Speaker 1: When I was a kid, there these pranksters, and they
were very sort of kid friendly pranksters on children's television
in the morning. And there was one thing that they
did that just sticks with men out because it was
just so funny where they would go into a supermarket
and they would open cereal box and they would start
eating the cereal in the supermarket, and eventually a supervisor
would come over and say what are you doing, and
then they would point to the box which set at
the top twenty percent extra, and say, we're just eating
the free bit.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbuchaw, Tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Cherald C. W. Cook and
Stephen Hayward Hunt James Lilex. Today we're going to talk
about fires, Carter and baseball crankory with Dan mcglomla.
Speaker 3: So let's have our selves a podcast.
Speaker 4: Despite what you have heard from Caruso, no firefighters have
told us that they are running out of water.
Speaker 2: And let's go out to Gigi Gracia.
Speaker 5: She is live in Pacific Palisades. I know your signal's
not the best, but gigib can you tell us?
Speaker 2: Well, firefighters have told me they have no water on
this block, and you may be able to make out
the ember storm that we're in the middle of right now.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, the first of the
year of twenty twenty five. A quarter of the way
through this century, a quarter of the way through that
my tempest, fugitive, et cetera. Times wag at chariot and
all that. What number is it, Well, it's seven hundred
and twenty two, it seems, and we look forward to
giving you fifty more this year. I'm joined by Charles CW.
Speaker 3: Cook And who's this other guy we got here?
Speaker 2: Hey, you you can show the hardy chuckle. It's Stephen Hayward. Gentlemen, Welcome,
Happy New Year. Although that sentiment is a bit old
by this point, we're into it. But again, we've all
been enjoying our lives away from the microphone.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 2: However, world affairs demand that we comment, don't they just
not just world affair has been national. There's something that
is different, it seems, about this particular set of California fires.
We get used to them every year, at least I
do news horrible fires scenes of immense conflagration, people fleeing.
Speaker 3: All the rest of it.
Speaker 2: But there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of houses and.
Speaker 3: Wood and stuff out there, so we're kind of used
to it. At this is different. Why is it different?
Speaker 4: Well, I guess having grown up in southern California and
seeing a lot of fires up close over the years,
this one's just so much bigger. And there's the Hollywood factor.
Let's face it, when Malibu and Pacific Palisades burned down,
we're getting the list of all the celebrities whose homes
have been lost, and the cost to insure is going
to be and the state is going to be enormous.
By contrast, now I was only two years old or whatever,
but the bell Air fire of nineteen sixty one, which
might be as comparable. When bell Air burns down, that's
also a lot of rich people who lose their homes.
There's a great pick sure, by the way, James of
Richard Nixon standing on his.
Speaker 2: Roof with a hose in his shiny shoes right.
Speaker 3: His beach his beach shoes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, So that was about five hundred homes were lost.
I think we're now up to five thousand structures or
more in the Eaton Canyon area. It may be have
some interest to Ricochet listeners that I think. I have
recorded three episodes of this podcast from one of my
best friend's homes right on the edge of Eaton Canyon
with a spectacular view of the mountains. His home survived
in part because he's been aggressive about brush clearing on
his perimeter, but a lot in his neighborhood are gone,
and he tells me his house smells terribly of smoke,
so it's going to be a while before it's inhabited,
even once they get the power back on.
Speaker 3: But you know, the old saying is California.
Speaker 4: Has two seasons, fire season and mud slide season, and
all we need is a big, heavy rain in the
next well really anytime this winter, and we're going to
have massive mudslides along Pacific Coast Highway and elsewhere. So
this is what's the old Churchill line. This isn't the
beginning of the end, it's just the end of the beginning.
We're in for some rough times.
Speaker 2: I had the great thing about all that rain, of course,
or the capacious reservoirs that California has built to contain
them to get into the dry times, Charles, does this
seem like it's different because it's bigger, or is it
different because something that we've been talking about for the
last five years, which is the revelation that our betters
and our leaders may not actually be as competent as
we believe, and that the investments in the institutions in
which we have invested so much faith and trust turned
out to be hollow and just simply mechanisms for people
who don't deserve the position to get to get ahead
in life. Is that part of it or am I
just reading some cranky political take into it.
Speaker 1: Well, I didn't know, And I'd like to ask Steve
about this. As the Californian on the panel, I have
seen absurd attempts to blame this on Trump. Yes, often
promulgated by people who are simultaneously telling others not to
politiciz the disaster.
Speaker 6: That seems obviously silly.
Speaker 1: Then I've seen a lot of arguments that California, although
this is a natural disaster and is no one's boult
in a legal sense, has not prepared well for this.
Now here's what I do know, Steve, and you could
tell me to what extent you think the governor or
the mayor or anyone else is to blame her. I
have over the years written probably fifteen thousand words in
National Review magazine on California's water woes, especially in the
Central Valley. The protection of the Delta smells at the
expense of agriculture, the pushing of millions of tons of
water every year out into the sea, the failure to
build new reservoirs despite Californians telling their government build new reservoirs,
and so on and so forth. So I am predisposed
here to think that California has screwed this up. And
then I see that now viral Fox News local Fox
News segment in which the post says, despite what always
just said, there's no evidence that firefighters don't have any
water to work with. And then they cut and the
lady on the scene says, firefighters tell me they have
no water to work with, and you just couldn't write it.
But of course I want to think this because while
I love California very dearly, it's the most beautiful state.
I am a very pro California person. I grew up
going to California. I really think it is astonishing and wonderful.
I also think it is horribly disastrously mismanaged. So to
what extent is this a fault of the government.
Speaker 4: Very largely, it's not so much that the water isn't
available in the quantity is necessary for something this large.
It's the fact that we have not been taking steps
for years to reduce the risk from this kind of conflagration.
You know, there's lots of people have written about this,
about the delays and obstacles to just clearing brush, clearing trees,
doing control burns. The environmentalists soue and block and lengthen
every proposal of the Forest Service or the State Board
of Resources to manage this problem.
Speaker 3: And so we have this dry tinderbox.
Speaker 4: I think, by the way, I mean, I really do
have to say that there has to be not just
niavete and ideology, but actually some malice among some environmentalists.
I think they want these disasters because for them, they
think it's more fuel so to speak, for their climate
change mania.
Speaker 3: Of course, this is all being blamed on climate change, right.
Speaker 4: So I could point in lots of great analyses, but
one of the best, from three four years ago from
all unlikely places was Pro Publica, that very left wing
news outfit.
Speaker 3: That's in their headline of their long report was we
know how to reduce wildfire risks?
Speaker 4: Why aren't we doing it? That they wouldn't identify the
real culprit, but they had exact the right, the correct
take on the subject, and you know, there you go.
It's we're just because we're morons.
Speaker 2: That's why it's inexplicable to the rest of us that
they're part of government that is responsible for forest management
says well, we need to manage the forests. Forest management
is what we do, so let us do management of
the forests. I assume that the people who are empowered
to do so have some expertise in the matter. But
yet when they're confounded by people who stand up and
say no, you can't do that, it's inexplicable to the
rest of us that they can delay and delay. We
don't understand why they would say no, you cannot get
rid of the dry tinder. Now to ascribe as you did,
the motives to them that they want the fires because
it it gives them more fuel, so to speak, fire away,
as Joe Biden said, for their climate change stuff, it
seems too Machiavelian and smart and cattling and the rest
of it. There has to be something else. They can't.
Speaker 3: I mean, what argument do they use.
Speaker 2: They don't get up in court when they're making their
argument and say no, no, you can't take that brush
away because that will deprive us of a very photogenic
opportunity to advance our agenda.
Speaker 3: What do they say, What are their reasons?
Speaker 4: Well, the superficial reason is well, this really represents and
by the way, this goes back to the horrible Yellowstone
National Park fires of nineteen eighty eight. What they said
was is got's overdid fire suppression for decades. There's a
little something to that. There's actually a decent, abstract argument
that we should let forest fires run their course. But
when you had then but then you do a one
hundred and eighty degree turn, and you do know, brush clearing,
no clearing of down trees for several decades. First you
turn the Yellowstone into a tinder box? Was at that
and now what thirty five years ago, whatever it was,
and now we're doing it to all of California. In
many parts of the West, this is true in other
states like Colorado, which occasionally has terrible fires.
Speaker 3: In the mountains there.
Speaker 4: So I think it's again a superficiality of an awful
lot of environmental dogma.
Speaker 2: Charles, would you agree that it's sort of like saying, well,
you know, we must let nature take its course. We
cannot intercede too much because that destroys the delicate balance
of nature. Therefore, we should not develop a ballistic missile
shield against meteors that are coming to, you know, to
crash into the ocean and demolish our civilization.
Speaker 3: Anyway you're going to see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's in some sense indirect in that,
although they would never say this, and I don't think
they actively want people to die, but the fundamental position
of those who take that view is that the houses
shouldn't be there in the first place. I think it
really does matter where you start. Again, I don't think
this is a literal debate between people who want fires
and people who don't. But I do think that if you,
like me, think that we should build in the United
States and that the earth is here for us to
use so that we can increase our standard of living
and bring people out of poverty and generally have a
good time, Rather than that we are a cancer on it,
and it will be better if we weren't here, and
we probably stole the land anyway, Then you come to
different conclusions, and I think Steve's onto something with that
that they, yeah, they don't care as much as I
do about this destruction.
Speaker 4: Well maybe the proof of that's, James, is I know
that you're a fan quote unquote of the fifteen minute City.
I guarantee you that two things are going to happen
that will be the next scandal. One, it's going to
take people three four years to get building permits to
rebuild their houses on the same footprint where they existed.
They're going to do all the permit reviews and new
building standards. Some of that makes sense, building standards do.
But along the way you're gonna hear the visionaries say,
you know, this is really an opportunity.
Speaker 3: It's like the old.
Speaker 4: Paul Krugman argument that hurricanes stimulate the economy, right who
Charles remembers that, And they're gonna say, gosh, you know,
I mean, it is true that you have a lot
of old neighborhoods with old construction up near Altadena that
completely wiped out block after block and they're gonna say, gosh,
we just redesigned that whole urban area, and it's a
great place where East plan a fifteen minute city. I
guarantee that op ED is probably in the hopper at
the Los Angeles Times right now. I have seen tweets
already saying about Malibu, well, gosh, you know all those
houses right on the beach, maybe we shouldn't allow people
to rebuild there because of climate change and rising sea
levels and this and that. And at least they propose
to buy out people there, although that would be expensive.
You know, I I'm shocked seeing these pictures because I
drive up and down that road when I'm down at Pepperdine,
and you know, even the most humble old shacks starts
around three four million dollars, right, and it goes up
from there. So that'd be a big price tag to
tell people they can't rebuild there. But I expect that's
going to be a great difficulty getting those houses rebuilt too.
Speaker 2: Well, when you talk about rising ocean levels, that this
is the position we must do something about global warming
to avoid rising ocean levels. Also, we're going to dump
the runoff water into the ocean, right and of course
they would it's a matter of scale, to which I
would say, all right, well, if it's a matter of scale,
then let's talk about Britain going carbon zero to bankruptcy, yeah,
versus China doing exactly whatever it wishes to do.
Speaker 3: Seven. You may be right.
Speaker 2: I mean, some of these communities were already fifteen minute communities.
California doesn't abound with them. But I was looking at
Pacific Power and some of the little commercial nodes. That's
what people talk about. The idea that you ought to
be able to walk or stroll or bike or whatever
to get what you need on a daily, regular, weekly
basis is a fifteen minute city and having a sense
of place. And you know, urban filia is one of
the terms that they use. I get all that, and
I approve of that, and that's what it was. And
if it comes back as that, great. The problem with
the fifteen minute city is designing it explicitly so that
it depresses the ability and desire to leave it. That's
a whole different set of social engineering we can talk
about elsewhere.
Speaker 3: But you're may be right.
Speaker 2: Part of the problem I think with this is that
a lot of these houses demonstrate a level of inequality,
and if you have inequity in the system, that is
proof that the system has no moral standing and therefore
should be dismantled. So it'll be interesting, yes, to see
how they would like to revitalize these things.
Speaker 3: And it really does.
Speaker 2: I tell you, it is, it is, it is, It
is what it is. But on the other hand, I
got to tell you this being twenty twenty five, as
I said before, a lot of people have already cast
off their resolutions.
Speaker 3: You may be one of them.
Speaker 2: I guess they last about two weeks or so. And
you know, I can see why, because there's really nothing
to keep you doing what you do except for willpower.
Sometimes you need something to help your willpower. Something you
need to tell you what to do. Now, I'm not
saying you need a personal trainer to walk around a
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Speaker 3: To the gym and the rest of it. But what
if there was one thing that every.
Speaker 2: Day you could use and it'd fit in the palm
of your hand like the most well engineered little device
you'd ever seen, and it could give you a guide
for how to.
Speaker 3: Eat the rest of the day.
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thank you Luhman for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. And
now we welcome to the podcast. Dan Dan McLaughlin senior
writer at National Review Online and a fellow at the
National Review Institute. You can find him hanger on Twitter x.
He's baseball crank. You know the avatar.
Speaker 3: You love it.
Speaker 2: It's the flying baseball with a peevish expression yelling about
something or other. That's right, that Dan's the crank. But
he's a great guy and a sensible fellow too.
Speaker 3: You really get down to it, Dan, Welcome, Thank you.
Speaker 2: So we have many things to talk about, but everyone's
been toting up the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, History's greatest monster,
as the Simpson is called. You had a you provided
a not uncharitable evaluation of the fellow, and you you
titled it Conservatism's debt to Jimmy Carter. And this is
not because it's like he was. He was so bad
that we had to go for Reagan. Remind us some
good words to say about Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, one hates to talk about Carter's accomplishments
without air quotes, but but there are some I mean,
I and as I said, yes, it is one of
those obviously, is just the argument that you know, he
gave us Reagan. But he in some ways prepared the
ground for Reagan. He started some things that I don't
think that Carter necessarily would have had the you know,
the guts and the backbone to take as far as
Reagan did, but he did. He should get some for
starting them. He started the defense build up, Now that
was a reversal. He had tried to cut the defense
budget his first year in office. You know, he definitely
did take a harder line on the Soviet Union, if
perhaps misguided in some of its applications.
Speaker 5: In his final year in office. You know, he.
Speaker 7: I mean also was big on using like the nineteen
seventy five Helsinki Accords to begin the process of building
a case against the Soviet Union as an abuser of
human rights, which was key not only to US propaganda abroad,
propaganda in the positive sense, but also to building more
liberal support at home for an aggressive stance in the
Cold War.
Speaker 5: You know. On inflation, Carter was completely unable to handle
inflation while.
Speaker 7: He was in office, but he did midway through his
term appoint Paul Vulker to head the FED, and it
was really Vulker, who did you know. Vulker was absolutely
essential working later in tandem with Reagan, but he started
to work under Carter to stopping inflation.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: And I think the biggest accomplishment.
Speaker 7: That Carter can take pure credit for, that's a really
conservative accomplishment, is deregulation. He signed quite a lot of
Bill's deregulating trucking, air travel, you know, trains, and you know,
perhaps nearest and dearest to many hearts beer, you know,
he did a lot to deregulate brewing in the United States.
There are only forty four breweries when he took over.
Billy Beer, of course, became the icon for those of
us old enough to remember that era. Yes, the beer
put out by by Jimmy's near do well redneck brother,
which I suppose we should be nostalgic for the days
when the president's near do well relatives simply sold embarrassing
beer rather than you know, selling out to China. But
you know, Carter's deregulation did a lot of good in
a lot of directions, and that he should be he
should get uh, you know, unqualified credit for doing that.
Speaker 2: Well, I know the guys want to leap in, but
I just want to ask this why, I mean we
why did Carter towards the end, was he actually affected
by the results of his previous policies and had a
Saul on the Road Damascus moment?
Speaker 7: I mean, I think on on on the Soviet Union. Yes,
he was mugged by reality. And and again I don't
know that Carter ever fully. You know, he never went
sort of the full evil empire route that that Reagan
started off with. But I think he realized that his
policies towards the Soviet Union had failed, and that that
something you know, that we were entering into a a
new era of confrontation in which, you know, negotiation alone
was not going to get us anywhere.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Dana, Steve Hayward out in California. As you may know,
I wrote a very critical book about Carter twenty years ago,
about mostly his ex presidency, where I think he was disgraceful.
I agree with you about his domestic record, and his
foreign policy accomplishments like the Camp David Accords were genuine
accomplishment for which I think, by the way, he should
have shared the Nobel Prize with began and Sadat and
they didn't give it to him until what two thousand
and two, when it was used to kick George W.
Bush in the rear end. I think the answer James
question quickly is I think that is one difference between
Carter and Biden that people are comparing him a lot
right now is there was a growing consensus for deregulating
the economy back in the seventies. I mean, one of
the sponsors of deregulating the trucking industry.
Speaker 3: Was Ted Kennedy.
Speaker 4: And by the way, the staff member did the work
on that was a guy named Stephen Bryer, later known
of course as Justice Bryer. And so Carter was sort
of swimming with the mainstream. And of course you can't
point to a single thing that the Biden administration has
wanted to deregulate or ease up on. Quite the opposite.
They're back to the old sixties style regulate everything. And
so there's the problem is, at the end of the day,
one of Carter's problems was he was, aside from the
regulation story, he was out.
Speaker 3: Of step with his own party.
Speaker 4: You know, he was actually kind of a tight one
on spending when the Democratic Party then wanted to spend
like crazy. He wanted to reform welfare and they didn't
want to do that, and so he gave up on it.
He had a lot of crazy energy policy ideas that
he also later reversed. But the biggest problem with Carter
is that he was kind of an odd duck in
the Democratic Party in the seventies, wasn't he.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean he was always an odd duck generally.
I mean, another distinction between him and Joe Biden is that,
you know, in you know, before nineteen seventy seven, Jimmy
Carter hadn't served in Washington and Joe Biden had already
been there for five years.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean Carter Carter. And by the way,
I was at the Federalist Society convention back in November
and they had Briar there.
Speaker 7: Chatting chit chatting with with Neil Gorstach, and knowing his audience,
Briar played up his deregulatory uh brief moment of his life.
But yeah, I mean, I I think that, uh, And
you know, Carter Carter was also a because you know,
following sort of the principle that everyone is most conservative
about that which he knows best. Carter was actually a
proponent of nuclear energy. That was sort of one of
his things that he was kind of right on about
about energy. But uh yeah, I mean his post presidency
and and you know, my my editor Phil Klein did
a tremendous demolition of Carter's post presidency, uh, particularly the
you know, sort of the foreign policy aspects of that.
I mean, I think Carter, you know, on the issue
of one thing I touched on on the issue of
like election integrity and whatnot. On the puzzit positive side,
we have Carter participating in the Carter Baker Commission in
two thousand and five with James Baker supporting things like
voter ID and other common sense election security things. And
some of that goes back to Carter's own personal history
of having been wrecked basically robbed in election. On the
other hand, you know, I think he was uniquely toxic
in bringing the prestige of a former president into branding
both the two thousand election of Bush and the twenty
sixteen election of Trump as illegitimate and stolen elections. And
I think that that you know, we don't really have
to go into a hypothetical scenario to imagine what sort
of slippery slope.
Speaker 5: That might lead us to by twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 4: I think it was his very first election at Georgia
and I want to say nineteen sixty two or something
where he had to go to court to get some
obviously phony ballots out and he succeeded at that, I think,
as I recall, but so that memory did stick with
him that you can steal elections, especially things like house
races and state legislative offices and stuff like that. It
is funny that that report that you reference quite correctly.
It's a very good report, still very much worth reading.
It didn't update I think a couple of years ago.
Some of the staff of it essentially said we were
right all along. It just disappears from the mainstream media
discourse about elections and election security. It's like a non
report thrown down the Orwellian memory hole. I will mention
that a couple more things about his post presidency. You know,
he loved Yasser Arafat, He cozied up to Hafez Assad
in Syria at the same time our country was calling
him a state sponsor of terrorism. In the eighties, and
it finally led to your guy's fearless leader, Rich Lowry
saying he's the.
Speaker 3: Former president of which country. I mean, he took the
side of all.
Speaker 4: Of our enemies as relentlessly as say Ramsey Clark used
to do back in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I would say that carter skepticism of stolen
elections definitely stopped at the water's edge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ah, yes, that's right.
Speaker 6: Why did he win? Was it Watergate seventy six?
Speaker 1: Yeah, his own party wanted someone else, it was the
ABC movement, anyone, but Carter. The Republicans closed that election
quite well. I'm tremendously that he did win. I sometimes
think about how different the world would be if, instead
of conceding with that great speech in nineteen seventy six
at the RNC, Ronald Reagan had been accepting the nomination
and were still if all of the things that led
up to that hadn't happened. It's a blessing in disguise.
But four lost just about and Carter won. Why, Yeah,
I mean, certainly there is. I mean, when I you know,
I've done some studies of the years on sort of
the powerful historical snapback that you get after a you know,
at the end of basically a two term presidency, when
you've gotten a president reelected. Right, So it was inevitable
the country was going to move back towards in the
Democratic direction after seventy two, although seventy two was such
a huge landslide that you know, it's certainly not inconceivable
that had Nixon second term gone better, that what you
get in you know, in seventy six could look like
nineteen eighty eight or like you know, nineteen forty or
forty four or forty eight, where you've got a large
coalition that is shrinking, but it's still big enough to win.
But I mean, look the Democrats. You know, the Democrats
won two popular majorities, two national other than FDR, they
won two national popular majorities between eighteen fifty two and
two thousand and eight. Right, Carter was one and LBJ
was the other.
Speaker 7: And I think both of those were kind of reactions
in a sense to you know, exogynous events and the
fact that Carter just he just postured himself differently as
like this uniquely honest man. And also you know, he
was the first I wouldn't say Carter was the first
evangelical Christian president because I think that gets into some
real definitional issues about what kind of religion was practiced
by a lot of our nineteenth century prisons. But he
was the first kind of modern president to speak the
language of the modern you know, born again Christian as
he put it at the time movement, and that definitely
had a big and is a reason like people like
Pat Robertson right, people forget that Pat Robertson and a
lot of fundamentalist Christians supported Carter because that was a
big moment of seventies for the evangelical revival.
Speaker 4: My reading on that is complimentary, which is the irony
is by the way, is what you may know is
Carter panted after being George and Govern's rubbing mate, and
he really wanted to be on the ticket because he
was ambitious to run. And it was lucky for him
that he wasn't, I think, because what he represented by
seventy six was the anti mcgovernor inside a Democratic party,
and it was his genius.
Speaker 3: I think to see two things.
Speaker 4: One is, after Nixon and LBJ and the Nixon pardon,
under Ford, American wanted somebody who taught Sunday school in
the Oval office. And second, he understood the first to
understand how the new rules of the presidential nomination process
favored someone who was going to aggressively run everywhere. As
his campaign manager put it, it's like running for sheriff
in fifty states. And he just outflanked everybody in campaign organization.
And he was able to claim every Tuesday that he
won somewhere, so you'd always say I won this week,
even though he might have only won one out of
three primaries or caucuses or something, and so it really
wasn't work a political genius, but it all seemed to
evaporate when he got into office.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think the other thing that maybe is almost seems
surreal today in today's world, but mattered a lot in
nineteen seventy six was the sense that the South was
being legitimized again, right that that particularly after a sort
of two decades of civil rights fights in which the
you know, the Deep South in particular, seemed to be
at odds with the rest of the country in a
lot of ways and was kind of cast out of
polite society. And of course there's nothing that makes you
more polite society than electing not only your own president,
but a Democrat who is, you know, beloved by the
national media and all of the liberal cognizanti, at least
as he was in the fall of seventy six. And
so I think there was a real, very real sense
that Carter was bringing the South back into respectable America.
Speaker 4: And then, I mean one of the great jokes, which
I'm sure everyone knows, is at least Carter only lusted
after women in his heart, unlike Bill Clinton, who put
the South back into disgrace. Okay, and we could talk
about Carter all day, Charles, you elend Carter question or
something else, because I want to ask Dan some sports questions.
Speaker 6: No, go for it, sports it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, since your Twitter handle is baseball crank so and
I grew up in the LA area, so I'm used
to two things. Lots of fires like we're going through
right now, and listening to your uncle every day called
Dodger baseball. I mean that was a ritual in my house.
And I mean, I know you writ some nice tributes
to your uncle Vin Scully when he died. None of
us knew this, right, I think you could have kept
that private information and I don't know say something about that,
because I mean I was chastised for once calling him
the Homer of baseball announcers, because you're not supposed to
say homer and broadcasting. But say to me he was
a poet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, well, yes, a homer in the homeric sense
and not in the while being the opposite of the
stereotypical homer, the announcer who is all in for his right,
you know, a partisan of his team and his fans.
And that came out of, you know, growing up as
a New York Giants fan, uh in a city divided
between three teams, and then going to broadcast for their
arch rivals, and knowing that you know, everywhere in town
people were listening to you who were not fans of
your team. So which is good, great training for a
national audience.
Speaker 5: So but yeah, and I mean, you know, he lived
for many years in Pacific Palisades, which is a place
that is very much under siege from from the farms.
Speaker 3: So right, right, But I'm told that you're now a
Mets fan, So.
Speaker 5: I am life, I am lifelong.
Speaker 7: You know, when the Dodgers left town, you couldn't really
be functionally a Dodgers fan in New York in the
sixties and whatnot, because technologically you just couldn't get the
games very much. So my mom became a Mets fan
and so so so inherited all of us as Mets fans.
So you know, so I've been a lifelong Mets fan.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So one of the who's this guy? They Soto?
Speaker 4: Was that the guy they just paid a billion dollars
for something to try and rid themselves with the stigma
of the Bobby Bunia day.
Speaker 3: Is that the way to think about it?
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, of course they're They're still paying Bania and
for more than half of the Soto contract, they'll still
be paying Vania through twenty thirty five.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I mean, there is actually a.
Speaker 7: Long history of the Mets bringing in some of these
sluggers who have a lot of difficulty adjusting in at
least in their first year to New York. Bania, Carlos Beltran,
George Foster. But you know, one advantage of bringing in
a guy who's just coming straight from the Yankees is
he doesn't have to adjust to the city.
Speaker 5: He knows the city, he loves the city.
Speaker 7: And Soto is a guy who brings a tremendous intensity
of focus to the game that I don't think is
going to be.
Speaker 5: Distracted by moving from the Yankee Stadium to see.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 1: Was that a good shade? So I'm a Yankees fan
and I loved so too. Last year. He was instrumental
in getting us to the World Series. He was not
the reason that we lost the World Series. He's infectious,
he can rally the team. He's obviously unbelievably talented, patient,
a student of the game, and I wanted him to stay.
Speaker 6: I'm also open to the idea that.
Speaker 1: He ended up getting paid too much for what he is,
and that choosing to spend all of those resources on
one person would have been a bad move for the Yankees.
Was it a good move for the Mets.
Speaker 5: I think it was a good move for the Mets.
I think it was a great move for the Mets.
Speaker 7: I have no question that the Mets probably overpaid a
little bit. You know, they paid a premium over what
is probably his best market value at this point. But
I'm a big believer partically in baseball, you know, and
I think this is maybe not true in football because
you have so many such large rosters, but certainly in baseball,
and to the extent that it's also you know, applicable
in basketball. You'd always much rather overpay for premium talent
at the top of the market than overpay a bunch
of people at the middle of the market, because some
of those people, if they don't quite live up to expectations,
you end up wasting the money right whereas here maybe
maybe you've wasted some of the money, but you're going
to get a lot of a lot of value out
of Sodo. I mean, you look at the Yankees contract
with a Rod, which they signed when he was about
the same age, which is another guy who was very
unusual in going on the market, you know, before he
was in his late twenties. There's no question that first
contract that the Rangers and later the Yankees signed with
a Rod, that he was worth every penny of that,
you know, and people thought it was a ridiculous amount
of money at the time. But you know, as the
as baseball continued to you know, values went up across
the board, you know, by the end of the deal,
it looked like a bargain.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I read that Ted Turner bought the
Atlanta Braves in the early seventies for I think the
figure was twelve million dollars, which nowadays that's a minor
league contract for one player.
Speaker 3: I have one general question about the game, Dan.
Speaker 4: You know, I was very skeptical and maybe even opposed
to the rules changes, you know, the pitch clock, limiting
the number of frows to first base, putting the run
around second, and extra innings.
Speaker 3: And it looks like I was wrong about that.
Speaker 4: The games are much quicker, the tendance is up, interest
seems to be higher. I guess maybe I don't know
how you measure whether the games are better or not,
But what did you think of the rules changes, and
you think it's worked right, and any additional rules changes
that you think ought to be considered.
Speaker 5: I would draw some real distinctions.
Speaker 7: I'm you know, I'm very much a traditionalist, but also
a I like more baseball in my baseball game guy,
and not a I want less baseball in my baseball game. So,
you know, the pitch clock, it seems to me, is
pretty good. It is somewhat of a restoration of tradition
because the you know, I mean, the game used to
have a clock called the sun right and so and
so there was a certain restoration there of speeding up
the pace of play. You know, I was in favor.
I was writing twenty five years ago about, you know,
having why they should have required the relief pitchers to
face more than one batter.
Speaker 5: So I think that's reasonable.
Speaker 7: You know, I was a little bit agnostic on some
of the base running changes, but I'm very opposed to
the whole the ghost base runner and extra innings. I
think that's designed to shorten the games. Extra inning games
are great, they're more baseball, they're bonus baseball.
Speaker 5: You know, if you've got to work tomorrow, you can
go to bed.
Speaker 7: But but but if you're if it's a really you know,
if it's a game worth your time, they can be
tremendously rewarding and often the most memorable games.
Speaker 5: That that that you ever see. So and I think
like the golden at bat idea that they were proposing
this year is just absolutely heresy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was my next question, right for listeners.
Speaker 4: That's the idea that once a game, a manager can
send up any player to bat, So theoretically you could
have a Soto or Shoheyo Tani.
Speaker 3: Bat twice in a row.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they actually crazy, but yeah, they passed a
rule in Oh I'm not.
Speaker 7: Sure exactly when it was formalized as rule, but they
basically they basically changed the rules in the Rand eighteen
eighty six or so to prevent this kind of thing,
because up until la time, you weren't required to submit
your batting order before the game, and so what would
happen And a lot of teams followed a standing standard
batting order at the beginning of the game anyway, but
what would happen on some teams if you had like
a single slugger who was your your best hitter. Cap
Anson would do this because he was the big slugger
and the manager, a good combination to have if you
want to rack up a lot of RBIs. And Anson
would wait and see is the first inning developed, to
see if the Cubs got a couple of men on base,
and decide when he would send himself up to hit. Now,
once the batting order was set, it was set for
the rest of the game. But I mean Anson led
the league in RBIs like six times and seven years.
It drove in like one hundred and forty seven runs
in like one hundred and twenty five games one year,
and they put a stop to that after that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Dan, who's going to win the World Series next year?
Speaker 7: You know, nobody knows. As a Mets fan, I know
better than to trust my own hopes. So I mean,
obviously you start with the presumption that the Dodgers are
the favorites, though I.
Speaker 6: Think so too.
Speaker 1: Do you think the Yankees getting that was a one
off or do you think they have a chance to
be good again?
Speaker 7: I mean, we won't know until their roster is fully set,
but I think it really is hard to replace the
production they got last year from Judge and Soto. I
don't know that you get quite the same year. I
don't think you're going to get a year like that
out of Judge every year.
Speaker 5: You might get.
Speaker 7: Another one and the the you know, in the course
of this contract. But that's you know, that's not his
his baseline.
Speaker 5: Level of ordinary production. Okay, it was a good year
for him.
Speaker 2: I hate to jump in with something completely irrelevant here,
but what were Obama and Trump?
Speaker 3: What were they talking about at the funeral? Oh?
Speaker 2: Is this not proof that it's just all one big
unit state and that this idea of divisions between them
is simply a fairy tale? Feel to us like sugar
porridge when actually, you know, I mean you would you
would think perhaps that there might be some cold friction
between them, but they didn't seem to be. So were
they discussing the necessity of coming clean.
Speaker 3: About the orbs? Dan?
Speaker 2: Is it the Orbs, because that's what a lot of
people online are saying.
Speaker 5: And not the uh not the Martians?
Speaker 3: Well, no, the Martians are a cover story. Yeah, it's
the news.
Speaker 7: I mean, you have to think, first of all, obviously
Trump is not you know trum. Trump is not a
guy who has like never in his life hung out
and socialized with you know, Democrats. Obviously he's a little
more bitter these days, but you know, he has that ethos.
I mean, some of this, obviously is just the kind
of civility we ought to have.
Speaker 5: I always love to.
Speaker 7: Tell a story about the Hampton Roads Peace Conference in
eighteen sixty five and Lincoln sort of warmly embraced some
of his old friends from Congress, and then as he
explained to them his position on you know, what he
felt the South was doing, at one point one of
them was like, so you're basically saying you would have
the right to hang us as traders and Lincoln's like, yes,
you know they were still his old friends, but he
was absolutely willing to tell them to their faces that
he was willing to hang them. So but you know,
maybe they were just talking about something they have in common,
like you know, Joe Biden's limitless capacity to have things.
Speaker 3: Up indeed possible.
Speaker 2: Indeed, Charlie, anything before we leave, because we've just Danis
to go and we have to skibattle and other things.
Speaker 1: No, I think I've been exhausted by this excellent podcast.
Speaker 2: Good as well you should be, and we hope the
readers feel the same way, but yet revitalized to hear
the next one. Dan, thanks for stopping by today, and
as ever, National Review and on Twitter Baseball Crank you
can find all sorts of interesting, fun, pequent things to
read there.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it mostly.
Speaker 2: Again, Well, one of the things we haven't talked about
for a long time is Canada because it's just kind
of up there and just sitting up there. You know,
it's got some people, some of them speak French and
the rest of it. And I don't know about you,
but I have watched Canada turn into something of concern,
shall we say, and I find myself at a Mexican
resort about twice a year talking to a lot of
Canadians because for some reason, a lot of Canadians go
to Gankun and they are of a certain demographic slice,
I'll admit, and they're loath to credit size their government
because they're Canadians.
Speaker 3: But when you wind them up and get them going, oh,
I tell you.
Speaker 2: Justin Trudeau is out. And it took a while, but
there you go. And it looks as if you're not
going to be the fifty first state that's gonna be Greenland.
But it looks like they're going to have a new
leadership and there may be a new day doming on
the horizon for our friends to the north, for our
maple scented, pine scented friends to the north. What do
you think, hope part of a global wave of sensible
populism and nationalism coming back or just.
Speaker 3: Usual ebb and flow of politics both? Thank you, Steve Well.
Speaker 4: I was hoping our authentic Commonwealth when Charles would say
more about that.
Speaker 1: No, I'm happy to please do.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 1: The Liberal party that has been in power for a
long time, so there's a certain degree of ebbing and flowing.
But Trudeau has been a disaster in pretty much every aspect.
And his presumed replacement, the leader of the Conservative Party,
how do I say this? Pierre Pollieve his name is
really impressive, Yes, and has impressed me for years. In fact,
remember first seeing him two three four years ago.
Speaker 6: He made an.
Speaker 1: Address on YouTube when he became the leader of the
Conservative Party and I texted Rich Lowry and said, this
guy is amazing.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 1: Often when you do that, you realize that they're actually
not the first time you see them, they're on the
best behavior, and then over time they disappoint you.
Speaker 6: They are politicians after all.
Speaker 1: But this guy has just put up a series of
solid performances, the most famous of which I think is
when he.
Speaker 6: Ate an Apple Apple report, destroyed this journalist.
Speaker 1: But it seems that this is one of those rare
occasions on which at the same time a country is
going to get rid of someone who is genuinely per
se terrible and bring in someone who is genuinely per
se fantastic. It's out with Carter, in with Reagan situation,
not just the turning over of the years.
Speaker 2: Is it too late for Canada, Stephen Well?
Speaker 4: I mean, look I would have said that about Argentina
until Milay came along and suddenly the place is turning
around really fast. By the way, they just had somebody
I think it was Dan Mitchell. The economists reminded us
that something like one hundred and ten economists around the
world signed some statement saying Malay is going to crash
the Argentinian economy. Reminds me of all the economists in
nineteen eighty one who said Thatcher was going to crush
England's economy.
Speaker 3: Wrong in both counts.
Speaker 4: So it is true, though that the Canadian economy relative
to the US has stagnated badly for the entire time
Budeo has been in office, and I haven't followed closely
with the policies are to drive that, but.
Speaker 3: It has to be something.
Speaker 4: I do think though, that there's an odd confluence here.
People say, oh, Trudeau is a casualty of Trump. I
think that is true in one sense, but I think
really what's happened here is Trump gave the Liberal Party
the excuse to give Trudeau the boot because it's the
only chance they have of not getting wiped out of
the next election. So I think there's a confluence of
opportunism here on both sides of the border. Well, we
will see.
Speaker 2: I am hopeful, but just talking to Canadians there is
a there is a sense of, oh, how to put this.
I don't want to use the word malaise, because, of course,
am I correct in assuming that I heard that they
played John Lennon's Imagine at Jimmy Carter's funeral.
Speaker 3: Did I get that right?
Speaker 6: If you heard that, guys, it did?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It did you know that bit in Hot Days and
Night when they're on the train and they all is
talking about how he fought in the war for the Beatles,
and Lennon says, I bet you wish you lost. I
thought of that when they played Imagine that Jimmy Carter's funeral.
On thought, I bet he's pleased he's dead. He was
the luckiest man in that room.
Speaker 2: It is an utterly meritricious song on just every possible
It is so philosophically bankrupt, and as a matter of fact,
the just the spiritual nihilism of it is dreadful. It's
a it's anybody who subscribes to that as some sort
of anthemic embodiment of a particular era and way of thought.
Speaker 3: Is revealing themselves.
Speaker 2: Imagine there's no religion. I don't think that Jimmy Carter,
actually known famously as a as a as a man
of a certain spiritual situation, would agree to that.
Speaker 4: Well, beyond the beyond the immediate offense of it that
you both point out, it seems like it's an old term.
I mean, shouldn't the term shouldn't the song We're waiting
for now from Taylor Swept or somebody be reimagine that's
the current phrase of the progressive left. We're imagine that, right,
reimagine that. So why haven't we got reimagined yet as
a top ten pop song?
Speaker 1: Well, said James, Imagine that Possessions is a good tribute
to the Cots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, yes, I imagine indeed because you couldn't afford them,
or because the ones that were being offered was sheathed
in a in a an avocado green or a harvest
gold color or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I do.
Speaker 3: I do remember that.
Speaker 2: I remember that that when Lennon was shot and that
song was played and everybody wept to it that we
had lost such a thinker, in such a such a
deep philosophical, poetic embodiment of our age.
Speaker 3: And I don't know who chose that.
Speaker 2: I think that it's almost I mean, it's it's like
the leftist version of Born in the USA in a way,
because you will you will find people at you know,
the at conservative rallies who love that song and you
want you want to tell them check the lyrics on that,
if you would please, because this really is not the
sort of anthemic hoorah for the US sort of thing
that we should talk about. Let's see one more thing
before we go, Perhaps the parade of change agents continues
with Mark Zuckerberg, who, of course is, if not a
lizardoid overlord from the center of the world, at least
is their humanoid ambassador. Intermediary said that all those fact
checkers that we were using, I fired them all, and
it turns out there like forty thousand of them, and
they're going to go with community notes. They're going to
go with community notes, which is like Twitter x where
people anybody can append to a statement something to the contrary,
additional information and the rest of it fact checkers. In
other words, an army of fact checkers, an army of
days zis. Glenn Reynolds would have called it.
Speaker 3: This is good? Is it not?
Speaker 2: Or does this just mean that one more plywood strut
keeping the whole thing from falling down into a debris
strewn massive disinformation has left us and we are again
to swim in in lies and in Russian inspired.
Speaker 3: Uh well, look, I think this is a big deal.
Speaker 4: Uh now, maybe it's Zuckerberg has realized he needs to
make accommodation with the zeitgeist.
Speaker 3: As Buckley used to like.
Speaker 4: To say, I do know a lot of people close
to the Facebook world in Silicon Valley, and I'm hearing
lots of incredible reports that there's lots of rending of
garments going on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: A lot of.
Speaker 4: People the end nashing of teeth, all the rest of
the stirm and strong, if we want to use the
German phrase.
Speaker 3: A lot of people are very upset about this.
Speaker 4: I have to say, the most satisfying part of it
was seeing the New York Times headline, the greatest one
ever that said face This book says fact checkers were
the problem. Fact checkers say it's not true. They wrote
that headline without any sense of irony here or self awareness.
Speaker 3: It made my day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Charles, I know that You're an avid Facebook user,
so how do we expect.
Speaker 3: This to affect your experience?
Speaker 1: Well, I don't use Facebook. I do have a Facebook
page which I put my writing on, but they don't
use it day to day because after Brexit, which I supported,
I just didn't want to see all of my friends
from school screaming at each other. That's the problem with
Facebook relative to Twitter. The people who scream at each
other are not generally in your family. But I think
it is good because although it is not real life,
Facebook and Instagram are closer to real life than Twitter is,
and they're more widely used. There are three billion people
on Facebook. There are one hundred and ninety to two
hundred and fifty million Americans on Facebook, depending on how
you count it, and that's the reason that they're left
so relentlessly and ruthlessly went on. They wanted to control
that information. And this is a good development. And even
if it is true that Zuckerberg is being cynical, I'm
less convinced of this, but I don't know. The outcome
is still good and maybe it will lead to a
habit that then assists.
Speaker 2: I'm perfectly fine with a happy outcome if it comes
from cynical motives, I'll take it. The problem with Facebook,
of course, is that it is aging out. The people
who are there who are camped on it all the time,
yelling at each other are generally boomers around that area,
and the young people could have nothing to do with it,
couldn't care less about it. The grammar is where it's at,
and so Meta they have so wonderfully called themselves after
they're immensely expensive and as far as I can tell,
utterly unsuccessful move to move us all to the metaverse.
Remember that when we're all by now, we are all
supposed to be strapped to have vision Quest goggle strapped
in our faces, like Remoras or something from the alien
Face Hugger movies, in which we'd be moving around, floating
in spaces torsos without legs, talking to each other, having
a meeting with a giraffe who is actually the avatar
for our boss, while the rhydo you know madness and
nobody wanted it and nobody's there, but Meta is still
their name anyway. Metas said that they're going to be
introducing AI models into the stream so that some people
will be conversing with and getting posts from utterly constructed individuals,
people who do not actually exist but embody an AI
generated set of ideas. So eventually it'll be robots talking
to robots just as so. I mean, I was on
YouTube the other day and I came across I was
reading the comments on YouTube, and I know that sounds
like I have absolutely no life and too much time,
but I was keen because I spotted two comments that
said virtually the same thing with very little variants in
the language.
Speaker 3: I mean literally it.
Speaker 2: Was copy and paste but tweaked as if you told
AI to do, you know, just say it again. And
one exactly why this was who made these comments? There
are bought accounts, they have no followers, they've been around.
Speaker 3: For a while.
Speaker 2: They exist to do what, to prove engagement, to create
a personality that's been around for a while that can
be sold or leveraged.
Speaker 3: What what what?
Speaker 2: I don't I don't understand. And when you find these
websites that consist of nothing but reposition stories AI written
that have a million links to another sites that are
identical of the same, you have the idea of just
this vast matrix of bots chattering to each other. It's
not dead Internet theory, but it's close, and I get
the feeling that Facebook is going to end up the
same way, that eventually it will be nothing but Ricochet.
That is real in the world. Because Ricochet is full
of real people. You can meet with them, you can
drink with them, you can argue with them, you can
go to the member space, which you should and talk
to them and realize that these are real, actual human beings.
Except for Katy Davis. I think he's a bot.
Speaker 3: Anyway, you should go there.
Speaker 2: Go there and sign out that I will, well, he's
programmed to do, so go there, sign up and enjoy it.
We'd like to thank Allwin for sponsoring this show. We'd
like to thank you, of course for listening to us,
and we'd love it if you would go to one
of the podcast places and rave about us, because that
surfaces the podcast gets more readers, gets more listeners, and
Ricochet thrives and thrives into another quarter century. After all,
one quarter of the century down, next one coming up.
I'm James Lolox said. It has been Charles CW. You
Cook and Steven Hayward, and we thank you all of
us for listening to this the Ricochet podcast and We'll
see you in the comments at Ricochet four point zero.
Next week, guys, Next week, Ricochets
Speaker 3: Join the conversation.