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May 15, 2014 - No Agenda
03:13:21
617: Climate Chaos
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The titles look good enough.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It's Thursday, May 15, 2014.
Time for your Gitmo Nation media assassination episode 617.
This is No Agenda.
Coming to you from the future here in the Hot Pocket Wasabi Tour Love Hotel.
In the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from the past in northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. DeVorek.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
In the morning.
A little more inspiration was possible.
Okay.
Uh, it's early.
Yeah.
See, the minute we start the show, that's when the Skype connection falls apart.
Yeah.
That's crazy how that...
I don't know.
Why does it do that?
We're on for 20 minutes.
It'll pick up.
It's the jingle.
You're telling me the jingle blows it out?
Yeah, yeah.
That's weird, because now all of a sudden we have this huge delay.
I don't understand.
How does that happen?
It just does.
You're in Japan.
Yes.
Hold on.
I'm just going to shut down everything I can.
Hold on one second.
Maybe it's...
Quit downloading porn.
Mickey's in the other room.
You never know what's going on.
All right.
So maybe this will help.
Yeah.
I'm in Tokyo.
We are about an hour early on the live stream.
And it is eight minutes to midnight Thursday evening here in Tokyo.
All right.
It's 7.52 a.m.
here in West Coast time.
Yeah.
All right.
Just, you know, not too bad.
All right.
It's picking up again.
Maybe it was BitTornSync or something.
Who knows?
Who knows what was running?
Anyway, this is our, what is it, third day here?
And was it when we leave yet?
Sunday?
No, fourth day?
I don't know.
It's so confusing living on the other side of the world.
You've been there for a month.
Wow.
No, not quite a month.
But, I'll tell you one thing.
I think we need to live here a couple months out of the year.
Okay.
Why?
Why?
Wow.
I love this place.
Okay.
Why?
Oh, okay.
Well, I'm glad you asked.
Here is a list of why.
This is nothing like I expected.
And I had all these weird preconceived...
I'm sorry?
And tell us nothing like it.
Okay.
First, we've got to really figure out why all of a sudden I can't even hear you.
Hold on.
Hold on one second.
Can you just talk for a moment?
Yeah, sure.
You know, something that bothers me...
This happens more now than it ever used to in the past.
You go to a website, and there's a page, oh, I want to print this page out so I can, you know, do something with it.
So you print the page out, and you get a million blank pages with one or two items on each page.
It's a disaster because of all the JavaScript crap that is on these pages.
And you're just like, no, they don't.
And whatever happened to the little icon that said, print, specifically to create a page you can print nicely?
They don't do that anymore.
No.
Because of all the JavaScript crap.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, it's not just JavaScript crap.
It's all the advertising JavaScript crap.
That's what it is.
Right, all the Flash.
Combination of Flash, JavaScript, and ads that are clogging up the page.
You can't print the pages.
Hey, I'm going to call you right back.
Let's just see if we can make this a little bit better.
Yeah, good idea.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah?
Alright, yeah.
Much better.
Okay.
Alright.
Did you get my rant about printing pages?
Yeah, no, I could hear you.
It's just that you became, you know, like the 20-meter band.
CQ? CQ? No, it wasn't CQ. It was just you complaining about pages, printing pages.
No, I know.
The best thing you can do is print as PDF. That actually works.
Do you have that on Windows?
Yeah, there are some PDF options.
Let me think about that.
Well, on the Mac, I have good success with print as PDF. Yeah.
Of course, you're going to get all the ads and everything there, but you don't have all these issues that you're talking about.
By the way, a lot of people taking exception, speaking of printing, to your rant against A4. Yeah, oh yeah, there's at least a half dozen people that get all upset.
Oh, half dozen people that emailed you, not the ones that emailed me as per usual.
Ew!
A4 is tall and thin like Adam, not fat and chubby like John!
That's exactly right.
That's objective.
Alright, Tokyo.
Makes sense.
Tokyo observations.
Here we go.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
First you tell us what you expected.
I want to stereotype and then you talk about it.
Okay.
The expectation was, and you have a little bit to do with this, just the way you, I clearly recall you saying, Tokyo sucks, traffic sucks, the cabs suck, I hate it.
You said to me, literally, I hate Tokyo.
Is this correct?
I don't understand why, but my expectation was a lot of annoying little people running around, shoving me.
I never said anything about that.
I'm telling you my expectation.
This is what I thought.
A lot of annoying little people running around, getting in my way, way overcrowded, stinky, smoggy, crappy, dirty, everything too small.
Next trip, China.
Okay.
So the only thing that is kind of true is small, but I got a list.
First of all, green.
I had no idea how lush and green and juicy this place.
I mean, we landed here.
It could have been New Jersey.
Juicy?
Yeah, juicy.
Like, you know, like green.
Lush and green and juicy.
Yeah, like the foliage is juicy.
Well, come on.
Maybe I'm romanticizing a little bit, but you know what I mean?
Yes, the Japanese like their, and you're in the right time of year because you've got all the blossoms.
Yeah, well, no, I think we just missed the blossoms.
But everything, there's just green everywhere.
There's great trees, and we're right near these fantastic parks.
But everywhere, and the streets, green, okay, streets.
The roads.
Beautiful.
Everything's...
What's supposed to be black is black.
What is supposed to be gray is gray.
And it's like they paint it at night, every night, just to make sure it's perfect for Adam when he's walking down the...
Everything is beautiful!
When was the last time you were here?
I haven't been there for a decade.
Okay.
Now that makes sense then.
That makes sense.
Why does that make sense?
What's changed?
Well, I think there's a lot of...
Well, that asshole hasn't come back for 10 years.
That's fixed up the place?
Well, here's the question.
If I were to ask you what is noticeable about cabs in Tokyo, what would you say?
They have the doilies on the seats.
What do you mean by doily?
You know, like this knit, just the little covers.
The seats are covered.
A lot of them are plastic.
Yes.
No, no, no.
They have, like, silk.
Some material.
Yeah.
Not silk.
What am I thinking?
Lace.
Yeah, lace.
That's a doily.
A doily is something that Martha Stewart uses to create stick figures with.
No, no, no.
A doily is a piece of wood.
You don't know what a doily is.
Yeah, a doily is a piece of wood.
It's a round piece of wood.
That's what a doily is.
A doily is a lace, piece of lace that you put on the table and then you put a cup on top of it.
It's a piece of lace.
Those are doilies that they have on top of those seats.
Okay, yeah, I'm looking at the book of knowledge.
Okay, gotcha.
What is it that...
Where did you get piece of wood?
What is it Martha Stewart is always talking about?
Doilies.
Yeah, doilies.
That's what you got on those seats, on those cabs.
I thought it was like a toilet paper roll.
Holy crap.
Okay, all right.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Alright, so what I noticed the most.
Here's what you would have noticed if you'd been here in the last decade.
Yeah?
The doors open and close automatically when the car pulls up to you on the street.
This is very...
And you are not supposed to open the door yourself.
That is a big no-no.
No, screw up the mechanism.
Yeah.
Was this like this when you were here 10 years ago?
I don't remember that.
It's possible.
These are just sedans.
These aren't, you know...
And these are...
This is jerry-rigged.
This is not...
These are bigger cars than you'd think.
I know that.
No, they're kind of standard sedans.
Yeah, American size.
Yeah.
They're big.
They don't sell those cars in the U.S. They're not really that big.
But regardless, they have a special mechanism that is jerry-rigged onto the rear left-hand door, and you are not to open the door yourself.
You stand there, the left-hand rear passenger door opens, you get in, and then he closes it.
And you do not open the door to get out, he opens it, and then you walk away and he closes it.
It's the weirdest thing.
And I didn't know this, and Day Master met us here, like, the first day we arrived, and I, you know, go to open the door, and she's like, oh, oh, don't do that.
I said, what do you mean?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
He knows you're, you know, a douchebag.
What is it, Gai Jing or something?
There's some term for douchebag foreigner?
Gai Jing.
Yeah, Gai Jing.
Foreign devil.
So he'll let you get away with it this time, but you do not touch the door.
Oh, that's charming.
But, everybody is super polite, really nice, very courteous.
Cab drivers are super polite, very courteous, have no clue what you're asking them to do.
If you hold up a piece of paper or something on your phone with, this is the address I want to go to, they go, hi, hi, hi, hi.
But they can't read it.
They don't actually know what you're saying.
They're illiterate too?
Yeah, well, they can't read English.
Oh, you should have it all in Japanese.
And then they just drive around.
We've had this several times now.
And we say, stop.
He doesn't stop.
He's like, stop, stop, stop.
Let's look at the map.
Stop.
He doesn't stop.
Or if you say, go straight.
What?
And you point straight.
Huh?
Communication is impossible with cab drivers.
Always had an escort.
Yeah.
Well, we have not had an escort all the time, obviously.
So we've been on our own, and it's a disaster when we're on our own.
Well, in China, the rule, I mean, what you're supposed to do, and I, in fact, have a book that I have that's squirreled away for Taiwan and Beijing and Shanghai, is you go to the hotel when you check in, and you have all these itineraries, places you want to go,
and you have the person at the hotel, one of the bilingual ones, write it all down in Chinese, You know, page after page, and you have the English translation on the same page, and then you hold up the specific translation for wherever it is you want to go to the cabbie, and he takes you there, and it's no big deal.
Because, in fact, in China, it's very common for people to do that, because most of them have all these dialects they can't even communicate with each other.
And that would be the thing I would do in Japan.
As opposed to saying stuff to guys that can't speak English.
Right.
The difference is we're not in a hotel.
We are in Dame Astra's apartment, her pied-à-terre.
So there's no concierge service.
There's no concierge service desk.
We just pop by and say, hey, could you write down some kanji for me?
And we're completely self-sufficient on our own, which is very cool.
Yeah, it sounds like it if you like to spend money on cabs.
Oh, just a couple of cabs.
It was just in the gallery because Mickey had her opening.
We're schlepping stuff back and forth.
How'd that go, by the way?
Very well.
It was this evening.
It was earlier this evening.
And you didn't drink, apparently.
No.
But, you know, we woke up at five this morning, and I've been prepping most of the day, and then we had the opening, which was from six to a quarter to nine, I think.
Came back here, finished up, you know, recording a couple of clips, and then...
And then started to get everything ready, because, you know, just all timing.
But the show was great, and it was very...
The Dutch Embassy was, you know, represented, and they also, you know, kind of brought their guest list for some of the prominent Dutch people here.
And actually, two people were very interesting who were there.
One was, he's a reporter, a financial energy reporter.
So he, let me see if I have a card somewhere.
He basically reports on oil, gas, pipelines, and nuclear energy.
You get somebody to talk to.
Yeah, for an hour.
Yeah.
He was like, wow, Adam Curry, who knew?
Because I'm laying everything on him.
I'm smacking him down with South Stream.
I'm laying down our Syria-Ukraine theory.
And everything I said, he thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Except for when I rolled out the tsunami bomb to screw up the nuclear energy in Tokyo.
He was like, eh, you lost me on that one.
I said, well, I don't know.
You know, the U.S. and Australia, they've tested 40 tsunami bombs, so it's not like it's a crazy, unthinkable thing.
It's, you know...
But I got a couple of pieces of insight.
He was...
I talked to him about the Nicaragua Canal versus the Panama Canal.
He said, yeah, everyone in the industry, everybody is talking about this, but nobody really knows any full details.
So it's one of those things that the entire energy industry is all over, but no one really knows.
Are the Chinese and the Russians doing it together?
Everyone's still waiting for this.
I didn't get a lot of info, actually, from him.
For the Russia-China deal to complete, you know, this is where Russia is selling their oil to China.
And he says, you know, they've been working on this for 10 years.
And the whole issue is the Chinese want a participation deal.
And they want 30% of the resource, of the ownership, if they're going to buy this oil directly from Russia.
And, you know, this has been on the table for a while, apparently.
So no one's really sure if that's going to happen.
It was kind of good, so I think it's a good contact for the show and have some good insight.
Yeah, the Chinese always want these participation deals.
That way they get a foothold, and they got the 30%, and then they kick you out of the country.
That's the way their deal works.
Except that they would be kicked out of the country.
Well, if they're getting oil from Russia, they're not going to be able to...
They're not going to be buying Gazprom anytime soon.
And then I met this other guy, and he is...
He's a journalist, and of course I've promptly forgotten his name, hold on.
He just wrote an article for Daily Beast about the, it's kind of big news here in Japan, Abe has been trying to change the constitution in Japan, apparently the 9th What would you call it?
The Ninth Amendment.
Revision.
No, it's like point number nine on the Japanese Constitution is they can't go to war.
Well, you know, we're behind that.
Well, no kidding!
And so he's been systematically working on changing this, and already the Japanese military-industrial complex is cranking up.
Yeah, well, we want that for a good reason.
Tell me.
Well, we believe that history repeats itself and maybe the Japanese will attack the Chinese and solve some of our problems.
Exactly.
And so now Mitsubishi is starting to...
Apparently the Japanese are very good at building stuff that kills people.
Oh, yeah.
Let me just get this guy's name.
If you're in one of the Mitsubishi cars, you know what that means.
Yeah.
Okay, here, so the article is...
Somebody got that joke, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Japanese women tell their men they have to choose between love and war.
The Abe administration's attempts to turn Japan...
This guy's name is Jake Adelstein.
The attempt to turn Japan from a pacifist nation into one that can wage war and export arms more freely is being met with some undercover resistance, or to put it more accurately, under the cover's resistance.
A Tokyo-based group known as Women Who Won't Have Sex With War-Mongering Men...
Has launched a full-scale sex strike just in time to block Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party as they make a push for militarization.
So that's a typical Daily Beast angle.
But this guy, this Jake Adelstein, he has a book coming out called The Last Yakuza, A Life in the Japanese Underworld.
And he apparently has spent quite a number of months hanging out with the jacuzza.
I believe at one point he had to leave the country for a while.
Things got weird.
He's an interesting fellow.
Yeah, that guy would be an interesting guy.
I'm sure he's got stories.
Yeah, he'd be a great dinner table conversationalist.
He didn't have to have his finger chopped off.
No, no, he didn't.
He didn't.
He did make a joke about that, though.
He was like, I forget what it was.
We were talking about guns or something.
He said, you don't have any guns here.
I said, no.
Oh, good.
He said, you can't have a knife.
Yeah, you can have a knife as long as it's just big enough to cut off your pinky.
He's like, okay.
Okay, so all voice systems here, like giant voice systems, but if you're in a cab and anything that is giving you an electronic computerized warning voice is a young girl.
Yeah.
And speaking of which, schoolgirls.
Holy cow!
Japanese schoolgirls?
I'm in love.
I get it now.
The ones that are all dressed up funny?
Oh!
They're...
I'm just blown away.
There's this one street, and you walk through the street, and you're like a salmon swimming upstream in nothing but just hundreds of Japanese schoolgirls.
And some of them are in uniform, but they're all in...
They got, like, you know, lacy things on their head and crazy whacked-out colors and high-platform shoes.
Yeah, if I put one of those...
I put a picture of the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
In the newsletter.
Mm-hmm.
Well, what I saw was ten times better even than the picture you put in the newsletter.
Did you take some pictures that we could put in the newsletter?
Yeah, I did.
I want pictures for the newsletter.
Yeah, we got lots of pictures.
Okay, tipping.
No tipping in Japan.
Yeah, that's right.
I didn't know this.
In fact, it is, in some cases, deemed an insult.
Right.
Well, this is good.
I encourage this.
No tipping is perfect.
It saves me 20% on everything I'm doing.
Okay.
And with the yen the way it is, this is not as expensive as I thought it would be.
No, no, the yen being what it is, right.
Well, it's because, yeah, you're at a discount right now.
Now's the time to be in Japan.
Resources.
Very impressed with how they manage resources.
And let me give you some examples.
For instance, this evening at the opening, now this was an opening that we weren't really in charge of, so obviously there was some Chardonnay in plastic cups.
I mean, that's typical.
That is a global phenomenon for Art Expo.
Of course, they also had bottles of Heineken brought by the embassy and some Gouda cheese.
But when you have a cup and they put a liquid in your cup, like in America, you'd fill it up three quarters of the way.
Here, one third, if not less.
It's just like a little bottom.
Everything is less, less, less, less.
The bathroom here in the apartment, which is a very typical, actually a luxury Japanese apartment, which means, well, being luxury is great, but Japanese means Mickey and I have to be bent over a lot so as not to decapitate ourselves moving from one space to the next, as the doorways are very low.
But the bathroom, the toilet itself, I had never seen this and it seems like such a smart idea.
And when you flush the toilet, and it's a very standard kind of looking toilet.
Yeah, it has the seat with the warming thing and all that crap, but that's not what I'm interested in here.
The tank of the toilet, on the top of the tank, it's a sink.
And when you flush the toilet, where typically in the tank it starts to fill up again...
There's a faucet on the top of the tank that then all of the water starts coming out right after you flush and you wash your hands and it goes down the drain into the tank.
Oh.
I'd never seen this.
I've never seen that either.
And again, it makes so much sense.
Well, yeah, I guess if you're worried about water...
Well, why not?
Why not be worried about water?
It's a simple thing that makes...
You've got to wash your hands anyway.
And for guys, it's great.
You're facing that direction most of the time.
You flush the toilet, and the water starts running.
Oh, great.
I'll just wash my hands.
You're good to go.
Yeah, well, it encourages cleanliness.
And, let's see, oh yes, something that I believe...
Seems to me that there's really a subtle message to that device.
Apparently the Japanese, if they don't have the water running, they wouldn't wash their hands.
No, it's a bad sign.
But anyway, go on with the story.
I don't think it's that.
Um...
You might as well wash your hands because the water's running.
Anyway, go on.
Something that I believe, if we could convince Eric, I think would be a big hit.
Safety helmets.
Now, the Japanese safety helmets That's because of those low doorways.
You should have been wearing one of those.
Everybody here who is doing something outside has a safety helmet on.
I don't care what you're doing.
I don't care if you're a crossing guard.
It's called hard hats in the United States.
It's not really a hard hat.
I know what a hard hat is.
A Japanese safety helmet, which is what I'm calling it, it has a different look to it.
It's kind of...
It's like the...
It's not...
Do you know what I mean?
It has a different shape and a different form and it's high gloss and it has a...
The bill is not...
So a construction helmet or a hard hat, as we know it, has a longer bill.
These are kind of short.
No, it doesn't.
Most hard hats don't have a bill at all.
Hmm...
If you were to Google Japanese safety helmet...
I'm looking at them right now.
It looks like a hard hat to me.
It's just got a couple of lined...
It's just a little different.
It's got like a...
It's got like a rim around the whole thing, which we don't have, which makes it look like a German war helmet from, you know, World War II. No, it's a hard hat.
It's like a hard hat.
I think there's a distinct difference between hard hats and Japanese...
Oh, look at a hard hat.
Yeah, no, I'm seeing a difference.
You don't see that?
I'm looking, I just typed in hard hat, and I've got the, no.
They're so similar, it's not, and if you look at the, like a pyramid hard hat, or if you look at the little thing, shop for a hard hat on Google, they have every variety, including the Japanese one, they all look the same.
The hard hat is really most, oh, here's one with the big bill that you're talking about.
Um...
No, I don't see it that different.
It's just a hard hat.
But why are they walking around the streets with him is the question.
You know what I'm reminded of?
I'm reminded of these characters who come into San Francisco and they spend the rest of their day in the city wearing their exhibition badge from Moscone.
He sent Yeah, no, this is different.
There's something very different here.
Alright.
Hold on a second.
I'm getting kicked out of the chat room, but it's not the chat room's fault.
Hold on.
Why are you getting kicked out of the chat room?
Well, the connection that I'm using right now is one of those MiFi things.
An LTE, yeah.
Now the bandwidth is outstanding when you do the speed test.
I'm getting 20 megabits down, almost 10 megabits up.
And I just had to move it to a different spot at the start.
Here we go.
I'm looking at this.
Uline's got a big company.
They got a nice white hard hat for $10, which is about right.
Skull Guard protective hard hat, $127.95 from Global Industries.
That is a jip.
Yeah, it's a jip.
Anyway, we are being...
By the way, for you, there's a Vulcan cowboy hard hat, which is shaped like a cowboy hat.
I got a Vulcan hard hat for you right here.
Yeah, okay.
There's a difference, and people will be emailing us, and there is a difference with typical Japanese hard hats.
Nobody cares about the Japanese version of the hard hat.
Yeah, there's a difference.
It's minor.
I think it looks funky.
We'll get one and wear it around Austin and see how far you get.
You know, you're cranky.
What is that, boy?
You're cranky today.
I had to get up early.
Did you have to start early?
What the hell's wrong with you?
You're not from around here.
Go on.
Go on with your observations.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, of course, a lot of our trip so far has been very nice because Sir Mark and Dame Astrid, who are, of course, Viscount and Viscountess here in Tokyo, and they know their way around here, and people know them, and they've been taking extremely good care of us.
We arrived on...
God, I don't know, was it Tuesday evening or whatever?
They had a car pick us up at the airport.
And that was my first experience.
Like, whoa, where's the traffic?
There was no traffic.
And it was 6 p.m.
Oh, yeah, in Narita?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was no traffic.
Out in the middle of nowhere?
It's quite a ways away from the city.
But there was no traffic.
No, it was a beautiful car, like a kind of a bus, you know, like a, I don't know, it was nice leather, smelled nice, had a...
No doilies?
No doilies, the guy's wearing white gloves, you know, perfect, little hat, little uniform.
We're watching Sumo Wrestlers live on TV. Was it a hard hat?
No, it was not a hard hat.
And then, you know, we arrive, and they take us out to dinner.
We go to this place, and it was a little small place, and on the steps going down into it, there was a...
It was a small place or a little small place?
How small was it?
Don't be such a dick, Dvorak.
I'm just saying.
Yeah, it's late for me.
I'm very tired, and you're up early and cranky.
Don't be a shit.
Okay, okay.
I won't say anything.
I think the problem is you're just jealous.
That's the problem.
You're jealous that you're stuck in San Francisco in your hoarder's house, and I'm here living the big life.
We got no air conditioning.
It's been miserable.
See, there it is.
There it is.
You didn't sleep at all last night because it's been sticky, and you're hot, and you're just cranky and angry.
All right.
So, a little place, not a little small place, a little place, and it's stairs to go down into it.
And at the top of the stairs, at the street level, there's a watermelon in the middle of the steps, and on either side, a little pile of salt.
Now, if I... What?
Yes, a watermelon in the middle on the top step.
Okay.
And left and right...
Is it on the ground, or is it on the table?
On the ground, right on the step.
There is a watermelon.
A watermelon.
And to the left and right of it, a pile of white salt.
Okay.
Do you have to jump over the watermelon?
You have to walk over...
No!
If I had seen this and not been with Mark and Astrid, I would have not walked down.
Oh, that doesn't seem like a very friendly, inviting place.
It looks like the place is closed.
Marking it with watermelons to close because they can't afford a don't enter sign.
This is...
The reason for this is to keep away...
To ward off evil spirits.
Well...
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah!
And then we had...
Uni...
Yeah, I knew you'd have uni.
Yeah, we had uni.
You like uni?
Yeah, it's very nice.
Okay, good.
Uni, which is essentially sea urchins, the reproductive organs.
It's the roe, actually.
I read it's not the roe, actually.
It's the stuff that makes the roe.
It's the gooey gut, yeah.
It's gooey.
It's very gooey.
If you like uni, the Japanese will love you.
Well, the Japanese love me anyway.
They just look at me and go, oh, we love you!
Then we had asparagus the size of a baseball bat.
Nice.
Well, that's an exaggeration, but really huge asparagus stalks.
And it was just mind-boggling.
And just really nice.
And alcohol.
Beer and sake.
And I... Okay.
Perfect.
Um...
I don't know, man.
I like it.
It's so far removed from anything I know, from any type of culture, and no one is a dick here.
The cab drivers may not know what they're doing, but everyone's really nice and just chill, and you don't feel threatened at any minute.
There's no crime here.
Or very, very low crime.
I think they have nine murders a year in total.
All right, well, I'm glad you're having a good time.
Yeah.
Now, before we left, of course, we had to go through the typical rigmarole at the airport in America, in the police state, where no...
Oh, before I get to that, a rival here...
We arrive at the airport, there's no one yelling at you, no one telling you, get in this line!
You got green cards!
None of that.
Here's a guy going, hello?
And he checks your customs form.
Oh yes, you filled out correctly.
Or you see someone, oh no, no, you have to put away, and explain, and help you over here, and just point to what you have to fill out, even though we did it correctly, but he was very nice and smiling, and then you go up to the customs counter, and no line, no crazy, no, you know, a million guys looking at you with big guns, like, ah, what are you coming to do here, you shithead!
You know, that's like America.
By the way, there's 442 murders in Japan.
Wow.
All of Japan?
Yeah.
I was just talking about Tokyo.
I think it's nine in Tokyo.
And so there's a really friendly...
Welcome!
Welcome to Tokyo!
And he looks at your thing and he's like, okay.
And he wants to do the biometric thing.
And in the US, you have your whole print on there.
And they angle this Logitech webcam at your face.
And here, it's very pretty colors.
And you're done with the fingerprint scan.
It's, oh, please smile for camera!
And boom, you're done.
And your bag comes right off.
Yeah, you took my picture.
And your bag comes right off, and you go to the customs.
Oh, hi!
Everyone's nice.
It's just nice.
It's a welcoming experience.
I remember a time when it was, welcome to America.
Please enjoy your stay.
What do you want?
Yeah.
Oh, no, it's not even that.
Who do you think you are?
Exactly.
What are you coming here for?
It's an embarrassment when I compare this.
So, before we left, of course, we had our TSA thing.
Now, very interesting.
This is early...
We haven't done an early morning flight from Austin in a while, and it was extremely busy.
And this was a Monday morning flight, so I guess people are commuters, and our airport gets busy, but I had never been there during this period.
And so there's a line...
And, of course, you know us.
We always go in the pre-check line, which is also the frequent flyer and or the premium flyer line.
And we do this with our coach tickets.
And we're standing in line.
Mickey says, ah, this is a long line.
Hold on a second.
I'm going to go up and talk to the guy.
Mickey gets anything done she wants, you know.
She has this thing about her...
Style.
Style.
That's probably what it is.
Class.
Something we know nothing about.
And then she's waving to me, and she says, oh no, the TSA guy said, no, the pre-check line is twice as slow as the regular line now, which is something you already identified this was going to happen.
Everybody is in the pre-check, and it's just taken a long time.
So we hop into the regular line, and it's moving along, and we get up to the front there, and we're together.
And then there's the ladies, like, oh, you know, of course she asked you your name, which is all ridiculous.
What's your name?
Adam Curry.
And she looks at you like, did he stutter when he said that?
Eric?
Yeah, exactly.
And then she hits the boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop, and Mickey gets to go through pre-check.
She gets...
And I have to go through the slave scanner, which I don't do.
I opt out, of course.
And she can keep her shoes on, can keep the laptop in the bag.
How does this work?
The woman, when she comes into America every single time, she is detained for being a possible terrorist.
But, oh, she gets pre-check.
Well, it's just a luck of the draw.
Well, not exactly.
I was a little irked by this, and I found a talk that took place the day before yesterday from our buddy Pistol, the head of the TSA, and he had a couple of interesting things to say about PreCheck.
And I wanted to play the first bit here, which is, well, you'll hear it.
But we can generally expedite those.
And so, for example, those going through TSA PreCheck, we've now expanded from our original four airports in the fall of 2011 to 119 airports, the busiest airports in the country.
And instead of having four individual lanes, one individual lane in those four airports, we now have over 600 TSA pre-check lanes around the country either open full-time during the time that the checkpoint is open or just during the busiest time, the early morning or late afternoon.
Right.
So this is exactly what we witnessed.
And the pre-check line apparently now is just where you throw everybody into and it's become an incredible hassle.
And now the part that blew me away.
As more and more people sign up, we can have greater and greater confidence that these are known and trusted travelers that we can expedite.
Now, key point here, trusted travelers.
Have a greater population, greater universe of people as known and trusted.
And as we do that, you may have seen we've included some people who weren't part of the Trusted Traveler program in a TSA pre-check lane.
And if you've been behind some of those folks who don't know what they're doing, that could be frustrating.
Yes, yes, I agree.
That can be somewhat frustrating.
We basically have been giving some free samples.
Oh!
Let me just see how this works.
We've been giving free samples, which means no checking for hidden explosive devices or shoe bombs or battery bombs or boob bombs.
A free sample to these people who have absolutely no clearance.
Mickey has had no interview, no nothing.
In fact, quite the opposite.
She is detained when she re-enters the country because she's a terrorist.
But she gets a free sample?
To say, okay, if you're not in one of our programs, but we're assessing you in at least three or four ways...
Oh, what would these three or four ways be?
Yeah, what would they be?
Let me see.
We detain her every single time?
This is bullcrap.
Then we'll perhaps have you go through, and there's some randomization on that.
Yeah, the randomization is that stupid iPad.
They go boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, left arrow, go ahead, you're cleared, That we've worked with Create on.
Then you go through that, and if you like that, then we encourage you to sign up.
There was no encouragement.
No one had a form that said, oh, did you like that, miss?
This is an outrage.
This is the security theater that we're stuck with.
I'm still reminded of the numerous...
Because they're supposed to keep...
The one thing when this all began...
You can't separate people from their luggage.
So if you check in a bag in Flight 1 and then you somehow miss it and you have to take Flight 2, they're supposed to stop Flight 1 and take your bag off.
Yes, yes, yes.
When's the last time that's happened?
Well, I've heard them threaten it.
Do you realize how hard it is?
They have to essentially unload all the bags because they just toss the bags into the luggage area.
You see it going up the ramp.
They're throwing them in.
They don't know where your bag is.
So they got to take all the luggage.
It takes like an hour.
You know how long it takes to unload the luggage?
When you go pick up your luggage, if you check luggage in.
You know, you've got to wait forever.
So they've got to do that, and then they've got to find your bag, which is a pain in the ass, and then pull it off the flight and put it on a different flight.
And then often, you're already on the plane, so they send your bag on a third flight, flight free.
Without you.
Without you.
Yeah.
And that is something that's been happening.
But this theater of going through the scanner and then, oh, we're giving you a free sample of what, freedom?
Here's a free sample of non-police state freedom.
Did you enjoy that?
What happened to protecting me?
No.
No, no, no.
Give it to the lady who you have absolutely no data on whatsoever.
Some people may receive that benefit several times in a row and then not get it.
Oh!
You may not get that benefit.
I'm an American citizen.
I haven't gotten that benefit.
Same thing even if you're in the program, because we don't want to provide a roadmap to terrorists, so we will always keep random and unpredictable, even for those known and trusted.
Wait a minute, hold on a second.
Oh yeah.
So if I pay good money...
Yes, sir.
...to get in the pre-scan thing, the pre-screen thing...
Yes, sir.
...they can say, nah, not today.
In fact, if you listen to this next bit, it even happens to him, apparently.
And just, I can testify that personally, because I get random out from time to time, and I think, okay, now this is not really risk-based if I'm going through standard screening, but go along with that.
Just go along with it, slave.
Wow.
Yeah.
Now, just to wind up this little talk, just to make it funny, and there's a lot of this going on now.
We see this on the telescreen happening very often.
He had a little video which he showed, and this is what you do when you are creating this theater.
You need to create an event in people's minds and make them believe that something that didn't happen...
Maybe it could, but you've got to give them some visual aid so they can really get into it.
This is where we go from the pre-check into the underwear bomber and what could have happened.
This video is just a 15 second video from Something the FBI took, so I was still with the FBI when the Christmas Day plot happened, and what it shows is just the device that the 24-year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab had, and the FBI and others recreated that device, if you will, which, as you remember, it burned, but it didn't explode.
Okay, let's just recap for a second.
This device that he had, what was the device that he had, John?
It was supposedly some sort of explosive device in his crotch.
Explosive underwear.
Yeah, I knew where that would blow up.
Okay, so here we go.
And so this is done just to see what would have happened if it had exploded as design is intended by the bomb maker and others.
And it's just on a sheet of aluminum to replicate the skin of an aircraft on a couple of sawhorses.
And so let's go ahead and run that and you can get a sense of the power of this non-metallic IED. So now they have a distant shot in a field of a sheet of aluminum on two sawhorses with this thing in the middle.
None of this happened.
None of this happened.
The guy's crotch started to smoke and the passengers of the aircraft hit him over the head and poured water on his crotch and put out whatever matchstick he was trying to light up.
But just to frighten you, we're going to show you this video.
Three, two, one.
And of course the whole thing explodes, a hole in the ground.
One.
Replay!
There you go.
Replay!
Oh, twice!
So you can imagine, in a pressurized cabin of an aircraft at 30,000 or 35,000 feet, that is clearly going to be catastrophic.
See, this is what you can imagine.
Please imagine.
But it didn't happen.
So we don't know if this master bomb maker can actually make a bomb or not.
And not only that, but it wasn't the government that stopped it from even beginning to happen.
It was the public at large.
And it's happened the same thing with the original shoe bomber.
He waltzed through, tried to light his shoe, and he was clubbed to death.
Not to death, but he was clubbed with some guy by a fire extinguisher.
They clubbed him in the head and beat the shit out of him.
And that's what the public will do if they're given the opportunity, because apparently the government can't do any of this work.
But there's so much idiocy going around when it comes to people like this Pistoli guy, like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
And I could not believe what I was hearing.
And I have the setup clip and the payoff here.
They had a congressional hearing, and this was, of course, about cyber theft.
And for some reason, the American public, I think the American public is docile, doesn't give a crap, but we are all buying into the fact that the government needs to protect your business.
So if you have any kind of business, And you have a computer, and you use the internet, apparently we're allowing it to be the government's business to protect us from, well, not just cyber thieves, but from the Chinese, obviously.
And this whole thing is wrong to me.
Since when is the government tasked with protecting your business from theft?
I mean, is this a government function?
Am I misunderstanding this?
Isn't this what the police does?
I mean, do?
They protect you from theft.
They patrol the streets, and if somebody's breaking into your place, they will arrest them.
I don't think it's the same thing.
It's not the same.
Why not?
It sounds the same to me.
They don't have checkpoints on the roads to make sure that no one who is coming down my road is a thief.
If they catch someone breaking in and they're smashing a window...
But these guys are doing, they want to firewall the entire country, and of course you're going to have to hire thousands of contractors to do all this.
This is about making the internet all of a sudden some kind of national infrastructure that needs to be protected, which is ludicrous.
You can't do it.
Anyway, here's his little setup from his spiel, and then I'll play the piece that just was mind-boggling.
American companies are renowned as being the most innovative in the world.
Companies of every size and in every industry, from manufacturing to software to biotechnology to aerospace, own large portfolios of legally protected trade secrets they have developed and innovated.
Okay, so he's talking about legally protected trade secrets.
So it doesn't matter if a Chinese guy or hacker, whoever it is, steals the secret.
If it's legally protected, they shouldn't be able to use it.
It's like if there's some kind of intellectual property that is so hidden that no one can access it, then where's the legal protection?
I'm not quite sure what he's trying to protect us from.
From what kind of theft?
What exactly?
In some cases, the secret sauce may be a company's most valuable asset.
The theft of these secrets can lead to devastating consequences.
For small businesses, it can be a matter of life and death.
Oh, really?
So, someone hacks into my computer and all of a sudden we're dying?
Not so sure.
I think he meant death of the company.
I'll give him a break on that.
Okay.
...the reality that they are being attacked on a daily basis by cyber criminals who are determined to steal their intellectual property.
As Attorney General Holder has observed, there are two kinds of companies in America.
Those that have been hacked, and those that don't know that they've been hacked.
Now, really?
There's no other kind of company?
That's it?
There's only two?
Either you're being hacked, or you don't know that you've been hacked?
Are you being hacked at this very minute?
No.
Many of the cyberattacks we are seeing are the work of foreign governments.
China and other nations now routinely steal from American businesses.
Yeah, don't sugarcoat it.
And give the secrets to their own companies.
Oh!
That's a pretty big fight in words.
Their version of competition.
And let's be clear.
We do not do the same to them.
We are now going through a healthy debate in America.
About the scope of government surveillance, but there is no dispute about one thing.
Our spy agencies do not steal from foreign businesses to help American industry.
Okay.
What is probably one of the best kept intellectual property secrets of any corporation?
I'm thinking big, massive, major corporations in the world.
What is one of the best kept secrets that everyone would want to have, but no one has been able to replicate?
The formula for Coca-Cola.
There's a reason why Coca-Cola has kept its formula locked away in a vault for decades.
But in recent years, the methods used to steal trade secrets have become more sophisticated.
So does he realize what he's saying?
There's your solution.
If you have something so incredibly secret, like, I don't know, the formula to Coca-Cola, apparently it is possible to protect this.
Yeah, you lock it in a safe.
If there's something you really want to protect and you really don't want China to steal, don't put it on a computer on the internet.
With the folder name, Top Secret.
Secret Formula, don't look here.
The whole concept is ludicrous.
So what are they up to?
Oh, money bonanza.
Money bonanza, of course.
Yeah, there's a money bonanza involved.
That's the only thing.
At the same time, the beast merch China.
Essentially, our companies have given China all the secrets because we've turned our manufacturing over to them.
So here, like for example, I'm looking at one of the cameras.
I have the new Olympus camera.
One of the new Olympus cameras.
The bottom of the Olympus camera, which has got all kinds of mechanisms in it, any of these cameras do, Canon, Nikon.
And they've got all kinds of proprietary ways of doing stuff.
And it used to always say, made in Japan, made in Tokyo even.
And now they all say, made in China.
So they've essentially turned over all their patents and everything to the Chinese manufacturer.
And it's generally only one or two companies that make all the cameras.
They make them for everybody.
So they know all the tricks that everyone uses.
So what has that got to do with cybercrime?
The Chinese, they're inundated with material that they can use.
They're prevented from using a lot of it by international law.
For example, most zoom lenses, for example, have no...
Most of them are all patented by the Japanese, and you can't really make a modern zoom lens without violating a patent.
And you will be cited and fined, and you will be driven out of business if you try to steal one of these mechanisms.
It's pretty much covered.
It's bullcrap.
This is a bullcrap argument.
Well...
It's a big deal and a lot of money is going into it and a lot of consultancies are jumping on board to...
Let me ask this question.
Cyber criminals are attacking all these companies daily.
As we speak, you're either being hacked or you've been hacked.
Why doesn't the Justice Department do something about tracking the IP addresses and finding these guys?
There is example after example of people who have been hacked.
They themselves track the guy who did it, like some kid in Minnesota or whatever.
Somebody hacked him or has been harassing him.
They turn it over to the FBI, and the FBI does nothing.
Well, let's listen to our other friend, Michael Chertoff, who was speaking at the same event as Pistoli.
I know it's pistol, but I like to say pistoli.
And here he is on the cyber threat.
And of course, we all know whenever someone says, yes, cyber, that he's a dick because he has no idea what he's talking about.
If you pay attention to what goes on at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, there have been presentations about, for example, the ability to hack into pacemakers or insulin pumps.
So, this was very interesting.
He's now taking the Black Hat conference findings and turning this into fear-mongering to sell his services to the corporations who are represented in the audience.
Remotely, when those medical devices are connected wirelessly to a monitoring station, they've demonstrated that your automobile can be remotely interfered with through some of the GPS and OnStar capabilities that they build into modern automobiles.
Okay, this is working out well.
Yes?
This is going to become a more serious issue as more and more devices in the home become linked up, quote, to smart grids.
Whether it's your thermostat or your smoke detector or your television, all of these things are going to be things that can be remotely monitored, penetrated, and in some cases compromised.
How we think about the architecture and the trade-offs involved in an Internet of Things is exactly the kind of challenge I think that an institution like this ought to be looked at.
Well, here's an idea.
I'm not going to get a connected thermostat.
I'm going to keep my dumb TV, thank you very much.
This guy can't be serious.
He's dead serious.
The Internet of Things, which is the biggest crock of crap ever to come down the road, is going to be used to leverage companies like Chertoffs and other consultants who are going to scare you to death because your coffee pot can be accessed and somebody can boil the water when you're not home or do whatever, you know, make coffee when you're not there.
Yeah.
You're going to come home and find a bunch of stale coffee.
The Chinese are going to be brewing coffee through the internet.
What happened, honey?
My coffee.
It's cold.
Yeah, the Chinese were brewing it.
Those bastards.
So there was a lot of that.
The internet of things is only being implemented for one reason and one reason only.
To spy on people.
Well, I don't think that's even the reason.
I think it's to deliver advertising.
So when you go to your, you know, your refrigerator's got a big screen.
It's going to have a touch screen because you want to, I don't know why you want a touch screen on the refrigerator, but you'll have one.
And it'll be asking you to say, hey, you know, notice that there's a sale on milk over here at the Safeway.
You should go get some.
Push a button and a coupon will print out on your computer upstairs.
And that's what's going to, that's the real purpose is not to spy on you because, I mean, yeah, you can monitor everything.
In their home, but there's no money in that.
The money is in selling crap.
Right.
Well, you chose one of my favorite examples, and the example that is always given, of course, is your refrigerator will know that you're out of milk, and it will automatically purchase the milk for you, and some guy will deliver it to your home.
That was the promise.
That's been the promise for 30 years?
I think I first heard that in the late 80s.
So 30 years.
Close to 30 years.
And I still see Cisco commercials where...
The dad is shopping, and the shopping cart starts talking to him about picking up the milk.
I have not seen this commercial.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Don't forget!
So, in other words, the shopping cart's gonna be a nag.
Yeah.
Generally speaking, when you go to the store to get milk, that's what you get.
Nag?
No, you get the milk.
I mean, it's not like you forget to do that.
Just go pick up the milk.
Yeah, I went to the store to get milk, and I forgot the milk.
Oh, we live in interesting times.
Where people buy into this stuff.
And particularly corporations are spending billions on these jabronis.
That's because they've got money to burn.
Yeah.
Well, there's certainly...
Yeah.
Alright, there you go.
Anyway, John, even at this early hour for you, this late hour for me, I would like to thank you for your courage and say, in the morning to you, John C. Dvorak!
Did the spreadsheet come in?
Uh-huh, it sure did.
Oh.
Well, then I will say to you, Adam Curry, in Japan, where you are, in the morning to you, and in the morning to all ships and sea, boots on the ground, feet in the air, subs in the water, and all the dames and knights out there.
Yes.
And I want to say hi to everybody listening in the chat room.
Yeah, I would say that as well, except for some reason I can't stay logged into the chat room.
I keep getting disconnected, so I have no idea who's in there.
But I know they're there, and in the morning, thank you very much for sticking with us.
Noaginastream.com, noaginachat.net.
Thank you to our artist, Cosmo.
I did the art for episode 616.
This was a tough one for our choice.
Because we knew the title we wanted, which was Jihadi Disneyland.
Right.
And of course there was a perfect Jihadi Disneyland piece of art, but we try not to be redundant by using art that either portrays or says exactly the same as the title.
Therefore we wound up with...
What did we have?
Boko Haram.
Yes.
Boko Haram.
Right.
This was an older piece.
This is why we want people to not put show numbers on the art.
Because we sometimes will go back a couple of shows and pull something that we...
Yeah, that we didn't use, but that we liked a lot.
Exactly.
And this was a parody, of course, which we've always thought of when we first heard the name Boko Haram, or whatever it is, Boko, Buku.
We always thought of Boko Haram, at least I did, in that name.
And of course, we did have one of our artists...
Condemn us.
Yeah.
That artist ripped off.
Like, okay.
It was a parody.
Which is like legal, by the way.
Yeah.
But, I don't know.
Some people just...
If you lack a sense of humor, there's nothing you can do about it.
All right.
So let's thank a few people who helped produce this show, the executive producers and associate executive producers.
We actually got a...
The newsletter pointed out our new Stonation.
Yeah, that was very interesting.
I like that.
It was invented by Spencer Pearson in Columbus, Missouri.
But first, let's start at the top with Sir Andrew Largeman in Taipei City.
He's right in...
He's just down the street from you.
Yeah, right up the road.
515, uh, ITM from Sir Andrew Largeman.
This 515 for May 15th donation.
515, that'd have been a good one.
Uh, is to wish Adam a smooth and fruitful trip in Tokyo.
He's actually having a juicy trip.
Adam's Tokyo notes and observations on his blog were fun to read.
Uh-huh.
Instead of talking about it on the show, he's blowing it off on the blog.
Oh, oh, please.
I'd like to request an L Sharpton resist we much.
Uh-huh.
I don't know if you have that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
By Charlie Rose, it's in your DNA. Oh, okay.
And then biodiversity.
Well, the only thing that's happened here, very strange, I'm using the new, this is weird.
Oh, okay.
I'm using the new Mac OS and it does some funky things.
I put the spreadsheet into full screen mode and then you can't get out of it.
Very strong.
Oh.
Okay.
Well, that stinks.
Yeah.
Well, I got it.
This full screen mode thing, this harkens back to DOS. You know, where you had a full screen, because that's the way it worked.
Right.
And this was like some new invention.
Oh, full screen apps!
Yeah.
And then they, I thought it was a joke, to be honest about it, that was an April Fool's gag.
Who the hell's gonna go with, what's full screen, who wants a full screen app?
If you want a full screen, you just click on the little thing, it becomes full screen.
It shouldn't default.
Well, yeah, so I clicked on the thing and it went full screen, and then you can't click it to make it go back from full screen.
You can't, escape doesn't work.
You have to, uh, uh, like command tab into a different app.
It's, look, I don't know.
There's no real conflict!
Tell me about this sexuality.
It's in your DNA. And I'll hit a karma there.
You've got karma.
Just to even it out.
I'm surprised you had those clips.
Well, I have the full studio here, and everything is pretty much...
This is a Mac you're using.
Yes.
And the Mac, you have to do all...
Yeah, because they've adopted the full screen stupidity, too.
Right.
Yeah, this is what you get when your visionary dies.
Yeah.
Sadly.
I don't know why anyone couldn't just simply reject the idea.
You know, if it was a meeting at Microsoft when they came up with this idea, why didn't somebody say, this is stupid and idiotic!
Why do we even pay you to work here?
That's what Bill Gates would have said.
Yes.
Ryan Merritt comes in from Hoboken, New Jersey with 420.33, which is the stonation.
Yeah.
And I look for a note.
No note.
He's the one who turned us on to the clips of Sharpton making all the gaffes.
Yeah.
Which, at the end of the show, I now have one of our producers mixed like a minute and a half song.
Right.
And I'll play that at the end of the show.
Yeah, it's a good mix.
I've heard it.
Anonymous, of all people, which is probably the smart money to give a stonation of $420.33 from Michigan.
Finally got a real salaried programming job.
Now make 100% more than any previous time in my life.
Who needs college?
Therefore, I figured I could stop being a douchebag.
So equals therefore.
There are conjunctions.
Why not stop saying so, but not and or or.
So that's his note.
Then he's criticizing us for saying so.
What am I hearing in the background?
A train?
Oh, okay.
It's 90 degrees and it's like miserable.
The window's open.
Okay.
I was just asking.
It's alright.
You have the window open.
I got it.
Spencer Pearson in Columbia, Missouri.
He's the one who invented this.
4-20-33.
Actually, it's come in before, but we didn't pick up on it.
In the morning, John and Adam have been listening since just before Christmas and have fallen in love with the show.
It's insane to see how many media sources, even many of the comedy podcasts I love, which we know those two are.
Which we really are.
end up repeating some of the same bullcrap memes in the mainstream media that the mainstream media is cooked up and dished out between adam's beautiful dissection of the bring back our girls malarkey and john's impassioned defense of the cannabis plant last sunday i knew i could be a boner no more please accept my donation of 42033 as the ultimate stonation
i've been considering donating to the show for quite some time and have been living the mac and cheese life to save up for a doozy but after hearing sunday's show and plugging no agenda on my own baby podcast bowl after bowl bowl after bowl.com if you have any interest i knew the time had come i I'd like a creepy Charlie...
Now, tell me that this is not...
How can this be?
Random number theory.
Not only do two people in a row ask for the Charlie Rose sexuality thing, which we rarely play, But, they both donated for 2033, so there's something in the ether about this, about Charlie Rose and this clip and Pot.
Well, hey, hey, wait a minute.
Charlie Rose and Pot.
Let me think about it.
I think not!
Tell me about the sexuality.
It's in your DNA. Yeah.
And that's creepy.
I want to think of the children plus a little podcast.
Karma never hurts.
Keep up the fantastic work putting on the best podcasts in the universe.
You really do make it look easy, but I have no idea what I would look forward to twice a week without the show.
You don't need to...
Won't somebody please think of the children?
You've got karma.
Alright, nice.
I'm moving along.
Just Diane.
300 in Eldridge, Iowa.
I have the note, but I have to run to the other desk.
That's okay.
Yes, you're running to the desk, and I'm still trying to figure out how I can reconfigure this full-screen app.
I don't think anyone likes full-screen apps, do they?
This makes no sense to me.
Well, yeah, what's really bad is when you have a big screen, because people like big screens because they're cheap.
Yeah.
And the full-screen app on a big screen is horrible.
It's not really usable, then, the app.
So Just Diane came in with $300, and she has a handwritten note on a card.
Mm-hmm.
With a Texas longhorn on the front.
It's weird.
Sorry it's been so long since my last donation.
My only wish is for a what difference does it make for my husband and a karma for our kids with human resources in the oven.
Ooh.
He's got a bun in the oven, as it were.
So let's give her that.
Yeah.
If I knew what difference does it make.
It's got to be under Hillary.
Yeah, that's what I thought, but it would be under the...
It would be under our...
I don't know.
Benghazi.
Yeah, I'm trying that as well, and it's...
What difference does it make?
I'm sorry.
I have the Hillary Emperor.
What is that?
No, that's not it.
I'm sorry.
I don't...
We'll do a make good for her.
Well, I can do a delicious, and then I have...
What is this?
I'm talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.
I have no idea what that is.
I don't know.
It's almost too delicious to believe, my friend.
I'm sorry.
Maybe I don't have that one.
No, we played it.
Yeah.
Alright.
Well, we'll look for it.
I'm sorry.
We'll have to do a make good for you.
Okay.
Sir Dennis Cruz, meanwhile, comes in with $201.
He'll be our associate executive producer for show 617.
Yeah, and he sent a very nice note, a long note, about sensimilia.
Of course, that was what it used to mean without seeds, and he explained in great detail why there are no more seeds and stems in our weed.
John, you know, when you and I are rolling up the doobs and we're complaining about that.
Yeah.
We can't separate that on our double album of Frampton Cums Alive.
Frampton Cums Alive.
That was the one.
No, it was...
And it's because everything's cloned.
They clone these...
I didn't know that.
This was educational.
Yeah, it was actually quite educational.
You know, a lot of interesting things for us.
So that is also highly appreciated, of course.
And that's it.
He's a sponsor of the Da Den Man Show and HotCoffee.org.
For anyone who wanted to check that out.
So those are our executive producers, associate executive producers for 617.
I want to remind people, we do have a show coming up on Sunday.
We get very poor donations.
This is an opportunity to get a cheap producership, it seems to me.
It was Sir Gene who remarked the other day when he gave us $269.69 for Swazilov.
He was astounded that he was the executive producer.
Yeah, he got bumped up because there was relatively nobody contributing on Sundays.
I don't even know if they listened to the Sunday show.
Whatever the case, it's coming up.
Go to Dvorak.org slash NA. ChannelDvorak.com slash NA. NoAgendaShow.com and NoAgendaNation both have buttons you can click on if you want to get involved that way.
And thank you very much to our executive producers and associate executive producers.
These are real credits.
You can use them anywhere.
Credits are accepted.
They're just like Hollywood.
With one big difference is, unlike those phonies, we'll actually vouch for you if someone needs to know.
And a quick promo in the PR department.
You'll find that under PR in the show notes.
There is apparently a No Agenda BlackBerry Messenger channel, a BBM channel, Nice.
Yeah, and I guess a lot of people use it, and they messenger each other on the Blackberries.
What is that?
Bongo.
So you can find the channel in the show notes, but I'll give it to you right now.
It's Charlie0023653Foxtrot.
And of course, we need everyone to do as much as possible when it comes out to propagating the formula.
Our formula is this.
We go out...
We hit people in the mouth.
Shut up, slave.
Shut up, slave.
There we go.
Alright.
I got a good example of how everything works.
Watching RT, I have a...
I was watching this report.
I only have the most important part clipped.
Because, as you'll see, this is a report on Palestinians and some guy getting screwed over and then they had all these horrible pictures and they were wrapping up this thing.
They brought a special guy to talk about this something.
Well, if you play the clip, you'll see what the problem is with this particular report.
Stop the settler and actually, you know, send him to the police and charge him with trespassing.
You know, no one can imagine, you know, the opposite situation ending in less than arrest and presumably also the use of live ammunition against this Palestinian.
Shadi's brother, Adham.
Wait!
Is this a signal?
Are we seeing red and blue stripes on the YouTube video?
No, this is over the air.
Really?
Yeah.
Sounds like...
Well, it's clearly digital.
Let it play, you'll hear it.
Okay.
Ah, all right, we know what that is.
Oh, this is nice, nice.
Yeah.
This is the coordinated monthly test of the emergency alert system equipment.
If this had been an actual emergency, you would have received timely emergency information.
This concludes this test of the emergency alert system.
God.
The RT Hebron.
Wow.
Then they have the, they list, let the girl get her thing in at the end.
Well, of course, this is done.
That was a great report.
You get to see a bunch of bloody stuff going on and you listen to these guys.
That, of course, is done at the local level.
This had nothing to do with RT. That's the local level.
That's your cable station doing.
That's why it's so crappy.
It's your local cable station.
It was free speech TV as far as I know, but, you know, whatever.
Alright, so even though we were traveling, I was able to watch the 17-minute video put together by Boko Haram of the so-called abducted schoolgirls, of which apparently only four have been identified by their parents.
And when I was watching this video...
And by the way, couldn't they round up a few more where they had that group picture?
Not everyone knew it was school picture day.
So they had 300 girls, supposedly, captured.
Or 276 is really the base number.
And they could only get 90 of them to show up for the photo?
What are the other girls doing?
Well, I was just looking at the video itself.
I was...
Did you see the whole thing?
Did you see the whole 17 minutes?
Did you have a chance to watch it all?
No, no, no, I didn't.
It was kind of hard because the original upload on YouTube has been removed by this user.
Okay.
Okay.
I had to go hunt around and find the full-length video, because you can find lots of little bits and pieces.
Why would somebody have it removed?
Well, for re-editing, apparently.
Now, this thing was styled.
They had overlays.
There was some chroma key in there.
There was multiple cameras.
Yeah, the guy was against the...
Every time when I saw it, he was against the green background, the key background.
Right.
What's the point of that, unless you're keying it?
Well, the BBC, BBC Radio, someone sent me this report, had a forensic specialist on who works with the Defense Department and the police.
Specifically, his speciality is video forensics of hostage situations.
And he says, and this is what you'll hear in this little bit of the report, this is the most elaborate hostage video ever in the history of all hostage videos.
Go figure that this would come from a terrorist group in Africa.
It was very interesting to see that these people were reasonably professional.
There was at least two cameras being used.
In fact, in one of the wide shots, we could see one of the cameramen.
They were using backdrops.
I suspect that the leader was recorded at a separate location.
But it was very obvious to me that a lot of preparation had gone into the production of this video.
We know it's been subject to some post-production editing in a non-linear suite because they've superimposed the logo, etc., and there are some cuts during the actual recording.
But I found it very interesting to note the amount of preparation in advance.
There's a suggested conversion from Christian to Islam for these young ladies, and they're all dressed in black and grey clothing, as you will have noticed.
So all of this clothing would have been prepared in advance.
So that gives us an indication of how organised this group of people are.
And when you put those things together, the extent of the preparation, the sophisticated editing, I could see that their cameraman seemed to have improved from their last video, and they're filming on two different locations.
What does that tell you about trying to locate the girls?
Well, it's going to be very, very difficult.
There's obviously a number of locations involved, and it's interesting to note now that families of these young ladies have only been able to identify four of them so far from the 200-plus that were taken, the most recent abduction.
So, it's very obviously a number of locations are involved.
It would be someplace pretty rural.
The forest area in the background, very interesting to note that no buildings are visible of any note, and it's just trees in the background.
There is some screening in the background as well, which is interesting to look at more closely.
The screening to me seems to be possibly hiding something in the background, so that needs to be looked at very, very carefully.
A banner.
This is the second banner that doesn't have Boko Haram's kind of logo, if you will, on it, but it's something else.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, very interesting.
Of this video, which wasn't like it was out of focus.
And I'll tell you, you can put my kid in a headscarf and whatever you want.
Parents have an uncanny ability to pick out your kid from a crowd, no matter what's going on.
It is a human recognition facility that parents have.
This is well documented.
So for only four parents to be able to find their child in this group where you could see a lot of faces is interesting.
Then all of these extra bits, multiple locations, multiple cameras, overlays, green screen, not seeing the background as we know from one of our producers who has been in that area.
This is barren wasteland and lots and lots of, where it's not barren, there's lots of buildings, lots of things to see, not forest, no foliage.
So the obvious thing that we need to do as United States, you know, of course, when we have something like this happen.
Overseas, a U.S. military Global Hawk drone flew its first surveillance mission over Nigeria today in the search for hundreds of kidnapped schoolgirls.
This comes as the Nigerian government said today it might negotiate with the terrorists.
This was an agonizing day for relatives as they tried to identify loved ones in a video released by the terrorists.
I got bad news for you.
This drone is not doing any surveillance.
They're going to drone these kids.
They're going to drone somebody.
That's what they're for.
I talked with the, I laid out some of our ideas about the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
The pipeline guy.
Yeah, and about the $49.6 billion and that they were sending in accountants.
And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense.
He says, yeah, we know about the issues with the money there in Nigeria.
So it's becoming more apparent that the trickery put together in this video is intended to...
It's another Nigerian scam letter.
It's just a high-end version.
Yeah.
Hi.
I have 400 Nigerian princesses for you.
And people may find it insensitive, but I'm sorry.
There's so much pointing to this being an elaborate...
Not even...
It's just a hoax.
It's a whole...
Nigerian scam.
That's what they do.
That's their specialty.
Do you know that the Nigerian scam letter writers is a huge part of the GDP of Nigeria?
Yeah, we've talked about this before.
Yeah, we have.
And this is just another scam.
Well, there was something else that I caught.
Good luck, Jonathan.
Oh, I had an email about that.
Hold on a second.
Oh, I had an email about names, because of course I was ridiculing his name.
Let's see.
Adam, I'm South African, but where I'm from among the tribal black culture names, there are names like Beauty, Good Luck, and even Cell Phone.
Cell Phone Jonathan.
No, it would be, yes, Cell Phone Johnny.
Quite common.
I'm not joking.
Normal African names like Sifo, Lindui, and Tumi, for instance, are still more common, though.
Again, this is from my limited experience, but Cell Phone, that's pretty cool.
What shall I call him?
It's a boy, Mrs.
Walker.
What shall I call him?
Cell Phone Walker.
Self or Walker.
This was kind of weird. .
Thank you.
I picked this up from MSNBC. Now, this is weird for two reasons.
One, the report is stupid.
Two, the host is stupid.
Three, the whole thing is stupid.
But once I went and looked at the report, there was something that I picked up.
This is our friend Ronan Sinatra.
Welcome back.
Shambling, mindless, flesh-eating monsters threatening to devour each other alive.
But enough about Congress.
No, I'm talking about the pandemic.
Who writes this stuff?
And he can't even deliver it.
Pentagon's newly revealed plan for the zombie apocalypse.
You know, I've watched this show.
I've tried to get clips from this show.
I cannot watch this kid.
He looks like he's 15.
He reads like an amateur.
He can't communicate with anybody that's on the show.
Why is he even on this show?
Why did they give him a show at all?
Mia Farrow's kid has got a show.
He must be making at least a million dollars on it.
No, no, no.
I doubt that.
I bet he's making good money.
Why does he have a show like this at all?
Because all the research said he would be great.
He does great Twitter.
He's completely tied into the White House or the State Department, I should say.
He's incredibly smart.
It just doesn't translate.
It happens.
MTV used to do this all the time.
They'd hire people who look great on paper and then they'd show up and they would suck.
Well, this guy sucks.
So, let him get into his little gag here.
Apocalypse.
I repeat, the Pentagon has a zombie plan.
Now, they get that it's silly, it opens with a disclaimer saying, while it's not a joke, it was for training purposes, but still.
Zombie plan.
31 pages of it, to be exact.
Written in military-speak, listing eight different types of zombies to combat.
From pathogenic zombies, like the ones on The Walking Dead, to evil magic zombies, I don't even know what those are, to space zombies and even vegetarian zombies, you know, like in Plants vs.
Zombies.
Still, the Pentagon has a zombie plan.
Well, there's two things wrong with him, and I'm going to get around to why I'm playing this at all.
One, the writing is atrocious.
It is sad humor.
It is VH1 level humor that's being written.
And I'm sure it's someone who he feels comfortable with.
Yeah, I know, but I feel really comfortable with Joanne or whoever is sitting with him and going through this.
And he really is not good at, he's not a prompter reader.
He's getting through it.
But it's a skill, you know, and he can develop this over time.
If they hired the Curry-Devorak Consulting Group, I would turn the gig down, but we could probably do it.
We could probably get a better.
I don't think it's possible.
I think it's a hopeless guy.
Jim Mikliszewski joins us from the Pentagon, which looks not under attack by zombies.
Jim, is everything all right over there?
You know, everything is fine here.
Pentagon security is absolutely impenetrable.
Oh, and now we probably continue with the joke.
And as a matter of fact, it would be impossible for zombies to actually...
And the lights go out.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Isn't the zombie meme at least 12 months behind the times?
Maybe two years?
You had picked up the zombie thing like five years ago, and I thought it peaked with a bunch of zombie movies.
Now, why is this even being...
It's like old material.
I'm glad you ask.
So I pull up the report, which is from April 30th, 2011, which is when I think we first discussed this report.
No, I think we discussed the report, but we had picked up on the zombie meme earlier.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, well, we actually had a conversation.
I said zombie, and you said you thought it was going to be something else.
Doesn't matter.
Yeah, no, I did poo-poo the zombie thing.
And this is from the headquarters of the United States Strategic Command.
Now, I think they're trying to cover something up here.
Because there is no reason to rehash this zombie thing other than that someone found it and there's something in here which could potentially be embarrassing.
Now, what they will explain in this report, and I refuse to play any more of it, is that this...
Zombie apocalypse plan was a real plan done as a simulation.
And I'm going to read the disclaimer that they're only reading one little part of it.
And this is ConPlan 8888.
This plan was not actually designed as a joke.
And this is from the actual document.
During the summers of 2009-2010, while training augmentees from a local training squadron about the JOPP, members of US Stratcom component found out...
By accident, it says that the hyperbole involved in writing a zombie survival plan actually provided a very useful and effective training tool.
Now that's where everyone stops reading, but this disclaimer continues for a whole other paragraph.
Planners who attended JPME2 at the Joint Combined Warfare School also realized that training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan.
This makes some sense.
If you are doing a training exercise and it's very believable, it can confuse people.
Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the Tunisia or Nigeria scenarios, we elected to use a completely impossible scenario that can never be mistaken as a real plan.
Hello?
Since when do we have Tunisia and Nigeria scenarios?
Well, that's a catch.
And that is what...
I'm like, wow.
Well, the Tunisia scenario hasn't played out yet, but maybe the Nigeria scenario is in play.
So I have the document...
And it's very comprehensive.
But I'm looking for similarities now between what is in the plan and what is happening in Nigeria.
Well, we had a scenario play out in Tunisia.
Was it post or pre...
What was the date on the Tunisian Revolution, which began Arab Spring?
That was Arab Spring.
That was...
In 2011.
2011.
So it would be right at the time of that memo.
But the memo does not specify...
No, I'm sorry.
This is 2009.
What they're saying is it's 2009-2010.
Let's see.
It was designed in 2009-2010, so it played out in 2011.
There you go.
Yeah, so the Phoenician thing did play out.
Yep.
But we don't know, do we have a document that shows us what the scenario was?
I put it in the show notes.
People are going to have to help.
There's so many, it's a lot of high-level jargon.
There's a lot of, you know, there's some very obvious stuff, which I, of course, completely understand.
But there's a lot of real operational stuff in here.
Hmm.
But I just found it, regardless, if you're training, and you're training for Tunisia and Nigeria, there's a lot of other things you could be training for.
Yeah.
Yeah, some coincidence.
And then for this old joke to be pulled out again...
Well, I'm not sure that...
I don't know if you're right.
The analysis of the old joke being pulled out again is to distract people from what?
They've already given up on paying attention to this memo.
Maybe someone found something?
I don't know.
Maybe somebody slipped it into the thing to get people to look at it again.
We know that Nigeria's in play.
Weird.
While you're on the topic of MSNBC, one of the things that people notice, and I always like to look at, what kind of person watches MSNBC? You can usually figure out the viewer by looking at the advertisements.
Yeah, pretty much.
Pretty much always, yeah.
Yes, almost always because they're, especially these little networks are targeted.
Like a lot of pill commercials on the CBS News is all, you know, for drugs, for depression.
A lot of depressed people watch the network news.
What kind of person do you think watches MSNBC? Hmm.
I didn't realize...
There seems to be something wrong with your MSNBC commercial clip.
It's zero bytes.
Hmm.
MSNBC Commercial Zero Bites.
Yeah, let me check in the original email.
Let me see what went wrong here.
Go to the foobar boy, because that would have it.
That's where I got everything from.
All right, continue while I'm working on this.
Anyway, so you have to try to figure out, you can reverse engineer the viewer of the networks by listening to the commercials on those networks, and then sometimes it's kind of humiliating because you look, you're watching the show, and the next thing you know, they got one of those little mopeds or those little...
Right.
Or that's you, my friend.
Or reverse home mortgage.
Yeah, reverse home mortgage, loser.
Alright, I got the clip.
Play?
Yeah, now you can figure, this is an MSNBC viewer.
How can I ease this pain?
When I can't go, it's like bricks piling up.
I wish I could find some relief.
Ask your doctor about Linzess, a once-daily capsule for adults with IBS with constipation or chronic idiopathic constipation.
Linzess is thought to help calm pain-sensing nerves and accelerate bowel movements.
It helps you proactively manage your symptoms.
Do not give Linzess to children under 6, and it should not be given to children 6 to 17.
It may harm them.
Don't take Linzess if you have a bowel blockage.
Get immediate help if you develop unusual or severe stomach pain, especially with bloody or black stools.
The most common side effect is diarrhea, sometimes severe.
If it's severe, stop taking Linzess and call your doctor right away.
Other side effects include gas, stomach area pain and swelling.
Bottom line, ask your doctor about Linzess today.
Yeah.
I never heard of this product before, but MSNBC viewers apparently are constipated.
Yeah, the black poop.
Black poop.
And they're all like Chris Matthews, apparently.
I've got this Chris Matthews clip.
The way he was with Obama, you know, I felt the thing on my leg.
I just felt that guy.
So now he's all in with Hillary.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Right.
He's in love with Hillary.
So I can play this on him.
Hold on a second.
All in love with Hillary.
Is this another one?
This is weird.
Something strange happened.
It's probably my fault.
Sorry about this.
You just downloaded titles.
Well, the titles look good enough.
I'm like, eh, screw it.
We'll just do some titles.
I'm trying to make these titles a little more easy for you to queue up.
Yeah.
This is, I don't know, this is clearly something that went wrong in the overall download.
I think that it's going to stick.
There are substantive issues where we can have a broad discussion about her leadership and her capabilities to be president.
I think that's all legitimate.
The health question is a legitimate concern, but that will be addressed when she releases her health records.
And as I said before, Chris, if there's no there there, let's move on and have that debate about the future of the country.
Let's talk about guts here, by the way.
And, you know, Karl Rove's guts compared to her guts, okay?
She goes up in New York.
I've never given her enough credit for this, but more I think about how tricky it is.
She went up to New York to run for the United States Senate in a state she really never lived in.
She could have been pounded up there.
You don't know.
Nobody knows the vagaries of the voter or the strange things that happen in an election.
She could have been humiliated.
But she said, no, I'm going to put my head out there in the ringer.
I'm going to take what comes to me.
I'm going to do something on my own, not just because I'm First Lady.
I'm going to do it on my own.
I'm going to prove myself.
And she did it, damn it.
And she did it.
And Karl Rove never did anything like that.
He was always hiding behind his W. It's a lot easier to hide behind a candidate than to be the candidate.
I'll tell you.
Right.
This is because Karl Rove apparently said that she might have brain damage?
Yeah.
There's some gossip going around.
This became a big news item all over the place because when Hillary conked herself out, as we recall, it was about a year ago.
Yeah.
You mean when she got her facelift?
Which we believe was a facelift involved or an eye lift or something that needed to get her out of the public eye.
Mm-hmm.
Now the claim is that she conked herself out and she was down for six months recovering from a horrible concussion.
This is ridiculous.
But we do have this clip, and I did take the takeaway.
I got the Chris Matthews takeaway from that long clip that I think would be a good evergreen.
I'm going to prove myself.
Right.
And she did it, damn it.
And she did it.
She did it, damn it.
Yes.
Well, I think...
Bagger, by the way, is what you call that type of person.
Well, the narrative has really changed in an interesting way.
There's no doubt that after the initial review panel, or whatever it's called, that we know for sure, and everyone has copped to this, that what happened in Benghazi with Ambassador Stevens, that it was one thing we all know for sure, it was not caused by The Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube.
Everyone agreed on this unilaterally.
Am I crazy?
Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.
I mean, everyone said this, right?
Everybody said the video was bullcrap and nobody ever watched the video and it wasn't causing any problems anywhere.
Right.
Except Eleanor Clift.
Eleanor, who is my friend from the McLaughlin group, as you know, she is the one that likes to say that he's a constitutional lawyer about her president.
And Benghazi came up.
What is going on?
Every media organization has investigated this to death.
This animates the right wing of the Republican Party.
And I would like to point out that Ambassador Stevens was not murdered.
He died of smoke inhalation in the safe room in that CIA installation.
I don't think that's the fact, Eleanor.
No, I think I've heard a drastically different story from people who are also in the know about that.
It was a terrorist attack, Eleanor!
He was murdered in a terrorist attack.
It was an opportunistic terrorist attack that drew out of that video.
The video had nothing to do with it!
She's still talking about the video!
There were demonstrations across the world because of that.
Not in Benghazi.
There was no video related to it at all.
It's still opportunistic, and it's still a CIA, and if you're going to put people on trial, we should put David Petraeus on trial, not Hillary Clinton.
There you go.
That's what it's all about.
So she is so...
Either dense or dumb or out of the loop.
This is the common kind of weirdness that's going on where some meme is created, the bullcrap, like our 42033 friend Spencer says, the bullcrap meme that's created somewhere by the State Department or whoever, and it stays in play.
I have a clip.
I have a follow-on to this.
Okay.
Because it's one thing for Eleanor Clift to somehow get some memo and say, oh, no, no, we know that he died of smoke inhalation, which we know he died in a horrific way.
Yeah, yeah.
Raped with broom handles and all kinds of horrible things happened.
This is real fact.
Yeah.
Not smoke inhalation in the CIA. And by the way, could she say CIA one more time to make sure that David Petraeus and everyone but Hillary is implicated in this?
And I think we should reiterate our theory that this was a botched operation.
It was meant to be an October surprise.
And the idea was, and we believe the ambassador was in on it, he was meant to be kidnapped.
Botched kidnapping attempt.
Yeah, botched kidnapping attempt.
Yeah.
For an October surprise.
But the problem was there were simultaneous operations going on.
They crossed, yes.
Unaware of.
In that regard, the CIA probably is responsible because they were running their guns, which were being run up to Libya.
I'm sorry, from Libya up to Syria.
And that's where things crossed.
So for Eleanor to say this, who's all in with Hillary and is an Obama bot and just a nut job, she was kind of cute back in the day, though.
I saw her press photo.
She, man, she's, whew, getting a little harsh there.
It shows you that anyone can be fooled at a young age.
Be careful, boys.
But when Bill Maher starts saying the same thing, then you know that there's a memo that went out.
Oh, you got Maher saying the same thing?
This is like a bad case of the shingles.
I thought it was gone, and it came back, and I'm itching again.
I mean, somehow, no matter how many times they turn that eight ball, it always comes up.
By the way, on this show they've got Baratunde.
Isn't he on Twit from time to time, this guy?
Baratunde?
Yeah.
What's he doing on there?
Well, he's a comedian, I believe.
Yeah, I know, but...
Yeah, he's pretty good, although he's an Obama bot.
And it's such a research test for America because, like, Sane people, I think, look at it and see nothing, and they see it and see the greatest crime in the history of man.
About 44% of Republican polls think Benghazi's the worst scandal in American history.
I think it's not a scandal, and I can tell why, because in 2012 the scandal was about Obama, because he was running, and now somehow the scandal's about a Hillary, because she's about to run.
That might be from Republicans' point of view, but...
This is very interesting.
Now, of course, Maher would do this because he is a huge contributor to the Democratic Party.
Yeah, he gave a million bucks to the party.
Or to the super PAC that, I guess, helps out the party.
But I didn't...
Well, anyway, now there's the guy from Reason Magazine or something.
Whatever it is.
Republic.
I don't know.
They got token right-wing guy.
From my point of view, there is a scandal here.
Just because John Boehner thinks it's a scandal doesn't mean that it's not.
Please tell me what it is.
It is this.
The administration, the White House, and the State Department could have said on September 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, hey look, fog of war, terrible thing happened, we don't know really what happened, give us a few days.
They didn't.
Instead, they said, at the moment, we condemn religious incitement.
They blamed a video by a Cerritos nutbag for this.
But that's what it was.
That's not what it was.
What?
Yeah, this is Bill Maher saying that's what it was.
That's what it was.
If you burned a Koran right now, if you had the courage of your convictions to burn a Koran on this desk right now, would you be guilty of inciting violence that happened somewhere else?
All right, so there's three or four more minutes of this.
Yeah, we don't need to hear it.
Yeah, we don't need to hear it.
But I just wanted you to hear that Bill Maher's like, no, it was the video.
Wow, that's been so debunked.
And why didn't the right-wing guy bring up the stand-down orders?
You're asking for assistance.
That's the scandal.
Because it actually brings up the real...
None of that.
None of that.
Yeah, of course it would trace back.
This is all just theater.
Yeah, well, that's TV. Well, I was more stunned by this, actually, because this is at a high level.
That's just a bunch of low-end losers.
This is the French foreign minister reiterating what's already been...
Now, if anything's been debunked, it's the gassing of civilians by the Syrian army that has been proven that the gas canisters weren't...
They were kind of handmade.
They were fired from too close because you couldn't get the gas.
Remember the gassing that took place a year ago?
And it was too close, and so there's been two or three studies.
Seymour Hersh came out with a long report showing that these were the rebels firing on these cities to kill the Syrian soldiers.
It was them who set off the gas.
Seymour Hersh is not just some hack.
You know, he's an award-winning investigative journalist and very well respected and has been completely stifled with his take and stance on this particular instance.
But most people have debunked the idea that the Syrian government was gassing the Syrian people, their own people, for some unknown reason.
And then there was a secondary thing where some people were gassed with chlorine, which they don't even have a stockpile of.
So that wasn't the government either.
But meanwhile, the French foreign minister decides to backtrack on the whole thing and listen to him.
And as diplomacy falters, the war continues in Syria and so does the use of chemical weapons.
That's according to the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, currently in the United States to meet his counterpart John Kerry.
He says France has reliable information that chemical agents were used by the regime on 14 separate occasions since last October.
Laurent Fabius also expressing regret yesterday that the U.S. didn't strike Syria last year when the news first broke of a chemical attack near Damascus.
I've said that we can't rewrite history.
A few months ago, if you recall events, there was a massive use of chemical weapons in Syria.
France was ready to act.
However, that was not possible as the Americans and British were not able to do so.
But acting would have changed a lot of things.
Firstly, concerning Syria itself, and also in a certain way, in the way Russians deal with a certain number of questions.
But we are not going to rewrite history.
So the French are irked that this scheme, this bullcrap scheme where we're going to bomb them, if you recall.
Yeah, yeah, no, that we pulled back, pulled back last minute.
And then Obama pulled back at the last minute after promising there was a line, we're going to red line, nobody can cross and all the rest.
And then he backed off because Congress wasn't going to approve it.
Yeah.
And he actually threw it to Congress knowing they wouldn't approve it.
Right.
And now the French are all bent out of shape for some reason, which I'm assuming has to do with either pipelines or oil.
And what do the French have to do with Syria?
And now they're also irked with the Russians for kind of saving the day with their idea to, you know, pick up all the gas canisters and ship them off somewhere.
I just found that to be very peculiar, rewriting history, which he says you can't do, which he did.
Very strange.
Very much like the lesser one with Bill Maher in the phony video.
Well, the French guy said some other weird things, I don't know if you caught this, regarding climate change.
Which he coins something different, and he puts a timeline on it.
Very important issue of climate change, climate chaos, and I said that we had 500 days to avoid climate chaos, and I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject,
and I'm sure that for them, So, 500 days to avoid climate chaos.
So, I like climate chaos.
I like climate chaos, too.
I think that's very good, but we have 500 days only.
Yeah.
So, what is that?
That's a year and a half?
500 days, yeah.
So where does that put us?
Does that put Kerry out of office?
Does that put Obama out of office?
I thought he had two years.
Is it a European thing?
Who has 500 days left?
That's the question.
Who or what is a 500-day time on?
Is that the EU Parliament, maybe?
Well, they're having elections shortly, but I don't know what happens in 500 days.
Well, someone out there who's listening will be able to help us.
What's he worried about, this guy?
Climate chaos!
We're going to talk about climate chaos.
I've heard some extreme examples of horrible things that can happen, but you have to listen to KTVU and what they say.
Okay.
An alarming government report which will be formally released this week says extreme weather events may become more common.
The National Climate Assessment concluded that global climate change is real and already happening.
Human activity, most notably the burning of fossil fuels, is causing temperatures to rise.
If emissions are not reduced, experts believe temperatures could rise by as much as 10 to 2100 degrees.
In California, drought conditions could worsen.
Leading to more wildfires and water resources becoming more scarce.
2100 degrees, eh?
Yes, just above the boiling point of aluminum.
Well, yeah, we'd be dying then for sure.
There was a different report which NASA participated...
By the way, this is the station that gave you something wrong.
We too low.
Yeah, exactly.
Boom, crash, ow.
There was a report, a new report, which NASA participated in and was touted as a NASA report, although NASA has backtracked immediately saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we had one guy, like an intern working on it, and it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't sanctioned.
And this is regarding the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Which is melting, but it's not just melting.
There was a startling new report today issued about the state of the huge Antarctic ice sheet.
According to scientists monitoring the area, the ice is now melting in a way that is unstoppable.
Unstoppable!
Unstoppable, I tell you.
Science and technology correspondent Jacob Ward joins us from San Francisco with a report from scientists at NASA and UC Irvine.
And Jacob, what?
UC Irvine and NASA, it's a very serious report.
This is the real deal.
Use this particular ice sheet and explain why it's so important.
Well, David, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is a massive collection of glaciers and other ice formations.
And the particular section that this report deals with is 255 square miles.
That's about twice the size of Philadelphia.
The reason it's so important is that inside that object is enough water, if it were to all melt, to raise global sea levels by four feet.
And as you mentioned, this report has basically shown that this is melting far faster and in a pretty unstoppable way.
So, Jake, the four feet of water, we will all be drowning.
The time frame is, of course, what is always the most frightening.
Well, the reason it is so bad is that with sort of an unstoppable flow like this, it's really just a matter of physics holding it back.
The whole thing basically sits in a big sort of depression bowl, and so it's just slowly falling into the water, and ocean water is getting between it and the rock that it sits on.
So there's just nothing to stop it.
It's really the greatest fear scientists have for a rapid sea level rise.
In sort of glacial terms, rapid in this case means between 200 and 500 years from now.
200 and 500 years from now.
Give or take 300 years.
This is so Michael Crichton's state of fear.
And I am telling you, Some douchebag crazy F is going to dynamite some big piece of ice somewhere just to prove a point.
I can feel it.
Whenever I hear these reports, that's all that comes into my mind.
Well, since we're on this topic...
You know, everybody's complicit in this.
I mean, the news media is the worst.
I mean, besides the 2100 degree increase in temperature, which he can't stop himself from saying, even though it's on the prompter, it actually meant by the year 2100.
By the year 2100, yeah.
So Marco Rubio was talking to the National Press Corps at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. And he's talking about, his speech was about...
Future retirement systems, social security, and what we're going to do about it, and all the rest of that.
It was a policy speech.
So the questions start to come in after he talks.
And I would like to play three...
This went on for a while, but I'm going to play three of the questions.
Start with Rubio Zero.
And remember that he was talking about retirement.
Earlier this week, you rejected scientists' assertions that human activity is causing climate change and that actions taken to curtail such activity will destroy our economy.
How would you propose that the country weather any dramatic shifts in climate and the impacts such shifts could have on quality of life?
Okay, now I do have his answer, which is a minute.
We don't have to play it.
We can skip it.
But I'm keeping this answer around because this will be the litany answer by the Republicans who are against some of this climate change hysteria.
So he's talking about retirement, so they ask him that question.
That's what the press corps does.
He gives a long answer that's very adequate, saying climate's changing all the time and blah, blah, blah.
So, okay, fine.
Question number two, Rubio 2.
What information, reports, studies, or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change?
Okay.
Well, again, I mean, I... Very good question.
Okay, so he's there to talk about retirement systems.
So they ask him the same question twice in a row, which he answers, by the way, again with another one long minute.
So, okay, here's question number three.
The U.S. Geological Survey has warned that sea levels could rise by two feet by 2060, imperiling Florida's coastline.
How should the United States prepare itself and its citizens to deal with rising sea levels and the catastrophic flooding that is likely to follow?
By retiring.
As I pointed out earlier.
It's like, there's a huge preoccupation.
This is like hysteria.
This is mass hysteria.
I've never seen anything like it, especially with the news media.
You've got the guy up there, he's got a million questions he can pull from the pile, but every question seems to be about climate change.
Right.
Well, that is...
I just find the whole thing to be...
That is how...
That is...
You know, we have elections in Gitmo Nation proper, and we have to go after the Republican Party and make them look like crazy religious nutjobs.
So, you know, you attack them on...
I'm pretty convinced that most people...
Are in on climate change.
I don't think that they are in on the dire consequences that are being fed to them.
And that's because of the overkill, probably.
And it's way too...
200, maybe 500 years.
That doesn't scare me.
Since they can't predict tomorrow's weather, this seems highly unlikely.
We don't have to rehash that debate.
But this is all politicized.
It's all politicized.
That's the only reason for it.
Before we go to our break, John, today is a pretty important day, although not really.
As the FCC has released their rulemaking seeking public comment, On how to best protect and promote and, quote, open internet.
This is the new meme, by the way.
We went from net neutrality to open internet.
Which, what does that mean, open internet?
This is a complete change in narrative, and there's a couple of things going on.
As you know, this is one of my main pet peeves, and I had a conversation again this evening at the opening with people who are well-intended.
You know, this girl, member of the Pirate Party, you know, she's very active politically.
And I said, you know, and somehow it came down to net neutrality.
Or, no, we were talking about the show, and she said, oh, I've heard a lot about your show, and I don't want to listen to it.
I said, well, you know, you'll hear about net neutrality and how we think it is the stupidest thing people are campaigning for.
And if you want to see someone just their jaw drop to the floor when they're kind of...
All in on what you're saying, but then you throw out net neutrality.
The only thing it's going to achieve is exactly what the broadband providers want, and that is metered billing.
They're like, what?
No, no, this is to protect the internet.
And they can't explain what it is other than, you know, outcome the analogies of the fast lane, which is just not an appropriate technical response.
Now, there's a couple things I want to do.
So first, I have in front of me the proposed rulemaking.
Understand that all of these groups, all of these non-profit groups, these little groups who have $200,000 being given to them, a lot of them indirectly through Open Society Institute, which is Soros, And I'm not quite sure, you know, how he ties into it.
But they're all, you know, asking for donations and I'm getting email after email and we're doing great and the fight is on.
But the fight, you know, this 60 days comment period, then we have another 60 days to come back.
So it's four months before we even get close to any final rulemaking.
So we're all, you know, everyone's really early with all the yelling here.
But the main thing that it's coming down to is Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which was revised in 1996, and specifically Section 706.
And the idea is to turn, and this is what people think is the right thing to do, is to have the government come in, in the United States, that is, and regulate the Internet, and make it so that the Internet is a telecommunications service, very much like the telephone.
Now, there's a couple of things that people are really...
When it comes down to the technological thinking about it, they are very, very, very wrong, particularly when it being discussed as a utility.
Now, there was a video going around that I wanted to play a little piece from.
This is from Internet Citizens Defend Net Neutrality.
Now, there's a lot of these...
Whenever it comes to explaining how this works, someone puts a video together with a drawing, a fast drawing, and stick figures, and a voiceover, and a lot of, yeah, right, understand, don't you think?
Crazy, right?
Bleh!
And it's just wrong.
The things that are being said are wrong.
Hello Internet.
When it starts like that, I cringe.
I cringe when I hear this.
Enjoying your internetting session?
Perhaps watching this video with lots of tabs open in the background full of interesting things to check out?
The internet is amazing, and that's because of the rules which govern how it works.
And what rules?
Thank you.
So already they're talking about the rules that govern how it works.
There is no governing in that regard.
So already this video is giving you the impression that there are rules and governance as to how the internet works.
Go ahead, please.
I was going to interrupt because right now the open internet, if you look it up, the FCC has a page on this.
And by the way, my thinking is a little different than yours about what they're really after in terms of turning into a telecommunications regulation system.
Like the phone.
I'm thinking they're trying to regulate it like television.
Because I know they've been trying to do this with cable TV forever.
The FCC wants to regulate the internet like they regulate television, in my opinion.
That's what the long game is.
And let me just play this, because the little key word is in here.
This is the first paragraph of open internet, if you go to FCC.gov slash open internet.
The open internet, quote-unquote, is the internet as we know it.
It's open because it uses free, publicly available standards that anyone can access and build to, and it treats all traffic that flows across the network in roughly the same way.
The principle of the open internet is sometimes referred to as net neutrality.
Well, hold on a second.
So you're telling me that I can use my Facebook Messenger to talk to my Yahoo Messenger?
Really?
That's what they're saying.
No, I'm just being the devil's advocate.
That's what I'm saying.
Or that Facebook is an open system?
No.
Not unless you're registered.
It's not open.
It's closed.
It's quite the opposite.
Under this principle, and here's the kicker, under this principle of net neutrality or open internet or whatever, consumers can make their own choices about what applications and service to use and are free to decide what lawful content they want to access, create, or share.
Lawful, well, we'll get to that, because we agree on the legality of it.
But they specifically, and I'm very familiar with Title II, because I had a lot of time today to read it.
The next title in the act is about broadcasts, but they're just not there yet.
So long game, you may be right.
You may be right.
But I have...
I'll get to this in a minute, because I'm going to give you information straight from the horse's mouth.
But I really need to point out the bogativity of these cries for help.
And so many...
I mean, I watched you on Twit, and I know you're staying away from...
It's like talking to a brick wall, so I understand why you're kind of backed off.
And you still are getting a little huffy...
You know, for the same people who said we never should regulate the internet, but now, oh, please come in and regulate the internet for all the wrong reasons, which is basically, I want Netflix.
That's the only thing that is.
These people providing alternative content are complaining about their Hollywood content.
It's pathetic.
But listen to...
Ironic.
Yeah, it's ironic and pathetic.
Just listen to the explanations, because this is very typical of...
And when you hear it, like, oh yeah, fuck, man, we gotta get on this, yeah, protest, yeah, turn my Twitter icon black, man, slow down the internet, no slowdown.
Amazing, and that's because of the rules which govern how it works, an important one of which is net neutrality, treating all data equally.
Okay, so there is no rule anywhere that is net neutrality, and all data by no means is treated equally on network.
Some internet providers want to ditch this rule to insert themselves betwixt you and your data as the most meddlesome middlemen in human history.
And the word betwixt is just not okay when you're explaining something to somebody.
It's just not okay.
To their benefit and our detriment.
How?
Well, think of the internet as a series of pipes.
Really?
Some are ocean and continent-spanning pipes through which vast rivers of...
Not trucks.
Not trucks, no.
Oh, you don't get access to those.
They're very expensive and you couldn't handle it anyway.
Interesting.
Yes, it's very expensive.
And I guess, who pays for that?
Just magic, this expensive backbone?
But you do have a little pipe that connects to the big pipes through which you can pull down and send out data.
You pay your internet provider to maintain this pipe.
That's not entirely true.
But okay, I'll let you slide on that.
on that.
Now, this is very interesting.
Now they've turned this around to say that the ISPs are on the news saying they want to build fast lanes.
This is not true.
This is not how the news came to be.
The news was Netflix specifically wanting...
specific type of access into the pipes and specific type of performance on these networks.
That was the conversation that started.
No ISP has said, oh, we have to remove net neutrality.
Show me one ISP who has said, we need to get rid of this so-called net neutrality, which is not a rule, does not exist as a written governance piece of legislation.
But this is how it's being portrayed.
And this is just Lies!
They want you to think they're expanding your access to the information superhighway, but removing this rule also gives them the power to speed bump the existing roads and charge more to use the fast lane that was really just what you had before.
Okay, that just...
Right, I mean, really?
Put in speed bombs to charge you for the fast lane which you had before.
This road analogy has got to...
Anyone who's giving you this does not know what they're talking about.
The power to preference some data over others is the power to favor one video site over another and to limit a tiny part of the pipe for the video you're watching right now.
And now they're like cutting it out.
You know, this condescending, patronizing style of chat is very much like MSNBC. This guy sounds like Chris Hayes.
Well, it's probably the same people who are behind it.
And now they're giving you a buffering thing.
And look again, what's happening here is you won't be able to get the video you want.
Really?
I mean, what happened to the production and upstream and sending things and sharing information?
No, no.
They will determine what video you can watch.
And this, unfortunately, is what a lot of people, the majority of people are like, oh, really?
I can't watch that video?
Oh, the video will buffer?
Oh, that sucks.
Or trying to...
Anyway, we've been through this before, constraining other companies in similar ways.
Take electricity.
You pay for a certain amount, and when it arrives in your house, you can do with it what you wish.
Okay!
I love the electricity analogy.
The certain amount you pay is not a fixed amount per month.
Okay?
If you leave the lights on and your air conditioner running 24 hours a day, your bill...
You're saying okay at the end of your sentences.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's late.
Yeah, I'm just mentioning it.
Thank you.
Thank you for calling it.
No, you're paying.
It's metered.
Hello.
It's metered.
But that's not what they're going to give as an example.
The electricity company doesn't get to decide that rather than build more power plants, it's going to dim your bulbs and then offer a brighter bulbs monthly subscription.
Do you hear this example?
They are...
Chris, what is this you're playing?
It's one of these non-profits, man.
Yeah, I got tons of these.
This has to be the worst of them all.
All right, well, I'm going to stop this.
Keep playing it.
I'm fascinated by this guy.
Really?
He's so arrogant.
Really?
And he's condescending.
He's so condescending and patronizing.
He's smug in a weird way, and he's just trying to bullshit you.
Also know that what you're seeing on screen is a lot of stick figures being drawn.
This drawing thing has got to go.
Not to be overly dramatic here, but preserving data equality may be one of the most important issues in a generation.
A generation?
Because without this rule, internet providers could cripple competitors they don't like.
I got some other things that might be important decisions like, um, let me think.
Let's not kill people anymore, particularly if they're brown and live in sand.
Let's not educate our children to be slaves for Motorola and Dell and Microsoft.
Let's not inject things that 24 to 30 shots before a child is one and a half.
Let's spread that out a little bit.
I got some other important decisions to make here.
Drawing douche.
Ever notice the same company that sells you internet also sells cable TV and landlines?
Stuff the internet...
Wow!
...replaces without data...
Let me write that down.
Hold on.
Stop the thing.
I gotta write that down.
I never noticed that before.
Have you ever noticed it?
Yeah, I never noticed it.
No backsies.
No backsies?
He said that?
Yeah, yeah.
This is very hip-talk.
And he's drawing stuff on the screen.
And you actually see no backsies.
Don't be surprised when years later all the traffic to them is fast and free while the roads elsewhere are slow and neglected.
This town is basically the internet without net neutrality, which some internet providers would love, but actual internet citizens not so much.
Not so much.
All the data the same lets one guy with a good idea and a bit of programming knowledge make something today that's seen by millions tomorrow, but only because his data is treated equally with everything else in those pipes.
All right.
I think these things would be better if at some point in the middle of all these drawings they draw two dogs fucking.
Just right in the middle of it.
That's something I'd watch.
Alright, do you need to hear the rest?
It's a little bit more.
No, no, you're probably right.
I think we're done.
It is getting annoying at this point.
Okay, so I believe that the people listening to No Agenda do not need to be patronized and do not need to have little drawings and analogies of fast lanes and toll boosts and speed bumps and broken condoms, whatever analogy you want to use.
I think our people can handle real information and they will actually understand it if it's explained to them in terms that are true.
And not this...
Ah, makes me mad.
Okay.
Before you say any more, you should maybe reiterate, you know, why is this even going on?
The guy who invented the term net neutrality has even backed off on what he, you know, his original thesis.
You brought that up in a show.
His original thesis is that this needs to be a metered service.
That is in Tim Wu's original paper.
Yes, and although it is impossible from an engineering technical perspective to literally treat every packet as equal...
That set aside, in his original paper, the only way for true democratization of how data travels on a network and who gets to use what, because it is not an infinite resource, is through metered service.
You use more, you pay more.
That is what this is all about.
Now, I read to you the paragraph the FCC released today.
The FCC proposes to rely on a legal blueprint set out by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
This is what started it all.
There was a lawsuit.
In its January decision, Verizon v.
FCC, using FCC's authority to promote broadband deployment to all Americans under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
At the same time, the commission will seriously consider using its authority under the telecommunications regulation found in Title II of the Communications Act.
So that would mean regulating Internet access as a utility like the telephone system, which also I'd like to point out is a metered service.
If you talk more, you pay more.
It's always been that way.
In addition, the notice proposes to retain the definitions and scope of the 2010 rules which govern broadband Internet access service providers but not services like enterprise services, Internet traffic exchange, and specialized services.
Enterprise services means for businesses, they can have a different deal than consumers.
Internet traffic exchange, very important because that is the market of how the internet works, which a lot of it is not, no money flows, it's peering from network to network.
This is what really makes the internet work.
And specialized services, which would be your Netflix inside your network so that it works the way you want it at a price that will be reasonable for you.
The agency proposes to enhance the existing transparency rule, which was upheld in the D.C. Court.
The proposed enhancements would provide consumers, edge providers, and the Commission with detailed disclosures, including information on the nature of congestion that impacts consumers' use of online services and timely notice of new practices.
So if they're going to make a change, and this is the proposal, based upon managing their network, they will have to tell you why and who's to blame.
As part of the revived no-blocking rule, proposes ensuring that all who use the internet can enjoy robust, fast, and dynamic internet access.
I understand everything in that sentence except dynamic.
I don't know what they mean by that.
Tentatively concludes that priority service offered exclusively by a broadband provider to an affiliate should be considered illegal until proven otherwise.
Let's read that again.
Priority service offered exclusively to an affiliate should be considered illegal until proven otherwise.
So that is the NBC Comcast clause.
You can't provide some kind of priority to your own content.
Ask how to devise a rigorous multi-factor screen to analyze whether any conduct hurts consumers, competition, free expression, and civic engagement, and other criteria under a legal standard termed commercial reasonableness, which is already kind of in place.
Ask a series of detailed questions about what legal authority provides the most effective means of keeping the Internet open.
There's your open, broad statement.
Section 706 or Title 2, so which one will it be?
And proposes a multifaceted process to promptly resolve and head off disputes, including an ombudsperson to act as a watchdog on behalf of consumers and startups and small businesses.
In other words, the FCC is saying, yeah, we think we should regulate this, and we probably want to do it in a manner that is consistent.
That depends whether it be 706 or Title II, but it's kind of the same thing.
It will be consistent with some form of utility, although, from what I'm reading here, the proposal is to keep it a little bit more open.
Now, The CEO of Comcast spoke to his investors.
Now it's two days ago.
And it was streamed on a conference call.
This happens all the time.
Public companies do this.
And this is for investors to listen to.
And in this case, it was not the typical call-in Q&A, like a quarterly report.
But there was a Q&A with an insider at Comcast asking the CEO questions.
And I have three clips from this, and I believe that when our listeners hear these clips, they will not only understand what the debate is really about, but they will understand the technical portion of it, and they will understand where it is headed because it is laid out very clearly by the guy who's on the other side of the debate if you look at the whole net neutrality issue.
So here he is explaining about what he is calling, I think it's appropriate term, paid prioritization, that would be Netflix, and Title II, and what that really entails if we go for a Title II regulation by the FCC. Then you have this reaction of,
oh my god, he's authorizing a fast lane, that's the death of net neutrality, and therefore we have to go to Title II. I think there are a lot of synapses in that logical chain, but I'm going to give you the biggest one.
And Tom Wheeler himself has written about it in a blog.
Lots of people have commented on it, which is, and I hope this isn't headline news to everyone in this room, but there is nothing in Title II that provides authority for saying that all services have to be treated the same.
In fact, the whole history of Title II has been that telecom carriers regulated under Title II are absolutely allowed to provide different levels of service for different amounts of money.
Think about Bells providing different levels of service to businesses versus residences.
And in fact, the language of Title II is That the differentiation in services being provided has to be commercially reasonable.
Now, this is interesting.
The one thing most people have right, and I'm going to use Leo Laporte as an example, I think a lot of our listeners have seen his stance on this, is that Wheeler is an insider for the Cable Television Association, where a lot of the providers are cable companies, and he is right that they are playing together and working together towards a common goal.
But he is incorrect in thinking this comment.
I think it's purely political.
I think politicians love using it to get votes and contributions.
Podcasters love saying this and bloggers love saying it to garner sympathy or something like this.
Like, oh, look at me, look at me.
I'm all for net neutrality.
But it is not in anyone's interest to slow down your video or slow down your website.
These guys are doing one thing and one thing only, playing together because their dream has always been to legally have a way to set your price and charge you more if you go over a certain price point and have that regulated by the government.
This is what they want.
They really, really want this because broadband, all types of access for the internet, have been going down because there's real competition, certainly in the main market, which is the peering and exchange market.
And this is a little bit longer clip.
This I think will help explain exactly what the different markets are and why you are going to have to pay for what you use.
There are two different markets here.
There is the last mile market where we as an ISP deliver content to our customers and charge customers for that content and they access the internet by going through Comcast as an ISP. And there is what I would call a first-mile market,
which is the way in which the Internet at large, the Internet edge providers, content providers, get their content onto our network to be able to be consumed by our consumers.
The open Internet debate It's about that first market.
It's about the last mile market.
It's about treating, making sure that consumers have an open and unfettered access to all the content on the Internet, that there's no blocking, there's no discrimination in the way in which they get access to that content.
The interconnection market is a completely different market, and it functions in a different way.
It is a market that I would argue is intensely competitive.
I think the ISP market is competitive, but the interconnection market is intensely competitive.
There are dozens of very large players in that space who are selling transit services.
So much by the competition is so intense in that market that the pricing in the interconnection market has dropped 99% in the last 15 years.
So among the dozens of large players here, Comcast alone has 40 companies With which we have settlement-free hearing.
That is, we don't pay them anything, they don't pay us anything, because our traffic is roughly in balance.
And there was a time when Netflix was using Akamai Level 3, then Cogent, and their traffic was in balance with our traffic, so there was no way in that model for us to collect anything without completely disrupting the business model and structure of the interconnection market, which I think would be a mistake to do.
Now, before I continue, is this clear, John?
Do you find this clear, what he is saying about the interconnection market?
Yeah, this is the old peering situation where you have all these backbone providers, and there's a bunch of them you've never heard of.
I mean, the public hasn't.
And they do deals.
Yeah, and they do...
They try to balance the deal.
So, okay, we'll give you a better connection to this, but you need the connection to me, and you're going to use so much of what I have, and I'm going to use so much of what you have.
And this is all, of course, bypassing the real internet main nodes, which is May East and May West and those sorts of things, which you actually have to pay a lot of money to get on.
And the whole world is about bypassing, so there's all these deals.
And when you have a movie, so what is a movie?
A gigabyte?
I'm just going to throw a number out there.
Maybe four.
HD? Could be more.
That's actually about a gigabyte the way they do it today, yeah.
So a gigabyte.
I remember waiting an hour for one megabyte to download on my 56k frame relay.
Or maybe that was the 28.8.
Regardless.
So, what he's saying is there was a time when Netflix was, and they were using, they might have been using Akama, I think they were using Cogent because he brings that up, but any type of provider, and these guys are not cheap.
It's very expensive to distribute that kind of data to Through a company like Akamai to these edge providers, and depending on which network you're going to and which deals you have, you're going to find yourself in different scenarios, different pricing.
And so obviously, as Netflix grows, it is not an infinite resource.
Bandwidth, including the network of Comcast, pipes become saturated, routers become saturated, there is management necessary, there is upgrade of equipment necessary, and these video services, Netflix being the one that has really kicked all this off, are really using up a lot of resources, and somebody has to pay.
What he's saying is, I really don't want that to be the interconnect part, because that will ruin the internet.
And I happen to agree.
So his idea is, you know, bring that inside the network and, you know, give them some kind of priority inside my network if that's what people want.
But that is actually doing the opposite of ruining it for everyone else.
It is making more room for the other traffic that is within balance.
We continue.
And Reed Hastings has said at Netflix that when he calls for strong net neutrality, I think his definition of net neutrality...
He's talking about Reed Hastings, I guess, the Netflix CEO....neutrality is transport shouldn't have a charge associated with it.
But he's talking about the interconnection line.
At the interconnection line.
He would like free transit.
Yeah.
And, Alec, Reed, I have a huge amount of respect for Reed Hastings.
He's built an amazing business.
And I don't blame him for saying I'd like my transit to be free.
And he used to pay $700 million...
To the United States Postal Service, taking $700 million cost out of your business is a good thing.
But I point out, you know, I'd like set-top boxes for free.
Imagine how much that would take out of our business and how much we could lower the pricing for our customers.
But somebody's got to pay for the set-top boxes.
I mean, and it's obviously we're the most logical person to pay for the set-top boxes.
Reid's argument that That he should have free transit, and it's a cogent argument as well, and that there should be free transit is just a cost-shifting argument.
That's an argument.
For transit providers, content delivery networks, other transit providers, to connect to our network.
There is a cost to that.
And if Netflix doesn't bear its share of those costs to connect to the network, then we have no choice but to raise prices for everyone else.
Even though Netflix is responsible for a third of the traffic on the Internet at peak times, that means two-thirds of the traffic is not Netflix.
Making a rough approximation here, why should two-thirds of the people who never use Netflix pay for the cost for Netflix to attach to our network?
It doesn't make any sense.
This, to me, is a very compelling argument.
And he is saying exactly the opposite of people who are calling the ISPs the evil devil.
He's saying, you know, Netflix is ruining the experience for everyone else.
We don't want to start charging people at the edge the opposite of what everyone thinks is happening.
We want to bring them inside the network and help them, but yeah, it's a cost somewhere, and it's probably going to be cheaper if they come inside the network.
But you're going to raise prices across the board, and here is the Comcast, the largest ISP in the United States, here is there.
What he is proposing will happen over the next five years, and I am here to report it is a version of metered internet.
It will be much more friendly than your telephone or your electricity bill.
We have a series of pilots.
We've got three or four different structure of pilots.
You know, when we started, we had two basic models, which is One is, depending on the tier of service you bought, that's how much capacity we would give you in a month.
So you'd get, whatever, 250 gig at, and I don't remember these numbers were right, at 15 at our 15 meg down service and 350 at 50 meg and 550 at 100 meg and whatever.
And then we had a model where everybody got 300 or 350, and you could buy extra packages of 10 meg each as you went through them for $10.
And tentatively, we're not there yet.
It seems like the second model is preferable to consumers than the first model.
The first model didn't really understand.
It was a little confusing to them.
It seems like the second model is preferable to that.
In our pilot markets, more than 98% of our customers are not affected by this.
So you're talking about something less than 2% of the customers being affected by these pilots.
I would predict that in five years Comcast at least would have a usage-based billing model rolled out across its footprint.
Usage-based billing model, and here's a CEO of a publicly listed company who is predicting something, which means he's really sure of his case.
These guys don't just, these forward-looking statements, you don't just do this stuff before shareholders unless you're very sure of where you're headed and what's going to happen.
Here's the pricing.
But I would also predict that the vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the In buying the additional buckets of usage.
That we'll always want to set the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.
And that number may be 350.
That might be 350 gig a month today.
It might be 500 gig a month in five years.
But it will never I don't think we will want to be in a model where it is fully variableized and, you know, 80% of our customers are implicated by usage-based billing and are all buying different packets of usage.
I don't think that's the model that we are heading toward.
But it is usage-based billing.
And that's exactly what he wants.
Well, I think what he really would like...
Well, yeah, because there's kind of an interesting trick here.
Essentially, it's a high minimum that you pay for it.
You're paying for stuff you don't use, in that case.
You're paying for stuff you don't use, which is great.
And then if you go over, you have to pay more, which is exactly what these guys like.
I mean, this is the cell phone model.
They love this model.
And this is what you get when you get regulation.
And that's what's going to happen, which I've always said is going to happen.
I've actually advocated it myself because it's the only thing that makes any sense.
But there's an interesting thing here about Netflix, which I thought was unique, which is Netflix did this deal because it's...
People were getting a questionable experience, and so they had to up the ante by doing this pairing agreement with Comcast, which is interesting because Reed Hastings, if you look it up, is just bitching and moaning about the, you know, he's a big promoter of net neutrality.
This whole thing is almost like a scheme dreamed up by Netflix to get a better deal, a better, more throughput without having to pay for it.
Yeah.
Oh, you know, the customer's going to have to pay for it.
Net neutrality is so we can get our movies through.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
The whole thing, everybody's playing, what your theory is, and I'm more or less into this idea, even though I have this more onerous concept.
Well, and that may come.
That may come.
I'm on board with that.
But the basic theory is that these guys are playing into the hands of Netflix.
Yeah.
Not anybody else.
You're not going to get any better...
YouTube.
No, you're going to get better Netflix.
You're going to get a guaranteed good Netflix.
And you're going to pay for it.
Yeah.
And it's going to be set by law.
And it's going to be set by law.
And it's all about Netflix.
If people would say, oh wow, I really want to have better YouTube...
No, screw YouTube.
I want to get better Blogspot posts.
Well, not even that.
Blogspot is also owned by some...
Isn't that also Google product?
Yeah.
Let's face it.
How many really independent companies are there?
I'll tell you.
Twit is one.
And I think, if anything, and I'm all for the little guy.
I'm all for Leo.
I want him to succeed.
I enjoy watching his success.
But his bandwidth comes from cashfly.
And you watch.
There's going to be problems.
Because of net neutrality.
And it's going to...
People and customers are going to pay more and be paid more by usage base and it's going to be set in law.
It's going to be statutory.
And congratulations.
Well, an operation like Leo's, which chews up a lot of bandwidth, because they're doing video on shows.
They have way too many shows.
They're always experimenting.
They keep too many shows on the air, I think.
And there are video, a lot of video feeds, which is high bandwidth.
And they're all high def.
They're nice feeds.
They're great.
Mm-hmm.
But there's too much of it, and he's going to either have to cut back on his programming or whatever, or have to pay more, which I think he can afford, to be honest about it.
Yeah.
But it hurts, I think, a lot of these networks of podcasts.
Like us, for example.
We have a podcast.
Yes.
It's like, we're never going to approach the...
The limits at all.
Because it's one show and there's no video.
Actually, we don't use much ban with doing this show.
No.
At all.
We don't have to stream it?
There's no reason for streaming?
Right, although you like to stream.
Of course I like it, but there's no reason for it.
No, we don't stream DH Unplugged.
I mean more that you don't...
So if you wanted to watch a Netflix movie, if you're not streaming it, you'd have to wait for it to download, and that would be a bad experience because, oh man, I've got to wait an hour for this whole movie to download, and then I can watch it.
So that's why people want it streaming, so you can kick it off in kind of an on-demand experience.
With us, you might have to wait two minutes.
If you have a slow connection.
And by the way, a lot of people have said, man, it took so long to download.
It took five minutes.
That's because sometimes we have different peering agreements run through different routes to keep costs down on our provider side, which, by the way, is kindly provided for by the Frownet guys.
We actually pay for it.
There's a lot of management that goes on, and it's not free.
It's not like they just have a server somewhere and unlimited bandwidth.
No!
And if you want any kind of experience, they have all kinds of agreements and routes that they take through different ISPs, and they can change that based upon demand and based upon billing cycles.
And you watch the 95.5.
Everyone's going to be on some version of 95.5.
And if you want to know what that is, look it up.
Even I don't really understand how it works.
You always get screwed when you go over 95% for bursts or whatever.
But anyway...
The bottom line is, do not accept fast lane, speed bump, toll road analogies.
You're right, this is all Netflix and just not wanting to pay up.
You are going to be paying, and you are going to be paying more if you want Netflix.
And if you watch a lot of it, you're going to be paying more than you pay now.
And the difference is, not only do you not have the competition in most cases, you now will not be able to bitch and moan because it will be set in law and the government will regulate it.
That's what you're voting for when you yell net neutrality and change your icon to black and talk about slowing down the net and ha ha ha.
That's the bottom line.
And I hope that it's clear now.
You're nuts.
Yeah, I guess I am.
I mean, this is really interesting to listen to this long spiel because it was pretty, you know, you had a lot of details, you have your theories, they all make sense.
Then you have the quotes from the Comcast guy, which is a guy who would know, and all the rest of it.
And it's, no, no, this is just a complete waste of your time.
No offense.
No, I know, I know.
Well, we have to provide this public service.
We have, I've been on the show, like you said, I've been on Leo's show twice where this came up.
And I could bring, and I drew the metered thing at him the last time.
I said, well, because I had argued with Leo two years ago about metering the internet.
I said, it's the foregone conclusion.
It's like going to be like water.
You use water.
You know, it's everywhere.
The water's everywhere.
But you turn on the faucet in your house and you got to pay for it.
And that's the way the internet has to go.
There's no...
There's two ways about it.
I mean, essentially, that way, not only, they're gouging it.
Yeah, but it's a lack of technical knowledge of how the internet actually works when people say, they're double-dipping.
This is...
It's two complete different markets.
There's two different things taking place.
Well, there's also, you know, Theo and a lot of these guys, they think that they're going to have...
They think they're going to get...
It's targeting them to gouge them.
Yeah.
Well, in some ways, it probably is true.
It may happen, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and sorry.
But if you've been getting, you know, essentially, you're using a distribution mechanism that for all practical purposes is free.
Although it's not free.
We pay to have our content distributed because it has to be done by some professional group.
It can't be just on my server.
No, and it's also, it has to go, it's a lot of bandwidth when you look at how many people download the show, and that bandwidth has to be paid for.
It is not free.
It is not just, you hook up the pipe and you're good to go.
This is the part that people, you know, Leo hasn't really had to deal with bandwidth because he gets from cash fly through some old AOL deal or whatever it is.
And one day someone's going to wake up and is going to say, you know, and that's what he's afraid of.
I understand.
Yeah.
You know, you're pushing a lot of bits here and our interconnect is getting pretty weird.
We're out of whack.
We're going to have to start buying transit and back halls.
Another example of this sort of thing is that you're right.
This happened to me a couple of times.
You're a writer.
You do a deal with some magazine and you get paid way too much.
It's way over the top.
Because there's a moment in time you catch the guys when they have to pay to get you or whatever.
And this isn't...
All deals are like this.
And then somewhere down the line where you're not needed anymore and the bookkeeper comes in and says, what is this?
This guy's done.
And you're done.
And...
This is, Leo has been coasting on that cashfly thing.
I have a version of this right now.
You know, the company in LA is, you know, they're tightening their belt and they're, you know, looking for something to happen and stuff going on and, you know, all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, the cell phone, yeah, no, we're not going to pay for that anyway.
Yeah, you know, have you heard of Cobra?
You know, these things happen.
It's life.
You provide value.
Things go the way you want.
You're right.
It's like the writer thing.
It's like everything.
Somebody has to pay somewhere.
Yeah, and when the bean counters come in, that's what they do.
They don't care.
Alright, speaking of people.
So Leo has a, because I always sit next to him there when I'm on the show, and he really has a look of...
Disdain, disgust, and amazement.
No, not me.
No, he has a look of fear.
Yeah, he does.
It's a very slight look of, this is not good.
He knows he's going to eat into his bottom line.
He's got Lisa, who's really running the show, and she's, you know, not a spendthrift.
And she said, look, we can't, we're just one less vacation.
You know, there's one thing we can't do now.
We've got to sell the Audi.
What are we going to do?
We've got to sell the Audi.
Yeah, and I'm not going to bust you on not wanting to get into the podcast patent thing.
You backed out of that.
Oh, well, no.
Actually, that's interesting.
You should bring that up because we have to talk about it.
Not on this show.
I don't want to talk about it.
We'll talk about it.
I talked to Lisa.
Lisa.
You always told me to go in there and find out what the hell's going on.
And?
That they're not supposed to talk about it.
That's what their lawyer said.
Don't talk about this.
Just not talk about it.
There's more details we can talk about later.
I don't want to, you know, know his business or anything.
But when he said that to me, and then Leo brings it up, I just said, we're not talking about this.
Ah, okay.
I was just working for the company.
Oh, alright.
No, because the chat room was like, eh, Curry's a dick.
He's against the podcast troll.
No, I was working.
I was all in with this company operation when I did that.
You were told by Lisa to shut up and not talk about it, and Leo brings it up.
You're like, no, we're not talking about it.
Right, exactly.
Good man.
Well, good.
You saved him.
Well, yeah, he should have shut up.
He shouldn't be talking about it.
This is the thing to be talking about.
I'm so happy.
That's very kind of you.
You could have gotten a cheap shot in there, but you saved him.
I'm a company man when it comes down to it.
I'm going to show my support by donating to no agenda.
Imagine all the people who could do that.
Oh, yeah, that'd be fab.
We do have some people to thank for show 617, which has got a six in the 6 plus 1, you get 7, there's opportunities here.
Sir Dennis Cruz.
Wait, he's back?
Yeah, the den man is back again.
No, no, I'm sorry.
Well, I just thought I'd give him an extra plug.
No, Tim, Kate, and Margaret McKernan in Roanoke, Virginia, who sent in a cute note, handwritten on a card.
This is card day.
This is like we get the two requests for the one clip, and now we have the two cards coming in.
A handwritten in longhand, which I assume this would be Margaret that wrote, maybe Katie, because no guy writes like this.
Dear John and Adam, just sending in some value for value, even though Club 33 is no more our favor.
I can't read it.
Blah, blah, blah.
Maybe make it rain here in Roanoke to sustain our vegetable garden.
We should do those.
Do you have a rain stick?
I didn't bring rain stick, man.
Oh, I can do the rain stick.
Yeah, do the rain stick while I get a glass.
Let's see here.
Here we go for Roanoke.
Should be in better fidelity with his mic.
We have been almost completely unsuccessful in the attempts to hit people in the mouth.
Yeah, it's hard.
Really, in Virginia.
Our only convert is our 10-year-old daughter, Margaret.
She comes home from her government school each day.
Tells us what she learned and asks us to tell her the truth.
Oh, wow.
We call it the De-Education Thursday.
Aww.
Keep up the good work.
Isn't that a pathetic kind of work?
That's good.
It's interesting, but weird.
Hey, are you familiar with the Ibiki?
No.
Wow.
What's Ibiki?
It's, uh...
Uh...
Suntory Whiskey?
17-year-old Suntory Whiskey?
Yeah?
What about it?
Hibiki.
Well, Dame Astrid said, here's a bottle, you need to drink that.
You have a bottle of the 17 Suntory?
No, I have half a bottle now.
Oh, you drank half of it already?
Yes.
This is really good stuff.
It's a very outstanding product.
Suntory makes a good product.
They own a lot of Bordeaux vineyards, they own some Scotch distilleries, and they do their own blending for the Suntory label.
I'm drinking it now, as we speak.
Very, very good company.
I'm drinking it as we speak, and the time is 2.37 a.m.
Anthony Disamore in Springfield, Missouri, $101.01.
He does send a note.
I will read notes when they send in like this sometimes, especially if they're short.
I've been listening a few months and love your program, but the clip show blew me away.
If this is the caliber of media deconstruction analysis you always provide, I would be remiss not to provide some value for value.
You should take my money.
$101.01 and keep up the good work.
It's funny, on the plane ride, Which was door-to-door 18 hours, but the flight from Atlanta was 13 and a half.
Yeah.
And I had the dog catcher app on the Android tablet.
I like the tablet because it has a huge battery life.
So I was listening to DH Unplugged and I had, I don't know, Tarpley or something.
And I kind of slipped to sleep.
Ah, we gotcha.
Oh, you got me.
But I woke up and it was the clip show.
And it was, I have to say, it was good.
I totally agree.
The clip show, there was some stuff in there.
I was like, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ramsey did a great job on that.
It was a good clip.
But, you know, it's us.
Dude.
We have a very funny show.
Dude.
Okay.
Dude.
Dude.
We do good work.
And we have normal conversations too.
It's not like we're just completely doing this constantly without chatting about certain things.
I'm dicking around on the email.
I can tell.
Sorry.
Because I got some things here I can't read out because I don't have them.
Urbandale Studios, EK in Freiburg, Germany, Deutschland.
I've been to Freiburg.
Very nice place.
It's in the Black Forest.
$100.33.
He's got a note somewhere I can't find.
Maria and Lane Rau in Anchorage, Alaska, $100.
Matthew Anderson in Roslingdale, Massachusetts, $100.
I know!
We have three of those Niner, Niner, Niners.
Vladimir Stashkov in Russia.
Hey.
Uh...
Does he have a note here?
He's got something he says.
In the morning, John and I would like to remind freeloading boners out there to donate to the show as it is scientifically proven fact you are not fully immune to the mainstream propaganda until you become a regular donor to the show.
Until then, boneheads who have yet to donate should feel like a Dutch retard from a famous city of crusted butt where everyone speaks disingenuous and extremely offensive dialect of Chinese.
I'm not sure what that means.
I don't either.
By the way, this is where they keep the plane and the Nigerian girls.
Could you please give me some appropriate Niner Niner karma to get into German university?
Yes, well you got the Niner Niner and we'll give you karma at the end with everyone else.
Absolutely.
Irwin Owens Jr.
in Alameda, California, right down the street.
I can actually wave to him, $99.99.
Paulina Spencer, also $99.99.
She's from London and we got a call out for a birthday here.
Dutchman living in London makes everyone listen to your show, including me, drives me mad.
I'm a douchebag, she says.
Brian Williams in Streamwood, Illinois, 7373.
And that comes in monthly.
He actually donates $73.73 every month by check through his bank.
Very nice.
Andrew Otta in Wahoo, Nebraska, 60.
I like his name.
Thanks for the entertaining and informative show.
Yes, that is William White from Honea Path, South Carolina, 5432.
And he says, after a long bout of douchebaggery, I doubt this one will de-douche me, but here's a start.
Okay.
Upstate South Carolina, whatever that means.
Thomas J. Riley, Wheaton, Illinois, who also comes in from the bank.
Cameron Smith in Wangare, New Zealand.
James Thompson, Cherrydale, Oh, Kansas, sorry.
Kansas and the USA. Brett Yeo, Baltimore, Maryland, 5028, and the following are all $50 donors.
Let me just scroll down to them, including the first one, which has some sort of weird character, Aichi Kitagawa.
He's in Japan.
It says Sweden, but I believe he is in...
What's that San Francisco I have here?
No, Aichi Kitagawa or San Francisco.
Oh, right, right.
I'm looking at the wrong one.
You're right.
Aichi is in San Francisco.
And then Eric...
Johnson is in somewhere in Sweden.
50 bucks and he wants you to take some iodine pills while you're there.
Chris Lewinsky in Sherwood Park, Alberta.
Common donor.
That's where all the money is.
Timothy Keiman in Bellevue, Michigan.
50.
These are all 50s.
Taylor Bentley in Tacoma, Washington.
Brandon Savoy.
Parts Unknown.
Mike Westerfield.
I don't know.
He comes in every month with 50.
Patricia Worthington in Miami Beach or Miami?
Sorry, just Miami.
Walter Grant IV in Moreno Valley.
And finally, another regular Kevin or Sir Kevin Payne in Chantilly, Virginia.
Who apparently was one of those Virginians hit in the mouth, which I guess is a problem in some parts of Virginia.
Like Roanoke.
And that concludes our donors for show 617.
We do have people that donate less than $50, which are kept anonymous, and I want to thank them and everyone else, and remind you to go to dvorak.org slash NA for the Sunday show.
Thank you.
Yes, and I'd like to give some karma out to everyone who needs it.
In fact, let me make that job karma, although no one requested it.
Typically, people need that.
And I heard on this Dvorak Horowitz Unplugged podcast that 800,000 people just disappeared off of the face of the earth, which brought our unemployment numbers down, but we don't know where those 800,000 people went.
They're on the streets of San Francisco from what I can tell.
So we got some jobs karma, also special karma for Mr.
Oil and his family.
They had a tragic event this morning, and so we're thinking of them and giving them lots of karma as well.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
You've got karma.
And I'd also like to thank FrawlNet because they did discount us and considered it a donation for $150, which should have been on the list.
Oh, very cool.
Very cool.
We put it as a total.
All right, so no nights, no nothing.
We got nothing, nothing.
We got birthdays.
Yeah, we got birthdays, but I would like to see some more.
I mean, here we are.
I think we're providing the value for you.
It's a quarter to three in Tokyo.
And tomorrow, of course, there's a big party, which I'll tell you about in a moment.
A party in Tokyo!
Dvorak.org.
Slash N-A.
That's right.
It's your birthday, birthday.
Oh, no, I'm going to go.
Brett Yo says happy birthday to his bestie, his bestie, Matt, 28 on the 13th.
So this is a belated birthday.
Paulina Spencer says happy birthday to Edward Luchtenberg.
He'll be celebrating on the 27th.
And Morgan Diller says happy birthday to boyfriend Nick.
He turns 22 today.
Happy birthday from all of your buddies here at The Best Podcast.
Ian, the universe.
I love it when women are giving their men...
The shout-outs and donations and birthday stuff.
It's nice.
I want to mention something to the letter from Vladimir.
Yes.
In Russia.
Yes.
There is a...
We have to emphasize this a little bit.
People...
I know people that have...
They listen to the show and then they think they've got it.
They've figured it all out.
And then some of them stop listening to the show.
Oh?
Yeah.
Yeah, we lose listeners.
We have a lot of new listeners, but there are people that need...
I just want to remind people that...
But there's revelations in every one of these shows, and sometimes I provide them, Adam provides them very consistently, and when I hear them myself, I'm thinking, oh, I didn't even think of that.
And that is kind of one of the values of the show, which is, oh, I didn't even think of that.
It's so obvious.
Right, right.
And that happens commonly with the show, but the reason you didn't think of it, because if you stop listening to No Agenda...
You get complacent.
You will be sucked back into the mess...
Yep.
And you will have this, you know, you will be just another slave out there just bumbling around.
You'll wake up one day and you're like, oh my god, I'm getting turned on by Kim Kardashian's fat ass and you're lost, you're gone!
Stick with the show.
It's good for you.
It's a very healthy show.
This is a healthy show.
It's a good diet show.
Everything about it is good.
You use it.
Listen to it on the gym.
I'm talking to Sir Mark and Dame Astrid.
Now, these two, when you see the work they've done, you should see this.
I don't know if you saw the blog post that I did about the...
It's a bookstore, but it's not.
This place is like a mega complex, which is a restaurant, it's a coffee bar, it's a bar, it's a library, it's iTunes, it's an Apple store, people go hang out, things open 20 hours a day, and it's a huge project.
And they are no slouches.
No, they're big shots.
Yeah, although in Tokyo or in Japan in general, no one's a big shot.
Everyone plays it down.
Like, you know, hey, whatever.
It's a team effort.
Yeah, every nail gets hammered down, kind of thing.
Yeah, but Dame Astrid also says, oh, no, we couldn't do this great work if we didn't have a great client.
I'm like, wow.
I always said we'd have a great business if we had no clients.
But they do not watch news.
They don't.
Good for them.
No, they don't watch news.
They listen, they figure, well, we didn't know.
And by the way, they don't necessarily, they're not, I think Daymaster is more on board with certainly my thinking, but our thinking, and I think Sir Mark may not even agree with a lot of stuff, but they use our program to keep themselves sane without being sucked into the whole system of the news cycle.
And in fact, when pressed upon it, They said that we definitely are influential in their award-winning architectural design.
Well, that's sweet.
It's not true, but it's sweet.
You know, a lot of people...
In fact, I said, hey, do we influence your award-winning architectural design?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure, Curry.
Sanity is like one of the things that we've noticed that people are thanking us for in these notes.
I noticed that when we had the last contribution from the anonymous lesbian performance artist...
At the bottom, there's a little note on the check.
It said sanity.
Because that's what we provide.
You're paying us for sanity.
Because it's insane if you don't deconstruct these stories and just listen to the mainstream media feeding you crap.
Feeding you memes.
For instance, there is this meme, and this is a typical no-agenda thinking and analysis.
There's an ongoing meme about, and there's conferences, and you see the stories of robots and being autonomous and killer robots and the transhumanist robots, and everyone's talking about...
Have you seen these stories?
Yeah, it's great.
Tons of them right now.
Why are they happening right now?
Because on the 23rd of May...
A new movie?
Yes, X-Men Days of Future Past, which is about robots gone berserk.
Oh, robots, yeah.
And once you understand how the system works, and that first and foremost everything on television and in the news is meant to promote another entertainment product...
It's also funny because when I was hunting around, there's a new Transformers movie coming out as well.
Robots?
Yes.
I'm getting all the Japanese pre-rolls.
Which is kind of cute.
Here's what I got for the Transformers movie.
And you can just hear the dispassionate energy that was put into this promo of Transformers.
Hello Japan, Mark Wahlberg here.
Go check out my latest film, Transformers Lost Age.
It has tons of action, some new characters, and it's full of effects that you've never seen before.
It opens in Japan in August.
Don't miss it.
All right, Mark, we're doing the Spanish market next.
Hello, Mexico!
Really?
Wow.
That's the way they do this.
Wow.
Well, since you brought up movies, I do have, and this time I'm trying to make it easy on you, and I don't want you to look at anything up.
I don't want you going to the chat room, because this is...
Well, I'm off the chat room, so there's no way I can...
So I'm going to give you an easy guess the movie for today.
This is something I do about once a month, maybe.
Hold on a second.
Hold on.
Let's just cue up the...
And now it's time for another episode of Guess That Movie.
Yeah.
All right.
Do you need to set it up or can I just...
No, it's pretty self-explanatory.
Where are you going?
I'm making sloppy joes for dinner.
I can't stay for dinner.
Pecker, you've got to eat!
Why do you think we called him Pecker?
Never did he properly as a child, just pecked at us food.
Well, I'm not hungry, and besides, I'm late for my photo shoot with Tina.
Oh, Pecker, we love your big sister, but you know how we feel about that place where she works.
The Devil's Workshop!
Well, at least they don't show pubic hair.
That's one good thing I can say.
Honey, don't say pubic in front of little Chrissy.
Bye, Mom.
Bye, sweetie.
Pecker, please bring me a soda!
Okay, okay.
Bye, Dad.
It'll be too late, Pecker.
This is, uh, yes, I know this one.
I believe this to be Happy Days the Movie.
You know, I've gone out of my way.
This is a segment of the show that I believe is important because it has a little light levity.
And you always fail to guess the name of the movies.
I don't think you're taking it seriously.
This time, I gave you every hint in the world.
That it must be called Pecker or something.
Exactly.
It's Pecker.
It's called Pecker.
You can look it up.
I've never heard of this movie.
Yes, it was on Epix.
I've never heard of this movie.
And now it's time for another episode of Guess That.
It's interesting you bring that up because I felt that I really did need to brush up on some of my movie skills.
And there's a number of movies.
I realize I really suck at this.
And it's because I don't watch a lot of movies.
On the plane...
We had Delta.
Horrible.
Just not a good experience.
Just to interrupt you, I seem to get most of my intense movie viewing on planes.
You get to watch three or four movies on a flight to Japan.
Yeah, so I watched...
I know I had seen it, but I couldn't remember.
I watched Taxi Driver.
They're showing oldies but goodies?
Yeah, they have this back catalog.
It's on demand, and it was not as good as I remember it, or man, it's just like, whatever.
You looking at me?
Yeah, but that, you know...
You talking to me?
So I know all of those classic scenes, but when you see them in the movie, like, uh, alright, not all that great.
Although I'd forgotten the What's-Her-Face from Moonlighting.
Right.
She was hot, man, back in the day.
What else did I watch?
I watched Men in Black 3.
That's a horrible film!
Yes, you are correct.
And what else did I watch?
I don't remember.
The best movies to watch on a plane are the Fast and Furious series.
I'm not going to watch that.
Seriously.
Let's do a little bit of Snowden stuff, and then we've got to go pretty soon.
We're running over time already.
Michael Hayden said something very interesting.
This was on a panel show.
He was on the show with Major Garrett, who was moderating, and then some lawyer.
And then we're talking about...
I think an attorney for the NSA and talking about metadata.
And the guy who was clearly invited to yell at Michael Hayden, I think he was an EFF type, that kind of guy.
Was essentially saying, wow man, metadata is so much more important, and Peter Baker, this attorney, had said this, that we don't need to listen to the content of your phone call.
Metadata is really what's important.
That really tells us about your life, about who you're calling, what time you call them, how often you call them, and it's much more important than the drivel you're actually saying on the call.
To which Michael Hayden responds, and Michael Hayden of course ran the NSA, and did he also run the CIA? Yes, during the torture period.
He's the torture guy.
He is the torture guy.
And he should lay low, it seems to me, but okay.
Well, he's doing anything but laying low.
We heard him on that show with Dershowitz, and he were against the Reddit kid and Greenwald.
And he's just going balls to the wall, man.
Yeah, first of all, David's description of what you can do with metadata and quoting a mutual friend, Stuart Baker, is absolutely correct.
We kill people based on metadata.
Alrighty.
The guy's unbelievable.
What is he saying stuff like that?
And he follows it up with this.
But that's not what we do with this metadata.
Oh, okay.
Stuart Baker, not Peter Baker.
Whatever that means.
This guy's insane.
No, he is totally off.
He's gone.
Because he's worried sick about this.
He's going to get tried as a war criminal.
He should.
Uh, Grand Green Raul, don't rap, don't rap.
Uh, was on the C-SPAN show.
Thanks, everybody, for thinking of us.
Thanks for calling in with your question or going, Hey, Grand Green Raul.
Just to do that would have been funny.
The C-SPAN call-in show.
It's so easy to get on that show, or just go, Hey, Grand Grava!
No, no.
But someone called in with something funny.
Chuck waiting in Kansas City, Missouri, on our line for Democrats.
Chuck, good morning.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Go ahead, Chuck.
Yeah, I wanted to ask, since we can't address the surveillance state unless we address the issues surrounding what is used to justify it, there weren't more journalists writing about the evidence that explosives destroyed the 3rd Tower of Building 7 on 9-11 and all the thousands...
Hey Chuck, we're going to hold off on the 9-11 questions.
We'll stick to NSA Edward Snowden as we're talking with...
WTC7 won't go away.
Questions about WTC7 won't go away.
I love it though.
That's so funny.
I got the Eurovision character.
He came out and he actually said something.
Oh, wow.
The winner, you know that guy.
Yeah, the converted lady.
Conchita Wurst, yeah.
Yes!
You know who you are.
We are unity.
And we are unstoppable.
The contest has played an important role in bringing Europeans together since it was first held in 1956.
You know who you are.
We are unity.
We are unstoppable.
What is he talking about?
I think the Antarctic ice melt is unstoppable, so maybe that...
I didn't realize that, and maybe this has always been this way, because of course I'm looking, how do they rig this vote to have this obvious why this Conchita worst won?
I did not know that they split the popular vote through phone and SMS voting in each country with a professional quote-unquote jury who also votes.
Oh, well that's how you do it.
That's how you do it.
Simple.
I don't know if it was always that way or if that's something that's new or relatively new.
That's when they politicized it.
I'm sure when it began in 1956, there was no call-in anyway.
They just, I don't know.
They probably added the call-in later.
That's an American gimmick to rack up money for the phone companies.
Just a quick couple of things that I have on the list, and I'll save some of this for Sunday's show.
A lot of people weirded out, to say the least, about the new rules that are being proposed, but will go into effect, it looks.
In Gitmo Nation East, the United Kingdom, if you have not paid your taxes, if you have been issued several warnings for paying your taxes, the British government now will take the amount from your bank account.
Well, they do that here.
No, they don't.
They lock your bank account and they can put a lien on it, but they don't actually take the amount.
It comes down to the same thing, but I think there's a nuance, there's a slight difference in just saying, oh, we'll just take it, don't worry about it.
Usually, you know, if you're not paying your taxes, it's unlikely that you have the taxable amount sitting in a bank account for them to just casually grab.
Correct.
And I think it's only a setup to a next step, which is just, you know what, why don't we all just don't worry about it, we'll just take your taxes from your bank account.
That's why I think they're doing it.
It's just to get set for that next step.
Maybe.
Alright, well, you have to go to bed.
You've got to produce the show.
We've got some clips.
I've got a whole series of things.
This Cohen guy showed up again.
Our professor?
Professor Cohen from NYU. Yeah, he showed up on...
What show did he show up on?
He showed up on Democracy Now.
Oh, okay.
He's doing the rounds again.
He was on some radio show and...
The democracy now, because democracy now, when they bring a guest on like this, they'll give the guy a half hour.
It's not like, you know, we got 10 minutes, like PBS NewsHour, the guy's on and makes, you know, keep it tight, keep it tight, soundbite, soundbite, give it a...
No.
The democracy now, they drag it out, and often it's horribly boring and stupid, and it goes on forever, you don't watch it.
This guy is just loaded with material, so I've got a bunch of clips from him that will just make your hair stand up.
You give us a teaser?
It's a teaser, my friend.
I don't have a teaser.
Oh, you don't have a clip?
Okay.
Alright.
I have, for Sunday's show...
See, I have a whole bunch of John Miller clips.
Which is very interesting about Al-Qaeda and what Al-Qaeda does and doesn't do and what influences them.
And he, of course, is the authority, being a former NSA employee, then working at CBS and softballing everything, and now back working for New York City, I should say.
Yeah, that guy.
The guy who did the great 60 minutes.
Yeah, that piece, exactly.
Breakdown of the NSA, which was just a joke.
All right, so we will be back on Sunday.
Did this time work for you, this little earlier?
Yeah, that's fine.
I can do this time again.
All right, so it works great for me, because now it's 3.
By the time I'm done, I'll be in bed by 4.30 or sleep at 5.
And then you've got a party.
Yes, the party.
I have the flyer right here.
It is the 50-50 party.
Is that tonight?
Friday night, yeah.
Oh.
Performing DJ Toretto.
Is that the DJ? That's me.
Actually, we have some really super acts performing.
This is all at the Super Lux.
Is it Super Luxe?
Super Deluxe?
Super...
I can't remember.
Yeah, what's the name of the place?
Well, yeah, Super Deluxe in Tokyo.
That is actually Sir Mark and Dame Astrid's project they have.
They do all these performances, and they do it from donations.
It's very cool.
But most importantly, the 5678s from Kill Bill will be performing.
That's the Japanese girl band?
Yeah.
Yeah, they're going to be performing for our birthday.
And it looks like pole dancers, so...
Sorry you can't be there.
Yeah, sorry you can't be there, my friend.
I've seen pole dancers.
I know.
They go on a pole, they swing around the pole, they climb up the pole, they slide down the pole.
Some of them go upside down on the pole and then slide down.
I know.
And then they swing out from the pole.
You ran a club, man.
I know, I know.
I wonder what the...
Yeah, yeah, the club.
You ran an entire...
Yeah, pole dancers.
You ran this entire club that worked out for a little while.
Yeah, but looking back on it, you know, I've always wondered why, who invented pole dancing?
You know, when you go to Vancouver, or no, Toronto, they have unionized strippers.
And so they go from club to club to club in these little jitneys.
Oh.
And see the same girl everywhere.
Oh.
But I was taken to a club, I think it was in Toronto, and they had this thing where the girl performs well on the pole.
The crowd starts yelling, shower, shower, shower, all in unison, and then the girl has to go into this shower, which is on stage, and turn it on.
Nice.
This is a Canadian's idea of cool, fun.
All right, everybody.
So we'll be back on Sunday right here.
And please support the program.
We're really trying to do our best for you here.
Dvorak.org slash NA. Any more reports from Japan?
Yes, we'll have more reports.
We'll move around and actually see the place?
Yeah, we'll have some more reports from Japan, from Tokyo here.
We're going to go to Akihabara?
We'll start here.
We've got a party, remember?
Coming to you from the Hot Pockets Wasabi Love Hotel here in Tokyo.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from the past, the near past...
From Northern Silicon Valley, that is.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
And we'll talk to you again on Sunday, right here on No Agenda.
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