Speaker 1: There's James who sounds like he's the shower running behind
him or something.
Speaker 2: That's for the special subscriber edition that we released later
for money.
Speaker 3: Make it a few seconds, and I'm gonna go upstairs
to my office and plug in and will be good.
Speaker 4: To go Only Fans studio.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure I didn't catch that one.
Speaker 2: Well, we were saying it sounded to Sevier in the shower,
so I said, you were going to go upstairs to
your only fans studio.
Speaker 3: Well, I am retired. I've got to make money wherever
I can.
Speaker 4: There you go retired, Yeah, not really.
Speaker 3: Get my dongle, so to speak. Can't do only fans
without a dongle. Ask not what your country can do
for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister gorbach Off, Tear down this wall. It's look to
Say podcast with Charles W. Cook and Stephen Edward and
James Lilacs. Today Alligators bed for Them, Natz to jeens.
Oh my, let's let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 1: Jans are passed on from parents to offspring, often determining
traits like her color, personality, and even eye color.
Speaker 4: My chans are blue. You know.
Speaker 3: The stakes are best, but alligator is a maglunatician. How
to run away.
Speaker 2: From an alligator?
Speaker 3: Okay, if they escaped prison.
Speaker 1: How to run away? Don't run in a straight.
Speaker 3: Line, run like this and you know what, Your chances
go off about one percent. Welcome everybody, This is the
Ricochet Podcast number seven hundred and fifty one. Join us
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for the next seven hundred and forty nine until we
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and it's great. It's awesome. You can listen to the podcast,
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things happen. It's the place you've been looking for on
the internet all your many many years. James LILYX from
Minneapolis at the moment, and I joined by Charles C. W.
Cook in Florida and Steven Hayward, who I presume is
in his I was gonna say Italia or Amatour or
wherever you have to be at California. Gentlemen, how are
you making it through? Well? Well, good, what what's are
you you? You sound a little stressed, as though you
are still processing the horrible message of the Sydney Sweeney commercial.
Speaker 2: I didn't regard it as a horrible message, and just
to make sure James that it wasn't a horrible message,
I watched it one hundred and six times.
Speaker 3: I did too. I was looking for a little nuances year.
What I love is the fact that that if this
this is an this is an opportunity in opening for
Hugo Boss. I thought to come out with their own
line jeans and have somebody standing there in a long
black leather jacket saying when you put on your jeans
in the morning, do you find it difficult? Is it
my struggle to put them on?
Speaker 4: Do you want?
Speaker 3: Do you want the pansta more evens around in the back?
I mean if they did that and somebody said, you know,
that's kind of Nazi, you'd say, you know, you said
that about this, You said that about they have no
room left for Nazi anymore, Sidney Sweeney, either inn thing
talking make you a stupid wordplay about jeans is Nazi? Yes,
but go ahead, go ahead, if that is the hill
on which you wish to die, we will be there
with the grave figures, the shroud and the tombstone. Elsewhere
in the world we have a tariff's deal, or do
we not? Apparently something with you, something with Japan. From
what I understand, Chuck Schumer got up on the floor
of the Senate, the well of the Senate, and said, no,
it's all about none of it is real. So what
is going on? What happened? I hear everything from man,
he took them to the cleaners to absolutely nothing's going
to happen whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Well, who can say? I mean, it's still in my
mind and mystery of whether Trump really believes in tariffs,
and you know, he's been saying for years tariff is
a beautiful word. I love tariffs. Or whether this is
and or it could be both. The second possibility is
this is all his real estate. Negotiating practices of the
last forty years apply to international trade. And you know,
I have some sympathy with the view that Trump has
articulated since the eighties that we've been Patsy's on trade.
You know, we've been going for years to these international
negotiations and saying, pretty please, could you lower your tariffs
and occasionally making a little bit of progress or getting
some concessions, and I think Trump's decided to blow the
whole thing up because he's been saying that, as we say,
as we know, since the early eighties. In any case,
I think the really big question is whether his legal
authority to do all this improvising is going to survive
the DC's Circuit Court of Appeals Supreme Court, because it
sounds like the argument before the court this week went
very poorly from all the news accounts I read.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for
tariffs or the means by which they've been implemented. Those
are two separate things. Of Course, I didn't think we
need more protectionism. We're a rich country. We do that
than everyone else. I agree some other countries can often
be silly, but it's usually to our advantage. But if
we're going to have tariffs, so if there's a good
reason for it, and there is, in a military context,
for example, often a strong argument for making sure that
we keep control of supplies that are necessary to our survival,
we certainly should not be doing it via presidential edict. Now, Steve,
you said you didn't know whether or not this was
true whether Chuck Schumann was right. And that's because we
don't have a debate in Congress that we should have
over what is in the same position in the Constitution
as taxes. But the whole thing is being made up
by Donald Trump on the fly. And even if you
love tariffs, which is fine, I don't, but that's fine,
that's a problem because it creates instability, it creates uncertainty.
It means that even people who follow politics aren't quite
sure what is happening. It's also very odd because not
only has Trump introduced these new tariffs, but he has
walked away from a whole bunch of trade deals that
were negotiated through Congress. These have superseded congressional law, and
that means that if you in the future are negotiating
with the United States, you're reasonably going to ask the question, well,
is this going to last or is the next president
whoever that is going to just get rid of it
on the fly. And the last thing I would say is, again,
if you like tariffs, that's fine, if you want to
make the case for them, I know a lot of
smart people do. But the idea that what we are
doing here is the exercise of an emergency power is
just ridiculous, don't You don't invoke emergency powers bit by
bit on and off over six months in response to
what you claim has been a problem for forty years.
That's nobody's definition of emergency. So I'm I'm not a
tiriff guy. I'm absolutely happy to debate it with people.
It's a normal political question. It's been in there since
the founding. But the mechanism here just makes this so difficult.
And by the time that this podcast goes up, even
if it's up in fourteen minutes, it's possible that the
whole thing could have been changed or delayed or revoked,
which is bizarre.
Speaker 3: So it goes well, here's the counter argument then, And
I don't like terrors either, mostly because I learned way
back in the junior high that Smooth Hawley made everything
very bad for a long time. So I mean, that's
the sort of deep historical analysis that I'm dealing with.
A lot of people would say that, okay, we conduct
a trade deal with China, everybody sits down negotiates our
site is probably corrupt because they're probably beholden whatever to
Chinese interests for whatever reason, and even if we do
sign something, China is going to break it at every
possible opportunity because they're not good faith players. They steal.
So what's the point then, you know, we can crack
these treaties, make better ones with people that we like
and promise to do good. But just the very idea
that while we talked to them, we all sat down,
we negotiated, we had a treaty, doesn't necessarily mean it's
something that accrues to America's interest would be the other argument.
I'm just saying that I kind of understand that as well,
simplistic as it may be. But yeah, so it's I'm
trying to think it was a big hurrah that China
was losing some of its manufacturing to India. Look, Apple's
moving some of their production from China to India. That's great.
And then a month later twenty five percent tariff on
things coming from India. That seems to be a little
counterproductive as well. But to the point that you made
before about strategic tariffs, about making sure that we actually
have the capability to build the things we build, I'm
not sure that a lot of people would say, you know,
I may end up paying more for athletes foot cream
and antibiotic. But it's going to be coming from America,
and I'm going to be reasonably sure that it is
as it's a genuine product. I mean, I bought some
antibiotic from on Amazon that came from China. I'm convinced
it's just vasoline. I have no idea. I have no
trust in any of the products whatsoever. Again, so that's
that's that's well true.
Speaker 2: But you wouldn't mind if the antibiotic could come from Germany. No,
Sidney Sweeney's face on it, No, die.
Speaker 3: No, because I would trust presistent, precision German engineering and
their sense of honor and duty in the rest of
it to put out a quality antibiotic. But to China,
I just know it's probably got you know, it's got
hand of virus eggs in it from from all.
Speaker 2: I just think that that is a totally fair objection.
But my preference would be if we don't think that
other countries are making products that are what they say
they are, that.
Speaker 4: We should ban them. It should put tariffs on them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: This is a strange response.
Speaker 2: To say, well, I don't think this antibiotic cream is
actually antibiotic cream.
Speaker 4: I think it is ground up beetle.
Speaker 2: But if you pay an extra fifteen percent to the
US government, you can.
Speaker 3: Have a You can have something made in the United
States under the United States inspection. Is all I'm saying.
I mean, I would rather if I had my Druthers.
I just had to buy an air frier because the
old one with the Italian name, which was made in China,
fell apart. I had to buy another one. The choice
of domestic manufacturers is bad. Now you can say it's
great that we don't as a country have to make
air friers anymore. It's assembly line work. It's miserable. It's
the meaning, it's the rest of it. I don't agree.
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be
able to buy an air fryer that came out of Akron, Ohio,
that was made by guys who had a pretty good
wage and a pretty good life. While that is I
understand the old model before computers in the Internet and
the information society and all that stuff broke everything, I
don't think it's something that is we should just completely
abandon attempting to duplicate or revive when plausible, when feasible.
Would I spend ten dollars more in one if it
come from America, you damn right it would have.
Speaker 1: Well, part of the problem is not fake product necessarily
ground up beetles or whatever. It's actual real products or
that are counterfeit. But there's two kinds of this. I
used to know someone who fifteen years ago was tracing
the problem of counterfeit pharmaceuticals from overseas, and what he
discovered was, in some cases, like in Mexico, for example,
you'd have a plant that was contracted out by one
of our pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the day shift to make
whatever they were making would close down, and then an
hour later a night shift would open off the books,
producing legitimate product, but under a generic label, you know,
to sort of get around our patents and so forth.
So there's that problem. And then the other problem with China,
which now goes back at least twenty years or more.
As I've talked a couple of patent lawyers about this,
and this has been in the press, their copies of
things like Hermes handbags or Gucci handbags are so good
that the manufacturers can't tell without practically using electron microscope.
I think they've now included some tracers and authentic bags,
and they can find it. But to the even the
trained eye, you can't tell there're so the knockoffs are
so good, and that's just straight out piracy, and that's
a big problem. I don't know if tarif is a
way to fix that. I don't think so. But the
spectrum of the problem is even worse than you think.
Speaker 4: I think my.
Speaker 2: Criticism of some of these arguments it's not that I
disagree with them, but that whenever Trump does this, everyone
who favors what he's doing or at is just sympathetic
to it. Talks about China, and I agree with the
criticisms of China. I had Tom Cotton on my podcast
a few months ago. I read a great book about China,
really eye opening, an alarming book about China. But Trump
didn't just put tariffs on China. I mean, if Trump
could come out and said I'm dealing with the China
problem three months ago, I'd probably have said, fine. But
we've got tariffs now on India and Indonesia and Vietnam,
which are countries that we've tried to move manufacturing to
to get out of China. And we've also got tariffs
on France and Italy and Germany and Britain, in Brazil
and Canada. And this is the bit that I just
find astonishing is that in so far as these tariffs
make a great deal of sense, it is with countries
like China communist dictatorships that steal our stuff, make subpar products,
flood our market. I think sometimes flooding the market is
fine because then it gives us the chance to buy
cheap things. But sometimes it's not because the aim is
to destroy our industry. They want to make sure that
our factory is closed. But Germany doesn't do that. Britain
don't do it, you know, Brazil doesn't do that. India
doesn't do that. So this is the sort of what's that?
What's that weapon a blunderbus. The blunderbus attitude is a
longing to me.
Speaker 3: Well, I think then we all know where we are
on this and need not to be labor it anymore.
Charles mentioned the UK, and I wanted to get to that.
There's a lot of attention focused right now in the
scepter dial probably outside given it's importance in the rest
of it, but the place from which freedom supposedly one
of the well springs of is going through this shuddering
contraction of what appears to be online rights and access.
Thanks to their Online Safety Act, it made it very
difficult for people to go to sites that have adult content,
and by that I mean anything that be interesting to
somebody over the age of eight. I mean movies that
are a scene from a description of a scene from
a movie that sounds a little violent. Naturally, everybody who
was opposed to this is being called a pedophile or
a pedophile enabler, which is always great coming from the BBC.
Jimmy who Jimmy, Great coming from them, But it fits
in with the two tier policing idea, with the Bobby's
knocking at your door because you wrote something mean and
nasty on Facebook or Twitter. The general idea that anybody
who shows up to protest a whole bunch of guys
who's just landed on a boat being given a mobile
phone and a set of clothes and being stashed off
in the local luxury hotel, that all of these things
are now outside of the boundaries of civilized discussion. We
can't have them, and they've got to be something has
to be done about them, and it all seems rather sudden.
Maybe so because the Online Safety Act is finally hitting
and the repercussions are being known, and other countries are
looking at it. But it seems as if there's this
sort of excel And Charles tell me if I'm wrong,
there's an accelerating deliberalization of the UK that comes as
something of a surprise, even for those of us who've
been seeing certain things happen in the last few years.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you're absolutely right. I don't know how
surprised I am. When I was at Oxford, I was
there at the time that a fellow student was put
in a jail cell over night for telling a police
officer that his horse was gay. Yes, so we've talked
about this before, I think so. I'm not sure how
surprising it is. What I find infuriating is exactly the
response that you adam rated, which is, oh, well, I
suppose you're in favor of This reminds me of a
law that California passed, which was enjoined by the Ninth Circuit,
which said that if you in any way wrote about
or advertised firearms in a way that could be appealing
to a minor, he could be fined twenty five thousand dollars.
And the problem with this in practice was immediately high
school clay sports teams shut down and magazines were unable
to write anything that could be plausibly deemed to be
addressed to somebody under a and so on. In other words,
you can't do that. Leave aside the First Amendment questions.
Britain doesn't have one. You can't do things like this
without affecting everybody. And so to turn around when people
complain and say, oh, and I suppose you want small
children to watch pornography, then it's just extremely annoying. The
problem is, James, is that while there are people who
are complaining about this, the sort of reaction that you
have instinctively had to this simply does not exist in Britain.
Speaker 4: They are just.
Speaker 2: Much more comfortable with this sort of thing, and it's
going to take some really stupid prosecutions to make them
realize that they've got it wrong. Last thing, I'll say,
there was a law that has been amended but not repealed,
called Section five. I think it's Section five of the
Public Order Act, and this law was put into place
in the nineteen eighties. I think Margaret Thatcher was on
board with it, she was quite bad on speech sometimes,
and it eventually met its demise or diminishment when comedians,
most notably Rowan Atkinson, started complaining that it was being
used to shut up people who were making jokes, who
were being funny about, say Islam or different racial characteristics,
or Christianity or atheism. And there was a campaign and
at that point the British got it because they saw
the way that.
Speaker 4: It was being used.
Speaker 2: But I do worry that there's no reflexive hostility in
the way you would encounter in the United States, so
this sort of thing they have to see it practically fail.
Speaker 3: I have talked about this with my friends in England,
and I tend to do so more. I'm a little
bit hesitant to say anything in the radio noown next less,
the next time I go through I get scanned by
the Interpol computer and they say, oh, this fellow, this
fellow said some problematic things. I mean, I I I
hear what you're saying, but I don't think that the
docility that you have described before remains in the same
percentage I think that. I mean, was it a Telegraph
columnist who had to who was brought up by charge
brought up on charges recently for tweeting out something like this.
I think there are there are more and more instances,
and again you may have the Telegraph audience self segregating
on that one and not spilling over into the Times audience.
But but but the the other portion of it was,
if I'm trying to remember here was the was the
banter laws? Stephen, do you know what the banter laws are?
Speaker 1: I do not.
Speaker 3: Okay. Well, in addition to the Online Safety Act and
the two tier policing and the government actually being caught
trying to do something with social media about getting rid
of or deep platforming people who talk about two tier policing,
there was a law that's passed and being called the
banter Law because it criminalizes pub talk essentially. Now that,
of course there's nonsense. There's no one's going to criminal Well,
what it does is it says that the owners of
a pub are responsible for maintaining a non threatening, inclusive,
friendly work environment. So if it's possible that your server
who's coming over to give you your ail, here's you
making a joke that offends them, than the pub owner
I believe, is responsible for not policing the banter or
making it known that certain things are not to be
discussed that and that's met with derision from every quarter,
except of course, those who say, oh, so you want
to sit in the corner of the snug that and
make jokes about Islam. Maybe maybe they do.
Speaker 1: Maybe it seems to me that soccer hooligans in the
pub are now Written's best hope for recovery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, you, me and Julia looking out
the window saying the pearls is you know that the
pearls will be our hope. That's what they thought in
nineteen eighty four as well. I'll tell you what it's
going to take. I've said this before and i'll say
it again. I think that Brexit happened when everybody opened
up their paper and story that the EU was going
to impose new green requirements on tea kettles and that
the EU was going to dictate that they boiled a lot,
took a lot longer to boil in order to save
the planet. And I think that's what everybody said. I've
had it right up to here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a very very quick point on this, you know,
exactly right. And the thing that always baffled me about that,
James Is. People who hated the EU, myself included, would
always point out how stupid their regulations were, straight bananas
and so forth. And then those who liked the you
would say, why do you always bring that up? That's
not important? And I would think, why doesn't the EU
stop it?
Speaker 3: Then? Right? Well, no, absolutely, because there is somebody whose
job depends on making a yearly report on the average
diameter of Swiss cheese bubbles. Right, it simply is, and
he makes one hundred and forty thousand euros a year
doing this to ensure uniformity in conformity to the Swiss standards,
of course that's why. Yeah, all right, well I had
none of that. Speaking of pubs or whatever, the Russian
equippal is Medvedev caught dolphins said something the other day,
did he did you? Did you hear this?
Speaker 4: Well, this is a really crazy thing to say, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll just go over to America in New.
Speaker 3: Q Yeah, well he says an awful lot of stupid
and crazy things. And so what do you do in
response to that? You short off and you say he's
drinking again? Or do you say, you know, fine, we're
can move a couple of subs around, Well, take your
best shot.
Speaker 2: What interests me about this is that I am actually
a devotee with Trump of the Madman theory, which is
to say that I think one of Trump's greatest characteristics,
and I mean this very genuinely. It sounds like I'm
being silly.
Speaker 4: I'm not.
Speaker 2: One of his greatest characteristics is he says crazy stuff
and people aren't quite sure if it's true. And he
did it with Kim Jong In, and he does it
with Putin, and he does it with Iran and so on,
and it works. I think there is a genuine you
in confusion and alarm in the world when Trump talks
that works to the benefit of the United States in
nise circumstances. I thought when I heard this that it
doesn't work from verte no, because I didn't look at
this and think, oh no, I sort of thought, oh no,
they're not going to do that. You shouldn't say that
unless you're actually going to scare people, and it didn't.
Maybe I'm to desensitize to it, but this just made
me think, you're a silly, backwards petro state losing a
war and you're trying to talk in a way that
would have been scary ever to come out of the
mouth of Joseph Stalin, but is not now. So the
madman theory, I thought, only works for some.
Speaker 3: It's told by getting everybody the table to negotiate something
about Ukraine, which I can't imagine anybody doing. But let
me offer this suggestion. I think the best way to
get Russia to the table is to tell Russia that
the United that the entire world community recognizes as legitimate
its occupancy of the eastern portion of Ukraine, just the
same way it worked as Europe or England and France
recognizing at Palestinian state, which is we all knew. Brought
Hamas right to the table.
Speaker 2: Happy to have Yeah, I mean I thought you were
serious for a second. Then I did too, trying to
read your eyes.
Speaker 1: Right, I did too, Chargie. I mean, well, so the
backup half a step. So Charnie, you said a minute ago,
I think you said this that Russia is losing the war,
and I'm not quite sure that's right, or if you
mean it literally and comprehensively. They are grinding out gains.
Speaker 4: At great just lost so many people.
Speaker 1: Yes, no, at great Colot. You have to think how
long can they sustain that? And maybe they're playing for advantage.
You want to grab as much territory as we can
until we have to end this because it's too costly
or there's sufficient new pressure from the West. But I
also think that Putin has made a the crazy man theory.
The other thing is, you know, Putin ought to be
smart enough to know that one way to get along
with Donald Trump is to give him a little something
flatter him. And Putin has given Trump nothing. And so look,
this is not rocket science or deep psychology. Trump has
been offended that, you know, Trump says these crazy things
few months ago, I'll end the war on day one.
And he's been in a certain way humiliated by Putin.
And Trump doesn't like that. And so Trump said, okay,
I said sixty days to reach a deal. What a
few days ago he said, I'm going to make it
twelve days, right, We're going to shorten a timeline. And
that may have been part of what provoked Medvedev to say, well,
we'll just send some submarines over, like the Red October
or something. And it seems to me it would have
been easy for the Russians to have thrown some kind
of bone to Trump to put him off for another
month or two. But they've done nothing. I mean, they
talk nice on the phone apparently, but you know, no,
even even a ten days cease fire would probably be
the Russia's advantage militarily because they'd move people around and whatnot, right,
But instead it's nothing. And I don't quite understand that,
except that they think they're going to win this war
or that Ukraine is on the brink of collects. The
other thing is we don't get much good reporting on this,
I don't think. But I think that there maybe at
the point of collapse politically and economically and otherwise. But
I'm not.
Speaker 3: Sure going to that a little bit more because we
all know, I mean, it's been years. It grinds on
the map of the line goes back and forth, drones
go this way, drones go that way. The one thing
that we can take away from this is that the notion,
the image is the reputation of the Red Army, and again,
who cares what it is if they can get the
job done on the end of what he cares about
their rep But just the whole notion of the Russian
military strength, which those of us who grew up in
the seventies and eighties, the Russian army consisted exclusively of
either drunks who would go out there and get slaughtered,
or Evandrago characters who would be standing dispassionately in their
uniforms over a glittering computer console. It's revealed now the
incompetence of their organization. It's reliance on brute force and
horrific discipline, if you want to use that word. It's
lack of equipment, it's lack of material l the way
that their whole system is dependent on Western interaction for
things like, oh, I don't know, roller bearings, The way
that now an enemy can be seen to fly missiles
far afield and destroy their prize bombers and the rest
of it. They look pathetic. They just absolutely do. But
it doesn't mean that they can't. They can't force the
Craine to the table a next all of that land
that they have, which is at this point parched, useless, demilitarized,
claim a victory and go home. But that requires Ukraine
to say, all right, you will seed this to you,
and now we are going to stop the war. Nobody believes, however,
that if they did do that and sat down and
said to Russia, all right, all right, you got these,
it's yours, get out of here, that they wouldn't be
back ten years later attempting to take Keev and bring
little Russia back into the fold. Nobody in your grain
believes that. So what are they to do?
Speaker 1: I have no idea. That's you know, that's sixty four
billion dollar question.
Speaker 2: At least it is wild though. The casualties, that's why
I say they're losing. You're absolutely right, Steve, your characterization
is absolutely right. But I just finished watching The World
at War, the twenty six part series on World War Two,
and something I had, for some reason not internalized is
that World War One was far more deadly for the
British than World War Two. The British numbers of dead
in World War Two about three hundred and fifty thousand
excluding the Empire, and the casualties are about three hundred
and fifty thousand.
Speaker 4: Twos.
Speaker 2: You've got seven hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand British casualties.
The Russian casualties in the Ukraine War are a million,
with a quarter of a million dead. That is if
you think about that, that is astaushing. How many Americans
died in what will say, three hundred thousand?
Speaker 4: I think I think.
Speaker 1: It's four something, three or four something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is just it is ridiculous. But the Russian react,
the Russian attitude toward war has I has been Jay
Leno's toward Dorito's you know, show your life, we'll make
more right. But what's interesting in this respect is before
you had all the peasants and the serfs coming off
the farm to grab a broomstick and go fight for
the czar. Now what you have is this indiscriminate use
of talented people, of specialists, just throwing them into meat
waves and meat assaults. So like, what do you do, Well,
I actually designed, build, operate highly sophisticated drones. Great, okay,
here's here's your whole go join the assault. At least
of course, if what I'm reading is correct, and I
read a lot of sources about this, So maybe yes,
they've lost a tremendous amount of people, but it's also
the kind of people that they have lost that puts
them in a bad shape. But do you think that
anybody is Here's two things to and the Ukraine question,
do you think a anybody is going to in the
West in Europe is going to want to get back
to the old naturalized ways of companies interacting and they
get our brands and we buy from them, and we're
going to pretend that we're kind of see them on
the same civilizational plane. Do you think that there's going
to be an appetite for that, or will the native
European avarice and selfishness return and they will strike deals
with the terroristic gangster gas station?
Speaker 1: I bet on the ladder, if only because the European
economies are so weak compared to ours. I mean, they
really do have a big problem with economic growth. And
as much as they all like to say we're all
good members of the EU, I think they are going
to look out for their own advantage at some point
each country. And I think it'll be easy for Russia
to pickoff in China as well.
Speaker 2: Charles, you Agreen, I totally agree, and especially on energy,
because the EU is full of hypocrites who on the
one hand say we're saving the world with our green policies.
Now you can't create any energy here in Germany or
what you will, and on the other hand, turned around
and buy.
Speaker 4: It from Russia.
Speaker 2: And they need to keep doing that because otherwise they're
going to end up unable to power that countries.
Speaker 3: Second question, how about if, at the conclusion of the
agreement whatever is reached between Ukraine and Russia, that we say,
and just to make sure that Russia conforms and lives
up to its end of the bargain, we're going to
give Ukraine two nice, beautiful, shiny nuclear.
Speaker 1: Weapons, or you know, we'll just give you back the
ones that we took from you thirty years ago, which
I think have probably been destroyed. But never mind, we
can still say something like that, yes, yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: Think we will. You know, in a non proliferation age,
I can't anybody saying, you know, you don't have them,
you want them? Well.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is my criticism of the way Biden
approached this whole business from the very beginning with three
years ago. Now is it was repeat in some ways
of our Vietnam strategy. You gave Ukraine just enough force
to not lose, but not enough to seriously threaten Russia
with any real damage or to make them really worried
that they might face some real damage. And so it
was always start stop, you know, where Ukraine would say, gosh,
we'd like some tanks, We'd like some F sixteen's, we'd
like this missile system, and we'd say, no, you can't
have that, and then three or four months later say, okay,
you can have them. And what are the are the
right weapons or not? I don't know. I'm not sure
the m one abrams tanks have ever been used in
the field, or if they have, whether they've been very effective.
People say the age of the tank is over now
now that we have these drone swarms and so forth.
But nonetheless, there was a clear signal there that the
United States is committed to Ukraine not losing, and that
meant if we stick it out like the North Vietnames,
eventually will win. Ye Trump, I then go back to
the previous point, Charlie, mate, Trump is the ideal person
to up end that assumption that the Russians have made.
You know, he just might give them more serious weapons.
Maybe not nukes, but you know, he might give them.
And I think Trump has said a couple of times
maybe we will give them missiles that can strike deep
into Russia. So you know, who.
Speaker 3: Knows switching gears to domestic events. Charles, I know that
as somebody who has had young children in the house
for a while, you no doubt are deeply steeped in
all the wonderful lore. Sesame Street and Elmoan, all those
are the things that the Republicans hate. I mentioned that
only begins the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Nonstan Friday
that shutting down the New story says, the CBP is
a private nonprofit. But somehow, I guess when the government
takes their money away, this private nonprofit just just blows
up and dries away, dries up and blows away. Do
you think that the it would be possible for people
in rural areas to find out what the heck is
going on? Because this is what I've been. There are
people who are sitting around their wireless sets, and they're old,
and they barely have the strength anymore to wind the
thing up to you to get the current so they
can listen to it. And then they just move that
little dial until they can find the only one spot
in the dial that tells them out in Bumpspeck, North Dakota,
what's going on in the rest of the world. So
this means a veil of ignorance, rawsy and sort of
dark knight falls over rural lands as the station's shudder
and fall silent. How are you dealing with this knowing
that this is what you've voted for?
Speaker 4: Well, No, that's the key, isn't it. This is what
you've voted for. Argument.
Speaker 2: This is why I hate this argument because rather than
just make the case for themselves, the left always has.
Speaker 4: To do this.
Speaker 2: They always have to end up with And that's why
getting what you want is going to be bad for
you and your voters.
Speaker 4: They always do it.
Speaker 2: Well, you say you want tax cuts, but if you
do them, it'll be bad for you and your voters.
Speaker 4: No, it won't.
Speaker 2: Well, if you reform entitlements, then it will be bad
for you and your voters.
Speaker 4: No, I won't. Well, if you get rid of NPR,
it'll be.
Speaker 2: Bad for guys. No, it will be bad for you.
That's why you are unhappy about it. The argument about
the only source of weather forecasting rural people being NPR
is so stupid that it just doesn't even need Dwelling
on the Sesame Street. One is slightly more complicated, but
it is the case that for a long time. Now
ten to fifteen years, Sesame Street has been primarily accessible
through HBO or Netflix or add on packages that you
get if you have a TV service or Amazon Prime.
My kids never liked Sesame Street, but they do like
some PBS programs, as a show called Wildcrats about these
brothers who go out and look at animals. Well, you can,
if you time it just right, get a few Wildcrats
episode on the local free TV station in Jacksonville that
broadcasts broadcast did. But if you want to actually watch
them outside of weird times, or watch more than one
every month, then you just have to get the four
dollar bolt onto Amazon Prime, which gives PBS kids. It
must have been the case for a very long time. Also,
there's a lot of them on YouTube. So I just
think these talking points are rooted in people's conception of
how television works in the eighties, as well as being
deeply cynical.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely correct, yours. Most of these people do have
internet access. We're not living at a time when there's
one copper wire that extends out to these distant rural communities. Actually,
there's a big push back in the day to get
fiber to the barn as they called it, huge infrastructure.
They would run the fiber optic cable everywhere in the
rural areas, superseded by things like STARLIK. So, now, if
all these people who are worried so much about the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting meaning no information goes to people
in rural areas, take that money, raise it yourself, and
offered to buy starling packages and dishes receivers for the
people in these places who need them. There's a great
charity they could set up. Are they doing it? Nope,
because that's supposed to be the government's job.
Speaker 1: Steven, Well, I mean, their lives get more and more pathetic.
I mean, for thirty years, the main lie would be, well,
you know, really the federal money is not that it's
a tiny portion of the budget for PBS and the
Corporation Public Broadcasting. It's really for our stations out and
you know across America. There may be an element of
truth to that. And so they'd say why bother, you know,
And you'd say back, well, if it's so a little,
why not, what's the problem of giving it up? And
they'd say, oh, they'd come up with something. And so
now they're saying this ludicrous idea that people in rural
areas won't get. You won't get any news anymore, proper reports.
The other thing that's always bothered me is that PBS
and NPR for that matter, but especially PBS has been
a vehicle for some people to get very rich, like
Bill Moyer's became a multi millionaire through a PBS show
that he could then piggyback and get corporate sponsors for
his own foundation and whatnot. Book deals burns the same way.
Uh and Sesame Street that was you know, Children's Television Workshop,
my next door neighbor who's passed away, but he was
the head writer for Children's Television Workshop and later the
Muppet Show would come over and have Martinez with my
dad before jetting off to London in the late seventies,
which is where they filmed The Muppet Show. They were
making good money doing that and selling it to PBS,
and so this, you know, this sort of the artisanal
were just a bunch of gosh, We're like, we're at
the level of associate professors at a little university. It's
just ridiculous, and it striven me crazy for years, and
we've gotten nowhere until you got enough mean Republicans finally
in office to do something about it, because I mean,
I remember last comment. I remember in the nineties, you know,
the Reagan people tried this and failed. The Newt Gingrich
and Republican Congress wanted to defund it, and they that's
what they were saying, you want to kill big Bird.
And Newton would say, big bird makes money. What do
they need to harm money for? And you know, but
it's still Republicans were always too timorous to pull the
trigger and do it.
Speaker 2: But now they have, so you know the other thing
that was funny about this was that they hit on
this idea that they would say, but we put George
Will on PBS. But George Will has been in favor
of defunding NPR and PBS for twenty years. When this
came up with Romney, George Will record columns say if
you can't get rid of that funding, you can't get
rid of anything. So the person that they were using
as the avatar of why their balance wants to get
rid of it too.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, yes, indeed, Well maybe we should end with
this because I saw this news story the other day.
I knew exactly how he was going to be played,
but it also brought back a memory, a deeply conflicted
memory of my youth. Washington Post is reporting that Pump
Trump is reviving the presidential fitness test. Now, when you
add this to the Sydney Sweeney bruhaha or kerfluffle or
whatever you want to call it, what we have here is,
of course, strength through joy. Cue the old newsreels from
the thirties of young arians with their close cropped hair,
smiling in the sunshine as they perform calisthenics. But this
is going to be seen as an example of that.
It will be seen as quasi fascistist, if not outright so.
And it will also be seen as absurd because Donald Trump,
Pip's also a fabulously unhealthy man. It started under Ike
this thing.
Speaker 1: When I thought I thought it was a Kennedy thing, Sorry,
so did I.
Speaker 3: But when I researched it, it was Ik who started
the thing. And you can imagine why. It was part
of that whole sort of mid fifties panic about youth,
which plays into the juvenile delinquency, which plays into all
that stuff that must have just mystified the people coming
back from the war looking at these kids sitting around
being complaining and sneering with their switch plates, like what's
the problem. But we were worried about them not being
able to read. We were worried about them not having
science because we're being lapped by Sputnik, and we were
worried about them becoming sort of physically degenerous and soft.
So I comes up with this thing where you're gonna
have to figure out how to do some pullups, You're
gonna have to do some sit ups. Now, Kennedy I
think may have surfaced it more and come out with
a medal for this, that and the other thing, because
he was all about the vega, even though we know
that he was fabulously unhealthy himself too, with the backs
and the pills and the rest of it. But I
grew up during this period when we were made to
do these things, when we were humiliated on the stage
of the grade school gymnasium. My gym teacher was a
man named ed Gorilla. Mister Gorilla, I wasn't spelled that way.
It was spelled with an A, but and he had
a brother named Harold, so there actually was in Fargo
a Harry Gorilla. But mister Gorilla who sort of in
my mind is now sort of like this Ed Sullivan
with a coach's whistle. That's how I imagined him. Was
tremendously disappointed in me and my inability to do the
most basic of things. That I would break my neck
if I show me to the top of the pole
and touch this. I mean, it's just Jim was a nightmare.
But the one thing that will never ever ever go
away is the commanding voice of Robert Preston singing chicken Fat. Charles,
you know not of what I speak, Stephen, you may.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, very much so.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 1: I remember the presidential fitness test from the first grade,
and I vaguely recall, you know, folders or literature that
the presidential seal on it. And it was one of
my early humiliations as a late blooming athlete, I mean
very late blooming.
Speaker 3: But we had to do the fifty yard dash timed.
I wasn't scared of that. It was the six hundred
that killed me. But go on, oh yeah, I don't remember.
Speaker 1: All I remember is that I still remember my humiliating
time in the fifty yard dash in the first grade.
It was eight point five seconds, which is really slow
even in the first grade. I mean, the best athletes
in my class. They were doing it in six point
five seconds and they became you know, wide receivers in
high school football and whatnot. And anyway, no, I remember
that that was a very big deal. And plus I've
always been a Robert Preston fan from The Music Man
and other great films of that era.
Speaker 3: But yeah, that song done done, touch your toes ten
times every morning, every morning, not just now, and then
go you chicken fat. None of us could actually figure
out what chicken fat was, because when you look at
the chicken, it seems to be pretty much tightly packed
with the things that chicken needs and that we would
later subsequently eat. But chicken fat, I guess was this?
So I mean, if that was that somehow is now
seen as this wonderful new frontier. Kennedy asked Camelot thing
where everybody happily doing their calisthenics in the morning, because
that's what JFK wanted us to. But now I guarantee
you it's going to be seen as strength of joy
and not our camp.
Speaker 1: And you know step one is setting up the camps, right, the.
Speaker 3: Camps have already been set up where Charles is right,
How close are Charles? How close are you to alligator alcatraz?
Speaker 4: Oh? Quite a long way.
Speaker 2: It's in southern Florida, right in the middle in their
alligator alley.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, I'm up north near Georgia.
Speaker 3: There have been no confirmed eatings prisoners yet.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Well, I obviously took Trump's advice when he explained how
to run away from an alligator.
Speaker 3: Oh did he I did? I didn't hear that was
so funny.
Speaker 2: Well, he went into an extended disquisition about how the
old conventionalisdom used to be that you should zig zag,
and if you zigzag, it tries to follow you, and
its tail is heavy and so it can't catch up
with you. But now people have realized that you should
just run in a straight line away from it. So
he was explaining how to do it if someone escapes.
Speaker 3: I missed that part. I just liked the idea of
the tail going back and forth and becoming unbalanced certrifically,
centrifically as it zigs and zags, so that the tail
exactly you know, moves so fast in an oscillating fashion
that makes it impossible for the alligator to move forward.
Does this work with crocodiles, though you know the distinction,
So does that work with crocs as well?
Speaker 4: Well, I don't think it works with alligats.
Speaker 2: As was the point Trump has realized, apparently at this
point in his life, that this is a myth.
Speaker 4: It's this thing that is so.
Speaker 2: The number of people who have died in Florida from
alligator attacks in the last seventy years is fifty. They're
all the same. They're all the same when you read
about them. They're sad, but they're also avoidable. Here is
how you die in an alligator attack in Florida. Step one,
you have a small dog. Step two, you walk that
small dog near too near a body of water that
has alligators in it. Three, an alligator comes up, sees
the small dog, thinks it looks tasty, and bites it.
Speaker 3: Four.
Speaker 2: Rather than running away and thinking, well, it's very sad,
that was a nice dog. I'll get another one, you
think I'll fight the alligator and get Fido back. And
that's the point of which you die from alligators in Florida.
Read any story in seventy years, and they're all that.
There's this conception out there somewhere that people just minding
their own business having a martini in Florida turn around
to be four an alligator, and it's just not true.
Speaker 3: So it's walking along with a bond, bond and a leash.
I get it. Isn't there some sort of basic alligator
repellent that you could wash your dog in that would
make it unpalatable? You would see.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, But did you know that about
an alligators? The reason that they're so dangerous but also
easy if you're Steve Owen to fight is that the
muscles that they bite down with are incredibly strong, three
thousand pounds worth of pressure. But the muscles that they
used to open their mouth are tiny. They're almost non existent.
And that's why you can stop an alligator opening its
mouth with your finger and your thumb. But once it
bites down on your say your leg, for example, you're done.
There's no way you could navigate it off. It's like
being a hydraulic mechanism.
Speaker 3: So the good part then is that you can clam
its mouth shut with your hands. The bad part would
appear to be what follows after that.
Speaker 4: That's about right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So people in Florida then carry bungee cords that
they can just wrap around the snout clip it to.
Speaker 2: If you the alligated guys when we see them sometimes
because they come out here. Because people see alligats and
call them in and you're not allowed to kill them,
and that's you're really in danger. I have to go
I'm sorry, no, you call them in and then they
end up in a restaurant. But people use electrical tape.
That's how weak the alligator is. One wrap round of
electrical tape on an alligators snout and a can open it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: Coming in California, I don't think there's any equivalent to this.
As a matter of fact, I think that there is, yeah,
an era hold over that ought to have gone extinct
and awful long time.
Speaker 1: It's not a lizard, But so out here in California
where I live in a remote area and a central coast,
I'm very close to a public ranch land with trails
through the forest that was closed yesterday by the fire
department because of a mountain lion site. And I've always
been told that if a mountain lion attacks you, you
will not know it until it's over because they're quiet.
They you know, jump at you from out of the
bushes or trees.
Speaker 3: Or something.
Speaker 1: So my normal walking or jogging route is close to
me right now. So not quite an alligator, but still
something to worry about.
Speaker 3: They at least seem to evolved a little bit beyond
the pond dwelling reptilian nightmares that are alligators and crocodiles.
But I mean, in everybody's mind, they only exist in Florida.
No other state app no whether state has them. I'm
not sure how far they go, but you know, at
least they're at least they're there. We know where they
are there, they're well contained, gentlemen. Anything else before we go,
I can't think of what. Oh yeah, Pentagon's going to
try the Golden Dome sometime this week and get back
to me on that. Remember being told that missile defense
was absolutely pointless. Do you remember in the eighties when
SDI was going on the very idea was technologically impossible
and also highly highly provocative to do.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I love pump on this stuff. This is
the kind of stuff Trump does that no one else
does that. I admire the space Force in the first term.
It was a terrific idea that got mocked because of
its name or for a lack of imagination. But it's
a really good idea and golden Dome. This is what
I want the federal government to do. Like, if we're
going to have a federal government, I have.
Speaker 4: To pay for it. This is what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: I agree. Do you know what the most anti ballistic
missile defense movie ever made might be? If I recall
correctly Raised the Titanic. Oh, I haven't seen it. You've
never seen Raise the Titanic. You've probably you've probably seen
the ship go down a few times. You owed upon
yourself to see it come back up. It's a very
interesting movie, broke the studio, it was extremely expensive, rather
inert in parts, and has one of those long attenuator
John Berry scores. Oh but I repeat myself, but I've
always had a soft spot in my heart for it,
except for the ending, because the whole point of the
thing is, My God, we can't have strategic defense initiative,
and we can't have ballistic defense. That would the worst
thing in the world. It's a strangely, oddly deflating way,
but it's of a time of the seventies and the eighties,
with a sort of that what are you gonna do? Nilism?
Pessimism and civilizational exhaustion that you saw at the times,
which I'm happy to say, does not seem to be
animating the right side of the creative world. At this time.
There seems to be actual interest, passionate support Western seven.
If the other guys want to be at and moan
about it, go ahead and make that case to the public.
We have made our own case from ricocheta at the
public for the last hour and now are declining to
do anything. But thank you Charles, thank you Steven, Thank
you the listeners for listening. Go to ricochet dot com
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it's been a pleasure as ever. We'll see everybody in
the comments at Ricochet four point oh and goodbye.