 So, a story that's shocking out of Britain, a British member of Parliament, member of the Conservative Party, was knifed to death by a Somali immigrant, some bloke named Ali, and Ali Habi Ali. And it's a strange case, as Colin Liddell knows. He was living in a 2.5 million dollar London townhouse, and his father is a high-ranking member of the Somali government. And his father is part of a Somali faction that is opposed to the Emirate of Qatar. So, maybe it wasn't just some random killing by some crazy third-world person as the media's portraying. Maybe this has something to do with David M.S., the member of Parliament, and his ties to Qatar. So, what's the David killed due to his connections with Qatar, Colin Liddell writes. And then the other question I have is, how come we had a complete cessation of Islamic terrorism while Donald Trump was in power? And then as soon as Donald Trump is removed from office, then we have a resumption of Islamic terror. Is there any connection between those two events? Seems to me likely that there is a connection that while Trump was in power, I think Islamists saw that it was not in their interest to continue to commit vast amounts of terror. And so they stopped. But now that Trump is out of power, and the spotlight is off of Islamic immigration into the West, then these Islamic terrorist events escalate. So in France, so it's a year now since a French school teacher was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee, a Chechland Islamic refugee who was upset because his history teacher was teaching civics and he talked about the right to blaspheme, the right to free speech, freedom of conscience. And he showed his class caricature as the Prophet Muhammad, and the girl told her father, kind of a false version, what had taken place in the class. And then it inspired this Chechen refugee to go behead the teacher. And so France, probably more than any other Western nation, has the highest percentage of Muslims and has the highest fear of Islamic terrorism. And so we have the growing popularity of right-wing pundit Eric Zamor, who is a Sephardic Jew, and seems to have about a 45% chance of becoming the next French president according to the polls. So he has a strong opposition to anti-Western immigration into France. A lot of news stories today, but right now the top one on New York Times is 90 Seconds of Rage. About the January 6th riot, the U.S. Capitol. And the New York Times asked, how could these ordinary citizens commit acts of breathtaking brutality? And it just reminds me of a classic observation from the social sciences that when our friends do things that are discordant with how we view them, we just dismiss. So anyone else acted in the way that our friends act at times, we would be on guard and we would disavow and we'd want to distance ourselves. But when our friends do things that are outside of our expectations for them, we always excuse it. All right? So we think of excuses for the people we want to excuse, and then we come down with a judgment for those who are not in our in-group. And that's the way the world works. We have different standards for our in-group and for our friends and for everyone else. So this New York Times article is called 90 Seconds of Rage, about 90 and 10 seconds of brutality in the United States State Capitol, and it talks about seven men in particular. Peter Steger, a bearded truck driver from Arkansas, who weaponized old glory. So he used the U.S. flag as a weapon. Logan Barnhard, heavy machine operator from Michigan, who once modeled for the covers of romance novels. So these guys were all punching and beating police. Three fencing contractor from Georgia, Jack Wade Whitten, four geophysicist from Colorado, Jeffrey Siball, five former Marine from Pennsylvania, Michael Lopatic, sex deputy sheriff from Tennessee, Ronald Maccabee, and seven, a self-made businessman from Kentucky, Clayton Ray Mullins. And his friends describe him as a well-intentioned person devoted to keeping his small country church afloat. He does not drink, he does not smoke, he does not curse, he does not bother with social media, and he prefers old Westerns to the news. So situationism raises its ugly head. So situationism reminds us that there's no such thing as moral character because who we are differs depending on the situation we're in. So the most you can say is that we have domain-specific traits. So someone may consistently be honest in business, but he may not be honest and faithful in his marriage. All right, someone may be kind and gentle in church, but very tough and harsh in business. Someone might be a wonderful raconteur and storyteller at a bar, but in a competitive situation, he may turn into a total jerk. So none of us have traits that will exist across all domains of our life. So when they reach out to friends of these seven accused men, all the friends say, oh, these are wonderful, kind, gentle, law-abiding souls. And it just reminds me of this finding from the social sciences that we simply blind ourselves to behavior of our friends that we can't explain or don't want to explain. We always just come up with explanations. So whenever you see someone who's a serial killer and they interview his neighbors or friends or acquaintances, oh, he's like a nice guy. All right, so we see what we want to see and we ignore what we don't want to confront. So we have these reality distortion machines going on in our head. So they essentially operate to keep us feeling comfortable and so we don't want to think bad things about our friends. So we excuse their bad behavior. We magnify the bad behavior of our groups and we maintain this distorted view of the world just to keep ourselves feeling comfortable. And I was just reading a similar article in the New York Times about this a couple of days ago. Australia is not a police state. So it's become a staple on right-wing media that Australia has turned into this evil dictatorship because of its laws restricting social gathering, trying to reduce the spread of COVID. So from Tucker Carlson to other right-wing outlets, they've suddenly got this agenda of presenting this distorted perception of countries that are tougher on COVID than what they would prefer. It reminds me a little bit of the saying about Jews is that every Jew thinks he's the quintessential Jew and a Jew who gives one more mitzvah, one more religious commandment than him is a fanatic and any Jew who commits one less mitzvah observes one less commandment than him is just a total goer, just like the non-Jews. So we all tend to think that we're just right. We have just the right amount of moderation. So Tucker Carlson early on in the pandemic went to Mar-a-Lago to advise Donald Trump to take COVID very seriously. And so Tucker Carlson's show took COVID seriously about a week to 10 days before Sean Hannity. So Tucker Carlson viewers were more prepared to take social distancing measures and other measures to restrict the flow of COVID about a week or so earlier than Sean Hannity viewers. But now if you go too far in COVID restrictions, then Tucker Carlson wants to portray you as not a free country. It's Australia's now some kind of dictatorship. So Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida announced the end of last month, Australia was not a free country. Well, there's no perfectly free country. Australia has had 150th the per capita death rate of the United States. So maybe they have been doing something right with regard to COVID. On the other hand, there's so much we don't know about COVID and what are effective restrictions against COVID that it may well be that these government measures have not been particularly important in restricting COVID or any account for say 50% of that discrepancy in per capita COVID death rates. So there's nothing that Australia and New Zealand have done with regard to COVID that other Western countries have not done. And the United States death rates are right in line with those of other industrialized Western nations. So you have tighter societies, more regimented and corporate societies like Japan and Korea and China. And then you have looser societies like the West where people are a little less likely to just fall in line with whatever the government line or the social line is of how we should respond. So there's a lot we don't know about what are the most effective strategies with regard to COVID. But still saying that Australia is not a free country because it's got lockdowns seems to me absurd. So when I was in Australia, I would notice how the Australian news media would portray this very distorted view of America. It's like this incredibly violent Wild West type atmosphere because they would focus on those crimes, on those stories out of America that were shocking such as Bernard Getz shooting all those people on the subway. And so we tend to distort the world around us to provide us with a feeling of comfort. So if you're in Australia and America is the dominant country on the globe, then it comforts you to think that your country is infinitely superior to America in many different ways because America is just so violent. Well, most of America has the same rate of violence as other Western industrialized nations. It's just certain pockets of America have astronomical rates of violence. What characterizes those certain pockets of America with astronomical rates of violence? Well, their demographics elsewhere in the world also have astronomical rates of violence. So those demographics in America that commit disproportionate amounts of motor and violent crime, they also commit astronomical rates of murder and violent crime if they're in London or if they're in Scandinavian countries or if they're in Australia, all right? So Somali immigrants in Melbourne, for example, have committed crimes like 50 times the normal rate of the population. So different groups commit different crimes at different rates. And America's, for example, racial experience pretty much is the same as those demographics have had elsewhere in the world. So there's nothing unique about America's racial experience. There's nothing really unique about America's COVID death rates. They're right in line with what you would expect. Now, with the 1918, 1919 Spanish flu, Australia also got off really light. So then maybe because Australia's less populated, maybe because of Australia's climate, there may be all these other reasons aside from government policies and lockdowns why Australia's had much lower rates of COVID deaths. So when the stock market goes up, politicians like to take credit. Ah, Trump, you know, gloried in the US stock market, but stock market doesn't just rise and fall on what a president says. So I was listening to Skip Bayless, the Fox Sports Commentator and he said that he has certain rituals with his wife, Ernestine, that she starts watching a Cowboys game with him. She cannot leave because when she leaves, they always lose, right? So we have this magical thinking in our head that, okay, because our government did this, then that's the explanation for the result. And the result may be overwhelmingly from other causes aside from government policy and the Cowboys winning or losing really doesn't have anything to do with Skip Bayless's wife getting up and leaving during the middle of the game. But we tend to think in this magical way. So in the United States, Poland and Britain, we've got all these protesters assembling outside Australian embassies, denouncing Australia's decline into thuggish autocracy and say save Australia hashtag that trended on Twitter. And Australians were confused, like what were they requiring saving from? From sunshine, from free healthcare, from low COVID deaths. But there's this right wing propaganda that depicts Australia as some kind of blasted hellscape being just ruthlessly repressed. And like where the heck does it come from? So looking at this essay in the New York Times and says that this propaganda is made for an Australian audience as part of an international right wing campaign to recruit those frustrated by lockdowns and sure of vaccines and animated by appeals to personal liberty. So Australians have been enlisted as unwitting props in an American culture war. So you ever felt like you've been enlisted as an unwitting prop in some inter-Nessian struggle at work or in your social community? This is how I think Australians are thinking. So you've got all these right wing videos that are edited in a deceptive way to try to depict all this brutal police violence against hapless Australian citizens. And they're just shown without context. They're deceptively edited and they're spread across anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown channels. And most of the incidents were recorded 12 months earlier and they usually resorted from provocation campaigns by anti-maskers to defy restrictions and to initiate confrontations with police officers. So we've got all these right wing American influences with millions of followers sharing videos in which Australian anti-maskers staged disruptions in shops or start fights with the police. But when you edit the videos in a particular way then it looks like innocent citizens are being brutalized by Australian police. So to give you an example of distortions that Australians think about Americans like I have Australians saying to me why are American police killing so many innocent people? And so I asked, they said this would never happen in Australia. So I said, okay, what's the procedure in Australia if a police officer shoots someone? He says, well, they take away his gun, they put him on death duty and they do an investigation. I said, that's the exact same thing that we have in the United States. If an American police officer shoots someone, they take away his gun, they put him on death duty and they investigate. It's the exact same thing. So it's not like Australia has unique policies with regard to COVID that the rest of the world didn't think of, right? It's nothing that Australian New Zealand have done that other nations have not also done. But it may well be because of Australian New Zealand being island states, because they're not as crowded as many European and American places and because of the climate that these other factors outside of government policy had much more to do with Australia's low COVID death rates. And I'm not saying Australian policies did nothing wrong. I'm not expert enough on public policy in which policies are most effective with regard to COVID. I don't automatically assume, however, that restrictions on personal liberty in the face of COVID automatically wrong. Sometimes they may be wrong, sometimes they may be right. Sometimes there are higher values than personal liberty, such as survival. Sometimes personal liberty, I think Trump's other competing values. So I see myself, I understand myself trying to be right in the middle here. So anti-lockdown protests in Australia were relatively small by Australian standards. So it's not unknown in Australian history to have over a hundred thousand people gather to protest something. But these anti-lockdown protests in Australia never got more than a few thousand people. So big difference in the Australian outlook compared to the American outlook is that Americans venerate freedom, Australians venerate fairness. So there's much more of a sense of solidarity in Australia. There's much more of a sense that we're all in it together. America is much more individualistic country. So you fly into Australia as an Australian citizen and you feel like you're coming home. When you fly into America as an American citizen, you feel like your government's treating you as the enemy. So Australians, generally speaking, trust their government more. They feel that the government is more on their side and is generally effective and is trying to do the right thing. So Australians generally overwhelmingly support these government restrictions on personal liberty in the name of reducing the spread of COVID. Now, it's interesting that it was a bumbling government response that has led to many of Australia's problems. They were slow securing an adequate supply of COVID vaccines in the time before the arrival of the Delta variant. So Australia's government let down the population by not getting enough vaccines. And so Australia was about six months behind the vaccination rates of the United States. So when Delta blew through the United States it did not cause as much disruptions when it blew through Australia because many more Americans were vaccinated. But now I think a higher percentage of Australians are vaccinated than Americans are vaccinated. Edie says, I was at a protest in Germany. I saw a protest of being dragged by the hair through the street and kicked with the knee in the face by a policeman. Did I dream that too? I have no idea. But I do know that when you initiate a violent confrontation, people often respond with violence. So you might push someone and they may respond by kicking you in the nuts or punching you in the face. So when you escalate the tension and when you escalate the confrontation then disproportionate amounts of violence are often used. One protest had died in police custody in Germany because of a heart attack. Well, may well have been a heart attack. When you escalate tension, escalate confrontation and escalate violence, then a lot of bad things happen that are not perfectly proportionate. So in general, you wanna behave in a very polite way to people who are armed, whether those armed people are police or not police. You didn't see a policeman being dragged by the hair. When you increase tension, confrontation, escalation around police, they're gonna act out. Just as if we increase tension, escalation, violence around you, you'd be more likely to act out. So police don't have to wait until they're dragged through the streets by the hair before they act out. All right, so therapists talk about couples should try to lower the temperature. So let's say couples are engaged in a passionate disagreement. If they simply take a break, usually they have much more success coming back to the disagreement later on when the emotional temperature has been reduced and they make much more progress. But if they keep going at it while the emotional temperature is burning hot, then really bad things result from that. So if you're in disputes with people and the emotional temperature is running very hot between you, then you're very likely not to like the results as opposed to when you can reduce the emotional temperature, then you're much more likely to have some kind of successful outcome. So you put police under pressure, or you put armed people under pressure, or you put dangerous people under pressure, they're much more likely to lash out with violence. So the situation is going to have a tremendous effect on people on how they behave. So you may have a law-abiding, compassionate, sane, moderate policeman that you escalate the tension, the pressure, the violence, the confrontation around him, and he's very likely to lash out in ways that he otherwise would not. And you also see this in the 90 seconds in the State Capitol on January 6th when you had this vicious outbreak of violence against police officers and people behaving in ways that are completely uncharacteristic of them, but when you get caught up in a frenzy, right, when the emotional temperature is rising hotter and hotter and hotter, then you're far more likely to behave in ways that are outside of what is normal for you. Okay, Daily Caller has been really good on this John Gruden story. The NFL wants fans to believe that out of 650,000 emails, only John Grudens were offensive. So the NFL has analyzed over 650,000 emails and the NFL did not identify any problems anywhere near what you saw with John Gruden. So really, out of the 650,000 emails, only John Gruden said something that was offensive. I mean, why was John Gruden deliberately targeted and destroyed with these strategically leaked emails? The most obvious answer is that John Gruden was declared an enemy by NFL Commissioner, Roger Godel. Roger Godel wanted him out and so he selectively leaked John Gruden's emails. So according to Associated Press, no current team or league personnel is caught up in this web of 650,000 plus emails. Really? Not a single current person in the NFL was involved in any of these 650,000 emails. So John Gruden is canceled for private comments he made a decade ago, appears to be a coordinated and deliberate campaign to end his career. He was deliberately targeted and taken out. Luke, what are your thoughts on Australia's Gitmo and how some Iranians and Afghans were fleeing war zones in the 1980s are still being held by the Australian government? This is against all laws as far as I know. Well, if you try to illegally enter Australia, you will never be allowed in Australia. So you're talking about both people. People who try to illegally enter Australia, you never will be allowed into Australia. If you get caught trying to illegally enter Australia, you will be sent off to detention camps in non-Australian islands surrounding Australia, where Australia will pay for your upkeep, but the purpose is to resettle you somewhere else. Do I think China is going to be nicer to the Aussies? I have no idea. Australia's pretty well situated and it's alliance with the United States to contain the reign of China. Two of China's three essential sea lanes go right past Australia. So India could cut off pretty much all sea transportation to China. Japan, if it wanted to, could cut off all importation of energy and other goods into China. The United States could cut off all importation of goods into Chinese ports and Australia could certainly be a part of those efforts if it wanted to. What happens when Aussies lose their country but they're not going to lose their country? What Australia is doing is totally illegal. It's not illegal because these are not Australian citizens. So Australia can do with them what they like. There aren't any effective international laws about what countries must do or not do with non-citizens. Non-citizens trying to illegally enter your country, there are no legal restrictions on what you can do to them. International law is just vague. It's virtually meaningless. These are non-citizens trying to illegally enter Australia. They have no rights, right? It's like they're invading Australia. There are no rights protecting invaders. Australia's like Israel. Yeah, Australia stands up for Australian national interests in a way that America's generally failed to do with regard to its own illegal immigrants. No NFL fan will stop watching because of the Gruden thing. Exactly. But it is interesting that the NFL maintains that this was the only guy saying something offensive in currently being personnel out of 650,000 email. I mean Australia being a colony on stolen land. Stolen land is just tendentious. Nobody grew up out of the land. So anywhere, any nation, there are, what, 300 countries in the world is all stolen land because someone always lived there before you did. Luke is way underestimating China, or China's falling apart. Two-thirds of China doesn't have an adequate supply of Australia. I go back to Australia. I've been back regularly, so no, I have no problem going back. If you think Australia is a police date or some fluggish dictatorship, there's just no empirical evidence for that. If you think Australia is a prison island, that's just a fact of your, that's just something out of your imagination. There's no basis for that. Now, Australia does not have, for example, the First Amendment rights of the United States, right? I'm not aware of almost any nation that has America's First Amendment rights. Unlike basketball, the NFL can't expand internationally. Well, it can expand internationally. United States, the National Football League plays several games in Britain. In fact, I think there's one game going on in Britain, in London right now. So the Dolphins hold a 13 to 10 lead over the Jaguars in London. That's the NFL expanding internationally. So one day, we may very well have an NFL team in London. We may have an NFL team in Mexico. We may have an NFL team in Canada, but we play pre-season games in Mexico and we play regular season games in London. And there's an NFL game going on in London right now. So yes, the NFL very much interested in expanding internationally. They've had that London game for 20 years, no increase. No, you're wrong again. So you're consistently wrong here, Glyde Medley. Are you embarrassed about that? They're playing more games in London than ever. They've had NFL minor league teams in Europe that failed, yes, but they are playing more games in London than ever. You're saying that the NFL can't expand internationally, but they've been playing in London for 20 years. They've been playing in Mexico pre-season games. So yeah, they have expanded their audience. So Eric Adams, the next mayor of New York and our likelihood, he is committed to keeping gifted programs in schools. So current mayor, Bill de Blasio announced plans to eliminate gifted schools, but gifted programs, but Eric Adams wants to keep them. So Eric Adams seemed like the sanest of all the available candidates in the Democratic Party for the next mayor of New York. And this is another example. Yeah, if they keep making the NFL more gay, maybe the Euros will become interested. Oh, am I a contrarian? Yeah, I think I probably have some contrarian instincts. I think that my need to be contrarian is probably correlates with my narcissism. So narcissism is not a fixed date. You're not like an eight out of 10 narcissist, you know, 24 hours a day in our likelihood that there are various situations that will bring out narcissistic tendencies. So let's say I'm on a panel. So I participated in public panels. I was on a panel with Eugene Vollek and Mickey Kals and Kevin Drum and some other leading bloggers. And so if there was a topic of conversation that was brought up, yeah, my mind would probably run to having a different perspective than the perspectives already offered. So part of doing what I do, offering opinions on the world is you wanna offer something unique. Now, that's very dangerous because when you wanna offer something unique, that will lead you towards conspiracy thing because it'll lead you away from the mainstream evidence-based perspectives. So that's why many pundits, many people who do what I do, they increasingly tend towards conspiracy theories because with conspiracy theories, can they keep offering something unique to their audience? So you have this incentive to try to provide your audience with something unique. And so it draws you to contrarian thinking. Contrarian thinking is primarily found in conspiracy theories. And so there is a tendency once you start developing an audience where you're giving your views on the world, you have to give them something that they can't find in the New York Times. And on Fox News, you have to... What? Unique USP, a unique selling proposition. So there's very strong tendencies to be contrarian and conspiracist. So I'd like to think I'm aware of those tendencies and the higher one's narcissism, meaning the higher one needs admiration, then the more likely you are to slip into contrarian and conspiracist thinking because to feed that audience, to feed that unique selling proposition, to feed your desire for admiration, you have to give them something unique. And the only way that you consistently give an audience something unique that they can't find in the mainstream media is generally speaking, being contrarian and conspiracist. And Maroon says I must be a hell of a narcissist then because Maroon loves the conspiratorial and contrarian perspective. Yeah, because you understand yourself as having these unique perspectives on life that are not reflected in the mainstream media. And so you're consistently taking the contrarian and conspiracist perspective because you feel like you have something unique to give to the world. And you may well go beyond the evidence in furthering your opinion that you have these unique important insights that are not to be found in the mainstream media. So that can very much lead you down a dark path. Given that a conspiracy is just three or more people colluding, it happens all the time. You're speaking there, the literal meaning of conspiracy theory, yeah. It's just two people colluding. But when we talk about conspiracy theories, we're not talking about the literal meaning of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory as it is understood is as opposed to the conventional wisdom. It's not 9-11 was a conspiracy theory. Al Qaeda conspired to commit 9-11. So the literal meaning is two people conspiring to do something, but that's not how conspiracy theory is primarily understood. Conspiracy theory is primarily understood is not just various people, two or more people conspiring to do something, but as opposed to the conventional story, as opposed to the mainstream media, as opposed to conventional scholarship. Oh, so all these missionaries have 17 missionaries were taken by a gang in Haiti, Port-au-Prince. So we have all these American Christian missionaries going to Haiti to do good. Now, remember, Haiti through its history deliberately killed all its white people, right? They slaughtered them, then they apologized, and they asked France, I believe, to send the more white people that they wouldn't commit slaughter anymore. France sent the more white people and Haiti slaughtered them all again. And yet more Christian white people go to Haiti to try to do good, and now they get kidnapped. Christian aid ministries said up to 17 of their group were kidnapped in Haiti. So maybe it's not a good idea to go to these places. All right, so there's a whole 12-step group for people who can't stop helping. It's called Al-Anon, people who want to help alcoholics help drug addicts, but often the desire to rescue or the desire to be rescued comes from the same sick place. It's a good idea to help moderately and appropriately, but flying off to Haiti to volunteer, probably a really bad idea. It probably comes out of a pathological need to help. So just because you desire to help does not mean that what you're doing is a good idea. Just because it gives you a good feeling, just because it makes you feel righteous and look righteous to your friends doesn't mean that it is righteous. New York Times story, despite a punishing drought, San Diego has water, it wasn't easy. So San Diego is one of the highest functioning cities in the United States. When San Diego was damaged by fires approximately 10 years ago, San Diegans bonded together to help each other. They were the opposite of the people in New Orleans who were just completely pathetic and waited for the government to come and bail them out. San Diegans got together. And people I know, like people in San Diego when they know the state's in a drought, they voluntarily take on measures to reduce their use of water. So San Diegans have confronted California's water shortage and they've taken all these measures to reduce their consumption of water. They have been good citizens, all right? But other parts of the state, let's just say other demographics in the state are not nearly as good at conserving water. So now San Diego is very likely to get punished. And water they have reserved for themselves may well be released to other parts of the state that have not been very good with conserving water. So San Diego has probably done better than any other locality in California with conserving water. Now this is a problem with left-wing policies. They consistently benefit those who do the wrong things. So you commit a crime, like liberal left-wing policies want to reduce your prison sentence or eliminate your prison sentence as much as possible. You don't work, liberal left-wing policies want to provide you with welfare. You get hooked on drugs and alcohol, liberal left-wing policies want to pay for your rehabilitation. You don't conserve water, liberal left-wing policy wants to take water from people who have conserved and give it to you who's splurged. San Diego is probably the most pro-social, like has the, among the highest exhibition of good citizenship of any of America's major cities. It's a strongly military town. It's surely a shining light on the hill. Oh, this is a funny story in the New York Times. Shorthand staff, some U.S. hospices are asking new patients to wait. So people are dying and they want to go into hospice, but hospices have a severe staffing shortage. They say, please wait on your dying, all right? Please wait, we've got to admit you now. So just hospices, you're dying, you want to go into hospice, it's like, oh, can you hold off on that? We don't really have the staff right now. All right, a horrifying story out of Philadelphia. One was raped on a train. Passengers watched and didn't call 911. So I wonder who were the people on this train? I suspect they weren't Sandy Agans. All right, so this guy, Fysten Neuhe, all right, horrible man, long criminal record. He boarded a train, sat next to this woman, gradually got aggressive, eventually ripped her clothes off and raped her. And the people around her, they took pictures, but they did nothing. And the sexual assault carried on for eight minutes and nobody intervened. So I'm just curious, who were these people? I don't think they were Sandy Agans. So who were on this bus in South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority train? In Upper Derby Township, where they just sat back and looked on and took photos as a rape was conducted for eight minutes. I'm curious who these people are, who just sat back because I don't think they were Sandy Agans. Then finally, op ed in the Washington Post, chronic pain is surprisingly treatable when patients focus on the brain. So not bad by Nathaniel Frank, he's the director of What We Know Project at Cornell University, which aggregates scholarly research to the general public. He talks about one-fifth of Americans suffer from chronic pain. And he was like that too. Often surgery is performed, despite dismal success rates of around 25%. And this guy says, nothing worked until I saw the late New York University physician, John Sano, who I've often talked about on this show, put me in an eight-week cognitive therapy program that finally provided me with relief. So chronic pain is often neuroplastic. It's generated by the brain in a misbegot effort to protect us from danger. So let's say you don't wanna deal with your anger with your friend or with your spouse or with your kids. So the brain helps you out by giving you back pain so it distracts you from your anger. So John Sano's approach is now called pain reprocessing therapy. So when our brains are on high alert, we interpret our surroundings through a lens of danger. And this is just like with the police, right? When police are on high alert, when we're on high alert, we interpret everything through a lens of danger and we're going to overreact. And so this pain reprocessing therapy aims to lower the threat level. So it's just like trying to lower the emotional temperature on a confrontation. So most of chronic pain is not structural. It's a mind-body phenomenon. And by changing our perceptions, gaining knowledge, altering our beliefs, thinking and feeling differently can dramatically reduce the pain. So it doesn't mean that the pain is imagined. It means that the pain's response and voluntary response like blushing or crying or elevated heart rate or bodily reactions to emotional stimuli. So neuroscientists often know that pain is an opinion. So most pain is not factually present but is generated by our brains and therefore depends on the brain's fallible perception of danger. And if you can shift the brain's perception of danger, then you can reduce your pain levels. So there was this one study that looked at MRI scans of 98 people with no back pain and two-thirds of them had disc abnormalities. So these body changes don't necessarily hurt. So data do not support a physical injury model of back pain. Most back pain is not related to physical injuries. Most back pain comes from the way that you're emotionally processing life. So exposure to stress or adversity or just difficulty with life, difficulty with processing your emotions, difficulty connecting with others is the number one predictor of chronic pain. Most of this research is focused on back pain but there are many other forms of chronic pain that are also neuroplastic, meaning an opinion. Most pain is an opinion. So thousands of people, I've seen thousands of people heal from dozens of chronic pain conditions with a mind-body approach says Nicole Sacks, a psychotherapist based in Delaware, specialized in eliminating neuroplastic pain. One person's back pain is another person's sciatica, is another person's irritable bowel syndrome, is another person's migraine. So her approach includes meditation, expressive writing. So that's what John Sonner would have people do, just write out all your feelings. If there's something that you might be unconsciously angry or resentful about, what could it possibly be? If I was jealous right now, I'm not conscious of it, who might I be jealous of? Because often we get physical pain to distract ourselves from the surfacing of difficult emotions. And deep journal writing invites us to unload these difficult emotions. So most chronic pain is real, it's debilitating, but it's learned. And so because it's learned, it can also be unlearned. Yeah, the great thing about back pain is that no one can prove that you don't have it. So you either need to go on disability or take a day off from work, you can just say back pain because no one can ever disprove it. Speak on how China has advanced hypersonics unlike the USA now. I don't know anything about it. I do know that China often lies and that most Chinese products tend to be quite shoddy. If danger is real, then you should be alert. And the outside world is more dangerous than what we consciously think about. But that doesn't mean that obsession with danger necessarily serves us. Why would a sane male intervene when there's a rib going on? I think most, most sendyagans, let's put it this way, that they would be outraged if they were on a train and there was a rape going on. Look, is the US the best nation in the world? That's just highly subjective, best in what sense. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. They have the strongest economy and the strongest military. Like China's per capita GMP ranks 75th in the world. So the United States also has the most efficient, hardest working workforce in the world. Okay, so we've got a link from the chat here saying that Beijing blasts nuke right around the globe. China fires hypersonic missile to circle planet in low orbit and terrifying display of its advanced weapons, catching US intelligence chiefs off guard. China's made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons. They are able to circle the globe at a low orbit, missed target by two dozen miles. Well, we know how incompetent much of China's tech has been like they send satellite into space, they lose control of it and it crashes to earth in unpredictable ways. So Chinese military launched the long March rocket in August carrying a hypersonic light vehicle around the globe for cruising towards its target, which it missed by two dozen miles. So China's made astonishing progress on the development of its hypersonic weapons. Okay, so China's been threatening to overtake Taiwan for 50 years, it still hasn't done so. China hasn't fought in a real war since 1979. Right, so the Chinese military does not have an impressive track record. So count me skeptical about these claims of amazing Chinese military prowess. If the USA was a ship, would you say it was survivable? Right now it is the most powerful nation in the world. Things can change overnight, nothing is immutable, but I would expect for at least the next 50 years the United States will continue to be the most powerful nation in the world. USA lost in Afghanistan recently, it means nothing. It had nothing to do with American national interests. It's good that we got out of there. So we fought a gratuitous war. We spent $2 trillion on Afghanistan completely needlessly, gratuitously, pointlessly and we got out, it doesn't negate in one wet America's strength and power. It's precisely because we're so strong and so powerful that we can waste $2 trillion on a pointless war like Afghanistan. When did the USA win a war last? Well, it depends on what you mean by win but our armed forces are trained and have had plenty of real-world war experience. So they're gonna be much more effective than a Chinese military that hasn't fought in a war since 1979. So we got blooded in Afghanistan, we got blooded in Iraq, we got blooded in the Kuwait war back in 1991. So our armed forces have had plenty of real-world experience that the Chinese haven't. The US hasn't fought a near-peer competitor in the last 50 years. Because there aren't any peer competitors in the United States, it's that powerful. It's like saying, how come none of the Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl victories are classic Super Bowls? Because in all the Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl victories, they annihilated their opponents. Right, so somehow is that a diss on the abilities of the Dallas Cowboys because they annihilated their opponents? Is it a diss on the United States that haven't fought a peer competitor in 50 years plus because the United States hasn't had a peer competitor in 50 years? At its best, the Soviet Union was something like had one quarter of the GNP of the United States. So the Soviet Union was a third-world country with some first-world weapons. So the United States has been so powerful over the past 70 years that it has not had any peer competitors. Look, the Chinese military has stolen all the biometrics of US government employees. They hacked, they have huge dossiers of blackmail on everyone, I guess they do. When did the USA annihilate China and Russia? Well, the United States defeated Russia in the Cold War and the United States could end China very quickly. They could blockade all of China's ports. China has to import virtually all its energy. So if the United States wanted to, it could just blockade Chinese ports. China's economy is heavily export dependent. The US blockaded China. China's exports would end. Its economy would end. It would not be able to import energy. It would be finished. Like China's surrounded by enemies. India could blockade Chinese ports. Japan could blockade Chinese ports. It's very easy to end China because China's very vulnerable. It has to import virtually all its energy. The United States is a net energy exporter.