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Sept. 3, 2009 - No Agenda
01:24:17
127: Poppy Futures Blooming
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Time Text
You don't have to be a chicken to spot a bad egg.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It's September 3rd, 2009.
Time for your Gitmo Nation audio publication episode 127.
This is no agenda.
Coming to you from the 17th century Canal House Crackpot Command Center in Amsterdam, Gitmo Nation East, where the years are creeping up on me.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from Northern Silicon Valley, indeed it is number 127.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Yeah, but what's the most important thing about today, John?
It's a happy birthday.
Is it my birthday?
Yeah.
It's my birthday.
Today's your birthday?
Yeah.
Is that right?
How come it's not cropping up in my Google Calendar?
Because I'm not really your friend?
We're not friends on Facebook, you know?
Otherwise, you would have known.
Doesn't Facebook...
Doesn't Skype...
Skype is supposed to alert you to that.
Look at your Skype alerts.
Skype is how I always figure out...
And by the way...
Plaxo does.
No, I'm not a member of Plaxo.
Please.
Well, that's why I don't know it's your birthday.
Yeah, but look at your Skype alerts.
It should have a little birthday present with my name.
Let me look.
Yeah.
That, I think, alone is worth the $2 billion they paid for it.
The birthday alerts on Skype actually work.
One new event, it says.
Mm-hmm.
No.
I know what these look like.
They're little GIFs.
I've seen them before.
No, nothing.
You're kidding me.
No, this is the reason.
You can't blame me.
Hold on a second.
Let me just see my...
This is what happens when you rely on technology too much.
Where's my...
My profile's filled out.
Hold on, let me check.
Account.
My profile.
Oops.
Oh!
Wrong.
Don't do that.
Edit profile.
Uh...
Hmm.
I thought you had to fill out your age when you register for Skype.
Or your birth date or something like that.
Huh.
I don't actually see it in there now.
Yeah.
That's probably why I didn't get the little gift.
Damn!
Damn!
A bummer.
Uh, I didn't even check, but I presume people can hear us.
Let me just see, uh...
Oh, yeah, good idea.
Well, there goes the paintball again.
Ah, yeah, okay.
Yeah, people can hear us.
Stream is up, according to Dave T. And, let me just see...
Yeah, okay, good.
Hey, John, how are you, my friend?
It's boiling hot yesterday, and it's going to be hot again today.
We're finally in September, so that means the weather gets nice and warm in California.
Yeah, and we get lots of fires.
California is burning down.
It happens every year.
Everyone's always stunned by it.
It's whenever the fire gets close to homes.
Last year at this time we were talking about the same thing.
We were talking about the fires.
Yeah, you're right.
But we didn't talk about the Craigslist and eBay sales by the state of California.
That was pretty cool.
Did you catch that?
No, you mustn't have heard about that.
No, I mean they had a big auction that was going to go to it and then I realized that I have a house full of junk already.
I don't need any more crap.
But you could have picked up a Ferrari or a Rolex.
Cheap.
I don't think they were that cheap, were they?
I have no idea.
I just thought it was kind of funny.
And it was a real news story, of course.
But I picked that up while I was in Chicago for a couple of days.
Actually, it was even before Chicago, but they were still talking about it.
Like, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger put all the state assets, and it was like a salami shop and all kinds of weird stuff.
They had all these repossessed items.
That would have been something for you, by the way, the salami shop.
Yeah, I've been something.
Salami.
Salami doesn't keep forever.
So what were you doing in Chicago?
It was the ad tech conference.
I understand you gave a speech.
Actually, I was on a panel.
And I typically tend to shy away from these types of events with good reason.
Because it's just a bunch of advertising jerk-offs jerking off together.
Hi, everybody.
How are you?
Thanks for coming to my panel.
Thanks for coming to my panel and jerking off.
But this was in...
So a big media buying agency in Chicago is Starcom.
And so I was invited by their new chief something officer, Sean Finnegan.
Who's been around?
Who's...
He's a pretty well-known guy in the media buying business.
He, of course, promised and delivered on putting us in front of a couple of other clients.
It's typical, go out there and suck some advertiser dick.
That's basically what it is.
I'm just going to lay it out for you.
So instead of being your normal self, you're actually kind of pleasant and charming?
No, I was on a panel, which I forget the title of the panel, but it was the equivalent of...
It was a panel, it wasn't a stand-up?
No.
No, I was just asked to do this panel.
Let me see.
I hate panels.
Well, this one was kind of funny.
The panel was...
Here it is.
I have the browser window still open.
It was a really long title.
What's wrong and what's right with digital display advertising?
Advancing digital media to drive business results.
And on the panel was VP and General Manager of Display Advertising from Yahoo Inc., Dave Zinman, and Group Creative Director with Digitas, Kevin McElroy.
And...
What people don't understand...
So display is basically banners, I guess.
Although for us, display is...
It could be that big block thing, too, that's in the middle of a page.
For years now, people of neural network, they don't even see banners.
And of course, the IAB, the Internet Advertising Bureau standard of 300 by 250.
It's like, thanks.
Now your brain really knows what to ignore.
Oh, there's that size block again.
I'm not going to look at that.
And of course, how can you think that you can be a brand advertiser with a banner when someone with a credit card can show up at Google and buy the same space with cellulite?
And the guy from Yahoo was pretty funny.
He was like, well, our best performing banner is the mortgage calculator.
Yeah, of course.
It's direct marketing.
The classifieds have moved to the front of the magazine, dude.
Forget about it.
It's over.
The internet is great for direct marketing.
Yeah.
It's kind of pathetic, but true.
But that mortgage calculator that those guys run is highly...
It's enough to make you nauseous.
I mean, it's got a lot of motion.
Oh, it's got the dancing cowboys.
Yeah.
You know it.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I know.
I've seen that ad.
As soon as I see it, I hit the button as fast as I can.
I hate that ad.
It started off with that dancing girl doing some three-step thing, and then it was something else, and some woman shaking her head in a car or something.
It's just the most annoying.
I would never, ever, I mean, I would reject that ad because of its annoyance factor.
I'm amazed that you actually know about these ads.
You can actually tell me what was going on in them.
I can tell you what's going on, but I can't tell you what the company was, and I can tell you for a fact I've never clicked on it.
And that, of course, is because it's a direct marketing effort.
It's not a brand advertising effort.
So you're not supposed to know unless you actually are looking for a mortgage, which apparently you're not.
I'm always looking for something.
Anyway, it was kind of fun.
There were a couple of people there from our old company, Think New Ideas, who I hadn't seen in 10 or 12 years.
That was kind of cool, bumping a couple of old buddies.
One of them who I had fired at one point.
That must have been pleasant.
No, I said, hey, dude, Kerry, I'm really sorry, man.
I'm sorry for firing you 12 years ago.
I said, ah, no problem, man.
I had a job three days later.
That was funny.
I had a job before I found this one.
Can I start off with a fun little clip, John?
If you play the real news thing.
No, it's not a real...
Well, I'll play the real news thing for you if you want that.
I mean, I'm happy to do that.
Well, is it real news or not?
It's not...
No, it's...
Well, yeah, it's from a real news show.
I'll play it.
Morning Meeting.
Oh, hold on a second, then.
I'll play the real news...
Play.
I thought you had these things, I thought it was just like boom.
Yeah, I'm hitting it, but it's not playing.
And now, back to real news.
Back to real news.
This is from MSNBC and it's the morning meeting from August 27th.
And this is about the swine flu pandemic.
And they have on this program, they have the MSNBC in-house doctor.
Let me see if I can find what her name is here.
When it pops up on the screen, I'll tell you.
Anyway, so she, of course, is advocating that you get the...
The swine flu shot.
And it's going back and forth.
And of course, well, you know, is it really going to be bad?
But I just want you to hear what this real doctor...
We should have now a real doctor talking.
Just listen to how she actually winds up this segment by telling you that you really should get the swine flu vaccination.
K-Part might be working triple time.
What you do now and what we do now as a country in deployment of the vaccine and in hand washing and covering your cough.
And look, this is one time.
Forget the conspiracy.
Listen to our government agencies.
These guys are telling the truth.
You know, there's no conspiracy here, folks.
Just get your damn vaccine.
Yeah, there you go.
Get your damn vaccine.
The woman sounded coked up.
She probably is.
I mean, she's just not like a fast-talking character.
Let me see if I can find her name.
No, don't give me her name.
Hey, play the clip I have.
Nancy Snyderman.
There you go.
I know Nancy Snyderman.
I've actually sat on a plane with her once.
You've done coke with her, don't you remember?
If anybody would do coke, it wouldn't be her.
Well, she wants you to get your damn vaccine, Johnny Boy.
Yeah, well, she's actually a specialist in nose, throat, and other forms of weird cancer that people get from doing cocaine.
From doing cocaine.
Before we get to your clip, John, just a quick moment to remind you what this program is all about.
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
Right on!
Right on!
That's our formula.
It's an easy formula.
That's what I like about it.
We're sticking to it.
So, I have a clip there that's a flu-related one.
It's just a news item.
This is where I think this is headed.
It's a straight news item that was done on a local station.
And now it's become, instead of having Snyderman yell and scream, you know, people should just get the damn shot, now it's presented as so matter-of-fact that I think this is the most effective sales pitch you can have, the way they do this one.
Sonoma County health officials today reported that a teenager has become the latest person to die from the H1N1 flu.
The adolescent's name and gender were not released.
Officials say the teen had a pre-existing medical condition.
The deaths of five other Sonoma residents have been linked to the H1N1 virus, and 36 have been hospitalized with the flu.
A vaccine is expected by October.
And then, you know, what they're going to do, of course, we've already seen over here.
I was just going to say, isn't that just a slick way to do it?
It's an easy way to do it.
And the next thing they're going to do, and we've already seen it happen here in Europe, where I am right now, is, well, you know, you're going to have to wait in line.
You can't be first.
We're prioritizing, and these are the people who are going first.
It's going to be...
It's going to be healthcare workers.
It's going to be first responders.
So they're going to create this false urgency.
And it works.
This is the Nintendo marketing approach for the Wii.
It's the Wii.
It's the Wii shot.
So I was in Chicago with the two Jens, Jennifer White and Jennifer Cooper.
And so we're having dinner, and of course, you have dinner with me.
Eventually, I'm going to say, hey, they're out to kill you, and you definitely should.
And she has two kids.
I say, hey, whatever you do, don't let your kids get this swine flu vaccine.
This is bullshit.
And then I said, actually, on the previous No Agenda, we were talking about Gardazil.
And how hundreds of girls, if not thousands, have died from this and all these horrible things.
And I see Jennifer Cooper just go white as a sheet.
And she says, are you alright?
She says, my daughter just had her first Gardasil shot.
I'm like, dude, don't let her get the second one, okay?
And not the third one either.
Just stop right now.
Is she okay?
Does she have a fever?
No, no, she's okay.
But her doctor was really, really pushing this.
She said, the kid's 12, Jennifer.
She's not having sex.
She's not going to, you know, there's no risk of cervical cancer until she's having sex.
Yeah, but the doctor was really pushing it.
And she totally freaked out, man.
She was like, oh, my God.
And then Jennifer White was like, oh, who has a new baby?
New baby boy.
Oh, yeah, no, I did all my research.
My kid ain't getting any of that stuff.
It's just like, wow.
You know, you just see how really intelligent people get hoodwinked.
Hoodwinked!
Yeah, well, none of that, but I think the doctor's at fault here.
What, is he getting a piece of the action?
Of course he's getting a piece of the action.
And even Jennifer Cooper said, oh my god, he's on the payroll.
Duh.
Duh.
Yeah.
So, we may have saved a life, John.
We may have saved another life.
That's why we're here.
And to hit people in the mouth.
I'm not going to play it again.
Have you ever heard of Pastor Manning?
No, I have not heard of Pastor Manning.
So I think he has a radio show.
It's an African-American pastor.
And there's a YouTube clip of him that I just...
He broke it up the fountain!
I could play the whole thing, but let's just listen to a couple of minutes here, or just a minute or two, of what he's saying.
And they can't take it no more!
He's talking about white people now.
And who can blame them?
I mean, who can blame them?
To build this nation...
And then have it given away!
Just given away!
Just thrown away!
Oh, hold on.
I'm sorry.
Given away by a long-legged, half-breed, usurper, illegal alien, a man who isn't even a citizen, and everybody in the Congress knows that he's not a citizen.
Dick Cheney knows he's not a citizen.
Dick Cheney knows.
And yet nobody will stand up.
I'm telling you, white folk are ready to riot.
Yes!
And they should be.
This guy is awesome.
White folks are ready to riot.
This don't make no doubt.
I haven't noticed that so much.
Well, listen, he has.
I'm telling y'all!
I'm telling y'all!
Now even y'all go talk to the long-legged Mac Daddy and tell him to resign!
And to resign!
The long-legged Mac Daddy.
And then all these people, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Dick Cheney, George Bush, all need to stand on a platform.
And then bring the nine Supreme Court justices and they ought to apologize to God-fearing, God-loving, patriotic Americans ought to have an individual apology from every one of these persons I just named that have allowed this long-legged mack daddy, this two-tongued liar, this quasi-Muslim, socialist, communist, Marxist freak called Barack Hussein Obama.
This guy's got an awesome show.
I'm really liking it.
You would think so.
It's funny.
Now, this is interesting because I'm not sure what...
Did you look up Mac Daddy to see what the reference was?
I'm sure it's a racial slur.
Let's see.
Long-legged Mac Daddy.
Let me see.
Of course I get...
Oh, Urban Dictionary.
Mac Daddy.
Here we go.
I think it has something to do with being a pimp or something.
Yeah, the pimpmeister, the king of the streetwalkers, possessor of the blingest of bling bling.
The Mac Daddy is the man who means everything to his ladies of the night.
Oh, baby, here, quote, Oh, baby, you my Mac Daddy.
Hmm.
Mac Daddy is a term used to describe a man with an unusual power over women and is derived from the French and later Louisiana Creole patois term maquereau, which means pimp.
There you go.
Interesting.
We should keep up with that guy just to see what happens.
Just for entertainment value alone.
You think?
I ran into a blog the other day from some ex-little green footballs and another right-wing black guy.
And I'm noticing them starting to come out of the woodwork.
And this guy's got a blog.
I have to get the name of it, and I'll bring it up in one future show.
But he's apparently a professor someplace.
And he doesn't have this guy's vitriol, but he has some of the most offensive questions.
Photoshop jobs on Obama.
Imaginable.
I mean, they're just in everything.
He's got the same kind of negative attitude.
And he went on and on about how it turns out if you start reading between the lines, it turns out that he was a jilted Hillary supporter that has lost interest in the party because Hillary was screwed.
But now he's a crazy Republican.
I don't even think this guy's a Republican.
He's just mad.
That is hell.
He's a Republican.
But if you listen to this whole thing, white folks are going to come up from Alabama, from Mississippi, and then from Oregon.
I don't know quite why he says Oregon all of a sudden.
And they're going to riot.
He said, you think South Central Los Angeles was bad?
Wait until white people riot.
And I was like, whoa.
I have to say, there may be something to it.
We really don't know what's going on, really what the pulse of the nation is, because there is no real news.
There is no national outlet that can really give you a feeling for what's happening.
You see little clips and bits, and it's really hard to put it into context and know if it's just a small local thing or if this really is happening.
I don't know.
Today, I'm looking at all the different news stories I have, and I'm really depressed.
I'm like, oh, man.
We're all going to die.
I'm in one of those moods today.
In the meantime, the two dingbats from Current TV, Laurel Ling and Yuna Lee, are now pushing their story.
Oh, their story?
Of course.
Is it Sweeps Week yet?
Are we coming up on sweeps?
Well, there's some only seeing it in print so far, so I don't know.
No, Sweeps Week, usually they harp on talking about it, so I don't think so.
Let me see, when is Sweeps Week?
Um...
Isn't it coming up?
I think sweeps is coming up, dude.
It won't be coming up until the season begins.
It's not going to come up on reruns.
Well, no, but the season begins, doesn't it start like next week or something?
Well, I think about the 14th, because that's when Leno shows up.
Right, exactly.
Well, so there you go.
So they're harping it now, and then they're going to put it out in sweeps.
Nobody cares about these two.
This is like negative sweeps.
This is like suck your ratings into the toilet if you have these two women on.
Well, that's what you think.
I mean, the one is like this and so...
She was talking about how the...
John is saying it in some story on CNN. Oh, we had to eat our notes and destroy the tapes to protect everyone.
Oh, really?
I didn't know they ate their notes.
Well, that's a new...
Yeah, that's a new twist.
They ate their notes.
We ate our notes.
We should do that, John.
We need to eat our notes after every...
You can't even find your notes for the show, let alone eat them.
Yeah.
You're still looking at the notes from last week's show that you forgot.
It's part of the charm of the show.
But there is a note that I kept for myself from last week, which is something you probably would have blogged.
There's a disturbing trend in the picturesque Swiss village of Lauterbrunnen where dozens of alpine cows appear to be committing suicide by throwing themselves off of a cliff.
Yeah, we did blog this.
The cow suicide dilemma.
Yeah, that's freaky.
That's one of those Darwinian type things that you go, hmm.
Any thoughts?
Whoa, what's going on there?
A garbage truck just went by.
Your buddies.
This is garbage day.
They're parking.
And what's cool about this little town is that they give us extra cans and a recycle.
You don't have to separate?
Oh, really?
Oh.
And you're near Berkeley, aren't you?
Isn't that kind of...
No, Berkeley's just...
Berkeley's the worst.
Berkeley, they don't let you take too much garbage.
They don't let you have garbage disposals because it's against the environment.
And they want you to separate everything out for them so they don't have to do any work whatsoever.
Berkeley is the worst town in the world for people who are recycling or doing anything because it's just like...
They make you do all the work.
Just like when you go into a Macy's.
And the woman that's the cashier, she doesn't just ring up your bill, she's typing in and scanning and typing in and scanning, basically bookkeeper data.
So it goes into the computer and they don't need to have a bookkeeper.
There was an article in the Financial Times, I think, about people complaining about the length of receipts.
And I have noticed this myself.
If you go into a Walgreens or any other store really in the United States, even at Radio Shack, if you buy a pack of batteries, the receipt is like three feet long that comes out.
And it's got bonus coupons and advertising.
And all you really want is just a receipt, you know, in case whatever you bought is bogus or you have to return it.
But have you noticed this trend?
Yeah, it started some years ago.
They're printing too much.
This coupon thing is out of control.
And they're putting them on receipts.
They used to have this little device, which I got the biggest kick out of because I ran into the guy who somehow sold the stores on this some years and years ago.
They finally took these things out.
But in the grocery stores, maybe they still have them some places, but most of them are gone because I think there was a maintenance fee that was just too high.
But you'd go into the store and then they'd ring up your bill and then a little coupon would come out of a little special printer that was sitting near the thing that returned change or somewhere around you that the guy would give you the coupon after you gave you your groceries and when you left you had this coupon.
And typically the coupon deal went like this.
If you bought a six pack of Coca-Cola, a coupon would come out for a six pack of Pepsi.
Really?
Yeah, and they say, you know, try Pepsi instead.
And then what happened was, so then the sales deal was, look, if these guys are buying Coke, you can sell them Pepsi, would you?
The coupon would come out, and they sold Pepsi on this.
Once Pepsi was sold on it, they could sell Coke on it.
So if you bought a six-pack of Pepsi, a Coke coupon would come out.
Do you think people actually look at all of those three-foot-long receipts?
No, there's coupon net calls out there that do.
I think there are.
But anyway, somebody along the line got, you know, figured out that this was just basically a scam, you know, playing one company off against another.
And I think they got sued for, like, unfair trade practices or something because, you know, they were, like, spying on the bill.
And so there's privacy issues.
You know, you shouldn't be giving out a coupon.
It just became a fiasco and the thing disappeared.
Just going back to your garbage men, something I noticed in Chicago, which of course is...
I'm sorry, sanitary engineers.
I'm sorry, did I say garbage men?
Well, of course we all know that the mob pretty much controls the garbage industry, which is fine because garbage is usually well taken care of, I think.
It runs well, right?
They do a good job.
Yeah, absolutely.
It works.
I'm happy.
Chicago, of course, is the center of the universe that is where our president is from.
And, of course, Mayor Daley pretty much controls the president and runs the world.
There are so many Russians in Chicago right now.
And they're all like...
Actually, they all look like they're adult film stars.
And they've got American passports, I might add.
I noticed this at the airport at the check-in.
It must have been 50 Russians with American passports all going from Chicago back to Moscow, whatever.
And I'm like, hmm.
Because, you know, of course...
Moscow is famous for the mob running everything there.
I think that there's probably a global thing going on here.
You know, the other place where there's a lot of Russians that, you know, just, I mean...
I don't want to imply that all Russians are mobsters, but these certainly were.
Is Boston.
Both Boston and Chicago are both, you know, kind of mob towns.
If we don't mind just generalizing.
No, they know it.
Ha, ha, ha.
It's not like we're shocking.
Oh, what?
I've never heard of such a thing!
There's mobsters in Chicago?
Anyway, so what's your point?
No, I got no real point.
Yeah, of course not.
So I do have an interesting thing here.
Apparently Rachel Maddow went on to one of the talk shows and said, yeah, I think I got the swine flu, which is like you when you came into the office.
I had the swine flu.
I know I did.
Yeah, so you're wandering around, you know, and coughing on people and licking their...
No, I stayed in my hotel room in the Marriott Courtyard, I might add, for six full days when I had the swine flu.
Okay.
Okay.
So anyway, so then now everybody, you know, nobody thought much about it at the time, but now everybody's all up in arms on how she may have infected the 30 Rock and the whole, you know, the people that work there have children and oh my God, blah, blah, blah.
Good.
Let them all get swine flu.
They need it.
And she should be at the front of the line for the shots.
Yeah, she should actually.
She should have priority.
I think we should start a viral campaign.
Get Rachel Maddow 2 to the arm.
ASAP. I have a request of readers out there.
Apparently, this came out in August.
I was going to blog it, but it's a little old, so I didn't do it.
But my wife pointed this out.
She found these things.
The headline here is PETA terrifies children with unhappy meals.
What?
Yesterday at a McDonald's in Albany, New York, PETA terrified children by handing out unhappy meals.
Inside the box, a bloodied rubber chicken, a pack of ketchup blood, a cruelty t-shirt wrapped in a blood-spattered chicken sandwich box, and a cardboard cutout of a knife-wielding Ronald McDonald.
How did they do this?
They just handed them out in front of the McDonald's?
Yeah, I guess they were all picketing in front of the place and they were handing out these meals.
You know, so-called meals.
If anybody has one of these things...
Oh, please.
It's worth money.
They have photos here.
The things are little works of art.
They got this Ronald McDonald with a maniacal look on his face with a big knife.
And then they got the inside of the hamburger, the thing that would hold the meal.
It's all spattered with what looks like blood.
It's really...
I consider it...
I was thinking Banksy, you know, one of these street artists did this.
But no, Pete has apparently got some artists in the company now.
Let's see if I can find a picture.
Totally collectible.
Win it Wednesday.
Unhappiness.
Oh, yeah, I see it.
Oh, my God.
The chicken is horrible.
The little chickadee.
The blooded chickadee.
Oh, my God.
I tell you.
Catch up with the times, McCruelty.
So on the kids' topic, something that I find personally kind of creepy, particularly because we don't know exactly what he's going to say, on September the 8th, so that will be, what is that, Wednesday, I think?
Buh, buh, buh.
Yeah, whatever.
September 8th.
No, maybe it's Tuesday.
President Obama will be addressing all students across America in a live web telecast and they've sent out documents to teachers With the things that teachers should do...
Talking points.
Talking points, exactly.
Before the speech, teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States in his speech by reading books about Presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions.
Who is the President of the United States?
What do you think it takes to be President?
To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?
Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
What do you think he will say to you?
I mean, they're making this big mystery.
And I find it, honestly, I find it offensive that the President is going to be speaking with a non-published agenda and is expecting teachers nationwide to just flip it on.
It's creepy.
Yeah, you know, when the story first appeared, it didn't bother me so much.
It was just like, you know, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have the president speaking to class.
It keeps the teachers from having to do any work.
But I think if they're going to do that, they should also play a clip from that crazy minister that you just ran earlier in the show.
The Mac Daddy!
You can just see little kindergartners going home.
Daddy, what is a Mac Daddy?
What's a long-legged Mac Daddy?
Long-legged Mac Daddy.
Long-legged Mac Daddy?
You got to take some specific little clips out of that.
That guy's pretty funny.
The whole thing is a clip.
It's one big clip.
You just start it.
You don't want to stop it.
Write goals on colored index cards or pre-cut designs to post around the classroom.
What do you think it's going to be?
This is the kind of cornball stuff they do anyway in these schools.
What's it going to be?
It's going to be...
I know what it's going to be.
It's going to be a very sincere talk in his, you know, off of a teleprompter about why, you know, more like one of those weekend things he does.
And it's going to be why it's important to go to school, why it's important to get a good education, what it means to the future of the country.
It's just going to be a...
It's going to be a rah-rah cheerleader thing.
It's not going to be any big deal.
You don't think it's going to be about getting your swine flu shot?
No, but it should be.
And when you get home, little kids, go to your daddy's wallet and take out 50 bucks and mail it to the Democratic National Committee.
Send it to me.
And ask your mommy why she's not supporting the president's health care plan.
Ask her.
Say to her, Mommy, do you want me to die?
No.
Well, you know now that the government has teamed up with Sesame Street Oh yeah, Elmo.
Well, they've got a Sesame Street character named Gordon, and of course Elmo, who will explain the importance of healthy habits, including, of course, all the things you need to know about the swine flu, the H1N1, the new H1N1 swine flu, which, dude, there are posters everywhere at the airports.
It's just outrageous.
If you have a fever and you're sneezing, you probably have swine flu.
No such thing as allergies.
I went through the humiliation tunnel again.
O'Hare is just the worst.
Oh, and I just detest it when the TSA agents are yelling at you.
Oh, God.
It makes me so...
I really have to calm myself down.
Three ounces.
Three ounces only.
Three ounces.
Three ounces only.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your shoes.
Laptops out of the bag.
Take off your shoes.
That's right.
Move it along.
Move it along.
I just want to strangle someone.
Just like, hey, you.
Fuck one!
Oh, I have a great entering the country story for you.
Oh!
Yes, it's been a while.
Yeah, that's been over a year that you've told one of these tales.
Yes, well, it's time for a new one of the humorous variety.
So I land at O'Hare, and I go to the Customs and Border Patrol agent in the Citizens line, and there's a guy like my age, maybe a year or two older.
It turns out he was two years older.
And I hand him my passport.
I say, good afternoon.
And he says, hey, hey, you're the MTV Adam Curry, aren't you?
And I start to say, why, yes, officer.
And I look at his name tag, because I want to say his name.
And his name tag reads, B-U-T-M-A-N. I'm like, why, yes, officer.
Officer.
Buttman?
Yeah, Buttman.
Well, maybe it was Buttman or something, because there was only one T. It's Buttman to you.
I'm not going to mispronounce this guy's name.
Well, yes, Officer Buttman.
That's me.
I could just see myself retained with rectal examination.
I'm like, oh my God.
Yeah, I remember watching you.
Yes, Officer Buttman.
I'm sure you enjoyed it.
Boot man.
um, Oh, jeez.
He let me in, though.
That was good.
Yeah, well, you're on the A-list now.
Oh, totally.
I think it's because of this show, by the way.
Let me, actually, let me give you some...
And now, back to real news.
This is even in the Financial Times.
This is news that you'll be interested in, John.
Gordon Ramsay, standing in the culinary firmament, has taken yet another hit with a number of his restaurants drubbed as overpriced and disappointing.
Even his flagship restaurant, Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, which was considered the best gastronomic experience in London last year, has suffered, quote, an unprecedented slide, according to the latest edition of Hardin's London Restaurants.
They're now saying, here it is, his seven-course menu prestige is not a three-star Michelin experience.
For 120 pounds, I might point out.
Which is not a bad price, by the way, for...
For seven courses?
For seven courses in a three-star restaurant, that's pretty low.
But if it sucks...
Yeah, if it sucks.
This is part of the never-ending smear that began when his business...
You know, people have to realize when they're watching any of this stuff that he essentially stepped out on his wife...
Yeah, that's where it really started.
Which, by the way, he is still not admitted and still has not really been proven, I don't think.
Well, whatever.
He stepped out on his wife, and the fly in the ointment is the fact that his wife's father was his manager.
And a major investor.
Yeah, everything.
His wife's father is like 40% of the business, I think.
Right.
And so this is not the guy you want to piss off, you know, by, you know, messing with his daughter.
And that's when it all began.
And it seems like no coincidence to me that it's just continuing because he refuses to make amends.
And he's, you know, that probably him and the, I mean, the guy is obviously the guy who is the wife's father is obviously no slouch because he's the one who built up this empire.
And he can, you know, can tear it down just as fast.
And he's like, you know, he's probably got connections everywhere.
Well, but he's still running the company.
It makes no sense for him to tear it down while he's still a major shareholder.
I don't know what the politics are, but I can just tell you that it seems like no coincidence, as far as I'm concerned, that this stuff keeps happening to Ramsey.
I think it's just typical the way the media works and the way life works.
It's a roller coaster, particularly if you're in the public eye.
You're built up, you're knocked down.
And I can predict right now, in a year or two, if we're still alive, he'll have an amazing comeback.
He'll fight his way back up to the top and he'll rebuild everything.
Maybe he should shut down some of his restaurants in the process and concentrate on one or two.
I think that'll just happen all by itself.
That seems to be the trend of him closing his restaurants.
Yeah, well, anyway, I haven't been to that place, Gordon Ramsay's.
In Chelsea?
Yeah.
But I'm sure it's fine.
I'm sure it's not as horrible as these guys are making it out to be.
I mean, because if nothing else, he's got to keep that one ship with his name on it at the top of the heap.
But of course, while everyone is talking about that, somewhere buried on page 18 is the record criminal fine, criminal fine I might add, that Pfizer has had to pay for false claims, false advertising, basically selling you shit.
Was it like $1.2 billion?
It was in the billions.
It's an unbelievable fine.
In a combination of civil and criminal settlement, Pfizer has agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice.
Within that $2.3 billion is a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, which makes it the largest criminal fine in history.
Combating health care fraud is one of this administration's top law enforcement priorities.
By all accounts, every year we lose billions of dollars to Medicare and Medicaid funds.
There it is.
So that, of course, is why they're trying to play this one out, is about the so-called fraud, and we need health care reform because these guys are stealing our money.
Those billions represent health care dollars that could be spent on medicine.
And after we have the reform, they'll stop stealing our money, right?
Oh, yeah, right away.
It'll end immediately.
It doesn't actually say in the article exactly what they did, which I always find disturbing.
The salesmen were doing some bribes, and there was a whole bunch of different...
Oh, don't tell me they were paying off doctors.
Doctors.
They were encouraging misprescriptions.
I don't know what the term is, but I'm going to say misprescriptions.
In other words...
There's drugs that are recommended for this, that, and the other, but you're not supposed to recommend them for these other things, and they're recommending them for these other things to move more product.
And there's a whole laundry list of stuff they were doing.
But it seems to me that all these guys do that.
I mean, Pfizer's just the tip of the iceberg.
People want to know why healthcare's so expensive.
They just need to look at these drug companies.
And where does that $3 billion go?
Who gets that?
They probably never even give him the money.
I mean, I don't know.
They'll fight that for so long it's going to be ridiculous.
I don't know.
It goes into the Treasury.
Oh, Timmy Geithner.
Timmy Geithner, another fine upstanding citizen.
Yeah, it goes right to goes right to the banks.
So one of the big things going on out here, which I find detestable, is we're going to Oh, actually, what clips do I have here?
Let's play a clip.
You've got a couple of clips.
I don't have any great clips.
Poison 1, Poison 2, Shooting at School 6.
Oh yeah, the shooting at school is kind of interesting.
We had a shooting here.
I'll give you the background on it.
It was up in the skyline of colleges.
I didn't even know what that was.
It was a little junior college, I guess, in the hills.
And I guess there was a couple of gangs or some kids that were two black groups.
And they got into a...
They're in the parking lot, and then they got into a screaming match.
One of them, yes, kerfuffle, and then one of them pulled out a gun and shot one of the other kids in the butt.
And then they all scrambled out of there as fast as they could, but meanwhile, of course, everybody's preoccupied with the thing, and it's Virginia Tech all over again.
Oh, right, right.
So they text message everybody, and then they do this and that.
But there's a couple of punchlines in this story, you have to play the whole thing, that are just to me, it's just the eye roller.
And the main one, as soon as you hear it, you're going to go, what?
What?
But anyway.
But there's also the naïveté of the kids.
It's just kind of weird.
Play it, play it.
Weapons drawn, they formed lines, then carefully walked room to room looking for the gunman.
Meanwhile, the school sent text messages to students.
Telling them to shelter in place.
I've got to stop it right there.
What happened to the PA system?
Remember that when we were in school, John?
I was like, hey kids, get in a safe place.
No, we're going to send text messages.
Does the school have everyone's mobile number?
Is that now required of it?
They might.
People determine that if they've done that at Virginia Tech where they don't have a big giant PA system because it's an actual university.
Text messaging probably would have saved some people.
But the point is that these kids were in the parking lot and they all raced out of there as soon as this happened.
So what are they looking for?
Stay in your rooms and lock all the doors.
There was an altercation between two groups of African American males in the parking lot number 6.
And during that altercation, one subject was shot.
That, by the way...
That, by the way, was the cop who looked very displeased by everything.
And he just said, look, there was an altercation.
A guy was shot.
You know, get out of my face.
It was just apparently was just a simple episode.
But anyway, go back.
Each classroom, they helped 3000 students calmly evacuate.
Pop, pop, pop, pop.
And then I was like, what was that?
These two students say they heard the shots, looked up, and saw a group of men sprinting toward them.
They just started like yelling.
They're like, oh crap, dude, run, run, run.
That guy got shot.
Police say the men got away in a fluorescent purple Ford Escort with a paper license plate.
I was really scared.
I saw the gun and I was just like, oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like that before.
It was impossible to find this vehicle.
Fluorescent purple.
The thing was literally fluorescent purple.
With spinning rims and all kinds of...
They'll never find those guys.
No way.
I mean, this thing was like so...
It was almost lavender.
It was just this gaudiest purple thing you've ever seen with paper plates.
Yeah, like that makes a difference.
This thing lights up the road.
What boneheads.
Oh, man.
That's our local news.
That's the hot stuff going on around here.
That and the fires.
Yeah, there's different stories going on.
Oh, man.
People are just calling me all day because it's my birthday, of course.
Happy birthday to you.
Some of the biggest supermarkets in Britain...
Have held secret talks because they're running out of non-GMO food suppliers.
So they literally cannot find...
Why don't you just take the phone off the hook?
That would do the trick.
It's kind of hard with a cell phone.
How do you take a cell phone off the hook?
Oh, it's called turning it off.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I could do that.
But what if someone important calls?
Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrison, Marks& Spencer, Co-op, Summerfield, and Aldi met with civil servants to discuss their problems in finding traditional food suppliers.
So they can no longer find food that is non-GMO, i.e.
laboratory-created frankenfood.
And by who?
I'm giving you the cue.
I'm with you, baby.
I'm with you.
You're not getting enough sleep, or what's the deal?
Yeah, let me see.
Did I fly on the red eye from Chicago to be here on time for the show?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
But that's disturbing.
Yeah, that's pretty disturbing.
I agree.
They cannot find suppliers who are not GMO. I mean, that's...
Wow.
I thought there was a bunch of things in the EU that prevented all this GMO food from being sold and bought and sold.
But then you're missing the point.
So European rules state that GM food has to be labeled.
The point is they can't find suppliers who sell non-GMO food.
Everyone's using this shit.
It's everywhere.
We're doomed.
I don't know what to tell you.
I think it's just...
I don't know.
I mean, up in Washington State, we shop at a little grower who grows his own food.
I mean, he's a farmer.
He's got a whole lot of land.
There's no GMO stuff up there.
We have the raw milk from the...
Dungeness Creamery.
Well, yeah, of course.
We get to buy a cow off the hoof, you know?
Yeah, but you...
Off the cliff, you mean.
You can't...
You can't...
I mean, there's not enough of those guys to go around.
And particularly in the United Kingdom, where...
There really are no small shops anymore.
Everyone shops at these big box supermarkets.
If they're not buying their food there, they're buying it at the gas station.
This is another very disturbing trend in Europe.
All gas stations are effectively mini-marts where you go and pick up your food.
People actually eat in the gas station these days.
Have you ever seen that?
What do you mean?
Is there tables in there?
Yeah, they've got stand-up tables, and you walk in, and so...
Oh, you get one of those reheated hamburgers that's been sitting in the bin forever, and you put some mustard on it and choke it down with a Slurpee?
No, we don't know the concept of Slurpee.
We have just aspartame-tainted Diet Coke.
Another trend I've noticed, if you don't specifically ask for it, you get a Diet Coke.
No, there, not here.
I tell you...
No, we're moving too much high-fructose corn syrup for that kind of scam to get any leg.
Well, this is the aspartame scam, and boy, I'll tell you, even on the airplane, if you don't specifically say, I want a regular Coke, you're getting a Diet Coke.
People are hooked on the taste of this shit.
People are really, really hooked on it.
And it's a good thing to avoid drinking.
Yeah, well, in general, I think Coke is a good thing to avoid.
Well, here's a headline for you.
Is this a real news?
Yeah, might as well be.
Armless man denied check cashing at Bank of America for not giving thumbprint.
Yeah.
Seems like real news to me.
Yeah, something's wrong with my...
Every single time I hit the button, it's slow.
Or it's not firing.
I don't know what's going on.
I'm too tired to figure it out.
Sounds like you need an upgrade.
I can probably...
I don't know.
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I'm sorry.
I see Michelle Bachman in the news again.
She's gone crazy.
Oh, my girlfriend.
I love her.
What's she doing now?
She's deciding that we all need to take a blood oath of some sort.
Really?
So we have to slit our wrists.
Cool.
Blood brothers in this.
I'm all for that.
What's the dealio?
It's about the healthcare deal.
I mean, everybody's taking these ridiculous sides, I mean, on an issue that is...
I mean, I don't get why the Democrats didn't just ramrod this thing through.
They had everybody they needed.
They should have just pushed this through in the dead of night.
I don't know.
What's their problem?
Well, they don't have the votes.
I guess not anymore.
Here it is.
Freed U.S. journalists suspect they were...
This is, by the way, one of the other stories about these dingbats.
Ling and Lee.
This was the CNN story.
Now they suspect they were lured into a trap.
Oh, right.
While they were conveniently wandering into North Korea.
This is a funny line here, according to the writer.
Ling and Li didn't go into much more detail about their experiences in captivity, saying there are, quote, things that are still too painful to visit.
Like eating our notes.
It's too painful for me to talk about eating my notes.
We should do that every show.
We should eat some notes.
Would you like some notes with your beer?
Here's a story about Ling and Lee.
Eat those notes.
Mash it up really good.
Dateline September 1st, 2009.
The State Department has extended a contract with Blackwater.
I thought they were banned.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Sources say the department has agreed to temporarily continue using the subsidiary known as Presidential Airways, these are the guys that smuggle guns and dog food, to provide helicopter transport for embassy employees around Iraq until a new contract with another security company, DynCorp International, oh yeah, is fully implemented.
Presidential Airways is an arm of U.S. Training Center, which is a subsidiary of CSEAT, formerly and still commonly known as Blackwater.
Of course, Dyncarp says we're not going to be fully staffed and certified in order to assume the responsibilities immediately, so we need these guys to continue.
I think, in fact, I have an article.
Wasn't this one of our Secretary of State's promises?
Let me bring it up for you.
There's a couple of Promises websites out there.
These guys are not performing very well.
Hillary Clinton, as a candidate for president, pledged to ban Blackwater.
In February 2008, she announced that she would sign on as the co-sponsor of a little-known bill put forward in the House of Representatives.
The Stop Outsourcing Security, or SOS Act, oh yes, we've got an acronym, sought to end the use of armed mercenaries in U.S. war zones.
Hey, Hillary, what's up with that?
Maybe we should ask Bill.
We know how much he likes it.
It's like all Roseanne, Roseanna, Dana.
People can remember that, you know.
Oh, yes.
These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq, Clinton said in February 28, 2008's statement on the campaign trail.
The time to show these contractors the door is long past due.
We need to stop filling the coffers of contractors in Iraq and make sure that armed personnel in Iraq are fully accountable to the U.S. government and follow the chain of command.
Well, I'm sure you've seen how well that's working at our embassy in Afghanistan.
I hope you blogged this.
Yeah, we did.
We blogged it about the thugs that are running the thing.
Well, it's like Lord of the Flies.
We've got Afghan National Employed as a food service worker.
So these guys are walking around naked.
There's pictures of them eating potato chips out of each other's butts.
Which, by the way, is not recommended behavior anywhere.
Simulated anal intercourse.
It's like frat boys.
And I'm sure that they're hired.
We need to get out of that country that's stupid that we're there.
You know, this is a couple of interesting things about Afghanistan and our being there.
So one, this is what President Obama keeps calling the necessary war.
And I think we should stop and evaluate that because I don't know what's so necessary about it.
And returning now to the vernacular, thanks to bonehead Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesperson, he's brought back the war on terror quote.
Now that's back.
I thought we were getting rid of that.
I thought the president said we're not going to say that anymore.
And now he's saying it all over the place.
War on terror.
War on terror.
It must have tested well in a focus group.
You can't under-resource, because of course they want 200,000 extra troops to go in, and by the way, it doesn't have to be reservists, it can just be blackwater dudes.
You can't under-resource the most important part of our war on terror.
You can't under-resource that for five or six or seven years.
Oh, really?
Whether it's under-resourced with troops, whether it's under-resourced with civilian manpower, whether it's under-resourced with economic development funding...
What warmonger said this?
This is Robert Gibbs!
So basically we just created another Vietnam and the Democrats did it again.
But no one's questioning this.
Nobody can question it because they're all, you know, liberals can't question the President of the United States.
By the way, I got the name of that blogger that's got the anti-Obama blog who's, you know, a black guy.
Typical.
I mean, these guys go crazy.
To me, some of the most offensive imagery.
But I'll mention it anyway.
Afrocityblog.wordpress.com.
And this guy, he's in the same league as that preacher that you were playing earlier.
Mm-hmm.
Well, it's a trend, John.
It's a trend.
And maybe it's a really good one.
It might be.
Unless we get out of Afghanistan and actually start focusing on this country.
Well, it would be an idea.
You know, we all know that the Taliban...
By the way, what happened to Al-Qaeda?
Weren't we after those guys?
I'm confused.
So they're in Pakistan.
They're not in Afghanistan.
An Afghan national employed as a food service worker at the Guard Corps' base at Camp Sullivan submitted a signed statement August 16th attesting that a Guard Force supervisor and four others entered a dining facility on August 1st Of course, these were not actual U.S. troops.
These were probably Blackwater-type guys.
Wearing only short underwear and brandishing bottles of alcohol.
Upon leaving the facility, the Guard Force supervisor allegedly grabbed the Afghan National by the face and began abusing him with foul language, saying, you're very good for fucking.
The Afghan National reported that he was, quote, too afraid of them.
I could not tell them anything yet.
No shit.
This is from Mother Jones, by the way, that I'm reading this from.
Mother Jones has to report on this.
Yeah, I think it's pathetic when you have to read news in Mother Jones.
There's just thugs everywhere, John.
There's just thugs everywhere, running everything.
It's big-time thuggery.
And the TSA thugs are very close behind to this type of behavior.
And by the way, why are they all 300 pounds?
Why is that?
I ran into a skinny guy in Texas.
He was screaming about, you're going to have more than three ounces.
If it's not three ounces, it's not allowed.
You should throw in the garbage.
If it's a jar that says six ounces on it, but there's only three ounces inside, it will be confiscated.
If it says six ounces, if there's nothing inside, it will be confiscated.
It has to be three ounces in a container that says three ounces, and it goes on and on like that.
Just forever.
I mean, it's like the guy never stopped talking.
To settle my anger in these moments in the TSA line, I've now taken to evaluating and studying the X-ray operator.
And they rotate, you know, so they all take their little turn.
And half of these guys just like sitting there, you know...
I know, most of the smart money just, you know...
But then I love watching my bag go through because you have the multiple colors.
It turns orange, blue, and you can see all these different things.
Now, I wish I had the balls because I know I can't do it.
I wish I had the balls to take a picture of what my bag looks like because my bag is essentially a big bundle of wires and batteries.
And if anything, when a bag full of wires and batteries goes to the x-ray machine, you might want to just check it.
They never, ever do.
But oh man, if you got some water in that bag.
Oh, the alarm bells go off.
Oh, water, water, water, water!
Yeah, I noticed that too.
They can find that water and they can also find a tube of toothpaste or whatever.
And I would just like to remind people one more time, we've discussed it on this show, but the reason for this liquids limitation...
It was because there was a so-called bust of so-called terrorists at Heathrow who were intending, it wasn't even at Heathrow, who were intending, according to the bust, to take liquids onto American aircraft to mix them up and explode these aircraft mid-air and bring them down.
All of these so-called terrorists were acquitted.
They were not convicted.
It was thrown out.
They not only...
Could they not prove that they were planning on doing this?
These guys had no passports, had no tickets.
And they didn't really even have the right chemicals to do this.
They acquitted all of them.
And still we have to do this.
We have to go through this humiliation.
Well, because they came up with a good idea and possibly somebody else can come up with that idea and they can do it.
So it's too late now.
No, it's for retail.
Because the minute you go through, you can get yourself a nice knife in first class and you can buy yourself a $7 bottle of water.
Well, there's that.
It's a retail scam.
So are you telling me that we've hired all these TSA people for the millions and millions of dollars it costs to keep this thing staffed just so they can sell more bottled water?
Amongst other things, yeah.
That's possible.
There's something in that.
You never know.
Let's do another one of your clips, John.
Uh, yeah, I just play these two clips, Poison 1 and Poison 2, and then, uh, it's just something, it bothers me when I say, I'm getting to the point now where it's getting annoying to watch these, uh, these cop shows where they come up with these, I mean, it's just, as if police work involved any of this.
Play clip 1.
Okay, so we're missing a big piece of the puzzle here.
All this noise you have...
Stop, stop, stop.
Oh, these are the machines that calculate DNA within seconds.
No, no, no.
This is the...
Facial recognition?
CSI... Right.
CSI... Miami.
And, of course, the cops are all standing around this most high-tech projector in the world where they wave their arms and the pictures are changing.
And then, you know, they say, well, I think that guy's got something to do with it.
Run the facial recognition.
But they have all these sound effects.
It is cool.
I can almost see the faces change.
Oh, shoo!
That's how it sounds like.
Yeah, cool.
Wait, wait, wait.
Go back.
Yeah, go back one.
That's Zoe Bell's trainer, right?
So what's he doing with Patrick Garrity?
Is he in any of that pictures?
Zoom in.
Hold on, I'm going to use the facial recognition software.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
He's working at least in one of the burglarized houses.
He's the one.
He's the common denominator, not Megan Hamilton.
Yeah, those are really good.
The sound effects.
And he puts a special recognition.
I love it.
Okay, now we go on to an even more weirder one.
This is a little longer, but this is on CSI New York, and they're trying to figure out if some guy had actually done something or not.
The real story, the way they handle it, is the guy had already been convicted, he's already served time, but for some reason they're going to...
Spend the police resources trying to prove he's innocent after he's already out of jail just to clear his name and this is what the cops do and they put this kind of effort into it.
but you might as well play this.
Get away, stop, stop.
What they're doing there is the guy was in a car wreck, so the police department apparently has bought a copy of his car, and they've hooked it up to some rig that the big automakers use to slam the car over and over again into a pole, wrecking it, of course, just to explain why a cell phone was sitting in the front seat.
This is the kind of effort the police do, by the way, with every small accident.
Go on.
So they're wrecking a car.
John, you do realize it's make-believe?
No, I know, but that's not what my point is.
The make-believe part I get.
...created the reported speed of the car and simulated the object of impact and placement of the phone and not once did the cell land on the front passenger side floor where you recovered it.
In Neville's vehicle, the power adjustment gears under the seat are too bulky for an object just to slide forward, but that doesn't definitively eliminate the possibility that the driver was holding the phone.
But it makes it more plausible to someone in the passenger seat.
Is that Belzer?
No, no, no.
This is CSI New York.
That's Gary Sinise and some other guy.
Which brings us to the Prince.
Now, Neville's left thumbprint was on both the driver and passenger seatbelt release button.
Well, he certainly could have been a passenger in his own car for another time other than the accident.
Yes, he could, and I thought about that, but...
This is Talmadge Neville's thumbprint lifted from the driver's side release button.
Now, based on the position of the apex and the delta points, it appears it never releases...
Hey, John, how's your apex and delta points doing?
Mine are feeling pretty good right now.
It's the belt from the passenger seat.
There is another possibility.
He could have used his left hand from the driver's seat.
Doc, I thought about that too, but why would he reach all the way across his body and turn his thumb 180 degrees to release the button?
How come we can't find Bin Laden?
I mean, we clearly have the technology.
I mean, we could really do some amazing shit, but we just can't find this guy, can we?
You can play the rest of that now.
It's unnatural action, but easily accomplished from the passenger seat.
It leads me to conclude that Neville released that belt to let someone else out.
So anyway, the point is that a friend of mine who's a pre-law and who does a lot of work for the public defenders, and he's starting to see this already, the jury pool of the United States of America is being corrupted by these shows.
Because people watch this crap, and it's complete fiction, and they think the cops are doing this kind of work on a day-to-day basis, so when a cop goes up there on the stand and says, blah, blah, blah, blah, the cop is telling the truth based on all kinds of work that they've put into this case.
Yep.
Oh yeah, and also it's a great way to get more technology companies building more crap and tax dollars and pounds and yen and euros being spent on more cameras and more sophisticated shit that doesn't actually work.
Money scam.
It's a big scam.
I was surprised.
I think it was Tuesday morning.
I saw the same story in some high-end publications, i.e.
Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and I'm reading it here on Bloomberg.
Afghan opium prices dropped to eight-year low.
And I'm thinking, how do they know this?
Is there an index or something that I'm unaware of?
Is there like some open market that these guys have access to?
It must be on a Bloomberg terminal.
I mean, they literally know opium poppy cultivation fell 22% to 123,000 hectares.
So they know how big it is.
They know where it is.
How come they can't just stop this?
All of this, of course, really backs up my theory that the reason we're in Afghanistan is to get the drugs and to bring it into the country.
It's a huge industry of which Bloomberg reports on.
Afghan growers made $438 million from opium this year.
How do they know that?
How do they know that?
Not $500, not $400, no, $438 million.
Yeah, a little too specific to be...
How does that work?
I mean, it just blows me away.
I don't understand.
And of course, Afghan farmers who produce more than 90% of the opium used to make the world's heroin slash poppy cultivation by...
It's like they're commodity.
Like they're talking about oil.
Well, there's less poppy output to raise the prices because, you know, your heroin, your smack is just too cheap.
It's the long-legged Mac Daddy making the smack too cheap on the streets.
That's what's happening.
Long-legged.
We've got to use the long-legged...
The long-legged Mac Daddy.
This is a 42-page...
They've got analysts on this shit, John.
Here.
Lower opium prices in Afghanistan reflect the continuing high levels of opium production, which is thought to exceed global demand for opium and its derivatives.
According to the 42-page report issued today, annual world demand for illicit opium has never exceeded 5,000 tons.
They know everything!
And there's a picture of these dudes with like, you know, with beards sitting in a poppy field.
No way, man.
No way.
This is a completely known industry.
They've got it down to percentages, to the exact dollar amounts.
I mean, come on.
And we were like, ooh, okay.
I guess so.
And of course, Monsanto.
There was something about Monsanto.
I should actually play the...
I should get some Roundup Ready Opium.
Yes, you got that story too?
No.
Did you do a Roundup Ready Opium?
Yeah, you're making a joke.
No, that's true.
I was.
I was making a joke.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's really true.
Let me find the...
The Roundup Ready Opium.
It is.
It's Roundup Ready Opium.
It's from the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan, OCA has been tracking the opportunities for Monsanto.
A well-known war profiteer, think Agent Orange, to take advantage of the current occupations.
These include pushing glyphosate, which is the Roundup herbicide, for poppy eradication.
Well, it turns out they've now made Roundup-ready poppy.
And, of course, they're not sure how this exactly happened.
I mean, maybe the growers have just been mutating this stuff.
But, yep, sure enough, they've got Roundup-ready poppy.
Wow.
So here's the plan.
You bring Monsanto into the picture so they can help eradicate, quote-unquote, the poppy fields.
And in fact, what they're really doing is testing the Roundup-ready poppies, and that's why they're spraying Roundup all over everything.
And by the way, the people who don't use the Roundup-ready poppy seeds, their fields are wiped out.
Yep.
That's genius.
Yeah, as reported last year in Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other GM seed companies.
One of Paul Bremer's last acts as head of the coalition provisional authority, i.e.
the guys who handed out cold hard cash by the pallet load, was an order stipulating that farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties.
So these guys have already got poppy seeds.
I'm telling you, they've got poppy seeds.
Unbelievable.
And we just sit here like schmucks.
We really do.
As we sit here like schmucks, we should remind people to donate to the cause here.
You get this kind of information only on this show for some unknown reason, but...
You know, what else can we do?
Dvorak.org slash NA. We need your help.
We'd like to get some more donations before Sunday so we can name some people.
There are some people that came up with wanting a jingle.
A ringtone or a jingle?
A ringtone.
I'm sorry, a ringtone.
If anybody wants a ringtone and they give us $50 or $100, this will be the last time we do it for $50.
We've got to up the ante, yeah.
Because there's so much demand.
There's two.
There's been two people so far.
There's so much demand for ringtones.
I'm telling you, John, people don't listen to this show.
They just see a PayPal link and go, oh, I should click on that.
Oh, yeah, it'll work.
I can use it.
So if you would please help us out with Dvorak.org slash NA or noagenda.squarespace.com, please.
And we'll thank you profusely on Sunday.
Also, we are going to go ahead with the dinner on October 3rd so far.
We have a bunch of people that are kind of signing up on an ad hoc basis.
Oh, is this definite now?
October 3rd, of course, which is the official day of Thanksgiving as per Abraham Lincoln's proclamation.
Was it Lincoln?
Yeah, it was Lincoln.
Yeah, Lincoln.
And then, so if people want to email either Adam or myself, adam.mevio.com or john.divorek.org, and just put in the subject line, No Agenda Dinner, or something like that, so we don't lose it.
And all the story...
Sorry?
Go ahead.
But anyway, go to noagenda.mevio...
Sorry, noagenda.squarespace.com, and please donate to keep us going for another.
We can get us into three shows a week.
That would be good, too.
Yeah, and all of the links, everything we discuss is always in the show notes.
Also, No Agenda Show is where you can find it.
We've got several other initiatives.
And don't forget NoAgendaForums.com.
If you want to participate in the live stream, NoAgendaStream.com, which is usually, our typical time is 9 a.m.
Pacific time on Sundays and Thursdays.
You can also join in at noagendachat.com.
We've got a lot of No Agenda.
This is all done by volunteers, by the way.
We thank them profusely for helping us out and keeping this thing running smoothly.
So I just have two quick stories.
You have laughed at me in the past about this, but thank goodness for Boeing.
They have announced they had a successful test of the ATL, the Advanced Tactical Laser, which was able to nuke an unoccupied stationary vehicle from the air.
There you go.
This actually happened about a month or so ago, didn't it?
It's not a new story.
No, well, the story is from yesterday.
I was going to blog it, and I said, oh, brother, you know, just another, who knows.
Yeah, no, they shot a laser from a big Boeing jet.
Yeah, and now they can melt shit.
Well, they already melt the meals they serve on these planes.
But this is serious business.
And I would just like to say that I believe before the end of the year, we are going to see the next phase of the financial crisis.
And now Beijing is starting to wield its ugly head.
Yeah.
Chinese state-owned companies will be allowed to walk away from loss-making commodity derivative trades.
We haven't talked about derivatives in a long time, but the total derivative exposure that's out there is estimated to be like $500 trillion.
It's some ridiculous number.
And so once that shit starts to unwind, then hold on to your hats and grab your gold.
So what's...
Do I have another clip left?
Yes, you do.
But what does it say?
Sixth Sense?
Oh, Sixth Sense, yeah.
Yeah, oh, this is interesting.
This is more propaganda that came out.
This is from a show called Lie to Me, which I think is actually quite well written.
And they...
Since nobody learns anything in school anymore, they throw this random information into these shows, and I'm not absolutely sure what the point of this one was, but it was kind of a jaw-dropper when I heard it.
I'm thinking, what is the point of telling us this?
And with reference to the source material.
Play it.
Let's take a look at our victim.
More good sound effects, by the way.
Yeah, I love these.
Which group does Dante look like?
The men on the left or the men on the right?
Um, the men on the left.
Oh, you have a sixth sense.
By that, I mean you see gay people.
Do you think Dante's gay?
Yeah, and so do you.
All the men on the left are gay.
A new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that most people can identify gay men by face alone.
It has to do with the pattern of muscle tension in the face.
You know, it is true.
Whenever a man's face is in my crotch, I usually think he's gay.
That's usually when I... It has to do with the muscle tensions in the face.
That is such bullshit.
What is that about?
That is such bullshit.
What show is that?
Lie to Me.
That's dangerous, man.
That shit shouldn't be on television.
It's like, you know what, the only thing that would really nail it is if somebody brought up this point.
You know, when you see, you can tell a Jew when you see him.
Yeah, that's next.
I'm telling you, that's next.
It's the nose!
Hey, it's that easy!
My God.
It was like, that's what, you know, they had these posters in Nazi Germany, you know, with the measurements of the skull, and it's out with Jews.
But anyway, I'm telling you, I was just taken aback by that one.
And it was also kind of pointless.
It's dangerous and it's disturbing and it's flat out wrong.
And this is what we should have our kids watching.
Red-blooded, God-fearing, Jesus-loving Americans are going to stand up and say, we're not going to take it no more.
We're just not going to take it.
So I have one more story.
You don't want another Mac Daddy?
No, I think that you've got to clip that guy down a little bit so we can use him as a more concentrated.
Okay.
New and improved, more concentrated, long-legged Mac Daddy.
Send me a link to that guy.
I'll clip some of it up.
It's in the show notes.
So I find something kind of disturbing, and this has to do with two of our knights, by the way, are members of one of the Tea Party alliances.
Wait, John, could I call this the...
Yeah, it's going to be as close as you get.
So there's a thing that started off, this guy Mackey, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, wrote a rather tame anti-Obamacare editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
All of a sudden, a number of, I don't know, fringe groups decided they're going to boycott Whole Foods, which is going to be highly unlikely considering the people who go to Whole Foods.
And by the way, there have been stories they've been interviewing people out in front of Whole Foods about this, and then the shoppers who are all left-wingers usually, or hippies.
I don't know.
I've never heard of it.
I don't care.
I just want some granola.
I want some granola, man.
But anyway, so they tried to make a boycott happen, but it's a very sketchy situation.
In fact, there was some press on a company called CTW Investments that were going to...
They said they should fire John Mackey, CTW Investments.
And I'm thinking, CTW Investments, is this like a venture capitalist who want to fire the CEO because he wrote a blame editorial in the Wall Street Journal?
Okay.
So I basically looked up their, just took their address and ran it through Google and came up with who these people really are.
CTW Investments is actually a, I think a 501's receive, one of those things.
It's an operation called Change to Win.
And the head of it, and many of the members, but the head woman who runs it, is also an executive at the SEIU. Okay.
And, meanwhile, I think they became the CTW Investments, and the T is small, by the way.
It's C, small T, capital W, which is change to win, if you don't figure that out.
They also, for some unknown reason, have posted, or somehow somebody posted their Form 8872 on the Internet, which came from 2006.
And back then, they took in $1.5 million.
From?
Well, just from donors.
But they doled out a, they doled, they didn't say who it came from.
But that's the kind of money.
By the way, compare that to the $200 or $300 a week we get.
Exactly.
Thank you.
I want to mention that to people.
You know, Dvork.org slash NA. I mean, these guys are getting $1.5 million.
And they're only spending about $400,000.
And mostly to different parties.
The Florida Democratic Party got $50,000.
The Ohio Senate Democrats got $15,000.
And on and on.
So I think they've sucked up so much money that they've had to start an investment company to put it somewhere, which is the only reason that these guys even have an investment company.
Meanwhile, the Tea Party people have decided to create something called a boycott.
A boycott?
Yeah, this was to reverse the damaging effects of this bogus boycott that is doing nothing.
And now this is a very interesting situation because the Tea Party people, apparently, they've all become friends because they didn't know each other before that Tea Party incident that was a tax revolt or whatever against Obama in general.
And now they've got to do something with their spare time.
And instead of doing something productive, they're going out of their way, and there's news stories all over the place, to shop.
And we're talking about a bunch of right-wingers and old people and retirees shopping at Whole Foods, which is funny in itself.
But why...
Well, I mean, as you can imagine, I mean, I think the whole thing's a publicity stunt done by Whole Foods.
The Whole Foods, by the way, is a company that does almost $8 billion a year in revenues, 2.71 in profit, the highest margins of all the food stores.
In other words, they say, well, it's less more expensive because it's, you know, better.
It's also marked up more because they have a 34% margin.
Wow.
As opposed to every other grocery outlet.
In fact, the average for the industry is 26.
So they're 8 points above everybody else.
So why, may I ask you conservatives out there and you crazy radicals, Republican radicals, led by one or two, there's a writer now that's got a couple of books out on the topic, who's a guy from Harvard.
Why are you spending your time Going to shop at Whole Foods, although it may be educational for you, when there's other things to do.
This is bogus.
This is stupid.
I'd like to remind you that we have a motto here at No Agenda.
You know what we do.
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
Yeah!
And we do it twice a week.
And if you would take a little bit of that money that you're spending at Whole Foods, we could do it three times a week.
Overspending at Whole Foods.
Yes.
They don't need your help.
34% margin.
Outrageous.
Hey, I gotta go.
I gotta check my poppy stocks on Yahoo.
Okay, that's a good idea.
Make sure my commodity futures are okay.
Probably the best investment you can make.
Yeah, no kidding.
Coming to you from the 17th Century Canal House in Gitmo Nation East, in the center of Amsterdam, where I'll be for Sunday's show as well.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where it's actually going to be another hot day, because our summers are always after summer is over.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Happy birthday to me.
Talk to you again on Sunday, right here on No Agenda.
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