299: Featherless Bird

In this episode, Professor Mouse, the Cosmologist, and Teddy discuss birdies and civil war before providing some cool recs. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Time.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
It's like a clown.

Speaker 3 (00:01):
No, don't this little page he's bagging boarding batman and
the gut are like a mate story tellers me some fellas,
we some felons. Isn't amazing. It's like a Pella bearver
sellad because this shit is so contagious.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Mouths on the.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
Summers can pilet that the shells while the cycle spinning
knowledge on the getty like appro beat the bab and
bet the rabbit. Don't step to the squad, we get
activic and hate. It's like a stepla parts. You don't
like fish talk, do you hate? It's a batl with
the cuttle fish killers tender pools on the taping Greatest
five Stars. If you cherish your life, Bucky Barneshit squad,
spraying leg and your pipe.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Doing it live. Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of
Its Bad is Just Bad, the best podcast you never
heard of. I'm your host rusa Rouse Joint is always
by the Sea Cosmologist and Teddy.

Speaker 4 (00:44):
We're what your rambling men, The bank ramble on empty.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
There's nothing in the bank. The bank is empty. That's
why you're not hearing this until the evening of Friday.
We're not hopping in at midnight as we usually do.
The bank has been robbed like that one episode of
Daredevil that we all liked.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
I can't meet him at the bank anymore. All of
the Ravens have flown the coop. We're sending our intrepid
reporter to London to get more ravens. This is on
your to do list, Teddy. You need to bring back
a ravens.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Lots of ravens.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, yeah, I think that'll be easy.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Well.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Also, if the Ravens ever leave the tower, the legend
is it dooms the British monarchy, so you should bring
them back to the to the US to help with
the dynasty that is the Baltimore Ravens and put the
final nail on the coffin of King Charles.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
So I've been trying to make Corvid friends for years.
At this point, some of my neighborhood Corvids are like
into it, and I don't necessarily all put Halloween decorations out,
but I get a lot of crows and blue jays
showing up. So if I can like make some international

(02:08):
raven friends, that might be kind of dope. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
International Man of Bird Mystery practicing.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Sorry, how prescriptive is furry?

Speaker 1 (02:20):
We're going to have to give me some context for
the thing you just.

Speaker 4 (02:22):
Said, because is I know what he's talking about. You like,
a feathery or a sely is.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
A term.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
For uh for the reptile folk.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
So is is it feathery?

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Is that the terms of feathery? Is there a feathery?
I mean there is now, I mean, I'm sure probably
it exists. I just I was I was wondering if
furry was a catch all term. But that doesn't make sense.
Scally makes sense because there are different kinds of animals that.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
You called.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
Birdiess, I like avian.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
That is that exclusionary to any species to all birds.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
All birds are avian?

Speaker 1 (03:09):
All birds all.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Birds birds have feathers.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
Okay, well, I mean also is the kingdom I know
as a as like a noted and documented bird hater.
This is not your expertise, but yes.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, I was thinking about some like gnarly chickens I've
seen in Puerto Rico that don't have feathers.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
But that's like not you know, like there aren't naked
mole rat birds. I'm gonna have feathers.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
I'm gonna do a deep dive on this later and
see if there's any featherless birds that could be the
poor image.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Did this already y.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
A non a flightless featherless bird is a man I wanted.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
Yeah, the classic diogeny is a debate tactic.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
I once watched MythBusters and they, Uh, this could be
one of those Mandela effects, and maybe this doesn't exist,
but I have a very vivid memory of watching it
could have been MythBusters, could have been something else, like
along the same lines. I saw a viti or a a.

(04:26):
They were basically trying to be like can humans fly?
Is it possible for human beings to fly? And they
constructed a human body in the way that it would
have to be in order for it to fly. And
it was a very small person with like an enormous

(04:50):
upper body and like arms that kind of like flourished outward. Bad.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
You're describing bad.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, but it was like it was like it was
like if our Arnold Schwarzenegger was smushed.

Speaker 4 (05:10):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
And then but the answer was like that doesn't exist anatomically,
so no, he makes me it can never fly, uh,
which you know, dashed our hopes and dreams. So the
I guess the kind of like the the the big
news happening today. We're recording live to tape. Uh basically

(05:32):
this is going to be posted. The moment that we
stop uh speaking, I will post this episode. And it's
a bizarre time in American history right now. Everybody's like
very sort of riled up, and it does give a
lot of parallels to things that presaged the Civil War.

(05:57):
And so there are a lot of these sort of
like alarmist headlines and articles that I've seen come out,
not by any historians that I have ever heard of,
mostly by journalists. And I've talked to a lot of historians,
particularly nineteenth century historians and Civil War historians who are
in my orbit or colleagues of mine and have been

(06:20):
sort of thinking about this era. The kind of consensus
that I have come to is that this is much
more akin to the violence of the nineteen sixties than
it is to the violence of the eighteen forties in
the eighteen fifties.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
And.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
That is still kind of not discrediting because we don't
know what is going to happen in the future. We
don't know how bad it's going to get. But the
latest is an assassination of a sort of this conservative
fire brand, which both kind of revealed the degree to

(07:00):
which the violence that's happening in American society is becoming
more similar to the Civil War. Considering his very close
approximation to the president, we're getting to the kind of
territory of the caning of Charles Sumner that happened after

(07:23):
he delivered this very fiery and impassioned speech in eighteen
fifty six, I think or thereabouts condemning slavery. He was
an abolitionist, and he made these very personal, vitriolic attacks
on Andrew Butler, who was a very old congressman. And

(07:43):
then one of Andrew Butler's relatives came into Congress and
beat Charles Sumner nearly to death. And this was a
like a moment that a lot of historians note as
being that a kind of pivotal moment where decorum ceased

(08:07):
to be publicly championed. It had not been official or
there had not been like really like decorum in politics
in the United States for a really long time. There
was the triumvirent of like John C. Calhoun and Daniel
Webster and Harry Henry Clay, who were basically the architects

(08:29):
of the Compromise of eighteen fifty, and they were kind
of like the dads of Congress, and they were keeping
everybody in line. All of those dudes died, and then
all of like the children, the younger people came out
and they said what they had all been thinking the
entire time. These old dudes were running the country going
like yeah, but fuck the North or fuck the South,

(08:52):
like for real, and then just getting into these fights
that were payoffs of things that have been bubbling under
the surface for a really long time. And David Goldfield,
specifically in his history America of Flame, talks about, how
to put it bluntly, the generation of Clay and Calhoun
and Webster was frankly just smarter than the generation that

(09:17):
succeeded them. And so it was a combination of incompetence
and a lack of imagination and creativity and a lack
of conviction to American ideals that created the conditions under
which this sort of reactionary assessment of violence then led

(09:38):
to the ultimate fracturing of the Union. Is that these
folks weren't sort of like kind of ready for prime time.
That's kind of a sort of a modern historian's take
on it. I don't think that Clay and Calhoun and
Webster were necessarily smarter. I think they were better at

(10:00):
managing the game of politics that had been established by
the founders, and that they had this sort of implicit
loyalty to the country that trumped them operating in their
best interests. And so that's another part of it too,

(10:22):
is that now when people put their best interests above
the country, there is a potential for like a really deep,
fractuous split, and that is when politics becomes much more
extreme as well. That's when the sort of the kind
of pro slavery politics that were inhering in the eighteen

(10:45):
forties and the eighteen fifties can manifest and flourish into
I don't actually give a shit about preserving the status
quo of the nation. I don't care about the Constitution,
which is stuff that we're kind of hearing echoes of now.
And it is not to be a both sidist, but
it is kind of a both sidest thing where there

(11:07):
are leftists going like, well, the Constitution is an imperfect document,
and the fact that we are constantly having to abide
by these amendments that are clearly outmoded, and that are
causing the kinds of or allowing the kinds of violence
that we see on a daily basis, particularly in k
through twelve happen in massacring children. We should eliminate this

(11:29):
fucking document. We should we should update this fucking document.
We should perhaps amend it as it was designed to
be amended. And then the kind of totalitarianism that is
more I think dangerous, which is, we believe in this
document above all, we do not abide by anything that

(11:51):
is written in this document ever for any second, at
any moment, which is a sort of like trumpest I
uphold a constitution for everything I do is unconstitutional.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
Yeah, well, and I think there's a like the Christian
fundamentalist take of church and state should not be separated.
We've got a whole other document we'd rather build into
like a theocratic state. Instead, we're trying desperately to rebuild
and recreate the nation in that image. And so to

(12:24):
your point about like putting your own self interest above
the country, those nutballs truly believe in a version of
the country in their own heads, that there's the shining
city on the hill, you know, second coming of the
Crusades thing that they are. They think that is the

(12:47):
in the best interests of the country, and they're desperately
trying to remake it in that image, which to us
is that's their bullshit. But they you know, it's very
easy for them to cloak that in no no greater good,
higher good, and that makes them extra dangerous.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, and it is too the like that triumvirent of
like the adults in the room, the Clays and the
Calhouns and the Websters. You see that with people having
this nostalgia for this era of American governance, the Bush,
the Obama, the brief body, you.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
Could all be polite about it, even if while we
were doing all the same horrible shit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, But I think also part of their appeal is
that they did believe fundamentally in preserving the integrity of
the nation. Now, the critique comes from people who believe
that the nation state as it's currently constructed is in
and of itself always already violent and always already this

(13:52):
behemoth that determines whether or not you can live or die,
and does so capriciously in a lot of ways, and
that that may be worth changing. But like the where
are the adults in the room? Thing? Is very much
this kind of historical refrain that we hear over and over,

(14:13):
and it was very much something that was happening in
the lead up to the Civil War of like, where
are the adults in the room? Is really like who
is going to without any sort of hesitation, with complete conviction,
uphold the dignity of this country and this nation, despite
the fact that it is severely lacking insofar as it

(14:35):
is preserving the institution of slavery.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
Yeah, and that's a really useful point of like you
keep kicking the can backwards, like when were the adults
in charge? When was it okay? And like you keep
kind of pulling up the floorboards on it and be like, well,
this is all sucks anyway. But they're a lot. There
are very very different ideas about what it ought to
look like, and some of them are truly horrifying. I

(15:00):
like what you said about it feeling a lot more
like the sixties, partially because you've got it against this
backdrop of Cold war or imperialist like puppet bullshit, which
feels I mean, during the American Civil War and the
American Revolutionary period, we were the puppets, Like there are

(15:24):
big empires trying to use US as proxies, and the
only reason the French even showed up was because they
hated the English and they were trying to they had
the imperial powers. So it's never not been that way.
But I think it is important and useful to look
at this more closely as the rash of political assassinations

(15:45):
and special interest groups fighting it out domestically while there
are big proxy wars going on outside also, and I
think the US is that's more useful because the US
was not yet really an empire in the American Civil

(16:08):
War period right like it had it was small potatoes
by comparison, and a lot of the imperial build out
came after that, you know, Spanish American Wars and today
Roosevelt and like that, late eighteen hundreds of like, so
I think that's more effective as a comparison point. I

(16:30):
was talking a little bit about having started to watch
Mash and thinking about like pushing things back. It's a
show made in the seventies critiquing the fifties. It's set
in the Korean War, but it's actually about Vietnam, and
this kind of like war war never changes. This is
all bullshit, is I think a really interesting comparison point

(16:53):
to look at. So that feels being watching that like
late it's mid early seventies into in mid seventy. I mean,
the show goes on forever, but that having like a
window back into that time period, this feels very akin

(17:14):
to that. I'm not. Also, we've talked about this before.
It keeps coming up. The the Imperial rot that is
the you know, the US currently it's such this big,
massive behemoth, the way it's built out, the way it's
sort of lopsided. I'm not if we have some kind

(17:39):
of civil war, it's not going to look like it did.
It's going to be asymmetrical and fractured and not dissimilar
from what is already happening in various cities of on
a city by city basis martial law or whatever that is.

(18:00):
I expected to just continue to look more like that.
And you know, you can look at like Roman Empire
of and I think this, you know, it's it is
a I bang this drum a lot, but I think
it's worth it. As like the are we rome comparison,
especially looking at the disaffection of the National Guard so

(18:21):
or the National Gardeners, if you will. They get set up.
They show up, they got nothing to do, they don't
understand why they're there. They have signed up under kind
of false pretenses. They are asked to go pick up
garbage bags and do lawn care, and which they do

(18:43):
not even do on their own bases and are not
being paid to do so, like their infrastructure is decrepit.
They are then sent to places they do not live,
they have no connection to, away from their regular lives,
to do some bullshit for photo ops. That is the
kind of thing that causes like Roman legionnaires to defect

(19:06):
and start to pick it and start, you know when
they because that's what happened with that empire of They
started like, we're not getting paid enough, We're not getting
the veterans benefits we were promised, we're not getting the
property that they told us we'd get. Once we did
your campaign to conquer your territory for Rome, we're going
to start advocating for ourselves. And that I think is

(19:29):
more likely than any kind of you know, true one
v one different city states. It's going to be the
militias and the National Guards and the people who are
feeling disaffected and taken advantage of finally saying not I've
had enough as stupid.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, And the one of the big sort of uh
sticking points. I mean, analogy in history is hard, if
not impossible, to do because shit is different. Shit is
just different than it was in the past. But the

(20:10):
idea that we could buyfur kate in the way that
we did during the American Civil War is missing the
issue why would we go to war? What is akin
to the enslavement of African people in the United States?

(20:31):
Because everything, because this is this was the thing that
kind of happened after the and I encountered this a lot.
I wonder if you all did. After the assassination of
this dude. I knew about him very sort of tangentially,

(20:52):
and so I mentioned this. The first person I mentioned
it too was my wife. I was like, you know,
Charlie Kirk, they just got shot something was before he
was confirmed dead, and she goes, who's that? And a
lot of people are like, who's that? And so there
is this kind of outside sense if you know who

(21:14):
he is and are like trafficking in that space, you
really know who he is. And I've seen like so
many like political streamers like devastated and crying, even like
leftist streamers. I think Hassan Piker took it very hard
because they were supposed to debate in like two weeks,
and it was this kind of surreal thing for him
and a lot of people, a lot of people that

(21:37):
I work with, a lot of my colleagues, a lot
of students, had no idea who he was at all.
And so there is a degree to which it's like, No,
they were arguing and battling over slavery for fifty years
before we had a civil war. Not a person in

(21:58):
the country lacked in the opinion on that. Everybody had
an opinion on that issue, and it was the issue
that drove debates around everything. You want to build a
trans continental railroad, can we have slaves build it? Or
are slaves going to be barred from building it? Do
we want to extend our territory? Continued this genocidal campaign

(22:22):
against the Plains, Indians, Yes, if so? Are we going
to create new states? Yes? If so? Are they going
to be slave states or are they going to be
free states? It permeated every single thing that happened in
the United States, and then after people sort of find
out who this dude is. Then it's like, here's what

(22:43):
he thought about gun control, Here's what he thought about god,
here's what he thought about trans people, here's what he
thought about this, here's what he thought about that. And
the people realizing it's like, oh, this is just like
an agglomeration of all of the things that everybody talks
about all the time, and there is actually so many
problems in the United States that there aren't any It's

(23:03):
just like, it's dizzying how many issues that you have
to have an opinion on that. What would we go
to war over confusion?

Speaker 1 (23:13):
Yes, And I've got to say taking one even like
another step back from that. In terms of trying to
make analogy and analogies and history, there wasn't if you
tried to explain, oh, there is somebody who went in

(23:36):
front of people and people who weren't immediately near him,
created popular history while reviewing it so much so that
and then you go into who Charlie Kirk was that
to try and explain, Oh, yeah, Charlie Kirk is whatever
the equivalent is of YouTube famous in the Roman Empire,

(23:57):
there isn't one like there is.

Speaker 4 (24:00):
There is just such a crucified them all the time.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well they crucified them. And it is not like we
could say, oh, right, and that person knew in Chile,
because Chile didn't exist, But like these folks in this
additional area new and could point this out one of them.
The scale is just so much bigger and just one

(24:26):
of the It's such a surreal thing to think about
and talk about. Because somebody who was in the audience
started selling some of the blood colored merch I think
a couple hours after, and like there's some weirdness around
that account. And I'm just sitting here being like, how

(24:47):
would one come up with an analogy to say the
Civil War? There was no situation. Hey, I'm I have
forgotten a lot of history to say any close to
TikTok in the Civil War, somebody was selling bloody merch
right after the assassination attempt. Just seems like that's that's

(25:09):
not a thing. We can't do.

Speaker 4 (25:10):
That, Yeah, I guess. So I'm thinking about adults in
the room. So Charlie Kirk was like thirty one, founded
Turning Point USA when he was eighteen, but didn't actually
found a turning point because like, nobody at eighteen can
actually do that themselves. The adult in the room was
Bill Montgomery. Bill Montgomery, old dude career advertiser, saw Charlie

(25:37):
Kirkspy convinced him not to go to college and like
funded him, bank rolled him. So that I think that's
important because kirk was very much a mouthpiece and a pawn.
Very it's very very successful at what he did, but

(25:57):
was just a convenient face to put in a puppet
to get get a messaging piece. He's a public relations
guy basically for a you know, talking about like what
are the kinds of issues that we would be fighting
about for fifty years before a war. It goes back

(26:18):
to the same kind of city on a hill, crystal fascist,
totalitarian bullshit of there is a very specific conservative view
of what the United States ought to be a patriarchal,

(26:40):
misogynistic horror show of a place that the same kind
of old dudes have been trying to put together for
a long time. And so the what is the big issue,
I don't know, the like top down one percent, a

(27:00):
couple of old dudes in a back room propping up
dumb impressionable in cells, getting them whipped up in a
frenzy and then used as cannon fodder. It's the songs
kind of still the same. But to your point, that's

(27:22):
I don't know that like backroom cigar bullshit isn't.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
War.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
We're like, that's not like it's going to get a
war started. Really, it's weird.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
It's even weird to in my head, a weird thing
to talk about what we are considering war forces just
large scale kind of destructions. And I say destructions because
including genocides, including environmental We have folks who have meeting

(27:58):
minutes that are just published on the internet talking about well,
we have I think, country to country anywhere from thirteen
million to a fraction of a like a large fraction
of a billion. People we just have in they are
in debt. They owe a certain amount of money. That

(28:19):
is just a they owe so much money a future
money that they don't own. It's not real money, but
it is real money. We have these promisory notes. That's
just a strange thing to think about and to say, oh,
we can leverage that and now, yeah, we can buy
this defunct town and create a data center there.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
This is a great point. Nuts the war won't happen
because it's already been happening. Yeah, it's currently happening, and
it's currently happening everywhere, and it's never not happening. But
it's just not going to look to what MOUs just
said about there's so many things wrong, nothing's wrong. It
all kind of blends into the background, like there's Jennis

(29:00):
and drone bombings and nobody can afford to eat groceries
or whatever like that's that's always happening, and that's what
it looks like. It's decentralized, there is I think part
of what gets people so angry is it would be
simpler to have a traditional looking war out out out

(29:26):
at your doorstep. But and so like the speaking of
meeting minutes I went to, I've been going to local government,
like super hyperlocal government stuff, and some of that is
to help write I helped rewrite a declaration from the
local city council that's like anti National Guard, anti takeover,

(29:49):
that kind of stuff, anti fascist, because there was old
guys in the room who were hemming and hauling over like, well,
we don't want to be too fire branded. I don't
want to like rock the boat too much. And there's
the you know, I was trying to find the quote,
and I think it's actually from Magneto and like Ian
mckela Magneto about like, you know, they'll have you talking

(30:12):
and forming committees while they come and beat your door
down and take you away, and so it's like that
is that's what's actually happening, is people trying to reckon
with the day to day bullshit and they get excited
or they get activated when they see people in uniform

(30:33):
on the streets. But part of the Charlie Kirkavi it
all is it's very insidious because he's getting people activated
and whipped up. Without the need for people in uniform
on the streets, they're able to get angry and stay
angry all the time, and get scared and stay scared
all the time, and so you stay in that hypervigilant state,

(30:56):
and that gets you out to vote for horrible people
who are selling you a problem and then selling you
the answer to what they pretend is the answer to
that problem. And then you're just in constant war mode
all the time, and you can never calm down, you
can never chill out, and the war doesn't need to
start because it's never over.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, it's so interesting looking at like if we look internationally,
there are so many national areas of popping off. And
you're right in terms of, oh, right, the many places
have been in a constant barrage since their inception as

(31:42):
a country. I'm looking at things from the fifties, sixties, seventies.
There are so many countries that have cyclically and going
off into these becoming war zones and then having a
various levels of stability, and it just feels like, oh,

(32:03):
there are a lot of things are happening at once.
Looking at South Asia, there are multiple prime ministers that
have been protested out because of student protests or violence
in the last five years.

Speaker 4 (32:21):
A great counterpoint, Bolsonaro in Brazil just got another breaking
news as of today, basically just finally got convicted twenty
seven years after for his coup plot, and like a
bunch of his lieutenants also got jail sentences. And this
is huge for them, Like this is the first time

(32:42):
they've been able to as a country, been able to
actually nail some of these guys with real consequences for
after decades of coups and crackdowns intotalitarian bullshit, and like
that's awesome, good for them. It's a long time coming.
So but that's the kind of you know, fractious inconstant upheaval,

(33:04):
which I think that you know, going back to Mouse's
original point about like where are the adults in the
room where it's the decorum? The United States has always
had this very thin veneer of exceptionalism and decorum, and
we do it the right way, and we do it
the polite way here at home. And isn't it so
terrible when we start like getting being mean to each other.

(33:29):
As long as you keep that like the icing on
the cake, we can go out and be grind everybody
else's boot or our boot on everybody else's neck. So
when it starts to come home to roost, suddenly it
feels really different. But it's not actually that different. It's
just you got to kind of it's the the whitewashing
landlord that like you see the canatuna and the cockroach

(33:54):
of all and painted white. Also when they go in and
they just airbrush over it. So that's just what I
think to me, it feels like that's what's starting a
fall away now.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
I think we're also in an interesting new business city
state like Peter Teel and a lot of the there's
a oh goodness, not the advantage the secret abundance. There
we go like the secret, but there's there's the abundance

(34:26):
movement and the looking at some of the Yeah, exactly correct.
The last big conference that they were doing, I think
it was this last year. It was all funded by
the Koch brothers, and it's all these technic want to
be technocrats who are going, right, we can take over

(34:50):
this amount and have these be our territories. And I'm
sitting like, it's not even we can't call it state
backed business. This is because some of these businesses are
larger than many state actors.

Speaker 4 (35:06):
Yeah, it's a business backed state.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
It is a again, it's one of those Oh no,
maybe I shouldn't have read as much like Neil Stevenson
and Hindlein as I did. Well, I puts in high.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
School, but like you best start believing in the cyberpunk dystopia.
You're limited it no, truly, and that is that's fact.
That's the fascism that he is here that we talked about.
We talked about like the Chrysto fascists. You know, there's
a there's a big spear of that with the Project
twenty twenty five of like trying to be fundamental statalitarian religious.

(35:42):
But the Mussolini style what he believed fascism really was,
like corporate fascism, is the government is a convenient lever
to pull in order to funnel wealth to your other
corporate buddies and give unfettered access to corporations and businesses
to do whatever the hell they want. That's that's like

(36:07):
Trump style fascism, because he's it's that's the art of
the deal, that would that they've been trying to do
since the eighties, And that's Neil Stephenson's whole thing.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah, I will, it's sorry to keep conquering on it,
but like I can't even call it hope. But the
cynical practic, like pragmatic and kind of practical side of
my brain looks at a lot of what they're doing
and saying, yeah, none of the things you all have

(36:37):
proposed can last. By design. The idea of sustainability they like.
In terms of people talking about sustainability, we can talk
about green we can talk about agriculture, but we can
also talk about like, hey, this thing won't eat itself.
As a business, you can hord a bunch of wealth,

(36:58):
but your businesses are just not going to work. We
were talking about talking about the Confederacy and talking about
Mussolini state that two of the access power, some of
the other ones survive, but like the National Socialist Party,
they weren't in power all that long.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
Line can't just keep going up.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
But line cannot keep Yeah, the trains were not on time.
They just led about it to the point where all
of their supply chains just were unfunctional and their populaces
were starving. And like I said, it's not hopeful. It's
just it's not gonna last and it's going to take
a lot of people out with it. If that looks

(37:42):
like what we have been brought up on when it
comes to the face of war, which is glory and
guns and going out in a hell of bullets, or
is it going to be a weird mechanical sound shows
up before a bomb drops on a hospital, or is
it going to be Hey, the electricity in this city

(38:03):
block is now just done because someone hacked the data center.
And to differentiate that, maybe it is a place of
privilege to say differentiating between those things is harder and harder,
because you know, my house hasn't been mortar shelled but
we're also looking at it in terms of, well, these

(38:24):
technocratic state actors. Are we talking about Hiwei or palent here,
which one of them is responsible for this horrible thing
that has just happened, you know?

Speaker 2 (38:36):
Yeah, And there's also that the peerteel of it all too.
It's like, I mean, these people are trying to make money.
They care about capitalism so much and preserving it, and
capitalism does operate in these like very competitive, toxic environments,
but not in fractuous, war torn environments. Does capitalism thrive

(39:01):
particularly on the home front. There is a degree to
which if they are puppeteering, not if they are puppeteering. JD.
Bants right, if he becomes the president, there's going to
be a degree of religious fundamentalism that attends to that.
Peter Thiel's a kind of a maybe a weird case

(39:21):
for this, because he like believes in the Antichrist and
has all this like weird out there stuff that he's
sort of in the past taken up, and people close
to him think that he's kind of maybe has gone crazy.

Speaker 4 (39:37):
That's important because it also speaks to like all of
the Christian Zionists or like they're not in they're not
in into Israel as a Jewish state in and of itself,
or into it as a means to an end. It's
we need Jerusalem because we need to jump start the apocalypse,

(39:58):
like we need to break the seals place the end
goal here.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
I was watching an interview that he was doing and
he was talking about transhumanism, and he he said something
that the Christian right, I think in his brain thought
he thought would appeal to the Christian right because it
was anti trans but it was so beyond what like

(40:25):
illegible opinion would be that it it it incensed and
confused the Christian right. He said that he was like
belittling transgender people. He was like transgender like, what is
that You're going to change some of your body parts
and you're going to assume a different identity. No, we
want transhumanism. I want people's brains in a box in

(40:47):
a computer. Transgenderism doesn't go far enough. Like that was
the point. That was the point he was making.

Speaker 4 (40:55):
And Thenson character.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
And all his supporters were watching him want like, yeah,
hold on, wait a second, what are you talking about?

Speaker 4 (41:06):
Pretty my brainwear?

Speaker 2 (41:08):
But that also is like the inability for these guys
like Bill Montgomery and Peter Teel and Elon must have
like connect to people in a way that is like
legible too, is also driving them to find people like
like Charlie Kirk and all these other folks like the
sixteen thirty Project. I think Taylor Wrensch just published this

(41:30):
thing that there's a similar thing happening for liberals and
folks that are being bankrolled to express like middle of
the road, pro capitalist liberal positions that don't rock the
boat too much, that follow like an abundance agenda, for instance.
And you know, it's this immense amount of money that's

(41:52):
going behind this because the people who want this type
of society are in articulate, They're unable to connect to people.
They're not normal. And the more you learn about a
Mark Zuckerberg, the less you understand who it is, and

(42:13):
so you get guys like Charlie Kirk, who I do
believe is just kind of a puppet. When you're eighteen
years old, you don't have you don't have opinions. Really,
you have a bunch of thoughts and you have attitudes
towards things, and over time you start to develop those.
But when it becomes hard coded in your brain to

(42:35):
express yourself only through the realm of a particular kind
of online debate culture.

Speaker 4 (42:42):
Then specifically, an old guy with a bunch of money
comes to you, props up your eighteen year old ideas
and says, don't go to college and from this point
on stop absorbing new information. Yeah, I'm like trapping you
in amber, like somebody if they and you know you
both knew me at eighteen, you had trapped that version
of me in amber insufferable.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Well yeah, Well, because when you're that age and everything
that you watch and read you kind of just agree
with because like everything that's presented to you is like, oh,
that is like a well crafted thing that that has
a persuasive argument. And I remember doing this all the
time in college, of reading like people people who were

(43:26):
in conflict with one another and agreeing with both of
them just because like it was presented in a way
that made sense, like you were. The ability to discern
and to have a voice and to develop a personality
and a unique opinion requires like a ton of work
that should should not be posted online as you're working

(43:46):
through that, and should also be something that you you
grapple with for a little bit, Like yeah, when you
were eighteen. It's just like it's like like even the
movies that I liked when I was eighteen, I watched
them again and I go, man, this sucks. And also
this is like a perverse worldview, like this is this

(44:09):
is awful that I enjoyed this, and it's only because
of all of the experiences that I had growing up
that I now feel like even semi comfortable throwing my
my fucking uh rex behind anything, you know, to bring

(44:29):
it back to the show, It's it is exactly what
you're saying there, of like, there's this like very articulate
and well spoken and well versed group of people online
who are doing the jubileeves and the surroundeds and the
podcasts and the debates and the streams and the twitches,

(44:51):
and they all have the ability to articulate ideas that
do not seem deeply felt and do not seem like
they go beyond the cursory performance of shutting down other
people online. Like so if you compare it, oh sorry, yeah, no, no, no,

(45:16):
go for it.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
I was gonna say, if we just thinking about age
and how certain things like there's so much power behind
folks being able to synthesize, like synthesizing information versus parroting.
So thinking about how you know, it's it's weird to

(45:37):
come up. But if you think about brother Fred Hampton,
we have a sixteen seventeen year old who takes on
with the Panther Party all of these ideas and goes
all right, at this time, I'm organizing free lunch for
these students put up with having to also so had

(46:00):
the police as well as national investigative bureaus look at
him and go, oh, you're dangerous, because he was like,
everybody's gonna see through. It doesn't matter if I go
to jail about this a supposed ice cream truck theft
which wasn't present, for no way to prove. There are

(46:24):
theories that cointelpro actually staged that wherever.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
And given another ten years and they'll come out and
be like, yep, that was us.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Well, and we're sitting here being like, oh, this seventeen
year old said, right, I'm applying this theory from a
bunch of Vietnam Vets from the Panther Party to go, hey,
this is we're doing our own thing in this chapter.
There is so much more power in that than well,
let me back away from that. There is there was

(46:53):
a certain amount of charisma and pragmatism that came out
of that where there were a bunch of go to
boys who also got in who said all right, we
are going to work with you. Panther party and was
able to broke her peace within a lot of egalitarian movements.
Charlie Kirk helped flow somebody's money.

Speaker 4 (47:15):
Yeah, like when we look at he as a human
money laundry machine.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Yeah, And we even look at Mark Zuckerberg with the
creation of Facebook and this one this isn't when it
comes to the invention of Facebook. Part of how it went.
The infrastructure that it was built on went from I'm
coding to rate the hot girls on my campus to hey,

(47:41):
we're able to algorithmically save huge amounts of behavioral data.
There's a reason why the tech infrastructure was built on.
Other projects that wanted to do that. There are there
was a lot of money and how do we algorithmically
collect this data from the same people who went, hey,

(48:02):
we can do that with library records and video store rentals,
and congress going oh no, that's a horrible idea. Across
the across the aisles, everybody went, oh, you want to
see all of the things I've done and rented at
the video store and read at a library. Absolutely not
versus the venture capitalist who went, well, I bet somebody
would want to, and I bet they'll pay for it

(48:24):
twenty years.

Speaker 4 (48:25):
I can convince you to just post it online yourself.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Of your own volition.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
Convince you to put all of your Facebook likes on
your profile. Yeah, uh.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, well it's not time.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
So we're all old enough now you can trust our.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
Res Honestly, I don't think i'd stand behind most of them.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
But some of the recipes that I have been wrecking
I will stand behind.

Speaker 4 (48:56):
All right, that's good. Yeah. I don't make a big
habit of going back to listen to what I wrecked
what eight years ago, So.

Speaker 5 (49:04):
I probably stand by what I said about things like
the Last Jedi.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
I feel like I feel okay about those.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
I feel like I feel also to This whole kind
of podcast has been us discovering all the things we
don't like like it's truly the inception of this show
was a full scale review of a comic book we
did not like and did not finish.

Speaker 4 (49:30):
Yeah, yeah, very much. So this this, this whole show
is a personal vendetta against Jeff Shahn's and Tom Yeng.
It just it's come out from it's expanded from that.
But to your point about don't post your like growing
and changing and working through things online, Uh, we do it,

(49:50):
so you don't have to.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
We don't.

Speaker 4 (49:52):
We don't promote it, but you can listen to us.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
We're using pseudonyms. So what should that tell you? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (49:57):
Right, yeah, one point, you got something to wreck.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
So I have a lot of things to wreck. I'm
gonna save some of this. I want to talk about
Mission Impossible, the final reckoning, but but I didn't like it,
so I'll save that for a future episode, because I
do think it's worth talking about the end of Tom
Cruise's career Big Bad. I wouldn't have thought about it.

(50:29):
I will wreck, and this is a very this is
a I understand that this is this wreck needs to
be qualified in a lot of ways because I I
can see people really not liking this. But I would
personally recommend bo is Afraid, and I would recommend it
for people who experience a very particular type of anxious

(50:56):
paranoia that you've not really seen represented on screen. So
Bose Afraid takes place in this person's mind, and it
happens in a way where it's very obvious that all

(51:16):
of the magical surrealism isn't occurring because it can't. There's
like gravity defying stuff and just stuff that strains believability
in such a way. But the movie never names it
as that. It presents it as if if it's actually happening.
And that's what happens in the head of somebody who

(51:37):
deals with generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. Is that
oftentimes the thing that you think is it could happen,
or that you are afraid of happening. It doesn't happen,
and maybe intellectually you know that, but it has a
profound effect on your mood and how you feel and

(52:00):
how you behave in the world. So like, one of
the things that that that immediately resonated with me where
I felt represented on screen was there's a moment where
Jaquin Phoenix who plays Bo, is going back to his
house and then there's this like scary guy. There's just

(52:22):
scary man who he locks eyes with and then they
race towards the door and Bo gets there first, closes
it in the guy's face and then retreats into his apartment.
And I remember so distinctly when I was a kid,
like walking down the hill from my house, having this

(52:45):
kind of like paranoia that somebody was chasing me, and
then just like sprinting, like bolting the rest of the
way into my house and like closing the door behind
me because I was terrified. There was nothing there, but
I was just terrified. This was before where I was diagnosed,
was before I saw a therapist or social worker at school,
and so it was this kind of like affirmative experience

(53:09):
where I'm like, there are other people like this. And
it was a three hour long movie, but I was like,
I find myself relating to most of this. Also, if
you have a difficult relationship with a parent or guardian,
and I specifically had one with my mother and Sodas
bow in this movie, it is also like one of

(53:33):
those kinds of affirmations as well. She's constantly short with him,
she's constantly saying things that are like not even passive aggressive,
like super aggressive. He like loses his keys, he has
a legitimate reason to miss his flight, and then she goes, oh, so, yeah,
I guess you're not coming, And I guess good luck

(53:54):
finding her keys or whatever, and it's like, oh my god,
just like the shame that a mother could put into
a child. So it resonated me on the exact frequency
it is three hours long. If you don't resonate on
that frequency, you will absolutely probably hate that movie because

(54:15):
it is such a specific experience that, Yeah, if you
can't relate to it, I can't imagine what watching it
would be like. It would be like you would be
confused the whole time of like is this happening? Is
this not happening? And then you know, the paranoid anxious
person is like, doesn't matter, man, both cases.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
It's scary and this is which is what it feels like.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
That sounds like it would trigger panic attacks in certain folks.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah, it honestly did for me. At some points I
was like, Jesus Christ, I can't do this. I had
to like pause and walk away.

Speaker 4 (54:47):
Yeah too hitting too close to home, but maybe also cathartic.
Yeah yeah, wow, cool, that sounds unpleasant, but well done.
I will just give a preview for let's see, since
this is coming out on September twelfth, twenty twenty five.

(55:07):
September twenty third is the beginning of fat Bear Week,
so the bracket will be up soon. Fat Bear Junior
for the little cubs is I think the seventeen, eighteenth,
and nineteenth, so mark your calendars. Check out explore dot
org and the catm National Park. I got links to

(55:28):
the fat Bear brackets. Bears are especially fat this year.
They're doing great, good, good salmon eating up there this season,
so I'm gonna have a lot of excellent contenders, so
keep an eye out for Fat Bear Tournament coming up.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
In terms of in terms of rec I'm gonna have
to stick with my food rec Hall mandations. Just a
quick one. Chop a spaghetti squash in half, add feta
and tomato sauce, pepper old bay if you want to

(56:11):
get real, real weird with it before you add the
chunk tomatoes. If you want with your tomato sauce, start
breaking up your tomatoes, sweat them, add some tomato paste.
Deglaze with a port red. There's a chocolate port that
is really good. It's expensive, but this part is going

(56:34):
to be wild, so bear with me. Deglaze with that
and add a small piece of dark or medium milk
chocolate to the sauce to bring down the acidity of
the tomatoes and put that in the spaghetti squash. It
is weirdly low carb, not as high sugar as you

(56:55):
want because the chocolate disperses. And I would give a
quick recommend you just roast the entire thing in the
oven for a couple hours and you are good to
go for a meal with cheese as needed.

Speaker 4 (57:10):
Really good? Does that count as a moley?

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (57:15):
My huh? Is tomato sauce? I don't know.

Speaker 4 (57:20):
There was an old joke on from the Food Network
about I think it was Sanchez would freak out when anybody,
any whenever anyone tried to, like on Chopped, present him
a dish that they'd had to add chocolate to as
a moley. And you can't just add chocolate and cold
and mulley became a running joke at my household.

Speaker 1 (57:42):
But because you're glazing with wine, you can have a
somere it is.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 4 (57:52):
Is not convinced.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Yeah that sounds good. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Up is this just bad? We'll see on
the next one.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
By it's just a.

Speaker 5 (58:12):
It's like, oh pirates quote your brain, Robin Nala is
no joking opening your mind with the probots as you
woken hitting hydra halen hairs had for a time, for
a hell of reasons, for more than with the soldiers
with them, and for all seasons. Listen closely while we
share our expertise in customic comments called sure deane Street
tuition to the Multiversity mouse, it's like God teaching perfect
balance when we snap and fine gents into your ears,
does the shoulders when we speak. Purple men, versuasive beech

(58:34):
for randy savage randals with the Immortal technique