Hurricanes, Hoaxes & Home Plate

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 on the goode.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
This is fifty plus with Doug Pipe. 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,

(00:45):
Get your life back New Promise Neiropathy dot Com and
now fifty plus with Doug.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Pipe and five four three two one Let's go. Welcome
to Thursday, or as as Bill Murray once famously sat
on screen groundhul okay. Plenty of humidity to go around
this time of year, more than enough to make you
feel when you walk outside like you put on a
wool overcoat and somebody dumped a bucket of hot water
over your head. It's oppressive, it's staggering, and it it

(01:15):
feels like home. I'm not sure I'd do well in
a cool, dry climate. To be perfectly honest, I suppose
I'd get used to all those mild breezes and cool temperatures,
to not having to turn on my windshield wipers on
the way down the driveway in the morning to get
all the condensation off of it. I've spent time in
milder climates, but not a lot of it. Houston's home

(01:36):
to me, and I can't say I just love diving
into boiling cauldrons every morning, but at least it's familiar,
and that has to count for something. And briefly ahead
of the newsy tidbits on tap, the National Hurricane Center
says we've got another full week ahead during which it
expects no development of tropical storms. Thank you so much,

(01:58):
Sahara and dust. If I can buy you a present,
I would that dust keeps the storms away, and that's
worth its weight and goal. Here's a crazy idea. How
about this go straight to the Sahara desert. Vacuum up
all the dust we can to stand, store it in
giant tanks all over the country, well at least on
the East Coast and the Gulf coast, and then as

(02:20):
soon as the storm begins to form out over the
ocean or the Gulf, drop a few loads of that
dust on it and just kill it. You know, that
sounded a lot more plausible when I thought of it
than when I said it. So anyway, let's get started here,
and I wanted to talk first this morning in kind
of a little bit of a long form thing about pensions.

(02:41):
The traditional retirement landscape in this country has undergone a
pretty profound transformation over the last forty years or so.
The cornerstone of the shift is the near total disappearance
of kind of the defined benefit pension plan in the
private sector. Along time ago, when my dad was growing up.

(03:01):
When my dad was working, a worker could expect to
exchange a lifetime of dedicated service to a single firm
for a guaranteed monthly check in retirement. Today that's dead.
I don't know of many, if any companies. I can't
think of one off hand it. I'm sure somebody's got
pension somewhere, but not that I know of. And while culture,

(03:24):
our culture often blames corporate greed for this shift, the
more clear eyed analysis shows a different driver. Really, the
collapse of the corporate pension is a rational, predictable response
to a fundamental breakdown and employee loyalty to understand why
corporations draw pensions, you got to know what pensions were Originally. Originally,

(03:47):
I said, correctly, designed to do my mouse getting a
little heead of my brain again. A pension plan was
never a simple act of corporate charity. It was a
very strategic, long term investment in that company's work, and
by promising a secure retirement tied to years of service,
business actively incentivized longevity. The formulas for traditional pensions have

(04:12):
heavily favored workers who stayed twenty, thirty, even forty years
at the same company. For corporations, ooh, this massive financial
commitment made sense. When workers reciprocated with steadfast loyalty, business
could invest heavily in training, they could promote from within
build stable, long term corporate cultures. However, the cultural shifts

(04:37):
that came along, like in the late nineteen nineties and
the early two thousands, just absolutely shattered that whole thing.
Employees began to view their careers as things to be
eaten in smaller bites, if you will. Job hopping became
the preferred strategy for making more money faster and for
personal career fulfillment. And as you might suspect, when workers

(04:58):
signaled that they were no longer were interested in staying
at one place for life. The foundational economic logic of
the pension plan collapsed. A business can't reasonably be expected
to fund a lifetime guaranteed retirement for an employee who
looks at their tenure there as maybe a three year
stepping stone at best, and as soon as that employee

(05:20):
be kind of launched, got off, the got off the pad.
Corporations had to adapt their compensation structures to to fit
in with reality. Really, it became financially reckless for firms
to carry these big long term liabilities for a workforce.
It was constantly shifting and changing. Corporations didn't totally abandon

(05:41):
the retirement, the thought like retirement, but what they did
was shift to defined contribution models like four oh one ks.
And from a conservative economic perspective, that shift represents a
logical realignment of risk and responsibility. The four oh one
K and the end dependent workforce are a match made

(06:02):
in heaven. It offers the exact feature that modern unloyal
workers want, and that's portability. You work somewhere for a
few years, get a little contribution into your four oh
one K, and then take it with you when you leave.
The four oh one K travels in the hands of
the person who owns it too, and not it doesn't
stay with that corporation you left, which is another big

(06:22):
advantage for people who want to manage their own money,
and corporations don't mind that at all, because it's only fair,
really that the people who demand the freedom to just
bounce from one employer to the next, they also have
to take the responsibility of managing their own retirement savings.
And as you might guess, some people are better at
that than others, but win or lose, they take responsibility for,

(06:46):
however their balance changes while they're in charge of that money.
Maintaining those old traditional pension plans required a ton of
financial predictability, and you've got people calculating things long term,
out decade into the future, relying on stable projections of
employee retention, which is that's out the window now, and

(07:06):
when employee turnover becomes rampant those projections, it's, like I
was saying, they become impossible to manage administrative financial costs
tracking funding fragmented pension benefits for hundreds of short term
workers that would bankrupt any enterprise. So the big boys
drop their pension plans, they protect their shareholders, they stabilize

(07:29):
their balance sheets, and they ensure the long term survival
of their corporations in a highly competitive market. The end
of pension plans is just really a story of supply
and demand. In the labor market. Employees demanded the freedom
to pursue better offers, move around, and change careers, and
voluntarily traded the security of corporate paternalism for the liberty

(07:51):
of career independence. Corporations just responded to the new reality.
Businesses didn't abandon their workers. Quite opposite, is the case. Really?
Modern workers refusal to commit to the firm made lifetime
pensions and obsolete relic and just like that, I'm running late.
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Get your life back, New Promise Neuropathy dot Com, and

(08:54):
once again welcome back to fifty plus on this Thursday afternoon.
Thank you all for listening. Represented Byron Donald, a Republican
from California, spoke on Fox Business yesterday morning about how
the Supreme Court's decision to allow baby tourism and continue
granting citizenship to any person born in the US period

(09:16):
is essentially going to overwhelm our country with babies who
quite likely will be taken back to other countries almost immediately,
and they're gonna be taught, in many cases to hate
Americans and then quietly return here when they're older and
old enough to vote in presidential elections because that one
moment at birth, never mind that they grew up in

(09:37):
any other country in the world, friend or foe. And
a lot of people are a lot of these babies
are going to grow up in countries that are our enemies,
but are gonna have They're gonna have American citizenship just
because mom came over here, flew over three days before
she was due to give birth, had the baby in America,

(09:58):
and then flew right ba go back to the country
as soon as that baby could travel. While they were talking,
Donald and the show's host put up a graphic. Put
a graphic on the screen of billboards being bought by
hospitals and going up all across South Texas in both
English and Spanish, by the way, that advertise birthing packages
complete with the pricing for natural and C section deliveries.

(10:23):
Got a phone number on it, got a website, the
website get this have my Baby in Texas dot com.
Let that sink in for a minute. I guess they
put that website on there because have my baby in
Texas and get me all the benefits of being the
parent of an American citizen infant dot com. I hate
to say it, but I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court

(10:44):
got this one terribly wrong, and all of us are
going to pay dearly for that decision. Billboards that encourage
people to get into our country, however they can so
just so they can have that baby on US soil
and start getting all that federal money for their families.
That's messed up. Birthright citizenship was a good thing in
its original purpose in time, but it's gonna cost us

(11:05):
billions now and with very little chance of a positive
return on that investment. Shifting gears. Now, let's talk a
little bit about the sleep we get every night, or
lack thereof. In my case, A lot of times I
don't know what it is. Really, I have no reason
for feeling like I shouldn't go to sleep and stay asleep,
And actually I have no problem at all going to sleep,

(11:27):
but I have a big problem staying asleep. I'm up
to three four times a night, sometimes sometimes to go peace,
sometimes just because I woke up, and a lot of
times if it's after about four o'clock in the morning,
I just can't go back to sleep. But enough about me.
In a recent sleep study, scientists discovered that eight hours
of sleep per night might actually be a little more

(11:48):
than we should get. That same research found out that
there's really not a specific quantity of sleep below which
a person's health just slides off a cliff, and the
lowest health risks kind of interestingly enough, or found in
people who get closer to seven hours of nightly sleep
and maybe even just six. Doctor named Mark Siegel said
this week that worrying about sleep causes more anxiety than

(12:10):
anything else, and that early stages of sleep actually are
when the brain essentially is sweeping out the trash. Another
fun fact revealed is that the highest mortality is tied
to people who get the most sleep, get nine, ten
eleven hours of sleep per night. They're the ones who
are gonna die first. I don't know why, but that's
what it says. And on that subject, I do think

(12:30):
that more sleep early in life is a good thing.
As a teenager, I slept a ton and at night
while we're sleeping as young adults, not only does the
trash get swept out, but it gives our body time
to heal little things that need healing from all the
running around and bouncing off stuff whatever. I was a
very active young man and constantly just exhausting myself playing

(12:54):
football and baseball and basketball and whatever else I could
get my hands on. And it wasn't at all unusual
for me to sleep eleven or twelve hours on a
weekend night when I didn't have school the next morning.
As for me now, I think what I'm trying now
is just to eat dinner earlier, so that's not making
my body work over time. When I go to bed.
That and crossword puzzles, I can be doing a word puzzle,

(13:16):
a jumble, or a crossword puzzle, one of those crypto
quizzes whatever in the newspaper. That's about the only reason
we take that paper. And I'll actually fall asleep while
I'm staring at the puzzle trying to come up with
an answer. And moving to something of a public service
announcement to the grandparents of younger children. Kids playing with
a popular gelike toy. They're called needles, and it's kind

(13:39):
of a cube, a squishy cube, if you will. And
these kids are getting injured from a TikTok challenge. Boy
who saw that coming, huh? And this TikTok challenge encourages,
encourages the kids to put these things in a microwave oven.
Quite a few children have already been burned by trying
to do this, a lot of them on their faces,

(13:59):
on their arms, hands, because these things just kind of
blow up in the microwave. That's horrible, and these TikTok challenges.
I don't know why anybody would let their child be
on TikTok. They're just so young and so vulnerable. I
hate that for them. And now shifting gears in as
often as I do on this program to keep I

(14:20):
try to get as many things. I'm squeezing a lot
of things into a small sack. Usually that's what I'm
trying to do. I don't want to take too much
time on one thing, although the pension thing did get
my attention because it's been talked about in the news lately.
But basically I prefer to just give you bits and
pieces that will inspire you to go look up the
rest of the information on a particular topic on your own,

(14:44):
at your own sources, the ones you trust, just like
you trust me to dish it up. Then you can
take it to wherever you take it to find out
more information about it. So after that long winded circle
of basically nothing, I apologize, first of all, but keeping
in mind the upcoming midterms, several people who fled Cuba

(15:05):
in recent years are warning Americans that if we don't
shut down these waves of socialism and communism coming into
local positions of power. We are only a few elections
away from having double digit communists seated in our own
federal Congress. Those people didn't come here for us to

(15:26):
allow our country to be what they ran away from,
and they're trying to tell us in no uncertain terms
that we're about to let ourselves be overtaken by a
system that has a one hundred percent failure rate historically globally.
The people in this country who are true socialists are

(15:47):
highly skilled and want to reshape our country. They know
what they're doing, They know how to manipulate people, what
to tell them, what they'll say, they'll give in exchange
for their support, and on and on about the wonderful
things socialism and communism can do for them. Only they
don't mention that in just a few short years after

(16:07):
introduction those political ideologies one hundred percent of the time,
like I said, are gonna fail, and they don't fail.
The elites who pull the strings they squashed the life,
sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, out of the people who
were promised that everyone would have everything they needed under
a communist or socialist government. Keep your eyes on Moron

(16:30):
Zomdani up in New York. We all ought to be
watching and listen to what he's doing and counting the
times that he's had to tell New Yorkers. It turns
out he's not going to be able to do quite
what he told him he was going to do for
this or that he promised free groceries. I talked about
that yesterday. Promise free food, but nothing's free, and that
food's going to be bought with tax dollars. When the

(16:50):
free store's open, and once the people who pay most
of the taxes finished leaving New York, which is happening daily,
there's going to be nobody to pay for the free food,
which means there's gonna be no food. Mom. Donnie's telling
New Yorkers now how to set their thermostats, where to shop,
turning a blind eye too, to not only to the
crime in his city that's being caused by illegal immigrants, who,

(17:11):
by the way, are living there free and eating free
in some of the city's nicest hotels. And because he's
a Muslim, he's ignoring people like the guy I mentioned yesterday,
some social media influencer with a million followers who looked
straight into his camera in New York City with a
loud crowd of followers behind him and said that New
York was now an Islamic republic and that Islam would

(17:34):
enter every house in the city. All those wealthy people
Mom Donnie counted on for tax dollars are leaving like
rats jumping off a sinking ship, and they're taking their
entire companies with them. Think of New York if our
majority here in this country stays quiet much longer. Think
of New York as the preview in the theater of
a really bad horror movie that's coming soon to a

(17:58):
city near you. Okay, enough doom and gloom. I've got
to get a break in here anyway. Ut Health Institute
on Aging is an amazing collaborative of providers from every
medical discipline all across the region.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Here.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
There are thousands of them who have taken it upon
themselves to get more education in whatever their specialization is
so that they can apply that knowledge just specifically to seniors.
To us. They're mostly in the medcenter, as you might
suspect of all these great providers, but a lot of
them practice in outlying communities and hospitals and clinics and whatnot.

(18:32):
So if you don't want to go to the med Center.
You don't have to go to the website. Look around.
You'll find all kinds of tremendous assets that are absolutely free.
Then after that, start searching for one of those providers.
Uth dot edu slash aging, uth dot edu slash aging.

(18:56):
All right, welcome back to segment three of this program today,
and I greatly appreciate you listening. You know I do,
I always have, always will. Please bring some friends, Please
let other people know about fifty plus. I do try
to cover a lot of bases. And that's just the
way my brain works. It's not that I can't pay
attention to something for very long, because I can stand
in one spot and cast into a lake a thousand

(19:19):
times and not be bored. But when it comes to
the news, there's just so much going on, and I
would much rather, I would much rather tell you a
little about a lot of things than a lot about
only one or two things during one of these programs.
And that being said, I was going to go back
a little bit to the socialism thing that I was
talking about earlier, but I'm gonna move on, and I'll

(19:40):
start with just kind of a little conversation starter. I
know a lot of us down here either had children
or grandchildren still have. They're out there playing little league baseball.
And we know what kind of money goes through these
Little League baseball programs, most of which in the right cases,
in the right states and leagues, and all of that
go to the kids into their baseball equipment. However, and

(20:03):
I didn't really read where this happened because I don't
want to. I don't know. I don't even care where
it happened. It shouldn't have happened. But the police are
investigating a Little league president somewhere in our country who
spent nearly sixty five thousand dollars of little league money
on casinos, strip clubs, and ed pills. Why does the

(20:27):
term batter up come to mind right now? And one
more of these little tidbits of boring information. There's some
guy who calls himself Snake the Bigfoot Hunter, and he
claims he has DNA evidence that Sasquatch is real and
apparently part human. And if you believe that, no, never mind,

(20:49):
there can't possibly be anybody in this audience who believes
that Bigfoot is real. You know what, I'm getting kind
of hungry, and that reminds me of an issue I
had with trying to get some lunch a while back.
It was after my show and I was trying to
I couldn't get my mind off this chicken salad wrap
that I liked at one of the office building delis
around where we used to work. So I pushed away

(21:12):
from my desk and I went there, and I was
just getting hungrier with every step I took. And just
as I got to the door, I noticed that the
lights were off, which was odd because it was like,
I don't know, one point thirty something like that, No
sign on the door, no nothing. And then the woman
who managed the place popped out of her office, and
it turns out they'd had a tiny little water leak

(21:32):
somewhere in the deli, and if I heard her right,
a plumber was actually either working on it or on
his way to work on it, and in walks the
health inspector. This place was always clean as a whistle,
but this time a health inspector with the wave of
a pen, shut her down, shut the whole place down.

(21:53):
Had to close up at least for the day. It
may have been two days, I can't recall, but if
that inspector had been five minutes later, that plumber probably
would have been gone, and nobody would have been any
the wiser, and more importantly, I'd have gotten my chicken
salad wrap that day. I can't even recall what I
wound up getting for lunch then or where I got it,
but I'm pretty sure I was disappointed the whole time.

(22:14):
I ate it all. Right, let's move on again. I'm
kind of hesitant to look backward with my content, but
sometimes it's necessary, and I wanted to go back this
afternoon to Sonny host and the woman on the view
who actually said she starts feeling uncomfortable if she's walking
through a neighborhood that has a lot of American flags
on display. That's on her, that's not on the people
flying the flags. She's making a presumption about them. She

(22:37):
is judging that book by its cover. And maybe sixty
seventy eighty one hundred years ago that argument might have
held a little water, but not now. The Left likes
to throw little jabs like that. It's their way of
playing the victim in a game that seemingly will never
end and therefore can never have a winner or a loser.

(22:57):
I personally don't believe what she said is true. I
believe she believes what she said, but I doubt that
many other people in this country would side with her
on that. And I'll share that in the midst of
my ongoing social experiment several months now, maybe even six months,
with the great people of Houston and Missouri City and

(23:18):
Sugarland and really just wherever I am. When whenever I'm
out and about and cross paths with total strangers, I
first try to make and I'm not talking about in
big crowds. I'm just talking about passing on a sidewalk
or passing in the grocery store or whatever. The first
thing I do is try to make eye contact. And
some people won't even give me that. Believe it or not,

(23:41):
I just don't see that in the South as being
a thing. But maybe they moved here from somewhere else
and don't know manners like we have manners down here.
But the bottom line is, first I try to make
eye contact, and when I get that, I'll be the
first one to just say a very sincere good morning
or good afternoon, or just hello, and then make a
mental note of their reaction. In sugar Land, where I live,

(24:04):
and again everywhere I go down around here. I don't
take this game to other states or any place outside
of Houston, the Houston Metroplex, let's call it. Really And
in sugar Land, I encounter people from all over the world.
It's like going to a United Nations meeting, for Heaven's sakes.
And thus far, the positive response rate to my good

(24:27):
afternoons to strangers is about ninety five percent. And their
responses aren't just brushing me off. They're genuinely returning good morning, Hey,
good morning to you. How you doing. They're giving me more,
in most cases even than just that simple good morning
or good afternoon. It's really refreshing. And if you consider

(24:48):
that maybe what two maybe three percent of the people
I encounter just might be having a bad day or something,
the positivity factor gets even closer to one hundred percent. Gong,
random people from random states and countries, all just living
alongside each other down here in the South and knowing

(25:08):
how to get along. And every time I think about this,
every time I talk about it, I get pretty fired
up because it gives me hope. It gives me optimism
for the future of this country. All Right, I'm gonna
do a little soft stop here and give you one
more conversation starter if you ever need it. There is
information from I don't know, from a bunch of veterinarians
or whoever. Anyway, it says there's an easy way to

(25:30):
figure out if it's too hot for your dog to
play outside, and that is by adding the temperature to
the humidity, and if the number you get is more
than one hundred and fifty, it's too hot. I don't
know what kind of snowflake little dogs were tested in
this experiment, but I can assure you most of the

(25:52):
dogs down here in this area are a little more
acclimated to heat then I guess those other dogs were.
With that number, if you had a temperature of seventy
five and a humidity level of seventy five, then it
it's too hot for your dog to be outside. Seventy
five seventy five sounds good to me, actually, since I've
been going out and playing golf and fishing and whatnot

(26:15):
in ninety five eighty five, and I get it. Dogs
can't shed heat like we can. In case you don't know,
by the way, dogs don't sweat. The only way they
can lower their body temperature is by breathing, by heavy breathing,
that panting that you see when they get overheated a
little bit. And if you don't know what that means,
you better learn, because that means your dog's getting close

(26:35):
to having a real problem with the heat. If it's
one hundred degrees outside and your dog is it's trying
to cool itself internally by breathing in one hundred degree air,
that's not going to cool a dog off. Have some
cool water around for your dog, not icy cold, and
if you really want to do it right and your
dog's going to be outside in an open field or something,

(26:56):
by one of those little bitty plastic kiddie pools, bring
about five gallons of water so and pour just enough
in there to be maybe two inches deep or so.
And then if you've got a little bit of ice,
throw a little bit of ice in there to help
that dog cool down if it really starts getting sluggish
because of the heat. Back when I was guiding on
the Katie Prairie for dove season, it was super hot

(27:18):
during dove season and I actually ended up seeing a
couple of other friends good friends of mine's dogs go
down because of the heat. They don't want to stop.
They want to please you, and it's up to you
to stop them before they get overheated.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I kind of went off the rails there. But dogs
in heat just don't mix well. And if you don't
take care of your dog out in that heat, it's
going to have a problem moving on. If you haven't
been keeping track of the preliminary hearing of Tyler Robinson,
the man charged with the shooting death of Charlie Kirk
and numerous other charges, a while back, the prosecutions presented

(27:51):
what it thinks is ample evidence to get a formal
trial on the docket, and I would have to agree,
one observer said, And this was kind of a good
way to put it. One observer said that about the
only way this case won't go to trial is if
the prosecutor forgets how to find his way to the courthouse.
Erica Kirk and Charlie Kirk's dad have both been in attendance,

(28:14):
says have Robinson family members. Once the preliminary hearing concludes,
and if trial is deemed appropriate, which it better be,
Robinson's gonna have to enter a plea after hearing and
seeing all the evidence that's been presented. So far my
gut tells me he might want to take a plea
deal and maybe just go ahead and accept life in

(28:37):
prison over the death penalty, which is still on the table.
In this case, I gotta take a break or I'm
gonna end up going long again on this one. I
want to tell you about Midway Meat Market out there
in Katie. They're on Old Highway ninety, just a couple
of miles west of ninety nine. You take Ien out there,
take I think it's the second Katy exit. After that,
you'll see a big Old ninety sign up over your head.

(29:00):
That's where you get off the freeway. Go in a
couple of lights, and Midway Meat Market will be on
the south side of that road, at the end of
a strip shopping center. Same feel it's had since it
opened fifty seven years ago, Same wonderful people, many of
them working there for decades, literally working in Midway Meat
Market because it's a nice place to work, it's a

(29:20):
fun place to work, and they are amazing with their
customer service. Two dozen flavors plus one of premium sausage, beef, chicken,
and pork cutover however you want it. There's butchers in there,
all day long, every day. They're open from eight to seven,
seven days a week, so not really a bad time
to go out there. USDA choice ground beef ground fresh daily.

(29:43):
Gonna get that at a great price. You can also
get a barbecue lunch or maybe even one of their cheeseburgers,
which I happen to think are awesome, or maybe just
grab some of those grab and go snacks. Midway Meatmarket
dot Com is the website. Go check them out midwaymeat
Market dot Com. And we are back. Welcome back to

(30:03):
fifty plus. Thank you all for listening. I really do
appreciate it. Very quick run through the markets and the weather.
The weather's going to be kind of what it was yesterday.
It's going to be today. Might get some pop up showers.
I think there's a little bit better chance of rain
a few days from now, but for now, just where
your son's green. Get out there and have some fun outdoors,

(30:24):
or do your chores, whatever you have to do. The
markets look pretty good. Actually everything was green at about
eleven o'clock this morning, the big four indicators that I
look at, and goal was up. I want to say
about fifty bucks. Oil was down from it got up
to seventy three dollars in something. Yesterday it was down
in the mid seventy twos, I think just a few
minutes ago. I can't recall the exact number, but it

(30:46):
was seventy two point something. Anyway, Moving into one of
those Almost Got Away with its stories from Los Angeles actually,
specifically the library at UCLA. The story of a man
who had access to some rare Chinese manuscripts, some of
them dating all the way to the fourteen hundreds, and

(31:07):
he would check them out authorities say, and then a
few days later return them. Turns out, though, that what
he was doing is stealing some of these works and
returning to the library dummy books disguised to look like
the originals. China, it turns out, is a pretty hot
market right now for art and ancient pieces of its history.

(31:28):
Their middle class and upper middle class over there, and
they have classes like we have them here. They just
treat all their people differently than we do. But those
people are getting money, they have money to burn, and
they are investing in their country's history. It's very interesting anyway.

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I guess this guy was just feathering his own nest
with those books and using multiple fake IDs and well
made labels to get the originals out and get the
fakes back in without appearing to be missing. Just this week,
he pleaded guilty to one charge, a single charge of
stealing a manuscript from the king dynasty Qui Ng, something

(32:11):
from the seventeenth century. He was sentenced to twelve months
in a day in federal prison. And to lighten things
up a little bit, I'll go to baseball now. We'll
talk about that a little bit about the Astros. Actually,
they're kind of struggling again, and it concerns me that
were looking very strong to be something of a contender
going into the playoffs, and now with the way that

(32:33):
our pitching's going, I'm not so sure. What we've wound
up with is a bunch of a bunch of relievers,
a lot of whom were starting pitchers when they came
to the team, and they're having to adjust to that problem.
Our ace, Hunter Brown, he came back, but he's not

(32:53):
the Hunter Brown of old just yet. Hopefully he'll regain everything.
I think the shining star among our arms has got
to be Josh Hater. He's been doing a really good
job of coming up, coming in when needed to clean
up a mess late in the game. But we shouldn't
be getting into those messes. That's the problem. We scored
what ten runs the other day and lost eleven to ten.

(33:16):
That's not good. If you can't win when you score
ten runs or more, then you've got a really bad
problem with your pitching. But that's not why I brought
up baseball. Actually, this is just a kind of a
fun fact for anybody who wants to really looks smart
among a group of baseball players and fans and whatever.
I watched this morning. An explanation of why distance from

(33:37):
the pitcher's rubber to home plate is exactly sixty feet
and six inches all the way back in the eighteen hundreds,
the mid eighteen hundreds, the man was only forty five
feet from the plate. Pitchers threw underhanded, and as you
might imagine, pitchers just dominated that game. They threw pitches
kind of like contemporary softball pitchers do, and with the

(34:00):
velocity that they could generate and the spin they could
put on the ball, they were virtually unhittable. As you
might imagine, they just dominated the game from that distance
in the mound was moved back a few feet in
eighteen eighty one, and then a little bit later and
that changed a little bit, but it still it still
gave the advantage to the picture. The batters just couldn't

(34:21):
keep up with the speed of the ball. And then
to help pitchers even more, they were allowed to throw
overhand beginning in eighteen eighty four, and then later than that,
just for reference sake, called strikes were installed in eighteen
fifty eight, and finally, finally the mound was moved in
eighteen ninety three to its current sixty feet six inches

(34:43):
from home plate. And now you know, oh, and I
need to do a little quick follow up to the
story about the TikTok takeover of Newport Beach out in California.
Guess what percentage of those lunatics was actually from Laguna
Beach or anywhere near there. How about three or four percent?
That's all a dozen, maybe fifteen or twenty tops, that's

(35:06):
all of them who were from that area. Among several
hundred people either arrested or detained, some were from other
parts of California, and others were from as far away
as Arizona. And my guess is that they didn't just
roll out of bed. Check social media that morning and
decide to book a quick flight to California or drive

(35:28):
in at breakneck speed from some other part of the
state so they could stir up trouble on the beach.
These things are, They're far more organized than they appear
to be, and it would not surprise me in the
least to learn that a lot of those people who
maybe came over from Arizona or from a different part
of California got paid to do what they did, and

(35:50):
somebody else paid to get them out of jail. Hats
off to the Newport Police Department, though, for bringing out
enough force from the very beginning to get that under
control before anything really horrible happened. Meanwhile, in and off
the coast of Iran, fighting has resumed after Iran, and
who wouldn't see this coming. Iran, of course, broke yet

(36:11):
another promise and started slinging missiles at ships in the
Strait of Hormos. They're also said to have renigged on
the agreement to allow inspectors into their nuclear sites, and
President Trump is responding with increased pressure and more strikes
on the Iranian military's infrastructure. He's given our navy the
green light now to deal with those fast boats, the

(36:32):
ones that fire missiles or lay mines in the strait
or just otherwise interrupt commerce out there. They're getting the
same attention, by the way, the same attention as those
drug boats that were leaving Venezuela pretty regularly a while
back hauling drugs across the ocean. Those Iranian fast boats
are about to join the rest of that country's naval

(36:53):
vessels on the seafloor, and you get what you bargained for.
You mess around and find out they're trying to battle
the US Navy with what would amount in our country
to a decent sized fishing boat. Only the only thing

(37:13):
they're going to catch is is hard hot fire from
helicopters and jets flying overhead, and maybe if they can
get a little bit closer, they'll get shot out of
the water by one of the ships they're trying to reach,
if nothing else. These people are determined, I'll give them that,
but they need to understand that there's no possible way

(37:35):
they're going to win this. And I actually do feel
kind of sorry for the people of Iran, the ones
who truly want to see this regime toppled. We've been
very careful so far, trying to take out the bad
guys and all of their equipment without leaving the good
people of Iran in the dark or without water. The
precision of our military strikes is unparalleled, and and I'm

(38:00):
really I'm proud that we have that much capability. And
I'm also quite thankful that our Navy is in all
of our military personnel over there involved all of the
equipment they have very closed and certainly within range of
Iran's striking distance with its missiles and drones and whatnot.

(38:20):
We have the ability to shoot those things out of
the sky. These are very fast, very small weapons, and
we have counter weapons that can just knock them out
of the sky before they can do any damage. That
is so impressive. And there aren't a whole lot of
other countries in the world who have the capability to

(38:40):
do what we do. Matter of fact, there probably are
not any that can do what we do. This whole
conflict is going to be resolved, I think fairly quickly now,
and I really do believe that. I'm pretty sure President
Trump's ready to see these people stopped as quickly as
possible too. Iran keeps saying it's gonna controlled the straight
but I'm not sure how they're going to accomplish that

(39:02):
with what little resources they still have, and real quickly
here at the end, several educators who lost their jobs
or comments made over social media about the assassination of
Charlie Kirk have settled their lawsuits and made money from
their former employers to the tune of several million dollars. Unfortunately,
in a land that protects the free speech so as
closely as ours, people who say rude, vulgar, despicable things

(39:26):
actually do have the right to say them. That said, though,
I do think that the right to say something doesn't
necessarily mean that your employer can't admonish or even terminate
you if what you said goes against that company's rules.
We'll leave it there for now. I'll be back tomorrow.
Thank you all for listening. Audios