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July 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:57:00

309 Call In Show July 2 2006 4pm

A variety of brilliant topics from scintillating listeners!

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	So, I'll throw it open.
	Does anyone have any questions about what, anything that they sort of feel like talking about or any questions that they've had about the podcast or stuff on the board or stuff unrelated that they'd like to bring up?
	What is your range of topics?
	Well, I guess we could narrow it to the range of topics that are in Free Domain Radio, which is pretty much everything under the sun.
	If it lives, breathes, moves, or has moved, then it's available for a topic.
	I guess we've done everything from talk politics to family issues to relationship to philosophy to psychology and free will versus determinism, and we've started working on weight issues and dreams lately.
	So we've really managed to narrow it down to pretty much...
	Everything. The Dream stuff's been really good, I think.
	Do you have a website or something?
	Yeah, there is a website, and it's freedomainradio, F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N, freedomainradio.com.
	and if you go to forward slash B-O-A-R-D then you can go to freedomainradio.com to the boards and that's where we do have a fair amount of stuff available to I guess we have about 150 odd members of people who've liked the podcast and who enjoy the sort of discussion and I certainly have tried in the boards and everybody's been doing great in that sense to sort of I've never had a board culture before I've never joined a board before and
	I've sort of tried to make it a more friendly and positive place because I know that boards can often degenerate into a kind of yelling match and we've really tried to restrain that and we've had very little of that which has been quite nice.
	So yeah, the dream stuff has been cool.
	I think that dream analysis is a very interesting aspect of things, and I've always had a sort of problem with some of the rationalistic philosophies that are out there, like objectivists and so on, where the respect for the unconscious doesn't seem to be as strong as I think it should be.
	So that's one of the reasons why I've been doing the dream analysis thing, since the goal of philosophy is happiness, and you want to get as much information to get you on the road to happiness as you can.
	And I've sort of experienced that the unconscious has an enormous amount of value in that, and so I've sort of found it very helpful, and I wanted to sort of point out how the dream analysis stuff could be helpful so people could try and look at their own dreams and see if they can't come up with anything sort of valuable from that standpoint.
	So you guys have been enjoying that, those who've heard it?
	Yeah, I think that's really good.
	That was a strange dream, but I thought the analysis was really cool, interesting.
	Yeah, and the interesting, when he put the dream on the board, I had no clue what it meant.
	I mean, it really was a tough dream.
	Some stuff's really obvious, you know, like a dream about my mom or something and stuff.
	It's pretty obvious, but I thought this one was pretty subtle, and it wasn't until I remembered that he had four brothers that I was able to start cracking the dream, because usually there's something quite...
	It's important in the dream that's a clue about what it's about, and that Connect Four metaphor seemed to be pretty clear about.
	And from there, it wasn't too bad, but just staring at it, it's like, okay, horses, holes, what does this mean?
	But once you crack it, it usually makes a good deal of sense.
	Now, don't fret too much about the pauses.
	I can edit those out. But if you do have any questions or comments, I mean, I know that there's an enormous amount of info in the podcasts themselves.
	If you do have any questions or comments, feel free to barge in.
	Don't worry about talking over each other.
	We can sort of get that going.
	And I'm sure that there's lots of questions that people have and are not necessarily keen on having another hour or two of just me blathering away.
	So feel free to just throw something out there and we can start a discussion.
	Is that what you do when you're in your car?
	You edit all the pauses out?
	All thinking time? Actually, you know, there's surprisingly few pauses.
	I try and work out the topic ahead of time and I'll try and have a couple of notes on my dashboard that I can glance at.
	I would say, occasionally, if I have a coughing fit, I'll try and edit that out because I don't want to give anyone an ear infection.
	But for the most part, it's a pretty good flow.
	If I've had a few too many errs, ums, you knows, and all the verbal tics that I have, I'll try and edit some of those out.
	But the problem is if you go to edit a podcast, the podcast is like 40 minutes, if you go to edit it, you can easily spend twice that amount of time editing the podcast, and then it starts to become a bit of a time sink.
	So I've tried to keep it relatively short.
	If I really go off in tangent land and have no idea how to get back, then what I'll do is just sort of stare aimlessly as I drive for a little while and then come back and try and remember to edit the pause out.
	But for the most part, I guess 90-95% of it is just a straight flow, so I don't edit those out, although there may be times where that would be worthwhile.
	Have you got a chat session going, as well as this Skype session, like before, so we can coordinate some stuff?
	Right, right. Let's see here.
	I think Francois might have one, but I don't think there's one for this.
	Do you know, I mean, I'm more than happy to create one.
	If you know how to create one, I'm more than happy to.
	I'm just no Skype-y expert.
	I mean, I have a free domain radio thing up here, but I don't have, I don't know exactly how to create a Skype session just for this, like a chat session just for this.
	Niels just started one.
	Oh, okay. Even better.
	So if you join with Niels' one, then you can follow it that way.
	Okay. Let's see if I can do that.
	Okay, there we go. I know it's a bit of an odd format to have it, because most of these things are like call-in shows, right, where you sort of have people calling in in sequence, but I find it's usually more, although there's a little problem with silence is that people feel a bit more self-conscious because they don't know that it's their turn or whatever, but I do find that once it gets going, it's usually quite a lot more fun and a little bit more interactive, of course, than waiting for someone to get off a phone call, so...
	Open topic. Okay, so if any one of you would like to start a topic or have a question or have a comment, if you do, that's great.
	I mean, if you absolutely have nothing, certainly I'm more than happy to, as I'm sure that you're aware, I'm more than happy to keep chatting.
	So feel free to start a topic if you'd like, though.
	What do you think about all this net neutrality craziness going around?
	You been reading up on that?
	A little bit. Tell me a little bit more about it, though.
	I've only really scared of the issue, as it's been mentioned in the boards.
	Can you give us a bit more about that?
	The only real exposure I get to it is from all the technology podcasts, and all of the hosts on those are known for being very liberally minded, so you don't really get a big breadth of idea of what the whole issue is.
	But basically...
	They're afraid that companies like AT&T or Verizon or people like that are going to remove competitors and other companies by charging more for priority bandwidth and things like that.
	So, like they're saying that Google, or they used to say this, I don't know if they still are, but they had the argument that Google is getting a free ride on their pipes and that Google should pay For faster access to people because they're used more and like Verizon, people are afraid that Verizon is going to try to get rid of Skype because they're competing with their phones and it's just a whole bunch of craziness.
	Right, okay, so the idea is that because there's this public domain called the internet, the protocols, and the backbones, because there's this public domain of access out there that people are going to try and monopolize the bandwidth to further their own economic interests rather than leave everything open to everyone.
	Is that sort of the idea? Yeah, that's pretty much the thing.
	People are saying, like, we don't want AT&T and Verizon and all these companies to become monopolies, and I guess they don't really think about the fact that they are already, but...
	Right. Now, I'm certainly no expert on the history of the Internet, but of course, as far as I understand it, it is a protocol that was developed by the state in order to make sure that in the event of some sort of nuclear strike or some sort of problem in terms of invasion or some military activity, that you would have a decentralized methodology of communication, and then it was used within the government for quite some time, and then it was...
	You can't exactly say commercialized, because it really wasn't commercialized from that standpoint, but...
	There was quite a bit of activity to open it up through the creation of the browsers in the early 1990s and the hypertext mock-up language to be able to further get the information out a little bit easier.
	So one of the interesting things about the internet is that it really is the result of public funding and it really is the result of an open standard that never would have been developed in the free market.
	I remember back in the early days of the internet there were private networks as well where you could go in and have chat rooms and so on and send emails back and forth And those private networks were beginning to communicate between each other, but then, of course, as soon as the Internet came along, then they gave up on that, and they just started to work over the Internet instead.
	So you have this very bizarre network that was created by public spending, And so now, of course, you have this problem, which is sort of this two-fold problem.
	One is that every traffic gets the same amount of access, which wouldn't make any sense in a free market situation.
	In a free market situation, you would pay for bandwidth, right?
	Because that's what would fund the actual development of this kind of protocol.
	And if you wanted to jump onto someone else's network to get to your final destination, it would be like in a cell phone where you have a carrier cost, right?
	It would be more expensive. So the two problems that are developed from this, number one is spam.
	I mean, I could certainly see that you would pay a penny or two pennies in email in a private situation, which I think it would be something that would make, or there would be free alternatives, but they would be advertiser supported, right?
	So you'd have sort of honest spam that would be a little bit more directed towards your particular preferences the same way that Google Ads are.
	Right now you just get spammed if you have an email out there at all.
	Everyone sends you everything because it's all free.
	And the second is that there is no priority for bandwidth based on the fact that it's a public infrastructure.
	So it definitely is an example, I think, of where government control leads to more government control, right?
	So you have taxation of government control creating the Internet, and then you have additional government controls to control the resource distribution because it can't be controlled by price because it's not part of the free market.
	Is that a reasonable way of looking at it, or I'm completely off base?
	I think that's about right.
	It was kind of weird. I heard on this one thing, there's a podcast called Security Now, and it's, have you heard it?
	No, I haven't, no.
	I've heard it.
	This guy named Steve Gibson, he's a security researcher and a big security guy, apparently, but I believe I heard him say one time that the idea that it was created for decentralized in the event of a nuclear attack That wasn't really true.
	It just kind of ended up working out like that and people...
	I haven't heard that anywhere else, but...
	Yeah, it certainly could be an urban myth.
	I've never had it verified, but it was certainly developed with public...
	I mean, a private industry would never create something like that where there would be this...
	You could travel anywhere in terms of data to get from A to B with no additional charges.
	That would not be something, because there would be no way to create a return on investment for that kind of technology.
	So, I mean, we have inherited this kind of bizarre medium, which is...
	It's publicly created, but it's doing an enormous amount for the free market because, of course, stuff like free domain radio can be out there and people can sample it for free and continue for listening pretty much as long as they want for free because the Internet is free relative to sort of the AOL model with dial-up where you had to pay for access time and download charges.
	So it's kind of interesting because the Internet has opened up quite a lot of media for the free market, which wouldn't exist otherwise.
	I mean, I certainly get most, I think somebody has a mic and microphone, and I think if you have speakers and microphone on at the same time, we're going to get, there we go.
	But I get most of my media through the internet, and really I find it very, it's a very bizarre and almost surreal experience to watch just a regular news show these days.
	Other than the occasional 60 minutes, which I still enjoy.
	To actually sit down and watch a news show would just be too bizarre for words because I just don't find that the mainstream media has anything particular of value in terms of insight to offer me.
	And where do you guys get most of your media from?
	RSS has pretty much killed the news for me.
	Right, right.
	And I can't watch anything because on CNN yesterday, between all their commercial breaks, they show pictures of the fallen from this week, like all the people who died over in Iraq.
	I can't take it.
	It's hard to take it.
	You know what, it's like when you go to those family functions and you can't talk about anything important.
	It's sort of like that. I'm just wondering, are you guys hearing a lot of feedback too or is that just me?
	Can't hear any feedback here.
	No? Okay, well it could just be me.
	I can hear a little bit of squealing.
	Yeah, but nothing too distracting, right?
	Not really.
	Yeah, so I find that in watching news it's just kind of surreal because there's just so much that's not talked about that's kind of essential.
	And so much nonsense that is talked about that's so inessential that I just do find it very hard to take it with any kind of serious...
	Any kind of seriousness.
	It just seems to be this big entertainment exercise designed to, not sort of consciously designed to, but just inevitably designed to distract people from the real issues of the day.
	It sort of reminds me of when you think of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s, where you have all of these, or in the 1920s, where you have all of these shows and reviews and topless dancers and all of this stuff going on.
	When at the same time you have this massive economic instability and the growth of particularly dangerous political parties like Nazism, I just view a lot of the media these days as this, you know, not planned, but inevitable kind of rah-rah nonsense designed to, or with the effect of sort of distracting people from important issues that need to be talked about.
	Because you just get never, it's like when you're looking at a White House press corps conference, you never ever Hear any really basic questions asked.
	It's all just nonsense.
	And where they do oppose, they oppose on such, the state, they oppose on such inconsequentialities that it's just almost funny.
	So I find that stuff very strange to look at.
	And I don't really get any, I haven't watched the news in a couple of years for sure.
	And I used to get the newspaper pretty regularly too, but that got a little bit stomach turning after a while as well.
	It's really strange as well how the TV news is fossilised into the same format every day with misery upon misery in every article and not much depth and then something about someone's cat at the end to cheer everyone up.
	The world is great because the tiny little thing went okay but the rest of it was all for the art format.
	No, I know what you mean.
	You hear 15 stories about murders, rapes, and all the terrible things in the world, and then it's like, here we have a squirrel who can skateboard, and that's just the human interest thing at the end.
	And it is kind of deranged, but of course...
	There is a lot of fear in the world, right?
	And people are sort of afraid of the future and afraid of the government and everybody in their gut recognizes that the existing system is unsustainable but they have a great deal of time processing that because they feel an enormous amount of helplessness.
	So what they do is they focus on the petty crimes rather than the major crimes of the state.
	So they'll focus on, you know, a murder here or a kidnapping there rather than, say, an illegal war that could be characterized as a war crime in the United States or in other countries as well.
	Because people feel a sort of fundamental sense of helplessness because they just don't know about any alternatives, which is sort of why I think it's important to talk as much as we can about alternatives to the existing system so that people feel at least that There's a way out of the current mess because right now I don't think people do feel like that way at all.
	And then they sort of view us as rabble-rousers who aren't getting them any kind of comfort because all we're doing is talking about what's wrong.
	And that's sort of what I try to do is sort of talk about simple positive solutions so that people at least have a feel that they have some kind of alternative.
	How do you find conversing with people these days about these kinds of topics?
	Do you have two answers?
	This is Heron Stone.
	Hi. Hi.
	It's good to hear somebody talking about real issues here.
	It doesn't happen often here.
	I've got a... Sorry, where is here?
	Pardon me? Where is here?
	Oh, well, on Earth.
	Right. Or Skypecast in general, or in just about any place, actually.
	Sure. My opinion is that, in fact, the age of Homo sapiens is drawing to a close.
	We are witnessing the end of about a 6,000-year blip in evolution.
	And, in fact, there are no solutions as long as the planet is populated by a bunch of unconscious language monkeys who believe everything they hear their language machines say.
	That's why... You know, changing the system, voting in new representatives and then whining about what they do is not going to change anything.
	We have to change.
	The planet, the people of Earth, have to wake up and not believe everything they hear.
	Their voice in their head tell them, you know, like robots.
	But, of course, the beauty of this approach is that that's quite doable.
	Biological evolution It has sort of run its course, but cultural and linguistic evolution proceed at a much faster pace.
	In two generations, we could raise a generation of children who are actually capable of thinking and negotiating and managing a global civilization peacefully.
	The current crop of humans is incapable of that.
	Well, I certainly agree with you there.
	I think that the real challenge for us as communicators, I think, is to try and get as many people to understand that personal freedom is the way to go, and that it's all well and good to understand the government, and it's all well and good to understand political involvement.
	But the real challenge is that we do need to find ways of getting freedom within our own personal lives, and that's what I'd like to answer.
	Now, can everyone just check their sound?
	Because if you have microphones on and speakers on at the same time, then we're going to get this kind of feedback.
	You know, you can mute everybody and then turn them back on one at a time and find out where the noise is coming from and then just turn off that one mic.
	That's a very good point.
	That was me.
	I have a button that can turn it off.
	I just wish there was a button just to activate it instead.
	Well, what you could do is just turn off the microphone until you actually have something, like you're just about to talk and then turn it on right again afterwards, if that's all right?
	Yeah, that's the plan.
	Excellent. Okay. No, I mean, I think that's a very, very good point.
	What was it? Language monkeys?
	I can't remember the phrase that you used.
	Oh, I use a bunch of them.
	Yeah, basically, yeah, language monkeys.
	They believe the voice in their head.
	They're identified with the voice in their head and believe everything it says and therefore act on everything it says.
	It's not much different than 6,000 years ago when people thought the voice in their head was God.
	And I certainly agree with you that that's a bad thing to do with the one exception, of course, of Free Domain Radio, which is absolutely the voice that you need to be following and everybody needs to be following consistently all the time.
	Of course, of course, you're right, yes.
	What was wrong with me?
	Well, you know, it's just important to be precise when we're talking about these things.
	That's right, you got it.
	And, of course, me, too. Of course, you should listen to me.
	Me and Free Domain Radio, yeah.
	Now, I've got a sense that you have a radio voice.
	I can feel that rich, velvety radio voice draping over me like a nice little summer tan.
	Do you want to tell us a little bit about your activities on the air?
	Well, I've done a lot of public speaking over the years, so, yeah, I've got that voice.
	You know, you have to be able to speak clearly to a large group of people.
	Somebody's mic is really big and they ought to turn that off.
	Yeah, I don't want to...
	Yeah, yeah, that's really annoying.
	I've done about 400 Skype casts since this started on May 3rd.
	I do a lot every day, a lot of short ones usually.
	My main focus is on linguistics, on language, the way we think.
	And that's why I was talking about the problem with humans and what I think is the emergence of literally a new species, but not a species defined by genetic inheritance, but by cultural and linguistic inheritance, that evolution has moved beyond biology at this point.
	What makes this new species difference is that I and other people I know are not identified with the voice in my head.
	I can listen to it.
	I can evaluate it.
	I can notice whether it's bullshit or whether it actually makes any sense or not.
	I can actually negotiate with other people because I recognize that any idea in my head is merely my way of thinking about things, not the way it is.
	And that's why people can't negotiate.
	That's why Jews and Arabs and Protestants and Catholics and every other group that's busy killing themselves and everybody else around here is that they actually think the way they think about the world is the one and only way it really is.
	And that is insane.
	By any measure that I can think of, the planet is populated by basically a bunch of insane language monkeys.
	And they need to be put out of business.
	And you think that that's biological and not cultural?
	Oh no, I think it's cultural.
	I don't think it has much to do with biology at all.
	I think that's why I'm so hopeful that within a generation or two we can change the whole game.
	Well, I think that's true, and I think that one of the things that I've talked about on the podcast is this idea that a culture really is the enemy for me.
	There's this quote from, I can't remember, some Nazi who said, whenever I hear the word culture, I take the safety off my revolver.
	Now, of course, I don't have any revolver, and neither would I want one, but I certainly do view culture as an enormously, it's a form of collective mental illness, or I guess more specifically, it's a form of scar tissue that forms over early trauma.
	When you're told things that simply aren't true, right?
	So you're told...
	We're all brain damaged.
	Right, for sure. I mean, my wife was told when she was a kid, you need to be proud of being Greek.
	You have this Greek heritage. And of course, Greece is a fiction.
	The country is a fiction.
	The culture is a fiction. And you see this in sports events all the time.
	I mean, you see all these nut jobs out there painting themselves various colors.
	Why? Because they just happen to be born where their sports teams are born, and this is their loyalty.
	And for me, culture is an enormous enemy to be fought, because I think that when people work with the same rationality, which of course is objective and universal, and the same sensual reality, which is objective and universal, agreement becomes possible.
	But when you work with irrational absolutes like culture, Yeah.
	Negotiation and compromise and peaceful coexistence becomes impossible.
	Well, I don't think that that's inherent in culture in general.
	That's just the particular cultures that we have created.
	I think it's possible, I think it's essential that we do create a new global civilization, and that will imply some sort of culture, but I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a reasonable, sensitive, intelligent, creative, loving, happy culture Right, yeah, it just has to be based on things that are true and empirical and verifiable and logical rather than just prejudices and bigotries that...
	Well, no, actually it's quite possible to continue to have our stupidities.
	It's just important to know that that's what they are and not be under the spell of them.
	I think there's some usefulness in that, in that kind of creativity for poetry and exploration.
	There's a reason for having a lot of this nonsense.
	It's just important to be able to distinguish between when we're actually making some sort of logical, analytical sense and when we're doing poetry.
	Right, right. I see what you're saying.
	I see what you're saying. I mean, as a guy who likes to philosophize as well as be artistic, I think that you might...
	I think it's possible to have the two in the same, but I think what is going to happen, of course, is people are going to have to deal...
	Primarily with their own personal relationships in the realm of culture before we can break free of it.
	I mean, there are all these power structures that benefit from irrational absolutes like states and religions and so on.
	But I think the real barrier is not people overcoming, say, being Greek, but people saying to their parents, sitting down with their parents and saying, you know, well, I sort of think that you told me a lot of things that aren't true.
	And we kind of need to talk about that.
	And talking about that with your siblings and talking about...
	It's primarily the personal relationships, I think, that stand in the way of human freedom.
	The state simply exploits that instability.
	I would say that the primary effort, at least from where I sit, is breaking the identity with the voice.
	That, in fact, that is what constitutes the insanity, is the fact that 98% of people, 98% of the time, maybe my numbers are off a little bit, But actually believe everything they hear their language machine say.
	They are identified with that voice.
	They think that voice is me, or I, and therefore they obey it.
	Can you give us a concrete example of something like that, say in the realm of the Iraqi war or something like that?
	Well, that's just the same thing writ large.
	I mean... I don't even know where to start.
	Virtually every conversation you hear in the world is between two unconscious language monkeys who are repeating the same old patterns.
	One of the things that's very helpful is to make a distinction between actual information content in an utterance and an emotional response to familiar sound patterns.
	To a large extent, in our early childhood, we are programmed to respond to certain kinds of sound patterns in whatever language we're brought up in.
	When you examine these things, they have no actual information content.
	They're what are called propositional functions in math.
	They're just a statement of variables and relationships between variables, but no actual definition for what this stuff really means.
	That people are willing to kill or die for these propositional functions.
	And really all they have is an emotional response to certain sound patterns, but literally they are meaningless.
	Right, right. So when people hear the United States of America or England or Canada and the swelling music and the flag and so on.
	Give me a gun, man. I'm ready to go kill for America.
	A boss I had once had an excellent metaphor for this kind of thing, which I think is quite an apt metaphor for a vast amount of human interaction.
	He says, seeing two people argue in a meeting, he said, my God, it's like watching two television sets facing each other.
	That there really is no listening, no creative analysis of the ideas.
	And this you see in the sort of Hannity and Combs universe, where people are simply repeating the kinds of prejudicial statements and manipulating them back and forth.
	But it really is like two television sets pointing at each other, pretending to have a conversation.
	It really is nothing to do with the exchange of ideas.
	And my experience over the years has led me to finally realize the possibility, the likelihood of actually changing The way any given individual's language machine functions once they pass the age of puberty is very slim.
	It is possible for a person to drastically reprogram their language machine, but it's quite rare.
	The only real hope that I can see is in raising the next several generations of children to be less brain damaged than we are.
	That it's pretty much a waste of time to talk to any adult.
	Even if they like the ideas, even if they agree with these ideas, the same old programming continues to run.
	Knowing about this stuff is totally irrelevant.
	What it really requires is reprogramming the language machine.
	Like I say, that's quite difficult for anybody over the age of 13 or 14.
	Well, unless you have a cattle prod, for sure, it is tricky.
	But a certain amount of electricity, I think, does jazz things up a little bit.
	Oh, you mean electro-shock.
	I'm just kidding. I haven't tried that.
	I don't know. Well, drugs are helpful, actually.
	I can't imagine, actually, my own life.
	I was a hippie, and so for me, it was ten years of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
	And I can't imagine...
	And having made the progress linguistically that I've made, if I hadn't taken a lot of drugs, you know, and taken things loose.
	This is quite, actually, it's an interesting coincidence because the Free Domain Radio PCP Orgy is actually next week.
	Oh, damn, I'm probably, where are you going to be?
	You sound like you're in the UK or someplace.
	So probably I won't make it.
	Now, that's excellent.
	Well, thank you very much. Excellent points.
	And, of course, please stick around. I just wanted to open this up to...
	Yeah, sure, yeah. I've had my say.
	I'll work for a while.
	Right. No, fantastic. Thank you so much.
	That was excellent. I love this language monkey thing.
	I'm going to try and borrow that and call it my own.
	Well, you can also talk about the monkey operating system, MOS. Right, MOS. Very good.
	Alright, it's back open, baby, so whatever you want to say, now's the time.
	Okay, I would like to take a few time of your evening.
	Not too much. I'm sorry, Neil, just before you start, I'm sorry that I didn't get your email until today, but it's an interesting idea.
	We should definitely look into it. Okay, cool.
	That's great. Helen, you said that when people have a dispute, they cannot resolve it.
	And a lot of it has to do with how we discover truth from falsehood, which is a thing that we're trying to find out here at Freedom Aid Radio.
	Because if you can't have a rational way of resolving disputes, then the only thing left is to resort to violence.
	Or to some kind of democratic vote, which is basically the same thing, because more people have more power.
	And that's typically what we see in religions.
	There's no theory of religion.
	You cannot explain it.
	So if they clash, then it's a power struggle.
	And you spoke kind of in...
	In metaphors, when you're talking about voice and etc.
	But I think that we've got basically the same ideas here.
	I wanted to respond to Stefan's earlier question about the news and stuff.
	And one interesting thing is if a big company has layoffs, people will get fired like 10,000 at a time.
	And you see this in the news.
	And everybody responds to it with, well, that's so bad, and there's this negative undertone and everything.
	But actually, it's creating more efficiency.
	So, it's a good thing, but that's not what you hear on the news, which is an interesting example, I think.
	And Stefan talked about how we really cannot watch the news, it's just revolting.
	But one typical show is pretty interesting in that way.
	It's the Daily Show.
	Because they've got some real good insight into what's happening, what people are being hypocritical, all the lies.
	They've got a good way of checking things through time, etc.
	They've got a good sense of humor, of course.
	But even that show is hard to watch.
	Because they're constantly trying to reinforce the idea that the news is there to keep the politicians straight.
	That's the mechanism that democracy has to keep everything going fine.
	That the news provides what's actually going on to the people.
	And that's really pretty awful to watch them see all these things, they know a lot of stuff, what's going on, but they can't make the last twitch to, well maybe, the government is fundamentally a really, really bad idea. They can never get to that and that's pretty disappointing.
	For instance, Because they do push some things.
	They're very critical of almost everything, but then at the end of the show they've got an interview like Al Gore talking about global warming, and he just totally sucks up to him, and he completely supports this liberal message, and that's really tough to watch.
	Can I just add something there?
	You're absolutely right. I find Jon Stewart is hilarious.
	I mean, the man is a comic genius because not only does he have a great voice for comedy, but his facial expressions are just brilliant.
	And I've certainly tried to And so is Stephen Colbert, of course.
	He is very, very funny.
	I find that because Colbert is having kind of a persona, that Jon Stewart's a little bit funnier.
	But I've tried to learn a little bit about how to sort of loosen up and have a little bit more fun with the audience so that by watching The Daily Show...
	The one thing I think is true about The Daily Show is that if you've ever read King Lear, King Lear has a fool who is continually telling him the truth in a cryptic and funny manner, but never, and so basically is trying to reform the world by educating the leaders, in a sense, or by educating and so basically is trying to reform the world by educating the leaders, in a sense, And that's a very funny thing to watch.
	And he is, of course, the only person who has any kind of request for truth and integrity and consistency, but he is essentially trying to improve, well, he's trying to entertain, of course, which he does a wonderful job in.
	But he's trying to improve the world by pointing out the falsehoods of the politicians, but not, of course, to question whether that power should exist in the first place.
	He just wants people to use power.
	In a better way, he doesn't want that power to go away, and I think that's the difference you see when he's criticizing them, and then when he sees them face to face, he's very much, he's very sycophantic, right?
	Because he respects the power, he just wants people to use it better, and that's the great illusion and the great trap of people who are commenting on the public sphere, is to want power to be used in a better way, and of course it can't be, it's absolutely impossible.
	So, I'm sorry, go ahead, I just wanted to point out my thoughts on that.
	Well, I was kind of finished, so...
	That were my point as well.
	And the other thing I mentioned about an earlier point that you had, one of the things, the basic, and this is coming straight off of Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt, the real challenge of economics is that the people who lose in a transaction, like layoffs and so on, the people who lose are very obvious.
	The people who gain in a hidden way are very obvious.
	And the people who gain when a corporation gets a subsidy are very obvious, but the study of economics is the study of finding The hidden losers and winners in economic transactions.
	So, of course, as we all know, when there is a subsidy that goes to a company, you might save 2,000 jobs, but you've probably cost five or ten times that number of jobs in the private sector being created because you've diverted capital to a failing industry, or you've gone into debt as a government, which means that you've taken capital that could be invested in a company.
	So, in order to save 2,000 jobs, which is obvious and doesn't need Any scientific examination or any kind of rigorous examination, you've ended up costing the economy 10,000 or 5,000 jobs, which nobody ever...
	I mean, if you don't get a job because the subsidy went somewhere else, you don't even know that you're missing anything because you didn't get a job and then it was taken away.
	So it's finding the hidden winners and losers that are on the other side of the economic equation that's the real science of economics.
	And that's what's never talked about in the media.
	Nobody ever says, when a company gets a subsidy that saves 2,000 jobs, nobody ever says, well, 5,000 to 10,000 jobs were destroyed.
	And the overall wealth of the nation was destroyed to a small degree today because this money went to this company.
	They always say, this company got this money and 2,000 jobs were saved and nothing else is ever talked about and that's why it's just so baffling.
	It's not baffling because people generally don't understand economics, but it's not a real pleasant experience to watch the news and just see them basically getting absolutely everything wrong.
	And that just certainly made my blood boil a little bit too much to be enjoyable.
	It's something that Jon Stewart can stand because he believes in power, he just thinks it should be exercised better.
	But because I don't believe in power at all, seeing people lie about it doesn't give me any sort of productive anger that I can do something about it with.
	Yeah, I would be very interested in how Jon Stewart would respond to people like us if he would Point out a couple of these fundamental inconsistencies about government.
	I'm really interested how he would respond to that, if he's actually interested in something like truth, or if he's actually, for a large part, corrupted still himself.
	Well, the problem is if he were, I think the problem, and I've emailed him and so have a couple of listeners have emailed him about Freedom Aid Radio.
	That'll take a little bit of time for him.
	I'm sure he gets tons of emails a day, but we'll sort of keep pestering him to see if we can get him to listen.
	I think the challenge that he would face is that to make fun of people in power without questioning that power is something that people in power actually kind of like.
	Because it makes them look tolerant.
	It makes them look funny. You remember George Bush I, maybe if you used to watch Saturday Night Live, came on and made fun of Dana Carvey's imitation of him because it makes them look benevolent and it makes them look kind and it makes them look kind of harmless.
	You know, like they're not dangerous, bad people who stop wars and get people killed and so on, but they're just kind of, you know, funny, self-deprecating guys who...
	Who just enjoy a good laugh.
	So there's a real danger in it, but the problem that Jon Stewart would face if he really began to criticize people in power is A, it'd be slightly less funny, and B, it would be much, much tougher, if not impossible, to actually get these people to come on his show as guests, right? Who come on his show as guests, they know what they're getting into.
	Like, John Kerry does not come on the Daily Show with any sort of doubt about how he's going to be treated.
	But if he did, you just, you know, there's a reason George Bush has never been on, right?
	Because George Bush knows how he would, at least he would have some idea how he'd be treated.
	So you don't get these people on your show if they have some inkling that you're going to actually ask them tough questions and humiliate them.
	So I think it would be tough for him to keep that part of his show going.
	Exactly. And that whole notion earlier about the unproductive anger and frustration is one of the reasons I completely bailed out on television altogether.
	You just sit there and you watch what goes on on that box all day long, and after a while, just to stay sane, you have to become numb to it.
	I think that's true. Now, was that a turning point?
	Like, obviously you had ideas about freedom beforehand, and then you started watching more media.
	Was there a turning point? Was there a particular instance or show, or did you sort of wake up one morning and say, I can't beat my head against the wall anymore?
	Well, for myself, I've always had a certain level of disdain for the media in general, but I was always kind of addicted to it, you know.
	And then about eight or nine months ago, I just...
	I don't know, it was just like something, like a light switch flipped in my head, and I said, that's it.
	And I got rid of my televisions and everything.
	I get all my media now from the Internet.
	Well, I think that's probably good, because if I understand the sequence of things, what happens was six or nine months ago you got rid of your TV, and then about six months ago you discovered Free Domain Radio, which is good, because I know that you work in tech, so what we've managed to keep alive is your capacity to speak English, so we're certainly very happy about that.
	Yeah, I haven't completely reverted yet, but...
	Or as my CEO says, when technical people are talking, you guys can just sit in the corner and beep and burp at each other.
	So, can you hear me?
	I certainly can. What would you like to say?
	Oh, I only want to say that I can listen to you, but I don't see the usual...
	A layout of the Skype cast where I can read your names and where I can see who is muted and who is not.
	It's a technical problem.
	Well, I'm sorry, it's not a technical problem I can help you with.
	It took all of my energies and skills to get it going to begin with, so I'm not sure how to get more people, how to get you to view more of the people who are in.
	You took it off?
	No, I didn't take anything off.
	You should be able to see it, but is there a reason that you wanted to see other people and see whether they were muted?
	No, I want to see the names of the other listeners, and then I can see who is muted and who is not.
	There's a way you can do that.
	You probably lost that window.
	What you can do is quit this SkyCast and re-enter it, and when you re-enter it...
	I did it before. I did it, and it didn't help.
	All right, then there's probably something wrong.
	You might need to restart Skype or restart your system or your browser or something.
	It might be a pop-up blocker or something that's preventing it from coming up.
	That's right, too, yeah. But I enjoy very much listening to you guys.
	Well, thanks very much, and we certainly appreciate your interest in trying to find our names.
	I'm sure this isn't anyone from the government.
	No need to feel alarmed. I hope you can find it.
	You don't see my name on your screen.
	I'm Michael Noodle. Yeah, you're not.
	I see your name. Oh, I'm sorry.
	I thought you were Patriot Act 2.
	I'm sorry. My mistake.
	I think he was talking and he's not.
	Sorry. I don't want to sound too paranoid or anything.
	I'm very glad that everyone has got aliases except for me.
	I'd like to comment on that.
	Sure, go ahead. This is you, Danis, in Philadelphia.
	And speaking from a consumer standpoint, when I buy broadband, when I purchase broadband, I expect to get the Internet.
	And the definition of the Internet is all ports and all protocols open.
	So simply the fact that Currently, there's really nothing stopping AT&T or Verizon from filtering those ports if they wanted to.
	And what net neutrality was going to do was to create a law that says, or a method for consumers to complain to the FCC if they discover that Verizon is blocking all the ports that Vonage, for example, is using and they can't use their Vonage service.
	And I think if anybody doesn't see...
	The writing on the wall is that our choices of broadband is getting slimmer every day.
	And it's just a matter of time before they realize they have the monopoly and then they can start filtering those protocols and ports.
	So basically, me as a consumer right now, I can choose between two or three different providers.
	When it comes to the point that I only have one or two providers and they're both blocking voice over IP, such as Skype or Vonage or whatever, because they sell telephone service and they don't want you buying service cheaper from anybody but them, therein lies the danger.
	And that's why I personally am in support of net neutrality, which I think is a dead topic anyway.
	I think they kind of ruled it out anyway.
	Now, that's an interesting point, and I think this raises a very excellent topic for debate.
	And I'm sorry, do you mind if I ask your name or do you want to just go with an alias?
	Hugh. Hugh, I'm sorry.
	Yeah, you mentioned that at the beginning.
	Well, I think it's a very interesting question around if we want protection from a monopoly, right?
	I mean, do we go to the state or do we rely on the free market?
	It's sort of one of the basic questions, not just of anarchism, but libertarianism or minarchism as a whole.
	Now, if we are afraid of monopolies, of course, I'm sure you're aware of this from the podcast or just from other people who've ranted in your general vicinity.
	If you're concerned about monopolies, then, of course, the greatest monopoly in the world is the state, right?
	So I don't think that you solve the problem of monopoly by going to the state.
	And the other problem that I have is that I think that if you start to get the state involved in this kind of stuff, I think what's going to happen is your choices are going to start to go down rather than go up.
	So let's say that the government passes some law that says, if you're AT&T, you have to keep all these ports open.
	Then what's going to happen is AT&T is just going to start lobbying the government.
	This is sort of what always happens, right?
	They start lobbying the government.
	They start looking for exceptions.
	They start whining and dining the politicians.
	And so while you might get a decent law in for a little while, It won't take very long for the richest companies to end up influencing the government a lot more than the private consumer.
	Whereas if there was no government, then you simply would not sign up with any broadband provider that threatened to block any channels.
	And any broadband provider in your neighborhood that was going to block all these channels Would simply find itself out of customers, and a market would open up for other people who would come in promising to keep all of them open.
	Does that sort of make any sense?
	And feel free. I mean, this is just a debating point.
	Yeah, but the problem is they're already lobbying.
	They've already lobbied to defeat this.
	And they've already, if you follow Internet law and what's been going on, I'll give you another example where they lobbied Verizon and many of the RBOCs in power have lobbied against municipal networks.
	And what I mean by municipal networks is, say you have a little town of, say, 10,000, and we all get together at a town committee meeting and say, hey, let's run fiber optics and have our own Internet provider.
	And, well, guess what?
	They've lobbied against that.
	So now that's against the law in several ways.
	So they're aggressively lobbying and campaigning to make it more of a monopolistic atmosphere for them.
	So prior to them getting into the Internet, it was a more open thing.
	You had a lot of small mom-and-pop ISPs operating.
	You don't have that anymore.
	It's just big corporate business jumping in.
	It's kind of like they fell behind The Times, and they didn't think the Internet was going to be all that.
	I don't know if you remember, that was the atmosphere back in the mid-90s when the Internet was introduced to their consumers.
	Sure. You know, you have Bill Gates on file.
	I don't remember verbatim what he said, but he basically said, the Internet, what's that?
	And he's eaten those words ever since.
	He's really regretted it. Yeah.
	My point is that, you know, if we, you know, you use the word free market, but we all know this is not a free market society.
	It's whoever has the most money who can lobby the most wins.
	And therein lies the problem.
	We have to give that power back to the people, for the people.
	It should be a government for the people, by the people, not for the people by the biggest check.
	And that's what's pissing me off.
	And it's going to lead to a wreck.
	And the most irritating thing about that, of course, is that I don't have the biggest check.
	I mean, I'd be absolutely for that system.
	If I had the money to buy the politicians, my main issue is that I don't.
	And that's the main reason that I'm an anarchist.
	I'm just not rich enough to be an effective Democrat.
	So I absolutely agree with you that the idea is, so it's just thwarted power lust really has driven me towards anarchism.
	If I can't rule, nobody will!
	But I would say that I agree with you that it should be government by and for the people.
	But the problem with that is that that's like saying it should be the mafia for the people.
	It should be criminals for the victims.
	Because, of course, the major relationship between the state and everybody else is the power relationship that is involved in the government having the guns and the people relative to the government being disarmed, right?
	I mean, you can have a Saturday night special, but you can't have a scud, right?
	So I think that that problem of the power relationship Being so widely disparate, it creates abuse, and we really are viewed, I think, unconsciously by people in government as livestock to be sort of sheared and grazed on and utilized as livestock.
	As much as possible.
	I don't think that there's any way to turn a monopolistic agency of violence into something that will serve the people that it's violent against.
	You know, if you have a mafia that is demanding protection from shopkeepers, to say that the mafia should really put the interests of the shopkeepers first, I don't think is ever going to occur.
	I'd like to think that there would be a way to do it.
	Because then I wouldn't have to be such a radical thinker, but I just have never been able to figure that one out.
	So if you'd like to find a way to figure it out, I think that would be great.
	I certainly would be open to hearing it.
	Well, one way is what we're doing now, and I mean, I think that's great, but yet lack of net neutrality is threatening this medium as well.
	So, you know, that's where I think net neutrality is an extremely serious topic.
	I would say there's one bit of hope, I think, coming around the corner in major theaters.
	I don't know if you're aware of a film coming out by Aaron Russo called Freedom to Fascism.
	Aaron Russo is a pretty predominant producer.
	He's the guy responsible for several rock and roll bands becoming famous, and oh boy, I forget.
	Yeah, I think he is a libertarian.
	But anyway, he's coming out with this movie that basically exposes the Federal Reserve and the IRS for what they really are.
	The Federal Reserve being a fiat money system that abolished metal-backed currency back in, what, 1913 or something?
	Yeah, that's right. And if you ask the average American, did you realize that the Federal Reserve is not an entity of our government?
	No. The answer is a majority, no.
	People do not realize that.
	But in fact, it's a private corporation run by the banks.
	So there lies some hope that when that movie comes out, it'll expose a lot of this power structure that kind of seems to rule us in a hidden fashion.
	Well, I think that's quite right.
	I'm certainly looking forward to seeing that film, and I found that Fahrenheit 9-11 was quite powerful.
	I mean, I know he's a socialist and so on, or a liberal, I guess you'd say, in the States, but I still found it to be quite powerful because it was, I think, I very much remember seeing it and being quite struck by the rhetorical power of his arguments and, of course, all of the scary stuff that's going on at the highest levels of power.
	I think that my sort of fundamental belief is that the next generation doesn't really believe too many of the myths.
	That we were all sort of raised to believe.
	There's certainly, in the States, there's still a warlike element among certain young people, but most of them are joining the military not out of patriotism, but out of financial desperation.
	And I think that there is a kind of general, and this is all nonsense that I'm just sort of feeling, so I don't ask me to prove it, but...
	I think that there's a general kind of pause in our culture at the moment.
	I think that we've reached the bottom of a particular kind of trough, and it just matters which way we're going to go as we start to go in a different direction now.
	I think much like Russia in the 1980s, the myth has run dry.
	Of the benevolence and good power of government.
	And the Daily Show and 9-11, Fahrenheit 9-11 and this show, will help a good deal continuing that process.
	And that's why I think it's so important to pump as many good ideas as we can out into sort of the cultural stratosphere at the moment, because I think that the culture is poised for a real change.
	Well, my personal favorite of any of the 9-11 documentaries is Loose Change, Second Edition.
	And some of the Alex Jones stuff, although I know a lot of people think Alex Jones is way far out there, but I think he's onto some stuff.
	I think Fahrenheit 9-11 was rather timid and really didn't cover a lot of the controversial issues surrounding 9-11.
	There's still a lot of open issues about 9-11 that our government did not even address, leading many to believe that the government was More than just...
	They were more than just...
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I'm at a loss for words. They were active in...
	You were saying they were active in the planning and execution of it, right?
	Certainly, we had some good debates about that on Free Domain Radio as well.
	Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's a growing consensus.
	I mean, it really is amongst my peers.
	Yeah. I don't know about the rest of the country, but certainly in a lot of online communities, I see that's a growing consensus that, you know, something just doesn't smell right.
	No, for sure, and we've had some great debates at Freedom in Radio on that topic as well.
	It's been very tough to get Niels to speak up because he's so shy on this topic, but we certainly do our best to try and draw him out of his shell because he's very shy and retiring on it.
	But no, it is definitely, these kinds of debates are very important to have about the nature of power and to understand the lack of benevolence that's involved in power.
	But it's very hard for people to see that very clearly, and my general theory is it's because they have faced certain corruptions within their own relationship with their parents or with their church, and then the state sort of takes that over as well.
	This is Charles is on.
	Charles is on. Has anyone had a chance to see Who Killed the Electric Car or does anyone know anything about that?
	I haven't now. Have you seen it?
	No, I have not. I was just curious if someone has seen it and can give a concise review of it.
	I would say the only media I've seen in that event is on The Simpsons, where the Masons get together, and they say, Who killed off the electric car?
	Who made Steve Guttenberg a star?
	We did. We did.
	I guess that covers it.
	Right. As many ways that I can get copyright violations into my show as I try to get them in.
	Now, we've had some people who are listening, and I know that there's some people who aren't too confident about their ability to speak English as fluently as we've done, but there are some people who haven't spoken up yet.
	yet?
	Are you lurkers or are you people with a burning yearning topic that you haven't revealed to us yet?
	Okay.
	I guess maybe I'll throw myself up as the pincushion on this one.
	and
	Russo, he may be right that our government was certainly glad to see something like 9-11 happen But I don't think there's sufficient evidence there to show that they were actively engineering the event.
	The stuff that he mentions in that video online, he does a really good job actually of employing the same kinds of sensationalistic techniques that the regular media does.
	Verbally saying things like, you know, the neocons were behind this and then showing visual images of documents that they've written before 9-11 that sort of intimate that they were involved but not really actually proving it.
	So you make the mental connection, but it's not really...
	I mean, it's appealed to emotion to me, it seems.
	Right. I mean, I find the 9-11 stuff perfectly fascinating, absolutely.
	And I certainly don't...
	I don't have the technical...
	A lot of the arguments are very technical.
	And I don't have the technical expertise to judge those things.
	So it's hard for me to sort of say that I know what happened.
	And I think people say, well, there's lots of evidence that's very bizarre and things happen and lots of evidence that things happen that don't jibe.
	I would be absolutely shocked beyond words if the official story were true.
	I mean, just because it's the government speaking, right?
	So it's like, hello, they lie, right?
	I mean, there's just no way to get the truth out of these people to save their lives or your lives.
	So I would be absolutely shocked if what the government said about 9-11 was true.
	That having been said, they were very good at tidying up the evidence, right?
	I mean, the planes are all gone.
	The buildings are all gone.
	The steel's all been sort of sold off and broken down.
	And so it's a pretty clean sweep of the area.
	And so I think that the problem is that there is no way to prove, at least to my knowledge, and this is sort of to my level of technical expertise, which is not I, in these areas, there's no way to prove what happened beyond a shadow of a doubt or what didn't happen.
	And so I certainly think that it's a fascinating topic to look into.
	I eagerly look for more conclusive evidence about what actually occurred.
	And I certainly do believe that in the very largest sense, the government in the United States is responsible for 9-11, because 9-11 comes from poking lots of sharp sticks into Muslim nations, right?
	Muslim nations not exactly...
	I'm sorry? I'm not saying that they're not responsible for it.
	I'm just saying that the direction that Russo is going is completely unproductive.
	It's obvious from the track record of the United States from the 1960s, 1970s on, that it's basically...
	It's our fault, why people over there hate us, but I don't think chasing after fantastic stories like this only does a disservice to the actual truth, because people will dismiss it as just fantasy.
	Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think that there is a certain amount of intellectual effort that gets poured into trying to figure out 9-11, which I think could be better used elsewhere.
	Now, of course, I'm never one to tell somebody else how they should or shouldn't live their life, but I would certainly say that we don't need 9-11 to prove the evil of the government, right?
	All we need to do is have a look at our 1040, right?
	I mean, and the consequences if we don't pay our taxes.
	That's all we need to do is to say that the government has guns to our head, and if we don't pay our taxes, they're going to throw us in jail.
	And so I don't think that we need 9-11 to prove the evil of government.
	And I think the problem is that if you focus on 9-11, even if somebody came out with a proof, you know, there was some memo that's got everyone's signature on it about, you know, we're going to do this dastardly thing and we're going to engineer these airplanes to go into the buildings in New York.
	My concern would be that people are going to go, well, that's just terrible.
	What we need now is an internal government.
	Federal Homeland Security Department, which is going to start reviewing everything the government does internally, and it's actually going to raise your taxes, and it's going to cause more government regulation.
	I think that if you prove the evil of the government in a specific manner, the temptation is for people to create additional agencies.
	We used to have a Department of Defense, but unfortunately it's now overseas attacking other people, so now we need a Department of Homeland Security.
	So I think that what happens is if you prove the evil of a government in a specific manner, the great tendency for the majority of people will be to say, well, we need another government agency to deal with this potential for government corruption.
	Whereas if you prove the evil of government in a generic manner, i.e., human beings should not have the right to use force against other people, then the conclusion that anybody who agrees with you is going to be pretty much a logical one, which is that we need to get rid of the whole institution.
	And that's sort of my major issue, that even if people were able to prove government complicity in 9-11, I'm not sure that it would help the freedom movement in particular.
	In fact, it might drive it quite the opposite way.
	Well, Stefan, you make a good point.
	Actually, you make the case about why this is actually important.
	Because what Alex Jones has done in his latest documentary called Terror Storm is that he did show the general behavior of governments, that this was not a fluke, which is very important to realize.
	He also goes very much into the state of mind of people, how people react to it.
	Greg here says, well, people will just dismiss it as a fantastic story.
	But that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you're talking about your own ideas towards this.
	People also say that a free society will never happen when you're arguing with them about if the government is good or not.
	Well, if we can change the mind of this person, then there's a good chance we can change other people's minds.
	Sorry, go ahead. No, you go ahead, please.
	Okay. So, what Alex did in this documentary, he starts out with giving five or six examples of state-supported terrorism or something that's more or less within that definition because, of course, it's tough to define these things.
	When it's not clear who's doing what, etc.
	But it's about aggressiveness on people that they are supposed to defend or that they're being aggressive and blaming it on other people.
	That's what governments are really good at.
	And Alex gives five or six examples of history, historical examples, who have For which we have clear factual evidence.
	That, in fact, the governments themselves have admitted this.
	Which is a very important point to understand.
	That it's not up in the air.
	We have clear evidence for this.
	And so that's one thing you have to understand.
	So people come with complaints all the time like, Well, the government would never do this because if it would come out, then they would be in big trouble.
	Well, you are making the assumption that they would actually get in trouble.
	Right. And you're making another assumption that everything the government does...
	You have to understand that a lot of things do not come out in the public, and we don't know these things, so we don't know how much isn't coming out.
	Sorry, just to further up that point, listening to Seymour Hersh's chain of command at the moment is quite remarkable when you see the clear documentary evidence all the way up to the top echelons of the American military establishment to decide to abandon the Geneva Convention and to commit specific war crimes against prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other areas and to ship To ship suspects to allied countries where they can be tortured.
	All of these stuff are clear war crimes, which you'd think, well, they're not going to torture prisoners because if it ever came out, people would get in trouble.
	And, of course, the only people who got in trouble were the people at the very lowest echelons, a couple of people.
	But it was definitely a systemic decision to abandon the Geneva Convention and to torture prisoners.
	And nobody got in trouble at the highest areas, even though videotapes and clear documentary evidence came out all the way up to the top.
	Yeah, exactly. Another example of a short while ago is the phone tapping and all those kind of things that the Bush administration is acting out right now, in that people say, well, look at this example.
	It gets them in so much trouble that they could never pull something up that big.
	So people use the example as a way to prove that it could never happen, even though it did just happen.
	And another thing is that when it does come out, what happens?
	Well, there's nothing you can do.
	A lot of people are whining about it, writing paper articles and all this kind of stuff.
	And even on television, there are people who say to the government, well, you're...
	You're going outside of this constitutional amendment and that, etc.
	And they're just giving you the finger.
	That's basically what it comes down to.
	And why is that?
	Because people don't have any power.
	You have got zero power.
	If I may say right here, my name is being that I am.
	And I think, you know, I do not want to defend the government.
	But you're making accusations, really, without substantiation.
	Did you mean myself or Nils?
	I just want to make sure. I think both of you, you were guys feeling each other on, you know, supporting each other in that.
	And I think it's not really...
	You have to substantiate everything that you say.
	It's, you know...
	Like Neil, I don't know who is Neil and who is not.
	I'm not sure. Oh, sorry.
	I'm Steph and the other guy is Neil.
	Okay. Neil, with all due respect to you, I'm not defending the government in here at all.
	There is a fish, but I don't know where the fish is.
	You know, by saying that the government pulled out of the Geneva Convention, this is not true.
	The government did not pull out of the Geneva Convention.
	Whether the government also was involved in one way or another in the 9-11 incident, and there is no evidence that that is really true.
	There's a lot of people that, you know, they do the hearsay.
	But factual evidence on the ground, and I know that the people that are providing the evidence for us are usually representatives of the government.
	So we really don't have independent Study that really proves that 9-1-1 was propagated by the government.
	Go ahead.
	I mean, we can sit here all day and say it's certainly possible, and I'm more than willing to agree with that.
	It is certainly possible that they were complicit.
	But if we're going to claim to be lovers of the scientific method and believers in Strict standards of evidence, then we can't take the evidence we have now and say, yes, the government did it.
	Good. Well, hold on, Greg.
	That's not the way we distribute our ideas.
	We are not saying this is what happened and you need to accept that.
	That's not what's happening.
	And you're getting pretty excited about this.
	I have a feeling that you've got some kind of ideas that it would be too bad of the government to do this, but that's also not in favor of what you're saying, that we need to be looking for the truth and that kind of stuff.
	What is important here is to explain a mechanism, a mechanism of incentives And at Freedomly Radio, Stefan has talked about war many, many times, and I think very, very, it learned me a lot of things about the incentives people have, and then psychology, soldiers, etc.
	And why is it so important?
	Well, why do people go to war?
	There are reasons for it.
	Why do they aggressively attack another country?
	It would seem weird from the assumption that Government is all good, etc.
	So, if we just look at the incentive system, and we don't need to look at any single fact, we just look at the incentives, and we know that there's no such thing as a citizen, there's just...
	You people just talked about, well, the government treats, because it has all the power, it treats the people without the power as a means to their end.
	So if you look at it like in that way, then there's clear incentive for them to keep the people in fear, so they will continue to look to government for solutions.
	Precisely why they would want to exploit 9-11 to do that, but that doesn't prove that they actually engineered 9-11.
	I didn't say that it proves it.
	We just look at We've got a happening.
	We've got some factual evidence of the events in all kinds of different forms.
	And if you want to understand what's going on, we're trying to piece it together in a rational way.
	So, the first thing we recognize is that the government has incentive, has a means, An opportunity for these things to make this happen.
	And if we dig into the history of all these kind of things, we know that government, in fact, has had a lot of knowledge about these kind of training exercises, and the military has been involved in this kind of business for years.
	So, from that point on, we know, well, it's possible that And then we look at alternative theories and alternative theory is something like the government has put forward and we look at those incentives and we look at those facts and then we try to piece it together.
	Sorry, if I can just interrupt for just a second.
	I certainly agree with you that we certainly wouldn't take anything that the government says as face value.
	In fact, that would be the lowest level of the credibility heap that I would have.
	And that we certainly do, I think there's great value in continuing to explore these things.
	And I think that within the freedom movement there's a great deal of value in having a look at these arguments and the physical evidence which is growing sort of day by day.
	Lots of people are looking into this kind of stuff.
	I think that the challenge that I always have with the 9-11 stuff is, is it an internal debate that we have within ourselves for people who already are understanding that the government is a fairly nasty organization, or is it something that we would ever sort of deal with with people who are outside the movement?
	Because as we can see right now, when we start to talk about the Abu Ghraib stuff, which I brought up of course, and the 9-11 stuff, We have people who say, well, there's no evidence, so you need this or you need that.
	And that's perfectly valid. Of course, everybody should ask for evidence and shouldn't take anything that we say on faith any more than anything else.
	But the way that I prefer to do it is to look at something like, if you want people to understand the evils of the government, to talk about something that is non-controversial, like what happens when you don't pay your taxes, because everybody can understand that and you don't need any evidence.
	So I certainly agree with you that we definitely need to keep pursuing this as a topic.
	And it is quite a fascinating topic because there is some very compelling evidence on the side of the skeptics, for sure.
	And there is some holes still about what happened in certain areas.
	But when I talk to people who are not familiar with these kinds of arguments, I find that the 9-11 stuff ends up with people saying, well, where's the proof and so on.
	Whereas if you sort of go up to someone who's not knowledgeable about the iniquities of government and say, well, you know, how do you like it when half of your life gets taken away at the point of a gun?
	They can't argue about taxation with you in the way that they can argue about 9-11, if that makes any sense.
	I'd like to make a comment right here, if you don't mind, Neil.
	Okay, please. Well, what I think is being tried right here is the government.
	And I think you want to prove to the people that the government is no good.
	So you can convince them to make a change.
	Well, let's say that you have proven your contention that the government is no good.
	So what are we trying to accomplish?
	We're going to take all of these people out, put them in a basket, and put them out, and then elect new people.
	What's going to happen with these new people?
	So are we setting, to begin with, we have to set parameters where we can work to help ourselves, first of all, recognize who truly is the right person to select in the government.
	And then, Even though you selected that, you have a massive amount of people in this country that are being, I guess, socially programmed to choose in a non-correct way.
	So they're going to choose people that are not necessarily really good.
	So those people are going to take position, and we know that Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
	And we're going to have the same thing 20 years from now or 15 years from now.
	So what is really the solution right here?
	I certainly agree with you that we're going to have problems if we say that what we need to do is get people to handle government power better.
	I certainly agree with you. I sort of think of it, I use the acronym N-O-T-A, NOTA, which stands for none of the above, right?
	So people say, well, who should rule over us?
	Should it be a king? Should it be a priest?
	Should it be a politician?
	Should it be a dictator? Should it be a Republican or a Democrat or a Tory or a Socialist or a Communist or a Hamina, Hamina, Hamina?
	Well, it doesn't matter because as anarchists we simply say none of the above.
	That no human being is capable of not succumbing to corruption through the power of violence.
	The power of money doesn't trouble me at all.
	The power of artistic ability, the power of beauty, the power of Of wealth doesn't bother me at all.
	The power of violence troubles me.
	The power of violence can never be survived by any human being.
	So our long-term goal and, you know, the question of how we get there remains one that we're still exploring.
	But certainly we have to know where it is that we want to get to eventually before we can figure out how to get there.
	But the goal is a stateless society.
	The goal is a society without A monopoly of force with any particular group.
	And there's lots of ways in which that can manifest itself.
	We have theories about what are called dispute resolution organizations, which are private agencies designed to help people resolve disputes in a non-violent manner, which are sort of mini-states but without any monopoly of violence.
	So there's lots of solutions about what happens when we get rid of the state.
	But the state, of course, is a logically immoral entity because it claims that certain people have the rights to declare war, to levy taxation, which are specifically denied to all other citizens within a country or a group.
	And so our goal is no government whatsoever.
	Our goal is to get rid of this sort of moral abomination called the state in the same way that in previous generations the goal was to get rid of slavery.
	And in previous generations to that the goal was to affect the separation of church and state.
	We're just sort of step by step climbing up this wall towards human freedom.
	Prior generations have done their part, separation of church and state, getting rid of slavery, women's emancipation, the rights of children, the Geneva Convention.
	Every generation adds its particular log to the fire of human freedom.
	And our one, which is a rather large one, is to say, now we need to go to the next logical step and get rid of the government completely so that we have a consistent moral rule across all humanity that no human being Yes, to initiate the use of force against any other.
	Right. Let me say, yeah, I think you're probably going to say the same thing I'm going to say.
	The problem with that is when everyone, every human being, has committed himself in a small place, in a group of people, in a group of nations, or in an entire world.
	When every single human being has committed himself And abided by that rule that I shall not use violence to impose my idea upon any other human being.
	Then we might have something like that, that might be reasonable.
	But at this time, this is not possible.
	The reason being is that there are still people that are They are not committed to any human law or any human right.
	All they care about is their own personal satisfaction in gaining power.
	And they may gather about them people that are mind-like or that are interested in something that they can take, like money, to go ahead and impose their own will upon you.
	Now, they are not called government.
	They are called something.
	Or something like that.
	What is the stages that prepares human beings on the entire planet, not only this country, the entire planet to basically accept and grow in these moral tendencies to respect each other and to care about each other and to grow in that.
	Nothing that I see in the educational system Nothing that I see that you have presented right now, other than your idea, which is a very good idea eventually, in a very advanced state of mind or state of consciousness.
	Sure, look, I fully understand your reservations about this, and of course, it is important that we don't back ourselves into the communist corner, right, which was what went on last century, where people said, utopia's coming, and any time that utopia doesn't arrive, it's the fault of people, and we have to force them to be better, and, you know, this was the dictatorial problem of the 20th century.
	Well, more than a problem, a genocide, nearly.
	Well, I fully agree with you that it's a leap.
	That's no question. It's a step that human beings have to get to in order to get to be a free society.
	I don't agree that every human being needs to be perfect in order for the world to be free because, of course, it's an impossible standard.
	Let me ask... I'll sort of make a brief comment and then I'll turn it back to you with another question.
	The first brief comment that I would make is that The fact that the state exists is one of the main causes of violence, if not the main cause of violence, I would sort of put it up there with religion.
	The fact that the state exists is one of the major causes of violence in human society because the economic incentives that are created by the state to use violence Are enormous.
	So, for instance, if I manufacture computers and I want to raise the price of my computers, and if I lobby the government to keep foreign computers from coming into the country, then because of the existence of the government, I want to go and lobby and I want to go and make people believe that, boy, it's going to be really great if you keep all these foreign computers out.
	And so if I can get the government to do it, then I'm offloading all the costs of violence onto the taxpayers who I'm then exploiting by raising the prices of my computers.
	If there was no government, There's no conceivable way that using your own private resources as a company to try and get to keep all foreign computers out of your country could ever work.
	You'd have to hire a coast guard.
	You'd have to hire customs officials.
	You'd have to intercept every ship which could defend itself.
	There's simply no way that you could ever get something like a ban on imports to work unless you have a government.
	It's simply impossible. So the fact that the government exists It's one of the major causes of violence in human society.
	If you get rid of the government, you are automatically going to be transferring the costs of violence to whoever is creating that violence.
	And that doesn't mean there won't be any criminals, but it means that things like war Economically, absolutely non-viable, right?
	War is a net loss of income, but it's a net transfer of income to the ruling class, so you simply can't have war.
	You can't have tariffs.
	You can't have taxation, because all of that, you offload the cost of enforcing all of that to the taxpayers.
	So without the government, you have to pay for that yourself, which means it simply becomes economically unviable.
	The second is, we don't require that everyone be perfect.
	All we do is require that people not use violence to resolve their disputes.
	So the question that I would ask you is a two-parter.
	One is, do you use violence to resolve your disputes in your life?
	And also, do you know lots of people in your life, or can you tell me how many people you do know in your life who use violence to resolve their disputes?
	Because that's all we're asking for.
	Not that everyone be perfect and kumbaya and hug their brother.
	But rather that people simply refrain from using violence.
	And I don't really know anyone who uses violence to resolve disputes, but do you?
	I think he's just checking his Rolodex here.
	Okay.
	Are you still there? Were you waiting for me to take a breath?
	Hello? Can anyone still hear me?
	I can still hear you.
	Oh dear. I think we may have lost him.
	I'm sure there were technical difficulties.
	But I think that's still a useful thing for people to understand anyway.
	We don't need everyone to be perfect for there to be a free society.
	I don't care if people want to do the moo-moo naked on their lawn and paint themselves blue.
	It may be irrational. That's fine.
	If they want to be druids and have dances in the park, that's fine with me too.
	I just don't want them to be using violence.
	And I find that very few people that I know of in my whole life...
	And just to clear the deck, What I was going to say was the problem is not just this government, but the whole idea of the state at all.
	Things like what Rousseau is doing is going to get people waving their fist at George Bush, not at the idea of the state.
	Right. I'd like to comment on that.
	I don't know if...
	I don't think Russo's talking at all about 9-11.
	He's talking about the Federal Reserve and the IRS. But I think what you're suggesting is that we just leave things status quo and leave things the way they are, which I think is nonsense.
	I think waking up the masses is not a bad thing.
	I mean, it's a start.
	Rather than just sitting and being complacent, I think is the worst thing that we can do.
	Anything that gets people thinking and talking and starting to questioning the status quo is not a bad thing.
	And anybody that suggests otherwise is with the status quo in your opinion.
	Well, I certainly agree with that.
	And I think that the society is in a bad enough direction, you know, even if we just look at a single factor like the national debt, and it's not just at the United States, but all over the world.
	Society is in a bad enough direction that we kind of need a different direction that's not just a tweak, right?
	In the realm of the state, for me, it's very sort of morally analogous to slavery, that you don't sort of say, well, we need to reform slavery, or we need to sort of pass more rules to make sure that slave owners are better.
	We need to sort of regulate the use of whipping with slaves.
	No, we need to ditch the whole concept.
	of slavery. The whole idea you can't reform a fundamentally corrupt institution like slavery.
	And given that the state is an agency which claims a monopolistic use of violence, the right to use violence monopolistically, you simply can't reform that as a moral principle.
	You can't turn shit into gold.
	You can't make an evil institution good through reform.
	Because especially when it has a monopoly of force, how are you going to enforce that, right?
	I mean, everyone says, well, we ought to pass a law, but Boy, you should see what happens to laws as they go through that process.
	They come out completely unrecognizable from where they went in after all the special interests get their hold on it and all that.
	So I think you're absolutely right.
	We have to break people out of their complacency, which means we have to provide to them sort of logical and viable solutions, well-thought-out solutions that are very, very different from what we have right now.
	Because as I sort of say to people who say, well, we should just make the government smaller, it's like, well, let's say that we could make the government back to where it was in 1776.
	Well, it only took about 100 years for there to be fiat money and public education and the War of Northern Aggression, as it's sometimes called, where 600,000 people get killed.
	You have a draft. You have all of the evils of a central state authority.
	Only about 100 years from the smallest state ever in human history with a great constitution and some brilliant minds trying to restrain it.
	You've got about 100 years before it turns into a kind of dictatorship and then only another 50 years after that where you start to get involved in World War I and then you get the Federal Reserve in 1913 and then another 20 years after that you have the New Deal and another 20 years after that you have the welfare state.
	So the very smallest government that we've ever had in the very freest country that we ever had, where you had no aristocracy, no historical hegemony, it took, you know, what, five, ten generations to descend into what we have now.
	So I don't see that creating a small government is ever going to solve the problem.
	It's always going to grow back because that's just the very logic of violence.
	Can I just add real quick?
	Somebody made a comment earlier that they don't think discussing 9-11 is productive.
	I can't think of anything more fascinating than the possibility that our government is behind 9-11.
	If people woke up to that fact, that would be it.
	That would be the big thing that would wake everybody up.
	And, you know, I mean...
	So, for anybody to say that 9-11 is really not something...
	I think that's ludicrous.
	I mean... My personal point of view is that the burden of proof should not be on us, the citizens.
	We don't have the resources and everything that the government does.
	The burden of proof should be on them to prove that they're not corrupt.
	And I'm tired of these people taking this stance that, well, they're saying, you know, you don't have much evidence.
	Well, you know, there's a lot of stuff.
	If you take the time and you look at all the accounts You know, specifically the Pentagon, it's just reeking of it being a missile as opposed to a plane.
	I mean, it's just...
	I don't want to get into that, but, you know, I mean, what more could you ask for to wake up at least the American public?
	Can I... Absolutely, yeah.
	Okay. Stefan, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about this.
	Because you're saying that it's important to show people what the real problem is so that they will look for...
	So that only if you understand the problem, only then can you get to a solution.
	Whereas if you say, well, this is just the Bush administration, then people will look at another administration.
	Right? Right.
	Okay, so, but if we know, or if we can show that in fact they did this, and we have shown, and we know it's in the public domain that governments have done things like this in the past many, many, many times, Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
	Just for those who don't know, I mean, there's just about every, and mostly I know about the United States, but I'm sure it's true everywhere.
	Just about every time that country gets into a war, the origins of that war, the claimed reason for starting that war are fabricated.
	Yeah, that's a good example.
	So the real interesting question, which is very analogous to a thing like war, Why would the higher levels of government want to start and go into a war?
	That's a very, very tough question.
	And the same question applies to why would a government make terrorist-type things and blame it on somebody else?
	While they are actually hurting people that they are supposed to be protecting, why would they do that?
	You're making assumptions and you believe in them.
	You have to really put your facts.
	Don't put the cars before the horse.
	You've got to put the horse before the car.
	If you have evidence that are unsubstantiated, then you can use those.
	I mean, you're making claims and these claims may be true.
	I'm not saying that they are not true, but you're just, you know, you make an assumption and you don't really put the evidence.
	Well, no, give him a chance, because the first thing you can establish, say, in a murder case or in any criminal case, you do have to establish motive as well.
	So, give him a chance to keep going.
	I agree with you that motive doesn't equal guilt, but motive is an essential thing for any kind of trial environment.
	Okay, like I said, it's completely analogous to the fact of war, because we know that For example, that the people in Korea or Vietnam were not aggressing towards American military people in the United States.
	We know that as a simple fact.
	And we know as a simple fact that Iraq was not attacking the United States.
	But that's a simple fact.
	That's open. There's no dispute about that.
	So, the question becomes, why do these leaders want to get into war?
	And it's not...
	You only need two examples of these kind of things to raise a very critical question.
	Another example is the atomic bombs in Japan in the Second World War.
	Why would they want Why would someone possibly do that?
	Because if people start from the assumption that the government is all good and wants to protect its citizens, etc., then it doesn't make any sense.
	But we know that these things have happened, that there are happy wars where the high-ranking government people send their own citizens into the meat grinders and consciously Let them be killed for very weird ends because the end was not to keep peace.
	They are actually starting a war in many cases.
	So what we can identify is an incentive system that's very, very, very important.
	If a government says, I want to go to war with Iraq and I don't care how, for instance, what has come out this week as a fact is that Bush has said, well, what we can do is we can send over a plane over Iraq in UN colors and hopefully shoot it down.
	Maybe that way we can get into war with Iraq.
	That's just fact. It's open.
	It's public domain. So why would they possibly want that?
	And until we discover this incentive, then we don't understand government at a fundamental level.
	And you can say, well, you need to improve the terrorism, etc., etc.
	That's completely irrelevant.
	We know that... I would like to stop you right here for a moment, please.
	Because you said specifically, and we're talking about the assumption, that the government is complicit in the 9-1-1 incident.
	I am talking about...
	You are giving a whole essay about things that are not related.
	So we're going to say, you don't have to say the government has incentive and has motive.
	But, okay, tell us about the evidence.
	I'm just explaining to you that I don't care about 9-11.
	And the war example is completely analogous.
	But you're making assumptions that are not substantiated.
	What you're saying has to be substantiated.
	Your time and the people that are present with us in this session is very important.
	And it is our responsibility if we give them any information that it be substantiated, that it be true, that it be of value to them.
	But if we are just stuffing, you know, there is a lot of people that talk.
	And talk is cheap.
	Let's make our conversation something, if we speak something, let us not throw off accusations.
	And if we throw off accusations, we need to substantiate it.
	And you are throwing accusations without substantiation.
	What I said to you is that I'm not talking about 9-11.
	Well, one of the facts is that if it would be true, then what would have happened is that the government knowingly would attack their own people and hurt their people for some kind of cause that we don't know yet.
	And what I'm saying with the war example, which is open and known, is it's the same thing.
	What happens in Iraq and in Vietnam and in Korea and in Japan is that they...
	They let their own military people die in war.
	They also let people from other countries die in war.
	That's completely not necessary.
	Okay. Well, we know that they are sending their own military to their depths.
	Consciously, they want to go into war.
	So, we have to ask the question, why is that?
	Why would a president possibly...
	One to send his own military to their deaths.
	That's a question that goes into the fundamental nature of government as a whole.
	Let me ask you a question right now, and I would like you to give me an answer.
	Let's say someone is attacking you in your home right now, and someone calls 911, and the chief of police in your town Sends a police to your home knowing that this police might have the potential to lose his life by the criminal that is trying to attack you.
	Now, do you think that this man or the chief of police is intentionally or is inherently corrupt and he's sending a policeman to get killed?
	Well, that's an interesting example that you gave, because Stefan has talked to some people who have some experience in this area, whereas the police officers, it's a complete disincentive to risk their life if they cannot get anything as a reward.
	Because the police is a monopoly, then it doesn't matter to them whether they succeed in their quote-unquote goals or not.
	So we have to recognize that they certainly will not risk their lives if they wouldn't get anything out of that.
	But you are completely avoiding the question of war.
	Well, I think...
	Sorry, can I just jump in about this issue of the police?
	Because it's a very important question.
	The question for me around the war is not too complicated.
	And the question around the police who are coming to protect my property and my life and so on, for me the question of the police is quite a little bit different than that.
	And certainly if I had a voluntary contract with some security company who I said, you know, listen, I would really appreciate it if you'd come by if I ever get a home invasion or whatever, Then if you could come by, that would be great.
	And they competed with other security agencies and so on, then no, I agree.
	There would be no corruption in sending people to come and protect me because that was their job.
	They signed up for it. It was all a voluntary interaction.
	The problem that I have with the existing state and existing police system is that the police do not protect my property, do not protect my life.
	The police are quite the opposite.
	I've never had a home invasion.
	I've never been mugged.
	I've never been in a fistfight.
	I've never had any kind of, as an adult, any kind of violent attack.
	But what does happen is that half of my money gets taken from me at the point of a gun, and the police are the people who come by to get that money if I don't pay my taxes voluntarily, sort of quote voluntarily.
	So my issue sort of with the state and with the police is that they take my money and don't protect my property.
	In fact, they're the ones who are threatening my property far more than any private criminal I could ever dream of.
	And as far as the state goes, with war, well, my particular theory, which I put forward here completely unproven, which I've mentioned before, is that...
	We do generally find that when the state begins to run out of money, lots of things get invented that allow people to take money out of the public purse.
	And the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being transferred to the private sector through the war in Iraq, It seems to me a completely valid reason why the government would go to war, the increased taxes and the increased surveillance.
	The government doesn't care about surveilling us.
	The government cares about the money they can tax us in order to create the surveillance agencies.
	This is my view.
	I don't have any proof. This is just sort of my opinion.
	But the government doesn't care about the Patriot Act and the government doesn't care about sort of tracking our phone calls or anything.
	What the government does care about is taking our money, right?
	I mean, it's a racket. And so I would say that when it comes to war, when it comes to violations of civil liberties, The government isn't some sort of crazy, insane parent that wants to spy on us all the time.
	The government just wants to create lots of excuses that make us want to hand over our money with less complaint.
	So I think that the war is simply just a way of transferring money because the one thing that's always the case in war is the government gets more money from the internal taxpayers.
	The primary Victims are the taxpayers, not the foreign combatants or even the domestic combatants.
	The purpose of the war is to transfer money from the private sector through the public banks and through the public infrastructure into other private hands.
	The incentive is to exploit events like 9-11, not to create them.
	Well, I think that's still an open question.
	I mean, there's lots of doubt around the 9-11 thing.
	It's not a proven case, but neither is the government's a proven case either.
	So I don't have any conclusions, and I don't think anyone has an open and shut case around 9-11.
	I certainly think that the government has not proven their case that everything that they say is true.
	And I do agree that the burden of proof really should be on the government, because they're the ones who generally lie more than anybody else.
	And of course, there's lots of evidence on the other side of 9-11 as well.
	I just find that it's not necessary.
	I think it's an important thing to keep pursuing, and I agree that it would be a pretty strong clincher in terms of government evil if it could be proven that the government was behind 9-11.
	I just don't find that it's necessary in talking with people, and I think it's far too debatable a point when you can deal with things like taxation that people experience every day.
	Well, my point about this is that if we can show that they are complicit in any of these acts, it doesn't matter if it's one or two or ten, but it's actually quite easy to prove a dozen of cases in the last century, then we know that there is an incentive for the government to actually hurt their own people and to use it for their own ends.
	For instance, to go into war You cannot easily go into war.
	If you don't have the masses behind you, then there will be problems.
	You always want to keep the people quiet and down, and railing for you, and seeing the other people as the enemy.
	You wouldn't even get a military going.
	Right.
	If you look at Hitler in 1938, he pretty much got the newspapers to say that the Czechoslovakian Germans were begging the Wermack to come across the border and save them, and they invented all these atrocities that the rest of the Czechoslovak population were going on.
	In 1939, when they invaded Poland, they actually put some bodies, dressed them up as Polish soldiers, and laid them around a German radio station as if they'd been shot in self-defense.
	Absolutely, you cannot go to war without a pretext, and the most evil regimes in the world always create a pretext and always have a moving story as to why they have to go to war, which has nothing to do with the reasons.
	The central purpose, as we've talked about before, is that War is the health of the state and that war involves a massive transfer of money from taxpayers to other private citizens through the mechanism of the state and that seems to me the major reasoning behind it or the major purpose behind it.
	So having a government which is a monopoly on force not only are they not responsible towards any kind of market mechanism Which normal businesses are.
	Not only does violence spread violence, but they also want to keep everybody in fear from external entities and they have an incentive to create the fear if there's nothing to fear.
	We need to understand that.
	And if we don't understand that, if we don't see these incentives, and if these things like 9-11 are true, then we can certainly expect the same thing to happen soon again.
	That's very, very frightening, because 9-11 was in 2001, I think, and then a year later, Something happened in England.
	The train bombings.
	Right. And, well, we people here in the West aren't that used to this kind of thing.
	Well, it happens sometimes, like in Spain, England.
	But in other countries that are not the West, like South America, these things have happened far more many times.
	In one operation it's described of hundreds of bombings within a few decades and there are manuals for people who work in this kind of environment that says well it's good to focus on children and wives because that will really get the people riled up and that's awful.
	That's an excellent point, certainly.
	The one thing that, and this comes from certain thinkers around the world who are not necessarily American, and Noam Chomsky is one of the people who makes this case, he says that there's nothing new about 9-11.
	The only thing that was new was the direction that the violence was occurring in, because normally it occurs to people who have much less power overseas that American foreign policy causes the death of many people overseas, but not It's very unusual the direction that the guns were pointing.
	That's the major difference between 9-11 and everything else.
	And as far as the deaths that have been caused, of course, Americans are way ahead of the countries that American government and the CIA and so on have been involved with overseas.
	So the degree of horror that Americans feel about 9-11, which is perfectly valid, is still nothing compared to the degree of horror that people overseas feel about things that the American government have been responsible for.
	So definitely you keep sowing that kind of stuff overseas.
	Something's going to happen, and whether the government is involved or not is still a fascinating topic to pursue.
	But I would like to open up to any other questions, just as we're finishing up here.
	We're coming up on two hours.
	I know it's passed by like a flash, like a dream, like a slow, strolling jog through Heaven's gates.
	But if anybody else would like to bring up anything towards the end, I would certainly be appreciative of hearing anybody else.
	Neil and Nathan is there, or Stan?
	I just wanted to say thank you for sharing what you guys know.
	This is a very good topic that you guys are talking about.
	Even though I disagree with some things that you guys are saying, it's absolutely okay that we are able to do that and discuss it in openness like this.
	I have total respect to both of you guys and the people that are on this cast.
	Well, thank you. And look, I also wanted to point out that your demand that we provide proof for allegations is absolutely and perfectly rational, and it's something that we do always need to remember.
	When we do float around within our own sort of circle, sometimes we do start to take too many things for granted.
	So your point is absolutely well taken, and thank you for mentioning it.
	Thank you. Another thing that I wanted to point out, and that is I see what you guys are leading up to.
	And basically, you know, like Neil was talking about, the government is trying to create fear.
	And the fear justifies us to do something that is irrational.
	Let's say somebody is violent to us, so we're going to go there and be violent to them.
	And the same way with us right now.
	When we look at the evil of the government, and they are doing wrong, and therefore we are Like Neil was saying, it's terrifying.
	Well, no, it's not terrifying.
	We have to look at this with no fear.
	We have to look at it as it is.
	No emotional attachments.
	And try to look at a solution that is best.
	And I see that there must be a change.
	The change must begin somewhere.
	And the change must begin with everyone.
	Everyone takes responsibility of his own thoughts and feelings and actions.
	And by doing so, And allowing change, basically beginning with the change of our thoughts, the thought patterns that we are taught and programmed into.
	So I see that change must be, and that change must begin with each person, and I begin with myself.
	Thank you for listening. Beautifully put.
	Beautifully put. Thank you so much for sharing.
	That was a great, great speech.
	I'm probably going to steal it and pretend it's mine too, so thank you very much.
	That's nice. It's true of course.
	The existence of government is based upon the ideas in the minds of the people.
	If nobody would see the government as good, then there would be no government.
	It's that easy.
	So we try to change people's minds.
	Yeah, sure. The government runs on the argument for morality, which is why they always need a moral cover for what they're doing.
	And by asking people to apply ethics consistently, I think that we are going to basically...
	The government can unravel within a couple of years as long as people start to see it for what it is.
	And that's why the case needs to be clear and consistent and logical.
	And once you get people to stop believing in the morality of an entity, that entity which rests on morality, as the government does, I think it's going to be completely shocking how quickly it's going to go once our message gets out more consistently.
	it's not going to say that it's going to happen tomorrow but I think we'll all be absolutely shocked at how quickly the whole entity fades away once we pierce the veil of these moral illusions that keep people down to this idea of government virtue alright well if there's nothing else thank you so much everybody for spending your Sunday afternoon chatting about these electrifying topics I certainly love them and I'm glad that other people enjoy them too.
	If there's anything, if nothing anybody else wants to add, we'll cut off here just I guess at two minutes, two hours and two minutes.
	So thank you so much everyone for listening and thank you for listening to Free Domain Radio.
	Of course, I appreciate everybody's input.

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