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May 28, 2009 - No Agenda
01:20:05
99: Dandelion Wine
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Time Text
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
After a very brief but extremely annoying hiatus, once again it's time for your bi-weekly Gitmo Nation publication.
This is no agenda.
Coming to you from the heart of Gitmo Nation East, yes, from New York City, the place so nice they named it twice.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from a place they only named once, thank goodness for that, Northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.
Yahoo!
We've done it.
We're on the air.
It works.
Not bad for a hotel shot.
Hotel shot, baby, yeah.
Interesting, you have to listen to the beginning because normally you have that planned voiceover you do at the beginning, which I think is pre-recorded, right?
No, it's never pre-recorded.
It's always live.
Everything is live?
Even that thing at the beginning and then this thing that you follow up with?
Yeah, that's always live.
Except I didn't write anything.
Now I just did it off the cuff.
Both are live all the time?
Always.
Always.
It's always like this.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
Yeah, you know, it's really live, and I know how to talk it up, so I talk into the donut, and it hits exactly when the voice guy comes on.
It's, uh, no agenda.
This is no agenda.
And then I hit this one, and then I talk over that for a little bit.
Oh, okay.
Because normally, I thought I'd heard a variation on the gain.
No, that's just me varying the gain.
It's Craig Law and Buzzkill.
In the morning.
No, baby.
Whatever.
It's all live.
It's all live.
Sounded good.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
So apologies, listeners, for not one but two missed shows.
Most of you probably know what's going on.
I'll be very brief about it.
My wife and I are separated.
She has asked for a divorce, and appropriate, and there's not much more to say other than that it is a very sad situation, particularly because there is a third party involved being our 18-year-old daughter, and it sucks ass.
And you can write about it in your memoirs.
Yes, and we did actually record No Agenda 99 last week, and it was horrible.
So horrible, and so just didn't feel right, and even though you warned me in the beginning, we didn't put it out.
Here's the question.
This is the real dilemma.
Are we now doing, as we speak, No Agenda 100?
No.
This is No Agenda 99.
I have destroyed the previous recording.
It no longer exists anywhere.
It's gone.
So this coming Sunday will be No Agenda 100?
Correct.
Alright, well that's good.
And hopefully, where are you going to be?
Are you going to be in some place where you have a better connection?
Yes, I will be in Amsterdam and not in a hotel.
So I will have a better connection.
Yes, I will.
And right now I'm in New York for business.
And that really is just one more brief thing.
In these types of situations, separation and divorce is nothing new.
It happens to a lot of people.
It's very difficult when it happens after 22 years.
But what sucks is that invariably one of the two parties, and often both, still have to go to the factory and still have to work because, you know, the chimney's got to keep smoking.
And in this case, this show is part of my going to the factory.
I have responsibility to over 60 families, as it were.
Well, you're getting docked pay for missing the last two.
That's fine.
I deserve it.
And thanks for being so nice.
Only docked pay for only two shows.
That's really kind of you, John.
Blow me.
So the big news...
And I have caught up a little bit with the news.
I was totally off the grid, like way off the grid.
So what's the big news?
Well, the big news, if we're going to talk real big news, is Obama's thing with his, you know, this...
Apparently they can grab you off the street and throw you in jail forever without any habeas corpus or anything else.
Oh, Jesus.
Tell me about this.
I mean, it's not like I wasn't as expecting to happen, not like we haven't predicted it, but honestly, and no bullshit, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Really?
Yeah, well, dude, I'm a little preoccupied here.
Yeah, I know, but you could at least pick up a paper once.
Okay, go to Dvorak.org, go to Dvorak.org, calm down, calm down.
You don't need the belch on the air.
Sorry.
Sorry.
You can calm down.
Go to Dvorak.org slash blog and look at, and the thing that's interesting about this to me is that the one who went after Obama the hardest, especially in the MSNBC world, was Rachel Maddow.
Oh, really?
Who just laid into him, well, if you want to call it laid into him, but she gave him nothing but grief for this, you know, he essentially gave a speech that was condemning the Bush administration for what it was doing at Gitmo and all the rest of it.
And then they came up and he said, it's all crap and everything's going to be legal from now on.
And so they designed this thing called Prolonged Detention.
Hold on, I'm looking for it.
I'm looking at Dvorak.org.
It's May 24th, or just click on the search and type in Maddow.
We don't have a lot of Maddow references.
M-A-D-O-W, is that it?
M-A-D-D-O-W. D-D-O-W. Sorry, we couldn't find anything to match your search.
You put in M-A-D-D-O-W? No, no, I misspelled it.
Obama outdoes Bush gets blasted by Maddow.
Should we play this?
It's too long.
It's like 7 minutes and 42 seconds.
It'll take up the whole show.
Tell me about it.
Well, just essentially, Obamacare has really interesting, kind of inspired speech, blasting the Bushies for all the stuff they did.
And then, essentially, announces the exact same plan with a new name change.
In this case, it's prolonged detention, which says that if we think that...
Oh, if you're an enemy combatant or suspected terrorist?
No, actually, the way he defined it could be anyone.
They could pick you up as you come into the country.
I'm already here!
They let me slip.
Well, he's at the...
Anyway, so she described it as a pre-crime sort of situation.
Oh, like thought crime.
Well, no, pre-crime, the minority report movie.
Yeah, but this is exactly what we discussed probably around episode number 40 when all of this stuff came out about what determines if you are an enemy of the state, essentially.
And it was so frickin' broad.
And this was exactly what Bush did.
Exactly what he did.
So it's just the same stuff, different face, right?
Yep.
But anyway, you can watch that and we'll talk about it on Sunday.
Okay.
Because it better be talked about on the 100th anniversary show because it really symbolizes a lot of things.
But can I just say a yeah, you told me so?
Who said that I wasn't on the bandwagon?
Yeah, I know, but there's no one else on this show, so just I want to feel good for a minute.
I told you so.
Okay, good.
Somehow that didn't work out the way I wanted it.
Okay.
All right.
So the fascist state gets yet a little bit closer.
Yeah, okay.
So you missed that one.
Here's another one.
I heard it.
There's a good one floating around.
I wanted to do a little piece here since our adoring fans are looking for insights that they don't get anyplace else.
And I want to do one before I get to the Korean story.
Okay.
Marine O'Dowd got busted for plagiarizing in the New York Times.
Who is Marine O'Dowd?
Oh, she's a reporter.
No, she's a columnist.
Marine O'Dowd.
And she's on TV. She's all over the place.
And...
She got busted for plagiarizing, and I started looking into it.
And I have an explanation for what happened, and also I find the whole situation amusing because just the same way that the Democrats are saying that the prolonged detention, which is the Obama version of a George Bush initiative...
And this, by the way, is exactly what's going on in Gitmo Nation East in the United Kingdom.
Exactly the same thing.
So, anyway, let's go to this.
So, Maureen Dow lifted from the Talking Points memo, Josh Marshall's blog, word for word, like 49 minutes, a long piece.
Now, I'm going to read you the original...
And I can say right until they get to one pronoun.
It's exactly the same.
Here's from Josh Marshall.
More and more, the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks.
it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq marine doubt more and more the timeline is raising the question of why if torture was to prevent terrorist attacks it seemed to mainly happen during the period when the bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq every single word is identical except we was swapped out for the bush crowd Ha ha ha!
Oh, boy.
Now, the funny thing, there's two things that are interesting about this.
One is that, well, everyone's jumping all over her for being a plagiarist.
And she, by the way, blames the mistake on the fact that somebody sent her an email with this quote in it, and she took from the email.
In other words, she has a plagiarist friend who she plagiarized from.
She didn't plagiarize directly from this.
She took it from email, which is just beautiful.
Which is embarrassing.
But the kicker here is that she obviously cut and pasted because every comma is in exactly the same place.
Now, what's unique to me, and I've written for the New York Times, so I understand this, is that the only thing that was changed, and the New York Times is top-heavy with editors...
And fact-checkers.
And fact-checkers, but they don't check for plagiarism, they check for facts.
And they don't have those systems that the high school teachers use.
Anyway, so...
What's interesting is nobody's brought up the fact that she threw in the Bush crowd, which was an obvious slanted slam.
Nobody says anything about that being weird.
But I realized that what happened here was that this thing went to copy-edit and then went to the editors or the line-edit and copy or whoever, and they found the word we, and the New York Times, I can assure you from working with them, are really upstate.
They just cannot take poorly referenced pronouns.
We being the pronoun in question.
We.
We.
Who's we?
It goes like this.
It's like, oh, is this John?
Yeah.
I'm reading this here.
Let me read this to you.
During the period when we were looking.
Who's we?
Is that you?
Is that you?
Were you looking?
Were you and your friends looking?
Yeah.
No, no, no, it wasn't me.
Well, I don't see who we is.
You know, they figured out readers are idiots, and most of them are, but there's...
So they say, well, we're okay, we're the Bush crowd.
Oh, okay.
I like crowd.
Even crowd is sketchy.
What is the Bush crowd?
It's a little sketchy.
Well, you know, she...
This is what you do in the last minute for the edit.
You've got to come up with something, because it was who specifically.
Well, could you say the Bush administration, or...
Well, you could have, or you could have just said the government.
There's a lot of things you could have said, but if they swapped it out, you got the bushcraft.
So essentially, I believe she probably just took the whole piece, whole cloth, and then ran it.
Now, everybody's jumping on her for being a plagiarist, and she's coming up with phony baloney excuses.
Well, I saw it in email.
I did this, I did that.
She's blaming a friend.
And by the way, the irony here is that she's the one who exposed Joe Biden in 1987 as a plagiarist.
Damn.
Oh, that's right.
It was a speech, right?
Wasn't it a stump speech or something?
Yeah, I remember that.
Oh, shit, John.
Hold on one second.
Don't move.
I'm not moving.
Yeah, I saw you move.
Hold on.
I'm squeezing my tea bags.
Oops.
Did I say that?
In fact, it's true.
I'm actually having Thai food.
What are you having?
Thai food?
Thai food.
Thai food tea.
Thai food tea.
No, I have no tea here at the hotel.
I promised my daughter I'd always have my phone near me, and it was in the bathroom, so I just wanted to make sure I had it next to me.
So anyway, let me finish this.
Yes, please.
So you're going to do a cut in?
Are you going to cut that out?
No, leave that in.
Are you kidding me, man?
There's no agenda.
Yeah, right.
So anyway, here we go.
So here's what happened, in my opinion, as a production writer, someone who does a lot of writing, and she does.
She's a columnist, too.
It goes like this.
You're constantly looking for material.
You're cutting and pasting and cutting and pasting.
You're cutting and pasting for notes.
And then you write, you write, you write, and then you maybe cut and paste some stuff so you can use it for reference.
And you go back and forth and back and forth.
Every once in a while.
By the way, this freaks me out.
I'm always freaked out about this.
My wife has a solution to it, but it always scares me that I'm going to make this mistake.
You run into a piece, a few sentences, that are very interestingly written.
That you think you may have written.
Oh, and this does happen.
It happens all the time.
Yeah.
So...
So I read this stuff going, did I write that?
It sounds like me.
It's pretty good.
And then you...
I have a piece that I wrote about UCSD Pascal about 25 years ago that got misattributed to some other writer, and now I've lost confidence in the fact that I'm pretty sure I wrote it.
But if you look it up on the archives, it's got somebody else to buy it.
You know, we had something not too long ago at our U.K. office.
Matt Cuddle, who does Games Weasel, the media show, the video game show, the gaming show.
And so he also writes a blog version of it, which is kind of the way we operate.
You've got the video version, the blog version.
We found out that a reporter for The Scotsman, which is actually a pretty respected newspaper, that this reporter had been plagiarizing every single one of his postings for like six months.
Wow!
Yeah!
Six months!
And we didn't take him to court or anything like that.
You don't have to.
Did you bust him in the public...
Domain?
Hereby.
Hereby busted.
No, we didn't.
They were hugely embarrassed.
Hugely embarrassed?
They were ripping the guy off.
That's beyond plagiarism.
And it was word for word.
It was complete copy-paste.
It was a freelancer and all this.
And actually, we turned it around.
We said, you know what?
Why don't you give us some fucking press, dude?
Do something nice for us.
I know how these things go.
There was no malicious intent.
It was just poor...
Poor process, poor journalistic process on their part, but for the Scotsman, which I don't read, I do believe it's a reasonably respectable paper, and they did do the honorable thing, and I think they did print something about it, and they fired her, this columnist, so they took care of it, but it happens.
How can you trace this stuff, particularly when you're working with freelancers?
It's very difficult.
So yeah, I could be vindictive, and we could go and bust them.
You don't have to be vindictive, you just have to make a point of it, but Anyway, this thing I think with Dowd was one of these deals.
I'm always worried that this is going to happen by accident, and I think that somebody working for the New York Times, if this actually happened to her by accident, it would be rather humiliating.
It's like, see, I can't keep track of what I'm doing, was what you're saying to yourself or the public announcement you'd have to make, which is the way it is, though.
Now, my wife has an interesting technique because she's always worried that, because we do a lot of books and we take, you know, like we just finished our spice book and you take recipes from here and there.
Is that thing out yet?
Is it available?
No, it's not.
Is it on the Kindle?
it will be cool so anyway so you take you know that you take like if you like you're looking for a definitive recipe I've done this when he said right about food for like chimichurri sauce for example if you take about ten of these recipes and you put them in the thing and then you look at me kind of digest the basic theory come up with you know your version the problem you always will run into is that sometimes if you let these things set for a few months you don't know if you wrote the thing about that you think is your version or not
She brings everything in when she does cut and paste like that in red or blue or green, so it's never in black.
So there's never a problem.
It's a great idea, because with the word, you can color the text.
That's a very good idea, and that's kind of like a built-in protection.
You can always come back and say, well, it was blue.
If it was blue, then it wasn't yours.
If you wrote it, it blew no matter what, John.
So anyway, yeah, that was good.
Hey, let me hit you here.
And now, back to real news.
I was reading The Economist on the flight over to New York, and a little piece in the, which I haven't picked up The Economist in a while, and they have these little, you know, story, the world this week, and they do politics and technology and business, and this one just tickled me pink.
Because it's kind of a food story.
Britain's Court of Appeal ruled that, contrary to the argument of their maker, Procter& Gamble, Pringles contains enough potato to be defined as potato chips and therefore are not exempt from value-added tax.
And I thought, that's amazing.
Here's Procter& Gamble actually trying to prove that there's no potatoes in their potato chips so that they can get some kind of tax break.
I just love that.
What I like to ask the question is why would a Pringle without potatoes get away with a tax break and Pringles with a potato have to pay more taxes?
Does that make any sense to anybody?
Well, it doesn't say it in this little blurb, but I presume it has something to do with agriculture or something like that.
Doesn't that make sense?
No, so they're taxing agriculture?
Well, no, it's value-added tax, so that's VAT. So there's different levels of value-added tax for food versus clothing versus chemicals, I presume.
So something like that.
I mean, it would be nice to know, and I think it certainly warrants some detail, yeah, for sure.
It's funny that, you know, here's a company who, you know, once you pop, you can't stop.
Pringles rock, right?
They're the best potato chips around, but the maker of them actually is saying, well, there's no potatoes in there.
There's not enough potatoes to actually be called potato chips.
It's actually a toy.
It's a floor wax and a dessert topping, but don't think it's a potato chip.
Well, people shouldn't be eating stuff like that.
Meanwhile, the bad local news here is that Monterey Foods, which is one of our top Is that a chain?
No, no, it's a place run by various people.
And all the Zuni Cafe chef shops, all the top chefs in the area that run these fancy restaurants, they go there to see what the latest crazy thing is that's in, like seps and truffles and oyster mushrooms and abalone mushrooms.
Now that one of the founders is having a beef with his, I guess, the other relatives or the kids or something, and now this thing may be over and ruined and out of business in the next month or two, and I'm depressed.
More food news.
This evening I had dinner with my partner, Ron Bloom, and one of our board of director members, Jerry Newman.
Have you ever met Jerry?
No.
What a colorful...
You really need to meet him, by the way.
He's in the office all the time.
Very, very colorful guy.
And he's been with us from...
with this company from day one.
Also helped us with our previous company.
He took us to Bar American.
Have you ever heard of this restaurant in New York?
It's not ringing a bell.
John, you need to eat at this place.
First of all, the ambiance is just outrageous, and it is packed.
It is very difficult to get a reservation.
And I had ribs tonight.
Oh, my God.
I've never had your pork or ribs, and I know you do a pulled pork and all that stuff, but somehow I feel it just might rival.
What's the Atlanta onion?
Is it Vidalis?
Vidalia.
Vidalia, thank you.
Vidalia onion soup, which was delicious.
Oh!
But Vidalia onions are interesting because you can actually eat them raw like an apple.
Yeah, and Ron, of course, is from Atlanta, so he knew all about them, and he said, oh, you have not lived until you've tasted Vidalia onion, and it was outstanding, I tell you.
Well, next time I get a shot at it, I'll go there.
What was the wine you had?
Let's go.
No, no wine.
Dude, we're working.
We're working hard.
What time was dinner?
Eight o'clock.
What time was it over?
9.30.
And you couldn't have had a glass of wine?
No.
We had a Pinot Noir at the hotel, and that was pretty much it.
By the way, I've been clean for almost two months now when it comes to the mojo.
And I've been going through quite an interesting process of cleaning out my system, which is just outrageous now that I see how long this crap actually stays in my body.
It's been weeks and weeks, and I can just feel everything...
Streaming out.
Sorry for the visual there, but I'm good.
I'm feeling good.
So the lighter clicks you hear are for tobacco only, and that, of course, is my final vice, and I'll get rid of that eventually, too.
It's a new me, and boy, I'm not funny.
When I'm not baked, which of course is one of the biggest fears of performers.
Hey man, now I'm not baked.
It just might not be good anymore.
It's your head in there.
Thanks, Bill.
I'm sure Brooks will be more than happy to do the show with you.
Well, while you're on the topic of Brooks, well, I can't do this anyway now.
You are so late.
Yeah, okay.
So here we go.
We've got some clips I want people to listen to, and I can go off with those.
Okay.
I want you to play a Bobby Kennedy clip.
Let me explain what's going on for people who have not seen this.
There is a...
American Experience on PBS has a thing called The Kennedys.
I can't remember.
But anyway, it was on last week and I think it's going to be running for a while on and off.
It is a must-watch.
It talks about the sketchy history of the family and everything in between.
All the way back to Joe when he was running booze.
Yep.
Oh, cool.
And I think even before that.
But anyway, I just was listening and listening.
I was just riveted.
I'm sorry.
He was running Moonshine, not drugs.
Moonshine.
You said booze, didn't you?
I think I said...
I don't know what I said.
You said booze.
I'm not baked.
Yes, booze.
Your memory's gone.
So anyway, there's this one clip.
This was the clip of his little speech before he got shot.
But it was like...
I've never really dissected this clip before, but I want you to listen to his words carefully.
Now, just for the timeline, because I think a lot of our listeners, you know, certainly...
Never heard of Bobby Kennedy, yeah.
You might just want to set that up a little bit more, yeah.
I don't know how much more I can set it up, but okay, let me see.
Bobby Kennedy...
Gee, you're not typing into Wikipedia, are you?
No, I'm just telling what day it was shot so we can get the date here.
So John Kennedy was shot in 63.
And this is 68.
Okay, so this is 1968.
Bobby Kennedy, if you want me to set the whole thing up, this has got nothing to do with the clip.
But I know you want to hear it, which is there was an anti-war movement going on and they were going to put in Eugene McCarthy to run against Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy didn't want to have anything to do with it.
And then Lyndon Johnson said, I'm not running for re-election.
And then Kennedy jumps in at the last minute and pushes aside Gene McCarthy and then...
You know, runs and then he gives, you know, he's making headway and then he gets shot, assassinated mysteriously, in my opinion, to this day.
But this is beside the point.
I just want you to listen to this speech because it's kind of interesting if you listen to his words.
I think he makes a kind of a verbal typo, but it's funny to listen to it in today's context.
Here we go.
You can hear the pandemonium that has been gathered.
They're pushing their way to a crowd of reporters and photographers gathered around the podium.
Up to the speakers, gentlemen.
What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or in the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together.
We are a great country, and a selfish country, and a compassionate country.
And I intend to make that my basis for running and over the period of life.
So did he say selfish country?
That's what I heard.
I heard selfish.
Yeah, let's listen to that again.
Hold on a second.
Let's just check.
Between age groups or in the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together.
We are a great country and a selfish country and a compassionate country.
And I intend to make that my basis for running and over the period of life.
Well, that's, you know, Bush was the king of this, you know, the king of these types of gaffs, and of course Rumsfeld, who at one point said, yeah, you know the plane we shot down over Pennsylvania?
Oh, I mean, the one that crashed?
I'm sorry, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So I was highly amused by that, because I'm watching this and I go, what?
What?
Good catch.
Yeah, so I had to put that one out.
Selfish.
Selfish.
I also like the poor and not so affluent.
What's the difference?
I'm sorry I missed that one.
What's going on within the United States over the period of the last three years?
The divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent.
Oh, more affluent.
I'm sorry.
More affluent.
My mistake.
My bad.
Alright, so I thought that was funny.
Now, another one, which is another clip that I got, which has a little...
This is more of a local complaint, since I know I get to dominate the show.
Yes.
For this time and this time only.
Enjoy.
No, there'll be other opportunities, I'm sure.
So...
I want you to play the stolen car.
This is one of the reasons everybody should have their own pod show, because you have personal grievances.
I just want you to play...
This is a clip from one of the TV stations, I think, down in the Salinas Valley, about a car ring that was...
They cut the guys, and then they got all the cars back.
And then there's this story ran, and my jaw...
was just hitting the floor and I'll explain why after you listen to the clip.
Added three more arrests over the weekend bringing the total to more than 40.
Three more cars were seized adding up to more than 60 stolen cars off the streets plus 33 guns were taken along with a 1.4 million dollars in drugs.
And stolen car victims were able to reclaim their vehicles at the CHP's makeshift car lot today.
A month ago Maria Alejo had her 1994 Acura stolen from her driveway while she was finishing dinner.
She had planned to buy a replacement car today when she saw a police photo in the newspaper that looked like her car.
I'm ecstatic because it's like, you know, the people that took this car, they don't know how hard it was for me and my daughter to come up with the money.
You know, I'm a single parent, for me and my daughter to come up with the money and buy another, a second vehicle.
The CHP will store the stolen cars for 30 days at a lot in San Martin.
For more information, contact the CHP's Monterey office.
Okay.
Alright, here's the deal.
The CHP, the woman has the car stolen.
It's reported stolen.
The CHP has the car in their lot.
She has to see it on...
Yeah, don't they know that it's hers?
Isn't it registered to her?
Yes, it has a license plate.
Even if the license plates were taken off, it would have a VIN number, which is...
Peculiar to the car.
And I presume that she had to prove that it was hers.
Well, I would assume she probably did.
I mean, what did they do?
Did the cops steal the cars from the thieves so they could auction them off?
Oh, it would not surprise me.
Would not surprise me.
Where are the news guys with this story?
Why don't they ask this question?
Why don't they say, how come you had to see this guy?
Excuse me, John, news guys?
You presume they're still news guys?
You mean journalists?
Or just news guys?
I mean, please.
I mean, what does it take to ask a simple question?
Why is this woman having to see this thing on TV to go get her car when they should have called her immediately?
Because you're probably right, because it's a freaking scam.
By the way, you too can pick up vehicles really cheap at police auctions.
Yeah, I guess you're not getting enough drug cards anymore.
Well, I was going to say, I should go down there and say, hey, man, that was my weed, dude.
That was my weed.
I saw a picture of it.
It's exactly like my weed.
I can prove it.
Hmm.
Anyway, I found it extremely annoying to watch that story.
I was in the car on the way to Heathrow Tuesday morning, and a real nice guy from Slovakia.
I always like to talk to the drivers because, you know, to find out where they're from.
Yeah.
We were talking about the incredible traffic wardens in the United Kingdom.
You need to turn down your speakers just a little bit, John.
A little bit of a slap back.
We're at what time?
43 minutes?
No, you hit it about the same time every week.
Well, that's when it starts to really annoy me.
And he told me, because he told me the story where he had the flu and he had been working for 12 hours.
So he pulled over to the curb and he closed his eyes for like, you know, he had taken some flu medicine.
And he's like, I got a little drowsy.
I didn't feel too good.
So I pulled over and he closed his eyes for like 10 minutes.
And he wakes up and the warden is putting a ticket under his windshield.
And he's like, hey, dude, I could have passed out, I could have been dead, why didn't you even attempt for a second to see if I was okay?
No, instead you write a ticket.
And then he proceeded to tell me that in the United Kingdom, these traffic wardens actually have an incentive, a bonus incentive structure for every ticket they write.
Wow.
Yeah, whoa.
Whoa, indeed.
Wow.
The UK is really screwed up.
Oh, dude, it is so messed up.
It really is.
And I don't know if any of the continuing saga of the ministers...
For the first time in 300 years, the Speaker of the House had to resign over this expense.
I mean, these ministers of parliament were using government money to do things like have their moat cleaned.
I mean, I love that one.
Oh, excuse me, the taxpayers have to pay to clean my moat.
Everything from that down to a broken toilet seat.
I mean, just outrageous.
And the Speaker, and the last time this happened was when actually they introduced freedom of the press, which is the irony is not, is obvious.
The Speaker had to resign because instead of going after these bandits and making them resign, he went after the people who leaked the information to the press.
Yes, the UK massively screwed up.
Massively.
Moat cleaned?
Yes, moat.
I need my moat cleaned.
It's this whole thing where you're allowed to charge your secondary home near Parliament to the taxpayer so you can still have a home in your constituency.
And that's really what it's for.
And there's all this trickery.
People bought homes and then sold them to family members.
All kinds of crap.
And it's just...
It's minor in the scale of what's really going on in Gitmo Nation and the New World Order.
And props to the Daily Telegraph for uncovering all this and really blowing it out.
Because it has opened up the eyes of the public.
Until the next Amy Winehouse scandal, at least they're thinking about it.
There'll be something coming up shortly then.
Oh yeah, it's about time.
It's about time.
We've got to get more celebrities.
Amy Winehouse is not carrying her weight.
No, she needs to step up to the plate.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Amy, what you doing, baby?
We need more real news.
God, what is her problem?
Yeah.
Well, now, of course, we have...
What's the...
Oh, the reality show, I've been following a little bit here in the States, of the couple who have eight children, and this is like their 15th season, and, you know, they have cameras in the kids' bedrooms.
Oh, yeah, yeah, something makes eight, and something or other.
And, you know, in CBS, the whole morning, oh, I mean, there is some real stuff going on in the world, people.
I've never seen this show, but the more I hear about it, the more I'm thinking it's the worst thing ever put on television.
No, no, no.
That has to be the Real Housewives of New Jersey.
That has to be the worst thing on television.
I've got to see that, too.
Bravo.
You have to watch it.
New episode every Tuesday at 10.
What's it called?
Kate Makes Eight or something like that?
Yeah.
Kate Eight?
Yeah, I think that's it.
But anyway, so her sister...
John and Kate plus eight.
Yeah, her sister and brother-in-law were on CBS this morning saying, you know, this is abuse.
These children are being abused.
They have no safe home, which of course is true.
But in show business, that's okay, you know?
Hey, it's entertainment!
Yeah, baby!
We love it!
It is so vapid and empty.
Thank God for shows like this.
Well, we do our part.
We do our part.
Who's we?
There you go.
The bush crowd.
We always refer to the bush crowd.
Adam Curry.
John C. Dvorak.
This is No Agenda.
We are the bush crowd.
It is we!
Sorry, I finally got some jingles to play.
Yeah, I'm noticing.
Well, we've got to work them in.
Yeah.
Okay, so here's...
Okay, I'm going to do another...
Third clip.
I'm going to kill some more time.
Good, good, good.
Third clip.
Herc some story.
Again, this is more of a reflection of the news media than anything else.
Oh, by the way, so I ran...
Besides, before I get to that, I ran into Steve Gilmore today.
Of the Gilmore Gang.
Yeah, you know, Steve, I really get along with this guy.
I've always liked Steve.
He's actually a very funny person.
Yeah, I used to like him, too, until he turned into a total dick.
I still like him.
A total dick.
So anyway, he mentioned something to me today, which I ended up putting on Tech 5, and I realized, I went over to the Google Developers Conference where I was literally thrown out because I didn't register by 9 a.m.
Like physically thrown out?
No, I walked out after they wouldn't let me in, but I made a fuss and got somebody in trouble.
Wait, did security have to escort you to the door, Mr.
Dvorak?
It would have been that.
Wait a minute, stop, stop.
I want to hear, before you get into this Gilmore thing, what happened?
I want to know.
I'm doing cranky geeks and I've got Jim Lauder back and...
Rafe Biedelman on the show.
Today's show, she started an audition to watch it.
So it's actually one of our better shows.
It's quite funny.
Because Sebastian Rupley mentioned that we have 125 years of tech reporting amongst the four of us, which of course I said means that the show is going to be terrible.
So...
It was a good show.
But anyway, so Needleman says, yeah, I went over to the Google Developers.
And he says, eh, this is not bad.
And so as we were leaving, I'm heading back to the parking lot, and he says, why don't you come over to the thing?
He says, you can get in.
I said, I don't have my, you know, I'm not going to be able to get in.
Your credentials.
Your press pass.
But I went back in.
I went in there, and I, you know, I went to the press thing, and I found what I thought.
I'm still probably going to write this up somewhere eventually.
i found it to be like did the entire of the just a bunch of very sheepish well got you know you didn't you know that the registration ended at nine a.m.
and we were not accepting any more media and we can't do this we can't do that let me call somebody let me call someone who is isn't this what is this a media based event or is it purely for i think that i don't know there's not a every media guy in the world was there including steve gilmore so but didn't know it's a little bit of a little bit of a little bit they had they need time to check you Do they have to do a background check?
What is the point?
There's no point.
Here's the point.
Somebody made a rule and everybody's following it.
Who did you get in trouble?
A woman named...
Well, I don't know if she's...
She may be...
I actually get a promotion.
It was a woman named Megan Hughes, who everybody deferred to.
So, you know, we gotta...
You gotta talk to Megan.
Megan's the only one who could approve this.
I already talked to Megan.
She, like, snubbed me when I was there, and she wouldn't even talk to me.
Jeez.
You know, it's because of this show.
She's probably an Obama bot.
She doesn't even know who anybody is, and she doesn't listen to the show.
So, I mean, it's obvious.
But anyway, so then I made a fuss to some people who supervise her, and then they apologized to me and said, I can come tomorrow.
Oh, but of course you're not going to go.
I might, because there's a keynote in the morning I might check out.
But it's beside the point, it's going to be a convenience thing.
By the way, we're doing this on Wednesday evening, just an FYI. Right.
So anyway, but the point is what I was observing, in fact, I was talking to Gilmore about this, was this weird little bureaucratic, like, this buzzing that was going around with people.
Nobody could make a decision.
Nobody could just say, okay, get in, get out of here, you know, get out of my face.
They were just wasting a bunch of time on this, trying to find somebody else who could make a decision.
Nobody would make a decision.
And I was thinking, oh my God, is this what this company is doing?
Devolving into one of those...
All 20-somethings, by the way.
Devolving into one of these decisions...
They can't make a decision.
They can't think for themselves.
All they are are just little robots.
I was very concerned about it.
Well, that's the story right there, then.
That's the story.
That is the story.
How deep has this kind of cancer gone into the company?
You have to wonder.
When you start seeing stuff like that, I mean, this is, you know, it's not rocket science to, like, you know, figure out what your job is and to do it correctly.
Yeah, but this is what happens with big companies who hire quick and explode and this is very normal and it'll hurt them somewhere, somehow.
Oh, yeah.
No, I think so, too.
But I was just totally fascinated.
I was just watching this.
I was thinking, oh, my God.
This is ridiculous.
So anyway, so Gilmore, who went to an earlier session, mentioned that HTML5 has got a new tag in it.
The blink is back.
No.
Would that be funny?
I didn't even know HTML5 was coming out.
Didn't we lock that shit down with 3 or whatever?
I guess not.
Did I like the blink thing?
I don't think the blinks ever left.
Not every browser recognizes it.
I'm going to check it out.
I'm going to start blinking my headlines on the blog.
I remember back in the day, man.
Boy, did we overuse that.
People blink and blink everything.
I loved Blink.
Okay, so what is back?
What has happened?
They're adding a new tag.
So now, just like an href for a JPEG or a ping or a GIF, an MP4. Or any sort of video file, which means you don't need to use Flash anymore to put video on your blog or any place else for that.
Well, that's not true because, you know, MP4 is still a container.
No, I'm not saying just MP4, but it's all the video.
So there's a video tag now.
Yeah, like href.
I don't even know if it's any more complicated than just the same, like a very similar tag to the photo tag.
You could always do embed.
You could always do a tag for a video file.
That's a lot different than the browser doing it.
You couldn't embed.
The browser still has to fire up a player.
In this case, it's in the browser.
That's the point.
Nothing's getting fired up.
So is this an IETF standard, this HTML5? How does that work?
Well, I'm just finding out now.
Mr.
Tech journalist getting thrown out of conferences.
You're trouble, Dvorak.
You're nothing but trouble.
That would have been better, you know, than just, you know, casual.
You're nothing but trouble.
I'm sorry, but the 9 o'clock deadline was not met, you know, kind of thing.
It's like immigrations.
These are the people that will be ruling the world in, let's say, about 25 years.
Well, actually, they are now, unfortunately.
Sorry, you've got an ABC News clip here to roll.
Okay, well, first let me read a story that's underreported.
It showed up on the blog as underreported news.
Gasparini actually found it.
He sent it to me and then I posted it for him for some unknown reason.
Under-reported news.
Ask yourself why you have to read this stuff on a blog.
Okay.
Now this is a whole story.
You can go to the blog and look up North Korea and you can get this whole thing.
I'm just going to read this part of the excerpt.
Apparently North Korea is irked at the United States because there's a bunch of countries ganging up on them, they think.
So I'm going to read you from the article.
The North's anger was provoked by the South's decision to join a U.S.-led international security initiative established after the September 11th attacks to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Quote, those who have provoked us will face unimaginable merciless punishment.
Unquote.
Said the military...
It's a military statement of the official Korean Central News Agency, blaming Washington for the latest turn of events.
The PSI, which is this protective group...
Services Inc., yeah.
...which now...
Groups 95 nations provides for the stopping of vessels to ensure they are not carrying weapons of mass destruction or the components to make them.
Have you ever looked at the definition of weapons of mass destruction?
It's about as broad as terrorism.
Right.
Automatic weapons.
Yeah.
Anyway, back to the quotes from the Koreans.
It's getting better.
Quote.
Quote...
It said its military would, quote, no longer be bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, in which the United States fought on the side of the South, because Washington has drawn its puppet soul into the PSI. With no binding ceasefire, it said, quote, the Korean Peninsula will go back to a state of war.
Wow.
And of course, they've launched three nukes by now.
They've done three nuke tests, haven't they?
Yeah, they've been doing a bunch of stuff.
But meanwhile, they say they're going to restart the Korean War if this goes any further.
Now, who is they in this case?
Is that Kim Jong-il?
Kim Jong-il's crowd.
Oh, that crowd, they're no good.
So, now, so, how do you think, now, with this kind of threat going on, that the Korean War might crank up again, which seems, you know, like it's something you might want to report.
You know what that is?
You might want to report on this.
Here's today's ABC News with Charlie Gibson.
And here's the way the story is presented to the American public.
By the way, Charlie is a news guy, in case you were wondering.
He is a news guy.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today that North Korea's recent military moves, including an underground nuclear test this week, were provocative and belligerent actions, and she warned the North it will face consequences.
Meanwhile, the North threatened a military response if the U.S. or South Korea tries to search North Korean ships for equipment needed for its nuclear program.
That's it!
That's it!
It's kind of a matter of fact, like a couple of lines.
Let's leave out some of the more interesting parts and move on.
Well, hold on.
Someone sent me a link.
Because I guess maybe it's the same report in a 10-minute clip, and I haven't pulled it.
One of our listeners slash producers sent it to me.
Former Ambassador Donald Gregg is in that report.
I'm just seeing the email now, so I'll have to pull that for Sunday's show because, of course, my uncle, Uncle Don Gregg, is the president of the Korea Society, and he is, I think I can just safely say it, he is heavily involved in any talks between the Koreans, North and South, and the United he is heavily involved in any talks between the Koreans, North
I know from my private conversation with him, he has said continuously that There is a severe underestimation of the culture of the Koreans, in particular the North Koreans.
And you do not want to mess with them, has always been his message to me.
So I'm going to dive into that and I'm going to try tomorrow to get a hold of him.
He may even be in Korea for all I know.
I'm going to see if I can get a hold of him to see if we can get some inside scoop.
And I'm surprised we're not seeing more of him.
Well, you know, they're downplaying this and it's bugging me.
The Koreans do have a culture that has to win.
I mean, you do business with them a different way.
You always negotiate in such a way that they have to always feel they won.
Very much like a lot of Asian countries, they have to save face, etc., The Koreans have little idiosyncrasies that are different than the rest of them, because they've always been attacked.
So this is not a minor thing, but it seems to be, if you listen to our news, there's not much...
But Charles Gibson, as I said, he is a true news guy.
He rings teleprompter as well as our president.
Well, he reads it a little better because he can actually read it into the camera.
Whereas the president can't seem to do that.
He can't pull that trick off, which is not that hard.
So anyway, so I was a little upset by that.
Meanwhile, there are emphasizing, and the same news stories cut right to the Pakistan situation.
And it seems to me almost as though the government has said, okay, you news guys, we're going to have to do something about Pakistan because these idiots over there, this Pakistani army can't handle anything.
And I should have this news clip, but I don't have it.
But essentially they went, because I thought they were going to downplay a lot of this, but no, they actually went over the top with the Pakistan story.
First, describing the fact that in Lahore, where they had this bombing that killed 20 or 30 people, it looked like they were targeting the ISI offices, which is essentially the CIA of Pakistan.
It is, yes, CIA. And they are credited with actually creating, with our help, the Taliban in the first place.
And the Taliban, you know, was then let to rule Afghanistan.
And now that we've rousted them, I guess we're getting pretty good at getting the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
Enough so that they're in Pakistan attacking to take over the whole place.
Yeah, well, we gave them their playbook.
You know, we taught them.
So they're in Pakistan causing trouble, and every time you turn around, oh no, we got them backed off, and then the Taliban, when they want to cease fire, they say, okay, we're going to go back to, we're going to stop doing this, we're going to stop doing this, really.
And it looks like one of those American wrestling matches from the 60s or 70s.
Yeah, where the guy said, no, no, no, don't hit me, don't hit me, don't hit me, and then he gives it to one of the guys.
We laugh, but we're really not happy.
Well, the Taliban situation there, so it looks as though, and the report had this interesting, it had some editorializing in it that I thought was a little...
I hate to use that word because it's a code word, but it was telling.
And what it told me was that something's up.
And it went something like this.
First he gave the report, this one guy on the ground, he actually had a foreign correspondent, believe it or not, there.
Not some guy standing in front of a green screen.
Green screen.
We're in the hotel.
And he said that the Americans were praising the Pakistani army for pushing back the Taliban.
but then there's this commentary that was that nobody thinks the Pakistani army has enough on the ball, as it were, to do more than one or two fronts, and now that there's some other groups,
I guess some of these jihadist groups that aren't necessarily Taliban, are I guess some of these jihadist groups that aren't necessarily Taliban, are attacking here and there within the country, you know, there may be more than they can handle, and it was presented in such a way that it was like, oh, okay, so that means we're going to have to go I mean, that's what I was thinking.
Well, you know, we're not.
Well, we are, because if they got A-bombs and the Taliban gets hold of one of those things, No, we're not!
We're not, John, because all we're doing is we're sending troops to secure the poppy fields in Afghanistan to keep the drugs flowing.
Well, there may be some truth to that, but it doesn't mean we're going to put up with some Taliban.
He's getting a hold of them.
Well, you show me.
You show me.
We've got no troops there.
We've got no movement.
There's no plans.
There's no contingency.
And Obama, if you don't remember, he mentioned this when he was running for office about having to go into Pakistan.
Yeah, but we're not.
He's geared up for it.
We're not.
Yeah, you know what?
Yeah, they said that about Vietnam.
We're not going into Cambodia.
No, he's not even saying we're not.
It's just we're not.
We are.
We're not going into Pakistan.
We're going to have people on the ground in Pakistan.
Has that been announced?
No, I'm just telling you.
I can see this coming down Broadway.
No, we're not.
India's going to go in there and take over the whole country and kill everybody.
That's not going to happen.
Okay.
Mark this down.
All I'm saying is that this is a serious mess.
Yeah.
Alright, what is the most popular weed these days?
Increasing in popularity by leaps and bounds.
Now selling for $9 a pound at specialty supermarkets.
Dandelion?
Yes!
Correct.
According to the Wall Street Journal.
Interesting.
I only say that because my wife has gotten involved in making dandelion honey and dandelion wine and dandelion syrup.
Is this a yuppie thing?
She's not a yuppie.
No, no, no.
But is this a yuppie thing?
Where's this surgeon coming from?
I have no idea.
Until you mentioned this story, I just took a wild guess.
I didn't know that this was going on.
I thought my wife was just doing something.
No, man.
She's on the cutting edge, dude.
She's on the cutting edge.
Well, she's a visionary.
Well, she's got a spice book coming out.
On a recent Saturday, Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. interior designer Morgan Green stopped at a produce stand and picked up some dandelion greens.
$9 a pound?
No problem, says Mr.
Green.
These are as good as yuppie green as you can get.
There you go.
There's yuppie.
Hey, you can come out and check out my lawn, dudes.
No, no, because if you don't follow the organic rules, you can get arrested for growing dandelions illegally and incorrectly.
The dandelion, perhaps the most common weed at the mall, is seeing a huge surge in sales at grocery stores.
Other long-scorned greens making the leap to the dinner table include purslane.
I don't know what that is, purslane.
It's a, yeah, I've seen it.
I don't know if it's a type of parsley or something like that.
I'm not sure.
I don't remember.
Lamb's quarters.
And, well, this one I know about stinging nettles.
Of course, in the Second World War, it was very typical to make nettle soup and all kinds of...
Yeah, if you cook them, the stinging goes away.
Yeah, and actually, it's kind of tasty.
You throw a couple of rocks in there and you've got yourself a meal.
I'm telling you.
Mmm, rocks and nettles.
When I was a kid, that's all we had.
We used to make that at school in Holland.
We didn't mean rocks.
Yeah, well, rock soup.
Sure, man.
Yeah, so you throw in rocks and some stinging nettles, and this is what we used to eat in the war, kids.
You chew the rocks, or you just what?
No, no, no.
You just put it in there for flavor.
Yeah.
Flavor crystals.
What is the world coming to?
I'm not sure how much nutrition you get from a boiled rock.
It was for taste.
That's what I'm saying.
I didn't even get any taste out of them.
The Indians up in the Haida is up further up north.
It just kills me.
What?
It's funny.
So the height that you used to take, they cook soup in a, they have a cedar box that's watertight.
These things cost a fortune to buy.
And you find them on Vancouver Island.
So you buy the cedar box, and then they put the liquids in whatever food you're going to cook in them, and then they take some rocks that are kept on top of the hottest coals imaginable, so the rocks are just red hot.
And then you drop them in the box, and it boils the water, and it's actually kind of an interesting way of cooking.
Probably safer than sous vide.
Yes, let's not go into that again.
No one responded to that, of course.
No one gives a crap.
Well, you know, I'm going to still go on.
No, no, you should.
You should.
I think it's a health and safety issue that is large.
Nobody cares about it because it's not being covered by the major media.
One of our producers, Alistair, sent me some aviation news, and it struck me.
I don't even know if he caught it, because the title of his email is, Bloody hell, stick to your 182RG, which is the type of aircraft I have.
You'll recall when we went into some reasonable detail about the Turkish Airways crash near Schiphol Airport.
So, he sends me this article...
The UK FAA, the AAIB, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Board, released a final report on an incident with a Boeing 737-300, and this is from September 2007.
So just listen to the facts and then it'll probably strike you.
The Boeing 737-300 was on approach to Bournemouth Airport, which is in southern England.
It's an international airport, but not like Heathrow or Gatwick, following a routine passenger flight from Faro, Portugal.
Early in the ILS approach, the autothrottle disengaged with the thrust levers in the idle thrust position.
The disengagement was neither commanded nor recognized by the crew, and the thrust levers remained at idle throughout the approach.
Because the aircraft was fully configured for landing, the airspeed decayed rapidly to a value below that appropriate for the approach.
The commander took control and initiated a go-around.
During the go-around, the aircraft pitched up excessively.
Flight crew attempts to reduce the aircraft's pitch were largely ineffective.
The aircraft reached a maximum pitch of 44 degrees nose-up, and the indicated airspeed reduced to 82 knots.
That's like, you know, three knots before stalling and crashing and flying like a brick.
The flight crew, however, were able to recover control of the aircraft and complete a subsequent approach in landing at Bournemouth without further incident.
Um...
This was exactly what happened with Turkish Airways.
Although it was blamed on an altimeter, this is exactly the same scenario.
However, This is a 737-300, and it was two years ago, and it was a 400 series that happened outside of the Netherlands.
Exact same scenario.
Throttle went to idle.
The crew didn't notice it in the Turkish Airways incident, which, by the way, still is very, very cloudy as to what happened.
And I'm saying, whoa, can anyone please pull these two together, see the similarities, and maybe call a significant issue with the Boeing 737s?
Well, somebody should.
Just a little bit of aviation news.
Yeah, it doesn't sound right.
It doesn't sound like, oh, I've stumbled upon something huge, but in the world of aviation, this is huge.
No, it doesn't sound this whole thing.
I believe that there's software issues with a lot of these planes, and there's different things that go on, and it's like people make mistakes.
But to have these two mistakes happen on very similar aircraft...
Yeah, it makes you think there's a subsystem that's faulty.
Yes.
Or some procedure or something.
It could be one of those things.
They always have this problem.
There was a good book that came out about 15-20 years ago called Dangers of Software or something like that.
I'm going to have to dig it up.
I do have it still in the library.
I'll find it in the next month or two.
What can I say?
It talked about...
The different kinds of catastrophes that have happened over the years, and one of them was a famous one, I think it was turned into a TV show, where some guy got onto a, you know, behind there was some radiation, piece of radiation gear to irradiate you for some, you know, medical reason.
And if you put in a, if you apparently, it only happened once in a while, but somebody went into the thing, and instead of going at the very low amount, they basically roasted the guy.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, gee.
And then they tried to figure out how that happened, and then they could never figure it out, and they figured the guy using the system had screwed up, and they fired him, and it was a big deal.
Then it happened again one other time.
And then some software guy who knew what he was doing found that a series of mistakes.
In other words, what had happened was instead of putting in the exact number and then hitting the button to go where you'd get that number.
Apparently, if you put in a different number, then you wanted to erase it, and you hit the backspaced key two or three or four times, and then you put it in again, and then maybe backspaced again.
It never erased anything.
The backspace key didn't work right.
And so it just added more and more juice to this thing.
And it turned out to be a software problem.
And this is the kind of thing that, you know, you have one series of it.
that we need to study the exact procedure that you went through which most of the time you can't do.
And then you can replicate it and it keeps on happening.
Right.
But it's always some software thing.
This is the reason we should probably do it.
I've always been very, you know, I've always flown Enstrom helicopters, which have the best safety record of all helicopters.
I don't think there's ever been a single fatality ever in an Enstrom helicopter, but I also got into Eurocopters for a while.
And there's a lot of, not really automation, but a lot of the systems are controlled by a computer in the Eurocopter.
And I saw it boot once.
I was like, uh-oh, it's Windows.
I'm not too confident about flying this thing anymore.
I do not like it.
I would not fly it.
You know the joke about what if your car runs on Windows or the analogy of a car?
Yeah, there was a whole series of gags for about a year there was a million gags like that.
Hey, maybe a perfect time, John, to bring up something we haven't talked about in at least a week since we were off air.
And that's another one for the Armory.
So we do need to get some people.
A lot of people, since we bailed out for a week, have dropped their subscription.
They hate us.
They've canceled their donation subscription?
Yeah.
Rightly so, I guess.
I understand it's a minor crisis in my family.
There's a few of them.
I could name names, but I won't.
No, you don't have to shame them.
But there's a bunch of them.
We forgive you and we appreciate everything.
I'm a little disappointed by one guy, though.
Then again, maybe they could transfer their $2 one to a $24 a year once better.
I've got the big list of people with the $1,500 and screwball numbers I'm going to run on our 100th show.
I don't have them for today, but I do want to encourage people to...
We're going to be doing the show again.
On track every week, twice.
Yep.
And, you know, maybe we can do a bonus show somewhere.
Sorry.
But generally, I don't see any problem again because we've done...
The only time that...
It's only in, like, dire emergencies where we don't do the show.
I think we have a lot of material that we're backed up on.
And we'll catch up, but if you would help...
And this wasn't even, it wasn't like a dire emergency.
It was like I was ill, you know, and I was literally ill.
So, you know, what happens?
And yeah, I know you keep saying evergreen, but I don't believe in evergreen shows because it's like, that's like lame.
You know, it's like either we're current or we're not.
You know, I'm sorry.
I think the Evergreen show would be great, especially if it was in the can for a long time.
And so did you hear about what Ed Kennedy said?
No, it's just not good.
Well, there's a couple things that we haven't touched on which are pretty big, and I would like to hear your analysis of it.
Number one, of course, with the big in the news in the United States, at least California gay union ban upheld.
Anything you want to talk about there?
Yeah, well, I mean, I was expecting that.
Everybody's all bent out of shape.
The gays are doing the wrong thing, as usual.
The reason it got passed in the first place was because it was passed as a...
Not the world's greatest law.
And then everybody went to court with activist judges.
And I'm kind of interested in the fact that the liberals are the ones that keep talking about activist judges, or somebody does.
But these activist judges have decided that, well, no, we think that whatever the population of California thinks, we don't care.
We're going to do...
So they decided to overturn the thing and a whole bunch of people got married.
And then they came up with, I don't know who it was, but a bunch of different religious people mostly.
Came up with Proposition 8.
And then, unfortunately, they found that the idiot mayor from San Francisco is probably going to be president of the United States someday.
Gavin Newsom.
He fits the profile.
Was, yeah.
Kind of a treat Williams look-alike type guy.
He's a handsome man.
Yeah, totally.
And he, you know, he's been around, which he had a few babes.
So he got on the podium and said, you can't do nothing about it now!
You guys, you tough too bad!
Yeah, you guys!
He started writing the people who had voted in the law in the first place and had thrown out.
And he was like throwing it in everybody's face.
That, you know, you, the people of the state of California, whatever you think you can do, you can't.
Because we can outperform you in court, so you're screwed.
And he just went on and on like that.
And I honestly believe that because people are so offended by that, A, because Californians do have...
We pass all kinds of laws.
The public passes laws.
That's what we do with it.
We have referendums.
Isn't it referenda?
Whatever.
I don't know.
But anyway, whatever the case is, we have this process where we can pass laws by the public.
They're trying to get that overturned, by the way.
They're trying to get rid of it because it's getting to be a problem.
Of course.
Heaven forbid there's actually a democracy.
Oh, please.
Let's stop that in its tracks.
That's no good.
So, the Californians, I think, were annoyed by this kind of taunting.
A, so a lot of people voted for it, and then the Obama campaign, which was extremely, if you didn't notice, he won, but he brought out a lot of the black voters, and many of them are religious, and they don't like the idea of gay marriage in any way, and so the Obama...
Well, probably was the one that pushed it over the top.
And now they're going right back to the courts again instead.
If they really want to get this done, they should...
Well, I don't get it.
If you have a referendum, and it's not just like final...
Is it ever final?
This is like the frickin' Lisbon Treaty.
Is it ever final?
When is it just done?
It's always final.
They just have to sue over it being unconstitutional or something like that, which they found.
The first one was vague and crummy, but they wrote the second one that's probably pretty ironclad, and that's why the Supreme Court said, hey, You're on your own.
We can't do anything.
What they should do, of course, is try to do another referendum on the other side if they want to win this war that they've created for themselves.
Now, that said, a friend of mine is over watching boxing, and he brought up an interesting point.
He says, why are all the liberals in particular, and the gay specifically, We want marriage as opposed to civil unions when marriage is really something that's biblical.
It's religious, yeah.
We've been through this.
Because civil unions are legal, right?
Yeah, and the thing...
Well, not in California.
I mean, civil unions between same sex has to be passed, too.
But you could get that.
But the gays say, no, we don't want civil unions, period.
We want marriage.
Well, the real problem, the way he sees it is this.
Is that the state of California or the local civil, you know, all these, we should just take marriage out of the picture.
You know, I am all for gay marriage because I really, really, really...
I don't have a problem with it either, but let's get back to the point.
Let me finish my point.
I really want everybody, every man, woman, whether you're gay, straight, transgendered, bisexual, homosexual, I want you to go through divorce as well.
Please, you should have that right.
You deserve that right.
Californians have gone through that gag a million times already.
Okay, so let's go back to this idea.
Get rid of marriage as a civil anything.
It shouldn't even be on the books.
If you want to have a civil union, you want to run off with your girlfriend and go to City Hall, you don't get married, you get a civil union right there, you sign on the spot.
You want to get married, it's a religious thing, go to church.
Yeah.
Go to a church and get married.
It would be up to the churches to say this marriage is okay, that one's okay.
Isn't there supposed to be separation of church and state?
Isn't that the whole deal?
And marriage, there should be a church thing.
So you can get married and have a civil union.
And otherwise go to another church that does allow it.
And there will be plenty.
But there's something else at work here because the whole thing is just nobody wants to do anything easy.
Nobody wants, you know, it's almost like, you know, somebody's kicked out of the house.
People have nothing better to do, John.
They got nothing better to do.
And by the way, look at the signs.
They're professionally made.
These are professional print jobs.
Yeah, no, I agree.
That's always, you've got to watch out for that shit when you see professional signs.
We forgot to mention it's dvorak.org slash na or noagendalibrary.com.
What's going to keep this show alive, and especially now that I'll be needing some extra income, It's not that funny.
There's news that we bring to you way ahead of anything that shows up in print, and I just want to refer again to the Wall Street Journal today.
We told you this when the PPIP plan was announced.
The website was up.
We looked at it.
We uncovered the total scam that it really is of just a way to get all the toxic assets off of the books of banks.
It's known as the PPIP. And so today, a headline on money and investing, that's Section C1 of the Wall Street Journal.
The industry, banking industry, lobbies the FDIC to let some buy toxic assets with taxpayer aid from their own banks.
Exactly what we told you was going to happen.
They're taking your taxpayer money, they're going to buy up their own assets, really cheap, to get it off their books and still own it.
And you will own 80% of the crap.
And you will own almost nothing of the upside.
You, the taxpayer.
You know, the taxpayer bunch.
And there it is in black and white in the paper.
Like some big discovery from the Wall Street Journal.
Big discovery, guys.
I also looked at the reporting as promised in May, recovery.gov.
Well, it's going to take me a month to figure out these reports.
As simple as the website was, now the reporting is out.
It's impossible to understand what they're actually reporting other than a lot of money is going to a lot of teachers.
Well, you want to get the teachers on your side so you can, you know, push your agenda.
Yeah, exactly.
Push your stupefying agenda.
And June 17th coming up very soon.
I'm still tracking that date.
Very significant.
You should know what it is, Mr.
Dvorak.
I'm sorry, what's the date again?
June 17th is the sentencing date for Bernard Madoff.
Oh, that should be good for a laugh.
And I just want to reiterate my prediction that there will be no sentencing.
There will be an international financial court, a banker's court, and it will have to go to the banker's court.
And once they start having some kind of influence over law when it comes to finance and banking, they will actually start to become law.
Yeah, I like your theory, but I don't think that's going to happen.
I think he's going to get...
They're not going to...
The public is not going to allow your scenario to actually take place.
Oh, please, John!
They were allowing the banks to...
Forget about it.
Don't get me started.
This whole Madoff thing, here's the scam.
$50 billion.
Of course, that's the big question.
Where did the money go?
$50 billion.
So take $1 million.
Imagine what $1 million looks like in paper.
Now, multiply that by $1,000.
So it's $1,000 million and then 50 times that.
So I have my own thoughts where that money went to.
I personally believe it went into Israel.
It's been put into weapons, probably to kill Arabs or something like that.
But when you really think about the scam, a lot of the investors were insured against losses in that money.
What company insures those types of losses?
Don't even answer.
I'll give you the answer.
It's AIG. AIG was bailed out by us, the taxpayer.
It's a hustle.
It's a big hustle.
And someone's laughing.
Oh, and by the way, everyone got paid off with bonuses.
Billions of dollars of bonuses.
And it's all coming up, and you're all going to go, oh, Amy Winehouse is more important.
Let's watch the show with those eight children.
Is this your new voice?
That's my idiot, idiot voice.
Which, of course, does not include any of our producer listeners who are on the ball and smart.
But propagate this information, please.
Tell people how we're being hustled and scammed.
It's just sad to me.
Well, it's sad that we're not on that side of the fence, so we don't have to talk about it.
We can just be sipping champagne in Paris.
And we could.
You know, that is a choice.
Both of us could make it any time, by the way, John.
There's plenty of hustle to get into.
I mean, we can still participate in all this.
But no, we choose for what is righteous.
We're righteous dudes, man.
Yeah, dude, and we're not even baked.
Alright, then finally, because we are nearing our allotted time, we want to talk about the nominee for Supreme Court.
I don't think we can talk about it.
We can save that.
We can save that.
It's still boiling away.
Well, there's a lot of controversy surrounding this company.
My favorite controversy is the Joe Biden comments when they picked Clarence Thomas.
And he said, why would they pick a person?
He's obviously picked because it's a publicity stunt.
I get a black man.
If he was white, he said this.
If he was white, they wouldn't have picked him.
Fantastic.
Does anyone remember the Anita Hill scandal?
Are our listeners even old enough to remember the Clarence Thomas?
No, I think most people don't.
That was a clip.
Google this.
The pubic hair on the Coke can.
Yes, and Google Long Dong Silver if you want to laugh.
If you want to laugh.
And that is what is on our Supreme Court.
A harassing, pubic hair, Coke pudding, Long Dong Silver porn watching dude.
Turns out to be, if you ever see him on a talk show or being interviewed, he's a great guy.
Well, of course!
He watches porn!
He's got to be a good guy.
I'm not against him.
I'm just saying.
I said that I was bull.
You don't think that was true?
You don't think that harassment thing was true?
I thought the evidence was pretty freaking compelling.
I don't know.
I was skeptical.
The whole thing was too much of a setup.
And that woman was a bit much...
I need a hill.
That woman.
I need a hill.
That woman.
You know what, John?
That, I have to call that, is pretty sexist.
Whenever a woman comes with what should be a legitimate complaint about sexual harassment...
It comes up a little late in the game.
You know, years and years and years after the fact, you come out and you say all this stuff, it's just a little sketchy to me, unless the guy's like a serial killer and somebody says, well, then you start to put two and two together because all these people come out of the woodwork with new information.
John, one of these days, it'll take five or six years, but I will eventually have to come out and tell the people that you touch me inappropriately.
This is what I'm talking about.
When it benefits me, I will bring it out.
Yeah.
You got to save that stuff, man, until you get a lawyer who's really going to help you.
End of.
The question is, what would be inappropriate for you anyway?
That is how vile you actually are.
All right.
Hey!
All right.
Well, we've just about filled it up.
Enough of that.
Yeah, just about filled it up.
I think we stop while we're still ahead.
I don't thought we ever got ahead.
So I'm going back to Gitmo Nation East, to Europe, and Thursday I come out to San Francisco for an entire month.
The timing could not be worse.
What airports are you flying out of when you come back?
Well, maybe I shouldn't mention that, because now that I can be a terrorist...
I mentioned it off the air, but I want you to pick some stuff up for me at Duty Free.
Oh, sure.
No, I'd be happy to.
But it's a massive bummer because this is exactly not when I want to be away from my daughter.
So that sucks.
And by the way, I want to thank everybody for sending me beautiful emails and encouragement, non-judgmental one way or the other.
That's highly appreciated.
And anyone who has experience in my situation, particularly as regards children, I would love to hear...
Hear your experiences.
I definitely need help.
And we do have the No Agenda Forums.
People are chiming in.
Go to NoAgendaForums.com.
Isn't there a NoAgendaWiki.com as well?
I don't know.
There might be.
On the 100th show, we're going to have to plug all these guys.
I mean, we still have Cage Match and Bubba still does his thing and we can't leave him behind.
We have a lot of people.
And don't forget to go to the NoAgendaLibrary.com or Dvorak.org slash NA and help us out so we can keep the show going.
So we should do something really special for episode number 100, like actually do an episode.
Prepare.
Yeah, please.
Stop threatening.
Well, just get some jingles up.
That'll be good enough.
That's all people really want to hear.
They really want the jingles?
Okay, for the 100...
I'll tell you what.
You get the website up, and I'll put the jingles there.
Yeah, okay.
Where's the website, man?
Where's the website?
We'll have something for you guys.
Alright, time for me to go to bed.
It's past midnight here in New York.
So coming to you from, I should just say, at the lovely Empire Hotel in New York City, Gitmo Nation East.
It's not bad, $220 a night.
Fantastic special promotion.
My name's Adam Curry.
You should be comped.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
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