Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Greetings.
|
Ivan:
[0:01]
| Salutations. Salutations.
|
Sam:
[0:06]
| Ah, that's better. You sound more fulsome. More.
|
Ivan:
[0:09]
| Fulsome.
|
Sam:
[0:10]
| Fulsome.
|
Ivan:
[0:12]
| Oh, okay. Fulsome. Yeah, I like that.
|
Sam:
[0:14]
| That's probably not actually the word I admit, but, you know, good enough.
|
Ivan:
[0:17]
| I like that word, though. Fulsome.
|
Sam:
[0:19]
| Fulsome. Fulsome.
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Ivan:
[0:21]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fulsome.
|
Sam:
[0:23]
| Okay. Shall I just play the music? You know, people can't hear you when you nod.
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Ivan:
[0:30]
| Well, but you know what I mean.
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Sam:
[0:35]
| I guess I do. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, June 27th, 2026. It's just after 17 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bo is here. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:13]
| Hello.
|
Sam:
[1:14]
| So I guess we're going to do our usual less newsy stuff at the beginning and then more newsy stuff as we go on. You got anything interesting to highlight this week, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:27]
| Do I have anything interesting?
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Sam:
[1:30]
| Any non-news, or at least non-serious newsy. Sometimes this is personal stuff. Sometimes it's, you know, I do my movies. But, you know, it could be whatever. It could just be like, you know, tell a funny joke. Do some stand-up, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:46]
| No. I'm not going to do stand-up, but I will comment on one thing. I, this week on my business trip, the main objective that I had was to meet the new CEO of the Puerto Rico's power utility. Okay. Now, why is this a big thing? Well, look, if any of you, any of you that followed the news, you know, about, you know, what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, which is almost coming up on 10 years. The biggest issue that happened, one of the things that caused so many deaths, and still to this day causes a lot of angst against the people of Puerto Rico, is the power. The electric grid situation.
|
Sam:
[2:36]
| Because it basically just never recovered after that hurricane a number of years back?
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Ivan:
[2:41]
| It's never fully recovered. Well, okay. It was in really bad shape before the hurricane. It deteriorated substantially in the previous, I would say, to be, you know, to put the context of the time frame involved here. In the previous 15 years, it had been in serious deterioration, okay, where almost any maintenance, preventive maintenance was being deferred, not done. Putting the grid in a really precarious situation.
|
Sam:
[3:22]
| Presumably due to cost.
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Ivan:
[3:24]
| Because of cost. Well, the reason, it was because of cost, because what kept happening in Puerto Rico, which is a big problem for a utility, which is one of the issues that I find with all these people that are for, like, we want to reduce the population of the U.S. Let's block all these people coming in. Like, this is a good thing. It's a terrible thing. Almost any society that deals with population decline deals with issues that are far, far, far worse than dealing with more people. Okay? Because when you have a declining population, an electric utility is, for the most part, a fixed cost system. So what keeps happening is that you have to charge everyone behind more and more and more for the electric. Okay? When there are less people to divide up amongst the fixed costs. Okay? And so...
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Sam:
[4:23]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[4:24]
| Well, yeah. You've got three million, four million people. You're dividing up the fixed costs. You have to now divide it to $3 million.
|
Sam:
[4:32]
| It makes perfect sense when the fundamental infrastructure is indeed fixed, as you said.
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Ivan:
[4:40]
| Yeah, and that's the reality of utilities.
|
Sam:
[4:43]
| Well, that's the reality of current utilities. I've read some stuff about how, in some developing parts of the world, they're basically standing up, you know, stand, standalone solar at local levels that could be much more adaptable.
|
Ivan:
[5:00]
| But, you know, that's, well, that's something that's happening in Puerto Rico. Let me tell you something. Solar adoption in Puerto Rico is in mass like right now, which also exacerbates the issues. But the reality is that when you still depend on a electric grid, Because, you know, the electric grid powers everything. Hospitals, power, the airports, transportation, traffic lights. Look, you know, you need a grid even if you have a lot of independent power, okay? Not everything can be, you know, it's complicated, especially, well, in a developed country where that's just the way the system was developed.
|
Sam:
[5:44]
| Well, yeah, there's a lot of inertia of how it is now, but as technology is developing, you certainly could see a world.
|
Ivan:
[5:52]
| You could build it now where you decentralize the power and storage and stuff, but that's not the way it was. It was set up in a different way.
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Sam:
[6:00]
| And that's why a lot of these technologies are taking off faster in places where they're building from zero right now.
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Ivan:
[6:08]
| Right, of course. but you know because you wouldn't build it's like i having a discussion you know with somebody look if i was to build a you know start up a new company i mean they would have nothing, basically no systems that are that are on local servers like i wouldn't build a day if i was starting a new company i'm not building a fucking data center now that used to be something that if you were going to build a you know you have a very large company you're standing up one of the first things you have to plan was for a data center, right now you don't have to do that you're gonna you're gonna get everything as a service. You're not going to fucking like set up, you know, a data center. So it's the same thing as a utility. If you're going to start a new power grid somewhere, hey, we're going to populate this new island that has no power. Okay. You're not going to do it this way. Okay.
|
Sam:
[6:55]
| No.
|
Ivan:
[6:56]
| But the reality is that so much of everything that exists is dependent on that system and, And the new CEO is somebody that when the hurricane struck, she's originally from Puerto Rico, which is a change that wasn't the case before. She was a Coast Guard Reserve. She was part of the Coast Guard Reserve. She had actually had been active Coast Guard, went into the reserve, and right afterwards was reactivated because of the hurricane. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[7:26]
| Like, very soon thereafter. And she's an engineer by training and she has worked in the utility industry, you know, anything related to utilities for many, many years. She led the, actually her last job before this one was to be the head of the LA Public Department of Water and Power. Okay. And so she was talking that when they arrived, when they rebuilt the system right after the hurricane, because the situation was so dire, and because the grid got destroyed way worse than any other storm that we had had. You know, and we had had some major storms in the past. But look, I remember, like, when I went to school at Carnegie Mellon, right after I started at school, like, weeks, Hurricane Hugo struck Puerto Rico. And Hugo was a very powerful storm that also hit the United States. And it hit the United States very hard as well. I think it was South Carolina.
|
Ivan:
[8:22]
| It hit the Carolinas, if I remember correctly. And it was a devastating storm. But I went back for Thanksgiving, and basically everything was back up and running. Less than 90 days after. Okay? And that's because the grid was in really good shape. Okay? So it didn't really take that long to bring everything back. With Maria, when they got there, the grid was in bad shape. So much of it got destroyed. She was explaining to me that she was working with the power brigades setting up stuff. And basically, look, they had to put it together with whatever the fuck they had at hand. This was not a rebuild that you would build to spec. They were trying to build. We're trying to get people that have been months and months and months without power. We need to get them power now. They can't sustain like this, okay? So it was rebuilt in a way that wasn't exactly the best. A lot of reasons, listen, afterwards, FEMA and.
|
Ivan:
[9:25]
| The House and the Senate approved funding for rebuild, but Trump blocked a lot of that money from being distributed, okay? And it didn't really start getting unblocked until the Biden administration. But even at that, they had set up a process that was so different and so complicated that to today, that money still, most of it has not been spent to rebuild the grid. So the grid is really still in that, you know, a lot of it in just the shape of, we just put it together, you know, basically like with duct tape and saliva after a storm. And it's still like that in many places. But look, she, by the way, the one thing that impressed me is that I will say that after I've met with many executives in the past, she's one of the most, she's one of the smartest top executives that I feel I've met in person.
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Sam:
[10:28]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[10:30]
| Which gave me a lot of hope. And I didn't realize how personal it is, this thing is to me. I wasn't thinking about that before I went to this meeting. And then, of course, I start talking about it and I wound up and I was there with our senior VP or whatever. I did something hasn't happened to me in a meeting because I was trying to explain how important it is for me to succeed. I couldn't stop. I could not stop myself from crying. Talking about it. Because I, you know, to me, if she succeeds in doing what she is set to do, the lives of the people of Puerto Rico will be substantially improved. Okay it substantially improved and so you know.
|
Ivan:
[11:18]
| I i i i i was really she gave me a lot of hope that this will finally happen, and so i really you know want to talk about how i i think that, that this this this person really seems to be prepared and she said she's on a she's on a mission to make this happen somehow. Okay? That this is personal to her too. Okay? Because when she came in with the Coast Guard, she had come in and she couldn't talk to her family. Her parents still lived in Puerto Rico. And all of a sudden, she wound up with a brigade. She wound up showing up at their door and they were like, how the hell are you here? Oh, Coast Guard! I'm here on a military plane! Basically, that's how she showed up. So, yeah, so that was a different thing. I, you know, my boss was like later saying, well, damn it, I've never had a salesperson like crying. Meeting? That's a first? Well, I'm sorry, okay? So that was not a sales tactic, okay? Did that work? It just happens to be that... Well, I don't know. We're just meeting, and we're just talking like right now.
|
Sam:
[12:40]
| Did it work? Just to be clear, the crying was about the emotional situation of the situation in Puerto Rico, not, please slide, please make this deal.
|
Ivan:
[12:51]
| Yeah, that was not, no. I was talking specifically about trying to explain why it's very personal to me that it's important for her to succeed. Because, you know, I've talked about this. It was so difficult to evacuate my family out of there after the hurricane. We had to get a damn private jet and load them up because my brother's in-laws were dialysis patients that couldn't get dialysis. They were going to die if we didn't get them out. Right not not not you know this wasn't like for you know this was this was very serious for us my grandmother was also needed uh medical care, and you know we had to evacuate them all that way and the reality is that, you know that's still very shocking to me because yes i could help some people and we did help a lot of people but a lot of people still died but anyway but, but yeah but My thing is, not to bring it down, but, I think the whole point is that they have hired a person that seems, well-prepared for the job and that I am very optimistic. And that usually my business meetings are not this way, where it's something that is that personal.
|
Sam:
[14:00]
| Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, good?
|
Ivan:
[14:05]
| Yeah. No, it's good. It's good.
|
Sam:
[14:06]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[14:07]
| This is good. So.
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Sam:
[14:10]
| Shall I jump straight to a movie?
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Ivan:
[14:12]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[14:13]
| Okay. First up, from 1951, Superman and the Mole Man.
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Ivan:
[14:22]
| Superman and the Mole Man?
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Sam:
[14:26]
| The Mole Men. The Mole Men.
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Ivan:
[14:30]
| Okay. What year is this from?
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Sam:
[14:32]
| Oh, I said that first. You're just not paying attention to me at all. 1951.
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Ivan:
[14:39]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[14:41]
| So it is the first feature film based on any DC Comics character.
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Ivan:
[14:48]
| I'm going to guess that this is very different from the Richard Pryor Superman 3.
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Sam:
[14:53]
| From the Richard Pryor. Yes, yes it is.
|
Ivan:
[14:56]
| You know, I just saw a story that I shared about this on the Slack. That Richard Pryor apparently got approached about being in Superman 3. And he said, are you guys nuts? This is, I'm a comedian. What the hell am I going to do being in Superman? I'm going to make this terrible. No, I'm not taking this. And then they came back and raised the offer. No, no, no. Then they raised the offer again. Then they raised the offer again. Then he showed it to, I can't remember who the heck it was. And I'm like, listen, you're taking this stupid offer. It doesn't matter. Okay. All right. Just, just, no, no, you can't. You're not saying no to that about a buddy. After he said no, they just kept offering more money until he was like, okay, fine. Fuck it. I'll do Superman three.
|
Sam:
[15:42]
| Yes. Yes. Anyway, this was the first occurrence of George Reeves playing Superman, who later played the role in a TV series, Adventures of Superman. And so... Yeah, okay, the plot summary from Wikipedia. Clark Kent and Lois Lane arrive in the small town of Silsby to report on the world's deepest oil well. That night, two dwarfish, furry humanoids emerge through the shaft and scare the elderly night watchman to death.
|
Sam:
[16:19]
| Lois and Clark arrive at the oil well and find the dead watchman. Clark and the foreman explore the surrounding area for signs of foul play, but then Lois glimpses one of the creatures. The medical examiner is summoned and he later leaves with Lois. Clark stays behind to confront the foreman, who confesses that the well was closed out of fear they had struck radium and not oil. I'm going to read one more paragraph. The two mole men explore the town, but the residents become frightened of them and their luminous torch. Local Luke Benson assembles an angry mob to kill the creatures, one of whom falls from the dam after being shot. Clark resumes his alien alter ego of Superman and rescues the creature mid-fall. While Superman takes it to the hospital, the second creature returns to the wellhead and disappears down its shaft. A doctor announces that the injured creature will die unless it has surgery to remove the bullet. When a frightened nurse refuses to assist, Clark volunteers. Benson's mob arrives at the hospital demanding to be given the creature. Superman stands guard outside the hospital and single-handedly disarms the mob. Dot, dot, dot. It continues. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[17:42]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[17:43]
| So, and it was only, it was only 58 minutes long. So, I mean.
|
Ivan:
[17:48]
| 58 minutes?
|
Sam:
[17:49]
| It qualifies as a feature film.
|
Ivan:
[17:51]
| Does it qualify as a movie?
|
Sam:
[17:53]
| I thought you had to be over an hour, but, you know, apparently it counts.
|
Ivan:
[17:57]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[17:59]
| But, anyway, it was, apparently.
|
Ivan:
[18:02]
| Yeah, Sam.
|
Sam:
[18:04]
| This was one of these things where, like, they actually then used.
|
Ivan:
[18:08]
| Wait, who played Superman?
|
Sam:
[18:11]
| I also said this already. This was the first.
|
Ivan:
[18:14]
| No, I forgot.
|
Sam:
[18:15]
| I know. Sorry. Your memory is going. No, no, no.
|
Ivan:
[18:18]
| I heard.
|
Sam:
[18:18]
| Yeah, well.
|
Ivan:
[18:19]
| Look, look, I'm terrible with names and people. Look, look. I'm good with facts.
|
Sam:
[18:24]
| The Alzheimer's is advancing.
|
Ivan:
[18:25]
| No, no, no. Listen, I'm always terrible with names. I was at that meeting where they presented these people three different times and I kept forgetting their fucking names. So, no, that's not. That's just me.
|
Sam:
[18:33]
| You and I, for any long-time listeners of the show, they know we often refer to people by their role, you know?
|
Ivan:
[18:42]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[18:43]
| Oh, the president of Guam. Exactly. Guam doesn't have a president, but, you know, whatever.
|
Ivan:
[18:48]
| Now we're just talking. The president? You know who the president of Guam is?
|
Sam:
[18:55]
| Oh, it's Donald Trump.
|
Ivan:
[18:57]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[18:58]
| Yes, okay. But Guam does have a president. but yeah you wouldn't usually refer to it that way just like you wouldn't say the president of florida is donald trump either but you know but but it is, but it is sort of yeah anyway, uh no it's it's george reeves yeah and and george reeves george.
|
Ivan:
[19:22]
| Reeves yes is he is he like Like, of course, Christopher Reeve is with Noah West at the end, so they're not related.
|
Sam:
[19:32]
| They are not related.
|
Ivan:
[19:34]
| No. Okay, that would be weird.
|
Sam:
[19:37]
| Yes. Anyway, apparently the movie went on to become the first two episodes of the TV show as well. So it's sort of like... He's sort of a pilot for the TV show done as a movie. And it was a 1951 superhero movie slash TV show slash no budgets, marginal effects. And it was not impressive at all. No. No? Now, to be clear, it was not painful, so I'm not giving it a full thumbs down, but definitely less than a thumb sideways.
|
Ivan:
[20:22]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[20:24]
| Unless you are trying to be a Superman completist, and we are watching this because we are going through all of the DC universe media, and this was the first thing. But unless you do that, no. I mean, I guess if you are a fan of that era of sort of, you know, serials, stupid superhero stuff, like Flash Gordon and, you know, monster movies and all that. Maybe it's not within that universe. It's not the worst thing you could watch, but you know, it's not, I mean, it's, it's kind of dumb. The, the, the plot just sort of, it's like, what, why this is stupid, but okay, fine. I, you know, but, It was a thing.
|
Ivan:
[21:30]
| It was a thing.
|
Sam:
[21:31]
| It was a thing. And so, yeah, I mean, our loyal listener, Pete, who has talked to us about Superman in the past and has given his sort of one sentence review of Supergirl on our chat and says it's good, you know, might have some things to say about Superman and the Mole Man. I don't know. And it's just, you know, it's very much of its era, you know, and of its era of, you know, sort of the campy low budget stuff, too. Not like of its era of the top of the line stuff that was produced by Hollywood.
|
Ivan:
[22:14]
| Right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[22:15]
| You know, so anyway, that's all I have on that. I'm sure you're going to run out and watch it any moment now because of my glowing review.
|
Ivan:
[22:23]
| Let me start running right now. Now I got my running gear. I can go out and run and watch it.
|
Sam:
[22:28]
| And you'll dress up in a Superman costume to do so?
|
Ivan:
[22:31]
| Sure.
|
Sam:
[22:33]
| And not only that, you'll do a 1950s era Superman costume.
|
Ivan:
[22:37]
| Uh-huh.
|
Sam:
[22:38]
| You know? So, there you go. Okay, next up, I'll do my second one. And it's the opposite end of the spectrum. We're on the AFI list again for the top movies going through the 1998 list. And we're up to number two. Which is Casablanca from 1942. Okay. And I'll say up front, I think this one deserves its slot near the top.
|
Ivan:
[23:06]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[23:07]
| You know, and in fact, I might even put it above number one on this list, which is Citizen Kane. Okay. They actually dropped it to number three in 2007. Yeah. You know, they flipped, you know, The Godfather and Casablanca. Godfather was number three. Casablanca was number two. And then they flipped those. So Godfather is number two. Casablanca is number three in the 2007 list. But Casablanca is really good. Have you seen Casablanca?
|
Ivan:
[23:38]
| I think so, but it's been a long time. And actually, you're motivating me to want to watch it again.
|
Sam:
[23:44]
| Not Superman and the Mole Man, but yes, Casablanca. Yeah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[23:47]
| Yeah. Yes, Cousin one.
|
Sam:
[23:50]
| You know, and I will, and this is, it's 1942. And, you know, we talk about some movies that hold up and some movies that don't. This one holds up. I mean, it's definitely got some of the stylized, like a 1930s slash 1940s movie. It's not like intended to be 100% realistic, whatever. Some things are a little bit over the top. But it's really good anyway.
|
Ivan:
[24:19]
| You know one of the things about it that i remember because i was looking at the plot is because of my i should i read the first two paragraphs.
|
Sam:
[24:28]
| Of the plot first.
|
Ivan:
[24:30]
| No before you know before you get there no no no you you just to mention that i i uh i've always i've been a somebody that studied a lot though you know, the inner war period and world war ii Like I've read like book, I mean, Jesus Christ, I read a thousand page book just on the fall of Berlin, for God's sakes, not that long ago. So, yeah, it's my kind of stuff. I mean, I took a course, one course that I took at CMU specifically, had nothing to do with my major, but I saw it on the catalog, was the Collapse and Renewal of Europe, which was a great class. Okay. Learned a lot in that class. so yeah so this is I mean I know it's not obviously this isn't a historical movie but the setting itself is always is always intriguing to me movies like, Raiders of the Lost Ark are these that are set with, you know, those themes, you know, around the war period. I always, you know, find them interesting.
|
Sam:
[25:29]
| Yeah, no, definitely. It is an interesting era. And there are a lot of, you know, I think the one, the Casablanca is one example of this. But I think there's a lot of room for interesting stories that are sort of on the periphery. Sure. So not necessarily, hey, we're right in the middle of the big battles in Central Europe, or here's the story of Hitler, or whatever. But just regular people existing in wartime in the parts of the world that were not necessarily directly in combat, but were still highly affected by what was going on. And Casablanca is an example of that. So starting out the description, in December 1941, American expatriate Rick Blaine owns a nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca, then in French Morocco.
|
Sam:
[26:35]
| Rick's Café American attracts a varied clientele, including Vichy French and German officials, refugees desperate to reach the still neutral United States and those who prey on them. Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, he ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935 and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
|
Sam:
[26:59]
| Petty crook Ugarte boasts to Rick of letters of transit obtained by murdering two German couriers. The papers allow the bearers to travel freely around German-occupied Europe and to neutral Portugal. Ugarte plans to sell them at the club and persuades Rick to hold them for him. However, Ugarte is arrested by the local police under Captain Louis Renal, the unabashedly corrupt prefect of police. Ugarte is killed while in custody without revealing that Rick has the letters. One more paragraph. Then the reason for Rick's cynical nature. Former lover Isla Lund enters his establishment. Spotting Sam, Rick's friend and house pianist, Isla asks him to play as time goes by. Rick storms over, furious that Sam disobeyed his order to never perform that song again, and is stunned to see Isla. I'm messing up the name every time I say it. She is accompanied by her husband, Victor Laszlo, a renowned fugitive Czechoslovak resistance leader. A flashback reveals Isla left Rick without explanation when the couple were planning to flee as the German army neared Paris in 1940, embittering Rick. Laszlo and Isla need the letters to escape.
|
Ivan:
[28:16]
| You don't warn about the spoilers. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[28:18]
| Well, I'm only reading the beginning stuff. I'm not warning how it ends. Embittering Rick, Laszlo and— Okay.
|
Ivan:
[28:27]
| I don't think we need to warn people about spoilers, a movie from, 1942.
|
Sam:
[28:31]
| You know, there are people who have not seen it.
|
Ivan:
[28:33]
| No, I know they haven't, but look, I'm sorry. You know, if I'm talking about Toy Story 5 or Supergirl, I get it that you don't want to give spoilers. But listen, people, the movie was out in 1942. Okay? You know what?
|
Sam:
[28:44]
| You've had time? Tough shit.
|
Ivan:
[28:46]
| Yeah, a bit.
|
Sam:
[28:49]
| What if you are listening to this and you're only 12 and you just haven't had a chance yet?
|
Ivan:
[28:56]
| Fair. What if you're listening to this in like 100 years from now for some reason? It's still reported out there. You're listening to this and they're like, what the fuck? Wait, Casablanca? What the fuck?
|
Sam:
[29:07]
| Anyway, Laszlo and Isla need the letters to escape while German Major Strasser arrives in Casablanca to prevent that. And then it continues. So it's got this, like, love triangle thing going on with Rick, the woman. See, there you go. I'm forgetting the names already, and I can't pronounce the name, so I just say it's a woman. Is it? Ilsa? Ilsa.
|
Ivan:
[29:31]
| I-L-S-A.
|
Sam:
[29:32]
| Yeah, you're right.
|
Ivan:
[29:34]
| Ilsa.
|
Sam:
[29:34]
| For some reason, I was reading it as two I's, even though they were both capital.
|
Ivan:
[29:37]
| I think because I talked about Puerto Rico, it starts saying Isla, which is like, you know, island in Spanish, but, you know.
|
Sam:
[29:42]
| Yes. Yes. That's why. I'm sure that is why I am messing up the name. Thanks for the explanation. Anyway...
|
Sam:
[29:54]
| Anyway, it's got that, like, love triangle thing going on. It's also got all the war stuff going on in the background. And as I said, it's not, like, directly in the war. It's not like a war movie. It's not like soldiers in battles. But it's surrounding that. And it's just very well done. And it's emotional. And even though, you know, you do get sort of that.
|
Sam:
[30:18]
| The style of acting from the 1940s, you know, by the time you get to the end, You are incredibly emotionally invested in these characters and what happens to them. And it packs a punch. And also, I just have to say, the song, As Time Goes By, it's not just played that once. It's a recurring theme throughout the movie. And you, you know, the song also gets emotional the more you hear it and the more it, you know, because it ends up resonating with what's happening to the characters and all that kind of stuff. Good movie deserves, you know, I would have a hard time ranking like all movies that I've ever seen, but, you know, this definitely gets big thumbs up. It deserves to be near the top And it's held up for what, you know, 80 plus years at this point? No, almost 80, right? I can't do math. You know, wait, what are you? 2026 minus 1942. 84 years. There you go. 84 years. So thumbs up.
|
Ivan:
[31:33]
| 84 years.
|
Sam:
[31:34]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[31:35]
| All right. So now I'm going to want to watch this. I'm sure it's got to be at Apple.
|
Sam:
[31:43]
| Oh, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. Let me see. I will check on Just Watch right now. For where it is currently available, because these things do change periodically.
|
Ivan:
[31:53]
| I'll make sure I get the colorized version, because, you know, I don't want that black and white shit.
|
Sam:
[31:57]
| Oh, no. That's bullshit. It needs to be black and white. Okay. So, it is available on HBO Max to stream. It is available on YouTube TV to stream. Although, I will say, I had a bad experience with YouTube TV streaming a movie. I very rarely watch movies on YouTube TV. But last night, I'll tell you what it was. We started Silence of the Lambs. And I used Just Watch, and it was like, oh, it's on YouTube TV for streaming. I have YouTube TV. I'll try that. We started streaming it. And a few minutes in, realized it was a censored version. They blanked out the swear words.
|
Ivan:
[32:44]
| Fuck.
|
Sam:
[32:45]
| And I'm like, yeah, exactly. I'm like, fuck that. And so we went and bought it on Apple TV so we could have the real version that was not censored. There should be a freaking warning on these things. Like, things I don't want when I'm looking for a movie. I don't want them. I don't want a censored version in any way, shape, or form. I almost always want the original language with subtitles, if it's not in English, rather than a dubbed version. And I don't want them screwing with the aspect ratio either. Like, you know, like, services have gotten better about this. And also, by the way, filmmakers at this point are not making one version of the movie. When they make the movie to begin with, they are cutting versions of it in several different aspect ratios for different kinds of theaters and for a 16 by 9 version for television. And so the whole original aspect ratio only conversation is harder because almost everything that comes out now—.
|
Ivan:
[33:53]
| You can choose your aspect ratio now.
|
Sam:
[33:56]
| Well, most services don't let you actually choose, but they made versions optimized.
|
Ivan:
[34:02]
| No, no, no, no, no. What I mean is if it's in the theater, you could go see it in IMAX format or a regular format or this format.
|
Sam:
[34:12]
| Yes. And they've thought about from the very beginning, what will this look like on 16x9 on a TV? And they're thinking about that from the beginning. Whereas, you know, there used to be—it's less prominent than it was, but there was a time when—, A lot of streaming services screwed this up. There was a thing with The Simpsons, even, that made, like, headlines at one point. Where when—I guess Simpsons is Disney now? No, whatever.
|
Ivan:
[34:45]
| The Simpsons is owned by Disney, yes.
|
Sam:
[34:47]
| Okay, yes, Simpsons is owned by Disney. When they first put it on Disney+, the early seasons of The Simpsons, of course, were 4x3 because they were done in SD. But disney plus put them out zooming in to a 16 by 9 portion of the frame so as not to have sidebars, on the thing but the problem was that meant they cut off the top and bottom of every frame.
|
Ivan:
[35:13]
| Yeah yeah yeah of course.
|
Sam:
[35:15]
| And apparently there were quite a few places well first of all it looks stupid in a lot of areas yeah no no it's because you cut off the top of people's heads and stuff, but also there were specific scenes and specific episodes where you eliminated the joke because the thing they were referring to was now off-screen.
|
Ivan:
[35:33]
| Duh.
|
Sam:
[35:35]
| You know, so anyway, they've gotten a lot better about that over the years, but they still sometimes have problems. But anyway, so we then bought Silence of the Lambs on Apple to get the real version. Anyway, so this is on YouTube TV and HBO Max to stream, or it's available, and Or it's available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Spectrum. Available to buy from Fandango at Home. Something called Gruv. I don't know. Prime Video, Apple TV, and Amazon. Oh, you can buy it on DVD. They have it listed here to buy on DVD as well. Oh, Gruv is apparently also DVD. They're mixing in the buy on DVD on Just Watch Now with the streaming. They should split that into two categories. Whatever anyway you can get it all over the place is the point but all the all the normal places you would expect, Okay. That's it for me. That's it.
|
Ivan:
[36:33]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[36:34]
| So shall we take a break and then talk more recent news than World War II?
|
Ivan:
[36:39]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[36:40]
| More recent news than World War II. Okay. Here we go. You know, that's one of those, like, I think people have already done this, but I thought, like, an interesting podcast concept, would just be the actual news but delayed by X years. So actually, like, you could set up and like the news orgs would be the best serve to do this. But like, imagine, you know, the CBS evening news, but delayed by 50 years or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[37:17]
| I mean, I have seen sometimes something like that. It's always, like, really weird. Well, like, I have that newspaper clipping. Obviously, you guys on listening to the podcast can't see this.
|
Sam:
[37:28]
| Behind him is the New York Times from the day he was born.
|
Ivan:
[37:32]
| Right. Yeah, and it's always, like, really weird, like, reading the headlines. I mean, you know, on that, okay? It's just, you know, you're like, what the heck?
|
Sam:
[37:42]
| Scientific American used to have something like that where in every, I was going to say episode, It was a magazine, every issue, every issue of Scientific American, they had, you know, the, what was in the magazine. Whatever happened like 20 years ago, 30 years ago. 20, 50, and 100 years ago, because the magazine's been around for hundreds of years. Also, this week, by the way, it hit the news. It was sold to some, like, new thing that, you know, owns magazines and is basically, you know, it immediately.
|
Ivan:
[38:13]
| It's just AI articles.
|
Sam:
[38:14]
| Well, they immediately fired like half the staff and, you know, are gutting it.
|
Ivan:
[38:20]
| And so which have like a whole bunch of AI generated articles.
|
Sam:
[38:25]
| And obviously print magazines are dying anyway. But like some of them successfully transitioned to digital. Scientific American still had a good pedigree and was still doing some good stuff. Who knows if any of that will survive with its new ownership, whatever. you know, but it's, it's another one of those things that, you know, that kind of thing, the only way it survives intact as is like a nonprofit with an endowment, you know, because it's not going to be profitable and anybody running it for profit is just going to kill it and run it into the ground, you know? And there's a lot of things like that. And it's a shame because a lot of them are just getting killed and run into the ground rather than, you know, but, and you could see them surviving, but again, not as a for-profit entity. You need to like, you need to set it up with, you know, a massive endowment that it can live off for a hundred years without having to worry about finances.
|
Ivan:
[39:25]
| Not even. I mean, it's like sometimes it's just, it's a thing of like, you just need to break even.
|
Sam:
[39:33]
| That's true. You just need to, but it's easier if you have an endowment.
|
Ivan:
[39:37]
| Oh, of course. Yes. If you're well endowed, it's a lot easier.
|
Sam:
[39:41]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[39:43]
| Is that how that's said?
|
Sam:
[39:45]
| Yeah, that's how that's said. And Scientific American is well-known for being well-endowed.
|
Ivan:
[39:50]
| Ah, okay.
|
Sam:
[39:52]
| Sort of. Anyway.
|
Ivan:
[39:53]
| Sort of. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[39:54]
| Break, break, break.
|
Ivan:
[39:55]
| Break.
|
Sam:
[39:56]
| Here comes the break. You know, it still pisses me off. The Riverside that we used to just move the clickable area for the stupid music. Used to be able to click the whole bar. Now you have to hit a play button. So I'm always clicking the wrong place. Anyway, here's the right place.
|
Break:
[40:15]
| You're listening to this podcast. Do you like it? No! Do you want to support the show? No! Well, after you have subscribed to the show, followed us on Facebook, and told all your friends they should be listening to, what else can you do? I won't subscribe! You can help fund our Patreon at patreon.com slash curmudgeonscorner. Patreon is a way you can throw us a few bucks a month to help out with the expenses of the show you know web hosting equipment a little bit of advertising to promote the show and maybe every once in a while some much needed sedatives for Yvonne, at different contribution levels you can get a mention on the show our curmudgeons corner postcard or even a curmudgeons Corner mug. Fun stuff! Not fun! In any case, the contributions help tell us that you enjoy and appreciate the show. I really really hate Curmudgeon's Corner! Are we worth a buck a month? No! Five bucks a month? No!
|
Break:
[41:24]
| Or if you are nuts about us, maybe even more. 100 billion! Billion dollars even though you don't have, anywhere near a billion dollars if we're worth anything to you at all send it our way at patreon.com slash curmudgeons corner alex hates, really really hates curmudgeons corner that's, really mean isn't it but i hate curmudgeons corner but i really do.
|
Sam:
[41:54]
| And we're back.
|
Ivan:
[41:56]
| Anyway.
|
Sam:
[41:57]
| So where would you like to start, Yvonne, on the newsy stuff?
|
Ivan:
[42:01]
| Hey, how's Moscow doing today, huh?
|
Sam:
[42:05]
| Ah.
|
Ivan:
[42:06]
| Having a great time, huh? Over there in Moscow. Everything's going peachy, huh?
|
Sam:
[42:11]
| Yes. So I'd put a topic on here, and we've alluded to this in previous weeks, but this has accelerated since we last talked about it. Is Ukraine actually winning this damn thing at this point? I would say yes. Because there are a few things happening here. You mentioned Moscow specifically. Moscow has been under repeated drone attack for weeks now. It's fairly significant.
|
Ivan:
[42:36]
| And now it's not like a nuisance.
|
Sam:
[42:39]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[42:40]
| They're hitting Moscow hard.
|
Sam:
[42:42]
| Well, and to be clear, though, unlike how Russia has been hitting Ukraine, Ukraine is not, for the most part, hitting civilian areas. They're not hitting like apartment buildings and stuff like that. They're hitting industrial infrastructure. They're hitting all of things that, you can very seriously argue. Oh, yeah. These are military targets. It makes sense.
|
Ivan:
[43:07]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[43:08]
| But also things that do inconvenience the civilian population.
|
Ivan:
[43:12]
| Cause a lot of pain to the civilians. Yes.
|
Sam:
[43:14]
| So, for instance, you know, and look, there have been some civilians killed, just to be clear.
|
Ivan:
[43:20]
| There have been some. It does happen. But the Russians are just indiscriminately, you know, firing rockets at civilian targets. They don't care what they hit. They're just, you know, they've been just targeting deep, you know, massive barrages at civilian areas, period. Straight up.
|
Sam:
[43:38]
| Okay. Now, but things like now Moscow is having, you know, a gasoline crisis, you know, for instance. It's, you know, people can't get gas for their cars because, you know, you've read more than I have, I think, Yvonne, but the supply lines are being disrupted, blah, blah, blah. And we'll get back to that specifically, those inconveniences. Also, Ukraine, two additional things. One, Ukraine had been systematically for months and months now targeting and weakening air defense all over Russia. Not just around Moscow, but all around. We've gotten reports. They've hit industrial installations in Russia's far east.
|
Ivan:
[44:27]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[44:28]
| Way north. you know all over the russia is massive okay yes, it is by land area it's the biggest country in the world by far okay it is huge and ukraine has successfully been hitting things all over that country but they've been degrading air defense all over to the point, where in the last few weeks, russia has been relocating air defense from all the other parts of the country, to surround moscow instead basically to beef up their defense of moscow because moscow's under attack but because the air defense has been degraded everywhere that also means that by moving things to protect, moscow they are.
|
Sam:
[45:17]
| Weakening significantly the defenses all over the rest of the country Right. Now, Moscow is the major population center of Russia. It is a major center of economic activity, et cetera, et cetera. But still. And then part of this, Ukraine has also been very, very systematically working, to basically isolate Crimea. You know, they've been weakening air defense around Crimea. They've been making sure they have drone coverage about on all the highways that have been supplying Crimea with, you know, basics, food, gas, whatever. And have at this point basic, have gotten very, very close to basically, I keep using the word basically, they've gotten very, very close to having Crimea actually under siege.
|
Sam:
[46:13]
| The population, the civilian population of Crimea that is Russian-focused, as opposed to any Ukrainian-oriented folks who are still there, many of them are trying to evacuate at this point and get out. And it looks like they're setting themselves up for a situation where...
|
Sam:
[46:37]
| They may want to try to take back Crimea sooner rather than later. Now, they've had a hard time making progress on the front lines in the Donbass, which is the other area that Russia took over early on. But that front is weakening as well. But for the most part, it seems like Russia, for a long time, assumed Crimea was safe and wasn't even really involved that much. I mean, yes, Ukraine was occasionally hitting the bridge and a few other things. But really, at this point, Ukraine is putting the pincers on Crimea. And Moscow's in incredibly weakened position on everything.
|
Sam:
[47:23]
| And, you know, I saw, you know, and the number of people that Russia has been throwing at this has been massive. Like, we're talking like, we're approaching 2 million casualties out of this thing. And, you know, it's massive. I saw a thing, a foreign policy magazine. I couldn't read the actual article because it was a paywall. You have to like subscribe to the magazine, but there was some people quoting from it. Apparently someone did an analysis of the expected lifespan of Russians sent to the front. And.
|
Sam:
[48:07]
| If you count from the time they get sent to training near the front, Their expected lifetime is, I believe they said, five days to three weeks. Okay? And if you count from the time they are actually engaged in battle on the front lines, average lifespan 35 minutes.
|
Ivan:
[48:30]
| Oh, my God.
|
Sam:
[48:32]
| You know, and so.
|
Ivan:
[48:35]
| Oh, that's a, hey, that sounds like a great sales pitch to go, go, go fight, right?
|
Sam:
[48:43]
| Ah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[48:45]
| Jesus Christ.
|
Sam:
[48:47]
| Yeah, I mean, they're just getting eaten up. And like, you know, Russia has a big population and they're recruiting like, you know, they're recruiting mercenaries and such too. But nevertheless, there's only so long you can be losing, you know, thousands and thousands of people every day, which they are.
|
Ivan:
[49:12]
| The whole thing was unsustainable. I mean, I have said this for a beginning. This is, you know, this is four years of this shit right now. This whole thing was unsustainable, okay? From the moment this became a quagmire, okay? And the only reason he's been able to sustain it this long is because he's just been using people as cannon fodder because he is a dictator in a country. But a second aspect that helped him was something that happened also to the Germans during World War II, since we were talking about World War II a little bit earlier. It's great to have some of this where early in the war, Berlin was completely isolated, the German population, from what was happening in the front. So they weren't really pushing back against what Hitler was doing because they were like, oh, look, it's a great success, blah, blah, blah, whatever, all this stuff, right? But, you know, all of a sudden, you know, as time passed and Berlin started getting bombed and all of a sudden there were shortages of shit because they never rationed anything. There were also shortages and shit. They're all like, what the fuck is going on? You know, because because they had been kept really in complete, you know, isolation of whatever really was happening in the war. OK, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[50:33]
| And that was the same thing that Putin was doing. I mean, even though Russia doesn't completely, like, block the outside Internet and stuff, the reality is that Russian media just basically said, oh, these people are liars, whatever the heck they're saying, you know, we're winning, we're whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But look, as, millions of Russian, shoulders.
|
Sam:
[51:04]
| Knees and toes, or whatever, you can sing the little song. Go ahead. Russian shoulders. Yeah, that. Soldiers.
|
Ivan:
[51:13]
| Millions of Russian soldiers have been perishing in the front. It's very difficult to, you know, to keep what the hell is going on when so many people keep dying because all those people are known by a good number of people. So everybody has to know somebody now that somebody that went and died at the fucking front or most people do. And so, you know, and then now all of a sudden there are gas lines, there's bombs going off around your capital regularly when they've been saying everything's fine, we've got everything under control, there's no problem. And then you see these massive explosions going off all around Moscow. Because, you know, they're hitting fuel depots. One thing about hitting a fuel depot with a bomb is that these things are basically like... The explosions are... Biggest explosions you can get that don't involve a nuke.
|
Sam:
[52:12]
| There was this one video of them blowing up some fuel tank thing where the lid, you know, and it's one of these like cylindrical things with a lid on it. And you see it explode. And the lid, which is like this massive circular piece of metal, just goes flying hundreds of feet in the air.
|
Ivan:
[52:35]
| In the air. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[52:37]
| And it's like.
|
Ivan:
[52:38]
| Hard to miss.
|
Sam:
[52:39]
| Yeah, it is quite stunning, you know.
|
Ivan:
[52:42]
| Look, I remember like one time, you know, we had a, in San Juan, we had one of those fuel storage facilities like that, that looked just like the one that blew up on there. Blow up by accident, obviously. Okay, I don't know, I can't remember what exactly caused it, but look, that thing could be felt in the whole city, okay? Now, San Juan's smaller than Moscow, but it's still, it was felt by 1.3 million people, OK, when this thing went off. OK, so when you've got this happening regularly, people are rabid, you know.
|
Sam:
[53:15]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[53:16]
| Putin has been having regular emergency meetings. The the rumor the other day was that because of fuel is getting so short, they went to Kazakhstan and were trying to buy a whole bunch of fuel from Kazakhstan. And Kazakhstan was kind of like, do we really want to sell this fuel to Russia right now in the middle of this situation, you know? But, the estimates here are that fuel production in Russia has plummeted 25 percent, at least. OK, at least. OK. And obviously, depending on where you are, this is probably more acute. It seems that in Moscow, they're making it far more acute than in other places. The thing they're saying here is there is a state of total uncertainty, said one former senior Russian finance official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. There's a feeling that there is no good end to that insight, to this insight. So people are all of a sudden now realizing, hey, we could be fucked. And another thing that's really interesting, you know, given what happened in the Persian Gulf, I'll tell you something. I think we need Ukraine and NATO.
|
Sam:
[54:41]
| Well, at this point, Ukraine is the biggest, most capable military in Europe.
|
Ivan:
[54:49]
| Yeah, by a lot.
|
Sam:
[54:52]
| And, you know, arguably, even against the Russians, obviously, we're talking about that. You could argue, because Russia is partially European, mostly European, but, you know, yes, they don't have nukes, but in terms of, like you said, modern warfare, they have been innovating in all kinds of areas. The use of drones, the counter-drone warfare.
|
Ivan:
[55:24]
| Drone counter, yeah.
|
Sam:
[55:27]
| And basically, a lot of these things are how to do war on a budget as well.
|
Ivan:
[55:33]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[55:33]
| Because what we're seeing here over and over and over again, and this frankly is shown in the U.S.-Iran thing as well, is that, you know, you get at this point, you can counter multi-million dollar weapon systems, hugely expensive weapon systems with really cheap, just barely more than off the shelf stuff for tens of thousands.
|
Ivan:
[56:02]
| By the way, can I tell you something, something else about this entire conflict right now that should give pause to somebody, to the Chinese.
|
Sam:
[56:09]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[56:10]
| If I were the Chinese and I keep thinking that I could take Taiwan. And you're looking at what the fuck happened in these two places. I would say this would give me significant pause because it really shows that all that investment and all this warfare, unless you have, with this shit, You can really afford a major military power with not that much money.
|
Sam:
[56:35]
| Right. And, you know, I mentioned the drones that cost tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands or millions. But also, they are doing quite a bit with off the shelf. Like, you take a drone that you can buy off Amazon and do some modifications to load it with a bomb, you know, and then go use it in battle.
|
Ivan:
[57:02]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[57:03]
| And you can actually be quite effective with literally off-the-shelf consumer products.
|
Ivan:
[57:10]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[57:10]
| You know, not just something custom. And look, there are the custom-made military drones that they're doing, and they're innovating like crazy on that, too.
|
Ivan:
[57:17]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[57:18]
| But you can do stuff with off the shelf, you know, and, and, and you can prove, and they have been proving that they can make it work effectively against the, high budget dollar, you know, massive weapon systems. And, you know, not, you know, not a hundred percent, not always, but enough.
|
Ivan:
[57:43]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[57:43]
| You know, and again, going back to the beginning, we have not yet seen the front lines move a lot. The front lines have been in stalemate for years now. However, what's happening is they are, instead of concentrating on the front lines, they're working on the supply lines. They're working on, you know, weakening everything behind the front lines.
|
Ivan:
[58:10]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[58:11]
| And, you know, you do that long enough, the front lines just collapse on their own.
|
Ivan:
[58:16]
| By the way, by the way, again, again, not to beat up that horse, but... World War II, that was the same thing that they did. Look, the way that the German military machine had been able to operate, okay, was because they had developed all these methods of, actually, they didn't depend on oil imports. They actually had factories that were building synthetic fuels, okay, and other products like this, okay, that they needed for the warfare. So what did they do? The main one was the synthetic fuel production, okay? This is something that the predecessor to BASF developed during the lead-up to World War II, because they knew that they could be cut off from oil. So they needed to be able to develop synthetic fuel. So what did they do? Hit the factories. Smash them. Once those facilities were destroyed, the troops could not resupply fuel. And that's why after the D-Day invasion, when they came in, the Germans were pretty much powerless to stop them. They just, the tanks didn't have fuel. They just couldn't fuel them up. Period. End of story.
|
Sam:
[59:26]
| I'll also mention real quick, I found the reference to that foreign policy article, so I can quote the actual numbers rather than my vague memory of them. This is on Blue Sky from Peter Baker of the New York Times, and he is referencing the foreign policy article. The foreign policy article itself is, as the tide turns against Putin, beware the drowning man. And I've seen a few references to this article, but again, behind a paywall, so I have not read it. But apparently it is all about how Putin is getting increasingly desperate, given the scenario, and how when somebody like this is made increasingly desperate, they can take more and more unpredictable, aggressive actions that could cause all kinds of problems. But nevertheless, he's in trouble is the key that starts that. But when people are in trouble, they're dangerous. Not like Putin was ever not dangerous. But anyway, the quote that Peter Baker gives, he doesn't actually have quotation marks around it. So I interpreted it as a quote from the article, but maybe he's saying something else. But he's a reputable reporter anyway, so whatever. The average life expectancy of a new Russian recruit, from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone, lies somewhere between 10 days and 3 weeks. Once sent onto the battlefield, they survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:55]
| I mean, that's unsustainable. It's totally unsustainable. By the way, there's a Washington Post article, Unease Deepens in Russia as Ukraine Steps Up Long-Range Strikes. OK.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:08]
| They have some interesting analysis on what's going on. I was going to get back to a quote here about this. Here we go. Hold on. Hold on. People don't feel safe anymore. The war is knocking at our door. In Crimea, panic is setting in. One Moscow business executive said, also speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution, everyone wants to leave by foot or by bicycle, however they can. There are going to be problems with food. No one can supply. Questions are also mounting about the Russian military's apparent failure to foresee the sharp improvement in Ukraine's drone capabilities and to develop countermeasures. There are not enough missile defense systems to protect our infrastructure, the Moscow business executive said. No one appears to know what to do to increase production. This is a terrible situation that Putin and his closest circle appear to not have expected. They have not prepared for a long war, nor are they ready for the drone threat. So this is, you know, they are, like you said, same thing as evidence there, same thing here. Putin is going into a full-fledged panic right now about the situation. And I love to see it.
|
Sam:
[1:02:27]
| Now, it's not to say that Ukraine will completely take over all of their existing territory like this week, you know, but for for the first time in a while, it seems like saying that they will eventually seems kind of like not crazy.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:47]
| No, exactly. It doesn't seem crazy anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:02:50]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:50]
| It doesn't seem crazy anymore. And the main issue, like you mentioned earlier, is the fact that because they have been hitting Moscow, because they have been hitting all this critical stuff, where they are running low on defense systems in other places, where they are having to take, things out of the field that were meant to, you know, protect the front lines or attack, they're having to take, they're having to remove them because they need them to protect, because they're getting hammered where they didn't expect.
|
Sam:
[1:03:18]
| Well, along those lines, I mean, remember when, oh, what's his name? The, the, the guy who was running that, that paramilitary force for Russia decided to.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:30]
| Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, again, we do our name thing.
|
Sam:
[1:03:34]
| The Wagner group.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:36]
| The Wagner group and whoever was in charge of that. The guy that the plane all of a sudden just fell out of the sky.
|
Sam:
[1:03:41]
| Right. Well, that's how it ended. But first, he decided to do a run on Moscow with his military troops and got hundreds of miles.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:49]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:03:50]
| And apparently, when he stopped, it was not a military thing stopping him. If I remember, correct me if I'm wrong, my memory is it was something like Putin got a hold of his family.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:09]
| I think you may be right.
|
Sam:
[1:04:10]
| Something like that and said, you stop right now or they're all dead. And so he stopped. But it wasn't because the defenses of Moscow held and stopped the armored column heading in their way.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:26]
| All right. I'm looking this up. Wagner Group Rebellion, blah, blah, blah. Pirozhin? Pirozhin. Yeah, that was his name. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:04:36]
| I mean, that may have been something that was speculation, but never confirmed and never, you know, never verified.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:43]
| Advance to Moscow. Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. Advance to Moscow. I don't want to fire. I don't want to fire.
|
Sam:
[1:04:51]
| While you look that up, my point is not actually like how it ended. It's that... This guy was able to advance hundreds of miles towards Moscow, essentially without opposition. Now, he was Russian. He was not a foreign invader. But it still points out that, you know, things are weaker than you expect them to be, you know, because people just aren't set up or prepared for that. I mean, along similar lines, I mean, let's be completely clear. You know, if Canada's decided to invade Maine, they can probably take the whole state before we realized what the fuck was going on, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:30]
| True.
|
Sam:
[1:05:31]
| Because we don't have defenses set up against a Canadian invasion, you know. So, but nevertheless, you know, it shows that a lot of these things that we have thought for years are like, oh, that's solid. It turns out it's not as solid as you might think i mean and even what we were talking about about the asymmetry between you know cheap drones versus multi-million dollar planes, i i mean it's just pointing out a vulnerability that's actually been there a while so i just looked.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:10]
| It up and your your memory is correct okay they they they the way that they stopped it was that Russian intelligence contacting not only Perugian's family but also families of top Warner commanders and senior officers. They explicitly threatened to kill him if the march to Moscow continued. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:06:31]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:32]
| That's how they stopped it.
|
Sam:
[1:06:34]
| Which, by the way, is I guess a legitimate way of stopping it. They stopped it.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:40]
| Right. But if they had been more prepared Yes. If they had decided, hey, our family could be threatened, let's move them to safety first, they wouldn't have been able to stop them.
|
Sam:
[1:06:52]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:53]
| Think about that. I mean, that was the only way that they were able to stop them. It's pretty crazy.
|
Sam:
[1:06:59]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:01]
| But it also shows what we know about. I mean, it was my argument like this at the beginning, like everybody was saying, whoa, Ukraine is going to fall in days. And I'm like, no, Jesus Christ, bullshit, man. No way. The fucking Russian military has been a paper fucking house of smoke and mirrors, the entire time. Fuck, it's been a house of smoke and mirrors for over 50 years. Look, in the Cold War, they were only really propped up by the fact they had nukes. The reality is that their military assets, everything they had was shit. Anytime they ever entered into a combat, they got their ass kicked. They couldn't fucking, like, in Afghanistan that basically had nothing, they struggled. Okay?
|
Sam:
[1:07:43]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:44]
| Any military encounter they got, they got their ass kicked.
|
Sam:
[1:07:49]
| Well, by the way, to be clear, I think Canada could take Maine, but we would probably take it back.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:55]
| Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. But if we were not prepared, you know, all of a sudden they just came and, you know, went and invaded Maine, we couldn't do it. They would probably take it.
|
Sam:
[1:08:09]
| Right. Yeah. But anyway, I think.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:12]
| And I would move to Maine. Thank you.
|
Sam:
[1:08:16]
| Well, yes, I mean, there have been jokes for a while for, you know, here in Washington state. You want us, Canada? You want us here? We could do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:26]
| We surrender. We surrender. We didn't attack you. Well, we surrender anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:08:32]
| Well, I mean, remember, going back to when W won in 2000, there were people would make maps after the election of like, you know, the the the where all the blue states joined Canada. You know, it's been an ongoing joke for a long time. But yeah. So anyway, shall we take a break and come back and talk about something else? OK. Next break. Next. Next. And yeah this is the ray lynch break so uh we already talked on the show ray lynch passed away a little while ago and so, rest in peace ray lynch we still we still love your stuff and here you go uh yeah go go buy some of his albums i'm sure uh some of the money and you know, all that stuff so yes here you go.
|
Break:
[1:09:28]
| No no it's not the beginning of the show again we're just taking a little time to credit the artist responsible for the music we use at the beginning and end of the show, what you are listening to right now is The O of Pleasure by Ray Lynch.
|
Break:
[1:10:01]
| The music we close our show with is Celestial Soda Pop. Both of these songs are from Deep Breakfast. Now Platinum, Deep Breakfast was the first independently released album ever to be certified gold by the RIAA. Ray Lynch's other albums are... The Sky of Mind.
|
Break:
[1:11:04]
| And the best of Ray Lynch. You can check out Ray Lynch or buy his music at raylynch.com, iTunes, Amazon, or anywhere you usually find music.
|
Sam:
[1:11:24]
| Okay, we're back. So my turn to turn a... My turn to pick a topic. So just quick bullet points of things I'm not picking. Okay, there were some SCOTUS cases this week. We're expecting some more big ones next week. As usual, they did lots of bad things. Whatever. There's been more reflecting pool trauma. You know, they put up a fence. They've got guards around it. You know, because apparently all the damage is from some guy with an X-Acto knife, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:02]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:12:03]
| Whatever. And it has nothing to do with doing the work badly in the first place or Donald Trump's motorcade driving over it before it was refilled with water. Not, no, no, nothing to do with any of that.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:16]
| No, no.
|
Sam:
[1:12:18]
| We've got all kinds of additional drama.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:20]
| Yeah, an exacto knife was able to go and like destroy the entire pool. One exacto knife. That's all it took. One guy with an exacto knife. One guy with an exacto knife, right.
|
Sam:
[1:12:30]
| Yes. And Trump has been battling more with Republicans in the Senate specifically. We've got that going on. We've got like... And Vance and Johnson doing like Watergate comparisons, talking about how whatever, there's interesting stuff there. And of course, Donald Trump himself continues to seem like he's melting down further. And who knows what his mental state is. But no, none of those, none of those. What I am picking is that this week we had primaries where a bunch of progressives from the Democratic Socialists, won primaries in New York and a couple other places. And some of the establishment Democrats seem to be freaking out about it.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:28]
| And so I want to talk over themselves. They need to get the fuck over themselves.
|
Sam:
[1:13:34]
| I agree. I mean, look, here's the thing. I mean, their fundamental case is something along the lines of, hey, look, you know, maybe this, maybe they can win in these like isolated places that are heavily blue, but they're going to be an anchor around the National Democratic Party because, everybody is going to associate with the Democrats with the most radical possible. Agree. person in New York.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:04]
| You know what? This is the stupid... Listen, let me tell you something. The way that this conversation stops is if you guys stop calling them yourselves radicals, because there's nothing radical about what the fuck these people want. Especially in the face of what people in America are suffering. Okay. There's nothing radical about it. What the fuck is radical about wanting people to be able to, you know, I don't know, shit, tax the rich. Fucking afford health care. Fucking give people, like, the ability to be able to live. I mean, you know, respecting people's rights. There is not. But, I mean, you know, like, Momdami is a radical. Oh, my God, he gave people free buses. What a fucking radical bastard. What the hell? Oh, child care. I mean, shit, Biden tried to do that. Biden tried to fucking, like, fund child care, and they blocked it, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:15:06]
| Look, there are a couple things here. First of all, I think the Democrats really have to embrace from top to bottom the, I mean, the old notion of the Big Ten, right? What works in New York City is different than what might get a Democrat elected in Iowa. Okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:25]
| But there's nothing wrong with these guys over there at all.
|
Sam:
[1:15:30]
| Right. Look, and so you have to have that whole spectrum. You have to have that whole sort of anti-fascist coalition, et cetera, you know, in place. And that takes all types. And it's going to be different in different parts of the country. and that has to be okay. Second, like you said, a lot of this is branding. Most of, like a lot of these specific positions that are talked about. If you poll them individually, our majority positions in the United States.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:01]
| Everybody likes this shit.
|
Sam:
[1:16:03]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:03]
| I mean, good Lord, everybody. You go exactly what you said. You take the individual positions. You go through them and you ask people, Hey, are you for this? Are you for this? Are you for this? Are you for this? Everybody says yes. Stop with the fucking bullshit that there's some radical, like, you know, I don't know. The biggest mistake, and the problem is that even that you got these Democrats that make the same mistake. They're trying to equate these people like they're Fidel Castro.
|
Sam:
[1:16:31]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:32]
| Nothing there is you know god stop.
|
Sam:
[1:16:37]
| No you are trying.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:39]
| To be communist dictators.
|
Sam:
[1:16:41]
| You are hurting the cause more and and look there there's there's policies and then there's just energy and attitude.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:52]
| Oh god yes.
|
Sam:
[1:16:54]
| And like look, Look, first of all, there is a toxic element of the progressive side. There is. The people who are like, we won't vote for Kamala Harris because she supports genocide.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:07]
| Those people, no. Yeah, no.
|
Sam:
[1:17:09]
| You know, those are, that is.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:13]
| But you see, that's not a policy, but that's not policy position. That is purity testing of who the hell I'm voting for. Okay. And like I said, okay, listen, you know, listen. If you guys are going to go and basically say that it's either all or nothing, you go back to the big tent. Listen, these people are in the tent. And, yes, maybe there are certain people that are not exactly, hey, maybe they don't want, maybe this guy in Iowa doesn't want to give free buses. Okay. I can live without the free, you know, it's okay. I can be with a guy as long as he's pro-rights and, you know, democracy and taxing the rich. You know, maybe he doesn't want to tax them 50% to rich. Maybe he only wants to tax him 25% of rich. Okay, fine! God, stop with the fucking... Man... You know, people drive me crazy like that.
|
Sam:
[1:18:06]
| Going to the energy thing, I think the the part that I and I know you are, too, because we've talked about this before. I am upset with sort of the established Democratic leadership in Washington, not because of any policy position whatsoever, but because the way they communicate and the way they talk about things is so passive and so low. It's passive. It's low energy. It's low energy. It also refuses to take things head on. It's like it seems like every single word out of their mouth, comes out of, you know, examining polls and looking at, you know, consultants who are trying to say, how do we better appeal to the median voter and blah, blah, blah. And look, winning the median voter is great, but, and I've said this before on the show, people, the voting public detects when you're being phony, like, it's a flare, you know? And so I would rather have somebody with a slightly less popular position who is willing to— With energy, who will advocate it fiercely.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:32]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:19:33]
| Than somebody who's trying to triangulate to get just the right position that'll get 52% of the vote. You know, and and so we've got and then look, I realize, especially when we're talking about Congress, they're in the minority. It's it's not like they can do a lot. They can't, like, pass legislation because they just don't have the numbers.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:58]
| OK, but you know what? Listen, we are very close to a midterm. OK, like right now, you know, we we can we can make a lot of headway in that direction. OK, soon. Let's stop with the bullshit. Let's stop trying to put people in that are like Bob Menendez's. Let's try to put more people in that are like the Momdami's and AOC's out there. That's the kind of passion that we need. We're not going to get anywhere. I'm sorry with Hakeem Jeffries. Man, the guy is another low. You know, I don't hate him, but he's not the right guy.
|
Sam:
[1:20:36]
| And Schumer definitely has passed his expiration date.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:40]
| Way past his expiration date way.
|
Sam:
[1:20:43]
| I mean and again it's not necessarily some of it like with with like schumer and stuff some of it you know people say it's not necessarily age itself, but a lot of the older people in congress also just don't get the modern media environment they're acting like no they're acting like it's still the 1980s, you know you you go on you go on the shows and you're nice to your opponents and you call them the distinguished gentlemen and you buy tv commercials on like cbs and listen.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:18]
| In in this era when we've got an entire breed of right-wing people that are happy with nazis yes that are okay with you know, racism. Fuck this shit. We cannot be passive. We can't be low energy. This has to be a completely different game.
|
Sam:
[1:21:42]
| Right. And look, the argument that people make is always, look, if these people end up being the face of the Democratic Party, we lose everything. And the fascists continue to win.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:57]
| I totally disagree. If there is one thing that we have seen is that Mom Domi has gotten a lot of press and publicity ever since he's become mayor. This guy is not a liability. This guy is a serious asset.
|
Sam:
[1:22:12]
| I mean, how Trump likes him.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:13]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:22:14]
| When Trump met him, he's like, oh, man, you're great. I love you. We can work together.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:20]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:22:21]
| You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Trump still lived in New York, he would vote for Mom Domi. because he likes you.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:28]
| Yes! Yes, you know, what do you know? And by the way, you know, the one guy that basically kind of like scolded this entire group of people with their bullshit, you know, no, no, no, Obama. Oh, you know what? Obama went to New York and specifically appeared with Mom Domi in an event.
|
Sam:
[1:22:50]
| You mean scolding from that direction? Go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:52]
| Yeah, you know what? Obama was basically showing, basically all these people, oh, were kind of like a steering away from a dummy, blah, blah, blah. No, Obama went and fucking stood with him at an event and basically raised his profile even more by doing that. And to me, what that felt was an explicit slap in the face of all these fucking people saying that this is the wrong people to be a standard bearer. Let me tell you something. No, I disagree 100%. This is the right standard bearers. I want more Mondami, not less.
|
Sam:
[1:23:34]
| Right. And look, and again, it's not necessarily a policy thing. It's an attitude thing. And it's a, it's a knowing how to interact with modern media.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:45]
| But he has been very effective also at implementing what the fuck his policies are.
|
Sam:
[1:23:51]
| That's true. Like a lot of people before he was elected were saying, you know, he can't do any of this stuff. Even if he gets elected and none of it's going to happen, he's just going to completely fail.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:01]
| And the guy has been effective. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:24:03]
| Right. And look, the thing with this notion of it's an automatic failure if you elect these kinds of people. Well, first of all, the guy I was talking about, Harrison, a former head of the DNC, I think I've got his name right, and I don't have his quote in front of me, but he got into a big like online kerfuffle because he basically said, look, if you hate our party, don't run in our party. Don't use our resources. Don't whatever. Go start your own third party. And there's there've been a lot of back and forth on it. One defense. Look, parties are private organizations. They do have a right to police their boundaries. And I don't deny that at all. But the question is, what's smart? Should you try to keep these people out or not? And then the other side, basically the answer is, look, if we win your damn elections, we are the party.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:01]
| Exactly. And they're right. They are right. And that's the one thing that I don't think these people are realizing. They are now the party. Stop fucking fighting them.
|
Sam:
[1:25:14]
| Right. I mean, take advantage of the energy. I mean, look, I'm not saying it all.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:19]
| Advantage, you know, we say advantage sounds like, hey, we're going to take advantage and we're going to do something else. No, no, no, no, man. Leverage it. Use it. Harness it. Join it because it's getting us a lot more stuff that, you know, that everybody we've been trying to get.
|
Sam:
[1:25:37]
| And again, that is not to say the same thing works everywhere in the country. If you're running in Iowa, it's a different race. The Tancredo or however you say his name in Texas, it's a different race. He's not going to win by, like, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:52]
| Wasn't Tancredo a guy that went to jail? Tallarico! What the fuck?
|
Sam:
[1:25:57]
| Tallarico. There you go. Tallarico. Tallarico. Trafficking went to jail.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:03]
| That credo too. Okay. Or we.
|
Sam:
[1:26:09]
| We started out talking about how good we are at names.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:13]
| Holy shit.
|
Sam:
[1:26:17]
| Look. There are different things.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:20]
| No, no, no, no, no. Stop one second. Okay. Who the hell top 10 credo is. Okay. Because I don't. Okay. So to be clear. So you understand who you just confused Talarico with. OK, because. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:26:33]
| They both start with T. Come on.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:36]
| OK. Tancredo's outspoken advocacy for immigration reform and particularly his criticism of President George W. Bush border security controls reportedly made him a persona non grata in the Bush White House. You know, his policy was Tancredo introduced the Mass Immigration Reduction Act. The act would impose an indefinite moratorium on immigration to the United States. Under the act, only spouses and children of American citizens would be allowed to immigrate, which Tancredo estimated would amount to 300,000 immigrants annually, when the moratorium would last for at least five years. This guy was a bitter racist, okay? He was anti-abortion, anti-immigration. And I think there was something that happened also where, oh, here it is. This is the one that was the best. In November 2006, Tancredo referred to the city of Miami, Florida, as a third-world country. His comments drew strong criticism from numerous political leaders and organizations, including Florida Governor Jeb Bush. So, yeah, this is the guy who you confused Tallarico with.
|
Sam:
[1:27:57]
| So, anyway, my point is, if you're running as a Democrat in a historically red or very purple state, you are, of course, going to have a very different approach than if you were running as a Democrat in Manhattan.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:14]
| Yes, you're not going to have the same positions as somebody in Manhattan. Absolutely. But that's okay.
|
Sam:
[1:28:20]
| But, yeah, but that's absolutely okay. and also the.
|
Sam:
[1:28:25]
| The fundamental, like, hey, if we go with this wing of this party, we're an automatic loser, misses a couple things. One, just looking at history, by the way, people, one person, Oliver Willis on Blue Sky. I've followed him for many, many years. But he pointed out the comparison to the Republicans nominating Goldwater. Okay. And people say, well, Goldwater lost.
|
Sam:
[1:28:58]
| But the thing is, and for those who don't remember, which this was before my time, too, by the way, when the Republicans nominated Goldwater, they lost badly. Goldwater was a very, very, very hard right figure in the Republican Party. And, however, they followed that up by Goldwater set the stage for Reagan. Who set the stage for George H.W. Bush, who set the stage for George W. Bush, who eventually set the stage for Trump. Basically, the Republicans kept winning and were on an upward swing for a long time after that, where the Republicans sort of leaned into their base. And arguably, that's how Trump won, too, by the way. He did not care one tiny bit about the median voter. He went after a core element of Republicans that were being ignored by the establishment Republican Party.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:59]
| We skipped Nixon.
|
Sam:
[1:30:01]
| Oh, Nixon. Yes. Nixon won too. Sorry. Nixon was after Goldwater? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so anyway, we set up—now, there were Democrats in between, of course, but the Republicans had a long run of really successful people from their point of view after that run—, And again, Trump himself is a perfect example about how you can win with a base strategy instead of winning on a median voter strategy. So we know that that's viable. Also, and I'm right in preparation for this show, I started looking up 2028 polling. And first of all, it made me realize I got to get my ass in gear on getting election graphs ready to go.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:48]
| Hey, yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:30:49]
| Well, normally my target is midterms, like to launch right after midterms. But there's already a lot of polling, certainly national polling, but even state level polling. I'm looking like there've been state level polls for Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, all within the last few days for various different matchups for 2028. So yeah, I increased my priority in my randomized to-do list for election graph stuff. I'll get on it. Again, my target is always to launch right after midterms, so this November. In reality, the last few cycles, I've been a little bit later than that, like launching in January or something. But this year, I have no excuse. I'm unemployed. I just need to get it done.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:40]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:41]
| But anyway, and apparently there's lots of data I could already be riffing on. But just looking at national stuff, just for the, we automatically lose if we choose a progressive, there is AOC polling for 2028. And, Just as an example, I'll give you a few examples of this. She does lose to Vance in the—and this is national popular vote, not electoral college. She does lose to Vance, but it's actually pretty damn close. It's about as good as Harris did against Trump this last time. It's 37.1% to 38.9%, with, by the way, 24% undecided. Huge amount of undecided.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:20]
| Yeah, so that's not really a lose.
|
Sam:
[1:32:22]
| But, the point is just she's competitive. It's not like it's a blowout. You put AOC in and she loses. And if you put her against Rubio, she wins. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:33]
| Well, I mean, fuck Rubio. I mean, what the hell? I mean, come on.
|
Sam:
[1:32:37]
| And if you put her another person she's been polled against, Tucker Carlson. She crushes Tucker Carlson.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:44]
| Gee. Well, he says he's no longer a Republican, so.
|
Sam:
[1:32:49]
| Well, true. But also, AOC versus Carlson, by the way, has 43% undecided in the poll average.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:56]
| So, well, that's because, okay, but how much, wait, how much did she get in that matchup?
|
Sam:
[1:33:02]
| AOC versus Carlson?
|
Ivan:
[1:33:04]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:33:05]
| 31.4 to 25.6.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:08]
| 30, wait, wait, wait, how much did she get again?
|
Sam:
[1:33:12]
| 31 to 26.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:13]
| 31 to 26. That's a lot of undecided.
|
Sam:
[1:33:17]
| That's a lot of undecided, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:18]
| Oh, yeah, that's a lot of undecided.
|
Sam:
[1:33:22]
| Indeed, indeed. But the point of all of this conversation is that, you know, you should not just assume that everybody who's saying, like, if the progressives become the face of the Democratic Party, we automatically lose. No.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:40]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:33:40]
| Look at the real data. Now, you can make the argument that that's not where you want the party to go because you're fundamentally a centrist. Look, I'm more centrist than some of these folks. I have—and, like, apparently some of the folks— Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:53]
| Well, I have to admit that, I have really moved off to fucking us. I have moved so much left.
|
Sam:
[1:34:03]
| I, you know, the Trump administration has moved me further left than I ever imagined I could be before Donald Trump. Absolutely. But having said that, like, my main concern is generally not their goals. It's, are you being unrealistic about the methodology to get there? You know, like, like, just, you know, like universal health care, for instance. Yeah, I think we should have it.
|
Sam:
[1:34:31]
| But, you know, but, you know, if you tried to do it with a law that just outlawed all insurance companies next week, that would probably end up a disaster. You have to have a transition plan that makes sense. You have to have, you know, whatever, you know, but you have to think through all the options and do one that makes sense. And I think there's a lot of sort of wishful thinking among certain parts of that cohort that are like, let's just jump straight to like, you know, the, the, the, the. The Danish model or something and skip everything in between, you know, you have to, so I like to be tempered by realism and I do in some areas like endorse gradualism. Like you have to like, you know, put in a 10 year plan to get from here to there or something, but I don't generally disagree with the final result in most cases, but nevertheless, you know, I I'm still to the right of some of these people. I'm sure some of them would call me a neoliberal shill or whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:35:41]
| But it's not an automatic loss, is my point. You have to put these ideas out into competition and let them compete. And look, when it comes to a presidential election, I've said before, and I will say again, I am going to look at the polls. I'm going to look at who is most likely to win. And I'm going to pick based on that, but more than any policy issue. However, I think the progressives have an actual shot because there is a legitimate case to be made that a big part of why the Democrats' approval ratings overall are on the floor, is because of, sort of what we were talking about before, the sort of way you approach and do messaging and the way you interact with the media, it's style things more than it is policy things. And some of these folks like Memdani and AOC, they've got that down.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:39]
| Listen, but can I just say something again, just a reminder, if, you know, you're saying that you, maybe you think that you're further to the right on it. I, I guarantee you that I could take almost every damn position that they've got and you're probably coming up like matching up 90 plus percent.
|
Sam:
[1:36:55]
| Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah, the disagreement is minor, which also is one of the reasons that it pisses me off when progressives are in the mode of like, you know, oh, you, we can't possibly go with you because you're, you're just a, you know, like I said, neoliberal shill or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:14]
| Yeah, no, no, no, I get that.
|
Sam:
[1:37:16]
| We agree on 90%.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:19]
| Not more than 90.
|
Sam:
[1:37:20]
| Work with us on the 10%. We're still better than the other guys who agree with you. Way better! 100%, you know, and who are actually outright like, you know, anyway, you know, and I understand there are some things that certain people, view as non-negotiable. I'm like, I want to live in reality here where you get nothing unless you win.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:50]
| Like I've said before, like when I vote, I want to make sure.
|
Sam:
[1:37:53]
| And worse than nothing because they do damage.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:55]
| No, exactly. And that's my point. I've said that this whole thing where you won't vote for somebody, even though directionally they are in your, you know, taking you where you want to go. It's just not exactly maybe every all the way there, but at least they're not taking you away from it. And that is what we've had now in this decade of this bullshit with Trump. OK, the reality is that the people that still to this day will say that, you know, Hillary and Trump were some kind of like, you know, difficult decision when there was a SCOTA seat that was open. The chance that we had gotten that seat and Hillary was president. But where we would be today would be dramatic. Even if Trump won the next election, it was dramatically different.
|
Sam:
[1:38:48]
| Yeah, I mean, I'd said before, I felt like if Hillary won, she'd probably be a one-term president because of how controversial she was. But nevertheless, you know, and Trump probably wouldn't have run again in four years. You know, honestly.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:01]
| But what I'm saying is that if we had that seat, how critical. Sam, how critical that SCOTUS seat was.
|
Sam:
[1:39:10]
| No, I know. If Trump had gone down to defeat, the Republican Party would have probably reverted to the control of, like, Jeb Bush and Romney and those kind of folks.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:19]
| Exactly, right. They would have run Romney again, maybe.
|
Sam:
[1:39:22]
| Because they would have, like, look how disastrous this failure was. Yes. Let's go back to what works. Yes. But, yeah, no. The whole universe would be so different, you know. I mean, of course, this is true of any election, right? If Gore had won 2000, you know, it'd be very different. If Trump had gotten reelected directly instead of having Biden in between, it would be very different, etc. And this last term, oh my God, if Harris had won, we'd be in such better shape than we are right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:54]
| Oh, my God.
|
Sam:
[1:39:55]
| Even with the damage of the first Trump term. But, you know, I said, even before Trump was elected the first time, long-time listeners will remember, me saying just the fact that he won the Republican nomination, not domination, although it kind of seems like that sometimes, Just the fact that he won the nomination itself was damaging to our democracy, potentially for generations, you know, and and where we are right now. I mean, the other part we have to live with is it's going to take a long time to undo all this damage. Now, going counter my incrementalism thing, I've also said on this show, the next time the Democrats have a trifecta.
|
Sam:
[1:40:50]
| They can't be wimps about this. They have to use that to the full extent. They have to get rid of the filibuster right away. They have to make new states. They have to increase the size of the Supreme Court. They have to go big and hard for massive things that make a difference in people's lives in the short term. That you know they they can't be like oh we're just trying to get back to normal and we're going to be very you know cautious no they they have to be big and bold or they're just going to get another, whoever the next inheritor to the trump part of mega is the next time around they They have to be, you know, more aggressive. And that also means they can't just have a bare, you know, they can't have mansion and cinemas in there gumming up the works and keeping you from doing that. So, anyway. Anything else?
|
Ivan:
[1:41:57]
| I'll just mention that as I was talking to Sam, I got a reminder and I realized that I did this, that on my, I just went and I did this. I realized that I wanted to kick myself for not having done this, but apparently my American Express gives me a $300 annual chat GPT credit that I had not been using.
|
Sam:
[1:42:18]
| Oh, okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:19]
| And I mean, basically pays for my subscription. And i fucking just found out yesterday somebody posted online i said wait what, i'm like wait what so i just enrolled in it and so now i get get it for free, and i'm kind of pissed off that i had been paying for when i could have gotten it for free i'm a fucking idiot okay and with that well.
|
Sam:
[1:42:47]
| With that, we can close up?
|
Ivan:
[1:42:49]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:42:49]
| Yeah, we're shorter than we sometimes are, but that's okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:53]
| A little bit, but.
|
Sam:
[1:42:53]
| We're in our target zone. We're in the zone. Officially, our target zone is 90 minutes to two hours. Yeah, we're in the zone. Even though we often, like, end up over two hours. Our official target zone is 90 minutes to two hours, and we're right in there. We're in the zone.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:10]
| Yes. We're in the zone. Auto zone. No.
|
Sam:
[1:43:14]
| Auto zone?
|
Ivan:
[1:43:15]
| Not that zone. That's a commercial.
|
Sam:
[1:43:16]
| Okay. Anyway, it's a commercial. That's lovely. Okay, go to curmudgeon-corner.com. Do the thing. Look at the things. Do the other things. Specifically, you can see all our archive of Ultros. You can see transcripts. You can see all the ways to contact us. All of that. And, of course, you can go to Patreon and give us money. Money, money, money. And at various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug, all of that sort of thing. And at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask and we don't hate you. That's a little aggressive. But if you ask and we are okay with it, we will invite you into our Curmudgeons Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and a whole bunch of other listeners are chatting throughout the week. So, Yvonne, name a something that we talked about on the show. No, no.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:23]
| No, we didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:44:24]
| That we didn't talk about on the show, but was shared on the curmudgeon score of Slack or discussed on the curmudgeon score of Slack that would make people, feel bad that they aren't on the curmudgeon score of Slack all the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:39]
| Okay, a 777 with Qatar livery, okay, that is not operated, is not yet been delivered to Qatar, but is to be, we're to Qatar Cargo, made an extremely low pass at Horseshoe Bay in Texas, Resort Jet Center in Texas. Now, when I first saw this video, I was first, well, it looked real, but I was like, damn it, is this AI? Because this is insane. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:45:13]
| At one point, the plane's wingtip is like, looks like it's like six feet off the ground.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:17]
| Look, I have seen somebody else do this. You know, I've seen two other people, two other aircraft do this. I saw somebody with a cargo 747 for a South American airline somewhere outside the United States do this, a pass similar to this. Okay which was also insane because it's set from 747 is bigger than this damn thing there's an airline called aerosur just look it up just look 747 aerosur, just a-e-r-o-s-u-r look it up on youtube you will see this it's an insane pass okay and also if i remember correctly the guys that took delivery of the new, presidential aircraft for the Argentine president. Did this also with a converted 7 aircraft, which I think was the 757 that they took and they did something like this. Those are the only two times that I remember off the top of my head. But this thing is a 777 is coming in. It's coming in at a speed of, let's see, I got it here, about 180 knots. So about 200 miles an hour. Okay. It is flying incredibly low. And then the plane makes a right turn and climbs immediately where the right wingtip is basically less than 10 feet off the ground. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:46:39]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:40]
| It is insane. Okay. Like I said, I heard about this a lot of people saying how crazy and unsafe it is. And this is one of these things that absolutely crazy and insane and dangerous, but also ridiculously cool to see.
|
Sam:
[1:46:57]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:58]
| But it's nuts. You shouldn't be doing this with a triple seven.
|
Sam:
[1:47:04]
| Like that passenger plane that was on its air trials and did a barrel roll, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:08]
| Right, exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:47:10]
| From decades ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:11]
| Yeah. So, you know, it appears this is, look, it seems like a company that was a party to the conversion in the middle of this. This is an X-Delta 777-200LR, for whatever reason, Delta in 2020.
|
Sam:
[1:47:30]
| Yeah, people, by the way, people pointed out that it clearly wasn't just the pilots because you had at least two people videoing this on the ground.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:40]
| And there was like chase helicopters. Yes. And there was also chase helicopters looking at this. Okay. So I want to see the helicopter footage. So this was taken delivery by Delta in 2009. During the pandemic in 2020, they grounded the fleet. At that point, for some reason, Delta decided to not fly 777s anymore. They grounded the plane. Surprisingly, it hadn't gotten a new owner yet, so it had sat around for a while because the LR was a version of the 777 that didn't sell that well. My LR is a longer-range version. It was a very extended-range version that they did. And part of it, if I remember correctly, the reason they developed it originally was they were trying to see to get non-stops from Australia to London. OK, but Qantas decided not to do it. So this plane got grounded. They were converting it. Qatar Airways wanted to get a cargo plane. Hey, cheap way to get a frickin' 777 cargo plane done, convert one that's sitting on the ground. So they sent it off. It was being converted. It was about to be delivered. And these guys, I guess, took the opportunity. Hey, we got a triple seven to play with. Woo! And did this.
|
Sam:
[1:48:57]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:59]
| Crazy. You got to watch it. Go look up the video. It's pretty cool. But it's dangerous and unsafe. And please, for the love of God, people, don't do this. If you've got a hand out of 777, this is not a great idea.
|
Sam:
[1:49:18]
| Yes along those i i looked up the youtube video you saw you you mentioned also impressive i also looked up the video of the 707 barrel roll from 1955 that was, that that's cool too although it happened far enough away from the camera that it's kind of blurry which is unfortunate but you know that's unfortunate but you know they did it they did it that Aerosaur 7471.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:43]
| Pass is nuts. Okay. All right. That is... That was so crazy. I'm like, this is just like this, but think of a 747 instead. No.
|
Sam:
[1:49:57]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:58]
| Don't do that. Don't do that.
|
Sam:
[1:50:00]
| Don't do that? Well, I won't ask for that next time you're piloting my 747.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:08]
| I'll try not to. You know, also brings me a question that I'm still like wondering, you know, they're trying to, you know, Trump is saying that he wants to fly his 7478 soon.
|
Sam:
[1:50:19]
| By the way, I want to correct myself. Well, I don't know if it's a correction or a change. I had heard and mentioned on the show a week or two ago when we talked about Air Force One that they plan to do a July 4th flyover of Mount Rushmore. The latest thing I heard is they want to do a July 4th flyover of the National Mall in D.C.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:39]
| Well, I saw in the story I was reading, I also saw the whole thing about the Mount Rushmore thing. But anyway, regardless, I'm wondering who the fuck is going to fly the plane. And the reason why I'm saying that is because the 747-8 is a totally different plane than the 747-200 fleet that is currently in use. Typically, Air Force pilots are the ones that are supposed to fly these things, and I'm not really understanding who the hell we're getting with any experience to be flying a 747-8, since we don't really have any in the fucking U.S.
|
Sam:
[1:51:19]
| Well, the only thing I could say is presumably the people doing the flight trials of this are also the pilots who are going to be doing this for the president.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:27]
| Yeah, but, oh, wait, I figured that flight trials are usually done by contractors. Not the fucking Air Force pilots.
|
Sam:
[1:51:37]
| Well, true, but you might...
|
Ivan:
[1:51:39]
| They might be having the Air Force pilots do some of this stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:51:43]
| And presumably... But here's the thing. Well, presumably... But my point is that... But whoever they intend to be the pilots for this, presumably have been training for it ever since they found out they were going to get this.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:55]
| Yeah, but my point is that even if they've been training, they have not been training like for real, Sam.
|
Sam:
[1:52:00]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:01]
| They have been training in a simulator. We're going to put a whole bunch of simulator jockeys right now to basically be flying the president because we don't have a...
|
Sam:
[1:52:13]
| Maybe they've been secretly flying commercial flights in Asia for the last year.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:18]
| Maybe. Well, not Asia, actually. Probably the biggest one, the best one to do with a Lufthansa. They've got... They actually have passenger 747-8s. Well, I guess the other one is that I... Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:52:30]
| They could do cargo.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:31]
| That's the point. They could do cargoes because there are a whole bunch of cargo ones that are flying in the United States. Cargo, not passenger, but yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:52:40]
| Okay. Well, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:43]
| Maybe they are getting training. Maybe. Maybe. But you know what? Again, you got to remember, we weren't expected to be flying this plane right now. And these guys don't care about anything, including OPSEC, safety, security. So it would not be beyond them to completely compromise on safety because he's so obsessed with flying on this plane.
|
Sam:
[1:53:07]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:07]
| And maybe that's a good thing. Well, no, because I don't want the other people to get killed.
|
Sam:
[1:53:11]
| What you're going to see, Yvonne, they have clearly seen this video from Texas, and they're going to want to do the same thing with Air Force One over the National Mall. Six-foot altitude. Not only, they're going to want to beat it. They're going to want to be lower.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:28]
| Okay. I would normally, if the only person on board the plane was Trump, but there was being flown remotely, I would be yes, but I really don't want to get all these other people killed. But if we could fly to plane remotely and Trump is the only passenger on board, then let's go for it.
|
Sam:
[1:53:46]
| I have a way to bring all of the current issues together.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:49]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:53:51]
| You set Air Force down. You have the low pass over the National Mall, but then you land it in the reflecting pool.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:02]
| Perfect.
|
Sam:
[1:54:04]
| Dot dot dot i will give my robin letter plug one more time robinletter.com if you're not already active in it if you haven't already created your own robins go do so i had two new registrations this morning so i, i am continuing to get registration you know what i just forgot.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:21]
| About this okay i i just checked how they are training i forgot that we oh i i guess i forgot to mention this. We bought another 747-8.
|
Sam:
[1:54:31]
| As you interrupt me in the middle of my spiel, but okay, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:34]
| I know, but I'm sorry, but I had to go, correct. We bought one from Lufthansa.
|
Sam:
[1:54:39]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:40]
| A passenger one. Yeah, they went, aside from the gift, aside from the two that we're doing, because they have to train the pilots, we went out and bought another one.
|
Sam:
[1:54:51]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:52]
| This happened under radar. Nobody noticed.
|
Sam:
[1:54:54]
| Is that one also going to be converted into an Air Force One?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:57]
| Probably. Eventually, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:55:00]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:01]
| Air crews use a dedicated 747-8I aircraft acquired from Lufthansa for primary training. Following initial qualifications, completed on a leased cargo airplane from Atlas, which is the only other operator in the U.S. That Atlas cargo. So, anyway. But, yeah, we bought another. And you see, nobody, I even forgot. We bought another one, just in case.
|
Sam:
[1:55:24]
| Just in case.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:26]
| Because we don't have money for health care and for, you know, food for those starving. But we could buy as many 747-8s as we want.
|
Sam:
[1:55:34]
| In one of his many, you know, clips made directly for, you know, Democratic commercials, Donald Trump himself said that the reason we can't pay for daycare is because we have to go bomb Iran.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:50]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:55:52]
| So.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:52]
| Yes. Okay. Good. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:55:55]
| We're done here. Thank you, everybody, for listening yet another week. Have a great week. Stay safe. Have fun. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And if all goes well, we'll talk to you again next week. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:10]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:56:41]
| Okay, thank you. And it's Saturday afternoon, so I'm going to do more campaign signs for Brandy Donaghy campaign signs out all over the place.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:51]
| You need that.
|
Sam:
[1:56:52]
| I have to deal with one that got cut up, too. One that got cut up.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:56]
| With an X-Acto knife.
|
Sam:
[1:56:57]
| Something like that. 350 feet long.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:00]
| 350, yeah. Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:57:03]
| Okay, hitting stop.
| |
|
