.
	When I first saw her, when she first came over to the States to settle in, she still had that British upper class kind of air, which is a disdainful kind of understated quality.
	Hard to put your finger on.
	I mean, you can identify if you know what to look for, but I would think she put people off.
	Yeah.
	And I wonder if that's changing at all because I even saw it coming through when she was doing the Jenny Craig thing.
	I don't think people care.
	Maybe.
	No, they don't.
	Maybe she'll back off of it.
	I mean, it's a style of interpersonal relationship.
	No, I think people just don't care about her.
	It's like, oh, whatever.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I said, well, that's probably true.
	Two more things I just want to touch on briefly with you.
	The big news here that no one of course is really talking about is Russia has once again, they do it every winter, turned off the supply of gas to the Ukraine.
	The minute it goes below freezing.
	Every winter, we must do this.
	Yeah, it's like, oh, let's mess with those people again.
	Now, of course, all of Europe's gas that comes from Russia flows through the Ukraine, through that pipeline.
	And already, I've read reports that there's 25% less coming in, so it's going to send prices skyrocketing.
	Europe is, rightly so, I think, worried about About these events, because we're pretty dependent upon what comes out of Russia to heat the homes in the winter.
	Well, that's what happens when you create a dependency relationship.
	And I thought that senators were elected.
	That's pretty stupid, I guess, huh?
	They are elected.
	Well then, how come not only Obama's Senate seat is being given away, and why is Hillary's Senate seat being given away?
	Don't those people have to be elected to come in?
	Why does the mayor or governor or whoever it is...
	That's the convenience of the states.
	The states have control over those seats, and they're the ones who set up the elections, and if there's a situation where they don't have representation, they don't have time for an election, the governor can appoint a senator and send them to Congress.
	It happens all the time.
	Well, that sucks.
	Why does it suck?
	Do you have to re-elect the guy?
	No, no.
	Does New York really need Caroline Kennedy as senator?
	I don't get the Caroline Kennedy thing either.
	Oh, I do.
	Alright, tell me.
	She, of course, she was a big Obama suck-up.
	She's going to have front row seat at the inauguration and she'll be at all the right balls.
	And she, of course, lobbied that Ted would show up and endorse Obama.
	It could be a quid pro quo.
	A total quid pro quo.
	In fact, Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg said, the idea that we would pass up appointing someone to the Senate who was both a friend and a critical supporter of Barack Obama is political malpractice.
	Yeah, I heard that.
	Bloomberg's an asshole.
	Well, he got himself extended, didn't he?
	Yeah, as soon as he did, he screwed the public.
	It's unbelievable.
	It's hilarious, actually.
	You know, it's almost like Lucy and the football.
	What did he do?
	How did he screw the public?
	Well, he cracked out.
	He immediately got back in the office.
	He's going to raise taxes.
	He's going to do this.
	He's going to do that.
	He's going to just stick it to him after making all these kind of vague promises that he wasn't going to do anything like that.
	The state of New York is in serious, serious, serious trouble.
	They're going to go broke.
	They have 80 new taxes, I think.
	In New York.
	80.
	You know, the thing a lot of people don't realize who don't live in New York is the fact that there's an income tax.
	The city has an income tax, the state has an income tax, and the federal government has an income tax.
	So you're taxed three times if you live in Manhattan.
	And when I moved...
	And I think, by the way, that city income tax is pretty high.
	I'm not sure what it is, but I'm sure someone could tell us.
	But it's, you know, it's non-trivial.
	After we moved back from the States, I had a mailing address with an assistant that I used to work with, and she lived in New York, so I just used her New York mailing address for stuff.
	And I got a $2 million tax bill from the city of New York.
	Wow.
	They said, hey, you owe us $2 million.
	Pay now and then we'll assess how much it was later on.
	You know, that was a tough little nut to crack there because those guys are serious.
	And they got guns.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it was, you know, it's very difficult to get them off your back and to say, well, listen, I never actually lived there.
	Well, prove it.
	And by the way, pay us the two million now.
	I'm like, no.
	Yeah, well, that scam is a total scam.
	You don't have to, you know, tell them to screw themselves.
	You're not paying them anything.
	Oh, well, they have enormous powers, John.
	They can dock your pay.
	They can do all kinds of stuff.
	They can't dock your pay.
	You're in England.
	If it's leaving the United States, it can.
	It's coming from California.
	I don't see how they can attach it.
	I think it'd be a lot of trouble.
	I don't think it's easy.
	But whatever the case is, you got out of it.
	Yeah, no, I got out of it.
	After $10,000, $15,000 in legal fees, sure.
	That's the whole scam right there.
	That's disgusting.
	It always seems to happen with me.
	I'm on the list.
	Horowitz thinks that people should consider shorting municipal bonds from New York State.
	Oh, hell yeah.
	How about the municipal bond market?
	This advice is too late, actually, because it just collapsed.
	I think they...
	Well, it wasn't given yesterday.
	It was some time ago.
	Okay.
	Well, no, but yesterday or the day before, I read on Bloomberg that the muni bonds had collapsed.
	They were down like 12% or some outrageous number, which is big in bond land.
	That's ridiculous.
	I mean, bonds are supposed to be the best and stablest form of investment.
	They haven't been a stable or a good form of investment since I was a kid.
	Yeah.
	Not anymore.
	So here's what New York will do.
	And Forbes wrote about this.
	Let me bring up that article.
	States consider selling off roads and parks.
	Check it out.
	Minnesota is deep in the hole.
	We paid for this with our taxpayers' money, and now you're going to sell it to somebody?
	Yeah, check it out, dude.
	Check it out.
	Minnesota.
	The state still owns a premier golf resort, a sprawling amateur sports complex, a big airport, a major zoo, and land holdings the size of the Central American country of Belize.
	And they're selling it all.
	It's for sale.
	Come on in.
	Well, maybe they shouldn't have owned it in the first place.
	I don't know.
	The Tappan Zee Bridge?
	The Tappan Zee Bridge?
	That's outrageous.
	So you buy the bridge and put up a toll booth?
	You can literally say...
	It's like going back to feudal times.
	No, but you can literally say, I got a bridge for you.
	I got a bridge for sale.
	Tappan Zee Bridge.
	So you buy the bridge, you put up a toll booth, and you charge five bucks a head to go across it.
	You don't have to pay me.
	You can go around.
	Democratic Governor David Patterson appointed a commission to look into leasing state assets in New York, including the Tappan Zee Bridge, the lottery, well, the lottery is always a good one, golf courses, toll roads, parks, and beaches.
	Recommendations expected next month.
	This is crazy.
	So they're selling off the whole state.
	Why can't we get...
	To the highest bidder.
	Yeah, why don't we just sell the whole thing in one go?
	Can we just bundle it up?
	Sell it to the Arabs.
	Yeah.
	They got the money.
	Let someone be king of New York.
	Let's bring in the Dubai money.
	Buy up New York State and let them run the place.
	Let them move over here.
	There's two cot over there and the other thing.
	They might as well just take over.
	The state of New York should be all Arab.
	Isn't that outrageous?
	And then they can have the little, kind of a Jewish stronghold.
	Yay!
	Yeah, there you go.
	Which actually represents Israel because it's got a similar shape.
	And so you'd have a recreation for the amusement of everybody of the Middle East crisis in New York State so we can watch it locally.
	And check it out.
	And then we have all these cameras around New York City and we can do a reality show.
	That's what the cameras are good for.
	Yeah.
	And you can just follow random storylines, random people.
	It would be pretty cool.
	So anyway, New York's got problems.
	But, you know, they're mismanaged.
	What do you expect?
	Yeah, they've used all the pension funds.
	It's a nasty business.
	Nasty, nasty business.
	And you got anything else?
	No, I think we hit most of the important stuff, I think.
	I'm sure somebody wrote in and said, hey, why don't you talk about this?
	And we didn't do it.
	What about our we didn't get our call-ins?
	Well, no, because I have to configure the router.
	I have to get the voice.
	Here's one crazy thing.
	With Skype on the Mac, it may be different on Windows.
	When you call someone, or you have a call established, then you can toggle the keypad so you can enter in dial tones.
	Let me see.
	Yeah, toggle dial pad.
	So I could, hopefully, this won't break anything.
	Right.
	So I can do that on this call.
	So then if I want to call into the conference...
	What do you toggle, by the way?
	What is the key?
	There's a little drop-down menu on your call window.
	It says more, and down below it says toggle dial pad.
	Let me see.
	You're on Mac or Windows?
	I'm on Windows.
	Okay, I get more, and it says play games, crazy talk, avatar.
	I don't have any of that good stuff.
	Wait, on the window itself?
	Where it says more.
	Let's play Chinese checkers.
	You have to play Chinese checkers, but I can't obviously dial anything.
	Well, anyway, the crazy thing is...
	So what I wanted to do is I wanted to start...
	Wait a minute.
	You can send a fax.
	I didn't know that.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	I'm sorry.
	No, it's all right.
	I wanted to...
	So you can't connect two calls together.
	You can't say, okay, I have call one here, call two there.
	I want to conference them.
	You have to call...
	You have to set up a conference and call both numbers at the same time, which it does perfectly.
	So I can call you and I could call into the conference set up Except then, the conference setup is saying, okay, please do your dial tones for your passcode, but there's no toggle to dial pad, at least not on the Mac client.
	So you can't do it.
	So that's why I set up a different VoIP client, which, as I just said, doesn't work.
	But it's crazy that you can't do that in Skype.
	I can't do it at all, except I can play Chinese checkers.
	So next week, I'll have it sorted out.
	Skypeify Outlook with Skylook.
	Woo!
	I wonder what that is.
	That sounds hot.
	Can you play Chinese Checkers with me?
	Do I have to do something?
	Let's see.
	It doesn't open Chinese Checkers.
	It opens up the Skype Extras Manager.
	And then it has Chinese Checkers.
	We'll click to open the plug-in.
	Click to see all available commands.
	No, you're going to break the connection, I'm sure.
	Recommend to a friend.
	I don't know if I can.
	I think it's going to blow up.
	I don't trust it.
	Don't do it.
	All right, last one.
	From Canada.
	This is in my never-ending search to understand carbon credits.
	Oh, so you actually prepared for the show this week?
	I always prepare for the show.
	Okay.
	You usually just don't care about what I have to say.
	I'm sorry, what did you say?
	Grow your own carbon credits.
	Hey, you know, I'm thinking about this.
	I was talking to this with my son, Eric, and it was like...
	Who does Channel Dvorak, by the way, for me.
	And he did Channel Curry for you.
	Yeah, oh no, and I wanted to thank him last week.
	I forgot about that.
	We have to thank Bubba, too, for putting up the show notes.
	Yes.
	He says he will not be a call screener, so we can forget that.
	ChannelCurry.com, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so it's a cool page.
	It has all of my feeds.
	He's got some other gimmick he wants to do, but he has to explain it to you.
	Okay.
	A couple of them, actually, including having your head with a screen on the forehead.
	Oh, cool.
	He added something.
	He's got Mevio Today in there.
	Cool.
	And what is this?
	Now, there's a video window all of a sudden on ChannelCurry.com.
	Yeah.
	It's a good place to centralize things.
	Anyway...
	And it has my recent Twitter tweets.
	The United States Navy responsible for...
	Okay, I see what he did.
	Cool.
	And it has one big RSS for all of that, so it has a combined feed as well.
	That's really cool.
	Yeah, he's actually got the combined RSS thing down to a fine art.
	Yeah, that's fantastic.
	Did he use my checkout code?
	Your checkout code.
	At GoDaddy for the domain name?
	I don't know.
	I doubt it.
	Do that on your own time.
	So back to Canada.
	Yeah.
	Some prairie farmers are looking to the future where they can make money selling carbon credits.
	That brings me back to the point I was going to make.
	Yes.
	We need to start a business where we just buy.
	There's a lot of areas in Washington State where they've clear cut.
	And they just leave it.
	They clear cut an area and there's a little bald spot on the side of a mountain.
	And then it's just a bunch of crap after that.
	And then they just abandon it.
	So you buy a few acres, you rip all the logs down and you leave.
	And you can probably pick this acreage up pretty cheaply, I'm thinking.
	And then you plant trees.
	And you get carbon credits for that.
	So you set up shop, and then you collect all these carbon credits, and you have to plant like 50 trees.
	And so you send somebody up there, and you plant 50 trees.
	And there's room for probably 1,000 trees to 10,000 trees?
	I don't know.
	Well, let's read through this for a second.
	Let's just read.
	The farmers get credits to follow certain farming practices, like zero-till, which involves seeding without plying up the fields, The result is that the crops absorb carbon dioxide and the carbon stays fixed in the soil.
	Man, what is all this?
	I'm not buying it.
	People till for a reason.
	Yeah, they lease the credits from the farmers paying $2.38 to $5.43 per acre.
	Hmm.
	$5 an acre?
	Yeah.
	That doesn't seem like a lot of money.
	It doesn't seem like a very minute amount, actually.
	Yeah.
	If you have 100 acres, you get 500 bucks.
	Well, I guess if you had 10,000 acres, it's better than poking an eye with a sharp stick, but there's got to be some way of getting in on this.
	Because people do it.
	If you watch the Green Channel, I was watching this crappy Green Channel.
	And I'm always, I gravitate toward this stuff.
	Like, it's horrible.
	Because I'm, it's like watching a car wreck.
	It's a thin line between love and hate, John.
	In slow motion.
	So anyway, so they're going on, and this guy's on there, he's at Tom, whatever his name is, the guy who does Funniest Home Videos, he does his dinner party.
	Tom Bergeron's dinner party.
	And they have a bunch of people that gather around, and they're all green nut balls, and they go on and on about one thing or another, and how they really like, how they like to have their carrots cooked.
	And so the show goes on and pretty soon they get into this kind of like insightful discussion as it were.
	And this one guy chimes and he says, you know, I was buying my airline ticket and then on the website there was an option.
	Do I want to offset my carbon credit thing?
	And he says I did it and it cost me like for my ticket to New York, it cost me $6 to offset the carbon credit and I felt really good about it.
	And it was painless.
	I'm thinking, painless?
	They just took six dollars from what?
	You don't know.
	And where does it go?
	What do they do with that six dollars?
	Well, I think they probably do what I'm thinking, which is they stick a tree in the dirt.
	Untilled soil.
	And untilled soil.
	And if that, I mean, who knows?
	They plant a seed.
	They plant one seed.
	It's a $6 seed.
	That's the business we should be in.
	Why don't you plant your own seed?
	No, why don't we just find out a place that, you know, so Canada clearly is not worth it.
	But I'm sure there's going to be other places.
	There's got to be tons of scams we can get in on.
	It's not a scam, Adam.
	It's not a scam.
	We're saving the earth.
	It's the first time you've used my name on this show.
	Well, beware.
	So anyway, you're right.
	We need to find some.
	But I'm thinking, I think planting trees has to be done anyway.
	You might as well get a carbon credit for it.
	What is a tree worth in carbon credit dollars?
	Let's ask Google.
	What is a tree worth in carbon credit dollars?
	And what about this for an idea?
	You buy one of those Christmas tree farms and then you close it.
	Yeah.
	So people can't chop down the tree.
	Yeah, but I bet you it costs a lot of money.
	Then you resell it as a carbon credit.
	I'm just going to be on the lookout for carbon credits everywhere.
	What is a carbon?
	Oh, this is interesting.
	Six trees.
	It's $300?
	What?
	Wait a minute.
	That doesn't make sense.
	Hold on.
	Wow, what is this?
	This is an interesting site.
	Its true definition is the ESO, or Exchange Soil Offset, or more popularly...
	Yeah, hold on.
	Oh, this is good information.
	They talk about...
	Oh, man, hold on, you'll like this.
	I think Gore's on to something here.
	Yeah, of course he is.
	Today is the first day of new currency that is very much like the real carbon credit.
	Note the word currency.
	The Save the Planet carbon credit is officially launched this day, September 1st, 2005, to a less than rapturous welcome from all who use her.
	Let's call them credits because in science fiction films, credits are the currency of the future anyway.
	Yeah, no shit.
	The 20-credit note would be entitled the holder to drive for 20 weeks at current technology levels.
	I believe this is really where we're going.
	I don't know.
	You see this picture of the 20-carbon credit note?
	They've got a note here with a queen on it.
	This is a New Zealand site, and they have a 20-credit carbon credit, which is probably what the thing would look like, except for the watermark that says save the planet.
	And I like the power lines.
	You like the little pylons there?
	It's hilarious.
	I'll blog it for anybody.
	And there's a little map there of what looks like Busch Gardens.
	That's funny.
	Is this for real?
	Oh, look at the back.
	The back has two windmills, two wind turbines.
	Pay the bearer 20 weeks driving in return for 20 carbon credits.
	Where did you get the back?
	I don't see the back.
	Scroll down.
	According to Tufts, an average 25-year-old maple tree absorbs 1.1 kilo of CO2 per year.
	Over 25 years, that's 27.5 kilos, means that 36 trees are needed to absorb one ton of CO2, and with each tree costing $50, each carbon credit should cost at least 50 times 36 trees is $1,800.
	Otherwise, there is more value in felling the trees.
	Using these trees to give estimates to their carbon value gives very expensive carbon credit prices.
	Oh, man.
	This warrants some investigation, actually.
	I think so.
	It's going to take a little bit.
	Well, get used to it.
	I'm going to carry a couple of these around on my wall.
	I'm going to print them and cut them out.
	There's not a lot of people working in manufacturing.
	You know, you put a shack up on about 500 acres in the Washington State Mountains that you own that you pick up cheap or you lease.
	And you put a shack up there and put some guy in there with one of those little shovels that got a little twisting.
	You poke a hole in the ground and you twist and you pull out a kind of a cork pops out of dirt.
	And you stick a tree in there.
	And this will be this guy's job.
	Instead of working at a factory and making products.
	And, you know, you can pay him.
	So you have a computer up there and you send him that many carbon credits and he has to plant the trees and you have an inspector go up there so it's official.
	Make sure he's actually doing it.
	You know what?
	I think for 2009, that should be our task.
	We need to find a carbon offset based business that we can sell to our listeners.
	Well, or whoever.
	Right.
	Well, no, we'll do that with...
	Oh, can't we do that with t-shirts?
	It's like we'll attach a carbon credit to it somehow?
	Carbon credit.
	We could.
	Yeah, of course we could.
	That would be a good gimmick.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	One carbon credit t-shirt.
	So we'd have to...
	Well, actually, if the trees are what they are, we can probably plant one tree in my backyard and then attach that to the t-shirts, and that would probably make up for all the t-shirts we're going to sell them.
	Oops, sorry about that.
	Okay.
	All right, enough frivolity.
	Yes, indeed.
	An hour and a half.
	An hour and 42.
	How do we get away with it?
	A lot of it was probably at the beginning when we were trying to set up.
	Not really.
	So next week we'll try some phone calls.
	And then I'll be ready to do it with you every single day, John.
	There you go.
	We should just go live, do an hour, take some calls, and then stop.
	Either that or I'm going to do it by myself with a daily source code.
	I might do two shows a day.
	You could.
	You've got nothing but gab in you.
	The gift of gab.
	Coming to you from Gitmo Nation East in the United Kingdom, I'm Adam Curry.
	I'm John C. Dvorak here in Silicon Valley North, also known as Gitmo Nation West.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	I said that twice.

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