July 14, 2025 • 32 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So this is a very unpleasant thing you have to
talk about, especially because I don't know that there's a
good answer, and I like things to be cut and dried.
I like it needs to be straightforward. A nice woman
named Tricia wrote, zar, it makes my blood boil to
(00:21):
see how many fake websites are selling t shirts and
hats saying that they will donate money toward relief efforts.
I just thought I would ask if you take a
moment to mention that people really need to look into
what they're really paying for and where the money is
really going to. It may be trivial, but living here
(00:44):
in Conroe and knowing people who've lost loved ones in
the floods, it just takes me off. God bless you
for all you do. God bless our Texas. So one
of the things I've noticed over many years is that
(01:04):
when there is a tragedy like has happened in Kerrville,
there is a certain buzzard class.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I'm reminded of Thenardier down in the Sewers and les
Miz after the revolution, and he's picking the gold out
of the teeth of those who had died revolutionaries, and
then he'll sell those go on to be a proper
gentleman and arrive in places of esteem. I have seen
(01:43):
these types of people, and they don't wear a cap,
you know, they don't wear instead of make America great again,
I am a scoundrel, I'm a scavenger. I'm a hyena.
In fact, quite the opposite. Oftentimes they're very slick. They
(02:05):
will they will have an American flag in their place
of business right behind them. They will make protestations of patriotism.
They might ask you to pray before they eat. They
don't do that all the time, just when you're there,
because they need to convince you they're a good person.
(02:26):
And the scavengers who are soulless, they have no soul.
They're opportunists. They watch what's out there and they know
that at certain times, people are not vigilant at certain
(02:48):
times money. At times, money is just just falling out
of people's pockets, and that's when they pounce. That's when
the money is to be made. And they have no
sh so they're not encumbered by that. So with that
being said, as always, the Kurville case occurs and folks
(03:11):
start reaching out and they want me to promote this
or that effort that they've undertaken. I don't know if
one percent of them are scoundrels or ninety nine percent
of them are scoundrels. I know that there are people
(03:33):
who are also out there who in a moment like this,
dive in headfirst to help. It's what they do, it's
who they are. For many of them. It is a
god complex that a lot of us are gifted or
(03:57):
cursed with, which is a desire to solve the people's problems.
And there was nothing wrong with that. In fact, thank
God for it. Thank God for this complex, this need
when there is a problem, to find a solution, no
(04:17):
matter what it takes. This is a mindset that most
people that get into government don't have, especially bureaucrats. They
don't think of this as an opportunity. They don't think
they've been given an instrument to solve people's problems. I
don't think old girl asking for over eight thousand dollars
(04:40):
to go to the Urban Land Institute when she could
have done it for pennies on the dollar and really
not even needed to go. I don't think she's thinking,
how can I serve the most people the best way,
so we don't have flooding problems. And you see this
in so many ways. You see so many people. We
focus on the elected officials. Damage's done by the bureaucrats
(05:01):
whose names you'll never know, who are squandering money. They
often have to appease the politicians, but they've got the
real power. The bureaucracy has the power, not the elected officials.
The elected officials peacock around because they need your constant
validation by vote. The bureaucrats they don't. And that's why
(05:23):
when you hear people talking about term limits and you go, Okay,
well that's great. We got a bunch of problems with
government being non responsive. So what we'll do is we'll say, yeah,
you can stay in government, but only for a brief
period of time. We're going to put someone else in
there who's equally non responsive. But the real power is
in the hands of the bureaucrats. Anyone who's ever been
(05:45):
around government understands this. The politicians don't know. They ask
Christy Noam this weekend, is it true that FEMA didn't
do this, this, and this, and FEMA didn't answer the
phones in Texas? And she says, I don't know, because
she's an imbecile because she doesn't know. You can't know
there's somebody in FEMA who made that decision. That's the
(06:07):
way it works. So I think a lot about this.
It comes up a lot because I get a lot
of requests to promote this or that. Every single day,
somebody will ask me to promote this or that thing
that they're doing for Camp Hope. And I can't possibly
do that for a number of reasons, one of which
(06:28):
is I want to have punch. When somebody's raising five
hundred thousand dollars for Camp Hope, I want to make
sure I give that a lot of attention. When someone
is doing something that's going to raise five hundred dollars,
that's wonderful, But I can't give those equal weight because
it takes five hundred thousand, not five hundred dollars to
keep Camp Hope going. I'm grateful for the five hundred.
(06:50):
But then you find that a number of businesses or
individuals will say, hey, we're going to support Camp Hope.
Tell people to come in here and spend money, and
when they spend money, we'll give a little bit of
it to Camp Hope. Well, nobody ever follows up and
finds out if they did that. And I will often
ask David Malsby, did we get a check from so
(07:11):
and so because they marketed using camp hope as to
why you should come in and spend money this weekend
at their restaurant or there this or there that, And
he'll say, I'm sorry, he knows why I'm asking because
I'm following up and I'm not suggesting that it would
be any more efficient if we had a governmental entity
to do it. I think the American Red Cross is
(07:33):
an absolute scam for what that's worth, and nobody calls
them on it to account because they got so many
famous people on their board. Most Underloaded job Seeker song,
the reference to Uncle Joe so clever, so incredibly clever.
(07:55):
So I wish there was an answer to the uh
to the scammer. But it's sort of like what I
said last week about you get into trouble when you
assume that everyone is just like you. I want to
(08:16):
smash my head into a brick wall. When people will say, Michael,
how can those people show up where the illegals are
being deported and shoot at our officers? How can they
do that? Don't they realize those officers are doing some
doing us a favor and it makes me crazy. But
(08:40):
then I realized, I guess in some ways it's good.
There's still people that are not as cynical as you are,
but it is It is naive and dangerous to believe
that everybody shore there's your values and behave the way
(09:02):
you would. How many times when you've seen a story
in the news have you thought to yourself, how can
someone do that because they're not bothered the way you are?
How could Bernie Madoff, who claimed to be a proud Jew,
(09:25):
take charitable contributions one hundred percent of them of charitable
foundations and use that and squander that money, squander it
all weekend and play tennis with them on Monday and
have lunch with them on Tuesday, knowing he has left
that foundation with zero dollars. It's not like you. I
(09:47):
could never know. You couldn't. But the danger becomes when
you assume that because you couldn't, someone else couldn't. Fred says,
your opinion confirmed. The American Red Cross is horrible. I've
volunteered twice for a full week, five straight days each
(10:08):
after Alison and after Rita from eight in the morning
till six in the evening, worst bureaucracy and ego combat
zone ever and an absolute sinful waste of donated dollars.
And this from someone who worked at the HISD TODJ.
Mahal On Richmond for two years in the eighties. So
(10:29):
every time there is an incident, a big incident like Kerville,
and I'm always worried that our company's going to ask
me to speak for an American Red Cross. So what
I try to do is I get out in front
of it and go, hey, guys, because the company likes
(10:50):
to use our resources to raise a lot of money
for whatever is going to help the most. Well, the
thing is, there's a flood in Miami on Monday, in
North Carolina on Tuesday, and Curveville on Wednesday, in Los
Angeles on Thursday, and Idaho on Friday. You don't know
(11:11):
what the good local organization is. You can't. So where
the American Red Cross steps up is We're this good
organization that you learned about Clara Barton, and we do
in Florence, Nightingale or whoever else. We're nice people and
(11:32):
we have really really nice commercials on TV. Well, that's
how I know I can trust you and so it
becomes very easy to write a check to the American
Red Cross. The American Red Cross has long made its
part of its business model in each major city where
they raise all the money to make it a social
(11:56):
status to be on the board. Ah, yes, to be
on the board of the American Red Cross. Is American
Cancer Association as well, but the American Red Cross, you're
on the board. And then they brought in Liddy Dole,
who was Bob Dole's wife, and she was, you know,
transportation secretary, and she ran the or oh this is
(12:18):
and so what it became is something that rich people
could feel like they were doing some good and never
have to actually touch anything dirty. But we all feel
so good the American Red Cross. And what would happen
is immediately when something like Currville would happen, the nation
would say we want to help, and donations would flood in. Well,
(12:44):
the American Red Cross has got a whole pr team,
they got money to spend, They probably put some ads
on there, and boy, they just soak in the contributions. Well,
my understanding is and I say that, well, my understanding
(13:04):
is that if you donate during Harvey to the American
Red cross where they're standing around in Houston and you
live in Houston and you donate all this money, they
don't necessarily spend it in Houston. They spend it in
(13:26):
other places. To the extent that they spend anything at all,
they spend it on corporate salaries, their executive director salaries,
and beautiful buildings and all these sorts of things that
don't save a soul. Well, if people understood in Houston
that when you donate during Harvey, that those funds are
(13:48):
not going exclusively to Houston but might get siphoned off
to somewhere else, I dare say their revenues would drop,
their contributions would drop dramatically. But you know, it's not
just that. It's not just the do gooder, self dealing
(14:12):
society charitable organizations where this happens. I tear. One of
the things that I find most frustrating is you'll have
these scoundrels that will say, if you come in here
and spend a bunch of money on our plays, we'll
give a couple of pennies to the charity. They don't
use those words, but that's what they're doing. And then
(14:33):
you get folks who say we're going to feed these people,
and we're going to pay for it ourselves. Our restaurant
is and there was a place called Vasinos. And if
they're to be believed, they're just feeding. If you want
to write them a check to help them feed more, fine,
But they're just feeding people because they're a local tex
(14:54):
mex restaurant and this is their community. And then we
had the guy with grape juice. That's what they're do it.
And then you'll have people who say one hundred percent
of our profits will go and so if they if
they made a thousand dollars, if they brought in one
thousand dollars today and their profits were three hundred, they'll
write a check for three hundred. Then you have people
(15:16):
will say one hundred percent of our proceeds, so whatever
you come in and spend that will go to the cause.
It's just frustrating. There's no good answer, and I can't
solve this problem. But I had an experience. We had
an officer in Baytown who was shot and killed execution. Still,
I was asked by a pizza company in the town
(15:40):
to raise money and we raised I think a million
dollars and they wrote a check for a handful and
I'm still sore about it today.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Michael said, for.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The ones we go don you are on the Michael
Berry Show.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Hey, good morning, Michael. I'm seventy years old and I
was raised in Houston and went to HISD all my life.
I remember back in the sixties going to elementary school,
we were sent home with little Red Cross envelopes for
our parents to donate too. So I think the indoctrination
of us into the whole Red Cross thing goes way
(16:23):
back for some of us.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I think you're absolutely right. You know, there is something
called Navigator, or I believe it's called Charity Navigator. I
forget what it's called. And it gives a rating to
nonprofits as to what percentage of their money that they
receive in donations goes towards overhead bonuses, salaries and the like.
(16:54):
And yeah, I don't know how many people know about it,
some people do, but it is it is an attempt
to bring some accountability to an issue that we know
there are bad people. I mean, we just know that
we know there are bad people. And the thing is
(17:17):
what makes them particularly pernicious is that they always gravitate
to areas where people are meaning to do the best.
They gravitate to patriotism, they gravitate to community spirit. After Curville,
(17:41):
they gravitate to tragedy and loss. They're the lowest scum.
When you walk up on the several species who feed
on the dead, and you get a certain emotion should
you recoil at how vile they are. There's still part
(18:06):
of the there's still part of the natural cycle, but
there's something about them that is grotesque. I have witnessed
this type of person so many times, so I ran
out of time. Last segment, there was a deputy who
was shot and killed in Baytown a few years ago,
(18:29):
and he was walking into the station. I think he
was a constable's deputy walking into the station. A guy
just walks up behind him, doesn't see him coming, like
five o'clock in the morning, shoots him in the back
of the head. Did not know the deputy had no
beef with him. I had no real reason why he
did it, just thought he would do it. So here
(18:51):
was a deputy that had I mean, I think he'd
been on the department thirty years, well regarded guy. He
would get there before anyone else and make the coffee
sort of everybody's friend. And it was brought to my
attention by some folks who knew him and they were
gonna raise money for him. So one of the one
(19:13):
of the pizza companies in our region said, well, we'll
we'll have a day in his honor where we will
donate from what we sell. So I had the head
of that company for the region come on the show
(19:38):
and I said, you're donating the proceeds that means all money, yes,
I said, not the profits. You're donating the proceeds that's gross,
not net, and he said yes. So an officer friend
(20:01):
of mine, Steve Marino, was very good friends with that
family and they had been counseling the family, the widow
at night, so he stayed very close to it and
live on the air on our evening show that day.
People were calling in and we were encouraging them. And
(20:24):
I have never twenty years of doing this, I've never
had this experience. I had people emailing me and saying, Michael,
we just called our Papa John's and they said the
wait is going to be three hours and fifteen minutes,
and we said we'll wait. It's for a good cost.
(20:47):
I mean, people are so short tempered and in a hurry.
And the faster things happen, the more demanding we become.
That everything happened that fast all the time. We don't say, Wow,
this is really nice. Think how much better it is
today than the old snail mail. Think how much better
(21:08):
it is than having us in a fax. Think how
much better things are with this this and it? Don't
We just want everything faster fast. I had people telling
me that the next day it took four hours to
get our pizza and it was the best pizza ever.
The pizza was cold. We didn't care. We were participating.
You know what. We can't make a big donation to things,
(21:32):
but we could buy, golly order a pizza, and we'll
use that company again because of it. And so days
and weeks go by and there's no check to the widow,
and then there's a little bit of tiny check. And
I already knew that it was close to a million
dollars in sales. We had officers who were going into
(21:56):
the locations of this national pizza company. We're going into
the locations in uniform. The constables were letting their constable's
deputies do this, and they went in the kitchen and
they got flour, they're making pizzas. This is all going
to a great cause. We're all in this together, and
it ended up being a little pissant contribution to the widow.
(22:20):
So I called the fellow up. I said, Keith, what
the hell are we doing here? What are we doing?
We busted our butt to raise all that money for
that officer you came on and he said, well, Michael,
what costs it? We don't make very much money on
a pizza. I said, I know that was your busiest
day of the year, and it doesn't matter how much
(22:41):
profit you make. You said, proceeds, and he said, it's
all the same. But you'd be surprised. We don't make
We don't make just the tiniest bit on pizzas. I
don't need to know your profit margin because that wasn't
part of the conversation. The conversation was buy a pizza,
(23:03):
and the money you spend with that company will go
directly to the widow. And now you tell me the profits. Well,
the prophets still, the amount given to her was also
not the prophet. It was far, far, far less, and
(23:23):
I have I won't do it on the air, but
I have most of you know who I'm talking about.
I have used every opportunity that that person's name comes
up in conversation with me to say I had a
horrible experience with this person. I feel this person is
a scoundrel. And the victim in all of this is twofold.
(23:47):
It is the widow of the woman of the deputy
who was killed, and it is all the people who
bought a pizza that they may not have wanted, who
waited forever, who spent their harder and money in twelve
twenty thirty dollars might not seem a lot, but for
a lot of people it was. And I had people
(24:07):
who said, I never, we don't do that, We don't
order pizza like that. We could get a tatinos at
the store for a dollar fifty whatever it was. I
did that to help that deathtic. So, yeah, there are
scoundrels out there who live among us. You normally smoke
mister Bidens the Michael Berry Show. Have you seen these
(24:29):
churches or or you're Catholic, Jim that noodles are being
presented instead of wafers. They call them Roman Catholics. Yeah,
that's my that's my Catholic joke for the day. I
was somewhere earlier this summer and there were a group
(24:54):
of guys and guys where were We must have been
six of us, And somebody brought up religious affiliation. And
this guy said, well, I'm Catholic. What are you? I said,
(25:15):
I'm Christian. And he didn't think that was funny, and
I said, Oh, don't worry. I don't have anything against Catholics.
Some of my best friends are Catholics, which is one
of my favorite things to say about anything. I don't
have anything against Homo's, I don't have anything against Mexicans.
I don't have anything against left handed people whatever. Some
(25:36):
of my best friends are because that's always been one
of my favorite lines. He got his feelings hurt, and
he told the person who had put the group together
that I was mean, I'm fifty four years old, you're
in your mid forties. Mean, what are we eight mean?
(26:00):
That's a funny joke right there. I'm not Catholic. I'm Christian.
It's not funny, Michael, I'm Catholic. Okay, So let me
get this straight. I can make all the jokes about
how blacks need to stop voting for Democrats, they need
(26:20):
to stop making bad decisions. They need to stop doing
this and this. I can do it in an accent.
I can use this line. I can ridicule this beacon
of blackness among certain people. And you think it's hilarious.
But when I make a Catholic joke, you get your
(26:41):
feelings hurt. Do you kind of notice what's going on there?
Funny is funny? You got a good Southern Baptist joke. Fire.
I love it. It's either true or it's not true.
I find it hilarious. How many people do not want
any affiliation they have to have a joke attached to it.
(27:06):
And I've come to understand that is because people don't
understand what a joke is. A joke is not an insult.
If you ever watched a Southern Baptist comic, there are
a few of them. What's the guy's name, Tim? This
guy's name Jim that does the funny songs? Tim. He
(27:27):
makes jokes that are at the expense of Southern Baptists.
We used to have guys come in that would preach
revivals at our church and then have some jokes about
how many committees we had and Baptists versus this where
Baptists were the joke of it. We thought it was hilarious.
If you can't laugh at yourself and you don't understand
(27:48):
the point of humor. And it's important that people understand.
Sight is a sense. If you lack the sense of sight,
you are called blind. Sound is a sense ability to hear.
If you lack that sense, you are deaf. If you
(28:12):
lack the sense of speech. Forever, you were referred to
as dumb. Dumb did not mean stupid. Dumb was replaced
with mute because it became the case that if you
couldn't respond when someone spoke to you, that you were
considered stupid, an imbecile, whatever word you wanted to use.
(28:35):
So if you asked someone a question and they weren't
able to answer the question, you said, what are you dumb?
Meaning what are you mute? It didn't mean stupid. But
in time those two words blended together so that most
people today may be made I don't know. I suspect
(28:56):
a lot of people today don't know that the term
dumb refer to the inability of speech, and so dumb
was changed to stupid. Well, and well, stupid replaced dumb.
That's what I meant to say, was dumb was replaced
by mute, the inability to speak. So if you lack
(29:18):
these certain senses, which some people do, you lack the
sense of taste, of smell, touch doesn't make you a
bad person, but it does reduce your ability to experience
the phenomena of life. And there is such a thing
(29:38):
as lacking a sense of humor. It's called a sense
of humor. For a reason, you are humor less, which
is one of the worst insults I can give someone.
And that brings us to our next point. Be mindful
of the humorless. The humorless are the people who will
(30:01):
turn you into hr The humorless are the people who
show up at work in a bad mood because their
cat pissed on their socks because they always have a
lot of cats. The humorless are the people who are
not in love, nor are they loved. They don't have
rewarding relationships, They have not achieved the professional success they
(30:26):
believe they are entitled to. They do not get the
appreciation and the a plumba and the applause that they
think that they are entitled to, so it puts them
on edge at all times. You ever see somebody walk
in front of you in the crosswalk, and they slow down,
(30:49):
real slow, even though it's turned green for you to go,
as if go ahead and hit me, I'm gonna slow down.
How sad did you have to be that your sense
of utility, because it's not joy that you're mad at
the guy who's in the car, who's in the lane,
who's next up at the end. That your victory today
(31:12):
is that they're not going to run you over because
it would be more hassle than just waiting. So they'll wait.
And maybe I can make that person mad who's sitting
in the car waiting while I walk slower to cross
the intersection. Maybe I can make him as miserable as
I am by slowing down. That guy is humorless. People
(31:38):
who laugh are happy. People who can't laugh and say, well,
I like jokes. I like jokes. They just have to
be funny. That one wasn't funny. You don't get to
decide what's money. That's the whole point. You don't get
to decide what's money. The fact that you don't see
the humor in something doesn't make it less funny, nor
(32:00):
does it make it offensive. Makes you sad and pitiful.
So identify those people in their lives and then cut
them out like a cancer, because that's the person who's
going to HR. And by the way, HR is always
going to be populated by somebody just like them. A
person who gets up in the morning hoping to take
(32:22):
out the best seller at the company, the best executive
at the company, the most loved person at the company,
because that's all they can really do is drag through
an intersection and make the latest second. That's their contribution
to humanity.
So this is a very unpleasant thing you have to
talk about, especially because I don't know that there's a
good answer, and I like things to be cut and dried.
I like it needs to be straightforward. A nice woman
named Tricia wrote, zar, it makes my blood boil to
(00:21):
see how many fake websites are selling t shirts and
hats saying that they will donate money toward relief efforts.
I just thought I would ask if you take a
moment to mention that people really need to look into
what they're really paying for and where the money is
really going to. It may be trivial, but living here
(00:44):
in Conroe and knowing people who've lost loved ones in
the floods, it just takes me off. God bless you
for all you do. God bless our Texas. So one
of the things I've noticed over many years is that
(01:04):
when there is a tragedy like has happened in Kerrville,
there is a certain buzzard class.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I'm reminded of Thenardier down in the Sewers and les
Miz after the revolution, and he's picking the gold out
of the teeth of those who had died revolutionaries, and
then he'll sell those go on to be a proper
gentleman and arrive in places of esteem. I have seen
(01:43):
these types of people, and they don't wear a cap,
you know, they don't wear instead of make America great again,
I am a scoundrel, I'm a scavenger. I'm a hyena.
In fact, quite the opposite. Oftentimes they're very slick. They
(02:05):
will they will have an American flag in their place
of business right behind them. They will make protestations of patriotism.
They might ask you to pray before they eat. They
don't do that all the time, just when you're there,
because they need to convince you they're a good person.
(02:26):
And the scavengers who are soulless, they have no soul.
They're opportunists. They watch what's out there and they know
that at certain times, people are not vigilant at certain
(02:48):
times money. At times, money is just just falling out
of people's pockets, and that's when they pounce. That's when
the money is to be made. And they have no
sh so they're not encumbered by that. So with that
being said, as always, the Kurville case occurs and folks
(03:11):
start reaching out and they want me to promote this
or that effort that they've undertaken. I don't know if
one percent of them are scoundrels or ninety nine percent
of them are scoundrels. I know that there are people
(03:33):
who are also out there who in a moment like this,
dive in headfirst to help. It's what they do, it's
who they are. For many of them. It is a
god complex that a lot of us are gifted or
(03:57):
cursed with, which is a desire to solve the people's problems.
And there was nothing wrong with that. In fact, thank
God for it. Thank God for this complex, this need
when there is a problem, to find a solution, no
(04:17):
matter what it takes. This is a mindset that most
people that get into government don't have, especially bureaucrats. They
don't think of this as an opportunity. They don't think
they've been given an instrument to solve people's problems. I
don't think old girl asking for over eight thousand dollars
(04:40):
to go to the Urban Land Institute when she could
have done it for pennies on the dollar and really
not even needed to go. I don't think she's thinking,
how can I serve the most people the best way,
so we don't have flooding problems. And you see this
in so many ways. You see so many people. We
focus on the elected officials. Damage's done by the bureaucrats
(05:01):
whose names you'll never know, who are squandering money. They
often have to appease the politicians, but they've got the
real power. The bureaucracy has the power, not the elected officials.
The elected officials peacock around because they need your constant
validation by vote. The bureaucrats they don't. And that's why
(05:23):
when you hear people talking about term limits and you go, Okay,
well that's great. We got a bunch of problems with
government being non responsive. So what we'll do is we'll say, yeah,
you can stay in government, but only for a brief
period of time. We're going to put someone else in
there who's equally non responsive. But the real power is
in the hands of the bureaucrats. Anyone who's ever been
(05:45):
around government understands this. The politicians don't know. They ask
Christy Noam this weekend, is it true that FEMA didn't
do this, this, and this, and FEMA didn't answer the
phones in Texas? And she says, I don't know, because
she's an imbecile because she doesn't know. You can't know
there's somebody in FEMA who made that decision. That's the
(06:07):
way it works. So I think a lot about this.
It comes up a lot because I get a lot
of requests to promote this or that. Every single day,
somebody will ask me to promote this or that thing
that they're doing for Camp Hope. And I can't possibly
do that for a number of reasons, one of which
(06:28):
is I want to have punch. When somebody's raising five
hundred thousand dollars for Camp Hope, I want to make
sure I give that a lot of attention. When someone
is doing something that's going to raise five hundred dollars,
that's wonderful, But I can't give those equal weight because
it takes five hundred thousand, not five hundred dollars to
keep Camp Hope going. I'm grateful for the five hundred.
(06:50):
But then you find that a number of businesses or
individuals will say, hey, we're going to support Camp Hope.
Tell people to come in here and spend money, and
when they spend money, we'll give a little bit of
it to Camp Hope. Well, nobody ever follows up and
finds out if they did that. And I will often
ask David Malsby, did we get a check from so
(07:11):
and so because they marketed using camp hope as to
why you should come in and spend money this weekend
at their restaurant or there this or there that, And
he'll say, I'm sorry, he knows why I'm asking because
I'm following up and I'm not suggesting that it would
be any more efficient if we had a governmental entity
to do it. I think the American Red Cross is
(07:33):
an absolute scam for what that's worth, and nobody calls
them on it to account because they got so many
famous people on their board. Most Underloaded job Seeker song,
the reference to Uncle Joe so clever, so incredibly clever.
(07:55):
So I wish there was an answer to the uh
to the scammer. But it's sort of like what I
said last week about you get into trouble when you
assume that everyone is just like you. I want to
(08:16):
smash my head into a brick wall. When people will say, Michael,
how can those people show up where the illegals are
being deported and shoot at our officers? How can they
do that? Don't they realize those officers are doing some
doing us a favor and it makes me crazy. But
(08:40):
then I realized, I guess in some ways it's good.
There's still people that are not as cynical as you are,
but it is It is naive and dangerous to believe
that everybody shore there's your values and behave the way
(09:02):
you would. How many times when you've seen a story
in the news have you thought to yourself, how can
someone do that because they're not bothered the way you are?
How could Bernie Madoff, who claimed to be a proud Jew,
(09:25):
take charitable contributions one hundred percent of them of charitable
foundations and use that and squander that money, squander it
all weekend and play tennis with them on Monday and
have lunch with them on Tuesday, knowing he has left
that foundation with zero dollars. It's not like you. I
(09:47):
could never know. You couldn't. But the danger becomes when
you assume that because you couldn't, someone else couldn't. Fred says,
your opinion confirmed. The American Red Cross is horrible. I've
volunteered twice for a full week, five straight days each
(10:08):
after Alison and after Rita from eight in the morning
till six in the evening, worst bureaucracy and ego combat
zone ever and an absolute sinful waste of donated dollars.
And this from someone who worked at the HISD TODJ.
Mahal On Richmond for two years in the eighties. So
(10:29):
every time there is an incident, a big incident like Kerville,
and I'm always worried that our company's going to ask
me to speak for an American Red Cross. So what
I try to do is I get out in front
of it and go, hey, guys, because the company likes
(10:50):
to use our resources to raise a lot of money
for whatever is going to help the most. Well, the
thing is, there's a flood in Miami on Monday, in
North Carolina on Tuesday, and Curveville on Wednesday, in Los
Angeles on Thursday, and Idaho on Friday. You don't know
(11:11):
what the good local organization is. You can't. So where
the American Red Cross steps up is We're this good
organization that you learned about Clara Barton, and we do
in Florence, Nightingale or whoever else. We're nice people and
(11:32):
we have really really nice commercials on TV. Well, that's
how I know I can trust you and so it
becomes very easy to write a check to the American
Red Cross. The American Red Cross has long made its
part of its business model in each major city where
they raise all the money to make it a social
(11:56):
status to be on the board. Ah, yes, to be
on the board of the American Red Cross. Is American
Cancer Association as well, but the American Red Cross, you're
on the board. And then they brought in Liddy Dole,
who was Bob Dole's wife, and she was, you know,
transportation secretary, and she ran the or oh this is
(12:18):
and so what it became is something that rich people
could feel like they were doing some good and never
have to actually touch anything dirty. But we all feel
so good the American Red Cross. And what would happen
is immediately when something like Currville would happen, the nation
would say we want to help, and donations would flood in. Well,
(12:44):
the American Red Cross has got a whole pr team,
they got money to spend, They probably put some ads
on there, and boy, they just soak in the contributions. Well,
my understanding is and I say that, well, my understanding
(13:04):
is that if you donate during Harvey to the American
Red cross where they're standing around in Houston and you
live in Houston and you donate all this money, they
don't necessarily spend it in Houston. They spend it in
(13:26):
other places. To the extent that they spend anything at all,
they spend it on corporate salaries, their executive director salaries,
and beautiful buildings and all these sorts of things that
don't save a soul. Well, if people understood in Houston
that when you donate during Harvey, that those funds are
(13:48):
not going exclusively to Houston but might get siphoned off
to somewhere else, I dare say their revenues would drop,
their contributions would drop dramatically. But you know, it's not
just that. It's not just the do gooder, self dealing
(14:12):
society charitable organizations where this happens. I tear. One of
the things that I find most frustrating is you'll have
these scoundrels that will say, if you come in here
and spend a bunch of money on our plays, we'll
give a couple of pennies to the charity. They don't
use those words, but that's what they're doing. And then
(14:33):
you get folks who say we're going to feed these people,
and we're going to pay for it ourselves. Our restaurant
is and there was a place called Vasinos. And if
they're to be believed, they're just feeding. If you want
to write them a check to help them feed more, fine,
But they're just feeding people because they're a local tex
(14:54):
mex restaurant and this is their community. And then we
had the guy with grape juice. That's what they're do it.
And then you'll have people who say one hundred percent
of our profits will go and so if they if
they made a thousand dollars, if they brought in one
thousand dollars today and their profits were three hundred, they'll
write a check for three hundred. Then you have people
(15:16):
will say one hundred percent of our proceeds, so whatever
you come in and spend that will go to the cause.
It's just frustrating. There's no good answer, and I can't
solve this problem. But I had an experience. We had
an officer in Baytown who was shot and killed execution. Still,
I was asked by a pizza company in the town
(15:40):
to raise money and we raised I think a million
dollars and they wrote a check for a handful and
I'm still sore about it today.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Michael said, for.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The ones we go don you are on the Michael
Berry Show.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Hey, good morning, Michael. I'm seventy years old and I
was raised in Houston and went to HISD all my life.
I remember back in the sixties going to elementary school,
we were sent home with little Red Cross envelopes for
our parents to donate too. So I think the indoctrination
of us into the whole Red Cross thing goes way
(16:23):
back for some of us.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I think you're absolutely right. You know, there is something
called Navigator, or I believe it's called Charity Navigator. I
forget what it's called. And it gives a rating to
nonprofits as to what percentage of their money that they
receive in donations goes towards overhead bonuses, salaries and the like.
(16:54):
And yeah, I don't know how many people know about it,
some people do, but it is it is an attempt
to bring some accountability to an issue that we know
there are bad people. I mean, we just know that
we know there are bad people. And the thing is
(17:17):
what makes them particularly pernicious is that they always gravitate
to areas where people are meaning to do the best.
They gravitate to patriotism, they gravitate to community spirit. After Curville,
(17:41):
they gravitate to tragedy and loss. They're the lowest scum.
When you walk up on the several species who feed
on the dead, and you get a certain emotion should
you recoil at how vile they are. There's still part
(18:06):
of the there's still part of the natural cycle, but
there's something about them that is grotesque. I have witnessed
this type of person so many times, so I ran
out of time. Last segment, there was a deputy who
was shot and killed in Baytown a few years ago,
(18:29):
and he was walking into the station. I think he
was a constable's deputy walking into the station. A guy
just walks up behind him, doesn't see him coming, like
five o'clock in the morning, shoots him in the back
of the head. Did not know the deputy had no
beef with him. I had no real reason why he
did it, just thought he would do it. So here
(18:51):
was a deputy that had I mean, I think he'd
been on the department thirty years, well regarded guy. He
would get there before anyone else and make the coffee
sort of everybody's friend. And it was brought to my
attention by some folks who knew him and they were
gonna raise money for him. So one of the one
(19:13):
of the pizza companies in our region said, well, we'll
we'll have a day in his honor where we will
donate from what we sell. So I had the head
of that company for the region come on the show
(19:38):
and I said, you're donating the proceeds that means all money, yes,
I said, not the profits. You're donating the proceeds that's gross,
not net, and he said yes. So an officer friend
(20:01):
of mine, Steve Marino, was very good friends with that
family and they had been counseling the family, the widow
at night, so he stayed very close to it and
live on the air on our evening show that day.
People were calling in and we were encouraging them. And
(20:24):
I have never twenty years of doing this, I've never
had this experience. I had people emailing me and saying, Michael,
we just called our Papa John's and they said the
wait is going to be three hours and fifteen minutes,
and we said we'll wait. It's for a good cost.
(20:47):
I mean, people are so short tempered and in a hurry.
And the faster things happen, the more demanding we become.
That everything happened that fast all the time. We don't say, Wow,
this is really nice. Think how much better it is
today than the old snail mail. Think how much better
(21:08):
it is than having us in a fax. Think how
much better things are with this this and it? Don't
We just want everything faster fast. I had people telling
me that the next day it took four hours to
get our pizza and it was the best pizza ever.
The pizza was cold. We didn't care. We were participating.
You know what. We can't make a big donation to things,
(21:32):
but we could buy, golly order a pizza, and we'll
use that company again because of it. And so days
and weeks go by and there's no check to the widow,
and then there's a little bit of tiny check. And
I already knew that it was close to a million
dollars in sales. We had officers who were going into
(21:56):
the locations of this national pizza company. We're going into
the locations in uniform. The constables were letting their constable's
deputies do this, and they went in the kitchen and
they got flour, they're making pizzas. This is all going
to a great cause. We're all in this together, and
it ended up being a little pissant contribution to the widow.
(22:20):
So I called the fellow up. I said, Keith, what
the hell are we doing here? What are we doing?
We busted our butt to raise all that money for
that officer you came on and he said, well, Michael,
what costs it? We don't make very much money on
a pizza. I said, I know that was your busiest
day of the year, and it doesn't matter how much
(22:41):
profit you make. You said, proceeds, and he said, it's
all the same. But you'd be surprised. We don't make
We don't make just the tiniest bit on pizzas. I
don't need to know your profit margin because that wasn't
part of the conversation. The conversation was buy a pizza,
(23:03):
and the money you spend with that company will go
directly to the widow. And now you tell me the profits. Well,
the prophets still, the amount given to her was also
not the prophet. It was far, far, far less, and
(23:23):
I have I won't do it on the air, but
I have most of you know who I'm talking about.
I have used every opportunity that that person's name comes
up in conversation with me to say I had a
horrible experience with this person. I feel this person is
a scoundrel. And the victim in all of this is twofold.
(23:47):
It is the widow of the woman of the deputy
who was killed, and it is all the people who
bought a pizza that they may not have wanted, who
waited forever, who spent their harder and money in twelve
twenty thirty dollars might not seem a lot, but for
a lot of people it was. And I had people
(24:07):
who said, I never, we don't do that, We don't
order pizza like that. We could get a tatinos at
the store for a dollar fifty whatever it was. I
did that to help that deathtic. So, yeah, there are
scoundrels out there who live among us. You normally smoke
mister Bidens the Michael Berry Show. Have you seen these
(24:29):
churches or or you're Catholic, Jim that noodles are being
presented instead of wafers. They call them Roman Catholics. Yeah,
that's my that's my Catholic joke for the day. I
was somewhere earlier this summer and there were a group
(24:54):
of guys and guys where were We must have been
six of us, And somebody brought up religious affiliation. And
this guy said, well, I'm Catholic. What are you? I said,
(25:15):
I'm Christian. And he didn't think that was funny, and
I said, Oh, don't worry. I don't have anything against Catholics.
Some of my best friends are Catholics, which is one
of my favorite things to say about anything. I don't
have anything against Homo's, I don't have anything against Mexicans.
I don't have anything against left handed people whatever. Some
(25:36):
of my best friends are because that's always been one
of my favorite lines. He got his feelings hurt, and
he told the person who had put the group together
that I was mean, I'm fifty four years old, you're
in your mid forties. Mean, what are we eight mean?
(26:00):
That's a funny joke right there. I'm not Catholic. I'm Christian.
It's not funny, Michael, I'm Catholic. Okay, So let me
get this straight. I can make all the jokes about
how blacks need to stop voting for Democrats, they need
(26:20):
to stop making bad decisions. They need to stop doing
this and this. I can do it in an accent.
I can use this line. I can ridicule this beacon
of blackness among certain people. And you think it's hilarious.
But when I make a Catholic joke, you get your
(26:41):
feelings hurt. Do you kind of notice what's going on there?
Funny is funny? You got a good Southern Baptist joke. Fire.
I love it. It's either true or it's not true.
I find it hilarious. How many people do not want
any affiliation they have to have a joke attached to it.
(27:06):
And I've come to understand that is because people don't
understand what a joke is. A joke is not an insult.
If you ever watched a Southern Baptist comic, there are
a few of them. What's the guy's name, Tim? This
guy's name Jim that does the funny songs? Tim. He
(27:27):
makes jokes that are at the expense of Southern Baptists.
We used to have guys come in that would preach
revivals at our church and then have some jokes about
how many committees we had and Baptists versus this where
Baptists were the joke of it. We thought it was hilarious.
If you can't laugh at yourself and you don't understand
(27:48):
the point of humor. And it's important that people understand.
Sight is a sense. If you lack the sense of sight,
you are called blind. Sound is a sense ability to hear.
If you lack that sense, you are deaf. If you
(28:12):
lack the sense of speech. Forever, you were referred to
as dumb. Dumb did not mean stupid. Dumb was replaced
with mute because it became the case that if you
couldn't respond when someone spoke to you, that you were
considered stupid, an imbecile, whatever word you wanted to use.
(28:35):
So if you asked someone a question and they weren't
able to answer the question, you said, what are you dumb?
Meaning what are you mute? It didn't mean stupid. But
in time those two words blended together so that most
people today may be made I don't know. I suspect
(28:56):
a lot of people today don't know that the term
dumb refer to the inability of speech, and so dumb
was changed to stupid. Well, and well, stupid replaced dumb.
That's what I meant to say, was dumb was replaced
by mute, the inability to speak. So if you lack
(29:18):
these certain senses, which some people do, you lack the
sense of taste, of smell, touch doesn't make you a
bad person, but it does reduce your ability to experience
the phenomena of life. And there is such a thing
(29:38):
as lacking a sense of humor. It's called a sense
of humor. For a reason, you are humor less, which
is one of the worst insults I can give someone.
And that brings us to our next point. Be mindful
of the humorless. The humorless are the people who will
(30:01):
turn you into hr The humorless are the people who
show up at work in a bad mood because their
cat pissed on their socks because they always have a
lot of cats. The humorless are the people who are
not in love, nor are they loved. They don't have
rewarding relationships, They have not achieved the professional success they
(30:26):
believe they are entitled to. They do not get the
appreciation and the a plumba and the applause that they
think that they are entitled to, so it puts them
on edge at all times. You ever see somebody walk
in front of you in the crosswalk, and they slow down,
(30:49):
real slow, even though it's turned green for you to go,
as if go ahead and hit me, I'm gonna slow down.
How sad did you have to be that your sense
of utility, because it's not joy that you're mad at
the guy who's in the car, who's in the lane,
who's next up at the end. That your victory today
(31:12):
is that they're not going to run you over because
it would be more hassle than just waiting. So they'll wait.
And maybe I can make that person mad who's sitting
in the car waiting while I walk slower to cross
the intersection. Maybe I can make him as miserable as
I am by slowing down. That guy is humorless. People
(31:38):
who laugh are happy. People who can't laugh and say, well,
I like jokes. I like jokes. They just have to
be funny. That one wasn't funny. You don't get to
decide what's money. That's the whole point. You don't get
to decide what's money. The fact that you don't see
the humor in something doesn't make it less funny, nor
(32:00):
does it make it offensive. Makes you sad and pitiful.
So identify those people in their lives and then cut
them out like a cancer, because that's the person who's
going to HR. And by the way, HR is always
going to be populated by somebody just like them. A
person who gets up in the morning hoping to take
(32:22):
out the best seller at the company, the best executive
at the company, the most loved person at the company,
because that's all they can really do is drag through
an intersection and make the latest second. That's their contribution
to humanity.
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