Cross-Country Headlines

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote because.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
You were the TV remote.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Remember when music sounded like this, Remember when social media
was truly social?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey John, how's it going today?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
This show is all about you, theode. This is fifty
plus with Doug Pike.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to
do for fun. Fifty plus brought to you by the
UT Health Houston Institute on Aging, Informed Decisions for a healthier,
happier life, and by new promise Neuropathy Lose the Pain
and Numbness, Get your life back, New Promise Neiropathy dot

(00:48):
Com and now fifty plus with Doug Pipe.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
All right, we have been cleared for takeoff on this
Wednesday edition of fifty plus one, in which I'll be
bouncing back and forth around and across the country to
share little bits of information I find interesting as I
prepare for this hour. I seldom start prepping for a
show with any specific topic in mind, really, and I

(01:13):
actually consider that a good thing, because for one thing
to be so important, it usually winds up being something negative.
And I try not to go down that path any
more than necessary.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
When I'm doing fifty plus.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Most everybody in our age category has lived through plenty
of negativity and doesn't need a whole lot more. I
will tackle news item that are maybe unsettling or maybe
make you squirm in your chair a little bit, and
that just needs to be done.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
But I'm not going to overdo it, that makes any sense.
And with all that being said, let's get started.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
While I'm still in a patriotic mood on the heels
of this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, I want
to share something I read yesterday about something that happened
in the immate aftermath of nine to eleven, and the
story really really touched me so much that and sadly,
my first instinct was, Hey, you need to go check

(02:11):
this out to make sure it's not AI.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
I checked it out. It's not AI.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
It's a really interesting, fascinating story about something that happened
on that horrible, horrible.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Day in American history.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Pentagon employees thousands of people, many of them new parents,
it turns out, and for those new parents, Pentegret, Pentegrite,
Pentagon Brass set up a big daycare center within those
five walls, and shortly after that hijacked jet crashed into
the pentagon. The few people in charge of a few

(02:42):
dozen infants and toddlers weren't really sure how to get
all those kids out and get them safe. One point,
one of the women from the center saw marine running
through the hall, flagged him down, explained the situation. The
marine then just turned and ran out, leaving the woman
to think that she and her modest staff and those
kids were going to be on their own.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
But they weren't.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Within a minute or so, that one marine returned with
about twenty more marines and other service members. Some grabbed
the heavy cribs loaded with infants, others herded the toddlers
out onto the lawn, and they didn't stop until they
were nearly a quarter mile away.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
From that destruction.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
The marines and soldiers then had the the wherewithal to
use those heavy cribs to create kind of a circle,
and they put all the kind of like wagons circling
the wagons under attack back from Boy, anybody who watched
gun smoke or what else Bonanza, I think Bonanza. I
don't think Bonanza had too many circled wagons. But I'm

(03:44):
sure if you were from this generation that I'm in,
you've seen enough Westerns to know what circling the wagons means.
So anyway, they circled the cribs to keep the toddlers
from wandering off. And then they all stayed. Every one
of those marines, every one of those soldiers, sailors, whoever
was their air force personnel, I don't know, but all

(04:05):
of them stayed around until every one of those kids
parents had been notified and the parents had come and
picked up their children. One by one, those servicemen and
women took care of more than one hundred and twenty
one hundred and forty something like that, young children who

(04:26):
I'm sure were frightened, who I'm sure had no idea
what was going on, but I'm also sure felt pretty
comfortable and safe in the hands of those people. These
are trained fighters, and instead of fighting anybody, they just
safeguarded more than one hundred and forty children that day.

(04:46):
And there was one other thing that the guy who
wrote this story said or wrote, and that really struck
a chord with me too. He said that it's not
politicians who keep us safe and warm and out of
harm's way, it's our military. And if you stop and
think about that, that is so right. God forbid, If
we ever do have another war around here, it won't

(05:06):
be politicians on.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
The front lines.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
It'll be marines, it'll be soldiers, it'll be air force personnel,
it'll be Navy personnel. Even the National Guard might have
to get involved. And every one of those people will
do that, and they'll do it voluntarily, and they'll do
it with pride. Never forget that. And so moving forward,
let's tee it up in Texas this afternoon with a.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Story about what has to be the oldest couple ever
arrested on drug smuggling charges. I'll tell you more about it,
and then I'll tell you how old they are. This
is a man and his wife.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
They rolled up to a foul, furious border patrol checkpoint
down there in South Texas. Canine drug dog alerts to
the front of the box trailer this guy was pulling
with his pickup truck and inside a special compartment in
the front of that trailer. Agents wound up pulling out
one hundred and thirty four packages of cocaine that weigh

(06:08):
a total of more than three hundred and forty five pounds.
According to the complaint, The couple was told they'd be
paid anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars for hauling
that truck to Houston.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
I don't have any idea what.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
Cocaine's worth, but my guess is that it's not worth
spending the rest of your life in prison, which I'm
afraid just might be what these two are.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Gonna face if they're convicted.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
Either that or they've been making these runs for years
and they have millions of dollars saved up, and when
their fancy lawyers find a loophole it gets them out.
They'll just go buy a little island in the Pacific maybe,
and live out their lives fishing and drinking coconut milk.
By the way, he's eighty and she's seventy four. And
I wonder if either one of them has neuropathy, because

(06:53):
if they do well, New Promised Neuropathy can take care
of them. How about that for a segue?

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Huh?

Speaker 3 (06:58):
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(07:20):
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(07:41):
Stubner Airlines so far, and another one coming to Missouri
City really soon. New Promise Neuropathy dot Com is a
website get your life back, for heaven's sakes. New Promise
Neuropathy dot Com. All right, welcome back to fifty plus
and thank you all for listening again. I certainly do
appreciate it. Bring some friends next time. Okay, I'll even

(08:03):
give you free admission. And don't forget the podcasts are
available at the iHeartRadio app. You can just go there,
ask it to search for fifty plus on AM nine
to fifty KPRC and low and behold, you'll stumble onto
more than one thousand episodes of this show. Staying in

(08:25):
Texas for a little bit longer, state rep for six
more months. Jasmine Crockett earned a mention this week for
making ridiculous statements when she should have been patting our
country on the back for enabling her to do and
say outlandish things without repercussion, unless you count social media
responses to some of what she said. She was at
the Essence Festival of Black Culture over the weekend. Somebody

(08:47):
put a microphone in front of her and she just
went off. Among other things, she said she was one
of the five hundred and thirty five most powerful people
in the country. That's wrong, Jasmine. I'm pretty sure she's
not even one of the fifty thousand most powerful people
in this country. But she's got a right to think
that and to say that because she lives in the

(09:07):
greatest nation on earth, and no matter how stupid you sound,
when you say something in America, you can still say it.
And then pretty quickly social media responded. One person said,
I thought the point of Independence Day was to celebrate
America as a country, not individuals, no matter what race
they are, and that guy was correct, man or woman.

(09:29):
I'm not sure. There were a couple of other comments
I'll withhold. Though they got a little testy, that's okay,
And there were some other honest and good ones.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
But I'll move on anyway.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Interestingly, after November, Crockett's going to be out of a job.
She lost in the primary to James tallerco who has
convinced enough Texans at least that he was more moderate
than Crockett, which is also a wheelbarrow of manure. He
was actually here in our office this past week. I
saw him, but I didn't ask for an autograph Crocket.
It seemed like an nice enough guy.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
He didn't.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
He was very cordial and whatnot going through the office
to interview with one of our one of our jocks here.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
I'm not saying he's not a nice guy. He probably is.
I just don't agree with his politics, and that's that's fine.
He can have his and I'll have mine.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
We'll jump back up to New York City again for
this next segment, where an Islamic extreamer ranted recently that
New York City and this guy was he was in
a crowd and he was stirring them up, and they
were stirring him up. And that New York City crowd, Uh,
he told, and he looked right into the camera. He
was recording for a post on whatever platform he's on,

(10:39):
and he came straight out and said that New York
City was an Islamic republic now and that Islam would
soon be in every house in the city.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
But that's a totally different story.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
I wanted to talk about what's going on with the
businesses in New York City, hundreds of them that are
already shuttered, and the the staggering number that are predicted
to close as Moron Zomdani's free grocery stores start to
kick in and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Little bodegas where many New Yorkers buy their daily groceries,

(11:13):
don't stand a chance against Mom Donnie's plans almost certainly
going to be shuttered soon. Just like the rest of
these stores. They can't compete with the city run stores,
that's for sure. The taxpayers are going to bankroll them
until enough taxpayers finally pack up and leave. Then the
grocery stores run dry, but you can bet the Mayor's
refrigerators still going to be full. New York City wanted change,

(11:37):
but man, they just they handed the reins to the
wrong guy and off the wall. In coming back to
Texas for a little while, word that five alleged members
of the Venezuelan gang Trend the Aragua, were arrested and
federally charged here for murdering kidnapping. Ever since Governor Abbot
declared that gang a foreign terrorist organization in twenty twenty four,
federal and state law enforcement have found evidence to believe

(11:59):
that nearly three hundred and fifty TDA members still in
our state. Maybe fewer, maybe more, but we really don't
want that influence in Texas. President Trump declared the TDA
a foreign terrorist organization in early twenty twenty five, and
since his inauguration, almost three hundreds suspected TDA members have

(12:20):
been federally charged. How anyone could be against removing foreign
violent gang members from our state is just beyond me.
I don't see how anybody could be against that. Okay,
shifting gears again. I mentioned Graham Platner yesterday and I'm
gonna do so again today because it seems that every
Democrat in power today who still has any common sense

(12:43):
at all is telling, pleading, or begging Platnir to step down.
Just walk away, walk away. Man fade into the sunset,
as if there wasn't already enough dirt on the guy
to seal his fate in November. But they don't want
him on the ballot, I don't think, because they know
that's a guaranteed loss for him. The final straw for
him was this latest accusation of forcing himself on a

(13:07):
woman to have unprotected sex against her will. Apparently that's
turned the tide. The Dems know this guy's damage goods,
and my gut says he'll bow out within a week,
maybe go into hiding for a year, and then reappear
somewhere that not many people will either know or care
who he used to be and what he used to do.
I want to climb out of the mud for a
few minutes and just talk about some lighthearted, interesting conversation

(13:31):
starter stuff that you can use this week, just in
case there's another party, or for whatever reason you just
want to break something up, like I'm trying to do
with this bad news and weirdo news and all that
I've been giving you for the last few minutes. One
thing I think might be fun is to remind you
that it was our country that invented air conditioning in

(13:54):
nineteen two in New York. Actually, I'm surprised it wasn't
invented down here. We certainly could have used it before
New York would need it. It's truly hard to believe
we've had AC for one hundred and twenty four years
in our country and France is just now catching on
and blaming us for a heat wave over there recently.

(14:15):
How do you say catch up mustard in French? And
since we've talked about a few socialists this morning, I'll
drop this one on you because I think this guy
may be one. An investment firm's co founder is suing
after being fired for ignoring the return to office mandate
that he himself signed. He argues that it applies to quote, employees,

(14:42):
not owners end quote. I don't see how he can
possibly win that suit since it was he himself who
said that everybody needed to come back.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
To the office.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
Okay, now I'm gonna kind of tiptoe back into the
mud a little bit. And actually it's a pretty troubling
story for me because I admired what.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
This guy was doing.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
It was yesterday that the man who is alleged to
have shot Charlie Kirk appeared in court for the first
time and was seen laughing with his attorney at one point,
whereas Erica Kirk became emotional and actually walked out during
testimony that described the shooting. The judge in this case,
a judge named Tony Graff from Utah State District Court,

(15:23):
ruled that the public would not be allowed to view
physical evidence from the trial. And I'm kind of glad
about that. I think that that could have really messed
some people up. He also found a prosecutor in civil
contempt for violating a pre trial publicity order. That said, though,
the judge also ruled that the prosecution could keep the

(15:44):
death penalty on the table. Tyler Robinson, the guy who's
accused of shooting Charlie Kirk, will have his day in
court and we'll see what the jury figures out. And
speaking of out, we'll take a time out now to
take a little break here. On the way there, I'll
remind you that ut Health Institute on Aging is that
amazing collaborative of thousands of providers from every medical discipline,

(16:09):
mostly in the med center, but also some of these
people work in the outlying communities at hospitals and clinics
and private offices, whatever, so you get to go see
them if you need them, even if you don't want
to go into the med center. And the reason you'd
want to see them is because every one of these
people involved in the Institute on Aging have gone back

(16:29):
and gotten additional training to what put the diploma on
the wall, training in how they can apply their body
of knowledge to us, to seniors. That's a really big
deal around here. You should understand that you should want
to go to these providers. And if you go to
the website and get an idea of all the free

(16:50):
information and resources you can get there, and then start
your search for one of those providers, you will be
very prepared to get whatever's ailing you looked at by
somebody who can truly understand how it's affecting you and
then get you on a path to feeling better. Ut
dot edu slash aging is the website utch dot edu

(17:13):
slash aging. All right, welcome back to fifty plus. Thank
you all for listening. I certainly do appreciate it. On
this Wednesday afternoon, the first thing I want to cover
in this segment is not news.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
It's not flashy.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
It's just an observation made by let me see who
it was, Dagan McDowell, which I presume to be some
sort of information gathering firm. And according to Dagan McDowell,
there is a seventy percent increase in US bookstore companies
in recent years. They say it suggests kind of a

(17:47):
revolt of the smartphone and the popularity of these new
stores that are popping up here, and there is is twofold.
Some people are going to bookstores to actually buy books,
take them home and read them, refreshing in and of itself,
but others are using these places as community hubs, kind
of hide away from the digital peeings and stuff like

(18:09):
that just bother us day to day. They go in there,
they sit down at a table in the bookstore, turn
off their phones and just read for a while. And
it's not just our it's not just our generation that's
doing this. These are younger people twenties and thirties, let's
call it, who are just looking for something else to
do besides stare at their phones. And why they're doing that,

(18:32):
I think is number one, because staring at that phone
all day tends to make somebody not antisocial, but they
just lose their ability to communicate with other people. And
when somebody says, hey, how's it going, they they might
look up from the phone and say cool, and then
look back down at the phone. And the reason they
have to look back at that phone is because they

(18:53):
don't have anything to say. They don't no matter how
to make spit it out, Doug. They don't know how
to make conversation anymore.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
If you've been reading a book in a bookstore for
a few days, instead of scrolling and tapping and scrolling
and tapping, you might say, well, actually, it's going pretty well.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
I've been reading such and such a book by such
and such.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Author, and I find it fascinating. Or I think it's
a horrible book. I don't like that book. But they
have something to talk about that can start a meaningful conversation.
Seventy percent more bookstores. I find that very refreshing, and
truth be told, I don't use the word refreshing very often,
but enough about bookstores.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Earlier in the week, the.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Supreme Court handed President Trump another solid victory, and Immigration
law Court ruled that Border Patrol has the authority now
to deny re entry to lawful permanent residence Green card holders.
They can be turned back at the border if those
people have been charged with a crime, not convicted, just charged.

(19:52):
A green card, the court said, is not a passport.
For a very long time, green cards were almost like
get out of anything called cars that enabled criminals to
travel freely back and forth across our borders doing whatever
they were doing, even if they'd been charged with sometimes
serious crimes. Now pretty much if somebody's facing charges, we

(20:13):
don't have to take them back. And on top of that,
the courts also said that the FEDS could reinstate deportations
under the Alien Enemies Act, which dates all the way
back to seventeen ninety eight. This one's going to help
border enforcement shakeout members of TDA and other violent gangs
who've found their way into our country but are not
welcome here and moving way out to California now somewhat surprisingly,

(20:36):
actually in a good way.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
A Newport Beach takeover that was.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Organized by teenagers and young adults on TikTok resulted in
more than four hundred people being arrested. Newport police said
it well in a statement on Instagram and I quote.
A large group of agitators invaded Newport Beach, spurred on
by an alleged TikTok takeover. These persons came to our
city with the intent of causing harm, injury and destruction,

(21:06):
bringing harassment, disturbances, and mayhem end quote. And you know what,
NBPD did exactly what it should have.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
It didn't back down.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Four hundred plus arrests in these so called takeovers. Young people,
I think believe that because there's so many of them,
it's kind of like safety in numbers that whatever they're
doing wrong, the odds of actually getting caught and charged
with a crime by a handful of officers or deputies
who might show up, that's pretty slim. In this case, though,

(21:37):
Newport Beach brought the farm. There were officers on foot,
there were officers on bikes, there were officers in vehicles,
even officers on horseback, and lots of them. And they
caught and arrested more than four hundred of these punks.
Maybe what maybe half of them actually learned a valuable

(21:57):
lesson from this experience. They've had the one left an
arrest record in their files. So moving on, I learned
I heard yesterday of a man named Chuck Todd and
listened for about two minutes while he whined and whimpered
into a camera, even bouncing up and down, very nervously,
very weirdly, honestly bobbin and weavin and moaning about how

(22:21):
President Trump had ruined the Fourth of July for him,
and what a fool he is for saying that if
it weren't for our president, the alternative pair two novembers
ago would already have run this country into the ground.
We wouldn't have celebrated anything on the Fourth of July.
They would have all been embarrassed to be Americans. And
of course they would have choked industry by smothering it

(22:43):
in rules and regulations. They'd have encouraged some brand, some
brand new way of policing that sends social workers out
to deal with deranged gunman. That was the first, and
I guarantee it'll be the last that I ever listened
to anything. Chuck Todd says, what a whiner. If you
don't like the country, just leave it. How so many
people could have bought into this nonsense the left's been

(23:04):
peddling for more than a decade. Now is beyond the pale,
and through it all enough people with common sense, thank god,
are re emerging now and increasingly willing to speak their minds.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
And from here we go back to California.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
I feel like a ping pong ball, really bouncing from
state to state and back again. Well, gad about Gavin
Newsom is using a backdoor deal to shift the state's
education into the hands of the governor's office and taking
that control away from what's actually a fairly conservative state
education administration.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
There was a.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
Fellow on MSN talking about how Newsom is a puppet
of the Teachers' union and how he's siding with the
more liberal people on the state's Board of Education.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
They're the ones, as is he, who want.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
But haven't quite been able to get the power to
push DEI and all sorts of far left ideologies within
their schools. In other words, Newsom's going out after California's
children on his way out, paying back favors, I guess
to the lefties in education, his thoughts are as slimy
as his hair. And now bouncing back to Florida, three

(24:11):
Saint John's County elected officials have been charged in alleged
election fraud, two sitting commissioners, one former mayor of Saint
Augustine Beach. They're accused of mailing out tens of thousands
of voter guides that contain false information and candidate endorsements.
And to be clear from the story, I honestly can't
tell you whether the three people accused or from the

(24:33):
left or the right, And honestly, I really don't care,
because election fraud should be something that appalls all of us,
no matter what side we're on, plain and simple, this
is just another issue of election tampering and another reason
that we so desperately need to get.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
The Save Act passed.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Eighty percent of Americans favor this, but the Democrats in
Congress are just completely ignoring their constituents wishes and stubbornly
opposing that would protect the integrity of federal elections from
both sides. They don't want that for the country they
swore to serve. Let that sink in before you cast
your vote in November. They are opposed to fair elections,

(25:13):
and the arguments they make against the Save Actor straight
up garbage. Okay, I'm running out of time in this segment,
so I'm going to kind of lighten things up a
little bit, maybe for from the desk of Captain Obvious,
I saw this little one liner states that have legalized
sports betting have seen a spike in gambling disorders. What
could possibly be the connection between those two things.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
I wonder.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
And this next one, let's call it good news bad news,
and it's there's a warning here. This is if you're
eating lunch still, just maybe just turn the radio down
for thirty forty seconds.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
That'd be plenty.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
The good news was this guy thought he had brain cancer,
but it turned out it wasn't cancer at all. The
bad news was it was worms in his brain. Remember
when we were little kids and somebody at Halloween would
put a box on the front porch and you had
to stick your hand in there and try to identify
what was in the bowl inside.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
And it was a.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
Bowl of spaghetti, but what they told you was that
it was I don't know, brainworms. There was that one,
and then of course the bowl of grapes that they
told us for eyeballs. I wonder how many little kids
from back then are still in therapy today from reaching
in that box and finding brain matter and eyeballs. Okay,
I got to call time out and take another break

(26:28):
here on fifty plus. Let me tell you about Midway
Meat Market. If I may I'm gonna get these directions
right this time, I swear for the first time, probably
because there are so many different numbers in here.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
You take I ten west.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
Go under ninety nine, and at the first maybe second
exit past ninety nine going west, you will see the
exit for Old Highway ninety. You take that exit, you
go into Old Town Katie and there at the second light,
you'll see a strip shopping center on your left. Pull
in there and go to the far west end of

(27:02):
the shopping center. That's where you're gonna find Midway meat Market,
and that's where you're gonna find some of the best
meat products you ever put in your mouth.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
They've got special prices on meat box as they call them.

Speaker 3 (27:13):
You can get a pork box, a chicken box, a
beef box, a prime beef meat box, all of which
are cut fresh and then frozen and stored for people
to order them. Go out there and pick them up
and then have all the meat they're probably gonna need
for the next month. Or you can just buy a
little of this and a little of that, maybe some
of those twenty five flavors of quality sausage they have

(27:35):
out there every day. Maybe some grab and go snacks
for the kids on the way to baseball or soccer
or whatever practice. Or maybe you just want to sit
back and have a cheeseburger or a big barbecue plate
at one of the tables they've got in there across
from the lunch counter. Midway Meat Markets open seven days
a week, eight am to seven pm, every single day,
and you'll never find a nicer bunch of people who

(27:57):
want to help you get what you're looking for in
a Midwaymeetmarket dot Com is the website midwaymeeat market dot com.
And welcome back once again to fifty plus. Thank you
all for listening on this Wednesday afternoon. I greatly appreciate it,
you know I do. In this segment, I'll go ahead
and get right down to some of the things that

(28:19):
are going on around the world, not the least important
to which certainly is the stoppage of our ceasefire with Iran.
They just simply can't be trusted. They were firing missiles
at ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and President Trump
lived up to his word and has resumed combat with them.

(28:39):
I really can't imagine what those guys are thinking, what
the Iranians are thinking when they keep just they just
continuously keep saying they won't shoot anymore, and then the
next turn you make, they're pulling the trigger again. President
Trump just came right out and said it the CeaseFire's over.
We're back to war. And I'm glad he did, and
that even the head of NATO said the strikes that

(29:01):
were done were absolutely necessary. Iran is just putting more
and more distance between itself and everybody else in the world.
And I can, for the life of me, other than
just stupidity and stubbornness, I can't, for the like of me,
think of any reasons they would do that. The only
thing I can think is that they underestimated President Trump's resolve,

(29:25):
President Trump's determination to put a stop to their hopes
and dreams for nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
I think it's pretty safe to say that.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
Nobody in our entire country wants to be at war
with Iran.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
I think we can all agree on that.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
But what a lot of Americans don't realize is that
if we just pick up and go away, say okay,
you guys, just do what you want to do over there,
Iran would go right back to trying to manufacture a
nuclear weapon, and as soon as they had one, somebody
would strike the match and light the fuse.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
And if you're.

Speaker 3 (29:57):
Unsure where the every day Iranian stands on this, and
I know there are a lot of people over there
who don't like the regime that's ruling them now for
any number of great reasons, go back and find some
video from the funeral procession of their former supreme leader
a few days ago. A sea of people over there
all shouting death to America. And if you don't realize

(30:21):
just how influential that guy was, consider this. A Democrat
campaign organizer from Massachusetts, woman named Calla, I guess it
is Cala Walsh called the man whose regime tortured women,
killed thousands of its own people for daring utter a
word against that regime. Kala Walsh went on Iranian state

(30:41):
television and called this guy the goat of anti imperialist leaders.
And knowing that there's good and bad in everything, the
bad part of our right to free speech is having
to hear young, easily influenced people praise barbaric leaders, and
worth noting she made her discuss little speech while not
wearing a veil, and not long ago, an American woman

(31:05):
who visited Iran with her brother, was actually swept into
a van while walking down the street, unveiled, taken right
off the street, and then brutally beaten before being thrown
in jail, where she died only a few days later.
And now, you know what, let's slide into something a
little more palatable, a little more positive. Nick Shirley, the
man who exposed widespread fraud around this country, has now

(31:27):
testified to Congress about what he found when he pulled
back the curtain on how many people were stealing from
American taxpayers and how much they're still stealing. Lots of
people already been caught and charged and prosecuted, but what's
been done now has only scratched the surface of this problem.
According to Shirley, it exists pretty much in every state,

(31:49):
and it comes disguised as all kinds of things, daycare,
senior care, transportation, meal programs, all heavily funded by tax dollars,
your money in mind, going into the pockets of thieves
who are living extravagant lifestyles on our dime. I am
really grateful to Nick Shirley for having the courage to

(32:11):
go do this stuff and to go get video evidence
of daycare centers where there are no kids, senior centers
where there are no seniors, food programs for hungry people
that haven't fed a hungry person since they opened up.
I can't remember whether it was California or Minnesota or wherever,
but I believe it was. I want to say it

(32:33):
was California, some sort of learning center or daycare center,
whatever it was, per the address on its registration was
operating out of a taco stand. The people who perpetrated
all these frauds against American taxpayers, I guess, just got
so bold that they realized that they weren't being looked at.

(32:54):
There was something I saw a long time ago, well
months ago, anyway, that said some of the converse stations
that have come up in court cases show that these
people knew that if they weren't billing the government for
more than about two and a half or three million dollars,
the government wasn't even going to look at them. So

(33:16):
rather than have a company billing ten fifteen twenty million
dollars a year, they just opened up eight or ten
places that were billing one or two million dollars and
just laughed and laughed all the way.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
To the bank.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
They know the heats on now though, especially up in Minnesota.
In Minneapolis, I read a story I bet it's been
a month ago now, maybe two, that talked about how
the Minneapolis airport is coming across more and more suitcases
loaded with cash and headed out of this country. They
are taking the money and running. Literally, you disappear from

(33:51):
here with three four five million dollars in cash somehow,
and you never have to look back for the rest
of your life. Oh and by the way, somewhat ironically
and a little silly, I forgot.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
To say earlier in the week, or maybe it was
last week.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
I don't honestly, I don't remember that day, and I
put a note about it at the top of a
page of my notes, says today as I forgot day,
and I forgot to tell you whatever day that was,
why they have that day. I'm really not I'm just
not sure, but it seems only appropriate for me to

(34:29):
go ahead and let you know, even if I'm doing it. Well,
I forgot, by the way, and I don't think I've
mentioned this yet, but if I have, please forgive the redundancy.
This is important so as we send a lot of
our kids and grandkids off to college this fall, maybe
just the back to school for the younger grandkids. Know this,

(34:51):
eight percent of college students around the world are reading
at the level of a ten year old, if not worse,
And in our co it's even worse than that. It's
fourteen percent. Fourteen percent of college students in the United
States of America don't read at the level of a

(35:12):
ten year old college students. That's pretty clear evidence that
the US education system is pretty useless at this point.
Fourteen out of one hundred college students can barely read
a coloring book. That's an embarrassment. And for the travelers
in the audience, let's let's do this. A gate agent says,
here was for it looked like American Airlines heard on

(35:34):
the intercom asking a crowd of plane passengers to voluntarily
give up their seats. The plane was overbooked, they didn't
have enough seats for everybody, so they wanted to offer
up I think what was it, one thousand dollars prepaid
visa card and twelve hundred and fifty dollars in trip credit.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Will you have taken that.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
I've been in that situation before where they started offering.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
A little more and a little more.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
To get a few people to get off the plane,
but they never got up to my price. I don't
even remember where. I think I was coming home from
Florida from a trip over there. I don't know what
my price would have been, but they didn't get to it.
So I got to fly on home with the rest
of the people who had better things to do than
spend another night in a place where they weren't supposed
to be for another night. By the way, briefly with

(36:18):
a public service announcement, I saw this, I want to say,
two days ago from the con Air Company, a recall
of almost two million wire grill brushes over concerns that
the metal bristles could detach.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
I would presume.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
That you're not using that metal brush to brush your meat,
and that if you were using it to brush the
grill clean, that those bristles, even if they did fall out,
would fall to the bottom of the grill. But I
guess that in the society we live now, you never
can be too careful. All right, one more conversation starter
before we have to get out of here. Up in

(36:59):
New York York City, there is I guess you could
call it a trend maybe of something called rest clubs.
That's where a bunch of people gather up in a
park to lie down. The little story said there might
be guided breathing, there might be sound baths, maybe some meditation,

(37:22):
or you can just take a nap.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
That sounds wonderful.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Wonderful if you're a socialist and you don't have a
job and the government's going to take care of you,
or so you think. But for most people, most people
have jobs, they can't just join a rest club and
go to the park and lie down. I don't need
a guide to tell me how to breathe, and I'll

(37:48):
lie down. I'll lie down after I eat dinner and
watch a little TV. Then I'm going to bed so
I can get up and go to work the next day.
That'll be Thursday, and I'll be back here again at
noon on a M nine fifty k pr C for
listening to fifty plus audios.