All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 25, 2018 - No Agenda
02:49:01
1089: Puppet Mouth
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Oh, you've got to get one!
Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak.
It's Sunday, November 25th, 2018.
This is your award-winning Gitmo Nation Media Assassination Episode 1089.
This is no agenda.
Hoddling for dear life and broadcasting live from the capital of the Drill and Star State here in downtown Austin Tejas in the Cludio in the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon I can't play the jingle then either because it specifically asks if you can...
Oh no, let's hear that horn.
Yeah, I guess it would work.
I can hear the horn.
How bad is it?
If they honk it, they don't normally, this Sefer guy who drives it this way isn't honking the horn like a maniac like some of these Amtrak guys.
Is this a normal occurrence for this time of year in the northern Silicon Valley area?
It happens.
Okay.
Well, we made it.
We've had a lot of fog recently.
It's a little more than usual.
I mean, it actually harkens back into the 70s.
There's a cycle of fog.
Oh, yes.
When we were all going to die from global cooling.
From cooling and fog.
I had fun reading the climate report that came out on Friday.
Ha!
Ha!
Somebody read it.
I didn't get a hold of it.
All I know is I have a report from CNN. Yes, I have a similar report.
I think we'll just play yours.
I have a report on CNN where the girl says, yes, the report just came out one and a half minutes ago.
And I'm already reading through it.
And somehow she's already read through it.
Yeah, I heard it.
That one too?
Yeah, yeah, but it's okay.
I have the exact same one, but let's play it.
The U.S. government is releasing a major, highly anticipated...
And by the way, how mean!
How mean to release this when no one is watching!
Report on climate change.
Oh, stop.
Why...
The U.S. government, it's NOAA that brought this out.
No, man.
No, man.
You know who did that.
You know they released that on Friday so that no one would see it.
Yeah, I saw that.
I saw that bullcrap, too.
But it sounds amazing.
They released it on Friday because there's no news, so this would get even more news.
Exactly.
It should have.
And I think it did.
The U.S. government is releasing a major, highly anticipated report on climate change.
I like the highly anticipated.
Did you even know it was coming out on Friday?
No.
Nobody did.
In fact, it's being made public right now as we speak this hour, 2 p.m.
Eastern.
The congressionally mandated report documents the human impact on climate change and its cost to the economy.
Now, it could contain dire threats that are at odds with President Donald Trump's own environmental policy and own pronouncements.
Let's get right to CNN's Renee Marsh for details.
She's live in Washington.
So you were able to take a quick look at this report.
It is officially being put out in the 2 p.m.
hour or so right now.
What new details are we learning?
Right.
So, Holly, you're right.
I mean, this report released literally about a minute and 40 seconds ago.
But the government report squarely focuses on the human impact of climate change for people here in the United States using real-life examples.
Does she have a stopwatch?
Yeah.
Does she have a stopwatch a minute and 40 seconds?
I'm going to take through some of the quick highlights that I'm seeing in my first read here.
It says people who are already vulnerable.
This is called the executive summary, which is the first page, which is what all you ever read in the news media.
Including low-income and other marginalized communities will feel the impacts the most.
This report goes on to talk about the health impact, the economic costs, and the impact on transportation infrastructure.
And it's very specific according to regions here in the United States.
As it relates to the economic impact, the report...
It's very specific according to regions.
Regions of the United States, I think.
No, don't you say it's regions that are making it specific?
The wording should be it's very specific regarding regions of the United States, perhaps.
But according to Regis, Regis are not the authority that are making it specific.
Are you upset about this report that somehow it's full of crap?
I mean, you're not really going to try and deconstruct this piece of crap that basically just says, we agree, high likelihood.
There's nothing new here.
Oh, except extreme weather, which you're witnessing right now.
We're all going to die!
The cost and the impact on transportation infrastructure.
And it's very specific according to regions here in the United States.
As it relates to the economic impact, the report says that the climate change is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century.
Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach higher.
Hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century.
So quite pricey.
They also go on to say the frequency of severity in allergic illnesses, including asthma and hay fever, are expected to increase as a result of climate change.
More people will be exposed to things like ticks carrying Lyme disease, mosquitoes that transmit viruses like Zika, West Nile virus, and dengue fever.
So that will become more prominent.
Small hay fever.
When it comes to agriculture and our food sources, it specifically talks about the Midwest and it says increases in temperatures during the growing season in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in productivity of U.S. agriculture.
And obviously that impacts not just people in the United States, but as we export, it impacts people who rely on our export as well.
I mean, this is a lengthy report.
We're all gonna die!
Yeah, that's pretty much the report.
We're all gonna die if we don't hurry up immediately and do something about it.
There's a similar report like this, like in the 80s.
I mean, every so often on Twitter, somebody digs up some old article from some...
Time in the past, 10, 20 years ago, saying we're all going to die and we don't do something today.
Let's listen to CBS's version of the report.
The extensive federal report details how global warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas is impacting each region of the country.
Researchers said climate-related events are expected to become more frequent and more intense.
But President Trump's policies and rhetoric often reject climate change.
His administration has rolled back Obama-era environmental regulations and promoted the production of fossil fuels.
So we're getting out.
In June 2017, the president pulled the U.S. out...
That was a great little edit they did there.
This is cool.
And the production of fossil fuels.
So we're getting out.
That's all it took for us to leave the Paris Climate Accord, apparently.
2017, the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a pact of nearly 200 countries to curb climate change.
Last month, Mr.
Trump dismissed global warming on 60 Minutes.
But what about the scientists who say it's worse than ever?
Uh...
You have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda.
And just this week, President Trump tweeted about East Coast cold weather, writing brutal and extended cold blasts could shatter all records, whatever happened to global warming.
Former Vice President and environmentalist Al Gore said the president may try to hide the truth, but his own scientists and experts have made it as stark and clear as possible.
Hold on, it's almost over.
No, no, no, you gotta stop.
You gotta back it up, because there's something that said something about Gore that I wanted to get, because I think it was worded peculiarly.
Warming.
Former vice president and environmentalist Al Gore said the president may try to hide the truth, but his own scientists and experts have made it as stark and clear as possible.
Okay.
No, sorry.
I misheard.
Okay, but Gore has been out there saying, oh, it's unbelievable.
He tried to hide this, tried to hide the report.
It's his own scientists.
If anybody's trying to hide anything, it's Gore and his pressure group that...
Keeps any alternative opinion from coming on the news.
The White House tried to dismiss the report, saying it is based on the most extreme climate change scenario.
But, JB, it is worth noting the administration chose to release it today, right after Thanksgiving, on the busiest shopping day of the year.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
Here's what's interesting.
Of course, I went through the report.
Do we know that it was...
You know what?
Honestly, I don't care.
Because every single time we talk about stuff like that, I get emails.
And everyone's triggered and there are people getting sick.
Actually sick from hearing the name Trump in news reports that we play.
They're ill.
People are getting sick.
I know, but they're sick.
People are getting sick and I want no part of it.
So I don't care.
I don't care.
What I do care about is that They say in this report it is going to hurt poor people and marginalized groups.
Poor people and marginalized groups will die sooner from this horrible, horrible catastrophe that is taking place.
The crazy thing is, is that The measures that were agreed to in the Paris Climate Accord are being put in place in Europe, in places like France.
And the actual people that these taxes, these carbon taxes are supposed to save, are on the streets burning the city of Paris because they can't eat anymore.
Maybe the whole thing's a scheme to get rid of the lower classes.
I mean, there's report after report of Paris.
I'll play one of them from CNN. And nowhere, not for a moment, does anyone mention that the hike in fuel price is because of the implementation of carbon taxes.
They just don't even say it.
I want to take you to Paris now.
Stunning pictures coming out of there.
Protesters filling the most famous street in France.
The iconic Champs-Élysées with fire and explosions.
In a second weekend of protests, the usual scene of tourists and Parisians enjoying cafes and luxury shops replaced by burning vehicles.
As 8,000 protesters clash with 3,000 police in riot gear, the demonstrators, who call themselves the Yellow Vests, are angry over rising fuel prices.
Now, police use tear gas and a water cannon in an attempt to break up these demonstrations.
CNN's Jim Bitterman is joining us now from Paris.
Jim, tell us why these protesters are so angry.
Well, I think it started off as a fuel protest a week ago, Anna, but in fact, over the last few days, it's generalized a lot.
Really?
See, this is what I mean.
He doesn't even give us the truth why they're angry.
Well, that's CNN. In fact, he sounds like Norm MacDonald doing a conversation.
He does sound like normal.
People are just dissatisfied with the Macron government.
His approval rating has dropped to 25%.
They're worried about the rising cost of living, about pension payments that aren't really making ends meet.
So it's just a generalized anger about the state of the economy.
And, of course, Macron, President Macron, has vowed to continue forward on his ideas of reforming the economy here.
So...
Instead of explaining what reforming the economy means, the idea is a new green deal.
It's the green economy that he's supposedly kick-starting by penalizing people.
Do you know the price of diesel?
Now I'm not sure if it was diesel or regular petrol.
One of the two went up 30 cents.
I have a report that contradicts your report a little bit.
Come on.
Went up 30 cents.
They're now paying the equivalent of seven dollars per gallon.
Seems a bit high.
Seems a tad high.
I think people just have had enough and they heard a lot of people say that today.
You heard a lot of people calling for Macron's resignation.
Now, here on the Champs-Élysées, this is not the scene you would expect on a Saturday night following Black Friday.
You would think there would be a lot of people out and that sort of thing.
People today were protesters throughout the day.
And only about an hour ago or so did the police make a move with a major assault on the avenue here with multiple trucks and hundreds of police to clear away the demonstrators.
And for the most part, they've succeeded.
There are still a few pockets of resistance along here.
We haven't heard from Macron all day until very late this evening when he put out this tweet.
He said, thanks to all the law enforcement, you'd expect that, but he said, shame on all the people who assaulted them, shame on those who voluntarily assaulted citizens and reporters, shame on those who tried to intimidate our elected officials.
So you have him taking a very kind of professorial or perhaps paternalistic tone, something that he's been criticized for in the past.
Okay, I'd love to hear your...
Okay, but first before you play, which I believe is from CBS or something more, which they do mention these issues that you say CNN didn't mention.
I've never heard that CNN clip before.
I will say, based on what I know and based on this other clip and based on what's really going on, CNN should be ashamed of itself.
That's a bullcrap report.
All of them from CNN are like that.
Every single one of them.
It's getting worse at that place.
Yeah, it is.
Why are they doubling down on this?
I don't know.
It makes no sense.
Anyway, here, play this.
This is a French fuel tax protest.
Anger continues to grow over the country's rising fuel taxes.
Thousands across France are also protesting President Emmanuel Macron's administration.
Macron has defended the fuel tax, saying they're necessary to wean the country off fossil fuels.
Lisa Hambly from our partners at the BBC reports.
I'm sorry.
I don't know if they come back to it in this report.
When he says the fuel tax is necessary to wean people off fossil fuels, that's not quite the same as saying it's your carbon tax.
Which I believe it is.
So now it's just saying it's a disincentive?
Is that the message?
Yeah, there's a disincentive thing.
But at least they're a little closer to the truth here than your CNN report, which was shameful.
A sea of yellow.
The protesters in their trademark high-vis jackets on the Champs-Élysées.
The authorities mean business too, using water cannon and tear gas against the thousands of protesters, trying to prevent them moving down to the Palais de la Concorde and the Presidential Palace, which has been cordoned off.
Organizers bill this as Act Two in their rolling campaign.
Hold on a second.
I read everywhere that there was no real organizers.
That it was something that originated on the internet and it wasn't a new kind of protest.
Well, let's look at reality here with the protests we always have.
There were always organizers.
Yeah, I saw report after report that there was no central organization.
It was organic, kind of like Arab Spring.
Yeah.
So I'm happy to hear this.
Organizers bill this as Act Two in their rolling campaign.
They're angry about an increase in diesel tax justified by the government as an anti-pollution levy.
But the campaign has grown into a broad opposition against President Emmanuel Macron.
This metal worker says, we feel like we've been working for years now, and it's just extortion, while members of the government live like princes.
It's not even possible to live anymore after paying taxes, says this woman.
I'm disgusted.
I'm telling you, if I saw him, I wouldn't be able to shake his hand, and I'd tell him exactly what I think.
Some here have been ripping up the street and trying to build barricades.
But as protesters let off fireworks, the authorities have the power to move them on.
Now, before we talk about this, I have a similar report from Euronews with men and women on the street, which kind of fills this in.
And I think it'll make sense for...
And before you go there, I want to mention what you're going to do.
Is promote the idea that the nonsense in the report that came out here, that if we don't do anything, it's going to hurt the lower classes.
This is evidence of where they are doing stuff.
And it's hurting the lower classes.
Because they're doing stuff.
Yes, and that was exactly my point.
A very tense day on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Clashes erupted between police and some yellow vests.
Authorities used water cannons and tear gas for several hours in order to counter the most radical protesters.
While many regret these incidents, others believe these methods are the only way to be heard by their government.
Honestly.
Isn't it interesting how every single report, regardless of organization, has that one explosion in it?
Your clip had it.
I had a clip with the explosion.
This is the second clip with the explosion.
They just edited it.
Yeah, mine had the explosion.
Yeah, I think there's one explosion and everybody used it.
Just put it in as a little opening kicker.
Would you?
Hell yes!
Get in!
Honestly, what do they think they're doing?
There are certainly some rioters, but we're not responsible for that.
We're just here to be heard.
The problem in France is that we don't have a choice.
If we want something, we need to fight for it.
They don't listen to us anymore.
Emmanuel Macron was the main target of the thousands of yellow vests gathered this Saturday.
But apart from the president, the whole French political class is criticized by the demonstrators.
I'm demonstrating because it's not possible anymore.
I'm retired and we can't make ends meet anymore.
It's not possible.
And I don't understand why the members of parliament, the senators have all these privileges.
We don't diminish their salaries.
Who do they think we are?
What are we?
What are we?
Are we sheep?
What are we?
Are we the dogs of French society?
Is that why our ancestors fought?
I love this guy.
He translated the French guy.
He acted a little bit.
Who are we?
What are we, sheep?
Are we the dogs of French society?
Is that why our ancestors fought?
What started off as a movement against taxes on fuel morphed into a larger gathering against other types of tax, as well as to denounce the cost of living in France and social inequalities.
But without the central structure, nor official representatives, the yellow vests seem divided over what to do next.
We need a citizens' assembly.
Citizens need to make the votes referendums.
We're the ones who should have the voice.
Now that we've started rising up, we need to step up the movement.
Macron won't stop until we face him with a general strike, clearly.
Ah, there it is.
That's what's coming next.
General strike.
And so it's clearly there's a little more going on than just the fuel price.
I would say migration may be irking some people and just the overall economy in general.
There's a couple of things I find interesting about this, which is covered a little bit, but it's not covered well here.
One is they call it a pollution tax.
Oh, love that, yes.
When we were talking about carbon pollution, it's carbon tax.
No, it's pollution.
I don't want to use those terms because it's promoted everywhere.
And it should be carbon dioxide, but they've just moved that to carbon just to make it easier.
Yeah, carbon dioxide tax, which is like, you know, don't drink soda.
I like the idea of the guys wearing these yellow kind of street workers' vests.
Now, this is a mandatory item for your automobile in France.
So is it.
Yes, you must have a yellow emergency vest in your vehicle at all times.
That's not a bad idea.
I think, I don't know if it's mandatory in Britain, but I know pretty much everybody has that.
We should do that here.
But I like the idea of everybody wearing these things.
Well, what's cool about it is you could create a global movement of yellow vests, yellow jackets, whatever we want to call it.
I like yellow vests as a vest.
And this is happening now, I think it was happening in Belgium, I believe somewhere in the south of the Netherlands this was happening, and people are putting on yellow vests.
It's small, so it's not to this proportion yet.
It's not on the Champs-Élysées with the Arc de Triomphe in the There's stuff they were showing on CBS. There was thousands and thousands of people with these yellow vests.
Yes, exactly.
But I'm saying the ones in other parts of Europe are starting to do the same thing.
The yellow vest meme is happening.
I think it's a good one.
Yeah.
The other thing that you didn't get to see because it was pretty visual and they just kind of mentioned it in passing on the CBS report was the fact that they're literally digging up the street.
Yes.
Yeah.
I know.
It's great.
Well, yeah.
Well, they have a little more power there.
I mean, in the United States, it's actually punished.
I think it's a felony, and it's punishable by all kinds of horrible things if you even advocate a general strike.
Is that so?
General strikes are illegal in this country.
Is that so?
Oh, yeah.
We can't have a general strike in the United States?
Really?
Go try promoting one.
See what knocks on the door.
Huh.
That's illegal.
Isn't that freedom of speech?
Can't I say whatever I want?
You're talking to the wrong guy.
Hmm.
Well, that's something that needs to be looked up.
You can look at it.
I think it began...
I think it was either under the Roosevelt...
I think maybe the Roosevelt administration is the one who promoted that because they were having so much trouble with the longshoremen and some of these really powerful unions we used to have.
Hmm.
But yeah, general strikes, you can't do one.
You can't call one in a local area.
They were thinking about this in San Francisco some years back over some complaint, and it didn't get very clear.
Well, you mean a general strike if it's labor unions who are organizing it?
That's what you mean by a general strike.
No, a general strike is where everybody stops working.
Yeah, but you say it's illegal to organize that, or it's just illegal to stop working?
I'm not quite sure what the...
It's illegal to organize it.
Right, but I think it's illegal to organize it if you're a union, not if you're Adam Curry, a podcaster.
No.
I call a general strike!
I call for a general strike!
Please bail me out.
I need to look this up.
General strikes.
Just look up general strikes.
I'm trying to find it.
I cannot find anything that says it's illegal.
A general strike is illegal.
I can only find it in combination with the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board.
Their Section 8 prohibits the general strike organized by labor organizations, but I'm not so sure.
I can organize anything I want.
Well, it's possible that if you weren't in a labor union and you organized a general strike, you might get away with it.
But as far as I know, well, for one thing, that's never going to happen.
But, yeah, we'll look into it.
We'll report further.
Interesting.
But yeah, I don't think it will happen.
But it's just interesting to me the disservice that everyone's getting here.
It's like, you know, this report is being touted as, oh my God, it's going to hurt all the poor people.
But the exact same recommendations that are in the United States' congressionally mandated report are the ones that people are rioting over in France.
Or at least some of them.
Yeah, it's not the elites that are rioting.
No, no.
But the French do have this odd history of chopping people's heads off.
They take their protests pretty seriously.
Yeah.
It seems as though they get to a boiling point and just go nuts.
Well, there's one other thing that may be playing into all of this, and it's something that is not reported.
At all here.
In fact, I haven't heard much of it.
Only in the Netherlands did it get my attention.
This is the Global Compact for Migration.
Which, of course, neither of us had heard of.
No, no, we talked about this some time ago.
This is a while back.
Right, but it's now been agreed to.
This thing passed, and what that means is it's just an agreement.
It's not legally binding, except in multiple European countries, including the Netherlands, in their constitution, their ground laws, as they call them, their basis laws, It clearly states, I think it's Article 94, that any European agreement or treaty supersedes national laws.
And people in the Netherlands are very upset about this.
What are they expecting?
They're in the EU. But here's what the compact says.
Refugees and migrants are entitled the same universal human rights and fundamental freedoms which must be respected, protected, and fulfilled at all times.
However, migrants and refugees are distinct groups governed by separate legal frameworks.
Only refugees are entitled to specific international protection as defined by international refugee law.
This global compact refers to migrants and presents a cooperative framework addressing migration in all its dimensions.
I could go through every single article in this.
This came up in the conversation because Trump refused to sign on to this global agreement and they made a big stink about it.
And then it kind of passed by and now we've no longer since forgotten about it.
Now it's back in the news, I guess, because...
Other people are starting to look at it.
Yeah, and this is the United Nations Compact, a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
And of course, it says that because of natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change and environmental degradation, we will see huge migration.
They keep promising this.
And the entire idea is when people are on the move, you sign up to the compact and you basically can't stop them from coming into your country.
And that's what people are worried about and, again, not mentioned in any of the reports about Paris.
I think that also may have something to do with it.
I don't know about French law, but, you know, as you point out, it's like, hey, it's United Nations.
They all sign on to it.
Or not everyone has signed on yet, actually.
But once you're in, then you're in.
And then you've got to let it happen.
So, you know, this migrant issue is a problem.
Well, it seems to be a yes.
The compact will ensure migrants working in the informal economy, which is not defined in this document, but I guess that means running drugs, hookers, black cabs.
Ensure migrants working in the informal economy have safe access to effective reporting, complaint, and redress mechanisms in case of exploitation, abuse, or violations of their rights in the workplace in a manner that does not exacerbate vulnerabilities of migrants that denounce such incidents and allow them to participate in respective legal proceedings, whether in or violations of their rights in the workplace in a manner that does not exacerbate vulnerabilities So you can start shit before you even roll.
Yeah.
It's really quite stunning, this document.
Developed procedures and agreements on search and rescue of migrants, which now is happening as non-governmental organizations are doing this.
They're actually going as close as they can to, for instance, Libya off the coast and pick them up, save them there and bring them back.
The primary objective of this is to protect migrants right to life that uphold the prohibition of collective expulsion, guaranteed due process and individual assessment, enhanced reception.
Enhance reception?
What is it?
Directional antenna?
No, no.
Enhance reception and assistance capacities and ensure that the provision of assistance is an exclusively humanitarian nature for migrants and is not considered unlawful.
And I put the thing in the show notes, and I'm going to go take a look at it, but you get the gist.
And the Dutch are very, at least the ones that will email me about it, Seem to be very concerned about this.
Very concerned.
Yeah, they should be.
Yeah.
Which is interesting at the same time when Hillary Clinton...
I have that clip.
With her interview in The Guardian?
Yeah.
I don't have her talking, but I do have the report.
Okay, yeah, where is it?
Hillary.
Yes.
It's very interesting that this comes into play.
The minute we have this global compact coming into vision, this is what she tells The Guardian.
Hillary Clinton has called on European leaders to curb mass migration to the continent.
She says it's helped spread right-wing populism.
In an interview in the British newspaper The Guardian published today, the former Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state warned, if we don't deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.
She said it lit the flame for racist political ideologies in Europe.
Clinton's comments sparked outrage and confusion from immigration activists and European lawmakers who cited her long track record of welcoming immigrants.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure how that all works.
It was very strange.
The timing, certainly.
And by the way, the little ditty at the end, he says, you can find old clips of her bitching about the Mexicans coming across the border.
Oh, of course, of course.
So there's no consistency here.
But if she's going to play the game of being a progressive neoliberal...
I guess some self-contradiction there.
She has to stay on one side of the fence or the other.
She can't be saying stuff like this.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I'm confused.
John Kerry was also quoted in some European publications saying similar stuff.
Like, uh-huh.
Very odd.
Maybe these people still think that when they do an interview overseas that we don't see it here.
Is that possible?
That dense?
That's your long-standing theory.
Maybe.
Could be.
Could be.
Hmm.
Okay.
Yes.
I don't have much more from Euroland.
Let's see.
I think I have something else.
Oh, yes, I do, actually.
I'm sorry.
It's a short clip.
You know, I have several friends in the United Kingdom, and they always like, you know, whenever there's a mass shooting, they always like to send me a link and say, how are those guns working out for you?
And I'm not kidding, they love doing that.
Oh yes, the Brits in particular.
Knife crime is at an all-time high, particularly in London.
Four or five people stabbed a day.
Many fatal.
Okay, fine.
But the latest is, I love this.
And I think the police, you know, the...
British police, famous for back in the day, the Bobbies never had, didn't, they just had a club, club and a helmet, didn't have any weapons, that's changed.
And now we have this new issue, people swiping mobile phones while on their moped.
So, of course, it's easy prey because, you know, as we know, everyone's on their mobile phone.
They're holding it.
They're holding it.
They're walking around.
They got two of them.
It's very easy to grab that.
So along comes a moped.
Bam!
Grab your iPhone, your $1,300 handheld computer.
And now the police have figured out a way to go after it.
It's too bad we don't have video for once on the show, but you'll get the gist of how they are going after these moped cell phone robbers.
London Metropolitan Police are tackling criminals on motorbikes in a new way.
Specially trained drivers are using police cars to knock them off their two wheels or they're forcing them to crash.
Scotland Yard has released this footage showing how they're pursuing and ramming into the thieves.
Senior officers at Scotland Yard say there's no maximum speed at which police vehicles might hit motorcycles.
It says the policies for officers to assess the risks of a particular chase and make a judgment accordingly.
Police say it's a myth that they won't chase riders who've removed their helmets.
It comes after thousands of mobile phones have been reported stolen by people on scooters.
And the video is fantastic.
They're rear-ending these guys, and they rear-end someone on the motorbike, and the guy flies over the hood of the cop car.
They break.
He slams off.
It's fantastic.
Yeah, no.
There is...
I've seen these.
This is pretty funny.
Right.
And they're hitting them from the side.
Yeah.
Any way they can...
Any way they can get them.
If you give a guy and a cop in a car, because it's a boring job anyway, generally.
Hey, there's a moped guy.
Go run him over.
Yeah.
I cannot imagine that would not be accepted in the United States.
I can't imagine.
No way.
I don't think anyone would say that's okay.
Now, I'm sure this stuff happens.
Somewhere along the line, these idiots decided that if they took their helmet off, they're not going to hit us.
So they ripped their helmet off and threw it out of there.
Right.
And it's Seems to me with that kind of, the way it's set up, the cops would say, here's the guy with no helmet, get him!
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
No, it's fantastic.
Just fantastic.
You know, I think we may see more crime with these e-scooters.
Wasn't there an article about some guy who escaped the cops on one of those bird bikes on the e-scooter?
The electric scooter?
This I missed.
Yes.
Well, actually, I had an interesting Thanksgiving conversation with some of the millennials here.
And there was a point I hadn't thought about, is with all of these electric scooters, and just if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's like the kids, you know, step-along scooters that are motorized.
These things are being created and built at an incredible rate.
They're just being pumped out.
They're all built in China.
They have huge lithium-ion batteries either on the front post or underneath the You gotta ask, how long will it take before one of these turns into essentially a flying bomb?
These things explode.
You hit something hard enough, you just...
Batteries have this tendency that they're poorly made.
And if you disrupt them with some kind of impact, I don't know, 15 to 20 miles an hour should probably do it.
I think we'll be seeing these reports pretty soon.
Yes, good prediction.
Yeah, and it should be a terrorism threat, really.
Yes, I think it should be a terrorism threat.
I think these scooters are terrorist devices.
Black Friday.
Yes, I have a clip if you want to intro it, starting with the clip from PBS, the Black Friday report.
Yes, I would like to do that.
Millions of Americans spent this Black Friday swarming stores and scouring websites for deals.
The retail data firm ShopperTrack estimates today's sales will hit $23 billion.
That's up more than $2 billion from last year.
Across the country, retailers saw the annual rush of shoppers bursting through their doors before sunrise, scrambling for discounts.
Events took a violent turn near Birmingham, Alabama.
An argument between two men at a mall there ended in gunfire.
Police shot and killed the suspected shooter.
An 18-year-old and a 12-year-old bystander were wounded.
Now, I tried to look around to get your typical Thanksgiving Day footage, and it didn't seem like there were any big records of people trampling each other.
It just didn't have the same vibe as it used to.
We had a lot of good, the same vibe here.
I didn't get it here.
Didn't get it here.
You know, mostly it was, oh, it's, you know, people are all doing it online this year, doing it all online, shopping online.
Oh, that's the reports I got.
No, all reports were the same as usual.
They said it was up $2 billion, which is a lot, which should actually help things.
But my favorite thing, which I didn't think got enough news, I put a picture in the newsletter of the...
That free shipping?
Of the guy dressed in a bear costume.
Oh, yes I did.
Why did that get more coverage?
I don't know.
He cuffed a guy in the bear costume.
So it looks like a cuffed polar bear.
You know, I think that Black Friday has gotten to a point in the U.S. media where every report is probably sponsored.
It's like they have a choice of going anywhere and they might as well say, hey, everything's good over here.
Come look at Walmart.
It just seems like it's native advertising.
You know, I ran into a native, after the fact, I did this research, there was an Atlantic, and people can look this up if you like southern cooking and you can't do a decent biscuit.
There's an article on why we can't cook good biscuits, and it refers to specifically soft red wheat from the south that is sold as all-purpose wheat and self-rising wheat, the kind of wheat they sell by these various vendors down there.
It's different than the northern wheats, which will not make a decent biscuit because of the nature.
Are we still on Black Friday?
What are you doing?
No, I'm still on Black Friday in a roundabout way.
I'm just reasserting a point you just made about native advertising.
Okay.
Because you said, to reiterate, that it seems as though all these reports aren't really about Black Friday.
They're about some, you know, and I think this has been true for a few years because they talk about Kmart and all these other, you know, Kmart and Walmart.
Did you find another one of those secret shopper stories?
You know, the secret donor who donated?
They always do that?
No, I did not find that story.
But let me finish my, I said they started a biscuit story.
I should finish it.
So at the end of the article, they go on and on about this one Wheat, lily white, made out of some southern state.
Completely ignoring, because I did some research afterwards, and I found about 10 of these companies that made a soft wheat flour in the south, in Kentucky and elsewhere.
But no, she has this one, and then she says, and it's only available on Amazon.
Yeah.
And I'm reading this thing and thinking about the fact that, you know, all these other products that you can get directly, you can buy, you can look it up, and you can find, Whedon Myers or some company in Kentucky, it seems like a good deal.
Cheaper and better, and it's got a long history from the 1860s.
But this was like, I'm reading this, it seems like a real article about something, and then it boils down to Amazon is the only one who carries it.
You have to buy it from them.
Of course.
And I'm thinking, this is ridiculous.
There's no...
I was very irked by this.
Yeah, people are going to be very sad once they figure out that Amazon has taken over everything.
There are no more local retail shops.
Mom and Pop is dead.
Literally.
It's going to be upsetting.
I think that we, in looking at Google as the true evil corp, I think it's Amazon.
Amazon is probably a lot more evil than Google.
Well, at this point, I'd say yes to that.
Now, Black Friday...
Who's going to stop using them?
Oh, I'm really trying to diminish my use.
It's very difficult when you send me links to the SSD drive that I need to get from Amazon.
Where else would you get those products?
That's what I'm saying.
It's very hard.
It's already very hard.
But I do try.
I do try to...
I'm failing, but I try.
I try to get stuff at other outlets.
Online, but it's hard.
You know, it's the 800-pound gorilla.
Now, back to Black Friday.
So, as far as I understood from the reports, we had one fatal shooting.
Yeah.
Sounds about right.
Let's see how everything was in Europe, where we also have Black Friday, and they also reference another holiday, which people called me out on on Twitter.
Before you play this, can I mention one thing when I was there last year?
They were having Black Friday, because I was there then.
In London.
And I was quizzing people about this.
You don't even have Thanksgiving.
How do you have Black Friday?
And they all told me, everyone said this, it's Amazon has been promoting it.
Interesting.
That's not what this report tells us from Euronews.
It's time for today's power play.
It's all about a backlash against a very American phenomenon which is growing in Europe.
Backlash against the American phenomenon.
Backlash!
Let's take a look.
Black Friday.
It might just drive you to despair.
Bargain mad shoppers literally falling over each other just to get 40% off a television.
The American phenomenon is linked to Thanksgiving.
And even though Europe does not mark this holiday, Black Friday has been creeping onto its continent in recent years.
With sales increasing by 32% in Europe last year, but not everyone is happy about it.
In France, Greenpeace has launched a counter-campaign calling on Europeans to ditch the bargain-fueled chaos in favor of getting active and spending time with family and friends.
So you're going to hear this little panel discussion between a couple people.
I think one is from Sweden.
Maybe Sweden or Finland.
I can't remember.
So you have to get into your accent for a second.
So they really kind of like the whole idea that they've got these sales are going up and that's good for the economy.
But it's an American thing.
So it's inherently disgusting.
It has Americanism all over it.
So we're going to do it a little different.
We're not going to be as crazy as them.
Of course, you're only just getting started.
I think that first image encapsulates what Black Friday is, you know, in our heads.
But then there's, you know, again, we're talking about messaging.
So you were shaking your heads when you were looking at that.
Is it, you know, is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Black Friday?
It's a sale.
Well, it's a good foil wallet, but it's bad for the planet.
We are already consuming 1.5 planets every year.
This is a statistic I didn't know existed.
Did you know we are already consuming 1.5 planets every year?
What is she talking about?
And I looked this up.
The assertion is that last year, or this past year, we consumed more minerals than the planet actually can provide to us.
It's like a global warming statistic, is what it is.
Except it's about climate, it's about minerals.
It's like peak oil.
Yes, thank you.
It's peak product, is what it is.
But it's bad for the planet.
We are already consuming 1.5 planets every year.
And so we really should think carefully.
I don't...
It may be the translation that makes it funny.
We're consuming 1.5 planets!
But it's bad for the planet.
We are already consuming 1.5 planets every year.
And so we really should think carefully what to buy and buy quality.
And, of course, good price if possible.
But not just to rush and buy anything because it's cheap.
The idea that this is so American, do you think that's something that people think about, in France especially?
Well, brand companies are getting more global, so they have global approaches.
We can think about Halloween, for example, that was kind of introduced to Europe.
You know, I got people telling me it was bullshit, that Halloween is not true, it's not happening in Europe, it's even happening in France!
So there's no more resistance to something American?
Not necessarily.
I think that it's a balance.
There's a try to use a phenomenon to promote products.
Then there'll be a response of society, which can be that harsh.
But also, I think a balance will happen throughout time.
But very quickly, Laura, should there be a different messaging when it comes to Black Friday in Europe?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I think that if it's going to work, it will work on the same basis.
A different messaging.
Don't...
Buy a lot, but buy responsible?
Which is that everybody likes a bargain.
I mean, I'm half American, and I've actually just come back from the States, and I was there for Halloween.
And I can assure you that even while people go a bit crazy for Halloween here, it's nothing like in the States.
So even if we get back to Friday here, it's not going to be like it is in...
No one's going to die.
Well, there you go.
There you go.
Maybe the sale is actually quite good there.
It's a bunch of haters.
God.
Haters who really...
Yeah, they're haters.
They're trying to make Black Friday more of a, you know, a social experience.
No, it's about sales and deals.
And everyone knows it.
You can't pretend that it's not.
So these retailers can balance the books.
Yes.
It's an inventory turn.
I saw some mini documentary on Black Friday, and it has had different meanings throughout the years.
There was a Black Friday during the Depression, and it of course had a whole different meaning.
There were different Black Friday interpretations throughout the ages, going back decades.
According to the Wikipedia on shopping, the Black Friday word has to do with stock market crashes.
This is a bad day on Friday, but specifically for this holiday, I said the word holiday.
What is this?
It's a day off in the United States anyway.
Black Friday is in a form I'm going to read from the Wikipedia so we can get to the bottom of it.
Black Friday is an informal name for the Friday following Thanksgiving Day.
It was just celebrated on the fourth Thursday.
Black Friday has been regarded as the beginning of the shopping season, although the term Black Friday didn't become widely used until most recent decades.
When I was a little kid, I never heard this term, and I first started hearing it I don't know.
Maybe...
When did you first hear it?
Because it may be 15, 20 years ago.
Oh, no.
I've only heard it in the context of shopping.
What I've learned is that in the 50s, it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving, and that's why it was called Black Friday.
Well, here, the earliest evidence of the Black Friday plight to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving.
And it made it all look like black, like everything was black.
The usage dates to at least 1961, right?
More than 20 years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became the day represented at the point of the year when retailers began to turn a profit, thus going from being in the red to being in the black.
Yeah.
So it morphed.
Ultimately, this is an American invention.
We rule.
This is what we do.
We create these types of things.
you suckers in Europe.
We're good at it.
Yes, we're very good at it.
And we've And if this began in 61 and then morphed into what it is, probably in the 80s, I think, is the way it is.
Sounds about right.
Looks like the timeline.
That means that we've been doing the official Black Friday, the modern Black Friday, which means retailers make all their money, and they all got a clue that everyone's going to go shopping, so let's go overboard.
That has taken, what, 30 years?
Plus years?
80, 90, what, about 38 years?
The Europeans, they don't know what's going to happen.
38 years from now, they could be completely nuts.
Well, remember, we've created new holidays.
We have Cyber Monday.
We got the Cyber Monday.
Which is going to get...
This holiday, by the way, which is a bogus creation of Amazon.
It's not a holiday.
It's not a holiday.
It's a bogus construction.
It's great marketing.
And I believe that Amazon pushed the idea of Black Friday in Europe, or at least in London, if these guys aren't full of crap.
I would think you're right.
To promote...
If Black Friday exists, then Cyber Monday will exist.
I think Amazon's genius marketers, if that's true.
Well, it really only started in the last five years in Europe, so I'm sure we can track that back to Amazon.
Probably.
Probably.
I don't know.
Oh, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
It's all people buying shit they don't need with money they don't have.
That's what keeps the country going.
Well, sadly, that is the way our country, this country, works.
Why is it sadly?
You don't like buying stuff?
No, I don't like it.
I will always remember George W. Bush after 9-11 saying, it's very important we all go back to work and keep shopping.
I remember that too.
One of the funniest things he's ever said.
Yeah, but it was kind of necessary because when you don't have the shopping taking place, we can't create the fake monies to lend to you.
Nothing happens.
If the shopping's not going on, we're a mercantile country based on an oil economy, which is something we can't ignore completely.
And we know either one of those things is disrupted.
You're just going to end up in a depression, and then you get the opportunity for some socialist government to take over some bad things to happen, which is what some people strive for.
People shouldn't shop so much.
Well, that's what Greenpeace was trying to say.
Yeah, that's what Greenpeace was trying to say.
Their basis for saying that is ill-advised.
I've got to tell you, just a shopping experience, since I at least was here from school, and Tina the Keeper and I were consolidating our lives, so I was hell-bent on taking them away from Sprint and bringing them to my T-Mobile account, which is just better and cheaper, in my opinion.
How's the coverage there?
Is the coverage good?
Yeah, the coverage is really good.
Especially up in Arkansas where she goes to school.
Oh, then you want T-Mobile.
But it's also cheaper.
I like it.
Have you seen the CEO of T-Mobile?
Yeah, I have direct contact with John Ledger.
The long-haired freak?
Yeah, John Ledger.
He's not a freak.
He's not a frigate defending your friend.
No, he's not my friend, but I've had issues and I DM'd him and he DM'd me back and gave me his personal assistant to help me with.
That was when we were in Italy two years ago.
But anyway, I digress.
So the way it works is a big rigmarole, and you hand in your phones, and you get new phones back, and basically you don't pay for anything, but then you're moved over, the numbers are moved over, and it's cheaper, I guess, for a while.
We'll see.
But two things.
A, the T-Mobile store were the only ones there.
So much for Black Friday.
It was like, where's all the shoppers?
Nothing.
But here's the other thing.
I have my iPhone 7 Plus, which sits in the corner on the charger.
The only reason it's there is it's running WhatsApp so I can get to WhatsApp from a web browser elsewhere.
I don't use it.
Is it in a little shrine?
No, it's on the floor.
I don't use it.
But the girls use them, and so they were going to get new ones.
I don't know what Apple was thinking.
I mean, I've been able to keep up with the numbers.
It's the 7, the 7 +, all the way back to the first one, which I had.
Then I stopped at 7, and now we're up to...
But now we still have the 10.
We have the XS, the XS Max, the RX. It's all these different model numbers.
It sounds like you're buying a BMW. Yeah.
You know what?
It's a bit like I'm confused about BMW or Mercedes numbers.
And you just see these phones.
There's four new iPhones next to each other.
The only difference you can really see is price.
Yeah, the phone, this one's a little bigger than that one.
That one looks a little bit brighter.
I think they screwed it up.
What were they thinking with all of the...
It was so easy to remember.
Like, the new phone has this number, and there's the big one that has a plus.
And now, you know, this one has a better camera.
That one has an OLED versus an LCD screen.
It's like, who...
I don't...
I think they made a mistake.
I think people just look and say, well, I can afford that one.
It looks kind of the same.
Does it work?
Yeah, it works fine.
Well, this is reminiscent of Apple's.
Apple has a tendency to do this.
They did this with the Macintosh.
Once Jobs quit and Scully took over, and then Scully ran the business way up.
He 10xed the company.
And then once he left, I think Spindler took over after that, but once he left, they started...
This weird branding of the Macintosh.
There was the Macintosh 2.
There was the Macintosh LS. There was a whole series of Macintoshes that came out in boxes and standalones.
It was really very confusing and I thought that It was something of somewhat genius of them to do a yearly new iPhone, and it was going to be this iPhone, then it was the 5, then the 6, then the 7.
And then you had the Plus, and then the S. We had an S cycle, so you knew it was going to be S. Well, they also had the little color ones.
Well, that's the RX now.
The RX has the little color ones, except you can't really get any colors because they don't stock them enough.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It seems like a marketing mistake to me as someone who...
I'm not stupid.
I've kept up with this stuff.
Lots of skews.
Yeah.
There are people in marketing departments that really believe that lots of skews, give people a lot of choices, is a good idea.
I don't think so.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I think, you know, I wound up saying, well, just get in the RX, you know, looks fine.
You know, it doesn't have the spiffy super camera on it or the OLED display, but it's got the A12 processor.
Woo!
I think you're right.
I think it's a mistake.
I think Google's following it more, you know, Pixel, Pixel 2.
I think they're up to the Pixel 3, actually.
Pixel 3.
Got a Pixel 3.
That's it.
There's not a Pixel 3 S and a Pixel 3 A and a Pixel 3 3 I's.
Yes.
None of that.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, exactly.
A little entrement before we take our first break.
This came out this morning.
I only had a chance to listen to it for one second.
This is from CBS this morning.
They are talking about conspiracy theorists.
I'm always interested what people think a conspiracy theorist is, because I would say that I am one.
Huh?
Huh?
I said, huh.
Let's see if the description fits what's inside the tin.
What does your basic conspiracy theorist look like?
If I ask people to close their eyes and imagine who that person is, most of them are going to think of a white male, middle-aged, look a lot like me.
Tinfoil hat?
Perhaps.
Living in the mother's basement with a ham radio.
Yes!
Woohoo!
Almost right, except for the basement part.
Ham radio.
Ham radio.
Thanks for...
You know, we have this movement to get more people, younger people especially, involved with amateur radio.
And yet, this guy, like...
And I don't believe, by the way, that many of these conspiracy theorists, whoever they are, are hams.
I don't think that many are.
Is Alex Jones a ham radio guy?
I don't think so.
Is he a conspiracy theorist?
Yes.
Oh, okay.
Well, no, I don't think he's a ham radio guy.
Yeah.
With that, though, thank you for making me a ham radio guy, and I'd like to thank you for your courage and say in the morning to you, John C. That's right, the man who put the C in compact for migration, Dvorak.
In the morning to you, Adam Curry.
In the morning, all ships and sea boots to the ground, feet in the air, subs to the water, down all the dames and all the knights out there.
Yes, in the morning to the trolls.
Got a late signal this morning, but I'm glad y'all showed up.
That's No Agenda, what was it?
Noagendastream.com is where you can listen live to these shows during the day.
The days of Thursday and Sunday morning.
I'm rather confused now.
You can troll us in the troll room.
We appreciate it.
And sometimes you get some good feedback from there.
I also want to say in the morning to Uncle Cave Bear.
He brought us the artwork for episode 1088.
The title of that was Three Chambers.
This was the Poisonous Gravy...
It would be the Friendsgiving gravy, which you detailed as to how that is produced.
Hey, how was your Friendsgiving?
You had a Friendsgiving, didn't you?
The kids had a Friendsgiving?
You went over there?
Yeah, it was good.
The gravy was good.
I tried it.
I smelled it first.
How much did you drink before you went over?
I don't drink and drive.
I don't drink that much when I drive.
All right.
We do have two people to thank for today's show.
By the way, I should mention the people that are listening, and I don't think there's going to be that many, because Thanksgiving Day and the Sunday in particular that follows Thanksgiving...
Are very slow.
That's why most TV shows are on reruns.
They won't even do late night shows.
I'm surprised the news isn't a rerun.
Although when you listen to the news, you might think it is.
But we do have two people.
One executive producer and one associate executive producer to thank.
And the executive producer is anonymous.
And he gave $1,089.33, which is...
It's even better than our 33 square.
He showed $1,089.
So he's a member of the $1,089 club, by the way.
It hasn't been used for a while.
That club hasn't been reopened for a while.
And he...
Did it before the newsletter went out, which had the 1089 offering, because 1089 is 33 squared, which we thought would be a big deal, and it turned out nobody cares.
I look at the spreadsheet and I'm like, huh, you thought people would like the 33 squared promotion.
Yeah.
No.
Not really.
No, there was no interest.
I mean, there's a few people.
I'm always telling Tina.
I want to thank people who did think it was cool.
Including anonymous here.
But let's see.
Here's his note.
Anonymous, no jingles, no karma wins.
The classic software, Dvorak on typing, going to be reimagined and re-released for OTG phones and smartphones.
No, we're not going to do that.
First of all, you're not going to write it.
I would write it.
It's already been written.
What?
Dvorak on Typing was a product that came out.
Oh, no, no.
I mean, no.
Reimagined for OTP. Oh, reimagined.
No, it's not going to happen.
You had Dvorak on Typing?
Your imaginations aren't that good.
What is this?
Tell me about Dvorak on Typing.
I'm not familiar with it.
It was a product that came out in the, I think in the late 80s, maybe?
90s?
I'm not sure.
From Interplay.
I was working with them.
They're a software company down in Southern California that has long since been switched around.
I don't know what they're doing anymore.
I did a couple of products for them, and they wanted to do this typing thing, but it was kind of a confusing problem because it wasn't about the Dvorak keyboard.
It was a Mavis Beacon clone.
The name Mavis Beacon rings a bell, but I'm not sure what that was.
It was a typing program done by, I think it was Broderbund.
Oh, this taught you how to type?
Yeah.
Huh.
And this was the same thing.
Do you still have it?
Does it still work?
My contribution was mostly saying the letters.
It's kind of a collector's...
You can hear it.
A... B. C. That's you in the software.
D. I need this.
I need a copy of this.
F. That's right.
Good work.
Do you say stuff like that?
Yeah, I think so.
Excellent job.
Oh, please.
Somebody find this software package for me.
First, I need a five and a half inch disc and a five and a quarter inch disc.
But yeah, it's out there, it's floating around.
Oh, fantastic.
It's one of the many little things I've done in people.
So you were really, so basically you were the precursor to Common Core.
Exactly.
Dvorak on typing.
Well, thank you, Anonymous.
We'll get right on that.
But more importantly, thanks for playing.
Thank you for really giving us a boost there with your 33 Squared for our special 33 Squared edition of the show, 1089.
Thank you.
That's appreciated.
And you will be the sole member of the 1089 Club.
And we have Vlodek...
Zelenic, I think is his name.
Zelenic, maybe?
I don't have a city for him for some reason.
I think it's Vlodek Zelenic.
Zelenic.
Zelenic, I think, yeah.
20202.
No jingles, no note.
No nothing.
Thank you.
Holy crap.
So that was a short segment.
That's it.
Okay.
Well, look, we're happy we got anything, quite honestly.
As John said, these are typically very, very bad weeks.
This is a bad week, for sure.
But I kind of enjoyed the tops we were able to discuss.
I like the globalization of Black Friday and stuff like that.
So I was happy to be here, and the support is, of course, appreciated.
These credits...
I was thinking about this over the two days of Thanksgiving, where really you're getting credits for credits, which is kind of cool.
Because what is a number like 1089?
It's just a credit.
It's a credit towards your payment facility, and we're giving you an actual credit you can use in return.
It's a real value-for-value proposition.
Executive producer of No Agenda Show, 1089.
You can put it anywhere.
We will vouch for you.
And remember, we have another...
Episode coming up on Thursday.
And shoot, will it be in December already?
I don't know.
I think we have.
Well, maybe.
No, no.
I think we're still good.
Still in November?
Okay.
Yeah, let me look.
There's still a chance Bitcoin can rebound.
There's still a chance Bitcoin can rebound.
That's right, everybody.
Keep hodling and go out there and propagate your formula.
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
Water.
Order.
Shut up.
No.
Shut up, slave!
It's a little segue here.
Yes?
I'm now monitoring Madam Secretary?
Yes, yes, I'm glad you are because I can't watch it anymore.
It's pretty hard to watch.
Yes, yes.
It's because it's pretty much taken over by the Lear Foundation.
The Candace Bergen show, which you're also supposed to be watching.
Oh my God, that thing is unwatchable.
Well, there was like a whole thing about...
Did we do the ice thing?
Did we already do that from that show?
I don't know.
I'll go look at it.
Yeah, the Lear Foundation is all over these programs.
Yeah, these two in particular.
But let's just get a little knife into Russia on this particular short clip.
And this is Taylor Leone as the Secretary of State in a fictional story.
Well, in this case, it's a spy or ex-spy talking to the group.
I don't think we know anymore what Russia is or isn't capable of.
We need answers.
That's it?
Yeah, that was it.
I'm keeping these short.
Yeah, I can tell.
Well, I did watch something else about, I think we got through four episodes of The Clinton Affair.
This is very interesting.
I think it's originally a series done by A&E and now it's on Amazon.
The Clinton affair chronicles really the Monica Lewinsky story and how that got extrapolated out of originally the Whitewater investigation with the special prosecutor Ken Starr, which ultimately resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Yeah, but the impeachment was for his...
had nothing to do with the Whitewater investigation and only had to do with his testimony about Monica where he lied under oath.
The interesting thing, as you're already starting to point out here...
I did not know all of the history.
I did not realize the affair went on for two years.
I did not realize the extent.
And I did not realize, if you look at Paula Jones and...
There was one other one...
Forget.
What it really was about was sexual harassment in the workplace.
And that's a little different than the way I recall this going.
Now, of course, this was 95, 96, 97, 98.
I was doing other things at the time, so I didn't pay that much attention to it.
Probably didn't care.
But, you know, it's one thing to...
It really, sexual harassment in the workplace is a huge issue where you're doing this to subordinates, and that's what Paula Jones was about, and one of the other women, or multiple other women.
But what's uncanny is the parallel.
And when you watch the series, it's like, holy crap, this is exactly the type of thing that's happening to Trump today.
I mean, right down to the same issues, the same defense, the same attacks.
The difference is, you know, Trump, as far as we know, paid off hookers and porno stars to have sex with him.
It wasn't necessarily sexual harassment in the workplace, but the same idea of an investigation about something which was like, "Really?
The white water?" Maybe there was something with the savings and loan, I don't know.
Clintons did have Vince Foster's death in there, which Trump hasn't had anything like that yet.
But you know, like a Russia investigation, and eventually, it's like history repeats itself.
We love, in America, we like starting at the top with, you're doing something really bad for the country, and we bring it all the way down to a hooker, and to sex, and that's all that we seem to be able to do, is bring it down to someone having sex with somebody else, and the parallel is just uncanny.
You don't think it is, but when you see the series, you're like, holy crap.
And just as bad, by the way, the name-calling, the horrible press reports, very similar.
No wonder.
No wonder Hillary wanted all this.
No wonder she enlisted MI6 with Steele and all these guys.
No wonder.
Are you implying that this was her only way of getting sex?
No, that's not what I'm implying.
It's very interesting to watch.
I think we've seen four or five.
It must have been a nightmare to clear all of that.
It's just all these news reports.
Very good.
And very little of Hillary.
It's really about Bill, about what he was doing, and it's Monica's story, I guess.
But look at all the details.
Definitely a recommendation.
We're enjoying it very much.
Yeah.
I was thinking of Equalizer 2 or something.
I saw Equalizer 2 on the plane.
Yeah, what did you think?
You know, it's like, all's well that ends well.
Yeah.
Can't we just have everyone die at the end and just end it?
It always has to end in a great way.
I saw it as modeled after...
A lot of people haven't seen it.
It's Denzel Washington, right?
That's what we're talking about?
Yeah.
I see it modeled after a classic Hong Kong style movie where there's some horrible thing that happens at the beginning and then the rest of it is...
Revenge.
Yeah.
And then at the very end, a classic Hong Kong movie.
These were mostly in the 80s.
John Woo and some of these directors came out of this genre.
And the genre was very simple.
And I think The Punisher would be one.
There's a whole bunch of these movies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it would always start off with some horrible, horrible, like a great murder that was very ridiculously graphic.
And people...
And then they've done a revenge thing starts to get back at all the people that did the bad deed.
And the whole thing is a chase movie after that.
And then at the very end of these movies, typically...
They get all the kill everybody.
Everybody's injured and then a house or a building or something blows up and then they shoot it from about 40 angles and there's a blow up, blow up, blow up, blow up.
So it's not just one explosion.
It's like the same explosion shot from 50 angles and then the heroes are all beat to crap and they're limping and they got crutches and they walk into the sunset.
Yeah.
It's the same story.
And here's the thing.
I was wondering, how could I have ever missed The Enforcer Part 1?
I mean, what happened?
Was that Denzel as well?
Oh, The Equalizer, whatever it is.
The Equalizer Part 1 was a good movie.
Oh, wow.
You should go back and watch that.
I don't think so.
It was a great airplane movie.
To me, it felt like...
Well, the next movie on my agenda is Mission Impossible, the newest one that they just finally put on DVD. It felt to me like this was Denzel getting a house in Sun Valley or something.
Like, yeah, I'll do this movie.
Denzel said he didn't want to do a number two, but he did it anyway.
Now, speaking of movies in Hollywood, uh, we get a rare opportunity today as the MPAA, the motion picture picture association of America has, uh, uncloaked its true, uh, mission.
Uh, had we had net neutrality and I think, uh, now this could still be implemented of course in California, where as far as I know, the net neutrality laws have passed, uh, And specifically, although billed as, hey, man, no one can slow down your Netflix or even slow down your no-agenda show because it all has to be, no one gets any priority, no fast channels.
The part that this show focused on was the small use of the words, ISPs may legally block unlawful content and unlawful traffic, which is what seemed to be quite an issue.
It's not illegal, by the way.
It's unlawful.
It's a little different.
Something can be unlawful very quickly.
So the MPAA has put out their recommendations.
This is what they want legislators to work on.
I believe this is what they wanted to have implemented with net neutrality.
And it's pretty interesting.
Four main topics that I just want to discuss.
They demand hosting providers filter using automated content recognition technology, which, as we know, works really well.
To forward Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices, DMCA takedown essentially, to users, terminate repeat infringers after receipt of a reasonable number of notices and prevent re-registration by terminated users, implement terminate repeat infringers after receipt of a reasonable number of notices and prevent re-registration by terminated users, implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high-volume traffic for particular files, which sounds like
No, that does a whole lot of sense.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I thought the net neutrality was all about that.
I know.
I'm just reading it to you.
Well, now, of course, net neutrality didn't happen, so maybe they added that in.
But even then, that would not be in accordance with net neutrality, which they supported.
We continue.
Agree not to challenge third-party application of court orders regarding suspension of hosting services in cases by rights holders against pirate sites.
Remove files expeditiously and block referral traffic from known privacy sites.
So this is where it gets interesting.
They continue reverse proxy servers.
Should disclose the true hosting location of pirate sites upon referral.
Terminate identified pirate sites and prevent these sites from re-registering and agree not to challenge third-party application of court orders regarding suspension of reverse proxy services.
ISPs.
Should forward Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices to users, terminate repeat infringers after receipt of a reasonable number of notices, and prevent re-registration.
Also, expeditiously comply with document subpoenas for user information and block sites subject to court order in the applicable jurisdiction.
And finally, social media should be compelled to remove ads, links, and pages dedicated to the promotion of any privacy devices and terminate repeat infringers.
They really want to block links.
A site that has a link to anything, which, of course, Google would be the biggest offender, but they're the good guys.
And I think it's very telling to see what the Motion Picture Association of America really wants.
But more importantly, they claim that they have the right to do this because of the Constitution.
I want to read this to you because I actually looked into it to try and figure out what they meant.
Let me see where it is.
They call it the...
I think they call it the copyright clause, although that's not what it's called in the Constitution.
Hold on a second.
Why can't I find this copyright?
So they released a very large document, the MPAA. And this is, what actually do they call this?
It's their rationale for all of these horrible things they want to implement.
And they say that they cite here specifically respect for copyright driving innovation and competition.
And here's what they say, which I think is very disingenuous.
Respect for copyright helps drive this creative and economic activity, making the United States the global leader in the creation of content enjoyed worldwide.
The Constitution's copyright clause recognizes that securing the rights of creators in the fruits of their creativity, including to determine how to disseminate their works, increases both the production and distribution of content to the ultimate benefit of the public.
And this thinking to me, and I've looked at several Supreme Court cases, it is so contrary to what the Constitution says, in my humble constitutional opinion.
Well, let me tell you what I think.
No, you can't, because you come in after I've told you.
Section 8 of the Constitution, indeed, has the following clause, which is not titled the Copyright Clause.
It's just a part of Section 8 of the Constitution.
And it goes as follows.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to the respective writings and discoveries.
That is one of the powers Congress has.
And they somehow believe that this means that this is to let content creators enjoy the fruits of their labor.
And they say distribution is a part of this clause by taking the word promotion and progress and saying, oh, that's about distribution, so our distribution needs to be protected.
They lay this all out.
But really, what I believe the Constitution says, and I am interested in what you have to say, is they're not about making more money for the creator.
They're saying to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, that would be technology, For the people, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right.
And now, of course, the limited time has become the lifetime of the creator, plus 70 years, and it's plus, I think, 95 that was a corporation.
150 years.
It's insane what that's become.
I think this is something that should really be revisited at a Supreme Court level.
It is just disgusting the way they are taking this clause and turning it into something for the Creator.
No, it was so that people could receive useful knowledge and information to build upon, to promote for the people, not for your profit.
I'm interested to hear what you have to say about it.
Copyright law was to protect the creator for 26 years, and then he could renew it for another 26 years if he wanted to.
And then it'd go into the public domain, which means Mickey Mouse, for example, should be in the public domain by this law, and so should Donald Duck and all the rest of these Disney things.
And the...
And the idea was, so the guy who did the invention of the creation, even though there's patent laws that also protect those guys, would make out from, you want to be creative, but it wasn't for life.
And it wasn't like for anything, it wasn't for something you could just sell.
I mean, now it's become a commodity.
You create something and you sell it to somebody else and then they now own it.
That's not protecting the creator.
I mean, it is for the moment that he gets the check.
The whole thing is a scam.
But what I'm saying, so I'm disagreeing with you here because I do not believe that this was to protect the creator.
No.
No.
It's not to just protect the creator.
It is to have a time limit where the actual invention can help the general public.
That is the distribution part, to progress, to give it to the people at large in the public domain.
Well, I don't know about the distribution part.
26 years was just arbitrary.
There's no rule that says 26 years.
That was just made up, and now it's been extended to, as you say, 150 years is about the lifetime of a copyright or a patent.
Yeah, everybody's dead.
Yeah, no.
I said it twice now.
The point was, yeah, they get protected for 26 years because otherwise it would just be like...
The stuff would be stolen instantly, so you wouldn't be able to even do a magazine to just steal it.
That's not paying anything for anything, because it's just easy to steal.
And so they had to protect this guy for a while.
And then it was supposed to go into the public domain, which I did say, and that benefited the public, where you could work upon it, use it for something else.
You could rejigger it.
You could rewrite it.
You could do other things with it.
Well, all I'm saying is the Motion Picture Association of America's interpretation of the Constitution has been debunked by, as far back as Justice Brennan, that this is not intended to secure the rights of the creators and the fruits of their creativity to ultimately benefit the public, because it doesn't benefit the public.
It benefits the corporations at this point.
And I'm just blown away by how they think that's what that constitutional clause means in Section 8.
It's all about them.
Well, yes it is.
And they're screwing themselves because now we've gotten to this point where we have too many services.
That's why we're going to see people start stealing content again.
Again?
Yes, in bigger numbers.
I think it definitely got better with easy access through Netflix.
But then you have Netflix, you have Amazon, you have Hulu.
You have to have $500 worth of subscriptions if you don't want to have FOMO and want to watch the latest, coolest show.
So of course people don't do that.
No.
You can't monetize the network.
There is the cord-cutting phenomenon, which is partly due to this overpricing.
Partly due.
It's because of the overpricing.
Yes.
And the kind of the scammish aspect of bundling.
I mean, if you get a subscription, say...
How many people watch more than one or two movies a month on Showtime...
HBO, Starz, and all these other things that you subscribe to in a bundle and it costs you a lot of money and you're really just seeing two movies.
You have the access.
The whole thing needs to be rethought and the MPAA is, to me, they're making the same kind of mistake that the RIAA made when they brought to the public's attention the fact that you could get MP3s by downloading them for free, which was just an underground thing for years.
It was usually done by DJs and people that, you know, they just really couldn't put a collection together.
And it was underground trading and college kids were the biggest, probably the biggest thieves.
They had many of the college networks had all these songs that somebody slipped onto the network that school didn't even know about it.
And they were trading back and forth and listening to music.
college kids couldn't afford to buy all these songs and albums, and most of them weren't that good at the time.
But it was just underground.
It stayed that way until the RIA came up and brought it to the attention of the public at large.
Hey, look what's going on.
And the next thing you know, everyone's saying, yeah, geez, oh, this is cool.
And the Napster became a thing because of it.
Yes.
The whole thing is really not as poorly thought out.
They're just – I mean, why can't they bring – take Pirates Bay offline?
What do you mean, why can't they?
Who's they?
They're MPAA. In that document you just read, they're talking about sources of distribution.
They can't, and that's why net neutrality was needed, and now, as I preface, this decloaking shows what they wanted to do.
At the ISP level, they wanted to shut you down under the unlawful content, unlawful network traffic clauses.
That's the point.
You can't shut down torrents.
You can't shut down stuff.
It's peer-to-peer.
It's always going to be around.
That's where they're going after the ISPs.
And we only have four of them.
We only have a few real ISPs, certainly in the United States.
And they just want to block that traffic.
It's a referral link.
It's a proxy link.
It's torrent traffic.
And they have agreements with all the payment services.
Comcast, it's in their interest to block those things because they sell movies.
Yeah.
They have their own, you know, Netflix clone that they, you know, if you're a Comcast customer, you can, most of the ISPs do.
Rent this movie.
It's new.
Rent this movie.
Three bucks, four bucks, whatever it is.
And they would love to be able to block this stuff.
But I don't know how they're going to get around to technology.
These guys are slow on the draw.
They're not technologists.
They're a bunch of bureaucrats and lawyers.
We've already agreed on this point several times in the past.
Every time you turn around, now you have the VPN can go past all this stuff and what are they going to do about it?
This is exactly what they said.
They wanted to mandate that referring link traffic from VPNs would be available so they would know if both sides, A, if the hosting part was where that originated from or if you were accessing from the wrong country for something you're not supposed to retrieve.
You go to, okay, you take your VPN, everyone has one.
I'd say half the users of this show have a VPN. You're just making my point for me.
I don't understand what you're doing.
I'm going to make your point for you, because apparently you can't make it to me.
But I'm going to make it to you.
So you've got these VPNs all over this, and they're encrypted every which way.
They're encrypted to the VPN, they're encrypted from the VPN, they're encrypted from the VPN to the other site, and the other site back and forth.
I don't care what kind of deep packet sniffing you do to just look at this data stream that's just an anonymous data stream coming in just as a bunch of nothing.
I don't see how you're going to be able to determine that as a BitTorrent stream or anything else for that matter.
These guys are fooling themselves.
They're charging money It is in California.
Yeah.
I also said that, and so I said we'll have to see what happens in California.
If it was the law, you better believe they would have ways to say unlawful traffic, unlawful content coming from these IP addresses, their VPNs, their proxy servers, they would have every right and the ISPs would have to comply.
That's my only point.
They have to make VPNs illegal.
No.
You can't tell.
It's not unlawful traffic.
Yes, unlawful traffic or unlawful content.
They could easily have said that IP address is a VPN. It's a proxy server that's serving VPN clients.
That needs to be blocked at the ISP level.
That was the plan all along.
One of the plans.
No, I think you can.
I think you definitely can.
Of course you can do that.
It's too late.
These guys are always too late.
Yeah.
I mean, I'd like to see them try.
Yeah.
I mean, what do you do about banks?
What do you do about these kind of encrypted systems that have to exist or these companies can't do business?
So it would have been a nightmare.
Yes, it would have been a nightmare.
If these guys think they're going to get anywhere.
And I think what's interesting is let's see how it works in California because they're going to start suing.
California now has these laws on the books.
You'll see.
We're going to find out exactly what would have happened, and it's probably going to happen in California because of the net neutrality laws that include those clauses.
I think in California, which is where you'd think it would happen because, of course, they put net neutrality in.
California is also the home of all these content producers down in Hollywood.
you'd think that this would be the perfect place for a testing ground.
But because of the crunchiness of the whole state and the way everyone sees things, they won't be able to implement anything that would attack an ISP.
Because besides having Hollywood, we also have the largest tech community, I believe, in California.
And they're not going to let this – Net neutrality is not killing VPNs.
Not yet.
Not yet.
This show will be long over by the time they get that far.
You know...
If there's only one thing I fundamentally disagree with, is you base a lot of your assumptions of when something will happen on old situations, before social media, in fact, often before the internet.
Facebook is going to die in our lifetime, John, it will, even without a competitor to Facebook.
It's going to happen.
People have choices for other things, they get fed up, they have other things to do in life, all on their phone.
But they still have other things to do.
They're going to leave things.
Things will happen fast.
I really believe things happen faster.
Yeah, I know you believe that.
But I think your belief in this, in particular with Facebook, is wishful thinking more than it is objective analysis.
Oh, okay.
You hope it does.
No, I don't care.
I really don't care one way or the other.
I will say this, that yes, I do base things on things like you say on the past.
Because people were predicting the demise of IBM, you know, during when the microcomputer came out.
Ah, it's the end of IBM. The microcomputer is going to take them out.
That's about time.
And it was the same thing.
It's wishful thinking.
But we didn't have the internet then.
We didn't have the same infrastructure.
So, of course.
So what?
Well, speaking of crunchy then, let me take us on a different topic with something to listen to.
Podcast advertising.
We don't do it, and there's reasons why we don't do it.
But I have a piece of podcast advertising that is running rampant.
You know, we've had the Squarespace.
We've had the...
What's the underwear everyone was advertising?
Oh, God, there's an underwear thing going around.
You're right.
And also the mattresses.
Yeah, it's Casper the mattress.
What was the...
What's the...
What the hell was that?
The...
Come on.
Joe Rogan has them as a sponsor.
I don't know the underwear.
Yeah, it's an underwear thing.
It's like, they're perfect fit.
They're great.
It's underwear.
Go to the store and buy some.
No, no.
It's like some special underwear company that Tommy John.
Tommy John.
There we go.
Thank you, Troll Room.
Tommy John.
MeUndies, another one.
There's already competitors.
It's pathetic if they're selling underwear on their podcasts.
Oh, it gets better.
This is a live read, which I've always believed is the way.
If you're going to do advertisements, you've got to do live reads.
I think that's the way to go.
I still don't think the network can be monetized properly, but I've always believed in the endorsement model.
This is the Talk Nerdy podcast, not something I listen to.
I actually got this from one of our knights, Sir Rod, Sir Atomic Rod.
He is a nuclear expert.
And, uh, he was a command...
I don't know if he was...
He commanded us a nuclear submarine for a...
I always mess it up.
But anyway, he's not a dumb guy.
So whatever this podcast is, it's interesting to him and therefore interesting in general.
But this is...
How the show opens with their live read commercial.
Enjoy!
I want to take a quick break to thank the sponsors of this week's episode, starting with Crickstart.
Super yummy snacks made with cricket powder.
They taste really good.
They're good for you.
And of course, I think what's the most important about them is that they're all about sustainability.
This is the future of food, you guys.
So these are...
Snacks, crackers, and protein bars that are made from crickets.
By the way, I think the reed is one of the best ever.
Cricket powder.
So don't worry, there's no like antennas or legs or like weird little crunchy bits.
It's all powder.
You don't know there's crickets in there except, you know, cognitively, which is good because you really do feel good eating these protein bars.
They're actually really delicious.
I think they taste better than those gummy.
Are you ready to try one yet?
Have we convinced you yet?
Are you ready?
No?
Chalky protein bar.
You stop for just a second.
I'm trying to decide if there is a note.
I can't say for sure, but a note of incredulity with this woman trying to be sincere.
In other words, is she?
I know she can't possibly be sincere, but she sounds like she's trying or you think it's just a dead read, but she's got a lot of life in it.
I can't.
For the life of me, can't figure out this read at all.
Well, yes.
I think the one that hooked me in was, this is the future of food, you guys.
To me, it's like, now I want to hear about it.
That you usually get in the store.
And they have yummy flavors.
Like, there's a cardamom-flavored one that I'm really partial to.
And they're really good crackers, too, that you can dip in hummus.
You can eat with cheese or with guac.
And they're good for you.
We can do crickets and hummus now.
They've got lots of seeds and seed butters and hemp and yummy things like chocolate and dates.
The great thing is you can keep them in your bag so that you've got food on the go.
They're quite balanced.
They're really high in protein, like twice as much as beef or chicken.
They've got all the nine essential amino acids that are necessary for muscle growth and repair.
And they've got other vitamins and minerals in there.
So they've got the macronutrients and the micronutrients.
Macro and micronutrients.
I'm learning so much from the cricket lady.
That you need.
But here's some fun stuff.
Over 40 crickets in every bar.
Over 100 in every cracker bag.
Don't worry.
You don't notice them.
They're powder.
For the same amount of protein compared to beef.
Remember when life was simple and we just counted the marshmallows and the Swiss Miss chocolate powder mix?
You know, life is different now.
Crickets require 12 times less feed, 2,000 times less water, thousands of times less land, and they emit 100 times less greenhouse gases.
So just for that reason, you should give them a try.
All you've got to do is go to crickstart.com and you'll get 20% off of your...
Whatever.
I just, I couldn't stop listening.
You can get Clip of the Day for that if you want it.
It's your option.
No, I have it.
of clip of the day, I'll do this.
I love bugs!
Bugs, bugs, bugs!
Tastes like poop.
That's all I want to do.
I can't.
That is the damnedest thing I've ever heard in terms of her full enthusiasm.
It's the future of food, guys.
Because I don't believe she's enthusiastic unless she's a lizard.
It's the future of food, you guys.
This is another thing I've noticed.
How can somebody do a podcast where they're trying...
I don't know.
Maybe it's just a humor podcast or just doing jokes?
I don't know.
It's called Talk Nerdy.
I don't know.
It's nerd stuff.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It just seems so shameless.
Shameless.
I use the word a lot today.
But this is very shameless to say.
It's the future of food.
And then go on and promote something like this.
This is – and I'm not going to say which podcast this is.
But this reminds me of the guys who – they do one mattress and then the next – greatest, greatest.
And then the next – a month later, it's a different mattress, which is the greatest.
It's the greatest.
Well, I don't think that's new.
I don't think broadcast history would show that we haven't found products being the greatest.
I was listening to Mark Levin.
Mark Levin.
The great one.
Mark Levin.
And Mark Levin was going on about one of these systems where, you know, you make sure that you don't have your identity stolen.
For months and months and months, it was this one company.
I'm not going to plug either one of these companies.
And then all of a sudden, It's another company.
And both of them do the world's greatest jobs.
It just seems to me, and I don't know if people can, I mean, people bitch and moan about all kinds of dishonesty of all sorts, you know, from up and down.
You know, the media's dishonest.
The president's dishonest.
Everybody's dishonest.
But how could you do something like what we do, which I think is the point you were making, and then do that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And claim to be neutral or whatever it's supposed to be.
That bug read is the worst thing I can imagine.
It's a podcast.
I like the term.
It's the future of food, you guys.
I hear this a lot.
You guys.
I'm assuming you clipped that as an ISO. No, I didn't actually.
Damn.
Because that's the way they end the show.
No, I actually clipped an ISO from...
Where is it?
From the French, is what I clipped an ISO from.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, let me see.
What was it?
It was the...
What were we talking about?
About the...
Yeah, about the riots.
Here it is.
This is the ISO I clipped.
What are we?
What are we?
Are we sheep?
Yeah, the problem is it's muddy.
Yeah, it is a little muddy.
I agree.
There's another term that I hear a lot, because, you know, we watch a lot of YouTube videos to get stuff, and, you know, you just wind up watching YouTube videos.
This is the phrase that I'm getting a little annoyed by.
I'm going to go ahead and...
Have you noticed this?
I have.
I'm going to go ahead and start the donation segment.
But now that you mention it, I'll be annoyed by it every time I hear it.
Okay, guys.
I'm going to go ahead and let John explain that.
I'm going to go ahead and...
Hey, why don't you go ahead and go to the bathroom?
Why don't you go ahead and tell me what's going on with that?
Yeah, it sounds like Lumberg on the office space.
I hear this so much.
I'm sure people are annoyed with stuff we say over and over, but hey.
Well, we at least try to correct our gaffes.
Let's play something from...
CNN did an interview with Zuckerberg.
And, you know, he's not even getting...
He must irk him because now it's just sending out some random reporter who's probably the tech reporter.
And she's going to go ahead and interview Zuckerberg.
And it's not the top level that he's used to because, you know, I think he's...
Well, can I interject?
Yeah.
I think the news media has finally gotten a clue and looked at their numbers and said, hey, why are we giving this guy a free pass?
Good point.
He's competing with us.
Good point.
This is...
I have my theories about Facebook.
They are going to die in cost.
That's really what it's going to come down to.
They are killing themselves, choking themselves, as witness in this interview with King Zuck.
You are CEO and Chairman of Facebook.
That's an extraordinary amount of power, given that you rule a kingdom of 2 billion people digitally.
Shouldn't your power be checked?
What?
I know.
That you rule a kingdom of two billion people digitally.
I know.
That's why I said it's like some techie girl they put in there.
Fangirl to go and interview.
And to be tough with him.
Okay.
Go ahead and...
I'm just going to go ahead and be tough with him.
Of power.
Given that you rule a kingdom of two billion people digitally.
Shouldn't your power be checked?
Yes, I think that ultimately the issues that we're working on here, you know, things like preventing interference in elections from other countries, finding the balance between giving people a voice and keeping people safe, these are not issues that any one company can address.
But let me give you an example of a place where I think independent governance is really helpful.
So one of the things that we are going to start rolling out soon is...
Basically, letting people in the community get an independent appeal.
Just listen to it for a sec.
Listen to what he's saying, because otherwise you'll miss the importance of his idiocy.
...place where I think independent governance is really helpful.
So one of the things that we are going to start rolling out soon is basically letting people in the community get an independent appeal when they feel like their content is taken down in a way that doesn't fit with our community standards.
So now you post something, if someone else reports it, we might take it down if we find that it's hate speech or violates our policies.
But if you disagree, you're going to be able to appeal and you'll also be able to appeal to an independent body.
And that's an example where that independent body will have real teeth and power and will be transparent in the decision that they're making.
And if I want to overrule that independent body, then I'm not going to be able to.
So you're not stepping down as chairman. - What's going on?
That's not the plan.
So the idea here, if we didn't have enough people already screening all content uploaded because artificial intelligence can't do it, now they're going to have tribunals?
They're going to get into conversation with people about this?
That's going to bankrupt them.
Well, they'll probably try to get volunteers.
But I thought the most interesting thing about this clip...
Was the journalist who misconstrues what he had to say.
Yeah.
And at the very end says, oh, so you're not stepping down as chairman.
And then he says, you're missing the point.
Which, yes, she was missing the point because she's an idiot.
Yes.
Well, I don't know about them going broke with having these...
I think the whole...
I don't know.
I don't use Facebook.
Me neither.
Never have...
I would like to get a No Agenda Facebook account, which I might do.
Why?
Because you can't buy advertisements on Facebook unless you have an account.
Can I tell you something?
I don't want any advertisements of our show on Facebook.
I'm just vetoing it right now.
Besides, you've had two years to do it.
You keep threatening.
You've never done it.
You had to have an account.
Yes, I know.
Look, for $100,000, the Russians won the entire 2016 election.
I have to agree.
We can get a president in.
The price seems too good to be true.
I mean, it's just a dynamite outfit there.
We can get someone elected president for less than $100,000.
Well, yeah.
Okay, we're talking about, since I brought Trump up, people say, well, you guys are just a couple of Trump apologists, you can use that thing.
Here's the Merry Christmas medley that was used to just kind of ridicule Trump.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
May God bless you all.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Serve God through serving others.
So Merry Christmas, everyone.
Merry Christmas.
May God bless our troops and their families.
And may God bless you all with peace and joy in the year ahead.
And we are going to say Merry Christmas again.
Oh, okay.
Now I understand.
I guess Trump was lying about us not saying Merry Christmas.
Is that what the idea was of that clip?
Well, that comes out of Fox.
It actually all stems from O'Reilly, who's not even there anymore.
But it's the war on Christmas, which was a bigger deal three or four years ago.
And it's by kind of...
Fallen by the wayside, but Trump still uses it as a talking point.
Yeah, that's incorrect because, you know, obviously commerce understands the importance of Christmas.
So there's still a lot of social justice stuff going on with happy holidays, etc.
But I think ultimately, you know, the retailers are just, it's Christmas, we just got to have Christmas.
It's better for business and no one's fighting that.
Yeah, I think you're dead right.
Is it better for business?
Why would we want to...
Downplay Christmas when it sells so much product.
Sales!
That's what we're all about.
The holiday season, because the holiday season refers to everything from the holiday Thanksgiving through New Year's.
So it's a whole weeks and weeks, a month, over a month of buy, buy, buy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there was a report I got from one of our millennials.
And unfortunately, like everybody in the family except me, because it always results in, did you take a picture?
You have a phone?
You got a camera?
Oh, I forgot to take a picture.
This is a very common problem I have here.
I guess Whole Foods, because people can't cook, They sold turkeys and they sold whole meals in a thing, in a container.
Thanksgiving meal to go, good to go, Thanksgiving meal in a box.
Half a turkey and a bunch of dressing and gravy in a big bucket.
The Whole Foods on Ashby and Albany, I guess, on Thanksgiving, had a line that was close to a quarter mile long for people to Lined up to pick up their turkey orders that were pre-cooked, you know, pre-cooked meal.
Really?
Yeah.
And apparently I was told that Amazon has been, they went with it and they started promoting it on Amazon so you can get, why cook?
You can get a beautifully cooked, professionally cooked meal from Whole Foods, you just have to pick it up.
That'll be better than anything you can do.
Idiot.
Yeah.
Well, cooking is, of course, going by the wayside to some degree.
I think the big thing now is that the Instapot, is that what all the kids are talking about these days, the Instapot?
Oh, the Instapot?
Yeah, the Instapot.
Mimi told me about the Instapot about a year ago, and I kind of looked into it, and she says that in Port Angeles, in the city council, She's, you know, Politico up there.
She says every old lady, it's not just the kids, she says every old woman raves about this thing.
Oh, you've got to get one!
Yeah.
And it's just a pressure cooker as far as I can tell.
It's a pressure, it's a programmable pressure cooker.
Woo!
Is it an internet of thing?
I bet it is.
I'm sure it will be.
Yeah.
At some point.
But this is what I see.
You and I can turn them on remotely and blow up their house.
This is what I see all the recipes for.
Oh, and they've got a great Instapot recipe.
Just throwing stuff into the pressure cooker.
Pressure cooker.
Wasn't that the 60s or 70s?
They were huge.
Oh, no.
Let's go back to the Depression.
Oh, really?
That pressure cooker.
The Depression cookers.
This was one of these great tools to save energy and really cook faster and, you know, kept all the vitamins and nutrients in it by cooking to death under steam pressure.
Because you steam pressure, it would pressure, the pressure would push We're good to go.
And so, yeah, I'm not sure when they became super popular, but my parents had them in the 50s.
They had one, and I think they were popular during the Depression.
I don't know when they were invented.
I'll look it up as we speak.
All I remember is my mom had one.
Now I'm talking 70s.
And it had that little valve on the top, and I was like, well, what happens if you pull that up?
My mom would be like, then you'll have food all over the kitchen.
Don't do it.
She always warned me to stay away from it.
Well, there's that, yeah.
Yeah, the pressure cooker, which is a great device, I use a Swiss pressure cooker that has three ways of not blowing up.
Ah, a Husqvarna, no doubt.
No, it's, what is this one?
It's a, what is this thing?
A Saab?
Oh, Swiss, I'm sorry, Swiss.
Swiss, I'm sorry.
Swiss, yes.
Swiss, you know, they're not going to let anything blow up in the place.
No.
I don't know what the brand is.
I think the Instant Pot uses one and a half planets of power.
I don't think it's very efficient.
It doesn't seem like a good...
I don't know.
I like cooking regular.
Pressure cookers.
I remember pressure cookers.
They had the relief valve on the top and they were made out of pot iron.
And then they had two things on the side.
You'd clamp it in.
You'd clamp it down.
So, I mean, this thing would be a real explosion if that relief valve didn't go off.
I mean, it would blow up the house.
Well, must I remind you of the Boston bombing?
Yeah, well, it was pressure cookers.
Pressure cookers, yeah.
But, yeah, I think they were used, once they were invented for the public, they were very popular.
Because you could cook in a pressure cooker about one quarter to one third at a time, anything.
It's the original microwave.
There you go.
The microwave has bumped him out of the way.
Hey, before we go into our break, because I was reading the Hillary Clinton interview on The Guardian, you know, you run across The Guardian, they have a pitch.
Very similar to kind of like what Wikipedia does, except Wikipedia has it at the top, and they say right off the bat, you know, if everyone gave them a $1...
And then we'd have enough and we wouldn't have to beg for money.
And The Guardian puts this article at the bottom about their independent journalism.
And I don't know if you've seen their recent...
And remember, this is The Guardian.
They think that they are real news, the top, they are truthful, they are independent.
Oh, they consider themselves The New York Times.
Yes, they do consider themselves the paper of record next to the New York Times.
I wanted to share with you their donation pitch, which is at the bottom of pages.
It's in its own little box.
And I want you to listen to this and tell me if you have any issue with what they're saying.
Their pitch goes as follows.
Hey, you may have noticed the free press is under attack.
President Trump refuses to condemn those responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
He revoked the CNN reporter's White House press pass and attacks the mainstream media at his mass rallies.
The president recently praised a congressman for attacking a Guardian reporter.
He has accused the American press of being the enemy of the people.
In 2018, this is their pitch.
In 2018, The Guardian broke the story of Cambridge Analytica's Facebook data breach.
We recorded the human fallout from family separations.
We charted the rise of the far right and documented the growing impact of gun violence on Americans' lives.
We reported daily on climate change as a matter of urgent priority.
The Guardian is editorially independent.
Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by shareholders or politicians.
At the time when journalists are under attack, we need your ongoing support to continue bringing The Guardian's independent journalism to the world.
Support the free press by making a year-end contribution to The Guardian.
Thank you.
And how disingenuous can you get?
Wow.
Yeah, you know, I think I've seen these pitches.
I never read that.
That's a good read.
They're full of crap, those guys.
I'm going to show my sport by donating to No Agenda.
Imagine all the people who could do that.
Oh yeah, that'd be fab.
Yeah, on No Agenda.
So the pressure cooker was kind of invented in 1679 by the French.
Really?
It became popular in home cooking around 1939.
It took a while.
Yeah.
Really?
Interesting.
And it was popularized from the 39 through the 50s and 60s and onward.
And now they're popular again with the thing you talked about.
Yep.
The Instapot.
Instapot.
It's been renamed, but it's a pressure cooker.
Yes.
Carl Lindner is the top guy.
We don't have to rename him.
He's at the top of our list from Cary, North Carolina.
Came in with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
And he's getting knighted us today.
Yes.
Sir Carl of Cary.
That's right.
Sir Carl of Cary.
Martin Benes.
Benes.
Benes.
In Kennesaw, Georgia, 12080.
He needs a dedouching.
You've been dedouched.
So his blood pressure is going up or down.
I can't tell.
Don't use my real name.
Refer to me as Sammy Wu from Buffalo, New York, 10890.
Jimmy Wu.
He needs a dedouching.
It's Jimmy Wu.
Oh, no, wait.
Stop, stop, stop.
Stop the dedouching.
I've been listening to this show since March.
I was hit in the mouth by a good friend, Leo.
He's a douchebag.
Ah, okay.
And then Leo, not Leo, but Jimmy does need a de-douching.
I was right.
You've been de-douched.
It's alright.
Now we have a bunch of 10890 contributions, which is our gimmick contribution for the show.
We got about 12.
Starting with Richard Huford, 108.90.
Sir Patrick Coble, there in Tennessee, 108.90.
Sir, I think it's Sir Thomas Butterick, I believe.
Pretty sure, yeah, pretty sure.
108.90.
John Knowles, 108.90.
Chris Keffy?
Keff?
Keff?
Keff.
Keff?
Keff, Keff.
In Ghent, New York.
Sir Knight of the Eastside.
He wants karma for all the listeners.
We'll put that at the end.
Sir Hamus, Mooresville, North Carolina.
Thank you for your courage.
James Murray, 10890.
A 33 haiku.
From the morning, a little crackpot salute.
Listens the buzzkill.
Listens the buzzkill.
All right.
Oh, it's a haiku.
I've got it.
Sabode Peth.
KC5, DDY, 73s.
73s.
Randall Brown.
Randall Brown, 10890.
Gordon Jones, 10890.
William Cornell, 10890.
I'm donating so that John doesn't ruin Adam's Thanksgiving plans in vain.
You know, I wound up not having to cook anything, of course, because I was way too late after we had technical difficulties.
And I have to say, the millennial cooked the bird and did a fantastic job.
It was a butterball, so that might have made it easy, but it was fantastic.
Thermometer pop-out?
Yeah.
No, no, she did thermometers and basting and the whole thing.
It was fantastic.
Very, very impressed.
Yeah, I was very happy.
Very happy.
Now, you should be thanking me.
I don't think so.
Daniel Wood.
What?
I don't think so.
I'm not going to be thanking you.
Yeah, you should be thanking me.
I don't think so.
Daniel Wood.
They want some jobs coming.
I put that at the end for you.
Jovany Gomez or Jovany?
Jovany?
Jovany?
This is one hundo for always keeping it at a hundred.
Thomas Kilbright in Waco, Texas, 100.
David Flynn, 99.99, El Paso, Texas.
Steven E. Taft in Marietta, Georgia, 8008.
Boobs.
Sir Dan the Man, Boobs.
Cape Coral, Florida, 8008.
Sir Brian Kaufman, 75.75, Scottsdale, Arizona.
Frank Pugh in Tallahassee, Florida.
Barron Mark Tanner, $67.89.
Frank Pugh is $75.00.
Sir Brian Kaufman, $75.75.
Barron Mark Tanner, $67.89 in Whittier.
James Fulton in Stokesdale, North Carolina.
Keep it up.
Sir Loud Pipes in Charlotte, North Carolina.
$55.10.
Matthew Scott in $53.32 in Willard, Missouri.
Happy 33 Squared.
Please dole out some relationship and jobs karma.
Sir Chris Knight of the Vortex Ring State in Mercer Island, 51.
Brian Richardson, 5069 in Aurora, Illinois.
Michael Kleckner in Ewing, North Carolina.
Ewing, New Jersey.
Let me cough.
These are all $50 donors, name and location.
Here we go.
When applicable.
Joe Winkie in...
Santa Rosa?
The big-ass blonde.
Hey!
I haven't heard from her in a while.
We have not heard from the big-ass blonde for at least a year.
Yes.
Well, welcome back, BAB. I forgot where she's from.
Texas.
A Texas girl with a big ass.
And she's blonde.
Which is not uncommon.
In Dallas?
Alexa Delgado, Aptos, California.
Kenneth Lindenberg in Miami, Florida.
And last is the fairly short list.
38 total from everyone.
Very small.
Mitchell Kaufman in Hillsboro, Oregon, wine-growing country, 50.
And we do have a note from somebody in that email that we left out.
Yeah, I have a couple of notes.
Yeah, I have a couple of notes.
Mark Annabelle won a jobs karma for his friend Mick, who hit him in the mouth four years ago on a U.S. road trip, and he's just been made redundant.
Yeah.
So we'll have jobs karma.
Also, we got a night assistance request, which we like to break for our nights, from Sir Snurkle, who is longtime producers and a knight.
Almost six months out of work, seven people depending on me to pay bills, money runs out on Christmas Day.
Anyway, he...
Yeah.
It's a whole long story, but he was made redundant.
Companies love to fire people when that happens.
And he lives in Brisbane, but it's a Silicon Valley tech company that made him redundant just before Christmas.
I have to say, that too was a grand American tradition.
Yeah.
What company is it?
Let's name names here.
I don't know if he named the name.
That's a problem.
No, he didn't.
Anyway, he's even put his CV in, so I promised I'd put the link in.
He is a knight, and we'd like to help our knights out as much as possible, and of course we hope.
Give him a job!
Yes, give this guy a job.
And we got some karmas for everybody.
And thank you to everybody who supported this show, especially on the Thanksgiving Day version and our 33 squared.
Typically, these are very low number days, but we're glad that someone showed up.
Thank you very much.
Also, everyone who came in under $50, typically reasons of anonymity.
But we also have those subscriptions.
Take a look at them.
You can find them all at dvorak.org.
Slash NA. Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
Yeah!
You've got karma.
It's your first day, first day.
And today, being the 25th of November, 2018, here's our jobs list.
A jobs list?
Our birthdays list.
Not very big.
Daniel Wood celebrates his birthday today, and Dave Corbinu has a birthday shout-out for his smoking-hot fiancée, Joanna Lynn, who turned 30 on November 14th.
I think I may have missed that one, so apologies.
Happy belated birthday from everybody here at the Best Podcast in the Universe!
And then we do have by way of people just being on the layaway plans and saving up.
We got two nightings today.
Very excited about that.
So if you can grab your blade there from the next to the chaise.
Perfect.
We need Michael Howie.
Michael Howie.
And Carl Lindner.
Lindner.
Lindner.
Yes, both of you.
Hop on up to the podium here because you have supported the No Agenda show in the amount of $1,000 or more.
That gets you a seat at our round table of the No Agenda Knights and Dames.
And I'm very pleased and proud to pronounce the case.
You guys, Sir Michael of Calgary and Vegas and Sir Carl of Cary.
For both of you, we have hookers and blow, rent boys and chardonnay.
We got boba and stinky tofu, English muffins with butter and honey, trophies and tire smoke.
We got pepperoni rolls and pale ales.
We got redheads and ryes, organic macaroni and plasticizers.
We got fresh milk and pablum, ginger ale and gerbils, bong hits and bourbon, gashes and sake, and mutton and mead, all for you at the round table.
And you can go to noagendanation.com slash rings, hand over your work.
Enter your information for your ring sizes.
Eric, the show will get that off to you as soon as possible.
If it happens in October where you are knighted, give us a little time to get stuff out.
People say, hey, where's my ring?
It can take a month or two depending on the order status.
It's definitely going to take longer in Canada.
Yes, it's one of the hardest items to do, because you can't just have an inventory of sizes.
You know, we try, but it's very difficult.
So you wind up with a lot of odd sizes, and it's something we just started on, and we like it.
We'll just keep it.
But that's why sometimes it takes a little while.
Thank you again for supporting the show.
Dvorak.org slash NA, another show for you on Thursday as we wind down the month of November.
Even though it's reported as a joke, even Reuters picked up on it that the head of Russia's space agency says their mission to the moon will be tasked with verifying the American moon landings were real.
It's a hoax.
Rogozin was responding to a question about whether or not NASA actually landed on the moon nearly 50 years ago.
He appeared to be joking, says Reuters, as he smirked and shrugged while answering.
But conspiracies surrounding NASA's moon missions are common in Russia.
Hmm.
Where does that put me on the spectrum?
Russian.
I'm a Ruski.
Must be a Ruski.
I have a couple other things.
Oh, yes.
BBC Click...
Did a little piece about artificial intelligence.
We love artificial intelligence that will be used to understand if a crowd is getting too rowdy.
Well, the story kinds of it explains it.
At the end of the day, what we want to be able to do is to take a training set where you have some audio acoustical characteristics and knowing what the crowd was doing or how the crowd was responding.
Oh yeah, it's great.
We have to teach the computer to say that was the crowd cheering versus that was the crowd booing.
They have to know when to turn on the automatic water cannon.
That's what this segment is about.
Once we have that training set, then the computer can go through the recordings and then look for those types of responses in the acoustic data.
And then you basically have a model for classifying different crowd sounds.
When you get to different types of events, say it's going back to the original thoughts of things like political rallies, you may have more chanting going on.
But again, a person chanting versus a person cheering versus a person booing, they should all sound acoustically similar.
And so we think that studying the problem of sporting events should transfer into other type of crowd type events.
So supposing it's a political rally and maybe things start off and the crowd is overall quite happy, but things are beginning to slide into something a bit more hostile.
I just wonder if the hope is that the computer system will pick up that hostility and give an early warning, perhaps pick up on it before the human beings do.
That would be the goal.
The goal would be able to create an early warning system for...
For security or peacekeeping that would allow the computer to essentially determine that the crowd mood is changing.
And perhaps there would be triggers in that to say, okay, this has the potential for becoming violent.
So flip on the microwave, nuke the fuckers!
That's where all of this is going.
You know, you can't have somebody watching and just determining one thing or another.
Tell me if this is happy or if this is hostile.
It's a happy version of Lock Her Up.
That's what I think, too.
But who knows?
The algo might interpret it the wrong way.
I don't know.
We're talking about misinterpreting things.
This is Aaron Burnett here.
I'm misinterpreting something that Trump said.
Out front tonight, President Trump attacking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, doubling down on a slam against Justice Roberts this evening after the Chief Justice defended the U.S. judiciary to the President in an unprecedented public statement.
Let me show you exactly what happened.
It all began when Trump was asked about a federal court ruling which was against his new policy that would bar migrants who come into the United States illegally from seeking asylum.
Here's what the president said about the ruling.
Well, you go to the Ninth Circuit and it's a disgrace and I'm going to put in a major complaint.
This was an Obama judge.
And I'll tell you what, it's not going to happen like this anymore.
Okay, that sure sounds like a threat.
Okay.
That's what she sees as a threat?
Does that sound like a threat to you?
Yeah, that he's going to put in a major complaint.
I'm going to write a nasty note to the Times.
That's a threat to her?
Erin Burnett is really...
She does a lot of eye-rolling, head-shaking.
It's pretty unprofessional.
I can't watch her.
I used to watch her a lot.
I liked her.
And now it's just everything.
Eye-roll, head-shake.
It's starting to...
Her dis...
Her dysfunction or dystopia, whatever it is that she's exhibiting, stuff like this, is starting to show up on her face.
Interesting point.
I think she's losing some of her...
Collagen.
Cheery looks.
Yeah, collagen.
Collagen.
That would be it.
Collagen.
It's collagen.
It's drooping.
It's the horrible puppet mouth.
Meanwhile, Hayden had a stroke.
Oh, really?
Michael Hayden?
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Oh, crap.
We are learning here at CNN that former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden, who also works with us here as a CNN analyst, suffered a stroke earlier this week.
We are told it happened at home and that he is now receiving expert medical care.
His family thanks everyone for their warm wishes as it begins the healing process.
And general from everyone here at CNN, our thoughts are certainly with you.
And we look forward to your recovery and getting back here at CNN as soon as you can.
Actually, he's actually been hospitalized.
No, that's not good.
I mean, it's mad.
They don't play that part.
I had a clip that would have tied into your Ninth Circuit court clip.
This is the courts and the asylum and the deal he's now struck with Mexico, which I think is quite telling about what the president wants to have happen, what I think a lot of people in America A major development on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Washington Post confirming the Trump administration and Mexico's incoming government have struck a deal on a new border policy.
It would force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims move through the U.S. courts.
CNN's White House reporter Sarah Westwood joining me right now with more on this.
So we've been hearing of the possibility for weeks now.
Are these the final stages of this plan?
Well Fred, it looks that way and the president seems to be making progress on his efforts to curb asylum seeking in the U.S. This deal comes after his administration The deal would turn Mexico into a waiting room of sorts as migrants who want to request asylum in the United States would be required to wait in Mexico while their claims are being adjudicated.
In U.S. courts.
Now, the president has recently tried to make asylum, changes to asylum policies, through executive action just before the midterms, in fact.
He announced an attempted policy change that would require migrants to request asylum at legal points of entry.
It would forbid them from requesting asylum if they were caught trying to cross the border illegally.
that executive action was blocked by the Ninth Circuit, who said it was illegal for the president to make those kinds of changes to the asylum system unilaterally.
Obviously, the president has been fixated on that decision as he's been spending his Thanksgiving holiday down here in West Palm Beach.
But this deal with Mexico would mark a significant change to the asylum system in that no longer would migrants be eligible to request asylum the moment that they touch on U.S. soil, which is how the current law works.
But Fred, it's unclear that the president is going to be able to make this kind of major change to asylum policy without the help of Congress.
us.
It's very interesting.
Yeah, go ahead.
I like the use of the word, he's fixated.
That's why he's in West Palm Beach.
Yeah, exactly.
What is the connection between being in West Palm Beach, which sounds like a place to play golf and relax for him, And being fixated.
So he goes to West Palm Beach when he's fixated?
What is this kind of report?
I don't know.
They just throw this stuff out as though there's some connection.
I believe it's meant to show the dichotomy between his life and the life of the caravan and the migrants and the asylum seekers.
Oh, that could be true.
I think that's a possibility.
It's just kind of a sneerish, sneerish little...
He's in West Palm Beach and these poor bastards are stuck in Mexico.
But if there is anything broken with our, and we hear this continuously, our immigration system is broken!
We need comprehensive immigration reform!
Having participated in the immigration process twice, having petitioned for people to come in legally, and actually helped a third person, I know a lot about this process, and the only thing that truly is indeed broken is somehow you are allowed to request asylum after you have snuck into the country illegally.
That's the part that...
It's a very small change.
You fix that, you fix a lot.
That's the only thing.
And why it doesn't happen is a whole other story.
Because we know we want amnesty.
We want cheap labor, in California especially.
It's not just California, John.
It's really everywhere.
The cheap labor, it's quite despicable.
We don't talk about it enough.
When you see the organizations that deal with asylum, not with migrants, asylum.
And the billions of dollars they receive from government, and these are religious organizations, and they all have placement, and they all have deals with, you know, that's why they wanted to send a lot of the, was it Syrians, I believe?
The Syrians or Libyans?
They wanted them to go to Detroit.
Syrians.
Wasn't that the Obama thing?
I thought it was Minnesota they were sending them to Minnesota.
I know they're sending Somalis to Minnesota.
Yeah, I mean, it's a work program.
It's a work program, but it just seems so disingenuous.
No, it is disingenuous.
It doesn't seem disingenuous.
It is.
And I think the original ruling should stand.
If you want asylum, then you go to an asylum station at a port of entry.
That's how it works.
The Ninth Court didn't see it that way.
What is...
Wait, wait, wait.
I have a question.
Yeah?
I have no idea what it...
I don't know why it's important.
Is the Ninth Circuit Court an important court?
Is it the last one before the Supreme Court?
I don't understand the system.
Can you give a synopsis, a short synopsis?
It's one of those appeals courts.
There's a bunch of them around the country.
And they like to funnel...
If it's like an issue that's going to...
Where you want an outcome that favors the progressive left-wing ideologies, you try to send it to the Ninth Although the Ninth Court – because the Ninth Court is always – it's a caliphate.
I think it's in San Francisco.
It's around here somewhere, I think.
But it's very liberal, and they always come up with these crazy ideas, and they – They hate Trump.
It's a perfect court for them.
Is it all West Coast, the Ninth Circuit?
Is that the idea?
Ninth Circuit is West Coast?
I believe so.
Okay.
But do they have more power than, I don't know, the Fifth Circuit or the First?
No, no, no.
Oh, okay.
But you don't go from circuit to circuit.
That's the one you go.
You go to your regular court system and then an appeal gets bounced off.
To the 9th, and then it goes to the Supreme Court after that.
It doesn't go anywhere else.
Are these circuit numbers, are they mapped to FEMA regions?
I don't know that, but I don't think so, but it's possible.
Yes, FEMA region 9, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada.
Maybe there's some coincidental thing there going on.
Maybe it's not so coincidental.
Huh.
The other big one is the D.C. Court of Appeals, which doesn't have a number.
Right.
Which is where the rapist went.
The rapist?
Oh, Harvey Weinstein?
Or Bill Cosby?
No, not him.
He wasn't a judge.
Oh, the judge rapist.
Yeah, the judge rapist.
Who was the judge rapist?
Unproven rapist went there.
So...
Did you know about the new Interpol boss?
Yes, I did hear about the new Interpol boss.
What do you know about it?
Here's the clip if you want to play.
It's 27 seconds.
Where is it?
New.
Ah, yes, got it.
I'll remember when I hear the clip.
I feel honored to have been elected to preside of the executive committee over the next two years.
And so, Interpol has a new president.
Kim Jong-yang of South Korea beat out a Russian candidate, and that's key because the Russian was the favorite for the job, and there were concerns over Kremlin interference.
The International Police Organization says the election was free and transparent.
Kim is a career policeman and will serve a two-year term.
Yeah, what I heard was, maybe this is a week ago, that, oh, it's going to be Putin's buddy is going to be the new boss of Interpol.
I guess that didn't happen.
Well, the thing that's always interested me, and I don't have it in the clip, unfortunately, is that the old Interpol boss was busted for being a criminal.
That's not much different than the United Nations climate change chief who just had to resign because he was using air travel excessively for private use.
He always had to go via Paris.
Well, I'm going from Washington DC to Baltimore via Paris.
You know, to go see Pierre and everything.
Yeah.
And, you know, spewing carbon dioxide and increasing his footprint.
Yeah.
These stories are not so uncommon amongst the elites.
I have two clips.
What are we doing?
I have two clips that is, which has a question in the middle, which I'm going to ask you.
Because you're the one, this is your beat, reading documents.
Your document reading is your specialty.
This is the Trump, Saudi, and CIA findings one.
President Trump taking sides with the Saudi government yet again.
He's doubling down on his rejection of the CIA assessment of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and defying coast to punish the Saudis.
Joining me now is Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed.
He's a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Senator Reed, great to have you on New Day.
I want to start with the President's comments on these really refuting the CIA findings.
Okay.
Have you read the findings?
Why not?
There's no findings.
There's no report.
It doesn't exist as far as I... He just said right there on CNN. He refudiated the CIA's findings.
Yeah, I don't think he refudiated even the findings.
He said there's no clear report.
That's what I remember.
There's no report.
We had the Washington Post come out and say, according to sources, people familiar with the matter, not allowed to speak on the record because they were not authorized, but there's no report to my knowledge still.
Can't they make it more clear?
It sounds to me from that question that there's a report and there's findings.
So I guess not?
Is that what you're saying?
I haven't seen it.
I've only heard...
Maybe it'll be cleared up in the second half of this clip.
Well, that would be good because I'm very confused.
Really refuting the CIA findings.
Let's listen to what he said yesterday, and I want to get your reaction.
No, they didn't conclude.
They did not come to a conclusion.
They have feelings certain ways, but they didn't have the report.
And you can ask, Mike, they have not concluded.
Nobody's concluded.
I don't know if anyone's going to be able to conclude that the crown prince did it.
Senator, is the president lying?
Yes.
The CIA concluded that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi.
Wait a minute.
Who is this speaking?
Who is this speaking?
This is one of the guys...
Unfortunately, I thought his name was in there, but he's one of the new Democrat guys that will be running one of the committees.
So they're going to bring him on all the time, and he's just going on.
He's a Democrat congressperson.
So the point that this makes, and we'll finish the clip in a moment, is that it was only a headline, the Washington Post, and it's so irritating that this happens.
No, wait, it gets better.
Yeah.
I'll just continue with a quick layup.
But listen carefully.
The Washington Post only spoke of sources who told them that the CIA had come to these conclusions in a report.
As far as I know, unless it happened this morning, no report has been issued.
No report.
No official word at all.
But the news media, right down to actually The Guardian...
Who use it as their pitch are just claiming that the CIA have made this decision and this is their conclusion as if it's a published report.
And did I say that correctly?
Yes, and if you listen very carefully to what this guy has to say, You will probably laugh right in the middle of the clip.
Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the...
I'm going to start the clip over.
I want to hear the whole thing.
Really refuting the CIA findings.
Let's listen to what he said yesterday, and I want to get your reaction.
No, they didn't conclude.
They did not come to a conclusion.
They have feelings certain ways, but they didn't have the report.
And you can ask, Mike, they have not concluded.
Nobody's concluded.
I don't know if anyone's going to be able to conclude that the crown prince did it.
Senator, is the president lying?
Yes.
The CIA concluded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi.
They did it, as has been reported to the press, with high confidence, which is the highest level of accuracy that they will vouch for.
It's based on facts.
It's based on analysis.
The notion that they didn't reach a conclusion is just unsubstantiated, that the CIA has made that clear.
Senator, why do you think he's covering for the Saudis and what can the Senate do about it?
Well, I think he feels that he has an arrangement with the Saudis in terms of the region where they will act on behalf of I don't know.
has made this claim about their financial input into the United States, although it's widely exaggerated.
And I think he probably has relationships going back to previously business relationships, and he might even be thinking in the future of business relationships with the Saudis.
So he's put himself in a compromised position where he can't look at intelligence reports in a detached, objective way, make a conclusion and then introduce evidence and introduce policies to affect a better outcome.
He seems to be a captive of the Saudis, actually.
No, so he read the report, which doesn't exist as far as we know, and he couldn't bring himself to actually read the report properly?
Is that the story?
No, if you listen carefully, and in fact, you have to go back to the middle of that clip, he says, he goes on and on and on about all this report, and then he subtly says...
paper.
It's based on facts.
It's based on analysis.
The notion that they didn't reach a conclusion is just unsubstantiated that the CIA has made that clear.
So, Senator, why do you think he's covering This is before that.
It was very slow.
The CIA concluded that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi.
They did it, as has been reported to the press, with high confidence, which is...
Great.
Boom.
All right, you deserve it.
That was good.
Clip of the day.
So, alright.
As reported by the press, he puts it right in the middle of all that gibberish.
There is no report.
He just says...
With high confidence.
With high confidence.
As reported in the press.
In fact, this time I listened to it again, not this last time, but when you played the whole clip, it even got by me that time because I knew it was in there.
Jeez.
And then I should have pulled it out as a sub-clip.
That's masterful.
This is what goes on and it is reported as news and these guys just slap it up.
Just bring the Washington Post guy in there and ask him.
Oh, they'll say the same thing.
When the fake news is wrong, defendant Donald.
You know, I realize, you know, we receive some disturbing notes from people who, long-time listeners, freaking out.
Stop defending Trump.
50% of your news is about Trump.
Yeah.
Here's the sad thing.
For nine years...
Nah, I'll make it eight.
For eight years, we have essentially been showing you how the media worldwide...
It's bogus.
We never used the word fake news.
It was bogus.
We even used bogative.
We dissected it.
We said this is bullcrap.
And typically that was because they were positive about Obama.
There was lots of other examples.
But then all of a sudden a guy shows up who becomes president who is doing the same thing.
So maybe it's just an overload.
I don't know what it is, but people who I like...
I think it's an overload.
It must be.
People who I like are getting overloaded, and they're burning out.
They're frying.
It's completely...
Orange man bad.
They're just freaking out.
I got a note saying, you should...
If you're going to do all...
Yeah, you say it's news deconstruction, but if you're going to do that, why don't you do some...
Take apart some pro-Trump stories.
And I'm thinking, what, from a blog?
Yeah, from Breitbart?
Where's the pro-Trump story to take apart?
We already take apart Fox News.
We don't even pay much attention to them.
And we're looking for new media being disingenuous or sneaky or saying things that you're just throwing in crap like this last clip.
And just spotting it and saying, look what you're doing here.
This is bull.
I've been thinking about some of this.
Nah, help me with this.
I'll just walk through it.
It's not complete.
I'm just starting to come up with some theories.
It's completely...
It's not an issue for me or you or anyone to bring up the theory that we may be living in a simulation.
This has been declared by people who are adored by left, right, center, and everywhere.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates.
They all say it's possible that we're living...
It's actually highly likely we are living in a simulation.
So this is not a crackpot theory.
This is something that we can talk about.
You can't scoff at me for what I'm about to say.
If it's true that we're living in a simulation, which may very well be so, I think you have to look at it as an extrapolation, just like the fern plant, the leaf is made up, looks like a fern, so we're clearly creating a derivative of some simulation, and we have simulation all around us.
And I'm going to take one example where I think this is taking...
Now, I want you to be serious and listen.
Don't be thereminning me, just listen.
I left the Reddit...
I've never been on Reddit.
I used to be in the Reddit group around May.
May was April.
And I left the Reddit group and I really didn't look at it.
I went back a couple months later because they were doing something interesting, which I appreciated.
They would take the episode and they would post the episode and people would comment on that episode.
Of course, it was all very, you know, about how we're horrible and we defend Trump.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, it was interesting because there's an episode that And they're talking about what we talked in specific pieces.
And sometimes, well, maybe some valid points.
And so, to me, although I didn't participate in the conversation, I would read that.
This stopped.
And it just became a group where a story about Trump would be posted, and then the same three or four, you know, Nix handles would, you know, basically goes like this.
Post something about Trump and then say, blah, no agenda, we'll never talk about that!
With that exact voice.
That's the exact voice, actually.
Orange man bad.
So, that stopped.
And I couldn't figure out, why did they stop doing it?
You know, is that because I'm not participating?
I think that's a lot of it.
If I say, I agree, disagree, then, you know, you get a whole crowd jump and people start to post.
Now, correlation is not causation, but we had excellent transcripts for a while, which were being done through, I believe, the Amazon Transcription Engine by our buddy Tom Clogwog in Australia.
He has a website, natranslations.online, and he even made them in OPML, so they were completely machine-readable, and I'd put them in the show notes, just testing it out.
And they were actually quite good transcripts.
When we started doing that, that's when they started posting entire deconstructions of pieces of the show.
Because Amazon only gives you so much free and our content is so long that Tom could no longer use the service because now it would start to cost money and it's really expensive.
So we're using now the YouTube transcription engine, which is cute.
It sucks balls.
It's just no good.
I mean, it's very, very, very poor, certainly compared to what we had.
The correlation is that those deconstructions of each episode of the show stopped appearing on Reddit.
So if we're in a simulation, I think it is very possible that these names is like, I forget, Aaron Van and Hartwell Schwarkville and whatever.
They're like three different people on Reddit who post the whole day.
They're just posting stories.
They no longer have the access to the transcript, so they don't really know what we're talking about.
And now they're just going out trying to find something and literally just posting a no-agenda show sucks next to each thing.
So I think that the people on Reddit, in the Reddit group, are actually very sophisticated bots, but limited in scope.
Kind of like, you know, they can't really do much more than what they're doing right now without the proper input.
And I'm starting to look at a lot of people who I only know through either Twitter or even email.
I think that a lot of these just art little bots spun up just to...
Maybe I did it myself in my own simulation, but they just kind of interact with the world.
But you can do things that will stop their programming.
So you can enter, like a control C on some of them.
And I've had some small successes with it.
Particularly with some email conversation we had recently, which we don't need to get into.
But after you said, go argue with Adam, thanks bro.
That was nice.
That was like the shittiest thing you could do to me.
Why?
He was going to argue with somebody.
He might as well argue with you because I wasn't going to argue with him.
Anyway, I really think That it is possible that in some cases, everyone has a coalition of bots around them, whether it's on your social media, wherever it is, and you have to look out for them and you'll see that they are doing the same thing over and over again.
Maybe with small...
The people who troll you on Twitter, it's beyond just like a Russian bot.
It's really sophisticated in the simulation.
Well...
If that's true, I wish they'd give us more money.
This is the only thing I haven't figured out yet.
How do we hack the bots into accessing a PayPal account and sending us some cash?
Well, it's not going to be Control-C. I'm surprised that you actually went back to that Reddit thing.
But you're definitely right about if what you say is true.
That they were just basically stealing or doing word searches on a larger, which is doable, but I could do that.
Do a word search on a very well done transcript.
You could find stuff in there.
It'd be kind of funny.
And you could bitch and moan about it because a lot of the intonation is gone in transcripts.
You don't know if somebody's joking.
You could say, you could read something straight in a joking manner and...
Which doesn't make sense, but you can read something in a joking matter that if you read it, it would sound straight.
But also notice when the NPC meme cropped up, the non-playing character, people on Twitter at least got really upset.
And I think that those were mainly simulations.
It makes no sense to have your world filled with real people online.
It's got to be a bunch of bots and simulations that are all running around.
Maybe I have a copy of myself that is in your world.
I don't know.
But it's kind of mind-blowing when you see...
To me, the correlation was interesting.
That we've started providing...
Yes?
I think the general notion that we're all in a simulation is nonsense.
But...
The idea that perhaps a lot of the followers you have on Twitter, for example, I keep seeing them.
They're following me.
They chime in every once in a while.
You look at their page.
There's no background.
There's a picture of a guy.
He's very vague generalities about him.
He's got 60 followers, maybe four followers, maybe one follower.
I definitely think those are all bots.
Yeah, but that's just a bot within the simulation world.
I mean, I think there's a level higher.
I know you're not buying it, but I'm just saying.
I am looking into this, and I am trying to find ways where I can manipulate the behavior of these bots, and I'm having some success.
I will report back.
I'm very excited about the issue.
I can attribute, I believe, the whole thesis, and I would put Elon at the top of the thing, because there is a commonality between everybody who has this simulation thought, and I think it really does connect to the better quality of the pot being sold in California, largely.
And that's where I get my pot from, so that makes sense.
It is the true red pill of the Matrix.
I mean, this stuff is nasty.
Oh, it's not nasty.
It's dynamite.
Yeah, dynamite.
Well, we got...
I got the last thing I think is kind of funny from the CBC is the Toy Story teaser, which apparently...
Toy Story, I guess, has Lasseter laughed and all the rest of it.
They can't get this movie finished, the newest Toy Story.
And so they try to make...
You know about this?
No, no, no, no.
Isn't that...
Wasn't Steve Jobs instrumental in that and Pixar and all that?
I know he was, but this Lasseter was the genius at Pixar.
Okay.
And they roused him for being a...
Oh, that's right.
He was a hugger.
He hugs too much.
Over-hugging, yes.
The hugger.
The over-hugger.
So they got rid of him.
Now they can't get this movie finished.
And so they have fake controversies like this, which is the Toy Story teaser, which you can all go watch.
And the CBC has noticed that it's become very controversial because of a new character.
I'm not a toy!
Ah!
Ah!
Okay, so this is the point where all of our viewers turn to themselves and say, what are they playing?
What are they talking about?
Okay, so this was a teaser, obviously, for Toy Story 4 that just came out this week.
The movie itself comes out next summer.
But let me try to explain what you saw there.
So that was Forky.
He is a spork.
Kind of turned arts craft, who clearly is a toy, but doesn't want to be a toy, doesn't think he's a toy, but the other toys think he's a toy and want him to be a toy and want to take him on their toy adventures.
So, we're talking about a kid's movie, for crying out loud, but...
Boy, what a premise for our time.
I think we're in a time where we're constantly trying to define or redefine everything, right?
We're talking about labels all the time and pronouns all the time.
What is an asylum seeker?
What is an illegal alien?
What is a male or female?
Are those things important?
So we're always constantly trying to Define things.
And so I looked at the trailer, and I'm like, oh, are they trying to tell me something?
Is Pixar trying to have a bigger statement for the parents?
Because those movies are great, because the parents often get something from it, and the kids obliviously are just watching cartoons.
And so it sounds like you're happy that they're taking this on.
And Sarah, I mean, you're a new mom.
Yeah.
Do you see this as being, I guess, a springboard for conversations that you might have?
Oh, boy.
Hollywood is lost, man.
Let me give you the premise to this.
Yeah.
So they have this trailer and then at the very end there's this spork with a face drawn on it who is objecting saying he's not a toy and I should have clipped that as an eye so maybe I'll get it later.
I'm not a toy but he's caught up in this toy world and he's bitching and moaning about it because he can talk.
And so now it's become a big point of controversy amongst the pundits of the CBC, because maybe it has to do with transgenderism or something.
Ah, yes, there we go.
We needed some of that.
Because he's not really a toy, but he is a toy, so he thinks he's a toy.
He self-identifies as not a toy, but they're all identifying him as a toy.
It's a huge controversy, and the movie won't be out for a year.
The pre-promotion is rockin'.
All right, everybody.
And you can take that to the bank.
Remember, we're all just living in an Elon-simulated world.
We shall return on Thursday with another episode of the best podcast in the universe.
You never know what's going to happen between then and now, but we'll do our darndest to break it down for you.
Remember us at Dvorak.org slash NA. And coming to you from downtown Austin, Texas in the...
Capital of the Drone Star State.
It's FEMA Region No.
6 on the governmental maps, probably where the 6th Circuit is also located.
In the 5x9 Cluedio in the common law condo in the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
And from northern Silicon Valley, where we never know if the Zephyr even exists, today's simulation was brought to you by FOG, or covered up by it, I might say.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
Until Thursday, as always, adios mofos!
When the fake news is wrong, defendant Donald, donate to a no agenda.
They give us shows week after week.
Donate to a No Agenda.
It's a show that's really unique.
Donate to a No Agenda.
Listen to John and Adam speak.
Donate to a No Agenda.
Science is turning into a clean UTC7 won't go away I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water Just send your cash.
I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water.
Just send your cash.
We just need cash.
I know a lot of people want to send blankets or water.
Just send your cash.
It turns out he wasn't never going to meet the Pope.
Raw meat.
It turns out he wasn't never going to meet the Pope.
Raw meat.
There are rules in the world, so you kind of have to follow them.
No, that's not important.
There are rules in the world, so you can't have to call.
No, that's not important.
There are rules in the world, so you can't have to call.
No, that's not important.
It's the advice that sometimes I can't even get so obscure again.
No, that's not important.
So I guess I'm a steering committee or something for giving advice.
He fell for it.
He fell for it.
The old DePo wanted to get his name.
This is the leader's gonna meet DePo.
But it turns out he wasn't never going to meet the police.
So you kind of have to follow him.
The second me, the part of me, give away all your masculinity.
The second me, the part of me, give away all your masculinity.
No balls in the brain.
All that's left is slavery.
Stop spreading fake news.
A vasectomy does not involve cutting your nuts off because, you know, then I'm going to have to listen to Brian Brushwood complain to me for another five years.
He doesn't know you know what it is.
Please tell all the newcomers your theory.
I discovered a book in the 1920s that I still have a copy of, and it's about medical procedures.
Vasectomies are not new, and they were used in the 20s as a youth fix.
Men were told, get a vasectomy and you'll look younger.
It's like the, another one that came along some years later was the lobotomy.
Yeah.
There was actually a faddish thing, and there was apparently some guy in Central Park that would give you, you can get lobotomies without having to really go into the doctor's office.
They would slip a needle behind your eyeball, and the thing was, I guess it was curved a certain way, they could actually nick and cut off the little piece of the brain that hooks the front to the back.
Yeah.
This was done to, I don't know, middle-aged guys.
I'm not sure what the ages were.
But I started noticing this with men who had vasectomies.
And I will say this, not all of them, but most of them start to look a little bit like an old lesbian.
As if there's a uniform lesbian look.
Yeah, at least I think that there's a uniform lesbian.
I just think it's the Chris Hayes look.
That's pretty much it.
Gather a light.
This end of me, the ball of me.
Give away all your masculinity.
The ball to the ground right.
All that's left is my every.
The best podcast in the universe.
Mopo.
Dvorak.org.
Slash N.A.
What are we?
What are we?
▲
Export Selection