Clinging to the life raft of sanity by a single strand of reality.
It's Thursday, April 2nd, 2009.
This is No Agenda.
Burrow deep beneath the southwest quadrant of London in the Crackpot Command Center in Gitmo Nation East.
I'm Adam Curry.
And looking left, looking right, looking up, looking down in northern Silicon Valley.
Still looking.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Hey, everybody.
Rockin'.
I love it when a show starts off like that.
So you write us some little ditty at the beginning of this thing, I notice.
The opening, you mean?
Yeah.
You've only noticed that now after 84 episodes?
It's always a little different, so I'm starting to notice it.
Okay.
You're an evil man.
What was this one?
It was something about...
That is the definition of buzzkill, my friend.
The stream of reality or string of reality.
I thought it was creative.
Thank you.
You should listen to the show once in a while.
Or maybe even when I'm talking, you might consider...
You know, your wife is so right.
You are just rude.
I'm not rude in the least.
But I don't take it personally.
I'm funny.
I don't take it personally.
Yes.
Yes, you are.
Good morning, sir.
So...
So I understand from looking at, well, not from looking at American news so much, but give us a rundown on the riots that appear to be taking place where they turned off all the cameras in this area of London because they didn't want to show the cops beating people up or they didn't want to show the rioters taking over.
They just didn't want to show something.
So we have the G20 taking place in town yesterday and today, and I wouldn't say riots so much as protests started taking place.
Just to your point about the CCTV cameras being shut down, the London, and this is hundreds of thousands of cameras that were turned off, but it was because of a legal ruling.
Did you catch any of that?
Yeah, something about that resolution was too low.
No, no, no.
Ah, interesting.
No one said the resolution was too low.
It says the CCTV network does not fully meet the resolution standards required.
It's very possible they're too high resolution.
They don't want too much on the video cameras.
You need to have a little bit of, you know, grainy look.
Otherwise, it doesn't look good on television.
Oh, they never made it clear whether it's too high or too low?
It's just not right?
Yeah, the quote is, the CCTV network does not fully meet the resolution standards required.
Huh.
You know, it's not that maybe too high.
It doesn't sound right.
Well, I've been in legal proceedings, a friend of mine, and they showed CCTV footage in front of his club.
Dude, this is pan, zoom, full color.
I mean, this is not like you're frame by frame.
It's full motion video with audio.
And they use that in court cases.
Audio?
Yeah, audio, video, everything.
You got a shotgun mic on that thing or something?
It must be...
It's definitely directional, but it works.
So the camera at my friend's club is across the street.
And they just...
And they show it in the courtroom.
Just zooming right in.
That's crazy.
Wow.
Yeah.
Gitmo Nation, baby.
It's really bad.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah, so we have...
Twenty-two pairs of leaders in town.
Of course, the prime ministers and presidents, as well as financial ministers or secretaries of treasury or central bankers.
Basically, the whole New World Order has congealed on the city of London over in Docklands, actually.
So it's not like there's any problems here.
Although we have been hearing the helicopters for the past 48 hours pretty much nonstop.
And yesterday, the protest started.
It was fascinating, of course, to follow this on Twitter, because then it really comes through almost like news.
You want to follow the hashtag G20 and G20 Rally.
Yeah, you can kind of get a good idea of what's going on.
Really, I would say riots, no.
First of all, it was almost a festive mood.
People were dressed up as kind of like zombie bankers, a lot of V for Vendetta masks floating around, some great pictures.
The photographic material coming through on TwitPic, etc., is just awesome.
There's some good links in the show notes for today's program.
And they kind of coordinated.
They wanted to do the four horsemen of the apocalypse, so they had four different parades, if you will, all coming together in the City of London, in the financial district.
And what the cops did is they kind of trapped them all in.
Imagine an intersection, four horsemen of the apocalypse trying to meet in the middle, and the cops just pretty much surrounded him and just made him stay there and hang out for a while.
They did trash RBS Bank, broke in, finally busted through a window, and took some computers and dumb shit like that, and a couple people got beat up.
I'd have to say the police were reasonably tame, actually.
Some guy died.
Yeah, well, shit happens.
But it wasn't because he was beat up.
I don't think.
I don't think.
The way the media was playing it, the BBC seemed to have it looking like an out-and-out, all-hells-breaking, loose riot.
No, it's definitely not.
Okay, but that's kind of the way the American media had it, especially the PBS. I have to say, Barack Obama said it...
Best.
And I do have some sound clips for later if you want to listen to him.
He did a press conference with Gordon Brown.
And he said, look, these summits are, the people usually aren't that compelling to look at.
He's got a chuckle.
He says the language is dry, so there's always a bit of drama being injected.
Not that he was referring to the BBC or America showing this, oh, protests and horrible.
How many protesters do you think there were?
In total?
PBS says 4,000.
Oh, no, more than that.
That's what I was thinking.
Much, much more.
No, I'd say closer to 40,000 would be accurate for yesterday.
I'm not quite sure today.
I did hear on the No Agenda stream from the Real News that they had torched the Bank of England.
And I don't even have to go look at the video to know that someone lit a fire somewhere.
The media is totally, totally looking for it to be pandemonium, but it's really just not.
And I think it's because there are multiple groups.
No one's really...
Protesting for the same thing.
We've got the climate campers.
So they come in and they pitch tents in the middle of the street.
And they want better climate change protections.
Then you have a lot of people saying capitalism is dead, so we're against capitalism.
And then others are still walking with the jobs, justice, climate stuff.
And there's some funny pictures.
The one I liked the most was consumers suck.
It's like, what are we protesting here?
Consumers suck.
I'm just not quite sure what it's supposed to be.
But I have to say that just overall very interesting things taking place news-wise.
The Guardian, the communist newspaper...
Has, amongst all of this, conveniently, with the G20 Summit, has come out and said, we're going full 24-7 on Twitter.
We're publishing all news on Twitter.
Furthermore, just showing that they really don't understand what the deal is with Twitter.
Wait, wait, wait.
I saw that article and thought it was an April Fool's gag.
You're telling me it's not?
You can't tell me that's for real.
That's an April Fool's gag?
No, they're publishing...
I don't know if they're going to publish the whole newspaper on Twitter.
That could be a gag.
But they're at the protest.
They're twittering their asses off.
Let me look for that article.
Maybe it was...
Maybe I got fooled.
You could have been, because I looked at that and went, this is bull.
I was very dubious about doing a Tech 5 yesterday.
In fact, I ran a...
Every year I do an April Fool's joke, and I was thinking I wasn't going to do one this year, but this year I did one by running last year's April 1st Tech 5.
What did you do?
Didn't you do something last year?
Yeah, I can't remember.
I've done so many of these gags that it's...
They're so successful, I can't remember.
No, some of them are very successful.
I'm in the Hoax Hall of Fame, as a matter of fact, with one of them.
We don't remember last year.
I'd have to think about it.
It wasn't anything great.
I mean, I haven't really done anything great for at least almost a decade.
In general, right?
Exactly.
I think the one last year was something I ran in the PC Magazine.
It was a funny column.
I can't remember which one it was.
But anyway, whatever it was, who cares?
But I was so dubious yesterday of all these articles I'm looking at.
I'm thinking, this could be an April Fool's joke.
This could be an April Fool's joke.
This could be an April Fool's.
I mean, every piece of news.
Let me read, like, here's one.
Did you see Google's?
Did you see Google's April Fool's joke?
Yeah, you know, I think their jokes are lame.
Which one did you see?
Autopilot?
The artificial intelligence thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, here's one.
Malicious virus.
This is about Conficker.
Malicious virus, quiet, but attack may be in the works.
That could be an April Fool's joke.
What happened with that?
What happened to the whole Conficker thing?
Wasn't that supposed to explode?
That thing, of course, is what was going to happen.
I think it's a dead worm that's just floating around.
I wonder if it's an acronym or what it stands for.
What does Conficker mean?
I've always thought that the name must give some clue about what it's supposed to be other than Con You and Ficker You.
I don't know.
There's just nothing that's ever come out about it.
And there's, you know, this April Fool's thing was the real, was an actual, there was a gag for you.
Here's a Wall Street Journal article, which I don't think was April Fool's, but in challenge to Microsoft PC makers test laptops running Google software, that could be an April Fool's joke.
Microsoft to enable private clouds in Windows Server.
That could be in April Fool's.
You know, it's interesting.
All of the mainstream news on any given day could be an April Fool's joke.
I'm telling you.
That's what I was thinking yesterday.
Now I'm worried you're sick because the problem with these news coverage operations like Google News, they run stuff that's three and four days old, three and four days later.
So I wonder how much of the April Fool's stuff is going to sneak into the mainstream.
Here's musicians Billy Bragg and Robin Gibb have joined forces with their record producer Pete Waterman, accusing Google of devaluing songwriters amid a row.
Oh, that's not an April Fool's joke.
Okay, what is that?
But it could be.
Well, it's all these guys who...
We call them Sir Cliffs.
Cliff Richard has been a big proponent over here because in Britain, your copyright, your ownership expires after 50 years.
So all these guys who had hits when they were teenagers, like Cliff, 15, 16, now their shit's coming up and their copyright was expiring and they lobbied and they lobbied and they lobbied and of course they got it changed.
Just like Sonny Bono did in the U.S. with Disney.
Disney.
According to Unlucky Dip on Twitter, police are letting protesters through the cordon one by one.
Each is photographed and filmed.
Of course.
What do you expect?
Because the CCTV network's down, they've got to do it by hand.
So, obviously, the big, big, big news here is not just the G20 summit, but President Obama being in town, visiting with not just the Prime Minister, but with the Queen.
Any news about that in the States?
That's all they're talking about.
And what are they saying?
Well, first they show a lot of photo ops.
There's Obama with this guy.
There's Obama with that guy.
There's Obama with the girl.
There's Obama with, what's her name, from Germany.
There's Obama.
There's Obama.
And, you know, he's walking around with that smile.
And walking around.
And then the main thing, they're starting to twist it very slowly toward Michelle.
There's Michelle-mania going on in London.
I'm telling you.
Michelle Mania.
You know why?
Because she touched the Queen.
She put her arm around the Queen.
Oh my goodness.
Oh my God, I'm surprised they didn't shoot her.
And the Queen put her arm around her ankles.
It was great.
Great, great shot.
The front page pictures today is like, you see, it's almost like a chart of the Dow Jones.
Barack, Queen, Michelle, Prince Philip is like up, down, up, down.
Give these people some apple crates, please.
Barack Obama is two times as tall as the Queen.
Yeah, well, so is Michelle.
But any soundbites or anything?
Because I have a couple things that I think would be kind of cool.
I don't know.
The soundbites, I think they're annoying.
But there was a...
I mean, just mostly, you know, the same old thing like you mentioned earlier.
Just these clips, these little clips here and there.
But mostly it was the talking heads of the media.
I mean, the thing that gets me, and I've always been like...
Rolling my eyes over this.
The media is always moaning and groaning, trying to save money.
We don't want a foreign correspondent.
Meanwhile, Market Watch, we have people everywhere around the world in true foreign correspondent fashion sitting there.
So we have Tom Bemis, who's one of my editors, in London.
That's where he lives.
And they brought him on the BBC to do a little chat with him.
But meanwhile, these big networks that are throwing money away, For example, here's the question I'm trying to get to.
What is the point of sending Katie Couric, the anchorwoman, to London to stand in front of one of the bridges on the river to give a report from there?
It's pointless.
Don't they have somebody working the room?
There was such a great YouTube video I saw yesterday.
It's a BBC program, Screen Wipe, I think it's called, and it deals exactly with this question.
And of course, because otherwise the news is boring, and no one will watch it.
If it's not Katie Couric with her flamoush, then who cares?
Then why even bother?
And then the other one was, I was watching PBS, I was watching the News Hour, which is a little more sedate, and a little more in-studio, a little more conversational, and a little more in-depth, because it's an hour.
And they decided to go big time, and they sent a Margaret Warnier, or whatever her name is, this kind of, she's a good reporter, but she really has more of a face for radio.
In the morning.
Hey.
They ship her.
Hello, pot, kettle calling.
Hey.
So they ship her.
Yeah, yeah.
They ship her over there.
And by the way, if you notice, I'm on the radio now.
Everybody.
They ship her over to London.
And she's standing in front of the Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament.
Is that where the action was?
I believe that's where the conference was.
On that green piece of grass, because it's funny, if you drive by there, and I've driven by there many times just around evening news time, you see ten crews set up all next to each other, all doing the same shot from that little patch of grass with the abbey in the background.
This is the redundancy of the news coverage, which is again one of the reasons that news media is suffering.
They don't even get it.
It's shucking.
So I don't see why they spent the money.
It just seems like a waste of money.
I mean, don't they have correspondents that work there all the time?
Apparently not.
And if they're going to send somebody over there, why don't they send a local expert?
But John, when it comes to mainstream network news, NBC, CBS, ABC, those guys, they're making money on those shows.
I know.
But they're still pulling their foreign correspondents out of the field and doing all this other stuff and doing these gimmicky things where they'll send the anchorman.
What is the anchorman doing in London?
He's supposed to be the anchorman.
He's not supposed to be a loose cannon.
Well, because they expected huge riots and everything to be on fire.
Did Katie Cork have a flak jacket on while she was in the streets of London?
Didn't she have some camouflage?
She was dressed down.
She seemed bundled up.
Jamie Oliver, of course, cooked for all the dignitaries last night.
Well, that's a shame.
Why don't they get somebody who knows how to cook?
During the press conference...
This is very funny.
They didn't even show it properly on the British news.
They took one of those side-by-side things, and they took about six questions.
It was very funny.
The first one, Out of the Gate, was awesome.
Let's have a little listen here.
Cue track.
Thank you very much.
I said to Barack I was going to introduce him to my friends in the British media.
Nick.
Prime Minister, thank you very much indeed.
Nick Robinson, BBC News.
A question for you both, if I may.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly blamed the United States of America for causing this crisis.
France and Germany blame both Britain and America for causing this crisis.
Who is right?
And isn't the debate about that at the heart of the debate about what to do now?
Out of the gate.
Right.
Slam the host.
My friends from the British press, kabang!
So, of course, the president didn't answer the question, but I'll just let you hear a little bit of his stammering.
It's kind of funny.
I would say that...
Think, think, think.
If you look at...
No prompter.
The sources of this crisis.
The sources of this crisis.
Oh, jeez.
Well, you know, the...
So the one thing...
I mean, we don't want to beat this up because it's kind of dull, like you said, but I noticed that Sarkozy was supposed to walk out on the thing, but he didn't, and he showed up, and then he gave us a little talk with that German woman, his counterpart.
They had the alternative press conference, which was...
So downscale, it looked like community theater.
A little crappy-ass podium.
It looked really warm in there and kind of smoky.
Sarkozy is totally playing up and playing the big man.
Yeah, and the first thing he does is he blames the US for everything.
For starting it, yeah.
He's supposed to be our friend, you know, when he first got in, right?
And then the way everyone's analyzing the whole thing is that the US is trying to fix the problem with stimulus, and they made it clear that both France and Germany specifically They would think the problem can be fixed with regulation.
And so they're going to, like, crank up their regulation machine.
And in Germany, the regulation machine is already cranked up to an extreme with ridiculous rules and regulations about when you can fire somebody.
And the French are much better.
And it's going to be, you watch, regulation, if you reinterpret, if you look at it and you break it down, you deconstruct, you're going to find out it's just a form of protectionism, which is what these guys are supposed to be against.
Well, it's...
It's very apparent that there is a major rift between the U.S. and Britain.
Gordon Brown will do anything, Barack Obama says, and the rest of Europe, which is indeed categorized by the two countries that have most of the say, which is Germany and France.
And they are adamantly against more stimulus, or stimuli, because it would include everybody.
And of course, I watched all of these speeches and conferences, and our president is saying, hey, look, we're really doing everything here.
I even put more money on the table before I even came.
What are you guys doing?
And Gordon Brown, last night, Let me also add that I'm confident that President Sarkozy will not only be here for the first course of our dinner, but will still be sitting as we complete our dinner this evening.
And I think as President Obama has said, look, never before has the world come together in this way to deal with an economic crisis.
Any of the crises that we've seen since the Second World War have not had this level of international cooperation.
And never before has the world come together with so many countries represented from so many different continents to address this crisis.
So we have China, we have India, we have Argentina, Brazil, we have South Africa, we have Russia as well as Europe and America and Japan.
And we are within...
A few hours, I think, of agreeing a global plan for economic recovery and reform.
Okay, so that was last night, and of course, the news has been all over it.
I'm wondering what kind of watch he has.
How many more hours is just a few?
I was just watching.
It seems like there's a, quote, substantial agreement on fiscal stimuli worldwide on the table, but they're not going to announce or make any decisions because they've agreed to hold another G20 summit.
Where they're going to review all decisions before moving ahead.
And Gordon Brown now also saying, save and create jobs.
Amazing how that's taken over.
He said $5 trillion will be injected into world economies this year.
The UK has apparently pledged $1 trillion in SDRs to the IMF. It seems pretty clear that this is an economic hit job and it's all just coming down.
Well, it sounds as though there's a couple of...
The thing that's interesting to me is that there's two basic theories that are still floating around out there about what to do.
Yeah, one is regulation and the other...
Well, actually, there's three.
One is regulation, two is more fiscal stimulus, and the third is kill off the population.
I don't think Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have given up on that one yet.
Well, that's because they're royalty.
But anyway, so...
It seems to me that there's the one variable, the one missing element that always has to be considered, which I think is why Gordon Brown is amongst those backing the stimulus idea.
There has to be this fear, especially amongst the Germans, the French, the Italians, everybody, that what happens if the United States proceeds with this concept And we decide not to.
And then when things snap straight, they're in great shape and we're screwed.
Because, you know, it's happened in the past where we're in great shape and everybody else is screwed.
It's kind of like a, it's a fractal.
Fractal.
There you go.
It's a repeat, everybody.
And now, back to real news.
John, I'm distraught.
Have you heard the real news?
No, what?
The long-running soap opera Guiding Light is going to cease.
Oh, yeah, I heard that.
It's a travesty.
I think it's been a dead soap opera for some time.
Of course, but that's the top of the news, along with what you sent me.
This pisses me off.
This really makes me angry.
From the New York Post.
Does it make you so angry you can spit?
Jim Clark.
Yeah, did you see that?
Did you see that picture?
Screw this guy!
I hate this guy now.
I hate him, hate, hate, hate him.
Jim Clark, who you probably know, is the guy who has a yacht that was way too big and ran on computers.
No, no, the computer yacht, that's not Jim Clark's yacht.
No, no, Jim Clark also had a completely computerized sailing yacht, absolutely.
No, no, no, that's Perkins over here, Kleiner Perkins.
No, no, no.
Don't make me look it up.
Jim Clark also has something that runs on Sun Microsystems crap.
I'm sure that wasn't Perkins.
Perkins is the one that's...
Regardless.
Regardless.
Netscape.
He's got a 100-footer.
His is like a 100-footer.
He has a $100 million yacht, okay?
Yeah.
No, I said that 100-footer is bigger, but yeah, it's 100 million.
That's where the 100 comes from.
He is marrying swimsuit model...
What's her name?
Christy Hins.
I hate this guy.
Or Hines.
Hines.
Who cares?
I'm just saying.
Well, you apparently do.
Oh, no.
Who cares what her name is?
Oh, of course she is.
Just look at her.
Holy moly.
He's like 67.
We have...
This is good news for all men.
He doesn't look bad for 67, I'll say.
I didn't know from a distance.
Give him three years, you know, and then she'll be looking.
Her eyes will start to stray.
Her eyes are straying already.
I think she's just cross-eyed.
That picture that was in the post was just precious.
It was like, wow.
It is.
You just go, I hate you.
Yeah, but you also look at that and you go, there's a number of captions for the gold digger would be one of them, but expensive wife.
Wife 3.0 in his case.
No, it's 4.0.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
That's why 4.0, and she doesn't look like a cheap woman in terms of...
I mean, that dress she's wearing looks like it costs a fortune.
But of course, if he's got a billion bucks, it would take anybody, even an expensive wife, to spend that fast enough.
Although it looks to me as though she would have the chops to do it.
I'd just like to add one more...
One more story here to our Real News Corner.
Because you'll be hearing about this at the top of the news, everybody.
Miss Universe describes Guantanamo Bay as relaxing and calm after a visit to detainee camps.
What?
Miss Universe, who is from Venezuela, Diana Mendoza, she went there and she said, hey, the waters surrounding the facility at the center of the allegations of human rights abuses, they are so beautiful.
They sent her to Gitmo on vacation to roll out this bogus story.
It is...
Oh, that is...
I like it.
I like it.
I'm impressed.
And now, back to Real News...
So back to real news, by the way, I have a complaint.
Uh-oh.
So I go to, I noticed that I didn't realize that this was an ongoing complaint.
I noticed it the other day.
So I'm at Monterey Foods buying vegetables, which is a green grocer, and it's a good one.
And I'm in there, and of course it's in Berkeley, so it's like at a Berkeley style of customer.
In other words, people that look like they're just about to die.
Were any in the PETA... They're all in the PETA camp.
Many of them, you know...
So they're keeling over.
They're holding on to their Zimmer frames.
So there's just like a horrible group.
We're going to get in so much trouble.
Every once in a while I've seen a younger woman that maybe just moved into the area and she goes into Monterey Foods with her makeup on because she's going shopping and she feels obliged because maybe she's from the Midwest or Texas.
Where she feels obliged to actually look presentable in public as opposed to wearing baggy-ass crap and hair with gobs of goo like dog shit kind of in it.
I'm telling you, I'm just describing the scene so you can get a feeling for it.
I'm with you.
I'm smelling the dog shit.
And so you see these women that come in, they're made up, and they walk in, and they take one look around, they stop, like they hit a brick wall right at the entrance.
And you see them, boom, they hit this brick wall, and then they freeze, and you see their eyes going back and forth and back and forth, and they slowly walk backwards, back into the parking lot, never really getting it.
Wrong store.
I have seen us going into a gay bar.
It's like, this isn't right.
Oops!
Can I have my coat back?
When I was in college or something, we were floating around doing bar hopping.
There used to be this place, I realized it was a gay bar, I think it was called Mike's Pool Hall, and it was in San Francisco in the North Beach area.
And there was like three or four of us, and we did that exact same thing.
We walked in and we just hit this brick wall.
It was like a whole 500 guys turned around and looked at you.
It was like, what?
Oh, oops.
And then we slowly walked backwards.
Okay, so I'm at the Monterey Foods.
And I'm trying to, you know, check out, and there is, the line is held up, because apparently there was some kind of a middle-aged, gray-haired, frumpy woman that was grousing, because she had brought her canvas bags, and they had mistakenly packed the vegetables into a sack, a normal paper.
Oh no, the horrors of it!
It was, it was, and she said to stop the presses, they had to unpack it.
Let me see your supervisor!
They had to unpack the paper bag as they repacked it into her beat-up old dirty canvas bags that look like they haven't been washed for like a year at least.
And so I realized that there's this trend.
It's actually died off a little bit, but there was a trend for a while where it was cool to have a canvas bag that you drag to the store.
And I know in Europe this is always promoted because they charge you like a nickel for the bags there.
Yeah, they do it at Sainsbury's.
Yeah, well, all throughout France, I know you have to pay for the bag.
It's very confusing to people who aren't used to paying for a bag that costs like.001 cents worth of plastic.
But okay, whatever.
Anyway, there was this trend for a while, and so everyone had these grimy old canvas bags, which didn't really hold that much, as a matter of fact.
And I don't know, it was just galling to me having to sit there while she was making all these demands on the staff.
Well, you're not as pissed off as I thought you might be about that.
Well, you know, I seem to have calmed down.
It happened a few days ago.
I will tap into your feelings there.
There were almost 3,000 news stories I saw on Google News.
Did you see this report from AARP? And you had already called this.
You talked about the meat issue.
So this new report, of course, is a total hack job.
Study finds red meat may be deadly!
That's killing us!
You're going to die!
So why are they telling all the AARP people this?
Because they're the ones who have been eating raw or red meat for all these years and they're alive.
In fact, they're old enough to be in the AARP. There you go.
Case in point.
So what's wrong with this picture?
For real.
Well, that's it.
No, of course not.
I think if you wanted to just do a whole show on how deadly meat is.
That's how it's going to kill you.
Oh, I do want to give you an update on...
A little aviation update.
You remember that Pilatus PC-12 that had 39 people on board that crashed?
Of course, all perished.
It was really sad.
Actually, it was about 14.
Too many passengers.
I did check around on this, and two things of interest.
One is that even though...
Technically, depending on the age, not legal to have that many passengers.
As long as the weight and balance was in check, then it should have been okay.
There seems to be an issue with the Pilatus as well as the TBM. A couple of these French planes, a lot of them have massive engine failures on a short final, and that's essentially what this looked like.
But here's the craziest thing about this crash.
On board were two daughters of Irving Budd Felkamp, and he is the owner of a prominent California abortion clinic.
And so to know that this plane crashed into a cemetery at the Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery, right into the memorial called the Tomb of the Unborn.
Wow.
How crazy is that?
Sounds planned.
I'm glad you said it.
Yeah, well, you should be.
But that just, I'm like, whoa.
What is up with that?
What kind of message is being sent there?
Yeah, who's sending it?
That's pretty good.
Yeah, that's a pretty good one.
If true...
Oh, no.
Well, what?
Please.
I'm just saying.
I mean, do we know for a fact that it hit that headstone?
Yeah.
So it's just basically in there somewhere.
Yeah, it's embedded.
It's just stuck in there.
It's just stuck into the tomb of the unknown.
Shadow Puppet Theater!
Yes!
Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius has a tax problem.
Everybody seems to.
She's gone back and corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than $7,000 in back taxes after finding unintentional errors.
Don't look over here.
Nothing to see here.
Look at that.
I would say that wouldn't you think that there'd be a fine involved or a penalty?
Oh no, that's only if you're a schmuck like us, John.
A lot of people emailed me and said, I had no idea, because I talked about the IRS and that they have guns.
And people even went so far as to look up the...
Some of the statutes for the IRS, and there is a whole paragraph in there about guns.
People don't understand.
The IRS is probably more powerful than the DEA in the United States, and they're armed, and they convict you by fining you, garnering wages, doing all kinds of trickery, taking money out of your bank.
I've actually seen that happen.
Take it out of your bank account, put it in theirs, until you prove that you didn't do something wrong.
You have to prove your innocence.
It is the most un-American, undemocratic institution in the world, and I'm not afraid to say it because they've already screwed with me so many times, there's nothing left to screw.
You'll be getting a call.
No, man.
I was smart.
After I found out what the IRS can do, my wife got everything.
I gave it all to her.
So here you go, honey.
I want nothing.
That's a good thing.
Yeah.
So a tip for you out there who might be audited.
What the IRS guys don't like to see, because they figure that you're over-prepared...
When you bring out your folders and files, you have a million little tabs on everything.
Oh, really?
They don't like that, huh?
No, because obviously you're like a nut job.
I've even heard that if you call the IRS and they pull up your name on screen, and so I can't remember where I read this or heard this, that if they see that the government actually owes you money, they're instructed not to tell you.
Hey, Mr.
Dvorak, we see that you actually owe you $3,000.
Where would you like us to send the check?
No, they're not allowed to say that.
Even if they had you on the phone.
Should you ask them when you're on the phone with them?
Most people don't know.
You'd be surprised how many people don't even know that.
I didn't know that.
Who would know it?
Why would anybody know that?
Would people know that you have taxes coming back to you?
Oh, no.
I think everybody knows that.
Bloomberg wrote a...
I was going to say, Bloomberg wrote a great article that will be in the show notes, and they calculate the financial rescue now, don't believe the numbers you're being told, $12.8 trillion in funds given for...
Lent or guaranteed.
Granted, probably two-thirds of that is in guarantees.
But if all that shit fails, that's our entire GDP. That's what we do in a year, isn't it?
12, 14 trillion?
Something like that.
I'll tell you, there's just about halfway to what they really need, which is going to be about 35 trillion.
And I'll explain that someday.
Now, back to real news.
You're going to leave me hanging, huh?
And now, back to real news.
So they threw out the case against Ted Stevens and told him to go home.
Yeah, what was that about?
First of all, this was the guy who was caught supposedly soliciting sex in the bathroom stall?
No, Ted Stevens is the inner tube Webby's guy from Alaska who was the 85-year-old guy who went on with it.
Oh, right.
It's not a bunch of trucks, it's a bunch of tubes.
Yeah, right.
And it was because he had a contractor douche in his house?
No, he was getting a lot of gifts and other things.
I mean, he was on the...
Wait, so he got off?
100% because of prosecutors in jail.
Procedural error?
No, no.
It was prosecutorial abuse.
They weren't doing, you know, you're supposed to, when you do discovery and you find something that the defense can use, you're supposed to give it to them.
And they weren't doing that, among other things.
And, in fact, the entire Office of Public Integrity, who was pushing the case, got, you know, It's reamed by the new Attorney General, that guy, the new guy, who's supposed to be, you know, he's a tough guy.
Holger?
Yeah, and he doesn't want to put up with any of this kind of crap.
And so now I'm thinking, wait a minute, wasn't Stevens, who's a Republican, put into a bind by the Bush administration?
There's something else, there's a missing piece to this puzzle.
I agree.
And it's just a matter of time, but we figured out, but why would the Democrats let Stevens go, who's a Republican, when they could embarrass him, and instead embarrass all these attorneys, I guess, who might be Republicans, but what were they doing prosecuting Stevens in an ill manner?
I mean, it wasn't as though they were acting like Republicans, trying to protect Republicans.
They were, you know, reaming the guy.
So there's something screwy about that story.
Well, you presume that...
Look, they all work for the same people at the end of the day.
That was amazing to see President Obama and the First Lady were at 10 Downing Street in the morning.
Shit.
In the morning!
And so you saw the handshake and everything.
And then Hillary Clinton...
Goes over to the president, and he's like real...
I mean, look, Michelle is hugging the queen.
Everyone's lovey-dovey, and Gordo, my buddy, and shoulder-slapping.
And Clinton comes over, and it was like Barack Obama worked for her.
Good morning.
And he shook her hand.
No hugs, no shoulder, very formal.
It was astounding to see.
Just astounding.
What do you think that means?
Well, I mean, of course, the Clintons and Bushes are still running the show.
Hey, are you clicking a lighter?
No, it's a ballpoint pan.
Cool.
Like you.
Some great audio surfaced from a guy who was returning from one of the Campaign for Liberty regional events.
Have you heard this?
He was detained by the TSA. I'm sorry, the campaign for what?
Campaign for Liberty.
It's Ron Paul.
Oh, Ron Paul.
As you know, of course, the MIAC report came out and told police departments, oh, you know, if anyone has Ron Paul literature, they're probably a terrorist.
Got to watch out for them.
So this guy had just been to this Campaign for Liberty, and he had sold T-shirts and stuff like that.
And so he had $4,700 on him.
And they stop him.
And they take him for questioning.
About why does he have so much money on him?
And do you want to hear how egregious this is?
Because he recorded it.
Yeah, well obviously everybody's on pins and needles.
Let's do it.
Yeah, he had a little recorder with him.
What do you do for a little...
Is that relevant to him?
Yes it is.
Am I legally required to tell you that?
Well, I'll tell you what...
Go kick the plane.
You may not be legally required to come in act, but you will be legally required to help the police officer.
Can you hear that?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm just trying to ask some questions to figure out what all this is about so I can get you on your plane.
But you won't play smart and I'm not going to play your game.
How much money is it?
I don't know the exact amount, sir.
The card says about $4,700.
$4,700?
Yes, sir.
Why do you have all this money?
I asked her if I'm required by law to answer the question.
I'm just asking you why you have $4,700.
That's my question.
I don't understand.
Do you want to talk to the DEA, bud?
Do you hear that?
Do you want to talk to the DEA, bud?
You better tell us why you have that money.
Why do you have that money, huh?
What?
You don't understand the question?
A lot of people don't realize that the DEA has been, you know, they can pull somebody over in their car, and then if they have more than a couple hundred bucks on them, they just can take the money.
Take the money, yeah.
It's just assumed that if you have more than a couple hundred dollars, it's drug money.
You're a drug dealer.
No price.
If they can tell me if I'm required to answer the law on a question, I'll answer the question.
That's why I'm just asking for a simple question.
I just want to know why you have $47.
That's not an unusual thing.
I care if I made me $50.
He refuses to answer any questions.
He don't want to answer.
So we're going to have to take him down to the stage.
We're going to have to take you downtown, son!
We're going to take you downtown!
If you don't answer the question, you've got to submit to us.
this out there was trying to get it anyway Oh shit, there's the handyman.
Hum for free for a few seconds, John.
Let me open the door for him.
The handyman is now appearing at Adam Curry's manor to fix something because he lives in an old place.
Yeah, no worries.
And now he's having small talk with the guy.
He'll be walking back as he returns.
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.
And there's the dog.
It's another Shelley Winters moment, whatever you called it.
Yeah, exactly.
So what?
You got any more tape?
Yeah, you want to hear more?
I got more of it.
Yeah, no, I love this stuff.
So he recorded this on his phone, and I think he's saying the right thing.
Oh, he recorded it on his phone?
Yeah.
Yeah, he just kind of did one of those.
Your phone only holds about two minutes at a pop.
No, that's not true.
The Nokia can record until your memory's full.
Oh, okay.
With one touch of the button.
So we can listen to a little bit more.
I think he's saying the right thing, though, by saying, hey, man, look, you know.
But listen how they're triple-teaming him.
And they're threatening him.
I said, okay, we'll go in here.
He started playing this game again.
I said, I'm done with him.
So, I've been completely cooperative, sir.
I'm not playing any games.
You're not cooperative, you're going to ask the question.
I'm simply asking if I'm...
If you have nothing to hide, then you can just tell us what it's for.
Oh, my favorite.
If you have nothing to hide, then you can just tell us what it's for.
You've got nothing to hide, slave.
You're going to have to provide proof of why you had that much money anyway.
You're going to have to provide proof of why you had that much money anyway?
What is that all about?
What's that?
It's legal to leave and enter the United States of America with $10,000 without declaring it, and as you know, since we've discussed this before, you could actually leave, and people don't know this, because I got a note from somebody asking me this the other day.
You can walk out of the United States with $50,000 in cash if you want to.
You just have to fill out a form to tell somebody that you got that much.
But if you had $9,999 in your wallet, it's legal to walk in and out of the United States, let alone fly in from Cleveland.
So to say that you have to explain $4,700 is a blatant lie.
And it's egregious.
It's police state and brutality.
And these guys should be suspended without pay or whatever.
I mean, just...
Fucking TSA, man!
TSA! Yeah, right, exactly.
Promotions are in order.
I understand, sir.
If I'm required by law, I'll be happy to answer your questions.
I don't understand the law.
Are you from this planet?
I mean, do you understand the question?
I hope they ask me that one day.
Are you from this planet?
You'll have to stop and think about that one.
Hold on a second.
Why can't you just answer the question?
You act like a child.
You act like a child.
We're going to take you downtown.
You're going to the police station.
You can't answer any questions.
We don't know what's going on.
Am I being forced to go to the police station?
Come on, let's just go to the police station.
Am I being taken or am I free to go?
We're going to take you.
You're going to the police station, yes.
Whatever you want to call it, we're going to the police station.
What's it saying there?
We're going to get into semantics here.
We're just going to go to the station.
You're not going to get small questions.
You're suspicious.
It's really suspicious right here.
Me.
I'm just from your answers.
That's why we're going to the station.
Am I being forced and safe?
You will be.
You're going to the station.
Do we have to put you in handcuffs or will we have a problem?
Oh, we're going to put you in handcuffs.
Yes.
That's fine, sir.
I don't understand the law.
I'm happy to go.
We're going to help you understand the law.
I can't.
It blows my mind.
And this is always what I've thought about these guys.
You know, that they're a bunch of little fucking fascist Nazis who have some power.
They're not trained well enough to be doing this job.
They're not necessarily that bright.
And they think that they have more powers than they do.
And they abuse them because of that thought.
And because they now have real badges.
So that gives them a little bit more...
Which was a huge mistake.
Yep.
And...
Yeah, how long until they get guns?
That's all we gotta wait for.
Hold on.
So what was that outburst?
I'm telling the dog to be quiet.
That works?
I couldn't even hear the dog.
I could hear you.
Well, it worked, didn't it?
You like it.
You remind me of a southern mom screaming for her kids at the back porch.
My parents used to have a whistle.
They had a bosun whistle when I was a kid.
We had a kid in our neighborhood.
Some woman had a big bell.
No, I had the bosun whistle.
She'd ring this bell, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and the kids would come scampering.
It was very annoying.
I wonder if I can find a bosun.
How do you spell bosun?
Is it I-N? I think it's B-O-S-O-N, isn't it?
Google says B-O-S-U-N. Yeah, let me see if...
Son.
Bosun.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, get a bosun whistle.
That's what you need.
Yeah.
It's so hard to find.
You know, I've noticed this as I've been putting together our request and dedication TWAP, is what I'm calling it.
It's a TWAP. A Twitter app is a TWAP. I'm coining that, if you don't mind.
So the way it works is, it's not public yet, it only works on direct messages from me.
You send off an album slash artist...
And then once the requests are compiled, it plays it and actually will say, you know, Adam Curry, you requested, and then fill in the blank.
And what the system does, which is cool, and it'll probably go live for everyone who listens to the No Agenda stream next week, is it searches for this stuff out on the Internet.
So what you get back can be very interesting, to say the least.
Sometimes you'll get the completely wrong piece back.
In other words, it's not foolproof.
Well, it's not about being foolproof.
It's about cool.
No one can have a library that can compass anything everyone wants, so that's the Internet.
The stuff is mislabeled.
But sometimes you'll get a live version you never heard before.
Sometimes it'll be a cover version.
It's fun.
Turn on your headphones or your speaker a bit, if you don't mind.
I think...
There it is.
This time at the...
Hold on.
That was at the 57-minute mark.
Usually when I say it.
So, yeah.
I wonder if we can track down some old Noel Coward monologues.
Noel Coward.
So, hummingbirds are interesting.
So here's a...
And now, back to real news.
Hummingbirds are interesting.
So I got a bunch of hummingbirds around here.
And their sound, by the way, is this.
That's the sound?
Yeah, so they make that sound.
Why don't they call them clacking birds, then?
Anyway, so they're frightening.
Little bitty bird.
The things will come up and they'll just be zooming around.
For one thing, they're just faster, just amazing.
So once in a while, this one likes to zoom right in front of you, about two feet in front of your face.
Oh, scary, yeah.
And stand there, or hover there, just frozen staring at you.
You know that if he made a move for your eyeballs, he'd be faster than you could block him.
They're tiny, aren't they?
Are they little itty bitty things?
Yeah, they're about two, three inches long, maybe three at the most.
And they're very pretty.
They're electroluminescent colored and, you know, they jerk.
They just fly and they don't fly in a straight pattern.
I've never seen one caught by a predator bird.
Our square here is so wonderful, you know, right smack in the heart of southwest London.
And there's so many birds.
I'm often editing until 3 or 4 in the morning.
And you can tell when it's about 3.30, that's when just tons of birds go...
It's so loud outside.
It's amazing.
Yeah, they wake up.
But it's beautiful.
Right in the middle of the city, and we've got the blossoms are now out.
It's just fantastic weather.
I always used to joke in Sao Paulo when I used to visit down there more often, because I'd go there because I'd write for a magazine down there.
And the first thing I noticed about Sao Paulo is there's no birds.
Really?
At all.
Within 100 miles of the place.
I did see some birds recently, but nothing like running into these enclaves like you have there.
You got lucky.
Well, hopefully one day you'll see it.
Okay, the next little tidbit I have on my list...
Is that honey is being contaminated with high fructose corn syrup.
Well, which honey is it?
Well, that's the problem.
You can't tell, but there's a couple of earmarks that are interesting.
One of them is, and it reminds me of something somebody told me once about Heinz ketchup in the plastic bottle, which is also filled with high fructose corn syrup.
Yes, tons of it.
I've noticed that, yeah.
Occasionally, you can get an organic version of Heinz ketchup, which is made, ironically enough, in Canada and imported into the U.S. because apparently we're too stupid to be able to make it ourselves.
And the organic version, which has got a green label, is kind of cute.
It's about the same price, but it's made with sugar instead of the old-fashioned ketchup way, rather than high-fructose corn syrup.
Well, sometimes with the high-fructose corn syrup ketchup, when you dump it out, if you don't shake it, you get a bunch of water, it looks like.
But that's the corn syrup.
It really doesn't like to mix with things.
So can you just shake it out then and live?
Well, I think it would take you forever.
You may squeeze out the corn syrup and then squeeze out the ketchup.
It's just still mixed in.
Maybe just make your own ketchup.
Maybe that's better.
You know, to be honest about it, I've tried it.
I have never been successful.
It's very difficult to do.
You need big cookers, and it's kind of a steam pressure cook kind of a thing.
Really?
Yeah, it used to be, when I was an air pollution inspector, every time I do this, somebody tweets, this guy's been doing too many things.
I used to inspect the Del Monte ketchup factory.
John, is this an April Fool's joke?
It was yesterday.
And I saw him making ketchup.
You used to inspect...
The ketchup factory.
Yeah, because it was possibly a polluter.
And it stunk up the neighborhood, I can assure you.
They didn't have high fructose corn syrup then, did they?
No, no.
They would shovel in...
Here's what I'll describe a ketchup maker.
It looks something like a large cement mixer, only stainless steel.
And it's kind of at an angle, just like a cement mixer would be.
And there's a big hole in the thing, a flap that opens up, and they throw in these tomatoes, tons of them.
And then they take a shovel, and they shovel sugar in as though they're firing a coal-fired locomotive.
Cool.
And then they crank this thing up to some high temperature, and then they mix up the...
I forgot if there's impellers inside or if the thing turns.
I don't remember.
But whatever the case is, it takes a long time, and it makes this ketchup.
And it's just not possible to make this sort of...
A lot of condiments really are not easy to make at home, like Tabasco sauce would be another example.
Anyway...
What is the main ingredient of Tabasco sauce?
The Tabasco pepper?
Okay.
It's like a cayenne only.
But it's still hard to do because of what?
You don't have the equipment at home?
I don't know.
For one thing, the process is very screwy and they also barrel age the stuff.
And even if you look at other competitive sauces like Tabasco, you won't find any that have that aroma.
You know, the thing is a pungent, like, you know, essentially the aroma I think is the most interesting thing about Tabasco.
Tabasco sauce is probably one of the greatest single condiments.
In the world.
It's an unbelievable product.
I'm always astonished because it's so cheap.
Every time I have Tabasco sauce, I actually think about, wow, it's amazing that this exists.
So now the high-fructose corn syrup is mixed into the honey, but I presume if you're getting the organic, natural stuff that you're in the clear.
You'd think, but you can't be sure, because except for Germany, there's very few countries or areas that...
Who are labeled properly.
Germans, by the way, are pretty...
They're honey nuts, and they are very strict about honey.
You can always count on German honey to be pretty good.
But anyway, the reason I bring up the anecdote about the ketchup is because of the high-fructose corn syrup coming off of it.
It doesn't come off of the organic stuff, by the way.
Nothing comes off.
It's just you don't have to keep shaking it.
It's because the honeys that have high fructose corn syrup, they start to separate.
Over time, if you don't mix them up.
And you can see the corn syrup coming off of it.
And it looks horrible, by the way, because you can have these, a lot of honeys, depending on the sugar content, they like to harden up into a mass.
So it's kind of like a naturally creamed honey.
And by the way, we have in Port Angeles area, there's a honey guy up there who's a complete...
Fanatic about honey, and he's the one breeding all the new bees and all the rest of it.
He always lectures you about this stuff.
I'm just kind of passing along this stuff.
Anyway, the stuff separates, and you can kind of see it.
And the weird ones are the ones that have that ability to harden up into a solid honey, which I like because it's not such a mess.
But it would be like a solid mass at the bottom and then a bunch of weird-looking goo at the top.
And just to review, high fructose corn syrup contains mercury and will eventually kill you, correct?
Well, I don't think it's the mercury that's going to kill you.
The thing is, it doesn't seem to be...
It's not a natural product.
Here's the point.
It's made in a refinery.
Like oil?
Yes, like oil.
You can find the process for it.
What was that?
That was what my parents called me with.
The bosun's whistle?
Yep.
So, anyways, it's an unnatural product that seems to have issues with the pancreas.
It might be responsible for modern days, late adult onset diabetes, because there seems to be a correlation between the amount of diabetes and the amount of corn syrup, or high fructose corn syrup.
How does this shit get approved by the FDA, and why is it still in our food if it does all this nastiness to you?
Well, for one thing, they have a propaganda machine that says, no, it doesn't do any of this stuff.
If you look at the chemical, the chemicals of high fructose corn syrup is nothing more than various sugars that are all over the place and fructose, which is a sugar.
So how does this stuff any worse than sugar that's out there already?
That's what they would say.
Okay, that's what they, yeah, got it.
And they have plenty of, you know, and the problem is that you can break, you know, it depends on how you do the analysis.
Why don't we just use sugar?
Well, high fructose corn syrup is subsidized, so it's like one-tenth the price.
So all these horrible, you know, these businessmen look at the numbers and they go, well, although I notice now that people are starting to switch because they can use sugar as a selling point, which is hilarious if you think about it.
But it's so much cheaper.
In fact, there's a product up that we used to buy called Portland Punch, which was a sugar-based drink made from the local berries of Oregon.
I think there's Logan berries and Lola berries.
There's a bunch of different berries in it.
But it's like one of the most delicious...
Drink mixes you could buy anywhere.
And about a year or two ago, the guy, the CEO, decided to switch the formula into high fructose corn syrup.
Now you gotta hear this story.
My wife is pissed about this because she hates this stuff.
So she calls the guy and talks to the CEO. Hello!
It's Mimi Buzzkill here!
And the guy has the gall to tell her that the FDA now recommends that all sugars be only high fructose corn syrup.
Oh, of course they recommend that.
No, but it's a lie.
Oh, that's a total lie?
Oh my gosh.
So she calls him on it.
And then he backs off.
He says, well, I don't see that there's any difference.
And then they go back and forth with this apparently heated argument.
And then I guess she ended up with her slamming the phone down and never buying the product again.
She should do a show, man.
Get her on the show.
She should do a podcast or a blog or something.
Or tweet about it immediately.
She won't do any of that.
Mimi Buzzkill says, I'm never buying that again.
So we can't have the product.
And the product does taste different.
I mean, sugar does not give you the same flavor profile as high fructose corn syrup does.
It's different.
And it's also something disgusting about, you know, you take your formula for your product that you've been in business selling for decades.
And then you just change it.
And you just, out of the blue, just, let me just change what's in it.
To a product that has to go to a refinery.
So it's cheaper.
So it's cheaper.
So I can make it cheaper and sell it for the same price.
You don't see them lowering the prices on any of these products.
Of course not.
No.
So the Australians are doing a lot of interesting reporting, and neither Unilever, Kraft, or Nestle, three of the world's largest food producers, can confirm or deny the use of nanoscale particles...
Or just nanotechnology in their food.
So here's what the article discusses.
First of all, there's a lot of nanoparticles on packaging with UV filters to keep out light so that it doesn't turn to shit, which of course it really is in the packaging.
They've got shirts that don't stain because they've copied the nanostructure of lotus leaves to create water-repelling surfaces.
That's kind of cool, actually, but I wouldn't want that against my skin.
An ice cream that has lower fat content but the same fatty texture and flavor.
It's frightening, this nano stuff, because they're messing with the deepest, darkest particles, and that's like Monsanto-type area, you know?
Have you heard about this in Africa, that all these Monsanto crops are not producing seeds and farmers are committing suicide because they're basically dead in the water?
Well, that's funny.
It's not funny.
Well, that's a twist on their old thing.
Well, you know, you're going to use our seeds.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Hey, check these tomatoes out.
No seeds.
South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically manipulated corn, maize is what that's called, failed to produce any seeds.
The plants look lush and healthy from the outside.
Monsanto has offered compensation.
But so far, several farmers have just committed suicide.
They have an 80% crop failure, essentially.
And they're dead.
They're just completely dead.
I mean, can we just understand that you can't mess with food like that?
It's just not a good idea.
Well, you know, if you go back far enough, I think people would probably call breeding the same kind of...
They probably have the same negative attitude as some of the Luddites would.
And it's possibly just being a Luddite here.
Well, that's always possible.
I hadn't considered that.
I'll get back to you.
I'll get back to you on Sunday.
I have to think about that one.
You better think about it.
Or else.
Larry Silverstein, who's the, of course, famously the developer of One World Center.
The One World Center.
Come to the One World Center.
He bought the World Trade Center towers two weeks before 9-11, took out double insurance on it, got a big payoff, and now he needs financial aid.
Why?
Well, I can't build the One World Center without some money from the New World Order.
So I think he's asking for a billion?
There's something shady about this guy.
No, no, John.
Please.
Larry Silverstein.
So here's the back story that I just love.
So very few people know that he purchased the World Trade Centers literally a few weeks before they were brought down.
I'll just leave in the middle of how they came down.
At that time, before the purchase had been completed, the paperwork still had to be signed.
He was hit by a car.
And he was in the hospital with broken bones.
His pelvis was fractured.
And he didn't want anyone to know.
Total news blackout.
And he signed the papers almost on his deathbed in hospital.
And, of course, the double insurance, which he collected on.
Of course there's something shady with this guy.
Are you kidding me?
How convenient.
And now he needs financial aid for the One World.
One World Center.
I didn't know that he was building that thing.
That's funny.
Well, he has the plot.
It's his land.
Was it 16 acres?
Something like that?
Hmm.
So...
That's pretty interesting and obscure, and I think that's one of the reasons that people should, and I'm going to take a break here.
I don't think you should say take a break.
I think you should just make it flow.
Because when you say take a break, then people go piss.
And don't listen to your message.
I think they're usually pissing during the show.
In their pants.
In the morning.
Anyway, we can use some financial help.
Go to Dvorak.org and either donate on a monthly basis or give us a big donation.
We'll have a list of $150 and also $50 donors on Sunday, which we'll call out to.
Also, my son mentioned, and by the way, I did get a number of $6.66 donations.
Highly appreciated.
I like it.
By the way, we had one the other day.
We got $20.12.
Oh, that's a good one.
Yeah, in the morning.
In the morning.
That's good.
But anything over $50, or are we now just down to a $2 donation?
No, we got a couple.
I mean, we still are big donors, our one friend, and we could use some big donations.
But my son suggested that nobody has given us the Chinese lucky number.
You know, the more eights that you have...
Oh, 888.
Yes, of course.
$8.88 or ratchet up.
$888.88 would be $8.88.
You can get it in the morning for that.
Go to Dvorak.org slash NA if you like this show because we need to keep doing the show.
What was the other one?
There's another URL. Noagendalibrary.com.
I-berry or library.
Yeah.
Library.
You know, Bill Gates pronounces it library.
Library.
Like a three-year-old.
A lot of people pronounce it.
It's amazing.
If you start listening, you'll find a lot of people...
There's two words that are always mispronounced.
One is library.
Yeah.
But my favorite one is...
And ask.
How about ask?
How about that being the universally mispronounced word, ask?
It's not axe, people.
My favorite one, though, that people constantly mispronounce is zoologist.
People pronounce it zoologist as if there's three O's in the word.
Zoologist!
Now, my favorite thing is when you watch a TV, usually a cop drama.
I watched one the other day, and I just cracked up because there's something funny about the cop interviewing somebody, and they say, well, what do you do for a living?
And the person says, I'm a zoologist.
Ha ha!
It's like a zoologist is not going to mispronounce their own business.
They should have just changed the script.
That would have been easier.
I'm a zoologist.
Oh, really?
You work at a zoo?
Is that what you're telling me?
There's another move here right along those lines of the meat will kill you, the meat issue.
And this one's starting to piss me off because they can come for...
My money, they can come for my property, but stay away from my toilet paper.
Dr.
Alan Hershkowitz, senior scientist and waste expert with the, here it comes, Natural Resource Defense Council.
The Natural Resource Defense Council has said that fluffy toilet paper...
Is worse for the environment than human beings themselves.
What?
Yes, millions of trees are harvested throughout the Americas, including rare old growth forests in Canada, to sustain the United States' obsession with quilted, ultra-soft, multiplied toilet paper.
And it must stop!
That's interesting that someone would come off the wall with this.
Well, if you're the Natural Resource Defense Council, this is what it is, John.
We're going to see this every single day.
This is how the low-carbon economy gets ushered in.
And we're going to have people literally wiping their asses with sandpaper because they think it's going to cool down the earth.
In the middle of a snowstorm.
Use a corncob, my friend.
A Monsanto corncob.
Do you know that the Queen of England used to have, and some say she still does, used to have a person to literally wipe her ass?
I think that's what Michelle was trying to do in that stuff.
In the morning!
It's called the, what is it, the groom of the stool.
And this was a high-ranking official, the groom of the stool.
So the queen would do her business, and then the groom of the stool would literally wipe her butt.
And some say it still happens, but...
No, it's going to happen if she lives any longer.
Please do not...
That's one of the few pleasures in life, is a nice toilet paper.
Nice toilet paper.
It's important.
Well, you know, it's like in India, you use your left hand.
Right, and you never shake...
Well, of course you don't shake.
You shake with your right hand, right?
Well, you don't eat with your left hand.
You don't eat with your left hand.
You use your left hand, you just keep wiping it off, then you wash.
And then in the Ganges.
And then, you know, I'm sure I can do some Indian.
But what are the three pebbles for?
Sorry.
Obscure Terminator reference.
Couldn't help.
NASA has, and this is under the category, severely under-reported news.
NASA has come out with charts and research and, well, the sunspot cycle is behaving a little like a stock market.
We right now are at an all-time low, almost.
Of solar activity, which of course is why the global warming trick is kind of tough to pull off because it's cool right now.
And it will swing up, obviously, because the solar activity goes up and down.
But it's just amazing.
They're essentially, once again, a report from NASA saying this is what global warming is about.
This is why it happens.
And they're just publishing it.
It's just out there.
Ready for everybody to view?
Nothing to pay attention to here is what you should be playing.
Yeah.
Don't look over here.
Nothing to see here.
Ooh, look at that!
And that, of course, will be in the show notes at noagenda.mevio.com.
Well, I guess this guy, I think he's Swedish, that came out and says that the whole...
He's the world's expert on tide and the ocean size and the ocean.
He's an expert on whether the ocean's...
He knows a lot about the water.
Yeah.
I can't come up with it with a tireless.
He might be a zoologist, for all I know.
He could be a zoologist.
So anyway, he says he's a bunch of bull.
Yeah, okay.
So he'll have two bullets to the head soon.
Take him out back, boys.
Suicide.
Two bullets to the head.
But you know, it's so easy.
You just fly in America.
It's like the TSA. We'll say, hey, you look suspicious.
Come here.
Oh, he resisted.
We had to shoot him.
Oh, he took my gun and shot himself twice in the head.
I wonder what's going to finally happen to that TSA hero.
How is that resolved?
Is there a story in a newspaper about this bullshit?
No, only online, obviously.
I haven't seen any newspaper stories about it.
That doesn't make any sense, because the online world is just nothing more than derivative of what's in the newspapers.
If you listen to these newspaper guys, there's nothing original ever done by online people.
It's all taken from newspapers.
No, that's not true.
I have one for you.
I like that sound effect.
That was good.
That was me almost spilling the remainder of my tea.
I do have a guy, actually, who did something.
I love your little sound effects.
Let's see if I can just find this.
A guy talked to Rahm Emanuel.
Remember we were talking about the enslavement of our young people with the GIVE Act?
Yeah.
Shift until it hurts.
Yeah, so he went and he interviewed...
I just want to find it here.
He interviewed Rahm Emanuel about...
Why can't I find this?
Crap.
Don't tell me I've lost it.
I just...
Ad-lib.
No, because the whole point is he went out and he did the interview and he recorded it.
And I wanted to play it for you.
Oh, good.
It's something we can look forward to on Sunday.
Yeah, I guess we'll have to do that.
But just to counter your point, there are people who are doing it.
Of course, when you listen to the audio, it's almost unlistenable.
It's all kinds of extraneous noise.
It's just not professional enough to really make it...
Make it yet, but the information is there, and it's good, because Emanuel is just saying, yeah, oh yeah, three months, three months you'll be sent away.
And, you know, I'm pissed.
Well, I have to play it for you on Sunday.
I'm sorry.
I don't know what happened to it.
Yeah, no, the professional level or professionalism of online journalists, if you want to call them that or whatever you want to call them, it just comes with experience.
Here it is.
I got it.
I was so hoping for it to be on Sunday.
Really?
You might get a kick out of it.
I'm Dan Smith from the New York Daily News and I am podcasting this week from the Regency Hotel in Manhattan, where I sat down with Congressman Rahm Emanuel.
He was at the Regency raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which he chairs, and is also promoting his new book, which is called The Plan.
A tip is, don't make it sound like you're talking out of your anus.
I wrote with Bruce Reed.
I'm going to ask you about the Universal Service piece of the plan.
Can you tell me about it?
Like, how is this going to work?
Are people going to, particularly, are people going to live in barracks?
Universal civil defense training.
Universal civil defense training is what he calls it.
And so, yeah, I think he had it at 18, but we were saying somewhere at the ages of 18 to 25, you will do three months of training.
You can do it in between your, at some point in college, you just do that.
Some point in college, universal defense training.
Three months worth.
The audio is really crappy, but I'll put it in the show notes.
Why don't you clean it up?
Put it through a system.
Sometimes it's hard, man, if it gets that digital warble in there.
I'll see if I can pull some good stuff from it for Sunday's show.
You know, just cut the lows and the highs and push the mid-range and filter it.
And of course...
Send it over to Dolby Labs.
Dolbly.
Another obscure reference you didn't get.
I didn't get that at all.
From Spinal Tap?
What about it?
Okay, you've seen Spinal Tap?
A couple times.
So, the girlfriend who then weasels in and wants to manage the group, and she's bitching about the album, and she says, oh, you know, the mix was all wrong.
She's saying this in a band meeting, because you never should have used Dobly on a rock record.
Dobly.
Well, that's like the line in...
In Showgirls where she says, I want to get some of that Johnny Versace.
Oh, Versace.
No, it's Gianni.
Gianni Versace.
Gianni Versace, everybody.
I do have one...
Well, that's just like library and zoology.
Zoologists.
Yes, indeed.
I have...
If you're interested, one more bit there.
And now, back to real news.
The BBC has admitted they were desperately hoping that their entry for the Eurovision Song Contest would suck because they can't afford to host the next show if they win.
Ha ha ha!
I love it.
Can you imagine a single economy so bad, everybody puts up the suckiest people.
God hope you don't win.
It's such a great show.
Unfortunately, Sir Terry Wogan isn't going to be doing the voiceover this year, because that's the only reason to watch it, is to watch the BBC with Terry Wogan crapping on everybody.
And so he's not doing it.
He's backed away from it.
There are two things we haven't talked about, John, that I think we should mention just for the timeliness of it.
One is the firing of the General Motors CEO, apparently by the White House.
I can just see Ron Emanuel going over there.
Hey, man.
You gotta take a vacation.
Yeah, well, of course, it was a $20 million vacation.
Don't forget that part of it.
I thought it was like $35 million or something.
I thought it was more than $20 million.
Maybe it was more.
I thought it was $20 million.
Whatever it was.
What is the world coming to?
I mean, how does this work?
And where's the reporting on this?
How does that work?
It was reported, but it was just reported as fact.
Yeah, thank you.
How does it work?
The president calls him up and says, yo, dude, I'm sorry, but why did he have to be fired?
Why?
I don't know.
But why don't we know this?
We spent billions of...
We spent $20 billion on these companies.
I think we have at least the right to know why.
Why did he get fired?
And just because the guy sucked or he drove the company into the ground doesn't mean that the government has the right to fire somebody.
What's next?
Alright, well that's predictable.
What's the other items we missed?
The journalist fund from the Huffington Post, I think, is worthy of a mention.
Because I think that this is going to be one of those huge failures.
There's a fund set up, $1.75 million, coming from a number of partners, including the Stable Center for Investigative Journalism, And it's like, again, what's this money going to be used for?
Jay Rosen is an advisor to the fund.
How does this work?
What are they going to do?
They're going to give people like 50 bucks to go out and...
I don't know.
I don't get it.
It's pathetic is what it is.
And this Ariana Huffington, I don't like her.
She really irks me.
She really...
I'm not sure.
I can't put my finger on it, but I just want to bitch slap her.
Maybe it's because everyone fawns over her so much.
Well, she's something of a character because she keeps flip-flopping from one party to another.
She'd be a huge Obama fan.
She was married to some guy that ran for governor.
I don't even know what she's ever done.
I mean, besides being...
She's like a high-level version of Paris Hilton in terms of, you know...
Don't you think?
But with the perfect face for radio...
There you have it.
What's the deal with her?
And how does that thing make enough money for her to wear all that bling?
Where'd she get it from?
I think she was married to a multi-millionaire.
I think she took a big settlement when she got divorced.
I don't know.
We need to look her up on Wikipedia.
The only source of literal information in the United States.
You probably didn't know that the CEO of...
PPR, luxury brands firm PPR, was held hostage for two days by people who were let go and by employees who wanted higher wages.
Did this news make it to Gitmo Nation West?
I never heard it.
Well, you will be hearing it because, thank goodness, there's a showbiz tie-in, so I can't wait to see it tonight on Entertainment Tonight, everybody!
And now, back to real.
Salma Hayek's billionaire husband is held hostage in his car during French credit crunch protests.
So luckily, you'll hear that now that Salma Hayek is involved.
Huh.
They're going to start jacking this up.
It's not, you know, the protesters, they were just protesting.
It didn't look good enough, you know?
We need some real anger out there.
Yeah, I wouldn't think.
You watch.
They're going to work on it.
PETA kills animals.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that story was first explored by Penn Jillette and his pal...
What's his name?
Teller.
Teller.
Yeah.
On that bullshit show that they do, which is the name of the show, by the way.
Yeah.
Bullshit show that they do.
It sounds like it's a bullshit show, but the name is bullshit.
It's called Bullshit, yeah.
About two years ago, they went and they did a slam on the PETA people, and they discussed this thing, and nobody picked up on it.
I thought it was like...
It was...
Deplorable.
And now, what, two years later, three years later, there's news.
This has been going on ever since before.
So the news is that PETA operates a dog and cat slaughterhouse at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters.
Right.
And this is published in government records.
This is what Penn and Teller talked about, this place, like three years ago.
Well, I think I'm going to delve into that, because it only just kind of popped up on my radar yesterday.
And I should look into that.
I mean, what's up with that?
Do you know any details or just the headline like that?
No, I don't know any real details.
Since you brought it up, I mean, I haven't even seen the story.
I saw the thing about PETA because actually somebody blogged it, I think, on my blog, dvork.org slash blog.
Check it out.
And go to dvork.org slash na and you'll get more stories like these.
Is that smooth enough for you?
Very smooth.
And then the final story, and of course now I'm worried about these April 1st jokes, this is a translated story from Latvia.
Already suspicious.
Apparently a chartered ship from the Netherlands arrived at, what would the, Venspils port, I guess, in Latvia, with three tons of marijuana.
But, instead of...
Destroying it, apparently, and this is the story, they're going to sell it in drugstores.
In Latvia?
In Latvia.
Good for them.
And if they can't sell it all by the end of May 2009, they'll just give it away.
Please, people.
I mean, who's going to go in and buy it if you know they're going to be giving it away?
That does sound like an April Fool's joke.
It sounds like an April Fool's joke, but I just wanted to mention it.
I hope to God it's true, because that will be my next holiday destination.
Latvia is supposed to be pretty interesting, as is Estonia.
All of that, the new Europe, is stunning.
And they're happy to see you.
Yeah.
They're always happy to see you.
You know, the architecture, yeah, it is kind of beautiful.
People should come on.
Well, I guess now is not a good time.
No, but it's probably still cheaper to go to the right side of the Adriatic as opposed to the left side.
Go to Croatia.
Good, fun country.
Slovenia, I've been there.
It's a beautiful little place.
Compact.
Is that where you write a column for a magazine over there?
In Croatia.
The Croatia what?
Tech Gazette?
Bug.
The Croatia Bug?
It's an English publication?
No, it's in Croatian.
It's translated.
Really?
There are people that can do that.
Yeah, that's interesting.
What do you write about?
International tech issues.
Cloud computing.
These people are like still on abacus.
You're like, cloud computing is coming.
I can do a call from five years ago and it's right up to date.
That's not true.
Most of these little countries, because of the nature of the internet, they're all on the same page.
I think what's really being overlooked with a lot of these guys is the fact that their software development going on in Eastern Europe is outstanding.
South America and all over the world that is as good as anything we're doing and they can't get any traction.
And Americans are like, you know, well, it's like the Silicon Valley syndrome.
I was always told this by the venture capitalists.
So where's this company that you think is so great?
Well, they're in North Carolina.
Oh, North Carolina?
Is that a direct flight?
No, you have to take a connection.
Oh, no, forget it.
No, we don't want to go look there.
There might actually be something good going on.
We don't want to go on any connection.
And this, by the way, is a fact.
I have been told that at some point, especially in the late 90s, when it began, it hasn't changed.
The venture capital people in Silicon Valley will not invest in any company anywhere if there's not a direct flight from San Francisco.
If there's a connection involved, forget it.
Well, some of these guys will take their own plane, obviously.
But I think your point is well made.
And yes, there is astounding work going on.
Most of what these guys now wind up doing just to live is they form little teams.
Like we have some guys over there in Romania.
Which, of course, is convenient because they're 10 hours earlier than San Francisco, so they do a lot of stuff during the evening, and we work with them completely by remote.
But still, the real creativity, yeah, it's not really getting out.
They can't get a break, can't get any money.
But there is some astounding work going on, not just in the Eastern European countries.
No, I ran into it in Sweden.
I thought the Swedes had a whole bunch of good ideas.
They're very creative.
And the problem is their own venture capitalists don't exist.
They call themselves venture capitalists, but all they do is put money in high-interest banking accounts, if they can find them.
And they can't get anybody in the U.S. to be interested because there's no direct flight.
And they know that it's like MySQL.
They had to actually set up shop in a Bay Area to get anywhere.
And when they set up shop here, the next thing you know, they were bought by Sun and they made billions of dollars.
I mean, you have to...
It's not easy.
I think the only guys that may have bypassed that process is Skype.
I don't think they ever moved to the U.S. They did it in Amsterdam.
Yeah.
That's where they set it all up.
I think their main development may still be there.
Could be.
Shout out to Congressman Ron Paul.
H.R. 1207, which is the bill to audit the Federal Reserve, now has 50 co-sponsors.
So it's almost doubled since the last time we spoke.
I know you say it'll never pass, but 50 co-sponsors is quite a bit.
Yeah, it'll never pass A, and it'll be interesting to see if Ron Paul's still alive two years from now.
Oh, no, no, no.
Ron Paul has been around for a long time.
He's not going anywhere.
They're not going to do anything to him because they need someone to call out as the kook.
Well, that's true.
That's one of the reasons I appreciate you.
Yes.
The love is so mutual.
And I'm severely hurt.
Everyone knows now that I've got my milfy thing going for Bachman.
And they send me a picture of her kissing George Bush.
Could not be Fuller on the lips.
It just makes me wretch.
Boy, they know how to get to you, this audience.
Oh, man.
Well...
I know how to screw them up.
Send them a picture.
You know, it could be doctored.
The whole picture could be a fake.
No, it looks pretty real.
You're being sucker.
You're being bamboozled.
Well, I still love her to bits.
I really do.
I hope she stays around.
But, you know, they're already doing the kook thing with her, so...
Once you're labeled a kook, you're safe.
That's true.
Yeah, that's what I keep telling Patricia, who is sometimes somewhat concerned.
Well, yeah, I would be too if I were her, but for other reasons.
Nah, nah, man.
Oh, nice.
I need to get a snare drum in here and I can sit here with the two drumsticks just ready to go.
In the morning.
And now, back to you.
Dr.
Don, you see you got nothing to see here.
Look at that.
So, I think that's about it.
Yeah, that's why I have the final tune running.
Sunday, as per usual, sir?
Seems so.
Okay.
And in the meantime, if you've got nothing better to do, check out noagendastream.com because I'm working real hard on it.
I probably spent...
I'm probably working 18 hours a day lately because I spend so much time hacking the stream stuff together.
And of course, I'm not at all.
Every CEO of a company that has any type of engineering should try it once or twice.
Just go ahead and try it.
Try and put something together.
So you get a deep appreciation of what goes into this stuff.
It's not like it's really hard necessarily because it's like learning French, I guess, another language.
But there's so much you've got to think of and you can program yourself into a box.
and oh.
you And you get a new appreciation of what those people are doing when you yell at them.
Not that I do that, but I know lots of CEOs who are not cognizant of what it is.
It's like creative writing.
It's not an exact science.
You can approach things from multiple directions.
It's like painting.
Would you agree?
Whatever you say.
Now, see, this is what Mimi and I are talking about when we're saying that you're just rude and we really feel you need an attitude adjustment.
How is this rude?
I couldn't have agreed with you more by saying anything else.
But to say, whatever you say, that's horrible.
And I didn't go, whatever you say, I just said...
Now you sound like my daughter.
I didn't say it like that!
I didn't.
You're like, you know, I can see why she has issues with you.
Whatever you say.
I'll try that on my wife tonight, see how she responds.
Whatever you say.
It's like the rudest thing you can say!
Oh, well, okay.
I'm a sorry person, then.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry I didn't mean to say that.
Coming to you from the Crackpot Command Center in the southwest quadrant of London in Gitmo Nation East, I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm John.
Whatever you say, Dvorak, up here in northern Silicon Valley, the place that doesn't exist, and that's also known as Gitmo Nation West.