Automated Transcript
Ed:
[0:00]
| Here's my mug.
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Sam:
[0:01]
| Oh, is that the new one I sent you?
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Ed:
[0:04]
| Yep.
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Sam:
[0:05]
| Oh, no, it's the original. I think.
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Ed:
[0:08]
| Nope, nope, this is one. It says, I think. I thought my original one was dead.
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Sam:
[0:13]
| Does it say, what do you call it, specimen?
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Ed:
[0:16]
| Yeah, it says, I hate curmudgeon.
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Sam:
[0:19]
| Oh, excellent, excellent. That's the right one then. That's the one.
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Ed:
[0:24]
| I thought it was, because my original one got broken somehow. I don't remember how.
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Sam:
[0:28]
| I thought you said your wife stole it. Either way, you have a new one now.
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Ed:
[0:33]
| Either way.
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Sam:
[0:35]
| Okay. Well, let's see. There we go. Going to hit the button on that. And, yeah, let me check this real quick. Okay. Have you thought about things you might want to talk about?
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Ed:
[0:53]
| I did indeed.
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Sam:
[0:54]
| Okay.
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Ed:
[0:55]
| I wrote down a couple things.
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Sam:
[0:56]
| Excellent. then we can just get started you can tell me while we're recording oh okay.
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Ed:
[1:01]
| Sounds like a winner.
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Sam:
[1:03]
| I mean we are recording already but it's like before i hit the music okay but let's uh let's do the thing here we go all righty oh i messed that up there it comes there it comes, Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, June 14th, 2025. It's just after two UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter. Yvonne Bo is not here. This week, our schedules just didn't align. I was only able to do it Friday, and he was only able to do it Thursday or Saturday. So I sent out my little request for co-host, and guess who answered this time? It's Ed. Hello, Ed.
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Ed:
[2:07]
| Hello there. It's the old man again.
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Sam:
[2:10]
| Welcome back, old man. Is that the right way I should address you from now on?
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Ed:
[2:15]
| Absolutely. Once again, this week came in second in my age group. There were only two of us over 80 doing it.
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Sam:
[2:23]
| Very nice. Very nice. What was it this time? Like a double marathon?
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Ed:
[2:29]
| That was a 5K run. No, it was a 5K run. And I'm not even really running anymore. I'm back to walking since, uh, in, in, uh, October, October last year, I had a tibial plateau, basically a stress fracture.
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Sam:
[2:44]
| And that is, well.
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Ed:
[2:47]
| It wasn't that painful, but it pretty much ended my running days. Walking was still fine. I continued doing a fair amount of walking and, uh, I'm, I'm still walking, just not as much.
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Sam:
[2:57]
| Yeah. Understood. You're probably still walking more than I am, to be honest. You know, so can't say much. Anyway, as usual, when we have a guest, the guest determines most of the agenda. We still like to start out less newsy and get more newsy as the show progresses. And, you know, I, I might have a couple movies still, like I have determined, I, I, I did, I did a calculation right before the show started that, well, this only covered like November to January. I haven't like looked at the more recent stuff yet, but I am finishing, I'm either a movie or a TV show or a book about every five days. So so like doing one 5.1785 days to be a little bit more or 857 to be a little bit more precise, but yeah that means if I do one movie a week on this show I'm never going to catch up so I need to like start doing two or something and yeah so anyway I should do a movie or two but.
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Ed:
[4:06]
| You could always go to three days a week on the podcast.
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Sam:
[4:09]
| We could do that we we we could do a podcast every day you know it's just no it's it's too much damn work you know if if we were ever to do it more frequently it would really have to be more a spontaneous we do the live stream we hit stop and it's done just however it comes out of the box it's done i don't do any prep i don't do any anything whatsoever i've i've cut back so much on how much work I do, like editing these damn things. I, I'm very close to just taking it straight out and just exporting it and go. I, the, the, and the things I do at this point are mostly automated as, as opposed to me doing stuff, but still it's, yeah, no, no, I, I can't imagine doing this daily. I thought about for a while, once we started the tick talk, Like right now, I just post like three clips of the show every week.
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Sam:
[5:06]
| And, you know, but when we first set up the TikTok, I was like, you know what I'll do is and I gave Yvonne the login to I sort of said, whatever I think of something I want to say that's news related, I'll just pop up my phone. I'll record two minutes and I'll publish it. And boom, we'll fill the curmudgeons corner TikTok channel with more stuff, not just the clips of the show. It'll be more engaging. It'll be more often, whatever. Because you need to succeed in that platform, you have to be posting all the time. And I thought about that. And the first few weeks, I was like, okay, if I think of anything, I'll do that. If I think of anything, I'll do that.
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Sam:
[5:49]
| And I just never got inspired to do that. So I did. And so it's only clips of the show because, and I know lots of people do it. I follow people on TikTok who like post five or six times a day and the things they post are just like a couple minutes long and they're clearly just pop open their phone and talk into the phone for a couple minutes. You know, there are people on TikTok who do much more elaborate productions than that and do all kinds of editing and fancy stuff. But there are definitely people out there succeeding on tiktok who are literally a thought pops into their head they open their phone they record for a couple minutes and they post it and done and they're doing fine you know but i just i just never maybe i'll start thinking about it again maybe i'll get inspired at some point but so far my head just doesn't work that way it's like it.
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Ed:
[6:44]
| Sounds sort of sounds sort of like a verbal uh facebook.
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Sam:
[6:47]
| Where you write down.
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Ed:
[6:49]
| When you think of something yeah.
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Sam:
[6:50]
| It is essentially like that it's and and even even in the other social media i'm actually really bad at that like i'm i'm my like if you do look at you know i'm not on twitter anymore but i'm on blue sky i'm on mastodon and i am posting regularly on those but my posts are mainly reposting stuff other people put out you know it's only a few times a week do i do something that's actually me typing my own thoughts and even then it's usually in reaction to something i read like and i'll make a comment about it and and i i just i don't know like this podcast is my main outlet for just like hey i'm gonna talk about whatever and i've just never made the mental shift to like do that in other forums. Even when I, I mean, I still have applesmay.com is officially my blog, but I haven't posted anything there in years.
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Sam:
[7:48]
| I, and the thought was also there, Hey, whenever I have something to say, I'll post something never really did. You know, the only things I posted are some things, things where I created some sort of system and said, hey, every time this happens, I will post something about it. And it was very structured. I never did a free form off the top of my head, whatever. I don't know. Maybe I should try again. Maybe I shouldn't. I don't know. So where do you want to start today? You said you had thought about things you wanted to talk about today. What is the lightest, least newsy thing on your list? We can start there.
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Ed:
[8:29]
| The least newsy thing? I was just going to say that my siblings, my brother, my sister, and I are going to be coast-to-coast participants in the No Kings demonstrations.
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Sam:
[8:41]
| Okay, yeah.
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Ed:
[8:42]
| My sister lives in Berkeley, and she's going to be in Oakland tomorrow for it. My brother's in Iowa City, and I'm going to be going—actually, I'm going to go to No Kings in the morning near here in Labbertville, I think it is. And then in the afternoon, we're going to—Doylestown is having its own anti-Trump thing, so I'm going to go there, too.
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Sam:
[9:04]
| Now, I don't get how you figured out that the anti-Trump protests aren't newsy, but let's go with it anyway. am i.
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Ed:
[9:12]
| Going to them.
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Sam:
[9:13]
| But uh yeah no and for for anybody who doesn't know i mean hell this this podcast will probably go out after all of these are over almost not even probably almost certainly, we'll go out and just just watch i say that and then like i get inspired and put it out but like no i was gonna say it's nokings.org and they are probably gonna have more events after this weekend so you can still go and check them out but it's they they have organized these protests all over the country i in fact i think there are some in other countries as well um but but mostly u.s protests and yeah i'm just looking yeah there are a few in europe it looks like a few elsewhere.
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Sam:
[10:02]
| So there are a handful in other places, but by far, by far, it is a U.S.-centric event because it is, you know, the subject line, oh, did I give the URL? No, no kings.org, no kings.org. You can go there and find out more, find out if there's one near you, whether it's the weekend that we're talking about or some later events. But they were making a big push for events on June 14th, which is now, essentially. Yeah, I said it's June 14th to UTC. U.S. time, it's tomorrow, Saturday, June 14th, and all over the country. And I've been thinking I want to go, too. Like, I've got some things going on earlier on Saturday. But I think probably I'll be done with those things in time to do one of these. There are several near me as well. Like, I'm just south of Everett, Washington. Let me see. I will...
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Sam:
[11:08]
| Look at what's closest to me. There's one in Everett, Washington. There's one in Marysville. There's one in Monroe. There's one in Edmonds. They're all over the place. And of course, there's one in Seattle, and there are a bunch more all across the area and all over the country. And they're basically there's a whole bunch of non-profits and advocacy groups who have come together to organize these so like each individual one is organized by somebody somebody different so for instance the one in everett here is by snohomish county indivisible one in in uh marysville is by veterans say no kings as i look at these various ones the one in Monroe is by something called No Kings Monroe. So there are all kinds of different things by all kinds of different people under this umbrella. And it's a whole bunch of protests. And I think that they have probably, they've been organizing these for a while, but I'm gathering there's probably more momentum for because of one, what's happening in Los Angeles over the last week, And two, Donald Trump's little military march in D.C. as well. You know, I think these things both inspire sort of counter-protests.
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Ed:
[12:33]
| It's little military march?
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Sam:
[12:35]
| Yes, little, little military march. And we'll see how they go. I mean, these are all very much oriented towards, these are normie demonstrations. These are intended to be nonviolent, peaceful. They are emphasizing that over and over and over again, whereas, you know, they're always troublemakers in any group, any large group. But these are the kinds of things that, you know, people will be bringing their kids to, their pets, you know, this is people of all ages and, you know, are very, you know, will be, I can almost guarantee these are going to be very self-policing in that if people start trying to make trouble, you know, the people at the demonstration itself will take care of those people. And keep it from getting out of control, but, you know, frankly, even the ones in LA and stuff that they've been, for the most part, they didn't start getting out of control until, the police started trying to harass the demonstrators, but even then, I mean, they're, they're.
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Sam:
[13:56]
| And there are some, like I said, there are troublemakers in every crowd. I mean, yes, somebody did burn a Waymo. You know, there is graffiti all over the place. People have been doing that kind of stuff. It's not helpful. And I'm hopeful that these no kings marches will avoid all that nonsense.
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Ed:
[14:15]
| Well, they're making it pretty clear in their instruction pages. It says, this is not a rally. You want to go to a rally, go somewhere else. This is a, I don't know what they're calling an event. Right. No protest signs. None of that. Just the placard they're going to give us to put up over our head.
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Sam:
[14:32]
| Yeah. The one in Everett here is labeled that it has a rally, then sign waving. So they're going to have both. Yeah. And I think different ones are like, I'm just clicking around. Some of them have more information about exactly what they have planned. Some of them don't. And some of them, some of them have locations that are public that others, you only get the address if you RSVP, you know, so all kinds of stuff like that. So what, what are you, I mean, you know, it'd be nice if like this event had already happened and we could talk about how it went, but what, what, what are your intentions on going and what do you expect? And what, why is it important for you to go?
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Ed:
[15:21]
| Well, I think it sounds like it's going to be just sort of a, we're here and we don't believe in kings and, as we say, an event, not really a rally or a protest as such. My concern, part of the reason why I'm doing this and why I'm going to go to the actual rally tomorrow evening is that I see our nation in severe distress at this point with a guy who very clearly talks like a dictator and is carrying out dictator actions. We'll talk about it later, I'm sure, too. I think we're under a real threat. I think we're as close to loss of our republic, at least a democracy republic, as we've been since the Civil War.
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Sam:
[16:10]
| Yes. I mean, one of the things, you know, as we dive directly into real issues, you know, people talk about, like, what, you know, how will you know? When are we really in a crisis? You know, do we have a constitutional crisis right now? do we not? Are we still a democracy? Are we not? And the thing is, I mean, occasionally these things happen with a really abrupt revolution and there's a clear day that it happened. But much more often, there's a gradual erosion and there is no clear single day where everything is different than the day before. And instead, it's just slowly over time, things are different than they were before. And even in your out-and-out, direct, unabashed dictatorships, life goes on for most people.
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Sam:
[17:13]
| People get up in the morning, they go to work, they go home. There are certain people that are harassed by whoever's in charge, certain people that are taken away to prison and killed and everything else when it gets really bad. But for the most part, you know, 99% of the population continues to go about their regular day. And, you know, they sort of slowly realize things change. I mean, people talk about the myth of the frog in the boiling pot and all, which isn't really true. The frog does generally jump out before they are cooked. But yeah, it's a gradual thing. And I'd say, look, right now, if you look at the stuff that's already happening every day right now, in terms of people argue, has Donald Trump directly violated a court order that has already been validated by the Supreme Court? But already there well first you can argue that yes he actually has the Supreme Court gave an order to get that guy back from El Salvador and he is back now but it took them like a month and a half to do it.
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Sam:
[18:25]
| But even before then I mean you're already softening the standards like before it would be like you're violating a court order from any court you don't have to, appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court. I mean, you can appeal it to the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, you still need to obey it. Well, they didn't. And so is that already a crisis? We've got the president giving a speech in front of military folks who were pre-screened for whether they were his supporters and instructed to cheer at his political statements. That's a dramatic change from how presidents have done events in front of the military before.
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Ed:
[19:05]
| That's a huge change from what the military has ever done. I was in there for 27 years, and it was made very clear to us, we did not, as soldiers in uniform, ever express a political opinion. Afterwards, and you're sitting in your shorts around the bar at night, you can talk all the politics you want, But you don't say, I'm Colonel Haynes, and here's what you should believe. That was not done, and it shouldn't be done.
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Sam:
[19:33]
| Yeah, and at this latest, I forget exactly what event it was, but Trump was in front of a military audience, and they made sure the audience was screened so that anybody who had any qualms about Donald Trump would not be in the audience. They also screened it for, he said he didn't want any fat people. Like, so, so they screened at least.
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Ed:
[19:55]
| At least someone decided there shouldn't be any fat people.
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Sam:
[19:58]
| Yes. Well, yeah. I mean, this is the kind of thing that we know Donald Trump is in the past, like complained because at a veterans parade, they included people who had lost limbs while they were in the military. And he said, I don't want, nobody wants to see that. I don't want to ever have those people, you know, in my presence again, basically. You know, so I have no doubt that it came from the top. Even if it was somebody anticipating what he would want, it clearly is what he would want. And, you know, and basically making sure that when he, like, for instance, said bad things about Governor Newsom in California, that everybody cheered or booed when they mentioned his name or cheered when he said that he'd go against him or whatever. And then, you know, the calling out of the military for the situation in California and, you know, arresting the congresswoman in New Jersey for that incident a few weeks back and now indicting her or, you know, the harassment of the senator in California this week. All of these are things that are direct, you know, contraventions of what would have been normal in any other presidency before this. It's even stuff that Donald Trump didn't do in his first term.
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Ed:
[21:18]
| His staff prevented it.
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Sam:
[21:21]
| His staff prevented it.
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Ed:
[21:23]
| But he's got a different staff this time.
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Sam:
[21:25]
| Well, he's specifically chosen people who won't say no to these kinds of things.
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Ed:
[21:31]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[21:31]
| And hell, for that matter, all the Dodge stuff, you know, so when you talk about, you know, are we no longer a democracy or whatever? There is not that one mark, but they're all of these, you know, basically American democracy was built on the norms around respecting the institutions that were defining the country, both the ones that were explicit in the constitution and ones that had developed over time and enforcing the norms of certain behavior, like, you know, Hey, if you lose an election, you gracefully say, oh, well, I lost. I'll try again next time. Norms around what kind of debate is appropriate and what kind is not, and norms around lying is bad. You can argue, but if you outright say something false, you will have repercussions for it. All of those norms are out the window and have been for a while.
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Ed:
[22:33]
| Well, the concept of what's called liberal democracy, which is what we have had is a democracy with all people entitled, depends upon people cooperating and working together and not going out and encouraging a riot because they lost an election. It's so much of it depends upon the guy who lost the election coming forward and shaking hands and standing up with a new guy and saying, this is our president and I salute him. Once that norm starts breaking down, you get anarchy and out of anarchy very quickly comes oligarchy, which is what Trump really wants.
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Sam:
[23:18]
| And it becomes a very difficult spiral, too, because absolutely. Because if the other side... Continues to try to play by the old rules, they will lose very often. Not always, not guaranteed, but yeah.
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Ed:
[23:36]
| On the other hand, as I've said multiple times over the years, if we adopt the policies and actions of our enemy, how are we going to explain to our kids who the enemy is?
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Sam:
[23:48]
| Exactly. Well, that's why I said it easily leads to a spiral because the other side decides that they need to adopt the same tactics and then they just make it worse. And it spirals and spirals until something does break. And, you know, I know, you know, there's some people who are itching for, you know, revolution at any time, but an actual revolution tends to be really bad for a long time.
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Sam:
[24:18]
| So it's just, it's just a very hard situation to pull out of. I mean, there are some countries that have pulled out of these things without bloodshed, but it usually takes a while.
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Sam:
[24:31]
| It's much harder to build these institutions and build these norms in the first place than it is to destroy them. So once you've destroyed them, it's just really hard to get them back because the whole mindset of the country changes in terms of what people expect is the normal way to operate, what people expect is the only way to get things done. If nobody believes that they can get what they want through the process and no one follows or respects it anymore, then like you said, you have a situation of anarchy, which tends to get worse before it gets better on all kinds of metrics. So I don't know you know I think we're we've, we've gone a long way down that direction. Do I feel it's not recoverable at this point? No, no. I have faith and I have confidence that this country will eventually pull out of the disaster it chose in 2016 and chose again in 2024 on an even worse scenario.
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Sam:
[25:51]
| But, you know, So I, hell, even after 2016, I was saying right away, even if Trump only lasts one term, it'll take decades to recover from the damage he's done. Giving him a second run, it's, it's going to be a long time. It's going to be a long time. Even if Donald Trump is out of office in three and a half years and we get a string of quote-unquote good presidents, good congresses after that, it's still going to take a long, long, long, long time to undo the damage of these eight years.
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Ed:
[26:33]
| And in the meantime, things like the climate change are going to continue coming forward to make it even more difficult.
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Sam:
[26:40]
| Yeah.
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Ed:
[26:40]
| I think our economy is going to be screwed badly by the time Trump's done with it.
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Sam:
[26:45]
| Well, this is where, like, does the rest of the world step up if we're not, you know? And that leads to further American decline for us not taking the lead in all kinds of things like this. But, you know, one hopes that, you know, the rest of the world can pick up the slack. But, you know, it's just as likely that, you know, Trump and Putin and these folks get what they want in terms of a multipolar world with spheres of influence that are competing against each other and each doing their own thing that is not particularly helpful to the world as a whole.
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Ed:
[27:24]
| Um you mean like h.g wells positive all.
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Sam:
[27:30]
| Kinds of people did you know in 1984 also had that structure.
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Ed:
[27:35]
| That's what i mean you know oh.
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Sam:
[27:37]
| That's uh george orwell not.
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Ed:
[27:39]
| Oh geez you're right i'm i'm thinking the wrong guy but uh excuse my age yeah orwell yeah um but yeah triumph three countries.
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Sam:
[27:50]
| Yeah, well, and honestly, this was how the world was generally perceived prior to the 20th century anyway. I mean, you know, the Portuguese and Spanish literally divided the world in half and said, you've got this side of the line, you've got that side of the line. And then the English took a huge chunk of it as well. And it was all just sort of like the great powers competing in what parts of the world do they quote unquote own. And Trump's made it clear that like that's the kind of world he would like to see again you know people asked make America great again when are you talking about and there was a lot of you know hey he's talking about the 1950s he himself has now made it very clear that the time he thinks wistfully of and thinks America should go back to is the 1890s specifically yes so yep.
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Ed:
[28:43]
| Absolutely the the error that led up to the great depression.
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Sam:
[28:46]
| Yeah robber barons and uh well.
|
Ed:
[28:51]
| A huge huge concentration of wealth and a very small number of people.
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Sam:
[28:55]
| Yes and and the spheres of influence we were just talking about across the world you know not quite the close to the height of colonialism not quite i think i think it peaked into early 1900s but yeah i mean anyway yes so so you're going anyway that's what that's.
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Ed:
[29:16]
| Why i'm going to be there tomorrow.
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Sam:
[29:17]
| That's why you're going to be there tomorrow and i hope we get some coverage of these things one of the things i've noticed and people have pointed this out before is of course the peaceful protests.
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Sam:
[29:31]
| Don't get a lot of attention. You know, it's the ones that do turn violent, that people get all kinds of news coverage and get on TV. Like, this is not the first day of protest that's been called since Trump has been back in office. And several of them have actually had quite large attendance in cities all over the country, just like this one is expected to, where not only do you have big crowds in the big cities, but you have decent-sized crowds in smaller cities all across the country. And this has happened on a number of occasions. And there have been other places that have been having protests of one sort or another on a near-weekly basis all the way straight through. But they tend not to get attention unless they are disruptive, unless they are violent. You don't really see it. I mean, just on a smaller scale, you know, I mentioned last week, you know, how I'm annoyed by my commute back and forth, but almost every single day on that commute back and forth where I'm going on I-5 from Seattle to Everett, Washington, there are people on the bridges over the highway holding up signs of one sort or another and, you know, waving at the cars below and trying to get attention. Is that ever on the news? No.
|
Sam:
[30:55]
| I mean, hell, driving under them, I barely notice them these days. I'm like, oh, there's some signs again.
|
Sam:
[31:02]
| But because they become part of the landscape and they're not going to make the news because they're not disrupting anything.
|
Ed:
[31:11]
| I think they still accomplish something because people see them. They do get some news commentary. Periodically, people get interviewed from it. Yeah. And and the more people that participate, the more people see it, whether or not the news reports it. It's almost.
|
Sam:
[31:31]
| And that's what's good about like things like No Kings, which are nationwide. Like, you know, it used to be the model for these was we are going to have a big event in Washington, D.C. And we want like hundreds of thousands, millions of people to show up and march on the mall. Or we're going to have a big event in CityX, you know, if it's something else. And the problem is it's harder to get people there. And, you know, most people across the country aren't going to see that directly. Maybe it will make a big splash.
|
Sam:
[32:06]
| But this model that has been developing over the last few years, I mean, And people could always do it, but I think technology is enabling it more and more, I think is useful because people all over see it. And like you said, it serves multiple purposes, even if it doesn't get wall-to-wall coverage in the media all day long or whatever. One is if you actually go to one of these things, you realize, oh, I'm not alone. I am part of this bigger community that believes the same way I believe. And I'm going to meet people. I'm going to network with people. I'm hell. I'm even.
|
Sam:
[32:53]
| This part's annoying to me, but like if I RSVP, I sign up with some mailing list, they're going to send me crap. And, you know, and maybe some of these people will be inspired to do other things and get involved more deeply. You know, my wife, who's now a state rep, didn't start with events like this, but she started being heavily involved in online communities after the 2016 election. And gradually became more and more involved, became involved in in-person things as well, helped or started helping to organize things, et cetera. She organized a couple of like rally events, parade, things like this, and was involved in person in a variety of others. And, you know, she ended up a state rep, you know, just because she got more and more involved. And, you know, out of every one of these that occurs, you may not get, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who get more involved like that, but you'll get a few.
|
Sam:
[33:58]
| And it helps get the next generation of activists and politicians energized. And even if that's not, you know, any particular person, like I said, it helps build that awareness. And I think especially in redder areas, having the blue-leaning people sort of get together and know they're not alone is helpful. But it's helpful everywhere. And like, you know, I mentioned the people waving the signs over the highway. Yeah. Even if I don't honk back, even if I'm just driving back and forth, you know, there, there are thousands and thousands of people who just drove under those signs and saw them.
|
Sam:
[34:44]
| And maybe you don't convince anybody. Maybe you convince one or two people. I don't know. Maybe you get them thinking in a way they weren't thinking before, but you show a bunch of people that, oh, yeah, there actually are a bunch of people out there who care a lot about this, and it's not a lost cause.
|
Sam:
[35:06]
| There's stuff we can do. So even if a lot of the stuff is performative right now, I mean, let's be clear. Donald Trump won. The Republicans took the Senate. The Republicans took the House. The Republicans have been leading the Supreme Court for a number of years now. There is not a lot that can be directly done in policy terms at the national level. If you're in a blue state or a purple state, maybe. But so a lot of this is, you know, solidarity and organizing and building up for the next battle. Now that, you know. And it does make a difference. We've talked about the taco thing with Trump, you know, Trump always chickens out. And even with this immigration stuff, there were reports in the last 48 hours that he's reconsidering how aggressive ICE is being because people in the agricultural industry have been calling him, talking about how badly it's affecting them and how it's going to affect, you know, this summer's crops. And such, and that it will hit food prices and things like this.
|
Ed:
[36:23]
| Landscapers, roofers, all of these industries are, and that's, you know, that's part of the foundation. You know, it's hard to run a factory without a roof.
|
Sam:
[36:34]
| Yeah. And so Donald Trump is saying, ah, change is coming. We might change some of this stuff because he's discovering that going full on out Stephen Miller may be losing him some losing him support and what we found you know immigration and tariffs both seem to be one of the areas that he actually does have some deeply held opinions as opposed to just doing whatever it takes to give him more power and more money but even there he's proving to be somewhat practical where, you know, if it's, if it looks like it's backfiring, he backs off. And so I don't know there, there've been a number of cases where the, you know, You know, really loud opposition has led to dropping polls, which in turn has led to Trump backing off. And so there you go. And not every time. And, you know, I fully expect in some cases it'll make him dig in further.
|
Ed:
[37:40]
| But the trouble is is that even if he if he backs down he's got guys like head seth and steven miller and uh what's his name banner bannon bannon bannon steven bannon these people are they don't back down because they were you know miller doesn't give a damn i miller wants to see people with brown skin killed well just like.
|
Sam:
[38:06]
| We just saw with elon though like in the end And Trump is president. If any of these, if Trump starts believing that any one of these people are actually hurting him rather than helping him.
|
Ed:
[38:20]
| He may get rid of them.
|
Sam:
[38:21]
| He may get rid of them. He has no hesitancy to throw people overboard when they are no longer useful to him. Or when he senses any level of disloyalty.
|
Ed:
[38:33]
| Yep. Nope. We'll see. We've got three and a half years, probably.
|
Sam:
[38:39]
| Okay. uh anything else on uh on no kings i.
|
Ed:
[38:45]
| Think we've covered most of the topics i had.
|
Sam:
[38:49]
| Let's hear about we're done thank you very much everybody i gotta hear about.
|
Ed:
[38:53]
| A movie first.
|
Sam:
[38:53]
| Okay well let's take a break and then uh maybe the next segment can be movies you can you can do some movies too um and or tv shows or books or whatever you want the next segment will be media. So time for time for a break. And as usual, I have to find the right break to run. This time, it will be this one.
|
Break:
[39:19]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. It was just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. Do you believe Come on, come on, come on. I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. You, you, you, it's, it's amazing to get the show on the road. There's a road? There's a road? Oh my God, there's a road.
|
Sam:
[40:24]
| And we are back.
|
Ed:
[40:27]
| Timed it perfectly.
|
Sam:
[40:29]
| As always, you're quite the consummate professional there. Okay, so let's do this. I'm going to do two movies. And in between, maybe you have some media you've seen recently that you would like to talk about as well. So I will do the first one, then I'll ask you for one. Then I'll do one. Then I'll ask you for one. And then we'll take another break and see where we are. I see Ed like thinking deeply about what he might want to talk about.
|
Ed:
[40:59]
| I'm thinking the last movie I saw was Wicked.
|
Sam:
[41:02]
| Was which?
|
Ed:
[41:04]
| Wicked.
|
Sam:
[41:05]
| Almost a year ago. That's okay. You can talk about that. Or you probably watched some TV or read some books. Those are fine too.
|
Ed:
[41:11]
| Actually, I guess that's about as recently as you've been hitting them too, isn't it?
|
Sam:
[41:15]
| Yeah. Well, the one I'm about to do, I watched on August 19th of last year. So we're not quite a year in the past. And this, again, this is why I have to start doing like two a week instead of one. But I'll try to make them slightly faster, I guess. Is faster the right word? Okay. This first one is, I mentioned this last week, it's Judas and the Black Messiah, which is a a biographical historical drama from 2021 okay and and i told yvonne last week it was more a film festival film than it was like a mass popular film that everybody would know about you know it's its budget was only 26 million dollars and it made 7.5 million so it lost money at the box office. But the basic thing is it's a... It is...
|
Sam:
[42:17]
| Okay, the Wikipedia one-liner is, the film is about the betrayal against Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in late 1960s Chicago, by William O'Neill, an FBI informant. And so it's a biopic so it's you know based on a true story but fictionalized and you know so they're you know it's not an actual documentary there are actors playing the parts they've made up dialogue for situations that you know we don't have actual transcripts of etc and and in as is usual for these kinds of things i don't know specifically about this one but for this kind of drama. They often sort of make composite characters so that you have less people to keep track of than real life. They simplify certain situations. They heighten others for the drama. In any case, it was a, you know.
|
Sam:
[43:20]
| Basically a situation where this guy, William O'Neill, was arrested in Chicago for trying to steal a car by pretending to be an FBI agent. That was his scheme for like stealing the car instead of like, you know, pulling a gun on somebody or whatever, he pretended to be an agent and take the car, you know, and he was caught and they basically made a deal with him that if he was acting as an informant for the government and worked to try to infiltrate the Black Panthers, that they wouldn't charge him for the crime that he had clearly done.
|
Sam:
[44:06]
| And so over the next few years, you know, he got into the Black Panthers and rose up in the ranks of the Black Panthers while always secretly being an informant for the feds. And then eventually this whole situation, well, I'm mixing a couple things up.
|
Sam:
[44:29]
| So the guy I talked about got close to this other guy, Hampton, who was forming alliance with various gangs while working with the Black Panthers as well. Hampton became the one who became further up in the leadership and you know he was, eventually betrayed, like it said. Yes, yes. Hampton was betrayed by O'Neill. Anyway, that's the drama of the thing. Spoilers, sorry. And I'm vacillating on the spoilers. The whole situation explodes at the end. There's significant consequences and we see how all that plays out. The only actor I recognized in this thing was Martin Sheen, who, who played, who did he play exactly? Someone high up in the, did he actually play Hoover? I forget who he played. He played someone high up in the FBI and, but I'll give it a thumbs up. It was good. It, it, it, It was not, you know, as a, as this kind of sort of biographical, historical drama, blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[45:49]
| It's definitely not your like, it's not like watching the superhero movie or going to an action film or whatever. It's more serious than that. It's more, it's not quite documentary style, but it's getting there. But it was compelling, and it was a little slice of history I didn't know. Also, like most things like this, it's coming to you from a particular point of view. So it's hard when you watch this knowing, okay, how much of this was real? How much of it is spinning it to make this guy look good? How much of it is spinning it to make this guy look bad, you know, and as opposed to a, what, what really happened, you know, like, and I, and by the way, Martin Sheen was indeed playing Jagger Hoover. So look, look that up while, while I was talking, but yeah, so it's, it's hard to tell. Like, I mean, I guess that's true even of documentaries. They're coming from a point of view, too. And sometimes it's more neutral. Sometimes it's not.
|
Sam:
[47:06]
| But regardless, it was compelling. There's a slice of history I didn't know about sort of 1960s Black Panthers versus FBI stuff going on in Chicago, which I'm sure was mirrored in other places around the country as well. And I don't want to say it was fun. It was not fun, but it was good. So that that's my review of that one and yeah your turn well.
|
Ed:
[47:39]
| I as i said i the last movie i saw was almost a year ago somehow we just don't seem to get to them very much anymore for whatever reason too busy i guess uh.
|
Sam:
[47:49]
| And you know pandemic kind of broke that habit in a lot of people too even the ones that were going regularly but it's starting to pick up i've gone to a couple movies in person i went to a movie in person yesterday i will not talk about it today i'll talk about it like next year sometime probably if i go at this pace but and and i also saw wicked in the theater but i have not gotten to it in order yet so i'm not going to talk about it but i'll let you talk about it other than well.
|
Ed:
[48:17]
| Rather than that.
|
Sam:
[48:19]
| I'll preview my thoughts what.
|
Ed:
[48:20]
| We did do.
|
Sam:
[48:21]
| Is uh yes on.
|
Ed:
[48:23]
| And on Oscar night, our son and his wife and our daughter and her husband, we all went to an Oscars party at the local theater here.
|
Sam:
[48:33]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[48:33]
| It was great fun. They have an open bar and food catered by a bunch of the restaurants in town. And then when the Oscars start, we all go in and fill up the whole theater. I have never watched an Oscars show clear through. I watch a few minutes of it and get bored out of my skull and go off and do something else.
|
Sam:
[48:52]
| I think years ago, like I'm, I went through like maybe two or three years where I actually like forced myself to watch all of the major award shows from beginning to end. But then.
|
Ed:
[49:07]
| That's your OCD coming in again.
|
Sam:
[49:08]
| That's my OCD coming in. I was like, I'll watch all of them. So I know what's going on. And, you know, I'll watch the Oscars. So I'll have an idea. Oh, these were the important films of the year. Blah, blah, blah. I'll watch the Grammys. So I'll know what's going on with that kind of stuff. I'll watch the Emmys. I don't think I did the Tonys.
|
Ed:
[49:28]
| But if, if, if somebody does an Oscars party like that, you know, in a theater, I highly recommend it because somehow being in the audience, being in a live audience there, it really was kind of fun.
|
Sam:
[49:41]
| And we all stayed for the whole show.
|
Ed:
[49:44]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[49:44]
| Because after watching a few of them on TV, I decided, okay, I never need to do that again. So since then I've only watched highlights if, if there weren't.
|
Ed:
[49:53]
| You know, even a funny joke that someone tells and you're sitting alone, you don't laugh at it. When you're in a crowd like that, laughter and enjoyment is contagious. Right. And pretty soon things aren't even necessary that become kind of entertaining and fun. So, yeah, it was a good time. If there's one going on, I would say go to it because if it includes dinners and drink and everything else, I don't know, it's $45, $50, $60 a person. It's worth it. It's five, six hours of entertainment, and it's clearly worth it.
|
Sam:
[50:27]
| Now, watching the Oscars in person at a party didn't inspire you to immediately go out and seek out where you could watch all those movies?
|
Ed:
[50:36]
| No.
|
Sam:
[50:39]
| Not for any of them?
|
Ed:
[50:40]
| A couple of them. Well, we had seen a couple, three of them last because we did go to, we had seen Wicked and we saw Oppenheimer and a few of the other shows that were nominated. But no, I just, we just somehow don't seem to get to the theater that much. We're even a contributing member.
|
Sam:
[50:57]
| Now, Ed, you don't have to watch movies at the theater. Like 99% of the movies I watch, I watch at home.
|
Ed:
[51:04]
| Well, I'm doing that. My wife sort of dictates what we watch. She watches a lot of them and she likes to get the old series or any series and binge watch it over three or four days. You will watch 10 years of episodes. So right now we're watching one that's, it's an FBI versus the CIA thing to do with a lady who's been tattooed. I don't remember the name of it.
|
Sam:
[51:31]
| That's helpful.
|
Ed:
[51:32]
| And the tattoo, she was kidnapped and brainwashed, and the tattoos are clues to crimes that are coming up. So they solve what a tattoo means, and then they go out and stop the crime. That's not a good idea. It's kind of fun. Tonight's episode, geez, I'm going into another one. This will be my second. Tonight's episode showed that the leader of the FBI group had participated in a crime arrest program.
|
Sam:
[52:04]
| Okay, is it called Blindspot?
|
Ed:
[52:06]
| That's it, Blindspot.
|
Sam:
[52:07]
| Okay, I've been frantically Googling over here the things you've said to try to find it.
|
Ed:
[52:13]
| That is it, yeah.
|
Sam:
[52:15]
| Blindspot, and let's see, it was on TV from 2015 to 2020, five seasons.
|
Ed:
[52:23]
| Five seasons, woo! We're going to see a lot of it then. But the leader of the group participated in a basically illegal wiretapping and got a whole bunch of people arrested over the years. And then tonight that became an issue in the episode. And they all disagreed. This is law. It's illegal in this country. Not supposed to do that. But if we turn you in, all these really bad guys that you got arrested are going to be released. And they addressed, I thought, with, you know, some depth. And the characters did it. But it has the CIA guy is, you know, someone who ought to be stabbed in the back in a dark alley. And they portray him that way. But, hey, it's a fun show. But, you know, it's worth watching.
|
Sam:
[53:09]
| Thumbs up?
|
Ed:
[53:10]
| Thumbs up, yeah. I'll give it a thumbs up.
|
Sam:
[53:12]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[53:13]
| The Oscar party is definitely both thumbs up.
|
Sam:
[53:16]
| Okay, I will do my next movie, and then I'll ask you for one more thing. Okay, my next movie, speaking of something that the other movie was not, this is a superhero movie. This was X-Men from the year 2000. So this was the original X-Men movie. There's obviously been a series of them following up from that. And it yeah let's see it's like it's it's not is it the origin not quite the origin it starts at the beginning it starts with magneto in 1944 nazi or occupied poland and then it then it zoop zoops zoops is that a word zooms forward zoops okay zoop zoop anyway then it it brings a bunch of the x-men together and you know they and you know it's a superhero movie i could i could read you the plot of it but you know i i i don't know if it's sort of like rom-coms.
|
Ed:
[54:26]
| It's always the same plot.
|
Sam:
[54:27]
| Yeah well you know this is i'll read you the the the again the the shortest part of the description from wikipedia the film depicts a world where an unknown proportion of people are mutants possessing superhuman powers that make them distrusted by normal humans it focuses on mutants wolverine and rogue as they are brought into a conflict between two groups with radically different approaches to bringing about the acceptance of mutant kind charles xavier's x-men and the Brotherhood of Mutants led by Magneto. And so, there you go. I'm gonna give it a thumbs up. You know, wavering towards the thumbs sideways, I remember, you know, and again, this has been almost a year since I saw the stupid movie, but it's been ten months. But I...
|
Sam:
[55:25]
| You know, I kind of grayed within a curve within the genre. It wasn't particularly memorable, but I remember having fun while I watched it. And for this kind of movie, that's what you want. You know, you just want a couple hours of escapism where, you know.
|
Sam:
[55:47]
| Whatever happens and you watch it play out. And they use their superpowers and they have some battles. And there's a little bit of human drama around it. Typically for me, like the superhero movies that I will give a flat out like thumbs down to are the ones that really lean heavily into the action components and away from characters. Like I, I find myself like almost tuning out, like when they're actually in the big climactic battle, it's sort of like, okay, tell me when the battle's over. I know some people watch these things just for that.
|
Sam:
[56:26]
| I kind of watch the even superhero movies. I watch for, are there interesting plot points? Is there, are there interesting interactions between the characters? Are they, you know, is there good dialogue that I enjoy that's like clever in some way? Those are the things that like get me and and make me interested and i again i don't see anything i i i'm not remembering anything that like this was outstanding on any of those fronts but it was it was fine it was good it was you know it was entertaining as it needed to be i didn't feel like it was too too so heavy on the action that i just got bored and annoyed because that was all there was.
|
Sam:
[57:17]
| And, you know, and I don't know, maybe I shouldn't grade on a curve. Maybe that should be a thumb sideways when it was just like, oh, it was okay. I don't know. Uh, I, I tend to leave the thumb sideways more like thumbs down is just straight up. Like, oh, I hated it. Unambiguously. I hated it.
|
Ed:
[57:38]
| The Blair Witch Project.
|
Sam:
[57:40]
| No, no, you gave a thumbs down to Blair Witch. I actually thought it was okay. We've talked about this before.
|
Ed:
[57:47]
| Yeah, I know.
|
Sam:
[57:48]
| But yeah. Maybe I should save the thumbs up for the ones that I thought were really outstanding. But they're very few. Those are few and far between. Most movies are, eh, it was an okay couple hours. And I leave, Thumbs Sideways is a little bit below that, and Thumbs Down is I absolutely hated it. Okay that was mine so then the next one i want to know because you mentioned it a couple times what did you think of wicked part one.
|
Ed:
[58:20]
| I liked it a lot yeah it was we saw the uh the stage presentation when we were in san in uh jacksonville and it was superb we took one of the grandkids to it as i recall but the movie i thought was just spectacular the singing is good The costumes are exotic Just overall, highly entertaining, You don't go to it to see the plot The plot's sort of thin But I really thought it was excellent Well done.
|
Sam:
[58:54]
| And well worth seeing I'll give a preview Although I'll talk about Wicked in order When I eventually get to it some year, But first of all, I also saw the play my wife my daughter and i saw it on broadway with the original cast so we we it was still adina mizel and and what's her name who played glinda i'm i remember i i i am upset that i am not remembering it off the top of my head christian chanelworth oh okay yeah so i i saw it would be Glinda. Yes. So I saw it with, with, with the original cast on Broadway. It was great on Broadway, liked it at that point. And actually like, so it was one of the few movies where I actually brought up like to, to my daughter and to Alex, Brandy was out of town at the time. Do you guys want to see this? Like not, not only while it's still in the theaters, but fairly soon after it opened, we saw it like, we didn't see it on opening day, but we saw it like a week later or something like that. And my, my preview is I also, I agree with you. Thumbs up. It was, it was good. Front to back, kept my attention. We took my mom to it. Her review was, it was too loud. She had to keep her thumbs in her ears the whole time because the volume was too loud in the theater we went to.
|
Ed:
[1:00:23]
| I have to agree, the theaters play stuff too damn loud. I'm deaf at this point. I have hearing aids. I turn my hearing aids off in the movies because it's just, I don't know why you make it so loud it's it's a lot parts of it are so loud that there's damaging to those of you who still have good ears.
|
Sam:
[1:00:42]
| Yeah i i mean it's one of the reasons they want to make it really and truly immersive they want to make it different than what you can get at home so they want to crank it up in in all kinds of different ways they want to make it absolutely impossible for you to get distracted by other things you are you are going to be paying attention to that movie you know, but yeah maybe I'll talk more about it when it comes up in order but I agree thumbs up for Wicked it was a good movie let's take another break real quick and then when we return, we will come up with one more topic and this time we will make it a newsy topic I think, who knows maybe we'll come up with something else that isn't But, you know, probably newsy. So anyway, back after this. And this is a Wiki of the Day one. So here we go.
|
Break:
[1:01:42]
| Do, do, do. Hello. This is Standard Raveena. I'm here to let you know about Sam the Curmudgeon's other podcasts. The Wiki of the Day podcasts. Wiki of the Day comes in three varieties. Popular, random, and featured. Each highlights a new Wikipedia article each day. They just pick the articles differently. This week on Featured Wiki of the Day, you would have heard this summary for Sudasticus.
|
Break:
[1:02:07]
| Pseudasticus, meaning false astachos, in comparison to the extant crayfish genus, is an extinct genus of decoupod crustaceans that lived during the Jurassic period in Europe, and possibly the Cretaceous period in Lebanon. Many species have been assigned to it, though the placement of some species remains uncertain and others have been reassigned to different genera. Fossils attributable to this genus were first described by Georg Zuhmunster in 1839 under the name Bolina Pustulosa, but the generic name was changed in 1861 after Albert Oppel noted that it was preoccupied. The genus has been placed into different families by numerous authors, historically being assigned to Nephropidae or Protostagidae. Currently, it is believed to be a member of Stenakiridae reaching up to 6 cm, 2.4 in, in total length. Sudastachis was a small animal. Members of this genus have a crayfish-like build, possessing long antennae, a triangular rostrum and a frontmost pair of appendages enlarged into long and narrow pincers.
|
Break:
[1:03:13]
| Deep grooves are present on the carapace, which is around the same length as the abdomen. The surface of the carapace is usually uneven, with either small tubercles or pits. Sexual dimorphism is known in P. pustulosis, with the pincers of females being more elongated than those of the males. There is evidence of possible gregarious behavior in P. Lemurvices in the form of multiple individuals preserved alongside each other, possibly killed in a mass mortality event. With the oldest known record dating to the Cinemarion age of the early Jurassic, and possible species surviving into the Cinemanian stage of the late Cretaceous, Pseudasticus has a long temporal range and was a widespread taxon. Fossils of this animal were first found in the Solenhofen limestone of Germany, but have also been recorded from France, England, and Lebanon. All species in this genus lived in marine environments. That's all there is to it. See? Fun, entertaining, educational, and short. Okay, now look for and subscribe to the Wiki of the Day family of podcasts on your podcast playing software of choice, or just go to wikioftheday.com to check out our archives. Now back to curmudgeon's corner. Do, do, do.
|
Sam:
[1:04:31]
| Well, there we go. I hope you learned a lot, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:04:34]
| You know, as she was reading that, it occurred to me, What must be the life of a scientist when his grandchild sits on his knee and says, what did you do, grandpa? And he says, oh, I classified worms from 10 million years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:04:53]
| Yes, well, you know, this one was a crustacean. But yes, there are scientists out there whose entire career is classifying worms from 10 million years ago or whatever.
|
Ed:
[1:05:06]
| There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:05:07]
| You know, so, you know, and, and, and there are certainly some times where I am jealous of that career and that, that would be, you know, that would be fun.
|
Ed:
[1:05:18]
| When my phone rang, when my phone rang at one o'clock in the morning for someone who had broken an ankle, I was sort of thinking maybe classifying worms would be nice.
|
Sam:
[1:05:29]
| Yes. And not the intestinal parasite kind.
|
Ed:
[1:05:33]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:05:35]
| Anyway. Anyway, so Ed, do you have a preference for a last topic of the show?
|
Ed:
[1:05:41]
| Well, I guess the most current thing, I mean, we've already talked pretty much about what's going on in L.A. and in our presidency.
|
Sam:
[1:05:49]
| We touched on it.
|
Ed:
[1:05:49]
| And I'm tired of talking about him anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:05:51]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[1:05:52]
| Yeah. But how about just a real brief rundown of what's going on in Israel, which is, to me, the Israel attack on Iran is what I would call an offensive operation. And since it was preemptive, which means that Iran had not committed any military action against it, might be planning one, I don't know. But that was, by most international standards, was a crime, an offensive assault on a neighboring nation's that is breaking all the rules. But more of a problem probably coming is that the whole Middle East, this is going to throw the whole Middle East. I really think that place is likely to explode big and bad. There's a bunch of people from Egypt who are marching towards Israel that I hear today. Not an army, a group of people.
|
Sam:
[1:06:54]
| I have not heard that at this point.
|
Ed:
[1:06:57]
| I didn't hear the description of it. I just heard a brief thing on it. I don't know anything about it.
|
Sam:
[1:07:02]
| One key thing here is that as we are recording this on Friday night U.S. Time, this is still ongoing. Israel is still attacking Iran, and Iran is still retaliating against Israel. These things are still happening as we are speaking. So let's talk a few of the details of this. As you said, it was preemptive. that the basic theory and, you know, Netanyahu has been wanting to do this for at least a decade. Oh, yeah. And they've done a few smaller attacks on Iran. But fundamentally, the notion is, hey, look, Iran has a nuclear capacity. They've been developing over the years. Iran has insisted up and down from the very beginning that they have no intention of doing nuclear weapons, that this is a civilian program for nuclear energy, et cetera. Their religious leader has on a few occasions actually issued statements saying that the use of nuclear weapons is a horrible sin and should never be contemplated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But nevertheless, Western intelligence agencies, including both Israel and the U.S. And others, don't believe them.
|
Ed:
[1:08:18]
| The International Atomic Energy Association also says, They're lying.
|
Sam:
[1:08:23]
| Well, no. Well, the last time they were in there for sure, it wasn't that clear cut in terms of their, like wit. We'll get back to it. Let's finish up the scenario. I'll get back to that. But fundamentally, all of the Western intelligence agencies believe that that's just a cover. What they're trying to do is even if they don't build a bomb today, they want to make sure their capabilities are such that if they decided to build a bomb, they could do so in days. They want to have everything in place so that, you know, at a moment's notice, they could decide, you know, actually we do need a nuclear bomb and have it almost instantaneously before anybody could stop them. And the West's position on that is that's equivalent. Even if all you are actually doing with your nuclear program is civilian uses, if what you build out is such that you could switch it to a military use overnight, then we don't want you having that, Let alone if you actually build the nuclear devices.
|
Sam:
[1:09:34]
| And so, you know, there have been, you know, like I said, occasional Israeli attacks to take out one thing or another in Iran, or take out an individual scientist or two, attack a facility or two, going back decades. This attack is different it is much larger in scale they have taken out a significant portion of iraq's military leadership they have taken out and as individuals not just we're taking out a a facility no they were specifically targeting individuals in leadership they were specifically targeting most of the lead scientists that were involved in this effort, and they're taking out facilities. They're taking out nuclear facilities. They're also taking out other aspects of Iran's offensive capabilities. They're taking out air bases. They're destroying planes, all of this kind of stuff on a fairly massive scale.
|
Sam:
[1:10:40]
| And, you know, the stated intention being we want to completely remove the risk of them building out this nuclear program. Now, having said that, I've heard a number of military analysts and experts in what Iran actually has been doing here say that, well, one of their two big nuclear enrichment sites is buried deep, deep, deep within a mountain. And even if you destroyed all of the surface entrances and buried it and cut it off from external power, et cetera, that's just a delay until they dig it back out again. Because Israel is not doing anything, does not have, and I'm going to caveat this in a second, they do not have the type of massive bunker buster bombs that could potentially get to this underground facility. Now, when I heard someone say that, I said, well, except we all know, actually, Israel has nukes too. Now, there's no reports that they're using them, but at least in theory, they probably could break open that mountain if they wanted to.
|
Sam:
[1:11:58]
| But anyway, the massive attack from all reports so far, it's been very effective. The Iranians have, of course, responded. From all reports, their response has not been very effective. However, unlike the last time that Israel and Iran had a tit-for-tat last year sometime, I forget exactly when it was, but this time, a few did get through to Israel. There have been some actual hits on Tel Aviv. I believe it was like the Israeli army headquarters was hit. So, you know, now most of it has been stopped on the way, but there have been some hits back. And so, again, as we are speaking, it is continuing. The Israelis actually said explicitly they expect this to last several days.
|
Sam:
[1:12:47]
| And we'll see. You know, of course, what everybody worries about is what you said, Ed. Does it spiral out of control to something even bigger that involves more countries in the region? One thing that was potentially, you know, Iran had threatened before this happened that if Israel did attack like that, Iran would hold the U.S. to blame. So the U.S. has been very vocal in saying we had nothing to do with this. This was just the Israelis. Iran, you better not attack us because then we will get involved. The U.S., by all reports, was not involved in the offensive strikes against Iran. However, the U.S. has been involved in helping to take out incoming weapons heading towards Israel.
|
Sam:
[1:13:37]
| So we have been involved in that sense. A couple other interesting points on this, and then I'll throw it open to discussion again. There have been conflicting reports on exactly the U.S. stance on this. The initial sort of leak out of this was there was, first of all, the U.S. Did know in advance. The U.S. started moving to take non-essential personnel out of the region several days before this attack happened. They were evacuating families from embassies in the region. They were moving various military assets further away from Iran, etc. So the U.S. Had a heads up that it was happening. The initial reports out of this were that on Monday there was a phone call between Netanyahu and Donald Trump that was reportedly very contentious because Donald Trump, if you remember, is trying to renegotiate a new Iran deal on the nuclear weapons. Now, rewind a little bit. There was a deal in place that Obama had put in place that basically had, in exchange for some sanctions relief.
|
Sam:
[1:15:04]
| The Iranians agreed to limit their refinement of uranium, limit their nuclear program in a bunch of ways, let the inspectors back in, all this kind of stuff. And to your comment about inspectors before, the inspector reports were that Iran was living up to that deal. Now, the Netanyahu and a bunch of conservatives in the U.S., including Donald Trump, had a big problem with this deal because they read it as this deal allows Iran to build nuclear weapons. And the reason, as far as anyone can tell was because the deal had an end date.
|
Sam:
[1:15:45]
| The deal basically said, we have all these restrictions in place for 10 years, but there was no agreement past 10 years on what would happen. Now, of course, the Obama administration's stance on that was the intention was to build a trust during those 10 years and then continue negotiations on what things would look like after that. And potentially, no one would say this out loud, but if you could improve relationships enough during those 10 years, maybe you would even normalize relationships at some point. And, you know, I solved the nuclear issue as part of the way. There was also a lot of contention about how the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated was only about nuclear weapons and nuclear development. It did not include Iran.
|
Sam:
[1:16:39]
| There's a difference. It did not include Iran's other activities to be militarily involved in the region. So it did not involve their development of missiles. It did not involve their participation in the war in Yemen. It did not involve their participation with various groups in Lebanon and Syria and even Hamas, all of these things. And so when Donald Trump came in, one of the very first things he did was pull out of this agreement. And of course, Iran is like, okay, well, if you've reneged on the agreement, we do too. And that's when they resume development.
|
Sam:
[1:17:22]
| And so now Donald Trump got back into the presidency and he is apparently, they have now had five direct meetings between Americans and Iranians. I will give Donald Trump some credit. Like one of the things that he has no compulsions against doing that I think is actually the right approach as opposed to, you know, he's just talking directly to the Iranians. None of this like will work through intermediaries, whatever. No. There's a U.S. envoy talking to an Iranian envoy straight up. We're going to negotiate this, whatever. He did the same thing with with North Korea when he was president last time. This is something that Obama and Biden won't do. They'll they'll like work through intermediaries and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, in some cases, it's just like, you know, yes, just just get them in a room and start talking. We recognize that you may not like him, but at some point you need to talk to him and talking through intermediaries doesn't really help anything. Just talk to them. But anyway, there are five meetings that already happened. Apparently, as far as anybody has reported, what Donald Trump was trying to get out of them was essentially just going back to the agreement he'd ripped up last time he was president.
|
Sam:
[1:18:41]
| With maybe some small minor changes sprinkled around the edges so he could say that he was right to kill the Obama deal and this one's oh so much better but substantively it was about the same but the Iranians weren't budging on I think the sticking point I heard was they still wanted to do some of their uranium enrichment because they stick to the line They have a civilian program that they are legally allowed to do under the non-proliferation treaty that they signed with certain reporting requirements and etc. And they want to be able to do what they're supposed to be allowed to do under that treaty. And they were not budging on that. And so back to the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, Trump was apparently trying to get Netanyahu not to do this because he wanted to continue his negotiations with Iran because, you know, This guy wants a Nobel Peace Prize. You know, he'll solve Ukraine in one day. He'll solve Gaza in five days. He'll solve the Iranian issue. One of these things, he wants to get a Nobel Peace Prize out of. But anyway, he was telling Netanyahu, please don't do this right now. We are actively negotiating with Iran.
|
Sam:
[1:20:07]
| Give peace a chance. You know, we want to, we're going to try to make this do this. We're going to try to make this happen. We're going to get a deal.
|
Sam:
[1:20:16]
| And Netanyahu is like, no, absolutely not. Because Netanyahu never wanted a peace deal out of this. He never wanted some scenario where Iran is bound by some agreement that may or may not be enforced over the years. He hated the agreement Obama put together, even though by all objective reports, it was doing what it was supposed to be doing and keeping Iran from developing beyond a certain point. He was never happy with that. He does not want a deal now. He wants to just go in there and destroy as much as he possibly can. And there was reporting in the last 24 hours that the Israelis recognized they probably can't actually fully destroy the nuclear program in Iran, but they want to weaken it enough to delay it significantly. And they're making noises about hoping that this gives the Iranian people an opportunity to overthrow their government, blah, blah, blah. But, okay, let's get real here. The one way, better than any other, to bring people behind a leader who isn't necessarily that popular in the first place is an external attack.
|
Sam:
[1:21:39]
| You know, George W. Bush was not super popular in the first few months of his presidency. I mean, it was middling, okay, he wasn't like as unpopular as Donald Trump is, but he wasn't like a super popular president. Or, sorry, I want to, both him and, well, let's talk George W. first. Then we had 9-11.
|
Sam:
[1:22:03]
| His approval rating went up to like 90 fucking percent, you know, because the country had been attacked and everyone rallied around him. And the afterglow of that lasted for years, you know, and until he started killing it himself with the Iraq war. George H.W. Bush had a similar big bump during the first Iraq war where, you know, and that wasn't us being attacked, but we were at war and people rally around the leader. And so, you know, if there was any chance of Iran liberalizing over time, the quickest way to kill it is something like this. And even more literally, there was an Iranian leader who was one of the chief negotiators in the negotiation with Donald Trump's team, who had made some statements last week about how the Iranians wanted a deal, and they liked this process, and they thought we could get somewhere, and they were willing to put on restrictions in exchange for various things, and that these conversations were productive. And Donald Trump, on his social media, reposted the statement from this Iranian who was just killed by Iran yesterday.
|
Sam:
[1:23:27]
| You know, so one of the people who was actively involved in the negotiations with Donald Trump, actually apparently several of them were, Donald Trump also tweeted or tweeted, truthed, whatever social media he used, basically saying, yeah, but he basically said, look, you know, we were coming towards a deal, But unfortunately, most of the people we were talking to are dead now. But Iran can still make a deal if they want to. Let's talk. Meanwhile, the Iranians have officially said they were supposed to meet again on Sunday this weekend. The Iranians are like, yeah, no, that's not happening. You know, duh. And I got to believe, like, in addition to like actually destroying the things they're destroying and killing the people they're killing, that one of Israel's actual explicit goals, if you looked at their planning, was to kill these negotiations. They had no interest in these negotiations going anywhere.
|
Ed:
[1:24:28]
| My guess is that's exactly right.
|
Sam:
[1:24:31]
| Yeah. And finally, one last thing related to the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump. I mentioned that a lot of the initial reporting was that this was a very contentious meeting and Donald Trump was like, no, don't do it. And Netanyahu was, yeah, we're going to do it. And that basically Netanyahu explicitly defied Donald Trump's wishes in order to do that. There has been subsequent reporting that says, even though that is what the Trump administration is saying publicly, that privately, at the actual meeting, they did not express any objections whatsoever and, in fact, gave a green light to this.
|
Ed:
[1:25:17]
| Could be.
|
Sam:
[1:25:18]
| Could be. Like, can't trust anything any of these people say. Netanyahu and Trump are both liars and disingenuous in all kinds of different areas. So there's no reason to trust either of them until you have sort of reports from independent third parties. And I don't think we have that at all right now. We have sort of Israel saying one thing, Trump saying another. And the whole notion is that they made a private deal, but publicly agreed to say something different. And I think part of this was coming out because it was actually, the first narrative was looking bad for Donald Trump because it was basically like he tried to get Netanyahu to act in a certain way. and Netanyahu told him to go fuck himself. And that doesn't make Donald Trump look particularly good. So maybe this counter spin here now to try to reframe that in a way that says, oh, no, actually, this is once again just Donald Trump playing four-dimensional chess. So, I don't know. What do you think of all this, Ed? I know you're scared of escalation. Anything else?
|
Ed:
[1:26:29]
| I'm not sure how we prevent it from escalating you know, they flew through Jordan Air to get there they threw through Iraqi airspace to get there, We're helping Israel to shoot down missiles coming at them, which sounds to me like we're participating in some form.
|
Sam:
[1:26:56]
| Well, you know, the model is the last exchange. I mean, this is much bigger than the last exchange. But last time around this happened, and it wasn't that many months ago. I forget exactly how many again. I said last year before, but I don't even know. But it wasn't that long ago. You know, there was an Israeli attack on Iran. Iran attacked back. There was a tit-for-tat, went back and forth a couple times, and then it stopped. Because nobody wanted the further escalation. You know, so far, the Iranians haven't attacked U.S. Interests as part of this back and forth. and last time the americans and the jordanians and the british and a whole bunch of others were also involved in sort of shooting down the missiles coming from iran towards israel so if they are again it's no different than last time yeah uh the the difference is only is the scale And can Iran, like, stop in a way that allows them to save face and not actually destabilize the regime there? You know, I said everybody rallies around the flag when the country's attacked, but maybe if they look too weak, that changes. I don't know. And it also depends, like, it's not over yet. How far does this end up going before the Israelis do stop?
|
Ed:
[1:28:25]
| The Iranian government has not been real popular with their people.
|
Sam:
[1:28:29]
| No, and if you remember just a few years back, there was a major sort of youth uprising, and especially among women, but of youth in general, rebelling against sort of the morality codes and the morality police and such. And that got really big for a couple months and then got quashed. Violently squashed you know and so has been quiet for a while because people were jailed and people were killed and you know.
|
Sam:
[1:29:04]
| And you know repression works you know and so but we'll see but again it's not the kind of scenario where that kind of thing flourishes is when it's internal like what happened that last time that led to that All those demonstrations in the street was video of a prominent case where a woman was jailed and then died in jail after having been in public doing things the morality police disagreed with. And that was 100% internal. And I say that with the caveat that I am also 100% sure there were various foreign intelligence services egging it on because that happens no matter what. But it was basically a grassroots movement internally to Iran on an internal issue that, if it had been a little stronger, might have been able to overturn the government. It wasn't strong enough. Instead, it was repressed. But with this kind of thing, where you have an external attack on the country, that's the kind of thing where people rally around. That's not the kind of thing that tends to weaken movements or weaken the people in power.
|
Sam:
[1:30:30]
| Again, there's a tipping point where eventually sometimes governments fall in these kinds of situations.
|
Sam:
[1:30:37]
| It doesn't feel like we're there yet. Of course, hell, for all we know, by the end of the weekend, Israel will have decapitated the rest of the Iranian government.
|
Ed:
[1:30:46]
| That may be harder to do.
|
Sam:
[1:30:48]
| They killed quite a few generals, apparently, the head generals in the Revolutionary Guard, and they killed a bunch of scientists. But they did not, so far, go after the country's president, the country's religious leader, leaders in the cabinet, things like that. Maybe they will. But they sort of have been focusing on the military side, although, as always with these kinds of conflicts, there are reports of civilian deaths as well. Just because, you know, you go after the scientist living in his apartment building, you hit other people in the apartment too. That kind of thing. And if nothing else, Israel has shown in Gaza that they don't care one slight tiny bit about the civilian death toll that gets in the way of them killing the people they want to kill.
|
Ed:
[1:31:42]
| There have been very few wars in history in which there have been fewer civilian deaths than military deaths. The vast majority of the time, it's been highly skewed towards the civilians.
|
Sam:
[1:31:56]
| And even, especially when you add add-on effects, like not just killed directly by weapons, but killed by, you know, lack of food or medical care because infrastructure has been destroyed. and that kind of thing.
|
Ed:
[1:32:14]
| Starvation and disease, injury. If you break your leg and the system's working, your leg gets fixed. You break your leg and the system's not working, you die.
|
Sam:
[1:32:25]
| Right. And, you know, the 20th, well, the second half of the 20th century, let's start after World War II, because if you include World War I and World War II, the net for the 20th century is just as bad as any other century. But the second half of the 20th century was much better along those lines than most of history. Unfortunately, it seems like we're reverting to the mean here and getting back to how things used to be.
|
Ed:
[1:32:58]
| It was better because a large part of it was not only the Marshall Plan, but the idea behind the Marshall Plan. Is let's get rid of poverty in those countries that lost the war and the other countries. Let's rebuild and let's have people, you know, work together. And it worked.
|
Sam:
[1:33:16]
| Yeah. And I mean, the key to the Pax Americana or whatnot after World War II was exactly what people keep talking about as the... The liberal world order, or whatever they call it, the rules-based world order, was that you had a significant portion of the world, and we did have this sort of multipolar thing during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and now more with China as well. But you had a fundamental international agreement that we were all better off if we weren't at war and if we honored treaties and traded with each other and developed interdependencies. So, you know, hey, we we are so dependent on each other that any war would be disastrous for both of us. And and then and so you get like the longest period of peace in Europe that Europe has seen ever, basically.
|
Ed:
[1:34:28]
| Actually, majority of the world.
|
Sam:
[1:34:30]
| Or at least since the Roman days.
|
Ed:
[1:34:33]
| Yeah, there were small skirmishes going on over the place, but there was no major war. And the economy throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and even into the 80s, was really cooking along pretty well for the people on the bottom and the middle, much better than it had. And then gradually that began eroding. And, you know, we've kind of gotten away from that concept. But, gee, if we are all eating well, then we're all pretty happy, aren't we?
|
Sam:
[1:35:05]
| Right. Like, if you can get everything you need without going to war with anybody, then why would you get a war?
|
Ed:
[1:35:12]
| Yeah. Part of the part even of the economy is if you build a tank, it costs, say it costs you $10 million to build that tank. That tank does not produce any wealth. It doesn't. It doesn't make anything. All it does is tear up your roads if it drives down them and kills people and destroys wealth. If you build 10 semis, those 10 semis produce wealth and more than pay for their cost. So anything we put into munitions and warfare is lost to the economy ultimately. There's a little boom at the beginning because people are getting to work and we're spending money and doing all that. But then later on, you know, the factories are failing and everything's going to hell in a handbasket.
|
Sam:
[1:35:58]
| Well, yeah.
|
Ed:
[1:36:00]
| Wars don't produce wealth.
|
Sam:
[1:36:01]
| Well, and here's the thing. That whole post-war order, rules-based international order, is the thing that Donald Trump and his people fundamentally don't believe in. They think it was bad. Of course they don't.
|
Ed:
[1:36:18]
| Because they believe in an oligarchy in which, you know, he wants to be a king, and that concept doesn't support, it supports liberal democracies.
|
Sam:
[1:36:30]
| It does not support oligarchies. And it supports, like, the whole notion of, it's fundamentally built on the idea of cooperation. And that's just a completely alien concept to Mr. Trump. And so, yeah, he's hell bent on tearing down that order, regardless of the fact that that actually led to all kinds of improvements for the world in terms of, you know, reducing the, it doesn't solve everything. Certain people still got screwed. Certain people still benefited. But all in all, it was a net positive for the world over what had existed before.
|
Ed:
[1:37:16]
| And what exists now.
|
Sam:
[1:37:18]
| And it provided all kinds of protections that may not have avoided every negative option. Hell no. All kinds of bad things still happened every day. But it guarded against the worst options. And now he just wants to remove all those protections and, you know, to hell with it. Let's go. You know, if Russia wants to, like, take over Ukraine, so be it. It's in their sphere of interest. I'm sure the same thing would apply, like, you know, China wants to take back Taiwan, you know, or for that matter, U.S. Wants to take Greenland and Panama, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:38:01]
| You know it's it's all the same thing it's like you know if we want to why can't we and if we can then of course they can on the things they care about so uh yeah so we'll see i i think donald trump may actually be a little bit annoyed at this iran thing because like i said he wanted to make a deal he wanted to get his nobel peace prize but but in the end you know i think his general philosophy is going to be to wash his hands of it and be like, well, if they want to go at it, that's their business, not ours. And, you know, I mean, we are defending Israel right now because there's a significant portion of, you know, both parties in the U.S. Actually, who would be absolutely apoplectic if the U.S. didn't. But yeah, I could easily see him saying, you know, you guys want to have a little war? Have fun.
|
Ed:
[1:39:01]
| You know, that brings up an interesting... How is it that we have changed anti-Semitism, which is hatred of Jews, to being hatred of Israel's anti-Semitism? If I hate Italy, does that mean I'm anti-voke because he lives in Italy? For God's sake, no. You know, the Israeli government has not been a decent government for a long time now. That has nothing to do with the Jewish faith.
|
Sam:
[1:39:31]
| I mean, I certainly think that conservative Israelis have been intentionally muddying that line. And the Trump administration has been intentionally muddying that line as well. And going further than that, saying that being pro-Palestinian is automatically anti-Semitic, essentially. Even if you're just expressing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people. If you do that incorrectly, then you're clearly anti-Semitic. There was an interview I saw part of just earlier today with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah. I think Jon Stewart was on Trevor Noah's podcast or whatever. And they talked about a bunch of things. But the clip I saw was specifically about John Stewart and how he feels about, as a non-religious Jew in America, how he feels about the notion of Israel and how they are positioning all of this and how they are positioning the notion that not only that.
|
Sam:
[1:40:51]
| In order for a people to feel secure, they have to have an ethnically based homeland.
|
Sam:
[1:40:59]
| And how he thought that idea in and of itself was pernicious. And you can understand how Israel got there, especially in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II.
|
Sam:
[1:41:11]
| But, and a long history of being driven out of places that were their home, right? You can understand why a Zionist movement existed along those lines. But he talked about how he felt like the notion that this homeland had to exist in a certain way, and that's the only way that Jews could be safe, was harmful in and of itself because it required you to dehumanize other people like the palestinians um and i i i honestly i what we're seeing is a backlash against the movement away like nation states only developed a couple centuries ago you know before that century you know countries were a lot more fluid and a lot more based on like who was king and what areas could they control and very often controlled areas that were a patchwork of languages and cultures and stuff like that, the nation state as we know it today that's really a culturally homogenous and racially homogenous group that comes together as a country as well, is not that old as a notion of the norm of things being.
|
Sam:
[1:42:37]
| But I think a lot of what we're seeing now is a backlash to that starting to erode. The United States actually being the prime example in the world of a country that was not founded and based that way. It was not, we are a single culture, we are a single religion, we are a single ethnicity. Instead it was founded on a set of principles and ideas instead and and for most of its history was wide open welcoming of immigrants from all over the world and then we started shutting down immigration from china and then we started shutting down immigration from other places and then you know and of course there's a whole fraught history of the slave trade but you know in theory, we were based on ideas and welcomed all kinds of people. And there was the whole idea of the melting pot and all of this kind of stuff. And.
|
Sam:
[1:43:36]
| We also had a lot of other places in the country where, not the country, in the world, where migration was getting more active. And a lot of these things were being broken down. I mean, another big example is the UK. after you after britain started losing first gained their huge empire and then started losing it but had a policy of for many parts of the empire people could come to the homeland and come move to the uk and particularly lots of people from india and pakistan the the characteristic makeup of Britain is significantly different than it was 50 or 100 years ago because of immigration and from other places in the empire. And other places in Europe have seen the same thing. And Germany was letting in Syrian refugees and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And I think we're seeing a backlash to that where all over the world people are saying, you know, no, Hungary is for Hungarians. France is for French people. Italy is for Italians, you know, et cetera. And trying to get back to sort of these more ethnically pure memories of a long time ago.
|
Sam:
[1:44:59]
| And Trumpism and Millerism and the stuff in the U.S. Is an extension of that where, you know, like we said, he's longing for the 1890s, you know, in terms of how the country was made up. And, you know, even though his own family immigrated since the 1890s, to be clear, you know, but anyway.
|
Ed:
[1:45:23]
| His ancestry is not all that pure, is it?
|
Sam:
[1:45:27]
| Yeah, well, one of the things that the German chancellor did that was, you know, I think we mentioned on the show the whole thing about, you know, him pointing out that, no, the defeat of Germany was not seen as a sad day in Germany because it was when they were liberated from the Nazi dictatorship. But also, the German chancellor brought Donald Trump the original of his grandfather's birth certificate from Germany and presented it framed and, you know, all nice to him. But the subtext of that is, your family are immigrants too, Donald Trump.
|
Ed:
[1:46:10]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:46:11]
| And not that long ago.
|
Ed:
[1:46:13]
| An immigrant whorehouse owner, as I recall.
|
Sam:
[1:46:16]
| Yes. Yes. And draft dodger. He moved to the U.S. Because of the draft. Well, no, the second time. Well, yeah, he moved because of the draft. He did not want to be drafted into the German military. And I think this was pre-World War I, if I'm remembering my timelines correctly. But he didn't want to be drafted into the German military. So he came to the U.S. He tried to make his fortune in the California gold rush or some such, or the Alaskan gold. I forget. You can look him up on it. Anyway, it was Alaska. He was trying to make his money from gold. He failed at that. So instead he opened the whorehouse and he got rich doing that. And that was the beginning of the Donald Trump fortune.
|
Ed:
[1:47:10]
| Very few of the gold miners got rich. It was guys who ran the grocery stores and the whorehouses that got rich.
|
Sam:
[1:47:16]
| Yes. Yes. And the traders who would buy the gold from the miners and then sell them to other people. And, you know, yes. As usual, the people on the ground aren't usually the ones who make the money in the end.
|
Ed:
[1:47:31]
| Well, we're getting off topic.
|
Sam:
[1:47:33]
| Anyway, anyway. And then he tried to go back to Germany and the Germans wouldn't let him back in because he was a draft dodger and sent him back to the U.S. Anyway, we were talking about Iran, weren't we? How did we get to that?
|
Ed:
[1:47:46]
| I don't know. I think we're about done.
|
Sam:
[1:47:49]
| Yeah, I agree. Let's wrap it up. Okay. Thanks for joining us at Curmudgeons Corner once again. You can go to Curmudgeons-Corner.com to find all the stuff, all the ways to talk to us, our archive of shows, transcripts of recent shows, all of that fun stuff. You can also go to our Patreon to give us money at various levels. You can get a, us mentioning on your, it is getting towards the end of the show. You can tell because I start flubbing my lines even more than usual. You can get us mentioning you on the show. You can get us ringing the bell. You can get a postcard. You can get a mug like, like Ed has in front of him at this very moment. Well, not like that one. That's a special one-off just for Ed, but you can get our regular curmudgeons corner mugs. And, and yeah, what else? Oh, yes. At $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, you can be invited to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, where Yvonne, Ed, myself, and various other people are throughout the week chatting, sharing links, all kinds of stuff. So, Ed, do you have something from the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack that you would like to highlight, or should I pick something?
|
Ed:
[1:49:08]
| I figured you're going to ask that, so I went back and reviewed, and we had a fascinating discussion from one of the members who had received an advertisement for a prepaid cremation.
|
Sam:
[1:49:23]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[1:49:23]
| And we all discussed the advantages, and I pointed out that I'm anticipating being cremated because I think it'll prepare me for the afterlife if there is one. And another one of the members proposed that composting is the best way to go but composting is expensive and it's not available everywhere so my wife and i are going to probably go we're going to end up in the there's a veteran cemetery at washington's crossing where washington crossed the delaware and i'm very familiar.
|
Sam:
[1:49:57]
| With the place i used to live.
|
Ed:
[1:49:58]
| We'll end up in there in the in some ashes from us okay i was anyway nice.
|
Sam:
[1:50:05]
| But i'm not sure that.
|
Ed:
[1:50:06]
| It's nice.
|
Sam:
[1:50:07]
| Per se i would rather see you in this form than that but you.
|
Ed:
[1:50:12]
| Know hey what the hell but.
|
Sam:
[1:50:14]
| Under the circumstances when you think of the various things to to do yeah i mean i i don't know i i'm one like, I've thought for the most part, like, I'm not going to be there. So whatever works for my family, you know, that's exactly right.
|
Ed:
[1:50:32]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:50:33]
| And like, I, yeah, I don't have too strong opinions. I guess I feel like it would be nice to have some sort of physical place where family could go to remember you. But then I also think, well, realistically, you know, people don't actually visit those spots all that often. they can remember me from anywhere.
|
Sam:
[1:50:57]
| My mother's family has a plot in Vermont that's up on a hill. It's a cemetery up in a hill outside of a very, very small town that has a great view and has generations of people there. My mother has indicated that's where she wants her ashes when she goes eventually, hopefully not anytime soon. She's doing really well, by the way, for anyone who cares. She hasn't cleared to drive yet, but everything else seems fine at this point. They're waiting for the numbers representing the pressure in her skull or the amount of fluid in her skull to get down below a certain level. It's way down from where it was, but not at whatever level their goal is. So they're just watching it for another month. Anyway, she wants to be there. And I've thought a few times, you know, I like that place too. I've visited it a couple of times. It's very nice, very calm, nice view, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn't mind being there too. But then I also think my family lives in Seattle. You know, why would I put that in Vermont?
|
Sam:
[1:52:02]
| Like they would never ever go, you know? But, you know, I don't know. But for the most part, I think the answer is whatever works for my family. You know, I won't be there. You know, you guys decide what works for you. And, you know, there are people who do all kinds of weird things like, you know, have the ashes baked into some sort of object they keep with them, you know, do, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:52:29]
| All kinds of stuff that I've seen people consider or do. That seems a little over the top to me. I mean, what was it? Jeremy Bentham, the famous philosopher who just had himself stuffed and you can still visit him in a cabinet at the University of Oxford or something.
|
Ed:
[1:52:47]
| Oxford and Cambridge is one of those.
|
Sam:
[1:52:49]
| Was it Bentham? Now I have to check. Jeremy. Of course, I can't spell it. Jeremy Bentham Body. Oh, yes it is. There's pictures of him. Let's see. It's at, Okay, here we go. I have to read this summary. Yes, if you just Google Jeremy Bentham's body, you will immediately find pictures of him. He is on display at the Student Center at UCL, which is what, University of Central London, something like that? I have to check that too. University College of League? University College London. University College London. And he is stuffed and on display in a glass case in the student center at University College London.
|
Ed:
[1:53:49]
| I would never do that to my future generations.
|
Sam:
[1:53:54]
| This was his specific request that this is what would be done with him. And they have honored him. And you can go visit him to this day.
|
Ed:
[1:54:02]
| Well, our intent has been to make things as easy as possible for the kids. So we've actually prepaid everything with the locals' mortuary here. So all they need to do is call them, they come pick up the body, burn it, and then they can take it on up to Washington Crossing, which is only about 25, 30 miles from here.
|
Sam:
[1:54:24]
| So a quick additional note on Jeremy Bentham. They note that what is in display is his stuffed body, but a wax head of him. And the reason is, here's a section, I'm on Londonist.com. What about his head? While the skeletal remains and wax head of Bentham remain in the student center, his actual head remains out of public view elsewhere at UCL. The head was once stolen in a prank by students from the rival King's College and has ever since been kept under lock and key. And they do also have a picture of the head along with the picture of his body on display.
|
Ed:
[1:55:12]
| So, Jesus, we say in his public forum, don't do that to me, please.
|
Sam:
[1:55:19]
| Yes. For all members of Ed's family who are listening, he does not want to be on public display in stuffed form. Okay. Well, I guess that clearly indicates the end of the show. So thank you once again for joining us, Ed. It's always fun to have you.
|
Ed:
[1:55:39]
| And it's always fun to be here. I always enjoy it.
|
Sam:
[1:55:42]
| Okay, so everybody, we expect to have Yvonne back next week. Ed and I, I think, are both going to try to go to one of these rallies. If I succeed in going, which in part depends on how the rest of my day goes, then I will report on it next week on the show. Yvonne should be back, hopefully. Or he was only here because our schedules didn't align. So hopefully there won't be any problem next week. And so we'll have a normal show next week. and so everybody stay safe have fun all of that stuff i usually say yeah goodbye all right goodbye, Wait, Tang, up until I tell you.
|
Ed:
[1:56:45]
| I've got about 2% more of the battery left.
|
Sam:
[1:56:49]
| Okay, let's get this done then.
|
Ed:
[1:56:53]
| I assume that's your son behind you.
|
Sam:
[1:56:56]
| Yes, yes, that is.
|
Ed:
[1:56:58]
| Hello, Alex.
|
Sam:
[1:56:59]
| He can't hear you, but Ed says hello, Alex, because you're on my headphones. But, okay, I'm hitting stop, Ed, wait until it says 100% uploaded before you actually hang up or close out or whatever. Okay, here we go. Hitting stop.
| |
|
