 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Wednesday, March 20th, the month marches along. Thanks for joining me. Glad to have you here. We've got another news roundup for you. And we will jump right into that. We'll jump right into the roundup. And we'll start with this mess in Texas. Texas and the federal government added again with regard to immigration. This court is intervened. The Fifth Circuit is intervened. And it really is a mess. And it's kind of harder to untangle and harder to understand. So let's try to untangle this mess. And we'll keep track of where this goes. All right, so last year, the state of Texas passed a law, SB4, that basically criminalizes immigration into the state from Mexico. And so it criminalizes the border crossing and allows the state to criminally prosecute those who cross the border. They can spend five years in jail on a first offense. And if they do it twice, they can go for 10 to 20 years in jail. I mean, this is not the issue we're going to talk about today. But just think about that for a minute. Somebody's crossing the border into Texas from Mexico trying to bring a better life, trying to maybe raise a family under freedom, trying to come into the United States to work, because they can't get a welfare. They can't get these other things. They're coming to work. And there are no victims. There's zero victims. They haven't shot anybody. They haven't raped anybody. They haven't killed anybody. They haven't done anything. And the state of Texas can put them in jail for anywhere from five to 20 years. And then send them back to Mexico. So wow. I mean, that is quite something in terms of criminalizing immigration and turning it from something that we could talk about how bad breaking that particular law, what the penalty should be. But clearly, clearly, this is a victimless crime. And you're sending somebody to jail for five to 20 years on a victimless crime. And yet, I'm sure there are a lot of people who support this. Anyway, this bill was passed. Now, the problem with the bill is that the Constitution basically says that the immigration policy, immigration enforcement, is the responsibility of the federal government, not the state government. And indeed, an Arizona law that is somewhat similar to SB4 from, I don't know, 10 years ago or more than 10 years ago was actually mostly dismantled by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional. But SB4 went ahead. A district judge, the Biden administration, sued saying this is a federal power and not a state power. A district court judge last month temporarily blocked the Texas law while it was being argued in front of the court, saying it was probably unconstitutional. Unconstitutional. It could open the door to each state passing its own version of immigration laws. This judge, David Azra, said the law intruded into federal affairs even more than the Arizona law that the Supreme Court basically knocked down. So he basically froze the law. Temporarily blocked it while it was being discussed in district courts. And you know, these cases take forever, so who knows how long it would be until a decision was made at the district court. Anyway, so that was appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court. The Fifth Circuit Court said, no, the law should be enforced while the court, while the lower court makes a decision. So the law should basically, Texas should be able to enforce the law, again, temporarily. And of course, unless the Supreme Court intervened until the court made a final decision, until the lower courts made a final decision. So now Texas can apply the law. So then it's appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court. And yesterday, the Supreme Court in the morning basically said that they agreed with the Fifth District Court, with the Fifth Circuit Court. The Fifth Circuit Court is the most conservative court in America, I think. And in a 63 vote, they basically sided with the Fifth Circuit that Texas could continue to enforce the law while the law was being adjudicated in the lower court. All right? Pretty clear. And I saw that yesterday. And all right, that's what the Supreme Court has done. The process will continue. What was amazing was, then in the afternoon, the Fifth Circuit Court then came back and said, after the Supreme Court said, OK, we agree with the Fifth Circuit, it continues to be enforced. Then the Fifth Circuit Court came back and said, no, we're freezing the law. And we're going to have hearings about this tomorrow, which is this morning. So we're going to expedite hearings about this. I hard to exactly understand why they did that. But we might have a hint in it that two justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, wrote in their concurrent opinion, they agreed with the majority, that this law should continue to be enforced while it was being heard. But they did write, quote, if a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this court. And this is where maybe the Fifth Circuit Court said, what would a soon mean? How do they mean by soon? Maybe we need to hold all this and speed up the process and make a decision about the law, about whether it's constitutional or not. So the next time it comes to the Supreme Court, there's a decision about whether it's constitutional or not constitutional. So that's what's going on. You probably heard about this in the news. It's all over the place. It's very confusing. I still don't quite get it because it seems to me that the decision still needs to go back to the district court because the district court has to rule about the constitutionality of this and only then send it. It will be appealed to the Fifth. And only then will the Fifth get involved. So I'm not sure why they're getting involved at this point. Maybe one of the lawyers can get online. I was looking around, trying to figure out what is really going on here. I couldn't. So maybe one of our lawyers can tell us. But that's where we are today. Again, the Fifth Circuit Court, not a district court, Circuit Court, the Fifth Circuit Court has scheduled our arguments for this morning and is trying to speed this up. But I'm not sure if the speeding up is about whether the law is legitimate or not or about whether there should be a stay on the law or not. I'm confused. And I hope I brought a little bit of clarity to you guys and some confusion because I'm confused. Why wouldn't you be? All right, that's where we are. Of course, this is the problem with the kind of immigration laws that we have. This is a problem with the complete confusion, the irrationality of these laws. They're all over the place. They're unclear. Immigrants don't know what they mean. People trying to enforce them don't know exactly what they mean. And there are obviously states on the border are not happy with these laws because they allow for too many people just to cross over the border. I don't think anybody's happy with these laws. I'm not happy with these laws. Nobody's happy with these laws. What we need is dramatic, systematic, complete overhaul of immigration laws. And what Texas is doing and what Arizona tried to do and what Arizona might try to do again if it has a Republican majority, if it has that, they're going to try to plug in the holes where they think that the federal government is not. But of course, it's not their responsibility, but they do suffer part of the consequences, at least appear so because they seem to be forced to at least provide some welfare benefits. These are not sure exactly why. It's super non-objective. It's super confusing. It creates a dissent. It creates conflict between people. And what we need is immigration laws that are clear, unequivocal, and that allow for a lot more legal immigration than we have today so that illegal immigration will get reduced. And clarity about the whole issue of asylum, I mean, it cannot be that under asylum, anybody can get in. Asylum needs to mean something. Or asylum as a criteria for immigration needs to be scrapped completely. But there has to be some method. There has to be some standard. Of course, I think asylum as a standard of immigration is part of some international law treaty that the United States have a party of so they can't completely eliminate it, although they probably should. I will recommend again, nobody who matters is paying attention, but I will recommend again a immigration system based on the ability of the immigrants to get a job in the United States, not the government's point system, which is playing at central planner who knows what is required by the US economy, what jobs are valuable, what jobs industry needs, but a simple market-based solution. You have a job offer, you come in. Don't have a job offer, can't let you in. That's it. I think under that system, most people want to come to the United States could be allowed in. And it would be a net benefit, win-win, for everybody involved, everybody involved. And we won't then rank jobs by, no, no, this job is really, really important for the national prosperity. And this job isn't. So we don't care if that job is filled, we just want these jobs filled. No, anybody who's willing to employ an immigrant can employ an immigrant. And you can make the visas five-year visas renewable if they have a job or if they've started a company or all kinds of ways in which to continue, you can make it so that these immigrants can never vote. You can make it so that they never can get welfare. You can create all kinds of things that make it so their impact, their so-called supposed impact, is at least somewhat minimized if you're really worried about these issues. All right, that's the confusion state of Texas immigration law. And it's not going to get any less confusing in the near future. All right, geoengineering. Geoengineering is this attempt. Instead of stopping human beings from, let's assume climate change is happening and we need to do something about it, it's this idea of instead of depending on shutting industry down, closing everything down, constraining everything, blocking everything. Instead, what we will do is we'll create some kind of effect in the atmosphere that will actually cool the temperatures. So instead of shutting down carbon, instead of shutting down carbon emission, we will actually not have any carbon limits, but we will do something to cool the atmosphere. And there are a lot of companies trying different things, universities experimenting with different things. I talked about this on a previous show. I think we went through three different mechanisms that are being studied out there and are being tried. And it's quite promising. Yeah, it's the scientist playing God. I love it. I love scientists who play God. I'm sure they do a better job than God himself. And it's a way that's pro-life, pro-life, pro-progress, pro-economic growth, and so recognizes that, yeah. I mean, global warming can have disruptive effects that maybe we want to mitigate, right? Well, there is a lot of criticism of this from, I'm sure you wouldn't get this, from the environmentalist movement. They don't want anything like this. They don't want to actually reduce the dangers of climate change. Because what they really want, what they always really wanted, which really motivated their movement all along, was deindustrialization, lower standard of living, lower quality of life, lower production, fewer CO2 emissions, just less human beings, and less impact, impact, less so-called impact on the environment. That's what they really want. Climate change is just the most convenient excuse to shut down production, to shut down growth, to make us poorer. So one of the projects was at Harvard. And the critics of geoengineering basically have argued that even studying the possibility of geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions. They also fear that such research could create a slippery slope that increases the odd that nations or rogue actors will one day deploy it despite the possibility of dangerous side effects, including decreased precipitation and agricultural output in parts of the world. So they don't want to use this. I mean, they don't want to use this because it might lead to societal pressure, less societal pressure, less societal pressure to cut greenhouse gases. But why do we care about greenhouse gases? Because it warms the planet. Well, if we can cool the planet to offset that, why do we care? What they really care about again is to stop the life processes that lead to the emission of CO2. Anyway, they campaign and their efforts were fruitful. And it's official now that Harvard's geoengineering experiment has been canceled. So it's not happening, which is tragic, sad, horrible for all of us and also for the scientists who've devoted significant effort and energy towards this. And again, it shows the power of the nihilistic environmentalist movement. I mean, it's just pure nihilism. The hatred is the hatred of man. The hatred is the hatred of progress. The hatred is the hatred of achievement, of success. It really is horrible. All right. Intel, you know, the Silicon Valley-based chip manufacturer, I think the only company in the world really today that both designs and manufactures its own chips, almost all manufacturing chips is done by TCMC and by Samsung. But they don't design the chips. They build chips for other people. Intel is the only company that does it, I think, maybe there's some companies in Japan and elsewhere. But it's the only big company that has ambitions to really build and design its own chips. It also has ambitions to compete with TCMC and Samsung in the foundry business, that is, in the business that builds chips for other people. That is based on designs, let's say, that Apple submits or some other people submit. And they create the chips for them. So that's called the foundry business. And Intel wants to enter that business and compete with TCMC for that. Intel has been struggling for many years. Of course, in the 70s, it created, in a sense, the chip industry. In the 80s, it dominated the memory chip industry. And then it was outcompeted by the Japanese and basically lost that. It pivoted, it pivoted. If I remember right, ultimately without government help, it pivoted to the chips that basically run our computers, the chips who run our laptops and our desktops, our computers. And it became the world largest manufacturer of logic chips, those kind of chips. And since then, it's general success with chips has been in decline. They have lost technological edge to TCMC in terms of deploying the latest, best chip making technology and chip making equipment. Even though a lot of this equipment is based on ideas and initial projects at Intel, they basically sold, gave that technology to ASML in the Netherlands. And ASML makes that equipment today. But TSMC and Samsung are a lot better at deploying that equipment. Intel is trying to catch up. It's being way behind. As I've described in the past, though it's been a while, chips, in my view, are a crucial strategic product in the world today. They basically, they are chips in everything. And among the everything are weapon systems, advanced chips, will be the key, that in software, will be the key to advanced weapon systems from now on. They are ready and they will become even more so into the future. So here we have an American company trying to compete with the Taiwanese and the South Koreans, all allies, by the way, but strategically vulnerable because of their proximity to China, trying to compete with them. The Japanese, by the way, are making some progress with chip manufacturing and chip design. Chip design overall is dominated by the United States. Software to design chips dominated by the United States. And the equipment to build chips dominated by ASML in the Netherlands and then some companies in Japan. And China lags and has more, somewhat more primitive technology than any of these players, which I count as the West, including South Korea and Japan. All right, so that's where we are, right? That's where we are. So as you know, Congress passed the CHIP Act, Biden signed the CHIP Act. It provides for 70 something billion dollars in direct grants to chip manufacturers and then another 75 billion dollars in loan guarantees for domestic chip manufacturing. It could be a foreign company, but it has to be manufactured domestically. This is the government being a master central planner, a picker of winners and losers. And the first grant has now been granted from the CHIP Act, that is an 8.5 billion dollar grant to Intel and then as much as 11 billion dollars of loans or loan guarantees to Intel. Intel is building manufacturing plants all over the United States, including Arizona and Ohio. In Ohio, they expect to build the largest AI chip manufacturing plants in the world, in America, one of those. Anyway, huge in Ohio, not far from Ohio State University. I don't know why Ohio, but it's Ohio, where they're gonna build us. Anyway, so the government has picked at least one of its winners. Intel is basically going to spend 100 billion dollars over the next few years. It is expecting to get even more support from the federal government as it does this, both in terms of grants and loan guarantees. Other companies will be announced soon in terms of the grants that they get. It's gonna take a while for these plants to actually be built and go into production, although everybody's super ambitious these days, who knows. It's gonna take a while for the money to actually get to Intel. There are all kinds of conditions and constraints, including a bunch of DEI nonsense that's associated with this. And in addition, Intel has indicated plants to tap something called the investment tax credit from the Treasury Department. And they think that the benefits of this tax credit will basically cover 25% of capital expenditures on this project, so 25 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. But pay less taxes, I'm all for that. This is gonna be interesting. We're gonna continue to watch this and track this. The costs of this kind of government intervention will be felt long-term, then are felt short-term. Short-term, it looks like a win-win-win-win. A lot of money is flowing into building manufacturing plants, people have jobs. Manufacturing goes up. Chips are made in the United States. But the misallocation of resources, the fact that money is going to chips versus something else, that maybe has a higher return of capital, maybe more valuable to all of us, the fact that the government is picking Buddhism losers, does that impact Intel's ability to be competitive in the future and to thrive in the future? Or is this in a sense, a death knell for Intel, the fact that they're getting money from the government that often is a sign of you won't be able to compete in the future. Will these plants ever be built? How many of these will be white elephants? Plants built and then they'll never find the employees they need, the trained staff that they need in order to actually make the chips. All kinds of things could be happening between now and the next five, 10 years. And of course, if we have problems in five, 10 years, nobody will link it back to this. Nobody ever blames central planning, government involvement, government intervention on the problems that we are talking about. All right. Remember the big difference between central planners who take money that basically is free and allocate it based on their ideas versus money allocated by financial markets where there's competition for return, where what drives the allocation of capital is whether you can make a profit or not and with this constant competition that is if you're not good at capital allocation, if you're not good at investment, what happens to you? You go out of business, capital gets allocated to another firm that's good at it or better at it than you are. So the competitive pressures and the need to make a profit drive rational decisions versus government which again is relying on central planning which never works and which cannot work and where there is no profit motive and therefore much more open to corruption, malinvestment, stupid investments, corrupt investments and investments that are guided maybe by nationalist tendencies or by lobbying or by a million other considerations that have nothing to do with economic ones. So hedge fund, private equity fund, bank, financial markets, stock market need to show a profit. Otherwise, the investors will leave, big difference, big, big, big difference. All right, Ben and Jerry, Ben and Jerry always in the news. Unilever that bought Ben and Jerry, what was it, 30 years ago, something like that, bought it I think in the late 90s, maybe 25 years ago. Unilever that bought, oh, they bought in 2000, so exactly 24 years ago they bought Ben and Jerry. Unilever has decided to spin off its ice cream business. They have the largest ice cream business in the world of which Ben and Jerry is one piece of that business. Ben and Jerry was founded as a so-called socially conscious, socially responsible business. When it sold to Unilever in 2000, it established its own independent board, a board that was established in order to preserve the social responsibility and all of that social justice nonsense. And Unilever stuck with that. There was a big issue about selling ice cream in Israel and Ben and Jerry in Israel. I can't sure how that was resolved, but I did a show on that, we covered it in a show. And Ben and Jerry's still continues to be one of these devoted leftist businesses that advocates for and runs its business on somewhat leftist principles, still trying to make money. Well, now Unilever's selling it and it looks like Ben and Jerry could become an independent company or it could sell to private equity or it could sell to somebody else. It's not clear exactly what will happen to Ben and Jerry, but one thing is clear that that board of directors, that independent board of directors that is committed to social justice and woke and whatever else, that independent board of directors will continue. It was in the original deal when Unilever bought them, the original deal included, that even if Unilever sold Ben and Jerry, the independent board would always be in place. So for those of you who love Ben and Jerry ice cream and who hate their social justice agenda and were maybe hoping that finally they could get rid of the social justice agenda and be able to buy the ice cream guilt-free, ain't happening, you're stuck eating ice cream. Every time you buy this ice cream, you're supporting causes that are trying to kill you, causes that are undermining everything about this country and everything about its value. So I have boycotted Ben and Jerry's for, I don't know, 30 years since the mid-90s. I hope you boycott Ben and Jerry and yeah, ice cream's important. Why wouldn't we talk about ice cream? Ice cream's like consumption is good, right? Life is good, consumption of tasty stuff is good. Now Ben and Jerry's also had too much sugar and it's one of the reasons consumption of ice cream in the United States, I don't know if you know this, consumption of ice cream in the United States is in decline, one of the reasons Unilever is selling off the entire ice cream business. All right, there we go. It's, Ben and Jerry will stay politically correct to the end. All right, finally, I don't know what, this is such a, we've talked about this so many times, but I need to keep highlighting it because it's so stupid and it's so disgusting and it's so ridiculous. We talked about earlier shows in the months past about how the Houtis are basically blocking world trade. You know, one of the most, or the busiest channel for world trade through the Suez Canal is basically blocked because the Houtis keep firing at ships and a lot of insurance companies won't ensure ships to go through the Red Sea and into the Suez Canal and they're forcing them to go around the Horn of Africa, which is a much longer trip, much more expensive. Insurance costs have gone up, travel times have gone up, costs generally have gone up, which is a huge drag on the global economy and is pretty pathetic, a bunch of, a kooks, a bunch of barbarians from the, I don't know, 9th century who want to bring Sharia law to the world and who are funded and armed by the Iranian, barbaric Iranian regime, are holding, basically holding the entire world hostage because they are, you know, controlling the sea lanes and not letting ships pass and shooting at them and it's absurd and it's continuing for months now. The United States claimed they'd formed some kind of coalition of the willing or something and they were gonna take care of the Houtis? No cigar, I mean, it just, it keeps going. They keep firing at ships once in a while, they'll sink one or it'll cause fires or kill somebody and in the meantime, there was a shooting regularly and intensely at American Navy ships, basically at war with America. Indeed, one of the captains of these ships says, this is the most since World War II that the US has taken fire on the oceans, right? This is, the US Navy has never been under fire more than it's under fire right now in the Gulf of Eden than the Red Sea from the Houtis. Now, the Houtis of military force that it should take the United States, I don't know if they were serious about it, a couple of weeks to dismantle, maybe less and much of that dismantling could have happened from the air, although it is true that some civilians might die as a consequence because like Hamas and like most evil regimes they are hiding behind their civilians, right? Yeah, I mean, B-2 with a nuke would end it in a day but short of nuclear, this is not a big problem militarily. This is an issue of will and this administration is a cowardly administration. This administration is a tiptoe around the problems of the world administration. The only crisis they seem to be gung-ho about is in Ukraine and that probably explains why so many on the right anti-support for Ukraine, not because there's anything about Ukraine or Russia, although they do admire Putin, but it probably has to do with, oh no, if the left is so excited about this, we must not, we can't be. But, you know, nothing is happening. Once in a while, I guess they go and they bomb a few things. Of course, the US Navy is not taking a hit because they have really good defense systems, so this is good, I guess, exercise for the US Navy to test out its defenses against these kind of rockets and bombs and drones. What's it gonna take? One of these rockets hitting one of these ships and killing some American servicemen before the United States takes this seriously? It's just mind-boggling and nobody cares. Like, this is not in the news, Congress is not having hearings about this, they're having hearings about all kinds of other things that are really mostly irrelevant to us, including to our national defense, all kinds of hearings, but the one thing they're not doing is actually talking about the threats to America, the threats to trade. America has been the defendant of global trade since World War II. That has worked out really, really well for us. It's worked out really, really well for the world. It's created this amazing win-win globalization, which is a huge benefit, and we're walking away from that. We're just walking away from that and handing it over to the barbarians to dictate where ships can travel. And if this stands, it's only the beginning. The Somalians are gonna start, they pirate business up again. Other places around the world in other regions are going to figure out ways to hijack ships, stop shipping when they want to, and basically demand ransom. Everybody is watching. American weakness, we all pay for in spades in this administration, unbelievably weak. All right, that's all I had, so we're gonna turn to our super chat. Let me just thank Silvanos and Ryan. Thank you for the supports. We only have three questions. Three questions, so if you wanna ask a question, now's the time to do it. We are way short of our goal, so more questions, more stickers at any amount would be really helpful to get us closer to the goal. But we'll start with Andrew, and Andrew, who pretty much every day is here asking questions. Thank you, Andrew. Really appreciate it. Is the science of ecology fatally infected by politics? They're predicting doom from slight warming while discounting the greening of the earth is absurd and irresponsible, in my opinion. Well, I wouldn't even call it politics. They are fatally infected with a philosophy, an anti-human, anti-man, anti-progress, anti-capitalist, anti-capitalist philosophy. And it is this really, it is this philosophy that guides pretty much their attitude towards everything. So, and is it fatal? Yeah, it's fatal, and will they ever abandon it? I don't see how. It's entrenched, and it's come out of, again, a whole philosophical approach that views man as a stain upon the earth, views man as something bad, something negative. It has its origin, everything bad has its origin, in Christianity, but it's been secularized completely and secularized in a sense, but also, you know, kept its religious tones because a lot of this environmentalist stuff is religion, that there's original sin. Human beings' original sin is reason. It's the fact that we, in order to survive, need to change the environment. That's our means of survival, is to change the environment to fit our needs. We can't just automatically adapt, right? So, that's part of it, right? They have original sin, they have a deity, mother nature or whatever they feel like at the moment, I guess, they have their priests, the various environmental organizations, they have a whole, and they have a real political and moral agenda, which is the destruction of human industrialization and progress. So, I don't see how that goes away without all of our culture, our entire culture, adopting a more rational philosophy, adopting a pro-life, pro-man, pro-growth, pro-progress philosophy, right? Neocon. Finkelstein defended Russia invasion of Ukraine and said, unlike Israel in 1967, Russia had the right to attack because of NATO expansionist, he's so awful. Yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised. He's the kind of person who would support authoritarians, he's the kind of person that supports Hamas, so he's definitely supporting authoritarians. He's the kind of person that hates the virtues, hates the good, Israel, Ukraine, America. Well, Ukraine is not quite fully in that camp, but at least partially relative to Russia at some years. And that is Finkelstein. There's not much more one needs to do. This is a shtick and he's doing very well with the shtick in terms of attention, probably money, probably everything else. He's become very, very prominent as the guy with the shtick that is basically hatred of the West. He talks really, really, really slowly and he seems very academic and thoughtful, but he's not, he's just a liar. He's just a liar. We'll talk more about Finkelstein tomorrow when Ilan Giorno is gonna join me at 7 p.m., I think, Eastern Time, to talk about the debate between Finkelstein, a Palestinian and destiny, and Benimars. So that debate is going on. I'm reading a bunch of stuff about Benimars, which is interesting, right? Benimars was for a long time considered on Finkelstein's side and Benimars has had a somewhat, some conversion but he's never retracted all the bad history that he produced before he shifted sides. So he is a terrible person to defend Israel because a lot of the history that people used to attack Israel, he, I'm gonna say created because it wasn't, it's not true. He fabricated, he made up, at least based on some significant sources that I trust a lot more than I do Benimars and these other guys. All right, thank you, Neocon. Stephen Kreisman, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. We need a bunch more stickers, guys. Thank you, Stephen Hoppus. Thank you, RDF. Even $2, $5, $10, all of those. Everything helps. Everything gets us closer to the goal. All right, Frank says, will EV cars be in auto racing in D500 Le Mans? I really don't know. It's gonna take a long time for the, I think racing community to adopt EV cars. There's something that I think they don't really like, particularly, it doesn't have that raw of the engine. I don't know that they've made EV cars yet that can handle the rigor of the track. I just don't think so. And then of course, there's the battery life, particularly when you're full throttle. How much of the, is the battery gonna survive? How long will it survive? So, unclear. So, yeah, I mean, so yes, auto racing, I just don't know. I think it'll be a long time. I mean, I talked about the EV Chinese cars the other day, but the reality is that at least for now, Americans seem to be resisting EV cars. Now, it's not surprising. They cost $50,000, they cost a lot of money. Europeans seem to be resisting EV cars. And their primary problem are things like range. And it'll be interesting to see if the Chinese can solve their problem and maybe make it so cheap that people will buy it in spite of the challenges that they face. I don't know, but then of course, it's not clear that America's gonna allow them to import the cars. I have a feeling that whether it's a Biden administration or a Trump administration, they will find excuses not to allow Chinese electric vehicles into the United States no matter where they're produced. James, are you watching the show, Shogun? Yes, I am watching Shogun. I'm really enjoying it. I haven't watched the last two episodes, so I'm behind on it, but I am watching it. Shogun, there was a series made of Shogun in the 1980s that I watched, which was very good. I can't remember if I read the book. My wife read the book and really loved it. Again, back in the 80s. I read other Clavel books that I really enjoyed. I like that author quite a bit. The interesting stories set in exotic places, a lot of history that I'm not familiar with. So I've really enjoyed Clavel's books, and I'm looking forward to watching the rest of Shogun and seeing what this kind of modern production is gonna do with it. Certainly, the one virtue of the modern production is it's beautifully made, well-acted. It's in Japanese and English, so you have to read subtitles, but that's good. It adds authenticity to it versus I think the 1980s show was all in English, which was weird. So yeah, I mean, good show. I encourage people to watch it. Where is it on? Is it on Hulu? I think it might be on Hulu. So if you can, if you have Hulu, go watch it. I am Mirkat. Biden's stopping the Rafa operation across the line. Make America great again. I'll go back to hating Trump after the election. Gaza must be destroyed. I get it, I get it, I get it. People are gonna find excuses and everybody's gonna find reasons to vote for Trump or to support Trump. I get that. It's easy because Biden is an awful president. The real question is what are you gonna get? What are you gonna get in his place? What is Trump gonna offer? And would Trump be any different? In this case, would Trump have been different in the beginning? Not clear, not obvious to me that Trump is dramatically better. Maybe he was in his first term, very friendly to Israel and quite supportive along certain lines, but he also tried to push a peace deal to state solution. He tried to do all kinds of other things, but yeah, Biden is from day one was trying to slow down Israel, trying to moderate Israel, trying to get them to do whatever they're doing in a more moderated fashion than I think the Israelis wanted to do. I think Netanyahu is channeling the Israeli people. The Israeli people wanna get this done, but he is, as I've always said, weak, so he does it slowly and he does it with consultation and he does it with appeasing Biden and he does it with all these things instead of just going ahead and doing it and ripping the band-aid off in terms of world opinion and world response. By the way, Canada is no longer supplying Israel with weapons. Canada is no longer supplying Israel with weapons because it is objecting to the way the Gaza campaign has been, whatever, and the humanitarian, supposed crisis, or whatever. All right, thanks, sir, and Mikat. Scott, you said a few years ago we had more free speech than ever. Is that still so while Biden is pressuring social media to suppress speech? He doesn't like, yeah, it is so. We still have more free speech than ever. In terms of era, in our particular years, but in terms of era, we have more opportunities to express ourselves. There's a lot less government censorship than there was in the past. If you go down back to Hoover's FBI and the monitoring of Americans by the FBI back then, it's so on. But I want more free speech and clearly Biden violated the First Amendment and the Biden administration. But by the way, so did the Trump administration. The first inroads into social media and telling social media and misinformation of all that were done under Trump. But this is all violation of the First Amendment and needs to be stopped. One does not exclude the other. So yes, we should recognize the fact that America in its past, unfortunately, was, again, I remind you of Lenny Booce in the 1960s going to jail for saying the F-word, but also the kind of surveillance from the FBI under Hoover was far more intense even than I think what the NSA does today. The files that all of us would have had under those days at the FBI and a whole variety of ways in which our free speech was violated and the risks we were taking. I think the Supreme Court over the last two decades has liberated speech significantly. That is, has stood by the First Amendment in ways that they hadn't in the past. So good for the Supreme Court. And I very much hope they continue that trend by getting the government to stop talking to social media. Stop talking in a very, very extensive way. But if you think this is a democratic problem, then you don't know what you're talking about, Scott, which is, of course, not surprising. When, what's his name? Ted Cruz, years ago, lamblases Facebook for, quote, censoring conservatives. This is when Trump was around, censoring conservatives. That's government talking to social media and telling them what's unacceptable. They're just as bad, and maybe worse. So the idea that this is a Biden administration problem or a, that will be solved if we give the range to Republicans is pure BS. The Republicans do it, and indeed the Republicans initiated it by using pressure in Congress, threatening regulations on social media in order to get their own way, in order to get the social media to behave in ways that they wanted them to behave. It doesn't matter who it was, it's a Republicans. And you know, Trump supported this, it didn't Trump. Forgive me if I got this wrong, but didn't Trump say at some point, and maybe we can find the clip, he said, you know, something like, you know, if the Washington Post keeps attacking me like this, you know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon beware, maybe there's an anti-Trust lawsuit somewhere there. I mean, that's what he said. Is that an administration that respects free speech? That's exactly what the Biden administration did. Threatening social media, in this case it's not social media, it's real media. Threatening them with going after their parent company, unrelatedly, you know, to silence them wanted to change their coverage. I mean, it's a joke. Indeed, I think that Trump elevated this kind of thing of threatening the media, elevated it beyond anything that I think any other president, at least that I'm familiar with in the last 20, 30 years has done. So the Biden administration just continued that trend. God, but the idea that Trump is pro-free speech in any way, in any way, is just complete evasion of the facts on the ground. It's a complete evasion of what he said, it's a complete evasion of his behavior, and it's a complete evasion of what he said his intention is going to be. One of the reasons I want the Supreme Court to rule on this and to rule on it as clearly and unequivocally as possible is to prevent Trump or whoever, Biden, Trump, whoever from doing this in the future. Unfortunately, based on our arguments, it doesn't look like they're going to. Trump's bluster is exactly the same as the bluster of a bureaucrat walking into Twitter and saying, you know, I'll be really upset if you publish this or that. It's the same thing. It's bluster. Bluster is a form of violation of free speech, and that's what the Supreme Court needs to rule. And the reason they won't rule against the Biden administration, even some of the conservative justices, is because of the argument you're making. So you are supporting the idea that bluster is not a violation of free speech. The government can accuse people, can threaten people, and it doesn't count as anything. Don't worry about it. Just be happy. God, I mean, you're so dishonest, Scott, because as soon as Trump became the nominee, Trump is never done any wrong. Trump is perfect. Trump is fantastic because your agenda is to defeat Biden, so you'll never say a negative word about Trump and you'll defend him to the end. But that has sheared dishonesty. And the idea that a president stands up and threatens the owner of a business, that he's gonna go after him unless the newspaper owns, doesn't change his coverage, that is, if that's not a violation of free speech, I don't know what is. And if you don't understand that, then you can't think. Sorry. It's a threat, a government threat. It's the essence of violation of free speech when the government threatens. Savanas, what do you think of the online dating market declining? Would a purely transactional dating method be realistic in a capitalist society? Well, I don't know what purely transactional means, but I have to say, I don't know. I mean, I find this, I would like to see people go back to meeting people live and dating people through work or through. Now, I think part of the problem with dating is that dating people at work became such an issue, right? It became like, you know, barred and you could lose your job for doing it. But work was probably one of the places where a lot of people found their spouse. I did, I mean, work was the military, but I did. And you get to know somebody, you meet them, you get to know them. I mean, it seems like a great place to meet and date somebody. Going out and hanging out with friends and hanging out with people, get people out of there flipping on the phone, looking at pictures and trying to figure out who they are good date with. I don't know. I really think that school, work, social gatherings, face-to-face is a much better way. So I don't know that dating markets are in declining. That, I mean, online dating markets are in decline. But if it's happening, then I think that that is a, that's basically a good thing. If and only if, at the same time, the real world dating market is increasing. That is, if people are finding other avenues, if dating overall is in decline, that's not good, right? People should date, people should have fun and enjoy the company of others. Would a purely transactional dating method, I don't, I don't think dating is transactional. I think dating should be, you meet somebody, you want to get to know them a little bit more, you date to get somebody a little bit more. I don't know what's transactional about it. It has to be mutual, so in that sense it's win-win. So it's a trade, but I don't think that money needs to exchange hands in a sense of a transaction like that. Thank you, Savannas, that was $50. We really, really appreciate the support. Paul, don't you think Trump's narcissism and love of dictators more dangerous than Biden's weak and fickle government? I mean, I do in the end. That's why I don't support Trump, right? I don't support Biden either, but I don't support Trump exactly because of that. I think his narcissism is, and his embedded authoritarianism is unbelievably dangerous and could be the number one threat to this country, faces in the future. I don't get to vote, and I don't get to influence a lot of people who do vote, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time, but yeah, I mean, I think Trump really, really sucks. And, you know, at least, Ayan Mirkat says, Trump really, really, really sucks, but I have certain red lines, Biden crossed it. I'm gonna hold my nose and vote for Trump. I get that. I get that. I think it's wrong, but I get that, right? But somebody like Scott, who, you know, can't completely evade everything wrong with Trump, everything he does wrong, his character, his authoritarian leanings, his admiration for Putin and Xi, ignores all of that and ignores his entire first administration, ignores the fact that this is the first president who tried to overturn a legitimate election, the first president of American history, who really made a concerted effort to reverse the choice in the ballot box, the first president who really tried to stay in office illegitimately, to evade all that, to evade how he behaved towards Mike Pence and what he told Mike Pence to do on January 6th, to evade all that, is just the height of evasion and in the name of what? In the name of, well, he's not the left, beat the left, beat the left, I'm willing to forget everything, forgive everything because it's absolutely evading. You saw what happened and you evaded, it's meaning, you evaded the content, you evading everything about it. And now, see Scott, about a year ago, would have not taken the bait, he wouldn't have tried to defend Trump in the elections, he wouldn't have tried to defend Trump on January 6th, but now he's gonna do it because now Trump's his guy, right? DeSantis was his guy before, so he was willing to consider criticizing Trump but now it's gone, it's gone. The Trump virus, the Trump brain virus hasn't completely infected him and everything Trump does, everything Trump is and everything Trump was is saintly. All right, let's not talk about that more. Andrew, when you indicated that Christianity's original sin is productivity, it really elucidated the opposite natures of Christianity and objectivism. We literally regard the great sin as a great virtue. Yes, I mean, the ideal, the ideal, of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition is the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Eden where man does not produce, where the Garden of Eden where man just is a beneficiary of nature and he lives with nature and harmony with nature but he hasn't bitten from the fruit of knowledge so he has no knowledge, so he has no reason. So he doesn't need to produce and he doesn't produce, he's just an animal. The ideal ultimately is for man to become animal. It's the reversal of evolution. It's giving up free will and it's giving up human reason so we can just go out there and be in the pasture with the rest of the animals and live happily ever after, I guess, as animals, not as human beings. That is ultimately the ideal. And yeah, with, you know, and therefore this world, because we do need you to reason, because we do need to produce, this world is grubby and dirty and sinful and it's only in the afterlife where you don't have to produce anymore. By the way, Marxist utopia is a Christian utopia. It's a world in which there's no production, production happens kind of automatically in the background. We don't even talk about how it happens and all your needs are met and you can do whatever you feel like doing and you don't have to produce. No productivity is actually occurring. And he got that. It's again, it's the Garden of Eden. It's the Garden of Eden. I should do it just to show on the Garden of Eden. Andrew says, thoughts on George Conway's point that the media should cover Trump differently because he's not a normal person but a narcissistic sociopath. Not sure if he's a sociopath but he has that potential. Yeah, I mean, I do think the media should cover. I mean, I think the media should... The problem is that the media, I think, is too soft on him and then it distorts what he says. So it has this combination of accusing him of things he isn't responsible for like the bloodbath and not human, those people are not human. And then not attacking him and not criticizing him on the things where he needs to be criticized and should be criticized. They should be making a big deal, for example, on his threats against the media, the threats that he's made about what he would do in the media in a second term. They should be focused on, for example, the free speech stuff that he's actually said and articulated. They should be looking closely at who the Heritage Foundation is vetting to be in a Trump administration. Who are these people? What do they believe? What do they think? What is their agenda? And they should take... They should look at Trump policy, you know, projections. So I think they should treat him differently, much more seriously than they do. Instead, they look for soundbites and take them out of context and attack him that way, which is stupid because they look stupid and then nobody believes them when they actually are. All right, let's see. All right. I will... I remind you that we're still a little short on this show, so if somebody wants to step in and get us through to the threshold, that'd be great, but if not, I will see you all tomorrow. I think it's 2 p.m. East Coast time. We'll have our next show, our next news roundup. And then in... In tomorrow evening, at 7 p.m. East Coast time, we'll have Ilan Giorno to discuss the Lex Friedman debate on the Israeli-Palestinian or the Israeli-Palestinian Gaza issue, which should be interesting. So thank you again, in particular, thank you, Savanos, who came in with basically 70 bucks for the show. I really, really appreciate that. And I will see you all tomorrow for another news roundup. Bye, everybody.