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March 29, 2015 - No Agenda

03:00:08

708: Power & Gossip

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	Like, they're arms straight down, and they're real stiff, and they're just bug-eyed.
	Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
	It's Sunday, March 29, 2015.
	Time for your Gitmo Nation media assassination episode 708.
	This is No Agenda.
	Diving deep into the ABSB Extended Squitter Spec and broadcasting live from the Crackpot Condo in downtown Austin, Texas, FEMA Region 6 in the morning, everybody.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, where I received a bat signal, I'm John C. Devorak.
	It's Crackpot and Buzzkill in the morning.
	You didn't actually receive the bat signal.
	This is a fact.
	No, the bat signal has been expanded.
	Adam Berkpile, who has the Pocket No Agenda app, is working on...
	What happened was the provider that provides the push services no longer provides a free tier.
	They what?
	They no longer provide a free tier.
	It costs money to do these alerts on...
	How much could it cost?
	Believe me.
	It's like 200 bucks a month.
	To send out a bad signal of eight times a month?
	To have it appear on the iPhone with an alert?
	Yes.
	There's a whole industry built around that.
	That is a jip.
	Just so people know, the bad signal is whenever I tweet with a special hashtag thing that comes from my account, that triggers at least one app, but there's also other apps that have been made.
	And for a while, the Pocket No Agenda app has been kind of down because of this change.
	But now we have two new apps you can use, Pushbullet and Pushover.
	Push bullet.
	Push bullet and push over.
	Push over is funny.
	Yeah.
	Larry Gilbert did that and I can't see who our other producer was who did the push bullet stuff.
	Anyway, you can find those links in the show notes at 708.noagendanotes.com.
	And it works.
	I just tested it.
	And so it gives you a nice little push notification.
	What does the push notification consist of?
	What do you get?
	Do you get some noise?
	It honks a horn?
	It honks a horn, yeah.
	And it says, no agenda bat signal.
	We are now live.
	This is my tweet.
	With no agenda episode 708.
	And it has the link to the no agenda stream.
	Do you have any idea how many people subscribe to the bat signal?
	Not yet.
	Wait, so did the other service provide you such information?
	Probably, but the developers of this thing will have to tell me.
	I don't know.
	I just send out the tweet.
	Okay.
	It seems like for $200 a month it seems pretty pricey.
	Oh, that's crazy.
	That's crazy.
	That's crazy.
	When Twitter, by the way, is free.
	Yeah, you're not the product at all.
	No.
	No.
	Breaking news, John!
	Breaking news!
	Breaking news, breaking news, breaking news!
	The German Wings pilot had a club foot and narcolepsy!
	Figured I'd just add to the bullshit.
	Narcolepsy actually doesn't make sense.
	I did have this one...
	Before we say anything...
	I got a few clues.
	I know you do.
	I just want to point out that...
	This is so irregular, yet I don't believe people really are on to what's happening here.
	So if this guy was gay, then he wasn't gay.
	Then he was living with a girl, but then he had broken up with her.
	But it was a different girlfriend who said he was going to go do something crazy.
	There's antidepressants at home.
	He was hiding his craziness.
	He had bad eyesight.
	He also converted to Islam.
	I haven't seen that one.
	Oh yeah, that came out for a brief moment.
	They also tore up his note.
	Well, the note was already torn.
	And it was in the trash.
	The note from his doctor.
	Oh, I'm tearing up this note and throwing it in the trash.
	So there's two things that's going on.
	One is, it's certainly in the United States media, but I saw the Dutch newspapers, and they were doing exactly...
	Well, there's actually three things.
	One is, we need to have more safety in the air in general, with multiple pilots on deck, never have one person there.
	Of course, the next generation aviation comes into play, which I will be talking about.
	And then we have all this...
	What is the term?
	Psychological autopsy.
	Love that term.
	And it's like the war on crazy.
	We should not have secrecy if you're nuts.
	We need to know all this stuff.
	Well, if we need to know all this stuff, let's just throw it back at the reporters and all the investigators and everybody and ask the simple question which nobody seems to ask.
	They say there's drugs involved.
	What's the drugs?
	Oh, they never tell you, do they?
	But now I heard that there are certain...
	Why is it so hard to tell us the drugs?
	It's not privacy's debt.
	Ah, yeah.
	Yeah, it's because the drug companies won't let them tell the drugs.
	Everything goes through mass media, and mass media reporters won't ask about the drugs because they'll lose some sponsors.
	I can't drive this point home enough, apparently, in the newsletter.
	Well, if you combine the so-called reports of his depression and taking medication for that, if you look at...
	TCAs, tricyclic antidepressants, such as lithium, benzodiazepines, benzos, benis, carbamazepine, all these SSRIs, they are very known.
	One of the side effects is vision problems.
	So this is now all fitting perfectly together, but it's a little difficult to go reporting.
	Now saying, well, because he was taking these antidepressants, you know, he had vision problems.
	This is not necessarily something the pharmaceuticals want out there, except in their standard disclaimer.
	You know, anal leakage, vision problems.
	Do not operate an Airbus.
	Do not operate an Airbus.
	But I got a lot of feedback from...
	I got an interesting note I'll read from one of our donors.
	It was anonymous.
	He used to be an Airbus guy.
	I worked at an airline with a fleet of A320 aircraft.
	One morning I awoke to find the FAA had grounded the fleet for an uncontrolled maneuver.
	There had been a near-miss situation and the plane flew itself out of the problem.
	But the pilot was surprised when the plane did not go where it was supposed to go.
	Well, under computer control.
	It turned out that in the most recently delivered aircraft, Airbus had changed the escape procedure from climb and bank to one side to climb and bank to the other side.
	Oh yeah, nice.
	But the change was buried in a 7,000 plus page operating manual and not highlighted as a change.
	Hmm.
	This is the kind of crap that goes on.
	Generally speaking, with software, which will bring us, when we go to the tech segment later in the show, will give me my opportunity to bitch and mow about Microsoft OneDrive.
	Okay, good.
	Holy crap.
	Just hold on to that.
	Hold on to that.
	I see you have clips.
	I only have just one thing to lead you into it, maybe.
	That is a reminder that the expediency at which this airman was blamed, and of course there's a lot of misinformation about medical certificates, you have first, second, third class, what they mean, about privacy laws, but really this guy is just being dragged over the coals posthumously.
	Yeah, that's what you do.
	He's dead.
	But I would like to have, A couple pieces of data, of actual data, such as the recording from the cockpit voice recorder, which I believe is just like the Boston bombing video that doesn't seem to exist.
	Lots of people have been told what's on the audio, what the audio contains from the cockpit voice recorder, but have not heard it themselves.
	And from the prosecutor, we know that you could hear his steady, constant breathing all the way down to the end.
	And I wonder, you know, I've listened to cockpit voice recordings before.
	There's ambient noise.
	You're going, you know, you have a pretty rapid rate of descent.
	So there's noise involved with that.
	And as you get closer, I wonder if they could hear him really breathing all the way to the ground, because this is pretty much what you're going to be hearing the last few hundred feet.
	Slide slope.
	Pull up.
	Terrain ahead.
	Pull up.
	Sink rate.
	Pull up.
	Terrain.
	Pull up.
	Don't sink.
	Don't sink.
	Too low.
	Terrain.
	And that just keeps on going.
	Too low.
	It doesn't stop.
	It doesn't stop.
	And that's the noise of the cockpit.
	That's what it says.
	Too low.
	I can't hear him breathing!
	Well, the breathing thing bugs me too.
	In fact, they have a breathing clip just to confirm it.
	You might as well play that clip.
	This is the co-pilot bonus breathing story.
	...for these families to make.
	Made even more difficult by the revelation that the co-pilot appears to have crashed the plane deliberately, killing himself and 149 other people.
	It was this mangled cockpit voice recorder which gave up its secret.
	It seems the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cabin and then steered the plane into its final descent.
	The prosecutor handling this investigation, talking of deliberate intent to destroy the aircraft.
	The most plausible and probable interpretation for us is that the co-pilot refused to open the door to the cockpit to the flight captain and activated the button to start the descent.
	The pilotage for the commandant de bord.
	The prosecutor described the flight's final ten minutes.
	He said the captain left the cockpit, perhaps to use the bathroom, leaving the co-pilot alone at the controls to start the plane's descent.
	The captain is heard pleading to be let back in, but there is no response.
	The only cockpit noise, the sound of the co-pilot breathing normally, with passengers heard screaming just before the moment of impact.
	That is just not true, because you will hear...
	That's not true.
	Two things not true.
	One, that is not the only thing you're going to hear.
	As far as I know, I've looked at manuals and I've talked to Airbus airmen.
	You can't turn off these TCAS warnings, the pull-up, sink rates, terrain.
	You can't turn those off.
	Those are there for a reason.
	So that just makes no sense.
	And there is one piece of data that I've been going after about the Intentional, or the intent of the aircraft based on the flight management controls, which there is some actual data, after your clips we'll get into that, but there is no data whatsoever about a button push that causes this descent.
	Does not corroborate with the, there is some data, amateur data, doesn't corroborate that at all.
	So this report is bogus.
	Can I mention a few things here?
	First of all, is his mic live that they'd be hearing him breathing in the first place?
	Was he broadcasting his breathing?
	Okay, so if he was just breathing, I do not believe that would be enough to trigger his headphone microphone.
	There's a squelch setting on those, and you set it higher than you're breathing, obviously.
	Otherwise, you keep kicking that out.
	Yeah, you breathe and all that.
	You never hear anything.
	It's a single duplex, if I'm not mistaken, isn't it?
	Single duplex is a contradiction in terms.
	It's duplex.
	It's not duplex.
	No, it's not duplex.
	It's half duplex.
	No, that's not true.
	It is full duplex, but it's noise-gated.
	Okay, that's what it, okay.
	But most cockpit voice records, I don't even know if they record that audio specifically.
	I know they record the ambient audio.
	And you would have heard, I'm pretty sure the warnings would have punched through.
	It doesn't matter.
	We have no evidence, no data.
	As far as I'm concerned, it's all bull crap.
	What are you doing?
	I'm breathing, normally.
	Okay.
	I have a lung condition.
	So that always seemed like bullcrap.
	This guy keyed up, you know.
	And what happened to he was gay?
	That went away.
	He was gay, that went away.
	Gay part.
	Yeah, the gay part.
	But it just seemed like, and you're right, there'd be all this other...
	Racket going on.
	And in that report, this guy says all you could hear was screaming and the guy breathing normally.
	How did those two things mix together?
	Well, the point is, whoever's reporting this, wherever that was from, they are reporting on hearsay, speculation, and at best, rumor, because they have never heard this.
	So they're reporting lies.
	Here's what I've noticed.
	That guy, if you listen to him with this British accent, put together a package.
	And NewsHour had another person with another British accent putting together a package.
	And everything I've seen has been some British guy, always a British guy, Doing these reports, I've never heard of these people that are doing these reports.
	Ah, did you write down any names?
	Because that could be important.
	No, I didn't, and I only realized it when I started saying, why is everybody British all of a sudden?
	And I can dig their names up.
	Yeah, it might be interesting.
	These reports are all, you know, done.
	Of course, then, well, you know, it's in the mountains of the middle of nowhere, and we don't really have a reporter there.
	Why don't we do your clips, and then I'd like to come back with the research that I've done.
	All right, well, here's the clips.
	This is the dubious backgrounder, which is co-pilot clip one.
	This will be followed by the innuendo, which I find to be sketchy.
	Let's do a dubious backgrounder first.
	Start it off.
	Will Connery of Independent Television News has this report from the co-pilot's family home in Montalbord, Germany.
	What was his name?
	I missed his name.
	Connery from Independent TV out of the UK. Neil Connery of Independent Television News has this report from the co-pilot's family home in Montalbord, Germany.
	Behind the energetic and healthy appearance, what turmoil could have driven Andreas Lubitz to do what he did?
	More clues uncovered about his mental state are starting to surface.
	Documents with medical information discovered at the house he shared with his parents are helping investigators trying to understand his actions.
	At his flat in Dusseldorf, where he sometimes stayed, torn up sick notes for Lubitz are helping prosecutors build up a picture of the 27 year old.
	The fact that a ripped-up current sick note which covered the day of the crash was found supports the assumption that he kept his illness secret from his employer, this prosecutor says.
	Neighbours say Lubitz appeared to be in excellent physical shape, but evidence is growing of some other problem.
	In his flat, along with torn-up sick notes, investigators found medical documents relating to an...
	Say what?
	You went from a torn up sick note to sick notes.
	Oh yeah.
	In his trash can.
	Which means he didn't use them.
	If he used...
	It doesn't matter.
	Nah, it's all broken.
	Let me tell you something.
	If people came into my...
	And I've only been here for four months.
	If they came into my condo here...
	You're a neat freak, we should mention.
	Yeah, but you would find...
	He had transmitters and weird-looking antennas, such as this Alpha Loop, known for its World War I capabilities.
	He had all kinds of dubious bottles of pills.
	Which, of course, is from my voodoo doctor.
	They didn't have a lot of trouble in my place.
	One investigator was killed.
	Archivist.
	One investigator was killed as the pile fell over.
	Exactly.
	Um, It's just disconcerting.
	I think this is pretty much a very good example of how industry ran this news story.
	And I'm just taking my stance that something was wrong with this aircraft.
	We have multiple German wing aircrew who refuse to fly.
	But we're not flying.
	And, of course, there's all A320s that they fly.
	No one's going to necessarily come out and say, because of this.
	But they don't trust it.
	There was a maintenance issue with the nose wheel, landing gear doors.
	But they're just not flying.
	And that's not typical...
	For this type of incident, as explained.
	Did Egypt air go on strike when we had the al-Akbar guy go down?
	No, I don't think so.
	Well, they're doing a good job if this is a cover-up.
	And so let's go to, you can skip the rest, then go to the innuendo.
	And there's actually a couple of little snippets in here that make it At the local flying club where Lubitz was a member, they're in disbelief.
	Ernst Muller tells me none of this makes sense.
	It's strange.
	This isn't an everyday event, that someone kills themselves and takes 149 others with them.
	Some things happen, but to take innocent people with you, like this, it's just terrible.
	The regional mayor told me his thoughts are with all those suffering.
	We mourn with all the families, including the family of the co-pilot, he says.
	But there's no proof so far that the media reports are what really happened.
	There's been more police activity at Lubitz's parents' home with items taken away as this investigation continues.
	As the hours pass, more details continue to emerge about the real Andreas Lubitz.
	It's really fantastic how it works when all you have to do is just insert this basic story and then everyone is investigating things that could be based on just a false premise.
	And they just go on and on and on, and then we're all crazy, and we need to have psychological evaluations for all, which is a part of your first class medical, of course, but it doesn't matter.
	I think, I mean, I'm all in.
	Let's have psychological evaluations for bus drivers, train drivers, Uber drivers, for teachers, for nurses, doctors, babysitters, because they could all come in one day and kill you!
	Yeah.
	The war on crazy is just full-blown now.
	And of course, again, the NewsHour being...
	I've looked at this from this perspective.
	The NewsHour is sponsored by these big companies in one way or another.
	And you know...
	Well, I know Boeing is a frequent...
	Boeing's a big sponsor.
	I don't know if Airbus...
	EADS, I think I've seen their logo once in a while.
	I think they may want to step up their advertising.
	There's some gratitude here.
	Well, this may be a good time to do it.
	Maybe a sales job going on here.
	But NewsHour does a...
	Okay, NewsHour has this...
	By the way, I want to say the one psychological evaluation that you'll never hear anyone pleading for is politicians.
	And they really should be the top of the list.
	I would say...
	This is an interlude here.
	Play the PBS pitch for NewsHour.
	Okay.
	Where can you turn for news you can trust?
	How do we make sense of something like that?
	On PBS, we believe journalism should never stop asking questions.
	Give to your PBS station and support in-depth, independent journalism.
	We answer to no one but you.
	And...
	Our corporate advertisers.
	I mean, underwriters.
	I mean, sponsors.
	I'm not going to accuse them of doing a slipshod job here to basically cover up a corporate scandal.
	If there was one, we don't know.
	That's the point.
	But it's interesting how they passed off this story to ITN and let them do the story.
	And you can go, hey, well, it was their reporting.
	We ran their story.
	Good point.
	Excellent point.
	Because normally they run their own stories.
	So here's the third clip.
	That's of note.
	Yes, it is of note.
	That is of note, yes.
	The third clip, which is this one, which is...
	There's been a number of reports, and one of them was on NewsHour, when they had this guy on.
	We had a clip of where the guy says, well, you know...
	The procedure is you never leave two people in the cockpit.
	You don't leave a loner in the cockpit.
	You always put a flight attendant or somebody else in there.
	You remember that clip?
	And now we keep hearing the guy was locked himself in there, but we don't know that he physically pushed the guy out.
	He just locked himself in or however that works.
	So they had to fix the backstory.
	So let's fix the backstory.
	So we make this more clear so people aren't confused by what we've already done on the show.
	Lubitz locked himself in the cockpit alone before the crash.
	That prompted Europe's Aviation Safety Agency today to recommend all airlines adopt the two-person cockpit rule as soon as possible.
	U.S. rules already require it.
	Okay, we got that straightened out.
	Yes.
	So now we're good to go.
	Onward with the bullcrap.
	It just cracks me up.
	That's all I've got.
	Okay, so here's where the things that I was looking at.
	The official story, there's some bothersome pieces besides the fact that we have not actually heard the audio, which I don't see why they wouldn't release that.
	I mean, it just makes no sense.
	We had audio of Flight 93.
	Let's roll!
	That wasn't necessarily cockpit voice recording, but we had a lot of these different...
	We had the cockpit voice recording from the flight that was forced down!
	Right!
	Well, that was ATC. That wasn't cockpit.
	That was ATC. Okay, it was ATC. But this is not unprecedented that this stuff is released, particularly...
	Look, if I was running a news...
	I could get a recording of the captain banging on the door and passengers screaming before it cuts out.
	That's ratings in the can, baby.
	Yeah.
	It might be freedom of information requests.
	That may be more difficult because it's technically, maybe it's German property.
	I don't know if it's French property.
	Probably German.
	But still, it would just help me a lot.
	It would help me personally as a favor.
	It would be nice if they did that.
	Now, there is other data, and this is part of the next-generation aircraft system, and this is the so-called ADS-B technology.
	And the ADS-B is a system like a transponder.
	You know, we have the old mode A, B, and C transponders that send a code, Which is just to identify which aircraft.
	It also sends the aircraft registration number, a few other pieces of data.
	The newer systems, and there's two that are being rolled out worldwide, two is the 978-UAT and the 1090-ES. And people are upgrading to this because eventually it will be mandatory.
	And these transponders can send and receive From radar stations, but you can also just receive their signal on one of these little USB SDR software-defined radio sticks, which costs, I don't know, like 20 bucks or something.
	And people have been hacking on this stuff for a long time.
	It operates around the 1 gigahertz frequency.
	And there's a network now of people who are receiving these signals and aggregate it through sites.
	The most predominant one is FlightRadar24.com, which appears to be on the up and up.
	And these guys, they sell their professional app, they have their full-blown app, and they have in-app purchases.
	And apparently they're doing about $2.9 million a year in profit.
	They have nine people working for the company, have no...
	Venture funding that has been announced at least.
	And they say they're just running on their own revenues.
	And they have, you know, like you can track flights based upon this system.
	Now, they don't have all flights because only about 20% of commercial airlines in the United States have this.
	I was not able to find out if the German wings...
	Airbus 320 had either of these installed, but according to Flightradar24, they did.
	And here's what's interesting.
	There is one data register in this, I think it's 56 frames or something that these transmitters poop out.
	There's one, Register 40 is what it's called, and if the ground station interrogates the aircraft, which is not abnormal, but again, this is not really a rolled out complete system at all, it can say, give me flight management control data.
	And every, I think it's every second or so, this transponder will spit out a signal.
	And the FlightRadar24.com guys have three entries, only three they say, and they say they received it from, they had to aggregate a whole bunch of ground stations, which includes amateur data received by people with just laptops and a little USB stick and a wire hanging out of it.
	But of course there are also ground stations that are being built for The true next generation aircraft system or air management system, which in theory makes some sense that, you know, you can know the intent of an aircraft, what the flight crew has intended.
	And the example is here at 0930 Zulu, 093052 Zulu.
	There was an entry from the Register 40 in this, which apparently was...
	It was interrogated by a ground station, and it came back, altitude setting for FMC, flight management computer, 38,000 feet, and has the Q&H, which is the pressure, 106, which is normal.
	Then at 93054 Zulu, The flight management bit comes back as the setting for the altitude, ALT, is 13,008 feet, and then at 930.55 ZULO, so this happens within a couple seconds of each other, the flight management computer reports altitude 96 feet.
	Which would indicate that someone turned the altitude dial.
	Now, to go from 38,000 feet to 96 feet, you probably have to spin the dial to the left twice, which would make sense if you then wound up at 13,008 feet, halfway to the 96 feet setting.
	Now, what's interesting is that they only have three entries of this intent, nothing before, nothing after, and they say it was probably just good luck that one of these ground stations caught that and they took two days to decode all this information.
	I don't want to say that it's not true.
	If it is true, this clearly shows at least...
	A setting on the flight management computer with the altimeter, if the autopilot was engaged, it would indeed take this aircraft down.
	The problem is there's no data before or after, which is suspicious.
	There is very, if any, reporting on these three entries, and ADS-B is, of course, hackable.
	You could put these lines right into the data dump.
	You could just add it in manual, just type it in.
	But you can also easily spoof the transponder code.
	There's no good authentication as far as I've been able to find out.
	It looks like it's legit, but the one thing we know is it's not the guy pressing a button because this was specifically him twirling the altitude setting to the left twice.
	And this is all part of what they call the extended squitter registries in this new ADS-B system.
	I don't understand why this is not being used as evidence.
	I don't get it.
	It seems like this is proof that he did that.
	And I think it's only because the backstory, which we fixed part of, as we just played, says that he pressed this button to take it all the way down in a controlled descent.
	That does not jive with what FlightRadar24.com's data is saying.
	Uh-oh.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Sounds like we need another correction to the backstory.
	Well, we might.
	We might.
	And I don't want to accuse these guys.
	The only thing I could think of is that the FlightRadar24.com, maybe they've got some deal on the back end because they're intended to get the...
	The flying public accustomed to this form of tracking and reporting of aircraft.
	It also, the conversation that I keep hearing is, we need to stream data live from all these airplanes.
	That's exactly what this is.
	This is data being streamed live with some interesting additional data.
	There's a lot of things that this extended squitter spec contains that can be put into the broadcast.
	But it's funny that of all the different fields, of all the things you can get from the extended squitter, this is the only thing is this two inputs to the flight management computer with the altitude control.
	So I don't know exactly...
	Where this will head, I think you'll never hear about this ADS-B data, even though it would be fantastic as proof.
	But I really question all of it now.
	And by the way, is there not a single body?
	These disintegrated completely?
	There's not an arm, a foot, a piece of an ear?
	Nothing?
	Well, I think there's still really...
	I don't know.
	You don't know.
	I know you don't know.
	They can't get up there.
	It's cold.
	I want to thank producer Charlie, by the way, for really...
	He's an ADS-B expert.
	Of course, that's what our intelligence network is all about.
	And...
	I put his notes verbatim into the show notes so you can see all the backgrounders and how this stuff works.
	It's interesting to see how this works.
	There's a lot of people playing around with this on the receiving side.
	But you can also easily transmit.
	You could spoof this from your laptop, technically.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, well, we're not going to get to the bottom of it.
	The scheme is underfoot and the media is not going to go any deeper than you're going to get from these ITN guys.
	I remain...
	Whoever else was assigned the story.
	I remain skeptical.
	I remain...
	I believe it still is an Airbus versus Boeing thing.
	The timing is weird with sales jobs going on, big sales jobs to Middle Eastern countries, and the war machine is cranking up.
	I did get an email from one of our producers, Adam and John.
	I'm a pilot in the military industrial complex to fly a Navy variant of Boeing 707.
	And I agree 100% with your assessment of fly-by-wire and flight engineers.
	So what I said is the fly-by-wire, now we're seeing the unintended consequences of technology.
	And we used to have a third guy on deck.
	He continues, I love knowing that if the shit hits the fan and we lose all power and or hydraulics, I can still fly the good old 707 since it uses all old-school manual controls.
	Don't get me wrong, it's a pig, but it always works.
	Also, my flight engineers kept me from doing stupid shit all the time.
	Every time I read about that Air France story, how the fly-by-wire system contributed to the crash, it pisses me off more and more and makes me realize what a dumb F system this is that Airbus installed.
	There is some religion to this.
	The Boeing versus the Airbus guys.
	And now they're talking about command and control.
	We can remotely land the plane.
	All of this is going to be misused.
	Technology is going to kill more people as we grow older.
	It's just not going to stop.
	It's just not going to stop.
	Doing a fine job of killing people.
	I did like one theory that would be typically second half of show.
	But since we're talking about it anyway.
	This crash was on the 25th.
	The Large Hadron Collider cranked up on the 24th.
	It's just about 130 miles north of the crash.
	So it could have been just magnetism.
	Dragging the aircraft down.
	Sucking it down to the Earth.
	To the core of the Earth.
	Yeah.
	Changing it into little protons.
	And what was this other one?
	Who was on the plane?
	Someone came up with a crazy...
	Oh yeah, there was...
	I didn't even go into this one, but...
	Apparently, there was an investigative team who were coming back or on their way to look into massive banking fraud tied to Crypto AG, Siemens, the Vatican Bank, Mossad, and the CIA. I mean, I can't think of one more name to put in there.
	The AIIB Upcoming Bank.
	No, they were not on there.
	They don't have to kill anybody for that.
	That's going nowhere, except everyone's joining.
	So, I'm sorry, I don't have any answers because we have absolutely zero information except for the data that I just gave you.
	And that's all there is as far as I'm concerned.
	And that does support the intentional crash.
	It does support it.
	But there's no way to really authenticate this data.
	And I'm just not too sure about this outfit that produced it.
	Although I have no reason to doubt them.
	And that's it.
	That is the true story.
	So you'll hear CNN go on for five more days?
	Oh, yeah.
	But this is really all we got.
	Well, apparently, in terms of news, that's all CNN ever has.
	Wrecked planes.
	It does bring me to something else that I wanted to talk about.
	I went to dinner with...
	Christina and I went to dinner with my ex-banker friend and his wife.
	The banker.
	The ex-New York banker.
	Right.
	And we have other stuff to discuss about what was going on.
	But at a certain point, he said, during the dinner, he says, Capitalism is gossip and power.
	And I said, wow.
	What?
	Where did that come from?
	He said, well, think about it.
	That's what it is.
	That's how capitalism works.
	And I wrote it down.
	And when I went home, I decided to give it a little search.
	And I wound up with a guy who I had never heard of, and I'm very surprised, but I'm sure you have, Walter Winchell.
	Walter Winchell is pretty much credited as the father of the schlock, bullcrap, celebrity-driven news cycle that we have today.
	It's funny that of all the people that never heard of Walter Winchell...
	It would be me.
	I know.
	I know.
	It would be me.
	It is very humorous.
	People out there who know Walter Winchell are laughing to themselves.
	I don't know if there's many people who do know him.
	Oh, yeah.
	But I have a few clips.
	Walter, you have him?
	No, I have clips from, old clips from 1994.
	Neil Gabler, he is the author of Power, Gossip, and the Culture of Celebrity.
	So he wrote the book about Walter Winchell.
	And I thought it was, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to just learn a little bit about Walter Winchell as he is the founder of Of what we are in today, and actually listen to an example as well.
	So I'd like to play here, this is from PBS, and it's from the 90s, speaking to Neil Gabler.
	This is kind of the backgrounder on the whole concept.
	There was no real gossip in mainstream press before Walter Winchell.
	Winchell was in the, was he in the 20s and the 30s?
	Was that his time period?
	Mostly the 30s and 40s.
	Oh, I thought there was some 20s there, but it was during...
	Well, there might be, but he was a radio personality.
	Yes, well, he started as a columnist for the New York Post.
	Right, but he became famous as a radio personality, ended up wielding a lot of power because he understood a new medium.
	Here we go.
	And that medium had not really been fully developed in the 20s to the point where somebody like that can emerge.
	Invented, and I use that word advisedly, invented the mainstream gossip column.
	Gossip had always been marginalized before Winchell.
	And by that I mean that there were things like Town Topics, which was a society scandal sheet.
	And there was a scandal sheet called Broadway Brevities, which wrote gossip about various Broadway personalities.
	But these had very small circulations, and they certainly didn't hit the mainstream readership.
	They weren't part of the mainstream journalism or the mainstream media environment.
	And then Winchell comes along.
	And single-handedly...
	And it was single-handed.
	He creates this column in which he talks about who is romancing whom, and who's about to divorce, and who's anticipating a birth, and who's consorting with gangsters, and who's welching on bets, and who's ill, and all of these things that had previously been shielded from public view.
	When we gossip over the backyard fence, we gossip about our neighbors, and that's one thing.
	But the only way that this gossip That is mainstream gossip in a newspaper and ultimately syndicated gossip across the country is relevant at all is if you're gossiping about people that everyone knows.
	And the people that everyone knows are almost by definition members of some kind of elite.
	Whether it's a financial elite or a social elite or a celebrity elite.
	Now when you take all those factors And you put yourself in the position of someone who's reading Winchell's column in the late 20s or 30s or even later.
	But let's get back to the kind of inception of that column.
	And you're reading about some movie star who's getting divorced or some socialite who's lost a fortune in some way or another.
	You are penetrating the veil.
	The veil that has always existed.
	You're punching a hole in it.
	Or you're letting Wichel punch the hole in it and you're looking through that hole.
	And that empowers you.
	That gives you a sense of power over the people about whom you're reading.
	By invading their privacy, you are in a way appropriating them.
	That is, of course, I know this intellectually.
	I've witnessed it, but that is exactly what it is.
	It empowers the slaves who feel disenfranchised, have no power, feel their vote doesn't count, and it's a human mechanism that, as of course we'll hear in this next clip, was geniusly exploited.
	He writes again and again and again how tired he is of writing these columns, how much he would like to retire.
	It sounds like you, John.
	How he only does it for the money.
	How he's always looking for something else to do.
	And I think he got bored with gossip.
	He said this explicitly later on, that gossip just bores me now and I can deal with the affairs of the world.
	So I think that would have happened.
	I think, too, that there was always the political potential within Winchell.
	That he understood, at some point, the The relationship between the cultural democracy he served and the political democracy he could serve.
	Certainly, the Anti-Defamation League understood that and using Winchell's column to fight the Nazis, both abroad and domestically.
	And others came to Winchell on a regular basis.
	Civil rights leaders would come to Winchell because they understood the way in which the column could serve their purposes.
	Sound familiar?
	Yeah, Winfield's interesting.
	I just looked him up on the Wikipedia.
	I remember him when I was a kid.
	He was still around until he died in 72.
	Well, you actually used part of his legacy.
	Well, I'm stuck with it, I guess.
	Yeah, it's okay.
	But he began his radio.
	His radio things really made him...
	He was good at...
	He did the thing about...
	Should we hear an example?
	Because what I like so much...
	I can do an imitation of him.
	No, no.
	Let's do this.
	I don't have any...
	You have an example of him?
	I do.
	And this is really nice because, first of all, he starts off with something that, you know, obviously you were influenced by him through the ages, although I don't think directly...
	But he also has a little sound.
	This is a video.
	You can see it in the show.
	It's from C-SPAN, actually.
	He has a little kind of like a telegraph sound.
	And it's a button that he's pushing himself.
	And he's firing off these things.
	And the topics is what makes it fantastic.
	And by the way, this was around the McCarthy era.
	And although he always denied it, he was, as you'll even hear in this clip, he was a central figure in calling out the communists of the McCarthy era.
	So here is a piece of Walter Winchell.
	It's time, America.
	Time for Walter Winchell.
	Presented to you by Gruen, the Precision Watch.
	Gruen, the finest watch you can wear.
	Gruen, the finest watch you can give.
	Brings you the man who gives America the news.
	Walter Winchell, the New York Daily Mirror and the Washington Post.
	Mr.
	and Mrs.
	North and South American, all the ships at sea, let's go to press.
	Mr.
	and Mrs.
	America and all the ships at sea.
	I love it.
	You should add Mr.
	and Mrs.
	America.
	Except say Mr.
	and Mrs.
	Gitmo Nation and all the ships at sea.
	Dallas, Texas.
	The Texas special of the Katy line has been wrecked near Royce City, Texas, between San Antone and St.
	Lou.
	Love that.
	San Antone and St.
	Lou!
	Several reported kills just happened.
	We may have more on it later.
	Love it!
	That's the tease, the classic tease!
	Puerto Rico.
	The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico is on the march.
	They are plotting violence and maybe a revolution after eating armories for their guns.
	New York City.
	The police in New York have a new hot lead on the murder of a bronze monster.
	He was killed last week for welching on commission due to adultery in East Harlem.
	This is like your criminal news he's throwing in there.
	Hey, we got the news.
	He was welching on the bets.
	Oh, yeah.
	New York City, Mayor-elect Wagner will name his police commissioner this week, maybe Wednesday.
	The field is now down to six, including Assistant District Attorney Vincent O'Connor and, surprise, Chief Inspector Rothengast, two good men.
	It's unbelievable because we have the pilot of the plane was on medication.
	Washington, D.C., it's a baby boy for the Peter Campbell Browns.
	And then go to the elite baby boy and wait for it!
	Columbia Hospital, Washington.
	Mr.
	Brown is New York City's next commissioner of investigation.
	New York City.
	It's a baby boy for the John Costellos at Leroy Sanitarium.
	The lovely mother is the song star, Nancy Donovan.
	New York City, hear this.
	Dorothy Parker, the famous playwright and poet, will make a speech in New York on the 17th of the hall in Greenwich Village.
	Probably on 4th Street, on behalf of the communists, now in American jails, for conspiring to overthrow the United States.
	Good girl, good girl.
	Reno!
	Dorothy Parker, communist!
	Well, he was...
	Powerful, man.
	Powerful.
	He actually...
	Well, he was way past his peak by this...
	He peaked in 1948, and I believe this to be true, because he was very anti-Nazi, anti-communist later.
	Well, he was a Jew.
	He was a Jew with a non-Jewish...
	He changed his name.
	Right.
	But he was a very pro-Roosevelt.
	He kind of peaked with Roosevelt.
	And so when...
	And his style...
	And was it not Roosevelt who was influenced with his...
	Was it Fireside Chats from Roosevelt not influenced by him?
	I really doubt it.
	He had...
	The only lasting influence he had with his style was Paul Harvey.
	Right.
	And that's the story?
	Good day.
	Paul Harvey?
	Good day.
	Paul Harvey, without the high-speed patter, did his type of news.
	That's the story.
	Paul Harvey's amusing because at one point, and I remember this, it was too funny, because Paul Harvey had that extremely...
	Outrageous old-fashioned radio voice.
	And this is the story behind the story.
	Something like that.
	I can probably do it.
	He was actually hired and was on the 60 Minutes show for about a year.
	And they couldn't deal with him.
	Paul Harvey?
	Yeah.
	Really?
	Paul Harvey, I remember.
	He's a radio guy.
	They wanted him on 60 Minutes TV? Yeah.
	Ah, that's no good.
	So they put him on, and I said, this is dumb.
	This guy's not a TV guy.
	TV came out around 1948, and that's when Winchell Peek, because TV... Change the way...
	And if you read McLuhan's theories, you know, you had a hot medium and a cold medium.
	And the two mediums, radio versus TV, were so different that Winchell couldn't make the transition to TV because you'd be annoyed if you watched this guy.
	From now on, I'm quoting an open letter from God.
	That's Paul Harvey, yeah?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, play a little bit of Paul Harvey.
	My dear children...
	And believe me, that is all of you.
	Oh, wait.
	That's too funny.
	That's his crazy letter from God.
	Here, let me try this one.
	If I were the devil.
	No, that's also not a good example.
	Well, anyway.
	Somewhere around there.
	Everyone's heard Paul Harvey.
	Not everyone, but...
	He's dead now.
	Yes.
	When did he die?
	He died in 2008.
	Not too long ago.
	Not too long ago.
	I just thought it was interesting when I hear that, and it was just reminded that it truly is that people get empowerment from celebrity gossip and, ha ha ha, she has cellulite!
	Ha ha ha ha!
	Well, it's funny that you bring this up because I was thinking about this, about the mechanism on daytime TV, which is really where most of this stuff really occurs.
	And I thought about the main shows, including the new ones, like The Real and some of these shows where you have a bunch of people around the table, like Whoopi Goldberg's The View.
	Yeah.
	So you have these things, and they're a little bit gossipy, but if anybody out there wants to really see this at work, and now that you mention it and had that clip, which I think was a great clip, almost worthy, but not quite, is you have some of the shows, for example, on the daytime with individual personalities, which I would say, from your thesis, would stem from Paul Winchell.
	Did I say Paul Winchell?
	It would be not Paul.
	Walter.
	Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney is a comic act.
	Never mind.
	So yeah, Walter Winchell.
	It would be Queen Latifah.
	She comes to mind.
	The Ellen DeGeneres show.
	Meredith Vieira's got a show.
	But the show of shows.
	TMZ. That's a different model.
	Oh, okay.
	I'm talking about shows where you interact with an audience.
	There's no audience at TMZ. There's no way to have the...
	Bill Maher.
	Bill Maher's a comedy show.
	He does jokes.
	All right, I'll shut up and wait for you.
	I'm talking about daytime shows.
	Bring it home, baby.
	Bill Maher's a daytime show.
	Bring it home.
	And, yeah, I don't know why you said Bill Maher.
	The show that talks about gossip, Bill Maher doesn't talk about gossip.
	I mean, he talks about political gossip a little bit, but it's not to an extreme that we're talking about here that you brought up.
	The show of shows, if anybody wants to watch how this really works, you have to watch the Wendy Williams show.
	Wendy Williams is a black woman who is intimate with the audience.
	The audience and Wendy Williams are as one on the show.
	It's genuinely a work of art in this regard.
	And all it is, from beginning to end, is extremely inside baseball celebrity gossip.
	Mm-hmm.
	Where she brings out, oh, she has a, and what happened?
	Why does she have a swollen toe?
	And then she'll make some back, some kind of callback that you don't know, I don't know.
	It's almost like listening to the Jim Rome show, the sports talk guy, or some of these guys who have created their own universe.
	And to watch the Wendy Williams show, which in some ways is nauseating, because all it is is extreme celebrity gossip, and the audience is all in with her, and she's a big woman, all in with her when she does something like, oh, did you see the cellulite on her ass?
	And boom, the audience is all in.
	It's astonishing, this show.
	Our listeners won't be able to watch for very long.
	It's exactly what you're talking about, the Wendy Williams show.
	There's a 30-second clip, back to the PBS interview with the author of the book, about the transition to the celebrity culture.
	I should have played this just before what you said, actually.
	He created a preoccupation with celebrity, with gossip, with trivia.
	And that grew and grew and grew and grew until it really kind of subsumed the press.
	I mean, that process is still going on now.
	If one wants to see the origins of this media environment in which we live, where we're more interested in what happens to Michael Jackson's marriage than we are in what happens to Haiti, if one wants to understand the origins of that, One has to go back to Walter Winchell.
	Needless to say, I've ordered this book, which does not exist on Kindle, and I shall read it, and if there's anything else in there that I learned about it.
	What's the name of this book?
	Hold on.
	The title of the book is...
	It's called Winchell, subtitle, Power, Gossip, and the Culture of Celebrity.
	I think I got one of the last two new copies that you can get second hand, but certainly not on Kindle.
	It's interesting how this form, I like, I'm going to get this book too, where Winchell and you play some Winchell.
	Winchell actually mixed the gossip in.
	He mixed it in with news.
	The purest form of this, again, I'll bring it up, is Wendy Williams.
	She mixes it in with no news.
	Well, here's the cool thing.
	I believe that the transition that we have seen is from politicians and leaders, they have become the celebrities.
	And that is now, and in some cases, it's extreme.
	Clinton, Obama, Kerry wishes.
	He's just too fucking stupid to be a celebrity.
	He's stupider than the stupidest celebrity.
	But then the association.
	That's another big one.
	The association with George Clooney.
	You can go on and on and on.
	And that is really how...
	I like that empowerment angle.
	Like when you can...
	We found out that he's smoking cigarettes.
	The president is...
	I have control over him now because I know what he's doing.
	It's sad.
	It's sad.
	And I don't know exactly what the antidote is.
	I don't know exactly what it is, but we should be able to help people.
	Well, screw it.
	I don't want to help anybody.
	People who listen to the show will just be reminded how this came together.
	I like this.
	This was the rabbit hole I like going down.
	I'd never heard of the guy.
	I'm very disappointed in my historical knowledge.
	Yeah, well, you were raised probably away from him.
	And not too young, I think.
	Just missed all of it.
	Well, he was...
	Even if you were young, you would have been introduced to him via Saturday morning cartoons.
	The guy was so famous that all the cartoons were mocking him and doing imitation.
	Oh, really?
	Caricaturizing him in Bugs Bunny.
	Well, his legacy is still alive today in Texas, by the way.
	Did you know that?
	No.
	By God, for 25 years, they've been growing babies and cows!
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	You did not know that, did you?
	That's exactly it.
	See?
	Uh-huh.
	I know.
	That's a good call.
	I know.
	For 20-plus years, they've had glow-in-the-dark dogs you can buy that are part jellyfish.
	There's a clip.
	You want one more?
	For 20 years, they've been growing open-air HIV corn in Texas.
	Protogen.
	You know about pharmacological corn?
	HIV corn?
	I thought I was nuts.
	HIV corn?
	They've been selling glow-in-the-dark dogs?
	Yes, with jellyfish.
	For 20-plus years, they've had glow-in-the-dark dogs you can buy that are part jellyfish.
	I would like to order them along with my sea monkeys, please.
	Wow.
	Yeah, I know.
	Send you those.
	You're not listening to him.
	No.
	I had to ask him, did you edit this?
	Did you make this up?
	Because that's almost...
	The literal definition of incredible.
	I say, no, that's exactly what it is, man.
	Okay, I'm fine.
	Now, of course, I've got no time to listen to him.
	You crazy?
	No time for that.
	Wow.
	I'm busy.
	A lot of listening to get those clips.
	Busy doing the...
	Well, lots of people listen.
	Nothing wrong with that.
	No, it's fine.
	Buying seeds and...
	Buy some seeds while you're at it.
	And boner pills.
	It's all good.
	It's all good.
	We've had a...
	Every once in a while, somebody quits, they go overboard.
	We've talked about this, man overboard.
	Yes.
	I thought...
	Someone gave me a splash sound for that.
	Some guy went over a splash, so splash went over the side.
	Yeah.
	This was an email that you forwarded to me.
	I'm not going to say who this is, but I have to read some of this before we go into a segment.
	Yeah, I think you should.
	That's a good idea.
	Because it's distressing.
	It's distressing on a number of different dimensions.
	Because we're not trying to be mean-spirited or a-holes on this show.
	We do make light of things, which is kind of a-hole-ish.
	Let me reiterate, there's two things, people.
	New listeners misunderstand two things.
	One...
	We're really just trying to make light of the situation because if you laugh about it, it changes your chemical composition and you can feel better about typically things that you're not being told the truth about it or it may be just a little disappointing in general because of all this information, transmission we can enjoy that there's just too much and your head's going to explode.
	The second piece is when we talk about people, we pretty much on the show are always talking about them from a media perspective.
	We deconstruct media.
	We look at things.
	So if I'm talking about how Abby Martin looks, formerly of RT, it's not because I have any personal vendetta or crush on her.
	It's just seriously thinking about why she's no longer on RT, and part of it is she can't walk in heels.
	And we have experience with this.
	We know how it works.
	And media dominates people's lives.
	So you might as well know how it works if it's dominating.
	You might as well know how it works, and the internet has just made it worse.
	Yeah, it didn't make it better, it made it worse.
	And we expose this as best we can, and there are people at higher levels than we have ever achieved that could do an even better job of exposing it, but they're all in because you get paid off.
	You're making huge amounts of money.
	You're not going to turn on your own media unless you're nuts.
	Precisely.
	I haven't been listening to the shows lately, he writes.
	I've been trying to focus on setting up life here in China.
	He's just left from Denver.
	I'm going to skip most of this, but there's a couple graphs in here that need to be read.
	I appreciate what both you and Adam do, but after all the disruption in our lives lately, both me and my, I don't know if it's a wife or girlfriend, have decided to look for more positive inputs.
	Yeah, that hurt a little.
	That stung a bit.
	I hope to come back and listen eventually, but the tone of your show seems too angry for me at this time.
	Really?
	I'm thankful for Twit and the shows they produce and the consistent message of being positive.
	What?
	I guess so.
	I'm a rule follower, right?
	What do you do?
	Are you a rule follower?
	Mm-hmm.
	So I suppose that there is a contingent that doesn't want to hear any of what our analysis has to say.
	We deconstruct stuff, we tear it apart, and then we make it apparent in many instances that what the public is getting fed is complete horseshit.
	At some point, you make that blue pill, red pill decision, and you say, the horseshit's better.
	I prefer the horseshit because it's positive.
	It's tasty, it has nice little chunks.
	It's positive.
	It's a positive message.
	If you had a positive message, well, you can go...
	There's a lot of preachers, by the way, that have a very positive message.
	And I think Osteen is a good example of a guy who has the ability to produce a positive message.
	It's all Bible-related.
	You don't want to deal with anything.
	I would just go that way.
	Just go straight to the Lord.
	Yeah, just become a, right, it's easy, and you can get nothing but positive feedback, and don't read the news, don't listen to anything.
	No.
	But if you're going to be in the world, generally speaking, you can still listen to the Lord, you can listen to Osteen or any of these other preachers that are very talented.
	But that doesn't mean you should be just buffaloed by, you know, oh, let me buy another phone.
	I have one, but I need a new one for someone to be sold.
	These operations of positive...
	I need the next new big thing.
	...are selling you stuff that you don't need.
	Yeah.
	It's all about selling you the sucker.
	I have, based on that, maybe I should mention this.
	I have news from the...
	From my Twitter.
	I have news from my Uber sources.
	Okay.
	You know, from the Uber Intelligence Network.
	I've got information, man!
	New shit has come to light!
	I really like taking Uber in town.
	I don't want to get the car out of the garage and all that.
	It's a pain in the ass.
	It's like seven or eight bucks, but I never really take something that has to be far enough away for me to get into a conversation.
	Pretty much everybody who's driving Uber, I'd say 30% is local, Texan, born and raised, and the rest is, well, here's the two I spoke to.
	One Uber source from Kashmir is very interesting.
	I hear about Kashmir, the The area that has been fought over between India and Pakistan.
	Is he Indian or Pakistani?
	Pakistani.
	But he prefers to call himself just from Kashmir.
	He doesn't like to be from either one, actually.
	That was kind of the interesting thing.
	I'll get back to him in a second.
	I had a young kid from Baghdad.
	And he's been here for a number of years.
	He came to study computer Q&A or some software Q&A. Anyways, at Austin Community College.
	And he's driving Uber to make up for the cost.
	Not making a lot of money.
	But with these guys, and you should try this yourself.
	If you're in a cab, a cab is a little harder because, I don't know, but certainly with the Uber, he's like, where are you from?
	And with your no agenda knowledge, you'll be able to strike up a conversation.
	So Baghdad, you know, puts, oh yeah, well, that IS is pretty funny, certainly since it's the CIA, and that's when, you know, The car will jerk a little bit, you know, because his head whips around and goes, you know this?
	He said, yeah, of course.
	You know, not everyone in America is stupid.
	He says, oh, everybody knows this, and everybody in Iraq knows this.
	Everybody knows this is crazy, CIA, Mossad.
	And then he just goes off on the American population.
	He says, I came here, I want to work.
	I want to work hard.
	I want to get an education.
	I care.
	I don't want any handouts.
	I don't need anything from anybody.
	But everybody I know here in America, they don't want to work.
	They just want to party and smoke weed.
	Yeah, watch TV. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
	That's an interesting observation.
	I think he's right.
	Well, there's some evidence to that.
	Do you have a clip?
	Do I have a clip?
	I don't know.
	What's your evidence?
	What's your evidence?
	You can play the noodle boy if you want a clip.
	The cashmere guy said something even funnier.
	And this was a couple days ago.
	And I try to write these things down immediately when they start talking about it.
	But he said, look, everybody knows that MH370, everybody, where I come from, he says, everybody knows that they were testing a weapon that can disappear things.
	And this was the target.
	We all know that.
	Thanks.
	The one that disappeared?
	That plane that took the left turn and disappeared?
	Yep, he says it was.
	I never heard this one.
	Well, you don't live in the Middle East, do you?
	You don't live in Pakistan or Kashmir or India, do you?
	You really get out of control.
	I like this.
	Disappear things.
	I need a jingle for the Uber sources.
	I've got information, man.
	New shit has come to light.
	I'm just going to keep taking these guys.
	I'm going to go out to dinner.
	They're fantastic.
	Well, if you get a weapon.
	He said, everyone knows this, where I come from.
	Oh, I said, known fact.
	Yeah, fact.
	You know what?
	I'm not questioning it, but it's just interesting to have this type of info.
	I like it.
	I really very much like it.
	All right, with that, I think it's more than time to thank you for your courage and say in the morning to you, John C. Dvorak!
	Well, in the morning to you, Adam Curry, in the morning to Mr.
	and Mrs.
	America, all the boots on the ground, feet in the air, subs in the water, all the dames and knights out there.
	In the morning to everybody in the chat room, noagendastream.com.
	Good to have you there.
	In the morning to Void Zero, who will be going into have some procedure done April 1st.
	So we're just sending him some karma for this coming week.
	And in the morning to our artist, Lynn Hartson, two in a row.
	Two in a row.
	Well, that's a random number theory at work.
	Is it?
	Well...
	Or is it he just nailed it?
	He just nailed it.
	Oh, baby.
	The guy nailed it.
	Possible.
	People do nail it.
	But, you know, usually it's not necessarily streaky.
	Well, we've had Nick the Rat on the street.
	We've had Martin J.J. on the street.
	The big streak was Martin J.J. to the point where he had to retire for a while.
	I think he actually didn't go to work anymore.
	He disappeared from social life.
	He said, you know, I'm kicking ass.
	I'm going to back off because these losers can't seem to get an art piece in.
	And I really want to thank Martin J.J. while we're talking about it, who pretty much saved our ass with a backup recording of the show.
	On Thursday.
	No idea what happened.
	I did check today's recording.
	It seems to be working.
	But we had a meltdown.
	I had a three-hour file with no audio.
	And Martin JJ had recorded the stream and is highly appreciated.
	Actually, I have a backup recording, which is the iRiver IFP799, which records fine.
	And I like it because it's very small.
	It runs on a AA battery.
	You can just plug it in.
	It's good to go.
	The problem is...
	You can no longer get the files off of the device with modern operating systems.
	There's a little irony there.
	Oh, I've got my backup device.
	It's the 1950s.
	I know, it sucks.
	It's horrible.
	It's horrible.
	So I could get it off.
	We do, after the show, we do a post-mortem.
	And so we put stuff together, and then this thing, he's, oh, no problem.
	I got my 1942 backup thing running here.
	Should be great.
	Yeah.
	And so it recorded, but the only way to get it off would be to spin it off in real time three hours before I would have said to re-record it.
	So if anyone has any ideas about that, and I don't have a Windows machine, it would have to be on OS X. It's just nutty that that's not possible.
	I'm so surprised.
	And I didn't know it because we haven't had a crash like that in a long time.
	You didn't have to use the backup.
	Anyway, so I highly appreciate Martin J.J.'s efforts there.
	Oh, here we go!
	Man overboard!
	Fletcher on the fly!
	Good.
	We got it now.
	Let's man overboard.
	We got to take that and sweeten it with a splash.
	Yes.
	Like a toilet bowl splash.
	Yes.
	Yes, we should.
	All right.
	Let's thank a few people who helped us out.
	We did have a couple of executive producers, associate executive producers for show 308.
	Is it 308?
	I would say 708.
	Yes, 308.
	If you want to go back in time, that'll work for me.
	308.
	John C., which stands for, I forgot.
	Dvorak.
	Cognition.
	Cognition.
	There you go, good one.
	Steven Yarosh in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
	That's $3,6415, which is actually a combination of $3,1415 plus $50.
	Hope the spring is nicer in Tejas and Barclay than we're experiencing here in Massachusetts.
	Barclay?
	No.
	He says Barkley?
	Oh, that's good.
	No, it says Berkeley, but I... Oh, okay.
	Tejas is not really, you know, Texas and Barkley.
	Mm-hmm.
	Thank you, sir.
	I'm going to use Barkley from now on.
	Good.
	Thank you so very much for the bi-weekly dose of sanity.
	Required to keep me off the ledge.
	I'm calling out Eric, E-R-I-C, who I punched in the mouth last year, and Al, who Eric punched in the mouth as boners.
	Oh, well...
	Douchebags!
	I got douchebags, no boners.
	Well...
	Sorry.
	Please note the forward email from Homeland Security and the Bakken oil train explosions.
	This came out after show 702s detailing the evils of rail versus pipelines from Putin anti-gay to the Hobby Lobby case and to the BS that is the XL pipeline discussion.
	Thank you for deconstructing the media excrement and giving us the truth.
	I couldn't ask...
	I couldn't not risk getting on the Fletcher Fest.
	Plus, everyone can use a good shot of karma, so I made a 3-14-15 donation.
	I can't wait for her SK Fletcher scream, Yarish.
	Yarish!
	Yarish, okay.
	I couldn't come this close to executive producer and not make it.
	So, here's an extra 50 bucks it also makes for $36415 or $1 a day for the year.
	Can I have two shots to the back of the head?
	Her head is gone.
	Boom shakalaka.
	Karma, thank you.
	T-B-P-I-T-U. That's right.
	Thank you, bye.
	And her head is gone.
	you've got karma And a reminder for those of you who are new or missed it or hadn't heard about it, 31415 donations for the Fletcher Fest.
	You'll get your own shout-out.
	Very similar to...
	Before he blows his voice out, so get in quick.
	That's right.
	World leaders have Fletcher Fest.
	Booter!
	Even the elites have it.
	Coke Brothers!
	How can you not have one of these?
	When do we end this?
	I'm going to put a date on it.
	Put a date on it, because we have to keep Fletcher alive.
	And then I also want to release them all to the public, so people can, if their name happens to be Putin, they're in luck.
	I have a clip, boom shakalaka.
	You have a boom shakalaka clip?
	Boom shakalaka.
	I shall put that into my bin.
	Nice.
	That came from...
	I'll play it later.
	It's a Charles Schwab commercial for computer-assisted stock picking.
	And they say boom shakalaka, huh?
	And he says boom shakalaka in the middle of it for some unknown reason.
	The computer voice.
	That's a computer talking, supposedly.
	Even though we know it's some guy doing voiceover.
	Onward.
	Onward with...
	Oh, Thomas Nussbaum.
	Earl, Sir Thomas.
	Earl, Sir Thomas Nussbaum.
	3, 14, 15.
	Earl Nussbaum sends much love to all my No Agenda family.
	Fletcher Fest, he wants Nussbaum.
	I don't know if he's suggesting this.
	Everybody send me pics, which is really dedicated to you.
	I think so.
	And Fletcher, for this particular donation, he's been in contact with Nussbaum, made a special one for him.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Well, we already had the Nussbaum yell.
	So I guess he's...
	So you've already had that one.
	This is an extra special one.
	It's nice.
	Bonus.
	He's off the rails, man.
	He's doing his own thing.
	He's gone nuts.
	He's gone nuts.
	Just don't let him in the cabin.
	The future Sir Got Nate, which is the way he wants to be known, and curiously, I had his email open.
	He does have...
	Got Nate as his request from Fletcher, and he sent an email in, and I went to open it, and then I realized that I stupidly did something on that sheet.
	Let's see if I can find it.
	Ah, here it is.
	Good.
	Good.
	Thank you for the back arrow.
	I've instructed my...
	I don't know how long that's going to work, by the way, with this new stuff from Microsoft.
	What's this?
	What's your problem?
	The back arrow.
	You hit the back arrow and you go back a page and then another page and then you find the stuff you were at that you stupidly got off of and this is from SirGotNate.
	Or will be.
	I've instructed my bank's automatic bill to pay this.
	This is a once-early state offer.
	I don't think I heard anything.
	A deadline for the Fletcher scream.
	Once payment is accounted for, I'd like to request...
	Oh, he's the one who wants internet.
	I would like to request an internet!
	Fletcher scream.
	My office's internet connection loves to let go at random times during the workday.
	Whenever this happens, at least one person in the office screams internet.
	I plan to mod a stable's easy button to scream internet every time I hit it in response to my internet going down.
	Or when somebody else screams, he wants to hit it.
	So he says save a ring for him.
	He's on his way.
	I guess he wants to be somewhat anonymous.
	Okay.
	Good, we're saving the ring.
	I have the email from Michael Hintz.
	Michael Hintz from Everett, Massachusetts Nuts.
	We've got a lot of Massachusetts Nuts.
	I got the email.
	4-5-6, and you have the email.
	Hey Adam and John, I've been listening a little before episode 600 without a single donation.
	So I'm far too long a douchebag.
	The way I see it, it's time I donated.
	Please de-douche me if you don't mind.
	Of course not.
	You've been de-douched.
	There is no good excuse for the long delay, but I've always wanted to contribute information to the show instead of just cash.
	Now I can.
	A couple episodes back, you played a clip of Patrick Moore talking about how Greenpeace's goals shifted over time.
	In his speech, he said that they regarded humans as a plague on nature, which reminded me of an insane group I know called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
	V-H-E-M-T dot org.
	I believe we talked about them some...
	I think so, yeah.
	A few hundred shows ago.
	A couple hundred episodes ago.
	Apart from that, I wanted to request a birthday from my son and myself, so I got that on the list.
	Thank you both for the incredibly entertaining and informative show.
	Like many others report, I find that no agenda eases my mind and improves my sanity in the face of the MSM's incessant bullshit machines.
	For years, I ignored news entirely because I couldn't stand how fake, misleading, and downright sick it was.
	All those years, what I really needed to be doing was laughing at it.
	Seriously, though, it always bothered me not to be informed, but now I am both informed and entertained on a regular basis, and I have a healthier, more realistic view.
	A healthier, more realistic view of the world.
	Sometimes it's hard to listen to coworkers, family, and friends spout verbatim the lines they're fed by the MSM, but I've learned to just nod and smile.
	It's better that way.
	Keep up the fantastic work, and I'll keep my end of the bargain coming more steadily in the future.
	Michael.
	Thank you very much, Michael.
	I did have a thought as I was reading that.
	These days, pretty much everybody you know has been quoted or interviewed for something.
	And all you would have to say is, you know, when you were interviewed for the school paper or when someone was quoting you, did they get it all right?
	And guaranteed, they'll say, no, of course not.
	And that's the only way you can help people understand that maybe what they're hearing, seeing, reading is not entirely correct.
	That was the opener for me, man.
	When I was first interviewed by the New York Times, they got everything wrong.
	I mean, not everything, but a lot.
	And they had the checker even called when they still had that.
	I don't know if they still do it or not.
	The fact checker.
	Yeah, when they had them.
	Yeah, so that's what I said.
	I don't think they have them anymore.
	They used to have fact checkers until, I don't know when they got rid of them, probably in the 890s sometime.
	No, I think I still got a call from a fact checker in the 2000s.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	Maybe that was a London financial day.
	Anyway, that's what we've got.
	That's it?
	But this was not a good day.
	It was worse than Thursday.
	Yes, it was worse than Thursday, I have to say.
	This is true.
	Well, maybe we're doing something wrong.
	Curiously, I was reading one email where somebody said, oh, actually, there's a meetup.
	Somebody said, you're doing it wrong.
	No.
	I think we should get to the meetup.
	Okay.
	This is Tim, who's in Michigan.
	The Michigan folks have a little click that they're trying to make happen, because they're all...
	When I was there, we did two or three meetings with different people, and they all seemed to get along with each other.
	He's going to meet...
	They were going to have a meeting, but the storm came in in July, so now they're going to have a meet-up.
	On the 7th, or I'm sorry, on April 1st, on April Fool's Day at 7 p.m.
	at Ashley's Bar and Grill in Westland.
	So anybody's interested, if you're in Michigan, go there.
	Ashley's Bar and Grill of Westland in Westland, Michigan.
	But he says, after last Thursday's No Agenda episode, the one you just referred to, he says he's talking to the group.
	Which I thought was one of the strongest.
	I feel like meeting up.
	Let's try again, he says.
	And...
	I thought it was a strong show, too.
	And we've had a lot of really strong shows recently.
	But for some reason, I don't know.
	We got that letter, and then the other guy who says we're angry and making him depressed, and we have negative news.
	He wants positive input.
	He wants good, happy news.
	Happy news.
	Let me see.
	I don't know.
	I'm looking.
	Nope.
	No, I don't think so.
	I mean, happy news.
	What's happy news?
	Oh, a puppy was born, and kittens live.
	This was my favorite story of the week.
	The report says DEA agents attending sex parties in Colombia should have known the prostitutes in attendance were paid with cartel funds.
	So this report says the drug enforcement agency agents had sex parties with hookers, which I think I'd like to know a little bit about what exactly constitutes a sex party, just to fill me in.
	If it was an orgy, they'd say so, which seems to me to be a sex party.
	I would guess that a sex party was just a place where you pick up hookers.
	Possibly.
	And so the only mistake, it appears from the report, is that they didn't know that the hookers were prepaid.
	Prepaid by the cartel.
	Prepaid hooker.
	This is a shocker.
	I would never expect it.
	Gambling is going on there.
	...were paid with cartel funds, the same drug cartels the officers were supposed to be fighting.
	To make matters worse, most of the sex parties occurred in government-leased quarters, where agents' laptops and BlackBerry devices were present, potentially exposing them to extortion, blackmail, or coercion.
	The report even says that a foreign officer allegedly provided protection for the DEA agents' weapons during the parties.
	Ten agents were investigated and seven admitted to DEA investigators that they participated in the sex parties.
	Their punishment was nothing more than suspensions, ranging from just two to ten days.
	I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
	I think this is a recruitment story.
	They need more people at the DEA and I'm all in.
	That's a great interpretation of that story.
	What else could it be?
	Yeah, because it's not a story with any sort of legs.
	Yeah.
	Recruitment.
	Let's close out.
	They're having more fun than I am sitting here.
	Better than that drone crap, man.
	Seriously.
	Let me thank everybody.
	I have two quick PR mentions.
	I already mentioned the push-bullet, pushover, bat-signal.
	Also, thank you very much, Sir James Blackknight of the Noagent Roundtable, who registered Let's Get Social Dot Today.
	Which, of course, forwards to noagendashow.com.
	Although I would consider a separate page that just has that crazy social song with a link to our site.
	That may be even funnier.
	I'm not going to play it because it gets stuck in my head.
	Come on!
	It irritates me.
	Come on!
	It's horrible.
	Just cut to the chase with it.
	Just move away from that guy doing his rap.
	Come on.
	I love that song.
	No, I'm not going to play.
	I'm not.
	No, no.
	Come on.
	No.
	No, it's not okay.
	It's not okay.
	Why is it not okay?
	Because it's an earworm and it doesn't go away.
	I'll play it at the end of the show.
	How does that sound?
	Okay, as long as you play it at the end of the show.
	All right.
	Hey.
	Look, listen, people, seriously, we need a little bit more help to...
	Dvorak.org slash NA. For Thursday's show, please chip in if you can.
	You know, we're giving you some value here.
	And propagate the formula.
	Our formula is this.
	We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
	Order!
	Order!
	Shut up, slay!
	That's right.
	Easter is coming.
	Your birthday is on Easter.
	My birthday is next Sunday.
	Alright.
	And do we have a special donation thing for that?
	Yeah.
	4-5-15.
	April 5th, 2015.
	It's your Easter donation.
	And we will be reading all the names?
	I think we should.
	Well, we could.
	Okay, we'll read all the names that you suggested.
	Yeah, why not?
	It sounds like we should do that.
	It'll be fun.
	There's a couple of cleanup operations underway, and I wanted to at least highlight them.
	And with cleanup, I mean our good old two to the head.
	And I've had this in the show notes, in my prep at least, for the past, I think it's three shows now.
	Ukraine first.
	Two high-ranking Ukrainian officials have been arrested during a televised government...
	I'm sorry, this is not the right clip.
	Wrong clip.
	There's a...
	I think there's been four...
	Shoot, I'm sorry, this clip got lost.
	There's been four suicides of former and high-ranking officials in Ukraine, Ukrainian government.
	They just seem to be so depressed they're killing themselves.
	Or maybe it's some kind of clean-up job.
	And it's all suicide.
	And then we have this report that came in.
	A decorated Boston police officer and army veteran remains in a medically induced coma tonight after being shot in the face during a traffic stop.
	Officer John Moynihan was one of several gang unit officers trying to pull over a car.
	Well, Police Commissioner William Evans says video shows Officer Moynihan approaching the driver's door when he's shot point blank.
	The suspect then continued firing at officers as he tried to run.
	Police returned fire, killing the suspect at the scene.
	A woman driving by, she was also injured but is expected to be okay.
	And Moynihan, by the way, he served as an Army Ranger in Iraq.
	He was honored at the White House for helping save a fellow officer following the shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in 2013.
	How annoying is that?
	But I hate it when good witnesses just get shot in the face.
	Well, that's just a shame.
	It's a big shame.
	It's not the same as the execution shooting in the Florida apartment.
	No, no.
	Or the guy who was being interrogated and shot in the back of the head by the FBI. That's what I meant.
	That was in Florida, I believe.
	It could be.
	Well, there were some executions of three different drug dealers, and that was not in Florida, but that was a part of it.
	It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	No, the story's out.
	As it is, it's done.
	Yeah, it is.
	I've been diving into a couple things as deeply as possible and not really getting very far with the things I wanted.
	The main one would be the Iran negotiations.
	I decided to...
	It was time for me to really get down into it.
	And I really just wanted to start off with a list of the names that Of the negotiators who are back at the table, I believe, today or certainly Monday in Lausanne, Switzerland.
	This is the so-called P5 plus 1.
	Which includes, and this is not discussed very widely, but it includes representatives from the United States, China, the UK, France, Germany, and Russia.
	And apparently all these different countries are represented at the table with Iran for what we're being told is the agreement on Iran's nuclear program.
	I'm glad you brought this up because something is interesting to me.
	When you watch this coverage of this thing on France Van Cat, for example, it's like Alien.
	Compared to what the coverage is to us, with Kerry being in charge of the whole thing, apparently, if it wasn't for him, nothing would be going on.
	And it just seems as though there's a disconnect, or a misconnect, on this story about what's really happening.
	Well, so what we're being told...
	Weird.
	Yes, well, this is what I have...
	It's one of these no-agenda things that even I have to catch myself at.
	Say, wait a minute, I'm doing this all wrong.
	I need to be finding out who is at that table, who are the negotiators, and what are they really talking about?
	Now, I believe that this, especially if you look at who's in there, why does Russia have to be in there?
	Why does Germany have to be in there?
	Why is China in there?
	Why?
	Well, it must have to do with geopolitical issues that, on one hand, it must be dealing with Syria.
	Syria has support from Iran, has support from Russia.
	The Russians have the port there.
	In fact, here's a little clip.
	This is...
	Assad did an interview with Charlie Rose, which will air tonight.
	And here is a little clip of that.
	Tell me about the sexuality.
	It's in your DNA. Sorry.
	Here it is.
	In a rare interview, the dictator of Syria appears to be...
	By the way, I'm sorry.
	Bashir al-Assad is not a dictator.
	That would imply that he seized power, that he was not democratically elected.
	You can say what you want about the elections, but dictator, I believe, is a false premise.
	Would you agree?
	They're using that term to besmirch him.
	In a rare interview, the dictator of Syria appears to be pushing open a door to negotiations.
	Bashar al- The setup is great.
	The setup is he wants negotiations.
	But when you hear what Assad has to say, it's quite the opposite.
	Assad sat down with Charlie Rose today in an interview for 60 Minutes.
	Charlie asked Assad about Secretary of State John Kerry's recent comment that the U.S. is open to talking about an end to Syria's devastating civil war.
	If I want to mention the statement of Kerry regarding the dialogue, I would say what we have in Syria so far is only a statement.
	Nothing concrete, yet no facts, no new reality regarding the political approach of the United States toward our situation, our problem, our conflicts in Syria.
	But as principle, in Syria we could say that every dialogue It's a positive thing.
	And we're going to be open to any dialogue with anyone, including the United States, regarding anything based on mutual respect.
	What kind of communication is there between your government and the American government?
	There's no direct communication.
	None at all.
	I find that to be somewhat disturbing.
	Do we have no dialogue?
	We're not talking at all?
	Zero?
	No, no.
	Nothing yet.
	That's why the United States...
	Nothing yet?
	Nothing yet.
	Till this moment, no.
	Nothing.
	Would you like to have that happen?
	Any dialogue is positive, as I said, in principle, of course.
	Without preaching the sovereignty of Syria.
	And he does not look happy, because he knows that...
	If they really want to get rid of him, it's easy.
	Just boom, you're dead.
	So he's just doing whatever.
	He's just a placeholder for whatever Iran is coming our way.
	So the question is really, what exactly are they negotiating?
	We know from our Iranian sources that the Iranians locally in Tehran believe this is intended to actually give Iran a nuclear weapon.
	Which we have some theories about, which are not crazy, but how hard can it be?
	It's obvious what they want.
	They want to have a nuclear program, and we have to determine, if you just look at the face value of what is being reported, we have to be able to count how many centrifuges.
	So I went looking for who are the negotiators.
	These are always big teams.
	I should throw in a little side piece of information here.
	If you look into it, maybe we should confirm this with Atomic Rod, but it's my understanding from intellectual sources, academic sources, I should say, That the Iranians are some of the most advanced in nuclear research in the world.
	They're like top guys.
	It wouldn't surprise me.
	This is one of the things that they just liked.
	Of course, we killed a couple of them, right?
	Remember, they were dying off.
	Yeah, but the Israelis killed one guy, murdered him, because he was one of the top guys.
	But apparently, this is a very promising program.
	I don't know what they're up to.
	So I have a list of a few of the negotiators, the ones who were there, but by no, because I'm looking for, uh, industry business.
	I'm looking for an oil guy.
	I'm looking for anybody who somehow is involved in something that wouldn't necessarily need to be at this.
	If just talking about sanctions versus, uh, nuclear centrifuges.
	So here's what I found.
	Um, Mohammed Javad Zarif, uh, he's an Iranian diplomat.
	Now, it's always interesting to see, and this is all based on the Book of Knowledge, Wikipedia.
	So he was at the University of Tehran.
	Then he was permanent representative for Iran's United Nations.
	All that seems okay.
	But then he was head of the UN Disarmament Committee in New York.
	So he lived in New York for a while.
	He studied at...
	Let's see...
	At age 17, he left Iran for the United States.
	This guy hasn't even been there, I guess.
	Drew college prep school.
	Then he went to San Francisco State.
	Graduate studies.
	Graduate School of International Studies.
	University of Denver.
	So, seems to be a bit of a shill.
	Then we have Ali Akbar Saleh.
	There's a number of colleges in Colorado.
	Oh, they're all spook colleges.
	They're all spook colleges.
	And I've never heard of University of Denver, so I have to assume that it might be in that category.
	It's the Wikipedia, so who knows?
	Ali Akbar Saleh is head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, so it may make sense that he is there.
	He was also the Iranian representative to the IAEA, that's the International Atomic Energy Agency, and he, I think he also had an interesting scholastic career.
	Yes.
	Received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the American University of Beirut in 71. Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT.
	Okay.
	That seems like he might be a nuclear expert.
	I would think.
	And then we have Feredun Abbasi Davani, Iranian nuclear scientist, head of the Atomic Energy Organization.
	He, where is he?
	I think he also had some interesting schooling.
	I can't find that off the bat.
	We're getting to the interesting ones.
	And then a name that popped up.
	Oh, I know this name.
	Mohammed Al-Baradei.
	Do you remember Mohamed ElBaradei?
	The name definitely rings a bell.
	This was the guy who was on deck to possibly become the new president of Egypt when they were in turmoil when the coup took place.
	And he is the guy who is part of the Crisis Institute, the International Crisis Group.
	This is the big shill organization, kind of like Council on Foreign Relations.
	Alright, go on.
	Well, this International Crisis Group is interesting that he's at the table because this is, you know, who's in there?
	It's like Soros and all these guys are back in there.
	The International Crisis Group is a bunch of shills.
	And he tried to get in.
	He was on deck, and of course that didn't happen.
	And then the next name...
	That I liked was Wendy Sherman, Wendy Ruth Sherman.
	She seems to be leading a lot of the negotiations.
	This I got from the state.gov website.
	You can't even get a list of the U.S. negotiators from your own State Department.
	She's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, but her career is interesting.
	As she was the director of Emily's List.
	She was the co-founding CEO of Fannie Mae.
	And she worked directly and still works for the Albright Stonebridge Group.
	Which, of course, is the Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, consultancy.
	So whether she is negotiating on behalf of the clients of the Albright group, or whether she may be feeding back information to the clients of the Albright group, and neither is, of course.
	She's got that spook white hair.
	She's got the elite, like Fifi Lagarde, kind of.
	Yeah, that look.
	And so I continue to...
	Well, this would be a good woman to follow.
	And so she is the one.
	This is how I got this.
	Let me see.
	Our intent is to absolutely end this on November 4th.
	That's an old report.
	The 31st is the deadline for these round of negotiations, which apparently is a President Obama red line, which means it'll just go on for the month of April.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	It means nothing.
	Sounds good.
	And this is all I could find right now, and I'd love to know who is there from Russia, who is there from the UK, who is there from Germany.
	I think it's more than just one representative.
	There's a lot of people.
	And then maybe we'll figure out what this is really about.
	The only thing that makes sense to me is we're doing concessions, we're doing a deal.
	It's just about the numbers.
	How much will Iran get cut in on these deals?
	Just look at the players.
	Your uncle might know something about this woman because she works for everybody.
	She was a baker, I think, right?
	Back in the baker days?
	Well, she was a counselor for the United States Department of State and special advisor to the President Clinton and Secretary of State and North Korea Policy Coordinator.
	Ooh, I will.
	Okay, I'll send off a note.
	I can't say, you know, is she a douche?
	I'd say, hey, did you work with her?
	Yeah, I've got to be kind of cool with Don, you know.
	I'm going to go a little easy.
	I don't see if she's ever worked a day in her life.
	She's always in some government thing.
	I mean, she did the director of Emily's List.
	The director doesn't mean you did anything.
	She was the director of Maryland's Child Welfare, and she was a social worker.
	It's not Fannie Mae she founded.
	It was the Fannie Mae Foundation, which is a foundation.
	This is what I got from the WikiLeaks, so...
	She is a careerist government worker, official, elite representative.
	Interesting person.
	This is, of course, also in some ways by proxy, most likely related to what's happening in Yemen.
	And this is very interesting that we have this coalition and they have a name for it.
	The Decisive Storm Coalition.
	Yeah, it sounds like Saudi Arabia made that name up.
	No.
	So there was a...
	One of the shows I kind of like to watch on RT is Boom Bust with that blonde.
	Oh, the one with the kind of funky accent?
	Aaron Eight, I believe is her name.
	Okay, yeah.
	And she can walk in heels.
	And so she'll probably be around longer.
	That's why she has a career.
	Whatever the case, she puts on a pretty good show as a stock market show.
	It's a stock market show that has all kinds of kind of twisted stuff that's like, wow, that's kind of interesting.
	And they had this guy who's one of their regulars.
	A lot of these guys are doomsayers, which is always amusing.
	And he had read from one of his something I guess he wrote in 2009 talking about the Houthis being the biggest threat to Saudi Arabia.
	And it was one of his investment reports.
	And I, to be honest about it, really never heard of this operation until recently.
	And I don't know about you, but it seemed like they just showed up.
	But apparently they've been around.
	And there's some sort of threat to Saudi Arabia.
	And that's why the only reason the Saudis are getting involved in this from my perspective is because there's something else we don't know about.
	And we're not being told by the media that.
	that involves Saudi Arabia and these guys.
	I have a thought.
	They always say, everybody in the media, everybody, and it started off as believed to be sponsored by Iran.
	Believed to be.
	Now, they say they are sponsored.
	They're Iranian front.
	Which I don't believe in.
	I don't believe it either.
	I don't believe it either.
	The only similarity is that they're both, and here's kind of a kicker, they're both Shiites.
	But the guy they ran out of town, the guy was, he's a Shiite.
	So that doesn't wash.
	There's something else going on, this whole scene.
	I have a geopolitical theory.
	Do you have a clip here that I want to play?
	This is the Saudis versus Houthis?
	Yeah, you might as well play that.
	Saudi Arabia launched a new wave of airstrikes today against Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.
	They targeted a northern stronghold.
	An oil-rich area in the east and the rebel-controlled capital.
	The Saudi press agency released this video showing Saudi Arabian Air Force jets bombing an airport today in Sana'a.
	A spokesman for the operation said the Saudi-led coalition is prepared to take further military action if warranted.
	There are no plans at this stage for ground forces operations.
	But if the need arises, the Saudi ground forces and those of our friends are ready and will repel any aggression.
	Meanwhile, four Egyptian warships are en route to the coast of Yemen to secure the strategic sea passage off of its coast.
	Yeah, there you go.
	That's what I found.
	And I think it would be a good idea for anybody who's listening right now, if you can, to just pull up a map.
	John, do this with me.
	Of Yemen.
	And very quickly, you'll see the geopolitical, the strategic importance of Yemen.
	It's not about oil.
	It's certainly not about the resources Yemen may or may not have.
	Now, the new capital, I guess the Houthis have...
	The new capital of Yemen is Aden.
	Of course, there we have the port of Aden, near the Gulf of Aden, and this is on the southern, not quite the southern tip, but the port is in south Yemen.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a big one, and a lot of pipelines coming in from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, to that port.
	And then they have pipelines under the sea out a little bit further where they have a big oil transmission station so ships can load and then sail off.
	But if you really look at the geographic region, Yemen is right there at what they call the Gateway of Tears.
	I had not heard this term.
	which connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.
	And this is all about shipping.
	If you want to ship, you can go around the Cape, but really you want to go to the Suez Canal.
	So you have to go through this.
	You have to go around the corner of Yemen.
	To Choke Point.
	To Choke Point.
	Of course, you know what's right across from Yemen on the Sudan side is Djibouti.
	And Djibouti is where we have our drone base.
	That's our guys.
	That's how we patrol the Gulf of Aden all the way up to the Suez Canal.
	And I think that's the only thing.
	I mean, the South Africa route, the Cape, the BRICS are pretty much in charge of that.
	But it seems that we need to protect our interests, our Saudi friends' interests.
	And maybe we're just stretched too thin, or we're probably providing a lot of advisors.
	But the Houthis just have to go, because we need to install somebody there who keeps everything calm, because that port is incredibly important.
	And that's all I can see, really.
	I don't see why we can't make friends with them.
	With the Houthis?
	Yeah, why not?
	They never said anything.
	Well, they did.
	Their slogan was, death to Israel, death to America.
	If you remember, they talked to one of the head guys, and yeah, they have a motto.
	Which is, kill America.
	Which is, you know, life, death, pursuit of happiness, and death to America is kind of their motto.
	Yeah.
	And they said, and I don't say why not, they said it was just hyperbole, because it was popular to say that, but they would be glad to do business with us.
	Yeah!
	And I believe them.
	Why would, you know, they...
	Well, maybe...
	Yeah, you send somebody over, like they send Kerry over to talk to him, and then they shoot him.
	Okay, that means they probably were dishonest.
	But until that happens, I don't see any reason that we can't do a deal with them.
	Well, we're not doing it.
	It's the Saudis who are doing it.
	The Saudis are the ones that are more concerned about them than we are.
	Well, what if Mexico was overthrown?
	We'd probably start thinking about doing stuff here.
	Numerous times.
	Yeah.
	We'd like to do it.
	Yeah.
	And how'd that work out?
	Well, it's still Mexicans.
	Exactly.
	We've still got Mexicans.
	Hmm.
	But that's really why Yemen...
	Another run at Texas before all is said and done.
	This is the geopolitical importance of the region.
	And I think we'll see a lot of Djibouti activity, a lot of drones.
	It's got to be.
	It's just the only way it can go.
	I don't see anything else for a...
	Well, I'm still of the belief that there's something that we both have not picked up on that we need just to keep looking at.
	And it probably is related to all other things.
	But right now we have six or seven conflicts going in the Middle East.
	Rebelization takes time.
	That's my point!
	It's so obvious that that's what's taking place.
	The full rebelization.
	Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to rub a lice!
	Exactly.
	What else we got?
	You did have a little discussion about Assad.
	I did have a clip about him.
	I want to get that out of the way before we move to domestic or whatever.
	Just to make sure that the public is still aware, even though we've proven, it's been proven by scientists, 97% agree.
	And it's been shown by certain universities and people that have been on boots on the ground and everything in between that the chemical attack that took place in Syria was done by the rebels.
	But no, we've got to make sure that the public still thinks, because the public is, you know, they're just memes.
	They're all looking for memes.
	Just reinforce facts.
	Let's reinforce it again with the Assad and Chem weapons slip back into the narrative just casually.
	Still to come on the NewsHour, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejects charges that his military use chemical weapons.
	It never ends, does it?
	It just never ends with these people.
	Just keep telling the lie.
	Propagate what the New York Times reported somewhere.
	That's the sad part.
	Just keep doing it over and over.
	How many people listen to No Agenda?
	I don't know.
	Well, I'm guessing around 250,000.
	Could be.
	Spit in the media bucket.
	There is...
	Totally.
	It's just a small percentage of people who will not be voted off the island.
	And we have people falling overboard constantly, which is always a problem.
	So we can't even keep our own listeners sometimes because we're depressing.
	Oh, well, let's have a little fun then.
	This is true media deconstruction for you here.
	We have Ted Cruz went on the CBS morning show.
	Okay, can I do a pre-analysis Ted Cruz clip?
	Of course.
	I just want to do one thing, because I know this won't work into what you're up to.
	I just want to point out that they talked about this on Gwen Ifill's, the Obama hagiographer, Washington Week, which is a terrible show, by the way.
	Extremely boring.
	And she brought up the Ted Cruz announcement and smirked As if this guy is a complete idiot.
	Moron, idiot, loser.
	Moron, idiot, loser.
	Even though he's very well educated.
	Crazy Republican.
	And she makes a snide little comment.
	You're going to have to listen to this.
	It's very close to the end of this clip.
	Where somebody...
	The guy who's the supposed expert about Ted Cruz says something.
	And she says, under her breath, but it's very...
	You can hear it.
	As if...
	...who've lost their health insurance, lost their doctors, have faced skyrocketing health insurance premiums.
	Imagine in 2017, a new president signing legislation repealing every word of Obamacare.
	But before he gets to run against an actual Democrat, Cruz has first to face down more than a few Republicans.
	So how is that shaking out, Dan?
	Well, I talked to one of his folks today, and they said, well, at this point, he's the only candidate, so he's kind of got a clear field ahead of him.
	As if.
	So for another couple of weeks, he's the only one.
	Seriously.
	As if!
	Right.
	And she had a smirk on her face after the clip and she was just so like, this clown, oh ho ho, what a dork.
	As if.
	I just am disgusted by this kind of reporting.
	At this level, she is like one of the high-end, most respected public news sources.
	There are.
	It's unconscionable.
	I'm no fan of Ted Cruz.
	I don't like Ted Cruz.
	Particularly the way he speaks, he's creepy, he's slimy.
	The creepy part about Ted Cruz, before you go into your bit, is when he tries to smile.
	It is a square smile that looks forced.
	He needs to work on this because there's muscles.
	That's his voice.
	His voice is shite.
	His voice comes across.
	It's like nails on a chalkboard.
	Yeah, well, he doesn't have a prayer, but he will at least add some life into any debate that happens.
	And a reminder that he is not dumb.
	Very successful lawyer, prosecutor, state senator, wife, Goldman Sachs.
	I mean, he's a power couple.
	Yeah.
	They got connections.
	And he's definitely not dumb, but he doesn't...
	He's not...
	He's not electable.
	That's the word.
	So he...
	I think this will be interesting to play it in this direction.
	He...
	Went on CBS this morning, and he was asked about a couple of things.
	And here's where I heard about it, and I went and looked.
	This is distortion of media, which is why I think this is kind of interesting, and then how that propagates throughout.
	Because, obviously, mainstream media, which is predominantly progressive, liberal, Democrat, left-wing, is really pushing to make this guy look like a complete crazy guy.
	And I find it obscene and offensive.
	Anyone who wants to run for president, take that seriously.
	It's a big-ass deal.
	And if you're...
	Cutting people down who announced to run, then you're just a dick.
	It's un-American, is what I think it is.
	So here's Bill Maher on his little program, and he is going to read, he's not going to play a clip, but he's going to read his interpretation from a transcript of Ted Cruz on CBS This Morning.
	Really?
	No!
	Not really!
	Most people would just answer it.
	Ted Cruz's mind goes, oh, an opportunity to lie.
	So he was asked, apparently, what music do you like?
	So this is what he said, and it's not important to explain how it is because it tells something about this guy.
	He said, I grew up listening to classic rock.
	My music changed.
	My music taste changed on 9-11.
	Who's that?
	That's true.
	He said, I didn't like how rock music responded.
	And country music, the way they responded, resonated with me.
	I had an emotional reaction that said, these are my people.
	Right.
	I love the rodeo and Paula Deen and books about dead kids who go to heaven and come back.
	That's who I am.
	So I looked up how rock responded with three giant fundraisers.
	Huge concerts.
	September 21st, all four networks showed America, a tribute to heroes, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Bon Jovi, Pearl Jam, a virtual roster of classic rock.
	I think it speaks to...
	I thought it was interesting the way this was presented, and I want to deconstruct it so you can see how this works.
	I got the full clip of Ted Cruz.
	It was a full-on question.
	Listen to the whole thing.
	Listen and think if you believe he is sincere or not.
	And then Mars' interpretation only goes to money.
	Money and benefit concerts.
	Which doesn't necessarily mean, you know, that they did a good thing.
	I'll get into that in a minute.
	Here's the actual piece.
	You just heard Mar make him sound like a douchebag.
	I know we've got to wrap it up, but I do have one more thing because I see headlines where people say, who is Ted Cruz?
	So this is what I'd like to know.
	What kind of music do you listen to?
	If I came over on a Saturday night, what are we doing?
	What are you watching on TV? What do you do for fun?
	On TV, I just finished watching the third season of House of Cards.
	That's his problem, right?
	House of Cards.
	You've got to work on that, man.
	You have good taste in TV shows.
	Fortunately, there are fewer murders in politics and in real life.
	What's your music?
	Music is interesting.
	I grew up listening to classic rock, and I'll tell you sort of an odd story.
	My music taste changed on 9-11.
	And it's a very strange...
	I actually intellectually find this very curious, but on 9-11, I didn't like how rock music responded.
	And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.
	And I have to say, it just is a gut level.
	I had an emotional reaction that says, these are my people.
	And so ever since 2001, I listened to country music.
	But I'm an odd country music fan because I didn't listen to it prior to 2001.
	No, I hear you on country music.
	Final sentence, final sentence.
	You should be elected president because, just one sentence.
	Because I'll tell the truth and I'll do what I said I would do.
	Okay.
	So, very different than Bill Maher's read of it.
	It is like, these are my people.
	No.
	And now I wanted to find out why he thought country music did a better job.
	It didn't take me long.
	I have a report.
	This is from, I think, VH1. And everybody was saying, if you go back and I put a couple articles in the show notes, Across the board, mainstream media was reporting that country music did a much better job, mainly because they wrote songs.
	They didn't just do free concerts everywhere.
	They wrote a ton of songs, which are, of course, very kind of boot-in-the-ass, you know, America, whatever, like Hank Williams Jr., America Will Survive, Charlie Daniels' This Ain't No Rag, It's a Flag.
	We had, of course, Keith, Toby Keith.
	We had the song that caused a bit of controversy.
	What the hell was the name of that song again?
	Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, subtitled The Angry American.
	But universally, mainstream media was talking about the country community really doing a great job from a patriotic standpoint, however convoluted it may seem now.
	But Bill Maher can only equate it to people singing their own songs, elites in the front row for a concert that raised some money that God knows where that went.
	I personally, if it was premeditated, if it was premeditated, I think this classifies Ted Cruz, the Ted Cruz campaign as brilliant.
	And I'll tell you why.
	If you look at music sales across the board in the United States in 2014, and I'm going to throw in country Christian gospel, which is an extra 17%, your total is about 48% of the United States who buy country music.
	And you get country radio.
	This is what no one is seeing.
	Country radio is a...
	They still have disc jockeys.
	If you ever watch the Country Music Awards, they're all thanking radio.
	You never hear anyone at the Grammys say, thank you, radio.
	No.
	No.
	Country music, which is a huge percentage of the American population listen to it, they're going to love what he said.
	And he's going to be all over country radio, and they will support him because of this one interview and how it's been highlighted.
	And then you have the morons going on MSNBC. This is Ebony editor, senior editor, Jamila Lemieux.
	And here's what she said as she started off an interview.
	And they, of course, asked about Ted Cruz.
	And he says he likes country music.
	Nothing says let's go kill some Muslims like country music.
	There you go.
	Good work.
	Nothing says let's go kill some Muslims like country music.
	Wow.
	It was so bad, they had to issue an apology.
	I have a programming note.
	A few minutes ago on this show, a guest made a comment about country music.
	That comment was not appropriate, and we want to be clear, this network does not condone it.
	Oh, yeah.
	I guess they got a little bit of a pushback.
	From the executives of the network.
	Yeah.
	Somebody called in and said, what the hell are you guys doing?
	You're skating on thin ice already at MSNBC. It just alienated half of the country.
	Yeah.
	Well, you didn't really alienate half of the country.
	You alienated about 1% of the country, which would count for the number of people that actually watched MSNBC. You probably just alienated more people on behalf of MSNBC than they did.
	Well, this is true.
	The numbers are better.
	Yeah, this is true.
	Terrible.
	So I think it sounded pretty legit when it just came out, when he talked about that.
	I can understand it.
	It's a little strange.
	Well, he is a politician.
	Yep.
	And we can't forget that.
	And it's not beyond these guys, and he's smart.
	Well, that's why I think the country radio route is genius.
	I think you're right.
	I think you're dead on.
	This was a scheme.
	It worked like a charm, and these counter-efforts from Marr and the other people just made it better.
	Yep.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	Fell right into the trap.
	That's a 10-point analysis.
	Thank you.
	I'll be here all week!
	That was a good one.
	Mmm.
	All right, well, I got a little thing to talk about then.
	Yeah, good.
	There's two clips.
	Well, actually, first, let me play a clip.
	This is kind of a version of Ask Adam.
	We don't need the theme.
	No jingle, okay.
	You could play the theme.
	No, no.
	If it's not real, it's not real.
	The clip, I want to tell you what the clip is, but let me set it up.
	It's a free food for zoo animals clip.
	Apparently in the San Francisco, at the Oakland Zoo, which is one of the...
	It's a great zoo to visit because it is such an old-fashioned, pathetic zoo.
	I mean, you know, you go there and say, oh my god, these poor animals.
	You know, there's mangy chimps that won't even throw shit at you and they're all depressed.
	When did you last go to the zoo?
	A number of years ago.
	Last time I went was with Jay, I believe.
	I haven't been for a while.
	Probably five, six years.
	But maybe it's improved.
	I'll go check it out just to make sure.
	Anyway, so they came up with this program where people can bring their own fruits and nuts and I guess just somebody...
	To feed the animals?
	Well, first they were the elephants mainly, and I guess some other animals.
	And so they put the animals away, and they opened the pit area, the outside part, and they let people go into that area and put like a pineapple, a bunch of carrots all around, so the animals can come in and eat it.
	And then you'd be like a gallery of people watching the animals eat the food you brought.
	And it seemed very popular and was very happy.
	I was unhappy with the reporting for one simple reason, which you may or may not be able to identify in the report, but play the clip and you'll see what galls me.
	Once their work was done and the elephants brought in, people in the crowd got to watch the fruits of their labor.
	Most of the time you come to the zoo and you get to hope you see them eat something.
	And this time you actually get to put the food there.
	About two-thirds of the donated fruits and veggies goes to the elephants.
	They have the biggest appetite after all.
	But all the herbivores here at the zoo will get a chance to sample the donated fruits and veggies today.
	This is a great opportunity for the primates and actually all of our animals to have a lot of different types of fruits and veggies that they wouldn't get all the time.
	As the animals chomped down on their treats and the crowd took in the sights...
	It was hard to tell.
	Uh, gee, would it be about the veggies?
	Oh, God.
	This is not okay, man.
	This has to stop.
	So, have more kale.
	Have more kale.
	Have more kale.
	have more tail you have more tail you have more tail you have more tail you have more tail you have more tail have more tail i think we'll obey now that really works on me i I want to have some kale now.
	I'd go for some.
	Anyway, yeah, veggies.
	One girl says, and then the other one says, veggies, veggies, veggies.
	You know, this is not, there's vegetables, a carrot, there's something.
	Veggies, it's just demeaning to the product.
	To an entire product.
	Well, this comes up again.
	This is I wanted to play this because it's going to come up again in this next report.
	Oh, boy.
	This is out of Europe.
	This, I think, was on France 24.
	And it was a report about how they're trying...
	And by the way, and I've said this before on the show, and it's probably in one of the old red books, that the long-term goal of the elites at some point is to get...
	Is to kill everybody.
	Besides killing everybody, they want to...
	Humiliate the regular folk.
	And I think one of the routes is to get them to eat insects as dinner.
	Yeah, this reporting on insects has been going on for a year or two.
	About the protein and everything.
	By all the great protein, you should all eat crickets.
	Look at these stupid slaves eating crickets.
	Eating crickets while we eat the filet mignon.
	Anyway, I found a couple things out because they're trying to feed cattle and pigs these bugs.
	Really?
	And they found their ways of grinding the bugs up and apparently that in some dirt you can feed these animals reduces the amount of gas.
	I have a question.
	Hold on.
	Aren't cows like herbivores?
	They don't eat...
	Animals?
	Cows?
	They can be...
	They apparently do like...
	They will eat bugs.
	Because in the grass, when they're roaming around, they're eating plenty of bugs.
	Yeah, but they're eating grass.
	And then the bugs are just like whipped cream.
	Yeah, well, they're trying to feed them bugs.
	But the irony of this is they can't do it legally.
	They can or cannot?
	Cannot.
	Because of mad cow disease, there's a rule that the animals cannot eat other animals.
	And certainly not their own.
	It's a bug.
	Okay.
	There's no mad cow bug.
	So they're having these problems.
	This is all happening in Germany.
	And meanwhile, the report continues and it discusses some other stuff which brings in more of the...
	I can just see it.
	First play clip one, and then we'll get the bugs part out of the way.
	It's good for the health of the chicken and also to be...
	Stop, stop, stop.
	This is the big joke.
	Not feeding animals...
	It goes down to chickens.
	They can't feed chickens bugs.
	It's good for the health of the chicken and also to be less or independent from the soy from Southern America.
	Are consumers ready to eat chickens fed on a bug-based diet?
	For now, one out of two people say no.
	But New Science thinks this will change and eventually will go a step further.
	The advantage of bringing first insects Into animal nutrition is to improve the acceptance of direct consumption of insects for humans.
	Oh!
	It's mind control!
	Good clip!
	The kicker was, one out of two people don't think it's okay for chickens to be fed bugs?
	What do they think chickens are supposed to eat?
	Chickens eat all kinds of...
	Chickens eat chickens.
	Chickens eat everything.
	But when you have chickens in your yard, you don't have any bugs.
	They eat bugs.
	They're huge bug eaters.
	They're great to keep a yard bug free.
	Yes.
	But one out of two people, and by the way, and the eggs from those chickens, and I can attest to this because we have chickens, are better than anything you can buy in the store from a factory.
	But meanwhile, somehow, how did the public at large, and this is in Europe, in Europe, Come to the conclusion that is not a good thing for chickens to eat bugs?
	Is this a factual regulation in the EU? Apparently for the farms, for these large operations, and I notice that with the best eggs I can get around here, it always says vegetarian diet.
	For chickens.
	I never realized it, but people have been brainwashed into not realizing what chickens really eat.
	They do eat everything, but they eat bugs, and they like bugs, and they eat lots of bugs.
	This is a natural thing for birds to do.
	They eat bugs, and somehow the public at large doesn't think it's right.
	How does that happen?
	Well, it just gets crazier as we go into the...
	Let's take a visit to parts of Europe where they're introducing a new idea, which is going to come over here.
	Apparently, some 10 cities have already adopted this concept.
	And just wait until they start feeding us bugs.
	But what if reducing pollution in food production was as simple as just eating less meat?
	Here in Ghent, the vegetarian capital of Europe, Thursday is known as Veggie Day.
	The city was the first in the world to introduce the initiative, and it's been widely embraced, even in schools.
	Today it was goulash with vegetables and Greek pasta.
	This school offers parents a choice.
	Today, 60% of the pupils are eating vegetables.
	The rest, however, still eat meat.
	These are two kids of my class, and the one is eating a veggie meal with the vegetable we just talked about, and he's eating a normal meal.
	They have always the choice, because obligation is no good.
	On Thursday, Lucas opts for vegetables, but wouldn't do so every day.
	That's because I also think meat's good.
	Municipal offices, hotels and restaurants have also taken up the challenge.
	Some offer extra vegetarian options, others prepare a menu void of all meat.
	Today is Veggie Thursday, so we have beetroot salad with yogurt.
	We have a pakora.
	We have a stuffed courgette with nut mints.
	You can add a lot of flavors.
	There's a lot of vegetables to play with.
	There's textures.
	There's spices.
	There's a lot to do with vegetables.
	The idea has since been exported to 10 cities in Germany, the United States, and Brazil, as more people change the way they eat in the name of the environment and animal welfare.
	Oh yeah, there you go.
	It's coming, Veggie Thursday, in the name of the environment and animal welfare, so we're now eating for political reasons.
	That's a political reason to eat.
	Veggie Thursday.
	Veggie Thursday is coming to a town near you.
	I think it should be...
	It's in Austin within the next...
	Why can't it be Veggie Friday?
	I like it.
	That's Fish Day.
	You're stepping on the castle.
	Oops, oops, oops.
	Sorry.
	My mistake.
	Veggie Thursday.
	That's going to collide with Throwback Thursday.
	It's not going to work with hashtags and stuff.
	I'm just saying that they need to evaluate the day they choose.
	But okay.
	The idea is set.
	I like that.
	Veggie.
	Sticking in Europe for a moment.
	By the way, I should mention this is, again, just another attack on meat eating.
	By the elites.
	Who want to keep all the good meat for themselves.
	Yeah.
	So my favorite new thing to be looking at is this unintended consequences of technology.
	In the Netherlands, on Friday, Friday morning, at 9.30, the entire northern half of the country was without electricity.
	And very interesting to see what happened, besides the obvious people stuck in elevators.
	And this went on for an hour and a half, at least for the majority of it.
	But stores had to close.
	No one could process.
	Because, of course, the Lowlands is pretty much a pin-only, cashless society.
	So, of course, all transportation, all the trains, nothing worked, but also traffic lights, Schiphol Airport had to temporarily shut down, no flights could land there.
	And the first question is, how the heck does this happen, that there's no backup system?
	But then when you look at all the different pieces that completely fall apart, Just because of the basics of electricity, not having that, the country was frozen.
	Completely frozen.
	You have to see some of the videos that are put in the show notes of traffic.
	It was crazy.
	It looked like Russian traffic, you know, where they have all the dashboard cams.
	They're always driving like crazy.
	I thought it was one of the most frightening things I've witnessed, particularly because they don't really know what happened or how it happened or why there was no backup.
	I would say this is a worrisome event.
	Yeah.
	But really, look at the businesses.
	Yeah, you can't take cash.
	Gas stations couldn't pump.
	Well, there was electricity involved there.
	But there's no reason you can't go to a store and give somebody cash, especially a small store that doesn't need money.
	Well, the problem is people just don't carry that much cash anymore.
	That's the problem.
	A lot of stores can obviously process cash.
	But the slaves of Gitmo Nation Lowlands just don't have the cash anymore.
	Very disturbing.
	And, of course, there's no analysis of really what it meant to society.
	They're just talking about the technical pieces of it.
	I'm sure it was a glitch.
	And then you were correct, John, as Mark from London, in exile from North Dublin, wrote, thank you for your courage and coverage of the Irish water debacle.
	You'll recall on Thursday we talked about Ireland now proposing a law for water, which no one has ever been charged for in its history, to automatically deduct that, just take it right out of your bank account.
	And you said water meters, and producer Mark says, yes, this is all about the issue of meters.
	Irish homes have never been metered, as you point out.
	It's always been a free resource.
	The government are trying to install meters in each home, and people are now putting up, printed out pieces of paper on the front doors advising that under no circumstances are agents of Irish water to assume they have permission to enter the home.
	And they are fighting the, and of course these will be smart meters.
	They are fighting that.
	So it is about the meters.
	You were right.
	Big dough.
	Yeah, good call, man.
	Good call.
	Meters.
	Mm-hmm.
	Well, I got some Bergdahl stuff.
	Yeah, that's kind of your wheelhouse.
	I have not been following that.
	Okay, well, they got the guy, you know, now they're starting to debate what's going to happen.
	Why is this?
	Is it only because of the trial that this is back in the news?
	This has to do with the Obama administration.
	Okay, so it's kind of a distraction.
	Don't look over here.
	Nothing to see.
	But let's catch up to the story by playing the Bergdahl backgrounder.
	I think really was sort of the final tipping point in leading to this backlash of people saying that this is not someone who should be heralded as a hero.
	The U.S. fought for him to come back because the military motto is we don't leave a soldier behind, but that doesn't make him a hero.
	Why did the White House get as far out in the direction they did when he was released?
	And what's been the reaction within the White House since then as they've watched this thing unfold and, in a sense, unravel from where it was?
	My own sense is that there was an underestimation of how angry people were in the military with the circumstances that led to his disappearance.
	Because remember, for five years, everybody would go on patrol in eastern Pakistan, on that border, were ordered to go and look for Bo Bergdahl.
	People risked their lives.
	There were conflicting reports about whether people lost their lives.
	There are some family members who think that their loved one was killed in the search for Bo Bergdahl.
	And at the time, remember the narrative was that the U.S. is leaving Afghanistan, that we're winding down.
	And I think there was an understanding in the White House, this is a victory because we've brought everybody home.
	And it's interesting that we have the news of the extension of the troops this week and this, because here were two instances in which the narrative of the war was challenged.
	In the case of the drawdown, that the war was going to be over.
	And in the case of Bo Bergdahl, that he was a hero.
	So it was interesting to see our understanding of Afghanistan, in a sense, change so dramatically in the span of 48 hours.
	So what do we know about the charges that he may face?
	And could he actually face jail time?
	Yeah, it's a great question.
	Not a great question!
	Good work.
	Slow clap.
	Good work.
	He's been producing, ladies and gentlemen.
	Good one.
	No, it's not a great question.
	Now, she does answer the question if you want to hear that.
	It's a short clip.
	It doesn't have another gag at the end.
	Wait, stop.
	This was, to me, interesting because I didn't think that they would try to do what she says they're going to do, which is not give them any jail time.
	Right now, the charge of desertion carries a five-year sentence, but the more interesting charge is a misbehaving before the enemy, which actually carries a life sentence.
	The climate inside the Pentagon that I'm seeing is one that is not looking to put him in jail.
	Remember, he served, in a sense, five years in captivity, but that there had to be a sense of accountability.
	So it seems that the expectation is that there'll be a negotiation down.
	There's not jail time, but that he had to be, in a sense, held accountable as much for him as sort of the expectation.
	Amen.
	Fist bump.
	I find that to be distressing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The fix is in.
	I'm trying not to report too much more.
	What are you eating?
	Do you have something in your mouth?
	I can hear it.
	That's because I was coughing.
	I had to put something in my mouth.
	A lozenge?
	No.
	No.
	What are you putting in your mouth?
	A piece of black licorice.
	It's the Weekly Hooker Report.
	Woo!
	Yeah!
	Ladies and gentlemen, the Weekly Hooker Report comes from the House of Representatives, March 25, 2015, where Ms. Barr...
	Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, I believe, submitted the following concurrent resolution, which was referred to on the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
	This is also known as House Resolution 29.
	Recognizing the disparate impact of climate change on women and the efforts of women globally to address climate change.
	Whereas women in the United States and around the world are the linchpin of families and communities and are often the first to feel immediate and the adverse effects of social, environmental, and economic stresses on their families and community.
	Hot flashes.
	Whereas, women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change, particularly in poor and developing nations where women regularly assume increased responsibility for growing the family's food and collecting water, fuel, and other resources.
	And here it is.
	Whereas, food-insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work...
	Transactional sex.
	And early marriage that put them at risk for HIV STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.
	Yes, conflict has a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable populations, including women, and is fueled in the world's poorest regions by harsher climate, leading to migration, refugee crisis, conflicts, over scarce natural resources, including land and water.
	And finally, whereas, it is predicted that climate change will lead to increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather conditions, participating in the occurrence of natural disasters around the globe.
	So they have all that crap in there.
	And then it is resolved.
	It's really a very short resolution.
	All that stuff is preamble.
	It's presented as fact.
	Presented as fact.
	Hereby it is resolved by the House of Representatives that Congress, one, recognizes the disparate impacts of climate change on women and the efforts of women globally to address climate change.
	And two, encourages the use of gender-sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change, which account for the specific impacts of climate change on women.
	Because climate change will drive women to be hookers.
	I didn't say that.
	That's exactly what it said.
	No, it's what it said, but those words that you added at the end are yours.
	I'm sorry, the word hooker is not used.
	The word is transactional sex, sex work, and early marriage.
	Right.
	I find that an interesting tactic.
	Yeah, that's Barbara Lee.
	She speaks for me.
	Good work!
	Good work, Barbara.
	It's the winning of Carly Hall.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I got this one short, short clip.
	This is the proposed budget cuts health...
	You know, they've got a budget, a supposed budget, because this is just very short, and I just have a bitch about it.
	...budget shrinks federal deficits by more than $5 trillion over the next decade, mostly by cutting health care and other benefits.
	Okay, they're going to shrink the budget deficit by cutting healthcare.
	Not by cutting military spending that, for example, the Pentagon can't even audit itself.
	We have no idea what they're doing with all that money.
	And we're spending more money on the military than all countries in the world combined.
	Nah, that's fine.
	Let's give them more money.
	And this other crap, the corruption that goes on and on.
	Let that go.
	Continue.
	But let's cut health benefits because, you know, this seems like a good thing to cut.
	Yeah.
	Well, it serves a dual purpose.
	Who are we kidding with this crap?
	And why doesn't the public speak out?
	Well...
	That's an obvious one.
	That is just for people who are overboard and say, oh, it's not positive enough.
	It's up to you.
	You get the government you deserve.
	That's what you get.
	It'll be so easy.
	You can change it.
	This election, you can change it.
	It's not hard at all.
	No one feels like doing it.
	That's the problem.
	It's fine.
	All right.
	One thing that is local, then we should go thank some people.
	Now, I saw this document, unclassified document.
	At first, I didn't think it was real just because of the way it was presented.
	And then I looked at it and I'm like, this is not surprising.
	Of course, this has been, certainly in Texas, has been quite the talk of the town.
	I'm talking about Jade Helm 15.
	Some are calling it a Texas takeover.
	What's happening is between July and September, a bunch of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Special Ops from the Air Force and Marines are conducting some realistic training exercises across the Southwest, including 17 different Texas cities.
	The goal is to see if groups of these Special Forces can move around the civilian population without being noticed.
	You know, blend in so they can place themselves in strategic positions to handle different threat scenarios.
	The military says these are vital skills when it comes to an ever-changing threat.
	But in the slideshow of the training exercise, it says Texas will be simulated hostile territory.
	Well, that hostile characterization didn't sit well with a far-right radio host in Austin who told his listeners that he had access to the secret document It details a federal takeover in Texas.
	A libertarian website also picked up on the plan, and before you know it, rallies were being held against the event, but apparently the so-called secret document was published weeks ago in several local newspapers, letting the public know the training was in the works.
	Still, the Pentagon and local law enforcement are trying to knock down the rumors, trying to let everyone know that the feds have no plans to grab the Lone Star State.
	Apparently this kind of stuff just doesn't play very well.
	In Texas.
	It's real!
	I love it.
	I love it.
	I'm going to give you a clip of the day for that.
	Oh, well, that's...
	Are you sure?
	Yeah, because it's such a screwball story, I didn't know anything about this.
	Okay, well, I shall accept it.
	So it's educational.
	Educational.
	Clip of the day.
	So what you're telling me is that these boneheads...
	What are these guys supposed to do?
	Wander around?
	Are they going to be in uniform?
	Just blend in.
	Okay, Bruce.
	Oh, that haircut's beautiful, by the way.
	I like the white sidewalls.
	Let's just go around Austin, blending in.
	Just roam around.
	This reminds me of the Andronico store in downtown Berkeley.
	Mimi figured this out.
	There is some psychiatrist or shrink somewhere who apparently his or her specialty is agoraphobics.
	This is all developed over years that we figured this out.
	What is agoraphobia?
	Agoraphobia is...
	Fear of veggies?
	Can't leave the house.
	Oh, okay.
	You can't do anything.
	You're just kind of paralyzed unless you're in your own home.
	And apparently Kim Basinger was one of those for a while.
	According to her ex-husband, whatever the case.
	So you can go to Andronico's every so often and find someone almost all the time, actually, in the big store, someone's and sometimes a couple of people standing around trying to blend in, looking like they're scared to death because the psychiatrist has sent looking like they're scared to death because the psychiatrist has sent them Okay, here's the deal.
	Here's where your first goal is.
	You've got to go into Andronico's, shop around a little bit, and then stay there five minutes and then you can leave.
	But they don't.
	They go in there and then they're usually standing somewhere frozen.
	Like their arms straight down and they're real stiff and they're just bug-eyed.
	Well, I walk around downtown a lot.
	I'm going to keep my eyes open now.
	Yeah, keep an eye because these guys are going to be trying to blend in and you know they won't be able to because they're not locals.
	And we already have enough annoyance on the street.
	The family, what is it?
	Planned Parenthood?
	Save the children.
	Whatever it is.
	And then with the red t-shirts in the same place every single day.
	And they're trying to adapt their message.
	Just speaking to morons on the street.
	And Christina and I walk into the spin studio.
	And they say, hey, would you like to learn about helping children and about tattoos?
	Because Christina's got her tattoos.
	I'm like, oh, this is a novel approach.
	I said, no, but I have enough time just taking care of this one.
	Thank you very much.
	I don't like other children.
	By the way, I used that trick.
	That you don't like children?
	No, not that I don't like.
	I've never had anyone ask me.
	They just assume I don't, I guess.
	I don't know.
	That's what I'm going to say.
	You came up with this idea that someone says, would you donate?
	We're trying to save the earth.
	And you'd say, I hate the earth.
	The earth is flat.
	And I adopted this.
	And it works.
	So I'm going to Monterey Foods and somebody's got some Save the Whales or something.
	Nuke the Gay Whales, I think, is the...
	He says he wants to save the whales.
	And I said, I hate whales.
	And it was like the guy who was like a deer in the headlights.
	It was like, what?
	And you just keep walking, right?
	Yeah, they just keep walking and they don't bother you.
	They don't go after you.
	They don't try to do the plan B, you know, the skip logic.
	They don't know what to do when you say you hate whatever it is they're doing.
	But you don't always have to say you hate the topic.
	It's fun to come up with alternative things, such as We said, would you like to help save the whales?
	And you said, beached whales is good eating.
	And just keep moving.
	Now you're just being silly.
	But I've got to entertain myself, too.
	Let's be honest about it.
	Alright.
	I think we should thank a few people.
	I'm going to show my support by donating to No Agenda.
	Imagine all the people who could do that.
	Oh yeah, that'd be fab.
	Yeah, on No Agenda.
	Got a couple of notes, too.
	Somebody didn't send a check, but they sent this in, and I'm going to post these as an anonymous military guy named Amen Fistbump.
	Amen Fistbump.
	I'm interested in seeing some of the actual U.S. propaganda.
	I was a loadmaster in the Air Force on a C-17 Globemaster 3.
	These are actual leaflets we threw out the back of the jet on airdrop missions in Afghanistan in 2008.
	And so these look like dollar bills, and they're all in Arabic.
	And so that's the trick.
	Hey, money!
	Well, it looks like money, but it's the same size and everything, but it's all in Arabic, and it's actually very decorative.
	And I'm going to post some of these to see what they say, or at least maybe I'll dig up one of our Arab...
	Listeners, producers, and just ask them what it says.
	Whatever the case, it's very funny, but that's the extent of the note.
	I don't even know where it came from.
	It was all hush-hush kind of a thing.
	Cool.
	Nice.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	You get a kick out of it.
	Anyways, we do have some people to thank for show 708.
	Stuart Rushing in Corvallis, Oregon, $176.56.
	And this looks like it's going to be, he leaves only $48 for his knighthood, and he's going to accomplish it on his 60th birthday next month.
	Nice.
	And I refer to him as Sir, and now he feels, you know, that he's been stealing from us, I guess.
	Okay.
	James Rockle in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
	One, two, three, four, five.
	One of my favorite donations.
	In the morning, he says, and onward.
	Sir Mike DeCock.
	Or Dukaka.
	I said Dukaka.
	12345 in Chandler, Arizona.
	Oh, he has a douchebag call-out.
	He has a douchebag call-out.
	I'll read it.
	His friend Dom Brandt, Dom Brandt, has been listening to Noah Genesis episode 38 and has never donated.
	I'm calling him out as a douchebag.
	Douchebag!
	He says he's been listening for years and as a director of dudes named Ben, he can certainly afford to contribute.
	I fully expect him to rectify this matter by becoming an insta-night.
	Okay, thanks, Mike.
	Nice.
	Thanks for informing us of people like that.
	Yes, this will not stand.
	Dan Borowski sent a note in.
	This came in as a check for 12345, his favorite donation.
	My favorite, anyway.
	But he's the guy who uses the United Federation of Planets station.
	Oh, yes.
	This is his ongoing...
	He says he's almost a half-knight now, and even though I'm not yet a knight, I have taken on the sacred quest of listening to all No Agenda podcasts, starting from the first.
	Oh, please.
	I can assure you that until you get to show 200, the show's not that good.
	I noticed that John's use of, yeah, no, goes all the way to show number one.
	Well, this is an insight that we're unaware of.
	Yes.
	Show one, huh?
	This phrase is so much a part of no agenda that eliminating it might disturb the show's karma.
	The global forces.
	Which might be why we had lousy donations today.
	Because I don't think I got one call out last show.
	You've got to do more yeah-nos.
	Yeah-no, I do.
	And this was a check that was sent in?
	Yeah.
	Based upon your incessant promotion of this, I started...
	Paying some of my bills via bank check.
	And I'm kind of surprised I hadn't done this a long time ago.
	It's very easy.
	Yeah, if you have an online banking account, and you start digging around at what it can do, it's very powerful.
	I agree.
	You can send checks, you can create time payment plans yourself, and it'll just automatically send a check from the account, and you can monitor more than one account, so you can send money from all kinds of different directions, and the bank takes care of all of that.
	And curiously, it's part of the service.
	It seems to be free.
	I don't see any extra charges.
	It seems to be free.
	And some of these banks, you know, send individual checks out.
	They don't bundle them, which costs like 60 cents, I think, or more to process and put it in an envelope.
	And meanwhile, they're charging you for withdrawing from the teller machine, and they're giving this away.
	So take advantage of it, people.
	It's truly a dynamite way to support the best podcast in the universe.
	Yeah, well, he hand-wrote a check, so...
	Okay, but I'm just saying that I started looking into it, because I have a couple of...
	I kind of like sending out the paper checks, but now that I'm alone, no one's buying the stamps anymore for the envelopes.
	I got to go to the post office.
	Yeah, well, I do, but...
	Anyway, yes.
	Post offices are great.
	I agree.
	Von Glitschka in Salem, Oregon.
	Thank you, Von Glitschka, for sending me that beautiful piece of art.
	Life is too short for bad art.
	I think I tweeted a picture of it.
	It's beautiful.
	I haven't seen that.
	On the tweeter somewhere.
	Salem, Oregon, 100 bucks.
	He says, my wife now fully understands native advertising, thanks to you guys.
	She's surely realizing you guys aren't complete nuts.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Noel Vincente in Morristown, New Jersey, $100.
	Marta Calistom in...
	Is it Calistom or Calistrom?
	She sent a note.
	Calistrom, I think.
	I see Stom, no R, but that's a note.
	It looks like Strom on her note.
	All right.
	And she sent a check-in and a card, which is a nice card.
	It's a little educational card that has a little girl saying the word amazing.
	I said the word amazing too often.
	I've hired a PhD student to teach me other options.
	And the card is filled with every possible option to the word amazing.
	There's quite a few.
	I can read a few.
	Astonishing.
	Singular.
	Stunning.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Stupendous.
	Splendiferous.
	Splendiferous.
	I like splendiferous.
	Yeah, very good one.
	Spectacular.
	Phenomenal.
	Remarkable.
	Extraordinary.
	Staggering.
	Scintillating.
	That's a good one we never use.
	Inimitable.
	Titillating.
	Breathtaking.
	Flabbergasting.
	Titty-tastic.
	Titty-tastic?
	Yeah, titty-tastic and cray-cray.
	No, no, no.
	Amen.
	Fist bump.
	That's not good.
	Titty-tastic.
	Dazzling, stupefying, astonishing.
	And then the back of it has another 50.
	It's just word after word.
	So you don't have to use the word amazing.
	She proves it by buying this card and sending it to us.
	Oh, nice.
	Thank you, Marta.
	Colin Sloman in London, UK, 7070.
	Pascal Schelfhout.
	Oh, Pascal Schelfhout.
	Schelfhout. Schelfhout.
	That's what it says, Schelfhout.
	No, Schelfhout. Schelfhout.
	No, come on.
	Come on, try it, man.
	Schelfhout.
	Schelfhout.
	In Haarlem.
	In Haarlem.
	Which I believe is where Harlem is named after in New York.
	I like this note.
	Well, yes.
	The Dutch used to own New York, in case you forgot.
	Yeah, it was called New Amsterdam.
	Yeah, and that's why you have Harlem, Brooklyn.
	They got suckered out of it.
	Brooklyn, which is Brooklyn.
	Queens?
	Queens Day.
	No, Queens is not the Dutch.
	They have Queens Day.
	Yeah, they do.
	Hi, Adam and John.
	After three and a half years on benefits, I finally managed to land a job.
	Woo-woo.
	Even though I'm happy to be able to donate, and I'm happy to be able to donate again, trouble is I don't have time to listen to the show anymore.
	Oh.
	You've got to commute.
	You're going to be driving to work.
	Yeah, you listen to the commute.
	He says job karma works.
	Just be patient.
	Okay.
	We'll add some at the end for everybody as well, of course.
	Heather Simkin in Hanley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, 59-59, and she has a note.
	Love, Heather.
	Oh, Heather, love back.
	Send pictures.
	Brett Fegley in San Clemente, California, 55-55.
	Michael Ull in Atascadero, California.
	50, what is it?
	50, I've got the thing in the way.
	53.21.
	Eric Hochul in Berlin, Deutschland, $52.00.
	And then we have Christopher Cavaletto in Williams, Arizona, 5150, and Sir Kevin Payne in Richmond, Virginia, 5069, and then the rest of these with a short list of $50 donors, including John Anderson in Youngsville, Louisiana, David Duvall in Malta, New York, Chase Tomlinson in Austin, Texas.
	You should have a meetup.
	Yep.
	Corey Noonan in Los Angeles, California.
	Ross Turpin in Proy, Kansas.
	Peter Sir Peter to you.
	Totes in Parts Unknown.
	And finally, Gerald Inabinet.
	And I've been in Union, South Carolina, and Sir Mark Tanner, who comes in a couple times a month, $50 from Whittier, California.
	Those are the people we'd like to thank for show 708.
	We hope to do better next Thursday.
	We've got an extra day in there for people to get into it, and hope the show is still working for you.
	It's cheaper than a movie.
	And hopefully more valuable.
	I was just looking at some of the entries here, and I know what's going on.
	I'm seeing a number of Donation amounts below the 50 level, which means we don't read out the names because most people want to be anonymous or on their monthlies.
	And I think there's three that are tagged with Facebook.
	Oh, yeah.
	I know what's happening here.
	Well, Eric actually points this out.
	And Mimi talked to me about this.
	Well, Mimi is running that.
	That's the funny part.
	Well, is she really?
	I'm on Facebook.
	I'm on the No Agenda group.
	Yes.
	No Agenda group.
	If you read the note on Eric's email, he says there's No Agenda group, which is always gossiping about the show on Facebook.
	But in a nice way.
	Yeah, it's a positive.
	They're not saying we suck.
	It's not like most of these groups always turn against us.
	That's the Reddit group.
	The Reddit group is starting to get ugly.
	Yeah, that would happen because they think they can do it better.
	Generally, that's how that starts.
	Oh, like these guys who did the forums once and they decided to do their own podcast and then the podcast deteriorated.
	Oh, that was different.
	It was different.
	It was because you're not participating in the forum.
	Well, no.
	Well, that's not okay.
	It's just too many.
	This is not right.
	Whatever the case, they're trying to get enough donations through or mentioning Facebook, which should show up on the spreadsheet, and Eric will dog it so they will all be mentioned.
	And the cumulative amount is supposed to be $1,000 so they can knight somebody, which I guess they'll auction off.
	I don't know how they're going to choose anybody.
	But that's what's going on.
	I thought it was just funny that Mimi seemed to be running it.
	No, she told me about it when somebody came up with the idea.
	It wasn't her idea.
	No, I think it was Marcus Kavich.
	And I said we could have a special Facebook donation amount that I can create a button for.
	And she said, well, they want to, you know, collect donations on the Facebook site.
	And I'm thinking, how's that going to get to us?
	And, well, then someone can write a check.
	It's just, nah.
	The way to go is to get a special button that's a fixed amount or open amount.
	We can make it just the same open amount.
	And you click on that, it always gets credited as a Facebook donation.
	I can still do that, but no one's...
	That Facebook, I don't know, I don't go there.
	No one's giving me the go-ahead to do such a thing.
	I'll just do it.
	And I'm realizing more and more how the real problem with Facebook, the reason why it's dangerous is because it really is an evil time machine.
	And let me explain.
	You disturb the forces of time and dimension when you reconnect with people from your youth and from high school.
	It's not good.
	You start to follow these people, and then you start to, they're like strange, and they have weird politics, and they're just goofy, and then you have to keep reading about them, and you feel bad, you don't want to unfriend them.
	It's an evil time machine.
	Stay away from it as much as possible.
	I don't, you're not talking, you're preaching to the wrong guy.
	Preaching to the choir, I know, preaching to the choir there, I know.
	But I didn't think that was the reason.
	I just thought it was a waste of time, period.
	But you're right.
	And I do think you don't have contacts with the old high school buddies because you don't.
	There's reasons for that.
	There's reasons why the universe has moved you on.
	If you're on the steering committee for every five-year reunion and there's a few people you'll stay in touch with, that's different.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's different.
	That's always been around.
	It's always been fine.
	That's all we've got for this show 708.
	Yeah, that's pretty disappointing.
	I don't know how it converges where people say best show ever, fantastic, and then donations are down.
	Fine.
	Yeah, I find that...
	I don't like that.
	No.
	If they said this last show sucked...
	I'd feel better about it.
	I know I have to worry.
	I mean...
	And then we can say, well, we make a better show for you.
	But it's the best show ever, and then nobody cares.
	Like, wait a minute.
	Something's wrong.
	Somebody's not telling the truth.
	Exactly.
	Well, please help us out for the Thursday show.
	We, as always, have a lot of things to deconstruct and help you live a healthier lifestyle.
	Dvorak.org slash N-A Man overboard!
	Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
	Let's vote for jobs!
	You've got our mind.
	Amen.
	It's fun.
	I got a mid-do here.
	Mary Walden wrote in and said, Tuesday, I made a donation, Noah Jenner, from the day's page, included a birth request for my friend Kyle, and didn't make it on the air.
	So I'm hereby making good on that.
	And as we learned today, we had Michael Hintz.
	His son Desmond will be two.
	And on the following day, the 31st, his son is two today, Michael himself will turn 29.
	That means next year, if you add up our ages, it will total 33.
	Coincidence?
	I think not.
	I agree with you, my friend.
	Happy birthday from all your buddies here.
	The best podcast in the universe!
	How does somebody turn two one day and then 29 the next?
	His son is two today.
	Oh, his son is two.
	Oh, sorry.
	He turns 29 tomorrow.
	I'm sorry.
	Maybe that wasn't entirely clear.
	I was doing a lot of that on the fly because neither of those entries were in the official spreadsheet.
	Do we have, I don't know, the big good I got.
	That's all right, I got it.
	I never sent it in.
	I took care of it, man.
	Now, how about, do we have no nights?
	No nights?
	No.
	Not with these donation levels, no.
	I do have, and I want to talk about this, we said we were talking about China, and I think it's important that we bring this up, because I've been following it for maybe half a year now, and you've scoffed at it.
	You can still scoff, because I think you're probably right, but given a couple years, this Asian investment bank Infrastructure.
	AIIB, the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank, may be interesting, and certainly we have a lot of countries joining because I just don't worry.
	Well, it's more interesting now than it was when you first brought it up.
	But I did first identify it.
	This infrastructure bank is part of a bigger picture, so far as China is concerned.
	Ultimately, the Chinese policymakers, economic policymakers, I believe, are pushing towards the idea of the renminbi as a reserve currency.
	But there's lots of things they have to do on the way, and this is one small step in that direction, having a multinational institution that they can lead.
	Another will be free convertibility, and as you know, that's some years away.
	Another will be a more liquid bond market that's accessible to foreigners.
	Those are things that have to happen before the renminbi becomes a part of the reserve currency system.
	And, you know, having said that, they've done other things, other little steps, like the currency swaps to facilitate international trade settlement in renminbi.
	So I see it as part of a whole in the development of China.
	And just a quick follow-up on that.
	This is, I believe, mainly because the IMF reforms to 2000, was it 2010 reforms that Fifi Lagarde was asking the United States Congress to, what is the word, ratify, which we do not do,
	and those reforms would put China into a voting position in the IMF slash World Bank, but certainly IMF, We, the United States, would still have veto rights and be number one, but we have not ratified that.
	And now it seems like what they promised, the BRICS in particular said, oh, we're just going to, we eventually will move away to something else.
	And now we have...
	You won't let us in your club.
	We'll start our own club.
	The Netherlands is now in.
	Australia is in.
	China has officially requested the WAN, the WAN to be in the SDR. I'm sorry, that makes no sense what I just said.
	Here's the Treasury Department again requesting the IMF reform bill, which is just, I don't think it's going to happen.
	And, you know, this is not huge, but everybody's in it.
	They had the Dutch jump into it, I thought was interesting.
	And the Australians.
	And it's just, everyone's like, why would we take a risk on not being on board with it?
	Well, the Japanese aren't in.
	We're not in.
	And we didn't want anybody else to go in, but they did, against our wishes.
	I wonder if there'll be any...
	There'll be fallout from this.
	I was going to say, repercussions.
	Repercussions.
	And was there anything, you know, since we talked briefly, we said we were going to talk about China on the show today.
	Your buddy over there from the Horowitz-Dvorak Unplugged business.
	He called me.
	He left messages like, ah!
	I missed him.
	I think he's on a plane maybe to China.
	I don't know.
	But he said, ah, I got all kinds of stuff and information.
	Did you guys talk about what's happening with China and the failing of all of these trusts?
	50 or 60 different trust companies have defaulted.
	We didn't talk about the trust companies, no.
	What did you talk about?
	We talked about the Chinese numbers...
	Finally, they can't cover it up anymore.
	They're going down the tank.
	Could you give us a little background?
	I'd love to hear it.
	Well, the Chinese have these...
	It's always been suspected by the investment community that China's numbers are bullcrap.
	And they're normalized, which is really the problem.
	Nobody wants that.
	That means that when somebody said, well, you know, it's down a little bit, but we'll give it this number because this is the number that's expected by the party.
	The party wants to see this number, and we think we can get to this number, at least average to this number, next time.
	So the numbers are all bullcrap.
	But at some point, you have such bad numbers that you can't, you have to, you know, commit Harry Carey.
	I'm sorry, these numbers are terrible.
	And so these numbers are now starting to creep into reality.
	And this is making China a very risky investment on all kinds of levels.
	Okay.
	But no, we didn't talk about all these trusts failing and some of this other stuff.
	It was a foregone conclusion.
	I mean, you can't invest in these areas.
	And that's why the American stock market is so good, because we at least were transparent.
	We are not completely, but we're more transparent than anybody else.
	Well, you know, according to our ex-banker from New York, we won.
	You know, the American banks won.
	It's funny.
	I was standing on the balcony last night.
	I have a little balcony here.
	Did you finish the story about him when he started the show?
	Yeah, you know, he...
	Whoops!
	There we go.
	Amen.
	Fist bump.
	He was the one that got me onto power and gossip as capitalism.
	Oh, right, right, right, okay.
	But as I was standing overlooking downtown Austin, that's the view I have, here's what I see.
	There's a number of buildings, and the buildings are labeled.
	And from right to left.
	Do you have a balcony?
	You can stand out on the balcony and view the bugs and the bats and all the rest of it and say, my people!
	No, no.
	No, that would be a southern view, and I have a northern view.
	So I see the city.
	Do you have a balcony?
	Yeah, a small balcony.
	Small?
	Can you have a party on the balcony?
	No, absolutely not.
	Party in my pants is about it.
	And I go from right to left, and there's maybe, I can see 15 buildings, maybe something like that.
	Ben, what do I see?
	Bank of America, Chase Bank, Moody Bank, IBC Bank.
	And it only kind of hit me last night.
	There's all banks.
	And they have huge buildings.
	They're running the show.
	Every single bit of it.
	And people like Belinda Gates, they're at the lower level.
	They are lower level than these guys.
	Well, you think they're doing a crappy job, these banks?
	Not for us.
	I think in Gitmo Nation proper here, I think we're doing okay.
	But they're running the drugs.
	They're running everything.
	That's my point.
	That's really what's going on.
	When you see the power, these are huge buildings.
	What is in there?
	What are these people?
	No.
	What are they doing in there?
	What are they doing in this huge Chase Bank building?
	What are they doing?
	I know, because Chase Bank's in New York.
	There's headquarters or someplace else.
	That's not the headquarters.
	No, no.
	It's huge.
	This is one of many giant Chase buildings around the country.
	What are they?
	I agree.
	What are they doing?
	What are they doing?
	Do they need all these people in Austin?
	Yeah.
	And Bank of America is the biggest building here.
	What are they doing in there?
	Well, you know, I read that the retail is what they really want to get away from.
	None of these banks want to do that anymore.
	It's all about running the world, I guess.
	And then this comes out, and I thought this was kind of coincidental with my observation of downtown Austin, is the President's podcast.
	I just got a little piece of it, his little podcast that he does.
	About 2,000, 3,000 people ever watch this thing on video.
	I don't know if even anyone listens to it on audio.
	And he had a couple of...
	There's a couple of orders that came out with this, not memoranda, not executive orders.
	And it's about something we've talked about in the past, payday loans.
	And we've talked about that in regards to people who work at home, do webcam work, or any kind of work that may or may not look like it's similar to payday loans.
	Just individuals, and they're getting thrown out of banks.
	Chase is number one, like, oh, we won't let you have an account here anymore.
	And now the president comes out with this.
	This began with porn stars.
	Yeah, I think webcam, mainly.
	But maybe some porn sites as well.
	And we deconstruct that back to they want to get rid of payday loans.
	And we'll get into that in a second.
	But first, let's listen to the president and how he describes this.
	And, of course, we always start off the podcast with our – everyone say it.
	Heil, everybody.
	Hi, everybody.
	Five years ago, after the worst financial crisis in decades, we passed historic Wall Street reform to end the era of bailouts and too big to fail.
	As part of that reform, we created an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with one mission, to protect American consumers from some of the worst practices in the financial industry.
	And let's just stop there for one second.
	That was led by Elizabeth Warren.
	She ran that, and right after she said everything's great, I started getting notices of phony baloney looking like a check.
	Was it $1,000?
	Just go ahead.
	Just send us in.
	We'll give you $1,000.
	And what was the big on that?
	27% APRs?
	The whole thing, this consumer protection has done nothing.
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	At least nothing we can see any evidence of.
	They've already put $5 billion back in the pockets of more than 15 million families.
	Oh, shit.
	I don't know where those numbers are coming from either.
	This week, they took an important first step toward cracking down on some of the most abusive practices involving payday loans.
	Wow, he actually named a company during his speech.
	Did he name a company, you said?
	Yeah, that's pretty outrageous.
	He targeted payday loans.
	Oh, that's an actual company name as well.
	Yes.
	Wow.
	Let's listen to that again.
	You didn't know that.
	No, I didn't know.
	No, no, I didn't know that.
	Yeah.
	Let's do it again.
	Involving payday loans.
	I'm going to go back a little bit more.
	That's pretty brazen.
	Involving payday loans.
	Millions of Americans take out these loans every year.
	In Alabama, where I visited this week, there are four times as many payday lending stores as there are McDonald's.
	Another fine American institution.
	But while payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt.
	If you take out a $500 loan, it's easy to wind up paying more than $1,000 in interest and fees.
	The step the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced this week is designed to change that.
	The idea is pretty common sense.
	If you're a payday lender preparing to give a loan, you should make sure that the borrower can afford to pay it back first.
	As Americans, we believe there's nothing wrong with making a profit.
	But there is something wrong with making that profit by trapping hardworking men and women in a vicious cycle of debt.
	Yeah, like student loans, as an example?
	Protecting working Americans' paychecks shouldn't be a partisan issue.
	I love that.
	Protecting Americans' paychecks.
	That's the meme right there.
	We're going to protect your paycheck.
	Let's just talk about payday loans for a moment.
	Which I think you're probably more qualified to do that, John.
	Okay.
	What is a payday loan?
	Just so we explain this.
	Well, payday loans began as a very interesting scheme where you have a bunch of debts or something and you're behind and you're going to have to pay a bunch of fees.
	You can take a loan out of your payday.
	That's kind of a pun.
	You take a loan out on the check that you're going to get, but today's Monday, you're going to get paid on Friday.
	Mm-hmm.
	And so you show some check stubs or whatever, and they'll give you a loan for the entire amount of your Friday check.
	So you're going to get $180 on Friday, and they'll give you the $180 on Monday, but there's going to be like an $18 fee.
	Right.
	It's the fees really that are...
	It's not the APR. Right.
	So when Friday comes along, you get your $180, and you have to pay back the...
	$180 you owe these guys, but you can't because you are...
	I mean, you can, but you're still going to be short $18 to go by net-net.
	And so that becomes...
	So you only get to pay off some of the loan.
	And so now you're going to be behind at least a minimally $18 on the principal.
	And so now you have to go to the next week.
	And either take out another loan or just wait till you get paid again.
	But meanwhile, it's added up to now you probably owe $36.
	The $18 plus an $18 fee.
	It's like a fee base and there's some interest aspect to it.
	And it starts building up to the point where you never can pay it off and you pay not just $1,000.
	A lot of people in the military have been, because they put these payday loan places up around these bases, and they have been bankrupted by these guys.
	What's interesting is the calculation that the president and this agency made is based upon the APR, the annual percentage rate.
	And what they say is if you borrow $100 on a payday loan with a $15 fee, so your next paycheck, and sometimes you have to write them a check, they'll cash that check, multiple ways they do it.
	The way they calculate the annual percentage rate on a $15 fee for a 100 payday advance, they say that's a 391% annual percentage rate.
	Okay.
	However, if you take their same math and you take a credit card, $100 credit card balance, your late fee will be $37 on average, which is a 965% annual percentage rate.
	Oh, that's okay.
	How about your utility bill?
	If you're late on a $100 utility bill, typical fee, $46.
	Results in a 1,203% APR. All of this used to be against the law, and they had ursery laws in place around the country.
	And the last state to avoid them, I believe, was Arkansas.
	I remember back years ago when you could get an Arkansas credit card, which was the best deal in town, because they couldn't charge more than 3.5% or something like that.
	And this is all the joke, considering the cost of money based on the interest rates coming out of the Fed is near zero.
	So this is all who used to be illegal that is now all legal.
	Because there's no consumer protection.
	It was illegal for a reason, because this bullshit would happen, and half the dummies out there, oh, well, you know, they won't pay next week.
	But this sort of thing goes on because the public needs it literally needs to be protected against this sort of thing, because it's at some point you don't get how complicated it is.
	And they make it.
	What do you think all the fine print is?
	What is huge documents you got to sign?
	This is terrible.
	And Elizabeth Warren is going to promise to fix it.
	She's not going to do anything.
	Nobody's going to do anything.
	This is horrible.
	The situation we're in and this is maybe is what this guy went overboard for because we're complaining about stuff like this.
	Live in a dream world.
	Yeah.
	No, it's.
	Yeah.
	I think it was also the New York Bank who told me...
	We were talking about...
	Of course, I'm just rolling everything out I can, Adam.
	We only have a dinner, so I have to throw as much as I can out.
	Ten minutes!
	You scare me.
	You have ten minutes.
	You wouldn't play the clip.
	You play it on me, but you never play it on yourself.
	I'll play it on myself.
	Less than ten minutes to go.
	Ten minutes.
	Okay?
	I can save it for Thursday if you want, but it was really just, it was related to this, but okay, fine.
	No, no, you should finish it up.
	Yeah, he said, because I was talking about auto loans, he said auto, we were talking about Uber, that's what it was.
	He said, you know, they already provide auto loans, and he was just talking about the business in general, and then I said, well, you know, until that subprime market crashed, he's like, no way, that's nothing, it's small, the biggest one is student loans, and there's a business that In providing loans that the government won't provide.
	I've got to get more.
	You know what?
	Ten more minutes.
	You're right.
	I've got to stop.
	We've got to find out whether something very big is going on.
	There's an opportunity for us to make money, and I'm sure we'll screw it up.
	We're not going to screw it up.
	We're just not going to capitalize on it.
	We're not going to do it.
	That's true.
	That's what's really going to happen.
	You're right.
	Okay.
	Besides that, who wants it?
	We could do research for the public at large as a public good or organization, the two of us.
	We could do that and become enlightened.
	Or we could go work our butts off to make, you know, blood money off of lending or something with the government.
	Oh, my God.
	Why don't you just retire now?
	I prefer doing this.
	I enjoy what we do.
	I wish more people would show some appreciation.
	Yeah.
	We do have people that support the show, there's no question about it, but sometimes it's like, what happened?
	Yeah, that's true.
	All right.
	I'm going to enjoy the sunshine here in the Drone Star State.
	Coming to you from the Crackpot Condo, right here in the capital, Austin, Texas.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from the capital of Northern Silicon Valley...
	Yes.
	Over by the bridge.
	Yes.
	I'm John C. DeMorack.
	We'll be back on Thursday right here on No Agenda.
	Man overboard!
	Allah Akbar.
	Bomb them.
	We need to kill and bomb them.
	Bomb them.
	We need to kill and bomb them.
	Bomb them.
	We need to bomb them.
	We need to kill them and bomb them again.
	Adios, mofo.

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