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Dec. 21, 2014 - No Agenda
02:50:25
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What is he talking about?
You don't get a time out.
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It's Sunday, December 21st, 2014.
Time for your Gitmo Nation Media Assassination Episode 680.
This is No Agenda.
Celebrating the solstice with a moon dance, live from FEMA Region 6 in the capital of the drone star state, Austin Tejas.
In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where I'm under attack by ants, John C. Corack.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
In the morning.
This is not the first time this has happened that I can recall on the show.
Right.
This has happened before.
I'm sure it happens all the time.
I live in California.
We're victims of the Argentinian ant.
I remember having this in Los Angeles.
Remember we had our attack?
Yeah.
They'd circled the whole house and then all of a sudden I guess it's when the big rains came maybe?
Oh yeah.
They don't like being drowned.
No.
And then they were coming through the light sockets.
Oh yeah.
You'd put something down on the ground like a cup for two seconds and then It's astonishing how quick they find something.
Now, is this not something that goes all the way from the Northwest all the way down to Mexico?
Is this like one big colony, this super colony, or is this something else?
Yeah, it's an interesting group.
They do not get to Washington State.
It's an interesting group, these ants.
Well, it's because it's the only variety of ant that doesn't fight amongst themselves.
So they're part of one giant collective hive.
Most ants, if one hive sees another, they go into war and try to kill each other.
But if, for example, you wipe out a nest of these things, and there's a bunch of stragglers, and they go find another nest, they're welcomed.
So these are like commie ants.
Yes, they're communist ants!
No wonder they're all over California.
And what are they called?
They're Argentinian?
That's what they're called?
Yeah, they're Argentinian ants.
You can look them up.
Yeah, fine.
They're annoying.
Very annoying.
Yes.
They get it in their heads that they can be somewhere or do something.
It takes days to get rid of them.
Okay.
Why don't we just wrap this up?
How do you get rid of them, John?
Well, you vacuum them up as fast as you can.
You block their entrance.
I use ant block with poison before I see them coming in.
Of course, then they move and they start coming in someplace else.
You just keep doing that.
One of the things I've learned recently, which is kind of gruesome, but it works.
Is you get one of the...
This is good information for people on the coast or anyone who's confronted by these ants.
You get a scriptoliter.
A scriptoliter, yeah.
One of those lighters.
Those little lighter guns.
Oh.
Barbecues.
Oh, yeah.
Find a bunch of these ants and you fry them.
Well, you've got to have the flamethrowing scripto version.
Yeah, yeah.
You fry as many ants as you can.
Everyone you see moving, you fry them all and leave them there.
Yeah, so they send off a stench and a message.
No, no.
They get picked up.
Oh.
The dead ants, the Argentinian ants are interesting because they used to build most of their ant hills.
They used their own dead compatriots.
My goodness, John.
What an education I'm receiving here.
The Middle Ages used to do that with human skulls and stuff.
In fact, there's a church in Spain that's made out of skulls.
I think we do that in Corpus Christi still.
That wouldn't surprise me.
Anyway, so they take it, and when they get the ones back that have been burnt to a crisp, they send out the words that, uh-oh, this isn't good.
And then they just disappear.
We don't see them again for weeks.
Wow.
Anyway.
Well, this is...
As long as they're not in the kitchen cabinets.
Once that happens, then you're in deep shit.
Well, that's the time to get the...
The problem is you've got to be careful you don't catch the house on fire burning these ants because right now they're all paperwork.
I can't do it.
We have Terminix take care of all this for us in L.A. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but they don't...
The problem with the professionals is that I don't think they really...
For one thing, they're all high school drop.
No offense.
I know there's a couple that listen to the show.
But a lot of them don't give a damn, and they just as soon kill you as...
Turn it off now!
It's fine, fine, fine.
So you're in a bad mood, clearly.
Would you be in a bad mood?
You had ants crawling all over the place.
I have so many...
Yeah, I can be in a bad mood, but I'm not going to be...
In fact, I'm in a bad mood for a different reason.
May I? Okay, hit it.
This past week, twice, and the week before that...
I go on Facebook, which as you know I don't do regularly, but I do at least every 48 hours I'll check in.
And again, it's two people I know who are dead.
And this is so depressing.
Matthew Hennessey, who worked at my company in New York, Think New Ideas, and he'd moved to the Austin area, I don't know how long ago, and when I arrived here, and Matthew 41, 42, was, and he's like, hey man, it's Adam, good to have you here, to Facebook.
He said, yeah, we should have a drink.
I'm like, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, and that was a good guy, so I figured we'll do that one day.
And then in your timeline, show us, oh, well, he's dead.
What?
Yeah.
How old was he?
41.
That's not right.
No.
Then we have Celeste Rufo.
Now, we already lost Warren Cucurulo.
There were two camera people at MTV, Warren and Celeste.
And Warren died of...
They probably both died of lung cancer because we were all smokers back in there.
We'd be smoking in the studio before we'd do a segment.
Put this cigarette down.
Warren died two years ago, and Celeste, who was an Emmy award-winning cameraman, went on after MTV to do a lot of incredible stuff.
But you know, it's like when somebody who, for seven or eight years, you've looked at them looking at you, and you build up a very strange relationship, but it is a bond of some sorts.
And then it's like, oh, well, Celeste is dead.
62.
Now here's the thing that pisses me off.
One, I open up Facebook, all I get is dead people.
Fuck this.
This is annoying.
Two, you never find out what happened, because that's what you want to say.
Shoot, what happened?
What happened?
How did they die?
But of course, everyone's too polite and doing RIPs.
I miss you.
I want to know what happened.
And then, of course, I sit down and go, should I just type in?
Like, will somebody please tell me what happened?
Did you do that?
Did you type in and express this thought?
Kind of.
Kind of?
So, wait a minute.
So you're complaining about the politeness, and then you go polite.
No, I went unpolite, actually.
And I even posted, I want to hold hands with everybody now and tell a secret.
And then everyone thinks I'm a dick, of course.
But I really want to...
Why does everyone think you're a dick?
Because you didn't do R.I.P. You're not respectful.
R.I.P. R.I.P. R.I.P. And I realize that, you know, I'm 50 now.
Who knows how long it's...
I hope I live to be like my grandparents, 98.
That would be great.
And I could be really...
Tends to be genetic.
Hunchbacked over, but I'll have all my hair and I'll be kind of...
Just make sure you have a cane that you can lift up those skirts.
Yes, that's a very, very, very good tip.
Thank you.
Thank you for this tip.
John C. DeVore.
You're sick.
The C stands for cane.
And now we know.
It's becoming a good theme, that sea.
That sea is versatile.
Yes, it's very versatile.
But here's what I realized.
That's it.
When I die, no matter when it is, there'll be...
R.I.P. A slew of R.I.P. Oh, Dana Miller.
Did I tell you Dana Miller died?
Who's Dana Miller?
Dana Miller was my radio syndicator.
And Dana was...
His boyfriend died 25 years ago of AIDS. And Dana became this huge AIDS activist.
Ran the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the AIDS Project Los Angeles.
And Dana...
But he was a manager, like Rick Springfield, Corey Hart, but also Andy Gibb.
Death around Dana all the time.
Everybody with Dana just died eventually.
But he was a very strong force.
Dana, like, 62.
Huh, 62 seems to be the...
Yeah, and everyone around Dana dies.
Dana doesn't die.
These ants are dying, that's for sure.
And so anyway, I realize that's what it's going to be.
I'm going to die one day, and there'll be no Sarah.
No one will care by the time I'm dead.
No, I will.
It'll just be a thread on Facebook.
Oh, rip!
R.I.P. R.I.P., oh boy!
I joined Facebook just to say this.
R.I.P. Yeah, and then everybody posts pictures of the dead people.
Well, remember this one?
Yeah, remember this one?
And then someone will come in and say, I just want to say right now, I love all of you!
But nobody wants to talk about the method or the rationale or the reason for the death, how he died, you know, slow, miserable death, tortured by terrorists, nothing.
No, nothing.
And no one's honest, of course.
No one's honest.
Maybe it's like a wake or something.
Yeah, I know.
There's been instances where somebody died and you say to yourself, Jesus, it was about time, that prick.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what you think.
I mean, what can you say?
I mean, that would seem to be something.
If you were being honest, it has to happen with a number of people.
So I'm now completely pissed off with this.
I'm like, oh, no more Facebook.
Let me go to Twitter.
And then I see...
Now I've seen everything.
I see a photo...
With the caption, perfect rainy day breakfast.
Egg, roasty style potatoes and English bangers.
Posted by at the real Dvorak.
You are now a food social network tweeter.
Yeah, I've decided.
This is ruining everything.
Knowing that this irked you to no extreme, you know what that means.
Yeah, more of this?
Well, I have, like, it's curious because JC started the idea.
He started taking pictures of all the dinners.
This is so wrong.
Your food looks like crap.
It's hard to make food look good.
The bangers look undercooked.
The egg is burnt on the edges.
The roasty looks kind of good.
You put ketchup on it to ruin the taste.
No, no, no.
Ketchup and potatoes American way.
That's true.
And the roasty's roasty, whatever it is.
Yeah, the egg is cooked hot, so I get a nice crispy little edge around it.
And did you actually...
She would say, whatever it is, you're going to bitch about it.
So it doesn't mean anything.
My opinion is useless.
I totally agree.
She started taking pictures of all the dinners, and so I took a few of my...
He says, I said, what are you doing?
He says, I'm taking pictures of the food.
It's time for this kid to get his own apartment.
He says that he studied this.
He says, if you want to get more followers, you want lots of pictures of food.
He's documented this.
That's interesting, because I've got to get over the hill here.
I'm stuck at 99,000 followers.
I need to go to like 100.
Well, if you unblocked a couple people, maybe your count would go up.
I doubt it.
Does that get docked from your count if you block?
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, once you block them, you could actually block them.
You could be at 200,000 if you unblock everybody.
Oh, right.
So anyway, I've decided I'm going to follow suit and start posting pictures of food with maybe some food tips.
Sad.
Very sad.
Well, the food tips will be good.
All right.
The good news is I found out that at Universal Studios, they have...
Now, Universal Studios, the tour, if you've never been on it, it's changed a lot over the years.
And you can get out and you don't have to sit in the stupid bus the whole time.
And probably you don't have to sit in it at all if you don't want to.
But you know Megatron?
Megatron, is he a transformer?
You're talking about Universal Studios in Los Angeles?
Yes, yes I am.
Because the one in Florida and Orlando is just like...
You might as well be at Disneyland.
Okay.
Megatron.
Megatron, is Megatron not, is he a Transformer or is he one of the Transformers?
So they have a dude in a Megatron suit and he is on a crusade against selfies.
And it's consistent.
So here's this girl.
She runs up in front of Megatron and, you know, selfie!
And listen to what he then does.
You've got to see the video, actually.
It's even cooler because the guy, you know, is in the suit, like, freaking out behind her.
Selfie!
You will not receive a selfie so long as you stand before me with your ridiculous furred hoodie.
When will you learn that your status updates mean zero to nothing to anyone ever?
It doesn't matter which social network you posted on.
Worthless.
Use your mind.
Create new memories.
Interact.
Don't just add it to a library of forgotten photographs.
Okay.
Ugh!
How disappointing your generation is!
Bye.
It's good.
How disappointing your generation is!
Yeah, exactly!
That little sub-clip is what you should say for an everything.
How disappointing your generation is!
Yeah, I tried to isolate it, but it doesn't really work very well.
No, no.
Uh...
But I like that, and there's always a backup gig for me, I guess.
Yeah, no, I think so.
The Megatron man.
Exactly, you could probably do that same rant.
Be the Megatron man.
Well, you have your own version of it.
Marika Marika Marika Marika Intended to say Murica, but yeah.
No, I meant Marika.
I know you meant Marika.
Hey, John, do you know that we are from the future, you and I? Well, me more than you, but sometimes, you know, I bring you along on my future travels.
Oh, yeah, and?
What happened?
What's the latest from the future?
Well, I want to take us back to episode 677 of the Best Podcast in the Universe.
That was, uh, so what's that now, two weeks ago?
Was it?
77.
What number are we on?
We're at 80, so that's three, yeah, almost two weeks ago.
Okay.
Okay.
And here is what we were talking about.
Oh, we were talking about Uncle Don and how he agreed that South Korea...
We are performing a sales job on South Korea since they are now going to be responsible for their own defense, their own OPSEC. And we were kind of laughing about how we create all these reasons for...
And I guess companies to be worrisome.
And it's a sales job.
Everything we do is a sales job to sell more weapons.
Right?
Exactly.
That's what we do.
To address the threat.
I mean, the precedent is essentially...
Somebody would...
Somebody would point...
I pointed...
I was back and forth in the email of somebody.
And...
They just said, well, I don't understand why the...
Oh, I know that voice.
I know this guy.
Was it the Chinese?
Who bought all these Russian reactors?
India.
Oh, General Electric makes reactors.
How come they didn't sell these reactors?
Why does Russia get this 24 reactor contract?
Cheap ruble, I'd say.
Well, besides, I think that was pre-cheap ruble.
Now it's just a better deal, but they'll do it in dollars anyway, ironically.
Yeah.
And I said, well, because these deals, these sort of deals are done by this chief sales guy who is either Obama or Putin.
Putin!
And Putin was there, you know, doing the deal to get this contract signed because that's what they do.
Yes.
The president of the United States is the CEO of the military-industrial complex.
Yes, literally.
It's his job to close these deals in one way or another.
They call him the chief executive.
Yeah, he's the chief executive.
So here we were talking about this in relation to South Korea, and this is before the big Sony news.
This is just us talking about South Korea and, of course, keeping North Korea dangerous as part of the sales job to address the threats from the Korean Peninsula.
This kind of tells you that at least for the next period that is now being financed, I presume the bill is going to pass, We will see North Korea being very, very dangerous and us helping ourselves and our allies.
Can you mention some stuff?
You're playing a clip.
Yes, I am playing a clip.
Yeah, well, you have to say something.
I said we're playing a clip.
Yeah, you said that, but then you never...
The transition was vague, and so it sounded like you were just still talking.
That's how good the quality of this audio is on our show.
I'm so sorry.
So I'm listening to you saying, this is funny.
He said this exact same thing.
What's he leading up to?
Why is he doing this again?
I'm actually leading up to you having the punchline.
Right.
Okay, now start the clip now.
The whole...
Okay, over again, and I'll do...
I'll separate it.
To address the threats from the Korean Peninsula.
This kind of tells you that at least for the next period that is now being financed, I presume the bill is going to pass, we will see North Korea being very, very dangerous and us helping ourselves and our allies, Japan and the Republic of Korea, with some sales.
That's what it's all about.
You have to kind of feel sorry for the North Koreans because they're a punching bag.
They're being vilified as a sales mechanism.
Yeah.
Well, isn't that what the whole axis of evil was to start with?
Well, it looks like it in hindsight.
There you go.
We called it.
Yeah, of course.
I'd forgotten about it.
Oh.
Completely forgotten about it.
Well, I haven't forgotten about the other angle that we're seeing here, which is...
Well, your angle is right on the money, John.
Like, completely right on the money.
The angle of getting everybody to sign on to the cyber-sharing bill.
And the president signed five bills in the middle of the night.
The ones we discussed...
All about the sharing, but even better than that, he just came out and said it!
Did you see this whole year-ender thing that he did?
I have the two clips.
I have a couple clips, too, so I'll take yours.
Let me do my two.
I try to cut them down as much as I can, and then I have a couple other clips that are kind of interesting, side clips.
Well, here's the clip of...
I want to play this clip first and make a comment on it.
This is the Obama, we do not need two-bit dictators telling us what to do.
So, you know, that's not who we are.
That's not what America's about.
Again, I'm sympathetic that...
Sony, as a private company, was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other.
I wish they'd spoken to me first.
I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.
Imagine if Instead of it being a cyber threat, somebody had broken into their offices and destroyed a bunch of computers and stolen disks.
He goes off the rail with this clip.
Yes.
Did you also see Sony CEO Michael Linton's response?
No, I didn't.
I have this.
It's a little longer than what you just did, but the whole thing is great and there's something very fascinating at the very beginning of this.
The president says Sony made a mistake.
By the way, Sony rebutted earlier in print that they had contacted the CIA, which is interesting, since the FBI came out with the analysis and the weak forensics.
But they said, we were in touch with the authorities from day one, so that's not true that they didn't contact anybody.
Pulling the film.
Did you make a mistake?
No, I think actually the unfortunate part is, in this instance, the president, the press, and the public are mistaken as to what actually happened.
We do not own movie theaters.
We cannot determine whether or not a movie will be played in movie theaters.
So, to sort of rehearse for a moment the sequence of events...
Now, this was very interesting when I heard him say this.
This is how media training and PR can go awry.
And I didn't notice it until I heard the clip.
I was watching the video first.
Instead of saying to review the timeline, he says, let's rehearse the timeline.
Yeah, I heard that too.
Which to me means that he was rehearsed and someone said, okay, let's rehearse the timeline again.
Don't you think?
I'd like to believe that's what he's...
But he's in the business of using words wrong, you know?
Okay.
That's his business.
It's quite possible that he just doesn't know the right word in movie theaters.
We cannot determine whether or not a movie will be played in movie theaters.
So, to sort of rehearse for a moment the sequence of events, we experienced the worst cyber attack in American history.
Okay.
I don't know about that.
That's dubious.
Shelley Adelson might have a different view of that as his casino, they stole millions of dollars and shut down his operations.
And we don't know how many banks are robbed.
Who knows?
This is totally...
But it's rehearsed.
And persevered for three and a half weeks under enormous stress.
And by the way, I have people on the inside and have a couple emails to share.
The network is still down inside Sony.
Desktop machines still have the...
The desktop GOP image, which of course is easy to deploy if you're in an IT environment.
An enormous difficulty.
And all with the effort of trying to keep our business up and running and get this movie out into the public.
Oh, yes.
When it came to the crucial moment when a threat came out from what was called the GOP at the time, Threatening audiences who would go to the movie theaters.
The movie theaters came to us one by one over the course of a very short period of time.
We were completely surprised by it.
And announced that they would not carry the movie.
At that point in time, we had no alternative but to not proceed with the theatrical release on the 25th of December.
And that's all we did.
So you have not caved in your view?
We have not caved, we have not given in, we have persevered, and we have not backed down.
We have always had every desire to have the American public see this movie.
You are well known as somebody who supported President Obama.
Yes.
Were you disappointed in what you heard today?
I would be fibbing to say I wasn't disappointed.
Fibbing!
Fibbing!
The President and I haven't spoken.
I don't know exactly whether he understands the sequence of events that led up to the movies not being shown in the movie theaters.
Therefore, I would disagree with the notion that it was a mistake.
It's a generally held view by the public and the press that that's what happened, and maybe that's how that view was held by him.
But knowing, as I do, the facts and how they've unfolded, we stood extremely firm in terms of making certain that this movie would appear in movie theaters.
Yes, it was a very important piece of work.
And I will say, the Christmas Day release, you do focus a lot of energy on that.
A lot of money, a lot of promotion.
Eric the Shill, who is a big movie buff, I don't have these in front of me, but he went off the top of his head with about ten blockbusters that are all coming out around the same time, and it would be crazy to bring this movie out because it's going to fail.
Well, I don't know why.
I mean, the movie itself, as we know, is not important.
No, it's not important.
It was made important all of a sudden.
The cybersecurity bills are signed.
Did you get the president talking about actually...
Not about the signing, but let me play the rest of these clips.
This is the We Do Not Part 2.
Play that.
I played Part 2 first.
I'm sorry.
Oh, no wonder it didn't make sense.
Yeah, it's my mistake.
I want to play Part 1 now, then.
No, skip part one.
Play the confirming goal of government.
This is where my thesis that this is all about getting these companies scared so they have to join forces with our genius government who can't even run a public health website, but they're going to help you.
When I came into office, I stood up a cybersecurity interagency team to look at everything that we could do at the government level.
To prevent these kinds of attacks, we've been coordinating with the private sector.
A lot more needs to be done.
We're not even close to where we need to be.
And one of the things in the new year that I hope Congress is prepared to work with us on is strong cyber security laws that allow for information sharing across private sector platforms as well as the public sector so that we are Incorporating best practices and preventing these attacks from happening in the first place.
These are all now passed.
The president signed five of them.
We read at least two of them to you.
The cybersecurity sharing bill is in.
Is in!
But I'm very worried, John.
Can I take you on another sidetrack for a moment?
Well, before you do that, I just want to make a back comment, which is the Sony guy is very disappointed in all the rest of it.
But he obviously doesn't get what's going on.
No, he doesn't.
Of course not.
What's going on has got nothing to do with Sony or anybody else is to get these damn companies to join, you know, to do a deal with the government intelligence agencies to share data.
And this is going to be it.
And this is, of course, a continuation of a fascist state because we have cooperation and government working together.
And it's also part of the sales job.
Right.
Yeah, no, it's a double hit.
It's a win-win.
Now, here's where it gets a little frightening.
I'm perusing around, and there's the Texas Tribune newspaper, and they do, I don't know, regular interviews, I guess the editor-in-chief.
And they bring on a freshman congressman who was just now voted in and who will be a Republican in the House starting, I guess January, whenever they start the new session.
His name is Will Hurd, H-U-R-D. And Will Hurd is...
I think it's unprecedented.
He is going to be chairing...
Not a committee, probably a subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee.
He will be on the Department of Homeland Security Committee.
This is not very typical, or let's just say it's atypical for a freshman congressman to come in.
Now, this guy...
I think is very dangerous.
We have to keep our eye on guys like this.
He looks like he's seven feet tall, black guy from Texas, wearing boots.
He's got a very dynamic look.
He's got a very big presence about him.
He claims that he is...
Well, he's an expert in everything.
And this is what really bothered me about the guy.
He was always saying, like, oh, yeah, well, you know, this is...
In fact, let me play this out of order.
I'll tell you why I didn't trust him.
Right off the bat, he's asked about President Obama's actions on Cuba.
And here's what he says.
The problem here is the Libertad Act was 1996, not 1986.
So right off the bat, I'm like, this guy...
I thought you said 76.
He said 86.
It's 96.
And so right away, I'm like, this guy, I don't like this guy.
And now, this is the kind of person...
Because, of course, we know almost nobody knows computers.
They don't run computers.
They don't have iPads.
They don't know anything in Congress.
We've seen this time and time again.
Janet Napolitano ran Department of Homeland Security.
She claimed she could not use a computer or didn't.
Right.
A lot of these people don't.
A lot of these people don't, can't, won't, don't understand it.
Now they bring in this one guy, and of course in the land of the blind, one eye is king, and you can hear how he speaks.
He's a Silicon Valley douchebag from Texas.
He's a CIA guy.
Yeah, but now listen to how he trumps his CIA credits.
You know, this is something I have a little bit of experience on.
Well, you're a cybersecurity guy, so you understand.
Yeah, I'm a cybersecurity guy.
That's right.
My degree was in computer science.
All right.
Right, and it says right all the time.
I was in the CIA, I was undercover officer, and my job was collecting intelligence on threats to the homeland.
But I also did some offensive cyber operations.
Oh, I did some offensive cyber operations.
This guy sounds like he's full of shit.
Yeah, he's a phony.
...as well.
Penetrating the networks of folks that were hostile to us.
Folks.
And then, you know, when I got out of the agency and been in business the last five years, I helped start a...
Can he even talk about that if he was CIA? Can he even say, yeah, we penetrated some networks of folks that would be...
Can he even talk about these things like that?
Seems very unlikely.
I don't think so.
And then, you know, when I got out of the agency and been in business the last five years, I helped start a cybersecurity company.
Oh, really?
Oh, he helped start a cybersecurity company, so he's now going to come in because he knows everything about cybersecurity, or at least how to outsource it.
We basically break into banks, steal their money, show them how we did it, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We break into banks, steal their money, show them how we did it.
I hate this guy!
To protect our digital infrastructure.
He's an obvious phony.
Yeah.
Yeah, but listen to how he's going to be running the show.
Threats.
This is not the first dumb fuck that's been running the show that Obama brought in.
If you remember old Skip Logic, whatever his name was, that was our CTO. Vec Kundra.
Right.
Kundra.
Well, you know, we also have Megan Smith is now the CTO. Yeah.
Megan Smith, she's writing me letters.
Hold on, let's finish this guy.
You've got to hear this.
Our digital infrastructure is coming from all places.
And one of the things that I think the federal government does a poor job of is we go in...
Is recognizing bullshit artists.
And the federal government goes in and asks business, tell me more about this threat.
You know, we need to learn more.
How are they doing this?
Give us the details and getting down in the ones and zeros.
But the federal government rarely goes back and helps a business and gives a business information on the threat that they may know in order to help that business protect themselves.
I think this is probably one of the examples.
And I'm excited because I'm going to be in a position to do something about this in this next Congress.
I'm going to be on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
This is a committee that investigated Benghazi, or the investigation of Benghazi got started.
Right.
This is where Fast and the Furious was investigated.
And I'm going to be the chairman of a subcommittee on information security and information technology.
Right.
And so I'm the only...
Well, yeah.
That's a chair of a subcommittee.
And to be able to use my background experience on this issue and talk about information sharing, talk about the threats to some of these other groups and how that we can work to protect our critical infrastructure.
It's frightening to all.
How we can do this to protect our nation and ultimately consumer and client information.
But you're also on the Homeland Security Committee.
As of last week, Chairman McCall has arranged for you and another freshman Republican from Texas, John Racklin, to be members of the Homeland Security Committee.
From a Homeland Security perspective, is it a good idea to come back to the original question, though, for us to be essentially capitulating to the threats and demands of the people who we're at?
No, look, you don't negotiate with bad guys.
You don't negotiate with terrorists.
And to me, in this case, you know, we should...
The North Koreans, in my opinion, when it comes to their technical sophistication, you know, they're in kind of the tier two.
And look, we shouldn't capitulate for these guys.
You know, we need to roll up, make a fist sometime.
These people scare me, John.
These are the people who are going in.
He's a bullcrap artist.
You're right.
That's what he is.
Ran a cybersecurity after doing offensive cyber attacks in CIA, which I can't talk about.
Stealing from the banks and showing how he did it.
Yeah.
Charging him for it.
That's a sub clip.
Stealing from the banks and showing how he did it.
That's my next career.
Stealing from the bank.
Show him how he did it.
Stealing from the bank.
Show him how he did it.
Jake, I'm not a doctor and neither are you.
Damn it, Jim.
I'm a doctor, not a diplomat.
There you go.
Email?
Quick emails?
Insider emails?
Dude named Ben?
Okay, these have been redacted, obviously, because these are people who are inside or close or whatever.
So this job, not as easy as flicking on a switch.
I'm sure you know the FBI and Sony, to the best of their knowledge, believe it to be North Korea, but read Enemies, and I would say the book Enemies, the book describes about as competent as I think the FBI are.
Okay, I think it's North Korea.
This is our insider.
But I think it's also an inside job.
I believe there to be a number of groups involved.
He says, D.N. Ben?
Hacktivists?
North Korea?
The cash symbol?
The true culprits will never be found.
This is no simple job.
Now here comes the interesting part.
Ever since Bain Capital came in and started going after middle management, this does not surprise me.
I even saw Bain, this is Mitt Romney's company, I even saw Bain take a long time executive director's office And kicked him out just because the Bain dude liked the view.
Is it customary that Bain stays inside the company whose people it is trying to fire?
I would say yes, that is very customary.
This is what these guys do.
So Bain were really the people who came in and started to clean house.
And then...
From a visual effects insider, I've been working in the visual effects industry for over 15 years.
I've been part of huge visual effects-centric films.
James Bond, Harry Potter films, Disney, Marvel, you name it all.
I have plenty of friends at Sony.
Here are the points I reckon are worth noting about Sony and why I do agree this probably started as an inside job and spun out of control in the media manipulation machine.
Sony Picture Imageworks is the digital division.
This is what we were talking about.
The disgruntled employees.
Due to tax credits offered by Canadia, they were relocating work to Vancouver.
There's tax credits there for the studios, so not the companies doing the work.
Lots of people lost their jobs and or were asked to move to Vancouver.
Think about a thousand people that have worked and invested in a place for years with families and everything.
Sony Pictures Imageworks used to be at the forefront of this industry, winning Oscars, making kick-ass technology in movies.
The last years have been horrible.
Morale was low.
Movies are bad.
From Smurfs to Hotel Transylvania, people were losing their jobs and those who moved were working for crap movies.
On top of that, The top technology officers quit adding fire to everything.
All of this is something I've lived through the eyes of my colleagues.
Very possible this started in that division because people just completely bummed out.
And the visual effects industry has always been under pressure.
Oh, yeah.
They have no union, and there's all kinds of crap going on.
No, in fact, I was a special on one of these, I think it was on PBS, actually, and they were talking about these guys, they're like vagabonds.
They start one company, like Industrial Lights and Magic, and then they have spin-offs, and then they destroy all their models and go digital, and it's expensive to start up because of the computer power you need to do the modern stuff.
Not just a couple of iPhones.
And you never get paid enough.
You always get ripped off by the studios, you know, because it's very expensive to do some of these things.
It looks, you know, it's not, using the computer doesn't make the film cheaper.
Right.
If you do it right, where it looks, you know, the real deal.
And yeah, no, it's a nightmare apparently.
And I believe they have no union.
I think that's the main thing.
Well, it's because they're all independents.
If you look on the credit roll, it's always these little companies that they use to do this and that.
And they're not going to unionize.
They can't afford it.
Let's look at two fabulous quotes from the media.
Now, as you know, one of my pet peeves is how the press reports on matters of technology.
Because they think technology is tech, which means phones.
And there's very little information really about what is going on.
Here is first Rich Lowry.
He's from the National Review.
Listen to how he perceives what happened inside Sony.
What do you make of it?
What do you make of what Obama said about it?
Where do we all take all this?
This, by the way, is on PBS. The issue is astonishing and just extremely disturbing.
It's like Adolf Hitler being able to reach into this country in the 1930s and stop Charlie Chaplin from making fun of him.
I mean, this is a Seth Rogen and James Franco.
It's a threat to no one.
And they didn't just reach in and steal these emails, which were disseminated all over the place.
I mean, they really tried to prevent the functioning of the company by melting its hard drives and all the rest of it.
Okay.
Hello.
Hello.
I doubt they melted the hard drives.
I don't think they melted the hard drives.
So, I really...
It's a very bad precedent.
I think they should have released the movie in one form or another.
Everybody's saying this.
Even if they couldn't have gotten it in theaters, given the terror threat, they should have released it online.
And it's ultimately a national security issue because it's agents of a foreign power reaching into this country and punishing a movie studio for exercising its free speech rights in a way that foreign power doesn't like.
You know, there was a clip.
I don't know if I have that on this.
Well, yeah, I do.
I want to play this because I got a comment on this.
Let's see, Andrew and Mitchell.
Brooks.
This is, you know, Brooks and Shields, a little twosome that commentate on PBS NewsHour.
Did they sing Summer Wine?
Summer Breeze?
Oh, I thought it was a group.
Oh, that's good.
That's Brooks and Dunn.
Anyway, Brooks and Shields, they come out and we've...
They closed the book on themselves when they both came out in favor, you know, with the CIA, whose side are you on?
Yes, we played that on the last show.
Sold out, so we know that they're stooges.
They're all in.
So here's another example.
I guess they're all in now.
So this is Brooks and his comments, and this is Brooks proves he's a stooge.
Cyber attack on Sony Pictures.
First of all, the president said flat out today that Sony made a mistake.
What do you think?
Yeah, I guess I think so.
You know, it's, you know, like the president said, we can't have a country where people are self-censoring.
Self-censoring.
The president even said self-censoring.
Yes, self-censoring.
They've done a movie about a civil rights figure, and a bunch of racists said, we're going to do something to your company unless you pull this movie, and they pulled the movie.
It would have been clear.
It would have been a disgraceful thing to do.
And so I think this is somewhat similar.
I do have some sympathy for Sony.
They're out there all alone.
A country with spending apparently hundreds of millions of dollars to target them.
What?
Back it up.
How many millions?
A billion dollars?
You gotta hear this.
This is funny.
Hold on.
The action problem.
The companies have to stick together.
The government has to say an attack on...
Wait, was it back further?
Back further.
Sorry.
Sorry.
When I pulled the movie, it would have been clear it would have been a disgraceful thing to do.
And so I think this is somewhat similar.
I do have some sympathy for Sony.
They're out there all alone against a country with spending apparently hundreds of millions of dollars to target them.
What?
Apparently.
The North Korea, which is broke, by the way, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
Bitcoins, John.
Bitcoin.
It's got to be Bitcoin.
He should have thrown that in.
They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin.
Yeah, I heard you.
I want to talk a little bit about the self-censoring thing.
Should we play the President's comment real quick?
I have that here about his self-censorship thing here.
One of the things in the new year that I hope Congress is prepared to work with us on is strong cybersecurity laws that allow for information sharing across Private sector platforms as well as the public sector so that we are incorporating best practices and preventing these attacks from happening in the first place.
But even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better too.
Some of them are going to be state actors.
Some of them are going to be non-state actors.
Some of them will be from Microsoft.
All of them are going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage.
We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.
Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don't like.
Or news reports that they don't like.
Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship.
It took a long time.
Alright, so let's talk about...
That was actually that clip that you didn't play.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Self-censorship.
Let's think about this.
First of all, does anyone remember the movie, the 1976 film, The Prophet, The Messenger?
It had different titles.
The Prophet, The Messenger, or Mohammed.
That movie, it was...
We almost said it.
That movie was brought out Amidst a bunch of fat laws that said, you can't bring this movie out because you cannot depict Muhammad.
And they cowed the theaters to drop the movie.
It was never released.
It was a big controversy at the time.
It was a big deal.
And so ever since then, the self-censorship took place, and they've never done a movie anything like this again.
That was in 1976.
And if we think about more recently when somebody didn't self-censor, like Juan Williams, who got fired from PBS for saying that he would always think twice when he sees a bunch of Muslims coming on an airplane.
And they fired him, Vivian Schiller's crowd.
Yes, yes.
Fired him for this.
Horrible.
Just suggesting that he has feelings about this.
And self-censorship, I brought this up.
I had a meeting with an ex-New York Times editor who was working on a book.
And we're talking about the early days of tech reporting and how things have changed.
And many of the opinions I expressed are the ones that we talk about on the show.
But one of the things I did say, I brought up to him.
I said, well, you know, if you're a writer, you do a lot of self-censoring.
This is what you do.
If you're working for Time Warner, you're not thinking of doing an expose on the creepy...
When I was, just to interject, when I was working at MTV, when I got into MTV, before I was even on the air, I did an interview with TV Guide, which was big back in the day, it mattered.
And the question was, you know, what did you think of Madonna when you interviewed her?
I said, I didn't like her too much.
They lost their shit over that.
Don't you ever, ever!
Say anything like that about Madonna.
And then from then on, I'm like, guess what?
I didn't say anything bad about Madonna.
Of course not.
No, why?
And this is the way the media works.
Yeah.
But meanwhile, I thought it was interesting, there was a disparity in belief systems.
Because I know a number of New York Times reporters, and I've discussed this.
In fact, they discussed it with one of them after I had this meeting.
And I said, do you self-censor?
I said, hell yeah.
Of course.
Of course.
So I'm talking now, this is an editor of the New York Times.
And I say, I tell him this about the self-censory.
He says, well, I hope to God no writers do that on my watch.
And then he says, I don't think anyone at the New York Times practices such a thing.
Wow.
And he's dead serious.
So the editors, even though they'll do what they did to you, which is come up to you and say, you better not do that.
Yeah.
They are in a dream world!
In fact, it's always said it's they up at the office, they, the suits, those people don't really...
The suits.
The suits, yeah.
I have John Barrow, Josh Barrow, New York Times reporter.
And I believe that these New York Times reporters are so freaked out about this censorship issue, probably.
This is why they keep saying, oh, we have to get this movie out.
We have to get this movie out.
Because they feel that maybe it's their chance now.
You know what I mean, John?
There's something weird about everyone saying, we've got to get the movie out.
They should put the movie out, man, because we can't have them censoring us.
Freedom of speech.
Oh, you think it's overcompensating.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They're censoring themselves constantly.
Are you ready for what Josh Barrow?
What is he writing?
He's in the New York Times, right?
Josh Barrow.
Let me take a look.
Who is this guy?
This is Josh Barrow.
B-A-R-R-O, I think it is.
Josh Barrow.
Opinion journalist.
He's a columnist.
He says he's a neoliberal and Republican.
Whatever.
Neoliberal?
A neoliberal Republican?
He's the worst person in the world.
I'm looking at Wikipedia.
He's currently a neoliberal.
He's a domestic course.
Nobody in the right minds calls themselves a neoliberal.
He's considered one of the worst people.
Long story, I'm not going to go into it, but it's something not to be proud of.
In other words, he's a Clinton Republican.
Here we go.
Listen to what his idea is, how we should...
I mean, of all the things you could do, John, how can you force Sony's hand to releasing this movie online?
In your wildest dreams, what would a way to do this be?
I'm going to steal the movie and release it.
I think the hack teaches us an important lesson, which is the risk that corporate America is a soft underbelly for attacks from outside.
And I think, you know, you had the president basically calling out Sony for being cowardly, saying it was a mistake to pull the film.
He wishes they'd called him before doing that.
It's not Sony's job to project American strengths to the North Koreans and it's not Sony's job to discourage further attacks that are likely to come on companies other than Sony by showing that attacks won't be successful.
That is the job of the government.
But one unconventional thing I actually think the government should do is I think they should seize the interview by eminent domain and release it.
It's a non-traditional use of eminent domain, but you can use eminent domain on intangible property.
It would be for a bona fide public use, which is to demonstrate that if you perpetuate an attack for the purpose of preventing a release of a movie, you will fail.
It seems to me that probably the last thing Kim Jong-un wants is for people to see this movie so the government can take it and air it on PBS and put it on government websites, show it in post offices.
What a maniac!
But basically, I think it is...
Show it in post offices.
We can't rely on Sony to do that.
And then we have to think also more broadly, if other attacks like this happen, probably for a less frivolous purpose than this, what are we doing to ensure that there is a response that responds to these proportionally and discourages those attacks?
Because we can't rely on the companies themselves to undertake responses when they are attacked in a way that is important.
Eminent domain, John.
That's the way to go.
Eminent domain.
That's exactly what I said.
Steal the movie and then release it.
Which would be...
That is eminent domain.
I do want to...
Just briefly, the FBI... Did you read their full-on statement?
I did not read the full-on statement.
I know you would.
Yeah.
And it's very, very disturbing.
And it's really just one pager.
I'd just like to go through this for a second.
Today, the FBI would like to provide an update on the status of our investigation to the cyber attack in late November by the group calling themselves Guardians of Peace.
The FBI has determined that the intrusion into S.P.E., is what they're calling it, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Network consisted of deployment of destructive malware and the theft of proprietary information as well as employees' personally identifiable information, etc.
After discovering the intrusion, SPE requested the FBI's assistance, although they say it was CIA. Since then, FBI has been working closely with the company throughout the investigation.
Sony has been a great partner in the investigation and continues to work closely with the FBI. Sony reported the incident within hours, which is what the FBI hopes all companies will do when facing a cyberattack.
Sony's quick reporting facilitated the investigators' ability to do their jobs and ultimately to identify the source of these attacks.
So message here, from Fortune 500 companies, I'm hearing dudes named Ben everywhere saying the executives are all in on sharing with the FBI anything and everything.
As a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, who are unnamed, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions.
While the need to protect sensitive sources and methods precludes us from sharing all of this information, our conclusion is based, in part, the need to protect...
What are you asking questions for, citizen?
While the need to protect sensitive sources and methods precludes us from sharing all of this information, our conclusion is based in part on the following.
Three points.
One, technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed.
For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks, which you can buy.
You can buy this.
All right.
So that's not real.
That's shaky.
There's stuff you can just buy.
Yeah.
Borderline script kitty stuff.
The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked to Ah, the internet.
Yeah.
For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol IP addresses associated with no North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hard coded into the data deletion malware unused in this attack.
All completely debunkable.
You can show how you could use this.
This is no proof.
Third, separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea, which I think was not not conclusively determined.
That was just the media saying it was...
Who are we kidding with these guys?
North Korea is cut off from the internet.
They don't have these skills.
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
Now, I want to point out that in the past 12 years, Sony has been hacked a total of 56 times.
Let us not forget the 2011 PlayStation Network hack, where they literally had users' passwords and names and usernames in an Excel spreadsheet...
This is not...
Sony has been warned over and over again just by being the target of attacks.
Sony definitely has culpability in what happened here.
Seriously, if you look at the list, 56 times, reasonably serious intrusions into their network.
Uh...
Regarding the, let me see, what do I have here?
I have two more things.
Oh yeah, I have the CNN piece about North Korea's response.
Of course I don't speak the language, so we can only go by what they say is the correct translation.
It doesn't really matter.
This is the message that is being propagated about North Korea's response in this CNN package, which I've edited down actually.
I'm sorry, that is actually a sound effect.
They sweetened this video to see the president.
He's walking down the steps of Air Force One in Hawaii, where he's on vacation.
But for some reason, they need to put this big jet landing sound in, even though you don't see a jet landing.
It kind of messed with my head.
Just hours after President Obama lands in Hawaii for the Christmas holiday, the regime lashes out via its state-run television.
With all of its usual bluster, the regime slams the U.S. government's investigation of the Sony hack as childish that North Korea is being framed, saying it can prove its innocence without using any torture methods like the American CIA. That I thought was genius.
That was huge.
Those digs come in response to President Obama, that the evidence points to Pyongyang.
North Korea directly rebuked the president, saying it is the one who should respond after insults to its supreme leader, but adds it will not conduct terror against innocent moviegoers.
And notice that this is not part of what the newscaster said, so I don't know where it's coming from.
Rather target the originators of the insults.
The movie and the hack at Sony also got North Korea's bank roller and ally, China, to respond.
In China's state-run Global Times, an editorial calls the movie's vicious mocking of Kim senseless cultural arrogance, and that China was once a punching bag for Hollywood.
But now that the Chinese market sits as a goldmine for U.S. movies, the teasing shifts...
To impoverish North Korea.
The North Koreans end their fiery rebuttal to President Obama by curiously suggesting that the two countries worked together in a mutual investigation to find the real culprits.
I love this is the narrative as well.
Very curious.
I mean, are they crazy?
Are they going to suggest we work together with them to prove their innocence?
This is very curious.
The most obvious thing about this...
Is, typically, a cyber-terrorist, if it's going to all of a sudden become what they've got the North Koreans dubbed as, like, the ultimate, I mean, these guys are the biggest cyber-terrorists ever, they're so talented, would usually take credit for something like this.
Rare that, especially when we've projected them as this extreme hegotistical group.
See, that's right, bitch, we did that?
But they know that if they took credit for it, they'd be busted eventually, because they didn't do it.
There's one other anomaly that kind of flew under the radar just before this all really exploded and came to light.
President Park of South Korea This was all over the news for about 10 hours.
And in a message ahead of the ASEAN-Korea commemorative summit, President Park says the 10 ASEAN member countries having diplomatic relations with both South and North Korea can be of great help as Seoul prepares for a peaceful unification of the peninsula.
She added a unified Korea would contribute to peace across East Asia as well.
Now, celebrating just how much Korea and ASEAN have developed ties since first opening dialogue 25 years ago, President Park said the two sides should forge ahead with an aim of enhancing the quality of life for their respective citizens.
The two-day ASEAN-Korea summit will begin in the southern port city of Busan, This is not good.
We can't have any talks of unification.
Numbers.
There's numbers.
We're losing out here if these guys ever unite.
And I know from Don that he has had very good conversations with Park.
And he has always said he hopes she has the courage to push ahead I don't think we ever talked about this, but it just hit me.
He said, yeah, I really hope she has the courage to push ahead and go for unification.
But he said it's going to be very difficult.
So here's this big grandiose statement about, oh, you know, we could look at some unification.
Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.
Get it out of this script.
No, this is not going to work.
Get it out of the script.
No good.
This cannot happen.
He's going to lose their ass.
This is bad.
No, no, no, we can't have this.
And finally, something from the State Department.
I like this.
This is a two-parter.
Of course, we don't have...
It's not really the Matt and Marie show because it's Jen.
I've been watching Jen with it in mind that she's really good.
Yeah.
I think you're right.
She's really good.
She's kind of cold-blooded.
You have to be.
You've got to have ice water.
She never gets flustered.
And she knows when to cut it off.
Mm-hmm.
And they have the RT keeps playing her a lot because I guess one of the RT women is in the questioning.
And they always show her.
They put the camera on the questioner and she's asking some question and Jen just puts up with it.
Very annoying.
Well, this is a two-parter.
Now, this is Matt with a very, very good setup.
And it's based upon emails, which have...
There's a lot of emails now.
You don't know any authenticity of these emails, but the emails apparently say that there was the Deputy Secretary of State was being consulted on the movie.
And he was...
In fact, I have...
I think I have some of the...
At least what they're saying is copies of the email.
But a couple of people are.
And this makes total sense of being consulted and said, oh, you know, I spoke to someone higher up.
They're all in.
This is good.
You should definitely go ahead with blowing his head up, but maybe cut the actual blowing up scene out.
But this look of terror, as you know, is going to blow up.
It's very detailed in their conversation about this movie.
By the way, if they're that detailed, what causes his head to blow up?
Oh, he's in a helicopter and I think some rocket.
Did he swallow a hand grenade?
That's the kind of thing he uses.
Or get something stuffed in his mouth and everyone jumped out and he blew up and took the helicopter with him.
You know, a very common thing would happen all the time.
Not exactly sure.
Doesn't really matter.
A report this morning cites these emails that were hacked from Sony executive emails saying that this...
I think Matt needs an education, too.
It's no longer acceptable as a professional journalist to say, these emails were hacked.
Let's get some terminology down, people.
State Department officials signed off on or gave the okay to this.
Oh, hold on a second.
Now, I didn't have this, because I just want to mention this.
Brooks, who just went on and on about how this was so terrible.
Him, he and, I guess he, I think he was on another clip or it's further on down the line.
He makes a big deal.
And I think there's a piece of this in that clip I played.
A big deal about all these emails saying that news media should be responsible.
This is a classic to me.
And not reveal any of these emails because their stolen property went on about that whole thing.
And now I didn't realize at the time, because I said, what?
Who cares?
And then if it's a bunch of State Department stuff that got out.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I would say that's the reason for taking that approach.
Oh, you're responsible of the news media.
And guess what?
You haven't seen this in the news anywhere, have you?
No.
This has not been reported.
This is borderline clip of the day.
No, the clip of the day is where Matt hammers at home.
This is just lovely setup.
And getting Jen all screwed up.
...movie that's caused such a kerfuffle.
When did the State Department get into the business of telling movie studios what they can and cannot make as movies?
Red Herring.
What do you mean?
We created the movie business.
We are not.
So department officials, just so all of you know, routinely meet and consult informally with a wide range of private groups, certainly including executives from movie studios and a range of private sector companies.
And individuals seeking information about US foreign policy and US views on developments around the world.
Our message in public and private is the same.
We respect artists and an entertainer's right to produce content of their choosing.
We have no involvement in such decisions.
We're not in the business of signing off on content of movies or things along those lines.
I know there were a range of different reports out there, so let me just see if I can address some of them and then we'll get to your next question.
Here she goes.
She's so good.
She's segwaying right into her little tabbed information sheets.
Well, I'm not obviously going to speak to the specifics of the allegedly leaked emails.
I can confirm for you that Assistant Secretary Russell did have a conversation with some executives.
Did you hear that?
Thank you.
Yeah, what did you hear?
Allegedly leaked?
Oh yeah.
She's reading this off of her tabbed paper, that's why.
Why would she use the word allegedly when they're leaked?
Are they not really leaked and they're all bullcrap?
No, this is different, John.
This is different.
I don't think this was part of the hack, but I think these were leaked.
Because, see, she is responding from a tabbed piece of paper.
The paper says allegedly leaked.
So she's just reading it and it slips by where no one alleged that they were leaked.
They were hacked at best, the way Matt describes it.
It's not leaking.
Leaking is something different.
They know that these were leaked.
I mean that, too.
Yeah, your point is valid.
These were leaked, and she's responding to that, even though no one is accusing anyone of them being leaked.
They were hacked.
...of movies or things along those lines.
I know there were a range of different reports out there, so let me just see if I can address some of them, and then we'll get to your next question.
Tab, tab, tab.
Well, I'm not obviously going to speak to the specifics of the allegedly leaked emails.
I can confirm for you that Assistant Secretary Russell did have a conversation with Sony executives, as he does routinely with a wide range of private groups and individuals, to discuss foreign policy in Asia.
Bob King, contrary to reports, did not view the movie and did not have Any contact directly with Sony.
As we've noted before, entertainers are free to make movies of their choosing, and we are not involved in that.
So, Assistant Secretary Russell, in his conversations with the Sony executives, if those executives got the impression that he was saying it's okay to do this, they were getting the wrong impression?
Well, I think...
I don't think any executive would want the State Department or the United States government to be in the business of signing off on the content of their movies or television shows or whatever it may be.
But, of course, there's a lot of information that we all know about North Korea and the fact that they have one of the worst human rights records out there, that they have consistently put out threats against the United States, and certainly we share information that is publicly available with executives as well.
Okay, that's the setup.
Then she really goes all for it, because here comes Matt, and he's gonna hammer it home.
I mean, does the State Department think that...
Something like that, whether it is an artistic endeavor or not, is something that is helpful or is something that is appropriate for any company to do.
And the reason that I ask this is not to suggest that you're involved in free speech, but remember the video of this poorly produced film involving the prophet Muhammad, I believe, which was blamed for...
At this point, I'm like, yeah, Matt, go!
The protests in Cairo.
Benghazi, which he doesn't say.
Weak.
You know, the State Department came out and wanted YouTube to take it down.
Right, take it down.
The State Department said that it did not represent the values of the United States.
So there is a history of movie criticism or film criticism from this building, and I'm just wondering if this is at all playing into this current situation.
I would not put them in the same category, which I'm sure does not surprise you.
It's not the same category.
It's a different kind of entertainment.
It's a fiction movie.
It's not a documentary about our relationship with North Korea.
It's not something we backed, supported, or necessarily have an opinion on.
Unlike the Muhammad movie, which I guess you did back and support.
I don't know.
You haven't seen it.
I have not seen the movie, no.
I don't think it's out yet.
Well, apparently it is.
Well, it's a good move.
And I just want to remind everybody that this is absolute bunk and bullcrap, as we learned from Evergreen Clip.
Martin Kaplan from the Lear Foundation about Hollywood and how the government influences Hollywood.
So in the course of our work, this is in the two years, 11 to 13, 335 storylines that we worked on have been aired.
We've worked with 35 networks in the past four years, 91 different television shows, and countless movies.
Yeah, well, it never ends.
Anyway, this morning, Obama's backing away from it now.
Is he?
Yeah, of course.
He's backing away.
Here he is with Candy Crowley.
This must be her swan song, I presume, as she's leaving the network.
I wonder if maybe it was fear of lawsuit as opposed to fear of North Korea.
Which is possible.
There's a threat right there that people are looking at their theater thinking, you know, anything happens here, I'm done.
It's over.
You know, that's possible, but look.
But look, look.
As I said, the Boston Marathon suffered an actual grievous attack that killed and maimed a number of people.
And that next year, we had as successful a Boston Marathon as we've ever had.
You know, sometimes this is a matter of setting a tone and being very clear that we're not going to be intimidated by some, you know, cyber hackers.
Cyber hackers?
I expect all of us to remember that and operate on that basis going forward.
Do you think this was an act of war by North Korea?
No, I don't think it was an act of war.
I think it was an act of cyber vandalism that was very costly, very expensive.
We take it very seriously.
Cyber vandalism.
Okay, now it's gone from North Korea to cyber hackers to act of war to cyber vandalism.
Alrighty then.
There's a need for a rescue mission.
when the world is threatened, the world needs help, it calls on America.
That's the story.
I want to bring two more clips in from Obama's speech about all this that have nothing to do with the North Korean thing, but it has everything to do with Obama.
You know, he plays basketball.
Yeah.
And he...
golf.
Yes.
And he throws a baseball like a girl.
Yes.
And I don't think he knows anything about football.
No, probably not.
Because here is Obama talking just casually, and then he goes off script and starts rambling, as he does.
And this confuses me because of the second clip.
This is when I want Obama on football one, and then the confusing part shows up in Obama on football two.
But play Obama on football one, and I want to comment.
Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter, and I'm looking forward to it.
But, you know, going into the fourth quarter, you usually get a timeout.
I'm now looking forward to a quiet timeout, Christmas with my family.
So I want to wish everybody a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Happy New Year.
I hope that all of you get some time to spend with your families as well, because one thing that we share is that we're away too much from them.
And now...
Josh has given me the who's been naughty and who's been nice list.
And I'm going to use it to take some questions.
He forgot Solstice and Kwanzaa.
I know.
I found that in Festivus.
He left that out, too.
What I think was interesting is that...
What is he talking about?
You don't get a time-out when you go into the fourth quarter.
No, you get a time-out when you've been a bad boy, and you get a time-out.
Besides, and there's a time-out with a two-minute warning, but there's no time-out, so he doesn't know anything.
But then I was stunned when there was a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, his name, Joe Flacco, and I guess his brother...
It's in the movie if we play Obama on Football 2.
On a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco.
You are the only person I have heard who figured out what was going on and why he mistook Franco for Flacco.
Yeah.
You're the only guy.
I was thinking Joe Flacco, the quarterback for the Ravens.
Because it's a local team.
I mean, Baltimore is local to Washington, D.C., so it's like a local team.
And he probably heard of him.
And I still think he doesn't know anything about football or he even watches it.
I saw someone immediately created a Twitter account, James Flacco.
James Flacco.
Thanks, President Obama, for the shout-out.
Oh!
But yes, I think you are absolutely, you are the only person who has figured out why he made that mistake.
Yeah.
He was a football in the mind of the fourth quarter.
You get your time out, you know, whatever.
Well, with that, John, I want to thank you for your courage and say in the morning to you, John C. Dvorak.
In the morning to you, Adam C. Curry.
In the morning to all the ships at sea, boots on the ground, feet in the air, subs in the water, and all the dames and knights out there.
In the morning to everyone in the chat room, noagendastream.com.
Good to see you all there working with us.
Let me see how many people we have listening to the stream right now.
Let me see.
We have, oh, 853.
Not bad for a Sunday.
In the morning to our artistes, Cosmo, thank you very much for the artwork for episode 679-er with little Kim Jong-il in the background there of Dan Rad.
That was a nice piece of art.
Very, very functional.
And we always look forward to what our artists will bring us next at noagendaartgenerator.com.
This is where we thank our producers, executive producers, and associate executive producers, for they are the ones, just really like Hollywood works.
They're out there really helping us with the big tickets.
And we don't have actresses for anyone to bang, or actors for that matter, so we'd like to give you credits at the front of the show for supporting us financially.
Yes.
And I want to thank a few right now.
I'm looking to see if Oscar Nadal actually sent us anything in.
You mean...
Because I don't have an email from him.
I don't have an email either.
He promised that this was going to happen.
Is this a duplicate?
Well, this was...
I don't know what this one is because his other one, O. Nadal, which comes in, is the 6969.
And then there's this one that's kind of pending.
We'll find out in the weeks ahead.
Also, Barry Hanna.
Let's start with R.S. Bagwell in Louisville, Kentucky.
He sent 1234.56, my absolute favorite donation.
This is a great...
This is a good day.
This is nice.
Yeah, we had a lot of people step up.
And let me just read...
He has a very short note.
And this is something people should...
This is an interesting idea.
And I... He may have mentioned it last year, but I don't remember it.
But now he's essentially...
He's essentially a baron.
He's now a baron.
He's never asked for any of these things.
We have to...
Has he been knighted?
I wonder.
But this is his fourth...
Wow.
Annual donation of 1234.56.
He wants job karma.
Please send me job karma.
I've done this the past three years, and karma continues to come through for me so I can push it along to both of you.
So every year, he gets his karma, then he sees what happens, then he sends us another 1234.5.
So he's done this four years in a row.
Four years in a row.
And I think that's remarkable.
Well, he should be baroned and knighted.
I don't think he's...
Well, we'll look into it and we'll give him a special ceremony right in the first of the year.
Absolutely.
Let's give him the jobs karma, because here it is, your annual karma.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
You've got karma.
Nice.
Thank you.
And then we have this anomaly...
Hold on one second.
Let me try one more search.
I already looked because I recall the email Oscar sent.
Yeah, he sent, but it was about this other small amount of money.
Let me take one more quickie.
It only takes a second.
Well, I have the spreadsheet for Thursday.
It was the same number.
It says, Karma Works, more details to come, and a bigger donation.
So I don't know.
Yeah, well, the bigger donation is this one, which is $936.72 with no note.
So if he has something to say, he'll tell us later.
Then we have Barry Hanna, who I can't find anything from, from...
Okotox.
Oh, I know.
I know Okotox.
Yeah, Okotox.
They have a big rock that means big rock.
Yeah.
This is big rock, and it's in a movie, this big rock.
Well, there you have it.
Very also noteless.
No list varies from $600.
So those are the big three for today.
Todd McGreevy in Davenport, Iowa, $350.
And he says, thanks for the seven years of enlightening us slaves.
Love the show notes.
Hooray!
One of the best parts of the show.
Donate and support the further development of the Noja and the show notes Uber search tool.
Currently in beta, I want to create a landing page that distills your brilliant find of the real value of the 97% scientist consensus on global warming, which is now cropping up here and there.
Other people got a clue.
Imagine being able to point your dinner guest to a simple URL that, okay, I'll write the column.
It's about time.
It's going to be co-authored, so you'll get your credit.
Simply proves only 33% of nearly 12,000 scientists abstracts endorse global warming, not 97%.
You're being lied to, folks.
Again, he says.
Keeps the discussion short while they're all grabbing their smartphones.
Here's to a prosperous 2015 for those listening to No Agenda Behind Enemy Lines, which would be in Washington, D.C. Correct.
Sir Ted Hosman in San Jose, California, 34567.
Sir Ted of San Jose, checking in once again for my annual birthday donation.
We have you on the list December 22nd.
Sure it is.
Nicholas McFall in Herndon, Virginia, 23611.
Gentlemen, I'm finally ready to step up and take my place at the No Agenda Roundtable.
I've been a loyal listener for seven years but only started donating this year.
The analysis presented on the show is outstanding.
I couldn't think of a better show to support.
I would encourage every listener to make a donation, even small ones, as the first is the hardest.
Donating to No Agenda shows made me more charitable in other situations as well.
This is a known outcome of support.
If you support, it changes the way things work if you donate.
Donating to no agenda show has made me more charitable in other situations as well.
One of the unadvertised side benefits.
I'd like to be known henceforth as Sir Nick of the South Side.
Oh, yeah.
I'd like it a...
Is it ISIL or ISIL? ISIS or ISIL? LGY karma shot for the show.
Hosts and all the producers of the best podcasts in the universe.
Thanks, Sir Nick of the South Side.
I'm not, you know, this is problematic because I'm not really remembering any...
ISIS, ISIL? No, we have a...
Let's see what we have.
We have...
There was a couple of clips.
We have O'Biden.
Let me see.
Um...
I don't remember.
John?
Oh, shoot.
What is going on?
No, I use O'Bite in common conversation now, and nobody ever...
No one ever questions it, whatever.
It's like, eh, yeah, whatever.
O'Bite, yeah.
I'm sure you're right.
Well, we don't have that clip, so sorry.
Hold on a second.
Sorry.
Hold on a second.
Let me bash this thing over the head for a moment.
Let me see if I can get this for you.
I don't know what's going on.
Oh, come on, people!
It's a computer.
Yeah, no, it's a people, believe me.
Okay, hold on.
What is this?
This is...
It's like my...
Something gets...
Fuck!
Give me one second.
Now I have to conquer this.
This is all I have.
What kind of a machine is this?
We will follow them to the gates of hell!
Wow!
We got it.
We're done.
We're good.
You've got karma.
We got it.
We're done.
We're good.
That was the clip he wanted.
That was the one he wanted.
I found it.
Yeah, I saw ISIS. It was worth it.
I don't know about that.
It was worth it.
It was worth it.
Come on.
It was worth it.
Roderick Leonard in Charlotte, North Carolina, 20202.
ITM boys, your analysis of late has been spot on!
Spot on!
Keep up the good work.
I punched my friend Ken in the mouth several times before he caught the no agenda fever, but he's hooked now and just recently punched his wife too.
What?
I wonder what newcomers think of when they hear this stuff.
This is not good.
You shouldn't be punching.
Punching his wife?
What?
And they're encouraging it.
This is not good.
Let's call him out for being a boner who loves the show but hasn't donated yet.
Douchebag!
You're my sole news source.
Well, there you go.
The other news is, as I mentioned in the newsletter, which was actually co-written this week.
What do you mean co-written?
You had your name on it.
It's normally on Saturday.
It's just a newsletter from me.
Oh, yeah.
I think I did pretty good.
You didn't care.
I did very well.
And you get to watch the commercial news and laugh at it because it's actually hilarious.
Anyway, shows like this are the only real unowned media and we must support the cause.
Exactly.
Yes.
So he wants a clippity-clop, don't eat me, Hillary.
Her head is gone, little girl, yay.
It's clippity-clop.
The message is clear.
Just clippity-clop.
Don't eat me, Hillary Clinton.
And her head is gone.
Yay!
You've got karma.
It's actually not bad.
Yeah, it's a lot of work, but yeah.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Push a button.
Oh, yeah, it's one button, yeah.
I'm not doing anything else.
No, that's fine.
You should have...
How about that for an idea?
You put them in a little queue and you hit one button.
It's not so much the hitting the button, it's finding all of the different things that people want.
Sir Baz von Bateau in Bateau Bay.
New South Wales, Australia, $200.
Hi there, John and Adam.
It's been a while since I donated.
It's last, so here it's time to send some Christmas cash.
Christmas cash.
To assist in keeping you off the cheese line.
You slaves can get used to mac and cheese.
The 4X Boom Shakalaka Karma.
Uh, yeah, we can do that.
Hold on a sec.
Yeah.
Keep up the great work and have a cool Yule, he says.
Cool Yule!
You slaves can get used to mac and cheese.
Mac and cheese.
Mac and cheese.
Boom shakalaka.
Boom shakalaka.
Boom shakalaka and boom shakalaka.
You've got karma.
That's our executive and associate executive producers for show 680.
That's right.
So we have another show coming up, of course, and we need all the support we can get all the time.
That is our special Christmas extravaganza.
Right, and that will be show 681, reminding you to go to Dvorak.org slash NA, find a program there, or just go to that, you know, any of the links that we sent you in the newsletter.
Yeah, they're all valid.
Dvorak.org slash NA. Of course, we always need you to be out there doing your utmost to help us propagate the formula.
Our formula is this.
We go out.
We hit people in the mouth.
World. Order.
Shut up, flame.
Shut up, flame!
There we go.
There we go.
That is indeed interesting, though, that Will Hurd guy about Cuba.
Of course, I looked into it.
I'm going to do some research on this guy, because I'll bet you if you look into it, you're going to find some information that is bullcrap.
All you have to do, really, is look at that video, which is about 25 minutes, and he gets tired at the end.
Then he starts saying, well, look, this is what I've been talking about for 19 months, and this is my background, this is my expertise, right?
This is what I do, right?
And it's just, no, no, I'm sorry, dude.
This is not what you do.
But this Cuban Liberty and Democratic Society Act of 1996, not 86, is the Libertad Act.
I think he is right, though, in that regard.
I do not see how...
No, no, he's right.
There's been talked about on other...
They talk about this to an extreme.
They say all Obama can do is relieve, you know, make it easier to try.
He can't do anything about most of these sanctions.
They're written in law.
It's a congressional.
The Congress has to change things, and the Republicans aren't going to do that.
I mean, we already got the shot over the bow by Rubio.
So, no, they're not going to change anything.
Now we can travel a little easier, go back and forth, but there's all the other stuff still in play.
And they've apparently been shipping them food.
I was watching RT, obviously.
They've been shipping them food all along, the Americans have.
In a roundabout way.
All kinds of work.
All kinds of work.
But once the Republicans get a clue that the Canadians are buying the place up, they should change the law.
Let's go down under for a moment.
Prime Minister Abbott?
Is he Prime Minister?
Abbott!
I don't think we have one of those.
We're going to need one pretty soon.
We're going to need an Abbott shout.
All we need is the Abbott and Costello.
So we have this one event, which of course is not just a nut job, whether he was a patsy or not.
I mean, the guy is completely psycho.
And because he asked for a flag, this is now...
We are no longer innocent in Australia.
This is the terror.
The terror is here.
This is it.
It's all over, people.
We are no longer innocent.
This is what's being said.
In fact, here is Abbott just laying it all on.
These events do demonstrate that even a country as free...
As open, as generous and as safe as ours is vulnerable to acts of politically motivated violence.
Madam Speaker, regrettably, for some time to come, Australians will have to endure more security than we're used to and more inconvenience than we'd like.
Regrettably, for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift.
I love it when they do that!
Oh, that was slick.
Just as an aside about all these dangers of living in Australia because you can't own guns, play the clip.
Stabbings in Australia.
Australia stabbings.
Make sure this is going on at the same time.
Of course, yes.
In Australia, eight children have been found dead and a woman injured in apparent mass stabbing.
The bodies were found at a home in Manurah, a suburb of Cairns.
Hello?
Hello, safety?
This is Liberty Calling.
F*** off, douchebag!
There you go, everybody.
Hey, Australia, welcome.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I looked at this thing.
It's the Foreign Fighters Bill Act.
Actually, counterterrorism legislation amendments the foreign fighters bill of 2014.
This is great.
Australia's current counterterrorism laws comprise four legislative regimes introduced under the Howard administration.
So we have some things are going to be changing.
So they have they already had control orders to control the behavior of a person where it's considered necessary to prevent a terrorist act control orders.
Huh!
The prison colony is resurrected.
Yeah, well, that's a natural.
Preventative detention orders which allow police to detain a person for up to 14 days if there are reasonable grounds to suspect he or she is planning or will engage in a terrorist act.
Stop search and seize your powers which allowed police to stop and search persons, vehicles, premises, seize items that could be used in a terrorist offense like, you know, peroxide.
Question and detention warrants, which allowed the ASIO, this is the ASIO, this was the, you can't have more than three people in a room together or something, to immediately detain a person for questioning.
Solitary confinement, they're looking for that.
That's next.
So now we have new offenses for traveling to a, quote, declared area.
This is now new.
The bill has introduced a crime punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment for a person traveling to an area in a foreign country that has been declared by the Australian government to be one where a listed terrorist organization is engaging in hostile activity.
That is a declared area.
They can't go there.
No, well, you can, but if you...
Well, do we have a list of the declared areas yet?
Well, we do know that the foreign minister has declared Sirius al-Raqqa province...
Which is the de facto capital of it.
So you go to Syria, you just go there to hang out for a while, then you go to the province.
How are they going to know you went there?
Well, if they catch you, they might see you with a drone.
New offenses for advocating terrorism.
What does that mean?
What is advocating terrorism?
This is the second offense introduced by the bill.
It makes it a crime for a person to intentionally advocate the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorist offense where he or she is reckless as to whether another person will actually do the act or commit the offense.
And this is interesting.
So if you did this on the tweeters, for instance, and someone read it, it would be reckless for you to do this in public.
If you said, hey, you should go blow something up.
Yeah, I think this is a free speech issue right there, which I guess, I don't know, Australia doesn't have that, perhaps.
No, no, no.
They obviously don't.
The other couple things I've added here, the foreign affairs minister can now suspend a person's passport for a period of up to 14 days.
If there's reasonable grounds of suspicion, the person may leave Australia to engage in conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or a foreign country.
My goodness.
I don't need proof.
Hey, I think you might be going over to do something.
You should just give me your passport.
No, they took that from our playbook.
The immigration minister must now cancel a person's temporary or permanent visa.
If there's a reasonable suspicion, the visa holder might be, directly or indirectly, a risk to security.
If the risk is confirmed, the visa holder's family members may, at the minister's discretion, also have their visas canceled.
Customs officers now have the power to detain persons suspected of committing any federal offense.
Hold on a second.
Yes, sir.
Are they talking about...
Which visas are they talking about?
If you're coming from a different country.
Or if you're coming in.
Yes, yes.
If you're a guest.
If you're a guest.
And then...
Okay.
Customs officers, if you're going into Australia...
I'm going into Australia.
Hey, Australia, here I am.
They have the power to detain persons suspected of committing any federal offense that is punishable by imprisonment of 12 months or more.
But you just got there.
Yeah, they can grab you.
Wait a minute, hold on a second.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, you're going to Australia.
They can stop.
I'm in Australia.
Now, what...
What offense could you possibly create?
You haven't even gotten past the border guy.
Well, maybe I just tweeted, hey, I'm here to see if I can find any terrorists to blow some stuff up.
I don't know, something like that.
It could be anything.
That would be an offense under this bill.
Yeah, but they usually don't let you communicate when you're in that area.
So you land in the...
I've landed.
But when you're landing in from outside in the United States...
No cell phones.
No, no, no.
You can't do the truth.
While you're taxiing to the jetway, you could be on your phone.
All right.
Well, I guess you could do that.
Here I am.
We're ready to blow up things.
Yeah, I guess you could.
Okay.
Continue.
Giving customs officers greater power to detain persons without charge risks.
Infringe the rights of freedom for any arbitrary detention, of course.
But this is all obviously for your safety and it shall not be questioned!
Please do not question authority!
Fear is freedom!
Subjugation is liberation!
Contradiction is truth!
Those are the facts of this world!
And you will all surrender to them!
You pigs in human clothing!
That's right.
Pigs in human clothing.
One thing on the caliphate I found here.
We sent another 1,500 troops to Iraq.
It wasn't widely reported.
No.
It's embarrassing.
Yes, of course it's embarrassing.
There is something new, which John Kerry started two weeks ago.
We've had this issue, this branding issue, which we quite frankly think has been kind of good.
ISIS, ISIL, IS. Now everyone's just saying Daesh.
This is the new, new, new official word.
Dash.
Yeah, I know.
I saw this dash thing emerge, and I can't find the genesis for it.
Well, I have some of that.
First, let me play for you Lieutenant General James Terry with the announcement of more troops going to destroy...
No, to degrade and ultimately destroy, and it used to be ISIL, now it's Daesh.
Iraqi security forces must be a capable force, one that can restore Iraq's sovereign borders, retake territory from Daesh, and secure the Iraqi people.
An offensively minded and trained security force, backed by an inclusive government of Iraq, is the key to future stability.
As you know, we have been authorizing an additional 1,500 U.S. personnel.
They will serve in non-combat roles to support additional advise and assist requirements and the building partner capacity effort.
In addition, we anticipate coalition contributions that should produce at least an additional 1,500 personnel in these efforts.
We're seeing initial successes in this fight.
My assessment is that Dash has been halted in transitioning to the defense and is attempting to hold what they currently have.
You will see some local counterattacks in that regard.
There will be challenges down the road that will require patience.
The government of Iraq understands the grave threat they face, and they are resolved to defeat it.
The Combined Joint Task Force represents what I believe is a new chapter of what ISIS will be a successful campaign to bring the coalition's power to bear and ultimately lead to the defeat of Daesh.
Defeat of Daesh.
Okay, so Daesh is...
Alright, this began in June.
And this is the French.
Yes, correct.
The French decided they're going to use the Arabic-derived term dash, D-A-E-S-H, or it's also D, I think it's I, apostrophe, something or other.
Yes.
And it never took, but now it's taking, and that's the interesting part.
Yes, D-A-I-S-H. Yes.
When Kerry, which means Dalat Nation, Al-Islamiyah, Iraq, Sham, which is Syria and the Levant.
So it's really a collection of ISIS and ISIL. It started in June, and now in December, it's now being recognized by us.
Why?
What's the reason for the change?
I don't know.
Other than that, I believe when Kerry went to get...
New, authorized use of military force.
And when he was being questioned, we played one or two clips because, of course, he's so boring, I can't risk my reputation with you anymore to play any more carry clips.
He was using Dash, which I believe he needs to encompass more groups.
It's such an all-encompassing name.
It's everybody now.
It's just everybody.
I just want to be able to use force on anybody who's brown and lives in this general sandy area.
Which is pretty much exactly what he asked for.
Alright.
I don't see any other reason why.
These guys are so tricky, John.
All they care about is...
It's using words to get whatever they think is necessary, whatever they need, whatever they want.
Well, on the topic of this area, I was combing through old clips, which I do occasionally to re-listen to them and see if there's anything that we can use or there's stuff that we missed.
So about 2010, I heard this.
And I've never heard about it since.
I don't think we...
It was either not played and we never discussed it.
And I haven't heard anything about it since.
But this was a 60 Minutes report on...
On Afghanistan and how the Taliban is winning the war and so the Afghani people won't do any deals with us because they think we're just going to leave and screw them.
And they're all going to get killed for talking to us sort of thing.
about that and right in the middle of it because they were talking about a discussing a improvised explosive device that they were taking out and then there was going to be an ambush but this little one little clip this 2010 clip with new information it's just I don't remember it I don't remember picking this up before and I don't know what's going on now but this is interesting using new and secret technology the Marines destroyed an IED from long range while it was still being planted in the road
I've got information, man!
New shit has come to life!
Let's hope you follow up with that.
I'm there, brother.
Do you remember this?
I don't remember this.
Some ray gun or some beam or something?
Oh, energy-directed weaponry, of course.
This is what our new, if he's affirmed, confirmed, this is what our new Secretary of Defense is specialized in, directed energy weapons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you see the guys planting the thing, you shoot down a little ray beam, and then it explodes.
Yeah, and blows him up with it.
Yeah.
It's a genius.
I would assume that if it's some sort of device that if it's directed energy and they could heat, it doesn't take much to blow up something if it's explosive, if you can heat it up.
So you aim this thing there and it heats it up, target it and heat it up and blow it up.
Yeah.
While the guys are still there.
Yeah.
It's beautiful.
Genius.
Are we good or what?
Yeah, we're great.
Yeah, this is Ash Carter.
This is the new guy, if he's confirmed.
And I really see no reason why he won't be.
He's really all about the Straits of Malacca and China.
He seems to be much more interested in that region of the world than the Middle East.
Which is interesting, because you kind of think that the reason Hegel was pushed out is because Hegel didn't want to do all this bullcrap in the Middle East.
But I see nothing but Asia news coming from his general direction, particularly the Straits of Malacca, which is all about blocking China's waterways.
But we've got to keep our eye on this guy.
I have no idea what...
Did you notice there was some action with Putin and Russia and that area too?
Yeah.
In fact, the BBC... It was unbelievable.
The BBC had this whole special on...
It was like a mini super package.
Like a mini special, a super package, kind of in between, like a 15-minute thing.
And, of course, well, Putin hates gays, and gays are, you know, you're not safe in Russia if you're gay.
Putin!
No, no, no.
And they bring this news as if it's all true, all happening now.
Even this giant iPhone is unacceptable here now, taken off the streets after the boss of Apple revealed he was gay.
Oh.
This is where the iPhone statue used to stand.
Now there's this festive tree here and just an empty space, like a new monument to increasing intolerance here.
Human rights activists say that since the law banning so-called gay propaganda was passed, it's like people have been given a license to be homophobic.
They say it's not just about artwork, of course.
Homophobic attacks are on the rise.
So this has long been...
Debunked, this iPhone thing.
And the iPhone thing, I have a clip.
Apple is so big in Russia that they had to back off on a couple of...
Yeah, because of the ruble.
The ruble thing is screwing them.
And they showed...
This is from RT, of course.
It could be all rigged.
It may all be not true.
But they go to an Apple store in Moscow, and their place is packed with people buying iPhones and Apple products.
But this is the story.
It's kind of interesting.
Apple were forced to stop trading online here in Russia this week.
Their products at one point were $100 cheaper to buy here in Russia than in the US. The tech giant justified this move on their side as extreme ruble fluctuations.
I had that last night, extreme ruble fluctuations.
Yeah, I bet you did.
It didn't feel very good.
Now, they not only have the places to buy the phones in stores, but they have an online presence, which is what they had to back off on because the ruble was screwing them.
Right.
And they were selling all the Apple products online for $100 less than we have to pay.
Yeah.
Well, how does the other story make any sense at all?
I don't know.
It's bullcrap.
We know that this thing was not removed because Tim Cook, Tollins, Tom, whatever his name said, he's gay.
Tom Collins.
Tim Collins.
This is not true.
It's just not true.
And they are lying.
But, you know, we heard about this somewhere, so I guess it's true.
Look, this empty spot looks like a new monument.
And just went on...
If you are gay in Saudi Arabia, off with your head.
They get beheaded all the time.
There are more crimes against gays, lesbians, LGBT, QQ, IAAP in the United States than ever occur in Russia.
Come on!
Stop using my gay brothers and sisters for a punching bag for your...
Punching bags.
Because you hate Putin.
It's not okay.
And you gay brothers and sisters, stand up and reject this.
Reject it.
In other retail news from Russia, I had no idea that there was Ikeas all over the place, and they showed some movies of it, and they're just like an Ikea here in Emeryville.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
Just tech shopping that went wild this week.
Ikea suspended sales of kitchen and home furniture in Russia because it's been overloaded with orders.
The company announced there'll be no shop prices in prices.
It'll be a gradual one because of the ruble exchange rate, but that didn't stop the Crowds, our shoppers expect prices to surge next year.
Can you imagine the margin on that crap, considering they don't have to even raise the prices?
I know, it's just junk.
Some assembly required are the words that make me shudder.
The whole Russian thing is very interesting.
We have to keep up with it.
I don't know how much to keep up with.
Well, they're going ahead.
It turns out that our problems with Russia are not deterring them from continuing to actually have an economy.
Vladimir Putin invited...
Kim Jong-un to come to Moscow next year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
Right.
And he would like to discuss a pipeline.
Yeah, huh?
Coincidence.
No, never.
From North Korea to its southern neighbor, South Korea, for some Gazprom pipeline.
And it makes nothing but sense.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense for the South Koreans, for sure.
Yeah, they don't need ships coming in with the gas when you could pump it in.
No.
It's flabbergasting that this has not been looked at previously.
Yeah.
Let me see.
The Treasury Secretary, of course, there's so much about the Sony and, you know, whatever, Christmas, ch-ch-ch, Jingle Bells.
Kwanzaa.
Bar Humba, Kwanzaa, Solstice, that we don't really hear much when the Treasury Secretary speaks.
And I found what he's, this is Jacob Liu, who is our new Treasury Secretary.
He followed in the footsteps of Tim Geithner.
A guy who can't figure out how to use TurboTax to file his taxes.
I haven't forgotten.
And the way he put this was very strange.
This is about Social Security, and this is kind of his annual State of the Union, how much longer this thing is funded.
But then for some reason, he pulled a piece out and said, if you look at this piece by itself, it's only funded for two years.
See if you can figure out what is going on with this and what the messaging is.
When considered on a combined basis, Social Security's retirement and disability programs have dedicated funds sufficient to cover benefits for the next 19 years.
After that time, as was true last year, it's projected that tax income will be sufficient to finance about three-quarters of scheduled benefits.
By the way, that puts me in a screwed position.
That's about the time that I'm going to retire.
No, he said 19 years.
You retire since you're 50.
You had a big birthday.
No, no.
Are you kidding me?
Retire in 15, 16 years.
The retirement age will be...
Well, maybe they keep moving it up.
They'll be raising it up.
Exactly.
They'll probably be 70.
Yeah, you will be right.
At the point it happens, it's boom.
And guess who's going to be part of that 15% that isn't funded?
You know it's going to be podcasters.
We're the first to go.
Podcasters first to go.
Here's the rest of it.
However, Social Security's disability program alone has dedicated funds sufficient to cover all scheduled benefits for only two years.
As was true last year, beginning in 2016, projected tax income will be sufficient to finance about 80% of scheduled benefits.
Legislation will be needed to avoid disruptive reductions in benefit payments to this vulnerable population.
Okay.
So, combined, he says, 18 years.
And then we go to 85%.
But if you take disability out, that's only good for two years.
We need new laws to, I guess, print more money or put some money into the coffers.
Can he do that?
Is that how it works?
Do you separate that out?
Or is this just a general way to get more money?
Because people are going, holy crap!
It's a general way to get more money because most of the Social Security system is legislated.
And they just can't randomly cut it off.
I mean, it's legislative.
You have to provide the money.
It's in the law.
Well, this does not bode well, then.
That's bullcrap.
Okay.
I take it down to the simplest aspect, but it's bullcrap.
I mean, there is a scam out there.
They're trying to kill Social Security and make these people invest their own money as though every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there is a professional investor, and they're not.
I mean, the idea is, yeah, put all your money in the stock market.
It'll keep the stock market boosted.
Then when it collapses too bad...
Which is what would happen.
They'd get screwed.
A lot of pros lost their ass in the 2007-2008 debacle.
How is the public supposed to fare in this thing?
I don't want to sound like a socialist, but you need the government to be the fishnet stockings to catch everything.
Hey, damn commie.
Yeah.
Yeah, commie.
That's it.
We got a rich and poor update, which doesn't bode well.
Okay.
Into it?
Hit it.
And the gap between rich and poor in the United States has reached a new high.
A new report by the Pew Research Center finds the gulf between rich families and middle and low-income families is the largest it's been in 30 years of data collection.
Pew found that while affluent families became wealthier from 2010 to 2013, middle-income families stayed the same while poor families got poorer.
Yeah.
It's a wonderful life, everybody.
Something up with that.
I also have a...
Well, I'll say this.
I'd like this clip later.
Here's one that bugged me.
This kind of just bugged me.
And I went and did some research and looked.
You know the Tea Party?
Yes.
The original Tea Party was, of course, surrounded Ron Paul with his money bombs, and then it was hijacked by the Republican fringe.
I want to play this 60-minute teaser clip, and I want to...
If you go look on Wikipedia at all the Tea Party sites, there's one name.
There's one name you will never find.
I did searches for the guy's name, and this is kind of the target of this particular clip.
Senator Tom Coburn is known as the godfather of the Tea Party.
So what does he think of President Obama?
I just love him as a man.
That and other surprises, Sunday on 60 Minutes.
Tom Coburn apparently, according to 60 Minutes in his wonderful journalism, calls him the godfather of the Tea Party.
You'll never find any reference like that.
And it turns out he's gay, I guess.
I don't know what the point of this teaser was.
This is beyond me.
I have no idea.
No idea.
The rewriting history, you know, one of the things we try to do, at least on this show, is be on the right side of history.
We try to be on the right side of history, and we defend against the constant attempts to rewrite history.
Yes, yes.
And this is a rewrite of history, if there ever was.
I mean, Tom Coburn, Tea Party, he's just a guy with a wig.
Anyway.
A little pet peeve.
No, you're absolutely right.
And of course, Tea Party became tea baggers.
And it's very...
And it got co-opted by Tea Party Express and those shpags.
A lot of them out of Texas.
But all of it is just name-calling and not good for anything.
All of it is just horrible.
I don't like any of it.
Here's something else I don't like.
Ants.
Ants, he says.
Please, Colorado sued.
A very short clip.
Okay.
Two states have sued Colorado in the Supreme Court over its legalization of marijuana.
Earlier this year, Colorado became the first state to allow recreational marijuana.
Nebraska and Oklahoma claim the opening of marijuana shops has led to an influx of the drug in neighboring states.
Okay...
I think this is what they're going to try to do.
They get this thing reversed.
Because after the D.C. thing happened, they're not going to fund it.
These are the Republicans.
And so they found two states that were amenable.
Because there's other states bordering Colorado that don't give a crap.
And I don't even know if Oklahoma...
Does Oklahoma actually border on Colorado?
I think so.
Let's take a look on the maps.
Feels bad.
I don't know that.
Well, you know the states, you don't have to know every border connection.
I believe...
Maps?
Maybe the Panhandle does.
It's back on Google Maps, I'm looking.
Kansas is directly north.
Yes.
And Google Maps is not producing my map.
We have Arizona, New Mexico.
The very tip, the absolute tip, north of Texas, touches Colorado.
Barely.
Just a tip.
So it is a border state.
Nebraska is the same way.
It doesn't really have a big border.
Kansas is a border state.
They don't care.
Anyway, the point is, I think they're going to try to go after this.
There's nobody in Kansas, man.
We drove through that.
I think they're going to go after this.
Really?
They can't do anything with...
They can't get anyone to play ball against Washington because Oregon's all in on the idea that they can get dope up there.
And then Montana and Idaho, which are close, the other two close states, they're not going to mess with this.
Anyway, you're going to start to see this sort of thing as a trick.
To get...
Federales to bust balls over...
Yeah, especially in Colorado where they're very aggressive.
Just a different topic.
I was reading something in The Guardian today, online obviously, and it said it was brought to you by...
And there was a link that explained what this meant, and this is part of how news is changing.
Now, the Guardian, isn't the Guardian supposed to, didn't they have some charter, they're holier than thou?
The charter says, we the Guardian are holier than thou.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
That's what it says.
So they have this information page, which I found, called Sponsored Content, Advertisement Features, and Content Supported by Foundations.
And you're a news guy.
You're a writer.
You're a magazine columnist.
You've been a reporter.
You are a reporter.
You're on the beat.
You're a journalist.
Here.
Guardian News and Media produces a variety of content with funding from outside parties.
These sources of revenue allow us to explore, in more depth than editorial budgets would otherwise allow, topics that we hope are of interest to Guardian and Observer readers.
The presentation of the content makes clear how the content has been commissioned and produced and who has funded it.
One of the three labels will appear on this content.
Sponsored by, brought to you by, or supported by.
And there's a difference in each three, and I'd like to discuss these with you.
Alright.
One is sponsored by.
Sponsored by is used to describe editorially independent content.
We accept funding from sponsors, both for content we are already producing, where using funds from a sponsor allows us to provide more in-depth coverage, and for new projects.
Before sponsorship is agreed with a client, relevant senior editors are consulted about its suitability and the editor-in-chief has the final say on whether a sponsorship deal is accepted.
A sponsor whose branding appears on editorial content may have a role in suggesting what kind of topics are covered, but the commissioning editor is not obliged to accept ideas from the sponsor.
The content is written and edited by Guardian and Observer journalists or those approved by GNM to the same standards expected in all of our journalism.
GNM will not show copy to sponsors for approval.
What do you think of this, the sponsored by businesses?
Sounds like native advertising to me.
It is.
It's bullcrap what they say, too.
The editor, you know, he's got the file.
So, yeah, if you're trying to push in a piece of sponsored content that is an obvious mess, a piece of garbage, yeah, you're going to nix it.
You say, no, we'll take your money, but you better come up with something better than this piece of crap.
And it appears...
By the way, this is where this other part comes in.
So maybe you should just let one of our writers...
Because they would like to just write it themselves and give it to you.
That would be the approved GNM outsiders.
Yes.
But, you know, if you give it to one of our writers, we can do a better job.
It will cost you more.
Because, you know, you're having to pay our writers, which don't work as cheap as the PR people work.
In fact, it's not true.
But yeah, that's what that is.
And it's just total native advertising, and it's couched beautifully to make it seem like there's no chance whatsoever of corruption when, in fact, they want to run something.
They're big advertisers.
They've got these guys by the nuts, and they say, you know, you don't have to run this piece.
I know you have some issues with it, but you know...
We'll just pull everything that we have.
We'll just pull all of our ads and we'll walk it over to the Telegram.
To the Daily Mail.
Well, even any of them.
They'll all take it.
And I would be surprised if by now all the British...
American tabloids and all the British broadsheets don't all take native advertising in some form or other.
And so, you know, you take it.
You take it.
You need the money and you're not going to have them pull everything.
Let's look at the other options, shall we?
Other options.
This is for people who are reading the newspaper, by the way.
This is to know what so-called product you're receiving.
Two is brought to you by.
Brought to you by is used to describe advertisement features that are paid for and controlled by the advertiser rather than the publisher and are subject to regulation by the Advertising Standards Authority.
This content is produced by commercial departments and does not involve GNM staff journalists.
That's brought to you by.
So that's just an ad, which is a little fuzzier because...
Yeah, you wouldn't know the difference because they're using the same type font.
It looks just like a story.
Yes.
You had to pay probably a little more.
Sponsorship's probably cheaper because you lose a little control.
But if you have total control, which I didn't...
That is like, yeah, that's an ad.
Yeah.
But it's only said brought to you by.
And a casual reader, if you're looking at the bottom and you see sponsored by or brought to you by, what's the difference?
What would be the difference to the reader?
Without looking at this thing, no one's going to go look at these rules.
It's going to be the same.
Yeah, it's going to be the same.
Well, then we have the third one, which makes it even more complicated.
We have sponsored by, brought to you by, and then the third one, supported by.
And supported by is used to describe editorially independent content that The Guardian has produced with funding from foundations around the world who support specific projects.
Examples could be...
What?
A grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help support the Guardian's global development site.
Or, the Joseph Roundtree and Open Society Foundations, that's Soros, supported the award-winning Reading the Riots series.
So that's content, I presume very much like PBS NewsHour or the Kaiser Health Report.
Which is funded directly from foundations, non-governmental organizations, who all have an agenda, to support specific projects.
Now, let me ask you, if this Guardians Global Development site, which I'll go take a look at right now, Western firms reduce...
Eritrean miners to abject slavery.
Life on the Ebola front line.
I thought of nothing else except my death.
Thai government censured for failure to tackle lead pollution.
Lead pollution.
Sorry, lead.
Sustainable development goals.
Eight ways reality can match ambition.
This is all presented by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
They are funding this entire...
All of this.
Ebola in Sierra Leone.
Burial workers put dignity before danger.
Now, what was the, of the three, give me the order again.
Okay, the order is sponsored by, brought to you by, and supported by.
Okay, so the brought to you by is just a straight ad.
The other two are kind of beating around the bush ads.
Yeah, sketchy.
Now, the funny thing about the Guardian, because I'm doing some looking around, they have their sponsored features as an actual link.
So you can see what they are.
Sponsored features, planning and pitching nonfiction, beginner's guide to social media for business, how to write better copy.
I'm sure if I look at any one of these, I can tell who the advertiser is.
Why is it important to marry data quality with patient safety?
That's got to be really exciting.
IBM Watson.
Five things to do in Brighton at Christmas.
Brought to you by the locals in Brighton.
How to be a music journalist with Tim Jones on December 18th.
How to write and publish a book about food.
Take lots of pictures of the food and tweet them.
Yes, get your followers up before you write the book.
Here's another copywriting, a two-day boot camp.
Infographics, storytelling, a one-day workshop.
Okay, let's pick one of these and see who they are.
Now, where are you looking?
Where are you finding this?
What are you looking at?
I found this under the guardian.com slash tone slash sponsored features.
So they apparently put their sponsored features on a page for people who want to look at just...
What idiot wants to look at just sponsored features?
I would assume there's a...
Brought to you by our support features, too.
Maybe.
I don't know.
This is the only one I could find.
Well, no.
These would all be sponsored features.
Oh, wait.
Sponsored was...
Was the first one.
That's a category, right.
The staff is writing these on behalf of an advertiser.
Right.
Well, let's take the How to Be a Music Journalist with Tim Jones.
Tim Jones, probably.
At the bottom of the page, it should say Sponsored By.
I'm going.
Oh, it has the name of the company.
I don't see it.
I don't see it either.
It's supposed to say Sponsored By.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
No.
Tudor Profile, no.
It doesn't say Sponsored By.
So they're not even doing that much.
That's strange.
This is a sales job to sign up to how to become a music journalist, and it costs you $99 pounds.
And it's being done by The Guardian.
They're sponsoring it themselves.
A house ad.
Okay, that's a house ad.
Let's find a different one.
House ad.
Beginner's Guide to Social Media for Business.
How about that?
Okay, I can't get back to the page.
There it is.
This is another...
How's that?
Yeah, 249.
So this whole thing seems to be rather dubious.
There's got to be one here that's not from them.
I don't know.
New image technology transforms colorblind viewing experience.
This cannot be from them.
Let's go to the bottom.
What do you see?
This is a UEA spinoff company.
It says iTech.
Okay, it says it.
Yeah, iTech.
Does it say it's sponsored by iTech?
I'm looking.
Currently, iTech supports individuals with doternopia.
No.
Protonopia.
It doesn't say anything.
It really doesn't disclaim it, does it?
No, this is a plug.
It just says, brought to you by a very small, on the left-hand side, UEA. Oh, there it is.
University of East Anglia.
Oh, okay.
Wow, could the type font be any smaller?
Well, not only that, but it's not as part of the stream of the story.
No, it's on the left.
In fact, they have a UEA advertisement on the right column.
Oh, yeah.
Click here.
Apply to the university.
Known for the experience.
This is the worst kind of journalism in the world.
Yes.
The piece is written for the University of Anglia.
It has a very small thing that says, brought to you by.
It doesn't even refer to the article.
Sponsored by.
It says, sponsored by.
Oh, mine says, brought to you by.
But it's from the sponsored by page.
Well, maybe they mixed the brought to Dubai and the sponsor.
Who the hell knows what's going on.
This is terrible.
Yeah, it really is.
And then an advertisement right next to it.
Click here.
This is horrible.
Now, this is where we can just...
I just wanted to use this...
And this is The Guardian.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it says under the logo.
That's right.
Unacceptable behavior.
It says right there.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, yes.
And what they're not writing for commercial interest, MI6 is telling them to write.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
I know.
It surprised me, too.
That's why I really wanted to bring it up.
I was like, wow.
Do they have any category that's just known as journalism?
Yeah.
Yeah, you can find it in there once in a while.
It's really much work.
As they said in that little pitch about it, well, we can't afford to do these stories, but we'll take money and then we'll do them.
Well, this is not how we choose to operate anymore.
This is a classic, classic example of you, the audience, being the product.
In fact, if I load this page right now, I can tell you, here it is.
Just the Guardian itself, Audience Science, Criteo, DoubleClick, Facebook Connect, Google AdWords, Crux Digital, OutBrain, and it just keeps on going.
These are all the ones, the trackers.
Cookies and trackers that are in the code.
Yeah, they're tracking you like a dog.
Yeah.
Yeah, like a dog.
Exactly.
Like a dog dressed up as Santa Claus.
We don't track anybody.
No, in fact, the other day I wanted to just...
Here's a big secret.
I wanted to find out...
I had a discussion and just some research.
What are the top podcast apps used to listen to the No Agenda show?
So VoidZero and I, we're working on this.
And the first thing he says is, well, the concept of the top is kind of the problem.
So what do you mean?
He says, well, there is no actual simple way to calculate these requests.
Some apps request chunks of...
The file many times rapidly, which is actually a protocol developed by Apple.
And so it shows up as a whole bunch of lines requesting different portions of the same file.
So you have to filter that out.
And there's proxies and network address translation.
There really, truly is no way, unless you have...
Some kind of tracking in the app itself, which doesn't tell you anything about apps, but if you have tracking in the app, then you can see who's listening and what they're doing.
But across all these different apps, you have no idea.
You cannot know what the top is.
It's a farce.
It's a lie.
You cannot track absolute numbers on podcasts.
Now, there are ways that PodTrack does it that give them some other forms of reporting, but truly, you really don't know all that much.
It's usually redirects.
Yeah, exactly.
It's redirects.
You don't know if someone stopped.
You just don't know.
So this model breaks.
It doesn't work.
It does not work.
And besides that, you wind up with stupid content like this University of East Anglia puff piece.
And that's why I'm very happy that we're doing it the way we do it.
The University of East Anglia.
I'm going to show myself by donating to no agenda.
Imagine all the people who could do that.
Oh, yeah, that'd be fab.
Yeah, on no agenda in the morning.
By the way, we made some basic decisions on how we would count stuff.
Are you interested in what we think?
Yeah, what do you think?
So what we think, it's always counterintuitive, where there are so many more Android handsets out there, but when it comes to podcast listening, head and shoulders above anything, as far as we know, is the Apple iOS Podcasts app.
Yes.
That's number one.
Number two is Stitcher.
Now, that's both iOS and Android, with iOS being slightly higher than Android.
And Stitcher.
Stitcher!
The guys who put ads when you pause it.
Stitcher.
Number three is Overcast, which is, I believe, iOS only.
And then it really drops down, and then you've got all these things like Dog Catcher and all these other ones.
Almost everything combined, all other apps, barely equal what Apple iOS Podcasts app in all of its different versions does.
With this podcast, I'm going to presume it's the same for a lot of podcasts.
And I find that interesting.
Yeah, no, I find it fascinating.
I had a similar kind of facet.
I can't bring it up for some reason.
But MailChimp, which takes care of the newsletter, and I hope people would subscribe and not unsubscribe, because occasionally it's really great.
Yeah, I'll say.
And we make a lot of points in there.
Good points.
They have a list of the email clients.
And by far, the number one...
No, no, the number one email client in general is Google Mail.
Oh, Gmail, of course, of course.
And that's all the desktops.
But if you swing over to the mobile, it's iOS completely, heads and shoulders above everybody else.
And in fact, it is at the transition point where there's more people reading the email on mobile than they are on PCs.
It's casual.
And I've got the news template is a mobile template, so it looks good on all platforms.
But yeah, no, iOS, that is a...
You're doing a lot of yeah, no today.
I just want to point it out.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
No, yeah.
I wish I could switch it to no, yeah, because I think that's mind-boggling.
No, yeah.
And by the way...
Anyway, Apple just dominates this, and I think it's because when podcasting began, it was pod, iPod, the orientation was that, and I think it's carried over as a tradition.
Well, there's more to it, I think, but I think the experience on Android is poor.
And there's been no marketing of any really good apps that do it.
Not that the podcast...
Why don't you do one?
I'm thinking about it.
By the way, I want to point out to everybody, just in case it wasn't obvious, we don't do any statistics.
We don't crunch the numbers.
We don't care.
We do not care about who's listening, where they're coming from, whatever.
I asked Void Zero to run one log file for one show for 48 hours.
And Manhattan, for two days, were baffled.
I'm so happy I don't do this anymore.
I'd rather have a broad-based audience.
We have kids that listen, we have people in their 80s listening, and everybody in between, and from all segments of the world.
Okay, let's thank a few of them.
But we don't have to show any advertisers any of that, which is great.
I love it.
Yeah, because you have to prove it and do research and all this stuff.
I mean, okay, we're not like the big podcasts that are selling MailChimp ads.
Okay, but we'll be unfettered and we will not have to deal with any of this sponsored by bullcrap.
Right.
Right.
Which we try to make as clear as possible.
Yes.
Anonymous comes in with a one, two, three, four, five from Ohio, Dayton, Ohio, as a matter of fact.
Merry Christmas, he says.
Andrew Terry in Brackley, North Hampshire, UK. One, two, three, four, five.
He wants a karma shot for us.
We'll put that at the end.
We'll have some job karma for everyone who requests that.
You bet.
Do-ga-digy.
Douga did you go Douga did you in fucked fucked you said yeah fucked fucked $111.11 and he says doosh cop doosh cop which was just a douche head yes that's right douche nozzle Patrick O Barham in Nooseville Queensland $100.
He wants a shout-out to Uncle Don, who he thinks has been tirelessly working to improve the lives of millions.
It'd be great if you'd listen to the show, too.
James Wells at Flagstaff, Arizona.
$100.
Gareth Kuchinskas.
Kuchinskas.
I think.
In Southington, Connecticut.
Sam Leung in Toronto.
Sir Sam, that is.
Sir Sam Leung.
88, 88, 88, 88, 88, 88.
I don't know what that means.
I don't know.
They can't always be doing the eights.
Sean Coffey in Annandale, New South Wales, 8080.
There he is.
Sorry.
I was daydreaming.
Pay no attention.
It's for the Knights.
I was daydreaming.
Sorry.
And he says, Sam, make a comment.
Whoa, dude, your dollar's gone way up, man.
Yeah, I know.
75 cents to our dollar now, the Australian dollar.
We have the, we're at 122 euro to dollar, which is like, it's getting there.
It's getting down to 120, which is nice.
And you know why?
It's because of these great gas prices.
That helps.
We're killing it here.
Ben Smith in Greenville, Texas, 75.
Also wishes everyone a Merry Christmas.
Gregory Davies in Lawton, Oklahoma, 6969.
He says, you saved me from insanity!
I think we've seined a lot.
We are seining you.
We're staining you from insanity.
David, oh, we create the, you know, a little better, the right perspective.
You go listen to the real news, you crack up.
It's a healthy news diet.
Yes, you crack up.
You crack up.
It's hilarious.
You can't help it.
Especially this North Korea stuff.
Oh, yeah.
This is some of the funniest material ever.
Scott Olson, San Diego, California.
This is David C. Pugh in Massillon, Ohio, 6969.
Scott Olson, San Diego, California, 6833.
Sir Jeff Yerke over here.
We've got a record project.
I've got to get back on the stick with that.
Is that your Red Fox project?
Yes, yes, the Red Fox project.
You know how long I've heard about this.
It's like five years you've been working on that project.
Yeah, we've got a lot of this stuff done.
Oh, yeah.
And what are you going to release it on?
We don't know.
Oh, okay.
It's like an exercise.
It's like a dot-com idea.
Oh, yeah.
Just do it.
Yeah.
Robert Lane in Rialto, California, $65.
Paul Love in Mechanicsville, Virginia, $60.60.
David Oliver in San Francisco, California, $60.60.
Jefferson C. Post in East Massachusetts, that's double nickels on the dime.
Marion Alavila, 55-10 from the Philippines.
Oh, we have too many of those.
George Oberhofer, Jackson, New Jersey, 50-33.
Gary Wiley in Squim, Washington, 50.
Is that how you pronounce that?
Yeah.
Because it says S-E-Q-U-I-M? Sequim?
Sequim.
Sequim.
All right.
Named after an Indian tribe.
Newbies that show up in the area always call it Sequim.
Oh, wrong.
Yeah, then they beat them up and kill them.
Throw them in a ditch.
So you better make sure you get that right.
Andy Clements in Maynooth.
Maynooth.
County Kildare.
Ireland.
We've got a lot of islands.
Nice.
And curiously, Eric Veet in Dublin.
California.
Oh, Dublin, California.
Now that's your crazy number theory right there.
Yeah, it's a little...
We've got an actual person from Ireland, and then underneath that, someone from Dublin, California.
Yeah, I know.
It makes no sense.
Love it.
David Smolsky in Austintown, Ohio.
50.
These are all 50s.
Sir Brian Watson in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Damian Curry, your buddy, in McLeod, Victoria.
Martin Van Galenlast. Martin Van Galenlast. Martin Van Galenlast.
Martin Van Galenlast.
Beneden Leeuwen.
In Beneden Leeuwen.
50.
Was it that bad?
You're not even trying.
You're just mocking.
I'm not mocking.
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
You're getting it all wrong.
Now I'm lost.
Well, go back to B'nai Loon.
John DeSantis in Fort Pierce, Florida.
These are all 50s.
Justin Bloom in Madison, Alabama.
Danielle Sweezy, or Swayze possibly, in Gresham, Oregon.
Sir David Trotsky in Romeoville, Illinois comes in commonly.
We thank him.
Benjamin Smith in Oakland over here by me and Sir Mark Tanner in Whittier, California.
We want to thank all these folks for helping us with the show 680.
And remember, we have 681, the special Christmas show, coming up on Thursday.
Dvorak.org slash NA. That's right, everybody.
Thank you so much.
Especially everyone who came in under the $50 level for anonymity purposes or you're on one of the subscriptions.
It really, really is highly appreciated.
I think you really enjoy the value you get from this content so much more when it's the actual product we put together for you.
And it is a product.
We don't just jump out of bed on Thursdays and Sundays and go, Oh yeah, let me do a show!
Hey, let's do a show!
No.
We are...
Creating a product and not using the public as a product.
Exactly.
Creating some phony thing that looks like a product.
Exactly.
Which is what you're dealing with when you're watching anything commercial.
Anything.
Well, pretty much anything.
Including NPR and PBS. Public radio, public television is not commercial free.
You're never going to see...
Bill Gates sucks shit!
Burlington Northern can have a complete sex scandal, and they would never be discussed on the news hour.
Probably not.
Exactly.
I do have a note from a 30...
Just to throw in something from someone that's a $33 a month subscriber that's been that way for a while.
Sure.
Set a note.
He wants to highlight Fabian Scherschel from Hanover.
He and his fellow podcast producer Dan Lynch have been producing one of the most popular Linux podcasts, Linux Outlaws.
And sadly they've announced the end of the Linux Outlaws after 370 episodes.
We could have probably plugged them earlier.
Yeah.
I wanted to see that they were recognized.
Fab frequently talks about no agenda on his podcast.
And without it, I probably would have never found the show.
Why do you think they stopped?
What happened?
Well, you don't know.
So if you could find a bit of Christmas spirit to give Fab and Dan a shout-out to let them know, firstly, thanks for hitting me in the mouth, and secondly, thanks for the second-best podcast in the universe.
They'll be missed.
Tom Green.
This is a problem, and this is also an opportunity, John.
A gap in the market.
We do a Linus podcast.
Dvorak.org slash N.A.
If you wake up with the blues, trying to fill your day with news, there's one thing you must remember.
No agenda in the morning.
For a healthy, balanced news diet, try NoAgendaShow.com.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs.
It's a time line.
It's your birthday, birthday.
I'm so a champion.
Well, we can make it really short for today's birthday segment.
Only one Sir Ted Hossman celebrates tomorrow, and we say happy birthday to our night of the No Agenda Roundtable from all your friends here at the Best Podcast in the Universe.
And we also have one night.
This is Nicholas McFall, who I think he's been saving for a while, no?
I believe so.
I believe so.
Let me see.
Wait a minute.
Let's reread his note here.
Yes, listened for several years, but only started donating this year.
The analysis presented on the show was outstanding.
Couldn't think of a better show to support.
I would encourage every listener to make a donation, even a small one, as the first is the hardest.
Do you think that's true?
A lot of people don't have...
They can't bring themselves...
A lot of our listeners can't bring themselves to donating anything because they think everything should be free.
And meanwhile, of course, they're watching commercial television.
Even if they're skipping it with their DVR, they're catching a lot of this stuff.
And that is the same as paying.
You might as well be sending these douchebags money.
Yeah.
Except they're deriving so much more value from you.
Yeah, because the product you get from these commercial operations is not...
Outstanding.
It's not outstanding.
It's dishonest material.
We're honest.
Yeah, we're pretty damn honest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
There's your story.
All right.
Nick, Nicholas McFall, step forward, my friend.
You are now...
Becoming a Knight of the No Agenda Roundtable, I proudly crown the Sir Nick of the South Side.
For you, my friend, hookers and blow, rent boys and chardonnay, malted barley and hops, Dos Equis and Dutch dominatrix, ass cream with bear fillings, porn stars and pot, Cuban cigars and single malt scotch, cannabis and cabernet, opium and warm orange juice.
How about some wenches and beer, some vodka and vanilla, bong hits and bourbon, or something?
A bunch of some mutton and meat.
It always seems to be a favorite of all of our nights.
Thank you very much for your contributions over the past year.
And I'm glad you've been listening.
And go to noageneternation.com slash rings.
Pick up your well-deserved ring.
Everyone wants to do that.
That should be coming in shortly.
And tweet the picture once you get it in with your certificate.
Tweet the picture and we'll retweet.
Yes.
Uncle Don.
So I've been going back and forth with Uncle Don on this North Korea thing, as you know.
And I told him, I said, you watch.
They're going to come out and they're going to confirm it's North Korea.
And of course, he has not gotten back to me.
I don't know exactly why, but I'm sure that there's all kinds of conversations going on.
Now, he is so bane from mainstream media because of his opinions as a serious guy.
You know, 50 years in the CIA, ambassador to South Korea, now working for the Pacific Century Institute, I think it is.
Yeah, I can't remember.
Yeah, some money guys.
He actually...
You know that he...
When he left...
Goldman Sachs gave him a contract.
Did we talk about this?
No, I don't remember this.
Yeah.
And he hated it so much...
He was so disgusted by what the things they wanted him to do, he quit and he gave all his shares back.
Because they'd given him shares.
They kept the shares like he should.
Yeah, I also kind of said, dude, no.
Yeah, don't do that.
He does not like those guys.
So when you don't like those guys, you're pretty...
If you don't like him, you keep the shares.
Well, no, he's a man of principle.
He's 87.
He's 87.
He doesn't need the money.
So he did get asked onto a roundtable in New York, a roundtable discussion on...
I'd never even heard of this outfit.
RNN. The Regional News Network...
Wow.
Yeah, this is getting...
Sounds Russian.
No, it's actually, if you look at...
Let me see, I have it here somewhere.
RNN is...
It's a little outfit that owns, I don't know, eight local stations around the New York...
The upstate area.
I mean, it's really...
I think it's unworthy.
But...
Well, they have a nice building.
Oh, beautiful building.
Half in the water there and everything?
Yeah, yeah.
So they had Don on for about 20 minutes talking about the rectal feeding torture report.
And I thought part of what he said was funny and clip-worthy here on the best podcast in the universe.
When you go through the report, we outsourced to two shrinks who've never done an interrogation.
Forget they don't speak Farsi.
They don't know anything about Al-Qaeda.
And by the way, Don has this great way of smiling at someone when they say these horrible things.
Yeah.
I've noticed this.
It's something he does.
He'll be really smiling like he's ready to burst out laughing while you...
It's a trick.
He's doing something very specific.
You have to watch this.
And he'll just be smiling from ear to ear while you're saying these horrible things about torture.
And I don't know why, but it's something...
There's got to be some tactic in here that we don't know about.
And we're paying him $81 million in taxpayer money with a contract for part of my two yahoos who don't even know the first thing about it.
And we're letting them figure out where the line is?
I mean, you spent a lot of years in government service, a lot of years in the CIA. How do we get to the point where we're outsourcing to people I don't think I have the authority to make these decisions, and then we have to defend it.
Well, we get into that business when we're asked to do things, which is basically not what we signed up to do.
We did not sign up to be jailkeepers and interrogators.
We were asked by JFK to murder Castro, and we weren't very good at assassinating.
I was involved in the hearings in 1975, the church committee, and we made eight attempts to get Castro and failed in all of them.
So we're not very good assassins, or we weren't, and we're lousy torturers.
And I'm glad to say that's true in both cases.
And it's just, I used to think that the best thing I had going for me as a CIA officer was the fact that I was an American.
And the fact that we did not torture our people, everybody knew the Soviets did.
And there was a huge difference.
I now have a very close friend who's dual citizenship.
She's an Arabic specialist, and when she goes into the Middle East, the closest guard to the secret she has is that she's American.
And she goes by her French citizenship.
And we've done that to ourselves.
And I think we need to stop it.
I hope that this will become an issue in the election.
I think Obama knows that we need an effective CIA. So he's not throwing the whole agency under the bus.
There's the bus.
He trusts Brennan.
And I thought Brennan tried to do a good job the other day.
And when he said, it is unknowable whether or not these EITs really led us to capture Osama bin Laden.
And I think that's a pretty honorable statement.
He's still a company man.
Or Don.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, of course.
And I like the fact that when it comes to killing people and torture, we just suck.
Yeah.
We're no good at assassinations.
We're pretty good with the drones.
Well, he didn't say that we weren't any good with that.
And by the way, I don't think we are.
How many real terrorists who are really coming over here to really attack us are we taking out compared to the number of citizens, I'm sorry, possible militants?
Come on.
None?
Yeah.
We're horrible.
But isn't that the idea?
Just to blow people up?
Just because we like blowing stuff up?
It's horrible.
It's really not even funny, really.
It's pathetic.
Alright, well that was interesting.
Well...
It was interesting that you got the clip at all.
Yeah.
How did you get that clip?
It showed up in my news feed.
He didn't tell me about it.
And all of a sudden the video showed up.
I search for stuff all the time.
I'm sure he didn't have anything.
He just happened to have a news feed that's got some keywords.
Yeah, I search all kinds of stuff.
Someone sent me this article.
When you think of the torture, the rectal feeding, and all this business, and the rendition flights...
Do you like hummus?
Exactly.
Jake, I'm not a doctor and neither are you.
Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a diplomat.
And if you think about who's being renditioned away to go into these secret camps and basements and be tortured...
You don't really think immediately about just some guy from Canada who was on his way home from a family trip abroad, stops at JFK. I'd never heard this story before.
Oh.
And had you heard about this?
No, no.
I think I have, but play...
Okay.
No, I don't have a clip.
It's...
This guy's name is...
Well, he has a very unfortunate name.
Maher Arar.
He's full just Canadian.
And he lands in JFK. And he is literally seized by the CIA. Thrown onto a jet.
Rendered out through Bangor, Maine.
And was gone for 10 months.
Being tortured.
The Canadian government was bitching about.
Yeah, and was tortured.
One tactic they use to question prisoners for two hours, then put them in a waiting room so they can hear others screaming, then bring them back to continue interrogation.
Electrical cable two inches thick, hit me with it everywhere in my body.
Mostly aim for my palms, sometimes a miss hit my wrists.
Struck me on my hips, lower back, constantly threatening me with metal chair, tire, electric shocks.
That's an enhanced interrogation.
You know, we can debate what the meaning of torture is.
Oh, man.
But you never think it's just some Canadian dude.
Like, wait a minute.
Canada.
Hey, stay home next year.
It's just some Canadian dude.
It's horrible.
It's just horrible.
That's okay.
They're all in on it.
Everybody thinks it's great.
I guess.
All right.
I got an interesting little side thing here.
Did you play the Snowden in Germany?
I didn't know any of this was going on.
Now, when Edward Snowden revealed what America was up to spying on civilians around the world, it came at a cost to his safety and also his own citizenship.
But with it has come incredible popularity with posters, music and even art devoted to him.
Some even describe him as a new pop icon of our times.
You've got Piskunov, traveled to Germany where the persecuted whistleblower has obtained quite a fan base.
Edward Snowden is keen that everyone knows.
Becoming a celebrity was the last thing he was aiming for.
But whether he likes it or not, he's now famous.
And in Germany, has a lot of fans.
One artist symbolically renamed a street in Berlin in dedication to the whistleblower.
In another event, inspired by his revelations, an NSA in the house message was projected onto the side of the US Embassy.
He is a hero, yeah.
Yeah, I know this.
I know this is happening.
I didn't know this was going on, and I want to put a commentary for there.
We have a lot of Deutschland listeners.
I would like to get one of these posters.
There's two kinds.
There's the bigger one, and there's the small one.
They stick on poles.
I wouldn't mind having either one.
The small one looks like a sticker.
I think the big one's actually a real poster.
I want to get one.
I think it's a collectible.
I agree.
This is really big.
This is Berlin mainly.
Berlin has become the center of freedom fighters.
Of course, completely misguided about Berlin being the place you want to be.
In fact, it's the place where the NSA really wants you to be.
It's our main hub of activity.
It's exactly where you want it to be.
Berlin's guy has always had this magical aspect.
A lot of cities do.
Paris, Madrid to some extent.
But Berlin's always, even though when it was all busted up by the Powers that beat Germany in World War II. It revitalized itself.
And if you go there, it's a very lively, comfortable place.
I think I want to go.
I want to go check it out a bit.
I want to see who's there.
You haven't been there?
Well, of course, I've been to Berlin, but I haven't been since the Snowden revelations.
Oh, since Snowden.
Oh, yeah, you should go.
I'd love to go and see what's going on.
Yeah, do a podcast from there.
Well, a couple, maybe.
There's a lot of people.
Well, of course, this is also where Poitras and...
Or I heard someone say Poitras.
Poitras!
Laura Poitras.
Maybe we're not saying it right.
I don't know.
When she's sitting there in front of Amy Goodman, and Amy Goodman says Laura Poitras, and Poitras sits there and doesn't say, no, no, no, she's pronounced Poitras.
Or she didn't say anything in the pre-meeting, the pre-interview.
It seems that that's her name, Poitras.
I want to keep it Poitras.
It's like Tim Collins.
Poitras.
Poitras.
Applebaum is there.
Applesauce.
The tour man.
What's her name?
Snowden's former girlfriend.
The cute one who was Assange's former girlfriend.
Oh, not the stripper.
No, not the stripper.
The stripper is supposed to be a Moscow with him now.
Whatever.
Yeah, I think I've heard that too.
He's also missing some teeth on the right.
The last video he did, which was...
He's missing teeth now?
On the right-hand side.
Yeah, it's always a Google Hangout.
The right-hand side of his face?
Yeah.
That would be a left hook.
Or a black...
On the right hand side of his face, that would be a left hook, probably delivered by some bruiser.
Well, I've never really paid attention, or I've never seen it.
Most of the time, I guess we've always seen his face mainly left profile, which is why I've always seen the broken nose guard on the glasses.
Well, he only wears the glasses when he's being Snowden, when he's being the guy.
The Snowden, the brand.
When he's out on the street in Moscow, he's not brand Snowden.
I wonder if he's learned Russian by now.
It seems that he should have.
I don't know if it's easy.
He's pretty fluent in the language when you're there that long.
It may not be that easy to learn.
Anyone can learn any language if you're stuck there.
Oh.
Let's see.
I have some things from Bamford about Germany.
I don't want to play that.
I don't think that's interesting, really.
I think the most interesting thing is here's the cop killer rundown.
Play that.
Yeah, this is New York.
Now, to New York.
Police officers have been shot dead in their patrol car in what appears to be vengeful executions.
The officers...
were ambushed and shot at point-blank range.
The gunman later committed suicide by turning the weapon on himself.
He made threats on social media to kill police officers just hours before the shooting in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
I don't think I can recall a time when some guy who was committed Acts of violence, including death, has not killed himself.
They always wind up killing themselves.
I find that unusual.
Never are the guys taken alive.
They're always killing themselves.
Always.
You're in a cabin, you've been running from the cops for months, you get burned to death, but he killed himself in the flames.
Yeah, so you can never talk to the guy.
Whatever the case is, if this is true, we assume that at least the dead policemen are true, as the story goes, it's Sharpton.
He should be arrested.
Funny you say that.
No, no, he's actually working in the White House.
Yeah, funny you say that.
So we have a huge fracas going on now between the PBA, which is pretty much the...
Professional Bowlers Association.
Yeah.
Policeman's Benevolent Association.
Oh, right.
And the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and literally saying, de Blasio and Sharpton have blood on their hands.
Blood on their hands, they're saying.
I'm in on that.
I agree.
And the police, the mayor came out and did some speech.
The police turned their backs on him.
This is not a good thing.
This is not how the mayor and the police usually interact.
And this is problematic.
If you want some problems with policemen, the New York cops, Chicago would be some too.
This is not the guys you want to have against you.
No.
This is not the guys you want who are saying, hey, you know what?
Why don't we just do everything by the book?
No, definitely not.
You don't want that.
Your city's going to fall apart pretty quickly.
And I agree.
Sharpton...
Of all people, Sharpton being an advisor now to the White House consistently is troublesome, man.
I mean, this guy, I was in New York in the 80s, and we had the Tawana Brawley case, and Sharpton was just such and so annoying.
And of course, that turned out to be not true, and people are stupid.
They don't learn from history.
This guy is a charlatan.
Luckily, there's a lot of families who are saying, hey, you don't speak for us, go away.
Some of them are doing that, finally, but that doesn't really...
That gets a little bit of reporting, not much.
Like I said, the Obama administration is...
Fairly stupid and subject to bullshit artists.
Yeah.
And I would go back to the CTO, CEO, whatever that guy's title was, Kundra, who said that SkipLogic was some sort of thing and people were out there speaking COBOL and whatever.
He just sounded like a moron.
He doesn't know anything.
But, oh, no, SkipLogic.
SkipLogic, everybody.
Hey, Jay Johnson's the last thing I got for us.
Jay Johnson is our replacement for Lucy Napolitano.
No, it's J.
It's J.
No, it is J.
It's not J.
It's J.
You pronounce it J.
No, you pronounce it J.
It's like Daesh, like Dash. J. J. J. J. J. Johnson.
J. Mr. Secretary Johnson.
There you go.
Now, we've got a lot of, how do you say correctly, undocumented citizens here in Texas.
I know, I'm sure several.
Yeah, I think we have a few in California.
Everywhere.
I have personal feelings about what's going on, how this works, and what is unacceptable to me is the general statement, our immigration system is broken!
It's like...
Fuck you.
Don't say that.
It's not broken.
It's become bureaucratic.
It's become unaffordable.
It hasn't been enforced.
There are laws on the books that are not enforcing.
I'll leave that for what it is.
It should not cost $7,000 per person just to become legal in America.
It just shouldn't.
It makes no sense.
It's never been that way.
And it's all since this went from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a morass of bull crap.
It needs to stop.
That whole department needs to go away.
It's crazy.
And then you get...
So now the idea is...
Because people are so confused.
There was no executive order.
The only thing that is being applied is discretion, which any agency can apply, discretion on who they are going to go after and deport, and it's felons, not families.
If you remember, this is the little mantra that they put in.
Felons, not families.
But the Mexican population, who I know and who I believe are probably undocumented here, They are afraid of this guy saying this.
From my homeland security perspective, we want to encourage people who are in fact not removal priorities and have not been for years.
These are people who are just simply not going to be deported because they've been here for years.
We don't have the resources and they become integrated members of society.
And if they're not removal priorities, i.e.
they're not criminals, I want them, I want to know who they are.
I want them to come out of the shadows.
And so we're offering people, consistent with our legal authority, the opportunity to come out of the shadows, submit to a background check, and be held accountable.
Oh yeah!
Right away, sir!
Ha ha!
No, any illegal immigrant that happens to be here for years knows the ropes, and that ain't the ropes.
Nobody, nobody is going to go, oh yeah, no, this is a great idea.
But finally, they're asking me to come out of the shadows and put my name on the list.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, this is not going to happen.
Oh, I'm in Hitler's Germany.
I can now change my name back to Rabinowitz.
You're not a priority.
Uh-huh.
People are so afraid now because now they're really quivering.
No one even trusts any of this.
Of course not.
You're not stupid.
Yeah, but people are going back to Mexico.
They're just leaving.
Screw this place.
Well, yeah.
Probably the right attitude.
If the Mexican economy ever picked up, there would probably be a lot more going back, but it's been ruined.
Indeedy.
All right, everybody.
Well, have yourselves a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Super Solstice, a Kickin' Kwanzaa.
What else do we have?
Festivus.
Fine Festivus.
That's right.
You staying in California?
No, I'm going up north.
Washington, as you would say.
Washington.
Washington.
All right, everybody.
So we have our Christmas special.
I hope you like it.
It was kind of us deconstructing us.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
It's good.
I think it is good.
It's actually one of the best shows we've ever done.
And you'll be hearing it in real time if you want, but also on the podcast.
We'll release it simultaneously on Christmas Day.
Right, and we'll be back Sunday after Christmas.
Yes, we will.
And then again, we'll be working on New Year's.
That's right.
Also.
That's right.
We could do another, you know...
No, no, no, no.
We're going to try and do another outstanding product for you.
And I'll be coming to you then from FEMA Region 6, where I am today in the morning, everybody.
My name's Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where we have ant problems.
And the yes-no problem.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
We will talk again, well, technically, on Thursday.
Right here on No Agenda.
Selfie!
You will not receive a selfie so long as you stand before me with your ridiculous furred hoodie.
When will you learn that your status updates mean zero to nothing to anyone else?
It doesn't matter which social network you posted on.
Worthless.
Use your mind.
Create new memories.
Interact.
Don't just add it to a library of forgotten photographs.
Okay.
Ugh, how disappointing your generation is.
America.
Ow!
ISIS.
We will follow them to the gates of hell.
ISIS.
I feel good.
Jake, I'm not a doctor and neither are you.
Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a diplomat.
I'm Joe Biden, and thank you for taking the time to listen.
Adios, mofo.
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