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Jan. 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:19:10

623 Call In Show Jan 27 2007

The soldier's greatest friend, and reasons for having children

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	Good afternoon. This is January the 28th, 2007.
	Thank you so much for joining us.
	This is going to be a bit of an open format show.
	I've only got one or two topics that I would like to talk about, which of course can be entirely overshadowed by the requests or requirements of the listeners, so thank you so much for joining us.
	We haven't chatted about politics, and in particular war, for a little while, so I'm going to read a short excerpt from an article This is from the February 5th 2007 issue of Maclean's which is an Obama Fest and also has a very interesting description from a soldier who has sought asylum in Canada to avoid being redeployed back to Iraq and briefly this is a fairly uneducated young gentleman from the south as of course so many of the soldiers are And he was told on joining up,
	he has two kids and he wanted health care and he wanted some benefits.
	And he was told when he signed up that he was not going to see combat.
	In fact, he was told he was not going to be deployed outside of the United States.
	So he says. We don't know.
	There's no record. But I believe this is fairly common practice within the U.S. Military, as is the case with all militaries, it surprises me that people can believe that a group of individuals can go around and murder hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but are somehow above lying.
	I'm not sure where that stands in the hierarchy of values, but I'm fairly sure I would rank murder much worse than lying.
	So somebody who's willing to go and murder or sanction or participate in that murder at whatever level probably is not above lying to you to get you to join.
	But I wanted to give a bit of a sort of grunt's eye view of the war, so I'm going to read a little bit from his book.
	He's written a book, let me just see, it's called The Deserter's Tale.
	And his status at the moment in Canada, he's applied for refugee status, for asylum, but this asylum has been denied because he was considered to have volunteered.
	And I've done a podcast and an article on this, so I'm not going to go any further into that other than to say it's not particularly volunteering if your opportunities are diminished by other state policies The destruction of manufacturing and the blue-collar lifestyle is certainly part of that.
	Another fairly important part of all of that is that you are bribed to go, you're lied to, and the idea that Some uneducated guy in his early twenties can make sophisticated decisions about the role of violence, the nature of his life, and especially after spending so much time receiving state propaganda in schools, free will, while still in absolute, does get blunted quite a bit through propaganda, as those who produce propaganda know very well.
	I just wanted to read a little bit about his experience of life on the ground.
	So this is a grunt, a private first class, I think.
	He says... I was scared out of my wits that first day at Ramadi.
	Our own Air Force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles, we began patrolling their streets on foot.
	With nearly 100 pounds of weaponry, equipment, and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow.
	It was just my platoon, 20 guys walking single file through the streets, full of Iraqis.
	I could now stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat.
	Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food.
	I kept hearing the last words my wife Brandy said to me before I flew out.
	Don't you let those terrorists know you, Josh.
	Even if they are kids, get them before they get you.
	I was awakened at 3 a.m.
	that first night and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists.
	Captain Condi and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside.
	Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good.
	Looking for contraband, caches of weapons, signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out damn fast.
	The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.
	I had no idea what to expect.
	Would I charge through the door only to be blown to bits by a grenade?
	Would somebody with an AK-47 knock my Oklahoma ass right back out that door?
	Would some six-year-old terrorist with two days of gun training be waiting to put me in his crosshairs?
	The minutes ticked on and I wanted the hour to speed forward so we could get on with it.
	One or two guys did push-ups to pump themselves up.
	I borrowed Mason's portable CD player and bombed out my eardrums to the beat of Ozzy Osbourne.
	It got me going. High and ready for action, I checked my watch, wished it would accelerate, and stuck some dip, Copenhagen bourbon flavor, behind my lip.
	You can't manage a cigarette when you've got an M249 automatic weapon on your arm, so dip was best.
	Makes your mouth black as sin and rots the roots right out of your gums, but dip was my nicotine hit of choice before going into that raid.
	I committed our instructions to memory.
	I knew the angles of the house, what door I would help blow down, how many floors were in that house, and who would do what when we busted inside.
	I would be the third in the door, which means I was the second most likely to get shot if anyone had a mind to take us down, and I'd head to the left.
	Always, for every raid, I'd be third in, heading left.
	I'd grip my M249. Yes, it could belt out 2,000 rounds a minute, but only in theory.
	You couldn't really hold your finger down that long.
	When you were blazing away like that, the bullets turned the barrel as hard as Hades, and if you held your finger down too long, it would warp the barrel.
	It took 30 seconds for Jones and me to put the charge of C4 plastic explosives on the door.
	Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn't blow ourselves up.
	You'd be fried meat if you went anywhere near the explosion.
	I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged in.
	Jones went first. That skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot.
	With Jones leading the way, we burst into the house, armed to the hilt.
	Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.
	I'd never been inside an Iraqi's house before.
	We charged through a kitchen.
	I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check out everything, so I even opened the fridge.
	Perhaps I thought I'd find guns or grenades hidden inside.
	No such luck. All I saw in the fridge was a bit of food.
	In the freezer, I found big slabs of meat uncovered, no wrapping, no plastic, frozen just like that.
	We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall.
	In this room, with the couches, we found two children, a teenager and a woman.
	One looked like the teenager, the other was perhaps in his early twenties.
	Brothers. We hollered and cussed.
	I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs.
	I knew they didn't understand, but I hollered anyway.
	Get down, I shouted. Get the fuck down.
	Shut the fuck up. They didn't know what get down meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, face down.
	We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye, we zip cuffed them.
	Zip cuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight.
	They must have bit something fierce into these young men's skin.
	There was no key, nothing.
	The only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.
	We pushed the brothers outside where 12 other soldiers from our platoon were waiting.
	The Iraqi brothers were taking it away to an American detention facility for interrogation.
	I don't know what it was called.
	I don't know where it was.
	All I know is that we sent away every man, pretty well every male over five feet tall that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighborhoods we patrolled regularly.
	Inside, we kept on ransacking the house.
	The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house.
	We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor.
	We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction.
	We found nothing but a CD. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.
	Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside.
	They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed.
	Outside, under a carport, I was assigned to watch the women and children.
	We weren't arresting them, but we weren't allowing them to go anywhere either.
	The family members couldn't go back inside, and they couldn't wander off into the neighborhood.
	They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.
	A girl in the family, a teenager, started staring at me.
	I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me.
	Inside, when we'd been screaming at her and the others, I'd assumed that nobody spoke a word of English, but this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me.
	She was skin and bone, not even 100 pounds, not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing.
	I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn't move.
	I had my weapon ready, She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair.
	She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly.
	Her eyes were cold black and full of hatred.
	In English, she asked me, where are you taking my brothers?
	I don't know, miss, I said.
	Why are you taking them away?
	I'm afraid I can't say.
	When are you bringing them back?
	Couldn't tell you that either.
	Why are you doing this to us?
	I couldn't answer that.
	I hoped she would not raise a fuss.
	I didn't want her to start screaming, which would attack the attention of my squad mates.
	One or two, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.
	I hadn't been in Iraq more than 24 hours, and already I was having strange feelings.
	First, I was vulnerable, and I didn't like it.
	Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that any time, anywhere, any Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse.
	Secondly, with hardly one foot into the war, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there.
	Something was amiss. We hadn't found anything in this girl's house.
	We busted it up pretty well in 30 minutes, taken away all her brothers.
	Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house.
	I didn't enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi.
	Her question haunted me, and I didn't like not being able to answer them, even to myself.
	So this guy says that he took part in more than 200 raids, never found one indication of weapons or any indications of terrorism.
	There was They would regularly beat up, and by beat up, break the teeth out of the mouth of the civilians, especially the women.
	There were gang rapes.
	There was all of the nightmarishness that exists in war.
	As some people have said, there's no such thing as a war crime, because war itself is a crime.
	But This is entirely to be expected.
	This is the hell that is unleashed when men go into a country fully armed with a relatively disarmed population and pretty much are let loose at will.
	There's no civil restraint.
	There's no... And of course, the people who are attracted to this kind of life aren't exactly people who are the best people in the world, as far as ethics go.
	I mean, they usually have pretty rough upbringings and so on.
	But... What I would like to say is that this gentleman, this guy, Joshua Key, his name is 28 now, he's quite a hero in a lot of ways, I would say.
	He has taken himself out of the equation, and of course, if there were more deserters, there would be No American participation.
	There would still be brutality in Iraq.
	It's a primitive country. There are lots of evil people around, but we don't have any control over that.
	The history and the culture of a country, we only really have control over our own actions and behaviors relative to our fellow man.
	And this guy is quite a hero, and of course he's terrified of being shipped back to the U.S., where he faces a maximum of five years for desertion in a pretty unpleasant prison, I would say.
	But this guy's a bit of a hero, I would say.
	He's quite a bit of a hero in terms of turning his back on this kind of life and of taking a stand relative to the murderous crimes that he was charged with or ordered to commit in Iraq.
	This is not going to make the world safer.
	Blood begets blood.
	Violence begets violence.
	If you combine...
	This kind of stuff, which is the overt violence that the state practices overseas, with the stuff like the foreign aid that goes to dictatorships, with the stuff like the arms sales that occur hundreds of billions of dollars a year around the world, arms that will last for generations, landmines, aircraft, Machine guns, just about everything, scuds, rocket-propelled grenades, just about anything that you can imagine gets sold by the government and the U.S. government accounts for almost half of the world's sales.
	Second is England, third is Russia.
	America sells 17 times more arms in the international market than China does.
	So this is just something to be aware of, that the world is a dangerous place, and that's not why we need governments.
	The world is a dangerous place because we have governments.
	And the kinds of moral courage that men like this are putting forward, I can only hope is going to spread.
	And it's not like he himself is a philosopher who is going to be able to change The world, but I still would like to sort of give him some praise in terms of his bravery.
	If other soldiers, if policemen and so on did this kind of stuff, refuse to participate in the horrendous crimes that are committed in the name of state and self-protection and security in the homeland, then this world would be a far safer and less macabre and murderous place.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	I haven't read the whole book.
	I don't know that I want to because I'm pretty sure that it's going to be just a sequence of horrendous crimes which do not surprise me and do not shock me, but nonetheless I do not particularly want to immerse myself in because this is what war does to the human soul.
	There is no immunity in geography.
	There is no such thing as an American soul.
	There is no such thing as a Western or British soul.
	When you put any human being as Milgram's experiments have pretty much proven fairly conclusively and as the experience of thousands of years of human history has proven fairly substantially human beings all abuse power.
	Human beings when given guns and orders will all commit unbelievable atrocities There is nobody who is immune.
	There is no bad soldiers over in Iraq and then good soldiers in America or in England or the other countries in the Coalition of the Willing.
	The power of violence and the power of monopolistic violence, particularly against a largely disarmed population where resistance is random but never concentrated, right?
	I mean, the insurgency, as we know, lasts an average of 11 years.
	This is going to go on and on.
	No matter what is claimed in terms of victory or loss, The Middle East is a swamp wherein many Western lives have been lost due to the desire for conquering for the sake of oil or for the sake of empire or for the sake of whatever.
	War profiteering, of course, is the largest one of these sorts of motivators.
	But there is no noble military human being.
	There is nobody who has this power of life and death who can blow off the doors of a house, come storming in, smash, scream, handcuff, potentially rape, drag off for interrogation, torture, and possibly murder and humiliation to Abu Ghraib or places like that.
	There's no human being who has this power who can not be corrupted and turned into a mere shadow of any kind of virtuous soul.
	All human beings will be corrupted.
	I would be, you would be, all human beings would be corrupted by this power.
	There is no human being who can handle the power of monopolistic and oligarchical violence and control and orders.
	So we should not be shocked at the atrocities that are occurring.
	War itself is the ultimate atrocity.
	We should not imagine that there are good sides and bad sides in a war.
	And I think to the degree, we can't expect soldiers to risk jail time and ostracism and alienation from their homeland because that's unrealistic.
	This is not what they do. This is a news story because it's exceptional.
	The vast majority of People in the military just say, okay, well, you tell me who to kill and I'll go kill them, like good capos.
	We can't expect people to do this.
	This is the job of philosophers and thinkers, to point out these atrocities and to point out the inevitability and the dehumanization of war and what, of course, it does to the soul of the homeland, right?
	War, atrocity, violence, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis murdered, half a million every month fleeing the country.
	What it is doing to the souls of those at home is also not to be underestimated.
	It's not as bad, of course, as what the war is doing to those who are directly participating in it.
	But in England and in America, what war is doing to the souls of those who are at home who know that their labor is being stolen from them through taxes to pay for these murderers and these rapists to go on a killing spree throughout the Middle East, which is...
	There's no good place to have a killing spree, but in the land of fundamentalist Muslims and thousands of years of religious warfare, that wouldn't be anybody's first choice about where to go and start sticking sticks into hornets' nests.
	There is nobody who can do this with impunity and the defenses that we have to put on domestically that we can't speak openly about the war and the atrocities and to some degree the participation that those of us who are paying taxes, I'm Canadian, not by birth but by naturalization,
	my taxes are going to do the same sorts of things over in Afghanistan but This participation that we feel, the silence that we feel in discussing these kinds of things corrupts the civilized life of the homeland as well as brutalizes the soldiers at the front.
	So whatever you can do to speak out against the war, I think it is to your eternal credit to do so.
	So thank you so much for listening.
	Let me just open this up.
	If we have any questions, I would be more than happy to hear them.
	So let's just have a look here.
	All right.
	So I'm going to just have a look and see if there's anybody who's waiting to speak.
	If you would like to speak or question or comment about the topic that we've been talking about or any other topic that you like, please feel free to do so.
	That was sort of the major issue that I wanted to speak about at the beginning to get the show off to a nice positive and bubbly start.
	So if you had sort of questions about the shows this week, we had some very interesting ones, at least I think, on libertarianism and on immigration and other topics.
	And we had a very interesting, though rather chilly, Ask a Therapist last night when we went on a Sub-Zero walk.
	If you have questions, I singing start naked.
	That's not really a question, although if you had a webcam, it would be fascinating, I think.
	But if you have questions or comments about anything that was talked about on the show this week or questions or comments in general, feel free to ask away.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have a little bit of a shot here.
	I'm not much of a drinker, but my throat's a little raw, so...
	We're on video.
	Oh, yeah! I'm the worst drinker in the world.
	I probably will be slurring upside down by the end of the show because I'm a very, very cheap drunk.
	All right. Somebody has commented, you have to give yourself over to power in order to wield it.
	Giving yourself over to it is to succumb to corruption.
	Well, I mean, I think that's entirely true.
	The one thing that's always amazed me since we're still waiting for people...
	Oh, we do have somebody? Okay.
	Fantastico. Even better than me rambling on and on.
	Well, maybe.
	All right. Nate, I think you're on.
	Or are you? I think you're on.
	I'm on? Yes.
	Oh, there it goes. I was looking at the thingy.
	I have two unrelated questions.
	Do you mean unrelated to the topic at hand or unrelated to each other?
	Both. Both.
	The first question is something I've been wondering for a while and...
	That's in regards to children and having children.
	I was wondering, we've talked about this before, about people having children, like in Podcast 600, people having children to validate themselves or to live vicariously through them or to make them go through things that they didn't get to go through that they wanted to go through because it might be fun or because it might be a fun thing to do or may look It's to dissatisfy their parents or to conform to what other people think or all those different things.
	But what are the right ways?
	What are the right reasons?
	Closely.
	Alcohol and also if you need labor, and particularly if you need labor that involves small fingers, pickpocketing, opening locks, that kind of stuff, that can be very helpful automatically.
	Also, if you run a rug weaving Those little fingers can be very helpful.
	If you're selling to Nike, this can be very, very helpful.
	So there are a lot of lawn mowing.
	Well, the problem with lawn mowing is that it can take a little bit of a while for the children to get old enough.
	Plus, it tends to be kind of visible.
	So there's going to be a bit more...
	It's going to be a bit trickier to do that.
	So there definitely are garage floor painting, human remote control.
	See, now what's happening is we're learning a little bit more about some of our listeners' childhoods through this process.
	Well, do you want to take a shot at the right reasons to have children?
	To make your husband seem mature?
	Briefly? No?
	Nothing from you? All right.
	Well, you know, the reason that I would say that is a good reason to have children is that you wish to share your joy of existence with other human beings.
	I mean, if you love life, if you're happy, I mean, not perpetually, there's always that witch of a Monday morning, but if you're happy in general and you know it, clap your hands.
	If you enjoy life and you want to teach and you want to learn and you want to bring up children to add to virtue, not like some sort of virtue camp or anything like this, but if that's something that would give you pleasure, bringing children into the world, teaching them about life, teaching them about happiness and virtue and if they would bring joy to your life.
	It's not required. I mean, you don't have to have children to have a happy life, but I think that if you want to bring children into this world because you have a genuine love of life and you want to teach people about life and virtue and knowledge and you want to share your joy in knowledge but I would say that another good reason to have children is because you want to learn from them.
	Children are amazing teachers.
	They really are. I worked at a daycare for many years and I talked to the mirror quite a bit.
	So children are amazing teachers.
	They have a very, very clear-eyed view of the world and this is of course why they tend to get brutalized so much.
	See things within the family.
	They see things within your own soul.
	They don't often have the vocabulary to speak about it as clearly as we'd like.
	But what goes on in children's eyes in terms of what they can see about you is one of the reasons why people often get so aggressive towards children because the sight of children cuts through a lot of fog.
	You've always heard this kind of silly thing about children, which can be quite true, that children might walk up to a fat person and say, why are you so fat?
	Which is a reasonable question.
	And, of course, the parents are going to stomp all over that and attack the child for being rude and so on.
	But, of course, it is a reasonable question.
	And that openness and curiosity that children have can be very liberating for anybody, really, but particularly for people who've gotten into a kind of habit and a kind of over-politeness.
	Children can be a real breath of fresh air as far as that goes in terms of Being open, blunt, not necessarily rude, but in society we can get pretty heavily layered against basic honesty.
	Whenever you're honest towards someone, You tend to be perceived as rude, at least I know that I do sometimes.
	So I think that if you want to learn from children and teach children and share in that kind of growth and in that kind of pleasure, children can, in my view, children are sort of naturally buoyant and positive and energetic and it takes quite a lot of work to turn children into unpleasant teenagers and so on.
	Yeah, children are absolutely natural philosophers.
	I don't go quite as far as Rousseau, but I certainly do believe that children are natural philosophers.
	They're much closer to an uncluttered view of reality.
	They haven't been taught how to fool themselves out of consistency, integrity, and how to lie to themselves about the validity of the senses.
	And this is really the great danger for most people who have a lot of illusions or a lot of falsehoods in their lives.
	Children represent a great danger.
	So that is one of the reasons that people end up becoming quite hostile.
	They think that the children are going to love them and the children are going to feed their egos and so on.
	But that's kind of narcissistic and selfish and children see that very clearly and tend not to react to it and tend to be disobedient.
	Losing the respect of a child must be about the worst thing in the world, and it's all too common in the world, and what happens is the children get aggressed against.
	Does that sort of make any sense?
	That's the best answer I've ever heard before, ever.
	So you're going to see this woman again tonight?
	Oh, she's in Florida right now.
	Well, you can fly to Florida.
	What I would do, what I just said, bring a tape of it and put on a little Barry White in the background.
	Say, hey, baby. Want to share some joy?
	So, you know, I have often been quite disappointed that people aren't using Free Domain Radio as make-out music.
	Certainly, it works in our household.
	Especially Podcast 500.
	Yeah, especially Podcast 500, but pretty much any of them.
	So, this is something that, I mean, Christine and I will often put on a couple of podcasts and make-out.
	So, this is just something that's important.
	I'll stop here before the hook comes off the side of the screen.
	Because sometimes, just one of me talking isn't enough.
	It's a ménage à 1990.
	All right. The other unrelated question is the...
	I've obviously been reading a bit of Ayn Rand, Fountainhead especially, and I've noticed a lot of...
	Yes. Well, I'm not actually reading reading, but listening reading.
	All right. That still counts.
	My problem with it, I mean not my problem with it, but the problem I keep noticing as a kind of a similarity between me and Dominique and Rourke is the sort of loneliness of integrity, I guess. The inherent loneliness that as you start to Start to adhere to principles.
	There's very few people that have any integrity.
	Some of my closest friends are examples of those people.
	I'm starting to see that in them.
	It's really upsetting because it takes a long time to make good friends.
	It's becoming less and less of a great feeling to hang around.
	Well, one of them, it's a lot more fun to hang around than the other, but the other is just so resistant to it and that he wants to say, there's no such thing as this or it's all just biological or things like that.
	True, some things are biological, but that's why we have reason and rationality.
	Right, those are biological too.
	I didn't think of that.
	I could have made that point.
	It's easy for me to have other people's arguments for them.
	I'm not in there, so it's just easier.
	Obviously, what goes on within our minds are rationality.
	Rationality is automatic and biological.
	You can see this when children develop object constancy and learn how to do it.
	Children reason very early, especially when it comes to the proportion of sizes.
	Especially younger siblings, try giving them one atom less of ice cream and you'll see all about rationality.
	That's pretty much innate to human beings.
	It's an innate faculty, which is why it has to be so Well, mainly we've had arguments over the past, not arguments, but debates over the past couple of days about,
	you know, why men are attracted to women and women are attracted to men and, you know, I brought up Nathaniel Brennan's point about they're attracted to what, it may be an initial thing first to be attracted by You know, by the way a person looks and how the chemistry that goes on there.
	But that's just the initial attraction and that can disappear within an instant after talking to the person for five or ten minutes.
	So he acknowledged that was true, but that he said values have nothing to do with attraction.
	And I'm like, well, if...
	If you only value looks, then of course you're going to be attracted.
	So attraction by itself innately is defined as holding something in higher value, whether that is nice rack or something like that, as Christina said on our third date.
	But to be attracted to someone is automatically to value them in some...
	even if it's shallow. Attraction is value in and of itself.
	So saying that value has nothing to do with attraction is like saying attraction has nothing to do with attraction.
	I mean, that's not even close to logical, right?
	This is just somebody who is frightened of what this axiomatic premise is going to reveal about himself, right?
	Right. He's very frightened of the word values or morality.
	He's always objecting to that.
	And when I bring...
	Today, we had lunch together and he was talking about the need for lists of protected historical places.
	I was like, why do I need to be enslaved to protect these places?
	Why can't people just solve these problems on their own?
	They're not that easily solved, but they're definitely not easily solved if I'm enslaved by them.
	He says, well, what about the pyramids of Giza?
	I'm just like, Well, that's really funny because they were built with slavery and I'm being enslaved to protect the pyramids which were built through slavery.
	I'd rather not be enslaved and have the pyramids knocked down and turned into a shopping mall than be enslaved.
	Right. Well, so this friend of yours believes that values have nothing to do with attraction, but he's attracted to historical buildings, right?
	Because he thinks they're more valuable?
	Right. And I told him there's no valuetrons inside the building.
	Obviously, a building has...
	No inherent value.
	It's only as valuable as someone is willing to pay for it.
	Okay, so let me ask you a couple of tough questions, which don't mean anything other than I'm curious.
	So how long have you been friends with this person?
	Can we give him a name? Can we call him Ralph?
	Mark, you might know him as MGS on the...
	He hasn't posted in a while.
	Oh, good. Let's make it personal.
	Excellent. Seven years.
	Okay, so seven years.
	And have you noticed that Mark is sort of anti-value?
	Have you noticed this for some time, or is this something more recent?
	I've noticed this for some time.
	And what is it that you value about Mark?
	He's extremely...
	He offers a lot of insight elsewhere.
	He offers a lot of help.
	He's my editor for the two Rhodes articles that I wrote.
	He's the closest to what...
	He's one of those minarchist types that never quite get over that hump.
	I get a lot farther with people that are the complete opposite than I do with him sometimes.
	What is it that I value about Mark?
	He's reasonable in some senses.
	In other ways, he's just not.
	That's a very good question.
	I'll have to think about that for a while.
	This is my suggestion for what it's worth.
	I would stop talking with Mark about values.
	I really would, because without a doubt, the direction that you're moving towards with this guy is that your friendship is going to blow up.
	I mean, that is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.
	If you continue to poke around in this area of values, core values, I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen.
	I've gone down this road a few times myself, more than a few.
	He's going to start to ego invest in his position, right?
	So he may have taken a position out of some personal philosophical or psychological tendency or preference or whatever.
	Maybe he wasn't hugely serious about it, but he's going to take this position that there's no such thing as values.
	I don't know what his position is, but it'd be something like that.
	Then what's going to happen is you're going to keep returning to sort of stick a toothpick in this wound because you feel unsatisfied that he's taken this position.
	Now what's going to happen is he is going to begin to defend this position long past he believes in it, long past the time he believes in it.
	Because it's going to become a point of pride for him.
	So once he has told you 500 times or 50 times that there's no such thing as values, how is he going to be able to back down without losing face, without sort of whatever, whatever, right?
	So I think it's sort of important not to back people into corners in this way if you want to keep them as friends or change their minds or whatever.
	What I would do if I were you, and I'm not saying it's the easiest thing in the world, I'm not saying I'd do it easily, but what I would do if I were you, Nate, is You can best instruct by living well.
	So if you start to get what you want in your life, start to become happy and start to enrich your own existence and have better relationships and so on, then at some point Mark may say, hey, you got a big pile of sugar over there.
	How did you get it? And then you might say, well, this is for me how the exercise of values, objective rational values, has worked out in my life.
	And so if you'd like to talk, if you want to know more about that, fantastic, and so on.
	But if you keep hammering him on an issue that you're diametrically opposed to, the friendship will absolutely explode.
	And that may not be the end of the world, because if this is not somebody who's going to change, And you have opposing core values, then it's just perversity, and not in a good way.
	It's just perversity to continue a relationship with somebody who has opposing and fundamental values to yourself.
	Now, if he's taking it up as a kind of position, like a sort of false self kind of position, if this is his way of being alternative or cool or different or whatever, if he's got some sort of approach in that way, Then if you stop poking at this with the toothpick, this wound with the toothpick, and start to live a happier and more productive life yourself and interact with Mark in a way or in those topics or areas where you do exchange mutual value,
	then at some point he may become curious about your happiness or your increased satisfaction in life, your peace of mind or whatever, and then you can talk to him about these things.
	And I only say this not even so much because of philosophy but because I have not had any particular success getting people who I know into therapy, although it's the most frustrating thing in the world because you know that if they went into therapy, oh, well, I don't have the money. It's like, well, yeah, we don't have the money to go to get higher education sometimes.
	It's still a damn good investment because it pays off more than it costs in the long run, even if you just count happiness rather than money.
	But it's very hard to get people to go into therapy, especially for me, because I had a very bad childhood, and so people say, well, my childhood wasn't as bad as yours.
	It's like, yes, but you live in a sick culture, so there's lots of things that we need to do to heal ourselves, even if we didn't have these kinds of dramatically bad childhoods.
	And I can't do it. I've never been able to do it.
	It's like pushing string uphill in a wind in the rain.
	And so the only thing that I've been able to do and what I've stopped doing with friends is talking to them about going to therapy and simply being happy and productive and positive myself.
	And if they want that, then I have some leverage.
	But if they don't value what I have, then what do I really have to offer them?
	Well, nothing really. So that's sort of my suggestion.
	If you want to keep this guy's friendship in other ways, just stick to those topics that are productive for both of you.
	Stay away from the core opposing values.
	If you keep poking around with those, I absolutely guarantee you that the friendship is going to explode.
	All right. I can definitely see that as being a...
	Yeah. Yeah, I actually...
	That's probably...
	I'm not sure exactly.
	You know, that's going to be a long time of...
	Okay.
	Yeah, I see what you mean.
	I'm kind of... Yeah, I feel like I'm going to have to bite my tongue a lot.
	That's what it is. Well, if...
	I mean, core values are explosive, too.
	This is why I say this is a slippery and difficult and dangerous path that philosophy will lead you along.
	Core values are very explosive to talk about.
	If it's come to the point where it's become a thing between you, then if you refrain from talking about these issues, he's going to bring them up.
	And he's going to bring them up in a mocking kind of way.
	And he's going to sort of start to make fun of your values.
	And certainly this has happened to me about a million times, right?
	You know, where you have friends who then start to learn about your values or learn about your core, what is most important to you.
	And then they just start making fun, right?
	You know, there'll be something on television about law and order, and there'll be some joke where someone will say, oh yeah, but Steph wants pure chaos and everyone to eat their young, or something like that.
	I mean, just whatever nonsense people come up with that allows them to continue to needle you.
	And at that point, the friendship is doomed.
	I mean, it's beyond doomed.
	doomed it's over right so I think maybe what you're feeling is the fact that this has become a bone of contention for him and perhaps for you but that if you stop addressing this in a direct manner that he's going to start directing it it could happen It very could easily happen.
	I'm not sure. I can't predict the future, but I would say that that's a possibility.
	It doesn't strike me as being something that's in his personality type, but as being...
	He's not a passive-aggressive type.
	I've never seen him be passive-aggressive, really.
	He's always been the aggressive type, the macho man.
	It's one of those macho men I was talking about in the Ask a Therapist thing.
	Yeah, I mean, definitely if you feel that there's something of value in the friendship that you wish to maintain, and of course not everyone has to have all the same values as we do.
	I mean, for instance, Christina likes Washing.
	So, sorry?
	Cleanliness. Yeah, and for me, cleanliness, of course, is next to godliness in that it's a fantastic and self-destructive myth.
	But so far, the iron casing of dirt is working okay.
	Not everyone has to share every value.
	I think there have to be core values that you share.
	This is going to blow up sooner or later.
	If you can get value out of the person and he can get value out of you, he's going to edit your articles, maybe you do something for him.
	That's more of an economic exchange of value rather than it is a shared intimacy of close friendship.
	Without a doubt, unless the core values get addressed, it's not going to work.
	What variation in core values is tolerable?
	Well, some people donate 50 bucks, some people donate a kidney.
	There's a small amount of variability that's allowable there, so that's one possibility.
	Well, I mean, I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm still sort of hacking my way through some of these issues, but...
	For me, I've had it that I have a friend with whom the majority of what we share is musical interests, right?
	I mean, okay, he's not a Christian.
	He's a bit of an agnostic when the topic has come up once or twice in like 10 years.
	But I really like going to concerts with this guy.
	He introduces me to all of this great music.
	He's really into music, like myself.
	And so this guy will sometimes go to karaoke together and he'll introduce me to these obscure songs that I really love and so on.
	So we share a value of music and he's written a book based on watching me write a book and saying, well, Jesus, Steph can do it.
	So, from that standpoint, that's a lot of...
	And, of course, he's got a great sense of humor and so on.
	So, yeah, we'll get together. There are certain things that I don't talk to him about, right?
	I mean, because it's just not going to get very far.
	But there's pleasure, right?
	There's pleasure in it. And really...
	As far as all of the abstract writing on the wall and Ten Commandments of Friendship goes, it really comes down to, is it pleasurable for you?
	Is the friendship positive and pleasurable?
	And when it gets mired in the frustration of constantly arguing about opposing core values, the problem is life is short and that's not much fun.
	He's not going to change your mind.
	If you can't change his mind, this friction is going to be endless.
	There is an implicit condemnation in core values that you should not let sink into the mire of passive aggression.
	So that would be my sort of suggestion.
	Don't you see the avoidance as a surrender of integrity?
	No, I don't, and I'll tell you why.
	Whether right or wrong, this is sort of my opinion, but...
	My integrity is not dependent upon me telling the whole and unvarnished and absolute truth to everyone in the world, because then it would be impossible for me to have integrity, right?
	I can't talk to everyone all the time about everything and so on.
	So no, I don't think that it's a loss of integrity, because my integrity is to do with my moral choices in my life.
	To have a synergy with somebody about just a particular thing, music or humor or whatever, or maybe you have someone that you like to play in a band with, You like going to museums with someone or you like talking about archaeology or something.
	You don't all have to have the same core values any more than the guy I go and buy my groceries from and I have to agree on the right foreign policy.
	There's overlapping areas of mutual benefit that are complicated.
	I certainly wouldn't say, though, that for me to withhold certain ideas from people compromises those ideas within myself.
	They're just not present in that relationship, but I still act on them within my own life.
	In the important areas, so I don't think so.
	That makes sense. Woohoo!
	First time. Where would you draw the line between friends and acquaintances?
	Orgies, I think. Orgies are more between friends.
	And acquaintances, it's more keyboard-based.
	Orgies with the acquaintances?
	So you don't feel awkward? Right, right.
	Okay, so sorry, Christina's got much more experience in this, of course, than I do.
	Friends and acquaintances, well, friends really are those that you share the core values with, and acquaintances with those who you share more peripheral or tertiary values with.
	Naturally, of course, I go to work, and people there know that I'm a libertarian.
	They don't know that I'm an anarchist.
	Other than the graffiti in my office and my chest.
	But, wait, let me...
	No, I'm just kidding.
	I won't, baby. Don't panic.
	I'm not showing the FDR nipples yet.
	So, because it's cold.
	I might knock the camera over. Anyway, so...
	And what do we have in value?
	Well, we both want to sell a particular product and services and so on.
	We're both excited. We're all excited by business.
	We're all excited by the creative process of making and selling something in the market.
	And those are values. Those are acquaintances, right?
	But they're not friends who are like core values who listen to my...
	Some of them have found me just sort of out of curiosity Googling.
	I think they typed in spotty forehead.
	They're looking for a kind of bird.
	Anyway, so, but yeah, acquaintances, you can share minor overlapping values.
	I don't particularly go for, and this was more of the objectivist approach, that you kind of all have to be the same cardboard cutout value system.
	That, to me, would indicate that somebody knows all of the perfect values and is able to impose those on others unilaterally and universally, and I'm certainly not smart enough for that, so...
	Right. I found it funny that the two things he seems to defend a lot are the fact that his father is a professor, a tenured professor at the university, and also the fact that his father is very involved in historical preservation stuff.
	So I can't see him dropping – compromising – Or talking about values, when those values would imply that his father could be considered evil.
	Well, sure. I mean, and just for those who haven't pursued this particular argument, this is a very significant thing that occurs, of course, when you start to talk about fundamental values, the argument for morality, the gun in the room, and so on.
	What happens, of course, is that if you speak to Mark and you say, well, I understand that your father wants to preserve historical buildings, the real question is, can I decide not to do that without getting shot?
	Would your father think or advocate that I should be shot for not wanting to fund historical buildings, or at least for not wanting to be forced to fund historical buildings?
	And if that question is put that, dare I say it, boldly, then the answer really is a defining moment in a friendship and, of course, in Marx's life, right?
	So if he says, yes, Nate, I think that you should be shot if you don't support my father's hobby of preserving buildings, then clearly this is not a conversation that is going to be very positive or productive or a relationship.
	Once somebody gets behind the gun in the room and cocks it at you, you're kind of done, right?
	I mean, there's nowhere to go, right?
	Once somebody is good with you getting shot for disagreeing with them, Not so much with the friendship anymore, right?
	So that is the great challenge that occurs with friendships, and I had exactly the same thing happen with a friend of mine whose father is the principal at a public school.
	Yeah, he's not going to say that.
	Instead, he's going to say, oh, come on, it's not getting shot.
	You have to be reasonable about what you call it.
	It's not getting shot.
	It's just You know, it's like taxation versus theft versus slavery, you know, calling it what it really is, and then he says, oh, that's overbearing and over-emotional, or that's an emotional word, or emotional, you know...
	You know what I mean?
	Oh yeah, but then what you face then, and it's the same problem that you face when you point out that Christians kind of want you killed, right?
	Then what you face is that there's a gun in the room that's pointed at you, and there's this friend of yours who's behind it saying, well, you know, the problem is that you're calling it a gun.
	The problem isn't that I'm willing to have a gun pointed at you and the trigger pulled if you don't obey my father or me or whatever.
	The problem is that you're calling it a gun, right?
	And that is a completely disintegrating moment from an ethical or friendship standpoint, right?
	I mean, it's like saying to the woman, the problem is that you're calling it rape, right?
	I mean, the problem is not that you got raped or whatever.
	I mean, it's just that you're calling it rape.
	Rape is such an ugly word, as people say.
	Calling it a gun, it's so ugly, it's so unpleasant, it's so unnecessary.
	So the problem then becomes that you're willing to talk about violence that this person is willing to deploy against you.
	And that completely detonates any potential virtue remaining in the friendship, that the problem with somebody pointing a gun at someone else is the person who's having the gun pointing at them calling it a gun, right?
	That is such an unbelievable skewing of any rational moral values that there's just nowhere to go from there.
	Interesting. All right, those are the two questions.
	I think they're thoroughly answered.
	You answered them very well.
	I like especially the children one.
	Me and Megan were talking about that the other night.
	Of all the wrong reasons to have children, she agreed on all the why you shouldn't have children.
	We both kind of wondered, why should you have children?
	What's a good reason to have them?
	Neither of us could think of any.
	I told her I would ask you or Christina and She said, yeah, go ahead and ask her, see what they say.
	But we can go with that, too.
	Somebody said, in the example of this music friend that I have, if you seek his company for the music, but you are diametrically opposed on a core value, aren't you then granting implicit approval to something you don't explicitly agree with?
	That's a difficult question.
	Oh dear, the mic comes back from the wife.
	Return to sender.
	I mean, I'm not sure that I do.
	I'm not sure that I do do that.
	I'm certainly willing to discuss it some more.
	I don't think that I'm implicitly granting a value to participating with somebody in something that I do enjoy with them, right?
	So I go and play online games, and I don't know any of the philosophies of any of the people who are shooting at me with rocket launchers, but we're enjoying the rocket launcher thing.
	I'm not sure that I would be implicitly granting them.
	Sanctioned on everything else.
	He certainly is not a statist.
	He certainly enjoys the debates that we have on the board.
	So we're not diametrically opposed that way.
	Like, he's not saying, you know, we should have communism or, you know, the government isn't big enough or anything.
	He just dislikes it as much as I do.
	Not to the same sort of extent.
	He's not a natural or keenly interested philosopher from that standpoint.
	So, no, I don't think that I would be granting Implicit approval, if I go to a concert with someone, that I would be granting implicit approval to every value that we differ on, but I'm certainly willing to hear more about that.
	Ah, okay, excellent.
	Get back to ye olde Skypey von Skypeyville.
	Oh lord. Oh, where is my Skype?
	Here we go. Okay, thanks very much.
	Dom, I think you're live.
	Am I here?
	You bet. Hello.
	Hi. Hi, Stephan.
	How are you? I'm great.
	How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing great.
	I'm doing great. It's really a pleasure and honor to talk to you.
	I've wanted to for some time.
	Just haven't... I had a good reason, I guess.
	No, I've always had good reasons, but anyway, forget that.
	No problem. A couple things.
	Actually, what I mainly wanted to talk about was the idea that was military service.
	You were talking before about atrocities and whatnot.
	But can I make one brief comment about the previous caller's discussion about having children?
	No, I'm afraid it doesn't fit into our completely strictly online format.
	No, I'm kidding. Go ahead. I was just going to say that I don't know of anyone that became parents for a good reason.
	I think everyone, most people have children for things like the two of us are great so we would have a great child or whatever.
	The only point I was going to try and make is the idea that if you have a good relationship, And the two of you want to have a child.
	That's a good enough reason you'll discover what parenting is after you've done it, not before.
	Can you tell me a bit more what you mean by that?
	I just want to make sure I understand what you mean when you say you'll discover what parenting is after it's not before.
	I'm not saying you're wrong.
	I'm just not sure I understand it.
	Just the idea that you have a child and There's a whole lot of joy in watching a child develop and whatnot.
	There really is. There are also a lot of horrors that you have.
	I mean, I'm a parent.
	I have a grown daughter.
	And there are some very trying times, particularly in the teenage years.
	But if you worry about all of that, you don't know what's going to happen until it does, in other words.
	Right, right. And especially the teenage years can be quite a challenge, for sure.
	They can be brutal. And I think more often than not, they are.
	But the whole thing is...
	The hardest part is getting over yourself, I think, and allowing your child to make their own mistakes and not, you know, jumping all over them for making them.
	You made your own mistakes.
	They need to make theirs.
	I think that the biggest thing is to see yourself more in a position of being there to help when help is asked for, particularly in the teenage years.
	Teenagers are the ones where they really don't want your opinion unless they ask for it and oftentimes will get hurt if you insist.
	I'm just kind of making that point.
	What I was trying to say The idea of if you have a healthy marriage and the two of you want to have a family, well then, trying to find the right reason to have a child is, I think, a little overanalyzing the situation.
	The trick is the happy marriage to begin with, right?
	I mean, if that's in place, there's a lot of other stuff that's in place that's going to really help with parenting, of course.
	Yes. Yes.
	And I think it's a wonderful thing.
	I'm happy. My daughter is probably the best accomplishment of my life, and I think she knows that.
	Well, I tell her that once in a while.
	Not often enough, I suppose.
	Well, you make sure to tell her.
	And then send her a big bill for your therapy that you've required after the teenage years.
	I think that will really bring it home to her.
	Right. Well, one thing that I always told her is that I felt that I was going to save her a lot of money in therapy by giving her...
	Someone to blame all of her problems on.
	Right. She's going to go to a therapist with a big picture of you just saying, that's it, that's all I've got to say, now help me with that.
	Yeah. Not complicated, not a whole bunch of things to say.
	Yeah, that's nice, that's nice. Keep her away from extended family and just, you know, mess her up yourself.
	So the single focus, like a laser, it's so much more efficient.
	Yeah. Great, right.
	Now, did you have another comment or question?
	You had one about the Iraq situation.
	Pardon? You had one about the Iraq situation that I talked about other times.
	Yeah, I mean, you see a lot of activity, well, not a lot of activity on the boards about it, but every once in a while, somebody will come on the boards suggesting that anyone that participates in military service is either a sociopath or a psychopath,
	and I'm not so certain that that's accurate, and well, of course, I'm a Vietnam veteran, so I've been in the service, and The one thing that I would say to anyone that is young enough to be in the service is that if you have any principles, don't do it.
	But you really do end up with a whole lot of baggage that I don't think is possible to get over it, really.
	But the other side of it is that what I was actually getting at is the idea that just because a person It doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with them.
	A lot of it could be that they're too young to know better or that, well, it may come to this in this country.
	If a draft is instituted, there are going to be people that are in the service Well, yeah, without a doubt.
	And I would not extend to...
	And I'm the one who talks about that in terms of the board, so you've certainly come to the right source for that.
	I would not extend any judgment of...
	I mean, for me, there's sort of two extenuating circumstances around military service.
	The one, of course, is to be drafted, right?
	I mean, if you're drafted, you do have the possibility of fleeing, but that's not always the easiest thing in the world.
	And the second, of course, is, as you say, lack of access to information, a lack of a moral understanding of the consequences of picking up arms and shooting whoever people point at.
	It's a real lack of enormous amount of propaganda that goes on around the military and around war.
	Somebody who's 20 years old who maybe didn't finish high school or barely finished it, not going to have access to a lot of the alternate and perhaps more realistic views of what the involvement in the military is really all about.
	So I would not say that I would morally condemn as sociopathic or murderous or anything every single human being who's ever been in the army because there's not a lot of choice for some people either directly through the draft or indirectly through Sort of propaganda.
	Do you mind if I ask if you were drafted or did you join voluntarily?
	Yeah, I was drafted.
	Right. So to me, you were exactly as morally culpable as a slave.
	I mean, you were in a worse position than a slave is because you were hired on at gunpoint.
	Hired on is probably the wrong phrase.
	You were dragged off to the killing fields at gunpoint, put in murderous situations that no human being should ever have to face.
	And this is worse than any human being would treat a slave.
	At least a slave owner has an economic interest in keeping the health of his slave intact, but the generals spend the lives of the soldiers like coins.
	And so I completely agree with you, and you have nothing but sympathy for me for what you went through.
	I just hope that you're able to fight your way free of any sort of moral guilt for this kill-or-be-killed situation that you were dragged into against your will.
	For me, I suppose, as I convinced him that I was...
	Well, at one point during basic training, I refused to carry a gun, and they ended up sending me to see a shrink, and I guess he came away with the idea that I perhaps was a psychopath, because I was arguing the idea that I thought that killing people was a bad idea, and that I didn't see it as a way of solving problems, and if they were going to order me to kill people, well, then I couldn't see a rational reason To choose, you know, who I was going to kill.
	And so I guess they thought I was a little crazy so I didn't carry a gun in Vietnam, which was kind of nice.
	But I'll tell you this, it still doesn't help in terms of the kind of baggage you carry around afterwards.
	I mean, because there's particularly, and I would say this to anyone who faces the possibility of being drafted that has any kind of principles whatsoever, If you're in that situation, I would suggest that you run.
	I realize what I'm saying is probably illegal now, but it's difficult to get past the idea of having to compromise your principles, compromise your dignity over being drafted and all of that.
	It's a mess. It is a mess, and I would say that whether you're drafted or not, you should run.
	If you join up like this guy did who's now seeking asylum in Canada, and there's another guy who's gone to jail, my advice would be to run either way.
	There's a difference, as you know, much more deeply and much more greatly than I do and hopefully ever will.
	There's a difference between compromising your values, which to some degree we all have to do when we pay taxes if we disagree with that system and so on, But then there's a complete and utter reversal of any sane or decent human values, which is going over and shooting, not that you did, but going over and shooting people who've never done you any direct harm and have not threatened you in any direct way for some nonsensical domino theory that turned out to be completely false anyway.
	That's more than a compromise of your values.
	That's a complete and total reversal of anything that's decent in the world.
	And I think, of course, it's desperately tragic that you had to go even into the war theater, even to the proximity.
	Of this kind of slaughter where, what is it, two to three million Vietnamese and Cambodians died in the space of eight or nine years or were killed.
	It's a complete nightmare, but of course, because you had a gun pointed at your head, your moral responsibility is complete, in my view, is completely eradicated.
	And I think that you should be enormously proud, if I can say so, of your ability to have withstood Are you still there?
	You bet. Oh, okay.
	You didn't think I was going to speak that quickly, right?
	Yeah. No possibility he's going to get done in 90 seconds.
	There's just no way. So you actually, did you lie down for a nap?
	Did you go out for a walk?
	By the time I come back, you should be winding up, right?
	Okay. Well, thank you so much, Stephan.
	And I appreciate what you said.
	And like I said, anyone with...
	Anything you can to avoid military service in your mind, then you should go ahead and do that.
	You definitely should go ahead.
	And I'm thankful for the Canadian's welcome of anyone that's in that situation.
	Yeah, well, I mean, certainly, you know, from a moral standpoint, anybody who can get away from this slaughterhouse factory would be well advised to do so.
	And if you can't, then at least don't take the moral ownership for it yourself, because you are in a corner and you have a gun pressed to your forehead, and there's really not much you can do, so don't succumb to the brutality that you're coerced to be involved in.
	Well, that should wrap it up, I think, for me.
	Okay, well, listen, thanks very much.
	Stay in touch, and I guess we'll chat to you another Sunday or two from now.
	Certainly, I hope so. Okay, thanks so much.
	Take care. All right, so we have somebody else.
	Oh, okay, all right. I think, Greg, is your mic on?
	You had some questions, I think.
	Let's move him to Chattyville here.
	Whether you like it or not, you're on, baby.
	So you can hear me then? Okay, cool.
	Well, I guess I'll just start with the story about the kid that left to join the Marines.
	The company I worked for, there was a...
	He must have been maybe 20 or 21.
	I think he was an intern.
	But he was with us for a couple of years.
	And he left to join the Marines and there was a huge parade, not a parade, but an office party with banners and cake and gifts and all that.
	Pretty much seeing off the conquering hero kind of thing, right?
	I thought the whole thing was kind of unfortunate.
	So I didn't go.
	Over the months I tried to talk him out of doing it and he wouldn't hear of it.
	A couple of weeks ago he just came back, I guess, a couple of weeks ago and he's on leave now.
	Dave actually got him scheduled to go back again in the spring.
	And it was interesting to see the change in his personality from before and after.
	I mean, before, I mean, he was like cocky and proud and energetic and motivated and all of that.
	And after coming back, You know, he was sort of...
	Yeah, he was definitely...
	It had definitely flattened him out.
	And the weirdest thing was...
	You look him in the eye and it was like his eyes had gone cloudy.
	You know? It was just a weird experience.
	He's talking about the...
	The insurgents they'd encountered over there and about some of the things they had to do and actually how Sure, they're often better trained than the U.S. troops, right? Because they've been these sort of mercenaries, and it is, to a large degree, mercenaries that are part of the insurgency.
	They're professional soldiers who've been doing it for 10, 20 years, right?
	And they've been moving around the world on a variety of conflicts, and they're well-funded by Groups and they know what they're doing, right?
	I mean, for these young American kids, the first time they've been in combat, right?
	But the insurgents are usually people who've had quite a lot of experience in exactly this type of warfare, so of course you're not going to beat them.
	Right, right. Guys who've fought in the 10 years war with Iran and guys who've been in Afghanistan for 10 or 12 years.
	Right. Even, you know, guys coming from Syria and Lebanon.
	Yeah, the Mujahideen from Afghanistan are all over this place, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, you're really throwing up rookies against very, very experienced people with all the predictable results that would entail.
	And it was just, I mean, it was just a creepy experience to listen to him tell these stories.
	And as he's telling them, he's got his hands in his pockets, and he's just looking at the floor and nodding his head.
	And you could tell that, you could just tell that the, you know, the movie's replaying in his head over and over and over again.
	It was just... It was a disturbing encounter, I have to say.
	This poor fellow is going to be feeling about all the people who baked him cakes to send him over to this hellhole.
	Oh, yeah. That still sickens me.
	I mean, they were giving this guy, you know, G.I. Joe dolls and yucking it up and, you know, all kinds of stuff.
	Tell him how great he is and how wonderful this is that we're doing this.
	You're a hero. Yeah, and you're telling this to a 20-year-old kid, right?
	What the hell does he know?
	So he thinks this is the greatest thing he could do, right?
	Because everybody around him tells him it is.
	Yeah, it's often sort of baffled me that we talk about these young men and young women as heroes, moral heroes, fine, upstanding citizens, and so on.
	I've been thinking about philosophy for decades, and I tell you that I do not feel quite certain as yet to the point where I'm willing to go and bomb cities and kill lots of people.
	And yet... These 20-year-old kids are so well-versed in all of the depths of moral philosophy that they are perfectly sure and perfectly certain about the rightness of their cause, that they're willing to go and murder hundreds of thousands of people.
	I just must say that whatever school of philosophy these young men have gone to, I sure wish they'd take some older folk, because that kind of certainty is really extraordinary, and I'm sure entirely out of hand.
	It was really sad.
	I would wince listening to him talk about his decision to enlist and about how fantastic America is and all of that.
	Actually, that was all before I even found A free domain, but even then, it just kind of turned my stomach to think about it, you know?
	And there was nothing you could say to this guy that would talk him out of it.
	I tried a dozen different ways, and, you know, it's just, once you flip that switch, you know, it's kind of stuck there.
	Right, right. Well, I think it's true that one of the things that characterizes an imperialistic empire state as opposed to the sort of shiny-faced and dewy-eyed ideals of the original republic is that virtue in the original republic is really around civil disobedience and independence and personal virtue virtue as is defined in a militaristic empire-based culture is virtue is defined as the desire to murder on the behalf of the rulers right and that's quite a shift and of course it takes quite a long time to get there And there's an enormous amount of propaganda that is required to shift that definition of virtue from something that is personal,
	universal, and humane, and independent, to something that is really just around a slavish regard and a slavish desire to murder on behalf of the rulers.
	And we can see this while I'm not directly comparing the two cultures.
	We can see this shift in terms of the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany.
	We can see it from the middle to the late Roman Empire.
	And sadly, of course, we can see this in America and England now, that virtue and what is called upstanding right and moral is the sort of slavish eagerness to kill whoever the rulers point at.
	And that's really quite a change.
	Yeah, actually, I wonder sometimes if that...
	That ideal we point to at the founding ever really even existed.
	That's not just a fantasy that libertarians have invented to imagine a golden age of...a small government because weapons of mass destruction didn't exist as yet, so they didn't have much of a choice, right?
	Couldn't make the federal government too big because everyone was well-armed and equally armed, but the moment that the government gets a disproportionate amount of power...
	Yeah, no, I agree. I think government is always and forever the same, and the only thing that kept the republic in any kind of minarchistic situation was simply the lack of ability to exercise the kind of power that they wanted, but that's long in the past now.
	I don't think it was a better government.
	I think it was just a more liberal. Right, right.
	Virtue back then was simply aligning yourself with one kind of hierarchy over another,
	really. It was rebellious and anti-establishment and revolutionary in terms of its, well, not even really revolutionary, but incrementally revolutionary anyways in terms of its philosophy.
	But you're still, as a patriot back then or as a rebel, You're still kind of pledging yourself to somebody else as opposed to pledging yourself to actual virtue, right?
	One thing that occurred in 1776 was that the fundamental issue was that the government was too far away, at least for those who wanted more power at home.
	I also think that it's true that if you look at the general combined, maybe there's some way to do this mathematically that's beyond me, If there was some way to mathematically measure this, maybe there is, where you could say, okay, so in the founding of the Republic, taxes were much smaller and so on.
	Taxes were much lower.
	Government was much smaller. But that government power, as did exist, contributed, actually maintained and fed the institutions of slavery, the institutions of mass draft that led to 600,000 deaths in the Civil War and God knows how much other human misery that occurred.
	And also, of course, subjugated the rights of women, of which there are almost none.
	Now, some of those have been largely remediated, right?
	The rights of women have expanded, their slavery is gone, and so on.
	So it's almost like there's a constant amount of freedom in human society.
	It just shifts around, right?
	So now there's no slavery, women have rights, children have rights, but now we're all taxed into the next dimension.
	So it's like, you know, the government giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other, so to speak.
	Right. It gives people the impression that there can only ever be so much freedom, but the presence of coercive institutions necessitates the limitation of freedom.
	You remove the coercive institution, then there's plenty of room for freedom.
	Right, and this is one of the major problems with the coercive institutions, as I was talking about in terms of Iraq.
	The very existence of a government causes people to have to justify that through distorting reality, right?
	So the very presence of a government, which is always bewildering, I remember this even as a kid, being just kind of bewildered by this.
	And of course, what happens is people then say, well, you know, people are really bad.
	You know, like there was this thing posted about the, by a conservative view of libertarianism, and I think it was because somebody confused the word libertarian with libertine.
	But basically it was saying, well, libertarians are a pipe dream because...
	Libertarianism is a pipe dream because we're all born from original sin and we're all flawed and therefore we need governments to control us.
	And of course, that all results or resides on the basic axiom that the citizens are sort of flawed through original sin or through some essential corruption within their natures.
	But the rulers, by heavens, are not, right?
	But of course, if it's original sin that applies to everyone, then you simply could not have a state, as we've talked about before, and you certainly couldn't have a state that was voted in by all these corrupt people.
	So this is really the danger that religion and the state have when they get together, is that religion really is the explanation as to why there is a state.
	It's a completely false explanation in the same way that it's supposed to sort of quote, explain how the universe comes about.
	It's a completely false explanation.
	But when you first come across the idea of a state when you're younger, It's kind of baffling.
	Because it's like, OK, so all these people who tell me what to do, why do they get to tell me what to do?
	Well, because you give them permission to do it.
	It's like, well, but if I give them permission, why do we need these laws in jail?
	So this essential mystery, which is the existence of a state, completely corrupts thinking.
	This is why philosophy has been such a mess throughout history.
	It's either trying to justify the state or it's trying to justify the existence of God.
	It warps every single conceivable notion that could go on in philosophy to try and justify either of these two completely irrational and non-existent And especially to turn them into sort of metaphysical or moral absolutes.
	It just completely destroys any rationality in philosophy, and that's another reason why these things are so dangerous, is they corrupt people's thinking.
	Right, because fundamentally it's a rationale for the use of coercive power.
	Yeah, I mean, most of philosophy is an ex post facto justification for why you should smile when they point the guns at you.
	Exactly. I would argue that that was also the case at founding.
	That didn't just suddenly become that way because of the Civil War or because of the Federal Reserve or because of Alexander Hamilton.
	It was there from the very beginning.
	The fact that They were willing to use violence to, you know, fire, right?
	It's a cute phrase, but in political terms, it doesn't make much sense, right?
	You can't expect the fire to get smaller by throwing more fire onto it.
	And so to me, the idea that there can be a virtuous state is kind of a national the idea that there can be a virtuous state is kind of a national and I mean, it's all just a bunch of made-up nonsense, and most thinkers are complete slaves to either the power of the church or the power of the state.
	And so what that does is it means that all of their thinking is just so heavily corrupted by the need to believe in these imaginary things.
	If biologists were forced to justify the physiology of elves and leprechauns, well, of course biology would be a complete mess.
	I shouldn't say forced, exactly.
	It's not so much the case anymore, but it's natural.
	And so the important thing is just to recognize that the very foundations of the belief systems themselves are non-existent.
	So, of course, if you're going to start off with 2 plus 2 equals 5, your mathematics is going to be complete nonsense.
	And so if you really want to see just how sick and corrupt that kind of thinking is, and those kinds of thinkers are, All you have to do is look into the face of a soldier.
	Right. That is the end result of all this kind of stuff, right?
	That is where this leads.
	All of these justifications for the power of the state and of religion and so on, they all end up in this situation where young men's souls are destroyed because they believe that it's virtuous to go and shoot people that they're told to shoot.
	And that then, of course, replicates itself.
	Part of the reason that you need soldiers is so that domestic life remains brutal.
	The soldier goes overseas and kills Iraqis.
	He comes home. What kind of father and husband is he going to be?
	Well, he's going to be destructive.
	He's going to be problematic to society as a whole.
	And that means that you get another generation of children who grew up alienated and angry, which you can then harvest as your next group of soldiers.
	And I think...
	To a certain extent, at least at a subconscious level, that's one of the reasons why we keep having wars.
	Because these people, they know.
	They know that if they don't have one, then sooner or later there's one generation that's going to wake up and say, what the hell have we been up to all this time?
	You know, let's cut that out.
	Right. I mean, how long did it take for the end of the Cold War to start in with the war on terror?
	It was about 10 years, maybe 12 years.
	And, of course, military spending didn't decrease during that time significantly, so this shows just how responsive this is to what people actually want.
	And it's that old Herman Goering quote, right?
	It says, The average citizen doesn't want war.
	What is the average boy on a farm going to gain from war?
	Nothing. He's going to be gone for years and he's going to come back if he comes back at all, missing an arm or a leg or an eye or a hand.
	The common people don't want war, but it's relatively easy because the rulers do want war.
	It's relatively easy to get it going.
	All you have to do is say that you're about to be attacked.
	Demonize your enemies and say that anyone who cancels rationality is a traitor to the country.
	And then everybody stampedes off the cliff.
	But of course all of that is not because of any essential irrationality in human nature, but because of the propaganda of priest-post.
	Right, because we've been pounded into believing that vice is virtue, and if that cycle ceases at some point, then the The subsequent generation is going to condemn the existing generation, and they don't want that.
	Right, and of course, you sow the fields of the world with blood, and almost profits grow thereof, right?
	So it's parasitical from the rulers down, and it's very much about biological flourishing.
	Amoral maximization of your gene pool at everybody else's expense and so on, but the saving grace of all of this is that it has to be sold with an enormous amount of moral propaganda because the rulers understand the power of morality a lot more than the moralists do.
	That's true. They get how important it is to train children in false ethics.
	They get how the world runs on ethics, whereas libertarians spend time arguing about whether if you're hanging from a flagpole, you should be allowed to kick in a window to crawl through somebody's apartment, even though there's such a thing as private property.
	That's where we're spending a good chunk of our energies, whereas those who would do great evil in the world are spending their time being certain about training the children in all the wrong things.
	Right, or arguing against the idea that there even is any such thing as a moral standard.
	Right, right. Can we not at least be as certain as evil people about the power of morality?
	Would that not be something that...
	We can aspire to, you know, to at least be 50% certain as the most evil people in the world about the power of ideas and of ethics.
	That, to me, would be an enormous step forward.
	That's not something that libertarianism is, I think, quite ready for.
	Right, right. And in a sense, you know, they kind of have a point because what they're trying to do is take the weapon away, right?
	You know, the evil people, they understand the power of morality, and so if you can convince them somehow that it doesn't exist, then you've taken their weapon away.
	Well, actually, you've just taken a bullet or two away.
	They'll just club you then with the hilt, right?
	That's true. That's true.
	Well, I mean, the problem is, though, of course, that where these arguments really root is in the minds of children, and children don't believe in relativism, and they don't believe in subjectivism, and they believe in right and wrong, and that's what they play, is cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians and right and wrong.
	Children are not, because they're more rational and sane than most adults, children don't believe in all of this hyper-sophistical Kierkegaardian nonsense about subjective reality and this This Kantian idea of the new amenable realm and platonic world of forms and all of the bullshit that academics spew out like ink out of a squid to obscure some simple basic facts.
	Children, which is where these people focus based on early childhood education and public schools and so on, children totally get that morality is absolute and right and wrong.
	And if you try taking a kid's Halloween candy saying it's a tax, just see how well it works.
	They totally get this stuff down in their core.
	So while we jabber among ourselves about all these nonsensical and academic subjectivism of morality, those who would do bad things in the world are going straight to the source of where all these ideas actually have real power, which is in the minds of children.
	I think that's a real shame.
	It's one of the reasons why I try and talk about sort of child raising and parenting and so on, and also, you know, why or how, if I get to time and space to do it, I think that taking these ideas to kids is very important.
	I plan to do that in a raincoat just sort of by hanging around children's playgrounds.
	I think that should work out.
	Yeah. Steph has some logic for you, kid.
	Get into the rational mobile.
	I got a bag of morality here.
	Do have the best candy. What's up?
	Christina's threatening me with even more medication.
	Got a hypo over there just stabbing you in the thigh when you get to a little...
	No, the...
	The moral mechanism in the mind is pretty much a biological fact now, isn't it?
	There are dozens of books on it.
	The only question I have is, is that mechanism a A delicate wristwatch, or is it a printing press?
	If I hit with a hammer, am I going to readjust one screw, or am I going to crush it completely?
	I'm sorry, that's one too many metaphors for me, hitting the wristwatch with a hammer.
	I lost the southern thread of connection with something biological there, so if you could run that through me again.
	Well, I guess what I'm saying there is...
	Given the amount of effort that coercive institutions engage in to change the minds of children, that would suggest that this moral mechanism is a great deal more resilient than just some Chinese origami in there.
	Of course, because it is at the root of natural selection for us.
	But the investment is pretty good.
	You know, from a standpoint of just return on investment, what happens, right?
	I mean, basically, the children get educated at the cost of $8,000 or so, $6,000 to $8,000 a year, which, you know, for the sake of ease of argument, goes on for 15 years or whatever.
	So let's just say $5,000 a year is, what, $75,000.
	So it costs $75,000 to educate a child.
	Of course, the people who run the state don't pay for that themselves.
	The taxpayers pay for it.
	But even if they did, right?
	$75,000 to educate a child, which said education then means that the child is going to be paying taxes with blind, conforming, bar-like charity for the rest of his natural life.
	And, you know, how much is the adult taxed Well, it's a heck of a lot more than $75,000, right?
	So it's a very good investment as far as that goes.
	People are paying $40,000 a year in taxes over the course of 40 years.
	So what's that? I don't know, $1.6 million off a $75,000 investment.
	That's pretty good, right? I mean, that's a pretty good investment.
	There's really good economic reasons why it's far better to invest in controlling the minds of children than it is to invest in controlling the wallets of adults, right?
	Because if you control the minds of children, they'll hand over their money with a smile, or maybe a grumble, but they'll still hand it over.
	And the enforcement costs go down enormously, so that's why I think it's sort of important to either talk to parents or to talk to Which I guess to some extent really kind of makes this sort of secular liberalism almost more pernicious than the aggressive,
	domineering, hyper-religious I was just noticing today that The God Delusion by Dawkins is number one on the non-fiction list.
	Highly appropriate. And it is good.
	I mean, Christina's just saying fantastic.
	It is good, but it's also very dangerous.
	And I certainly don't mean to be Mr.
	Doom and Gloom, but...
	History has shown that withdrawing people's allegiance to one false god doesn't exactly deconcentrate their allegiance to other false gods, right?
	So skepticism in religion presaged totalitarianism in government in the 19th to 20th century, particularly in the communist realm, but also throughout Europe and so on.
	Skepticism in religion, it tends to increase people's allegiance to the state because, of course, the root is the parents, which are not examined.
	And so if you subtract 25% from religious, you just add 25% to state.
	And you can see this in socialists, of course, who tend to be skeptical of religion but are very pro-state.
	You can see this in Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who are skeptical of religion but statist in their natures.
	And they have a kind of unquestioning allegiance to the state that they exactly condemn in the Christian allegiance or religious allegiance to the idea of God.
	So I certainly am happy, of course, on the balance, but it is a risky time because when you take away people's religious faith, they then have to pour more allegiance into the state because if they disbelieve in both, they come right up against their parents fundamentally.
	Right, and you're replacing one moral myth with another, really.
	You're substituting moral allegiance to some intangible ideal with a moral allegiance to just some guy.
	Right....dangerous to have allegiance to the state than it is to have allegiance to a god.
	It really is like 99% horror versus 100% horror, but at least you can claim that you can have a direct relationship with God which contradicts what other religious people are saying about God.
	You can't have that with the state.
	Right. There is no possibility for a Luther who's going to nail his precepts to the door of the White House, right?
	Right. Not to suggest that Luther was any more virtuous than any of the Catholic clergy he was railing against, but just that whole idea of the ability to still own your own rational consciousness.
	And Luther did a lot of good, sorry, Luther did a lot of good, in my view, Luther did a lot of good despite himself in terms of the separation of church and state.
	Once you break the monopoly of the Catholic hegemony, then you realize that you can't have a union of church and state when religion becomes fragmented because then it just becomes a war of all against all.
	So, you know, it was a step forward, I guess, in a horrible kind of way.
	The state itself is a kind of war of all against all.
	No, it's not a kind of war. As Ayn Rand said, and I think quite rightly, the state needs to be separated from economics, as she put it, as if that were possible.
	The state needs to be separated from economics in the same way that the church and the state need to be separated.
	And I wouldn't agree with that so far as you cannot separate the state from economics because the state is really around the moving around at the point of a gun of the wealth of millions The entire reason for the state is to control the economy.
	You can't separate the state from the economy.
	It's like separating the soul from the body.
	It doesn't make any sense because there's no such thing as a soul and it doesn't make any sense to say separate the state from the economy because the state is all about manipulating the economy.
	That's the whole reason it exists. The economy really is just a collective representation of individual value.
	Right, and the state is just all about putting guns at people and making the cost benefit of hanging on to your money versus surrendering it to the state so egregious that you'll just hand it over and complain or not.
	That's still the sequence. Right, surrendering your own value to that of another by coercive force.
	Right. And in the same way that, at least in the modern West, and though not so much in the East, the reason that people surrender to their parents is biological in nature.
	We have to have our parents in order to survive.
	The reason that people surrender to religion is for fear of social ostracism and feeling guilt or evil or bad.
	And the reason that people surrender to the state is because they're afraid of being thrown in jail.
	But in each of these situations, people build these fantasy puff pink candy cloud castles to live in, which make it all moral, right?
	I love my parents. I believe in God, and I love God.
	Jesus died for my sins, and I love my country.
	But when you strip away all of this pious nonsense, which people erect because they have fear, right?
	I don't have to walk around...
	Talking about that I love my wife, I love my wife, I love my wife.
	I mention it, of course, when it's relevant, but I don't have to keep pumping it out.
	When people protest so much and build up all of these fantastic superstructures in reaction formations to the fear and control that's being imposed upon them It's a good sign because it means that people can't live with the humiliation, so they have to make up fairy stories wherein it's not humiliation but virtue.
	And that means that you pull apart these fairy stories or fairy tales and you can usually get to some kind of core, but it's pretty destabilizing for people.
	Yeah, and not to trivialize the horror of the crime, but it's like the happy place that the rape victim goes to when an event is occurring, right?
	And when you start selling that in a mass way through public education and communications and whatnot, it becomes the apparatus of propaganda that perpetuates the whole thing.
	And I think that that's – I think that that's – it's pretty obvious that that's what they're doing with things like the Iraq War, you know.
	I sent 21, 22,000 more troops.
	You know, as I've mentioned before, it certainly could be the case, though I have no evidence for it, that we're in the stages of the mass pillaging of the public purse.
	And this would, of course, predict and explain why the troop escalation is going on for a conflict that obviously is not succeeding.
	Why would you send more troops?
	Well, the more troops you send... The more you get to build the government and the more war profiteering goes on.
	Once you start reducing troop levels, then the amount of war profiteering that's going to go on is going to decline.
	And so there's no interest in winning the war.
	It's just that if you escalate it further, more profit can be made.
	And that, I think, would be the case that what's happened is the public treasury is so depleted now, especially with the rise of the euro and the yen.
	Reducing the demand for the U.S. dollars, the public treasury is now so depleted that the Indiana Jones grab fest is, I think, underway.
	And that, I mean, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but that would certainly explain the recent decision to escalate what is completely, and it was clearly an unpopular and deranged war, even for those who would have been in support of it when it started.
	The support now is merely just an act of tooth-gritting will.
	Explainable in... In another way as well.
	I know, Greg, there's no other way to explain it.
	It's just this way.
	There's just one way to explain it.
	How many times have I had to tell you? I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Yes, master. Excellent, my minion.
	But if you look at the government, I mean, if you look at the military as just another government bureaucracy, then the troop escalation is exactly what you would expect.
	Right? Oh, the program's not working.
	We need a lot more of it.
	Right, right. Right?
	So... I think that's quite true.
	Sorry, go ahead. And so the escalation is just exactly the same thing you get with the budget expansions to departments like education and welfare and whatnot.
	It's the exact same scenario.
	Well, I think that's true, but I think that the one thing that's slightly different is that war is where government really finally gets to loosen its tie, kick back, and finally be itself.
	I think that most people feel that the war in Iraq as a whole is a complete utter fiscal, moral, and foreign policy disaster.
	There's not a lot of equivocation.
	And I don't think that's just the sources.
	I mean, this is just people that I've talked to in the States when I've been over in business there.
	Everybody's rolling their eyes about Iraq, and everyone realizes it's a complete mess in a way that they don't realize that the Department of Education is a mess.
	Like, everyone knows, oh, the schools need to be better and so on, but in that case, they do believe that spending more or whatever is going to solve the problem, but that it needs to be there to begin with, whereas the war in Iraq, the military, people will still say we need it, but the war in Iraq I don't think is quite the same in that people say, I don't think people really feel That if we spend more or send more troops in, that it's going to get better.
	I think that they feel that the war itself is completely misjudged, misguided, and complete.
	What does he call it? Catastrophic.
	This is John Stewart's term, right?
	And so I think it's a little bit different than other government agencies because the war itself, people have no faith in, but they still do have faith in things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and so on.
	They just think those things should be reformed.
	But I don't think that people believe that the war in Iraq needs to be tweaked or improved.
	I think that most people, they don't know how to get out of it with any kind of honor, as if that's possible or even important, but they certainly don't think that it was justified, required, necessary, valuable, protecting, or anything like that.
	And what's the one thing that you think that allowed people to come to that decision about the Iraq war more quickly What's the one difference?
	To me it seems that Well, I'll let you answer.
	Well, I think it's entirely optimistic, Greg, that you would ask me for just one thought.
	You want me to run through a podcast count now?
	We'll do that a little bit later.
	No, the one thing is improved communication.
	I think the one fundamental thing is improved communication.
	It's very hard for people to lie about the Iraq war.
	There's lots of people blogging.
	You can get access to foreign newspapers just with a click of your mouse.
	It is very hard for lies to continue.
	That's the wonderful thing about the internet, and I still have to do my whole podcast series on the internet, which I've kind of got planned, but I haven't got around to.
	The only thing is that people have access to better information.
	They don't have access to solutions yet, except for these kinds of conversations that we're having here.
	But they certainly have access to better information and they know that it's all lies and they can see this kind of stuff.
	Whereas beforehand, and it only takes one person to break through that, right?
	I mean, the mainstream reporters are only talking, only speaking the truth about the war and calling it a civil war and, you know, they still use the terms like insurgents and so on.
	But the mainstream reporters are only doing it because the dike has broken through the internet to begin with.
	So the information's already out there.
	They're trying to play catch-up. And they realize that if they didn't start to tell the truth about the Iraq War, people would simply recognize that they were just mere arms of government propaganda and would go to the internet and say, screw you people, and the dollars would dry up in terms of advertising and so on.
	So because the internet breaks the story first, what happens is the media have to follow it.
	Otherwise, they lose all I think it's what they have to lie about that is really the significant differentiator.
	The fact that the government lies to convince us that only X percent of children are dropping out of school or what have you, The Iraq War, where the lie is, you know, guns and death and destruction.
	It's right there in people's faces.
	They don't have any choice but to confront it.
	So, you know, truths about, you know, the efficacy of welfare programs or the failure of the public education system, people don't have a problem equivocating that because there's no obvious Well, I think that's true. As I've talked about in a podcast recently, the effect is much more diluted for things like welfare programs and poor education.
	The effects don't really show up for years, whereas bodies coming back in bits...
	The one thing I think that could occur better, which is still radioactive for the U.S. media, is what is not occurring as yet is the footage of Iraqi deaths.
	You don't see that kind of stuff happening very much.
	I think that...
	Everyone says, well, the war in Vietnam was kind of lost because Americans saw the bloodshed that was occurring to their own people more directly on television and so on.
	I think that's all true. America lost, what, 58,000 troops compared to 2 to 3 million, they don't even know, of North Vietnamese and Cambodians killed.
	So, you know, again, hundreds or thousands of times the death count.
	I don't think that it's particularly advanced for a society to say, we're unhappy that our boys, whatever that means, are getting killed.
	But I think that the real challenge and the really explosive and radioactive aspect of the war would occur when you would begin to see bits of Iraqi children embedded in walls and all the other horrors that are going on.
	And if you found a way...
	Because the language barrier, right?
	There's a reason that countries don't intend to invade other countries that have the same language, right?
	The language barrier makes them seem even more foreign and strange and jabbery and screechy and so on.
	But if you were to have sort of dubs with American-sounding voices of the Pain that the Iraqis were going through and so on, and the murders and the slaughters.
	To find empathy for those that you're killing, rather than those of your own tribe who's being killed, that is the end of war.
	That is the end of war.
	What we're doing right now is more like, well, we stuck our hand into a fire, we got burnt, and we should pull our hand back.
	But we don't realize that the fire is a fire we've actually set on somebody else.
	That, I think, is still something that has to occur.
	I don't know if it's going to happen in this cycle or not, but because whoever did it, if you bring that kind of truth to people, that is, I mean, that's so radioactive.
	It is such a confrontation of inhumanity to begin to broadcast the bodies of those, not just your guys, but of the other guys.
	That is a kind of humanity that we're still, I think, a ways away from in the media or as a species, right?
	That's That is absolutely unbearable for people.
	Not to just think, well, my son got killed, but how many people did he kill?
	That is really the end of war, and we're still a ways away from that.
	I don't even think you need translators for that.
	The pictures alone, for me, that was...
	That's a significant moment of moral horror to the point that you don't even want to believe that the pictures could possibly be real.
	Somebody had to fake these.
	Right. Right. And the other thing then, of course, is that to imagine...
	So there's one more step, which is to imagine yourself in your enemy's, your, quote, enemy's shoes, right?
	Or one foot left of the shoe, the other one blown up, right?
	Right. That really is another step.
	So when I did the podcast, I got a lot of email on the podcast I did about Iraqis and sort of the empathy that you could have for these poor suffering herd of human livestock charging back and forth across the Middle East from bombs to hostile neighbors and so on.
	It is, once you get the sympathy for the deranged and fear-crazed herd on the other side of the electric fence, then you really can start to see the true nature of the farmers, but as long as you only have sympathy for your own herd, you still have loyalty remaining to the herders.
	And yeah, that's to bring us back around the original story, that's kind of what I could see going on in this guy's head.
	Before he's, you know, waving the gun around and gung-ho and all of that, and afterward he's, you know, he's flat and dull and just, the best way I can describe it is gray, but when you look at him, the way he talked about the stories and everything that was going on over there, you could just, you could almost feel the war waging inside of him, you know?
	You could tell he was wrestling with that natural human desire to empathize with wrestling that with his own involvement and everything that went on over there.
	And that is the greatest horror for the soldier, I think, that when you are a soldier and you go and you stare down the beady eyes across the road and you're both trying to kill each other, I think that what you finally get, and probably for this guy is at a very unconscious level, but I think, Greg, that what you finally get as a soldier is that who do you have the most in common with?
	Do you have the most in common?
	You, some 22-year-old Southern kid who barely finished high school, do you have something in common with George Bush?
	No, of course not. George Bush backed out of his military, basically bailed out of everything, was a drug addict and was rich.
	You know, has never worked at Honest Day in his life, so you don't have anything in common with George Bush, but that's who you went to war for, right?
	Do you have anything in common with the people that you come back, with your wife, with your family, with the people who have not experienced the murder and the fear and the horror that you have experienced?
	No, you don't have anything in common with them.
	What about your teachers? What about your co-workers?
	You have nothing in common with them.
	The person that you actually have the most in common with is, to one degree it's your fellow soldiers, but to another degree it's the insurgents.
	Those are the people that you actually have the most in common with because you're both out there and you don't know what the hell you're doing.
	You're both out there based on ideology and enslavement.
	Theirs to a particular ideology called Islam and yours to a particular ideology called patriotism.
	The person that you're closest to is the person that you're trying to kill and that's the person that you're told is the greatest enemy.
	That uniting of the foes that occurs at a psychological level, which is well documented in World War I, where, of course, we all know the story that when the guns went silent in 1914, everybody met and drank in the middle of No Man's Land, because they actually had the most in common with each other.
	They were both trying to kill each other.
	And you're not trying to kill your fellow soldier.
	You're trying to kill the other guy who's trying to kill you.
	You actually have the most in common with your enemy.
	And so where is this guy?
	His soul is sort of pinned to the bodies of all the people he killed who he's actually the closest to ideologically and they're supposed to be the enemies and the people he's defending are supposed to be his friends but he's got nothing in common with them anymore and his soul lies pinned under a broken building in Iraq.
	There's nothing left for him to identify with except the people he killed.
	Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly true.
	But we don't learn that until way too late, right?
	And that's the grim danger of this, right?
	I mean, it would almost be more humane if you never learned that, but you don't learn that until after you've killed people.
	Yeah, that's true.
	That's exactly right.
	And I think the soldier in that sense is kind of a microcosm example of the whole society.
	Really? I mean, he's a personification of the contradiction built into the whole system.
	Right. And so he, you know, that self-destruction that's going on inside of him is a pinpoint example of the self-destruction of the whole civilization.
	Right. Right, and the brutality that he wakes up to far too late, from the euphoria of patriotism and everyone cheering his name, to the grim blind reality of the spear going into both sides, himself and whoever he's killing.
	The danger that he only wakes up to too late is the great danger that society as a whole, through its addiction to violence and control and hegemonic monopolistic powers like the state and the church, And the brutalization that occurs with children through irrationality, patriotism, and blind obedience to parental obligation,
	the fact that the soldier only wakes up so much later, after the disaster, after the soul murder has already occurred, that of course is the grave danger that occurs within society, that unless we get a handle on our own addiction to violence as a means of solving problems, however prettily we dress it up, then the great danger is that we only realize the danger of this after it becomes almost impossible to remediate because the government power has become so powerful.
	To do anything about it.
	Right, and that's when the devil of the false self lifts the veils from your eyes, right?
	And that's the hell that you could face, right?
	I mean, again, I think we can turn this thing around, but that is, of course, the grave danger.
	Somebody just had a question about this, the Christmastime war together.
	I'll just mention it very briefly.
	The war started in, I think it was August of 1914, Christmastime of 1914.
	This also occurred in Christmastime of 1915.
	The war stopped for Christmas.
	How funny is that, right? So the war could stop, but only for the misplaced birth date of Mithras.
	But the gun stopped and there was brandy handed out to the troops and probably fruitcakes that are still in circulation today.
	and um... they uh... they they do they want to shoot each other they knew that there was no war so the soldiers the british and the german soldiers they uh... they uh... wave with white flags and they went out and met each other uh... in no man's land and they share drinks they shared stories they swapped cigarettes uh... some could speak and they translated but uh... they were friends because uh... these guys were blood brothers they were both in the same situation uh...
	and this of course was anathema and was heavily heavily punished It occurred sporadically in 1915, but then anybody who did it was shot or imprisoned.
	Yeah, they had to stop it, right?
	Because you can't allow this kind of...
	It's like the pimp with the prostitutes, right?
	You can't allow any emerging humanity.
	Otherwise, the whole system falls to the ground.
	The whole system of murder and exploitation falls to the ground.
	So this is something that had to be highly and heavily punished.
	But of course, this is exactly what you'd expect.
	Who had the most in common were the soldiers shooting at each other.
	They had all been led there through their illusions.
	They'd all been led there as well through female brutality.
	There was a practice in England and perhaps in other places as well, prior to the opening of the Great War in 1914, and also shortly thereafter, that women would carry white feathers and they would hand these white feathers Which symbolized cowardice to any man that they found outside of uniform and thus shaming and guilting them.
	They wouldn't go out with them. They spurned them and the priests, of course, all spurned them and denounced them from the pulpit and the social pressure was enormous.
	And it's a whole system that produces this kind of slaughter.
	And it's a whole social machinery.
	And the empathy and the camaraderie that the troops had for each other Despite language barriers, despite cultural barriers, and despite the fact that they'd spent a year or two trying to kill each other, the empathy that the troops had, because you're actually closer to your enemy even than you are to your fellow soldiers, because your fellow soldiers aren't trying to kill you in the way that you and your enemy are trying to kill each other.
	The fact that you are blood brothers in the worst kind of ways, that kind of empathy simply cannot be allowed to develop or the whole structure comes crashing down.
	That sort of...
	Social intimidation.
	And that goes on today, too.
	And that's not so much in as explicit a way, but it was certainly the case in my own family where certain kids are expected to go into the Army and certain aren't because they're just too soft for that sort of thing.
	And so they're the ones that are treated like...
	You know, you walk on eggshells around them, right?
	The last thing I'll sort of say about this topic is that if you've seen Fahrenheit 9-11, there's this mom whose son says, Mom, the night before he's going to ship out to Iraq, he says, Mom, I don't want to go.
	I think I might die.
	I'm terrified. I don't want to do it.
	And the mom says, sits down with him on his bed and says, well...
	This is the obligation you've taken on.
	You have to go. It's for your country.
	It's for this. Basically, he's reaching out to her to save him from shark-infested waterists, and she's just kicking his groping fingers off the rail, sailing on and saying, good luck, son.
	It's virtuous to fight these sharks.
	Good luck. You've got a toothpick.
	And then he gets killed.
	And who does she take out her rage on?
	The White House. Please.
	Please. As if it's got anything to do with the goddamn White House.
	She should have spirited him up to Canada and saved his life.
	But she didn't. She convinced him to go to war, shamed and humiliated and bullied him into going to war, and then she gets angry at the politicians.
	The politicians are feasting off her horrifying parenting.
	They are merely the effects of her parenting.
	They don't see that as bullying.
	They see that as gentle counseling.
	You have to learn to accept your responsibilities.
	I know it's hard, blah, blah, blah.
	All that crap is sold to you as comfort.
	And that's what's happening to this poor bastard up here, who wrote what I read at the beginning, that the Canadian government is saying, hey, dude, you volunteered.
	We're not giving you asylum.
	It's like, the guy was 20.
	He was lied to.
	He's got no other opportunities.
	He had state propaganda his whole life.
	Please. Please.
	You know, then the reporter has the gall to say to him, hey, it's only five years if you go back to the U.S. You can only get five years in a military prison for a desertion.
	Why don't you just go back and take your lumps?
	It's like, what a six assignment Canada is considered to be this nice place, but it's no nicer than any other abandoned nut jobs in the world.
	This reporter, this guy's got two kids, right?
	And he's already been... Oh, just go back and take your five years.
	What lunacy! What horror!
	And what lack of respect for what this man is doing, which is, I think, quite remarkable.
	It's not going to save the world, but it's certainly going to save himself, and it's certainly going to help with his family and with his kids.
	So, you know, good for him. Pound on a helpless kid all his life, and then the minute he tries to run away, kick him in the balls.
	Right. Go back and take your lumps.
	It's like, what the hell are you?
	You're not signing up. You're not over there doing anything, right?
	But this is all the courage of the people who stay at home.
	Yeah. Yeah, which is pretty sick.
	There was a great debate between Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly where Michael Moore said, would you give up your teenage son to try and free Fallujah?
	Would you accept the death of your teenage son to try and free Fallujah?
	Because that's what it comes down to. That's the reality, right?
	And he said, no, I would go.
	I would go, but I wouldn't force my son to go.
	He said, but it's not an answer.
	You're too old to go. You're for this war.
	You think that people should be dying for it.
	Would you accept the sacrifice of your only son?
	And Harry Brown had this idea that you pass an amendment that says that nobody who doesn't have a son of draft age can vote for a war.
	Again, it's like trying to turn a shark into a dolphin just gets you eaten.
	Exactly. They're never going to pass legislation like that.
	No, of course not.
	And even if they did, they'd find some way around it or whatever.
	Unless you're in school.
	It's a symbolic gesture in an attempt to expose the hypocrisy.
	Right, right. The troops are all perfectly aware of this, right?
	This is something else that happens when you get over there and you realize that there's only other poor kids out there.
	It's that great line from P2. Charlie Sheen goes out and the poor kids all say to him, what the hell are you doing here, rich kid?
	And he's like, well, you know, I thought it was my duty as a rich kid.
	I don't think all the poor kids should come out and fight the war, this, that, and the other.
	One of the black guys says...
	And they laugh at him. Shit, you've got to be rich to even think like that.
	It's kind of true, right?
	I mean, yes, it's a choice.
	I'm putting... It's like, hey, you know, that's great.
	We have no other options. At least that's what they say.
	That's the story. That was the...
	Was that Apocalypse Now?
	I think that was Platoon. I think that was Platoon.
	Platoon? Yeah, because that was the Javi Jean one, I think.
	Okay. Now, I just wanted to mention if anybody else had any other sort of comments or questions.
	There was one question? Oh, Alchemy.
	You know, I don't really have any thoughts on alchemy.
	Somebody just had a question on alchemy.
	Of course, I expected that one to come next.
	But the only thing that I know about alchemy is that it arose from a medieval discipline, which was originally the idea of transubstantiating, I think, lead to gold.
	There was a way of changing the properties of a particular matter, a particular material substance, in order to be able to produce a more valuable substance.
	That was the sort of root basis of alchemy, and there was a lot that was done in alchemy that ended up being useful in chemistry and biology and so on.
	But, no, I don't know much about it other than that.
	I don't think that it's a particularly scientific pursuit.
	I also know that Freud was completely obsessed, sorry, Jung was completely obsessed with alchemy along with these mandelas.
	So he felt that there was a lot of very powerful stuff in alchemy, but he was quite mad.
	Insights, but mad. So no, I don't know much about alchemy, and I certainly haven't.
	I know that it was medieval science, mostly around the attempt.
	Kings funded it in order to be able to try and find ways to produce gold without having to mine it so that they could pay soldiers to go kill people, but it never really led anywhere, and it has only survived, I think, through the works of Jung into the modern age.
	There may be people who still practice it, but I don't know that it's particularly scientific, but I don't know much about it.
	Yeah, Newton was also, yeah, massively big on alchemy.
	And, you know, it was the lottery of the day, right?
	It's like if we could just figure out a way to print money through transforming one substance into gold or silver, wouldn't we be so happy?
	But that's really all I know about it, and Jung goes on and on about it, and it certainly made me fall asleep to Jung quite a few times, as did his discussions of mandalas, but...
	So, did you have any other, anyone?
	We've got a little bit of time, a little bit of room before we close the show for the week, and I go back to resting my voice.
	If anybody has any questions or comments, you can click on request microphone.
	Thoughts on Jung, for that matter?
	Well, I can speak very briefly about Jung.
	I went through a bit of a Jung kick when I was about 30, 31.
	Jung himself, of course, was a highly deranged human being and an untreated victim of sexual abuse.
	He was raped by a friend of his father's, as Freud himself was an untreated victim of sexual abuse.
	Untreated, of course, because it was new.
	So Jung had some particularly challenging emotional issues.
	If you're raised by somebody whose friend You've got a pretty corrupt family overall.
	Of course, that's not particularly positive.
	Jung himself was obviously very big into metaphor, very big into collective unconscious.
	I remember reading that when he was starting out, he We're good to go.
	I think that he might have been a little bit better off to look in the mirror and say, how did it feel to get raped by a friend of my father's?
	That might have been slightly more productive from a mental health standpoint.
	To do that, rather than to worry about possible coincidental myths that occurred.
	But he did have some great respect for the instincts and the passions.
	He also was quite skeptical towards parents.
	I remember when I was on vacation once on my own in Mexico, I think it was.
	I was reading that...
	I remember this sentence vividly to this day.
	Something about parents. He wrote very passionately about the evils of the wars, and he did quite a lot of analysis on Nazism from a psychological standpoint, but he wrote, and it really struck with me, he wrote...
	But of course, most parents are just ordinary, are a little more than ordinary incompetence, far more than half children themselves.
	And that was very powerful for me, right?
	Because it really began to sort of really reinforce this journey that I was on towards the skepticism towards parental authority that, of course, everybody knows where that went.
	And his treatment of his own children, of course, was brutal.
	And something that struck me about Jung was that Jung went on this pilgrimage later on in life to go into the heart of darkness, into darkest Africa, because he wanted to do X, Y, Z, some nonsense and whatever.
	And I remember, this is a little detail from, I read his biography, but I remember that he goes on this journey and a couple of his Zulu or African guides get eaten by lions during the course of this trip.
	And he just comments it and moves on.
	But, of course, these men would still be alive if he hadn't gone on this trip or if he'd armed them.
	Of course, they didn't like arming blacks in those days.
	But he's just like, you know, well, this is the hazards of whatever, whatever, right?
	This incredible coldness towards other human beings, to me, is always just very, very chilling when it comes to psychologizing people.
	He was, of course, very big into the authentic self, the true self, and so on, but it was a bit more mystical than I would put it, right?
	To me, the true self is that which accurately mirrors empirical external reality.
	As provided through the evidence of the senses, but for him it was a mystical union with sort of the collective unconscious and the images of human beings and so on.
	But his dream analysis could be quite good.
	So the way that these, the way that Freud and Jung and a lot of, it's not uncommon, the way that they treated their own children could be pretty brutal.
	The way that they treated their child patients could be quite brutal.
	And, of course, the fundamental thing that occurred was the denial of the pain of the child through the transmogrification of the agony of the child into a universal theory of psychology was the greatest crime, sort of in my opinion, right?
	So Jung translated the agonies of the child into the collective unconscious, and Freud translated it into the Electra and the Oedipal complex and the sort of tripartite analysis of the human soul, which has the superego, the ego, and the id, with the ego being the least powerful part of consciousness.
	But the failure of their ability or desire or willingness to accept the agonies of the child and the real horrors and agonies that were going on were, I think, pretty significant.
	One of Jung's case studies involved a girl who was preyed upon by an elderly Uncle who wanted to marry her later.
	And she was, you know, appalled and would faint and had all of these psychosomatic symptoms which any competent therapist or even any competent human being who had empathy would recognize as the signs of significant abuse, probably perpetrated in a sexual manner by the very person who wanted to marry her.
	But of course, he put it down as sexual hysteria and repression and this and that.
	All of which is non-empirical, and I think that that put society back quite a long way.
	Because, of course, what happened with Freud, as I mentioned a long time ago on podcasts, is that all these women were coming to him saying, yeah, I'm screwed up because I was raped as a child.
	I screwed up because my dad buggered me as a kid, both boys and girls.
	And Freud began to publish this sexual ideology of what was occurring to children, and society went apeshit.
	Society went completely insane, because it violated so many things, so many taboos within society, this sort of honesty.
	And so what he did was when he faced this kind of resistance, what he did was he said, oh, okay, well, maybe it's not true.
	Maybe they're making it all up.
	Maybe the kids weren't being raped.
	Maybe the daughters aren't being raped by their fathers.
	They're just fantasizing about being raped by their fathers.
	And that is something that is a fantasy that they have, so they must want to be raped by their fathers.
	They're dreaming it. Kids can't tell reality from fantasy.
	This is where, of course, you still get this idea that kids can't tell reality from fantasy, which is not true at all.
	But the dismissal of the highly legitimate complaints, particularly by women, of childhood rape, but also by men, was pretty horrendous, of course.
	And, of course, Freud was a heavy collectivist in terms of his addiction to Judaism.
	He was a Jew, of course, and was very pro-Jewish and so on, and really wanted to keep those collective identities, and Jung was very pro-collectivism and so on.
	So I'd say pretty primitive thinkers, not very honest people, not very rigorous within themselves.
	They had the priest's ability to make up convenient answers to explain situations that were occurring.
	And by the by, Freud was an incredibly incompetent physician who probably would have been sued into oblivion within about a year or two of starting his practice.
	Yeah, Freud could have equivocated because as an untreated victim of sexual abuse himself, the odds of him abusing his own daughter were quite highs.
	It certainly would be far higher than on average.
	So yeah, absolutely, he could have equivocated because of his own actions.
	We don't know. But I still think that to give credit where credit is due, the discovery of the unconscious, the dreams being the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud talked about, the discovery of individuation and the power and the value of myth, the myth-building apparatus within consciousness,
	It was good. I mean, there's a few silver linings in these clouds, but overall I think they did quite a bit of harm to the development of people's understandings of the world by saying that the human psyche was innately irrational, which of course I don't think is the case.
	It gets bludgeoned into being irrational, but if you keep throwing wooden boxes off a cliff, you say that wood never seems to take the shape of a box when you're looking at the splinters at the bottom.
	But that's not particularly good in terms of cause and effect, I think.
	All right. But yeah, absolutely.
	They're well worth reading. I mean, they're both very good writers.
	Freud, in particular, is an excellent writer.
	They're well worth reading. Sorry?
	Yeah, some people do find them very boring, for sure.
	Yeah, I know that Christina was not a big Freud fan.
	They're very interesting to read. It's very interesting to read for me, at least where the human mind was back then, where people's understanding of psychology and personality and so on was back then.
	But it's far more akin to religion than it is to science.
	So that's sort of my thoughts.
	All right. Excuse me.
	Do we have any other questions that people would like to chew their way into before we close the show for this week?
	What kind of webcam did you get?
	Actually, I didn't get a new webcam.
	I just wanted to make a joke about Dancing Naked with the Seven Veils and the resulting viewer blindness.
	So, no, I didn't actually get a new webcam.
	You know, it's the only time I've ever bent the truth in this show.
	So I just wanted to let you know that.
	Embellished. That's right. So...
	All right. Oh, wait.
	That seemed to be... Aha!
	I got you. Well, you know, let's just say that it was going to happen sooner or later.
	You know, I was wondering how many hours of podcasts are there.
	There's got to be 500 hours of podcasts by now.
	I can't believe people are having trouble catching up.
	It's laziness, really. I mean, it's just sheer laziness.
	I mean, what? Sleep? Showering?
	Come on. All right.
	So if nobody has any other questions, then I think we'll close the show down for this week.
	Thank you so much, as always, for listening.
	And except for those who've donated, I'll put out a quick nag for those who have not donated that kick in a few shekels.
	I think it'll make you feel great. I would certainly appreciate it.
	It's been a little dry this week.
	But I would certainly appreciate a couple, but not for the people who've already donated, who've been very generous, but let's get some new cash, some new blood in.
	I would really appreciate that.
	And, of course, the goal is for me to be able to move this to a full-time occupation so that I can keep the Steph 24-7 cable show going, which, according to my business plan and with enough amphetamines, I can probably keep going for about eight or nine days before losing my mind.
	Thank you so much for listening.
	I will talk to you soon. Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
	And I will be a little bit light on podcasting this week for a variety of reasons.
	But I will be sure to pick it up relatively quickly.

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