Be-Wilder-Ment & The Queen

00:00 Navigating the new world order from opposite ends of Gitmo Nation, it's time once again for No Agenda. It's Crackpot and Buzzkill! In the mornin'! From Gitmo Nation East in Southwest London in the Curry Terrace, I'm Adam Curry. I'm John C. DeVorek here in Silicon Valley North, also known as THE Gitmo Nation. Big thanks to Jeff Smith, THE Jeff Smith, for cutting that jingle for us. We'll have more, hopefully. You like that though, don't you? Isn't that cool? Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the way to go. We might as well go back to this style. Because nobody does that stuff anymore, except as a gag, and we might as well just do it. I bet you there's still top 40 stations out there that do the whole, Hey everybody! Let me tell you what's going on! Yeah! Hey there, JCD! How ya doin'? So, uh...

01:08 Sorry. See the problem is with you, it may just turn into the entire show. It is possible. Also known as daily source code. Not so weekly anymore. Yes. So the one thing, I mean, I think most of those top 40 shows have all deteriorated into the zoos. Well, it really started with the zoo format. I believe Scott Shannon is still doing Go back and I'm talking about you go way back into the 60s before That's right. Well, of course you had guys like dr. Don rose in the San Francisco Bay. It was a classic example of this He would have the you know, the bell he'd have the horns and the honks and he'd have a million jingles millions of jingles and tell jokes and and play top 40

01:57 And he's always telling jokes. In fact, there's one joke that I still remember him telling and I still tell this joke. Okay, you're gonna hit us with the joke? Yeah, a nun decides to, or a girl decides to go into a nunnery where there's a vow of silence, but she's allowed to say two words every year. So she joins up and she's in there, she goes in to see Mother Superior to say her two words after one year and she says, bed hard. So she goes back into the silent mode and then a year later, the whole year goes by, Mother Superior brings her in and she says her two words and she says, what's your two words? And she says, food bad.

02:48 So another whole year goes by and the Mother Superior brings her in and she says, okay, well what's your what are your two words this year? And the and the nun says I quit. Mother Superior says, well, you I doesn't surprise me. You've been doing nothing but complaining ever since you got here. Oh shit. I'm sorry. Oh my goodness. But it was just like this, you know, this That was the end of an era. And again, those DJs, you know, pre-Zoo DJs and Top 40 radio.

03:25 Back when I mean this was like pre 1970 hmm. We're making a quarter of a million or more dollars a year I mean, which is equivalent about two million dollars. I mean they were well paid the morning guys in the in the early early 80s We're doing a million. I mean, okay. Well the major market yes, and Scott Shannon is still doing a morning zoo on 95 5 PLJ I'm like that well Anyway, those days I think are pretty much over. And I don't know anybody who does a podcast that runs all the sound effects and jingles and things. I come close sometimes with a little bit of the intro jocking, but that's about it. Hey man, forget all that stuff. Guess where I was this morning? You were in Amsterdam. No. Where? I was visiting the Queen.

04:21 Oh, is today the day you visit the Queen? Yes! So she did this on Darwin Day. Yeah, interesting. I don't think she has any clue that it's Darwin Day, to be honest. Okay, so let's go to... Well, we're all here. Alright, so let me start at the beginning. So, first of all, the car that picked me up, John, had Wi-Fi on board. That was pretty cool. Have you ever had that? Yeah, it was a Mercedes S-Class. So it has the television monitors and the headrests on the front seat so you can watch TV in the back. Direct broadcast television, I might add. So it's digital, so none of this snowy stuff.

05:04 And then I- there's a sticker, actually I put it up on my Flickr site. There's a sticker right in between on the console of the driver's front console, it says Wi-Fi. I'm like, hey dude, is this- he says, yeah go ahead. I just fired up my phone and boom, got a connection. I mean, I'm sure it would have been faster if I'd used my own 3G connection, but the idea is kind of cool. Huh. Yeah, that was nice. Um, drove up to Buckingham Palace through the front gates. I gotta tell you, this was very exciting. Um, to, you know, just be kind of waved on. And you come in, um, and so this is where, you know, people can still walk at this point. It's just there's normally no cars allowed in the circular part. Oh, by the way, I turned on my Google Latitude so people could track me.

05:47 And I got, actually I got a, I put it on the curry.com, someone sent me a picture of me, my little face there in Buckingham Palace. Because of course you couldn't take pictures, cell phones had to be turned off. So I kind of cheated by leaving the cell phone on, but it's silent and I figured I'd just, you know, all I could really do is just broadcast my location. Now here's the interesting thing. So then there's the gates where you're actually, where the public is not allowed. And so they stop the car and then they check the car, which really only consisted of opening up the bonnet, that's the hood to you and I, and the boot, the trunk. And that was it. And they didn't ask me anything, only spoke to the driver. Okay, drove through the gates.

06:36 Parked actually he dropped me right right off in front of you drive through the gates and you get to this courtyard which is Really kind of dreary. It's just a square court. Yeah, it's square courtyard But on one side is the entrance and there's a red carpet. So you stop at the red carpet and walk up the red carpet and And I had my invite, which is really just a piece of paper with a number on it and my name and my photo ID. And said, oh no, you'll need that later. So just hold on to it. So I put it in my inside pocket, went off to the cloakroom, hung up my coat, and then... May I take your cloak, sir? May I take your cloak, sir? And then walked up the steps into kind of this holding area. There's about, I'd say, 50, 60 people there.

07:24 Anybody you know? Well, I'll get to that. So I walk in and it's really like a cocktail party reception. And what I really try to do is really keep my eyes open, my ears open because I have to be the camera now to be able to tell the story. Ready to eat material. Yeah, thank you. And I looked at all the details. The art, first of all, John, you would have shit yourself. I mean, this place, this waiting hall, kind of a rectangular hall, all gold, by the way, the ceiling, everything is all gold.

07:59 But the art, it wasn't portraits, which is what... because normally it's all these stately portraits, but this was Rembrandt, Vermeer, Albert Cuyp, Jan Steen, all these fantastic Dutch masters. You can walk right up to them and particularly the Dutch masters would do like, you know, marketplace scenes and there's always kind of sexy funny stuff in there. So there's, you know, all these weird people, you know, women, you know, I guess loose women on the square hanging out with guys and was just phenomenal to see all these works of art that I'd never heard of before. I'm sure they're in a book somewhere, but it's just like wow. And you might be surprised. Yeah, and they handed out drinks, all the little page boys and girls. Beautiful. What was the drinks? The drinks were red wine, white wine, water,

08:56 Orange juice or champagne. I chose for champagne. They were serving mums champagne Okay, which is always what they serve at the I asked obviously that's what they always serve at the receptions must be the one that's approved by the Queen yes, and So a couple of interesting things in this waiting room the fireplaces had electric heating elements in them, which I just found kind of odd and Kind of a bummer, you know, you really want that, you know, real fiery feel in a place like that. Coal. Exactly. Well, that's what they would be, typically. And so in the middle of this rectangular room, there's mirrored doors, which is, we know we're going to be going through there because in front of the mirrored doors is a huge plasma display, you know, showing the

09:49 I can't remember, it switched, but they weren't showing the new website, because this is what this was about, this was for the launch of the relaunch of royal.gov.uk, the Royal's website. But what's funny is the branding, it was on a stand that had a huge LG sign. Pretty lame. And every other monitor in the place, by the way, was Panasonic. So then the doors opened, And actually, one guy came up to me, he's from Australia, he was the consultant on the website. So they hired in a consultancy, the consultancy then said, okay, here's what we think you should do, then they hired another company to build it. And he said they were real sticklers about budgets and it was pretty funny.

10:35 Um, so then you walk in and then you have your card. Now remember, I have not been checked, I have not walked through. I mean, I could have had a fucking Uzi in my ass. Anything. And by the way, I probably could have, you know, anything. There was no check whatsoever. Not at any moment was my identity checked. Um, just nothing. Which I just found peculiar. So then the doors open, you walk in, and then there's two guys. and the Queen. She's right there. And then you all walk in one by one and you hand your little piece of paper which has your name on it and then the first guy says, Mr. Adam Curry! And then hands the piece of paper to the guy next to the Queen and he leans over and says, Mr. Adam Curry. And then you walk up and you shake the Queen's hand. And she has a firm handshake, I might add. And I looked her right in the eye and said,

11:36 Pull my finger. Why isn't there some protocol for addressing the Queen? Well, another interesting thing, no one gave any hints or help or whatever. I'd asked a number of people and they said probably the best and coolest way was to address her with ma'am. So I said, pleasure to meet you ma'am. And I would meet her later on, which I'll get to. So there was a camera, like the royal camera and video crew, so I'm hoping to get a picture of it, because that's just kind of cool for the archives. She's about 5'3", and she was wearing, I swear to God, John, a chroma key green suit. If we get video of this, you can key anything you want onto her outfit. It was phenomenally green.

12:26 Hmm, but like that ugly kind of yeah, no, I know that's that one color green that they use the key on one color green you you figured no one ever is wearing that color well guess what the Queen wears that color Maybe just in case But I was no one's keen on me. Yeah, really She wore beautiful pearls had a huge diamond brooch and she was continuously clutching her black handbag and And so everyone, again it's only 56. The black hand they had the pepper spray in it. Exactly. And so then we turn left into the room, the front of the room. They've got a nice six panel flat screen kind of display unit, rather large.

13:16 And once again, they were all served and the canapes come out and the same mum champagne. And I asked all of these pages, I said, you know, what is this? And they had little, you know, the puffy dough with the fish bits on the inside. I'm not quite sure what those would be called. But even their twisty breads, I'd ask every single thing. Did you guys make this? Oh yes, it's all made in-house. It's not from Marks and Spencer's? No, no, no. It's everything they passed down. Like, who made this? Did you make this? Marks and Spencer. It's not sold yet. So it's...

13:52 You know, so then someone comes up behind us and says, could you please make a path for the Queen? So everyone kind of, you know, the sea of people parts. And then the Queen walks in and it's crazy because she walks in and complete hush. I mean, you could have heard a pin drop on the carpet. It was so quiet. And she walks up and there's a little podium there. And so she's standing right... And it's very weird because, you know, how self-conscious... I would be embarrassed, you know, because she walks up, she's standing there, she's on display, everyone's gawking at her. And then, and this was the cool part, who was there to officially launch the site with a little intro speech and then hand over the first click to the Queen? None other than Mr. Tim Berners-Lee.

14:39 No. Which made total sense, right? Sir Tim, yeah. Yeah, Sir Tim. And I have exchanged email with him many years ago and of course, let's just be honest, this is the guy who invented the web, not Al Gore. He's a... Have you... You say Al Gore invented the internet. I'm sorry, yes, that's right. He came along later to do the web. That's right. Al did the internet and then Tim Berners-Lee did the web. Well, he's certainly recognized for inventing the concept of the web. Have you met him in person? Yeah, actually I hung out with him up in Telluride one year and went drinking with him and he got unfortunately, I think he was with his wife and maybe one of his kids and one of them got... When you're in Telluride it's a weird little place because it's like 12,000 or 13,000 feet. It's like being in the Andes and a lot of people get altitude sickness. Oh yeah, for sure. Doesn't aspirin help against that?

15:39 I don't know, I never have had it. But I know if you chew coca leaves that helps a lot. But I always take, there's a little bar there that is really fun to go drinking in which is really not true. Alcohol apparently helps. A thing you're not supposed to do in high altitudes is go drinking. And I think he went there, if I'm not mistaken, and got Some sort of a devastating headache, had to leave a day early. What I thought was interesting is he's a very nice guy. Very nice. He's very nice and he's kind of like me. He kind of has, you know, like his motor skills are kind of weird. He's kind of twitchy and twisty and all over the place.

16:22 Well, a little bit. Neither you or him are like shaking in your boots. No, no, no, no, no. But it was just kind of funny because I was like, man, if someone's looking at the two of us kind of, you know, like, like two fucking motherfuckers talking to each other. Makes sense to be British. So, yeah, so he wasn't, he's not a great, or he wasn't great today. He, you know, it sounded like he was nervous until I realized, you know, he's just kind of like a little messed up. Hold on. Get rid of that. So he does a little speech which was completely uninteresting. He tried to kind of bring together all the people communicating and we need information and yeah, okay Tim, we got it. It's free champagne, move on.

17:08 and then he hands over a wireless remote to the Queen and then she clicks and then the website opens up and they said, oh we have something special, she clicks again and I guess they have some... they took high-resolution panoramic pictures of one or a couple of the palaces, not Buckingham Palace as far as I understood. So you can kind of navigate around, you know, the virtual walkthrough And so then it's like, okay, so it's... That whole thing took... The queen clicking on it, she's up there for like five minutes and everyone's looking at a webpage. You know what I mean? So there's the queen in front of a big screen looking at a webpage. I mean, this is not a participatory sport or anything. It's kind of like, okay, now what are we supposed to do?

18:00 And so, you know, somehow Tim got everybody out of it. Oh, okay, applause, good, there we go. And then, you know, they had monitors along, all along one side of a wall, and they had school kids helping people out as they could, you know, could surf through this. But that, so I figured I'll go over to hang out with Tim, you know, and it was a good choice because the Queen then starts mingling. I was flabbergasted. And so I'm talking to Tim who has a foundation by the way that he started on. Had you heard about this? The World Wide Web Foundation? Is that the one that is promoting the semantic web with? I don't think so. This is more like a one

18:46 abstraction layer lower than net neutrality you know basically save the web. Save the web. Save the web. And so we're talking and I'm like hey man we should totally get John Doerr and Ray Lane to pull some money out for this because you know those guys rely on it and so of course he was all ears on that and had a little chat and then the Queen comes over starts talking to him and I got you know I got like one little word in there. Yes, because she really it's weird talking with the Queen What do you go? What have you got in common? And what are you gonna say like nothing nothing like I'm thinking there's a million things going through my mind like hey My wife is just as small as you want to dance. Yeah, I had no idea what this is How about the how about do you know your dress is chroma key? Well, I said this to one of the she has two guys who are her her personal

19:38 Yeah, guys, I guess. And they kind of stand at probably about four or five feet, no, maybe six feet distance and are just always kind of watching. So, you know, they're more like butlers that they look big enough to probably beat you up, but they're really proper guys. And you can see that they're just trying to make it all flow and making sure no one's bothering the queen, but they really stayed at a distance the whole time. I was talking to someone else and he overheard me talking about the chroma key and he was laughing. He said, yeah, totally. He said, all these guys are media savvy now, I guess. And I think she was there for probably like half an hour. She just kept mingling around. And I met someone. You never got to say anything to her? What do you think of this economy anyway?

20:25 Yeah, that was really the top of my mind. Did you guys get in any of that Bernie Madoff fund deal? Hey, want to buy some gold coins? I can get you a good deal. I did meet someone very good for us, John, for when you come and visit. I met the director of the British Library. And open invitation, he says, any book you want to see, I'll be more than happy to bring it out for you." And I said, wow, that's kind of cool because I was watching Stephen Fry last night and he built a Gutenberg printing press and he went and he got a look at one of the Gutenberg Bibles, you know, with the white gloves and he says, oh, we don't do white gloves. I said, what do you mean? So we have two Gutenberg Bibles and you're welcome to look at it, you're welcome to look through it and we don't believe in gloves.

21:14 We believe that the gloves will have, there's more chance because you have less sensitivity in your fingers, there's more chance you might rip a page. And yeah sure you might get a little bit of oil on it, but hey, it's meant to be used. And I was struck by that. Mmm, that's where we're going. Yeah, so we... Yeah, I've been thumbing through the Gutenberg Bible. What's this thing about revelation? I can't figure it out. Can you turn down your speaker just a bit? Actually, it would be interesting to have him bring out a Gutenberg Bible, whichever one he wants to show us, with one of the best illuminated scripts and do a comparison.

22:01 Luminated scripts. Well, you know these with these Bibles used to be handwritten written. I mean they well before the greenberg Bible Yeah, yeah Gutenberg, you know who was considered the devil by many because he mass-produced the Bible and he was the Bible until before then we're all individually crafted one by one yep, my scribe and And everyone was baffled when the Gutenberg Bible first came out because all of a sudden, instead of just selling one or two every so often, he was selling them by the hundreds and people were befuddled by this. They considered him to be, it must have been the work of the devil. Well, according to the documentary Stephen Fry did,

22:41 Once he got it all working and then he had an investor and he you know the investors are all I need my money back And then he didn't have the money so he had to sell all his stuff, and he died in poverty Doesn't that suck? I want my money back so he had to sell all of his presses and it and he never got but it's a fascinating story and Anyway, so we but we could have don't have the Magna Carta. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of first first hand We can take a look at that. Hmm. You know you oh, this is beautiful Okay, I just want to write down a note here rip off a corner

23:26 So, um, then I went, then we, uh, so then it kind of ended. It's almost like a prince party as in the purple one because you know it's over, you know, the doors open and the, and the pages and the butlers and they all kind of do the lights flash. It's like, ladies and gentlemen, the queen has left the building. And then you go out, down a different staircase, big portraits and I really took my... It's too bad I couldn't have really recorded all of this. I'm taking my time, I'm looking at all these portraits and everywhere there's a guy, you know, just standing there. And I'm like, you know, I'm just looking at the beautiful art, you know, that I'm hearing. He says, oh, no problem, sir. Just point out which one you'd like. We'll wrap it up and you can take it home.

24:13 He said that yeah, yeah, it's funny funny. Yeah Everybody's a comedian. I made a point to go to the bathroom which I'm so over right big letdown big letdown It's like I'm really like a modern airport bathroom. Oh, that's a crime totally and you know no little because of course I was looking to rip something off. You know the the champagne glass was actually it wasn't really a proper champagne glass it was a wide mouth and Kind of stem glass with beautiful er2 on it and you not something you could slip into your pocket without it being very noticeable So I'm figuring I'll take a towel or something like that. You know if they got like fucking Kleenex lame. Oh, yeah, what they should have is they should have a really ornate bathroom It's old-fashioned and in there should have a big bucket full of like matchbooks Thank you something like that right right they have the Queen's thing on there and it was a sign do not take

25:08 Or we will have to add $14 to your bill. And then everyone takes one of those matchbooks home and that would be your souvenir. Because people do feel obliged to have some souvenir from events like this, whether it's a napkin or a wine glass or something. I'm sure that the Buckingham Palace is just constantly being ripped off. Oh, no doubt. And this was clearly the reception side of the house. But anyway, it was it was really nice and it was It was an experience. Did you get Tim Berners-Lee email? What do you mean did I get his email? Did you get his email? You can mail him and tell him that you're gonna help him get funded for his whatever. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, no, that was the whole that was my whole ploy to hang out close to the Queen. It's just you know like yeah, I'll get you money no matter. Yeah, let me stand here Tim. Go ahead. I'll get you money Tim. Yeah, yeah, no problem, buddy.

26:01 Yeah, no, I've got his and Rosemary Leith, who is the director of the World Wide Web Foundation. And she had her daughter with her, a stunningly beautiful girl. Really? Young. So what's... Too young for you? Not young. No, I don't know, like 16. So, did you know anybody else there besides Berners-Lee? Interestingly enough, the only other guy that I recognized was the CEO of Blinks. The CEO of Blinks? Yeah, and he said, I have no idea how come I was invited. He's British.

26:46 And although he lives in San Francisco, he's old. Because they're listed on the, I think the pink slip exchange over here. So they went public. So what's the... Did everyone have name tags? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Name tags. So you could go looking around at people and say, oh that's so-and-so. Yeah, actually the name tag I did take with me. It has the little ER2 logo on it with my name on it. But it's not like a towel or anything. So... So you didn't feel obliged to protest the fact that the house of Windsor shouldn't even be in power? Stick out your tongue, stick out your tongue. Show me if it's split. You're reptile aren't you? I know you are. Anyway. She's almost 80 man, she looks pretty damn good. Yeah well, that's a good life. Yeah, go booze up and hang out with some geeks and have some canapes and back to bed.

27:49 Whatever she does. She probably does at least two of those deals a day. I wonder. The website is actually interesting, the new website. I might as well plug it. www.royal.gov.uk. Yeah, now they've got the high fives going on in England. We did it! We've gotten our publicity! Exactly. I hadn't even gotten home and they were already talking about the relaunch on Radio 2 here. So, they're good at it. But what's interesting about the website is, I'm just gonna bring it up for a second, you can choose your Commonwealth realm. So amongst the Commonwealth of... there's quite a bit, a lot of islands.

28:40 What about Canada? Are they listed? Yeah, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Belize, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia. Belize? They're an independent country. They still in the Commonwealth? Yep. Used to be called the British Honduras. Saint Lucia, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu. I never heard of Tuvalu. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Papua New Guinea. You got all that. Empire's still out there, isn't it? Yeah, well it's kind of in chunks, but yeah. Well, Canada, nice chunk to have. Yeah, the Canada thing is befuddling. But what was funny is, because I brought this up while I was there, let me see the... For example, Canada's got any connection. How come when we did, started this war in Iraq, the British came and they contributed soldiers and the Canadians said, nah, we're not sending anybody.

29:43 Why wouldn't they be obliged if they were part of this thing? Or is it just some sort of loose alliance? I think you're incorrect. I think Canada has sent troops, certainly to Afghanistan. I think so. I don't think it's anybody to Iraq. No, not to Iraq. Well... It just seems to me that this Commonwealth is not what the British Empire once was. To say the least. Well, no, because now this British Empire is just a financial empire and working quite well actually at taking away all of our physical assets. So good on you, Queenie. Good job. Did you bring this up, by the way? I wish I could. I don't have the balls for that, man. And what do you think she actually knows? Do you think she cares? She probably knows enough to throw you out. Yeah, right. It's not a good idea.

30:36 Probably some hand, some very interesting signal that would be involved. That would be worth knowing. Yeah, thanks. She probably just like scratches her left jawbone, you know, just a couple of times and boom, you're out on your ass. Tuvalu is the country where the .tv domain comes from. I thought that was Tonga. Well, I'm just reading what's in the chat, man. I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe Tonga's T.O. But I'm looking on the site because I'm trying to find about the prince I'm sorry the Duke what Duke of Edinburgh Philip no he's the Duke isn't he I don't know I don't keep up with that crap because it was let me see if I can find it because I was reading is like the Duke has no job is basically what it's here it is

31:28 Oh crap, no. I'll have to look for it. But it was like, he doesn't really have a day job, you know, a day-to-day agenda. He's involved in all kinds of stuff and does all kinds of meetings. Like the guy doesn't do anything. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. It's kind of like Hearst. Yeah, all of them. So, um... Hearst will get a kick out of that. Yeah, he doesn't listen to this show, let's face it. Anyway, it was fun. Good experience. Yeah, I'm irked now that I wasn't invited. Especially now that the Blinks guy was. You think you're irked? How do you think my wife feels? She kept saying, just call the master of the house and just say I'm bringing my wife. I don't think that's done. It just says this invitation is for you only and not transferable. But now that I know, next time I'll just print up one of those green pieces of paper, slap a name on it and a number and you're good to go.

32:33 I mean, it's not hard. Forging your way into a reception, that's pretty funny. Well, you know that the crazy guys have showed up in the Queen's bedroom several times. Oh yeah. Now I know why, because it's easy. They don't give a shit about security. I'm not kidding, John. This was really... Flying on EasyJet has ten times the security than getting into Buckingham Palace. Well, now you know. Indeed. Of course, if they hear this podcast, they may... Didn't you have to walk through a metal detector? No, no, no, no. No metal detector, no frisk, no nothing. They didn't even check my ID, John. Yeah. I guess I could've gone. Easily. Adam Curry. Crackpot and Buzzkill. That would be funny, wouldn't it?

33:31 But it I think we should we should wherever we go. We just need to have a little speaker system So it's a and we're going in to meet the queen Hello mom so ma'am so what else is going on this week anything you think Holy crap, the world is melting around us. Well apparently the Obama plan doesn't seem to be... What plan? What plan? Well that seems to be the problem. Yes, exactly. There is no plan. Let me just say one thing. Yesterday I had a luncheon and we have a...

34:14 a minicab company right down the road. You know, so this is, they're licensed taxis but they can't pick anyone up on the street. So they're kind of shitty cars, but you know, they're just regular Joes driving people around, essentially. So I walked down there, and you know, they got radios so they have communication, but it's kind of low-grade. And I'm always asking these guys, how you doing? How's business? You know, because I'm just obviously interested. He says, well, besides it being slow, he said, I've got all kinds of shit. And I'm like, good. You know, I got 20 minutes to kill. So lay it on me, brother. So what's happening now is banks are withdrawing overdraft protection or overdraft facilities.

34:55 And so this guy, I'm sure that at the end of the month he probably has to bridge maybe four or five hundred pounds to get to the next paycheck or whatever and that's what he uses the overdraft facility for. But they just yanked that, which they've done to millions of account holders. And of course the minute that happens he's got all these standing order debits for his insurance and council tax, all this stuff that has to be paid on time every single month. And then that starts bouncing out and he can't get any... any overdraft facility and it just goes into this, I mean the story goes on and on and on. The point of course is not this individual guy but this is what happens in the real world while people like John and I are sitting fat and happy watching C-SPAN with unbelievable testimony and questioning of banksters

35:48 Which I think I sat for a couple maybe four hours yesterday watching some of that but in the real world This is how people get hurt and this is the start and and it's frightening me for what's gonna happen to people Because they're really running into big big trouble well It'll be interesting. They're not handling it very well Meanwhile, so I'm watching C-SPAN per your You got hooked, didn't you? Now you can't let it go. Well, I've watched C-SPAN before. It's not like I've never seen it before. No, but these days it's pretty good. They seem to be more aggressive about what they show. They're at Davos. They're at these different kinds of events. They show these hearings like the ones I blogged specifically with Horowitz. A couple of these very interesting... Yeah, the attorneys for the SEC. Downs, right.

36:43 So they had this thing, I guess you couldn't find it, but it was on C-SPAN too, and it was Sarkozy addressing the Munich Security Conference. And this was a week ago, I believe, right? The Security Conference? Yeah, I guess so. It was after Davos, and the topic was the future of European security. And this actually was on C-SPAN last Saturday. I found that the whole thing if you listen to Sarkozy, it was Sarkozy and Merkel and this guy from Poland they had the Polish guy that runs Poland Donald Tusk. His name is Donald Tusk. Yeah, the guy who runs Poland. Yeah, Donald Tusk is the Polish Prime Minister and I'm thinking Donald Tusk. Hey, yo, Polish dude. Sounds like an American. Doesn't sound right. And by the way, he seemed to be the most erudite of the three and most

37:33 Now Poland being interesting of course because of the proposed missiles that would be placed in Poland. Yeah. So Sarkozy, when all this was said and done, and I have a lot of notes, I could bring a few up that are some of the more interesting comments, seems to me to be a little Napoleon. He's literally a little Napoleon. You see that his wife Carla Bruni has to wear flats when she's next to him? She can't wear high heels? Oh, please. She's a 5'4". Yeah, he's like 5'5". So he's going on and on about rearming Europe. Which is exactly what everyone said would happen if they signed this damn Lisbon Treaty, is then we'd have a European army. This is what the guy has been pushing for. Yeah, no, this guy's pushing it big time.

38:26 And then he's got, let me just mention a couple of things here. By the way, there's this quote I couldn't, I just got the kick out of. He said, can any area in, can any area in the world be rich without assured defense? Wow. Wow. Which is like, as soon as he said that, the first thing I said to myself was Monaco. Good point. Which is one of the richest places in the world, period, without question, and has no defense, and even during the, you know, when Hitler was running, they just did a deal to stay in tax. That's bull. And he goes on about the interest being the same as in the US. He made some very insulting remarks, you know, he says we share Obama's value.

39:11 The America we want has these values. The America we want. At this defining moment, change has come to America. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. This is your victory. We are and always will be the United States of America. I know you love that. Sorry, but by the way Biden was in the audience

39:56 Yes, he also did a speech. I did find his speech, but I never saw the Sarkozy. Oh, that's interesting because I'll have to give you the punchline of this whole thing. Okay. Anyway, he says by April of this year we're going to bring together this great family. And he talks about, you know, obviously the European Union trying to pass that treaty. And meanwhile, in somewhere he kind of sneaks in the thing about the A-bombs, about, you know, the fact that they have them and Great Britain has them. And he thinks, you know, even though they want this big giant European army, he thinks the A-bomb should be kept, you know, just within France. All of them in France? We're not going to share the A-bombs. You're the one who gave Poland the A-bomb. Uh-huh. But I thought that was kind of interesting. Now, it gets kind of weird as he goes on because he's talking about, you know, they talk about nuclear energy, the French do everything right, you know, a lot of French stuff. But he talks about the fact that they're apparently sharing soldiers and he makes this comment, quote, France will be happy to have soldiers in Germany and welcome German soldiers in France.

40:55 Wow. So I'm thinking, why are there French soldiers in Germany and German soldiers in France in the first place? Does this have to do maybe with kind of along the lines of we're not into protectionism except when it comes to protecting ourselves? Not sure. I found that the whole thing about the soldiers being shared, you know, well, that's the precursor to a European army, I guess. I think that must be. Because they're already doing that with police force. I believe that some police forces are being sent back and forth to different countries to quote learn. I'm sure they're just setting it up. You know a European police force, European army. Makes sense.

41:38 So, yeah, there's something going on. And the fact is that all we had here, we didn't have anybody else. I mean, there was Merkel and there was Sarkozy, and Merkel came and she... I didn't get to see her speech, but I heard her questions and answers, and I've concluded she's an idiot. And she's bitching about the chicken issue and some of these other little... She has a bunch of petty complaints. Shit no one cares about except for chicken farmers. Yeah, and... And Sarkozy also said, the public opinion of war is always bad, so we should pay no attention to it. Guys, unbelievable. And he says, and he also kisses, I made a note, he kisses, some Green Party guy came up and asked him questions and he just kissed the guy's ass, it was ridiculous, and went on and on about number one in the world with nuclear energy, 23% renewable, blah blah blah, who cares?

42:31 Armaments, defense is the priority, security, French, our people, just a few random comments. This I didn't get to look up, I wanted to do it before we did this show, but I gotta look it up. Helsinger Plus kept being, two things were brought up by Sarkozy and Merkel. One of them is something about we don't want another, we don't want Helsinger Plus or Helsinger 2. What is Helsingor? I don't know. I'm going to have to... I've been remiss by not having looked it up. We'll have it on Sunday show. And then they talked about EU plus, NATO plus, and I think what it refers to is some of these treaties and bringing out the guys that you're treating against, you know, like NATO plus might be NATO with Russia, which makes no sense. And they started doing a little inside baseball stuff.

43:19 They talked about getting Russian support for the EU and then they mentioned the Iranian satellite. He was like concerned about this and anyway, so the thing went on and on and on I'd have a lot more notes, but At the end they they they said next next on she's been Joe Biden will make his speech in five minutes and they broke up the At they broke up at the end with I was just under the impression that you know these people were like Hitlerian because they were shaking their fists and doing weird stuff So they so they say Biden well, what's Biden gonna say so C-SPAN kills Biden. They don't have him He never shows up interesting and it and instead he's bumped for and I could bump for now C-SPAN will give you the

44:09 the hearings for the deputy attorney general nomination David Ogden. Like who? So I'm thinking why are they bumping Biden for the deputy attorney general nomination debate which was really boring but Unbelievable. French are always, and by the way, if you look at the fractal of history, the French are as much troublemakers over time as the Germans have ever been. Actually, so let me say something about that because indeed the culture, and if you've lived in Europe you know this almost from childhood, first of all the Germans and the French

45:03 have always been at each other's throats or you know one way or the other politically or at war etc. But the French they really believe they rule the universe. I'm generalizing obviously but Sarkozy is a prime example of a French guy who considers the Netherlands to be the northern stop on the train route. You know that's literally how they talk about it. Oh Holland you mean that you mean the northern stop on our on our train line? That's how they feel about it. Belgium, the Netherlands, all theirs. They're incredible that way. Well, so they get into these beefs, so they must have actually, they must actually be strategizing how to get a European Union. There's two things that have to happen. One, you have to have the Germans and the French together on the deal. This will never occur. But they're trying their best. And that's why I think they have this soldier, you know, this is, what is it called when you bring your kid, foreign exchange students?

46:00 So we'll put the French soldiers in Germany and we'll put the German soldiers in France. And to maybe get so people get used to this. Let's give them all new uniforms, but with a little tag that shows what country they're from. That's what it's going to be. You watch. Yeah. You watch. I wouldn't be surprised. But the problem is that the Germans are still Germans. And the French are still French, no matter what you do about it. And it's going to annoy the locals. Because there's something that's grating to a Frenchman about a German. It's like the Brits. I mean, the British really dislike the French. Yeah, but they love to go there on holiday. They love France. They just don't like the French. And they bitch and moan. I mean, I don't think Americans, generally speaking, know how mean-spirited the British are regarding the French.

46:55 In general, I would say the British can be pretty mean-spirited. It's not just about the French. That's true, but I'm saying the French thing is really, you know, you can bring it up at a dinner or anything, it's just they just, they hate him. Yeah. And this goes back to God knows when. But, so this is shaking out to be something quite interesting if they keep going in this direction. Well we have another, we have a major flap going on today as we speak in the United Kingdom. This is the politician Geert Wilders, we've talked about him before on the show, who made the 15 minute movie Fitna, which you can find on, I don't know if it's on YouTube anymore, it's certainly on LiveLeak.

47:38 FITNA, which is, it's essentially a collage of headlines and then translations from the Quran and kind of basically saying Radical Islam is really bad and it's here. That is how I'd paraphrase this. Poorly put together. I didn't think it was a very good movie. It was kind of like one of those conspiracy theory clips, YouTube documentaries, you know what I mean? Like kind of weird stuff put together crudely. So first of all, but it certainly is not like, I wouldn't call it hate. It's just, you know, it's facts put together. Now you can call that hate if you want.

48:20 and some of it I'm sure is out of context and whatever. So first of all he's being prosecuted in the Netherlands for hate crime, a minister of parliament no less, but he was scheduled to show this movie in the House of Commons today upon invitation and the Home Office has denied him entry into the country. I'm sorry, what? The Home Office in the United Kingdom has denied him access to the country. So this story broke yesterday because he of course received a letter from the Home Office and it said, please don't come, we're not going to let you in. And so he said, look I've got a return ticket and he got on the plane this morning and the last I heard is he had landed but customs would not let him in. And so now of course the big debate is, you know, is there freedom of speech in Britain? Like, duh! No kidding!

49:18 Wait a minute, I thought that we're dealing with the EU where you don't have this kind of control from one EU country to another. You can't stop people from going here and there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. When did that happen? Today! Today! Today! As of today! Of course, but duh! This is what I keep telling Patricia. I said, hon, you know, don't you get it? It's only free when they feel it's free, not when they don't want it to be free. It's simple that way. So what you're saying is that the... oh geez, that's unbelievable. I mean, this doesn't make any sense. But then you have ministers of parliament, Muslim ministers of parliament. I don't even remember being checked when you go from... Oh yes you do, you definitely get checked. Oh that's right, you do walk through passport control at some... Even though most countries in Europe have no passport control. So if I go to Spain, and if I go to... it depends on which airport in France.

50:14 There's no passport control at all. You get off the plane, it lands at the European terminal, you walk right through. If you land at Gatwick or Heathrow, you have to go through the EU passport control. And it's not like a big deal, they look at your passport and, okay, you're an EU citizen, come on. They don't really ask you questions. I of course have to go through a different line because I don't have an EU passport and even though I do have a visa, they do ask questions. And the question is always, the reason I'm allowed to live and work here is because I'm married to an EU national. And they always say, uh, what nationality is your wife? I said she's Dutch. And where is she? And I always, my standard answer is, well I hope she's home because I'm really hungry. Which they don't find amusing. They don't find that very amusing. But you keep doing it. Yeah, of course. Of course. And by the way, I've met the queen. Fuck you, let me through. God damn it. Here, here's my name tag from when I met the queen, okay? I've got proof.

51:15 Yeah, so this is a big deal and what's interesting is on the radio here they have I don't know how many Muslim ministers of Parliament there are but there's one guy who's been on most of the talk shows and he's saying, hey look that guy has his freedom of speech and here's my freedom of speech you're not allowed in. That's not freedom of speech. That's not freedom of speech. That's hilarious. But the funny thing is like no one, not a single person even takes the effort to go look at the fucking movie. It's online and they're all talking about it like, oh, it's this hate crime thing. Like, what the... Go look at it before you talk about it.

51:56 And of course they don't show any of it anywhere and the whole point might say it's a crime But not a hate crime so the whole the whole turn on your speaker man you're you're really blowing me out there the whole reason he's not allowed in is because the Government is worried that it will start riots. Oh If it didn't start riots anywhere else Well, yeah, but you haven't got those Pakistani nutcases that they have in England. There you go. That's john at Dvorak dot org for all you Pakistani nutcases. That's where you can find them. There's a real good piece that was written. I'm going to have to go dig it up. That was written about how the Pakistanis were the ones that were the expats that moved to England. They were all influenced by clerics that were fairly liberal and modern. And then sometime in the

52:51 I think it was in the 70s or 80s, they switched based on what was going on in Pakistan, which is a movement toward conservative clerics, to a bunch of Wahhabists. in Pakistan and those guys then took over kind of pushed the Pakistani agenda and then of course they had their experiment called the Taliban and they had exported their philosophies to England some over a decade ago and it's been kind of taking the it's been pushed everybody's been kind of pushing in that direction and you know these things are all reversible but not everybody just lets you know doesn't pay any attention to it

53:34 That's always the danger. Did you, um... No, we can't say anything because it might offend someone. Well, this is the... I heard on CNBC even, someone mentioned that... I know they always talk about this, but the talk about the Fairness Doctrine really seems to be... the chatter is getting louder, John. You know, the thing is... yeah, it is, but you always have to remember that the Fairness Doctrine was instituted by the Republicans because the Democrats When push comes to shove, they're the ones who tend to be, you know...

54:11 more promotional about the political agenda than the republicans ever have been and essentially what's happened those you have a lightning rod for the fairness doctrine namely rush limbaugh who they just don't like because he's a big did you do rush limbaugh is for one thing he's been doing it for so long and he's so entertaining and he's got sees that the right you jodi and some huge huge eyes fourteen million or something and he gets caught and he And he gets quoted and again he is so, I don't think he's influential, but he does pound a specific drum and the drum is not even pro-Republican, it's just anti-Democrat. I think they've got

54:58 Limbaugh's gone, everybody's nerves. But the fact of the matter is, most of the editorials, and if you take Rachel Maddow who is on MSNBC and what's his name, the big head. Keith Olbermann. Keith Olbermann, I mean those guys and then everybody else that's attempting. And by the way, the woman, this is interesting, the woman who is pushing the main woman that's pushing the Fairness Doctrine thing, her husband happens to be one of the founders of one of the liberal radio talk shows that failed. What is it, Air America or whatever? Well he was one of the shows on Air America and I think then there was another somebody else tried to start something. It was boring! It was totally boring! The fact of the matter is we've always had a left-wing channel and this across the country called Pacifica Radio. We have a local version of it here in Berkeley. Pacifica Radio plays the most, they're not even left-wing, it's

56:01 borderline communist and they just basically hate republicans and pound the drum for all the progressive ideas and they have poets on and people who talk like this and well I think you know the indigenous people and they're the ones who try to change the name of all the holidays and they're essentially anti-american. They would be probably as they would be susceptible to this because if this thing ever went through everyone would be attacking all the left wing anything And the other thing you can do is you can pull a Hannity and Combs, where you can have a... I've always felt, you know, if you're ever going to... if anyone wants to get involved in politics, one of the things you want to do is you want to produce debates for TV. And the way you produce debates for TV, and you have a debate about topic A, and you get a very... and you're for it.

56:52 But you're producing it, it's got to be objective because there's going to be a debate. So what you do is you find the absolute best spokesperson for topic A in the world, knows everything, and then you find somebody against topic A who happens to be clinically insane, and you put them on the air. And there's your balance, you've got your debate. Topic A gets debated by a person who's very normal and some maniac. Oh, remember Morton Downey Jr.? Yeah, of course. God, wasn't he great. So, I mean, the fairness doctrine is kind of meaningless in the modern era, and they just put it all, you know, it's just Rush Limbaugh, they're just trying to get him off the air. They don't care about anything else, but it won't work. Because Rush Limbaugh really can neutralize his... They could take out the government, his audience, if they marched on Washington, it would be all over. You know, but he can also, he doesn't have to be, you know, you can also do this, have a sidekick, that's all you need to do.

57:51 Rush Limbaugh and sidekick right in the side rush. I can't believe you said that surely You know that President Obama is actually quite nice With Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak We didn't get together to pronounce my name a little better than why? So so you get a sidekick and make sure that the guys clinically insane and And that's what Hannity and Combs was kind of like. It was a balanced show. You know, Combs was useless. It's kind of funny to watch. Hannity's not as good by himself. That's the weird thing. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like you and me, darling. Anyway, so I don't know. I still think when push comes to shove, the Ferrandish doctrine is not going to pass. And it also may be a red herring to get all these right-wingers all, you know, get their panties in a bunch.

58:47 Moving go ahead. I was gonna say Michael Savage literally goes ballistic when it comes up Yeah, something he goes a little overboard though sometimes sometimes CNN reported something interesting yesterday, which I saw Maybe understandably maybe maybe I'm just reading too much into it Interpol issued a rare global security alert for 85 suspected al-qaeda linked terrorists wanted by Saudi Arabia Never before has Interpol been asked to alert the world about so many dangerous fugitives at one time, according to the press release. What do you think? I don't know, some weird stuff's going on. I think those fires in Australia are suspicious. I think those may be Al-Qaeda. Well, the police actually said they were angry. I have it here somewhere. Australian anger turns, as police admit, one of the deadliest bushfires was not arson after all.

59:54 So that sounds even weirder. Yeah, because there were new fires cropping up all over the place. You know, just out of the blue. And they had all these guys in their sights, you know, supposedly. Maybe the information, what is really going on is being suppressed for some reason. Yeah, just like everything else that comes through the internet there. Right. Yeah, Australia's got a police state when it comes to information. You know, the thing, somebody sent me a note, you know, because we were joking about the heat in Australia, but I wasn't realizing that those ridiculous fires that they were having, I mean, it's like my wife pointed out, it's like everything on fire from San Francisco to Seattle. Yeah. Well, we mentioned it on the previous show, and that's when you came with your, ha ha, Arizona's hot too, don't you feel stupid now?

1:00:46 Yeah, no. Well, I've always felt stupid so it's beside the point. But these fires being... as soon as I started reading about it, of course I've got the Australian sling box working. I can't seem to get it working. Did you get any local coverage? Could you see some good... Oh yeah, yeah. The guy who sent it to us, we want to thank him, you have his name. He actually works for Channel 9, maybe we shouldn't give his name out. and in Australia and he says you know he was telling about more fires being lit and but no offense to him but I thought the channel 10 coverage was a little better at least came in better and it was yeah there's a bit ridiculous and it's got to be as suspicious I think the whole thing is sketchy maybe they don't want to panic the public by you know by telling them that you know people are these are terrorists lighten up the place

1:01:40 Well, as Rahm Emanuel said, never let a good crisis go to waste. I suppose there's probably a vigilante attitude in Australia that has to be dealt with. You know, if you start saying, well, there's a bunch of, you know, if you say there's a bunch of Arab terrorists, you know, lighting fires all over the place, they would probably find any Arab in any bar and just kill him. Yeah, you're right. So who knows? I'm sure that will develop. Developing stories, anything else? Well you took notes, I have tons of stuff, but you took notes after our last... Oh yeah, here's a couple of things. I also wrote down a couple notes. There's more, there's this whole smart grid thing which we've kind of latched on to, there's more and more coming out about that.

1:02:34 Google's tied into it. By the way, Eric Schmidt, who I guess he doesn't work at Google anymore, he is now on David Cameron's economic team. Cameron being the opposition in the UK government for the conservatives. And he has this big article, yeah, I've got Eric Schmidt on my economic team. So the guy's on this team, he's on Obama's team. Does he do anything at Google anymore? Was he just out saving the world? Did he ever do anything at Google besides select a huge check? So Google is in on this smart grid thing and this ties into a number of things.

1:03:17 The fact that they're not talking about the so the smart grid idea is that the the grid that supplies Amongst other things electricity, but I think the grid will contain broadband and all kinds of stuff that it will determine when it's good for your washing machine to be on You know, so, oh well you can't wash right now, we're gonna make that happen at 2am or something of the like. And Google has, but they have some kind of API or something there now, they've announced... I didn't catch that, but that, you know, to me, there's always been, I always try to explain to myself from day one, I mean, when I first heard about this technology over 20 years ago, which is Power Grid connectivity to the internet,

1:04:02 So you can get your internet connection just through the plug in the wall. And the only explanation, it never worked. It's starting to work now and they actually have technologies that can give you almost a gigabit if all things are connected, if your house is actually wired correctly. And you can buy these little boxes to connect. If you don't have an ethernet port on somewhere, you can run it through your home's wiring. Yeah. And it works. Well, it works in the houses that are properly wired, which is only about probably half the houses in the country. But the idea is, I always say, why even do this? Because there's other technologies that are better, they're faster, they're not as screwy. But it's obvious that they want to have access to your power, A, because if you have an IP washing machine, you can put ads on the display.

1:04:59 Saying, yeah, hey, by the way, there's a sale over here at Safeway for some Tide laundry detergent. You want to check it out? Push this button and we will send a coupon to your printer. You think that's what it's for? You don't really think that's the applications they have in mind, do you? Oh, absolutely. That's the application. Dude, total control is the application, John. The application is advertising. You push the button and then it says, is this your printer? And then boom, you hit it. You come back, your printer's printed out a coupon. So you get a deal on Tide. I have to disagree with you, man. Yes, of course, that will be the application we're shown, but it's really about tracking everything you do and having total information field on your entire life. Come on, that's because we can run your life better. That's what I'm seeing. Yeah, that's what you'd be seeing. I think there's an element of that, but I think that's just too hard to execute.

1:05:49 Well, and I don't like the idea of I mean it has to be resisted obviously anything anything that that could go in that direction though did the gosh I'm scared to death Adam Curry Direction anything that goes into that direction should be stopped. Yes. Thank you. So I'm just to stick with that now the fact is Google sees it as an ad revenue stream because that's how they make their money right there. I mean, I don't think that they are yet You know wanting to control our lives. I'm sure they might like well. You know what you know what they've got all the bits That's that's the important thing because that yeah, they're plugged in soon as we sell the Google to some agency. Yeah, bingo Yeah, that latitude thing It's like it's very easy to quit your Google Maps on your phone, and it's still to be sharing your location It's it asked. Yeah, you want to still share your location. There's yes or no. I've hit I've hit it incorrectly a couple times It's a little freaky

1:06:46 Yeah, no, I don't like the I don't like latitude at all. No, in fact, this is I think it's gonna you know The thing is luckily in the United States were so litigious that one, just one person, one female gets stalked because of latitude and the fact that she pushed the wrong button and then is raped and murdered. That's the end of that technology. And a fat lawsuit. Well, let me then take you into the next topic which I think is pretty important. I'd love to hear your take on. So people have been pulling apart the stimulus bill, both the House, the Senate, and from what I understand the compromised version contains

1:07:23 Some very interesting healthcare initiatives which obviously come from Tom Daschle. And let me just read these to you. The bill's health rules will affect, this is from Bloomberg, will affect every individual in the United States. Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips easily transferred to a hospital is beneficial. It is good. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors, but here it comes. The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective. The goal is to reduce costs and guide your doctor's decisions. These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book. So, hospitals and doctors will be meaningful users of the new system.

1:08:25 And if they're not meaningful users, they will face penalties. And of course, meaningful user is not defined in the bill. So, it might understand that the stimulus package that passes will basically allow the government into our medical shit and guide our doctor as to what treatment we should receive. Well, a couple of things. First of all, insurance companies do that already. So I don't know if this is going to be that much different than that. Secondly, it is important that we have some sort of a secure medical information system because the number of people, it's in the hundreds of thousands who die

1:09:10 from the fact that they're given one treatment by one doctor because he didn't know that there's another treatment from another doctor that is going to kill him. If you combine the two treatments, I mean, the number is ridiculously high because these medical records are all hand-done and you can't read them. And the other thing is people don't realize in the United States in particular that the public, you as an individual own your medical records, the doctors do not. Okay, yeah, I agree. And so you should probably, you know, if you ever change doctors, you should ask for your medical records and then put them in a file and take them to another doctor or just do whatever you want with them. But it's not property of the doctor.

1:09:55 and that's little understood and people seem to assume it is. But then shouldn't I have the right to decide who can see it and who can do something with it? At the moment, yes, you could probably do that. You could probably get all your medical records, gather them up and then just tell people that you don't have to look. I don't understand why people don't generally do this and I think it's been drummed into them that you can't. And I think there's probably a lot of doctors that don't even know the facts but the fact is that The medical record is your property, nobody else's. Well, they want access to it through the smart grid, that's for sure. Well, they want a lot of stuff. It is bothersome that the government would have an oversight on treatment. What's the point? Why don't you just go onto a computer and type in what your symptoms are and have the great government doctor in the sky tell you what to do.

1:10:58 We're talking about how eight states have declared sovereignty. Yeah, this is uh, they're invoking the 10th amendment I believe and and essentially it's a 10th. What are you laughing about? Don't laugh at the constitution. That's funny about it. What? That they're invoking the 10th amendment? I don't know. I understand why California doesn't do that and split into three. Well, this has been predicted by many economists already that the United States could possibly split up and the main thing that's happening and this already I think this some of these states like I think in Texas it dates back to the Patriot Act or maybe Patriot 2 or God knows what where certain states said hey, you know what we're invoking the Tenth Amendment which means you you just can't overrule and do shit here and

1:11:49 You have to stay over there in your federal land and you have no right over us and you can't enforce all these terrorism related security measures. I'm going to have to look into this and discuss it further. And then, did we talk about the census? Oh that's right, we didn't talk about that. This was indeed news. over the weekend that now the census is important. This is taken every what, 10 years, the census? Yeah. It's important because it is used, and I'm not quite sure what the process is, it is used to draw up congressional districts. And I believe by, it may even be in the Constitution somewhere, that the census has to be a part of the Commerce Department.

1:12:48 And essentially it has now been taken away and the White House is now handling the census. In other words, Rahm Emanuel who was running the White House. And there's a... it's under-reported as usual. But I believe that politically that's a very, very powerful weapon. Well yeah, because it seems as though the threat is that they're going to get a hold of the census and then they're going to have control of the data and then they're going to redistrict the entire United States, Chicago style. So explain that. Well, you know, there's a lot of, you see this gerrymandering kind of thing that takes place all over the place. If you get enough people to, California does it constantly. You get enough people that you take over the government. You got Democrat governor, Democrat everything. And so then they start looking at the census data and then they start redistricting to protect their districts. In other words, you load up with, you know, if you're a Democrat and you have a district that has like,

1:13:50 you know, 50% Democrats and 50% Republicans in the district next door has, you know, 20% Democrats and 80% Republicans. You want to protect yourself so you cut out 20% of your Republicans and give them to the Republican thing because you can't get away with it. Just leave them alone. They'll have a Republican, you know, and then you're going to suck their 20 Democrats over and you end up with like seventy percent democrat can you keep just keep jiggering around the and that's why you see these districts in cali we have one around here that is is doesn't make any sense at all it's got a piece of san jose and then a little elect to square miles up north somewhere there's no where anywhere near did you know they they're not contiguous right there's like chunks of things and that's the district it's not based on geography it's based on demography

1:14:39 Yeah, or worse. So anyway, they have the demographic version of the... And so it doesn't make any sense because if I'm in this area where I'm going to have, you know, where there are things that I need about my streets and my roads and my bridges, why is somebody that's out, you know, a hundred miles away in some little hokey little town have any influence on what happens to me. I mean, the idea is you're supposed to be representative of these little geographic groups because people tend to huddle together in one town, for example.

1:15:17 Why would one town, Detroit will have, you know, that's places like Detroit and Chicago where you have these, you know, ethnic groups, you'll put them all in a certain area or the other way you can jigger it around as you jigger it around. So, so you have, you have a Republican and a Democrat areas that are, one is really solidly Republican and the other one is solidly Democrat. So you jigger it around so it's like one per you take the Republican area and yes You push a bunch of Democrats into that with 1% over and then you take the other one and you leave it So the Democrats take over both areas, even though there's like 49% Republicans in both they can't win anything I mean, there's all these little things you can do to screw over the electorate which is what it's doing by the way So this is not good. No, you know that I read a fantastic

1:16:08 fantastic conspiracy theory which you did yeah a really really really good one let me see one that I thought I'd have to share with you it was it was about the double swearing-in oh yes the one where I believe there's the two Obamas right so the The theory goes, you know who would, there was continuity of government was planned for inauguration day. And do you know that if anything had happened to Obama, who would be president? It wasn't going to be Biden? No, Robert Gates. How does that work? Well, I'm just saying. So it was announced and I remember seeing the announcement and thinking, hmm, whatever.

1:17:00 So, the theory is that Justice Roberts deliberately flubbed the line so that Obama would flub the line, meaning he wasn't inaugurated, meaning that Robert Gates for 36 hours was actually the Commander-in-Chief of the United States and he then purged, that's the word that's being used, all of the military commanders who were still from kind of the Clinton camp and the Bush camp and they wanted to get everyone out. who wasn't along with the program and then he got sworn in again properly. It's just a theory but I thought it was interesting to... Well, who was purged? Do we have any names? If somebody gets fired we would know about it, it would be in the public record. Well, you know, there's a couple of... I think it's commanders on the battlefield. I don't think it's desk job guys.

1:17:52 Well that might be but it's still I mean it's not as though we don't know well I don't know I don't know it was there a list you read this thing is just vague I mean there's just a vague assertion there's no specific there's a you know what there's a lot of links to different articles I'll send it to you can take a look at it right now it's like a real rabbit hole man you may not want to go down there I'll check it out but there is something still sketchy about the other thing how about this or a possibility that they when he Because the second one, the thing that was weird about the second swearing in was that it was private. Yeah, no cameras allowed. They have some links to that. You gotta see this whole article. No recordings. I think that he was giving... There was an audio recording. There was an audio recording. Oh, there was?

1:18:41 Doesn't matter. Do we know that we do we know that for a fact that the other recording actually reflected? No, we don't we don't have a we don't have a lip-sync of it. No, no, we don't just saying because it's possible that dead Obama or the city there's still not two Obama's or Still not the president. Well, that's probably gonna be true anyway See their second Obama or they swore him in to some World government office right right John sometimes you come out of left field my jaw just drops man. It's a lovely thing I got I got something Just a little add-on that we should take into consideration I think I was listening to the Horowitz and Dvorak financial show which is pretty much a repeat of all the good shit on no agenda and That's okay You had some sound clips. I was jealous of that

1:19:33 We were talking about Markopolis, this is the whistleblower who blew open the Madoff scheme. And thinking about how, first of all, my belief now that the whole thing is rigged and the whole thing is one big Ponzi scheme and it's all a bunch of bullshit and the bonuses are actually the way these guys get the money out of all this crap that they make up. But Markopoulos, do you know anything about his history? Because you guys were talking about it, that he worked for a firm and a client asked him to do some due diligence and then it led him into some really simple clues that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, right? Okay. And you heard that and you went, I doubt it. And you decided to do some research and you found out

1:20:16 Yes. Well, I had already found this out, but now, because I was just thinking, you know, maybe he's making a big deal about this and then, you know, throwing a couple other bones out there to, for everyone to be looking the other way and not really seeing the big, the big mountain in front of us that we're about to crash into. He led a 46 man special ops team overseas. Now, special ops is no joke, John. Doing what well it's special ops so of course it's not specified But special is like Delta Force stuff for the US. I know it's special This is like this is the jab like the jackals of the jackals of the economic hitman. Yeah, so That's all I know that's all I know that's all you know, but it was for the for the US Armed Forces You look around you you're not gonna find any details. I've tried and

1:21:10 that he led a 46-man special ops team. Like, well, that's interesting career change. Well, what makes it even more interesting is the fact that, well, he might be a spy. My point exactly. No, he's a front for the CIA and they decided they were sick of this Madoff thing and the SEC was a bunch of boneheads. They weren't going to do anything ever and may be in on the deal and somebody had to blow the whistle. So they He said, who can we get? Well, this guy. And they pushed him out in front and said, look, make the biggest stink you can so we can make some changes here. And we got some changes. Thompson fell on her sword and she quit. So now you know the whole thing. She is the worst. So you know the whole thing stinks because she's bailing. She just jumped out and it's happening everywhere. Finance minister in Germany bailed out, pulled the parachute. Just today

1:22:09 There was a shakeup in the British financial ministry. I should read the story. But people are bailing out all over the place. They don't want any part of it. Yeah, well I'd be bailing out too. I mean this is not going to get any better for these people so why should they stick around? Hopefully, you know, I'm sure they have these golden parachutes buried here and there. I mean this Madoff is like this, turns out his wife took out 15 million bucks a couple days before he turned himself in. And he's still, he's still Out walking about? Yeah, and his accountant has never been arrested from what I can tell. And they showed some poor guy in Florida who was running a $300 million Ponzi scheme which of course is tiddlywinks. And they've got him handcuffed, they're roughing him up, they're throwing him in the back of a cop car.

1:23:05 So is that right? Yeah, I see NBC, you know And it's local local affiliate coverage, right? So it even looked it looks a little bit like cops I swear to God man and the guys got his handcuff behind his back and you know his hair's all tough and tussled and like this guy and another mini made off and it's It's it's like we're focusing on all the wrong things like like the hearing with the bankers yesterday We're like raise your hand if you have a private jet. I'm God almighty. What have we lowered ourselves to this is so stupid

1:23:42 Richard, you've got a private jet. And he's like, yeah, of course I've got a private jet. What do you expect? I make a million dollars a year for the last decade, plus hundreds of millions in bonuses, of course. Who wouldn't have a private jet? It may be like if you didn't have a private jet, you'd have to be an idiot. It's so frustrating, John, because the public is only being focused on these minute details that have nothing to do with the big picture and the public doesn't even understand. Let me just say it for once and for all. When you talk about bankers, people, there are a couple of different kinds of bankers and we're looking at the wrong ones. You have retail bankers

1:24:23 and banking institutions that take deposits. Then you have the bankers that create bullshit money out of nothing. These are the guys that are on display, who have private jets and take out billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in bonuses annually. And then you have the central bankers. And I've mentioned them in that order because you need to be looking at the central bankers. These are the evil people. They're the ones that inflate the money supply. They're the ones that raise and lower interest rates for their own Profit they're the ones you need to focus on Ben Bernanke Mervyn King Who's the guy from the European Central Bank tree Shay?

1:25:07 These are the guys and the people behind them who actually own these central banks They are the culprits because Britain is doing the same. It's like it's so coordinated John They're rolling out these bankers the bankers all do a little me a culp a little dance Yeah, I'll pay you back and everyone's you know, everyone gets to yell at them, but they're not the problem They're just you know profiting in the middle end of rant. That's a good one. Not a typical So, uh... I can just run the tape every single time, is that what you're saying? I like you should. I should have to say. Thanks, John. I'm glad we're doing this show two times a week now with that attitude. God damn. Yeah.

1:25:50 So, okay, so here's the, so back to that concept. So, so I've been asking around and Horowitz and I discussed this and I, nobody's actually denied the possibility of your theory being part of the problem. Your theory being that the federal reserve started offering interest on deposits and excess deposits, not just reserve deposits as of October 6th. Right, which is when the market began to slide. It actually tanked. And that's because what, and the thinking would be that the banks that have the ability, that are connected to the Federal Reserve, would just as soon give them all the money,

1:26:31 that they have just to collect whatever interest they can get rather than put it in this crazy market which is unstable and you could still lose more money by being in it. So why loan out a nickel to the public or anybody else or a business or a letter of credit or anything else when you have easy money guaranteed. Free guaranteed money, 75 basis points. Actually I got the spreadsheet, it went up. They were doing 1% at one point, so 125 basis points at one moment. That's a lot. It is for that kind of, for this huge amount of money. I mean it's ridiculous. And so if that's the case, we're never going to get credit back until this ends.

1:27:15 If the thing is designed to rig the system, which we're going to have to assume since we followed the oil scam and then we watched all this crazy stuff going on with guys like Madoff, in other words, there's too much basic corruption. If the idea is to rig the system, in other words, tank the economy artificially, shake everything down, and the banks meanwhile end up, look, here's what you guys have, you know, you could say, you banks now hold all these properties that are just, you know, in the toilet. 19 million homes in the US? 19 million homes. We're going to keep, they all of a sudden say, okay, the interest rate deal is off.

1:27:55 We're not going to offer any more free money. You've got to put your money back in circulation, which you're going to have to do because they can't just sit on it. And let the things start cranking back up again. It should go up as fast as it went down, which is what happened with oil, by the way. It went down as fast as it went up. So it would be a quick turnaround. Meanwhile, to sweeten the pie, you guys have got 19 million homes that you can put on the market. as the market recovers and just ratchet it right up to whatever, get us back to where we were or close. There's a kink in your theory there because the Fed has done something interesting this week and you'll have to help me through it. They have now started buying treasuries and like billions and billions of dollars worth of treasuries. And isn't this, first of all I think it's the first time ever the Fed has done this.

1:28:52 Well, let me think. What would be the reason to do that? I'm sure somebody out there can come up with some. So one of our crazy listeners probably has. I think it's either in some way to screw China. This would be my just have a laundry list of things. Yeah, no, screw China is high on the list because remember, these are all just gangs fighting against each other. So it's either to screw China or to position yourself into a spot where you can actually profit from treasuries going up in value. which would happen if you crank the economy back up by pulling the plug on this free money, get the economy back on track, crank it up so you have this two-year, by the way, which is what happened in 1890. You have this two-year boom, which then brings all these properties, these real estate properties back into the market. Everything starts going up. It heats up the economy. You have to increase interest rates.

1:29:44 because right now they're down to zero. They actually buried it so it's almost nothing if it's not nothing. Treasuries then would start to become more valuable because they would be paying out more money and then they would go up in price. So these guys can make a killing on treasuries. And please remember that the Federal Reserve is owned by private banks. We don't even know who owns all of the Federal Reserve because it's unpublished information and considered private. So they're just going to go, it's a double whammy John. It's a double whammy. These guys just can't help but make money. Yeah, yeah. Well, that could be. I mean, that seems like a logical thing. Makes sense. And all the bankers in the middle, they're just facilitators, you know? They're just in the middle of it and they're getting their payout. Look, these guys don't care. They've already been paid. They've already got their...

1:30:38 their foreign investments, they've got their land, they know where they're escaping to, they know where they're going to go. Paraguay. Paraguay. Hey, we got a... Did you see we got a note from... a report from Gitmo Nation South? Yeah, our Paraguay guy. Yeah. Let me just see. Did you have... Yeah, he says that the bushes are sitting on top of the world's biggest aquifer. Yeah, that was last week. He sent something new, I thought. Yeah, it was most... I think... Here it is. Christian is his name. Here it is. I won't tell you everything he sent. Oops.

1:31:20 Oh yeah, everybody here hates the US in general, not because Hugo Chavez... This is another Google translator job. I'll read it verbatim. It's really hard to understand what he's talking about. I know that over here everybody hates US in general around here, not because Hugo Chavez. It's because what the US have done in the 70s and 80s around here. Okay. Here's the interesting thing. In the newspapers in general, they are... Well, it says matching, but I think comparing Obama to Hitler. Yeah, wow, that's weird. And he sends a link to a newspaper. Did you look at that link? Yeah, yeah. Hitler's terrible weapon publicity. My god. Yeah, it's actually an interesting article. It's in the Washington Post.

1:32:07 and it kind of talked about how, you know, well, you know, the story, you know, Hitler had Goebbels, and... Yes, he's his PR dude. Who was a PR guy, basically. And the thing was, if you read, by the way, if anybody is a public relations person or they want to study propaganda, most of Goebbels' speeches and talks and a lot of his papers are online here and there in translation. They're very interesting to read. And he's a very thoughtful public relations propaganda guy. You know, in the same league as the guys at Obama's campaign. What's his name? Alex... Yeah, the guy with the mustache. Axelrod, whatever. Axelrod, Axelrod and Karl Rover obviously have to read this stuff.

1:32:58 But what it was, is that the only reason that Hitler was such a PR nut in terms of developing imagery and all this stuff, is because in World War I, we were the geniuses at the time. We, the United States in particular, we're the ones, and if you look at World War I posters which are available at the Library of Congress, you can look at many of them there. Look up World War I propaganda posters. And we're the ones that were just calling the Germans giant rapist apes, and they had pictures of them, and we didn't know what a German looked like, so we made him look like a gorilla.

1:33:34 and with a helmet on, you know, and basically with dead women in both arms, you know, walking across Europe. And just really, you know, heavy hitting, you know, and this by the way is for the benefit of the bankers too, because the bankers are deep into debt with the British. Which bankers, John? Just specify which bankers. Can't remember. But anyway, so... Like the Rothschild-like bankers? Must have been. It seems so, yes. But anyway, so they cranked up the propaganda machine. They got the public, oh, we've got to stop these, we must stop them. And, you know, we got involved and ended up, you know, at the time, by the way, just before World War I, especially around the turn of the century, the United States and Britain were not friends.

1:34:21 No, no in fact we're with the the Anglo the Dutch Anglo Empire and the US have been enemies right largely uh-huh and That's part of our special relationship as they call it. We have a special relationship So we weren't friends and then the propaganda machine cranked up and somehow made us, you know, friends and we had to go help them. So the Germans were aware of this and Goebbels bitches about this incessantly in many of his papers saying, you know, we didn't get beaten by a better army, we got beaten by propaganda. And so he made an effort to make sure that Hitler had the best propaganda machine in the world

1:35:07 and could just pretty much take on anybody from that perspective. You know, I mean, they made everything sound like it was good. So now I guess in South America some people are equating what Obama did, because it was a propaganda machine par excellence, you know, from a guy who's really inexperienced, pushed this guy right to the top with a lot of really good work. And the posters, which was plagiarized by the way. Excellent work though. Excellent work and bingo the guy's the president now and so that you could see the association well, but the wheels are coming off the PR machine because I quite clearly saw President Obama promised that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would have all the details of the plan

1:35:51 And then, that was supposed to happen Monday and they postponed it till Tuesday. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, I'm ready, I'm watching, I'm watching, we've got Aaron Burnett on the scene, you know, I'm ready. And then the guy stands, he says nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, he even said, we have no plan. We'll have a plan in the next couple of weeks. Market starts tanking as he's speaking. It drops 300 points. And that, I'm sure, the only thing I can deduct from that is that there's a huge problem. Because that kind of PR mistake, I mean, they're no rookies when it comes to that. They wouldn't have Obama. Yeah, somebody screwed up. He wasn't keeping his eye on the ball. So I'm looking at Treasuries, 30-year Treasuries, and that same date, the October surprise, that same... Ooh, good one, John, thank you.

1:36:47 That thing was floating around $4.25 and it dumped it to about $2.50. Right, so first they tank everything, then they start buying them up. And then they started buying them up, so it's floating around $3.50, but if you have billions and trillions of dollars, you can't really invest it in anything without moving the stock itself. But you could do that with these treasuries, even though they have already moved it up to $3.50. But it's historically trades around five. So there's a big pile of money to be made. Yeah, nice margin in there. For big money. I mean, this is not for obviously for... So perhaps what we're seeing here, John, is the middle guys, you know, the Citibanks and the JP Morgans and Goldman Sachs, so they've made all their money. They paid themselves over $150 billion in bonuses in the past year and a half.

1:37:38 So they have those big yachts. Yeah, so they've made all that money and now the real evil people are going to make their money and they do it on a much bigger scale with this type of treasury scam. Yeah, that could be. Whatever the case is, it's actually good news for the public if what we described comes to pass. This will be a good thing for us. Why? Because it'll get the economy going again because you can't get a loan or anything these guys are basically locked everyone out I don't I don't think I have a benefit the public if it happens that way, but I have a bad feeling about the economy recovering That's my point. Yeah, I'm still optimistic now one of us is and I will say well somebody has to be and I Which make why am I the buzzkill?

1:38:34 No one ever said you were, you keep making a point of it. It should be Crackpot and the Buzzkill and Dvorak. And I still believe though that none of this would have happened. No wait, it's Crackpot and the Buzzkill and Dvorak. That's what it's supposed to be. Yeah, let me go kill this phone call. You kill that phone call man. So, you're not killing it, you're answering the phone call. No, I just wanted to see what it was, but you know what it is? It's that same call I get every time we do a show with a recording about somebody who does rug cleaning and I can't get off this list and they keep calling me. It's unbelievably annoying. Your rug needs cleaning. Oh, I'm running AAA rug cleaning. Do you have rugs that you need cleaned? If so, stay on the line.

1:39:27 All right, let me ask you one question is we got to close this up man. We're a buck 39 This is way over did this too long? So the stimulus package looks like it's passed looks like I mean, it's gonna go through there were three Three Republicans who were thanked incessantly by the way at the bailout press conference yesterday the two in particular are snow inspector so they're the ones that crossed the line and essentially got this thing passed through so remember those names and But why is it, how can all these people on one hand say we had to ram this through really quick because every single day is costing thousands of jobs, billions of dollars, we're all going to die. Yet when you look at it, all those spending happens in 2010. How does that work? Magic. Alright, that's good enough for me man. Magic it is. Okay, we're back on Sunday. Yeah, we're going to do it Sunday for sure?

1:40:27 Yeah, yeah, it makes sense just to have the have a couple of days in between although it's Saturday. Yeah, well It gives me a chance to do it on Saturday. I can do it, but you know no no let's do it Sunday Let's do it Sunday Then you know but what always happens then is then you know you have a you're so hyped up And you're of course because it's such a fantastic show then you go and you repeat all the stuff on twit and Yeah, so? You gotta watch your crossover, man. By the way, I don't repeat anything on Twit. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? You're, you're, you know, you're like nuts when it comes to this stuff. It's bull. You always repeat topics we discuss on No Agenda on Twit. Well, you know, like Bill Ziff used to always say, if you have a good thing, you know, you have something that people are interested in and you want to repeat yourself, just keep repeating yourself because they're still interested. I don't think it's a bad thing if I'm doing that, but I'm not.

1:41:18 We're gonna talk about the Munich Security Council on Twitch? You watch it come up. You watch it come up. It will now. By the way, Leo... You should take a look at the C-SPAN piece for six hours. It's really worth it. You'll enjoy it very much. When you do this... Well, we should talk about that another time. Besides I do a lot of cross-referencing we need to market the show up. We need another 50,000 listeners. Wait a minute. We were going to talk about our donation scheme. Yes, we're going to have a subscription-based thing. We have to get some income for doing this and we're going to ask people to subscribe. Let me give a little bit of background to that. The reason why we need this is because when the economy really comes crashing down, we won't have any money either. So we'd like to have a little bit set aside. I think we should, every donation, John, we should convert into gold.

1:42:14 We could do that. Yeah, and we won't spend it We'll just keep it in gold and it could be like an emergency fund for all of our listeners Is it a PayPal account as good as gold? Yeah Okay, and with that ladies and gentlemen We close down the show crackpot on the buzzkill coming to you from Gitmo nation east in southwest London in the curry Terrace I'm Adam curry I'm John C. Dvorak in Silicon Valley North and I'm also known as the optimistic buzzkill. We'll talk to you again on Sunday right here on No Agenda.