July 4, 2025 • 50 mins
In this episode, Professor Mouse, the Cosmologist, and Teddy discuss potentially and hopefully obsolete news. (We recorded early).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Time.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
It's like a clown. No, don't this little page. He's
bagging boarding batman and the gutter like a maze. Story
tellers me some fellas, we some felons.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Isn't amazing. It's like appella bever sell it because this
ship is so contagious. Mouths on the summer.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
He's co pilot, got the show while the cycle spinning
knowledge on the getty like a pro beat the Babo
the rabbit.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Don't step to the squad.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We get activic and hate. It's like a stepla parts.
You don't like fish talk?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Do you hate? It's a batl we.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The cuttle fish killers, tended pools on the taping Greatest
Spider Stars. If you cherish your life, Bucky Barneshit squad
spraying legen your pipe.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition. Uh is this just bad?
Is this just bad? The best podcast you ever heard of?
Speaker 4 (00:40):
I'm your host, Professor Mouse, joined as always by the
Cosmologist and Teddy.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Boom boom boom boom. That's what you hear outside right now?
Boo boo. It's the fourth of July. Boooo. This is
what you're hearing. Rod go America. Uh, good war another war.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
Oh wow, we're just you're just calling your shot. Huh,
it's just just Adam baumb corner pocket.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
In the into the future.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
It's the fourth of July. We're celebrating us. We're celebrating this.
Doddre getting into another log war murder?
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Can you get Can you get into another one if
you haven't finished the previous one?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Oh, you can get into a different one. You can
certainly have multiple wars going at one Yes, yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
At some point, yes, certainly. But also are they actually
different wars when when it's all the same root cause
of like we want their oil and also there's three
companies that make money off of the war happening, and
you cut off one head, two more take its place.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
This US is the US started Harry Potter and the
Boy who Lived or whatever the fuck it's called. Before
he got to the end and they found out that
the guy had a face on the back of his head.
They started reading the Chamber of Secrets, just kept kept
(02:17):
not finishing, but going on to the sequel.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And so that's what you were talking, Okay. I was incredible.
I was like, all right, I'm trying to follow what
the analogy is.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Okay, it didn't help that I forgot the name of
the books and what happened to them. But the first one,
Philosophers Zone. It is very much like what we talked
about with Brisbee, where you you buy games before you
finish them.
Speaker 5 (02:44):
It's just like, yes, yeah, this needs to be you
cannot We were talking some time ago about listening to
one CD until it breaks. Yeah, like you haven't even
gotten to the end of the track the first go
on the track ack list. You haven't even like taken
a look at the bonus features on the second disc
(03:04):
itt and you're already into the next one. But yes,
certainly they have a similar causes, same root bullshit. I
I'm glad we're banking some emphasizes ahead of time.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Yeah, there's there's.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Like a whole fucking thing like online about people like
regretting their voting ship. But it's like what what did why?
Like the centrist who voted for for Trump because like
Joe Biden was a mannequin, which fair, but you know,
vote for something else like just fill in your dog's name,
(03:44):
the like whole Oh god, I couldn't have believed you
would do this, Like he assassinated like in Irani in general.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
In his first term, Like what what this has been
on on the board.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
For like several for like a decade. At this point,
this is almost inevitability come past. Like there's no one
who's shocked by this except I guess people who were
voting for him as like the dove or whatever.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
And so now we're in.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
We're engaging in the most direct way, and this long
protracted struggle that has never quelled or ended just kind
of like eliminated itself from public consciousness for a little bit.
And we will be there for the rest of the
empire's fault and this might cause it. And we talked
(04:34):
about on this podcast like just kind of becoming like
a France or something like that, just like a country
that just like doesn't have global power influence. It's like
this is the beginning of that. And I can't wait.
I can't wait to be like just to kind of
become the UK, where like it's an empire, it still exists,
(04:56):
it's it's there.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Great Britain is there, but it's like they don't do anything.
There's there, there's.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I was just gonna say, if Britain was so great,
why is its abbreviation ky anywhere.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I like it.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Yeah, that's that's absolutely Our best case scenario is to
fade into the background but still benefit from institutional wealth
and privilege as opposed to getting actively bombed.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Yeah, that's like we're that's what we're praying for, is
to just kind of become just to kind of become
a functional, uh society without the global influence and without
the global dominance as opposed to being wiped off the
face of the earth for the sins that we've committed.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, I will say, And that's the So I've been
actively as you know, over over the time I've been
on the podcast, I've on the pod, I've been trying
to cultivate a sense of either silver lining or there's
an additional view that we can you know, continue to
(06:16):
bring nuance. Unfortunately, in this particular regard, I was very
seriously looking at finances in other denominations and in other
countries and how that looked. And I talked to one
of my cousins who lives overseas, and he basically went, hey, man,
(06:37):
unless you are planning to actively move to a different country,
the US's broad financial reach is such that a non
global touch is not possible, and we are far enough
(07:01):
into the whalan utani of it, of the the corporate
international corporate monopolies and cartels and corporate forces, that the
American Empire will only give way to a corpocrisy. I
(07:23):
think is the term whatever that term is. Maybe I've
just made it up, coined TMTM, as the maclroys would say.
But yeah, that'll be my thesis book if I have
a right one. But seriously, we the way that American
companies have been entrenched globally, there just isn't a way
(07:45):
to do that.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So you're saying that the only alternative is like it
becomes an oligopoly, Like it won't become like Brance or
any of these like European colonial powers. It became sort
of like functioning socialist economies. The United States can only
become a dictatorship or like plutocracy.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Well, I would say the option is more like if
we had the South Seas Company or the British India
Tea Company, if either of those became an actual government,
that's more likely for the US.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Yeah, and it's just Amazon.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Amazon, Alphabet soup. I don't think meta actually has the
staying powers.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
It doesn't yeah, it doesn't beyond it's like weird hardware
than nobody.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Likes honestly the other but Amazon has an absurd and
a really upsettingly absurd reach for all of the web services,
like there.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Is AWS already props up most of the US government
right now.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Not just US government, that's the unfortunate part.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Right and also all of every private sector company. Yeah,
the Wayland Utani is a good comp I've just read
something about the price of bananas finally going up and
somebody describing bananas as like the fruit that inflation forgot,
and of course, and somebody is talking about like, you
can't produce bananas, you can't build bananas in the United States,
(09:27):
And of course bananas famously are this colonial byproduct. The
fact that they are so cheap here and that we
can get them all year is this insane side effect
of globalization and colonialism. So like that feels like the
(09:47):
canary in the coal mine for me. Of like, bananas
are actually getting more expensive. They're catching up with you know,
we can't be insulated from the sins of what it
takes to have bananas in our grocery stores all the
time forever. It feels like a big change.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
It was the I think maybe we're talking about this
off off pod, but it was that. It was the
the Lutnik was. It was testifying again before Congress and
they were asking Hi about tariffs and he he was like, yeah, well,
you know, if if if the companies just produced in
(10:28):
the United States, they don't have to worry about tarofts.
And one of the congressional representatives was like, you know,
Americans eat billions of bananas, and you know, we can't
grow that many bananas physically in the United States for
large scale commercial consumption, So what do you mean make
(10:49):
it in the United States. It is such like a
kid's understanding of like how a global economy works, where
it's like trade deficits are useful because there's country that
can produce shit that you can't do effectively or efficiently
in your country, and then you can produce it that
they can't in theirs, and so you trade and both
(11:11):
of you are enriched by that. And it's like the
Secretary of the Treasury, based on the whims of the President,
is like everything made in the United States, nothing imported.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Ever.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Just build a fucking wall. We're going planet hulk or whatever.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
The fuck.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
That book was called There's gonna be of Ice wall
around the country and we're doing everything here and it's
like that would.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Suck, and it it does, and but like everything is
tariff to hell. I you know, it was tracking h.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
I talked about my Dice subscription, the which I canceled
because Tariff's doubled the prize. They sent an email out
to former subscribers and they said, oh, the tariff breeze
has uh.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
We don't to RaSE the price anymore.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
And I was like, great, subscribed and then they said
another one out and they were like, incoming tariffs, we're
raising the price again. It's like, man, fuck this this
is not worth it?
Speaker 5 (12:13):
Yeah, truly, Like how much do you like corn?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Cool?
Speaker 5 (12:17):
How much do you like anything other than corn? Sorry? Dude,
what do we make here in the state?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I think, And I know this one won't. This is
the thing I'm about to say will not move most
Americans or most American politicians. So it might be a
bit asinine to bring up.
Speaker 5 (12:41):
So please keep that something on the podcast. Yeah, please
go ahead, go right ahead.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The tariffs effect, we were talking about global reaches. The
tariffs affect manufacturing in other countries in such a more
profound way than the US right now now saying yet
the US will suffer when it comes to prices, and
there's a lot of medications that are going to be
(13:12):
harder to come by because injectors are the types of
plastics that are needed for injectors, the metal that needs
to go in for certain needles. Like, all of that
being said, yes, that's going to affect a lot of
people in here. But if we also look at how
manufacturing works globally, if we look at the producers in
(13:34):
places like Shangzong, places like outside of Hong Kong, things
in Malaysia, Bangladesh, these tariffs are crashing economies at a
scale not actually seen before. And the amount of global
(13:56):
misery that's coming about because of these price fluctuations is
hard to quantify, like the amount of people, because honestly,
one of the reasons why a lot of American manufacturing
goes over there is because there's not always a lot
of transparency about who or how many people are working
on a particular widget or thing, and the price of
(14:21):
that is we don't know exactly how many workers, we
don't know exactly how many cottage industries within there are
going to just go away and evaporate, causing huge amounts
of strife in terms of the amount of capital. Like
even if Americans aren't spending on certain amounts, the American
(14:43):
military share is still going to do that. And if
some of those tariffs go in and shut down huge arms,
just large amounts of the global populace are going to starve.
A large amount of the global park populace are just
to be out of I don't know, I put starve
(15:04):
out of work, but truly, like when you're out of
work or when you don't have those means, and a
lot from the way some of it works, people will
go to factories for weeks on end and send money
back to villages. That's gonna dry up. And that's not
me trying to project as an American not knowing this
is a true reality of some of the factory cities
(15:28):
from Walmart, some of the if you think about button
manufacturing or clasps, just those kind of everyday things, there
are huge factories and huge amounts of people working there
who are just going to be Yeah, just the amount
of global misery that's coming from it in that perspective
(15:50):
is just hard to fathom here. And it's not like
if we tried to make everything in the US, we
don't have the infrastructure to do it. We can talk
about the social Oh our Americans willing to like do
the button manufacturing jobs. We don't have the infrastructure for
data centers. We certainly do not have the infrastructure for
(16:13):
like large scale manufacturing anymore. The American John Walsh from Yeah,
the ge guy who like sold everything from Ge so
instead of everything in house, he broke it up and
the idea of oh, we sell at the final quarter
to inflate the stock price. That guy, he's the reason
(16:35):
why we don't have manufacturing in the US, because well,
it's cheaper to outsource it and then cut the manufacturing
towns because labor is cheaper. We just don't. We have
no way, of no mechanism to do this anymore.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
This is a really good point and it ties into
a mouse you're saying about free trade and like, you know,
we manufactured things they don't. They manufactured things we don't.
We trade back and forth in the United States is
a hollow shell now, like the only thing we trade
is money. Basically, there isn't a lot left here to
(17:10):
physically make things. And the what the tariffs are finally
pulling the rug up and revealing, is how brittle that
global supply. I mean, we saw this supply chain issues right,
like the how things drive. Because your fruit cup, it
(17:32):
was cheaper to have the fruits come from three different countries,
have it package in a fourth country and then flown
somewhere else, and like those things, there's a lot of
you know, human rights violations and environmental impact of doing
it that way to begin with. It is the way
it is built. The way Teddy is describing has all
(17:56):
kinds of like long term unso sustainable problems to begin with,
and so the fact to have tariffs just accelerate that problem.
He's very scary. But also you know, I guess best
(18:17):
case scenario, it's a we need to really radically re
evaluate how we make things in value human life. That's
not what this is going to do in any I
mean it is, we are doing it right now, we're
thinking through it. I'm sure it is. As people go
through incredible suffering, they will also rethink that folks in
(18:42):
power not so much with weirdly the exception, so the
no Kings protests that came through I heard. I don't
know if this is apocryphal, that some of those were
organized by the Waltons, as in the Walmart family, which
is fascinating if true, because it means that it makes
(19:06):
perfect sense to me that they're like, Oh, tariffs and
getting people deported cuts into the two things that makes
Walmart money really really cheap goods from other countries and
not having to document or pay on the US based employees.
You have ripped out the supply chains that fund that
(19:29):
fill Walmart shells and also ripped out the people who
are getting subsidized on food stamps and not documented to
actually work in those stores. It would make sense that
the oligarchs who benefit from this are not particularly happy
with the choices that the that Trump is making. So
(19:50):
while the Wayland utahification of the country and the economy
is objectively bad, the fact that it feels like best
case scenario realistically is that the corporate overlords and the
political overlordsh rip each other to pieces.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Maybe no, yeah, And that's the real thing about it too,
is that, I mean, all of this is like a
huge backlash against labor. There's like this way that it's
like do you do you do? Will Americans pick strawberries,
(20:31):
Will Americans working factories?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Will Americans so buttons on the clothes?
Speaker 4 (20:38):
The answer is yes, how much are you paying that?
Because I have a bunch of friends that if you
are paying a Liverpool wage, you're paying twenty dollars an
hour to work in a fucking semiconductor factory, would absolutely
take that job.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
And it's just it.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
The aversion to paying living wages to people is the
fucking the souper de jure of the American experiment menu
since the nineteen seven I mean way before that, but
like really really since the nineteen seventies, and so this
like depression and real wages and this like and this
(21:21):
is why this like American made America first, shit's not
gonna work too, because a lot of the people who
are coming out as being sort of sympathetic the importers
are also horrible capitalists because they are engaged in the
reproduction of this like global.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Labor market that is it.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
It's all about eliminating that cost burden, eliminating labor costs
as much as humanly possible, and some of the things
that you can get away with in other countries you
just can't get away with in the United States, and
you can get away with some heinous shit.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
If you're doing it to Americans.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
To your point about undocumented folks and Walmart, Walmart has
a vested interest because they're the number one food supplier
in the United States, and they rely on undocumented immigrants
to make the profit margins that they make because they
can engage in wage theft and also in setting the
price at the top that the farmer has to basically meet.
(22:31):
And so it's like Walmart says they're only paying this
much for strawberries, and they only want this much, so
I planted more than that. All you motherfuckers get out
there and whatever sells is the money you'll make. And
so there are tons of undocumented people who literally are
engaged in enslave labor because when you're out there in
(22:52):
the fields picking shit that ends up getting thrown away
and they don't get any money.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
I mean, what do you call that?
Speaker 5 (22:58):
But then in addition to the massive human and food
waste involved in that whole system is truly disgusting.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, which is wild in terms of and this is
this is me kind of not utopiafying, but the amount
that is produced that could just be hand, like if
if if we're looking at hey, we need to reduce
the amount of labor. You know what I think. I
(23:30):
think labor can be beautiful when you are sitting there
doing like, oh, somebody put in a lot of labor
in building a chair. They put a lot of love
and craft into doing this. There's a lot of love
and craft in certain video games. There's some interesting things
that people do with art. People think do beautiful things
with science that is hard and takes a lot of work.
(23:52):
I'm all for, Hey, let's automate some stuff for when
it comes to picking vegetables in hunt degree weather. And
if we don't want to pay robots to do that, cool,
but we should I don't know, maybe benefit as humanity
from not having to do that, being able to like, oh,
(24:16):
somebody who is who is in a wheelchair, or somebody
who can't go out and do farm labor, or like
all of those. Maybe we should just provide food and that,
you know, if it's there. Why why? Why?
Speaker 5 (24:34):
Yeah, the massive cognitive dissonance between incredible resource shortages and
also wait a second, incredible waste. There isn't actually a
resource shortage. It's just a just an empathy shortage sucks
so bad.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Weirdly, I think, and this is again another as we're
talking about this, it's coming back, but we're with the
amount that ICE as an occupying army is acting in
terms of agriculture, specifically folks who are working a lot
(25:15):
of these areas. We're losing huge amounts of institutional knowledge.
This is me being cynical. The people who have been
doing it are the people who know how to. So
you're telling me, oh, things are gonna get better when
all of the competent people who know these are the
(25:36):
things that sell, these are the things that these are
the products that work, This is the times to pick things.
All of that's just gonna go away. And you think
things are supposed to get better when all the people
who know what they're doing are gone. What explain the
logic to me? Because that doesn't that just that logic
(25:57):
does not hold up to me.
Speaker 5 (25:59):
Yeah, the idea that there there is no such thing
as unskilled labor. There are things that we don't respect
as skilled labor that still require skills, and you learn
on the job and you learn how to do things,
and yeah, that all goes away. And with the you know,
to mouse's point about the terror fluctuations, or to your
(26:21):
point about the cottage industries that are going to dry up, Like, yeah,
this is an incredibly brittle system predicated on human suffering,
and like not to bring it back to like Marx
was right. But Marx was right the separating people from
the cost of a good, So like putting all of
those layers of separation, so you don't understand why the
(26:47):
fast fashion costs as little as it does, and you
know understand why it shouldn't cost that little. Like that
all is terrible. But if that fluctuates and then the
terifs are all reversed and it goes back to the
way it was ten years ago, it can't actually go
back because there will be so much lost in one
(27:11):
it shouldn't go back. But that's like a whole other
problem of having to rebuild the entire global economy in
a way that doesn't hurt people. But even if it
were to, you've lost all those all that knowledge, and
those people have starved in the interim.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Then what mouse, I have a quick question for you,
if we're looking at like kind of that kind of
a historical perspective on this, has, to your knowledge, have
these types of teriff fluctuations had political or economic value,
(27:56):
either in the US or I mean maybe internationally. I'd
be too broad, but have like, has there ever been
precedent for this ever working before, because I.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Think great trusting, Yeah, no, there there has been in
the United States, like the famous McKinley terriffs that you know,
it was so weird to see, uh, Donald Trump go on.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
I think this was.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Joe Rogan or one of the several interviews he did
in the manosphere campaigning. He was like, and people forget
about President McKinley, great president, best president, like but but
behind me best president. The McKinley tariff was the sort
of huge tariff, and it typified something in the United
States that was a norm until the economy crashed. And
(28:48):
this was Republican rule. And so what the Republicans did,
to the chagrin of rural Americains and a lot of
working class Americans, was they did not support income taxes
(29:10):
and instead used tariffs as a way of generating money
for the federal government. Now McKinley was president in the
late nineteenth century, and the federal government, or as it
was known then just the government with the capital G
whenever anyone talked about the federal government or wrote about it.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Like back then, they would just call it the government
with a big G.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
Their primary responsibilities were not like intervening in state affairs
too much.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
They were collecting money.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
There was an administrative state, It was pretty small, the
bureaucracies were not terribly efficient, and a lot of it
was like spoils and ways and all this shit. And
so the McKinley tariff was made specifically to help American
companies that weren't able to compete but that still had
(30:12):
some infrastructure to produce goods. What ended up happening is
that it's an incredibly fickle revenue source for the country.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
You don't know what ebbs and flows business is.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Going to go through or how the markets are going
to react, because the markets are largely impacted by the
decisions of the government. What's not largely impacted by it,
and what's much more like predictable, is people's incomes. You
generally understand how how much money people are making in
(30:52):
a country, and by levying a taxmate you generally can
understand and predict what revenue the government is going to
pull in for whatever necessary things they're going to make
And so into the twentieth century, the state started to
take a much more active role in people's lives. And
this was at the behest of progressive reformers, like the
fucking Settlement House movement, all this shit where people were like,
(31:13):
the government should be involved in like basic social welfare,
the government should be involved in.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Healthcare to some degree.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
The government shouldn't be involved in like making sure that
people can go to the hospital, make sure that people
aren't dying of tuberculosis, to basic shit like that. To
also like the government should be involved in people like
not drinking alcohol, the government should be involved in enforcing
a moral order and a Protestant work ethic and all
this shit. And so the state starts to intervene much
(31:44):
more heavily, starts to have more expenses, to the point
where an income tax is absolutely necessary. And so by
the end of I can't remember who the fucking president was,
but by the end of one Republican administration, they pass
(32:06):
the amendment that creates an income tax, which was seen
as like probably not constitutional, and then it goes into
effect at the beginning of Woodrow Wilson's term. And so
oftentimes what what contemporary Republicans do as they go. It's
the Democrats that made the income tax. It was Woodrow Wilson,
(32:28):
but that shit was already on the fast track to
being passed and ratified, and he inherited that and then
like subsequent Republican administrations.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Like fucked with it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
But like it was, working class people preferred the income tax.
Rich people preferred tariffs because they didn't want to give
their money to the capital g government.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So I don't know that it has worked.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
It definitely works in a in a very like surge
precise way of all right, the United States is now
ramping up production of semiconductors. We have like the Chips
and Science Act and stuff like that, and this is
so that we don't have a reliance on something that
can really clog up the supply chain and that can
(33:17):
like really affect all these other industries like automobiles and
shit like that, Like consumer electronics will get fucked if
semiconductors and microchips and stuff like that aren't able to produce.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
And so Biden passes the Chips and Science Act.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
It would be smart to put a tariff on importers
who are importing microchips. If you're trying to actively grow
an American business, that would be a smart thing to
do because it will discourage folks from importing these things
that we're like saying, we're making an American industry. And
(33:54):
that's the only case in which it really sort of
works because you generate a little bit of revenue and
disincentivize people from like.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Fucking with an American industry, which is pretty good.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Like entry level jobs at semiconductor places, you can make
between seventeen and twenty dollars an hour in an entry
level position, and if you're an engineer, if you have
an engineering degree, you can be making like seventy five
eighty thousand dollars probably more. And so that's the only
time where like quote unquote works in every other instance.
(34:29):
And this is like this is like four out of
four out of five dentists a or whatever. It's like
four four out of five economists say that that wide
scale tariffs on every import into the country is a
bad idea, and then the fifth person thinks it's a
fucking terrible idea.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
So it's like historically, yes, it was.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
Terrorists were used to varying degrees up until the income
tax was codified in the Constitution, and then afterwards that
became the primary mode of government revenue until the seventies,
where the primary mode of government revenue was a credit card.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Nice.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Uh so, yeah, that doesn't work the way it's implemented.
Then we will see by the ten this comes out
what has been repealed. This could go back three or
four times by the time.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Just fucking that would like everything is bad.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
Like the fucking big beautiful bill thing is not big.
It was big, it's not beautiful, and it's getting trapped
up the Russia and we're recording this. This is like
so dangerous to like do this Collins Wells Fargo because
we're in the bank. We are banking all Collins Wells
(35:56):
Fargo because we're up to some shady shit over here.
The uh we're banking these episodes this, these are just
the murmurs of potentially the United States engaging in like
full scale war. And Putin just warned the United States
against going to war with Iran. And I'm like, man,
(36:20):
if one man could do like a broken clock is
right twice a day, if this dude could just put
the fucking fear of God into our just like our
president who's horrified of him. That would be a service
to humanity.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
Yeah, this kind of circles back around to people who
voted for Trump thinking he was anti war, the balancing
act of it. Just if anybody I think just less
war good if you have like insane ulterior motives for
that less war still good. Uh sucks when people vote
(37:03):
for you thinking that your policy is less war good
and you're like, no, no, no, just different war good.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Oh man, But like it is true.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Like I feel like Donald Trump is just like weird,
like fucking like sub vibe with Putin, Like he thinks
he's like.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
A big strong man or something like he's he's terrified
of that dude. If that dude like gives.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
Him a strong fucking strow talking to and looks into
his eyes and just lingers there.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, we're back.
Speaker 5 (37:44):
We're back on Darth Vader and the gangster they invented
of like trying to invent a worse dude to have
any kind of sympathy with the bad dude. I'm not
interested in comparing who's worse.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
I'm not comparing who's worth. But he's truly afraid of him.
He's like afraid of Russia he's afraid of he gets
into this like weird, uh this like he's he's like
loath to criticize him ever where. Like there's like a
huge propaganda in Maga of like Ukraine invaded Russia, Russia
(38:16):
is correct, and it's like played on state sponsored media
in Russia, like he is terrified.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
Yes, and certainly much of what we're seeing is he
is imitating, uh, certain things that Putin has done in
terms of some of the strategies he's talked about of
whenevery wants to invade a country, it's using a lot
of the same rhetoric about why they wish they were
part of US already or you know that, and trying
(38:46):
to annex Greenland in Canada using the same terminology that
Putin used to attack Ukraine, and then trying to have
a military parade for his birthday. Uh, you know that's
kind of that sort of thing. So, yes, there's definitely
some imitation as a form of flattery, which is I
(39:09):
think maybe less about maybe for Trump specifically about Putin.
For me, it feels like it is less about any
one man and more about trying to just like be
the big man. Like this is Mussolini style. Every dictator
looks like this has kind of a set of strategies,
(39:31):
and Trump would very much like to be in their
number and feel powerful, which is really the most pathetic
thing in the world.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
And the gag of it all is that the military
parade for his birthday or whatever, and the No King's
Day protest happened and we're both dwarfed in attendance by
just Pride. Yeah, yeah, no, when nobody went to any
(40:04):
of that shit, everybody went to Pride. And like the
fucking photo the photographs of some of the note Kings protests,
it just show kind of like just people in parks,
like listening to music, and then then like the true
juxtaposition of fifteen people watching tanks come down the street
(40:26):
and then cut to just everybody having the time of
their lives at Pride of its around the United States
is like it's such a great encapsulation of like where
our politics are right now. It's like this dude wants
to be a dictator so bad, but people are too
busy fucking partying to.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Give a fuck.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
I mean, it's like, oh my god, that was certainly
the case in my neck of the woods, Like there
was no. Nobody went to the fucking down DC. Nobody
went to the No Kings protest. Everybody was that Pride
it was fucking passed.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, I mean, if we again, I'm being as cynical
as possible. If you're in a video game and you
don't have an anti tank rifle, the general strategy is
to don't go to the tank. So if you are like, hey,
(41:28):
we're gonna put ten abrams on streets that frankly were
not designed to have abrams go down them, what direction
are you expecting people to go to the tank?
Speaker 5 (41:45):
Like?
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I feel like, again, were Tieneman Square notwithstanding, I feel
like nobody wanted to get away in the way of
the tanks. It was literally all We're just gonna bounce
And I'm like, why, what did you think was gonna happen?
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (42:05):
Yeah, So I hope that you had a fantastic Pride month.
Dear listener, Wrath is the is the next one? So
happy Wrath?
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Is it about that time?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
It's about that time. It's about that get Google get
wrecked good.
Speaker 5 (42:33):
I will recommend an interesting film I just called Zenia
or Zenia maybe uh twenty fourteen Greek film about some
Albanian Greek born brothers going on an odyssey to find
their dad and try to get citizenship, and there's a
(42:55):
like a singing contest and some dream sequences with rabbits,
and it feels a little bit like a Greg Iraqi film.
It's definitely like a new sort of Greek take on
that kind of weird wave. It's not nearly as weird
as an Iraqi film, but it has some similar energy
and it's really sweet. It's a nice road movie. So
(43:20):
I highly recommend Zenia from twenty fourteen. And it's in
you know, like kind of three languages at latch, which
is kind of cool one thinking through concepts of citizenship
and nationalism and the economy relevant to what we were
talking about today, but also very sweet. So yeah, check
(43:43):
that out.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
I will recommend. I'm doing a rewatch of Nightmare on
ELM Street cool and fucking Dream Warriors, fuck Rules, so
good nightmore.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Elms three three is so good.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
And if it weren't for Freddy, we wouldn't have The
Lord of the Rings, and that is absolutely true. There
is a moniker for Newline Cinemas, the house that Freddy
built and Newline famously produced and distributed the Peter Jackson
(44:29):
Lord of the Rings trilogy and like truly would not
be in that position if it weren't for Freddy Krueger.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
And the interesting thing.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
About these movies and you don't you don't, I guess
you don't really appreciate until you sort of like watch
them in hindsight or occur contextually with like how sort
of bad things look, is that they look fucking amazing.
There's like a full animatronic in Dream Warriors of Freddy
(45:01):
as a snake like emerging out and it's not cgi.
It's just like a functioning animatronic that is massive and
that you know, you know, chase kids down the hall
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
It's so cool.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And it's like it's called Dream Warriors because he's like
terrorizing this mental asylum and then all of the kids
find out how to get into the same dream to
team up and fight against Freddy Krueger, which is a
fucking awesome concept too.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
It's just like the creativity.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
And I know, once I get to Freddy versus Jason,
I'm gonna be like regretting everything and like the whole
like Freddy problematic stuff starts in Dream Warriors. This is
where like the cartoonish sort of a caricature of Freddy
is that he's like, uh, he'll say something problematic and
(45:56):
he'll he'll punctuate it with the word bitch. It's just
called everybody a bitch. And that starts in Dream Warriors.
He does it twice, and he does it appropriately where
you're like, Okay, this is where a menacing guy would
like do that. But then as as a franchise progresses,
this is like the thing that you forget that Jason
(46:19):
doesn't have a fucking hockey mask for like several films
where you're like, oh, Freddy didn't even really do this yet,
like until they start running out of steam or ideas
or like Wes Craven sort of you know, kind of bails.
Then it just kind of becomes like people are like,
I guess I'm working on Freddy six. What does he do?
He calls people bitch and he goes in the dream
(46:40):
we'll do we'll do that. But Dream Warriors like a
true masterpiece. It's such a good movie, and the original
one is is fantastic Freddie's Revenge. The second one is
is was not as good as I remembered it, but
I'll just be watching those because they're fucking eighty five
minutes long and are all sort of like just exercises
(47:06):
and practical effects in horror movies, which is great because
you can't do the fucking drug or going through the
woods and slashing people with a machete when the whole
can seat behind the monster is that he's the boogeyman
that goes into your dreams, and dreams are fucking crazy,
so you got to be creative while you're doing that.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Nice. In terms of mine, I have a couple of
recipes for folk a one a dairy free pesto. What
you do with the pesto, and this all dairy free
and nut free, and that's one of the reasons I
(47:47):
wanted to shout this out. What you're able to do.
You need to replace the not the type of pine
nuts that you might use with a starchy, either a
starchy root vegetable that you use first, or just straight
up a little bit of corn starch or potato starch,
(48:10):
whichever one you would prefer make as normal. Also add
in wilted wilted spring leaf mix. Lettuce doesn't work as well,
but anything that doesn't have too much water in it.
Wilt that down, blend it up like normal, Add in
forecloves of garlic and some lemon juice, and make sure
(48:33):
that that additional starch is in there as you're blending it.
Add olive oil to make sure that the flavor is there.
And the key for the dairy free portion, make sure
to add nutritional yeast, and you have a very lovely pesto.
And the starch helps replace some of the what's lost
(48:53):
from the pine nuts, So go ahead add that. The
other one is a very simple ice cream overripe bananas
in a food processor and you have banana ice cream. Uh.
It melts like it melts a little faster than regular
ice cream. But we're in a hot enough climate where
you know it's summertime. Eat the ice cream as soon
(49:15):
as you get it out of the out of the
food processor. It's really a lot creamier than you might
think from frozen right bananas. But it's excellent.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
That sounds delicious.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
Uh, Eat that while watching those films and you know,
hopefully this isn't the last podcast we ever do, but
if it is, we'll see on the next one.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Bitch.
Speaker 5 (49:44):
It's just.
Speaker 6 (49:50):
It's like, oh, pirates sport your brain Robin Nalis, don't
chokin open in your mind with the probots as you
woken hydrahalin hairs and for time the hell of.
Speaker 5 (49:57):
Reasons, for more than with the soldiers, with them for
all seasons.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Listen closely while.
Speaker 6 (50:01):
We share our expertise in customic comments, culture, Deane streetuition
to the multiversity molss like good teaching, perfect balance when
we snap in fine.
Speaker 5 (50:08):
Jensen too, your ears does the shoulders when we speak
Speaker 6 (50:10):
Purple men, versus and feet were randy savage draandals with
their mortal technique
Time.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
It's like a clown. No, don't this little page. He's
bagging boarding batman and the gutter like a maze. Story
tellers me some fellas, we some felons.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Isn't amazing. It's like appella bever sell it because this
ship is so contagious. Mouths on the summer.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
He's co pilot, got the show while the cycle spinning
knowledge on the getty like a pro beat the Babo
the rabbit.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Don't step to the squad.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We get activic and hate. It's like a stepla parts.
You don't like fish talk?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Do you hate? It's a batl we.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The cuttle fish killers, tended pools on the taping Greatest
Spider Stars. If you cherish your life, Bucky Barneshit squad
spraying legen your pipe.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition. Uh is this just bad?
Is this just bad? The best podcast you ever heard of?
Speaker 4 (00:40):
I'm your host, Professor Mouse, joined as always by the
Cosmologist and Teddy.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Boom boom boom boom. That's what you hear outside right now?
Boo boo. It's the fourth of July. Boooo. This is
what you're hearing. Rod go America. Uh, good war another war.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
Oh wow, we're just you're just calling your shot. Huh,
it's just just Adam baumb corner pocket.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
In the into the future.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
It's the fourth of July. We're celebrating us. We're celebrating this.
Doddre getting into another log war murder?
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Can you get Can you get into another one if
you haven't finished the previous one?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Oh, you can get into a different one. You can
certainly have multiple wars going at one Yes, yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
At some point, yes, certainly. But also are they actually
different wars when when it's all the same root cause
of like we want their oil and also there's three
companies that make money off of the war happening, and
you cut off one head, two more take its place.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
This US is the US started Harry Potter and the
Boy who Lived or whatever the fuck it's called. Before
he got to the end and they found out that
the guy had a face on the back of his head.
They started reading the Chamber of Secrets, just kept kept
(02:17):
not finishing, but going on to the sequel.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And so that's what you were talking, Okay. I was incredible.
I was like, all right, I'm trying to follow what
the analogy is.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Okay, it didn't help that I forgot the name of
the books and what happened to them. But the first one,
Philosophers Zone. It is very much like what we talked
about with Brisbee, where you you buy games before you
finish them.
Speaker 5 (02:44):
It's just like, yes, yeah, this needs to be you
cannot We were talking some time ago about listening to
one CD until it breaks. Yeah, like you haven't even
gotten to the end of the track the first go
on the track ack list. You haven't even like taken
a look at the bonus features on the second disc
(03:04):
itt and you're already into the next one. But yes,
certainly they have a similar causes, same root bullshit. I
I'm glad we're banking some emphasizes ahead of time.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Yeah, there's there's.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
Like a whole fucking thing like online about people like
regretting their voting ship. But it's like what what did why?
Like the centrist who voted for for Trump because like
Joe Biden was a mannequin, which fair, but you know,
vote for something else like just fill in your dog's name,
(03:44):
the like whole Oh god, I couldn't have believed you
would do this, Like he assassinated like in Irani in general.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
In his first term, Like what what this has been
on on the board.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
For like several for like a decade. At this point,
this is almost inevitability come past. Like there's no one
who's shocked by this except I guess people who were
voting for him as like the dove or whatever.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
And so now we're in.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
We're engaging in the most direct way, and this long
protracted struggle that has never quelled or ended just kind
of like eliminated itself from public consciousness for a little bit.
And we will be there for the rest of the
empire's fault and this might cause it. And we talked
(04:34):
about on this podcast like just kind of becoming like
a France or something like that, just like a country
that just like doesn't have global power influence. It's like
this is the beginning of that. And I can't wait.
I can't wait to be like just to kind of
become the UK, where like it's an empire, it still exists,
(04:56):
it's it's there.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Great Britain is there, but it's like they don't do anything.
There's there, there's.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I was just gonna say, if Britain was so great,
why is its abbreviation ky anywhere.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I like it.
Speaker 5 (05:18):
Yeah, that's that's absolutely Our best case scenario is to
fade into the background but still benefit from institutional wealth
and privilege as opposed to getting actively bombed.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Yeah, that's like we're that's what we're praying for, is
to just kind of become just to kind of become
a functional, uh society without the global influence and without
the global dominance as opposed to being wiped off the
face of the earth for the sins that we've committed.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, I will say, And that's the So I've been
actively as you know, over over the time I've been
on the podcast, I've on the pod, I've been trying
to cultivate a sense of either silver lining or there's
an additional view that we can you know, continue to
(06:16):
bring nuance. Unfortunately, in this particular regard, I was very
seriously looking at finances in other denominations and in other
countries and how that looked. And I talked to one
of my cousins who lives overseas, and he basically went, hey, man,
(06:37):
unless you are planning to actively move to a different country,
the US's broad financial reach is such that a non
global touch is not possible, and we are far enough
(07:01):
into the whalan utani of it, of the the corporate
international corporate monopolies and cartels and corporate forces, that the
American Empire will only give way to a corpocrisy. I
(07:23):
think is the term whatever that term is. Maybe I've
just made it up, coined TMTM, as the maclroys would say.
But yeah, that'll be my thesis book if I have
a right one. But seriously, we the way that American
companies have been entrenched globally, there just isn't a way
(07:45):
to do that.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
So you're saying that the only alternative is like it
becomes an oligopoly, Like it won't become like Brance or
any of these like European colonial powers. It became sort
of like functioning socialist economies. The United States can only
become a dictatorship or like plutocracy.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Well, I would say the option is more like if
we had the South Seas Company or the British India
Tea Company, if either of those became an actual government,
that's more likely for the US.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
Yeah, and it's just Amazon.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Amazon, Alphabet soup. I don't think meta actually has the
staying powers.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
It doesn't yeah, it doesn't beyond it's like weird hardware
than nobody.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Likes honestly the other but Amazon has an absurd and
a really upsettingly absurd reach for all of the web services,
like there.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Is AWS already props up most of the US government
right now.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Not just US government, that's the unfortunate part.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Right and also all of every private sector company. Yeah,
the Wayland Utani is a good comp I've just read
something about the price of bananas finally going up and
somebody describing bananas as like the fruit that inflation forgot,
and of course, and somebody is talking about like, you
can't produce bananas, you can't build bananas in the United States,
(09:27):
And of course bananas famously are this colonial byproduct. The
fact that they are so cheap here and that we
can get them all year is this insane side effect
of globalization and colonialism. So like that feels like the
(09:47):
canary in the coal mine for me. Of like, bananas
are actually getting more expensive. They're catching up with you know,
we can't be insulated from the sins of what it
takes to have bananas in our grocery stores all the
time forever. It feels like a big change.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
It was the I think maybe we're talking about this
off off pod, but it was that. It was the
the Lutnik was. It was testifying again before Congress and
they were asking Hi about tariffs and he he was like, yeah, well,
you know, if if if the companies just produced in
(10:28):
the United States, they don't have to worry about tarofts.
And one of the congressional representatives was like, you know,
Americans eat billions of bananas, and you know, we can't
grow that many bananas physically in the United States for
large scale commercial consumption, So what do you mean make
(10:49):
it in the United States. It is such like a
kid's understanding of like how a global economy works, where
it's like trade deficits are useful because there's country that
can produce shit that you can't do effectively or efficiently
in your country, and then you can produce it that
they can't in theirs, and so you trade and both
(11:11):
of you are enriched by that. And it's like the
Secretary of the Treasury, based on the whims of the President,
is like everything made in the United States, nothing imported.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Ever.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Just build a fucking wall. We're going planet hulk or whatever.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
The fuck.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
That book was called There's gonna be of Ice wall
around the country and we're doing everything here and it's
like that would.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Suck, and it it does, and but like everything is
tariff to hell. I you know, it was tracking h.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
I talked about my Dice subscription, the which I canceled
because Tariff's doubled the prize. They sent an email out
to former subscribers and they said, oh, the tariff breeze
has uh.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
We don't to RaSE the price anymore.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
And I was like, great, subscribed and then they said
another one out and they were like, incoming tariffs, we're
raising the price again. It's like, man, fuck this this
is not worth it?
Speaker 5 (12:13):
Yeah, truly, Like how much do you like corn?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Cool?
Speaker 5 (12:17):
How much do you like anything other than corn? Sorry? Dude,
what do we make here in the state?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I think, And I know this one won't. This is
the thing I'm about to say will not move most
Americans or most American politicians. So it might be a
bit asinine to bring up.
Speaker 5 (12:41):
So please keep that something on the podcast. Yeah, please
go ahead, go right ahead.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The tariffs effect, we were talking about global reaches. The
tariffs affect manufacturing in other countries in such a more
profound way than the US right now now saying yet
the US will suffer when it comes to prices, and
there's a lot of medications that are going to be
(13:12):
harder to come by because injectors are the types of
plastics that are needed for injectors, the metal that needs
to go in for certain needles. Like, all of that
being said, yes, that's going to affect a lot of
people in here. But if we also look at how
manufacturing works globally, if we look at the producers in
(13:34):
places like Shangzong, places like outside of Hong Kong, things
in Malaysia, Bangladesh, these tariffs are crashing economies at a
scale not actually seen before. And the amount of global
(13:56):
misery that's coming about because of these price fluctuations is
hard to quantify, like the amount of people, because honestly,
one of the reasons why a lot of American manufacturing
goes over there is because there's not always a lot
of transparency about who or how many people are working
on a particular widget or thing, and the price of
(14:21):
that is we don't know exactly how many workers, we
don't know exactly how many cottage industries within there are
going to just go away and evaporate, causing huge amounts
of strife in terms of the amount of capital. Like
even if Americans aren't spending on certain amounts, the American
(14:43):
military share is still going to do that. And if
some of those tariffs go in and shut down huge arms,
just large amounts of the global populace are going to starve.
A large amount of the global park populace are just
to be out of I don't know, I put starve
(15:04):
out of work, but truly, like when you're out of
work or when you don't have those means, and a
lot from the way some of it works, people will
go to factories for weeks on end and send money
back to villages. That's gonna dry up. And that's not
me trying to project as an American not knowing this
is a true reality of some of the factory cities
(15:28):
from Walmart, some of the if you think about button
manufacturing or clasps, just those kind of everyday things, there
are huge factories and huge amounts of people working there
who are just going to be Yeah, just the amount
of global misery that's coming from it in that perspective
(15:50):
is just hard to fathom here. And it's not like
if we tried to make everything in the US, we
don't have the infrastructure to do it. We can talk
about the social Oh our Americans willing to like do
the button manufacturing jobs. We don't have the infrastructure for
data centers. We certainly do not have the infrastructure for
(16:13):
like large scale manufacturing anymore. The American John Walsh from Yeah,
the ge guy who like sold everything from Ge so
instead of everything in house, he broke it up and
the idea of oh, we sell at the final quarter
to inflate the stock price. That guy, he's the reason
(16:35):
why we don't have manufacturing in the US, because well,
it's cheaper to outsource it and then cut the manufacturing
towns because labor is cheaper. We just don't. We have
no way, of no mechanism to do this anymore.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
This is a really good point and it ties into
a mouse you're saying about free trade and like, you know,
we manufactured things they don't. They manufactured things we don't.
We trade back and forth in the United States is
a hollow shell now, like the only thing we trade
is money. Basically, there isn't a lot left here to
(17:10):
physically make things. And the what the tariffs are finally
pulling the rug up and revealing, is how brittle that
global supply. I mean, we saw this supply chain issues right,
like the how things drive. Because your fruit cup, it
(17:32):
was cheaper to have the fruits come from three different countries,
have it package in a fourth country and then flown
somewhere else, and like those things, there's a lot of
you know, human rights violations and environmental impact of doing
it that way to begin with. It is the way
it is built. The way Teddy is describing has all
(17:56):
kinds of like long term unso sustainable problems to begin with,
and so the fact to have tariffs just accelerate that problem.
He's very scary. But also you know, I guess best
(18:17):
case scenario, it's a we need to really radically re
evaluate how we make things in value human life. That's
not what this is going to do in any I
mean it is, we are doing it right now, we're
thinking through it. I'm sure it is. As people go
through incredible suffering, they will also rethink that folks in
(18:42):
power not so much with weirdly the exception, so the
no Kings protests that came through I heard. I don't
know if this is apocryphal, that some of those were
organized by the Waltons, as in the Walmart family, which
is fascinating if true, because it means that it makes
(19:06):
perfect sense to me that they're like, Oh, tariffs and
getting people deported cuts into the two things that makes
Walmart money really really cheap goods from other countries and
not having to document or pay on the US based employees.
You have ripped out the supply chains that fund that
(19:29):
fill Walmart shells and also ripped out the people who
are getting subsidized on food stamps and not documented to
actually work in those stores. It would make sense that
the oligarchs who benefit from this are not particularly happy
with the choices that the that Trump is making. So
(19:50):
while the Wayland utahification of the country and the economy
is objectively bad, the fact that it feels like best
case scenario realistically is that the corporate overlords and the
political overlordsh rip each other to pieces.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Maybe no, yeah, And that's the real thing about it too,
is that, I mean, all of this is like a
huge backlash against labor. There's like this way that it's
like do you do you do? Will Americans pick strawberries,
(20:31):
Will Americans working factories?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Will Americans so buttons on the clothes?
Speaker 4 (20:38):
The answer is yes, how much are you paying that?
Because I have a bunch of friends that if you
are paying a Liverpool wage, you're paying twenty dollars an
hour to work in a fucking semiconductor factory, would absolutely
take that job.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
And it's just it.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
The aversion to paying living wages to people is the
fucking the souper de jure of the American experiment menu
since the nineteen seven I mean way before that, but
like really really since the nineteen seventies, and so this
like depression and real wages and this like and this
(21:21):
is why this like American made America first, shit's not
gonna work too, because a lot of the people who
are coming out as being sort of sympathetic the importers
are also horrible capitalists because they are engaged in the
reproduction of this like global.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Labor market that is it.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
It's all about eliminating that cost burden, eliminating labor costs
as much as humanly possible, and some of the things
that you can get away with in other countries you
just can't get away with in the United States, and
you can get away with some heinous shit.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
If you're doing it to Americans.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
To your point about undocumented folks and Walmart, Walmart has
a vested interest because they're the number one food supplier
in the United States, and they rely on undocumented immigrants
to make the profit margins that they make because they
can engage in wage theft and also in setting the
price at the top that the farmer has to basically meet.
(22:31):
And so it's like Walmart says they're only paying this
much for strawberries, and they only want this much, so
I planted more than that. All you motherfuckers get out
there and whatever sells is the money you'll make. And
so there are tons of undocumented people who literally are
engaged in enslave labor because when you're out there in
(22:52):
the fields picking shit that ends up getting thrown away
and they don't get any money.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
I mean, what do you call that?
Speaker 5 (22:58):
But then in addition to the massive human and food
waste involved in that whole system is truly disgusting.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, which is wild in terms of and this is
this is me kind of not utopiafying, but the amount
that is produced that could just be hand, like if
if if we're looking at hey, we need to reduce
the amount of labor. You know what I think. I
(23:30):
think labor can be beautiful when you are sitting there
doing like, oh, somebody put in a lot of labor
in building a chair. They put a lot of love
and craft into doing this. There's a lot of love
and craft in certain video games. There's some interesting things
that people do with art. People think do beautiful things
with science that is hard and takes a lot of work.
(23:52):
I'm all for, Hey, let's automate some stuff for when
it comes to picking vegetables in hunt degree weather. And
if we don't want to pay robots to do that, cool,
but we should I don't know, maybe benefit as humanity
from not having to do that, being able to like, oh,
(24:16):
somebody who is who is in a wheelchair, or somebody
who can't go out and do farm labor, or like
all of those. Maybe we should just provide food and that,
you know, if it's there. Why why? Why?
Speaker 5 (24:34):
Yeah, the massive cognitive dissonance between incredible resource shortages and
also wait a second, incredible waste. There isn't actually a
resource shortage. It's just a just an empathy shortage sucks
so bad.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Weirdly, I think, and this is again another as we're
talking about this, it's coming back, but we're with the
amount that ICE as an occupying army is acting in
terms of agriculture, specifically folks who are working a lot
(25:15):
of these areas. We're losing huge amounts of institutional knowledge.
This is me being cynical. The people who have been
doing it are the people who know how to. So
you're telling me, oh, things are gonna get better when
all of the competent people who know these are the
(25:36):
things that sell, these are the things that these are
the products that work, This is the times to pick things.
All of that's just gonna go away. And you think
things are supposed to get better when all the people
who know what they're doing are gone. What explain the
logic to me? Because that doesn't that just that logic
(25:57):
does not hold up to me.
Speaker 5 (25:59):
Yeah, the idea that there there is no such thing
as unskilled labor. There are things that we don't respect
as skilled labor that still require skills, and you learn
on the job and you learn how to do things,
and yeah, that all goes away. And with the you know,
to mouse's point about the terror fluctuations, or to your
(26:21):
point about the cottage industries that are going to dry up, Like, yeah,
this is an incredibly brittle system predicated on human suffering,
and like not to bring it back to like Marx
was right. But Marx was right the separating people from
the cost of a good, So like putting all of
those layers of separation, so you don't understand why the
(26:47):
fast fashion costs as little as it does, and you
know understand why it shouldn't cost that little. Like that
all is terrible. But if that fluctuates and then the
terifs are all reversed and it goes back to the
way it was ten years ago, it can't actually go
back because there will be so much lost in one
(27:11):
it shouldn't go back. But that's like a whole other
problem of having to rebuild the entire global economy in
a way that doesn't hurt people. But even if it
were to, you've lost all those all that knowledge, and
those people have starved in the interim.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Then what mouse, I have a quick question for you,
if we're looking at like kind of that kind of
a historical perspective on this, has, to your knowledge, have
these types of teriff fluctuations had political or economic value,
(27:56):
either in the US or I mean maybe internationally. I'd
be too broad, but have like, has there ever been
precedent for this ever working before, because I.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Think great trusting, Yeah, no, there there has been in
the United States, like the famous McKinley terriffs that you know,
it was so weird to see, uh, Donald Trump go on.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
I think this was.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Joe Rogan or one of the several interviews he did
in the manosphere campaigning. He was like, and people forget
about President McKinley, great president, best president, like but but
behind me best president. The McKinley tariff was the sort
of huge tariff, and it typified something in the United
States that was a norm until the economy crashed. And
(28:48):
this was Republican rule. And so what the Republicans did,
to the chagrin of rural Americains and a lot of
working class Americans, was they did not support income taxes
(29:10):
and instead used tariffs as a way of generating money
for the federal government. Now McKinley was president in the
late nineteenth century, and the federal government, or as it
was known then just the government with the capital G
whenever anyone talked about the federal government or wrote about it.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Like back then, they would just call it the government
with a big G.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
Their primary responsibilities were not like intervening in state affairs
too much.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
They were collecting money.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
There was an administrative state, It was pretty small, the
bureaucracies were not terribly efficient, and a lot of it
was like spoils and ways and all this shit. And
so the McKinley tariff was made specifically to help American
companies that weren't able to compete but that still had
(30:12):
some infrastructure to produce goods. What ended up happening is
that it's an incredibly fickle revenue source for the country.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
You don't know what ebbs and flows business is.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
Going to go through or how the markets are going
to react, because the markets are largely impacted by the
decisions of the government. What's not largely impacted by it,
and what's much more like predictable, is people's incomes. You
generally understand how how much money people are making in
(30:52):
a country, and by levying a taxmate you generally can
understand and predict what revenue the government is going to
pull in for whatever necessary things they're going to make
And so into the twentieth century, the state started to
take a much more active role in people's lives. And
this was at the behest of progressive reformers, like the
fucking Settlement House movement, all this shit where people were like,
(31:13):
the government should be involved in like basic social welfare,
the government should be involved in.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Healthcare to some degree.
Speaker 4 (31:23):
The government shouldn't be involved in like making sure that
people can go to the hospital, make sure that people
aren't dying of tuberculosis, to basic shit like that. To
also like the government should be involved in people like
not drinking alcohol, the government should be involved in enforcing
a moral order and a Protestant work ethic and all
this shit. And so the state starts to intervene much
(31:44):
more heavily, starts to have more expenses, to the point
where an income tax is absolutely necessary. And so by
the end of I can't remember who the fucking president was,
but by the end of one Republican administration, they pass
(32:06):
the amendment that creates an income tax, which was seen
as like probably not constitutional, and then it goes into
effect at the beginning of Woodrow Wilson's term. And so
oftentimes what what contemporary Republicans do as they go. It's
the Democrats that made the income tax. It was Woodrow Wilson,
(32:28):
but that shit was already on the fast track to
being passed and ratified, and he inherited that and then
like subsequent Republican administrations.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Like fucked with it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
But like it was, working class people preferred the income tax.
Rich people preferred tariffs because they didn't want to give
their money to the capital g government.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So I don't know that it has worked.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
It definitely works in a in a very like surge
precise way of all right, the United States is now
ramping up production of semiconductors. We have like the Chips
and Science Act and stuff like that, and this is
so that we don't have a reliance on something that
can really clog up the supply chain and that can
(33:17):
like really affect all these other industries like automobiles and
shit like that, Like consumer electronics will get fucked if
semiconductors and microchips and stuff like that aren't able to produce.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
And so Biden passes the Chips and Science Act.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
It would be smart to put a tariff on importers
who are importing microchips. If you're trying to actively grow
an American business, that would be a smart thing to
do because it will discourage folks from importing these things
that we're like saying, we're making an American industry. And
(33:54):
that's the only case in which it really sort of
works because you generate a little bit of revenue and
disincentivize people from like.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Fucking with an American industry, which is pretty good.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Like entry level jobs at semiconductor places, you can make
between seventeen and twenty dollars an hour in an entry
level position, and if you're an engineer, if you have
an engineering degree, you can be making like seventy five
eighty thousand dollars probably more. And so that's the only
time where like quote unquote works in every other instance.
(34:29):
And this is like this is like four out of
four out of five dentists a or whatever. It's like
four four out of five economists say that that wide
scale tariffs on every import into the country is a
bad idea, and then the fifth person thinks it's a
fucking terrible idea.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
So it's like historically, yes, it was.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
Terrorists were used to varying degrees up until the income
tax was codified in the Constitution, and then afterwards that
became the primary mode of government revenue until the seventies,
where the primary mode of government revenue was a credit card.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Nice.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Uh so, yeah, that doesn't work the way it's implemented.
Then we will see by the ten this comes out
what has been repealed. This could go back three or
four times by the time.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Just fucking that would like everything is bad.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
Like the fucking big beautiful bill thing is not big.
It was big, it's not beautiful, and it's getting trapped
up the Russia and we're recording this. This is like
so dangerous to like do this Collins Wells Fargo because
we're in the bank. We are banking all Collins Wells
(35:56):
Fargo because we're up to some shady shit over here.
The uh we're banking these episodes this, these are just
the murmurs of potentially the United States engaging in like
full scale war. And Putin just warned the United States
against going to war with Iran. And I'm like, man,
(36:20):
if one man could do like a broken clock is
right twice a day, if this dude could just put
the fucking fear of God into our just like our
president who's horrified of him. That would be a service
to humanity.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
Yeah, this kind of circles back around to people who
voted for Trump thinking he was anti war, the balancing
act of it. Just if anybody I think just less
war good if you have like insane ulterior motives for
that less war still good. Uh sucks when people vote
(37:03):
for you thinking that your policy is less war good
and you're like, no, no, no, just different war good.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Oh man, But like it is true.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
Like I feel like Donald Trump is just like weird,
like fucking like sub vibe with Putin, Like he thinks
he's like.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
A big strong man or something like he's he's terrified
of that dude. If that dude like gives.
Speaker 4 (37:34):
Him a strong fucking strow talking to and looks into
his eyes and just lingers there.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Yeah, we're back.
Speaker 5 (37:44):
We're back on Darth Vader and the gangster they invented
of like trying to invent a worse dude to have
any kind of sympathy with the bad dude. I'm not
interested in comparing who's worse.
Speaker 4 (37:55):
I'm not comparing who's worth. But he's truly afraid of him.
He's like afraid of Russia he's afraid of he gets
into this like weird, uh this like he's he's like
loath to criticize him ever where. Like there's like a
huge propaganda in Maga of like Ukraine invaded Russia, Russia
(38:16):
is correct, and it's like played on state sponsored media
in Russia, like he is terrified.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
Yes, and certainly much of what we're seeing is he
is imitating, uh, certain things that Putin has done in
terms of some of the strategies he's talked about of
whenevery wants to invade a country, it's using a lot
of the same rhetoric about why they wish they were
part of US already or you know that, and trying
(38:46):
to annex Greenland in Canada using the same terminology that
Putin used to attack Ukraine, and then trying to have
a military parade for his birthday. Uh, you know that's
kind of that sort of thing. So, yes, there's definitely
some imitation as a form of flattery, which is I
(39:09):
think maybe less about maybe for Trump specifically about Putin.
For me, it feels like it is less about any
one man and more about trying to just like be
the big man. Like this is Mussolini style. Every dictator
looks like this has kind of a set of strategies,
(39:31):
and Trump would very much like to be in their
number and feel powerful, which is really the most pathetic
thing in the world.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
And the gag of it all is that the military
parade for his birthday or whatever, and the No King's
Day protest happened and we're both dwarfed in attendance by
just Pride. Yeah, yeah, no, when nobody went to any
(40:04):
of that shit, everybody went to Pride. And like the
fucking photo the photographs of some of the note Kings protests,
it just show kind of like just people in parks,
like listening to music, and then then like the true
juxtaposition of fifteen people watching tanks come down the street
(40:26):
and then cut to just everybody having the time of
their lives at Pride of its around the United States
is like it's such a great encapsulation of like where
our politics are right now. It's like this dude wants
to be a dictator so bad, but people are too
busy fucking partying to.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Give a fuck.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
I mean, it's like, oh my god, that was certainly
the case in my neck of the woods, Like there
was no. Nobody went to the fucking down DC. Nobody
went to the No Kings protest. Everybody was that Pride
it was fucking passed.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, I mean, if we again, I'm being as cynical
as possible. If you're in a video game and you
don't have an anti tank rifle, the general strategy is
to don't go to the tank. So if you are like, hey,
(41:28):
we're gonna put ten abrams on streets that frankly were
not designed to have abrams go down them, what direction
are you expecting people to go to the tank?
Speaker 5 (41:45):
Like?
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I feel like, again, were Tieneman Square notwithstanding, I feel
like nobody wanted to get away in the way of
the tanks. It was literally all We're just gonna bounce
And I'm like, why, what did you think was gonna happen?
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (42:05):
Yeah, So I hope that you had a fantastic Pride month.
Dear listener, Wrath is the is the next one? So
happy Wrath?
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Is it about that time?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
It's about that time. It's about that get Google get
wrecked good.
Speaker 5 (42:33):
I will recommend an interesting film I just called Zenia
or Zenia maybe uh twenty fourteen Greek film about some
Albanian Greek born brothers going on an odyssey to find
their dad and try to get citizenship, and there's a
(42:55):
like a singing contest and some dream sequences with rabbits,
and it feels a little bit like a Greg Iraqi film.
It's definitely like a new sort of Greek take on
that kind of weird wave. It's not nearly as weird
as an Iraqi film, but it has some similar energy
and it's really sweet. It's a nice road movie. So
(43:20):
I highly recommend Zenia from twenty fourteen. And it's in
you know, like kind of three languages at latch, which
is kind of cool one thinking through concepts of citizenship
and nationalism and the economy relevant to what we were
talking about today, but also very sweet. So yeah, check
(43:43):
that out.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
I will recommend. I'm doing a rewatch of Nightmare on
ELM Street cool and fucking Dream Warriors, fuck Rules, so
good nightmore.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Elms three three is so good.
Speaker 4 (44:07):
And if it weren't for Freddy, we wouldn't have The
Lord of the Rings, and that is absolutely true. There
is a moniker for Newline Cinemas, the house that Freddy
built and Newline famously produced and distributed the Peter Jackson
(44:29):
Lord of the Rings trilogy and like truly would not
be in that position if it weren't for Freddy Krueger.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
And the interesting thing.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
About these movies and you don't you don't, I guess
you don't really appreciate until you sort of like watch
them in hindsight or occur contextually with like how sort
of bad things look, is that they look fucking amazing.
There's like a full animatronic in Dream Warriors of Freddy
(45:01):
as a snake like emerging out and it's not cgi.
It's just like a functioning animatronic that is massive and
that you know, you know, chase kids down the hall
or whatever.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
It's so cool.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
And it's like it's called Dream Warriors because he's like
terrorizing this mental asylum and then all of the kids
find out how to get into the same dream to
team up and fight against Freddy Krueger, which is a
fucking awesome concept too.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
It's just like the creativity.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
And I know, once I get to Freddy versus Jason,
I'm gonna be like regretting everything and like the whole
like Freddy problematic stuff starts in Dream Warriors. This is
where like the cartoonish sort of a caricature of Freddy
is that he's like, uh, he'll say something problematic and
(45:56):
he'll he'll punctuate it with the word bitch. It's just
called everybody a bitch. And that starts in Dream Warriors.
He does it twice, and he does it appropriately where
you're like, Okay, this is where a menacing guy would
like do that. But then as as a franchise progresses,
this is like the thing that you forget that Jason
(46:19):
doesn't have a fucking hockey mask for like several films
where you're like, oh, Freddy didn't even really do this yet,
like until they start running out of steam or ideas
or like Wes Craven sort of you know, kind of bails.
Then it just kind of becomes like people are like,
I guess I'm working on Freddy six. What does he do?
He calls people bitch and he goes in the dream
(46:40):
we'll do we'll do that. But Dream Warriors like a
true masterpiece. It's such a good movie, and the original
one is is fantastic Freddie's Revenge. The second one is
is was not as good as I remembered it, but
I'll just be watching those because they're fucking eighty five
minutes long and are all sort of like just exercises
(47:06):
and practical effects in horror movies, which is great because
you can't do the fucking drug or going through the
woods and slashing people with a machete when the whole
can seat behind the monster is that he's the boogeyman
that goes into your dreams, and dreams are fucking crazy,
so you got to be creative while you're doing that.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Nice. In terms of mine, I have a couple of
recipes for folk a one a dairy free pesto. What
you do with the pesto, and this all dairy free
and nut free, and that's one of the reasons I
(47:47):
wanted to shout this out. What you're able to do.
You need to replace the not the type of pine
nuts that you might use with a starchy, either a
starchy root vegetable that you use first, or just straight
up a little bit of corn starch or potato starch,
(48:10):
whichever one you would prefer make as normal. Also add
in wilted wilted spring leaf mix. Lettuce doesn't work as well,
but anything that doesn't have too much water in it.
Wilt that down, blend it up like normal, Add in
forecloves of garlic and some lemon juice, and make sure
(48:33):
that that additional starch is in there as you're blending it.
Add olive oil to make sure that the flavor is there.
And the key for the dairy free portion, make sure
to add nutritional yeast, and you have a very lovely pesto.
And the starch helps replace some of the what's lost
(48:53):
from the pine nuts, So go ahead add that. The
other one is a very simple ice cream overripe bananas
in a food processor and you have banana ice cream. Uh.
It melts like it melts a little faster than regular
ice cream. But we're in a hot enough climate where
you know it's summertime. Eat the ice cream as soon
(49:15):
as you get it out of the out of the
food processor. It's really a lot creamier than you might
think from frozen right bananas. But it's excellent.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
That sounds delicious.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
Uh, Eat that while watching those films and you know,
hopefully this isn't the last podcast we ever do, but
if it is, we'll see on the next one.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Bitch.
Speaker 5 (49:44):
It's just.
Speaker 6 (49:50):
It's like, oh, pirates sport your brain Robin Nalis, don't
chokin open in your mind with the probots as you
woken hydrahalin hairs and for time the hell of.
Speaker 5 (49:57):
Reasons, for more than with the soldiers, with them for
all seasons.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Listen closely while.
Speaker 6 (50:01):
We share our expertise in customic comments, culture, Deane streetuition
to the multiversity molss like good teaching, perfect balance when
we snap in fine.
Speaker 5 (50:08):
Jensen too, your ears does the shoulders when we speak
Speaker 6 (50:10):
Purple men, versus and feet were randy savage draandals with
their mortal technique
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