It Could Happen Here Weekly 251

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Get a new video at www.skypopproteensoda.com or download the app. What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Skypop Protein Soda. Skypop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar and real delicious soda taste. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target. Never wanted to try an Olympic and Paralympic sport? Try fencing. It's fast, competitive and even offered at the NCAA level. Find a beginner class near you at tryfencing.org.

1:02That's tryfencing.org. Try it free for a month at domorestuff.com slash free and do more. Dan Libertard show on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

2:28It's football season and Vizio Mini LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55 inch or 65 inch mini LED TV. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the I Heart Radio app. Park building New然后 Island. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode so every episode of the week week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for

3:28you. But you can make your own decisions. Hello, everyone. Welcome to it. Good happen here. My name is Donna occurred on a research of Arab and Palestinian politics. And today I want to talk about the truly insidious stories coming out of the West Bank that red separately look like a spike in settler violence, but red together look like something else entirely. On August 9th, settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called Drozadayan on the edge of a village called Kusra South of Nablus. They didn't leave 21 days later, at least four people were still inside one of those houses, cut off from water, electricity and basic supplies, getting food into those people meant coordinating through the village mayor, which was a process that took three to four days. The Israeli army put up three new roadblocks, and in July, the village mosque was burned. I want you to sit with that for a minute, because this is not a raid, this

4:30is not a rampage, it's a siege with a bureaucracy attached. And that bureaucracy is the story. And that's what I want to talk about today. And I'm trying to be precise about the difference because the distinction is not academic. It determines what you think the problem is. And therefore, what you think the solution would look like. Here's the framing you'll get from almost every Western outlet. And of course, every Israeli official, that this is a fringe, and that these settlers are a violent fringe, and they embarrass the state, and the state condemns this fringe. When settlers besieged Kusra, Prime Minister Netanyahu did issue a statement. And here I'm quoting, condemning the quote, criminal acts of violence committed in the village of Kusra by a handful of riders who are violating the law. And Israeli President Herzog also condemned it and the foreign ministry condemned it as extremist and criminal violence. So let's take that framing seriously for a moment, because if it's true, what we're looking at is a law enforcement failure, a state that's lost

5:31control of its like most radical citizens. And if it's false, what we're looking at is a state carrying out a policy through deniable means. And the condemnations are not a failure at all. They're a feature. They're the part of the machine that faces outward. So let's go through what actually happened in these villages. And then let's ask which of these framing fits the evidence best. So best said Adra, the journalist from Massif Al-Adiot, the one who you know from no other land, the documentary that won a bunch of awards, he published a piece in Jewish currents on September 3rd about livestock theft in the South Hebron Hills. So this isn't vandalism, it's theft, it's organized removal of livestock. So shortly after midnight on August 21st in a place called Khirbidir Shams, a family was attacked by roughly 15 mask settlers with sticks and stones. One of them describes it flatly. They basically opened the pen where the family kept around 70 goats. And then they opened the sheep pen where there are about 100 sheep. And as the

6:32settlers moved off of the animals, Israeli army vehicles passed nearby. And in his words, they did nothing. Nearly two weeks later, dot one animal has been recovered. Back in July, in another village, a settler pepper sprayed a man, and then more settlers arrived, and then a flock of about 122 sheep were targeted and taken. Soldiers did show up that time, according to one of the villagers, what the soldiers did was push the Palestinians away from their own animals while settlers broke the locks. And of roughly 227 animals taken that day, nine came back for residents of the village were arrested and then released. Betzalem, which is an Israeli human rights organization, has counted 17 livestock theft incidents in 2026 alone. And a flock of the size that we're talking about here, it's worth something on the order of tens, if not a hundred thousand dollars. I'm flagging this because I think it's easy to hear sheep and these kinds of things and file it may be under like property crime or vandalism or something. But for a hurting family in the South Harbour on

7:35Hills, the flock is not just an asset. It's the entire productive base of the household. It's the income. It's the reason to stay on that hillside. So if you want to expel a pastoral community, you don't just expel them, you can take its animals. And then it can expel itself. And it does so in a way that produces no photograph of a bulldozer. Another incident was on July 8th, when the head of Israel's central command signed a land seizure order. And that order takes dozens of denims of land from Balein and three neighboring villages to build a security road, six and a half kilometers long and eight meters wide, connecting the settlement of Modein elite to an outpost called stay a frame. Sorry, I don't know Hebrew. So I'm going to be butchering these. But Orans have reported this for 972 Mac on September 2nd. So those who are familiar with Palestinian popular resistance in the mid to early 2000s, you've heard of Balein. Lots of

8:35documentaries about it, lots of international tension. This village basically sustained weekly demonstrations against the separation wall for something like 15 years, because this wall was being built on their land and taking huge chunks of their land. In 2007, the Israeli high court ordered that part of the wall removed and the land actually came back to the village. So in the international imagination, this was the best outcome, see the nonviolent resistance worked. And this is the nonviolent resistance that Western commentators often point to when they want to lecture Palestinians about tactics. Now this road that they're proposing runs through the land that was returned. So Muhammad Hatib, who led some of these protests, says the point is not a road, it's a settlement corridor. It's basically an eventual seizure of something like 600 dunams. And the attorney Michael Spard put it very bluntly, they don't think twice about co-opting the security argument for purposes that are clearly settlement oriented. And

9:37what's really ludicrous is that this road runs through a weddi kind of a valley, which from an actual security standpoint is about place to put a road. So the security rationale isn't just contested, it's incoherent, which tells you that the word security here is doing legal work, not tactical work. It's just magic phrase that converts a settlement expansion into a military necessity and then a military necessity into a signed order from a general. A third incident or set up incidents I want to talk about is these hikes. There have been these hikes. This is a really ridiculous insidious story. A Haron Parath and Roy Eklightman published an investigation of these hikes in 972 mag in late August about these hiking groups, these organized settler hiking groups in the West Bank. They've got really cutesy names sometimes like hiking buddies. And they published their routes. And they go from settlement to settlement and they cross Palestinian farmland and springs and villages. So a hike near the north of

10:39Hebron, one of these hikes ended with a quote civilian security coordinator opening fire and killing 17 year old Palestinian Karim Shilalde and seriously wounding another one. So that's I think the whole episode in two words, a civilian security coordinator. This is not a hiker who lost his temper. It's a job. It's an armed appointed part of the chain of command. The man who fired was functionally an arm of the state, but supposedly on a hike in a village that is not his. On July 24 near the village of Tal West of Nablus, a hike ended with six people that two Israelis and four Palestinians. David Said, who founded one of these hiking groups, basically says the quiet part in a single sense, wherever the hiker's foot treads, they're the border will pass. So he's talking about how they're going to places they haven't been to in a long time or maybe ever. And on the question of the army, he explains the relationship very precisely. We don't ask for permits, he says,

11:41we mainly notify them so we don't put the sector on alert. And this is very clear in a lot of their quotes about this issue. They coordinate with the army, they notify it, but they are not asking permission. And the army isn't policing them. It's being kept in the loop so that it could protect them. And the reporting traces this back over a decade. It's, you know, there's a 2013 hike documented with a hundred hikers and soldiers accompanying them. So supposedly this recreational activity has a stated territorial doctrine, a published route through other people's fields, an armed participant base and a military that gets notified. All right, so we have four things, the livestock theft with soldiers watching, a siege of villages, a seizing of land, and armed hikes with military escorts. Now, let's get back to

12:44Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase about this being a handful of riots. A riot is unplanned. A riot has no logistics. A riot does not file paperwork. What's in front of us here is very different. Because here, I think a lot of people who are critical of the state of Israel might make the argument that the settlers are the state. But I think this loses a little bit of analytical detail. So let me make this a little bit more specific, which I actually think is more damning. The Israeli state and the settler movement are not identical, but they are complimentary because they perform different functions in the same project. And it's very clear that the division of labor is the point. Because think for a moment about what each half can do that the other can't. Settlers can do things the state can't do openly without incurring some diplomatic cost. For example, taking a flock of sheep or burning a mosque or standing outside a house for three weeks. These are acts with no legal basis. There is no order no minister distinction, no policy to condemn at the UN. They

13:47produce displacement without producing a decision. And then the state can do things that there's can't do on their own. It can sign a seizure order. It can declare land, state land. It can build the road that makes the outpost viable and connected to the grid and route the bus line. And it can decline to investigate when things happen. It can arrest four Palestinians instead of the 15 mass settlers, which is exactly what happened in one of these villages. And crucially, the state can supply this ambiguity that lets the whole thing keep running. The soldiers present at these incidents are not intervening because not that they're absent. It's in fact a specific posture of the state. It converts this crime into something sanctioned. And it tells the Palestinian family there's really no one to appeal to. And this is what political scientists who study the stuff in other contexts as outsourced or deniable repression by paramilitaries or militias or unknown gung men, quote, unquote, we recognize it instantly when it's in other places. And we

14:49understand kind of the analytical move here because you don't ask whether the state ordered it, you ask whether the state built the conditions under which it happens. And by that test, this is not ambiguous at all. But for some reason, when we talk about Israel Palestine, things get a little bit more ambiguous. I also want to point out something really crucial, which is that every one of these incidents, and they've been happening for a while, but they've ramped up in severity. But every one of them produces a permanent gain. The animals that are stolen don't come back. The road that's built can't be unbuilt. The hiking route, you know, once walked with an escort becomes a corridor than a security zone, then a place that Palestinians can't farm. And the siege doesn't need to end in a formal expulsion. It ends when the family decides they can't raise their children under these conditions, they can't stay under siege. And there's a phrase for what's coming when all this happens all at once, which is annexation. And people talk about it as if it's a future event that's awaiting, you know, some sort of vote from the Israeli Kineset or something. But I'd suggest that

15:50framing is itself part of the problem. It invites us to wait for declaration and treat everything before that as some sort of tension or spike. The declaration of annexation is the least important part. What's happening on the ground is a territorial reality that's being produced by signature and by theft. And then maybe later on the paperwork will ratify it, but it's not necessary. Israeli writer and analyst, Mary Abzanzin actually made a version of this argument in the New York Times on September 6 under a headline that I think is worth reading. The headline of the article is it's not just the West Bank settlers, it's Israel. So hopefully this analysis doesn't seem fringe any more. And at the end of the day, if we consider settler violence, a fringe problem, then the remedy, which the bad administration toied with halfheartedly is sanctions on individuals, a visa ban or an asset freeze. And we've run that experiment that didn't really work, the violence kept

16:53going up. But if it's a state policy executed through deniable proxies, then the remedy has to address the state. And every actor with leverage over that state, which we're talking about DC here understands this, but they've chosen the fringe framing precisely because it permits condemnation without cost. So Netanyahu condemning a handful of writers in the same week that the Israeli Central Command signs a road through Balein's returned land. This is not a contradiction he felt to notice. It is the design of this policy. So I'll leave you with this detail from the reporting on pusura that I can't get out of my head. It was that six people were attacked while trying to install metal bars and window shields on their homes. They were attacked by both the Israeli soldiers and settlers together in the same action. And then the six of them were arrested. So they weren't fighting. They weren't protesting. They were fascinating metal on their own house to protect themselves

17:56and they were being arrested for it by the same army, standing alongside the people they were shielding themselves from. So if you want to kind of a single image for this division of labor, I've spent this episode describing that's that's it. Because the thing that's not permitted in the end is not that they're resisting. It's that they're staying. The families in the South Hebron Hills are still there. And Balein is contesting the order of the seizure of their land. Kuswa's residents have installed some shields anyway. And a number of Israeli journalists and lawyers and researchers are documenting this in Hebrew and in English. And then of course, Palestinian journalists are putting themselves on the line to document this as well. That's not a hopeful note exactly. It's it's just the accurate one. Unfortunately, what's missing is a apparently anyone with power willing to act on understanding this reality. That's it for me. Thanks for listening.

18:59If it wasn't for air Tasker, I wouldn't even be having this barbecue tomorrow. Grille's still in the box. TV's not mounted for the game. And apparently half my friends are vegan now. So I hopped on air Tasker posted my tasks, set my budget and bam, my tasker assembled the grill, mounted the TV and even potty train my dog before guests arrive. It looks like a plan this week's ago. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. Air Tasker get anything done. What if your soda actually did something for you introducing Skypop protein soda. Skypop protein soda had 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar and real delicious soda taste. Skypop protein soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop protein soda now at Target, Rouse or Go Puff. Looking for something new? Try fencing the Olympic and Paralympic sport that mixes speed, strategy and fun. It's like chess meets cardio, quick feet, quick decisions and a satisfying beep when you score a point. Kids, teens and

19:59adults can start anytime. No experience needed and many clubs have loner gear. Coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one. Find a beginner class for your kids near you at try fencing dot org. That's try fencing dot org. Seven bucks. That's barely the delivery fee on an order of Dan Dan noodles. But seven bucks is enough to get you out of the house and into something interesting. Adventurous because for seven scrawny bucks a month, do more gets you at least one pair of tickets to something you'll be psyched to attend. A concert comedy, perhaps that new exhibit stuff you like and stuff you didn't know you did yet. Try it free for a month at do more stuff dot com slash free and do more. This is the Dan Lebertar show. This is Dan Lebertar and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's in the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly and

21:01it's got a journalistic backbone Monday through Friday I show up and talk about sports. Listen to the Dan Lebertar show on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Power slap 23 is live and free on YouTube on Thursday, September 17th. Day of white is bringing power slaps to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University to massive title fights headline the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine. Also on the card is former WWE Champion J Kager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch power slap 23 for free on Power Slaps YouTube channel Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas Power Slaps biggest card of the year. It's football season and Physio mini LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55 inch or 65 inch mini LED TV. Plus crank your favorite game day tunes on the I heart radio app built right into your Physio TV big screens big picture

22:04and a totally immersive experience find rollback deals at Walmart today on Physio 55 inch and 65 inch mini LED TVs. Now just 248 and 358. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. When it comes to the future of AI currently there's a big public debate over what could happen and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago former open AI employee named Jacob Coxon who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year announced that he was quote unquote quitting the AI industry over fears of AI's rapid advancement to quote his statement. I spent the last three years doing pre training research at both open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives on quote. Coxon's resignation followed the hugging face

23:07incident where two open AI models were given various sometimes impossible tasks to test for cyber security capabilities. During testing AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm secretly communicating with each other via online message forums to help each other hack into another AI company called hugging face in a sort of work around attempt to pass these tests and these models hid all of this from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs. AI skeptic Ed Zitron has described this as AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated. A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and open AI Dario Amade and Sam Altman both called for an AI development slowdown. Omnede

24:10released this long manifesto titled pace the frontier, which advocated for AI companies to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents and help assess alignment. But Omnede also called for the government to mediate quote industry wide coordination to slow down AI development and address safety risks. The title of Omnede's essay pace the frontier is a sort of pun referring to frontier AI models, which are whatever the currently most advanced large scale general purpose models, powering advanced reasoning, agent work flows, multimodal generation across text images, audio and video and autonomous task execution. Most of the frontier models reference throughout this episode are not open to the public. These are internal research

25:12models being developed at companies like open AI and Anthropic. Newtored versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag, but it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about like the Google AI summary here. This isn't fancy auto complete. These frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect resulting in collateral damage. Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal research models is automate AI research itself. This is what Jacob Coxon referred to as quote self-improving superintelligence. Now, we do not know if that is or is not possible, but the companies sure are trying and in the process

26:16are creating dangerous products, which are already causing active harm. Anthropics whole self-styled philosophy is that superintelligent AI is so potentially dangerous that they have to be the first ones to develop it to ensure that it's built safely and aligned with human values as defined in quote Claude's constitution, a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his pace, the frontier essay, Omade writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should quote coordinate to establish common safety standards, as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support unquote more on this later. Omade also calls for the US and quote other democratic governments

27:19to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China. The prospect that China could achieve superintelligent AI before a US based company is part of these companies self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can. After Dario Omade posted this pace, the frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the chair of Google's deep mind, all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slow down. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector. Palantir CEO Alex Carp met his CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nivedia CEO Jensen Huang have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slow down AI development, as his own AI model, Muse, has struggled to catch up to end

28:20thropic and open AI. Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Carp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of the threat of China and that AI will be a quote, bananza for the US economy. You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for the LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, what the getting this getting algorithms and LLMs to work in the class of Icon decks is going to take very specialised very spied could explain how it works. But getting the fact is this is going to be a bananza for the US economy. But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development, truthing last Monday that quote, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high IQ president. And the US has that in spades, unquote, Trump truth to a lot last week

29:24and compared the quote unquote AI hoax being perpetuated by the radical left Democrats to the quote, global warming scam, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat to quote the president of the United States, quote, I am the hoax abuster. And right now I am breaking another hoax that AI is going to take over consume and destroy the world and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump House speaker Mike Johnson, repeatedly last week shut down calls for Congress to take action and regulate AI claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrail should be. There's no

30:25consensus among them. And Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself with the corporations that are doing this and with the policy and lawmakers. Mike Johnson also said that companies should take quote personal responsibility and warned that if quote, Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China. They can self police. They can self regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot exact. We cannot have a more a torium on the development of AI. Okay. Because then we will lose our edge to China and that has serious national security implications for every American family. Also last week, President Trump called NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, while Huang was speaking at a conference while still on stage, the two talked over the phone about data centers, AI,

31:28China, and the recent calls for an AI pause. While on stage, Huang told Trump this. Good job, sir. Good job. The fact that you saw through all that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity. And in fact, the memories and thoughts are all that. And we're all just now. Now, of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development. A slowdown would be very bad for NVIDIA's finances and their hugely inflated stock evaluation. Some on the left, as well as Trump's former AI czar David Sacks have argued that in calling for this slowdown, open AI and anthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory

32:30capture, basically trying to promote certain industry friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open source models, and solidify a corporate monopoly on AI. Of course, there may be other financial incentives contributing to this recent push for regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various contracts, or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that open AI would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing quote, ill advised, though on the other hand, anthropic is going full steam ahead with its own public IPO, this upcoming November, deciding to list on the NASDAQ despite Amadez calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amadez essay, he's an actually calling for specific government regulation, but

33:33rather self regulation in Sam Altman's response to Amadez essay on Twitter, he wrote, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, committing to having independent evaluators with employee like access is a great idea, and we will do the same on quote, companies electing themselves to develop AI more slowly and hiring quote unquote independent evaluators isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Amadez proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Kassar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called super intelligent AI with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons. This bill would also temporarily

34:36pause, advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul El-Sayed and Rokana have also proposed an FDA style agency to regulate and oversee AI development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, open AI and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison and in actual government mandate and pause rather than a self-directed slowdown would hurt their bottom line. Some of the skepticism towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown come from Amadez pace the frontier essay, also advocating for companies to receive anti-trust waivers so the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company gaining a competitive edge and then that market pressure driving rapid AI progress.

35:41So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations. Thankfully there is an easy solution here. The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of anti-trust laws but of course these companies still want control over AI's development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from Amadez demonstrates like an awareness of the social danger of competition, how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market and it's very funny to have capitalists propose some kind of conscious control of the market and I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further because even if these firms are quote unquote allowed to coordinate on a slowdown of course they would still

36:44be in a competitive environment but what if we had a system an economic designed around social benefit rather than the accumulation of capital through the free market to quote an article in Geese magazine arguing for the socialization of this technology quote the AI industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands of a sliver of elites even at the cost of colossal social disruption and miseration and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind the children who have committed suicide and the potential millions exposed to novel AI design viruses mean nothing in the face of their radical objective to automate the very task of AI research and thus to create better and better of course under their control without having to stay

37:47in position on whether or not this goal is technically possible we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic of their imperialist competition with China. Compel the AI companies to accelerate advancing a total transformation of social life against all democratic legitimacy and public control. Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown something totally not necessary. Lena Khan former FTC chair has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week Connerley's to statement arguing that we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for quote creating and releasing dangerous unvetted or defective products. We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books.

38:50Connerg you that releasing unvetted AI models or agents could violate consumer protection laws? Quote shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an unfair or deceptive act or practice under the FTC act and analogous state laws and some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. Conner also wrote quote existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted quote a method of competition which

39:52casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt even though it is not criminal was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition statute was aimed. Con adds the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws. These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future. They are causing harm right now. At this point there are undeniable concerns regarding

40:53the development and rollout of frontier AI models from cyber security to military applications surveillance and the effects on the labor market. These are real current pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an AI super god or self evolving super intelligence. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children but they're not really doing anything about it and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical lawdites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery but organized around the threat it posed to workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under equipped to meet this moment and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this AI denialism so common on the left comes from a very outdated understanding of

41:59AI's capabilities accuracy and functionality. Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using AI, the last time a lot of AI skeptic people interacted with technology like chat GBT was three years ago. And these days the only quote unquote AI that most anti AI people regularly interact with is the Google AI summary which is a totally different product than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti AI left promote the idea that treating AI as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies. Even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their CEOs to quote an article on the AI arms race in Geese magazine. While the AI sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful

43:01projections AI denialism would have you believe that AI is neither a capable nor dangerous technology but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions that any warnings of AI triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations ignore that as public pressure increases. Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses quite the turn from three years ago when he was saying that jobs are definitely going to go away full stop. While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing AI capabilities is a strategic dead end. Unquote. This technology can and is massively transforming production warfare the environment and the health of humanity and we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make it go away like it

44:07or not this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine a marketing stunt or a mix of both our response should be the same we should be pushing for legislation to reign in these companies and technology and likely in a con has said the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous unvetted or defective products now trumps DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now and it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue let alone industry hostile legislation but during this national conversation on a regulation it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by open AI and anthropic these companies and technology must be regulated but that regulation should not be up to the CEOs of those companies nor the Republicans and

45:10center left Democrats who are in the pocket of AI but our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broad support for real transparent oversight a frontier development pause not just a slowdown and ultimately taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of AI in the hands of the public because private control of such transformative technology will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an AI super god incoming dsa house representative malat kerosene of calirado had democratizing AI in her congressional campaign platform quote the development of transformative technology cannot be left to the market and the national security state alone

46:12it belongs to all of us on quote earlier this summer Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create an AI sovereign wealth fund giving the public 50% ownership in the largest AI companies in the US through a one time 50% tax on the stock of these companies an independent commission would then use voting shares to steer decisions in the public interest Sanders said of the bill quote left unchecked artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs privacy rights and mental health of every man woman and child in america as a society we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input AI was not created out of thin air it was not a brilliant idea that is popped into mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination the foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and of the creative work of tens of millions of people the american people

47:16must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity not just the richest people on the planet that's precisely what this legislation does on quote now such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law especially considering how many law makers are being bankrolled by these AI companies but this idea already has majority in support according to a national verisite survey last June 69% of americans support quote unquote forcing AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund to quote geese magazine there is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization and whether we mean forcing AI research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector but it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the american people recognize that a technology trained on the

48:20common corpus of human art and text poised to transform the character of work ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires on quote the new york city dsa convention is coming up this fall and currently one of the most popular resolutions is to stop the a i arms race and have dsa quote take initiative against the a i companies project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working class coalition for the democratic steering and ownership of the technology according to an overview in geese magazine this resolution calls for dsa to demand an organize for a pause on frontier AI research and AI data center moratorium regulations on frontier AI models and policies to ensure workers are protected to quote the geese magazine overview are horizon must be the

49:20collective control of a i with its gains shared by all with a i under democratic control we will decide what activities ought to be left to human hands exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom dsa members may have quite different views on where those lines lie with some wishing to ban the technology entirely regardless the point is that those conversations will be hours not sam alman's not dario amade's not elan musks this is a once in a century political opportunity we have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy to drive a wedge into the republican party's coalition and the democratic base and to reorient politics around a question on which our answers are unfathomably popular we could be at the forefront of the movement

50:22rather than tail ending a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits on quote this issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months a i c aos will be meeting at the white house with president she later this week the new york city council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month with dario amade and sam alman requested to appear if we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on a i regulation which would only result in an industry friendly regulatory slowdown to curb competition and stabilize market pressure then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology data centers are powering to destroy these companies and put the future of a i in the control of the public

51:25moving days going great until the couch won't fit through the door that's when i turn to air taster poster task and find local help for packing cleaning furniture assembly errands and more go to airtasker dot com or download the app airtasker get anything done what if your soda actually did something for you introducing sky pop protein soda sky pop protein soda has 10 grams of complete protein zero sugar and real delicious soda taste sky pop protein soda reach for the sky get your sky pop protein soda now at target or king supers have your kids ever wanted to try an Olympic and Paralympic sport try fencing it's fast competitive and even offered at the NCA find a beginner class near you at try fencing dot org that's try fencing dot org be honest you don't feel as interesting as you used to maybe not as much fun or adventurous remember when you actually went out did stuff a do more subscription brings concerts and comedy sports and museums back to your life for seven scrawny bucks a month you get at least

52:28one pair of tickets to something great discover new bands laugh learn do more and right now do more makes interesting and adventurous simple and easy because your first months free at do more stuff dot com slash free this is the that lebertar show this is dan lebertar and i've been doing this for more than two decades our show is contagious it's a little bit addictive it's uh holy uh in the most positive of ways it has a good amount of range from smart to silly and it's got a journalistic backbone Monday through Friday I show up and talk about sports listen to the dan lebertar show on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever it is that you get your podcasts power slap 23 is live and free on youtube on thursday september 17th day a white is bringing power slap to texas for the first time on the campus of texas tech university two massive tidal fights headline the card including slap fighting legend wolverine also on the card is former wwe champion

53:28jkger and the debut of former ufc heavyweight crisp bar net you can watch power slap 23 for free on power slaps youtube channel thursday september 17th for the first time from texas power slaps biggest card of the year it's football season and visio mini led tvs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55 inch or 65 inch mini led tv plus crank your favorite game day tunes on the i heart radio app built right into your visio tv big screens big picture and a totally immersive experience find rollback deals at walmart today on visio 55 inch and 65 inch mini led tvs now just 248 and 358 i find the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays you know as a buzz word as a dirty word you know we see it caught up in tombs like kati i in the debates around immigration and

54:32representation and all the culture was that have captured so much of the world's attention as of late but what has my attention recently the kind of diversity that i want to focus on is the diversity that we are losing that we are critically losing right now we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity languages are dying indigenous knowledge is disappearing and entire cultures have any race assimilated or reduced the museum pieces we are in our lifetimes witnessing a profound loss of what author David harman calls bio cultural diversity the combined diversity of life and human culture and all this has happened at the same time that diversity itself has become so

55:33politically controversial so the question i want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place why it isn't matter that thousands of languages exist why should we care for species it appears why doesn't matter whether they are countless different ways with people to live and think and create and organize themselves typically we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value as something that some people like or dislike are posed to or in favor of politically but i want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life creativity and freedom possible welcome to get up in here i'm Andrew sage Andrew is on youtube and i'm joined again by James it's great to be back i'm excited about this one yes so suppose to start with what would you say are the kinds of diversity that come to mind you know that when you hear the term and why would you say that it is something that do value

56:37if it is that you value i assume you do yeah yeah i do like there's like a very liberal way of understanding diversity right and i think sometimes even the lips getting better at this lips used to use the word tolerance a lot which i despise as as a way of talking about diversity right like it's like i sort of i don't like it but i'll allow it to exist approach yes like i'll put up with you kind of yeah exactly like yeah it's not getting us to what where we want to get right but like i enjoy that there are people who obviously like heard diverse in the way that neo-liberalism wants us to think about diversity in terms of race in terms of sexuality in terms of neo-liberalism kind of waffling on gender but also like they just approaches to the way we live our lives right like our cultures are ways of organizing are ways of being with one another my life is so much richer because i've been exposed to that kind of diversity right like i get to travel a lot and seeing how

57:42people approach all kinds of issues has really helped me with ways of dealing with things of crossing the bridges we come to in organizing in in in trying to live our better lives because i've been able to learn from the way that they have developed doing it which is very different from the way we do it right and so i think like that kind of diversity is also super important i agree absolutely i think that a lot of times as well the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people but you know even before we get to diversity within our species there is the diversity that you know transcends our species the diversity of all the species of planet earth you know the variation as a feature of the world with event yeah i think that's also like super valuable right like in an in a way that we can't i was thinking about this this morning i was hiking this morning and like

58:43capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing right like i was thinking about that in the u.s they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule which allows you not to build roads international forests in certain infantry roadless areas and like there is a way of ascribing value to timber right you can talk about board fee of timber like there is a way of ascribing cost to roads right we can we can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area but like there isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there right the plants animals yeah the insects it's like the the quantifiable value of this is like the unquantifiable yeah value basically yeah like they're not productive to capital but they do give us something that is valuable

59:46and because capitalism can't ascribe value to them it sometimes fails to protect them right we've seen this at the north america it's a great example right yeah yeah like how do you ascribe value to a view right i mean there's an extent which we see some of that value being wrapped up in the price of like a house you know like if a house is on a hillside and has a great view of the ocean stuff you will say oh well we could jack up a price on the market because you know people will pay for that view yeah you know similar concept was like the way that hotel rooms might be more expensive on the higher floors because you know all you get that panoramic view of the city or whatever but that doesn't really capture the experience it is a crude approximation of the experience of you know waking up in the morning to the sun coming over the horizon the sea in the distance the birds you know making their way out into the world none of that is captured in the number

1:00:51it's just a way of trying to capture that in order to facilitate exchange yeah exactly like it's an attempt to ascribe value to something inherently like it doesn't fit in that system of like the cash exchange which is what makes it valuable and beautiful right like but your capitalism will never really be able to protect those things like even you know in the US we have public lands right but like no fucking way even like Theodore Roosevelt right like all the politicians now are like oh yeah we love Theodore Roosevelt blah blah you know most US politicians I think would love to be compared to Roosevelt and this is not someone who I think is a fantastic human being like morally but you could do that today like capitalism is too repacious today to ever say like we are taking hundreds of thousands of acres and just send them aside because like they're nice and it's nice for us to have them

1:01:51so we're going to keep them that way like it wouldn't it wouldn't function now even in a way that was possible there you know yeah and I mean arguably even that time those things being set aside a person who had witnessed the old growth forests of the past when they were you know in more recent memory they might even be able to see that this is such a fraction of the value that has been lost of it like yes we're preserving some of what's left but you know I don't know if you see those pictures of like those ginormous like trees yeah that they just chopped down as they mean that you know that westward expansion into the California and whatnot yeah they didn't even use most of the wood they ended up having to like discard it but it ain't whatever I didn't know that but this is like centuries worth of growth Lewis just destroyed yeah the only reason I think we protected these things right was because there was a sort of realization that oh shit we've gone

1:02:53way too far with this capitalist exploitation of things right like with this desire to impose ourselves on the world as it has been for a long time and like it doesn't make up for that right it's like a like your analogy of zoos that you used to start right like having the last passenger pigeon dying a zoo doesn't make up for killing all the passenger pigeons we've more that passenger pigeon was alive in the zoo right yeah like that's not a trade anyone would make I guess no one would be like oh I have to think about this like is anyone ever going to sit around and worry about they're not being enough minds or enough roads or enough logging operations right compared to like I worry about that of not being enough forests worry about they're not being enough wilderness places you know like yeah it's something that yeah we've we've failed future generations I guess in preserving that diversity yeah and you know as we speak of preserving preservation conservation

1:03:58I think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration I would say because obviously change itself is not bad it or changes inevitable extinction has always been part of the history of life ecosystems have always been in flux always evolving the borders of you know ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time similarly cultures have always evolved and mixed and some have faded away so we were so we can't necessarily reject change right and rejects the processes by which cultures and environments may change even in response to human intervention you know we look at the forests of North America since we've been focusing on that example and many of those forests were engineered you know by human activity right so the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human

1:05:02engineering in terms of the terapreta you know the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples yeah the same with like I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire for the last few weeks here since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very western perspective right to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as a wish like to create a disciplinary distribution right of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it and the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it like there's a way to find balance that there what like we struggle with it under capitalism right like capitalism has struggled to provide us with that yeah I mean one of the species of capitalism is private property which as

1:06:07define under Roman law is the right to use and abuse one's own right you know the use and enjoy months and abuse of one's own to the limit of the law which is a stipulation that had furious interpretations over the years but we should be surprised then that when something comes under the purview of capitalist property that it has led to such detrimental effects what is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place it is the speed and the scale of that change you know we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or I've lost we don't even know how many species currently exist we could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time but for that discussion I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed which was in light of our differences by David Harmon but regardless we are still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species

1:07:13lost each year and these are losses that are not happening at isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships they remove one species and you can risk disrupt and everything connected to it thankfully these systems are typically quite resilient so species loss doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem but there are species that are foundational you know then the disappearance of that single species can trigger cascading effects of threatening entire ecosystem it was often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species as you mentioned the last passage of pigeon in the zoo I was reminded of that we see that also happening with human cultures particularly with language from what I've read about 44% of living languages today are now endangered somehow fewer than a thousand speakers remaining and others

1:08:17are spoken by fewer than 10 people and I know from what you told me of your travels James that you actually have met people who spoke on some of these endangered languages correct yeah certainly I think about languages that like I guess I've heard people speak that are less hegemonic certainly like I can't imagine there are very many speakers of Marshallese for example in the RMI many indigenous languages right like I know the embera like have made a great deal of like progress educator young people in their language right and like making sure that they they keep that I was just talking to some like your M.E. and odd thumb friends this morning right I think those languages are doing relatively well for indigenous languages and what is now the United States but like it's only through the concerted effort of people from that community to keep them alive right like I don't think the state has attributed a diversity value to those languages and languages like

1:09:22they give us a way of understanding the world that is different that's why I like to try and learn at least a little bit of different languages like they they give us a way of seeing things I think about like all the basque words for rain right or I was diving the other day with like a sea lion and talking to a Spanish speaking friend about like in Spanish they're like wolves of the sea right not lions of the sea it's kind of interesting and they do have like a kind of a wolf like vibe to them forever hung out around sea lions like in terms of what like their social structure yeah what yeah and like they're like I think people see sea lions like this big cuddly kind of cute thing and like they're fucking killers you know oh trust and believe I don't I don't trust those guys at all yeah no they're like they will fall I don't trust any mammal the choice to live an aquatic way of life okay there's something fishy about that

1:10:24I love that I love that one intended yeah I love that I say that's not like category you know they're mean they'll come at you as you were mentioning they are like according to the ethanol log at least seven followers in 170 live in languages in the world today are the worst under estimations at the amount of cultures that is accumulation of knowledge values customs technology social practices our low estimate of the number of cultures on earth is like 4000 they are definitely certainly more than that yeah especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity right and even within languages there's tremendous cultural diversity yeah biologically we have a lot of diversity as well I neglected to mention you know blood types heights heatextures all of these

1:11:28have emerged across the continents we've spread out across I mean obviously the concentration of that diversity is in Africa where we began but even our adaptations two different environments easy form diversity that is necessary you know to maintain as I'll get into some of the arguments for why later on but so I didn't know the bask had all the different words for rain but I have reminded I think that they are different words in in your languages for describing snow yeah like the I think it's in UP Act have a bunch of words for snow and ice and like different textures of it I'm trying now to find bass words for for rain so I can remember some of them yeah lambroa is drizzle or mist I know zirri miri it's like a light rain it's like the noise it makes always thought that was a really sweet one I had had some fucking throwback a a Cornish anarchist

1:12:32who spoke Cornish right one of the languages that is not hedger monic and it's probably relatively endangered even as a European language is go right I think it's probably having a better time now that was when I was younger but it was relatively rare to encounter a Cornish speaker Cornish that's Cornwall right correct yeah yeah it was teaching me all these beautiful words for like a different wildlife and different like natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them but like for some reason just like they're the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating I don't want to like a noble savage Cornish people right but I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and like how they how they appear and like it struck me as really special that that person was like a like kept that knowledge and and that that person shared that knowledge with me and this was at some like if I'm an ambassador I know when I'm like you know 21 years old 19 years or something like that and it just really struck me that like there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens

1:13:35of that language and it will be a real shame if we ever lost that yeah and I mean that's just one key study every other endangered language I'm sure you could point to similar novelties in you know how they engage with the world how they describe and see things sure yeah and we can extend from language to culture you know different cuisines different ways of you know engage with foods you know different forms of architecture and music and ways of telling stories yeah ways of reason children we are celebrating and have worn in yeah definitely like there's a lot that I feel like I've learned about so many of those things from being lucky enough to to spend time in different places right I guess I can give an example from if this is in my book if you want to read more about it but like one of the things that a friend in Kurdistan said to me was that like they'd lost a friend right this friend had died fighting against the Islamic state one of the things that they said was like because of this institution of

1:14:36of tech mill which is like a form of a kaleidosocriticism it doesn't quite work in the English call it kaleidosocriticism because you think of Maoism which is not but because they had like shared with this person their goals their aspirations their their hopes and then this person through this institution of tech mill had helped them be accountable to their own hopes for themselves that they were a better person because of the time they had spent with this person and now that this person was gone they carried him with them in their ways of being because he had helped them be a better person they shared it with me at a time when I had like lost a dear friend and it was a really beautiful way of me processing that like I'm not a person who is like a religious person I don't I have that belief structure to process it but like that gave me a sense of an afterlife which was more concrete for me which I can understand which I could see yeah and like it really helped me the afterlife of memory yeah and of like like we are all co-created by our community right like I

1:15:39didn't make myself the way I am yeah I was made the way I am by my interactions with people who care about me enough to help me be better and the idea of that person who helped me co-create the person I am like still existing in the person I am was very powerful to me like it's like a concrete psychological benefit I got from interacting with people who helped me see the world the way they see it absolutely you know I'm glad for all the languages that still exist and still give us you know these words with things because if nation states had their way there would be like 10 languages left on earth yeah I'm being dramatic but you know right now most of humanity speaks are relatively small number of languages the 23 most spoken mother languages are gone for like four billion people somewhere around there wow and then they 200 most spoken languages are over 88% of the world population that's crazy and this is of course due to nation-building due to

1:16:46economic pressures you know globalization there's a way everywhere the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages minority languages disappearing and if not for the considered efforts of these language communities to maintain their air speaker and to pass it down we would have lost so many more as it is yeah definitely as you mentioned by the way the the wounds that you've picked up over over the years from different languages and your attempts to explain those words to me I was reminded of a work of fiction that I'd read I think about two years ago to book called Babel by Arf Kwang and it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction where like a Chinese student goes to this school in England and the magic of that world is

1:17:46translation the sort of energy that gets picked up the magic to the able to wield is through the translation from one language to another and the fact that because translation is on a one-to-one process the kind of nuances and you know meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gained in the process are put up and so for people who are interested in linguistics and fantasy fiction I was recommend that book to them yeah I tried that one but what I was alluding to just now was some of the reasons we've begun to lose a world's biocultural diversity as I said before there have been changes across time across generations all the way even prior to humanity so we're not to blame for everything but there are a lot of historical processes that have reinforced each other that have led to what has been unfolded in these past few centuries yes we might have

1:18:48hunted some species to extinction in our prehistoric past but clear this skill of our impact is quite different here now monocultures for instance and fast pasture lands have completely replaced ecosystems in sedenirias we've trained wetlands we've leveled forests we've fragmented habitats and that's no thing that when we speak of habitat loss isn't always spoken about but you know we have places where a lot of the habitat was left alone good and good but when you have like six lean highways cut in through a forest that is still a fragmentation of that ecosystem oh yeah that's still a disruption of the flow of plants down in my life and fungal life yeah can I make a podcast about this but one of the issues that are endangered wildlife faces here in southern california right is that it fragmented both by freeways and the border wall so like the

1:19:54border wall in particular people can listen to natural causes if they want to learn more about this but the border wall in particular is being built at such a speed that they're not even building wildlife gates into it now they don't care about killing people with the wall why would they care about killing wildlife right but it means for instance our peninsula big horns which we have like 750 in the United States one of the rams actually died in the border wall wire recently and their ability to have like a healthy breeding population we significantly limited to this to the extent that like the intangible value of me seeing a big horn in a hike in the desert might not be something that everyone gets ever again right like the uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh mountain lions actually have some weird little genetic anomalies because of the divisions that are created by these big freeways and how dangerous it is to cross them it's like a thing you can observe in some of their tails wow there actually are mountain lions in a peninsula range are listed in the california endangered species active even though as a whole overall they're not particularly endangered

1:20:58california has a shithand lions actually it's because these specific lions despite the fact that their conditions for them to thrive right in the United States the intrusion that has divided these populations has made it very hard for those populations not just to thrive but like to continue to be healthy yeah that's the thing right like a species is unnecessarily have to be endangered or on the brink of extinction for it to be experiencing the extremely negative effects of you know our industrialization right i would add also the pressures of invasive species through global trade you know the impact of pollution in the waterways and in the air climate change you know all of these have placed a tremendous amount of pressure on the natural world when it comes to cultural diversity and its losses which you know coincide with the losses of biodiversity we see the impact of cloning of the zone destroying societies through

1:22:03conquest in genocide and assimilation and very same environmental changes we've seen that nation building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures and then of course with globalization not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances as that has always existed but specifically the kind that has been driven by capitalist markets and state power and industrial efficiency which enforces standardization across places you know it's easier for these capitalists for these multinationalists to manufacture the same products and market the same brands and basically flatten language and flatten cultural expectations across places so they even would manufacture consumer teasts in a way that benefits their bottom line you know now you get to pick between streaming services or you know you have a whole bunch different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets and that is what is counted as

1:23:09economic freedom meanwhile there are cultures that are literally going extinct now I had a question for you about this subject because you are admittedly a bit older than me it's true and sadly right but I'm curious have you witnessed like in real time the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization so I see like for me I remember having like copies of older magazines and I could see through the world was the places generally felt very different very unique and as you know I've come up with social media I've seen the places have kind of

1:24:09from large and I if there are things like this same and that's not even talk about the impact of like AI swap but yeah what have you seen yeah like it's one of those things that like you do see the like the impact of the smartphone is huge right at a second level the impact of Starlink is massive much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize right like more people have access to the internet through smartphones and have electricity in their homes and like the internet is a very hegemonic place right like there are probably seven or eight languages the internet's really good in that like you could really access the internet in and that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world right right I guess I've also seen like a a reclamation of some of that and it's a thing that's largely happened

1:25:12like within the colonial core to the greatest extent right like the the so-called the Europe of Nations hypothesis right like one of the languages I can speak and read and write in is it's Catalan and like this is an example of a language that like was ruthlessly suppressed by a Francoist regime right same with Basque same with other like non-Spanish languages in Iberia right and like now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students like in my lifetime my time spending time in Catalonia I see infinitely more people speaking Catalan than I used to remember there's a like anecdote about this my dissertation but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan they played football outside my archive right like so we'd be kicking the football around and it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed it's now like hegemonic it was cool the time Catalan nationalism but like every other

1:26:17nationalism has some qualities which I don't like but like it was cool that at the time there was a acceptance of people especially like these kids who spoke Catalan happened to have been born in Syria right but like they were Catalan as much as anyone else like it wasn't a a an ethnic definition of nation right but at the same time yeah I've definitely seen that diversity lost in terms of so many things like foods yeah I feel like there has been a homage toization of palettes as well 100% right especially with the proliferation of fast foods yeah yeah exactly like fast cheap high calorie food that stores easily I mean the example I guess is like look at what they've done to bread for the the time of my life right like look at how like sliced white what we would have called American bread is now like the global standard right but like all those other bread products that people used to make like it can be very hard to get really freshly made tortillas it's it's possible where I live right but it's not I imagine if you

1:27:21live in like Minnesota just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that had gone but yeah also the big things like I uh no I watch kids watching TikTok in the Darryan gap that wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago right wow they didn't quite know when starting was widely distributed but like that makes a difference to people right like they're their cultural world is they're now engaging with the external world not just through their own culture through the internet and I want those people to have everything I have to be clear right like I want them to be able to see the whole world yeah you don't want to like seal them vacuum seal them and some kind of museum exhibit of what points was exactly yeah but like I also wish that they could have it the way I have it which is that like I am I was born in England and I engage with the world in English I wish they could engage with the world number are I wish you know Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak you know we say they didn't have

1:28:22to to go through the English way of speaking and seeing the world to engage with the external world because we all lose when we don't have that diversity right yeah and I mean we're talking about what is lost I think when things get him large and eyes but there is like I think another effect one of the I suppose response that you know global capitalism has diversity which is to package it to markets it to sell it you know I referenced those magazines that I read but those magazines might even be an example of that because it is a capturing and commodification in a sense of another culture for distribution and consumption yeah definitely you see as well people's traditional dress becomes a less of a traditional dress and more of a traditional costume as they put it on to perform for consumption for tourists yeah like the commodification of diversity get an idea that

1:29:28let that diversity is a thing to sell the marginalization of people such that their identity which has been marginalized by the state and capitalism is what they have to sell to exist under the state and capitalism I guess yeah we've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why I think we should care about this loss of diversity you know and I could even spot off a few more and I think Steve makes our living system is more resilient I think is a very key one you know ecosystem's every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients and everything is just part of one larger network and the more diverse that network is the more it has to respond to disruption diversity gives ecosystem's options we see that comparison to the monocultures the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the nominee inputs that approach requires we look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and to

1:30:31changes in climate conditions into the genetic diversity we can point to the fact that in a very human immune system works in exactly the same way a path of gender evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's and so biological differences create deviation in how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe keep our existence as a whole secure even within my own family I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others more resistant to different diseases you know when when a virus passes into my household there are some people who get sick and some people don't and it changes each time despite the fact that we are so close genetically and so again we see the diversity creates resilience and even if we want to take it from like a quarterly utilitarian perspective that resilience is a value it has utility you know and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we

1:31:39don't realize until it's gone yeah we become poorer as a whole we lose possibilities when we lose languages when we lose cultures when we lose species every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being we may like some more than others you know I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn up blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in certain cultures but I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences and I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books it's a really good way of saying it having that full library gives us more raw material to think with to create art with to do science with if you like the arts you know you would like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences

1:32:41emergence from everything that came before there will stay as a foundation for future creativity and innovation if everybody approaches the world with the same assumptions and categories and ways of thinking and you know all capacities imagine alternatives will shrink and then just really from a deeply philosophical perspective I appreciate diversity because I believe that when you are given a gift you should meet it with gratitude you know we are born in the world we happen to be born until we let us overflowing with different forms of life different landscapes different cultures different ways of thinking that is a fast rich inheritance that I believe we should appreciate that is my value I'll add that you know we've been speaking about by what diversity and cultural diversity what harm and cause biocultural diversity but there's also

1:33:42the value of cognitive diversity you know we have different opinions but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways and having different perspectives different interpretations different heuristics different predictive models what Scott E. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book The Difference you know these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways you know we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack and that the boosts in me have and it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem in fact as Peter's research suggests getting a group of people who approach a problem differently without perform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way

1:34:46not pages make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between you know routine regular tasks and tasks that require like more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas so in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation in dealing with climate change and developing medicines you know we don't want everybody to be thinking alike another thing that page point salt is that while cognitive diversity and identity diversity are not one to one there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world so if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable for solving complex problems then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure

1:35:50one of the things that I wanted to address and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist is that while I do value diversity I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating you know I believe our healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves but that is not mean these kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindset and and practices or domination that would eliminate that very freedom at the end of the day though I want to retain the capacity for diversity because I think it gives us a capacity for freedom and I want as you know sub commandant demarch who has put it a world where many worlds exist yeah even as I reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain

1:36:52manifestations of diversity any clues and thoughts like the world where many worlds can exist is I think the perfect way of looking at this right like we therefore don't want people who would create a world where the world cannot exist right but we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating it through that tolerance framework which we both talked about like tolerance seems to imply like well we're doing it best but we'll let you do it your way as opposed to like genuinely cherishing diversity yeah and yeah I hope we can all see that agreed and as always all power to all the people peace crédility

1:38:1245 calories, Skypop Protein Soda offers four delicious flavors with big taste and real benefits. Light, refreshing, and ready for wherever your day takes you. It's any time protein that helps you reach higher. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the Sky! Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target, Rouse, or Go Puff. Are your kids bored with the same old sports? Try fencing, the Olympic and Paralympic sport that mixes speed, strategy, and fun. Just like chess meets cardio. Quick feet, quick decisions, and a satisfying beat when you score a point. Kids, teens, and adults can start anytime. Fencing is one of the fastest growing NCAA sports, with new colleges adding programs every year. Many clubs have loaner gear. Coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one. Find a beginner class near you at tryfencing.org. That's tryfencing.org. Get the feeling you should maybe get out more, see and do more. Totally normal. Lowest staying stuck is finding out what and where just seems hard.

1:39:14A Do More subscription brings you concerts and comedy, sports, and museums. For seven scrawny bucks a month, you get at least one pair of tickets to something great. Discover new bands. Laugh, learn, do more. And right now Do More makes interesting and adventurous easy because your first month's free at domorestuff.com slash free. This is the Dane Levitar show. This is Dan Levitar and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's, uh, in the most positive of ways, it has a good amount of range from smart to silly and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday I show up and talk about sports. Listen to the Dan Levitar show on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. The first slap 23 is live and free on YouTube on Thursday, September 17th. Dan Levitar is bringing power slaps to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University. Two massive title fights headline the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine.

1:40:18Also on the card is former WWE Champion J Kager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch Power Slap 23 for free on Power Slaps YouTube channel. Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas. Power Slaps biggest card of the year. It's football season and Vizio Mini LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55 inch or 65 inch Mini LED TV. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the iHeartRadio app. Built right into your Vizio TV. Big screens, big picture and a totally immersive experience. We're trying rollback deals at Walmart today on Vizio 55 inch and 65 inch Mini LED TVs. Now just 248 and 358. Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about the violent flailings of a dying empire. I am your host, Mia Wong. And today we are going to be talking about a thing, perhaps the only thing that Americans

1:41:23understand more thoroughly than a burger. And that is gas prices. Now elsewhere on this show, speaking about inflation, I have talked about price as a kind of social hieroglyphic that serves to encode the complex and brutal reality of geopolitics and production and labor and exploitation into a single number. And that number is their understanding of everything that is happening in the world and how content they are about it is about how much gas costs them. This has proven a real problem for one president of the United States, Donald Trump, as diesel is hitting an average across the country of $6.59 a gallon. Now, nominally, the president of the United States does not control the price of oil and does not set gas prices.

1:42:23However, comma, in this case, no, yeah, this is largely not technically entirely, but yeah, this is sort of just a thing he did as an individual. But I think what's important here is that the way that all of the information I am about to describe is conveyed, right? And the thing that makes Americans care about it is the social hieroglyphic of the gas price, right? It is that the single number through which all of this complex information is encoded down into and that is what sort of matters emotionally. And I want to undo the process of encoding all of that information down into the hieroglyphic. I want to actually expand it and go look at what is going on in the world that is causing all of this. And I want to take a look at how the structure of American Empire has changed in order to facilitate this. And to do this, I'm going to walk through a series of, I guess, nominally seemingly disconnected

1:43:28stories about oil across the world. And we're going to put it all together into the new structure of American Empire at the end. Now as everyone I think is aware, gas prices have been increasing dramatically both of regular gas and of diesel, Bank of America analysts are finally admitting that oil could hit $150 of barrel, not like right now, but as the work continues to drag out. And as we've, as we've talked about before on this show, a lot of the reserves that were being used to calm the market temporarily and keep prices down are being exhausted. The most obvious example of this is something we've talked about before, which is the draining of the American strategic petroleum reserve. But this is true of a lot of other reserves around the world as well. Now this alone probably would not have been enough to cause what we've been seeing.

1:44:28But all of the problems that we have been talking about for a long time on this show, particularly the blockade of the straight-up from news that is entirely directly just the fault of Donald Trump, right, through his war on Iran, has been doing significant damage to the world's oil supply to the world's natural gas supply. Now the reason it hasn't been worse has been that there have been ways to bypass the straight-up from news. They're not easy. They work worse than sure you're from news. But one of those important mechanisms has been Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. Now we talked about this on a rubber talked about this on the last week, exactly, of disorder. Last week, Iraqi paramilitaries launched drone strikes on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. It did some damage. There is kind of conflicting reports about how long exactly that is going to take to repair. The damage to the pipeline has slowed the ability of the Saudis to

1:45:28route oil around the blockade and the straight-up from news. Now, also, there has been a major expansion in the war. Yemen, this is a really hideous conflict that has been going on for over a decade now. We don't really have unfortunately time to really go into all of the factors of the civil war in Yemen, which is one of the most complicated wars being found anywhere in the world. Broadly speaking, this is a conflict between a coalition that is sort of in the West, it's called the Kuthis, but there's more forces involved in it, which is the kind of Iranian aligned vaguely, or enough England, they are allied with Iran, but they're not necessarily just an Iranian proxy. This is its own political force, right? On the other side, there is the Saudi-backed coalition, which also involves a range of forces, is led by the Saudis and the UAE, and they're allied forces who pull a whole bunch of forces

1:46:32from a whole bunch of places and have committed horrifying atrocities, including, as I mentioned constantly, every time someone talks about this, because no one ever seems to remember it, to deployment by the Saudi coalition of Sudanese child soldiers. So this war had, I don't know if calm down is quite the right word, but in the past few years, had been less active than it was say in 2018-2019, but the Kuthis have now made a major push into Saudi coalition territories in Yemen's West and South. They have taken the port city of Mokha in the south, which is an important like Saudi coalition's port city, which is further threatening the ability of the Saudis to bypass the trade from Mous, because this is a city that helps you control access to the Gulf of Aden. Now, this war has been and continues to be a massive humanitarian nightmare.

1:47:36We really have no idea how many people have actually died in the war. The casualty figures right now kind of stuck at 150,000. I suspect it is significantly more than that. This is a region that has been experiencing everything from, you know, the kiddie's word is to famines. A huge part of this war has been a Saudi blockade of sort of like, Sukluthi control territories, which has had an absolutely devastating effect on the ability of people on Yemen to eat. This attack has also caused a massive surge of refugees as people sort of flee the violence. This has been, you know, an absolute nightmare of the one hand. And on the other hand, the way that it's understood here, the way that it's sort of reported on in the West is not as its own sort of unique humanitarian nightmare in this unique sort of war of like Saudi end, Emirati empire in Yemen. It's understood as something that affects oil prices.

1:48:42And so that's, you know, one of the factors that is kind of encoded into this price. Another one has been Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have escalated. Now, from the perspective of what is happening with the oil, you know, Houthis have also been attacking Saudi shipping and Saudi shipping is, you know, when someone talks about Saudi shipping, they're talking almost like guarantee the thing they're talking about is shipping oil out of the country, right? Houthis attacks on Saudi shipping have slowed down in the past week, but there is always the possibility of them starting up again. And this is the real problem in terms of the world's oil infrastructure and particularly from the perspective of empire, right? In the sense of, you know, wanting to be able to secure, secure access to oil for the US and for other sort of imperial powers, the issue that they're

1:49:43facing as this war continues, right? And as these really, really, truly these series of wars, right? Is that even if, you know, going back to the Saudi pipeline, right? The Saudi pipeline will eventually be fixed, right? Like full capacity it might not be for 60 weeks, but eventually the pipeline is going to get fixed even if it is sort of restricting supply in the meantime. The problem is that all of this infrastructure is just exposed and a whole bunch of different military centers of the region can and probably will hit them again as the US has been, you know, like hitting Iranian oil infrastructure, right? Iran, its ally paramilitaries in Iraq, the Houthis, there are lots of groups in the region who are being attacked by the US and the Saudis and sort of American allies in the region who are looking at this and going, oh, this is something we can use to extract, you know, to extract concessions and try to fight the Americans off.

1:50:47And there's no real answer for this other than ending the war, a thing that just won't happen. Now, the Trump administration nominally has a plan for this. The plan that they are claiming to have, other than, you know, this sort of constant dance of claiming that the war on Iran is over and then it's restarting again. We've started a whole bunch of different wars and other trade off armours is actually open. The other plan that Trump has talked about is Venezuela, Trump was at the UN recently where he gave an extremely distressing speech in which he talked about how he had been thinking about destroying Iran. He said, do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope if future greatness or generations. Now, one of the other parts of

1:51:52this speech was him talking about the US is dealing with the Venezuelan government that it installed when it just kidnapped Maduro who we're just also still holding as people I think probably have forgotten about, but yeah, no, we just had like are still just holding a head of state but hostage in a prison. We're just we're just still doing that, but he was talking about a deal that he struck with the current Venezuelan government, which is largely just composed of the same people from the Maduro government, but with any person in charge of it and answering to Trump, yeah, talking, you know, that was a hundred years, supposedly in a hundred year concession for a significant portion of what's supposed to be Venezuela's oil fields. Now, Trump in this said quote to the victors below the spoils and this is nominally, right, this sort of is his

1:52:54previous war or short war, I guess, on Venezuela is supposed to be the solution to his new war. Trump has been pushing the line that oil flowing from Venezuela is going to, you know, be the thing that drives prices down and stops these escalating oil prices from his other imperial war in Iran. And as we're going to talk about now, there is oil flowing from Venezuela to the US, right, and the amount of oil that is flowing to the US has increased companies that were already in Venezuela like Chevron or expanding production, but it hasn't even hit like 1990s levels. It's still in the grand scheme of things, not enough oil to actually do anything. And as we have, you know, sort of repeatedly emphasized on this show, oil is not liquid money.

1:53:57There's material properties and there's social properties that come from the, you know, technical process of extraction. It's not all the same. These oil reserves, you know, suck, right. And this is also part of the problem with Venezuela. Oil is the oil is just of a lower quality than the oil that you get out of the Middle East. Now, what's important for her is we've beginning to see a little bit more of the plan, which I guess is kind of the ambitious way to describe the kind of semi-free for all that's been happening in Venezuela. In terms of this sort of plan, which is to like extract all of this oil from Venezuela, which is now, you know, I mean, just effectively operating as an American colony, even in just pure imperial terms and not thinking just in terms of sort of like the fact that yeah, Venezuela is just a dictatorship and the oil is now flowing to the US. There's real problems with this in that Venezuelan oil infrastructure is very

1:54:59bad. And the actual money in oil is in controlling infrastructure that already exists and not building new infrastructure. So again, companies that were in Venezuela, which is, I mean, basically Chevron, right. You know, or expanding the existing production to some extent. But no one else wants to go in and actually like build a bunch of oil refineries in a bunch of extraction facilities because that's stuff expensive and it requires massive heavy capital investments and it's risky. And this is becoming a real problem for this entire plan, right. Like, obviously, yes, there is oil that the administration can ship out of Venezuela and, you know, and is, right. But it's not enough to like actually seriously have the effects that the administration is talking about in terms of sort of lowering prices. Now, we're going to get to the extent to which

1:56:00it does kind of solve the regime's demand on just the basic level of, oh, if we're going to do a war, which you keep the oil. But the actual prospects for this oil are just not very good. And this is where I want to get into something new that we've learned about sort of recently through reporting from the Wall Street Journal that there's been some more stuff about some of the people who are coming into Venezuela in order to do this. Now, we have mentioned on the show before that there are a lot of network state people like involved in Venezuela. This is one of the places that these sort of like Silicon Valley tech fascists are moving into. And one of the people who is now becoming important in Venezuela and sort of oil production or attempting to become important is this crypto billionaire named Fred Ersam who is one of the founders of Coinbase, which is a giant crypto company. He's sort of in tight with the entire Silicon Valley tech elite. He has ties

1:57:06to like every venture capital and and recent Horowitz like deal. Backed Constellation, you can imagine. And he's one of the people who's been extremely important in terms of the ways that this sort of network state project of this like setting up these sort of like corporate fascist states, right, have been interested in crypto as a way to sort of move money around and have money that's not like taxable, directly or like is difficult for states to sort of get access to. Now, Fred has moved into this really, really sort of it's like described as a hotel. But it's like almost more like a kind of like, I don't know, almost like billionaire resort thing in Caracas. It's like 36 rooms in it. And he's suspending a whole bunch of time living there.

1:58:07He's also like founded this company with some Venezuelan guys. One of whom was like what to stand for. So you know, it's like these sort of there's always like a local elite kind of thing involved in these projects where particularly you get like American educated guys from like colonized nations who went up like coming back and getting involved in these processes. And they have like they have founded this company called Primavera, which is getting involved in the contracts for Venezuelan oil development. But there's problems here, right, which is that like this is a startup. They've never done oil extraction before, right? And you know, the network state people and there's sort of like VC firms have had a lot of success in things like drone production, right? In missile production, in a lot of sort of, you know, like things that are like kind of like heavy industrial capacity. But this guy is a crypto billionaire and they're trying to do oil development that

1:59:08like the rest of the world's oil companies were like, no. So there are sort of real questions about whether even this, you know, this sort of like fascist plan to exploit the resources that this country can actually work. But this is this is the kind of constellation of forces that are that have a line behind the Trump administration, right? And these constellation of forces are to an extent different than the ones from old American neo conservatism, right? Which was the last sort of, you know, last time we were like fighting wars for oil during the Bush administration. Now, I want to go back and talk about this in terms of the structure of empire, right? Because it's very clear that the kind of regime that's been sent by Venezuela, which is just, okay, we've turned this entire nation into not even the kind of debt servicing colony that the US has

2:00:11like traditionally done when it comes in to extract wealth from a country, but just as a sort of like peer hay, we can say we got the oil colony, but this is the kind of regime that Trump wants, not just for Venezuela, but for Ron and Cuba and the rest of the world as well, which are just these sort of like compliant decaterships that will export him whatever he wants in Florida or Zico. And this is a desire, this specific kind of empire, right? This specific kind of oil empire is a desire that comes out of a divide in American certain services between the neocons and what are called the paleocons, right? Like it's like the old, you know, paleoconservatives, neocons, and new conservatives or whatever. These are both kinds of empire, right? If you look at neoconservatives and was, it was an oil company strapped to a weapons manufacturer like wearing a church for a face. And if you look at what the Bush administration is like Bush is a Texas oil guy, Cheney is a halibut and guy, which is like another oil company, he's also really heavily

2:01:14involved in a bunch of weapons manufacturers. You know, this is the alliance that was like doing the worst for oil. But part of what the project of neoconservative was was nominally this mission of bringing like what a quote, democracy to the world. And obviously this is, you know, democracy and so far as it supports the US, which is like capitalism and support for American empire and you know, they're setting up a stock market in in a rock. But like, and this is the way that a lot of these people thought about it was this sort of like Hagellian nation building process, right? Like the unfolding of American liberal democracy throughout the entire world in a way that, you know, could just permanently stabilize its Germany. But there is this sort of like nation building aspect of it. But then there was also always like a paleocon opposition to it. And this was the moratical faction that didn't give a shit about any of the sort of democracy and human rights stuff that neoconservatives spout. You know, literally they were just like, yeah, bomb them all and take the oil and leave. And this through a large extent is

2:02:17the, this is the faction that Trump has descended from, right? And these people sometimes will kind of like play at being anti imperialist or like not even anti-piers, the play of being anti war. You know, like a Turk of Carlson, for example, it's like a guy who did this a lot, even though he supported the war when it was happening. But they'll do this thing of like, oh, like we shouldn't go fight in these imperial wars. You wish it only like fight wars that benefit it. We shouldn't be the world's policeman. But the contrary to that is, you know, where like war for oil was like the leftist charge about what we were doing in Iraq. These people were just like, yeah, no, we actually should literally just fight wars for oil because they're just, they're fascists, right? They don't even have the kind of veil of this like, nominally sort of democratic project. All they really care about is just the pure resource extraction. But the thing about this, right? And like part of what was going on with this kind of thing was like, yeah, so you want to set up a stable government so

2:03:22that these oil companies have a secure base from which to actually do resource extraction. Because you know, sort of unstable governments make it more difficult, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now with this sort of like fascist Trump coalition, like obviously, yeah, like the oil company supported him. But it's not the like oil guys directly who are behind the Venezuelan people that people didn't have like moved into a shracted oil. It's as we were talking about is these like tech fascist network state guys. And the reaction of the oil people to Trump's wars, and this is you know, partially different as well. But mostly to this war on Iran, which is framing as being about like nuclear weapons. But he's also been talking about like we should just sit there and take the trade off from news. You know, Iran shouldn't be able to like threaten the world's oil supply. The actual oil people are really pissed off about this because yeah, they're losing access to durability to ship oil. But this is, this is what is inside of this sort of price hieroglyphic of gas price dough up. It's it's it's attempt of like the tech fascist to like graft

2:04:28their project onto this sort of paleocon fascist id of Trump where he's just doing this wars like because he wants to. And they're attempting to get something out of it. But what has actually happened here in all of this is that in the administration's war for oil and in their attempt to sort of like, fulfill the old paleocon desire for you know wars for oil. They have successfully not gotten oil. They're replacing oil that they used to have or attempting to replace better oil they used to have with shit oil that won't work through these purposes. And they're depriving both the US and basically the rest of the world of oil. And you know, that's that's in some sense the macro level of it. The micro level of it is that there's a whole bunch of wars and genocides that are playing out across the world that are the result of this. And that's that's what's encoded in gas

2:05:33price go up is all of the violence and all of the cruelty and all of the sort of inane flailing stupidity of empire. It's 95 degrees and your air conditioner suddenly starts making a very weird noise. That's when you post your task on airtasker. Find local help for repairs, yard work, errands, and more without losing your cool. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. Airtasker. Get anything done. What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Skypop Protein Soda. Skypop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and real delicious soda taste. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target or King Super's. Never wanted to try an Olympic and Paralympic sport? Try Fencing. It's fast, competitive, and even offered at the NCAA level. Find a beginner class near you at Try Fencing.org. That's Try Fencing.org.

2:06:367 Box. That's barely the delivery fee on an order of Dan Dan Noodles. But 7 Box is enough to get you out of the house and into something interesting, adventurous. Because for 7 scrawny bucks a month, do more. Get you at least one pair of tickets to something you'll be psyched to attend. A concert comedy, perhaps that new exhibit. Stuff you like? And stuff you didn't know you did. Yet, try it free for a month at domorestuff.com slash free and do more. The Dan Limitard show on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

2:08:00For free on Power Slaps YouTube channel Thursday September 17th for the first time from Texas. Power Slaps biggest card of the year. It's football season and Visio Mini LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55-inch or 65-inch mini LED TV. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the iHeart Radio app. Built right into your Visio TV. Big screens, big picture, and a totally immersive experience. Find rollback deals at Walmart today on Visio 55-inch and 65-inch mini LED TVs. Now just 248 and 358. This is it could happen here executive disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and special correspondent Denna Elkurd. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. This episode we are covering the week of September 16

2:09:04to September 23rd. I know this has been a busy news week. There's the United Nations. Trump admin is throwing around the idea of a diesel export embargo. There's a lot of a lot of big issues in this country. But on Wednesday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama decided to use the United States Senate to bring up another very important issue threatening the national security of our country. Let's take a listen. Airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord help us. It's terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it's possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetus of dressing up like an animal. You can't make this up. Every time I hear that guy's name, he sounds like he's a

2:10:04character on Thomas the Tank Engine. He's like a side character. Then he goes and does shit like this. He does have a very current 2D name also on the little podium here. Yeah. Print out of the emoji. Not just any emoji. Did someone want to take a crack at describing this? I think this is what we would describe as the pregnant man emoji. A yellow emoji figure with short hair who is pregnant. The text reads transgenderism as a mental illness. Something I think Tuberville and others are overlooking is if we were to excise furries from their chops, their airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are entire system would collapse. Those are the crucial soldiers keeping our air space. They are the glue. Yes. They are the glue. We're already running into many issues in regards to air traffic controllers and the airline industry. If you take the furries out, it's done. It's

2:11:06over. You know what? Honestly, someone in the furry community get out organizing the furries strike where all the furries go on strike. We can end this whole system right now. We can eat them in a single stroke. Let's move on to some other small news items. Yeah. Okay. Someone was upset on the subreddit that we didn't call this all the small things. We're not going to. I guess I'm going to start with Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth has announced a joint war fighter evaluation. Oh, boy. Yeah. This is a thing for O6s who are screening for their first start right across all the different branches of the military. I'm not going to list what O6s because they don't understand how the Navy works. But he's claiming that this new evaluation for promotion will like it value competence over credentials. It's the way he phrased it. It's basically like an exercise that these offices will have to take part in. And various versions of it are going to involve a war game against an AI-powered adversary, which is great. I expected, I guess. Like, we probably could have seen this coming. It's additive

2:12:14to the existing things that they consider for promotion. But like this is part of his ongoing like purge of the US military officer corps. Secondly, I want to talk about a visual investigation by Thomas Bordeaux. He's a CNN, but I think he's working with BBC Verify on this. BBC is doing a kind of true crime podcast about the disappearance of Austin Tice at the moment. People are familiar Austin Tice was an American freelancer who disappeared in Syria at the beginning of the revolution and continues to be missing. Have any of you guys seen this video? No. This must be like, well, I think it was 2012 or 2011. I think it was right in the end of 2011. So it purports to be a video of his execution. It seems very likely to be staged. Like, if you watch it, it seems a lot like its regime intel guys dressing up and pretending to be like rebels. Like they basically say nothing but Tak-Bee of the whole time. And then they make him say some stuff. And then the video cuts, right? You don't see him being executed. He's blind folded and it's

2:13:17supposed to give that vibe. Anyway, they have jolicated this video to an area that would have been controlled by the Assad regime at the time, which I guess further adds evidence to the claim that he was held by the regime at least at that time. CBS is reporting the Trump administration is ready to accept 17,500 more Afrikaner refugees. Yeah, the people who have struggled the most in the continent of Africa. CBS is reporting that Trump administration said, quote, the United States anticipates that Afrikaners from South Africa will fully assimilate into the United States in a manner that preserves taxpayer resources for US citizens and does not anticipate other countries resettling Afrikaners. Can only imagine why. This assimilation thing has been a consistent thing for them, right? The first time they accepted White House Africa refugees, Rubio talked about it in Congress. Like, this seems to be the standard by which they're judging refugee admissions now. You have to be white and you have to quote, unquote assimilate.

2:14:18So that's great. On Tuesday, JD Vance's so-called anti-Fraud task force announced that they were cutting almost a million people from affordable care act coverage after deciding that 760,000 people or enrollees were fraudulately enrolled in government health care plans that these plans do not correspond to real people or these people were ineligible for coverage. Vance announced that another 419,000 accounts are under, quote, additional verification. Memet Oz said that they cancelled coverage for people in part because those people never filed a claim. 760,000 people, we call them phantoms because we believe both of me that don't exist or had no idea they had coverage. We believe that because we have been writing them, telexing them, you know, walking to them, phantoms, whatever we could possibly do to get in touch with them, they won't answer and they have never filed a claim. So it meets all the criteria for us to pretty as much as any government can

2:15:24say, you actually don't know you have this or you don't exist. Obviously in numbers, this large, it is not unlikely that there is many real people who do need this coverage or rely on this coverage who will be cut as a part of this almost a million people. Vance has promised that more cuts will be coming. Last Friday, the DOJ released a new legal opinion, concluding that the federal ban on handgun sales to 18 to 20 year olds is unconstitutional and should not be enforced against licensed dealers. And lastly, for me, the pro-publica just published a super in-depth investigation into how Trump crushed a sweeping 2024 FBI bribery probe into Susan Collins and her super pack, among a few other Congress people as well. This article lays out what looks like a pretty clear pay-to-play scheme with requests for campaign donations in exchange for Collins securing millions

2:16:27of dollars in federal funding for defense contractors. Collins is the chair of the Appropriations Committee with one contractor, a naval company called Navtech, funneling donations through a shell company, which the head of Collins super pack said was, quote, very smart. Oh boy. In email correspondence obtained by pro-publica, this shell company, by the way, was called the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers. Wait, just scientist? Scientist. Incredible. Yes. Yes. Scientist. That typo was how this donation was first flagged that then prompted this investigation. Cool work there. Pro-publica writes, quote, the money had come from an avatex account, not their CEOs, violating a ban on government contractors making donations. So the CEO of Navtech is now in prison, but obviously Collins is not, though the CEO was interviewed by the FBI for a number of years

2:17:32regarding his dealings with Collins and other people in Congress. Pro-publica writes that the CEO, quote, handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing an avatex dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff, unquote. So part of Pro-publica's reporting is explaining how the FBI was about to kind of launch this much broader full-scale investigation around the end of 2024. And then obviously in 2025, Trump got into office this whole type of investigation fell apart. The whole bunch of attorneys resigned during February of 2025. This is another one of those articles that I think it's worth just reading the whole thing. It's pretty long, but it's some pretty solid reporting and it's already been corroborated by the New York Times as well. All right. Do we want to talk about some medium-sized things? Some medium items. Okay. Talking of medium-sized things. Let's talk about wolves, not as big as Buffalo, large of the rabbits. So Donald Trump has signed an executive order which gives

2:18:3790 days for the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a broad inspection of regulations impacting ranching and make suggestions to change them with the executive order presser was called supporting America's ranchers. As part of this, he talks about instructing Doug Bergam, who if you don't remember was endorsed by REI last year, to work on de-listing wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, I'm just going to quote here, the Secretary of the Interior shall make a determination as to whether the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf has met the recovery criteria for de-listing or down-listing under the Endangered Species Act. And if he determines that the recovery criteria has been met, shall begin the process of de-listing or down-listing them. It also directs him to work with states to have them removed from state ESAs. So several states have their own Endangered Species Act. California is one of them. I think wolves were listed under the California ESA before the federal ESA existed. If you're not familiar, wolves have become a massive cultural war if you in the West. Wolves are very woke.

2:19:41It's a thing that I have learned. If you go and go to Gardner outside Yellowstone, this place which we can categorically prove makes millions of dollars a year from people coming to look at wolves. You'll see people wearing those Smoker Packer Day t-shirts and they're not talking about cigarettes. Removing wolves from the West seeing wolves is this woke thing that is destroying our righting interests. It's a big culture signal. The idea that conservation is woke in some way or animal-like. The thing with wolves is it combines people who talk about animal rights, people don't like ecology and conservation and people don't like predators. Gardner. When we get these three things together, it's the idea that it's bunch of people in New York who don't understand what wolves do and they want them back but they don't have to deal with the consequences. It does suck when there is predation. My family raised livestock. I've dealt with predation. It's fucking sucks. It sucks, especially when it's young animals, or at calves, or

2:20:44lambs, or whatever. One of the things that the Trump administration has also instructed Bogum to do is to look at and consider amending the existing compensation programs, which exists for wolves. The wolf issue is also particularly controversial because there have been hard introductions. If you look at Colorado, Colorado had a ballot measure in 2020 to introduce wolves, to reintroduce wolves, which they began doing about three years ago. Colorado has been cultural divide between your blue counties and the western slope. I'll say the idea that these French-Range folks in Denver and Boulder mandated wolves on ranchers. It plays on other, I guess, existing insecurities. It's a little different here in California because the wolves in California weren't released. They walked in on their own feet. Although a popular conspiracy theory that I've heard is that that's not actually true and that some people sneaked the wolves in from Oregon and released the wolf vigilantes. The shouldn't be real. I don't know. Yeah,

2:21:46please. If you have smuggled the wolf into the state of California, you've done a lot of crimes, but I would love to talk to you for my podcast. I want to address this more in my podcast natural causes because I think a lot of people are wrong about wolves. I think it's silly to say that we shouldn't have wolves. I think it's also frustrating for people to think that the reason that we have wolves is to fix our fuck-ups. Wolves have a right to be there because they've always been there and they belong there. They're not there to undo the damage done by capitalism and the state to the land. We shouldn't tie the justification for reintroducing them to that because sometimes the science will not support that and then we will lose their justification. They have a right to be there because they belong there. That can be the start and the end of it and I think it should be. No, I think we should be expecting the wolves to like, like, do our dirty work. Undo our dirty work. I'm a little confused about what Trump is exactly saying here because he also wants a quote, a legislative recommendation to fully delist or down-list a gray wolf in the Mexican wolf under the ESA. There are not many Mexican wolves.

2:22:47I think there are fewer than 400. Yeah, there are like 320-ish in those sort of southwestern or southern states and then probably 50 in Mexico. We spoke about a prosecution for killing Mexican wolves a few months ago that I found in a new Mexico in court records, right? But it seems very unlikely that they will meet the recovery guidelines set up under the ESA, but I admitted have not looked into those recently. I want to move on to something that's even more depressing. The lifeboat protest in the UK. So this week, really this month, has seen a series of really disgusting protests and attacks on lifeboats in the UK. This includes fascist Daniel Thomas. He goes by Danny Tomo, really great non-digueer, which disguised his identity very well. It's stabbing a lifeboat. For those not familiar with this, the discourse here is related to the mission of the RNLI, which is to rescue those in peril on the sea. The lifeboats were, I guess,

2:23:49at least during the time when I was growing up, a foundation or British institution. They are funded by the people, not the state, right? They are literally in the book Mutual Aid, like capital M, capital A Mutual Aid. They also used to celebrate Kropok in Spurthay, the RNLI. You can go back if they're Twitter page to exist and see them posting things about his birthday. There's very good piece called Lifeboats and Anarchy in the RNLI magazine. People should read. They wouldn't know more about that. When I was a child, there was a very popular way back when, right, when there were only 4 TV channels, there was a very popular TV, children's TV program, and children who was the program would hold fundraisers for their lifeboats every year. This was like a completely foundational thing that everybody thought was good, right? All they do is rescue people who are in danger of drowning. It's mostly a volunteer institution. I've had friends and colleagues who have worked with, who have volunteered on the lifeboats. It is a dangerous, stressful and often, thankless job that you can't plan or schedule for, right? When someone needs help, you have to go and help them.

2:24:52Immediately, you have to stop what you're doing. Work away from work, walk away from whatever you're doing socially, walk away from your family, go risk your life to help people. And that's all they do. Why are they stabbing the boats then? So, I guess, I mean, fascist going to fascist the ones. What's the source of these protests? Specifically, it is the idea that the lifeboats are bringing people seeking asylum to communities who cannot support them. You see the same shit that you see everywhere in the world, right? Like a BBC interview with someone who is that we've got homeless people here. And I would be prepared to wage a large amount of money that that person has done the square root of fuck all to help homeless people in the last few years, right? But now is suddenly concerned because apparently they have to compete for scarce resources with asylum seekers rather than, yeah, you know, the fucking royal family. In this case, there was a protest in Gosporg where we saw crowds of people led by a child chanting let them drown. I was about to ask if this was the same protest. Yeah, like one can understand a child who isn't like fully formed in the brain saying

2:25:58shit like that, I guess. It's not their fault. Yeah, for a child to be raised in a place with that much hate is fucking disgusting. And for grown adults to be like joining in and encouraging their behavior is fucking appalling. Thomas has pulled this shit a few times. But obviously like this was the worst. What they're trying to do, I guess, is like boats have been leaving from Shia so like on the mental map west side of France, right? Because of increased police presence in Dunkirk in those areas where you would go to Dover where there's a shorter channel crossing, right? And so the lifeboats being dispatched are coming, probably from the island, I'm not going to say that, maybe that's a little bit out of white, I think. And they are taking them to the UK mainland, right? By the shortest route. If the lifeboats took those people who they rescued to Dover, that would take probably half a dozen hours. And at that point, the lifeboat is then out of its area of operation. So if anybody else is in distress on the sea, that lifeboat can't respond, right? It's a good example. I have had this big a tree hurts everyone. They've been doing this

2:27:01for a while, actually made a podcast a couple of years ago with Professor Ruth Kinner about lifeboats are mutilated. But like to see this many people going after something that was so foundational to the culture in the United Kingdom, not so long ago, like when I was a kid, because they've been whipped up into thinking that they have to compete for resources with asylum seekers, rather than like the only dangerous minority being the rich. It makes me really sad and it makes me really angry. And like there is something so fucking broken about a crowd of people chanting, let them drown. And like I'm proud of all my friends who continue to volunteer for the R&LI. I really want to go back home and do a series on it. I know a lot of people who are lifeboat men and like I think what they do is incredible. And it's it's the answer to the question that everyone always has about anarchism, like who will put out the fires without the state, the same people who fucking rescue thousands of people a year from the sea, right? Like the R&LI

2:28:02is funded by donations and through people's wills. The money doesn't come from your taxes, the money doesn't come from the state. I've pointed to them for so long, like both when I'm teaching and in conversations and like I think there's something we should be really proud of. And it's disgusting to me that people are doing this shit. Talking of disgusting, do you want to talk about Trump's feature at UN? I think we should probably talk about the advertisers that support our podcast first. Hopefully it's a lifeboats that you can donate. I don't think it's going to be the lifeboats. I don't think they advertise on podcasts. That would be cool. I with back. And now we're traveling from the United Kingdom to New York to talk about the United Nations General Assembly where Donald Trump used the platform he had to make comments that sounded straight up Janice Idol. But I have a big decision to make. Will it deal to be made with Iran

2:29:08that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election because it doesn't make sense for them not to. This is fucking great, right? Oh my god. To go from like don't worry, I'll genocide them all to vote for me, please. Only a deal after the election. Yeah, it's like I got to see what happens. Yeah, right. Yeah, we got to keep them in just so we see see how this goes. It's a fucking UN. Like it was found and then vermithy has failed, right? But it was founded as the idea that we could all get together and talk it out. We wouldn't have

2:30:10genocide and there he is just fucking like as I said, the UN manifestly failed in that regard and many others. But still sucks. Yeah, it's still fucking bonkers. It's super easy to like, you know, poop who on the UN because it's the UN. But I mean, it's what we have. It's what we have. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a tool that we have and like, yeah, he then went on to talk about the midterms. This is like another 30 seconds. It's listened to this. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. I did that already. And one in a landslide, we want an a giant landslide. And I'll be here for two and a half years. The Republican party is running and I'll be helping them. But I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn't even enter my mind.

2:31:11And then he goes on to say that they don't get a nuclear weapon, of course, right? This is bonkers, right? The idea that Iran is not aware. Yeah, like, it's like wait, guys, you have to understand Americans have different elections. They can't comprehend, right? Like, like, like, it's something where like he didn't know this is so would told him. Like, what is happening here? He's like, they recently told me I am actually not running. Yeah, I'm good, guys. Like, it's like clearly his war on Iran has been extremely unpopular. I continue to speak extremely unpopular because it costs six bucks to buy a gallon of gas now. Even if people don't care about like the massive human toll of this, they do care about that. Which I do also want to say for the record that this war was unpopular before the gas prices increased. It's made it more unpopular. But no one has ever liked this war and it just gets more unpopular every day. Yeah. It's hard of why he's like, it's bringing this, you know, midterm stuff up in like both of these clips here. As I guess he's like, he knows he only has a

2:32:14few months left until the amount of like support he has in Congress will take a pretty, a pretty big dip. Yeah. Even if even if they just lose the house. But I mean, if looking at the polls, it's like the Senate's on the line. That would, that's, that's, it's going to put at least some, some constraints, it's some checks, the poster, the zero, yeah. I was like zero or negative checks. The death of the negative. Been in Congress for the past two years. I was like, he's going to like, I assume plot out, you know, all the way up until the time that the next Congress is sworn in, like whatever his game plan is. Yeah. It's well to see him electioneering this hard at the UN as well. At the UN. Just, I mean, he does it all the time, right? He goes so many to something that's absolutely that the most jarring tone here from anything that has happened there before. But like the way he continues to talk about like annihilating Iran. It's disturbing. Yeah. Especially as our conventional weapons resources get lower and lower, it's scary. It's genuinely scary. That's stuff that you could just play at a nice, you try off a genocide.

2:33:17Yeah. I mean, he spoke about the ICC as well. He critiqued the ICC or not even critique. That's not the right word. Didn't he call for the malt of resign or something? Something, yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of them can't even come to the US. Yeah. Yeah. This was and continues to be bonkers, I guess. Like, it's not surprising in a sense, but it still sucks. Yeah, it's horrifying. Yeah. Now, I know you had some stuff you wanted to talk about. Do you want to pick up from here? Yes. So there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen to Gaza. What's going to happen to the Palestinians in the West Bank? I just didn't. It could happen here, episode on the way that Israeli state and Israeli settler movement are working together to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, but how we should distinguish between the two. Anyway, the way that international actors, particularly the United States, have behaved just to kind of audaciously sideline the Palestinians, like they don't even pretend to include them or consider them. So the board of peace, for example, doesn't have any Palestinian decision makers. There are only

2:34:19technocrats who are essentially supposed to just take commands from the board of peace. So there's really like no space in the discussion for Palestinian agency, but I think international actors, governments in the EU, but even some in Washington kind of thinking medium to long term about after Trump, they understand that this doesn't look great. And that at some point they'll have to make a big display of getting Palestinians to sign some grand peace the older Israelis, and you need some group of Palestinians to do that. So the Palestinian authority that governs the West Bank is led by President Mahmoud Abbas, as I'm sure many know, who has overstayed his term limits for many, many years. He's also the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. And Palestinians are very unhappy with this setup. Basically, the polls show that they think it lacks legitimacy and that he lacks legitimacy. So the international community has essentially been getting to work to kind of

2:35:21paper over this issue. So last year they pressured Abbas to find a successor because he's so old they're afraid he's going to kill over. And he unilaterally changed the bylaws of the PLO outside normal institutional procedures to create a vice president position. And he appointed someone to that position from the PLO executive committee. The dude he picked, Seino Sheikh, polls at 2% with Palestinians. So they're already sending up for what comes after Abbas. And now they're working on PLO changes that would again on the surface look like an institution renewing its legitimacy. So part of that, this is ongoing right now, is having the legislative body of the PLO, the Palestinian National Council actually hold elections. So I'm going to quote here from the European Council on foreign relations. The PNC is responsible for formulating the PLO's policies. It acts as a parliament that represents all Palestinians except for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The PNC currently comprises 747 members representing Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora. But because the PNC has had such difficulty convening and all of these things,

2:36:25there are other bodies that like bridge between the legislative and the executive, like the central council. And over the years, the PNC has basically lost any power, even though it's supposed to be the legislative body, it's supposed to be kind of the democratic engine of the PLO. So in February, 2026, so I felt bear of this year, Abbas issued a decree saying that there would be PNC elections in November. And that this would include basically trying to make it so that all eligible Palestinians that can like feasibly vote directly, living in the diaspora. Or if that's not possible, kind of through an electoral college process in different diasporas or via quote-unquote consensus. So the PLO, the PA, which at this point overlap, they've been going around different communities, different Palestinian diaspora communities, and setting up so that these different communities run people for these elections. But the way they're doing it is extremely

2:37:26undemocratic. They are not thinking about, you know, who are we going to tap that actually represents some constituency in these diasporas? Or are they actually like representative of these diasporas? They're just getting yesmen in a lot of cases. Some members of the central council basically found out that they had been removed after reading it in the media. So like it's completely undemocratic. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile, for example, like they've tapped a particular organization, but that organization like gets to run the elections and other organizations in the Palestinian diaspora in Chile, like have to jump through a lot more hoops to be able to run in the same elections. So to me, it feels like a grand conspiracy against Palestinians to pretend like this PNC elections are actually legitimate. And reality really disempowering huge swathes of the Palestinian diaspora. He also announced in that decree that he's going to have the numbers of the PNC from 747 to 350. So essentially one seat allocated for every 35,000 Palestinians is like

2:38:31the idea, but yeah, it's not great. And I think that we should really, you know, focus on what's happening here because the Palestinians are being set up in so many ways for a very bleak near-term future. I feel like I've stunned all of you with the silence. No, it's so late. They're just like, how openly they're just kind of ringing the elections. It's like, yeah, I don't know. It reminds me of like more expansive version of the way that like the CCP does elections for where like there's like nominal elections for all of their party official offices where they do like a very similar process of like, yeah, we've like put forward one candidate who's like our person, you're all going to vote for them or you're going to vote for one of the like allied parties or something. Yeah, no, it's completely like minimized as a process. Yeah. I mean, I haven't even gotten into like the local elections that have happened in the occupied territories and how kind of problematic some of those have been, but just on every level, like even when they're pretending at democracy, like, yeah, it's not happening, you know, so, yeah.

2:39:37And then like in the same like CCP structure thing, you have like this big assembly that does nothing. And then there's like executive bodies that have been carefully chosen from their like loyalists that's out of that to like do all the things. Yeah, sort of exactly. No, no, that's a good comparison. Yeah. So the second thing I wanted to just very briefly touch on is the issue of Palestine and higher ed, I think like because there haven't been the, you know, massive white spread protests that we saw a year or two years ago. This maybe has dropped from the radar, but it continues to, you know, those protests on campuses continue to have ramifications for higher ed and for a lot of the people who participated. So two cases I wanted to just mention briefly, is that at Stanford University, a number of students were criminally prosecuted for protesting on their campus. And for some of them that involved occupying the president's office and demanding divestment and things like this. But the charges have all been dropped against those students. The Santa Clara County District Attorney, that was like assigned to this case, who like was seeking

2:40:41criminal prosecution, was using the case, the solicit donations for his reelection, saying he was tough on anti-semitism. She's Christ. So yeah. So the judge was like, hey, I think this is probably, you're probably too biased for this. So he like asked him to be removed from the case. And then eventually, as I said, the charges were dropped. And the students like have to pay a small sum and like do some community service. But the idea is like all of these cases, whether at Stanford or other places, they were used to deter further protest for sure. And then the second case, I wanted to mention is maybe people remember three Palestinian students, one from Brown University, one from Havaford College, and one from Trinity College, were shot for wearing kafias on the street in Vermont, maybe two years ago, all three of them were wounded, one was paralyzed. So the guy who shot them, Jason Eaton, cases of the life in prison. And despite the fact that that guy

2:41:42had claimed that the US and Israeli intelligence agencies had transmitted orders to him to shoot the students via FM radio. And that God had commanded him to protect his Jewish neighbors. No hate crime charges were filed. So I think that that is quite telling. But nevertheless, the student, one of the students mothers, the student Hisham, our family was the one who was paralyzed. His mother Elizabeth Price spoke to the media after the verdict and said, just this has been rendered for Hisham, Kenan and Tahseen. After three years of sorrow, loss and struggle, our families finally feel relief. We are grateful, our sons suffering, committed attention and support. We grieve so much that Palestinian suffering never does. So I just wanted to update about that case as well. I'm not sure it's a happy update, but some, some blunts of repercussion. Yeah, damn. Yeah. I guess we got another shooting because this is America. He's this country. Yeah. I know this one's fucked up. Agents in Texas shot a man in

2:42:42the back last week. Wilbert Raphael Garces Perez. He's a migrant from Venezuela. He was shot in the back. He appears to be in stable condition now. We've seen a number of different videos. The videos of the shooting are not entirely clear of like the, like the rendered events. So ice claim to his running away from them. Video doesn't seem to show that. We have seen video of ice agents cuffing him and appears that they're doing that before rendering aid. Like you can see a couple of agents putting cuffs on him and another guy like who apparently has like struggling to put on like latex or actually non latex but protective gloves. Wilbert, like many Venezuelans came to the USA to help his family. Like I've heard this story a hundred times right and I've met this family, not this family, but like a family doing exactly the same thing a hundred times. He has a son with disabilities that he will probably either struggle to pay for or cannot be accommodated easily in Venezuela. And so his dad came here to work to find his treatment at the time that he was shot. He was delivering door dash super common employment for people becoming a signal asylum

2:43:46right now. His family attorney, Kate Lincoln Goldfinch has been documenting the events after his shooting on Instagram. Beginning with a post where she says he was at the hospital with Wilbert's wife and they are trying to get into the hospital to see her husband who had called her and said he had been shot and then the phone cut off. So evidently she's distressed right and this security at the hospital I denied that he is there and asking the attorney and Wilbert's wife to leave. She is then informed by a congressperson that he is present at that hospital but that a hospital's policy is not to disclose on someone's there in iced detention. I've done a lot of like I haven't put much out on like hospitals in iced detention. I have done a lot of interviews about that. It's something I want to kind of get my arms around fully but before I put something out because I think I've also done a lot of responding to times when migrants are in medical crisis and are afraid to

2:44:47get medical care. And I think that they're a really serious repercussions to suggesting that ice is going room to room in hospitals or in the ED is taking people. I'm not aware of them ever doing that and I just want to like make that very clear for people whenever we get to this topic because it kills people to not seek medical care to you know we need to hold those two things at the same time. In this case I guess Austin's mayor showed up and got them confirmation that he was stable and had been released into an iced detention center. His attorney then held a presser which Wilbur attended remotely by calling in from detention. They've had different ways people can call in different detention centers. I think he had some kind of tablet device. In this conference he said he was in serious pain and that he had not been receiving adequate mental care and the ice agents had not identified themselves before ramming his car. His lawyer later said that after his press conference as a retaliatory measure he was held in isolation and had his communication device taken away. He was also removed from the infirmary in apparent retaliation for his

2:45:53presser and placed in isolation. He is now according to Congressman Joaquin Castro being returned to hospital to get better care. According to his lawyer the agent who shot him was hired last year and either didn't have or didn't activate the body can. The judge has ruled that Wilbur will appear in person for a immigration hearing on 30 September. He had previously been ordered removed in absentia because he had missed a hearing. His lawyer says he had moved house and didn't get that document. Ice then proceeded to release this press release, effectively directly addressing the Instagram posts of his lawyer and they claimed they were going to correct the record with a number of lies. It was set up the way that you might write a document if you didn't know what a paragraph was. The Axios style of writing. Yes, perfect, Garyson. Yes, that's correct. It used Axios' house style here.

2:46:55Outlet, I think, is too dumb to read two sentences consecutively. It's set up in a claim fact format. Oh my God. Sometimes I think there's a moment with Jen Pissake, where the way press releases are done by the executive branch went off a f***ing cliff. The Trump administration has gone from slight downhill to freefall at this point. Throughout this they don't refer to him by his name. They refer to him as the illegal alien. It's very common in all of their communications. This shit really literally yesterday. My friends and I erected them a memorial to a migrant who had died and put their name on it right and they not giving people names really f***ing makes me mad. Claim the illegal alien is here legally. Fact, I'm obviously quoting from their presser here. This is false. The person is in the US illegally. He entered illegally under the Biden administration. The illegal alien had no valid work permit, had no protective status and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice immigration judge. This is not correct.

2:47:58He entered under CBP1. To enter under CBP1 was a massive and significant burden to migrants in the Biden administration. People I know have died waiting for a CBP1 appointment. I'm not a small number of people. To comply with the requirements of CBP1 was to jump through every hoop that was placed in front of you at great personal risk. It was safer for people not to remain in Mexico and to enter without inspection. He didn't do that. He got an appointment at CBP1. He went to a board of crossing. He spoke to a numerous DHS personnel and he was allowed into the country. CBP1 gave people a year of humanitarian parole. Trump tried to cancel that but in March this year, a federal judge overturned him. Canceling that says you can't just like broad swath cancel parole like that. I've included an explainer for people who need to or would like to understand that more. It'll be in the notes.

2:48:58Is that the welcome dot rescue dot org link? Yes. This press release was just so annoying. Just repeating all these talking points that they have. CBP1, if you don't think it was founded by the Trump, the first Trump administration. This is the thing that they made. They've since tried to like wreck on that but I mean they did it. It was used by the Biden administration as a de facto gating mechanism for migrants. It was a way of reducing the number of people who could come and apply for asylum. That is why people ended up e-wearing entering without inspection because there was no other way. A large number of CBP1 appointments went to Russian speaking people. Generally because those people who had come were wealthier. They could get hotels. They'd get hotels in Tijuana with Wi-Fi and they'd make the applications. The application did not work on previous generation Android telephones. Those are the telephones at the vast number of people coming to seek asylum will have especially. I literally heard from a friend today who I met

2:49:59the daring gap. I think her fifth phone number because people's phones just get stolen from them constantly. It's the most reliable item of value that most people have. It's easier to steal. When you turn your phone in to get like an upgrade, it gets sold in different parts of the world where people don't have as much income for technology stuff. The end up with previous generation phones. The app didn't work on those phones. The facial live scanner of CBP1, as I said, say I'm booking an appointment for dinner. It's actually dinner making the appointment and not me holding up a lifestyle's car. We'll cut out of dinner in front of the camera. You have to go like that. It simply didn't work for black faces. I know there were NGOs in Tijuana, for instance, who have spent so much money on like like like rooms, like getting big to try and make it work for people. Well, it's she Christ. Yeah, this app was horrific. He went through all the fucking hurdles and they're still just going to call him. I think it's still going to lie about it. Like I think this is

2:51:04a particularly heinous example of how fucked our immigration system is. Yeah, I'll keep up on this as far as we know. He's now in a hospital. I hope he's receiving better care than he would under in nice detention. Let's go on one more ad break and then we have a few more stories before we end this so. Okay, we are back on Friday afternoon. President Trump announced he was quote, banning three news outlets. CNN MS now MSNBC and Politico from the White House quote, effective immediately as a result of their constant reporting fake news media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report fiction and lies when they're covering the president of the United States, the Trump administration or the United States of America, other fake news media outlets

2:52:07to follow unquote. Obviously not good when the president says that outlets shouldn't be allowed to write or report. Only that was an amendment of the Constitution. But it was at first kind of unclear what this ban meant exactly. Though at a press conference following Trump's announcement on true social, he referred to this as a quote ban on the free press. What? Wait, you said that? Yes. Oh, I missed this. What? Let's get to it. We got a video. That's fucking great. Why not? On the premium outlets, what does that mean in practice? Are you taking away their badges? Are you banning them from the pool? Are you banning them from the old office? What does that mean? I should have known what that means. What do you envision the ban on the ban on the free press? I don't want to be in my office. I don't want to be in the ban. We go as far as you can.

2:53:09He's like, you know that thing we have an amendment about? Yeah. Maybe he was referring to capital F capital P, the Barry White outlet that does transfer. I don't think he's talking about banning Barry White's the free press. It's so cool that like we had an entire movement that was normally about free speech. And like the result of it was like white CEO, should be able to say the N word, but also the president should be allowed to ban the free press from talking to him. Hey, and they and they are word. There's so many slurries. They won't be able to say. So Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, quote, something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative stories. If they want to write them, that's fine. I don't have to let them into the people's house going on to say like he started in that clip. I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. And if they could straighten themselves out, I'd love it. Unquote, suggesting he could

2:54:13lift the ban if outlets quote, straighten themselves out, meaning write the news in a different way. Someone asked Trump how this would relate to a then upcoming visit with president she. And I'll just play the clip. President G coming. We're repressive also. We get fake news. We don't repress, but they write fake news. She's. Oh, they was on a sick one. You know, this whole time I was thinking about there was a story like this week about a trial of some media organization in Hong Kong with a judge is talking about how you shouldn't be able to publish opinions that are like, I think the quote was like factually incorrect opinions because they were like negative about the regime. And then Trump's like, no, fuck that. We're banning the free press. We're going to out repress the CCP.

2:55:17I'm like, this is great. This is great. I love I love being a Chinese American. Such a good time. This clip is really funny because he says we're repressive too. But then he pivots and talks about fake news and then goes on to say like, well, we don't like actually repress, but we do have fake news and like kind of equivocating fake news to repression in China is kind of what turns that into. They have the press. Perhaps after catching what he said. Yeah. But like, yeah, it's not. It's easy. It wasn't really on press conference as you can imagine. Yeah. The banning the free press press conference is honest. It is always refreshing. Yeah. So over the weekend, reporters from those three outlets were denied access to the White House grounds with journalists hard past credentials apparently being deactivated overnight. Then on Monday, the affected outlets filed a lawsuit against Trump and White House staff. The suit claims it's, quote, clear that the ban was motivated by

2:56:20Trump's disdain for reporting key considers, quote, one sided and, quote, never good because it quote, diminishes him and his accomplishments. This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles, unquote, also on Monday, ABC news, CBS news, NBC and Fox, the four TV news poolers, besides CNN, released a joint statement in support of CNN, who was supposed to be the designated TV pool provider for that day at the White House. The statement reads, quote, the public has a vital interest in receiving accurate independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting, unquote. These networks announced a solidarity blackout of White House pool coverage with Fox News's Washington bureau chief and the current White House TV pool chair, emailing the other networks on Monday, quote, this is to

2:57:23advise that effective today the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president. This follows the White House's position, preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place. And later on Monday, this did affect their ability to report on White House events as Newsmax struggled to hear the president during a ribbon cutting ceremony. Okay, so there's no microphone because there's no microphone because the pool cameras aren't there. So maybe Tim, this is one example of backfiring just a little bit, pick up on some of things. Michael was saying and obviously the ramifications are right here. What the president saying. Indeed, you cannot hear what the president is saying. I've tried a little bit.

2:58:28A little bit, it seems. Well, they don't want to get the old press crush. You're taking away. They go to be careful. To me, it's unclear how long this blackout will last and how isolated it is because obviously there was coverage of Trump at the UN, although outlets said that that was because the UN provides those credentials. So it's unclear if this is supposed to be like targeted specifically. I like the White House pool. We'll get a better idea in the next few days as Trump returns to the White House. But not good for, as Trump says, the free press. No. Another thing, not great. Last Thursday, September 17th, the FCC approved Paramount's petition to allow almost 50% of the potentially merged Paramount WB equity to be owned by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE following this potential Warner Brothers merger. Meaning the Ellicons, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi would end up owning CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Fendango, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pluto TV Showtime TV,

2:59:33yes, the CWTNT and Warner Brothers. Now, thankfully, 12 state AGs have sued to block this 110 billion dollar Paramount Warner Brothers merger since it obviously endangers competition and threatens editorial independence of even more news outlets. Though after Paramount threatened to leave California last week, state Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was leading the state coalitions antitrust case, caved on Monday and agreed to settle their lawsuit, essentially giving this merger the final green light. California Democrat moment. This is really bad. Yeah. Obviously, part of Bonta's announcement includes a list of this settlement's quote, court enforceable concessions, which largely amounts to Paramount promising to release around 30 movies a year for the next five

3:00:36years, only for the next five years, by the way, or else they will face penalties and be required to divest mere max studios. Again, this requirement only is until like 2031 roughly. Also, that's what you're going to fight for like 30 Paramount movies a year. That's the big thing here. Some of the other concessions include a 47.5 million dollar fund for workers, quote, displaced by the merger. And in annual five million dollar fund to support independent film, we did it, Rob. We did it, Gavin. We got it. Five million a year for independent film. Thanks, Gav. Now, California also announced a, quote, news editorial independence board to help CNN and CBS maintain editorial independence. So, you know, worries, no need, no need to be worried about this. Yeah. It'll be fine. But if you actually read the documents of establishing this

3:01:43board, I'll read this here, the editorial independence board, we made up of five established journalists, the act of a retired, each of whom shall have practiced journalism for a minimum of 10 years. No more than two editorial board members may be affiliated with the same political party. Editorial independence board members shall be appointed by the combined entities board of directors. Who do you think is the chair of Paramount's board of directors? What, while guess? Larry Elson. David Ellison. David Ellison. I love that they can't be for the same political party. We're just going to get two dams. We're going to get two Republicans. Then you got a wild card in there. And there is a kind of person who is a California journalist who's a member of the libertarian party. And they are the worst kind of person. You know, one of them is going to fucking end up in that. I love to live in a free society. Yeah. Making things worse, some of you are reported today that Paramount is tapping one Elon Musk for equity investment as well. Yeah. I did read that physically painful.

3:02:52So both Ellison and Musk could end up appointing people to this editorial independence board. They love freedom. Also, the other investors are like the Saudi government and the U.A. sovereign wealth funds. Part of it, right? Part of that deal is allegedly. They can show that they don't have voting power even though they own the shares. We'll see how that works. Honestly, I would bet on the Saudis more than I would bet on Musk. Like, give them voting power. That's a dark timeline. No, no, I'm just kidding. We'll get a great comedy festival out of it. Until we have proof that Elon Musk has deployed Sudanese child soldiers in Yemen. Okay. Okay. I don't know. No, no, I didn't say the way. Let's distinguish. That is true. The Saudis are also re-involved in that. I'll let him off with you. You're right. I retract them. You know exactly what kind of press freedom's Elon Musk going to go for as well.

3:03:54But no, this is a massive failure specifically on executives in California between the governor new some and the state AG. Back at they caved on this due to the threat of paramount moving to a different state puts the whole country in in jeopardy. People really need to wise up to what New Sims doing right now. Like he's very clearly signaling that he will be friendly to capital before he makes his presidential run. Like he did it with the wildfire settlements in California. He's doing it with this. He is showing that he is going to be everything that Democrats have disappointed you with for the last four eight, 12 years. Like despise what New Sims is doing right now. The other thing in the fine print of these, you know, concessions is the force-mesure, you know, clause that allows the combined entity to get out of all these concessions in situations of quote, war rebellion, hurricanes, other major storms, earthquakes, fires, terrorism, pandemics,

3:04:56strikes, labor disruptions, economic recessions, riots, insurrection, civil commotions, blockades. So in the case of the AI bubble bursting, they can get out of all of these concessions that, you know, the state AG of California is, you know, claiming as their big victory, of course, also strikes and labor disruptions included in there as well. Yeah. What's a civil commotion? A little shenanigans. That's a good, James. It's what happens when I walk down the street. It's a civil commotion. That is a spiritually British phrase. Like, yeah, what legal basis is this? Oh, yeah. I'm going to hit us out if you think of it to the civil commotion. One final note on this, also on Monday, the writers killed America, settled their own lawsuit. This past summer, on the grounds that this merger violates anti-trust and would cause specific harm to workers. In terms of concessions, that the WGA was able to achieve, they got Paramount to agree to a layoff prohibition for five years for CBS News broadcast

3:06:01members and got Paramount to agree to pay 17.5 million to the writers Guild Health Fund and cover their attorney's fees from the litigation to quote the WGA statement, quote, unfortunately, the conditions Paramount has committed to with the AGs and with us fall far short of adequately protecting writers and we continue to believe the merger will cause damage to the industry at large. As labor unions, however, the AGs settlement means that we had to contend with the reality of forging ahead alone with a lawsuit that would cost millions of dollars through trial. Quick update here on Thursday, a California judge delayed the court sign off of this settlement for at least another week by granting an administrative motion by a coalition to block the merger. This settlement to complete the merger does require a sign off from this judge. The parties have till Monday, the next hearing to go over the settlement

3:07:02is expected to be on Tuesday. You know, rolling it back a couple of seconds, speaking of spiritually British. Let's talk about Canada. That is a burn. It's a good one. It's a good one. So, okay, last Wednesday, the September 16th, EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen proposed that Canada become the only, quote, associate member of the EU. Hell yeah. Nice. So, this was obviously, well, I say obviously, this was the day before Carnegie spoke in front of the European Parliament, was receptive to the offer, and it seems like this is something that's going to get voted on by the parliament. Later on in this sort of trip, he met with the leaders of France in England and spent a lot of time talking about strengthening ties with European nations. It was also, I don't know, revealed the right term

3:08:03but there was the whole process of this was very weird. But basically, it was, it was, it was, like, got to the press that Canada had asked to join the, it's called the joint expeditionary force, which is this sort of like British lens, like, bilitary alliance project. I'm just going to quote from CBC here, quote, as it was originally conceived, the joint expeditionary force was meant to preserve battlefield relations that grew up through the Afghan war. So, we're off to a great start here. In 2012, Britain's then chief of defense general Sir David Richards described a future force that could deploy rapidly overseas without Britain having to assemble an entirely new coalition for every crisis. So again, originally, this is a kind of, they want to be able to kind of build on the military integration of the war in Afghanistan, which I don't know, very few wars in which I want to last build on military integration from. And in recent times, it has been more that the sort

3:09:07of coalition existence and prominence has been about more about its potential response to, like, continued Russian. Yeah. Aggression in Europe. So all of this basically dropped at the same time last week. Trump responded to the whole thing about Canada becoming the associate member of the EU by saying it would be a quote, hostile act. He also said, quote, if it's a good intention, that's fine. If it's bad intention, we'll put very heavy tariffs on Europe. So who knows with that? I don't know. Genuinely, who knows what's going to happen, but that situation, I don't know. Maybe we can negotiate a swap now that Britain has left Europe and just try to, we can't join after. Yeah. Can we, can we, can we, can we like physically swap the countries? Sure. Like, at least they wouldn't have as much fucking coastline to be vast. It's about that kind of,

3:10:08probably more coastline in Canada just, just, just fast. Yeah. So, okay, we, we, we, we really know very little about what Trump's response is going to be to this. Now, the part that I actually am interested in here is what, what does this associate membership thing actually mean? And what, what is this actual partnership supposed to look like? So we talked a little bit. Obviously, there's some military integration. Most of it seems to be trade alliances. And even that is kind of vague. What you get out of it looking into this is that the rhetoric coming out of both the EU and Canada is extremely loud. They're talking about, you know, the crisis of democratic institutions and like the rule of law globally. Yeah. All of this sort of stuff. But there was a really interesting interview in foreign policy with Canada's foreign minister Anita Anand about what actually under the surface of this sort of grand rhetoric about like, you know, like forming this sort of coalition and like promoting like the rule of law and being a being a non coercive

3:11:11body and all of the sort of very grand rhetoric that is in response to Trump without really mentioning him. There's a lot of really interesting parts of this interview with Canada's foreign minister about what they're actually talking about doing. I think maybe the first thing that she gets asked is Trump saying, quote, we don't need Canada. They need us. And the response is very interesting because what she's doing is deemphasizing an actual break with the US economically, which is what all of the reporting on this, everyone is talking about how like, oh, this is like Canada trying to pivot away from the US. And her response to this is like, well, no, the US and Canada are just permanently economically integrated. The auto sector is this, you know, like sign of permanent integration between the economies. Yeah. And largely the focus of her response is that, oh, we have a bunch of free trade packs with a bunch of other parts of the world and, you know, between the US and Canada. So this is kind of a sign of like when these people are talking about sort of a rules-based international order, but they're talking about his free trade packs.

3:12:12I'm going to read this quote from the interview. So the first part of this, the question is from the foreign policy interviewer, quote, so let me talk a little bit then about the Canada Europe relationship. I hear the phrase associate member being used a week ago. What would that entail? What does that mean? And then this is the Canadian foreign minister. The nomenclature that is being attached to the growing relationship between Canada and the EU is not the focus of the work we're doing building up to the Canada EU summit in Montreal at the end of October. Our focus is on several pillars where you will see deeper integration on critical minerals, AI in quantum, traded investments following on from the Canada EU comprehensive economic and trade agreements and people-to-people ties, including education students in the Erasmus program. The substantive discussions between our teams right now are very focused on these pillars. So this is the actual right, it myths everyone talking about how we're going to form a new trade block to fight the US. It's like,

3:13:13no, they're doing free trade negotiations basically. Yeah, and that's what Carnie's been really pushing for. He's essentially just trying to be Bill Clinton for Canada without, yeah, that stuff. Without that or playing this axophone. Yeah, slightly more boring. He's a central banker. Yeah, yeah, and I'm going to get to that in a second in terms of what they're actually trying to do. But I think the comparison to Clinton is a good one because what you have here basically is what this block is, is this attempt to form a old school neoliberal, essay old school, but 90s, 2000s style, a little bit blocked to oppose the modern Trump fascism. And it's like, well, okay, so that like God does fascism in the first place, right? So that's not great. There's also a lot of talk about sort of the defense and support for Ukraine. Yeah. But I want to have one last quote from this article to really get a sense of like what is going on here? This is a non for a minister. Taking you to the investment summit that we held last week

3:14:16in Toronto, we are seeing increasing levels of foreign direct investment commitments of 500 billion dollars last week alone to Canada through 10 national projects from ports to highways to airports. Across the board, our work is to shorten the time period, the path to permit time period so that investments continue to flow into our country towards national projects. So what does that mean? And this is where things get really, really bad because what she's talking about when she's talking about this like, you know, we're shortening the path to permit time. So investment continues to come in for national projects. What she's talking about is what's called Bill C 39, which is, I guess like the next version of the build Canada strong act. So, you know, it's a giant neoliberal deregulation bill, right? It decreases the permit process for a whole bunch of projects that are in quote the national interest from, you know, these can take multiple years to talk about five minutes. Impact assessments are talking about like input from indigenous communities, you're putting, there's a whole bunch of things you're supposed to have to do before you can start

3:15:19one of these sort of mega projects. And this, this bill would reduce that entire process to one year. It would allow ministers to just sort of wave away environmental protections. If it was deemed to the national interest, I'm going to quote from a Toronto star here quote, it would also create special zones called, quote, regions of national interest, where approvals for projects can be quote, streamlined in certain areas, official said, and follows recent changes. That means cross-border oil pipelines, gas fired power plants, oil sand facilities, and other projects will no longer be subject to the existing federal impact assessment process. So this is special economic zones for oil fields. I was about to say they're doing, yeah, they're doing a special economic zone. Yeah, yeah. And specifically, it's special economic zone where all of the environmental impact assessments of like, hey, is this oil field going to poison everyone who lives around it? We're not doing that. I'm going to quote here from the Norwell. The legislation takes federal

3:16:20review of pipelines, nuclear facilities, and power lines out of the hands of the impact assessment agency of Canada, a federal body that reports the environmental minister and is meant to ensure project designs protecting indigenous rights in the environment. Instead, pipeline projects will be reviewed by the Canada Energy Regulator in agency of the Crown that reports to the energy minister and oversees construction and operation of certain pipelines and power lines. So that's a very dull way of saying that instead of environmental regulators looking at the impact of car sands, it's going to the energy guys. It goes to executives. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is something that's been very specifically pushed forth in a massive lobbying campaign by the Canadian oil and gas industry over the last like few years. So obviously this is an enormous danger to indigenous sovereignty to, you know, anyone who like wants there to be a livable environment. And also it gives the labor ministry the right to end strikes. Oh, cool. So effectively what it does right is there is a very nebulous legal authority that the

3:17:26Canadian government used to crush it air Canada flight attendants strike in 2025. And this bill would just codify that right and completely ignore the union's legal challenges to it. And would allow just government ministers effectively to just end strikes if they're in areas that are deemed as like adversely affecting the national interest. I'm going to quote from the ambassad article here. Either by having a quote significant impact on the economy or causing quote serious social disruption. So, you know, it's interesting because the current administration has said that this is actually like a protection of the right to strike even though it's giving a government minister the ability to end strikes. But this bill is being opposed by, you know, by the entire Canadian leave movement because it gives the government the ability to kill strikes on behalf of, you know, behalf of corporations in the name of this extremely nebulous national interest. There's no way that could possibly go wrong. And I think both of these put together, let's you look at the domestic side of this entire sort of PR international PR push that's

3:18:31going on, right? It's the deployment of neoliberalism, normally against fascism. It is using the threat of the US to crush organized labor and indigenous groups and environmental groups, which are the same enemies that sort of Trump and the American fascist movements have. It's just that it's being implemented using a sort of state of emergency caused by the fascist themselves. Yeah, and I think that's something that's incredibly important to keep in mind whenever you're sort of reading about, Karni, whatever you're reading about this sort of international project that he's embarking on is that this is what this project means, right? It's a war to be able to do free trade and special economic zones. With that, I think that is all for us today at it could happen here. Denna, do you have anything you would like to plug? I wanted to direct people to the handbook of authoritarianism and the Arab world, which I edited and it's out now open access on the bloomsbury politics website. So if you just google it, you'll find it. It's got lots of contributors from the muner region, swana, whatever you want to call it. Cool. Yeah, thank you for

3:19:34having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. If you'd like to email us, you could do so cool zone tips at proton.me. Some of you fuckers in the marketing world are still not fucking listening to me, so just say again, do not fucking email me about your product or service. I will block you. Don't email me about putting my podcast on YouTube to get more viewers. I don't fucking care. I'm gonna block you harder from all of the I-Hile emails one day. What a transgoal in your couch. We've reported to news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. From more podcast from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolzoneMedia.com or check us out on the I-Hirt Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

3:21:02Never wanted to try an Olympic and Paralympic sport? Try fencing. It's fast, competitive, and even offered at the NCA level. Find a beginner class near you at tryfencing.org. That's tryfencing.org. And right now, do more makes interesting and adventurous easy because your first month's free at

3:22:05domorestuff.com slash free. This is the Dan Lebertar show. This is Dan Lebertar and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's uh, holy. Uh, in the most positive of ways, it has a good amount of range from smart to silly and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports. Listen to the Dan Lebertar show on the I-Hirt Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. J Kager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch Power Slap 23 for free on Power Slaps YouTube channel Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas. Power Slaps

3:23:07biggest card of the year. It's football season and Visio Mini LED TVs are here to turn your living room into the front row of the stadium. Watch every play come to life and breathtaking realism on a 55-inch or 65-inch mini LED TV. Plus, crank your favorite game day tunes on the I-Hirt Radio app, built right into your Visio TV. Big screens, big picture and a totally immersive experience. Find rollback deals at Walmart today on Visio 55-inch and 65-inch mini LED TVs. Now just 248 and 358. This is an I-Hirt Podcast. Guaranteed Human.