 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this December 1st, 2020. Something going on with the music. Anyway, I'll deal with that over the weekend and try to figure it out. My call goes out again. Sound engineer. I'm desperate for a sound engineer. Anyway, I hope everybody had a great November. The show, by the way, did great in November. I mean, we had one of our best months ever in terms of the amount of time people spent watching the show. Views are primarily dictated by short videos, particularly the one-minute ones. So while the views were way up, they weren't up as much as some months when one of our shorts goes viral. We got just over 500 subscribers, new subscribers. That's net, right? So new subscribers minus people who left. So that's great. That's one of the best months, certainly in recent times. And in terms of Super Chat, it was the second best month ever for Super Chat. The best month was December of last year, when on the final day of the year, we raised in Super Chat over $10,000. So just that one day kind of eclipsed everything. But this is the second best month ever. The best month ever, if you exclude kind of the one big fundraising event. So yeah, thank you to all the Super Chatters. Again, I'm talking about Super Chat, not about other forms of revenue. So thank you to all the Super Chatters. You guys have been great. Thank you to all the new subscribers. Thanks for joining. Those of you who haven't yet subscribed, please do so. Let's make December as good as November was. I have a feeling when I need some drama in December to match November's numbers. I generate interest when there's drama. War obviously helps this channel. We've done well in terms of viewership. When the Ukraine war started, when the war in Gaza started, but we don't, but it doesn't sustain. And then we do well when people like I and Hirsi Ali go Christian and stuff like that. So we need some drama in the world. So I'm looking for more drama. Israel's like steady state, now no more drama. It's the drama really has faded. So yeah, we'll see if we can match our numbers, our November numbers with December numbers for that. We need to get off to a great start on the Super Chat front in December. So get ready to ask questions and to support those questions with Super Chats. Let's see. What else did I want to say before we get started? Yeah, I see we've got Tinkerbell in town here from Israel. I'm going to be launching a show in Hebrew for those of you in Israel or for those of you not in Israel who would like to hear me talk about the issues of the day in Hebrew. It'll be once every two weeks. It'll be together with Boaz Arad who runs Einwitz Center in Israel. And it will be I think it's going to be on Thursdays. So on Thursdays, we'll be doing a Hebrew show trying to see if we can create some interest in Israel and trying to get some increase of viewership over there and impact over there. We'll see how that works and if there's interest and there's engagement in Israel. So you all invited to listen. It will be playing live on my channel. But we could, I'll try to have the automatic subtitles. I don't know if they work for Hebrew, but we'll see if they do. And yeah, please spread the word. Let people know that if you know Hebrew, if you're in the U.S. or anywhere in the world or particularly if you're in Israel, but if you know Hebrew, then there will be a Iran book show in Hebrew with basically Boaz interviewing me or riffing together. My Hebrew is not good enough to sustain itself for an hour and a half nonstop. So Boaz is going to help me out with that. So hopefully that'll be fun and you guys will enjoy it and we'll have Super Chat there as well. So we'll continue to embrace the Super Chat model. Tomorrow there will be a show at 2 p.m. East Coast time. It will be a positive show. I don't have the title yet, but it will be something positive. So I know half of you are like bored now. We don't want to hear anything positive. We're not interested if it's not doom and gloom. What's the point? But that will be tomorrow at 2 p.m., something about controlling your own life and what to do with your own life. I think that's all the admin. December shows should be pretty much on schedule. We've got the holidays coming up, so that'll move things around a little bit. Oh, I did want to say on December 31st, we will have a year in review show, a show where we look at the year 2023 and analyze it and review it. It will be programmed as a three-hour show. It will be a long show starting at 2 p.m. East Coast time. It'll be on December 31st. It will be very much focused on fundraising, so I will be asking you to make an appearance during that show and bring your checkbook and do a Super Chat or a sticker while you're there. I will be promoting this actively, but there will be a fundraiser for the Iran Brook show on December 31st, just like we did last year. I don't have anybody matching this year, so we'll just have to grind it out from zero, but we're going to certainly try to raise $10,000 or more, but that is the goal. The goal is $10,000 on December 31st, so if you'd like to come in and do your annual support through Super Chat, that is the date to do it. It'll be a lot of fun. Hopefully it'll be interactive. You guys have come in the chat and be friendly and nice. Maybe we'll ban a few people who tend to be a distraction and we'll focus just on the good guys. All right, that is December 31st and that's all the, so let's jump in. As many of you know, I served in Israeli military intelligence for just over about two years. During my military service, I was nine months in the tank corps and had major back surgery, so I couldn't be in combat anymore in a combat unit, so I was transferred to military intelligence and served in military intelligence basically in 1981 and 1982. One of the things that really shocked me on October 7th was the fact that Israel had, that the intelligence services had failed so miserably, so badly that Israel was not prepared at all, that the soldiers at the front were shocked to find Hamas right on top of them, that a civilian population along the border was not armed, it was not prepared to be armed and had no, no indication that this was happening or that this might happen or that there was a threat of this happening. And it clearly appeared and still is the largest intelligence failure in Israel's history and maybe, you know, just in history. It's just stunning. The Gaza Strip is not that big. Israel has drones. Israel can look in. Clearly now we know that Hamas was practicing this, was engaged in mock, mock attacks. It's just unthinkable. Israel has maybe the best signal intelligence in the world. It listens in and has the capacity to listen in on basically pretty much every single phone conversation that happens in Gaza. My guess is encrypted or not, they have electronic surveillance. They were probably monitoring email and every other form of communication. It's just inconceivable that Israeli intelligence missed this and indeed it turns out it did not. There is a major story today in the New York Times that basically lays out the extent of, lays out what happened, at least, you know, this is not official yet, but this is unofficial, but it lays out the scope of the failure and where the failure actually happened. It turns out the Israeli military intelligence had at their disposal a 40-page document, 40-page document, called, that they called, that the Israeli authorities codenamed Jericho Wall, that basically outlined point by point exactly the kind of invasion that was experienced on October 7th. The use of, you know, the use of drones, the use of paragliders, the use of trucks, all of this stuff laid out in massive detail. The killing of civilians, the taking over of civilian population centers, the overrunning of military bases. Hamas had detailed information about the military bases who was there, how many troops were there. The idea that the drones would knock out some of the surveillance before the attack actually happened, which indeed is what happened. The rocket launches, first you launch rockets, distract the Israelis, and then you come by ground, exactly what happened. I mean, step by step. And what's shocking about this is Israel had this a year ago. Israeli intelligence had been sitting on this for a year. And to a large extent, you know, this document, this 40-page document was widely circulated among Israeli military and intelligence leaders. But at the very top of the leadership chain, at least as far as we know within the military, we don't know if this got to the civilian. I mean, I'm sure the Shin Bet and the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agencies, were part of this, but it's not clear if it got to the politicians, if it got to Netanyahu. But we know it got to senior military officials. Basically, they determined that it could attack on a scale and ambition, as described in this document, was beyond Hamas' capabilities, that they couldn't pull it off, that it was unlikely that Hamas had approved it, that the leadership had approved it. It was unlikely that Hamas wanted a full-scale war with Israel, which everybody understood that this would lead to. In July of this year, just three months before the attack, a veteran analyst with the 8,200 unit, which is the electronic signals unit, the signals intelligence unit, warned that Hamas was conducted an intense day-long training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the 40-page document. She had read it. This was a female intelligence agent. A colonel in the Gaza Division, one of her bosses brushed it off. I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary. She wrote back. The Hamas' training exercise, she said, fully matched the content of Jericho War. It's a plan designed to start a war, she added. It's not just a raid on a village, but the military did not take it seriously. The senior people in the military just did not take it seriously. They brushed it off. I mean, if the military had been prepared for the terrorist attack on October 7th, it wouldn't have happened. It would have been crushed right at the beginning. If there had been more troops on the border, if the civilian population had been armed, maybe they would have never approved of a music festival so close to the border. Maybe they would have had arms security there. It just would not have happened. The lives of 1,200 people would have been saved and a war avoided. Maybe the war would have happened anyway. But it's just a stunning failure of Israel's military leadership, of the leadership of the intelligence services. I really don't know how they sleep at night. I mean, and at the heart of it, at least from what we can tell today, who knows what we'll yet discover as information comes out in the weeks, months, years to come. At the heart of it was a real belief that Hamas both lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do it. They didn't have the audacity, if you will, to pull it off. That belief was ingrained in Israeli government, ingrained in the military. You know, we'll see how much the government had involvement in this. But as we discover more and more of this, this was not a failure of the intelligence apparatus on the ground. Just like in a sense, 1973 was not a failure of the intelligence agencies. Indeed, they saw it coming. In 1973, it was a failure of the political leadership to take their warning seriously. Here, it's not even clear that it made it to the political levels. The military, at its highest levels, are the ones that did not take it seriously, did not put the military on an alert status, did not beef up security along the border, did not warn the civilian population of this possibility. And just the most horrific day in Israeli history in many respects could have been avoided and was not. I'd say that somebody who was in Israeli military intelligence, I've told you the story about the unwillingness of certain people within the hierarchy to believe intelligence that me and my colleagues had produced with regard to Syrian ambush in 1982 that landed up, they didn't take it seriously. And as a consequence, it happened and Israeli troops died as a consequence. This doesn't shock me. It doesn't really surprise me. The reality is, and I don't know if this is true of the American army, but it probably is, is the majority of the people who stay in the military, beyond the conscription, the three years they have to, and then maybe a couple of years to build up their resume or to get some experience in leadership. The people who stay for the long run, not all of them, but a big chunk of them, including in intelligence, are often, how do I put this delicately, losers. There are often people who are afraid to go into the private sector because they don't know what and how, what they would do there. There are people who don't want to start over in the private sector. They've got kind of a path. The military gives them a very protected path with a very defined pension and a very clear level of promotions. I was never impressed during my time in the Israeli military in intelligence. With the level of intelligence, the self-esteem, the confidence of my superior officers, particularly in my unit, but generally with their knowledge, with their expertise, with their ability to make decisions, with their ability to analyze information, they never impressed me. They never impressed me. I was a kid. I was 19, 20, 21, and particularly in times of emergencies, particularly in times where quick, instant decisions needed to be made, decisions that pertain to the life or death of soldiers at the front. I don't want to sound arrogant, but this is true. You can ask my wife, she was there. They often looked at me to make decisions. I was a sergeant, a first sergeant. They were majors and colonels and so on. It was pathetic. They knew it. I knew it. I don't know what the most senior levels were. I don't know how good they were. Again, based on my experience, not that. I just have never really been impressed by people in the military. I'm impressed by people I read about in the military of the past. I've never met anybody who's impressed me in the military of the present. I don't know if that's a bias of historians to talk up and impress us with the past. Anyway, we will learn more and more as more information comes out in the weeks, months, years to come. On the extent of the failure and who specifically is responsible, I'm very curious to know how much of this went to the political establishment. How much of it was rejected by the politicians themselves? Bonaparte would be an example of what? Napoleon was both brilliant and a complete and utter failure and a disaster as a general. He fought some brilliant battles and he also fought some horrible battles where he should have been able to win or who should have avoided the battle or he could have come up with alternative tactics. But I think you add up the number of people died in all the wars that Napoleon was involved in. It's something like three million, three million, million, not thousand, million. All right, as you probably know, the ceasefire and the Gaza Strip has ended. It ended this morning Israel time when Hamas launched missiles towards Israel. There were still attempts to extend it further. It's again sad for me that it is Hamas that ended the ceasefire. It should have been Israel. The ceasefire was not in Israel's best interests, even though Israel did get a significant number of hostages back. I think many of the other hostages that Hamas might have are dead. They already keep telling the Israelis, okay, this family's dead, these two are dead, those people are dead. So I'm not sure how many they still have, but a lot of them are already dead, sadly. Israel has renewed operations. It's hard to tell fog of war and wartime security exactly what they're doing right now, but there seem to be big explosions going on, particularly in the north of Gaza. It is interesting that the United States has made clear to Israel that any renewed hostilities, the United States government expects Israel to work much, much harder than it has to guarantee the safety of so-called innocents and so-called civilians. In particular, in particular, I'd say that it is, what was I going to say? Sorry, I was reading a super chat question and I shouldn't have, I should have been focusing on this. In particular in the south, it's going to be very, very difficult to Israel. There are two million people now crammed into the south, south of Gaza, half the size of the entire Gaza, and Israel's going to have to go in there in order to destroy Hamas. To Israeli government's credit, they keep saying they are continuing to commit it to the complete destruction of Hamas, the killing of the entire Hamas leadership. There was a Wasti journal article out today that claims that Israel is committed and its intelligence agencies are committed to killing all of Hamas leadership, including the leadership that today lives in Qatar. We know them, right? The Qatar guys that live in Turkey and that live in Lebanon. Israel supposedly is committed, we'll see if this happens, to a multi-year effort to find everybody affiliated and associated with Hamas leadership and kill them, assassinate them. Absolutely, that is the right attitude to have. Absolutely, I salute them for having that. I hope they live up to that. I hope they do it. We will see in the days to come how the war in Gaza itself progresses. It's clear that the Biden administration is very worried about its left flank. It's clear that in spite of the very pro-Israel words that Biden expressed at the beginning at the beginning of all of this, in spite of his going to Israel, he is going to mount significant pressure on Israel to rain it in, to slow it down. We'll keep track of this and I'll keep filling you in as I learn more about what's actually happening on the ground and what's actually happening in terms of the global consequence of all this. This is kind of a funny story. Let me set it up first in terms of why it's funny. The US economy, if you look at the top-level numbers, we've talked about this before, like GDP according to the numbers grew on the third quarter of this year at 5.2%. That is an astounding number far faster than GDP grew during Trump's presidency or during Obama's presidency. It's one of the best numbers we've seen. It's not a rebound from the COVID. We had numbers that were bigger than that in 2021, but this is not a rebound GDP. This is just a pure GDP, 5.2%, which is astoundingly high. Unemployment rates are super low. By every kind of measure, the economy, whatever the hell that means, on a macro perspective, is doing great as economists measure it. I don't think those numbers are nonsense. You can poo poo them, but I don't think they're nonsense. They say something. They don't say enough, but they say something. Generally, the economy is doing much better than anybody expected it to. Unfortunately, Biden is getting zero credit for that, indeed, negative credit. People think he is horrible on the economy. The big question mark for the Democrats is what's going on? Of course, everybody knows what's going on. The real problem is inflation. The fact is that most Americans who go and do their own grocery shopping realize when they go grocery shopping that everything is much more expensive today than it was, that everything is going up. 96% of respondents through a survey said they were very or somewhat concerned about rising prices. 96%. 74% rated the economy as either not so good or poor, basically because of rising prices. This is the political cost of inflation. Jimmy Carter could have told them that this is what would happen. When Democrats and economists talk about a strong economy, people just don't get it because for them, yes, their wages have gone up, but they haven't gone up as much as inflation, or even if they have, it doesn't feel that way. Whatever joy they might have gotten from rising wages, they just pay it all out when they go grocery shopping. This is the number one concern America has, is the fact that the cost of living has gone up, that inflation is high, that the grocery bills are higher, that many of their bills are higher. Now inflation was going at 56% for a while, it's come down, and now inflation is only growing at 3% to 4%, depending on how you measure it, by the latest measure of core inflation, it's only going at 2.70%. But inflation is still growing, that price is still going up. And in this context, here's a tweet from Joe Biden. I don't know who the people who write Joe Biden's tweets are, but let me just say, they should really get their act together. It sounds like they're letting people tweet who are complete and utter ignoramuses. They're also letting people tweet who disagree with Biden or who disagree with each other, and therefore you get competing tweets on the same topic that disagree with one another, all branding the president's identity. At least when it came to Trump when he tweeted, it was clearly seemed like it was him, and they were all consistently awful, but they were all consistent. So here's what Joe Biden tweeted. Let me be clear that any corporation that hasn't brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, it's time to stop the price gouging, give American consumers a break. Now this is astounding because it shows such a ridiculous lack of knowledge and understanding of what inflation is. As the community comments on this tweet say, as long as inflation rate is positive, prices are increasing. The fact that inflation has come down to 3.2% in October means that prices are still going up, granted at a slower rate than before, but they're still going up. You don't expect prices to come down. Inflation is prices going up and they stick there unless we have what's called deflation, and then the inflation number goes negative, and that certainly has not happened. So this is just an example of just the stupidity. This is not sophisticated. This is not hard. This is like a sixth grader should get this. And yet this is a tweet that came out under the name of the president of the United States. It has not been taken down. It has not been withdrawn. It's still up there. It basically suggests that the president of the United States is a complete and utter idiot. Ignorant of economics and certainly not qualified to be president of anything, never mind the United States or America. But there we go. What can you do? That is who we have in the White House. All right, COP 28. I might give you some updates on COP 28 as it goes along, particularly if stuff happens that is, I don't know, shockingly interesting or stupid or whatever. COP 28 is, of course, the climate change conference that is going on in the United Arab Emirates, a country that is completely 100 percent a product of fossil fuels, 100 percent a product of fossil fuels. But the UAE is running this COP 28, which is the anti-fossil fuel conference. It shouldn't be called the global warming. It's a climate change. It should be called the anti-fossil fuel conference. Anyway, it opened today formally with the UAE announcing that it was launching a climate investment vehicle and that they were going to invest in this vehicle, $30 billion. They were hoping to raise $250 billion total to make investments in climate, I guess, investments in companies that make money off of climate change. I don't know, something like that. The UN Secretary General, the just evil SOB who runs the UN and who is rabidly anti-Israel, horrifically pro-Hamas, and this is the guy who runs the UN. Anyway, he came out today and said, quote, do not double down on an absolute business model. Guterres told fossil fuel company bosses, lead the transition to renewables. He says, you know, we should, we need the, he says, the one they have the green limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels, not reduce, not abate, phase out with a clear timeline, a clear timeline. In other words, the head of the United Nations wants to create more poverty, wants to create more droughts, starvation, wants to create more climate catastrophes because people won't have the electricity to be able to survive the hurricanes or the water for the droughts. Once the starve and destroy human life on planet earth, that is the Secretary General of the United Nations. Don't reduce, don't abate, phase it out. Right now, I want a timeline, no fossil fuel, zero fossil fuels, which means no way to travel. I mean, think of all the things that just can't have happened right now without fossil fuels. King Charles, King Charles, the king went to UAE for COP 28. He's a big environmentalist. Again, you know, he was, you know, he, this is a quote from him, the earth does not belong to us. Who the hell does it belong to? He said, quote, the earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth. Now that is a good Christian saying. The next sentence should be, I don't know if he said this or not, but he should have said, and the earth demands our blood. The earth demands our sacrifice. God demands we sacrifice ourselves to him. Anyway, yes, earth, we belong to the earth. Did you know that the earth has a claim on you guys? I'm just scanning through the highlights of today. This is just, just the speeches today. Oh, here's what, here's a good one. Lula, president of Brazil, the socialist corrupt, rabidly left this president of Brazil. I need to be careful because I plan to go to Brazil and give lectures and, you know, you never know what he might do. But anyway, it turns out that part of the problem of climate change is caused by inequality. And in order to increase our climate change resilience, whatever the hell that means, we must fight inequality, quote, I can't imagine fighting climate change without fighting inequality to reduce social economic vulnerabilities means to increase resilience vis-a-vis extreme events. Lula vowed to make Brazil a role model in the effort to reduce emissions and slow the pace of climate change as the country prepares to host COP 30 in 2025. I mean, this is, this is amazing. COP, the COP conferences are going to provide me with fodder for my talks and my shows forever. The EU Commission, Vice President said that fossil fuels need to be phased out completely. It's the only way to stop climate change. India offered to host COP 33 in 2028. Yeah, they figured a lot of people will come. There have been a lot of fossil fuel getting there, but they'll, they'll enjoy, you know, Indian hotels, Indian cuisine will be a little boost to the economy. Plus, India can then virtue signal to the world that it cares, because certainly it's not going to care in terms of cutting emissions. That's never going to happen. Anyway, we can, we can keep, you can, I can keep scrolling and, you know, Vietnam has a plan to move away from coal. Sunak is going to invest heavily in wind farms, you know, from all that surplus money that the UK government has. Macron, yeah, this is funny one, right? Macron is calling for global reversal in coal. We need, we need to shut down coal. We need to stop using coal. Of course, the French love it if you all shut down coal because then you become more dependent on importation of electricity in Europe from nuclear France. France is, you know, dominantly nuclear. Anyway, we can go on and on, but there you go. That is your leaders in UAE committing to destroying your future, your wealth, your prospects, your opportunities. Gone. Oh, I just opened Twitter accidentally and there's the earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth by King Charles, King Charles. We still have kings and we actually listen to what they say. How shocking is that? All right, finally, just to, just to give you an uplift in the mood, right? Just to, just to make you feel a little bit better. The schools all across the country are taking, taking seriously the fact that there was an academic achievement gap between students, white students, Asian students and black students. And, and part of the mechanism by which they are taking this seriously and going to attack this great problem that we have, which is a, I think a real problem. I used to throw in Latino students in there as well. What they are doing in, in, for example, in Everston, Illinois, which is a suburb in the north of Chicago, they are starting, how do you even say this? I don't know how, what the sensitive way of saying this, but they are starting race based math classes and, and writing seminars as well, because there's a, there's a achievement gap in writing as well. In other words, these are classes that are intended for students of the same race, taught by a teacher of the same race as the students. So the solution to the fact that black students are underperforming or being outperformed by, let's say, whites and Asians is to create black only, white only, Asian only, Latin only classes. Is this going to allow black students to then improve their performance? What about black students who do really, really well? What about the overachievers? Are they going to be now held back because they are now part of the black math class? I mean, this, this will require a whole show to do, but one of the stunning developments of world culture, critical race theory, the modern left, the kind of the, the, the, the, the new left is that they have completely and utter rejected, rejected it. The idea of segregation, of integration, sorry, of integration and embraced segregation. Indeed, many of their thinkers believe that the civil rights movement was a failure because it achieved and fought for and insisted on integrating the schools when they want the schools to be segregated. It's just mind boggling. It's just mind boggling that this is literally actually happening. But not to worry, in San Francisco, the school board is about to vote on whether to let eighth grade students take algebra again. Algebra for eighth graders was banned in San Francisco schools because Asian students were the ones taking it, doing really, really well, and everybody else felt left behind. So they banned algebra. Now problem with that is that San Francisco public schools are dominated by Asia, you know, there's a lot of Asians and the Asian parents do not take lightly to this nonsense. They've been lobbying, advocating, pushing and it appears that after a 10 year battle San Francisco is going to actually have, after a vote, allow eighth graders to take algebra again. Maybe they'll segregate it. Maybe they'll have black algebra, white algebra, Latin algebra and Asian algebra. I wonder if it will be the case that the Asian algebra class covers the material faster than everybody else. And if that case, will we have to throttle them? Dunno, not sure. Sick, sick that the racist now comes from the people who were victims of racism in the past. And the racism they want to inflict is to a large extent on themselves and on everybody else. All right, just a quick story. Positive got to get into the positive. One of the positives of Javier Millay's being elected president of Argentina and one which I think the NCAPs in the United States won't like is that Javier Millay is, in spite of declaring himself an NCAP in spite of his radicalism and everything, put aside all the economic policies which will see what he can get done and what he can actually pass. But one of the really good things about Javier Millay becoming president is that he is unapologetically pro-America and pro-Israel. Indeed, he is a thousand times more pro-America than an alcocapulist in America and it's a thousand times more pro-Israel than an alcocapulist in Israel. And as part of this, the Millay administration has already announced, even though they haven't taken office yet, that they will not join BRICS, remember BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. That his commitment is to the United States. His commitment is to the West. He's not going to join China led BRICS. He's not going to join Russia led BRICS. He doesn't believe in communism or authoritarianism. He doesn't believe in autocrats. I mean, this guy, and he's got problems, but this guy is like so much better than any of the ancaps that troll me on Twitter. It's truly astounding. They want to embrace him because he claims he's an ancap and he's a libertarian president. But he's like a light years ahead of them. And if you saw the pictures of him waving the Israeli flag, I mean, that must have sent chills down the spine of Dave Smith and all the other pseudo freedom loving ancaps. So good for Millay. I'm more excited by Millay because he's not, it's not just about economics. Now, there are other things where I don't agree with him on abortion and some other things, but this is great. The fact that he's unabashedly pro-American and pro-Israeli. All right, we will turn to your super chat questions. We're like, well, we're close to the goal, 47 short of the goal. Sivanus just got us really close. You can join in, support the show, value for value, start off the month by achieving our goal. That would be great, because again, we need to make December as good as November, if not better. All right. Scott is being his dishonest, despicable self again. All right, Daniel, well, no, let's take Sivanus because he put $50. Incredible that thanks to woke police, woke policies, schools are going for circle and segregation. We keep reaching new levels of idiocy and double think. Yes, I mean, absolutely. I mean, woke culture is anti-reality, anti-reason. And as such, it basically is racist. And it is deterministic because you are determined by your race, even at the same time as, and this is where the fact that contradictions exist doesn't bother them. They believe that racism is a social construct. But the idea that they want to segregate, the idea that they want to separate the races, this was a line of the white supremacists, always, still is. Now it's embraced by the minorities themselves. I mean, everybody basically in America today has abandoned individualism as an explicit ideology. Everybody is a little bit on the neither here nor there, neither right nor left. But the right has abandoned individualism. The left has abandoned individualism. Every semblance of individualism, even the pretense of individualism, it's all gone. It's all gone. Tragic and horrific. Daniel says UNRWA apparently has a subjective definition of refugee, which includes people who have not fled across an international border, people who have not fled across an international border, people who have already received citizenship, and the children's children have displaced people. Yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean, it's completely arbitrary. But the whole concept of refugee, there's an element of arbitrariness to them in the world in which we live. It does an economic refugee counts. There's the lack of economic liberty in a particular country. Make you a refugee if you leave the country or is it only political freedom that is missing? Make you a refugee? What exactly is an objective definition of the concept? And certainly nobody, the way they use it today, has any clue of it, of what it means. And it's all a consequence of the muddying of immigration, the muddying of the idea of immigration, and it's all muddied by altruism. It's all muddied by the fact that we have to prioritize suffering people when we consider immigration. We can't prioritize our own interests. We can't prioritize our own needs. We have to prioritize their suffering. That's altruism 101, Christianity, as I'm learning from Dominion. 101 is applied to migrants. Yeah, Dominion makes the case that Angela Merkel in 2015 when she allowed all the Muslims in, was basically being a good Christian, even though she never mentioned Christianity and far we know she's an atheist. Just fold, have you seen the Musk interview with Andrew Sorkin? In it he repudiates his, you have said the actual truth tweet and has an excellent shake their fist at the sky moment about the ex-advertiser boycott, worth breaking down. I saw a bit of it. I haven't seen the whole thing. But I really don't think it's a shake their fist at the sky moment at all. I don't think it is at all because he's not shaking his fist as regulators at government, people who use force against you. He's shaking his fist here at advertisers who I think had a legitimate case against him because it took him a long time to repudiate the tweet and he still hasn't completely fully repudiated it. It still is in the case that Andrew, that Elon Musk has said, yes, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I was an anti-Semite. I should have never responded to a tweet by a known anti-Semite with such a positive response. I could have tweeted separately that I think the IDL is really, really bad and promotes really, really bad things for America. And I could have even said that many Jews in America have a very wrong attitude towards immigration. I could have said all that. I didn't have to respond to an anti-Semitic tweet. But he did respond. He's never really explained it. He's claimed he's not an anti-Semite. And I believe him. I don't think he is an anti-Semite. I just think he is a, he's childish. And he's, you know, in a sense moronic when he comes to these things, he doesn't think them through. He responds without thinking. He sees something. Oh, yeah, I know a Jew who believes in mass migration. Yeah, let me like this tweet. Let me support it. Let me write something without thinking about the consequences, not thinking about what it means, without thinking about who wrote the tweet and who he is endorsing by commenting on the tweet positively. He's just, you know, in many respects, a child when it comes to these things. He doesn't think it through. He's a great businessman, a great visionary, a great innovator, but he's too much like Donald Trump. And this is why people love him. When it comes to actually talking about ideas, he just says whatever comes into his mind. And without reflection, without thinking, without consideration, it just pops out there and just says it. Even if it, and then it takes him days to retract it. I think the tweet is still up. He never deleted it. It's just not serious, intellectually, ideologically. I can't take it along more seriously when it comes to ideas. Take him seriously when it comes to his business acumen, but I just can't take him seriously in terms of, in my realm, my realm of ideas. Elon Musk is an amateur in my realm. He's a child and he acts like a child in my realm. He's driven by emotions and he's way too impetuous. He's, you know, and he's not serious. He's not a serious thinker. Sorry. I wish it weren't the case. It would be fantastic to have Elon Musk as an ally. Is it time for 52-size cod deck for senior Hamas leaders? Yeah. I mean, I don't know that there are 52 of them, but yes, I would hope so. And let's hope they go through the deck and they eliminate every single last frigging one of them. Andrew says, do you believe Elon Musk when he says he doesn't care if people hate him if one needs the hate of others? Is it just a second-handed as needing love? I mean, I don't know. I mean, obviously, Elon Musk is first-handed in so much of his life and in his business dealings. I mean, he couldn't have done what he's done. He couldn't have risen and created what he's created without being a first-handed genius. So I don't think he does it because they hate him or don't hate him. That's not his consideration. Again, I think he's quick on the trigger when it comes to ideas. He's not thoughtful. He doesn't think it through. He doesn't moderate. Again, he's a genius when it comes to some things and he's not very good when it comes to other things. And the need of people to find heroes and to worship them and to view them as unerring in anything that they do, like many people's attitudes towards Elon Musk, well, he's a great businessman, so he must be great on ideas. And I'll interpret everything he does as a positive. Reminds me of the way people treat a Trump. And I think it's wrong. You have to evaluate. You have to judge. People can be great in some things and not so good in others. And that's okay. The fact that Elon Musk is generally on the right does not make him good and does not make him right. It just makes him of the right. And right now to be of the right is not a compliment. All right. Let me just say thank you to Chad for the sticker, to Dave Ossano, and to Wes. Thank you. And Tacey, thank you all for the stickers. All right. Orl says, how should Israel explain themselves better abroad? I don't think the problem is Israel's lack of ability to explain itself, although it could be much more strident and much more clear in its position. I think that the problem is with the audience. The problem is altruism. The problem is some extent anti-Semitism. The problem is a negative philosophy, a bad philosophy that the culture holds. Israel could explain itself better by being more strident, more unapologetic, more explicit about its self-defense aims, more explicit about the fact that all the lives in Gaza who are lost are the fault of Hamas, more explicit about the evil. And they think they need to repeat it constantly. So they need to be a lot more principled, a lot more explicit, a lot more brave in calling it like it is. And some of the spokesmen are, sometimes they are, and then they moderate it. There's no moderating here. Good guys, bad guys just call it like it is. The Godfather, Sandra Day O'Connor and Henry Kissinger died over the past couple of days? No. Any comments on their contribution to political discourse, both American and international? Sandra Day O'Connor didn't die over the last couple of days. She died years ago. She died a long time ago. Charlie Munger, the investment guy who died a day before Kissinger. But Sandra Day O'Connor has been dead a long, long time ago, a long time. Kissinger died as I said, I talked about it a couple of years yesterday, I think. She just did. Oh, yes, I'm completely lost it. Where was it? Where have I been? Sandra Day O'Connor just died. All right, I'm googling. I screwed up, sorry. I mess up sometimes. Yeah, she died today. Huh, I missed it. All the news reports are from an hour ago. I was preparing a show and not looking there. Sorry, I sometimes make errors and that's a biggie. All right, I thought she died a while ago. She retired a long time ago, but I guess she hadn't died. And I don't know if she was as sharp as Kissinger and Munger were at 99 and 100 and she was 93. Anyway, so let's talk about Sandra Day O'Connor. I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor was considered a conservative. From the right, she was a Supreme Court Justice. She was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. She was considered a moderate conservative. She was a kind of a moderating voice on the court. I think if I got it right and I haven't done the research, which I would have done if I'd realized we were going to talk about it, I think she was a bulwark against the tendency of the court to move against abortion. She, in spite of being a Republican and again, moderate conservative, she was not for the court overturning Roe versus Wade. She seemed like a very reasonable woman. She seemed like somebody who was respectful and polite and an interesting person. And I think she was one of the good guys. Was she as radical and as committed to liberty as I'd like to have to be? No. But on the court, I think she was a moderating force against the religiosity of many conservatives, which affected the separation of church and state and affected abortion. But she was generally on the side of economic liberty, but again, not as radical and not as consistent as I would have liked. So that is Sandra Day O'Connor. So in a sense of political discourse, I think she was part of a positive discourse. She was part of the debate rather than the yelling, cursing, hatred. Kissinger, on the other hand, I have very low regard for, I think I said this yesterday. Kissinger elevated pragmatism to the heights of foreign policy. He made pragmatism the dominant theory of foreign policy. He made under the realist school. He cut deals. He voiced opinions that I think were the exact opposite of my views on foreign policy. He won an Nobel Prize unjustly. He supported Israel, but he also supported any kind of compromise to establish, I don't know, a two-state solution or whatever. He wanted Israel to compromise constantly. His theory, his views, his approach to foreign policy was awful, horrific. That in and of itself should condemn him to kind of history's hell. He is one of the bad guys. Not one of the bad guys in the sense of killing, murdering or leading to that. But in the sense of separating morale from foreign policy, separating American interests long-term, principled American interests from foreign policy, and often allowing dictators to do and survive and to do things they shouldn't have been allowed to do. Kissinger never liked his recommendations. Didn't like him secretary except in 73 when he helped Israel. That was the only good thing I could think of. He shaped foreign policy in America since then. Everybody who has been in that role since he was in the State Department, basically has been a Kissinger acolyte, has been a mirror image of him. So in that way, he impacted whole generations of foreign policy experts and not just the people at the State Department, the people around the intellectuals, the professors that they were all shaped by the same either by the same philosophy as Kissinger was or by him directly. He was the guru of foreign policy and that is very, very bad, very, very bad. So not a fan of Kissinger at all. Yeah, I mean, America has adopted his opposed to foreign policy wholeheartedly. And the few people who have been different from Kissinger are the ones that have been shamed and ridiculed like John Bolton. John Bolton is very much an anti-Kissinger, but Trump fired him or he resigned, hard to tell what happened there, and now he's considered pariah among conservatives. He's ridiculed and shunned. Matthew, aren't peacetime generals mostly politicians and do you need real war to find the real generals? Patton was no politician. Yeah, but Eisenhower was. So sometimes you need a real war to figure out who the real politicians are. Like Eisenhower proved himself in World War II to be a great politician. And as a consequence, as a consequence, landed up ultimately being president of the United States. So even wartime generals are sometimes politicians. It depends what the president, what the political leaders want. But yes, you need wartime generals and those are hard to find if you haven't cultivated them during peacetime. You know, Patton is of a different era and it's not just Patton. Think about MacArthur. Patton and MacArthur are just of a different era. They grew up during World War I. They prepared for World War II and they had a completely different ideology about how to win wars than anybody in the military today. Today if you are Patton or MacArthur, and the same with Sherman, by the way, in the Civil War, today if you are Patton or MacArthur or Sherman, you would never make it to general. You would never survive the political machinery that is the Pentagon. You have to be somewhat of a politician just to survive it. All right, I have a hard stop at 3.30. Let's move through these critical thinker. About hippies and clearing garbage. Check out Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand for young people without a purpose. Time is an enemy to kill. That's absolutely true. The hippies and young people, and you could talk about a lot of people today. I mean, think about the people that John Peterson talks about, that he tells them what's the recommendation? Basically, clean up garbage. His recommendation is make your bed. Same thing. People without a purpose. Lots of time to kill. I never made my bed. Who has time to make your bed? Stuff to do. Places to be. Things to do. Never made my bed hardly in my life. But if you have no purpose, if you have nothing to do, just moping around, start with simple things like making your bed, clearing out the garbage, things like that. Critical thinkers continues. They seek and welcome the drudgery of mere physical labor. Yes, and somebody like Jordan Peterson reinforces that. Making your bed is exactly the same. And he continues, he saw it demonstrated on their so-called Earth Day when young people went out to clean the sidewalks of New York. Yes. Yes. The sidewalks of New York, of a goal bigger than themselves, to Jordan Peterson's credit, he's telling them to make the bed for themselves, for take responsibility for their own life. Part of that is making the bed. But it's the same principle. When you don't have purpose, when you don't have anything you need something to do. You need something physical to go out and engage in. You need to go do something and make your bed, clean the street, do stuff like that. That is the kind of advice conservatives like Jordan Peterson give young people. And that's the hippies of the past. That's the young people of today who have no purpose. If you have no purpose in life, what are you going to do in life? Critical thinker continues, could you comment on Rand's characterization of a fat, unhygienic raja of India parallels to Putin and his war, and his war recruits? So long as men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little. That's a great line. That is a great line. That's right. As long as your focus is on survival at the very basic level, then you can barely survive. It's only stepping back and thinking on a grander scale, industrial production, division of labor, trade that you can imagine producing real wealth and growing significantly. Yeah, I'm not getting the, you're going to have to explain these questions more to me, right? I'm not getting the Putin parallel. I'm going to think about that one and get back to you. But yeah, I mean, I kind of get what she's saying about the fat, unhygienic raja of India. But Putin and his war recruits, I mean, I've got a lot to say about Putin, his war recruits, and I've already said a lot. But I, sorry, I'm not getting the connection. And so I will, I will think about that. All right, I am a cat. Kisses, you're finally some good news. Yep. I may cut again. Oh, the GZ should still be the real the next Kothig, Kothege, Kothege was ultimately destroyed and, and salted. And so that nothing could ever grow there. It was completely, completely eviscerated and destroyed. Again, I may cut. And finally, for YouTube, for FU YouTube, for censoring my super chats, they continue to do that, huh? No. Andrew Chager, when the anti racists say we can't be colorblind, because we can't overlook skin pigment and objectively evaluate the individual according to a person's character, they should speak only for themselves. Yes. Absolutely. Objectivity demands that you focus on what is important, not on what is not important, what is causal and not on what is not causal. Philip Weather, is there a fundamental difference between ethics as a science as compared to other sciences such as physics or biology, for example? I mean, I mean, there are differences, obviously. You can't describe the science of ethics mathematically. You can't describe the science of ethics with formulas. The science of ethics while prescriptive is prescriptive. How things should be. It's not how things, you know, it doesn't necessarily tell you how people will behave, what will happen. It's not deterministic like physics or biology. Any science that deals with human beings lacks the deterministic aspect of physics and biology and chemistry and so on. I think that's the fundamental difference, right? Let me, so critical thing it says, could you just explain the survival mode of the Raj of India that she explains in the anti-industrial revolution? I'm trying to understand the characterization better. And he goes on in his quoting, the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of his jeweled goblet and neither did the Rajs of the people state of India. Yeah, so she's making, she's showing the Raj of India is like the Middle Ages baron and what characterizes them? What characterizes them is their ability to subjugate other human beings to their own needs, to their own desires, to their own survival. What characterizes them is the ability to get other people to labor and for them to basically carve off of that labor, any access without trading anything in return. The feudal baron and the Raj have no incentive to see industrialization, no incentive to see a division of labor society. They've got there, in a sense, slaves who are working for them and they don't have to work and they can benefit from the production of other people because they hold the gun because they use coercion to have enslaved them. The move away from feudal barons, the move away from the Raj is a move away from force. It's a move away from coercion. It's a move that says the baron doesn't ever wait to the product of the labor of others. The Raj doesn't ever wait to be exploiting his people, that they cannot use force on others and as a consequence, that move liberates the peasants to now improve, to now leave the land and go to the city and take up a profession. It creates a place in which a division of labor society can emerge. And the whole idea of industrialization is a consequence of liberty, it's a consequence of freedom, it's a consequence of getting force out of the equation, of liberating the human mind and human action from the permission of the baron, the permission of the Raj. And what the anti-industrialists want is for us to return to the time of the barons, the Rajas, the tribal leaders who exploit your labor, everybody's labor, for their own laziness or their own material will be jeweled goblets. And of course, one of the things that are sent to us like that is also illustrated, she says the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away, is that it's not like the feudal baron or the Raj were literally benefiting as a human being from this. They wasted their lives and that goes away by drinking his brains away. They drunk their brains away. They wasted their lives. They were wasting their lives of their, you know, of the people under them and they're wasting their own lives. It was a complete system of waste. Now, how did people accept this? Well, people accept this for a variety of reasons. Maybe the most powerful is Plato's reason. That is that some people just cannot take care of themselves. You know, this is the myth of the cave. You are just destined to only see shadows. You can't do anything. You can't do anything, but so human beings were told that they had no option but to be guided by authorities, religious authorities and political authorities, that they could not and did not have the ability to think for themselves. And therefore they needed the Raj to think for them. They needed the Raj to protect them and they were actually dependent on the Raj, not the Raj dependent on them. And they were convinced to do that. Critical thinker quotes Rand, so long as men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little that the man with a club won't be able to seize it and leave them still less. Provided millions of them are willing to submit. Yes, but they're willing to submit because they be taught from very young, but they cannot live their own life. And you know, parallel to Putin is basically every dictator does this. Every dictator tells these people their future, their present, their success is completely dependent on him. Now Putin adds a twist because we live in a modern world and people are exposed a lot. And that twist is what every modern dictator adds, that the threats from the other are great and only he can save them from them. Only he can defend his people. And of course, keep them poor. Keep them poor. And one of the things that poverty does to you is it doesn't give you enough time to think for yourself. It doesn't give you enough time to consider alternatives. It doesn't give you enough time to go out and produce more wealth. Keep them poor, keep the taxes going, send them to the front, keep them on edge, make them completely dependent on you or not dependent, feel like they're completely dependent on you. Alright, thank you critical thinker for walking me through that. John says happy Friday, you're on. I wanted to let you know I watched the movie coherence that I requested yesterday on Prime. For now, it's still on there. You're the best. Have a great weekend. Thank you, John. Really appreciate it. Thanks, guys. We met our target. We started off the month great. Although the show did go very long, so it took an hour and a half to get to the target. That's I like six fikki. That's supposed to be 650 hour and a half shows. But what the hell? I had the time to date. So we did it. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. I will see you all tomorrow. Don't forget, positive show, uplifting show, 2 p.m. East Coast time. Thanks, everybody. See you.