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Aug. 20, 2009 - No Agenda
01:20:16
123: Thanksgiving Turkeys
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You know, there has to be a couple of porn stars around here that would stand around naked for $300 for five or six hours.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It's Thursday, August 20th, 2009.
Time for your Gitmo Nation audio publication episode 123.
This is no agenda.
Coming to you from the Bamboo Strutted House Crackpot Command Center from a deserted island in Gitmo Nation Southeast this time.
I'm in Spain.
I'm Adam Curry.
And I'm in what's formerly known as California, maybe still referred to as the Bankrupt State.
I'm John C. Devorak.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill in the morning.
It's funny you mention that.
I think Ron was telling me that...
That he got his tax return from California and it was an IOU? Yeah, you mentioned this two or three shows ago.
I did mention that?
But now all these...
Play the horn.
Honk, honk, honk.
See, that's what you would do if I... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I repeated it myself.
Well, the thing I... I don't think I repeated it is that...
There are these, you know, there's sales tax.
Small businesses have to pay their sales tax.
And so they're taking their IOUs.
The state isn't accepting their IOUs.
Oh, really?
They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
Exactly.
How lame-o is that?
That is ridiculous.
If they're giving you an IOU, you should be able to give it back.
No, you can't, apparently.
It's beautiful here, John.
I'll bet it is.
I was there in smoky, smoky bankrupt California.
Why don't you just admit it?
You're really going to Ibiza.
No, it's south of...
So you can party in the foam and all the nightclubs there.
No, I don't do that.
We're not in Ibiza.
We're south of Ibiza.
You're in Ibiza.
No, we're not in Ibiza.
You say that, I'm just telling you.
I know you're in Ibiza.
Why would you go to any place that close to Ibiza if you weren't going to Ibiza?
Which, by the way, is just an out-and-out, drug-induced party town with nothing but nightclubs.
They don't do anything else that I know of but just party.
That's why I'm not going there.
That's why I'm not there right now.
We are in the Bel Airs, the Bel Air Islands, and we're south of Ibiza, as the Brits call it, Ibiza.
We're going to Ibiza.
So we're not an Ibiza.
It's Formantera.
Look it up on Google.
Formantera.
Former hippie island.
Nudest colony to the stars.
Yeah, great.
So let's get...
When you come back, you're going to be annoying.
So let's...
Only when I come back?
Not before?
I had such a nice...
You know, it's so relaxing, and I feel like a new man.
Yeah.
Because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.
Well, if you're going to go in that direction, let's start off the show by bringing up some Sebelius quotes that came from last Sunday morning.
Ah, my friend Sebelius, I have not seen anything being south of Ibiza.
She is creepy.
I didn't want to play the whole thing, but she's obviously one of those people who knows to go into a talk show and to just repeat herself.
So do you think it's going to be hard on old people?
Well, I think it could be hard on old people.
It's going to be hard on a lot of people because it's just a difficult situation because it's going to be so difficult and hard on especially old people.
And people that aren't that old, but people that are really old, and maybe some people, you know, that kind of thing.
Yak, yak, yak.
Now, Sibelius, of course, is the director of Health and Human Services.
Health and Human Services.
Okay.
She reminds me, to an annoying degree, of Carly Fiorina, who has the same patronizing style of talking down to you.
Isn't she from California?
Isn't she from the West?
Sibelius?
Sebelius?
I don't know.
You'd have to look it up.
Okay.
Okay.
So this is about...
I'm not going to play the whole thing.
I just want to play a couple things.
I want you to play Sebelius open to five.
Secretary Sebelius, thanks for joining us.
Good morning, Jake.
Critics say they're uneasy about end-of-life care measures being discussed within the context of cost-cutting.
Can you understand that discomfort?
Well, I think end-of-life discussions are very, very personal and very difficult.
Very difficult for family members, very difficult often for people to confront.
And my own mother spent...
Right.
There she goes, off the deep end.
She spends five or six minutes on...
You know, it's very difficult for young people.
It's very difficult for old people.
It's very difficult for families.
It's very difficult for large families.
She doesn't actually answer the question.
She doesn't answer the question.
No, she never answers the question.
But it's actually worse with some of these other ones.
But here's one.
This kind of caught my attention because...
This is what I call, I think it's payment.
Resto payment, yeah.
Before I set this up, this is a clip called Payment.
There's a bunch of people talking about the health care stuff.
And how Obama actually paved the way to push healthcare by doing deals.
First, they analyzed what happened with Hillary and the people that pushed back.
The AMA, the health insurance companies, the doctors themselves, everybody, all these people that wouldn't allow the thing to happen.
So they fought against it.
So the idea was that Obama was going to pave the way.
In other words, set the stage, do the due diligence, get these guys on board before he presented anything.
And apparently now the healthcare insurance companies, the doctors, everybody's on board except the public, which is kind of the missing link here.
Whoops!
So what I'm looking for now, and I advise anybody else to look for, is what was the quid pro quo?
Because obviously these people aren't going to just, yeah, whatever, we didn't like it before, but since you were going to do it, we're going to just be on board with you.
What do you mean we didn't like it before?
We didn't like what before?
Well, see, during the Hillary thing, all these people were against essentially the same health care program that she tried to introduce.
Was it exactly the same idea?
It's close enough.
The point is that they did some deal with all these people.
And I've been trying to figure out what some of these deals were, and she gives it away in this long-winded, believe me, the show would be over, as she answered that question, the opening question.
But she slips it in, what it was, and I think this was the quid pro quo for doctors, and play payment, and then I'll explain it.
Okay, so let me just understand what we're talking about.
How do we get everyone to be on board?
Not the public, but all the doctors, everyone who's going to be a part of this.
Everyone on board.
Now, of course, we know that Obama did a deal with the health care providers for $80 billion.
Right.
But here is the setup, and Sebelius lets it slip.
Doctors would have a payment provided to sit down with family members, if they choose, and have a discussion.
We were desperate to do that.
There were way too many specialists in and out of the room and way too little time to actually sit with someone and try to understand.
Oh, okay.
So it's like a consultancy fee.
So in the olden days, when you were dying or your mom was dying or something was happening, the doctor would talk to you about it and what you could do, this, that, and the other thing.
But now, they get paid.
I mean, normally they would just do this because this is kind of their job.
As a public service, we'll talk about all the options and we'll sit down before anything happens.
When you talk to your doctor, usually he's not charging you by the hour.
You know, and so now they've set this thing up.
This is what this whole end-of-life thing was all about.
It's got nothing to do with the end-of-life.
It's a payoff.
It's another insurance code entry.
Yeah, so just basically it's a bribe.
It's like now when the doctor says, well, I think your mom should probably be taken to an old folks' home, now they can bill the government for just telling you that because that's the whole thing was the scam that suckered all these, or not suckered, but got the AMN and the doctors on board.
It's like, look, you guys are spending a lot of time with this.
We can now pay you.
It's just completely unbelievable.
No, it's totally believable.
Because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.
Unless you get paid for it.
It is insurance company code 59732.
Yeah, so now they get paid for this and this.
Anyway, I assume that there's a lot of these little things you have to read between the lines, and it's pretty hard to do because you have to listen to people like Sebelius who just ramble forever by repeating herself.
And she talks real slow like this and very deliberately.
She reminds me of that woman that was on the SEC who was trying to answer questions as to how the Madoff thing happened, and she was the same condescending, creepy, bureaucratic woman that talks real slow.
Sheila?
Sheila and a Bear?
Is that her name?
No, one of the two.
There's a couple of them.
But anyway, now, here's a good example.
This is another clip.
And this is a clip of Sebelius again on this show.
And apparently, I'm guessing that on a lot of these morning shows, this is a new guy taking over just for substituting for Stephanopoulos named Jake something.
I forgot his last name.
Jake the Snake.
Jake, it seems to me that if he had listened to the answer to his question, his own question, he would have followed up and said, well, you didn't answer my question because she doesn't answer it.
But I think these people come on to these morning shows, I just get the sense of this because they see it too often, and there's a rule.
You cannot hound somebody for the answer to a question they didn't answer.
And in fact, it happened later in the same show where there were a couple of politicians that weren't answering the questions, and the two politicians went after each other, but the host wouldn't say anything.
But that's the whole...
All these Sunday morning shows, no one ever answers the question.
They never answer it at all.
Ever.
Well, in some funny way, they answer it by not answering it.
So play Keep Old Plan.
Oops, I'm sorry, I fucked that up.
Hold on.
Here we go.
But how can the administration make the promise that if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it, when CBO and other analysts estimate that some people will be switched from private to public?
Well, I think, Jake, if you think about a marketplace option and new plans being created in Toledo, Ohio, or in California or in Florida, the network of doctors is likely to be pretty identical.
A lot of plans exist in the same marketplace and doctors are part of a variety of networks.
So the idea that you would keep your own doctor is highly likely.
The other thing about the new marketplace is I think the president is eager to stabilize the employer marketplace.
Small business owners right now are dropping coverage because they can't any longer afford it.
They can't stay in the market with the new tax incentives that are part of health reform.
Small business owners would be encouraged to actually stabilize their insurance.
So in other words, yeah, you won't be able to keep your doctor, but you probably will get your doctor because these doctors are all part of the network.
They're all part of the system.
Yeah, but the question was, can you keep your old plan?
It had nothing to do with keeping your old doctor.
That was assumed.
She never answers the question.
She doesn't even come close.
She goes right off the track immediately.
And then I like the way she says, oh, you know, it could be like the weather changing things in Toledo, Ohio, or California.
Well, that's the old politician trick.
I mean, just stalling.
Yeah, I know, recently a man came up to me, and his name was Pete, and he was from Toledo, Ohio, and he said, can I keep my old plan?
He said, well, your doctor will be a part of the network.
Ah, it's unbelievable.
You know, you wonder why people are up in arms.
It's because these guys, this group of people are the biggest double talkers.
I've seen, I mean, they're worse than the Bush people.
The Bush people say, well, screw you.
I mean, they're at least pretty blunt.
This is just double talk.
Well, the thing that people have to understand, and I think listeners of this show are kind of catching on, but the discussion is just being taken away from what's really going on, is that healthcare is...
17, 18, almost a fifth of our economy.
It's a huge amount of money.
And all of the insurance companies, which of course is Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, they've all donated.
They have bought and paid for every single politician, including our president.
And now they're coming for their...
For their druthers.
They're coming for the payoff.
And this is what it's been about.
This is what, as you said, Hillary Clinton tried to do when she was the first lady, I might add.
She wasn't a politician.
Yeah, she wasn't even a public official.
She was a lawyer.
She was just a lawyer and a wife who got cheated on.
And, you know, but clearly a part of the plan.
This is all about money.
And we don't see it anymore.
We just gloss over it.
And I do love the fact that people are standing up, and I think it's right when people are saying, give me my country back, because they're starting to catch on.
You know, hey, wait a minute.
This is not about health care.
This is about the system being so broken, so morally bankrupt, that we're just, we're not even talking about the real issue anymore.
I think these people should stay off the air.
If they're going to be this way with these kinds of answers, in other words, non-answers or this long patronizing in Ohio and Florida and California and, you know, on and on and on, droning.
I mean, you have no idea how boring this woman is.
But it's so patronizing and smug.
And then she doesn't answer the questions.
questions it just really bugs me just you know but stay off the air don't do these shows you know you don't have to go up there and yeah I'm sorry John I I had to get to something really important.
Tough times in the porn industry, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The porn industry is broke, John.
It's gotten so bad that Savannah, you know Savannah, right?
Savannah Stern.
Is doing seven hours of standing around naked for a hustler party in Santa Monica for $300.
There is no more porn being produced, John.
This is a serious problem.
$300?
Is that all?
Yeah.
We need to do some parties up here.
We could get Savannah for $300.
Hey, finally we have a use for this money.
Let's get Savannah up to San Francisco.
Excellent idea.
I love it.
You know, there has to be a couple of porn stars around here that would stand around naked for $300 for five or six hours.
At least.
Yeah, well, we could get one at your place, one at my place, just for an hour and a half during the show, just standing around naked.
I'm standing there.
And can you get me some tea?
Sure.
This is really a problem.
This is a bogus story.
She's not standing around for six hours for 300 bucks.
At least five of the top 100 websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, which of course is a good thing for the consumer, referred to in the industry as tube sites.
According to internet traffic rankingservicealexa.com, which of course...
Well, which is not very good.
No, in this case it's actually appropriate because Alexa is used by system admins.
Of course, these are the guys.
Love them dearly.
What are system admins doing all day?
They're downloading porn.
Some of the content is amateur work uploaded by users, which of course is the wave of the future.
That's the wave of the future.
Who are all these people?
Have you ever thought about that?
You've stumbled onto one of these.
There's like a million people naked doing all kinds of weird things.
And you have to say, do I actually know any of these people?
Are they working in the cubicle next to me?
Are they in this city?
I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of people that are exposing themselves.
I think it's a very good development.
I'm all for it.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I do have something that goes right along with that, John.
Sir David Attenborough, the famous British broadcaster, explorer, etc., has discovered a new species of carnivorous plant.
It is a giant meat-eating plant, so big it can actually eat small rodents.
And they found this on their expedition in the Philippines.
So now they've given it a name.
The Nepenthes Attenboroughi.
Attenboroughi, of course, named after Sir David Attenborough.
This thing is outrageous.
A plant that eats rodents.
It's almost like...
What was the name of that movie, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show movie?
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
No, Little Shop of Horrors.
Here, take a look at it.
This is the BBC... It's an awesome plant.
And it's kind of freaky, though, when you think that...
Is this a new plant?
I mean, has it been around for a while?
Is it just...
It's kind of creepy looking.
Is this evolution?
Yeah.
Another looking plant that eats flies.
Yeah, right.
It looks like a funnel and flies are attracted to some goo inside and then they go down and they find themselves stuck in there.
It's a pitcher plant.
It's just a large pitcher plant.
Right, except...
I wonder if you stick your hand in there, what will happen?
I mean, how does it devour you?
You get a bunch of crap all over your hands.
You wouldn't like it.
It probably stinks.
No, but I mean, if it can dissolve a rodent, like a rat...
Yeah, it takes a while, though.
These things get stuck in there for a long time.
These are very slow processes.
Plants aren't fast-moving.
Yeah, you're right.
It's not like chewing them up.
Yeah.
Well, that's kind of the dream you have, right?
It's like, munch, munch, munch.
I think more interesting in the same article is this unidentified blue fungi.
Yeah, the blue fungi.
That is a gorgeous looking mushroom.
It is nice, isn't it?
It's blue.
It's a solid blue mushroom.
You should put this in the show notes just so you can see the mushroom.
I shall.
I found a clip, and maybe this is what you had seen on Current TV, but just because we were harping on Laura Ling and Yuna Lee, these, of course, the two reporters who were dumbfounded and shocked that they were taken into custody, sneaking across the two reporters who were dumbfounded and shocked that they were taken into custody, sneaking
And, of course, we now know that this is a total Current TV set up to get some more ratings because their IPO failed, and Al Gore called his buddy Bill and said, hey, man, hook us up.
Can you do me a solid?
Did you see this clip of them thanking everyone, John?
I don't know.
I probably did.
I just wanted you to listen to it.
It's just funny.
This isn't the one where she's whining.
Well, this is the two of them sitting together on the couch.
Oh, no.
This I have not seen.
Oh, okay.
So they got a little set up here about them being detained for 140 days in North Korea.
and now Laura and Yuna return home.
To all of the people who supported Yuna and me throughout the nearly five months that we were in captivity, we wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
I can barely keep listening to her. - Of course.
All the letters and postcards you sent us gave us strength to endure the difficult time.
You really got to watch it though, John, because what's her name?
Laura, I guess.
She's so sincere.
I mean, I'm sure it kind of sucked being in a hotel for four and a half months, but still, you crossed the border of North Korea to do a story!
Yeah, like Eunice said, we would receive letters and...
And they were getting mail.
...these letters, how much people were supporting us.
We learned about this grassroots movement on Facebook, about people writing in to their congressmen to...
A grassroots movement on Facebook.
Don't you love it?
No.
Please.
These people make me sick.
Wait, there's more.
President, we learned about the blog site Liberate Laura.
Which I think is also a porn movie, Liberate Laura.
I'm not too sure.
I think I've seen that.
...
around the country.
Candlelight vigils.
We knew that these vigils were taking place around the time of our trial.
And we thought about those lights and they gave us hope.
And we are so, so very grateful for all of your love and support.
We're so happy to be back with our families.
It was the toughest time in our lives.
And we would love to hear our experience with you in time.
But right now, we want to go back to our normal life.
Oh, so what they're saying is the special is coming.
So they're producing the big special, John.
Oh, yeah.
And there'll be a book deal, too.
Oh, book deal.
There'll be a movie.
A book deal and a Pulitzer.
She's got to get a Pulitzer.
Of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
But in the meantime, we just had to say thank you and express our deepest gratitude.
We are so, so humbled.
Thank you.
So, so, so, so.
So, so, so, so humbled.
They like to use the word so.
So.
That's to say it's not just a little, it's so.
It's a lot more.
It's so nice.
It's so good.
so it's just like you know blather georgia lawmakers the georgia lawmaker calls for the caning and execution of marijuana offenders gee i quit just in time represented benton from georgia tommy benton who looks like a character when you see him he's on his own on his own website he's yakking away I am opposed to the legalization of marijuana.
He says I think we should go to caning for people caught using it and maybe execute dealers.
Oh, fantastic.
He says it works in Singapore.
I like the people that always rationalize things work in Singapore.
Singapore is a fascist state.
Is that what you want?
A good caning is nice from time to time.
There's no guns in Singapore either, Benton.
You want that too?
You want to get rid of all the guns in the world?
Is he a Democrat or a Republican?
Well, let's see.
He's a...
I think he's a...
If off the top of my head, I'm guessing he's a Republican who probably doesn't want guns either.
So all you gun guys, you should write him a nasty note because obviously if you think Singapore is the solution.
Here's a story that we missed, John.
Yeah, he's a Republican.
Yeah, figures.
This is from our buddy Andrew Orlowski from The Register.
This is quite amazing to me.
The CRU, the Climactic Research Unit...
Which, of course, has provided the global climate data set, which is the most cited surface temperature record kept by the IPCC from the UN. So basically, this is the data that the phony baloney scientists...
I can't wait for the email.
The phony baloney scientists of the United Nations IPCC, of which not all were climatologists, and of course there's now 8,000, 9,000 other real climatologists who are against this research.
So this was the research that was used that led to eventually an inconvenient truth, and of course all the way down to the cap-and-trade legislation, and has sparked all this global warming unrest.
They say they no longer have the raw data.
What?
Yeah.
They don't have the raw data anymore.
There was a number of Freedom of Information requests that were submitted for the raw data.
They're the ones that keep all the historical data of surface temperatures.
And here was what they say.
We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value.
Apparently, they don't have USB drives.
Since the 1980s, we have merged the data that we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it's impossible to say if all stations with a particular country or if all individual records would be freely available.
Data storage availability in the 1980s meant we were not able to keep the multiple sources for sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues.
We therefore do not hold...
Homogeneity.
Homogeneity.
I think I've done that with someone once.
We therefore do not hold the original raw data, but only the value-added, i.e.
homogenized data.
Manipulated.
Why don't they use that word?
Yeah.
Oh.
That just blows me away.
That's a good one from Orlowski.
That's a fantastic...
It's awesome!
Yeah.
It's weird that you have to read stuff like that in the register...
Well, I read the register a lot because it rocks.
No, it's a great publication, but it seems to me, you know.
Can we donate to the register?
How do they make money?
They make plenty of money.
They make more money than we do.
Oh, really?
Oh, shit.
It should be donating to us.
Yeah, so the headline is, Global Warming Ate My Data.
We've lost the numbers, says CRU, as they respond to Freedom of Information requests.
The world's source for global temperature records admits it's lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow third parties to...
Lost or destroyed?
Yeah.
Jobs lost or destroyed.
Data lost or destroyed.
So this is the actual data that spawned this whole global warring debate.
It is no longer available because in the 1980s we didn't have enough money to buy hard drives.
That's basically what he's saying.
He could have written it on a piece of paper.
Print it out.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, that'll never see the light of day.
No one will talk about that.
So I was reading this.
We have a bunch of these alternative newspapers in the Bay Area.
Lots of them, actually.
Like The Guardian?
The Guardian, the East Bay Express, the San Francisco Express.
There's a whole slew of them.
They've got all kinds of sex ads in there.
Yeah, they seem to survive with sex ads.
Yeah, cool.
So I'm reading this story.
I just kind of, this chain of small restaurants called Cafe Gratitude.
And some woman, which may be the place you and Mickey ate at.
Oh, Alive?
Alive on...
No, Alive's different.
Okay.
Anyway, they went on and on.
Apparently somebody's quit or something, because they make everybody take a landmark forum seminars, which turn out to be, Landmark Education grew out of Earhart's seminar training, the EST group, EST, which is very notorious in the 70s and 80s.
And as you know, it's essentially teaching you to be a robot for the company.
So I got the biggest kick out of this, and it's becoming very controversial.
So I'm looking at the Yelp reviews of Cafe Gratitude, and this one review comes up at the top.
This just cracked me up.
This is from Sherry G. out of Los Angeles.
Everyone here is so happy.
Seriously.
Like, not a fake happy, but a genuine happy.
Now, what kind of a restaurant review is this?
My friend ordered something for something called an I Am Magnificent Chocolate Mousse and a Chi or Chi-T of which I cannot remember the cute name for.
Everything about this place is literally instant peace.
Down to the servers who went around asking everyone the question of the day.
Friday's question, what are you thankful for?
I mean, can you imagine eating at a place like this with a bunch of people eating green on their face and asking you stupid-ass questions?
John, let's go.
We've got to go there.
This is awesome.
Unfortunately, we do now.
We've got to go and record it.
First time in our restaurant review history.
We have to go record it.
It's going to be great.
I'll bring the G2 or the H2 recorder.
It'll be fabulous.
We'll just interview her.
The girl, when she comes over and says, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
I'll just ask her.
What kind of tree would you be?
What are you thankful for?
That's like Thanksgiving.
Do you ever do that where you go around the table and everyone has to say what they're thankful for?
No.
God, no.
That's my family.
That's what my family does.
Now, let's all hold hands and share a secret.
Yeah, every single Thanksgiving.
Share a secret.
That's what they do.
That's what they do.
It's like we all say what we're thankful for.
Come on, that's nice.
That's the American way, John.
It sounds like the Dutch way.
No.
Dude, I have no Dutch family.
I'm sure that there are some families that sit around doing that bit.
Even though Thanksgiving is like a fake holiday, it was actually created long after its invention, which actually came and went in the 1800s, finally made into a permanent holiday by Abraham Lincoln, and it had to do with being thankful for the end of the Civil War and the soldiers that fought.
That's what it was about.
It wasn't about pilgrims and Indians and turkeys and corn.
Really?
Yeah, really.
And so then you find it somewhere morphed into this bogus holiday about pilgrims and Indians and corn.
And you can find references to these little potlaps that they apparently had back when.
People that tried to sell it on the holiday.
Oh, no, it's about that.
It's not about...
Technically, Thanksgiving, which was put into play by Abraham Lincoln, and it had to do with thanking us for the end of the war and the soldiers who sacrificed themselves.
It had nothing to do with pilgrims and Indians, and meanwhile, the kids in school are propagandized about this fake holiday.
It's unbelievable to me.
Well, hold on a second.
It's a pet peeve.
Hold on.
Wait a minute.
You caught me off guard there.
Here we go.
John C. Dvorak's pet peeve of the day.
According to Wikipedia, which of course is the Bible, Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival.
Traditionally, it is time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general.
It is a holiday celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States.
While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.
Lies!
Wikipedia disagrees with you, John.
Lies!
They don't do a little history.
Have a historian go in there and fix that piece of crap.
Well, maybe you should go in and fix that piece of crap.
I don't have you.
I just did.
Though the earliest attested Thanksgiving celebration was on September 8, 1565 in what is now St. Augustine, Florida, the traditional first Thanksgiving is venerated as having occurred at the site of Plymouth Plantation in 1621. the traditional first Thanksgiving is venerated as having occurred at Yeah, right.
So you're saying that the Thanksgiving celebration was at the site of Plymouth Plantation in Yep.
That's fascinating.
There's a very good history.
Actually, I think if you go to dvorak.org slash blog, I think we have the outline of the history of Thanksgiving.
I'll go dig it up and repost it.
I usually post it every year in November.
My kids are aware of it, and they argue with their teachers in school, of course, which gets them into nothing but trouble.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Because heaven forbid that any real facts emerge from the educational environment.
October 3rd, 18...
This is well documented.
It's well documented.
Yes, yes!
October 3rd, 1863.
President Abraham Lincoln says, a proclamation.
This is the...
Here it is.
The proclamation which set the precedent for America's National Day of Thanksgiving.
During his administration, President Lincoln issued many orders like this.
Uh...
And here's the whole proclamation for this day of Thanksgiving.
So it's actually October 3rd.
What are we doing Thursday in November?
What the hell is it?
When you follow the history of it, it kind of bounces around a lot and then somebody set it in stone.
Well, how can I believe anything I'm taught in school now?
This is a jip.
A jip.
Well, now I'm not going to celebrate anymore because I'm not thankful.
Yeah.
Well, there you have it.
Now that corn...
That's why I'm sorry.
I said all this cornball idea that I'm going to sit around the table with a bunch of relatives I probably don't like and tell them what I'm thankful for.
They can go look it up.
Wait, I have to play it again?
That's so good, John.
I'm going to do that this Thanksgiving when we're all around the table and we're going to say what we're thanks for.
I'm going to say I'm very thankful for President Abraham Lincoln who on October 3rd, 1863 proclaimed the following.
And I'm just going to go through this whole thing.
And I say, and by the way, you were gypped.
You were just gypped.
This has nothing to do with pilgrims and Indians and corn and turkeys.
How'd the turkeys get in there, by the way?
You were scammed.
How do you think they got in there?
Some poultry guy dreamed that one up.
He says, what are we going to do with these damn birds?
These things are like huge.
They're impossible.
Nobody wants to eat them every day.
Well, I got an idea.
Hey, let's add them on to that Thanksgiving day.
I like it.
When we're talking about turkeys, I might as well mention this then, which is that people out there who, you know, the problem with turkey is like it's been bred to be this huge breasted things.
They can't even stand up without breaking their legs.
And then they, you know, get butchered and sent out for the one day.
Wait a minute, after the president pardons one of them.
That's my favorite.
You get pardoned, dude.
And so, anyway, these stupid birds, they go out, and by the way, they're wild around here.
I saw one flying over the freeway, and apparently in San Ramon, they're all over the rooftops.
These things are nuisances, these wild turkeys in particular.
And they're frightening when you see them flying, because they only get about six feet off the ground.
And I saw one flying over the freeway, and if I would have hit it, the car would have blown up.
I mean, this thing is just this big, giant thing.
Anyway, so the turkey, over time, you know, they've been breeding them and breeding them and breeding them so they, you know, maximum white meat and all the rest of it.
They taste like crap.
They're just horribly, horrible turkey flavor that's just annoying.
You can only eat it once a year because the aftertaste lasts for months.
So we always get heirloom, which I'm sure they're trying to kill out, heirloom turkeys from various growers, and you can get some of these classic turkeys that were actually the turkeys they were eating in the 1800s.
Yeah, in 1863, sure.
And, I'll tell you, they taste like pheasant.
They're delicious!
Well, the first time I had one, I went, holy crap, this tastes a lot more like pheasant than it tastes like turkey.
It had very little of that horrible turkey taste.
It was just a fantastic product.
It was just a great bird.
I mean, obviously there was a more natural bird without these giant breasts.
And it was, you know, it had more meat than a goose, but it wasn't one of these commercial horrible tasting things.
You said bird with giant breasts.
Anyway, that's my turkey story.
You got any more holidays you can debunk?
Besides Mother's Day and Father's Day and the Hallmark Reading Company?
No, those don't count.
Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day.
I think that's Hallmark, too.
Yeah, it probably is.
There's a company that used to really know how to market itself.
I mean, Hallmark, at some point there was a genius at Hallmark that could dream up all this stuff and sell cards.
I mean, let's face it.
What is a Hallmark card?
It's like a card that somebody prints that has some stupid thing on it because you can't think of anything creative yourself.
So you buy a card and you stick it in an envelope and it costs you like the dollar.
And it's like, Can't you just write a note or make a little drawing or something and personalize it a little bit?
I feel so bad for Mimi.
She gets like a little stick figure card.
No wonder you don't get laid.
There's no romantic in you, John.
She actually...
Send a card.
Send a card.
She likes to make her own cards and my daughter makes beautiful cards and we all make our own cards.
We don't do any of this crap.
Ah.
Although you run into a lot of people, where's the card?
Where's the card?
You have to have a card.
My mother was like a big card buyer.
I can just see the Dvorak family around February 12th sitting around the table all making cards for each other.
It's just a heartwarming visual I get from it, John.
It's really nice.
It's beautiful, man.
It's beautiful.
So are you familiar with Robert Ben Moshe?
No.
He works for you.
He does?
Yeah, he does.
He is the new CEO of AIG. Oh yeah, he works for me.
Yeah, well he doesn't actually because what did he do 48 hours after being installed as the new CEO? Quit.
Almost.
He went on vacation to his 8,000 square foot villa on the Adriatic Sea for two weeks.
He went on vacation.
I've worked with people like that.
Thanks for the job.
I'm going on vacation.
And this place is amazing.
He's got an outrageous pad.
Who is this Robert Ben Moshi anyway?
I don't know.
We're going to have to look into him.
Sounds like a guy looking into.
I mean, anyone who has the balls to take a job and then rush off to vacation immediately, I admire people like that.
Let's see.
Forbes profile on Robert Ben Moshi.
63 years old.
August 3rd, he was...
Name the Chief Executive Officer.
Let's see what he's done.
Former Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer of MetLife.
Okay, that makes sense.
An insurance company.
Before that, he was President Payne-Weber.
I'm waiting for the Credit Suisse.
He wasn't a member of Goldman.
How disappointing.
Speaking of which, I don't think either of us are a big fan of Fox News or Glenn.
Well, actually, Fox News, there's some stuff I like, or Glenn Beck.
But I do watch Glenn Beck because the time it comes on is convenient.
That's about the time I come home from the office.
And I saved this clip for two weeks.
Obviously, I couldn't do a lot of show prep out here south of Ibiza.
But he had this guy on...
Who I think actually is a Democrat.
Is this that weird guy that looks like he's got a wig on and kind of cross-eyed?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the guy.
Yeah, he has him on.
Yeah, I know.
I think I know what clip you're going to play.
In fact, I have the clip.
I just haven't produced it.
I thought it was a fascinating clip because it has to do with the show.
It was a fascinating clip.
It was the first time I actually said, oh my God, this is very, very interesting.
And we should figure out who this guy is.
Yes, this guy.
We want to get him on our show.
But the thing is, he looks like he's incognito.
I don't even believe what we're seeing is him.
It looks like he's incognito.
He's got this cheap wig on.
It looks like you bought it at the party store.
That looks like crap.
And then he's got some sort of maybe face work done that just kind of makes him not look like I'm talking about what he knows.
I think they injected something in his eyeball because the one eye is not even working.
And so this...
I don't know who this guy is.
He looks kind of creepy.
But anyway, so it's...
You know, Glenn Beck has this blackboard, which I kind of like as a prop in the studio.
And he draws connections on it.
Yeah, he dramatizes everything.
The dots.
You know, let's simplify it for the idiots that watch Fox News.
Which, let's face it, that's me.
And so he comes up with this...
Interesting story.
Connect some dots about Rahm Emanuel, who of course is the White House Chief of Staff.
You know, he's the Don in the middle of it all.
And this guy named, what is it, Whitaker?
Whitaker?
Yeah, Whitaker.
Yeah, whatever.
Whitaker, Whitaker, whatever.
Let me just play the clip.
Oh, shit.
Of course, I've got all this America's News Today crap that it starts off with.
Hold on a second.
Here, use that as the lead-in for the show.
I hate it when people do this.
Just give me the damn clip.
I'm playing the actual YouTube clip.
So listen to what...
Chicago is known for dirty...
Chicago is known for dirty politics...
Windy City, native Rahm Emanuel.
No exception to the Chicago way.
He was known as the bag man in the Clinton White House.
That sounds good.
Now in the Obama administration, his strong-arm tactics are helping make all Obama's dreams come true.
It is scary, but true.
Pat Goodell, he is a former Democratic pollster.
Pat Goodell, is that his name?
I think it's Pat Goodell.
Would you do a Google search while we play the clip?
I'd like to know more about that guy.
He's a contributor.
How are you, sir?
Good to meet you.
It is good to meet you.
Help me out here because I think there are a couple of disturbing connections and I'm all about...
I think this whole administration is all about connections.
Absolutely.
Okay, so it's really not about what you see.
It's everybody connected to everybody else and the money.
It's almost community organizing.
In a large way.
In a large way, yeah.
Okay.
You're right.
That rug is really, really bad.
That thing is outrageous.
Help me out.
Where do we start with Rahm Emanuel?
Well, we started with his role, as you said, in the Clinton White House.
Now, he leaves the Clinton White House and he gets two jobs.
He gets put on the board of Freddie Mac, which is the second of the big, giant mortgage cut.
Okay, now this we actually knew, that Rahm Emanuel was on the board of Freddie Mac.
But check out how much money he made from being on the board and how he did it.
What is his qualification?
Didn't he go to school for dancing?
He studied ballet dancing.
In college.
He was trained for ballet.
Freddie Mac doesn't do ballet.
No, that's true.
The other job he has is that he gets a job with Wasserman Perla, which is a major Wall Street Deal company, and he gets in their Chicago office, and he will then make $16 million in less than two years.
In two years?
Yes.
Two years, $16 million is what he makes.
That's on top of the quarter of a million the taxpayers gave him for Freddie Mac.
And $250 million.
And he was there when...
He was there when they were cooking the books.
Yeah, he was there.
Let's remember.
They were cooking the books.
Got it.
Okay.
$16 million.
How do you make the $16 million?
He made the $16 million basically on one large deal, and there's a second one.
But the big deal he got it on was he was advising SBC, which later grew into the new AT&T. Okay, SBC. Right.
Now, that's not really...
Here's what's interesting about the SBC thing is...
The guy who helped make this deal took a loss, did he not?
Yes.
They had to sell, because they bought another phone company, Ameritech, they had to get rid of a security company called Security Link.
It was a billion, billion and a half dollar investment.
He sold it to a group headed by...
A investment group being led by...
Whiteacre?
No, Mr.
Whiteacre was the chairman.
He sold it to a group led by Mr.
Emanuel for about $500 million.
Okay.
Six months later, the investment bank that bought it sold it for a billion dollars.
All right.
Now, John, were you following that at the time?
Yeah, a little bit.
But it seemed like kind of just a circle of corruption.
But the guy is, here's his background more or less.
Pat Cadell.
He was a long-time Democrat.
We worked for McGovern in 72, Carter, Gary Hart, Joe Biden, and Jerry Brown.
So he's like old, well-connected.
And he also was a consultant for a bunch of movies, including Air Force One, Running Mate, Outbreak, West Wing.
Now, here's what happened apparently, and this is again a sketchy source.
He defected.
He defected.
He went over to Fox News.
He did.
Here's why.
In 1988, Cadell left the Democratic Party after an acrimonious lawsuit with a Democratic consulting firm.
Ah.
And so he said, screw you, and went over to the other side, and he's been pounding them ever since.
He's like a nightmarish guy.
He's one of those...
It doesn't seem like he's a flip-flopper like Dick Morris, who will just basically go for anybody.
He's like the girlfriend you broke up with who just won't keep hounding you.
So he's got what they would say in the business, a hard-on for the Democrat Party.
Okay, so if I understand, so that was just a deal.
I didn't quite get the deal, but apparently the company was sold for half a billion, and then the guys who bought it flipped it for a billion six months later.
I don't understand how that happened.
Somebody doubled their money in some shady...
Google this Whiteacre guy while we listen to the rest of this clip.
That's good.
That's a good investment.
Hey, not bad, right?
That's good.
And he took out a huge amount of money.
Now, the president at that time, Whiteacre, was the chairman of SBC. America?
Does the name Whiteacre, the guy who helped Rahm Emanuel make $16 million, does the name Whiteacre ring a bell?
Pat?
Because when they appointed the new chairman of GM who announced the day of his appointment, I know nothing about the car business, his name was Edmund Woodacre.
Oh my goodness!
Oh my goodness!
So that, I was like, wow, that's a connection that no one reported on.
I do remember reading the quote of this Whiteacre saying, you know, I don't know anything about the car business, but, you know, I just run it like a business.
But so the insinuation here, or the assertion, is that...
Because Whiteacre helped Rahm Emanuel make $16 million in some bogus transaction, or not bogus perhaps, but in a transaction, Rahm Emanuel then turns around and says, you know what, we're going to hook you up, we're going to make you the CEO of General Motors.
Yeah, this seems to be the MO of this entire administration.
You know, I think in the olden days they'd call it cronyism.
Yeah.
So did you look up Whiteacre?
Did you find out anything?
Yeah, he said, you know, I'm looking at his picture.
He built a telecommunications empire, acquiring this and that.
He was an SBC guy.
Including a $16 billion acquisition of AT&T. Of course, then he took their name.
So AT&T can live on as a CIA front over in San Francisco in that weird building.
That way they don't have to change the logos.
And the $62 billion purchase of Ameritech.
Yeah, well, this guy knows how to do deals.
As far as he's concerned, the $16 million that went to Rahm Emanuel is chicken feed.
Yeah, really?
Nickname Big Ed.
Big Ed.
Six foot four.
He's the same height as you.
Upon AT&T's corporate...
Oh, wait.
His retirement payout from AT&T totaled $158.5 million, one of the top pension packages in the country.
It's a hell of a pension.
Wow.
And he gets 10 hours a month on the jet?
Born in Texas.
Yay.
Amazing.
His father was a locomotive engineer.
Went to Texas Tech.
He's one of those guys that probably is helping finance.
I think T. Boone Pickens is from Texas Tech.
I'm sure these two guys hang out together.
Pickens has taken the idea of becoming the owner of Texas Tech.
So he's throwing tons of money into the basketball and football programs and the rest of it to make the school beat Texas.
They've got nothing else to do.
Yep, that's what's running our country.
At least he drove his own car.
There was a fantastic...
Here's what kind of car he drives.
A Cadillac.
Yeah, of course.
There was a fantastic song that showed up the other day.
I've got to play this for you.
I don't even know where this came from.
I should play the jingle with it.
Hold on a second.
Hold on a second.
Because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.
Here's President Obama, everybody.
Old people got no reason.
Old people got no reason.
Old people got no reason to...
The lyrics are great.
Yeah, this guy's very famous.
Lots of drugs.
I like that.
Yeah, this guy, I can't remember his name, but he does a lot of these parody songs, and he does a really good Obama kind of cadence, which is hilarious.
Rush Limbaugh plays this character constantly.
Yeah, it's good.
That's the first time I heard that song was on Rush Limbaugh's show.
There's a porn movie that I've heard about.
I'm reliably informed.
It's Obama Does Palin.
Have you seen that one?
And they really don't look like Obama and Palin, but kind of.
It's really disturbing.
Obama Does Palin.
It's really, really disturbing.
You have to see this.
Well, no, you don't have to.
I don't need to see it, that's for sure.
It's disturbing.
I noticed that the Republicans are still sticking to this Palin.
And, of course, she does come up with – I know she's got some writers, but she came up with the thing of the death panel.
By the way, how amazing is it that some woman in Alaska – I mean, it's got to be a total setup.
But just by – with a Facebook – I mean, this is pretty interesting.
Just by putting something on your wall in Facebook that you can spark off such a huge debate, not just in the country but worldwide.
I mean, that's saying something for the way the mainstream media runs and how it works.
It's ridiculous.
And I'm sure the Republicans are now regretting, you know, the day they even found her.
Because she's like a nightmare.
She just keeps coming back.
She can't even keep a...
You know, she gives up on her governor's job after two years, which is, I think, enough to say, nah, she's done.
But no, you had somebody the other day, I was listening to one of these shows, and Ann Coulter was on there promoting her latest book.
The woman cranks out more books than anyone, than Isaac Asimov.
And...
And he's going on about, oh, Sarah, and she's like a big fan of hers, which makes me think, well, if you're going to be a fan of Sarah Palin's, why?
I mean, Palin, to me, is just kind of a...
I don't think she's that bright.
And why is they warming up to her to such an extreme...
Just like President Obama, she's a newsreader.
That's how her career started, reading sports and news.
She probably did some entertainment news.
They give her a script, she puts it on her Facebook, and it's all set up.
I think it's brilliantly done.
It's like, hey, let's launch this death panels thing.
We've got to have some idiot say it, so they get Sarah Palin to do it.
Then Fox News or whoever publishes whatever she's written.
I mean...
You can almost see Rupert Murdoch turning the dials.
Here's how I'll do it.
Here's how I'll make it all happen.
I mean, come on.
Death panel.
You know it's got to be that way.
In the Netherlands, where they had socialized medicine for as long as I can remember, I think it was one year ago or two years ago, they changed it from the single-payer option...
To private insurance.
And of course, it's mandatory private insurance, which makes it even more interesting.
And guess what was announced just at the beginning of this week, John?
Ooh, everyone's premiums going up by 100 euros.
Well, there you have it.
Yeah.
It's the insurance companies.
It is all about the insurance companies.
Yeah, and there's some scam going on with this thing we're trying to do too.
I would like to find the quid pro quo for the insurance companies like I found with the doctors and the extra fees they can charge now for everything.
You call in for an appointment, you have to probably pay five bucks to do that.
Of course, you don't pay it.
The government pays it.
What do you mean the quid pro quo?
The insurance companies bought all the politicians.
They bought all the media.
What are they benefiting from?
How are they going to be the beneficiaries?
What do you mean, how are they going to benefit from it?
Well, that's what I want to know.
How can they make more money than they're making now?
Just by raising the fees.
Well, I know, but if it's going to be the government coming in to compete with them, there's got to be some other scam going on.
It can't be that, you know, it's not going to come in with costing even more than it costs now.
They've got to, you know, they'll run these guys out of office faster than you can imagine if that happens.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, says, hey, the Taliban is winning.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he's delivering to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghani civilians from rising levels of Taliban violence and intimidation.
He's saying, send more troops!
We need more troops!
More troops!
Yeah, this is the next Vietnam, right in the cycle, by the way.
A little overdue, but falls right into it.
Vietnam, this is Vietnam all over again, and we have the same situation.
We have a Democrat, you know, in office who wants to try, you know, promises he's going to get out, but the only way to get out is to add more troops so we can get out somehow.
Well, there is a difference.
And the whole thing is going to be the same thing.
We're going to run out of there like crazy and about after, you know, some Republican gets elected and bombs Cambodia.
Well, there is a difference, is that our guy is president of the country.
You know, this Karzai dude, this is the evil part of it, who's living in the palace, by the way.
This guy grew up in America, as far as I know.
He went to American schools.
He was George Bush's buddy.
You know, he went through the entire American system.
And, oops, all of a sudden he's elected president of Afghanistan.
And now he's, you know, I guess today the elections are today, August 20th.
If they happen, because there were some, you know, now we've got Richard Holbrook out there saying, oh, the elections can't be stalled.
The guy has not campaigned anywhere.
He shows up for like three minutes at a time because of security concerns.
He's got nine people who are running against him who have been completely suppressed by whatever media they have left.
You know, we might as well just call this the 51st state.
Yeah.
It's nuts.
And this Holbrook guy, I don't know if you still follow the International Criminal Court.
Who's the guy who they found in...
The Serbian guy?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The guy was a farmer with a beard?
Yeah, exactly.
He says, look, I have it in writing.
Holbrook said, don't worry, we'll take care of you.
You can do all this stuff and we'll protect you.
And he keeps suing over and over again in this court while he's in jail, of course.
And he says, Richard Holbrook gave me the go-ahead, which I totally believe.
Yeah, there's something sketchy.
Even with that first Kuwait-Iraqi war, there's a lot of lost information about how they were kind of letting Saddam go attack Kuwait and kind of indicating he should do that.
And as soon as he did, we just bombed the crap out of him.
I mean, there's a lot of this sketchy.
There's a problem with this modern diplomatic negotiating.
You don't know what kind of screw jobs some of these guys are going to get.
Some guy does a deal, things don't quite work out, you're blameless.
What's it when you do something that you can't be held accountable because you divorced yourself from the actual event in some way that you can't be blamed ever?
So I know that you sent me this rather lengthy article, John, about...
Pretty much, I guess, it's your way of telling me, hey, man, here's why you should lay off the Ayn Rand stuff, because people will think you're a total nutball.
And, you know, I don't give a crap about her objectivism.
I'm not a member of the community.
Here we go again.
You know, we've got here.
Wait, stop.
You have not read.
We have to get an Amazon account.
I'm going to put it on the blog and put it on the thing, and we should be making money from all the promotion you're doing of this book.
Let me tell you.
This book, written in 1957, I have not read anything else by Ayn Rand.
I don't care.
This book describes exactly what is happening right now, and it actually has an unobtainable solution, which...
It essentially means blowing up the entire country, in a manner of speaking.
Oh, that's practical.
In a manner of speaking.
Well, it's happening anyway.
We're going into total demise, and it's a moral bankruptcy of every single institution and everything that once made this country great.
It's a book you should read.
It will make you feel good.
If there really wasn't John Galt, that there would be some kind of solution.
It does have a solution, but it has nothing to do with objectivism.
And I do not re-read this thing like some drone, and I do not attend meetings.
I never said you did.
You've never even read the book.
I've read the precursors, the same story.
Fountainhead's the same book as Atlas Shrugged.
She was basically warming up with Fountainhead, and then she hit the home run with Atlas Shrugged.
It's the same book.
Same story.
I'm sure I couldn't get through 20 pages without just falling...
I'd probably fall dead asleep.
I'd pass out, like you did with the burger.
Why don't you go read it, man?
Why don't you just go read it and get back to me?
I've got nothing better to do but read 1,200-page books.
Oh, no.
I'll read it.
Let me set up the account with Amazon so everybody can read it.
Where's your cycle book?
It's coming.
I got some new material.
Read the book.
Just do me a favor.
Just read the book.
It'll only take you two months.
Or I could listen to the book on tape, it'd only take me what?
56 hours.
56 hours.
It's the unabridged version.
Here's a little...
I'm sorry.
It's like going back and forth to the city for a year.
Here's a little ditty I thought was...
And this does crop up from time to time, but maybe this time it's really going to happen.
A collective...
A group including NBCUniversal, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, and Walt Disney are joining together to finally create an alternative to the Nielsen television ratings.
Others involved in the new project, which they say is going to launch in September, will include Procter& Gamble, Unilever, AT&T, WPP, Starcom Media.
So what you're saying with this article, they've lost confidence in Nielsen?
No, they really want to rig it now.
Oh, that must be it.
But of course, Nielsen ratings have been questionable ever since they came out, you know.
Because I think it's done on such a small sample.
Although statisticians will argue with me that it's usually pretty accurate.
I would agree with them.
But from time to time this crops up and every couple of years there's a group that gets together and says, we're going to put Nielsen out of business.
It's like Comscore.
That's another thing that frightens me.
And it costs a lot of money to get these.
I think we pay $100,000 a year just for the privilege of ComScore tracking us.
You had a couple of clips, I think, that were left over.
Do you have any left from...
Did we do them all?
Oh, no, I got the one that I was going to start the show with.
I'll give a setup on this.
I was going to start the show with it because I thought it would be amusing.
The MSNBC is starting to do some of these documentaries, and so they did one on the real story behind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy.
Wait, he really existed?
Yeah.
They dramatize it to such an extreme that they brought in this voice and I want people just to listen to this guy and just let the thing play through and you'll at the end you can make your comment but it's like this voice is brought in for this it's like it's not like the frontline guy that's actually believable this guy is so over the top corny that it's like why is he I don't know I mean but I found the whole thing quite amusing but it was like overdone it's like a and comparing a Hollywood actor to a stage actor Uh,
truth.
Far from being a warder, Robert Cleason was actually a former mental patient on the run from the police.
A compulsive hoarder of of firearms, he'd been sectioned for shooting up a hospital and jumped bail in Buffalo, New York after shooting a man in the foot.
His conflict resolution method is to be violent or to threaten violence.
He's in love with guns.
He's just infatuated with guns.
Unbeknownst to the Mormon community, Cleason's past was littered with firearms offenses and odd behavior.
Three wives had left him, the last when she found him taking a bath with a disemboweled deer.
You know, that's an American doing that voice.
And then the shing at the end of the sword.
Hey, it's time for another installment of Shadow Puppet Theater.
President Obama's nominee for Surgeon General is Dr.
Regina Benjamin, hailed by Mr.
Obama for her efforts in running a health clinic in Hurricane Ravage, rural Alabama.
Guess whose advisory board she's on, John?
Remember, this is the Surgeon General, all about health.
Monsanto.
Whoa, I should hit the jingle for that.
Monsanto.
I'm sorry, John.
You are incorrect.
No, no, no, no, no.
Remember, what is the Surgeon General responsible for?
The Surgeon General is supposed to remind us to eat healthy, exercise, live healthy lives.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
She's on the board of Burger King.
That's hilarious.
And she got paid $10,000 a year for serving on the Scientific Advisory Board.
You're telling me that the Surgeon General is on the board of Burger King?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You gotta love it.
I actually think Burger King is probably healthier than McDonald's, though.
Not much.
I mean, the grease is handled differently.
I mean, McDonald's takes their patties and throws them on a griddle so they kind of cook in their own fat.
And Burger King throws the patties on this conveyor belt that's got a bunch of holes in it.
And it goes across supposedly flames of some sort.
Flame broiled.
It's flame broiled.
And it goes across the flames and so they degrease.
It falls off the burger into the flames and it would probably bubble up back into the meat in some other form.
I don't know.
The Burger King over the years has really deteriorated.
Here's one to track.
Vicky Rivas Vasquez.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said Dr.
Benjamin would resign her position from Burger King upon confirmation by the Senate.
And she will also recuse herself from any specific party matters involving Burger King for the next two years as part of the Obama administration's ethics pledge.
Ooh, ethics, ethics.
So what's her name again?
Her name is Dr.
Regina Benjamin.
Regina Benjamin.
It looks like she's had a burger or two, actually.
That's what I'm trying to see.
She's not really svelte.
She's been eating there.
It's pretty apparent.
As the nation's leading spokesperson.
That's the opener right there.
As the nation's leading spokesperson on public health, she will continue to promote healthy eating and exercise.
Maybe she should start with herself.
As third-party counselor bringing her expertise on public health on an advisory panel, she was advocating for food options that were lower in sodium and recommending that nutritional information appear on food packaging.
Dude, we're too busy reading the cartoons on the food packaging.
That's the whole beauty of Burger King.
We try to make...
There's a picture here in this list.
I took a look at the photos.
I'll send you this.
If you look her up, this photo shows up.
Anyway, I think people should really start to concentrate on reading these labels.
Oh, that's the picture that showed up?
Yeah.
This guy needs a bra.
So...
You know, people have to really start looking at these labels and ask yourself when you get to...
My wife was moaning about this the other day.
She went to some...
She saw something and says, back to the original.
The original taste, you know, from the 1920s or something like that.
She reads the label and it says high fructose corn syrup.
So how's this original?
How's this back to the basic?
How's this anything?
It's high fructose corn syrup is a new additive.
But they weren't putting that in anybody's food in the 30s.
But wait, there's more.
She also reported receiving more than $20,000 for serving on another advisory board at Nebraska-based ConAgra Foods, one of the country's largest food producers with products such as David's Sunflower Seeds, Crunch and Munch, Healthy Choice, and Chef Boyardee.
All right.
What happened to Coop?
He's still around.
He's doing commercials for...
Infomercials.
The Clapper, I think.
No, for Help I Fall and I Can't Get Up.
What's that one called?
Life Call?
Yeah, the Clapper.
Oh, no, that's right.
There's a little thing you push a button and it sends for help.
It's not the Clapper.
Sorry.
Help I Fall and I Can't Get Up.
So, I want to mention we've got a respite here.
We could have gotten a little more money from the...
You know, Sunday shows don't seem to really generate...
I don't know what it is.
Almost all of our income for the show comes on...
And by the way, if we're going to do three shows, we're actually about...
We bring in about half as much money as we actually need to do this show, you know, and rationalize it.
You want to do one show.
Just to do one show.
Yeah, to do one show.
To rationalize doing the show at all.
Although we really enjoy it and we think we're doing a public service.
But I think the public has to also help us out a little bit.
Because we know how many people are listening to the show and there's a lot.
And there's only a few that have actually followed up with helping us.
And we're going to keep doing that.
We're going to have to do something eventually.
Because there's weekly begging for money.
It's getting pretty old.
Well, it gets old, but you know, last Thursday when I did it, when I was really getting angry about it and saying, you know, you spend $25, $50 to go to a movie, which is two hours of entertainment, usually you don't get as much out of it as you do from our show.
And you know how it's going to end.
And you know how it's going to end, and you're not, you know, meanwhile you're getting this show, like, you know, it's like a movie, a long movie every week for free, and you use it when you go to work.
Most of our listeners are commuters, and they listen to the shows.
There are some others, but they tend to listen to the show going to and from work, and it keeps them sane.
Yeah.
Think about what you pay a doctor to maintain sanity or a psychiatrist.
Yeah, we should be on that Obamacare, man.
We should be getting something.
We should be getting a payoff.
Exactly.
So I would encourage you to go to noagendashow.com or dvorak.org slash NA and sign up for one of the programs where there's a subscription.
We're going to add a $5 a month subscription option because a number of people have asked for that specifically.
They said, you know, you don't like the $2 because PayPal takes all the money.
With $5, it would probably be acceptable.
So we're going to add that.
And then we're also looking for people that can do grants.
And we're also going to...
Step back up and start doing our plans for the dinner.
Yes, because a lot of people in a lot of different cities are saying they will definitely...
But the dinner is not going to be a huge money maker for us.
No, it's not, because half of the money is going to go to the dinner.
Dinner, yeah, and the wine, for sure.
We're not going to do a cheap, crummy dinner with, you know, lousy food.
And obviously, if you're a foodie, you'd want to come to this thing because we're going to do probably, I'm thinking, I'm not sure what place we're going to go to, but it would be a place like Florida Lee in Las Vegas where I know the chef and he could actually make a special meal for us.
And I'll bring one of some spectacular or double magnum or something from my collection.
Oh, nice.
We should invite Kim Jong-il.
That reminds me.
Big talk.
So we're going to have a link for you to sign up for the waiting list or just for information.
You're not going to be signing up for the dinner.
Here's an idea.
Here's an idea.
Why don't we set it for Thanksgiving 2009?
Because I think my family would object.
No, it's October 3rd is Thanksgiving.
The official...
Oh, the real Thanksgiving.
The real Thanksgiving is October 3rd.
Well, that's an idea.
In Las Vegas.
And we'll give thanks to Abraham Lincoln.
You can read the tome.
I can read the proclamation.
And we can get a magician.
And a couple of porn stars who are apparently $300 for seven hours.
Yeah, that's reasonable.
We just have them standing there.
Yeah, just hanging out.
Yeah.
I think we've got a plan.
In HEMA underwear.
How about porn stars in HEMA underwear?
So go to the NoAgendaShow.com or NoAgenda.Squarespace.com or Dvorak.org slash NA and you'll see all the new stuff on there.
The site will be improved.
And then to wind it up, something that, of course, this is news that we've been talking about for several months now, I think.
And I'm not quite sure who this guy is other than an Air Force veteran who handled nuclear warheads in Europe.
He is the chairman of Steuben Foods and Elmhurst Dairy.
His name is Henry Schwartz.
And according to the New York Times, he is sounding the alarm.
He says an electromagnetic pulse weapon.
This guy is like 90.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's 75.
He's not that old.
So this whole...
75 is not that old.
I mean, you know, John...
Same age as me.
Go ahead.
Um...
So he's saying, hey, I'm really worried about this, primarily about our grid that won't be able to handle it.
It's interesting.
We talked to Larry, the guy that is renting the hangar to me at Oakland, and he's an engineer for Lockheed.
Lockheed Martin.
Works for the Skunk Works.
And John's real, and he's also up there, he's probably in his 70s, maybe late 60s, and John's real coy is like, hey, so that Aegis thing, you think that really works?
And Larry's like, well, I've seen some pictures.
And then I lay it on, hey, EMPs, and he looks at me and says...
Oh, you've heard of those.
Oh, yeah, that's for real.
EMPs are for real.
That could really happen.
But then when you drill down into it, and this guy's an engineer, and he sounded pretty credible.
He says, but, you know, no one has that technology.
What did he compare to, like Wizard of Oz shit or like Star Wars?
Yeah, he says you can do the thing with the A-bomb, but, you know, you have to get pretty close with it.
Most of what we're hearing is exaggerated.
Yeah.
So I wonder what's behind it then, if it's all exaggerated.
Because a lot of people are jumping on board with this.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
That's the thing that we're trying to get our listeners to think in those terms.
It's like, you start hearing about something, even from us, because we get suckered into this stuff, too, by the way.
Of course.
Not commonly, but, you know, it happens.
But we usually correct...
You know, our flaws eventually.
But the thing is, you always have to ask yourself, who might be behind this and why?
Why are they telling me this?
Because there's no reason for anyone to tell me this stuff unless there's some motive somewhere from somebody trying to make money, usually, or something's going on that's fishy.
Well, they've got a whole website, John.
I'm just saying the link.
It's EMP Act America.
Let's see.
About Us.
There's a whole sight about this thing.
Oh my god.
This looks too slick to be...
Protecting America against a permanent continental shutdown from electromagnetic pulse.
This is a slick site.
Yeah, this has got to be industrial.
This is a government site of some sort.
Military industrial complex.
There's no doubt about it.
There's something fishy about this.
Hold on.
These guys, you remember when we first started, we still do this, by the way, when we first started looking at the phony baloney sites coming out of the...
Oh, Georgia?
Yeah.
And you see these sites, and it's just like, you know what a website, when somebody puts up an honest website, the sincere website, there's a certain kind of gestalt, for want of a better term, that indicates to you that there's probably some honesty behind it.
When you start seeing these things that are way too slick, unless it's like a professional, like a newspaper, yeah, it should be, because it's a newspaper or a publication, but when you see something...
That is a special interest group and it's really slick.
It's very suspicious because special interest groups don't have the kind of money.
They haven't got $18 million to build a good website.
So the website, the domain name empactamerica.org and.net is owned by Steuben Foods and Elmhurst Dairy and affiliates.
Technical Contact Cause MCC Solutions.
What the hell is that?
Let's just...
They must have built the website.
Yeah, they built the website.
So he paid them to build this website.
Interesting to look at.
Avi Schnoor is the president.
We're going to follow this a little more closely because there's something screwy about this thing.
And I noticed at the bottom they got so many tracking bugs in there.
It's amazing.
It's a custom site.
There is one thing that I do believe is quite real because history has showed it, that solar flares, and I think, John, if you look into your cycles, were due for some solar activity in the coming years.
That can actually fry out the grid.
These solar flares, we've had solar winds in the 1800s.
Yeah, and they can take out satellites too.
Occasionally they'll bop a satellite off the air.
I remember that in the mid-90s.
I remember all cell phones, pages were down for like three, four days.
DirecTV was off the air.
I mean, it was a pretty massive solar activity.
And they do talk about it here on this website as well.
Yeah, well, we'll look into this.
Yeah, but this...
Well, help us out.
Dvorak.org slash NAE. We can use your...
Seriously.
My God, it's gotten so dark here, I can barely see the buttons anymore on my card machine.
The sun has gone down over the yard arm, everybody.
And remember, Adam and John say...
Jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
Yay!
Sunday I'll be back in the 17th Century Canal House Command Center.
And so we'll be able to stream live again.
And now I'm going to spend the next 14 hours uploading the show.
Through 3G. With a squirrel in a cage.
Through 3G. Noagenda.show.com Noagenda.squarespace.com Coming to you from Gitmo Nation Southeast South of Ibiza, not in the party capital, in one of those little Bel Air islands with very little electricity.
I'm Adam Curry.
And recommending you bring back some good olive oil.
I'm still here in northern Silicon Valley.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
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