This is your award-winning GiveOnNation Media Assassination Episode 1560.
This is no agenda.
When the sky is the limit.
And broadcasting live from the heart of the Texas Hill Country here in Region No.
6.
In the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
Playing for Northern Silicon Valley where cherries are in season.
I'm John C. Dvorak.
It's Crackpot and Buzzkill.
In the morning.
Oh, that's interesting.
I just read that, uh, the peaches are ready here.
And in season.
We'll go eat some peaches.
You know, there's not that many peaches anymore, unfortunately.
They, uh... Yeah, you know, they decided, uh, 15 years ago... Who's they?
Who's they?
The powers that be!
Uh, Gillespie County.
They decided... No!
No!
We'll just have, uh... We're gonna do wine.
No more peaches.
Get rid of the peach orchards.
Wine.
You guys got enough wine down there.
Half of it sucks.
Well, that's... Excuse me?
Half of it comes from California.
That's why it sucks.
You have more than enough sucky wine.
Leave the peaches be.
It was 15 years ago when they decided that.
This wasn't wine country 15, 20 years ago.
This is recent.
That's, that's, so I'm actually on your side but you didn't have to get all up in my grill about our wine sucking.
You're banned!
You're banned!
You're banned from the region!
I'm surprised I'm not banned from the region.
You're banned from the region.
You're banned.
That's terrible.
Fruit trees are a great product.
Yeah.
What do we have?
Pecans?
Another one?
Also less pecans?
What?
Texas?
No, this area specifically.
I told you that we have 290 wineries here.
Some crazy amount like that.
Oh.
I know.
I know.
And a lot of drunk bridesmaids.
A little bit.
Speaking of, I did the melancholy... By the way, most wine made in the United States sucks, so don't take it personally.
Okay, that's all right.
Megyn Kelly's show yesterday?
Oh yes, how'd that go?
Welcome new listeners.
It was good!
Both of you?
You know, she blew off two ad breaks.
That's how engaged she was in the conversation.
Well, what came out of it?
Oh, we just went through everything.
She started right, man.
She is spun up.
We're winning!
We're winning with Target and Bud Light!
Whoa, Megan!
Calm down.
Calm down.
We don't all win that way.
There's no winning?
Yeah, that's right.
It was kind of interesting because right off the bat, and she started with that and I gave her kind of the no agenda rap, she went, well that's interesting, I don't agree.
And then I think within... What didn't she agree with?
Uh, what I was saying was, you know, we only really win if we get rid of the true problem, which is Big Pharma, who was doing this to the kids.
And if we get rid of, you know, the ESG, the money that is forcing these companies into this.
And then after 10 minutes, she was kind of agreeing.
So that was, it was interesting.
You know, there's one thing that really bugs me, and I noticed this, well, I think the last time I did this show was two years ago.
There's, they use this Zoom product.
Which is specifically for television shows, and I guess obviously for this podcast.
And they have a whole system, so you just use your regular Zoom app, you know, on your computer.
And, you know, you call in, and then you're in the green room, and they can bounce you to some other room, and you talk to the producer, and they put you in the live on-air room.
I mean, so they can, they're switching stuff around from room to room, which is cool.
But the minute you go live, You see, you know, one box, it's Megan, you know, whatever the on-air signal is, and it's a two-shot most of the time, and the audio is out of sync with the video.
So the whole time you're just, you're like, what?
And then your own mouth is delayed.
It's very difficult, I find, to concentrate.
Well, that's like somebody with an IFB yelling in your ear or hearing yourself back two seconds later.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so that was two hours.
So I got a lot of No Agenda stuff in there.
Even the Value for Value that we're using, I think we do.
And every time she'd reintroduce me, No Agenda Show podcast.
Oh, good.
And I told her at the end, you're going to get a note from our lawyers.
Okay, maybe I didn't say that.
Funny idea.
But I called out Kara Swisher.
That was a great moment for me.
Um, you know, because she was all about, uh, you know, the lesbians and gays, they're not in this community.
I said, yes, you're so right, Megan.
And let's call out the biggest perpetrator, Kara Swisher!
And I, um... What was her reaction to that?
She said, you know, we used to be buds.
We used to text, but not anymore.
I said, no, certainly not after this.
She agreed with me.
She said, you know, lesbians and gays have to be against this grooming stuff.
Well they don't, they still haven't, it hasn't dawned on them that they're cis and their enemies are trans.
And they're going, they're going to be on the wrong side of history.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I think it was good.
It got a lot of positive responses.
So I think that's good in general.
We'll see.
So welcome, two of you.
Welcome to the show.
And we might as well right away congratulate Ashlyn Speed for her win.
In the No Agenda car?
Yeah, the SCCA, she won a regional, I think, the championship.
Yeah, she has enough points to win the Southern Conference championship.
Yeah.
It's so cool to see our logo on the car.
I love that!
You know, it costs sponsors millions of dollars to get your logo on something like that on the car.
This is not, you know, Formula One or Indy, but still, So she'll be racing MX5 or USF Formula 4, depending on opportunities and funding.
We're very proud.
Very proud of her.
Well, she should get funding because good female racers are rare in the professional arena.
And they're a great marketing opportunity.
It's a super marketing opportunity.
Exactly.
Super.
It's super.
Oh, and so...
Oh man, I said- I caught myself on Megyn Kelly and I said 100% and I caught- You actually said it?
And I said, oh stop!
Oh no!
I can't believe I did!
And she's like, what?
What happened?
What happened?
I said- Did somebody get me a copy of that?
I said 100%.
She said, what's wrong with that?
I said, this is what Kara Swisher always says.
That's my hate.
Listen.
And then she said it later.
I said, you said 100%.
She says, why do I hate that again?
It was bad.
It was very bad.
And Tina was in the other room.
She heard me go, I retract that.
She thought I really screwed something up.
I said, no, it's just, I said a hundred percent.
It happens.
Anyway, we have a deal.
The sky is the limit.
Sky is the limit, everybody.
If I understand correctly, They resolved the debt deal dilemma by making it open-ended.
There's no limit until 2025, so they can essentially, I think, spend whatever they want.
Well, that's one interpretation.
Well, that's the common interpretation I've read.
Do you have a different interpretation?
It depends on who you talk to.
Everybody came out with their own interpretation.
I don't have a counter-interpretation, but the Republicans had one interpretation.
Various Republicans had one interpretation.
Various Democrats had another interpretation.
What is the John C. Dvorak interpretation?
I do have, my interpretation is, I don't know.
I haven't read it.
I can't say.
Do you have a clip?
It depends on how dishonest the president is going to be.
Oh, okay.
Now I do have one little clip.
This is the House, this is a classic, one group of Democrats would say something like this, and this is a little short 10 second clip of a House floor Democrat making a commentary on the budget.
Rather than making the wealthiest pay their fair share, extreme Republicans wanted to balance the budget on Americans' growling, hungry stomach.
Balance the budget on Americans' growling, hungry stomach?
Growling, hungry stomach.
Wow.
Hmm.
Well, from what I read, the debt ceiling has been rumored to not be raised by any specific amount.
And that is kind of the opposite of what they were supposed to do, I think.
Again.
What?
Who haven't been able to read this?
I thought they voted on something.
What they voted on and how you can read it and interpret, it's interpretable.
That's the problem.
I did, there's some new shill who came out and talked about the student debt.
I haven't seen this woman before.
Here she is.
The Supreme Court will opine on the President's action to forgive $10,000 in student debt and $20,000 for those with Pell Grants.
But in this bill, even though House Republicans' bill sought to do away with that, we saved it in this bill.
So there's nothing on that in this bill.
We also protected the income-driven repayment rule which if anyone has had student loans knows it was not it did not work as intended and this rule is intended to really tie payments to true income this bill does in the payment pause but very close to the timeframe we were going to end it as an administration when it comes to repayment
I'm not quite sure what she said there because it confused me at the end We like to up-talk.
It sounds like you're all going to have to pay back your loans, is what it sounds like to me.
Which is a campaign promise broken.
It was a sucker's promise.
Anyone who believed any of this nonsense had a screw loose.
They were suckered.
And they're gonna get suckered again, you watch.
Yeah.
He's gonna re-promise it.
Now you said on, I don't know if it was the last show, that the 87,000 IRS agents was off the books, that was not going to happen?
That was one of the things that McCarthy claims.
And it's true!
It will not be 87,000 new IRS agents, it will be 85,260.
Well, at least they knocked it back.
They did not.
You know, you can't even, I don't know what these IRS agents are going to do.
If you want accountants or if you want people who understand accounting and taxation and taxes, you can't find more than $8,500 if that.
In the country.
Maybe even the world.
Accounting firms have been desperate, desperate for people who can do this.
It's not even there, so I don't know what you're gonna hire.
It's good union paying jobs, I guess.
Nah, this is odd.
Odd, odd, odd.
They gotta fix their Cobalt computers.
Oh my god, I got an email from one of our producers.
Gave me an update on, because I always say, your airline system still runs on Cobalt.
Here's the skinny.
Airline systems are some of the earliest systems written with COBOL.
They pioneered online systems at a time when batch programming was the norm on mainframes.
The airline systems use COBOL now for accounting only.
Reservations, weight and balance, seating and ticketing were written in IBM assembly language.
With the exception of FairQuote, which is generally written in PL1, which is similar to Pascal.
Eastern Airlines licensed its FairQuote system in PL1 to most of the airlines.
It's still out there.
Code was widely licensed between the airlines.
The operating system is TPF.
Stop me if you've heard of any of this.
Transaction Processing Facility, originally called ACP, Airline Control Program.
I've heard of PL1, but this I haven't heard of.
Which is an interrupt-based OS.
It does not time slice, but shifts tasks in the kernel based on I.O.
and CPU interrupts.
I'm so excited now to read this.
I'm getting moist.
No faster OS has ever come along that can turn around transactions faster.
Each mainframe iteration just gets faster with so much assembly language code in the code base.
Yeah, I believe that.
And then here's the kicker.
In 1990, airlines start outsourcing code to India.
With disastrous results.
Surprise, surprise.
Go figure.
C++ libraries have been introduced into the TPF operating system by IBM and newer code is being written in C++.
It never supported COBOL at all.
I worked for 15 years in the field, says our producer.
Most of it for the airlines.
That doesn't mean you can't keep saying that.
Oh, well, of course.
But I just want to make sure we have the right information out there.
Okay, speaking of money and economies, Erdogan won the runoff election.
In Turkey?
And everyone's all excited because, of course, he's going to fix everything, right?
Yeah, Wools, I want to bring you back in there because Basin said something interesting, this idea that voters or those who voted for Erdogan might have an appetite for change.
Will that be strong enough to prevent any changes, to trigger any changes within Erdogan's policies?
That's what you mean by change.
I think a lot of focus in the coming days and weeks and months will be about economy.
You know, this is the first time, just speaking about economy, this is the first time since 2002 Turkish currency reserves are on minus.
Just one side of how bad things are.
And also the inflation is skyrocketed according to an official expert views, 120, 130% inflation.
and there's no money.
And from tomorrow on, Erdogan, I think, will try to explore where he can get money from for the Turkish economy.
That will be the issue.
So change in terms of what his supporters would expect.
I'm not sure what one means by that.
I think fatalistic as main balks of the supporters are, They would basically expect the leader to bring back Turkey to the good old days of maybe 10 years ago when the per capita income was about $12,000.
Now it's $6,000 and purchase power will be brought back.
But it's a steep uphill battle.
Yeah, they're screwing those guys.
Yeah, give that guy the hook.
It's all France 24.
Our local report was much better.
It was literally like 18 seconds.
Here we go, this is ABC.
Yeah, sure.
Erdogan regime will continue.
Turkey's longtime president has won his runoff against a center-left challenger.
Erdogan picked up 52 percent of the vote.
The leaders of Hungary and Qatar were the first to congratulate him.
President Biden tweeted he looks forward to working with Erdogan as NATO allies.
Yeah, sure.
Well, I can't see him helping the country any further with his.
No, His policies.
No.
What are they going to do?
I really don't see anything working for them.
I don't know, it's a good question.
So everything seems to be, I mean if you want to talk about Russia and Ukraine, things seem to be heating up as it appears that I think we kind of have our new offensive.
It's just all this drone warfare now.
And not like good drones.
Here, let me see.
This is NBC.
In Ukraine, officials there are accusing Russia of unleashing the biggest drone attack against Kiev since the war began, just hours before the city's annual celebration of its founding.
Mollie Hunter has more on the ground there.
Mollie, a dangerous night, but also it shows how much the war has changed.
Yeah, Kate, that's right.
Look, in the capital city, the air defenses are working, but it can still be dangerous.
That's right, look.
Now, overnight, that air raid alert lasted for about five... How do you... Sorry, wait a minute.
You've got to go back in.
That was good.
That's true.
How do you... That's right, look.
That's right, look.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Mollie Hunter has more on the ground there.
Mollie, a dangerous night, but also it shows how much the war has changed.
Yeah, Kate, that's right.
Look, in the capital... Oh, man.
Wow.
I'm going to use this for everything.
That's right, look.
That's right, look.
It's a new thing.
That's right, look, everybody.
Yeah, Kate, that's right.
Look, in the capital city, the air defenses are working, but it can still be dangerous.
Now, overnight, that air raid alert lasted for about five hours, much longer than normal.
But Ukrainian officials are saying that the air force shot down almost every single... Listen to that effect they throw in there in the background.
Beautiful.
More than 50 fired at once at Kiev and across the country.
Now when interceptions happen, and we actually hear those explosions, fragments or debris fall to the ground.
Now here in Kiev, officials say at least one person was killed, one person was injured, and several fires broke out around the city.
Now the Ukrainian military says Russia is ramping up those aerial attacks to identify and exhaust air defenses.
They also say they are targeting military assets and critical infrastructure.
But, Kate, civilians are still paying the price.
They're paying for it.
This is nothing close to the firebombing of Dresden.
Well, here we go.
Tonight in Moscow, President Putin vowing to retaliate for what he said was a Ukrainian drone attack.
The attack, Putin said on TV, was aimed at scaring Russian citizens and hitting residential buildings.
In video verified by NBC News, a drone seen flying low over the capital.
The Russian Ministry of Defense says they shot down eight drones.
NBC News cannot independently verify that information.
The ministry says two people were injured and several buildings damaged.
And Moscow is pointing the finger directly at Kiev.
But tonight, an advisor to President Zelensky tells NBC News Ukraine is not directly involved in the attacks in Moscow.
Here in Kiev, the Russian aerial bombardment has been unrelenting.
At least one person has been killed, several injured, just in the last 24 hours.
Early this morning, the Ukrainian Air Force says it shot down nearly 30 Russian drones.
Molly joins us now.
Mollie, from your reporting, it feels like we're at a new inflection point with this war, and you're seeing it on the streets of Keeve.
Yeah, Tom, that's exactly right.
It feels really different here.
The last few days have been terrifying, and we have seen residents of Keeve by the tens of thousands seek shelter in the subways.
Those are scenes we haven't seen in months.
I don't even think she's there.
I don't believe she's there.
I don't believe she's there.
She's in Poland.
This is her reporting.
I got a clip of this.
I think this is from NPR.
Ukraine, another $300 million going to them.
Yeah, they snuck that in, didn't they?
The U.S.
has committed more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia's invasion in February 2022.
You played the Ukraine supposed grand total clip, which was the kicker.
Hold on a second.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that.
My mistake.
Here we go.
And in a city east of the annexed territory of Crimea, a drone crash set a Russian oil refinery on fire, but it was immediately put out.
Inside Ukraine's border, the Russian-controlled region Luhansk was also shelled, resulting in five deaths and 19 wounded.
This all occurred just one day after a drone struck Moscow, for which Russia blamed Ukraine.
Kyiv, on the other hand, denies the accusation, but said that it's good to watch.
Drone attacks deep inside Russia have intensified in recent weeks, with strikes on Moscow, oil pipelines, and even the Kremlin ahead of an expected Ukrainian counter-offense.
Washington on Wednesday said that the U.S.
doesn't support Ukraine attacking within Russia's border, but promised to provide more weapons to Ukraine.
In response, the United States is going to continue to support Ukraine, help give them things that they need to better defend themselves.
As part of all that effort, we've got an upcoming package here which will be the 39th drawdown of equipment from the Department of Defense inventories using presidential drawdown authorities.
The military package is valued at $300 million, and it includes artillery, anti-armor capabilities, and ammunition.
And then I'll play your kicker, I'm sorry.
The U.S.
has committed more than $37.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia's invasion in February 2022.
I thought it was more than that.
This number is floating around.
They keep saying they usually round it up to $38 billion.
I thought it was in the 40s.
Yeah, I thought it was higher too.
This is the number, for some reason they've gone to this number, maybe because of some recalculation, or you know, they keep finding money.
Who knows?
Still a lot of money, considering that woman sits on the house floor talking about starving babies.
In Denmark, four weeks ago, the finance minister was asked by a journalist if it would be a good idea to do a complete review of the Treasury, verifying whether the state of affairs are indeed, as they say so, needing to cancel this holiday.
Which is their store beta doc, The Great Prayer Day, which has been cancelled.
It was on since 1686 but they cancelled it.
And somehow, let me see, there was no need to since the house is in order and what that meant was, surprise, a week ago they found 16 billion kroner, 2.3 billion dollars somewhere in their books, which of course they're going to use to send to Ukraine.
How about that, Denmark?
So wait a minute.
So this I did not know.
So Denmark canceled one of their holidays.
It goes back to the 1600s so they can send money to Ukraine.
Basically, that's what you just said.
That's kind of how it comes across.
Yeah.
I don't know if the $3 billion is equal to what they spent on that holiday, but the holiday had to be canceled no matter what to get their books in order.
And then they had like $2.3 billion to send to Ukraine.
How does a holiday cost money?
Shouldn't it be something that saves money?
You don't have to pay the government workers that day, or I guess they get paid, but for the most part, things come to a standstill.
It shouldn't cost anything.
They're Danish, man.
I don't know.
The happiest country on earth.
I don't know.
I think that's been bumped, by the way.
I think the Finns are now.
If you've ever been to Finland, you have to roll your eyes thinking about that one.
Update from our boots on the ground, the New Jersey National Guard deployment to Ukraine, which we've been following.
So this is National Guard.
What?
Wait a minute.
Remember, we've been following this.
Yes, yes.
Well, here's the update.
The timetable kept getting moved around, but they were finally deployed last week.
They hadn't even left the U.S.
when the plane suffered engine failure and one engine were forced to land.
Thankfully, they were able to make it to an airbase in New Hampshire and ended up stranded there for two days while repairs were undertaken.
Last I heard, they were able to complete the trip successfully.
We're just not sure how long the deployment is going to be.
As two weeks up to a year is now being thrown around, They're still being told, our New Jersey National Guard, are still being told that following this rotation, they're headed to Mexico next, not to the border, but to fight the cartels.
This is news I haven't heard.
Okay, a couple of things.
What are we doing sending troops to Ukraine?
Especially National Guard troops.
National.
Hello, National.
National.
That's question number one that needs answering.
And question number two is I thought the Mexicans already said no to this idea that we're sending our troops, our National Guards, to Mexico to fight crime.
Well, this is boots on the ground.
I thought that was vetoed by Obrador.
This is boots on the ground, the stuff that we hear directly from the mouths of babes.
I thought this was an interesting report from France 24 in Ukraine.
Gives us a little bit of an idea about the drones that Russia is using.
It's apparently the third attack in 24 hours because it started slightly earlier last night than the previous night, the night from Sunday to Monday.
Around 20 Shahid drones, these Iranian-made drones, is what the Ukrainians are saying, were used.
I could certainly hear them.
That's actually the first time that I personally have heard the sound of these drones, which are always described as flying mopeds by the Ukrainians, and I've in a way long been wondering what exactly that sounds like.
Now I know.
What we could mainly hear was the sound of the explosions of the Ukrainian air defense systems shooting these drones down.
They did shoot Most, if not all of them, Dan, we're waiting for confirmation, but this time there was rather more damage than usual.
Flying mopeds?
What kind of warfare is this?
You know, I think the V-1 bomber had more effectiveness than these things.
These are like quadcopters, with a dynamite stick.
Flying moped?
Really?
But it's interesting because Zelensky came out and said something which I think is highly inflammatory and kind of makes sense from his warmongering perspective.
But it's the drones that the Ukrainians are focusing on because it's increasingly to the drones that the Russians have been focusing.
President Zelensky made an appeal to the Iranians last week when he said, what is the benefit to Iran of such cynical killing by Russian hands but with your weapons?
Your Shahids mean only that the people of Iran are being driven deeper into the dark side of history.
To which the Iranians said that Zelensky was putting on a political show and that his claims were empty.
He responded to that by putting this bill to the Ukrainian Parliament, which was passed, which imposes sanctions for the next 50 years on Iran.
So that will involve no transit for Iranian goods through Iran or through Ukraine or through its airspace.
sanctions on trade tech finance the ban on ukrainian investment on it on it on iran and the ban of the transfer of military and dual purpose goods so what he's saying is hey you may not be doing it but you're using iranian or your your technology your the russians are using your tech not your moped technology this high-end stuff
so conversely russia could say well you know america since they're using your stuff you know what i mean Yeah.
I'm surprised they haven't done that already.
Yeah.
By the way, so you can go to Iranian drones on Google and hit images.
And you can see the variety.
There's actually a variety of drones.
You can't tell which ones they're actually using.
But these all look like they're derived.
Remember back, this is about 10 years ago.
It was during the Iraqi war during something.
The the Iranians had captured an American predator or one of these drones.
Can you remember this?
And they were showing it off and we were demanding it back and they had the thing was intact and it was on a landing strip.
So they've taken, the Iranians, this is a decade or more ago, have stolen one of our drones sometime back and are now making Kind of crude copies of it.
And that's the drones they're using.
And they said for all the surveillance gear, they just load them up with some explosives and send them on their way.
Yeah, I do.
But I thought that was a big drone, though.
It was, it was a big giant predator, but I think they've downsized it, because the ones that they... Iranians, these are bigger than you think, looking at the Google page of images.
A lot of them are fairly big, but they're not the size of the predator.
That thing's huge.
Are these the ones that launch off a little thing?
No, they have a truck.
There's a picture in these photos.
There's a truck that holds about five or six of them, and then they shoot them off.
This is the future of war.
I think we should bring back our game show.
Win, lose, or drone?
Win!
Lose!
Or!
Drone!
That's right everybody, it's time to play Win, Lose, or Drone!
Will the moped do it today, or will it be something bigger?
Who knows?
Let's meet our contestants now on our game show.
Win, Lose, or Drone!
Win!
Lose!
Or!
Drone!
God, I feel good doing that.
That's about all they got going for him.
I got Sam Bennett.
He's from the Center for Naval Analyses on the Defense and Aerospace podcast.
And he says, you know, all this stuff we're sending over there, it's no good.
It's not going to work.
The F-16s, they're not useful.
To the F-16s, I don't think they're going to make a substantial difference.
They're not going to tip the balance of power in the war.
I mean, come on, you know, Russian air defenses are relatively intact.
The U.S.
doesn't send F-16s into air-to-air or ground attack missions without a whole suite of surveillance, electronic warfare, you know, command and control networks to make sure that they can ingress and egress.
I also think there's been a perennial Western bias to thinking that, oh, this one little piece of technology is a silver bullet that will solve the war, and it's not.
So, I get the symbolism with F-16s.
It's an important symbol for Ukraine and another threshold that's being crossed in the form of aid that's being provided that country, but it's going to take a while, you know, It's going to take a while, and I don't see these platforms as having a decisive impact on the war.
Yeah, there you go.
According to Dame 1 of 3, the reason why we send National Guard troops is you don't need congressional approval for that.
That makes sense.
I mean, not really, but I guess legally it makes sense somehow.
That's screwed up if we're setting the New Jersey National Guard troops.
Yeah.
Yeah.
CNN report as things are starting to ratchet up.
We're also hearing, interestingly, from Belarusian President Lukashenko, who is now offering nuclear weapons to any nations who want to join, who want to support Russia, Belarus.
It's not clear to me that he actually has any nuclear weapons to offer here, Sam.
No, he doesn't.
But what he does have and has done is allow or offer the opportunity for Russia to put what they're calling tactical nuclear weapons, in other words, short-range, relatively low-load nuclear weapons there as part of the ongoing effort to kind of waive the threat of nuclear catastrophe at not just Ukraine, but the international community.
But this is consistent with Lukashenko's Courting, shall we call it, of the Kremlin.
Yeah, go ahead.
I think he meant low yield.
I think low load is funnier, though.
Low load.
I got a low load, man.
CNN is all in on the nuke tip, though.
This report from Aaron Burnett, Burnett out front, this was a real head scratcher.
Vladimir Putin's top propagandist is now saying that... I'd love that.
So is there a title in the Kremlin?
Hello, Igor, you are now top propagandist!
Maybe it's just... That's not news reporting, Erin Burnett.
Vladimir Putin's top propagandist is now saying that nuclear weapons should be used to destroy Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, which is a crucial technology that Ukraine... Wait, how does that work?
You throw up a bomb and hopefully... No, man, it's a two-parter.
This is for real.
So apparently, I'll give you the short version here.
Ukraine is using Elon Musk's Starlink technology, I think it's called Defense Link, the military version of it, because we know Elon is a defense contractor, and they use that to target Russian, you know, to get the drones on target.
I don't know why you'd use Starlink for that.
Doesn't seem like completely appropriate, but maybe the Defense Link has some better stuff, but listen to how they do it.
Believed to use to launch drone strikes.
I think it's time to turn up the heat.
We understand that all drones and everything else works for Americans only while Starlink exists.
So, if we carefully launch our nukes into space, then there will be no Starlink.
This is the top propagandist we're listening to?
This is the guy!
Igor!
Igor?
Hey!
If we carefully launch our nukes into Starlink satellites, hey man, my internet!
Launch drone strikes.
I think it's time to turn up the heat.
We understand that all drones and everything else works for Americans only while Starlink exists.
So, if we carefully launch our nukes into space, then there will be no Starlink left.
Yeah!
Ukraine's not claiming responsibility for these attacks inside Russia.
But if Kiev gets blamed, that's just fine.
There's more to come.
The number of incidents is constantly increasing.
Not only in the border areas, but also in the depths of Russia.
It's already happening.
The scale will be exponential.
Here an oil refinery in Russia's far south is set aflame.
While along Ukraine's northern border with its invader, civilian areas are hit by shelling.
Apartments riddled with shrapnel, commonplace in Ukraine, a new experience for Russians.
This is a weird report.
They went from blowing up Starlink to what's happening in Russia, and it continues here.
Ukraine's new strategy is taking shape inside Russia.
Bomb them, bomb them, and bomb them again.
Drone and artillery attacks have hit Russian targets in an arc along its Ukrainian border provinces of Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Krasnodar.
And Moscow's not been spared either.
On the deck of a Royal Navy warship, key Ukrainian ally, the United Kingdom, gave Kiev a green light to attack Russia.
Legitimate military targets beyond its own border are part of Ukraine's self-defense.
And we should recognize, we should recognize that.
In response, former Russian president- Wait, wait!
That was interpreted as giving the go-ahead to attack Russia?
It sounded like it.
I'll play it again.
I'm going to go back a little bit further.
So, since when does the UK get to give anybody a green light?
Are they the boss of everything now?
It's our stuff!
It's our New Jersey boys there!
Legitimate military targets beyond its own border are part of Ukraine's self-defence.
And we should recognise that.
In response, former Russian President and close Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev claimed on Twitter that as the UK is in an undeclared war against Russia, any British official could be considered as a legitimate military target.
Yeah, baby!
Send some drones over to London and make them remind them of the V1 rocket.
Now that would be an escalation even Vladimir Putin might resist.
Now, Aaron, you mentioned the use of nuclear weapons against Starlink satellites there.
That would be, I think, technically impossible.
I have to say, also, locally they're not used by... Whoa!
Stop!
Why would you... Okay, so the whole report starts off based on, and you even introduced as such, the idea of using nukes against Starlink, and at the very end of the report it says it's technically impossible?
Then why are you reporting it?
Well, it sounds cool.
By the way, it's Starshield is the military version.
Starshield.
Because this is all... This is propaganda!
Aaron Burnett is the top propagandist for the United States!
Well, Erin, you mentioned the use of nuclear weapons against Starlink satellites there.
That would be, I think, technically impossible.
I have to say, also, locally they're not used by drones, certainly not drones that could strike as deep into Russia as Moscow.
But this, I think, should be seen, what we're seeing in Russia, as a completely new phase of the Ukrainian strategy.
This could be, effectively, what we've all been talking about, which is the beginning of their counter-offensive.
They're launching it, and they're launching it in Russia.
Oh, okay, this is it then?
So our counter-offensive includes mythical star shield, and this is what Victoria Nuland came up with?
Some hokey drones?
Oh, man.
Who's making the drones that are hitting Moscow?
We know the Iranians are making all these drones.
I think it was... I read about it.
Who's making the other drones?
Do they have a stick of dynamite in them or what?
How much power do they have?
I don't know.
SpaceX designs, launches and builds and launches customized military satellites based on variants of the Starlink satellite bus with the largest publicly known customer base being the Space Development Agency.
Hmm.
I wonder what it does.
This thing.
Yeah, no wonder we're getting less bandwidth.
He's using it for the drones!
That's an outrage.
Hmm.
So if this is the, uh, the long rumored offensive, which initially was the spring offensive, now it's just the offensive.
Yeah.
They dropped the whole, yeah, let's not get carried away.
The offensive.
Now we still have to do something with the Wagner group.
They're very irritating.
They're, they're still hanging out there.
So let's, uh, Richard Engel, our favorite over at NBC, Spook Central, Richard Engel, he's going to tell us what to do with the Wagner group.
The Central African Republic is a failed state.
In the capital, Bangui, they are victims of Africa's resource curse.
The people are poor, despite living on land with vast, untapped wealth.
Here, it's gold and diamonds.
But instead of lifting people out of poverty, the riches flow into the hands of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group.
See, now all of a sudden they're Russian mercenaries.
Sometimes they're a paid military group.
It's like they're all over the map with this.
Now it's Russian mercenaries.
The Wagner Group.
Russia's private army.
Oh, private army!
Private army?
What am I talking about?
To the hands of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group.
Russia's private army.
Great edit.
In Ukraine, Wagner fights for the Kremlin.
It makes its money here.
According to two Western diplomats in Bangui, Wagner is extracting a half a billion dollars a year in gold, rare timber, and blood diamonds.
The independent research group Century provided NBC News with more than a dozen witness accounts of violence by Wagner forces near the Indosima gold mine and other mine sites.
I've never heard, what is this group?
Have you ever heard of this group?
Some group that gave them the info here?
The independent research group Sentry.
Sentry?
Sentry?
Sentry.
Sentry, never heard of it.
Provided NBC News with more than a dozen witness accounts of violence by Wagner forces near the Indosima gold mine and other mine sites.
Wagner was invited in to the Central African Republic by the government to help crush a rebellion.
And it worked.
The capital is now far more secure.
There's a statue honoring Wagner on Bangui's main boulevard.
I can't find this.
The hot dog guy's got a statue in the... In the capital?
I doubt it.
Why don't you look up that statue?
We played the second part of this report.
The group even provides the personal security for the president.
You've said quite famously that if your house is on fire, you don't care what color the water is.
So, I understand why you reached out and you accepted Russian help.
Are you happy with it?
You journalists are here.
You should ask this question to the Central African people.
They will answer you.
I am here to make sure that this population is protected.
The government depends on Wagner for its survival.
Wagner pays itself in gold.
The people are left starving.
We reached out to Purgosian.
He responded with a voice note, calling our questions provocative and saying in part, quote, you've received enough information.
If by asking these questions, you intended just to spit at me, then I suggest you come closer.
And after that, try to figure out if it's your throat in my hands or someone else's.
Fighting words.
Okay, so this is...
This was erected February 23rd, 2022.
I have a picture here.
A woman lays flowers at the base of a monument to Central African soldiers and Russian armed men in Bangui.
The hot dog guy is not a part of this.
It's Russian armed men.
Yeah, I'm looking at it now.
There's no hot dog guy here.
This is bullcrap.
And why?
It's the Richard Engel report from on CBS.
And you think it's bullcrap?
But why?
Why this?
I mean, I don't understand.
Why?
Okay, Engel would be messaging on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Yes, of course.
So what are they trying to tell us?
That somebody's stealing the gold from Central Africa or... Maybe he's telling us we need to move down to Central Africa because they're killing people down there.
Much more important than a couple of drones in Kiev.
How about that?
Maybe.
That would be a good message.
We know all the guns are going there.
Sky News has their own version of a report here.
This guy's straight up Monty Python.
Professor Michael Clarke, tell us.
Obviously concerns about the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, but in the meantime there's plenty of other things going on, aren't there?
Including an apparent drone attack inside Russia again.
Yes, and the tempo of events is increasing all the time, so overnight it looks as if there was a drone attack at Krasnodar.
The Russians are saying the thing was a drone, and I'm pretty sure it probably was.
It hasn't been illuminated, the biggest fire you've ever seen at a refinery, there are lots of them, but it's a huge set of refineries, but nevertheless it makes the point.
And interestingly, Krasnodar is not so far from Novorossiysk.
And that is where all the oil exports go from Russia for the Black Sea and for ports in the Mediterranean and further afield.
So it's a really important port.
And also, at Novorossiysk, the Russians have now got most of the Black Sea fleet based there because it was too dangerous to leave them at Sevastopol, which is on that sort of southwestern tip of Crimea.
So they've moved most of the fleet to Novorossiysk.
They come in a very important port in the heart of Russia.
And even to hit, you know, a few miles away, the refineries is picking away at Russia's infrastructure.
And it's making the point to the Russians at the very least, even though this is, as I say, it's not a major fire.
It was put out pretty quickly.
But it makes the Russians have to bring some resources back to defend these facilities for the future.
I think these guys are doing it all wrong.
Wait, hold on.
First he starts off distinctly because I knew it was a small fire.
Yeah.
He says, it's the biggest fire you've ever seen.
But then, you know, you know.
This is, it's all wag the dog.
Oh, it's totally wag the dog at this point.
We're getting no information, no real information.
We're just getting various propagandistic reports that are fed, and then this switcheroo here, which is what I have to call it, about the Central African Republic.
Yeah.
And to send Engel down there.
That's a message.
Because some guys are taking some gold out of a mine because they need to get paid.
I mean, half a billion dollars.
We send that to Ukraine overnight with FedEx.
Half a billion dollars.
Woo!
That's not a big deal.
But I think the message was, you know, the dying hungry children of Central Africa.
These guys are horrible hot dog man.
And I don't understand because the solution is so clear.
If you want to get rid of Russia, it's so easy.
Just give them Chad GPT.
Tonight a stark warning that artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity.
It comes from dozens of industry leaders including the CEO of Chad GPT creator OpenAI.
The experts signed the statement which says mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Why are we even worried about Ukraine?
We're all going to die!
That was Nora.
Yes, that was Nora.
And she's saying that, and she's reporting this bullcrap story about how all humanity.
All of it, baby.
Including the, you know, aborigines in Australia are all gonna die.
Yes, the Ukrainians, everybody.
AI.
How is the AI going to kill anyone to start with unless they build RoboCop?
And then the RoboCop would have to build more RoboCops until they're all out of control and they would be killing people for what?
What's the motivation?
Well, maybe France 24 can help us out because they're all over this story.
Brief as it is stark, this one-sentence statement signed by more than 350 tech experts makes a plea to policymakers.
It says mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics.
Same writer!
Oh, hold on.
This is how it's gonna happen.
Same writer.
The Center for AI Safety points to several disaster scenarios, like drug discovery tools being used to create chemical weapons, or enfeeblement, where humanity loses the ability to self-govern and becomes completely dependent on machines.
Oh, hold on.
This is how it's going to happen.
What she just described is the plot of Wall E, the movie.
Wall?
This is another great movie I haven't seen.
You've never seen WALL-E?
No, no, I've seen WALL-E.
You mean WALL-E?
WALL-E!
WALL-E!
I think we even had a jingle about WALL-E.
A WALL-E jingle?
Well, that movie's theme was enfeeblement.
So they brought in enfeeblement, which is the WALL-E plot.
Which is that you have all these robots doing all this work So you just sit around getting fat sitting at the pool drinking pina coladas, which are made by the robots So that is now so they're bringing that and so the threat is this first time I've heard this by the way this because I didn't listen to that French 24 report, but Enfeeblement is is how they're gonna kill us.
Let's listen again to that enfeeblement part The Center for AI Safety points to several disaster scenarios, like drug discovery tools being used to create chemical weapons, or enfeeblement, where humanity loses the ability to self-govern and becomes completely dependent on machines.
We need to get the actual report where it states enfeeblement.
What was it?
The movie wasn't called... It's called a script!
Just the hazard.
Exactly!
Oh man.
Although, there's more to this report, but I just want to mention.
I had a thought yesterday that there is one area that I think we will see the brilliant A.I.
come in, and that is going to be medical care.
They already have the doctors just as a hump of human flesh in between the pharmaceutical company, but you come into the doctor, your provider, and you say, hey, I don't feel good, and the doctor goes in, hmm, well, hmm, let me look.
He goes down the list of drugs?
Yeah, and he says, oh, this one, you need this one, and he hands it out.
That's it!
So why not just cut out the middleman?
Cut out the doctor?
Yeah.
And you have pharma robots.
Pharma bots.
Among the statement's backers are executives from Google and Microsoft, the CEO of ChatGPT's OpenAI, and Geoffrey Hinton, referred to as one of the godfathers of AI.
Oh, that guy.
The existential threat, I think maybe the US and China and Europe and Japan can all cooperate on trying to avoid that existential threat.
But the question is, how should they do that?
And I think stopping development isn't feasible.
Other industry figures, however, say the fears around human extinction are overblown, and many believe the real problem with AI is its reproduction of bias learned from racist, patriarchal, or exclusionary systems.
The statement follows a much longer letter, saying...
I mean, it really is ridiculous.
And it's working, by the way.
It's working.
Elon Musk, it called for a pause in development of next-gen AI, warning non-human minds might eventually outsmart and replace us.
This is such a psyop on people.
I mean, it really is ridiculous.
And it's working, by the way.
It's working.
I think I have the clip here.
Here we go.
I believe that AI could eat us.
There you go.
She has a Glenn Beck.
Yummy human.
I was going to surprise you as an ISO later, but I had to do it now.
All right.
But it's so disingenuous.
OpenAI.
Oh, we signed this letter.
Meanwhile, they're releasing ChatGPT app.
I want to get a list of these idiots.
OK, so it's OpenAI.
So Sam Altman and he is their company.
They used to be a nonprofit.
Now their company is releasing ChatGPT app.
Microsoft, who also co-signatory, They are adding mandatory system-wide artificial intelligence, the Windows Copilot to Windows 11.
It's called Clippy.
Well, I think this is worse than that, because it will be basically indexing all your stuff, everything you have on your computer, sending it back to wherever, and then helping you.
I'm just telling you what they're saying and what they're doing.
Elon Musk, co-signator.
His brain implant firm has gotten approval for human tests.
Yeah, that's okay, but the AI is not.
Ivermectin wasn't okay, but it's okay for Elon to jam a probe in your head.
That's fine.
That's just fine.
It was interesting to see that the, and I think, I still think this is where it's going, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, he also has this world coin, some shit coin he's put together, and he's, you know, there's a wallet and whatever.
Isn't that the other Sam Altman?
Isn't that guy?
No, it's the same guy.
I think it's the same guy.
That's the same guy.
The OpenAI guy's not the same guy as the freaky guy that was selling the, that had FTX.
No, that's, that's Bankman Freed.
This is WorldCoin.
Why do I think Bankman Freed is Sam Altman?
I don't know.
I mean, they are kind of the same guy, I guess.
Well, one's got clean shaven.
That's a plus.
So, he's now released the Orb.
For Universal ID.
Release the orb!
Exactly.
The orb for Universal ID.
Clear is getting in the game.
With ID verification.
Clear, the airport guys?
Oh, those guys who struggle to do anything right.
You know what?
Your fake girly LinkedIn profile is going to get in trouble pretty soon.
You think?
Because now you can use clear identification with LinkedIn.
Soon it'll just be mandatory.
I can guarantee you that's gonna happen.
This has been your guarantee for years.
It's gonna happen.
It's going to happen.
And this is my favorite AI story.
We had the story just on the last episode.
They fired the National Eating Disorder Organization.
Fired everybody because they wanted to unionize.
They said, oh, we're not going to need you anymore.
We're going to use a chat bot.
Remember this story?
I'll remind you.
Nearly 70,000 people last year reached out to a helpline operated by the National Eating Disorders Association.
Those numbers had more than doubled during the COVID emergency and they still haven't returned to pre-pandemic levels.
But now the association is shutting down that helpline in favor of a chatbot.
Kate Wells with Michigan Radio has more.
The Helpline is run by just six paid staffers, a couple supervisors, and they train and oversee up to 200 volunteers at any given time.
The staff felt overwhelmed, under-supported, burned out, there was a ton of turnover, so the Helpline staff voted to unionize.
So cliche, but like, we did not have our oxygen masks on, and we were putting on everyone else's oxygen mask, and it was just like...
becoming unsustainable.
Managers at the National Eating Disorders Association, or NIDA, also thought that this situation was becoming unsustainable.
In March, the Helpline staff formally notified NIDA about their unionization.
Four days later, they were in what seemed like a pretty routine virtual staff meeting, NPR obtained audio as a call, and abruptly, NIDA's board chair, Jeff Craddock, fired all the Helpline staff.
After more than 20 years, the helpline was being shut down.
Instead, Craddock said, Neato would be transitioning to a chatbot named Tessa.
Okay, you remember the story now?
Yeah, it was a good anti-union thing.
Eating disorder helpline takes down chatbot after its advice goes horribly wrong.
So they launched, they fired the staff, they launched the chat bot, Tessa, amongst other things, stated that eating disorder recovery and intentional weight loss can coexist and be done safely.
God!
Recommended that you can lose one to two pounds a week.
Just count your calories.
This is horrible for people with eating disorders.
This is the worst thing you can imagine.
I also think that this is a counter-offensive.
I'm not sure it's all true.
I think the whole thing was a rig.
You get rid of all these people that want to unionize, put the chatbot in temporarily, and then fire the chatbot and start hiring scabs.
Oh, perfect!
There you go.
Nailed it.
Nailed it.
Now, of course, they're saying, well, this wasn't really AI, okay?
This was just a chatbot, man.
It wasn't really AI.
Which brings us to...
The genius test done by a professor and his students.
C.W.
Howell, who is a Duke Ph.D.
and a professor, actually assigned his students a really interesting assignment.
He said that he had them all generate an essay, 63 of his students, which used a prompt that he gave them for ChatGPT.
Their job was to then grade their essay.
and look for so-called hallucinated information and critique its analysis.
Now, what he points out, hallucinated information is stuff we talked about here before, fake quotes and fake sources, real sources that are misunderstood and mischaracterized.
He says that all 63 essays, every single assignment, what he found was that the biggest takeaway is that their students learned that ChatGPT was not reliable because all of them included some sort of hallucinated information.
And it shows you that ChatGPT, at least in its current form and maybe for all time, who knows how difficult this is for them to solve, is that can easily hallucinate and create false information.
I think we need to point out that the term hallucinate is made up by the tech industry to make it seem less impactful when it's just bullcrap.
Oh yes, AI can hallucinate.
Yeah, no, hallucination really should be only attributable to humans.
Yeah, well that's why they're using the word.
Or animals.
Yeah, that's why they're using it.
That's why they're using the term, to keep you believing.
There was an interesting question in there that I never considered, which is, is it possible that they can't correct this, ever?
What do you mean?
He said in there, they don't know if they can fix the hallucination problem with these essays that these things write up.
And I'm wondering whether or not that's true.
Is it possible that it's one of those things that because of the nature of the of the algos that are that make this thing work in the first place that because it's only doing putting one word after the other?
That it can't not do this?
And the reason I suggest that it's possible that it can't not do this, in other words it has to make these mistakes constantly, is how hard can it be to teach these things that humans have five fingers on each hand?
I know, it's very annoying that it can't do that.
So this brings me to the Wikipedia entry for AI winter, which you may recognize some of these moments in technology history, and I believe the hallucination will be the next AI winter.
An AI winter, according to the entry, in the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research.
The term was coined by analogy of the idea of a nuclear winter.
It all kind of fits in, because it's just as scary as nuclear.
The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or even decades later.
So the overview, timeline, 1966, the drastic failure of machine translation.
Does this ring a bell?
Well, yes, and that was the era when these things were called the electronic brains.
And that was a... Electronic brains!
They were the electronic brains, and it was considered that there was the same hype about it, and that's when those movies started coming out.
I think the Forbin Project came out, like, in the early 70s.
Early 70s, yeah.
We had all these movies where the computer was taking over, and it was gonna kill us all, and it was gonna...
You know, get together with other machines and the whole thing.
That was a distinctive moment in time which produced a lot of very entertaining films.
So this was the lack of progress.
In 1964, the National Research Council had become concerned about the lack of progress and formed the ALPAC, ALPAC, the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee.
To look into the problem.
And they concluded in a famous 1966 report that machine translation was more expensive, less accurate, and slower than human translation.
Then we got the abandonment of connectionism.
Does this ring any bells?
No, that one does not ring a bell.
1969.
Some of the earliest work in AI used networks of circuits or connected units to simulate intelligent behavior.
So kind of like neural networking.
Examples of this kind of work called connectionism.
Good term.
Walter Pitts, Warren McCullough's first description of a neural network for logic.
Marvin Minsky's work on SNARC.
S-N-A-R-C.
I don't know what that is.
So, Connectionism, that failed.
They were abandoned.
Let's see, why were they abandoned?
It didn't work.
It didn't work.
Then we had the Light Hill.
Anything Minsky had anything to do with didn't work, by the way.
Who was Minsky?
He was a professor at MIT and he was considered one of the fathers of AI, kind of.
Okay.
Then we had the Light Hill Report.
Sir James Lighthill was asked by UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the UK, now called the Lighthill Report, and he criticized the utter failure to achieve its grandiose objectives.
The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in the UK.
Completely gone.
Then DARPA.
DARPA.
They came in.
DARPA was going to save the day.
Early 1970, the attitude changed after the passage of the Mansfield Amendment in 1969, which required DARPA to fund mission-oriented direct research.
Of course, that went nowhere.
Then we had the SUR debacle, S-U-R.
The Speech Understanding Research Program, Carnegie Mellon.
So this is all basically still just trying to understand speech.
And then, and I should have known this one, the collapse of the LISP machine market.
LISP.
That was supposed to be the language of artificial intelligence.
LISP was going to take over the place.
It was the process.
There's still remnants of LISP here and there.
Emacs runs on LISP.
And I had no idea Lisp was actually an early, you know, AI-type language.
And it failed.
And we're left with Emacs, which only neckbeards use.
Then we had the Fifth Generation Project, 1981, Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
$850 million, a lot of money in 81 bucks, for the fifth-generation computer.
Their objectives were to write programs and build machines that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings.
Yeah.
That got everybody all jacked up in Silicon Valley.
Everyone was fearful.
Because the Japanese, you have to remember, in the 80s, We're running the world.
They were taking over.
They bought the Rockefeller Center.
They bought most of Hawaii.
They were buying everything up because that was the way everything should go.
In fact, there was a book done by James Fallows.
I have a copy.
He's not the only one, though, that said we should all do things the way the Japanese do them.
And the Japanese, you know, there's teams.
Get rid of the assembly line.
Teams!
Teams!
Yes, of course I remember.
These little teams.
Yeah, of course.
And Toyota was the way to go.
And they went on and on until the Japanese stock market collapsed.
I think that was in, I don't know, 93 or something.
Can't remember when it collapsed.
When it collapsed, it never recovered.
And the whole Japanese idea, and this idea that everything should be the way Japanese do it, fell into the toilet.
That was the end of it.
But it was triggered by that stupid computing project.
They'd made all these, they'd been, you know, sabre rattling about this fifth generation, I always thought it was called the fourth generation, but whatever, fifth generation computer that was going to run everything.
The fifth generation project ended not with a successful roar, but with a whimper.
Then the Strategic Computing Initiative.
That was DARPA's response to it.
The program was under direction of the Information Processing Technology Office, always with government, you see, always with government.
What are these guys doing?
Government has to come in once again.
Jack Schwartz, does that ring a bell?
Yeah, it does, kind of.
Yeah, he ascended to the leadership of IPTO and in 1987 dismissed expert systems as clever programming.
And he said he cut funding to AI deeply and brutally.
It was no good.
Oh, AI, yeah, I think he's the one pulling the plug.
Everything went down the tubes after that.
In fact, we had a note from someone that I read, I don't know, 10, 15 shows ago, where she reminded me that If you were doing anything in venture capital in the late 80s and through probably most of the 90s and you put a mention of AI into the proposal, it would be rejected because the AI had gotten such a bad reputation in the late 80s.
After all this happened, we went through all these issues that failed.
They were all failures.
In fact, your buddy John Markoff in the New York Times in 2005 wrote, at its low point, subcomputer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence entirely for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers.
The Economist, 2007.
Investors were put off by the term voice recognition.
Oh man, remember all that?
Remember the IBM?
You got the little box with the headset in it?
And you'd have to go, okay computer, I am now typing something to you, period.
Forget that!
Remember the cars that had a bunch of voices in them and you had to talk to the car?
What car was this?
There was a bunch of Japanese cars that were yakking at you constantly.
I don't remember this.
I was probably too young to drive.
I don't know.
Japanese yakking at you.
Oh man, that's hilarious.
I think we're just in another one of these cycles.
Of course!
This is all we are ever in is cycles.
And you always have to bring in Kurzweil.
Well, I believe in Kurzweil.
The guy's a genius.
Kurzweil.
You know, I've run into that guy so often.
I had him on my Silicon Spin show once, but I've run into him over time.
And he is so He's like not even in the room.
It's a very strange person.
What do you mean he's not in the room?
He's like Sam Bankman Freed?
Have you ever walked up to somebody who's like talking or doing something or looking at something and you take your hand and put it in front of their face and go up and down and up and down and up and down and they don't react to it?
Not recently, but I can imagine what you're talking about.
Yeah, that's Kurtzweil.
I have done that.
To Kurtzweil?
To Kurtzweil.
Wow.
So I think the problem I have with all of this is there are some very simple things I would like to solve, which I believe AI would be great for.
Spam would be one.
If Microsoft is putting it into their stuff, why not just solve spam?
I mean, heuristics, there's a lot of training being done.
Then how about Siri or Alexa or any of these things?
Make them work decently.
But no, none of it.
I think you and I should start this spam AI company.
What's that gonna do?
Stop spam!
But it doesn't work.
Oh well, it'll collect a lot of money then.
Yeah, now good luck with that.
Can you just imagine us showing up to some investors?
Hey!
Hey everybody, give us your money.
Look at us.
No, we have frontmen doing it for us.
We're too old.
Hey!
You gotta get some 20-year-olds.
Speak for yourself, please.
They don't like giving money.
They couldn't even use it properly on Facebook or Twitter to remove stuff.
It's all human beings who are now stressed out and on Zoloft.
Because of the horrible videos they have to watch.
And they want to unionize.
And they want to unionize, exactly.
Exactly.
By the way, just speaking of that, I looked up that Del Harvey, who according to my new friend here, was the one who was really running the show at Twitter.
Do you remember this conversation?
Yes, please continue.
It's a she, by the way, Del Harvey.
And Del Harvey is a very, and never discussed, Very, very strange person.
I found a Forbes article from 2014.
Harvey was the 25th employee at Twitter, where her official title is Vice President of Trust and Safety, but she's more like Silicon Valley's Chief Sanitation Officer, dealing with the dirtiest stuff on Twitter.
Spam, harassment, child exploitation, threats of rape and murder.
And that's not even Del Harvey's real name.
Harvey has an unusual background for someone with so much power over public speech.
She isn't a lawyer, won't say if she's graduated from college.
Del Harvey is not her legal name.
She's secretive about her past, but allows that she grew up in the South where she spent the summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution working with troubled youth.
Her education about the dark side of the internet came instead from experience.
In 2003, when she was 21, she started volunteering for Perverted Justice, a group that posed as young kids online to engage potential pedophiles in chats.
I remember that group.
When they caught one, they'd post the chats along with the identity of the would-be... This sounds like a cool reality show.
Eventually became the site's law enforcement liaison, bundling up evidence for local police.
This is a spook.
This is a very, very spooky person.
Well, you got the phony name, that's a big deal.
You gotta, you know, that one person that came, the costume expert who mentioned the fact that when you get in the agency, you, your name is changed.
If you're really high up, and clearly MKUltra working at the mental institution, completely controlled.
Yeah, I guess she's gone, right?
She would be gone.
We don't know.
We don't know.
They have a new name, new identity.
That's interesting.
Well, that's an interesting little tidbit.
Yeah.
You'll never hear this on any other show.
No.
Probably not.
And, uh, with that, how about I thank you for your courage, say in the morning to you, the man who put the C in... What was that term again?
Uh... Connecticism!
Connectivism.
Connectivism!
Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to my friend on the other end, Mr. John C. Dvorak!
And I would say, from the looks of things, we're gonna do one segment today.
It's going to be one segment, people.
You don't have to leave.
It'll take very little of your time, believe me.
Very little of your time.
All right.
Well, where are you?
Where am I what?
I said in the morning to you!
I did the whole echo and everything!
Oh, I'm sorry, in the morning to you, and in the morning the ships of the sea, and the subs in the water, and the dames in the night.
1936 on this Thursday, 1,936 trolls checking us out in the troll room.
I consider that 100 over.
1936 on this Thursday.
1,936 trolls checking us out in the Troll Room.
I consider that 100 over.
100 over. 100 percent.
The trolls can be found and can be joined at trollroom.io.
This is where you can join in the chat, you can listen live to the stream, or consider using a modern podcast app.
Go to podcastapps.com.
You can listen and subscribe to all the podcasts you listen to on the legacy apps, except you get this amazing benefit of having live podcasts, and we're not the only one.
They're all over the place now.
It's like people, this is what we pioneered for over 15 years, people are now doing as a standard.
As long as you got the chat, or as we call it the troll room, then it all comes together beautifully.
You can also interact with us and engage at noagendasocial.com if you feel so inclined.
Noagendasocial.com is our non-algoized social network.
We have about 10,000 accounts.
You might still be able to sign up.
I think it might be closed currently, but when we purge or a few drop off, we'll open it up.
But you can follow us from any Mastodon account.
We'll kick a few off.
Yeah, we will.
You can follow us from any Mastodon account that doesn't block us for our free speech.
And follow Adam at NoahJennerSocial.com, John C. Duborek at NoahJennerSocial.com.
Now, as a part of our value for value model, we don't take any was the whole concept that we don't take any creepy commercial money, no advertising money, no advertisers whatsoever.
We exist solely by your time, talent and treasure.
That's our boots on the ground reporting.
That's people who do servers and websites for us, people who do clips for us.
And of course, we have producers who we'd like to honor as executive and associate executive producers who come in with money that we do need to exist.
But.
Before that, we want to honor our artist for episode 1559.
The title of that one was, of course, Cobalt, honoring the old Cobalt programming language.
Parker Pauly brought us the artwork, and it was a Memorial Day special.
No mattresses for sale, but, you know, we always like to do something a little traditional on some of these traditional days, and so Parker Pauly had all the elements there.
It had an eagle, it had some Americana, you know, it had our names.
I personally, it wasn't my all-time favorite.
There were a couple other ones that I like the, which one did I like here?
You didn't, you thought it was creepy.
The capitalist agenda honor with the eagle.
Where was it?
Oh, no, I didn't like that at all.
Yeah, you said it looked like a person, not like an eagle.
Well, the problem, no, I didn't say the whole thing looked like a person.
The beak.
The beak, yeah.
The beak looked like some sort of creepy thing.
It was creepy.
I didn't like it.
Yeah.
I don't even see it on here.
Where is it?
It's on the left-hand side about, well, I got a lot of art today, about five down, I would say.
There it is, yeah.
Now, we both kind of like Comet Street Blogger's butt art, but it was not appropriate for Memorial Day.
It did show up in the chapters, as expertly done by Dreb Scott, in those modern podcasts.
It was a good butt picture.
Yeah, it's AI.
Yeah, I'm giving up on that.
It was AI butt.
AI butt.
It's an AI butt.
AI butt.
We know what's going on with your AI butt.
So, Parker Pauly had two.
He had one with the episode number in there, which we tried to avoid, so we didn't use that one.
He took it out smartly.
There are a couple of mattress sale jokes, which is good, but again, you know, on Memorial Day, we'll scoff and scorn the mattress promotions.
We're not actually going to use it as art then at the same time.
That would have been wrong.
Was there anything else that we liked that we needed to discuss?
No, I'm looking at him now, and this was clearly the most appropriate.
I mean, there was some other Memorial Day stuff, but like the Dame Kenny Ben with a soldier at a cross kneeling.
We don't want to get too maudlin about it.
What's the word you used there?
Maudlin.
Maudlin.
M-A-U-D-L-I-N?
Have you ever seen the TV show Maud?
Is that where the word is from?
Somebody will find that very funny.
I understand Maud.
I know Maud.
I know Maud.
Kiss my grits.
Kiss my grits is what Maud always used to say.
No, that's from the show Alice, I think.
Oh, you're right.
It's Alice.
Maud, Alice.
It's all the same.
I'm not old enough to really remember.
Thank you very much to Parker Pawley, Sir Parker Pawley for bringing us the artwork for episode 1559.
We're on to 1560 and we want to thank a short list of producers but still very important to us for supporting us for episode 1560 and we kick it off With Sir Anonymous of Dogpatch in Lower Slobovia.
He comes in once a month with random numbers.
We're sure it's code somehow.
We don't really understand it.
I'm sure this included a $2 bill as usual.
This $2,332.
Yes, it did.
He has a cash of $2 bills.
Do you have the note there?
But this is an oxymoron.
Or an oxymoron.
What am I thinking?
A palindrome.
A palindrome oxymoron.
I like the oxymoron idea, though.
I do have the note right here.
I have the hard copy.
Okay.
Oh, it's hard.
From Shuranimus of Dogpatch in Lower Slobovia, thank you for all the producers for their hard work to make this show and its searchable archives.
My go-to source for information.
I want to say something.
We have a new producer who's working on a new search engine, which includes the artwork, the transcripts, the clips, all the articles, and it's powered by AI.
And I've already used a little bit of it, and it's pretty cool.
So it's going to be, it's going to hit pseudonymous of Dogpatch and Lois Lebovier right where he likes it.
He's going to love this.
And then he has a quote, those who forgot history are condemned to repeat it.
Ukraine offers an example of forgotten history.
The Powell Doctrine offered points such as, do we have genuine broad international support?
And is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
That would be negative, if we're talking about Ukraine.
I think both are negative.
Correct.
So it violates both.
I don't think there's broad international support if somebody shows the people that nobody, not one country in the southern hemisphere of the entire globe is supporting this war.
Right.
In fact, Africa is all against it.
Several European countries are against it.
Poland's getting pissed off.
Yeah, I agree.
The growing sentiments by Ukraine's allies to impose reparations sets the stage for an ugly future for countries imposing reparations.
There is ample research on how sanctions, which this reminds me of a, there's an essay in Defense One, a newsletter, written by Wesley Clark and a bunch of other people.
Ah, the Wes Clark Seven guy.
And he's going on and on and on about how we're not supporting the International Criminal Court's persecution, or prosecution I should say, of Vladimir Putin.
Really?
Yeah!
I'll try to get a link to it for the next newsletter, but it's findable.
And they're going on and on about it, as if they don't know for a fact that George W. Bush would be listed as a war criminal.
And go to jail if we recognize the court.
If he stepped out of the country, but of course he's not going to do that.
Did you know that before George W. Bush became president, he had never left the continental United States?
No, I didn't know that.
He never stepped foot out of the country.
And in fact, I only know this from a fellow student, he was in his class at Yale, a Yalie newspaper guy, and he told me, he wasn't, this guy wasn't in Skull and Bones, and he says that even when George H.W.
Bush was the ambassador to China, George was offered a trip on the government dime to come over to China as one of his, as the son and party, you know, because if you're the ambassador, you get Hunter, you're going to have a lot of fun.
And so, nope, he wouldn't take the trip.
Wow.
He never, he hated leaving the country.
So he's not going to get arrested.
Okay, let me start over with this.
The growing sentiment by Ukraine's allies to impose reparations sets the stage for an ugly future for countries imposing reparations.
There's ample research on how sanctions and reparations undermine desired results.
The last major post-war agreement that imposed reparations was the Treaty of Versailles.
How'd that work out?
Which led to Hitler.
Yep.
What type of leadership will arise under a reparations imposed Russia and will these future leaders rebuild with far more venom?
Allies of the future rebuilt Russia are... Allies of the future rebuilt Russia are already apparent and they should... they could be formidable opponents.
No jingles, no karma.
Sir Onymous of Dogpatch and Lois Lobovia, always giving us something to think about.
He's a worldly guy.
He's seen a lot.
He's been around.
He knows what's up.
Oh, isn't he?
Appreciate that, Onymous.
Thank you so much.
And it really saved the day for us.
Although Robert Pattinson Jr.
came in, number two executive producer from Grove City, Pennsylvania, with an instant night donation, Adam and John, my first time donating, we're gonna de-douche you even though you didn't ask for it.
You've been de-douched.
Thank you guys for giving me entertainment and value over the years I've been listening.
P.S.
I would like my title to be Beelord of the Furries, if available.
Mmm, let's check.
Let's make sure.
Let me look.
Beelord of the Furries.
No?
Megan and I discussed furries.
She brought up furries on the show.
No, that's interesting.
And she was like, These furries, you know, I think the thing was some furries had gotten mad that Ron DeSantis said, you know, kids can't go to, can't be exposed to any kind of sexual stuff in public if they're minors.
And some furries were mad about it.
And I actually, and I was a furry expert.
I said, William, I'm a furry expert here because we have several furries who produce our show.
That probably confused her.
Like what?
And I said, and yeah, it's a sexual thing and kids, it's not appropriate for children, but the furries are nice people.
There's nothing wrong with, and she was laughing.
She, she was like, she kind of got a view of furries having sex with each other.
I don't know what she was thinking, but I defended the furries to a degree.
Well, you're a good man for the furries.
Well, we have a furry guy here.
I'm pro furry.
I noticed a note on No Agenda Social thinking it was hilarious to hear that during the graduation at Evergreen, there were furries in the graduation line.
I think there was a bunch of them actually.
Evergreen doesn't surprise me, of course.
You do believe?
No, I do have photos.
Of the, uh, of some of the furries, and I'm gonna post them on No Agenda Social, a couple of them.
Ah.
Do.
I had to, the problem is, I had to figure out what the date was for these photos, they're 2009, that's when that graduation was.
No, that's old now, old graduation.
Everything's changed now, man.
There's probably more furries.
You got it, Robert.
Onward with PaulSommers333.23, which is a Memorial Day donation, and that ends our... No, he gets a double Karma.
Because there was no... I couldn't find anything.
Double Karma for Paul.
You've got... Karma.
And that is our total of Executive Producers.
On to the Associates.
Yeah, hold on to your hats.
We got two.
Dame Slamy, Austin, Texas.
RoaDux222.22 in the morning, gents.
June 2nd commemorates one year since Sir Doodinchink and I joined the roundtable on our eight-year anniversary.
And we've never had a fight since we started listening to No Agenda together.
Before that, they probably did.
Thanks for all you do.
Love is lit.
Yak Karma, please.
Where's my yak?
I got a yak for you.
No problem.
Dame Slamy?
You've got And last on our list here is Ara Dadarian, our Trabuco Canyon, California Armenian, who comes in and we haven't heard from him for a while that I recall.
He comes in with $200 with a note that says, I need some passport karma for my daughter Grace.
She applied for her renewal in March back then when the process, I said then the processing time gave her a month to spare.
Now we're within two weeks of our trip and nothing!
So there's a warning for everybody out there that needs their passport renewed, and I believe that includes me.
Well, we discussed this a few weeks ago, that this was worldwide, remember?
This is happening everywhere.
Yeah, they don't want people going anywhere.
Nope.
When we call the number that the State Department has on their website to try and get an in-person appointment, you are within two weeks of your trip.
If you are within two weeks of your trip, we get a recorded message saying they're too busy to take the call.
We have asked our Congresswoman to help out as well.
My daughter's quite nervous.
But I told her that if I request Passport Karma from the best podcast in the universe, it's as good as done.
Thanks for everything.
Wow, that's a tall order.
Sir Ara, email me.
I'm going to email you my lawyer who's done a lot of work for this.
For me, on stuff like this, he's an immigration lawyer, but he may be able to help with this, because that does fall in the same category.
Who knows?
It's all about who you know these days.
It could be the passport karma will do the trick.
Yeah, well, let me give him the passport karma then.
Here we go.
You've got karma.
And that's our executive and associate executive producers.
John, let's take it through to the 50s.
Won't take very long.
No, we got a very slight today, I have to say.
Anonymous starts us off in Holmes Beach, Florida with $150.
Needs some jobs.
Karma will give him that at the end.
Rita Harrington in Sparks, Nevada.
Good ol' Rita.
Good ol' Hunter.
Good ol' Rita from Sparks.
You know Rita?
You know Rita?
Good ol' Rita.
I know Karita.
Chef's Catch!
Seafood Cafe in Beauty Point, Australia.
It's in Tasmania.
If you're in Tasmania, Chef's Catch.
Check it out.
Check it out.
Sir Mostly Nerd of India.
An Indian.
Great.
All right.
A hundred bucks.
Thank you.
Molly Morrison in Utopia, Texas.
What a name for a town.
A hundred dollars.
You know where that is?
Yes, I do.
Robert Taylor.
Well, good for you.
It's right up the road.
Robert Taylor Lowe in Landisville, Pennsylvania. 8008.
Uh, well, I'm gonna have to read a little bit of this.
I don't normally read at this level, but really enjoyed Adam on Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck Donation.
Told ya!
Sir C Sharp of Dot Net in Austin.
Uh, 8008.
Sir Kevin McLaughlin hasn't missed a beat.
8008.
Uh, in Locust, North Carolina.
Juana Treen in New York City.
After a little bit of this, it's considered a blessing to donate in multiples of 18 in Judaism.
Hence, $72.
Oh!
Interesting.
And she says, you know, listen to James Lindsay, and I was reminded by one of our, you know, James Lindsay, I played the three-minute clip of him last show.
Do you know who he is?
He's one of those guys who put in, like, all the phony baloney research papers.
Oh, I remember that, yeah.
And about a third of them got through.
No, most of them got through, not even a third.
I thought it was most.
Yeah, he's one of that group.
Yeah, that was a funny operation.
By the way, Sir C Sharp of .NET needs jobs coming for his smoking hot wife who got laid off from her lucrative tech job, so we'll do that as well at the end.
Jim Boreth in North Wales, Pennsylvania, 6666.
Craig Kohler in Evansville, Indiana, 6502.
James Buell in Vista, California, 6006.
Sir BNA in Nashville, Tennessee, 6993.
And his note?
I love the Too Many Eggs book.
Here's a donation over easy.
Cool.
By the way, TooManyEggs.com.
Get a free copy.
Sir Glenn in Raleigh, North Carolina, 5510.
With a switcheroo.
Oh, it's a switcheroo?
Yes, it's a... Oh, no, switcheroo's for Edward... Shia.
Shia.
Is that a Shia?
Shia.
Oh, yeah, Shia.
Rogan Donation for Liz.
For Liz, yes.
Mechanicsville, Virginia, $55 a switcheroo.
Linda Lupatkin in Lakewood, Colorado.
I read that and tell me if there's anything we should read there.
Yes, remember it was another ad.
ImageMakersInc.com for all your executive resume and job search needs.
But I don't do it right.
MakeGood, because we didn't do it right.
Now please.
Bob Butler in Cumming, Georgia, 50-69.
Gregory Forsyth Foreman in Bromley, UK.
It was the Orca story that got him.
Eric Craney in Spencer, Indiana, 50.
Oh, and all the rest of these are 50s and we're going to go right to the end.
Justin Kaler in Bluffton, Indiana.
Amy Zipkin in Greensboro, Georgia.
Kim Winship in Sarancho, Santa Fe.
Ray Howard in Kremling, Colorado.
Brandon Locklear in Sugar Hill, Georgia.
Danielle First in Kaukauna, Wisconsin.
Oh, I thought it was in Hawaii, but maybe it's Kakauna.
Ryan Sharp in Huntsville, Alabama.
Julie Minadeo in Costa Mesa, California.
Kyle Mann in Cincinnati.
Jill Woods in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.
Janet Alshouse in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Let me read this a little.
She has a 30-year career in TV news.
Done local, net, network, 24-hour and launch channel that rhymes with box booze.
What could it be?
Quit watching MSN cold turkey after trusted news initiative.
That's Janet Al's house.
And here she is!
Justin Heiner in Vinegrove, Kentucky.
Dotted Mind in Lincoln, UK.
Lincolnshire.
Claire Thornhill in Toronto, Ontario.
Tony Lang in Castle Pines, Colorado.
Robert Johnson in Lakewood, Florida.
Lakewood Ranch, Florida.
And Jordan Poino in Salem, Oregon.
Jonathan Peckham in Bristol, Rhode Island.
And Stephan Tuckney at TUCNY in Littleton, Colorado.
And last but not least is Aichi Kitagawa in San Francisco, California.
And I have one cash donation was given to me.
We had Black Knight Craig Weinberg and his wife Sarah over just after Memorial Day.
And their son Calvin is 16 and he makes his money while he can right now by cutting grass at a golf course.
Gave us $50 and a note.
Dear John and Adam, here's some cash for your troubles.
If you have any.
If you'd be so kind, could you please call out Stuart Tilma as a douchebag?
Thank you kindly from Calvin Weinberg.
We appreciate it, Calvin.
You're hard-earned cash.
We really do appreciate it.
And that is our entire list for today.
We highly appreciate everyone who supported us, especially our Executive Producers and Associate Executive Producers.
And we have those two Jobs Karmans by request.
Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
Let's vote for jobs!
And we added a goat, just for the twist!
Thank you again for supporting the Noah Jenner Show, episode 1560!
Our formula is this.
We go out, we hit people in the mouth.
Order!
Order!
Shut up, slave!
Shut up.
It's a birthday, birthday.
Oh, no, watch out.
Man, everything is short today, including the birthday list.
We have only one, and it's an insider.
Henry Mackie turns 12 years old today.
Happy birthday, Henry, from everybody here at the best podcast in the universe.
No titles, but we do have one Instant Knight.
That is Robert Pattinson Jr.
So we have our special Instant Knight blades out for you.
Got it.
And, ooh, careful where you swing that thing.
Robert Pattinson, Jr., step right up.
My dear friend, you are welcome here at the Round Table.
The Noah Jett and the Knights and Dames, thank you very much for your support of the show.
In the amount of $1,000 or more, I'm very proud to pronounce the K-V-S, Sir B-Lord of the Furries.
For you, we've got...
We've got cookies and vodka, warm beer and cold women, taquitos and taquilla, polish potato vodka, harlots and howl doll if you prefer, maybe redheads and rise, beers and blunts, rubaness, rumen and rosé, your thing, gangsters and sake, vodka and vanilla, bong hits and bourbon, sparkling cider and escorts, ginger ale and gerbils, breast milk and pablum, or maybe just the good old mutton and mead.
Since you didn't request anything special, I think the mutton and meat will suit you just fine.
Thank you very much.
And head over to NoAgendaRings.com.
Check out the handsome dame in night rings.
And of course, there's a helpful guide there to help you size it so we get the right size to you.
And please let us know where to send it.
And thank you again for becoming a knight of the No Agenda Roundtable.
No Agenda Meetups!
It's got your money!
Yes, a couple of meetups, no meetup reports, a written report.
I got a lot of pictures and videos from the No Agenda Pirates seeking booty flotilla, which was crazy.
That was in Florida.
Just a A whole bunch of drunk, no-agenda producers with their dogs in the water.
That was great.
We had a fabulous meet-up in the sea yesterday.
Myself, Sir Cum-Sized Guardian of the Fat Point, Dame Zil in a dress, Dame Rachel, Sir Edward, and a few other producers, Eric, Adler, Renee, and Mike made it out, along with some doggos, Buddy the Yellow Lab, and my sweet girl, Hannibal Lichter.
Poor dog, Hannibal Lichter, the red golden retriever.
What a time we had!
That's a great name for a dog.
Hannibal, Hannibal Lichter.
The second video has us doing the ITM since it was way too, yeah, it wasn't quite all of enough, but thank you very much.
I enjoyed looking at the, and the drone picture of you guys was good as well.
Tomorrow there will be a meet-up in the Netherlands, Amsterdam.
It's the Let's Go 6 Feet Under 6 o'clock in Stuyvesantstraat 6 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Joe the Big Club is organizing.
Miller's Alehouse in Tallahassee, Florida on Friday at 6.30.
We have on Saturday, Making Our Own Milieu at 4 o'clock, Cleveland Draft House in Garner, North Carolina.
On the next show day, Sunday, first ever Southeast Wyoming meet-up.
One o'clock, Chronicles Distilling, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Make sure you go there.
It's the first timer.
It's always cool if people show up.
And also on Sunday, the Mac and Cheese Four Days, 2 p.m.
Eastern at Dirtbag Alehouse in Hope Mills, North Carolina.
Just a few of the No Agenda meetups.
There are so many around the globe.
We're full.
I see stuff in July scheduled already.
Definitely check it out.
This is where you get your community.
Connection is protection.
And remember, if you can't find one near you, start one yourself.
It's easy.
Sometimes you want to go hang out with all the nights and days.
You want to be where you want to be.
And before we get to the ISOs, Paul Helmick wanted to give karma for his lawyer, Tom Corrigan, for winning his case Paul Helmick wanted to give karma for his lawyer, Tom Corrigan, for winning You've got karma.
See John, you CC me on the note and I take care of it.
Sorry?
Never mind.
Yeah, tell that.
I got a lot of ISOs.
Oh, well run through them as soon as you see winners.
Let me see, let me see.
1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2.
Here we go.
We're watching you, Ron.
I don't know.
That is so sweet.
This was great.
We will not be in panic.
We will not be in panic.
By the way, I forgot this when we got, uh, some human resource was abused.
You bendy dudes!
Just had to play that.
And here's the one I think that should win.
I believe that AI could eat us.
And I think that's kind of a winner.
I kind of like the other one better.
Do you like, uh, this one?
This was great.
That one?
Yeah.
Okay.
I think it was clear.
Oh, it's clear.
All right.
What do you have?
I don't know if I have anything to top that, but I do have three.
Okay.
First of all, I have aliens.
Probably not aliens.
Okay.
I got bang.
Bang, ding, ow.
What is that?
Bang, ding, ow?
Bang, ding, ow.
Where's that from?
It's from the famous, uh, well, you'll hear the whole thing and I probably should let that one out later.
That was one of the pilots on the plane that crashed in San Francisco.
Oh, bang, ding, ow.
I remember that.
Yes, of course.
Holy Fook.
Yes.
And the last one is this one.
Totally.
No, I think mine wins.
Probably.
Yeah, let me just check this one.
This was great!
Yeah, I think that's a winner.
I think that's a winner.
For our trans-Maoism segment, I have a couple of... I have a slew of clips for this.
Oh, good.
Well, first, let's see how this is being ramped up.
Because, of course, there's so much extreme right-wing hatred towards LGBTQ, that Department of Homeland Security is issuing warnings!
Department of Homeland Security is warning of a potential troubling escalation in tactics from right-wing extremists.
Catherine Herridge has more on this, and she joins us from Washington.
Catherine, we understand the power grid could be a target?
Good morning.
According to the intelligence report obtained by CBS News, these groups have developed credible and specific plans to attack the power grid since at least 2020 as a way to disrupt the country and the ability of government to operate.
The report warns extremists adhering to a range of ideologies will likely continue to plot and encourage physical attacks against power networks, which include more than 6,400 plants and nearly a half million miles of high-voltage lines.
While the bulletin emphasized small-scale attacks are unlikely to cause widespread power loss, it may cause disruption to critical infrastructure like hospitals and police departments.
Homeland Security noted several indicators, including online chatter.
While the report does not suggest an imminent threat, the Homeland Security Secretary has warned, lone wolf actors and small bands of extremists are among the greatest domestic threat because they are hard to detect, disrupt, and can mobilize quickly.
Bull crap!
This is, this is, this is so wrong.
Online chatter, John.
Online chatter.
Because, you know, they're all terrorists.
You know, when you boycott Target, by the way, you're a terrorist.
Just letting you know.
According to MSNBC.
When Target caves into this...
Then it says that the moment you threaten the employees of even a very large corporation, you get to control its policies.
This is economic terrorism.
Literally terrorism.
Creating fear among the workers and forcing the corporations to sell the things you want and not sell the things you don't.
You see how this is being turned?
Now it's to reject something that's being sold in a store by not going there.
Now you are putting the people who work there in harm's way.
And we got boots on the ground from a producer whose wife is a store manager for Carter's Oshkosh.
I'm not sure, I'm not familiar with this store.
Are you familiar with Carter's Oshkosh?
No, it's probably regional.
Was summoned to an emergency call this morning.
They usually only have one of these calls if there's a major personnel shift in corporate, so the rumors were running wild.
The call was covering the latest Target situation and how the company was planning to handle it.
Carter does sell into major retailers like Targets and Kohl's.
They also have a line of children's clothes that are alphabet people friendly, but the messages are neutral.
Things like a rainbow with the caption, love everybody, and have been selling them for years with no issues.
Today the stores were informed that they are to pull those products and direct customers who ask for them to their website for the safety of the employees.
They also had some window marketing that would have gone up today and that has also been cancelled.
From my experience, Carter's has been one of the better large companies keeping their politics out of the workplace.
During COVID, they never forced the death jab on people.
They never even asked what employee status was.
I'm hoping that this means the pendulum is starting to swing the other way.
The CEO referred to the Bud Light effect as well as the effect of their employees as the reason for the product pull.
So, this is now finally starting to dawn on companies that, hmm, maybe not such a great idea.
This is, of course, directed from on high.
The whole concept of this comes from the DEI, the ESG, and the now CEI, the Corporate Equity Index, which kind of forced these corporations into doing this kind of stuff.
And someone sent me a clip, it was very interesting, Beth Brooke Marciniak, Who, um, she was, she was, she's some bigwig, used to be somewhere, and she, she... This was in, this was in the newsletter.
Oh, is this what you were talking about?
This is the, the PGLE?
I don't know what PGLE is.
Partnership for Global LGBTQ Equality?
Oh no, this is something else.
Okay, well here she is talking about, this is from the Sustainable Business Network Conference.
Why don't you tell the audience about PGLE, what does it do, why is it important, and we would love to have more companies join in.
But this story about Davos and the handful of us that found each other.
So the PGLE, Partnership for Global LGBTI Equality, this is a group that was formed in collaboration with the World Economic Forum after five or six years of working behind the scenes with senior leaders at just a handful of companies.
This organization was founded in January of 2019.
Can you believe that?
The World Economic Forum just agreed to do it this January.
So we have, they're in collaboration with them.
We can use their channels of distribution, their brand.
They're now in the mainstream, on the main stage in Davos and into the mainstream of the programming at the World Economic Forum.
It's founded by seven companies.
We are signing on more.
We want more.
We have 14 now.
But what are we committed to do?
We are committed to change the world for LGBTI inclusion around the world.
Not by competing with other LGBTI organizations, but by amplifying and lifting.
By using the platform of the World Economic Forum, both in Davos, but also regionally and around the world.
Also working with the UN, trying to get these companies, you have to have signed on to the UN standards in order to join the partnership.
How many companies have signed on to that now?
270.
Our goal is to get many, many more, and then to work around the world, both not only in sharing best practices among the companies, but their strength in numbers.
So with the Platform of the World Economic Forum, the power of the UN, and then finally the strength in the companies working together, where when you combine the economies, the corporate economies of those 14 countries, we're bigger than a lot of countries.
So tremendous power.
In Davos a couple of years ago, Vice President Biden met privately with those of us working behind the scenes and he sat down with us and looked us in the eye and he said, you can do, you companies can do what we government cannot and will never do.
You have to change the world on this issue.
There you go.
And some of these founding members will not be a surprise.
Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, Coca-Cola Company, Edelman, Ernst & Young, all the advertisers certainly figured out here.
Human Rights Watch, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Salesforce, Scotiabank, GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, McKinsey & Company, Novartis, Nestle, WPP.
No wonder!
No wonder it's being thrown at everybody.
It's the whole advertising community are all in on this.
You've got some links in the show notes to take a look at.
So I picked up a weird series of clips from NPR.
Now this woman, I don't, this is called the trans the other side, this is the other side of all these arguments you have about, you know, mutilating kids.
Oh, okay.
This is the other side of the argument.
The other side, oh.
This is the pro side.
Yes, okay, good, we need that.
So we're gonna, this is a balanced show, we do both sides.
That's right.
But what was weird about this, this was, I picked this up on the NPR news feed, and There was two things.
One, it wasn't introduced by anybody.
It was just this woman shows up right at the beginning.
I don't know who it is.
Somebody with a British accent.
And she does this whole segment.
And I don't know who it is.
She's never outro'd.
And the weirdest thing to me was, since I record the whole hour of the NPR feed, it came in at a notable Maybe I'd say at least 8 to 10 dBs lower than the regular audio.
Huh.
Because it was very noticeable you have the high spikes of the normal audio and then there's this thing shows up as a little like a like a thing.
It's like what the hell?
Like was pre-produced but produced improperly?
It was pre-produced and never never potted up right.
Hmm.
And I have no idea what they were thinking or what was doing there.
I mean, I just fixed it, of course.
But besides just fixing it, I had to do interstitial fixes.
No.
Because the volume was going up and down and up and down in every which way.
It was a piece of shit, to be honest about it.
You had to do some real work here.
You had to ride the fader.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
And so, uh, But I still don't know where this came from, why they ran it, who was behind it, or anything else, but it pretty much presents the other side of the trans debate, and here we go, it's clip one.
Across the country, conservatives are targeting transgender people with legislation restricting their medical care.
19 states across the U.S.
have already passed laws banning at least some kind of gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
In Texas, lawmakers passed a bill earlier this month that would prohibit doctors from providing surgeries and essential medication for transgender youth.
This type of care is evidence-based and supported by the majority of doctors But Governor Greg Abbott has promised to sign the legislation when it comes across his desk.
Okay.
So this is Texas.
Yeah.
There's a lot of Texas in here.
Texas is targeting, being targeted by the way.
We want to erase them.
And so it's, the way they present this is, there's an interesting little contradiction throughout the report which is, All we've been hearing is, we don't operate and sterilize under 18.
There's nothing we do.
Even though there's tons of documentation that they do it.
Hold on, just literally three doctors left Dell Children's Hospital over this bill.
Dell Children's Hospital.
They left because they couldn't do their affirming care.
Yeah.
Just saying.
So here, because they couldn't do it, they couldn't operate and butcher these kids.
To put it mildly, yes.
Did I use that word okay?
Yes.
But this is again, this is the other side of the argument, so they're making, you know, they're leaving information out, and it's as if half the children in this country are They want to transition, they all do.
Well, we have to be honest about it, that the way the therapists are operating, they are indeed telling almost every child who has some typical child social issues or the anxiety issues, you may be a boy, you may be a girl, maybe it's time for some testosterone or some estrogen.
So yeah, that is happening, even though that is not really Gender dysphoria.
So here we go, part two.
Under the bill, any transgender minors already on gender-affirming medication will be required to be weaned off the drug when the legislation becomes law.
For more, let's bring in Teresa Gaffney.
She's been reporting on this for our partners at STAT News, the health and medicine publication.
Welcome Teresa.
Thank you for having me.
Teresa, what's happening in Texas comes as states across the country are targeting gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
How does this legislation from Texas... Wow, this is a script, John.
This is a total script!
...get into that picture?
And are they using the same language?
I want to stop it again.
I mentioned something else.
At first when I saw the levels being so low, and then I jacked them up as best I could without, you know, distorting the feed, I realized that part of this whole thing and all the people that are involved, that woman who is the host, Whoever she is.
And then this guest, they're talking in beyond normal NPR style.
So you have to strain to listen, which is, we know, is an effective mechanism to get people to remember things better.
Because you're, what?
So this is done on purpose.
So continue, sorry.
I'm just saying, Stat News delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and life sciences.
This seems like one of those outfits that you can order a report from.
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
Yeah, okay.
This bill is one that's similar to many other health care bills targeting trans youth, prohibiting, as you mentioned, medication for minors.
So it's targeting gender-affirming hormones and puberty blockers, and the language is mostly similar to the other bills across the country.
They all specifically target People who are trying to use these medications because of their gender identity.
This language of weaning people off the medication is slightly different, but a handful of other states include similar stipulations to systemically reduce gender-affirming care in the same way.
So let's talk about the specific medications that are targeted in this bill.
Tell me what those medications do.
What puberty blockers do is they stop the process of puberty Wow.
Patently false.
Lie.
for people who don't want their voice to lower or to grow certain hair, have their breasts grow, these will stop those changes.
You can stop taking the medication at any time and those processes will start up again. - Wow, patently false lie.
Stat News is owned by John Henry, who was also the owner of the Boston Globe and the Boston Red Sox.
Quick note.
My decision to create a new publication about health, medicine, and life sciences began to shape during a dinner I attended in Boston during the summer of 2014, about a year after I'd purchased the Boston Globe.
Two dozen of us had been invited by Eric Schmidt The executive chairman of Google to discuss why Boston, which had once had an opportunity to claim the mantle as a nation's tech hub, had been elipsed by Silicon Valley.
This is a bunch of elitist douchebags!
In that last report that woman uses an interesting phrase about getting about these bills and she says systemically reduce.
Hmm.
The use of the word systemic which stems from it was popularized by BLM with systemic racism.
Yep.
I think was used purposefully because the word systemic is one of those code words that the left likes.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
You know, just the whole, it's bugging me, the reason that this was different levels and the reason why it sounds scripted is because it is.
This is a report delivered by Stat News.
They might have even purchased this airtime for all we know.
The way it looks it's a might and that might be the reason that NPR was so careless about Well, you gave it at this level, this is where we're going to send it out.
Yeah.
F them.
We're not going to do any work.
It's not our report.
You can just see someone saying that.
I can.
I imagine someone in the control room saying that.
Yeah, exactly.
Part 3.
Gender-affirming hormones, those are things so someone who's a trans man might want to take testosterone so that someone's gender presentation aligns more with their gender identity.
Got it.
And just to be clear too, the puberty... Come on!
Got it.
That's a journalistic retort.
Someone's gender presentation aligns more with their gender identity.
Got it.
And just to be clear too, the puberty blockers that you're talking about, there are other minors who may not be transgender, maybe they just hit puberty very very early and their doctor decides it's a good idea for them to take it just to stave it off for a period of time until they hit a more appropriate age?
Hmm.
So I thought that, talk about leading the witness.
Yeah.
Which confirms that it's a script.
Yeah it is, yeah.
I just thought that this was like, okay, so every kid, if you can remember back in the sixth grade, you know, kids start to mature at different rates and some girls all of a sudden, you know, the ones that turn out to be pretty popular start, you know, getting big up top earlier than others.
And the other girls are jealous because, you know, they're flat and they make a fuss about it.
And, but what they mentioned in there, what guy What male doesn't want his voice deepening?
You want to have a squeaky voice?
Well, that depends.
I mean, if you've been told that you're really a girl, then off you go.
That was part four.
For a period of time until they hit a more appropriate age?
Yes, that's correct.
So, cisgender children whose gender identities align with their sex assigned at birth, if they start going through puberty too early, they'll go on puberty blockers.
And when their doctor and them decide it's the right time to be going through puberty, they just simply stop taking that medication.
This is a lie!
We know this is not, this doesn't work that way.
No.
No, it doesn't.
It's hard to believe, but anyway, here we go with part five and it's wrapping up.
This is the longest clip.
The next one is quite short after that.
Okay, let's talk about the language in the bill to wean transgender youth off the medication.
I want to quote here, in a manner that is safe and medically appropriate and that minimizes the risk of complications.
But you spoke to a number of doctors about this idea of weaning trans people off medication that they need.
What did they tell you?
So, I spoke to physicians and researchers, experts, and they all said the exact same thing, which is that there's no appropriate way to do this because it's medically necessary treatment.
It is never medically appropriate to take away gender from in care that someone does not want to stop.
So it sounds like maybe what's happening in the Texas legislature is not based in science.
That's right.
So one physician, her name is Meredith McNamara at Yale, she told me these people have no idea what they're legislating.
This is not based on science.
There's not research on how to wean trans kids off of gender-affirming care because it's most of the time not something that they want to do.
It's not appropriate to take away care that someone wants and so there's no science, yeah, based in this legislation.
Okay, and yeah, you have a number of doctors.
In your article attesting to that, but you do talk in your article about this other grave consequence for trans youth, and that's their mental health.
They're more likely to consider suicide than their peers already, but what are doctors saying about the impact a law like this might have, you know, on their general mental health?
Let me guess, let me guess, this is also debunked, let me guess, Well, you know, you ween them off and they're going to commit suicide.
I'm just guessing.
In fact, a law like this might have, you know, on their general mental health.
Yeah, so there are no, as you kind of mentioned, there are no known physical complications from stopping gender-affirming medication all at once.
The most serious consequence is for trans kids' mental health, and that is going to occur no matter how slowly people stop taking the medication.
But there is a lot of data showing that Delayed access to this care negatively impacts people's mental health.
So, yeah, LGBTQ people and especially trans youth consider suicide at much higher rates than their cisgender peers.
And so experts are worried that there's going to be a surge of mental health crises when people stop having access to this medication.
Wow.
Wow.
This script is unbelievable.
Shame on NPR for even calling this the other side, or did you call it the other side?
Well, I'm the one that calls it the other side.
But this is just a purchased- As I said, it just shows up in the feed.
No, this is purchased, this is slipped in there, this is a favor, whatever it is, it's from a bunch of ghouls.
It's a native ad.
It's a native ad from ghouls.
And it's unscientific, it's unscientific!
So now the last thing is a 16 second clip.
And this is the outro.
This is she's just signing off and telling that woman goodbye.
And then she slips in a little tidbit at the end to drive home what you just brought up.
And I've never heard this on a report like this before.
I'm going to so I decided to play through the outro.
I usually cut the outros, but this is the outro.
And here we go.
Teresa Gaffney is a reporter and podcast producer for STAT News.
Thank you so much, Teresa.
Thank you.
And if you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Podcast producer from STAT.
Okay, got it.
Decided over a dinner with Eric Schmidt from Google.
Yeah, that's a quality dude right there.
Well, I too have something to share.
Boots on the ground for one of our very brave parents.
We've established that there is a big difference to how girls are approached and coaxed into transitioning to be a boy.
Uh, which is 80% of the children who are, uh, who transition, uh, versus boys.
And, um, uh, two episodes ago we had one of the Wachowski, uh, sisters, formerly known as the Wachowski brothers, saying, you know, I, and the Wachowski brothers are just not attractive men.
They're, you know, level Harvey Weinstein unattractive.
And, uh, and, uh, I think it was Lisa.
Is that her name?
His name?
Whatever.
Said, well, you know, once I saw transgender women in porn, well, then all of a sudden I figured, oh, maybe I could be loved.
And I thought that was a very telling statement.
And one of our producers sends me this note, which I want to share because we've learned something new about a particular type of porn, which seems to be responsible for young men wanting to transition to become women.
Over the last two years, my 23-year-old stepson, whom I've known since he was two, has become a non-functioning member of society.
Smokes weed all day, loses menial jobs after two months, started wearing nail polish, women's earrings, and effeminate shirts, hanging out with trans people.
His ability to reason logically is gone.
Nothing that he says makes sense.
Every time we talk, I point out the things that do not make sense to me.
I point out that he is a non-serious person and needs to dress like a normal human to be successful.
Sounds like some of the TikTok clips you play.
It has destroyed our relationship.
My wife wants everything to just be okay and let him be him.
It has done damage to our relationship.
He called today.
He never calls me.
He thanked me for challenging him on his bullcrap and told me that he is in treatment for a porn addiction.
He explained that he is addicted to something called Sissy Hypnoporn, short for Sissification Hypnotic Pornography.
Now, I'm sure you've never heard of it.
I'd never heard of it.
He explains that this is sweeping the nation and every male in their 20s knows about it and uses it.
Hello producers, why am I only hearing this now?
He explained that 99% of the guys that are transitioning or dress effeminately are addicted to sissy hypnoporn.
Wow!
He was about to pick up and move to Boston where people were there to help him create an OnlyFans and navigate making a living basically as a sex worker.
Thankfully something snapped and realized that this porn has messed up his life.
And then he has, I cannot play any of this audio, but luckily our producer used to be a hypnotherapist.
He studied persuasion, manipulation, covert persuasion.
This is seriously effed up crap.
Manipulation using our most instinctive Drives at the most vulnerable time in a young adult's life where the result is separation of youth from their existing and future familiar bonds.
This is purposeful destruction of lives for the purpose of destroying our culture.
And he says, this is what it is.
It is sissification of men in sexual, uh, in, uh, in porn with, and there's like, it's remix now.
With voiceover saying, you are the girl, you are the girl, you are the girl.
And it says it over and over when a man is watching straight porn video.
It invokes first-person visual and kinesthetic experience as a woman, which is then anchored by climax.
Next time you climax, you think about being a woman.
There's countdowns and it's ASMR.
He says this is very, as a hypnotherapist, a former hypnotherapist, says this is very, very dangerous and he says it's all over TikTok.
He thinks it's a very important topic and we need to be on the lookout for it.
Now, there's some links in the show notes, so, you know, explore at your own risk.
One other thing... Yes, because you could be hypnotized!
One other thing... No, no, as Biden would say, no joke.
Now, you know, there's a category, forced feminization.
This has been a porn category for a long time, but now they're remixing this with these voiceovers.
So true hypnotizing, hypnotization.
And, you know, I think it's pretty well known, and we've discussed this throughout the years, that today's young men have a very distorted view of sex because of porn.
And they're very rough with girls and with young women, and, you know, we've seen this take place over quite a number of years, and we've had a lot of producers talk about it.
Yes, we actually invited people to give us stories, and we got to the point where we couldn't read these stories.
One other thing, his therapist has convinced him that we, his parents, are his abusers.
We abuse him by not supporting who he is.
So until today, he claimed that he was unsafe and felt very threatened in our very presence.
A direct result of his therapist, of course, who was an absolute hack.
So this is, you know, this is great information for our producers out there.
Keep an eye on your kids, people.
Keep an eye on your kids.
This is terrible!
It is!
We have a series of phony baloney reports on NPR.
We have big money supporting all this.
We have therapists who are out of control and probably partly responsible for the whole situation.
And then we have butchers that are posing as and are licensed as doctors.
Yep.
And to be fair, we know from our therapists, who are brave as well, that they have no other option.
This is what they are told to recommend.
By the American Association of Psychology, I think it is.
And by the American Association of Pediatrics.
And if they don't, if they don't comply and there's a complaint... Yeah, then get your license pulled.
You get your license pulled, your insurance goes away.
So you're not really licensed to do anything but obey.
And the butchers, as you call them, look, they used to, five, ten years ago, they did boob jobs for girls, and butt lifts, and whatever.
Vag... Vag... Vagoplasty.
I'm sure that's the right word.
You know, because, oh, it doesn't look like the porn movies.
Thanks, Internet.
Well, I'm not blaming the Internet for this.
No.
So, that's disturbing.
And I mean, I think I'm pretty hip to stuff.
I had never heard of this.
Now you have, so you're hip again.
Thank God I'm hip again.
So I got a report from China.
China's over here, you know, trying to capture some of their citizens.
They could just waltz into the country, I think.
Especially San Francisco and take over the place.
You're pivoting away from the sissy hypno porn, I take it?
Yeah, definitely.
Opening arguments are being heard at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse.
Three men are accused of acting as illegal agents for China.
They're accused of pressuring a New Jersey resident to return to China to face embezzlement and bribery charges.
All three men pleaded not guilty.
The names of the defendants are Zhang Xiuying, Zhu Yong, Sum Ching Wong, And Michael McMahon, a former New York City policeman who was working as a private investigator.
Prosecutors Sayju and others in 2016 hired McMahon to watch and investigate Xu Jin, a former Chinese Communist Party official who has lived in the United States since 2010.
Prosecutors said Zhang in 2018 left a handwritten note on Xu's door which read in Chinese, If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be alright.
In opening statements before a federal jury, McMahon's lawyer said his client was told he was working for a Chinese construction company trying to recover assets.
And he alerted local law enforcement of his activities.
The lawyer said, if he's secretly acting on behalf of the Chinese government, is he going to call the cops and tell them?
He had no idea, none, that he was working for China.
Now what do you think this is about?
What do you think is going on here?
The whole country is infiltrated with these Chinese spies that are doing everything they can to keep Anyone that has any familiarity with the Chinese Communist Party, get it.
Because there's dissidents.
Yeah, yeah.
Just get them back to China in any way you can.
And they're intimidating people.
It's totally illegal.
But we're spending as much time.
We are starting to spend time on this.
But now that you bring up these things about these therapists who are breaking families up and doing other crazy things, I think we should be looking at that, too.
There's a lot of activity in this country that is not being monitored well.
It's interesting you say that, where was this, there was something Yeah, here it is.
The Council on Foreign Relations released a report on fentanyl and the U.S.
opioid epidemic.
Now, it's the Council on Foreign Relations, so take it for the truth you want to.
Where are heroin and fentanyl coming from?
Most of the heroin coming into the United States is cultivated in poppy farms in Mexico with several major cartels controlling production, operating distribution hubs in major U.S.
cities.
You know, we were talking about China being to blame here.
Mexican cartels typically smuggle narcotics across the southwestern U.S.
border in commercial and passenger vehicles, moving through ports of entry or via underground tunnels.
Large quantities of heroin are also produced in South American countries, particularly Colombia, traveling to the United States by air and sea.
Most fentanyl in the United States is also smuggled across the southern border, U.S.
officials say.
Fentanyl coming directly from China, previously the dominant source, has significantly decreased since 2019, but China is still the main manufacturer of the ingredients needed to create fentanyl.
Drug cartels have been the leaders in fentanyl production.
Larger organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have their own distribution networks.
Some also depend on American citizens to smuggle fentanyl across the border.
Between 2017 and 2021, 86% of fentanyl traffickers were American citizens.
Well, hello!
That's interesting.
But are they American citizens of Mexican descent?
That was, of course, not mentioned.
Well, that should be mentioned.
Now let's stick with China for a moment.
South Korea reports seizing thousands of smuggled drug capsules containing an unusual added ingredient.
The powdered flesh from dead babies.
Some people believe they can cure disease.
The Korea Customs Service says they were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder.
But they wouldn't say where they believed the babies came from or exactly who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing.
The contents, though, were identified by scientific testing.
When we analyzed it, the powdered material sequence is better than a 99.7% match with a human DNA sequence.
No one's been reported ill from ingesting them, but scientist Shin Woo Gi warns they have the potential to be dangerous.
We also see superbacteria and other germs and viruses harmful to a person if consumed.
Some of the capsules were carried in luggage, others were sent by international mail.
The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and didn't know the manufacturing process.
One official said no one's been punished, but a customs clearance director at Incheon Airport warned consumers should be careful about health food supplements where the ingredients aren't clearly marked.
Man, that puts a new bent on baby powder.
Okay, I gave you a clip of the day for that thing.
I mean, this is baby powder?
What are we talking about here, people?
Unbelievable.
Meanwhile, state visit.
Big visit.
Good old Elon, hanging out in Beijing.
I'm Mr. Musk.
What's the goal of your China trip?
Surrounded by bodyguards strutting through a Beijing hotel lobby, Elon Musk's first visit to China in three years is an important one.
For Beijing, and for the auto, social media, and space executive.
Praising the vitality of Chinese development, Musk met with the Minister of Commerce, the Minister of Industry, and the Foreign Minister to discuss Tesla's place in China and the future of its technology there.
For last year, China manufactured half of the company's global output, some 700,000 Model Y and Model 3s.
Sales of the cars were also significant, with China being the Model Y's biggest market.
Slashing prices has also helped with the increasingly competitive industry in China.
China.
There's also a geopolitical aspect to the trip.
Amidst tensions between China and the U.S., Musk has regularly struck a sympathetic tone towards Beijing, saying according to the foreign ministry that the U.S. and China are like conjoined twins that should not be decoupled.
China always welcomes business leaders from all countries, including Elon Musk, to visit China and gain a better understanding and promote mutual cooperation.
The visit comes as there are rising calls in the U.S.
and in Europe for reducing dependency on Chinese supply chains.
And as foreign companies in China are increasingly voicing concerns after a series of corporate raids.
Yeah, Elon, just no problem for Elon.
Do any kind of business he wants.
It's all good.
And while we look at China as the source of fentanyl and the problems we have in the United States, this all of course started with opioids being over-prescribed.
There's a lot of good documentaries about it and NBC follows up.
Now to a landmark ruling stemming from the nation's opioid crisis.
A federal appeals court has cleared the way for a bankruptcy deal that would shield members of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, from future civil lawsuits.
The Sacklers earned billions of dollars from the sale of Oxycontin and other opioid painkillers.
As part of the settlement, they would pay as much as $6 billion and give up control of Purdue.
The settlement must still be approved by a bankruptcy court judge.
And they're safe!
Safe, everybody.
Of course, everyone focuses on the Sackler family, but meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson, I think they had to pay $23 billion in fines for their participation in it, along with, I want to say, Walgreens?
I don't want to be careful there.
Uh, you know, for distribution.
I mean, the whole thing is just being covered up.
But don't worry, Dr. Jen is here with another virus to be afraid of!
Back with our GMA cover story, a respiratory virus called HMPV.
The search term has over 10 million views on TikTok, as many people are wondering what exactly it is.
Don't you love that as some kind of, uh...
Uh, justification?
Hey, you know, there's over 10 million searches on TikTok for HMPV.
Oh, that must mean something's really going on there, or it's being spiked.
The search term has over 10 million views on TikTok, as many people are wondering what exactly it is.
Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jen Ashton is here to explain.
It presents like a cold.
Pretty much.
Upper respiratory infection, most of the time, it can hit the lower respiratory tract.
It's not new.
It was first identified over 20 years ago.
But CDC is tracking a higher number of cases before the pandemic even started.
This is the same virus as RSV, measles, mumps.
Symptoms, just like you said, George, kind of a bad cold, nasal congestion, cough.
You can see a fever, occasionally shortness of breath.
It can progress to bronchitis or in some cases pneumonia.
But this is a perfect example.
We've been so COVID-RSV influenza focused, we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And that's not the only virus out there.
This is just another example.
Oh, just another example.
There's many viruses.
Be very afraid.
Do we have a treatment for it, Dr. Jin?
And it is a virus, so is it treatable?
So no vaccine right now, no antiviral treatment per se.
We normally just follow this and treat conservatively based on symptoms.
Most people recover on their own, so treatment is what we call supportive.
So why is there a report?
You know, most of the time people will get better within five or seven days.
How you prevent it, people are bored and tired of hearing about this, but it bears repeating.
Hand hygiene, staying away from others if you're sick, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, the basics.
But will it kill me?
And the virus spiked this spring, how serious could it get?
Well, I mean, we have to track these things.
And I know people have that, you know, pandemic fatigue and psychological fatigue and they don't like hearing about it.
So we don't know.
Viruses mutate for a living.
It can always change.
John, did you know that viruses mutate for a living?
Yeah, they get more money that way.
No, viruses mutate for a living.
It can always change.
Our susceptibility can change.
We have to remember, it's how we behave, how the virus behaves, and how we behave together.
No, it's our fault!
And they started to see an increase, 36% increase in cases, even before the pandemic started.
So, most of the time we're out of the season by this time.
But people just need to keep this on their radar.
Yeah, just keep it on your radar.
I think NPR got it better by they were able to take care of this in 18 seconds with the real virus.
The FDA has approved a second vaccine that protects adults 60 and over from the common respiratory virus RSV.
This one is made by Pfizer.
RSV usually causes a cold for most people but for older people and babies it can cause serious or life-threatening complications.
It's interesting because I've never really heard of RSV being a problem for old people.
I never heard of any of these things before this recent.
Well, Tina said that when her kids were young that RSV, it was known, it was around, and she was, of course, careful.
So for moms... They start things differently at different ages.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, since you're on the bullshit clips, let's go to the climate WTF clip, the climate clip of the day.
Oh, here we go.
According to a new study, Earth is in the danger zone when it comes to seven out of eight specific ecological metrics, both in terms of overheating and losing its natural areas, as well as the well-being of people living on the planet.
Study looked at not just specific guardrails in terms of the planetary ecosystem, but also measures of justice in terms of preventing harm for groups of people.
Study looked at climate, air pollution, phosphorus and nitrogen pollution, groundwater supplies, and a number of other factors.
Ah, I heard nitrogen in there.
That's new, now that it was successful in the Netherlands.
Yeah, and justice, of course, was mentioned.
Of course, justice, yeah.
Did you see the Swedish dance show where the climate activist showed up?
You must have seen this video.
Yeah, I did.
Where the camera jib just slams the guy right in the face.
Do you think that was on purpose?
Well, I don't know if you've ever played with one of those jibs.
Sure.
We had one at Tech TV and everyone got to play with it.
Once you get the hang of using that thing, yeah, it was on purpose.
That was harsh.
And I'm sure these kids are like, hey man, that's not how it's supposed to go.
You're not supposed to bop me in the face with that.
So we got a letter from our Veritas guy.
Ah yes, the former executive director of Project Veritas.
Sir Strack.
Here is Sir Strack.
So we have a report that came in after A recent report.
This is a Veritas Update you might want to play.
Oh, hold on a second.
Veritas Update.
Yes, I see it here.
Looking now at Project Veritas, which is now openly at odds with its founder and former chairman, James O'Keefe.
The organization filed a lawsuit against O'Keefe today.
Project Veritas filed the complaint in the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York.
It accuses O'Keefe of several wrongdoings, including breach of fiduciary duty, financial misconduct, and workplace abuse.
The board of directors at Project Veritas considered removing O'Keefe from the board in February and placed him on paid leave over alleged management issues.
He was terminated on May 15th.
O'Keefe founded Project Veritas around 2010 as an undercover journalism group to expose corruption by government officials and corporations.
He launched a new organization in March called the O'Keefe Media Group.
Yeah, it looks like... Now, what did our guy say?
He said, I didn't agree with the stuff they were doing.
I think something like that.
Oh, I can't remember exactly, but he just bailed out.
He bailed out.
Something bugged him.
I bet you it was probably this.
Probably.
And so they're suing him over misappropriation of funds and approaching donors.
I mean, no one's going to win this.
No, this is not a winnable case.
But it'll just drag everybody down, it'll drain everybody's bank account.
Lawyers will win.
Yeah, y'all should talk and just sort it out.
No one's going to win that way.
Our guy has not said anything about this, and he may not know because he wasn't there that long, but there has to be a personality conflict within the company, a major one.
Within the board, I think.
Yeah, within the board.
Somebody hates this guy, and he hates them.
Yes.
And it's usually just that simple.
Yes.
Sad, sad to see that happen.
It happened, sad.
There's a couple of Russian things in the news.
Your buddy?
I have one Russian story.
All right, let's roll with your Russian story.
But this is a good, this is a feel-good story.
I'm not sure we should play it at the beginning.
Okay, what is this?
This is the Beluga Spy Whale.
Yeah, I love this story.
I'm glad you got this.
To news now of an alleged Russian spy turning up in Sweden.
He's white, about 15 feet tall, weighs around a ton, and is an excellent swimmer, a beluga whale.
As NPR's Rob Schmitz reports, locals are convinced the giant mammal has been trained by the Russian military.
The beluga whale that locals have named Valdemir, Val being Norwegian for whale, first showed up four years ago along the Norwegian coast as marine biologist Sebastian Strand.
The very peculiar thing with Valdemir is he arrived with a harness strapped to him, which read property of St.
Petersburg.
That, of course, sparked a whole bunch of theories on his origins.
The most prominent one?
Voldemir was trained by Russia's military for intelligence purposes.
He is, without a doubt, trained, because he responds to, or used to, at least, respond to common Russian training signals.
And several of the behaviors that we see him repeat, even to this day, are things that we know that the military whale programs also train the whales to do.
Russia has neither confirmed nor denied Valdimir is one of their own, but both the U.S.
and Russia are known to have military training programs incorporating aquatic mammals.
Strand worked for the non-profit One Whale, devoted to caring for Valdimir.
In fact, when we reached him, he was on a boat following the whale.
Strand and his colleagues are worried about Valdimir because it's clear he's been trained by humans and has a hard time finding food by himself, so he's constantly seeking human interaction.
There are viral videos of Valdemir picking up a camera dropped by a kayaker, another picking up a woman's phone.
Strand thinks Valdemir's lonely.
A big part of our goal is also reuniting him with others of his own species.
And if he ever does, he can leave his spying career for the humans behind him.
Wait a minute.
So they're just making up the spy part just because he's been trained that, oh, he's Russian, so therefore he must be a spy whale?
Well he was found with a camera on him strapped on him when they found him.
I read some of the stories about it and they said he was spying on mostly on fishermen seeing what their catch looked like.
We had a beluga whale story about a year and a half ago.
Beluga whales, by the way, are one of the prettiest animals you can imagine.
Very cute.
And they just have a nice quality about them.
Do you remember the beluga whale near France, I think?
Uh, no.
Hold on, let's just see if this story has anything.
A beluga whale, which usually lives in arctic and subarctic waters, has been spotted in the Seine River heading toward Paris.
Now that's a spotted whale right there, man!
The protected species is thousands of miles away from its habitat, but it's not the first whale that's mysteriously ended up in the Seine.
And if you're a Paris correspondent, Eleanor Beardsley reports.
That sounds to me like there's a spy ring of beluga whales we haven't been aware of.
Like a phantom, it's the incursion of the polar world into the troubled waters of the sun, says this French television news report, showing the white beluga whale swimming slowly through the river's dark waters.
Patrick Ayrault was one of the firefighters who filmed the whale with a drone.
It's an impressive animal.
All white.
That seems very tranquil.
He doesn't seem stressed.
He comes up for air regularly.
Because he's a spy!
But authorities say the whale is stressed and fleeing any contact.
Its normal habitat is off Norway, Russia or Canada.
Emmanuel Pascoviel with the Normandy Prefecture of Police is in charge of the unit tracking the whale.
This is bullcrap.
Alright, well, nice.
Spy whale.
Your buddy Claire Daly is mad.
She's the Irish representative in European Parliament.
MEP.
MEP, Member of European Parliament.
And I guess she's tired of the Russian stuff.
Thanks very much, President.
Tomorrow the Parliament votes on the second Cagnetta report on foreign interference.
A sprawling, paranoid, McCarthyist tract stigmatising whole sections of society and opposition politics under the spectre of Russian interference.
Calling for a battery of repressive measures.
And now here we are discussing the threat to democracy and the rule of law Because the Polish government goes off on a mad one against its political opponents under the guise of exactly the same thing.
Four years now, any time any old rumour of foreign interference has wafted out of the paranoid imaginations of the security sector think tanks that parade in here day after day, we roll out the red carpet.
We encourage, fund and amplify conspiracy theories about Russian interference based on the flimsiest of evidence.
And from day one the left warned that this is a bad road to go down.
Learn from history.
Counterintelligence paranoia erodes democratic values and the rule of law.
For four years we've been ignored, we've been slandered, and now four groups, the willing little helpers of the foreign interference crusade, are crying foul.
She's being abused.
It's a threat to fundamental rights.
It's a threat to the rule of law.
Well, remember where you heard it first.
We don't like to say we told you so, but we did tell you so.
Pot.
Kettle.
Black.
Man, I like listening to her.
Yeah, but what is she talking about here?
Well, so apparently there's Russian influence, you know, like Donald Trump stuff.
Russian influence campaign.
They're propaganda.
They're infiltrating a European Parliament.
Now they're all freaked out about it.
McCarthyism is on its way.
According to Claire.
What does she know about McCarthyism?
McCarthyism is a phenomenon of the United States in the 50s.
Well, but... It's kind of a reference that's outdated.
Everyone kind of knows it.
I don't know about that.
Did you follow Tara Reid?
I didn't know she was in town.
She's not.
She is the former staffer for Biden who said that he sexually molested her.
Oh yeah, and then she became a Russian.
Well, mind you... What's that all about?
The term is defected.
I don't have any clips, but she defected.
They were bringing that thing back from the Soviet times.
I don't know about that.
That's another old defected.
That's not what a defection means.
Of course not.
What's his name?
Seagal, the actor's Russian.
He didn't defect?
Did they say that about him?
They might have, I don't remember.
And of course we have Snowden.
But what's interesting about this is that she defected upon invitation of Maria Butina.
Now, you remember Maria Butina?
Yeah, the redhead.
Yeah, the other redhead, not the actual Russian redhead spy.
She's the one that had a romantic relationship with Patrick Byrne, the Overstock CEO guy.
And she got arrested, she got thrown in jail, and eventually she pleaded guilty to not registering as a foreign agent because she wanted to influence the National Rifle Association.
Which is kind of a bullcrap thing.
Half of Washington, D.C.
is a lobbyist that isn't registered.
But I find it interesting because to me, I mean, I think we both agree that Russians, first of all, no one hates the Russians.
It's only Putin.
No one hates the Russians.
And Hot Dog Boy.
But, you know, no one's walking around like, oh, I hate the Russian scum, Russian scum.
No, no.
In fact, Russians and Americans are very similar.
We have very similar values.
Except they don't like baseball.
And Maria Butina was trying to get Russia's law, she's now a member of Parliament, she's trying to get laws changed so that Russians could have, you know, an equivalent of a Second Amendment.
This feels like a signal somehow.
But you know a lot of times you get something like this and it's actually an intelligence asset that has been set up to do this so they can get over there.
Ooh, there you go.
And to let the Biden girl... it doesn't make any sense otherwise to me, at least.
Well, she left because she was asked to testify against Biden by Matt Gaetz and a couple of these Republican dudes.
And then she was told, well, you know, we can't give you any protection.
Yeah, and you know, Democrats might kill you.
And of course, she was only being used as a political pawn to make Biden look bad for the upcoming election.
So there's something, just Maria Butina in this tells me there's some intelligent aspect that we're not aware of.
There must be something more to this.
And if they're any good at all, we'll never be aware.
In fact, the fact that we got this close is phenomenal.
Probably that's it.
But I do have Biden, a supercut of Biden shouting.
Oh, nice.
Let's play it.
My grandpapa's name, Andros, Andros Finnegan.
As kitchen table, I learn.
I used to say, Joey, nobody's better than you, but you're no better than anybody else.
Maybe it's the Scranton.
I got a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.
Worried about whether I can make next month's mortgage payment.
Well, it is what it is because he is who he is.
That's why it is what it is.
You know, remember when he went on, he decided he was going to convince Bob Woodward what a smart guy he was.
So he went on, yeah, smart guy.
I'll lead an effective strategy to mobilize true international pressure, isolate and punish China.
Donald care.
Donald Trump thinks health care.
Well, I'm sick and tired of smart guys.
I got it.
This is all within our power!
Hang on!
Send every single person qualified to CUNY College free!
And if I keep going, you're gonna freeze your fingers off.
All right.
Another one for the books.
Your friend, and I want to point out that you, you identified Taylor Swift as a, as a phenomenon before the world did.
You were the first one that brought her to the show.
Yeah, and my basis was the fact that she got some free air time on one of the late night 60 Minutes type shows, news show, and she was getting promoted like...
Didn't make a lot of sense and then looking into where we discovered her father was one of the big vice presidents or big muckety muck that they use the term at Merrill Lynch.
Yep.
And he's the one who moved the family to Nashville.
Yep.
And she learned from him and she's become she's a marketing juggernaut and it's just beyond me that nobody noticed that you know this is all a scheme.
She's a genius in marketing, but I don't see that her songs are that interesting.
And now we have this latest, which you're going to discuss, this latest scam, a marketing scam, which is just beyond me.
Eye roller.
Well, what do you know that I don't know?
Is this a marketing scam?
About the forgotten attendance?
No!
Yes!
No, it's from the BBC anti-magazine.
Taylor Swift fans report amnesia following her show.
Taylor Swift amnesia.
This was reported on the Inside Edition.
The mainstream media didn't bite on this, but the Inside Edition did.
Do you have a clip?
No, no, I didn't get a clip.
I refused to bite on this.
This is MKUltra!
There was something... Yeah, you didn't think about that, huh?
You didn't think about that.
I didn't think of MK... She may be MKUltra for all I know.
Yeah, she's hypnotizing young children and who know this so they don't remember being... They don't remember anything from the concert.
Except what was put in there.
If your child went to a Taylor Swift concert and she's acting weird, let us know.
I'm telling you.
This is not normal.
No, none of this is.
Our show specializes in the abnormal.
You're telling me that you think this is a marketing scam?
Like, go to the show, don't remember it?
How does that work?
No, it's just an attention getter.
Oh, okay.
Oh, I want to go see if I can forget.
I mean, who knows that your fans are all a bunch of dingbats.
Let me see if I can forget.
Okay, perfect.
RFK Jr., you put it in the newsletter?
Do you think this is a takedown of him?
All of a sudden being... This Conor stuff?
Yeah, the Conor stuff.
Okay, there's a couple of Conor things going on.
Conor claims to have been to Ukraine and fought.
Yes, as a machine gunner.
But the story, if you read the story, which I link to it in the newsletter, the story in People Magazine, it has two interesting facets to it.
First, that he's supposedly married to Sheryl Hines.
No, that's...RFK Jr.
is married to Sheryl Hines.
Oh, okay, well then Cheryl Hines is the mom of this guy.
Yes, correct.
And the kid has an affair, or he's got some notorious worldwide affair going on with some Brazilian hottie.
Oh!
And if you look her up, because he supposedly goes to Ukraine, but then turns up in Brazil.
And some say, what is this?
Why?
You don't go from Ukraine to Brazil.
No, he was on a break from college.
Yeah, well, he's on a break, and then he... Okay, I mixed up the Sheryl Hines thing, because it doesn't make sense with this Brazilian story, because if you look in, again, it's People Magazine, same magazine with a story about him and this hottie, this singer from a Brazilian girl that he's dating and or seeing a lot of, and he goes from Ukraine right to her.
It's a very fishy story.
Some people are even wondering whether he was in Ukraine at all.
There's something very fishy about Conor Kennedy.
There was a rally where Robert Kennedy Jr.
said that not only did Conor go to Ukraine as a machine gunner, but it's also a just and righteous war.
I want to say that we are in the Ukraine.
For all the right reasons.
We are there because...
We are a good people.
And, you know, Abraham Lincoln said America is a great nation because we're a good nation.
And we continue to be a good people.
And we are there because of our compassion for the Ukrainian people who have been brutalized, who have been illegally invaded, and have shown extraordinary valor and courage defending their country and defending, you know, their families.
And their beliefs and their liberties and their independence.
Things that Americans have to admire.
My own son, Connor, I'm very, very proud that Connor joined the Foreign Legion and fought in the Ukraine during the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner for a special forces group.
Yes!
Yeah!
Yeah!
Woo!
You know, well, there's a possibility that they're trying to get Connor on the Kennedy list of people that's going to run for office.
R.F.J.
Jr.
is not gonna win anything.
Here's how I took it.
I took it as Kennedy's wife, actress, you know, Hollywood, That the only, she said, I'm only going to go along with you running the way you run with, you know, your, you know, your anti-vax, whatever, whatever other stuff that, you know, that we like about him.
If you, if you justify the Ukraine situation and maybe that's why they bring the Conor thing in.
What do you think about that?
Maybe, but I don't think she's got that much power influence.
Over him?
I think the Ukraine thing is the following...
Connor is going to run for office because he's a Kennedy.
They all do.
He doesn't want to be a member of the military ever.
But he wants to look like a tough guy.
So he goes and he does this phony baloney gig which makes him look like a military guy without having to actually join the army and serve the country.
But it still has a look to it.
Wow, interesting.
So you think this whole thing is... At least he has some chops.
So the whole thing is a ploy to get Conor in.
Future President Conor.
Yeah.
Kennedy's think that way.
They do have a long game mentality.
They have a long game.
The guy's a bit buffed, so he's a good-looking guy.
Interesting.
Up to the point, he's goofy-looking.
I mean, I shouldn't say good-looking.
He's not like a Kennedy, you know, a gorgeous Kennedy.
He's kind of a goofball-looking Kennedy, but he'll grow out of that.
He'll look like a regular Kennedy eventually.
And he's got his military service under his belt, without having to actually sign up for anything.
Heaven forbid.
Oh, interesting.
Oh, I like that angle, I like.
That makes a lot of sense.
Hey, and what is this?
What is Kosovo?
Why is Kosovo all of a sudden popping up?
Have you noticed these stories?
Yes, there's a bunch of action going on.
I have two clips.
CBS and CNN.
CBS first.
NATO is sending 700 more troops to Kosovo to help curb rising tensions in northern towns.
It comes after 30 peacekeeping soldiers were injured during classes with ethnic Serb protesters earlier this week.
Violence broke out in the region following the installation of ethnic Albanian mayors in Serbian-dominated areas.
They were elected in a vote overwhelmingly boycotted by Serbs.
Ethnic Albanians make up over 90% of Kosovo's population, but Serbs in the north have long demanded the creation of autonomous municipalities.
It's not clear when the extra NATO troops will arrive, though.
Hold on, stop the presses.
Connor Kennedy dated Taylor Swift.
Oh, that's interesting.
Huh.
He can't remember it, though.
It's all part of a series.
He can't remember it.
He can't remember it.
I can't remember anything that happened during my dating Taylor Swift.
Here's CNN in Kosovo.
More than 30 NATO peacekeepers injured in clashes with Serb protesters in northern Kosovo Monday.
Among them, several Italians and Hungarians.
NATO has condemned the attacks, saying they were, quote, totally unacceptable.
These are NATO troops, John.
Not UN.
This is NATO.
This is something, this is something, this is weird.
The peacekeepers, known as K4, have been present in this volatile region since 1999 in response to brutal ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
Yeah, ask the Dutch Blue Helmets how that went.
That was real good, boys.
The latest tension comes after ethnic Serbs boycotted an election in the northern part of Kosovo in April, leading to ethnic Albanians governing the region.
Serbia claims the Kosovo government is goading Serbs to clash with NATO.
As peacekeepers stand guard in Svecin today, whether the protesters here listen could determine whether relative peace returns to the region, or if Europe has another conflict on the horizon.
Mmm.
Another conflict on the horizon.
That's what we need.
Shift it away.
Well, Albania should be noted that Albania and Croatia both joined NATO in 2009, so there's a legitimate reason for NATO being there.
But not in 99.
No.
Because Serbia's not in NATO.
Albania wasn't in NATO then.
Nope.
So what was going on then that would...
It prompts these NATO troops to go in.
This NATO thing is out of control.
It's not a country.
It's not a government.
This has to be an alliance.
It has to be Ukraine related.
Is Ukraine related?
Is Ukraine NATO alliance related?
We're being set up for something here.
I'm sick of these people.
Best they can.
I'm sick of it.
Sick of it.
I'm sick of it.
I got one last clip.
uh, Canada is doing something fun.
Canada is about to become the first country to require health warnings printed on individual cigarettes.
As Dan Karpinchuk reports, the announcement was made on Wednesday, which was World No Tobacco Day.
The measure is aimed at raising awareness of the health risks of tobacco and reducing its usage.
The new regulations won't take effect until the beginning of August and will come in a phased approach over the next year.
Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says the warning will reach every person who smokes with messages including poison in every puff and cigarettes cause cancer.
King-size cigarettes will be the first to feature the warnings and will be sold by retailers by the end of July 2024.
Officials say it's part of a strategy to reach a target of less than 5% tobacco use by 2035.
The Canadian Cancer Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation welcome the measures.
For NPR News, I'm Dan Karpinchak in Toronto.
Yeah, I'd like to remind us all that research showed in the Netherlands, the more horrible Yep.
Pictures they put on cigarette packs of diseased lungs and people dying.
The more they sold!
So this is a great marketing promotion.
Well they have except for one thing in this case.
The ink causes cancer.
Of course!
But it doesn't matter!
You know, if you can actually be reminded of how horrible this product is when you're smoking it, poison in every puff.
People will buy more.
Poison in every puff.
This is a known fact.
It's a known fact, people.
That's marketing for you.
Genius, Canada.
Well done.
Alright, everybody.
Keep your eye out.
Keep your eye on your kids.
Give them a ham radio.
Now you're talking.
That's smart.
Yeah.
Get them ready for field day.
Get them using FT8.
They'll learn geography and technology and other fun stuff.
Yeah, most kids don't know geography.
Well, FT8, you'll learn it right there on the map.
You'll see how far your signal reached.
We have next on NoAgendaStream.com, we have the Millennial Media Offensive.
Alright.
Good little show there.
And coming up, we've got ACDC's greatest COVID hits.
We've got the Tyrannical Lisp and Steve and Hunter Jones for your end of show programming.
And coming to you from the heart of the Texas Hill Country here in FEMA Region No.
6 in the morning, everybody.
I'm Adam Curry.
Don't you think the Tyrannical Lisp guy sounds a lot like one of these podcasters that lives in Japan?
I think he is that podcaster that lives in Japan.
Well, from Northern Silicon Valley, I'm John C. Dvorak.
We'll be back on Sunday.
Remember us at dvorak.org slash n-a.
Until then, adios mofos, a-hooey-hooey, and such.
CDC's greatest tips.
Now available with proof of vaccination.
You've been fast and strong!
You'll get all-time classics like...
I got no chair.
It's been too long.
I'm glad to be fast.
Yes, I got to choose.
I took two.
Tell me not to fault you what you want me to do.
It's our best.
Enter to win a signed copy of the album by Brian Johnson & Johnson.
I took a fast vaccine during quarantine.
I was the worst damn shakes I have ever seen.
I'm not a legendary.
It's like quarantine for just two weeks.
Stay away from me for just six feet.
Because St. A.C. will tell you lies.
St. A.C. and ignore all your cries.
I'll help you.
Scientists have developed a universal flu vaccine.
It's effective against all 20 known strains of flu and can help us fight off dangerous new strains before they develop into a pandemic.
The new vaccine could be in use within two years.
Every year, flu causes 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness and up to 650,000 deaths.
The flu vaccines you receive today are strain-specific.
One is chosen each year based on whichever strain is prevalent, but this offers little protection against emerging new strains.
The universal flu vaccine uses the same mRNA technology as some COVID-19 vaccines.
It contains every known flu strain.
Doctors believe the world may be in for a nasty flu season this year.
Here is the CEO of Flulab and her globalist health official friends praising a universal flu jab just a few years ago.
We seek a transformative product.
We could get the RNA sequence from that, beam it to a number of regional centers, if not local, if not even in your home at some point, and print those vaccines on a patch and self-administer.
When you do get a universal flu vaccine, you're going to want to give it to six-month-old kids.
We need to set an ambition for the ultimate vaccine.
It is durable.
It is for everyone on this planet.
That's right.
One shot for every person all over the world.
For example, Australia had its worst flu outbreak in five years.
And that may be a sign for things to come in the Northern Hemisphere.
But vaccines can help protect people.
Would you have a new flu shot?
You don't want to be labeled a science denier, do you?
Brought to you by the W.E.F.
and the W.H.O.
Organizations that love to put things into your body.
There, there little one.
Now you're safe and protected.
There there, little one.
Now you're safe and protected.
I'm the Tyrannical Lift.
Just don't start your promo with hay.
Hey.
Hey.
No jacking up the chair, chump.
No, because the last time I did it, you got all up in my grill and you were really mean.