Rename the 'War of 1812'

Rename the 'War of 1812'

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's President's day. By the way, Favorite President, ready saying go?

(00:02):
Loaded question, ready to say go? Favorite President? All right,
he wasn't ready for that. Think about it. You got
two minutest. I love old Tafty that there is a
bad answer. You know, he was the first guy to
throw out the first pitch. Yeah, that's a bad answer.
Of all of the things for our president to be
famous for, that is not a good one. But right
now we're going to go back to the phones. We
were talking before we got into a different conversation we

(00:26):
got we were talking about federal employees and just how
the government, our current administration is kind of going through
who should and should not have jobs and how you know,
it's kind of they're not controlling the narrative well enough,
so it's just forcing us, the American people, to come
up with reasons as to why certain people are getting
axed from their positions. Well, full lines are open if

(00:47):
you have an opinion on this. At four h two, five, five,
eight eleven ten, Doug is on the line. Welcome in, Doug.
What's on your mind?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Hey, you know how many federal employees we have?

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Take a wild guest in general? You mean yeah, oh,
it's like, isn't it like three million or something?

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah, three million, which means it's a little under one
percent of this country is federal employees. Yeah, yeah, I
don't think that. I think that's way too many people
to begin with.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
I agree, all.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Right, our government's supposed to be small.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
I agree, not large. I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Okay, yeah, so, and we have in the last year,
we have added five percent. So if we cut five percent,
we're not going any further back than we were a
year ago, right, okay, yeah, So do we need all
those people? I only have so many national parks, right,
so why do I need to add five more percent

(01:43):
of people to the national park?

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well? Okay, So, so I mean I think we're getting
our hairs crossed a little bit here, Doug, because the
seasonal employees are still going to be added and subtracted
on a year to your basis as they usually are.
That's what it sounds like. At least I don't know
exactly the jobs of all what thousand people that were
let go. And I read the email. I don't know
if you caught that, but they did send an email,
and the email was worried as though when you like

(02:09):
the department determined you have failed to demonstrate fitness or
qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills,
and abilities don't meet the department's current needs. So I mean,
I don't know how they know that information, but you know,
I would just like a little transparency on how you determined. Okay,
So the National Park Service, which is less than one
sixteenth of one percent of the entire payroll number that

(02:32):
we're talking about here from federal employees, and how we
decided which thousand people to cut, including people at you know,
national monuments in Iowa and around the entire country. I
just want the transparency of Okay, this is why these
people were cut now, because just blindly slashing and not
having a good reason other than well not that we

(02:54):
we don't think this many people need to work in
this area. I just would like a better answer than that,
Like we should be firing the people that we really
don't need, not just oh well they don't need that
many people and then firing people there. I don't know
how many people the National Park Service needs. Does that
makes sense?

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, it makes sense. But what I'm saying is the
government has bloated as it is.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
I don't disagree with that, Doug.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
I don't disagree every every agency has bloated. The federal
government had added so many jobs the last four years
that they actually pushed the numbers up on adding jobs. Two,
if you have people who you allow to go home
and work from home. Now, I don't know if the

(03:36):
National Park system did that, but if the National park
allowed people to work from home, every one of them
should be fired.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
That's take care of a national park.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, I don't think that's I don't think that was
a problem here. I think it had more to do
with whatever jobs they were doing at whatever parks they
were doing. But I only have a couple of specific
examples of people from Iowa that lost their job, and
they've posted on social media, have kind of gone through there.
They weren't working from home per se, and one of
them had been working there for like eleven years or something,
which is, you know, it seems like something bigger than

(04:07):
just a person that was hanging out for a year
and then got a brand new permanent job and then
they fired him.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
That.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
This seems like a little bit of a different thing.
But I'm not I don't disagree with your your overall point, Doug.
I agree. I think you know, you talk about three
million employees, talk about you know, three hundred billion dollars
worth of payroll, like you should find ways to be
able to scrap that. I just want if we're going
to scrap so heavily into so many different areas, I
would just like the government to tell us, well, we

(04:35):
know what we're doing, we know which people we wanted
to cut. This was not just us, you know, taking
a huge machete to these departments just because we didn't
like how many people over there. We found very specific
groups of people that we think we can function without.
And if that's the case, then I'm fine with that.
I just would like to hear that from them.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Okay, But here's the thing. You know, you got the military, right, yeah,
which I'm sure that ten the three million number. But
every time they the Democrats or anyone cut the military,
how many people in Washington, d C.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Complain?

Speaker 2 (05:08):
How many people in the United States complain?

Speaker 1 (05:12):
I mean everybody.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
And they're there for our security, not for for me
to go look at a go to a state park
and camp.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, but a state park at a national park. But
they're they're not the same things, don't like like the state,
the state government is in charge of the state parks.
Like the state has the ability to staff state parks
the way that they they deem fit a national park
is by Teddy Roosevelt's pen over one hundred years ago.

(05:44):
And the federal government is in charge of maintaining those
areas for the sake of conservation as a whole, you know,
like that. I mean, this goes back to Roosevelt. This
is this is not like a new thing for the
federal government to have their hands on natural unse under Roosevelt.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
And we haven't changed the number of parks we got.
How many people were employed?

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Oh, I mean that's okay.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Now, how many people are employed? I think of it
that way.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
I hear it.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
If we were able to take care of the parks
that area, okay, because it's the square miles hasn't changed.
If the square miles hasn't changed, why have we had
to add thousands and thousands of people.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Uh, it's a good question. I'll do some recut on
this because I am curious on that question itself. But
you're right, I mean, you would imagine that there's a
lot more people working in that department now than there
were one hundred years ago.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
But we were able to do it one hundred years
ago with that many people. Now I could if it
was one hundred people and now I needed two hundred. Okay,
I could understand that. But if it was one hundred
people and now I've got twenty thousand people, what the.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
Hell is that?

Speaker 1 (06:50):
You're right, I don't disagree with that sentiment either, Doug. Again,
all I'm asking for is can we get a little
transparency on why certain people were fired? That's all I
want to know. Can you tell me what these people
did and why they should have been fired? That's all
I want to know.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Well, I don't know. I haven't seen these people, so
I couldn't look at the thing and say right, well.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
And right.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
But Doug, Doug, I don't need you to be able
to do that. I don't even want me to be
able to do that. It's not our job to try
to make sure that everything is going right with the
government when we're not the ones elected to do the job.
The people who are elected, who are making these calls,
who decided, hey, we're terminating these positions. I want them
to tell us why these people were selected, Like what

(07:32):
jobs did these people do that you felt that they
didn't need to exist anymore. If you can tell me that,
then I'm good. That's all I'm asking. I just don't
What I don't want, like I said, is I just
don't want us to be slicing chunks of these agencies
or these departments without knowing who we're firing. We're just
firing people because they make money off of the government,

(07:52):
and we don't even care about what jobs they do.
I mean, I've seen that in my own industry, the media.
I mean, it's people just get fired because they're number
instead of actually understanding the quality or the quantity of
jobs that they actually perform. It's all about, well, they're
just a person who makes this much money and we
just want to get rid of that. That to me,
that's just not a good way to do business. That's

(08:14):
all I'm asking. This was a good talk, Doug. I
appreciate you for calling in.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Okay, thank you, Memory, thank you for that talk. Yeah,
I enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
I did too, Buddy. I appreciate you. Thanks for listening
to us. When we come back, we'll tell you take
more calls. More people are calling in four h two, five, five, eight,
eleven ten. We appreciate all of the discourse, whether you
agree or disagree, or who are going back and forth.
That's what we're here for. I'm a fostering a conversation
with you on news Radio eleven ten, kfab and Raise Songer.

(08:41):
For instance, here are some recent presidents and how many
new units that they have approved from the National Park
Service for them to like operate and come under the
National Park Services level. I suppose it's like, uh, I
think six under Joe Biden, six different new units and
some other changes. Donald Trump approved five new National Park

(09:04):
units in his first four years of office. President Obama
was very into adding to the National park in the
eight years he approved twenty six new National Park units.
So you can go all the way back to Reagan
and even before that. Since in the last one hundred
years or so, since this has really been a thing,
the National Park Service has been getting more responsibilities as

(09:25):
time has gone on of different areas, and that would
explain why there has been a need for increase of
their workforce. And of course we learned on Friday that
a thousand of those employees had ended up losing their job.
So yeah, I'm just trying to trying to understand why
and whatnot, because of course this is something I'm passionate about.

(09:49):
Let's go ahead and go to Vic on the phone
line at four h two, five, five, eight eleven ten. Vic,
what are your thoughts on what we're talking about today?

Speaker 3 (09:56):
Yes, sir, I'm glad to be with you today. I
can't quite go back one hundred years, but I can't
go back fifty. I started with the federal I started
with the federal government here in Nebraska in nineteen seventy
four and worked until two thousand and four, so i've
been I work went up for thirty years and have
now been retired twenty. When I went to work with

(10:19):
the Senate State here for the federal government, there were
five officers in my department, and when I retired thirty
years later, there were fifty six. We were asked to
do half the amount of work that we originally were doing,
and it was taking us more than four times as

(10:40):
long to do it. And I'll give you the idea
of the waste that our government did that just in
amount of thirty years I was there. So the last
five years is when we really grew. And it was
when our administrators learned how to pad the stats and
our reports to get more employees. And the more employees

(11:02):
they got than the higher the ranking the supervisors and
chief was so very simple as that.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
So so they would hire people. Go well, I was
just asking if they were hiring people. The reason it
made sense for them to hire more people even if
the production wasn't as high, was because it helped them
gain promotion, is what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
That's correct, Okay, all right, that's absolutely right. On spun
on and uh we were. It took four times to
do the amount of work. And this mainly occurred during
the last ten years I was working, and that's when
we became got into electronics, you know, we got into
the cell phones and the computers, and we learned how

(11:46):
to generate paperwork. I mean, you could kill forests and
build libraries with the paper we generated. That was really
doing nothing but padding stats.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's it's an interesting and.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
They at the job and they go ahead, you're doing
was secondary.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Sure, wellbody really.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Cared about how it affected We were at our work.
It was just how much did we do?

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Right, I'm with you, Vic, it's good.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Uh good? That simple? Is that? Sure?

Speaker 1 (12:18):
You? I'm with you, Vic. I appreciate the call. Thank
you so much for listening to I got to move on, Vick.
I appreciate you for calling in and that's good perspective
on what we're talking about here from a guy who's
done it. And I appreciate Vic for his call. Today.
Phil is on the phone line of four O two
five five, eight eleven ten. Welcome Phil. What's on your
mind today?

Speaker 4 (12:36):
Well, really, I just want to talk a little bit
about what I think is happening. Okay, Well, everything seasonal
like right now, there's not a whole lot of parts
that's open, right, so they don't need that large workforce.
And it used to be just seasonal workforce with a
little bit of leadership, this kill there to keep on
keep all the areas functioning. Yeah, and then then what

(13:00):
happens is I get Bob that comes in. I really
like Bob, but he's a seasonal employee and next year
he's got a full time job and not back. So
what I do is I convert a lot of these
seasonal jobs into full time job so I can have
the people in the workforce that I won't. But right
now they're not doing anything in the wintertime. The three
foot to the National parks is just not there. Yeah,

(13:22):
and you don't need as many people. So that's why
everything's basically seasonal. With even the Forest Service, which I
volunteer dat a lot. It was more seasonal work and
not the wintertime. Most things are closed down. Yeah, are
very low throup. But you don't need a bunch of people.
That's what's all about. Yeah, and I look at people
being converted from park time to full time, right.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
I feel you, Phil, thanks for listening to us. I
got my thought process on. This makes sense when you
talk about what he was talking about, which was it's
seasonal work. Now there are national parks that are open
that you have access to, there are a lot of them.
You probably need less workers this time of the year
in general than you do otherwise. And that's what the

(14:04):
five thousand additional seasonal employees that they're still going to
hire for the National Park Service why that's important to note,
even after firing a thousand of the people who were
on a probationary period and then officially were let go.
I don't know what the answer is on that of
what those people's jobs were though, and I would love
to know why we got to the point of making

(14:25):
that the determination, right, like who who was in charge
of making that call on which people were let go
that were full time employees. Even though the way the
PHIL describes it, it does make sense, especially if you're still
hiring five thousand seasonal employees. You're not decimating the National
Park Service by any means. Just some people who have
been doing this for a bit as a full time

(14:45):
position lost their job. And you know who the parent
agency of the National Park Service is. It's Doug Bergham
in the Department of the Interior. You know, this is
a guy who lived in North Dakota and was in
charge of North Dakota as the governor. Nature's a big
I for this guy. So I can't imagine that he
would have signed off on whatever that would have been,
even if it wasn't necessarily his call to begin with,

(15:07):
if that wasn't something that he felt wasn't going to
absolutely destroy the thoughts of the National Park Service four
twenty eight. We'll take more calls if you want to
call us four h two, five, five, eight to eleven ten.
We'll take more of your thoughts on this on news
Radio eleven ten kfab and the song the United States
According to the Social Security Database? How many people do

(15:30):
you think are in the Social Security Database from the
ages of twenty to twenty nine years old? Pop quiz?

Speaker 5 (15:35):
What would make them be in that database? Just that
they have a jobs that they've contributed to their own
social security.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
I would think so, But it also could just be
who has a birth certificate? Right, like don't you have
a Social Security card like as soon as you're born,
because there's a number of people with that from age
zero to nine? Right? So how many do you think
are in the zero to nine range?

Speaker 5 (15:58):
I don't have so. How many people are in the
stay three hundred and thirty fifty million? Three thirty million ish,
three thirty million ish?

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Okay, okay, so yeah, you count on my fingers might
have to go to my toes. How many from zero
to nine solved for X? We'll save a cool forty
seven point three not a terrible guess million it's thirty
eight point nine, okay, forty seven point nine close to
your guests was twenty to twenty nine years old. The

(16:26):
most people in the database is from thirty to thirty nine,
right now, fifty two point one million, right, and it
goes on and on and on. That's really not my
issue here. My issue is that there are six million
people from age ninety to ninety nine in the Social
Security database? Do you think there are six million nonagenarians
out there? Nonagenarians? Isn't that how you say that? Well?

(16:49):
For what they're ninety or oh, six million, six million
nine nonagenarians. That seems like a lot. That's what I thought.
What about four point seven million people who are from
one hundred tow one hundred and nine years old? Think
there are four point seven million people in our country
that are aged one hundred to one hundred and nine? No?
What about three point six million people who are one
hundred and ten to one hundred and nineteen. How about

(17:09):
three point six million? No way? What about three point
four million people who are one hundred and twenty to
one hundred and twenty nine, No, there's nobody. What about
even more people three point nine million that are one
hundred and thirty two one hundred and thirty nine. Well then, yeah, okay,
usually that's how that works. No, it's not how right?
Three point five million people from one hundred and forty
to one hundred and forty nine years old. There you
go one point three million people that are one hundred

(17:31):
and fifty to one hundred and fifty nine years old,
one hundred and twenty one thousand that are one hundred
and sixty to one hundred and sixty nine years old,
six thousand and eighty seven that are one hundred and
seventy to one hundred and seventy nine years old, and
then variety of numbers. If you go down to two
hundred and twenty to two hundred twenty nine years old,
there are one thousand people, one thousand and thirty nine
people that are between the ages of two hundred and

(17:53):
twenty nine or two hundred and twenty two hundred and
twenty nine. There's a person in this database some have
that's aged three hundred and sixty to three hundred and
sixty nine. I mean, they didn't even have sess. Just
the country wasn't even in the Revolutionary War by that point, right,
old brittle bones out there, How was that even a thing? Okay,
So my answer right is, or I guess the question

(18:16):
you have to beg And this is why Elon shared
this and This's what he says. According to the Social
Security database, these are the numbers of the people in
each age bucket with the debt field set to false,
which means that they're not dead. The database doesn't have
them as dead people. Elon says, maybe Twilight is real
and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security. Oh,
Elon knows, Twilight didn't expect that. I think you read

(18:38):
the books or do you just watch the movies. I
don't know. Hey, I'm more of a Hunger games man myself.
So a lot of people sort of doing the math
on this. What do you think if we added all
these numbers up together? What would the math like? What

(18:58):
would it lead to? More than the more people than
there are here? That's for sure, three hundred and ninety
four million people. Okay, so we're off by almost sixty
over sixty million people.

Speaker 5 (19:08):
Oh, we had to make the math work, you know.
That's what Kevin from the office had his own system.
Looks like we do too.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
So we somehow added sixty million people from what's in
the United States. I mean, the numbers should add up
to about what the population is, right, you'd hope. So,
but there are six sixty million more people in the
Social Security database than there are actual people that we
think are in the country. Elon replied to a person

(19:34):
who shared that number and said, yes, there are four
more eligible Social Security numbers than there are citizens in
the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history. Well,
how do we fix this? Exactly right? What's the answer
he used to destroy social security? I mean, social security
seems like a thing that people for generations have been
talking about is an antiquated system of you know, basic

(19:58):
like we have the ability to say for our own retirement.
Now we're not worried about you know, us going back
to war and the British stealing all of our goods
in our land, all of our moneies.

Speaker 5 (20:09):
As soon as we stop worrying about that, I'm telling
you we're going to see some wooden ships on the horizon.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
The Great Navy of William Clinton and whatever the other
guy was coming in and kind of wreck us. Watch
out for that canon fire. I don't want to be
cannon fodder. No, thank you, yeah? Or do they just
use Canada and the Canada's mad at us now? So like,
do they just go through Canada because their old pals
that's not a bad strategy. Yeah, if you know through

(20:38):
North Dakota like that, they'll never expect it.

Speaker 5 (20:40):
And yeah, our neighbors down south, they're not too thrilled either.
Can you imagine taking fire from three different sides, because
you know they're coming from the east in their ships,
their wooden ships. They saved them, the ships that they've saved. Yeah,
they'll be coming down from the north, coming up from
the south. Dude, read about the War of eighteen twelve.
I mean, we thought we had that thing solved, and

(21:01):
they came in and they burned the White House. We
don't talk about that conflict enough. That was a real thing.
What was happening. They were mad, they were like, how
dare those guys? And it just took another generation to
get angry enough to actually act on it, and they
came in, they invaded Washington, DC. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
If it wasn't for James Madison's wife saving a portrait
of George Washington, we might not know anything about what
happened then. Really, well, it's just we don't talk about
it enough. It's crazy what happened then. We talk about
the American Revolution all the time, but nobody talked about
how they they tried to like restart the war. You
know what what was that? What it is thirty years

(21:39):
after it was over, Like the next generation was like, oh,
we're getting that back. We're not done here.

Speaker 5 (21:45):
Do you think if they would have taken it back
and if we were here today, do you think we'd
like talk differently?

Speaker 1 (21:49):
What would be different about us today? Nothing? Nothing? Well,
I mean we be we wouldn't be American now. It
would have still happened, it would have it would have
never ended. I mean it had been like you know
how the Middle East is fighting over religious stuff all
the time and in heritages and stuff. It would have
been the guys who live here fighting against the guys
who don't live here until we were either pressed into

(22:10):
submission by the British and you're like, okay, look, we're
gonna keep destroying you if you keep trying to rebel
against us, and if we kept rebelling against us, which
I would imagine considering the hard heads that were living
in what was the United States at the time, I mean,
think about this. They just couldn't stop with this stuff. Man,
the Western movement. I mean, we're twenty years before Texas

(22:32):
became a real battlefield type situation at that point. Go
read about that. That was crazy too, you know, stuff
like that was happening all the time. These guys had
nothing better to do with themselves. At some point, the
people who lived in the United States or what was
the United States, we're going to win it back if
they lost it in eighteen twelve. But they didn't lose it,
which is why maybe we don't talk about it as much.

(22:53):
It's like back to back champions right, It's just like
the second one doesn't really get talked about as much
as the first one did. The first one really that
was important, that mattered. The second one. You were just
kind of defending your crown. That makes sense, and that's
why we don't talk about it as much. But it
was crazy. Those guys came back. They wanted it back. Yeah,
so yeah, look that up anyway. I don't know how

(23:13):
I got onto that conversation, but social Security database that's
quite a mess. It's quite a mess.

Speaker 5 (23:18):
Well, I think you got onto it because they found
a few people who fought in the old eighteen twelve
who are.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
Still in the database collecting the money. Yeah, I mean,
you would have had to be like, let's see here,
that's two hundred years ago, two hundred and ten years ago,
two hundred and thirteen years ago, So you would have
had to been like two hundred and probably fifty years
old to be like actually fought there. We have at
least two people in the database that are still would
have been the right age to be fighting in that.

(23:44):
I mean over one thousand people according to the database
of their social security, over one thousand people would have
been alive to remember it. So let's go find those guys.
Where are they at? Yeah, maybe that's the reason that
we don't talk about that war enough. It's got a
terrible name, the War of eighteen twelve. That's the best
we could have done. We couldn't like do something like

(24:06):
Revolutionist's sequel. What if it was the War of eighteen twelve.
I ain't your hollered back girl? Oh?

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Because that's kind of what we decided on our side?
Is that? Is that right? Inappropriate? On brand? I regret
saying it either way. That was a that was a
tough look for you. Yeah, the War of eighteen twelve
didn't end until eighteen fifteen. Explain that to me. Yeah,
so it was more than the World of eighteen twelve.
It was the War of eighteen twelve, eighteen thirteen, eighteen fourteen,
and eighteen fifteen. That's it'll be accurate, right, What are

(24:37):
we doing here the week? We could have done like
the Four Years War or something like that. You know,
like people are renaming all kinds of stuff. Why don't
we rename that while we're at it. We got to
be that one. Forget the Gulf of America. Let's rename
the War of eighteen twelve and keep our kids, you know, Like,
what are we doing here? Anyway? Go read about it.

(24:57):
There's a Wikipedia page War of Failed Reclamation, the War
of Sore Losership. M there you go, sore losership, your
crazy crony heed drinking commings with bad teeth, yeah, and
your smells. And they drive on the wrong side of
the road. Yeah, what's that all about? It was in Spain.
Everything's normal on the roadways. I mean, there are some

(25:19):
things that are different, but you drive on the right side.
At least the cars look the same. Yeah. So I
don't know. We were talking about social Security numbers. That
just makes no sense to me. Another thing that I
was talking about a little bit earlier, and I may
talk more about in the next hour. Is uh Oregon.
There's a group of people in Oregon that are trying
to secede from Oregon. That's not the right way to

(25:43):
say that, right. They're trying to leave Oregon and go
to Idaho because Idaho has a Republican government and they
don't like being attached to the loonies in Portland. Would
you be okay with that if you lived there, or
would you be like, oh, come on, guys, do we
really need to do this? It would depend on what

(26:04):
I'm standing to gain or lose. I suppose let's just
say your state government would listen to you more. You
have to go through a lot of you know, red
tape and paperwork, but yeah, like you would feel like
you were going to be more properly represented for your
ideals in the state government. You would be going to
in Boise now instead of in Salem.

Speaker 5 (26:25):
Could set an interesting precedent for a states that could
split themselves off rurally.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
And you don't think California. You would probably just be staring
right at that too. It's like, there's got to be
something we could do too. We could just create our
own state