 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual lives. This is The Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show for another news roundup. For today is Thursday, December 14th, hope everybody is having a great week. It's holiday season, so let's jump right into it. Ukraine, Russia, the war there is kind of back in the headlines. Primarily because of the inability of Zelensky to convince U.S. Republicans to approve American aid to Ukraine. I guess they're still negotiating in the House and in the Senate. They're still trying to get a package that will include some kind of changes to voter security, some kind of changes to immigration, rules in order for Republicans to vote for this aid. It is kind of interesting that it's not like Republicans are basically using this leverage on the Democrats because they know Biden really wants it. Most Republicans at least want this too. I believe that sometime, either by the end of this year or the next year, aid will be approved whether you like it or not. It will be approved. Zelensky is also challenged, of course, in Europe where Germany is not only in a recession but is also facing massive budgetary crisis. There somehow the Supreme Court has ruled that they can do some kind of budgetary manipulation and therefore can't. They've just lost like $60 billion in their budget and they have no clue what to do about that. So Germany is going to be struggling. Gildes in Holland is opposed to Ukrainian aid. We've got Slovakia. We've got Hungary. So all this is going on. Ukrainian aid seems... It seems like there's a good probability that they're not going to get it or they're going to get less of it. I think everybody's going to come through in the end, but they're going to drag this out and they're going to make this suspenseful. And in the meantime, the Russians smell blood. And the Russians know that the aid is... that the West is struggling to provide the aid. They know generally that the West is weak. They see that the United States and to some extent Europe are distracted by what's going on in Gaza. They also sense that the opportunities to create more havoc in the world wouldn't be surprised in 2024. We see something in Latin America around Venezuela, Guyana, and maybe in the Balkans, maybe Serbia, Kosovo. We see something going on there that kind of creates tension in Europe that distracts from Ukraine. Russia will plod all its allies to create as many distractions and as many issues as possible. In the meantime, today, Putin made it very clear in a speech that he is not interested in compromise. He reiterated the goals of the war, which were to, quote, denazify Ukraine. And basically his goal is to take over Ukraine, to make Ukraine at best a 100% satellite country of Russia. He made this very clear to demilitarize it, to demilitarize it and denazify it. Whatever the hell denazifying means. Basically make it a part of Russia. He again reiterated the idea that all the annexed territories in east and south Ukraine are now part of Russia. And there's no compromising on that. And so everything that Russia occupies now plus more areas that they would like to occupy. And other spokesmen of the Kremlin, Medvedev and others have indicated that, yeah, well, Ukraine maybe can stay as an independent country if they want levive. Maybe they can keep levive in the west, but the rest is Russia. Will be Russia is a part of Russia. So the Kremlin is clearly upping its rhetoric, sensing western weakness. And, you know, there's no question the west is going to pay dearly for the weakness. And if the weakness actually manifests itself in a Russian victory, then the west will pay even more dearly. Then Poland beware, particularly Baltic states beware. And of course that means NATO and that means triggers US participation. The war itself is at a stalemate. I mean, Ukraine has made some progress in the south and it's made a lot of progress killing a lot of Russians. But in terms of actual land occupied, it is at a stalemate. It's likely to stay at a stalemate through the winter. Very difficult fighting conditions in terms of cold snow. Right now in Ukraine, even in the south, it is pretty brutal. Weather-wise, South Ukraine is pretty brutal. Weather-wise, right now. And so I don't expect anything to happen until the early spring. By then, maybe, not clear, by then maybe Ukrainian pilots will have been trained on the F-16s that they're getting. And they will be active in the region. That will give Ukraine, definitely, significantly help Ukraine, you know, in terms of being able to use the Air Force to support ground operations in order to strike deep behind enemy lines and in order to keep Russian planes away. Grante MSOs are doing a pretty good job with that, but the F-16s allows them to push them even further back, further away from the border. But there's no question. Russia is gaining confidence, not because it's doing well on the ground. It is not. It is very weak on the ground. It is out of, it is gaining confidence because it sees the weakness of the U.S. Primarily there, you have to put the blame on Republicans. And it sees the weakness of Europe. And there it's overwhelmingly the far right that is hampering any efforts to support Ukraine and to drive Russia back. Can Ukraine still win? Yeah, I mean, I have no doubts that it can if it received the weapons. It doesn't require NATO to fight, but if it receives the weapons it needs, yes, it can win. Russia is not in a good place militarily. It's great at putting landmines and slowing things down. But yeah, wars take time. Progress is slow. Parties learn. I wouldn't be surprised if next spring Ukrainian military will have learned from this last spring offensive in terms of Russia's defenses. But the other way is true as well. I mean, one of the things that Russia has gotten good at recently is jamming the West sophisticated precision weapons. It's going to be a back and forth. It's going to take a long time. There's no overwhelming superiority here, even though you'd expect Russia to have the upper hand. It does not. And I think the Ukrainians want this more. And we'll need to fight harder. And at the end of the day have by far not even close the superior weapons systems. So is victory possible? Yes, but much more commitment from Ukraine's Western allies has to be made. And they have to be follow up. I mean, the fact that the F-16s won't arrive in Ukraine and be operational in Ukraine until sometime, maybe in the second quarter of 2024 is a disgrace. The F-16s should have been approved on day one of this war. They would have been in the air for a long time now. And Ukraine would be in far better shape now than they are. The same with the Hamas took a long time. The Abrams tanks took a long time. Everything was delayed, delayed, delayed by the time they got the tanks. Mines were on the ground. If they'd gotten the tanks six months earlier, the war is completely different. In every respect, the Biden administration in the West and now Republicans have made this war as painful as possible for the Ukrainians, in spite of the fact that they have been amazing in their willingness to fight and their ability to fight against an army that pretty much every single military expert predicted that the war would be over in a matter of weeks and with a dominant Russian victory control over Kiev and almost all of Ukraine. That never happened. Those military experts were never called to account. They haven't pulled them off of television. They're still making predictions about the war that about as good as they were back then. I should do a show on military experts. I have a long history with them and their incompetence, incompetence. They know very little. They're very good at pativating on television, but in terms of actual underground making predictions about war, I've seen most nobody who's any good going back at least to the first Gulf War, but even before that. I guess the Lebanese war would be the one I would know most intimately would be the first one in the 1980s. All right. Let's see. Catherine and Jonathan up on the board, but not much going on in terms of super chat. Please consider supporting the Iran book show. It is your support through super chat and through monthly contributions of the way in which we fund this show. It is a donor supported project, the Iran book show. It doesn't run for free. It has to put food on the plate. So please consider supporting the show with a contribution. Catherine is here every single day supporting the show. Jonathan almost always in addition to a monthly contribution is often here with support. Jonathan might be on the Iran book show like next week. I think we might be doing an interview with Jonathan Honing next week. Let me finalize that before I give you topic and everything, but it's going to be a fun show. It's going to be a fun show. Jonathan, I think can second this. It would be one of the Iran book shows where Iran knows nothing about the topic. Literally nothing and where Jonathan is going to have to carry the whole show with his mind because I am basically ignorant of what we're going to be discussing. I know what we're going to be discussing. I don't know anything about it. Anyway, it's going to be fun. Jonathan is fun. We're going to have a good time with it. All right. So yes, reminder, support the show and reminder, ask questions. You guys get to shape the show, ask something about what's going on in the world right now and put some bucks behind it. All right, chili. Yeah. So here's the story about chili. I mean, this is a convoluted, interesting, fascinating story. Chili has a constitution. It was basically written in the 1980s, I think. It was 1980 under Pinochet, under Dictator. A constitution that is fairly pro-capitalism, fairly pro-markets, given the transition that chili was going on at the time, the Chicago Boys and the economic transition that was happening in chili at the time. So it's a constitution that has allowed chili, together with economic policies that a company did, to basically become the richest, wealthiest country in Latin America on a per capita GDP, but pretty much on any metric. It used to be the poorest before this. So anyway, about five years ago, there were massive demonstrations in the street against the kind of the, you know, against inequality primarily. The idea was this economic liberty, relative economic freedom, this constitution that was passed under Dictator has actually resulted in massive economic inequality and we're against inequality and we want some good old socialism. Massive demonstrations in the streets, riots. It was really awful for months and months. And at the end of it, it was, the two things really happened. One, it was decided that a new constitution would be drawn up and there would be, in a sense, a constitutional convention where a committee would draft a new constitution that that new constitution would be brought for vote to the masses. At the same time, at about the same time, and I don't have the exact timeline here, but about the same time, the Chileans also elected a very leftist president really for the first time and again turning their backs on years of, since the 1980s, so decades of really relatively speaking, relative to Latin America, certainly, free market policies that had led Chile to become richest country in Latin America. So the president was elected, still in office, a leftist president. There are elections, I think, next year or in either 2024 or 2025. But the committee came up, the constitutional convention came up with a constitution, a very, very leftist constitution reflecting what everybody thought was the will of the one. It was a sharp turn towards socialism. And so it proposed a very leftist constitution to the people and that was voted on, I think, about two years ago. And yeah, it was actually one year ago, so a year and a half ago. And in September 2022, it was rejected. People said, we're not serious, we don't really want socialism or we don't want a constitution that solidifies socialism and they basically voted it down. So now a new committee has been formed, a new committee that will is writing a constitution. The Chileans are going to vote on that constitution in three days. This new constitution is a conservative constitution. In some ways, it solidifies a lot of the good things that are in the 1980 constitution. It is a very pro-property rights constitution. It is a constitution that is the place of property rights and strict, you know, really as crucial. However, it is also a constitution that includes strict rules around immigration, which has been over the last few years supposedly a problem in Chile, and strict rules around abortion. So it is a truly right-wing kind of conservative constitution. One of the good things about it is it's going to say that pensions cannot be nationalized. It's a very market-friendly economic constitution. The constitution is very market-friendly. And you know, in the interim, also in parliamentary elections in Chile, the right and liberal parties have won. The left has lost. So Chile has reverted back to its pro-market perspective. But what's interesting is reflecting kind of issues, reflecting, if you will, what's going on with the right in Europe and in the United States. Chileans right now are less interested in economic issues. And they're much more interested in the social issues. And that's why abortion has suddenly made it into this new constitution, a negating abortion. And that's why immigration, toughened immigration, has come into the, you know, the right in Chile in the past was not really that associated with. So now religion and anti-migration have risen to the top of the kind of importance for the right in Chile. And that's why it's in the constitution. So this will be voted on in three days. I am going to make a prediction, but it's based on the polls. So it's not random. And that is that this constitution will fail as well. It will fail for a whole variety of reasons. But I think some of them have to do with things like abortion and others. I think people overestimate the popularity of abortion limitations. Certainly in the United States, Republicans have overestimated the popularity of limiting abortion. It is a real achilles heel for the Republican Party in election after election after election. And this is not going to go away. But it will, I think, ultimately, I think the constitution will be voted down. I think most people in Chile right now have the, take the approach of, you know, the status quo is not that bad. That constitution that we passed in 1980 is not that bad. You know, I think the leftist president, he probably can't do anything to change from an economic perspective the trajectory towards liberalization. I can't, don't think he can do anything big, dramatic to undo kind of economic liberalization in Chile. He doesn't have the support of parliament, and I don't think he has the support of the people right now. He might therefore also turn to the social issues and maybe emphasize trying to liberalize abortion in Chile more than it has. Yes, Chile is a Catholic country, but a lot of Catholic countries now have far more freedom with regard to abortion than, let's say, the United States has. I mean, Ireland comes to mind, but even some countries in Latin America now, it's easier to get an abortion than some countries in Latin America who are rabidly Catholic than it is in Texas. So, yeah, I'll let you know how the election goes, but it is kind of an interesting about Chile swings, you know, in terms of left, right, economic liberty against, and how the language of income inequality doesn't quite resonate as much, I think, with many right now, and how these social issues have really become to the forefront of the whole struggle between left and right. All right, a funny, sad, horrible, ridiculous story out of Boston. So Boston elected not long ago a new mayor, Michelle Wu, I think the first Asian American to be elected mayor, also a woman, and Michelle Wu wanted to have a holiday party for some of the council members under Boston Council. And, you know, the criteria for who to invite and who not to invite was not political. It was not who she likes and who she doesn't like. It turns out that the selection criteria was who is white and who is not. Basically, she decided she was going to have a Christmas holiday party exclusively for council members of color, or non-white council members. Unfortunately, one of her aides made a mistake, and he sent the invitation to all the council members and then had to backtrack and say, whoops, we really didn't mean you white people to invite you. It was just meant for the city's six conciliers of color, not to the, what is it, seven, six or seven conciliers who happen to be, yeah, seven. White council members were not welcome. So this is obviously an embarrassment because this mistake was made. God, what a queasy situation we have in this country. What an insanity. I mean, Boston is one of the most leftist city councils in the country, although it still manages to be one of the richest state in the union. It still managed to be an amazing city, I think because they've run it more from the center. But I think a social issue certainly, this is a city that is far to the left. And now the left is doing events for non-whites only. This is not racist. This is the thing to remember. Racism is treating people based on their skin color, their heritage, their genetic makeup, their ethnic affiliation. That's what racism is. Racism is not as the modern left would like you to believe. Racism is not something that only the oppressing classes can do to the oppressed. Anybody can be a racist. You can be a black racist, an Asian racist, a Jewish racist. You can be a white racist. There's no limitations. Racism is treating people based on their race, discriminating against people based on their race. It has nothing to do with power. The whole modern left wants everything to be perceived from the prism of power. Nothing to do with power. You can be a racist and have no power over anybody, not have power over anybody. But this racial segregation in the name of anti-racism is horrific. And it's going to lead to really horrible consequences down the road. And remember that, you know, the majority in this country is still white, even if it becomes less than 50%, it'll still be the biggest group. Do you really want to turn whites? Do you want to encourage them to become racists? That's never turned out well. At a time when Harvard and MIT are facing accusations of anti-Semitism, you know, these kind of issues at the top of mind, are some of these whites Jewish? I wonder. You know, they might be, I don't know. Probably more likely they're Irish. I mean, maybe we should, yeah, maybe it's anti-Irishness. It's just bizarre. It's just bizarre, right? Now, just to give you a sense that these kind of issues are not exclusively issues of Americans, there is a major uproar right now in, whoops, did I just closed a window? I did not want to close. Yeah, there it is. There is a big uproar right now over a new movie that Netflix is putting into production. It is a movie about Hannibal. Hannibal, the kothiggy, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, general considered one of the great military minds in human history who marched his troops, including elephants across the Alps and basically surrounded Rome, a true military genius. Anyway, Netflix is making a movie about Hannibal on the air camps staying Denzel Washington in the role. Now, this is causing people in Tunisia, is where kothiggy was to basically flip out. Hannibal was not black, they claim. Hannibal was, you know, of olive complexion. You know, he wasn't Arab because there wasn't such a tribe as Arabs back then. Remember, this is what, 270 BC. But historians are not convinced. He might have been black. It's not clear what color skin people had back then. It's not clear what color skin they had in kothiggy. It's not clear what color skin they had in that area of the Middle East of Northern Africa. Indeed, Netflix is also in trouble over the casting of Queen Cleopatra with a black actress, even though Queen Cleopatra is claimed to have been half Macedonian and that Hannibal was Phoenician and Phoenicians are not supposedly black. God help us from an obsession over skin color. Charlton Heston wasn't Jewish and he played Moses and he was white and Moses probably wasn't white, white, he was probably olive. And I don't know, you can go on and on and on. Ben Hur, the character isn't Ben Hur, that great movie, the great Christian movie. Everybody's got the wrong color skin probably. I mean, we're getting to the point where Italians have to pay Italians, blacks have to play blacks, white have to play black, white have to play Arabs. Maybe it should be people from exactly the same city. Accurate representation of race is stupid. And in a movie, as I said about Napoleon, accurate representation of history is ridiculous. It's a movie. It's not meant as a history book. It's not meant to convey history. It's a movie. It's supposed to enlighten not about the concretes of the movie but about the values that are projected through the concretes. It's a movie. It's supposed to entertain. I mean, I don't know if Napoleon was accurate. It was a bad movie whether it was accurate or not. It was a bad movie because it didn't entertain and it had no point. Who cares what color skin Hannibal had, has. Denzel Washington is one of the two, three best actors of his generation, maybe the best actors of his generation. I would go watch a Denzel Washington movie almost no matter what he played because he's such a great actor. And to watch him be Hannibal, that's going to be a real treat. One of the problems I think with Denzel Washington, particularly in later years, is he hasn't had the best roles in the world. I watch training there. I don't like the movie but Denzel is spectacular in it. I love watching great artists. I love watching great actors. He doesn't act the same. He is truly a good actor. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the movie. I hope it's better than Napoleon. Hannibal is an interesting character. The movie will be grandiose and fun. And Denzel, I think, is going to be excellent at it. Again, I think by far Denzel is among the top two, three best actors of his generation. All right, let's see. So even in Tunisia, people have pissed off. What is interesting is that the minister for tourism of Tunisia is actually not too upset. The cultural minister, I guess, you think she'd be the most upset. She said, I don't know. It's kind of out of control who they cast. But what she's trying to do is get them to film as many scenes in Tunisia as possible because that will bring revenue to Tunisia, will raise its profile. By the way, Tunisia right now is going through its own racial angst. I think I talked about this on a show a few weeks ago. And that is because the Tunisians are really upset because of black migrants who are coming to Tunisia on their way to Europe and are spending time in Tunisia while they try to figure out how to get on a boat to travel to Tunisia. And of course, nobody likes in the world generally. I think this is a truism. Nobody likes blacks from Africa. Even olive-skinned people from Africa don't like blacks from Africa. And so there are demonstrations and some riots, and there's been some real violence against the blacks in Africa supported by the government, supported by the government. So racism seems to be universal, sadly, and it truly is pathetic. I mean, you even get racism based on skin color in places like Thailand. So in Thailand, the many light-skinned ties, many of them have some Chinese heritage, and the light-skinned ties tend to live in the south, in Bangkok and in areas in the south. Dark-skinned ties tend to live in the north, and they tend to be poorer and more agrarian, but there is definitely a form of racism associated just with skin color inside Thailand, shades of whatever skin color you want to define it as. So there really is this tendency of tribalism even within a tribe based on skin color. Oh, Jimbo Jones is in Thailand. I'm not going to ask him what he's doing there, but Jimbo Jones is in Thailand. He's listening to the show, watching the show, and he says hello from Thailand. Am I right or not? I'm definitely right about this in Thailand. Thailand's a beautiful country with some of the nicest, friendliest people. You will get the best service at your hotel, for example, in the world in Thailand. I mean, it's just a wonderful, wonderful place to visit and beautiful, particularly if you go up to the north to Chiang Mai and Bangkok is not a particularly pretty city, although it has a lot of pretty places. But anyway, let's then get off on Thailand right now. Let's see. Yes, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has taken up a case that we've talked about before. We've talked about this case in the past, part of the barbaric Republicans' attempts to block all abortions is their attempts to outlaw on a federal level the abortion pill, in particular, the Milipristone. Something like... We'll just call it MIF, all right? We'll just call it MIF. If you remember, there was a Texas judge who basically ruled that this drug should be banned, and then a Fifth Circuit Court overturned his decision, but then said that this is an FDA-approved treatment that is available without a prescription in pharmacies all across the country. The Fifth Circuit Court said, uh-uh, the FDA needs to go back to the way this drug was marketed 10 years ago without the ability to buy it without prescription and without the ability to deliver it by the mail, which it is available today. Anyway, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, and we'll be hearing this case. It could have just passed and let the Fifth Circuit Appellant Court's ruling stand, but I don't think it wanted to. I think it wants to make a statement here one way or the other, and it's going to be really interesting to see which way it goes and by what kind of margin it goes. Again, the Fifth Circuit Court need to hear that part of the issue is what kind of jurisdiction does the federal court system have over drugs that have been approved by the government already, i.e. the FDA? That is, how can a court with no expertise overrule the FDA that would be an interesting issue in and of itself to see how the judges rule on that, particularly a Supreme Court that is generally anti-the-independence, overly-independence of regulatory agencies. So it's going to be interesting, and we will find out soon enough whether they side with really a complete ban on abortion in some states, including the medication that makes it possible, where no doctor need to be involved. So we will see how this plays out. I think it's a super important case for freedom, for liberty, and I really hope that these justices, in spite of overturning Roe, will not restrict this pill. And further restrict the rights of every woman to decide whether to have an abortion or not without anybody else's interference. All right. God. I have a lot of AI stories. We're going to go through these quickly. There's now a program run by Google's DeepMind. DeepMind is an AI developed by Google. It is a machine learning weather forecasting model. It is a weather forecasting model. They can run off of a desktop computer. It does not need a supercomputer. And basically is now as good, or actually it's better, than the best weather forecasting models that the Hurricane Center in the US and the European Center for Medium Range weather forecasts, high resolution forecasting system. It's better than them. It can run on your PC. And they've run it on back data and it forecasts better than any of these, which is stunning. That's stunning. I mean, it's not like these other models didn't have a lot of data and were laggards. And now we have an AI that basically can do a better job than any existing model. What's interesting here is once you apply AI to climate change, it'll be really interesting to see. I mean, remember the models, the climate change models, they pretend to be able to tell us what the weather is going to be in 100 years, but they have no concept. They can't predict the weather tomorrow. So imagine if they ultimately figure out how to program DeepMind to not only do weather tomorrow, you know, short and medium range weather, but also to do very long term weather. And that'll be really, really interesting to see what kind of accuracy it can provide and whether it will confirm some of the, or not confirm some of the climate change modeling. Anyway, soon to coming to your desktop, a weather forecasting system that basically will make meteorologists unnecessary. And this is generally a theme here that it's happening people. The AI revolution is happening. We're not going to notice it to begin with, but it is, we're going to see this grow exponentially. Take another application of AI. They are AI search tools, where you're going to basically say, AI, you know, tell me what's in the news right now. Which means you're not actually going to Google the news. You're not going to go to the website of the Wall Street Journal, the Reuters, New York Times, the others. You know, you might not even buy a subscription to them. So they are not going to get any ad revenue. And it's all going to be, you're just going to rely on AI to, every morning, basically tell you what's the news. Even I will be obsolete. Although, you know, you could argue that I am your AI. I am just a more humanly intelligent AI than AI would be, because I screen for things that I think are interesting. But you know, I might be able to learn your preferences, even learn your political inclinations, and maybe even give you news. Maybe you can tell it, oh, I listened to news from Iran, and it could scan all my news roundup shows, and it could probably, it could probably replace me. That's pretty cool. I can make my job prepping for these shows better, right? Easier. Now, one of the ways to get around that in terms of the business model for news organizations, and the business model for news organizations, is likely to go away. Is this news, the chat GPT now, has kind of deal with Politico, but it will summarize Politico and Business Insider, I guess both those companies' articles. It will have access to all of them, summarize them all, and Politico and Business Insider is a publication of a German publishing company that also publishes the tabloid build. So, chat GPT will have access to all of that, and chat GPT, the company that owns chat GPT OpenAI, will basically pay a fee to the German publisher to access all the information. So, the business model will change where it won't be advertising and it won't be subscriptions. It will be the publisher paying the AI to cover its stories. At least that's one possibility. And again, we're seeing AI is going to change the business model. It's going to change the way we're going to consume news. It's going to change how news is produced, fascinating stuff. It's going to be interesting. Anyway, really cutting-edge stuff, and we could go on and on because AI is already here. Here's just amazing stuff, right? AI is now helping create AI plus imaging technologies, advanced imaging technologies is now helping create an atlas of all the cells in the human body. It will be a map of organs and bodies constructed cell by cell. It's going to be a completely new era of understanding biology. We can now, because we can sequence, because we can use AI and because we have imaging technologies that we can even dream of in the past. And by the way, the imaging technologies are also AI assisted. This has all come online in the last decade, these technologies. Now they're being used to map cell by cell, so you could take a pancreas and cell by cell, map an entire pancreas. Research is configuring individual cells based on which genes they are expressing, right? So genes in the body express different cells in the body, express different genes. And that information can be used for drugs that target particular cells, for treatments or kinds of treatments that can affect particular cells. I mean, it is, you know, to quote a bioengineer and biophysicist from Stanford University, Stephen Quake. He says, we're at the stunning point in time in science where we've now able to understand the composition of these cell types. It's changed the way we understand how the human biology works. Now this is the kind of work necessary to extend life and basically to cure the diseases that are killing us. This is a story in Quantum Magazine. New cell atlases reveal untold variety in the brain and beyond. And this is happening, I think, at an amazing speed. On the one hand, civilization is crumbling over stupidity, just barbarism. On the other hand, the enlightenment is manifesting itself in some of the most stunning, amazing progress innovations. Well, at this point, the medley scientific discoveries that are going to manifest themselves in technologies we can't even imagine. One of the scary things is these technologies, if they advance and the culture is bad, the technologies will be used for bad stuff. So let's hope that doesn't happen. All right, I just want to make one final quick comment. I have gotten a lot of questions about some of my comments about the Nakba. You remember the Palestinian refugees in 1948 when they all left their homes? What are my sources for the fact that Arab nations encouraged people to leave their homes? I mean, there were a lot of sources, but I found an article, a relatively short article that aggregates a lot of this information and that has great citations. If you want to dig in and if you want to find more of the sources for this, you can. So it's an article called the Nakba Obsession. The Nakba Obsession. And it's in the City Journal. And I just put the link to the article in the chat so you can find it there. And it is a good article if you people wonder where do you get this stuff from? I put the link just above in the chat. All right, remind you this is a listener-watcher supported show. It exists because of your contributions. Without your contributions, I'd have to find something else to do. Literally, please consider supporting the show. There are 112 people watching right now live. It wouldn't take much from you guys to get us to where we need to be. Wes, for example, has just contributed $50. Wes contributes $50 pretty frequently. Please consider matching Wes because we need $250 to get to our goal for today. So please, if you can match Wes $50, please do so. We want to get to our target, which is only $250, and we're ready. We're very close to an hour show. And that is a bargain for an hour show only to be asked for $250. So hopefully we can raise the rest of the $100 in the time to come. But thank you again, Wes, for being such a good supporter of the show and contributing. Wes asks, the delays for Ukraine's support are maddening. Delays empower our enemies and result in more lives lost. Absolutely. And I want to emphasize that this empowers Russia. It empowers enemies all over the world who see America's weakness. It also empowers Russia and Iran and others to ferment conflict because they know the United States will not do anything and that will cause more casualties all over the world. So an accident of Venezuela is doing what it's doing right now. I'll give you one great example of our appeasement and weakness and pathetic nature of the Biden administration in this case. And that is American troops are continuing to be attacked daily, almost hourly, in Syria and Iraq. Now, there's an argument to be made. They shouldn't be there. Fine. Bring them all home. But what are we doing? We're leaving them there. We're leaving them there. And we're not defending them. And we're not retaliating. And we're not placing the blame where it belongs with Iran. We're now allowing the Houdis in Yemen to bomb ships traveling through the Red Sea. They just had a Norwegian ship. It has nothing to do with Israel, but they just had a Norwegian ship recently, just two days ago. America does nothing, even though it's committed to protecting the sea lanes. It does absolutely zero. This is weakness at a scale that's just unimaginable. We're now telling Israel there's a timeline. They have to finish in Gaza on a timeline which only a boldness, strengthens their hand, allows them to think that they can outlast Israel and America will ultimately cease supporting Israel. The display from the United States is pathetic, ridiculous in terms of its weakness. And Ukraine is just one manifestation of it, but it translates across the board and it will lead to significant deaths, significant destruction that was not necessary. And the blood will be on the hands of Biden and his, and the people in the White House. Now, granted, Biden has to deal with the left in the White House and the left in his party that would like the United States to turn its weapon systems against Israel. But it doesn't matter. He is President of the United States. It's on him. The kind of horror that the United States is going to be inflicting on the world really soon here. Thank you, Wes. Thanks for the support. Andrew, who pretty much asked the question, every single show usually multiple questions for lots of dollars. So thank you, Andrew, really, really appreciate the support. You too can ask lots of questions and support the show in significant ways. Please, ask questions. We're still about $80 short of what we need to be. All right, Andrew says, you excluded. I don't hear the basic case made that Ukraine fighting an American enemy is in our self-interest. Rather, the motive seems to be fear Putin. Why isn't our self-interest being clearly explained to the people? Because self-interest is not supposed to be a goal. Self-interest is not something people usually tout. And America doesn't know and can't articulate what its self-interest actually is. They're afraid because the implication of that argument might lead to a foreign policy different than what they want. Almost everybody in the foreign policy world, politicians and experts and think tank people and professors, almost all of them are Kissinger-like pragmatists, realists. Don't stand on principle. Don't fight for your self-interest. Don't do it and it's necessary. Do what is expedient. That is the world in which we live. And so it's not surprising that nobody actually tells us why fighting Putin is essentially in American self-interest. I did that. I've done that on several shows, but you just don't see it elsewhere. It's like they might brush aside, oh, you know, it's in American interest. Nobody wants to categorize Putin as America's enemy. We still have diplomatic relations with Russia comically enough in spite of claiming that their president is a war criminal and that many in their leadership have been sanctioned by the United States. We still have diplomatic relations. It's still trade with them as if, you know, no big deal. American foreign policy is incoherent generally and it just gets worse and Biden is particularly weak and bad about this. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Stephen, does this mean you didn't get an invite to the city council? I guess not. I mean, I don't know how you would categorize. I don't like to think of skin color. White is like, yeah, almost nobody's white, white, right? I mean, I don't know. But I am European, so no way I would get an invite to that one. Plus, God, much more important, they would discriminate against me for something legitimate. Now this I would accept. I'm a radical. I'm a radical. And therefore they would not invite me for that and that I'm proud of. Anyway, as I've said many times, I consider one thing I agree with the leftist and that is that race is a social contract. It constructs. It does not refer to anything real in reality. Jennifer, did you hear about the Turkish MP giving a speech in which he condemned Israel to Allah's wrath and then he had a Tart attack and died? Talk about coincidence. Yeah, I mean, there's actually video of it. You can find a video online. And he's literally in the heat of condemning Israel and then he's clutching any collapses. And then today they were announced that he died from it. So yes, beware, beware, you know, God's wrath is upon you. If you condemn Israel, you might die from a heart attack like this Turkish MP. Yeah, the video is pretty funny. I mean, funny, sad, right? I mean, it's sad. I can't feel sad for somebody doing that and having a heart attack. I can't feel sad about that. I have to admit. Um, Jeff, he says he's $10 for a couple of boxes of cheez-its. I don't eat cheez-its. You know I don't eat cheez-its. What is cheez-its? I don't even know what they are. I definitely don't eat them. Gail says, just curious, what is your opinion of retired General Westy Clark? Um, God, I don't, I don't remember. I remember having an opinion of him in the past, post-911. But look, I'm not impressed by any of them, really any of them. Certainly in terms of the way they, because they're all brought into just war theory, they all brought into this ridiculous way. And look, I haven't watched, literally I don't watch television news. So I haven't watched television news in at least a decade. So I haven't seen Wesley Clark since his commentary on, on post-911, war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So I don't know. I get my news from print and I get a lot of news from Twitter. And now I get, I'm getting a lot of news about what's going on in Israel from Telegram. You get a lot of, a lot of the people who are commenting regularly and who are giving you the, you know, kind of the reports from the front and putting up the latest videos, you get that on Telegram. That's true in Ukraine, of the Ukraine one. That's true of the, of the, of the war in Gaza. So I'm getting a lot of what I, what I know about Gaza right now. I'm getting from, from Telegram, from three different channels, three different Israeli channels on Telegram. Jeff says, still about $70 short guys. Got a few minutes left, not many, but a few minutes left. So for you guys to, if you want, make it up and allow us to achieve our target. Did you read the new article by C. Bradley Thompson about Harvard? Who better to be on the show to discuss the recent Harvard situation? I haven't read it yet. And, and yeah, I mean, I think, I think Angela is being in discussions with Brad to come on the show. I don't know why he hasn't been on the show recently, because we definitely, definitely reached out. So anyway, we'll, we'll do something, but let me, let me read the article first. David says, Carthago de Leda Este, I don't know, sorry, but I don't know Latin. I assume that's Latin. Andrew, another question by Andrew, he asks multiple questions. Positivity alert, the new skin cancer vaccine trials, mRNA technology being applied to new diseases. Thank you, Big Pharma. Yes, hugely excited about mRNA technology as applied for cancer treatments and many other treatments, vaccines against cancer, vaccines against many diseases that will now be able to be cured. But, but yes, I mean, generally, the, if not for the FDA, the innovation in healthcare would be stunning. It's stunning anyway. We talked about, I think, the CRISPR drug on sickle cell amnamia, which has been approved, the first gene therapy that's been approved both by the British regulatory authorities and by the U.S. I mean, there's a lot more coming down the pipe that's going to be very, very exciting. Bradley says that teaching your son to fight some bullies back off making better equipped for life. I think so. I think teaching kids a martial art like Akito or Jiu Jitsu or something is good. I prefer Akito because it's primarily focused on self-defense rather than offense. But I just think that teaching them something, I think it gives them some confidence. I fought bullies even though I had no training in anything, but I always got into fights. I got into several fights in my childhood. Apollo, Zeus, derealization and depersonalization. A question for Dr. Goulin later from February 3rd and his relation to self-esteem. I have no idea what either of those means, but I'm looking forward to you asking the question to Gina tonight. Oh, yeah. How did I forget? Gina Goulin is on tonight, 7 p.m. Don't miss it. It'll be a lot of fun. Talk psychology, anything about psychology, bring it on, bring your questions. Usually with Gina, we have lots of questions, so please join us to ask. Maria Lean, wow, $50. Thank you. That is amazing. First five, then 50. That is amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. We're now only $15 away. Somebody, somebody step in. Last question, Chaeli, just dropping this, keep up the good work. Thank you. Chaeli, really appreciate it. All right, guys, tonight, 7 p.m. East Coast time, we'll have Gina Goulin on. Please bring your questions. Please let your friends know. She's terrific. It'll be a lot of fun. Next week on Thursday, I think we have Jonathan Honing. I'll let you know what that's about once I have that nailed down. I think it was nailed down today, but I'm not sure. And what else? What else? I think that is it. Yes, don't forget, the Inran Institute is a sponsor of the show. If you want to go to the Austin Conference at the end of March, which you should go to, it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be very educational. Greg Salamieri, Ben Baer and others will be the professors. Those of you who are students and are interested in deep diving into Inran's ideas and who might consider, even if you're not a student, consider an intellectual career in the future. You can apply for a scholarship. Inran.org slash start here. You can get all the information you need there. Go apply. Austin is a great city to visit in March. And this program is going to be a fantastic program, guaranteed fantastic program. All right, everybody, and I'll have some news about my visit to Austin and a talk I'm going to be giving in Austin on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in January. I'm going to be giving a talk. If you're in Texas, please come. It'll be in Austin, Texas. I'll have details. It'll be towards the end of January. It'll be right after I'm in Michigan. You'll be encouraged to come to the talks in Michigan. I'll have the three talks I'm giving, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, two in Michigan, one in Texas. Actually, the talk in Texas might be on a Friday night. But I will have all that. I'll have all that down soon. And I hope you guys join us, Michigan and Texas and Colorado. I'll have that available, information about that available very soon. So Colorado in the second week in January and then the third or fourth week in January. It'll be Michigan and Texas. And hopefully we can get you guys to join us. It'll be, I'll give three talks in Michigan, two talks in Michigan, one in Texas and one in Colorado. All four talks should be a lot of fun. And yeah, 23rd and 24th is Michigan. 26th, I think, is going to be Austin. And Colorado is going to be, Colorado is going to be in Denver, just outside of Denver, just a little bit to the south of Denver. And it is going to be on the 12th, on the 12th of January. So just in a few weeks, I will be providing, you know, information about signing up, particularly for the Colorado event. Very soon, Colorado, they're going to charge you a little bit of money to attend. It's going to be a positive topic on objectivism and applying it to your life. It'll be Iran's rules. Michigan will be in Ann Arbor and in North Michigan. So it won't be in Detroit itself, although we're still trying to see maybe we'll do something in Detroit. So, all right, everybody, and David just stepped in. David Austin, thank you. David stepped in so we can achieve the goal. So you guys can achieve the goal. All of us achieve the goal. Thank you to all the super chatters. Thank you to all the stickers. And I will see you all tonight. And then, of course, we will be back for another News Roundup tomorrow. Bye, everybody.