Episode 163: Oops! All News 2: The Newsening

Shibby Boo.

How do I do this?

There we go.

Yes.

Okay.

So we made it into the podcast, which is happening now.

Here we are.

Oh, you are.

Now is when the podcast happened.

Now, now is when podcast?

Yes.

Now is dark and full of mysteries.

And that now is 34 minutes past midnight, which the bulletin of the atomic scientists are freaking the fuck out about it.

I mean, it's hard to see.

Oh, that's sweet.

That's not good.

You know what we're all in that situation?

Sweet girl.

That's so fucking funny.

One of the things you may not know, listeners, is that Nova continuously takes one for the team, piece-a-piece reporters.

Yeah.

It's fine.

I like hanging out with my friends.

And tomorrow I get to get on the train and go hang out with my wife.

So it's all good.

Exciting.

Tomorrow I might get my fridge working again, or I'll find out some catastrophic news and I'll have to redo my kitchen.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

I'm bracing for a bunch of comments that are like alternately, you're married, or I thought you were already married.

And it's like, listen,

I don't, there's, there's nuance going on here.

I don't need to explain to you right now.

Yeah, certain things are none of your goddamn business.

Exactly.

More importantly, though, it's polyamory happening.

Leave me alone.

To leap prognova, I'm married.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

And my wife is just like, oh shit, you have to record.

Like, I'm so sorry.

And flood the Wawa at like 95 miles an hour.

We did not rob the Wawa.

I feel like I should previse it with that.

Listen, every couple wants to feel a little bit like Bonnie and Klein sometimes.

Yeah, yeah.

Both Alma and Louise, you know, depending on gender.

Absolutely.

There have been a bunch of flyers going up in my neighborhood for polycule group therapy.

Get out of the polycule.

The ones out of the polycule.

You know, the ones with like the little

tabs that the ones with the little tabs that you can take off, you know?

And a bunch of them were gone the first time I saw the flyer and I was like, well, yeah, that's West Philly for you.

Rent going up.

Lots of people with alternative lifestyles out here.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I am the straightest person within like

the straight white guy in West Philly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Do you remember that stupid meme of the like one Russian riot cop like covered in blood surrounded by people that's like the last straight man in Europe?

That's that's you in like West Philadelphia.

It's true.

It's true.

That's completely true.

When we lived together, we were basically a clan meeting how far relative.

Wow, that's almost as bad as the bonus episode.

Anyway,

I'm not making that into a running joke.

No, no, please do not.

I thought, A bonus episode that gets us both canceled.

Yeah.

So

welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Roznik.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And it's, whoops, all news too, because you people wouldn't stop asking for it.

Yeah, the thing is, we try to record these in advance, and then there's a real problem when someone like takes a shot at the like former president or whatever and all of you have to wait two weeks or more for us to do our little jokes about it.

Well, it's amazing that they shot Trump and then Biden died.

Both presidential candidates

have been killed and now replaced.

Yeah, I was worried.

I was worried about I was worried about recording so many episodes so close together we'd run out of news.

And then it turned out as our good friend

good old Vladdie Lennon said, there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.

We're in one of those weeks.

Absolutely.

I've been in one of those weeks for like eight years.

Yeah.

So we're playing catch up a bit and we're doing this not for not for the first time where we just do an episode that's all news.

Aren't you lucky?

Yeah, some people like this.

I bet some of you hate it too.

Those are the more rational people, I think.

I think this is the thing, right?

Anything we do, any business decision we make is met with a roughly even split and everyone on both sides of it is furious and this as as a very anxious person right has led me to a kind of paralysis right like the best example of this is when um uh when we had devon like put in and then take out the noise that indicates a devon comment and that was straight down the it was like a presidential election it was 49 51 uh and it switched back and forth everyone insane everyone

insane about that there's no right answer and as someone who likes trying to please everyone, God only knows why I chose a life as a trans woman.

This is

rookie mistake.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm on the cycle of Samsara, like hoping for something easy to come up.

And it hits trans woman again.

And I'm like, fuck.

I mean, you know, this is going to be an issue that we only will really have to deal with when we eventually get acquired by private equity.

Oh, yeah, we're going to have to.

When we sell out,

we're selling out.

We're selling out.

Spotify.

BlackRock presents while they're

becoming like a Spotify exclusive.

Yeah.

Look, if Megan and Markle and Prince Harry can rip off Spotify for $100 million, there's no reason we can't do it.

Megan and Harry kind of queered the pitch for us, right?

Them and like the economy or whatever, because it turns out, even if we wanted to sell out and even if someone thought we were good enough that we would like would buy us out, they don't really do that anymore.

Like Spotify don't really just throw money at you anymore, partly because they don't have infinite money and partly because they got burned by giving like $300 million a second to Harry and Megan in exchange for like, you know, two episodes about mindfulness.

There was like a guy in the emails offering to buy us out a while back and it was like for three months revenue.

It was a crypto thing.

Yeah.

It's like, no,

no, I need more money than that.

Yeah.

Like, especially since I don't have real skills anymore.

No.

Can you explain this period on your CV?

No, not really.

No, no, no, no, no.

It's confidential information.

This is a podcast, right?

Yeah.

So it's called Volvision.

It says here you took four years off to talk into microphone.

And I was damn good at it, too.

Yeah.

I liked it.

I was good at it.

Yeah.

So now...

Before we talk about the goddamn news, we have to talk about the goddamn news.

Jari.

I cut that off way too early.

That was like a second and a half of news.

Oh, excuse me.

Whoa, Jesus.

That was incredible.

It's like a hippo in a nature documentary.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

I didn't hear that.

It was like a roiling bubble.

It was great.

Yeah.

I'm Wawa Bowl and Coke Burps.

I had to go to the Periodontis today and got mouth stuff done.

And I can't chew with my front teeth at the moment.

You can't call it mouth stuff.

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm right there with you.

I had Smash Burger for dinner,

which is a bold choice to get the loaded fries and stuff when you're a person of gastric disposition and you have a like six-hour train ride.

Don't you have a trade to borrow?

Yeah, the next,

really.

There's some things that are going to go down in like an Avanti West Coast train bathroom that I'm not going to be proud of.

Well,

eight minutes before we started talking about poops.

Yeah.

So

we had a quite nasty bicycle accident here in Philly last Friday.

We had a murder.

We had a bicycle.

Yeah, it was basically a murder.

Yeah.

Dr.

Barbara Freeds, who was 30 years old and a pediatric oncologist,

was riding her bike on Spruce Street.

But this is Thursday, last Thursday, right?

And so, you know, riding in the bicycle lane

with a helmet, doing everything right, you know, comes up to a light.

And then some guy, like in the traffic lane next to her, there's only one traffic lane on the street, decides, I'm not going to wait for the light to change.

I'm going to go around three cars at 50 miles an hour and just ran her over.

And then, you know, threw her 150 feet through the air.

And then you crashed into two parked cars.

Yep.

This guy is Michael Vahey.

Double

Vahey.

Vahey, I don't know.

69 years old.

Blood alcohol concentration of 0.16.

Double the legal limit in Pennsylvania.

Yes.

So, you know, it managed to accelerate to 50 miles an hour in a 25 mile per hour zone.

I mean, this is sort of brought to light, you know, just the insufficiencies of the bicycle infrastructure in Philly.

You know, and it's, it's, this is something that was entirely preventable if there was anything other than paint protecting the bike lane, paint and flex posts, which, you know, as we had Alfred Two on a while back ago to talk about the

student housing cube, they refer to those as car ticklers because that's about all they do.

Yeah, we need to

we need to install

sentry posts with guns on them

to protect the cyclists.

Every border implies the violence of its maintenance, but with like bike lanes, that's good.

That's good.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, and this is, this has been, you know,

at the very least, because this is such an egregious example, you know, there seems to have been recently a bit more of a unified push from everyone to say, look, we need to finally protect these bike lanes.

The problem is we have Mayor Sherelle Parker, who was elected on a platform.

and whose staff are

sort of somewhere between apathetic and actively contemptuous of anyone on a bicycle um these are the same people who did the kensington encampment clear out and uh

affected where i work and now people come in for all sorts of services we're unable to offer uh and the city basically tells us to go fuck ourselves so that's rad yeah parker is

like pure evil i feel very bad

very bad yeah i mean just just uh extremely like malevolent aloof just like not i mean you you know, because she did the communications blackout.

She forced everyone to go back to work in the office in the city, even though they didn't have offices for them.

She's going to ram through the Sixers arena.

And she's going to do absolutely nothing about this except, you know, some platitudes.

And then, of course, council person for this area is Kenyatta Johnson.

And he is also an active bicycle lane denier.

You know,

he is committed to ensuring that everyone can park on every surface all over the city, you know, walls, ceilings,

sidewalks.

Spider-Man, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's, it's, uh,

this is an uphill battle, I guess is what I'm saying,

to get any kind of real justice here.

I believe Larry Krasner's office just released a bus statement today or at a press conference today saying they are pursuing criminal charges.

The problem is, you know, we can lock this guy up and throw away the key.

It won't prevent this from happening again.

Correct.

Yeah.

And I mean, how, just on a sort of like ice-cold level, how long does it take to train a pediatric oncologist?

You know?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's,

I, I have a, I have a hunch it takes more money and time to train a pediatric oncologist than it is to, you know, wheel in some jersey barriers.

Um, might actually take less money and time to train a pediatric oncologist than it takes to like incarcerate a guy for the rest of his life though yeah this is true yeah i mean i don't think he's gonna go to jail for life i think he's gonna get like a relatively standard you know doi slap on the wrist um

but yeah this is i i mean this one hit close to home because i use this intersection fairly frequently you know as a psychologist nearly been killed here numerous times no this one always struck me as one of the safer ones that's the thing you know because you don't expect someone to just do that i mean right if you look at this road it's like you've got the bike lane here's b then you have the buffer that's also b

and then you have the trap travel lane which is here and then there's a parking lane and this is probably end to end about 25 feet right um you know so the fact that anyone is able to drive 50 miles an hour down this um

goes to show that A, people are incredibly reckless, and B, there's just insufficient infrastructure here to stop people from doing something incredibly stupid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Philadelphia is a policy failure.

It's a residential neighborhood.

This is not like a big road.

This is a tiny, tiny road.

And to be clear, this is kind of like the opposite of news in the sense that this happens every day in every city.

Yeah, this happens pretty frequently.

This one just happened to be particularly egregious.

And

I hope someone does something about it.

But again, we have an administration in the city, which is, you know,

jealous of people who live here.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, you know, well, they, they, they consider anyone who hasn't, you know, lived here for 50 years and is also very conservative to not be a real Philadelphian.

Uh, this whole city is governed like it's 1970

and it's in terminal decline.

It's really frustrating and stupid.

Um,

like separate you, I need to say grade separation, which is not a horrible idea, you know.

Yeah, I, I mean, doing that grade separating cyclists would require demolishing and rebuilding the city, which is what we're trying to avoid.

We tried that in the 60s.

It didn't work that well.

It didn't work, yeah.

Yeah.

Say her name again.

I can't remember her name.

I don't have that name.

Barbara Freeds.

Yeah, and she deserved a lot better than she got.

Exactly.

Fuck you, Sherelle Parker, whose fault this is.

Basically, yeah.

I mean,

I still don't understand why anyone voted for her.

Other than, I guess,

probably some, probably some fucking like,

you know, you probably got the support of the right pastors and then they delivered the congregation.

I mean, that's what really how the politics works.

Billy, yeah.

That's that is genuinely true.

Yeah.

I love a sort of a moderate theocracy.

Exactly.

Such that it is.

All right.

What do we got next?

Yeah.

So that was infuriating.

In other news.

I mean,

we did it.

It's Brat Brat Summer.

It is Brad.

It's Kamala Harris Summer, who is Brad.

Thereby making it Brad Summer.

Yeah.

And I mean,

God, okay.

I just, as much as I think it's reasonable to be relieved on a couple of levels, firstly, that I think she's a lot more likely to beat Trump than Biden's dead-ass corpse was.

I

agree with that.

And she might be both like, like in terms of policy, a little bit better and personally less like odious to the point that you feel less uncomfortable voting for her.

Again, I'm not going to condescend to anyone who's like,

I want no part of the whole Sherad, right?

But like, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I feel a little bit more comfortable going to the polls for Kamala than Biden, but like they have they have four months to change that.

Yeah, and you've already started on that, you know, which we'll get to.

Gruesome press release about

yeah, and if you remember anything about like Kamala's time as a prosecutor in California,

you'll know that it was, I mean, she did some good things and she did a hell of a lot of bad things, which is kind of an easy thing for any prosecutor to do, you know, like

it's kind of.

You shouldn't trust anyone who wants to be top cop.

Well, you shouldn't trust any politician, basically.

And

I include our faves, right?

I think the thing with all of the like brat memes and stuff that people kind of then legitimately felt betrayed a couple of days later when she did the thing that we're going to talk about in one of the next slides, and people realize, oh, wait, she's a politician.

It's like, no, that was always obvious.

You know, I'm not even necessarily against like having a good time making fun of these people or even like making them into memes, but you have to do it with your eyes open, you know.

And you have to be aware that they don't really think of you as a human being.

Yeah.

Just because you don't get to be vice president or president by doing that.

Right.

I was very confused by the, I mean, I know that there is the initial honeymoon phase.

I was like, okay, I'm not going to post anything until like 24 hours have elapsed.

People can be happy for 24 hours and then like, all right, let's let the reaction.

Then us like armchair leftists can, with our sort of like omnipresent air of misery, can say, actually, did you know that this woman who might give you like some hope is bad too?

Yeah, obviously.

You know, that's a jab.

Um, and I love it.

I revel in it.

It's a pleasure, you know.

You do what you love, you never work a day in your life.

Right, you work

and deserve nothing.

Right.

No, I get it.

I just, uh, yeah, oh, that's cool.

You have a photo, if like a video of her dancing.

Did you know that she uh went to the California Supreme Court to try and uh say that trans prisoners' health care was like optional?

Well, that's grotesque.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She, she, she since like said that she felt bad about it, which thanks.

Bet that's a huge consolation.

The specific kind of enthusiasm felt really familiar to me, and it was like how people felt about Hillary like in the week leading up to the election.

She's a girl gone wild.

Do you remember that McCarthy?

Exactly.

Happy birthday to this future president.

It's kind of like, oh.

Oh, wait.

You were serious, like that sort of thing?

They might.

Yeah,

it does not feel good.

The vibes are off.

I have seen people say, why isn't Beto O'Rourke the VP nom?

And I'm just like, I need you to, I need you to calm down.

I don't know what I need out of you, but I need you to calm down.

Just post less, talk less.

I don't know.

I think you're right.

Right.

I hope that she's a, like, she has better political instincts than Hillary.

That's not a high bar.

She even seems to, for what that's worth, which is very a little.

Yeah.

And like, prosecutor versus felon is going to like play really well in a lot of places.

Yeah.

She could still lose, right?

Like, yes.

They can still, they can still, they, they can still really, you know,

this up.

The polling right now is like Kamala, like, I've pronounced her name four different ways so far, and none of them have been right.

It's like Kamala.

That's going to be the real question is how the BBC is going to pronounce her name.

Yeah, I mean,

the funniest thing is Buddha Judge for VP, because then you get a kind of like double

pronunciation minefield for broadcasters.

Oh, yeah.

I think they're going to pick Shapiro.

I think so, too.

They're definitely going to do that.

That sucks.

That's really depressing.

I think the best answer is Bashir, personally, because I really like Deep Space Nine.

And

what he's had to say about vetoing anti-trans bills is genuinely very poignant.

Trans kids are made in the image of God, and I can't stand here before God and deny his wishes or something.

It was just like, I don't know if that really resonated with me personally.

You just also have to

successfully,

it's very

fruitful to look at these people who are like

kind of trying to drive trans kids to like,

you have to believe the word

and be like, these, these people are like freaks and bullies, right?

And it's cruel what they're doing to these children.

And that, that's very successful.

And I think that's a tactic that more Democrats could stand to emulate.

Not helped, however, by the New York Times opinion, uh,

like by the New York Times editorial going, hey, you know how the Dems can make themselves like more approachable?

Why don't they just throw a bunch of trans people onto the bus?

Oh, I saw that article.

I didn't read it because it was disgusting, but you know,

that's kind of funny New York Times now and forever.

Um,

except that one guy who

had a really good article about the railroads.

Yeah, fuck anyone who's ever written anything that's been published in the New York Times.

Fuck a Wordle.

I never do a Wordle.

Yeah, more of a spelling V-girl, actually.

Yeah, anyway, like that's like half the paper's revenue as well.

Like seriously, cancel your New York Times game subscription.

They do like bootleg copies of them online.

But yeah, so

Kamala's polling like 46.

No, fuck me.

It's like

it might legitimately be like something like 46, 45, and then the rest is good.

It's real.

Comeback of the year.

God don't even.

I think she's doing a little better in the swing states than Biden was.

I think that's where, you know, she's doing better with the 35 people who determine the election each year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Trump hasn't been able to land a glove on her.

In fact, none of the Republicans have been, which is great.

Like, they've gone for their obvious things, which is like racism and misogyny and disgusting sexual, like I assume they have their, you know, the back office at the Heritage Foundation has gone into like war communism mode, trying to retool the opposition research mill for this woman.

Yeah.

You know,

they'll have it in a couple of weeks.

They'll have something, I'm sure.

Right now, this has been a lot of fun.

Right now, everything's bouncing off of her.

You know,

what trouble is like, I call her laughing Kamala.

Nothing.

Sourceless.

Yeah.

You know what it is?

It's that he doesn't have new material anymore.

Like all the stuff with somebody like Joe Biden, who

has been in politics forever, right?

He had material for him.

He had like, and those were kill shots, right?

But like against Kamala, he's got

because he can't invent anything new because his brain is also fried.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

I think Trump's material is definitely flagging.

You know, he's not

doing well in his old age.

In his dotage.

Yeah.

Got no zingers.

Yeah.

He can't even pull back the like Reagan bullshit of being like my opponent's youth and inexperience, right?

Which would, you know, like put him up five points because his brain is fucked.

I love it here.

Yeah, I mean,

the debate was like, you know, they were both incapable of like rational thought, but at least Trump could string words together, even though they were horribly racist.

There's 100 million people outside, you know, Guatemalans to tear down the

yeah yeah the hoover dam or whatever i i i i think the thing is as well is that um

i think i'm i'm sort of like almost cautiously optimistic about karmala um i think she's gonna like as anyone elected president will do gonna do amount of a continuing insane amount of evil in the world um yes but as far as like kicking the can down the road on keeping like kind of like patrician democracy alive, something which of course we all love.

Um,

I think she's probably like their best shot for doing it.

Which

I'll buy that.

God, that's grim.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know,

and she might be a smidge better on Palestine.

I have heard that.

This is the thing, like, when you look at the actual like body count, not just Palestine, I mean, Palestine's the most salient example, but all the domestic stuff too.

Um, it kind of betrays how inadequate any kind of like moderation or like incrementalism really is you know right right yeah

you can be like oh it's it's it's a bit better now and you're looking at like a wasteland yeah

well the one palestinian left i'm sure will be pleased with uh kamala's uh moderate uh policy on israel yeah

i tell you what it's going to be a hard impression for milo to to land but i'm sure he's working on this is true this is true i haven't really here heard kamala speak that's the other thing i'm kind of like okay, I diggles a lot.

She's got nice vibes.

And this is the thing with all of the memes and stuff is that I think irrespective of the kind of politician-ness, I think I find her quite personally charming.

It just doesn't matter.

Yeah, because she's still a hideous worker and all right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

definitely more personable and would be the first non-teetotaler in office for

years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Biden didn't drink.

Trump didn't drink.

Obama.

Obama drank.

A lot.

Bush didn't drink.

I need to know if she smokes as well, because Obama reset the big smoking counter.

Oh, yeah.

And neither Biden nor Trump did.

So, like, if she does, America might be cool again.

Yeah.

She could be cool.

If she comes out to the inauguration, right, obviously, like, blood, like, stained with like international, especially Palestinian blood, but wearing a shirt that said, like, do not give me a cigarette under any circumstances, no matter what I say, that might like reclaim some American standing in the world you know see we need to we need to bring back you know real Americans like FDR you smoke a cigarette with a big long holder yeah

you know that's cool maybe the reason maybe the reason of why

yeah I mean this is the thing Obama was cool but like in a kind of in the same way as Bill Clinton right the cool kind of wore off pretty quickly yeah tell me about it whereas someone like LBJ, again, blood-drenched war criminal murderer, but like personally

personally cool.

Great society metro.

You get the great society metro.

So maybe the recipe is in order to get like kind of domestic political change out of a Democrat, you need them to be cool in like an actual way.

And that means they have to take up smoking.

That's right.

We're on the kind of draft Camela

sort of campaign, but it's drafting her into like smoking.

Yes, exactly.

You got to take up smoking.

Kids,

if you if you want to be cool and be president, you got to take up smoking.

That's official advice from the podcast.

Take up smoking now.

Ask your parents to bring you to the 7-Eleven.

Get a pack of Lucky Strikes.

Yes.

When I smoked, I started smoking Lucky Strikes and you couldn't find them anywhere.

So I'd switch to Marlborough's.

Yeah, now that is the case.

I mean, in the very, very rare occasions when I smoke, it's like, oh, I'd like a lucky strap.

I haven't smoked in, you know, I smoked like once every six months for a while, and now I don't at all.

I'm always jealous of people who can do that.

I

have a hopelessly addictive personality.

So I smoked

like

two packs a day, give or take.

I couldn't do that.

Yeah, from when I was I like from when I was 18 to 25.

And quit cold turkey because I'm awesome.

But like.

You sure are.

Yeah.

I feel miserable for like a day afterwards if I have one cigarette.

That's why I undo it.

No, I don't even like being around cigarette smoke now, which is cool.

It's cool how you can just kind of like reset your brain like that.

I just liked taking smoke breaks is the thing.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's the nice part of it.

I think it was really good for whatever like fucking neurodivergence, like ADHD bullshit or whatever I have going on to like force myself to go and like do another activity, which is light something on fire for five minutes.

Yeah.

Well, and they ruined that by making cigarettes you can smoke indoors.

I mean, that was stupid.

Vapes are so, so like sourceless apart from everything else, you know?

Like,

something cool about a vape, you know?

You show me a like private detective with a vape.

No.

Nope.

No.

This is what Kamala really needs to do is make smoking legal again yes smoking illegal vapes illegal really 180 degree turn from uh biden trying to make menthols illegal

you all dead bitch

i still can't believe biden tries to make menthols that's one of the most like wild

like public health measures you know menthols specifically it's racist is what it is yeah it is

joe Biden, racist?

Oh, my God.

Who is it?

Joe Biden segregationist?

Yep, but he won South Carolina, a place where there is no racism.

It was always funny to me when, like, in the kind of dying weeks of the campaign,

when people, like commentators, people who are well thought of as political journalists, were like, well, you know, African Americans love Biden, so why aren't they turning out for him now?

And then, you know, you would see a bunch of Vox pops,

a bunch of interviews with people.

And they're like, obviously he is 9000 years old.

I saw the debate and like,

like one of his ears fell off.

I cannot vote for this man.

And it's like, they just have the same concerns as everyone else, which is he was manifestly like unable to keep doing it.

But it was, it was kind of perceived as like, it was, it always got written up as like, oh, Joe Biden is like the kind of like the African-American whisperer.

And it's like, but are we talking about the same guy, the crime bill guy?

Yeah, the crime bill guy, the guy who can't put a sentence together.

I mean, apparently as early as like 2021, like he was addressing Congress and just like completely binning it like halfway through.

Just like had no idea where he was or what he was doing.

I would say the media was concealing this from us, but it was more like, you know,

it was fairly obvious.

They were gaslighting us the whole goddamn time about this guy's mental decline.

You know what I mean?

Well, also, I think he had a lot of cover from Trump, right?

Because Trump had spent four years being deeply insane.

Yes.

Right.

And we had all kind of more normal fashion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But we all had us kind of like sensitivity adjusted, right?

By like four years of the president has said the most insane thing you've ever heard for like the fifth consecutive day.

Again, the president is mad at a soda.

Yeah, the president, the president almost made like reunified Korea, but then Robert De Niro hurt his feelings.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that did happen.

Again, actors weirdly like kind of power broke us here because George Clooney brought down Biden.

So, you know, we got them together.

We could reunify Korea again.

The Film Actors Guild from TM America World Police is real.

Oh, one fun thing about this If She Wins is that it does like almost verbatim do the come-town bit.

The only come-town bit I like about how we get, like, we never get a white woman president.

And it just drives white women insane because they can't say, Isn't it time we had a white woman president?

And it just makes

no

extremely funny.

Just, I, I think, I think there's a few reasons why I hope Kamala wins, but I think high up the list is the Hillary Clinton congratulations tweet.

I will be turning notifications on for Hillary

on election night.

Sort of stumble backwards into the presidency.

It's pretty funny.

You know, the other thing, speaking of tweets, that's been fun about this, has been people being made to fall in line by Nanti Pelosi.

She is ruthless and terrifying.

Whether it's John Federman or like even Barack Obama, like everybody who is withholding an endorsement, like a couple of days later

has just like done a like fulsome endorsement.

And it's just, it's fully like, oh, I see.

Someone has been credibly threatened.

I saw your tweets.

Guess who just got credibly threatened?

Yeah, I mean, she put John Federman on a leash.

I mean, that's, it's, it's impressive.

I mean, it's depressing and frustrating, too, that she didn't

do the whole time.

Yeah.

Any of the times that he, he's like, said any of the shit that he has, she could have like brought him to heel, but she didn't.

I have it on good authority.

So I will reveal some personal information here, which is that Corinne's youngest sibling interned for a congressman who flipped parties

from Democrat to Republican.

It's not that hard to figure out, but I'm not getting nothing for free.

Sure.

And the scariest days that Corinne's sibling worked were the days that the congressperson in question got yelled at by Nancy Pelosi.

Because apparently she would just, she could scream at you for hours.

She's got the thing is, right?

Like she's been in Washington for like as long as Joe Biden has, if not longer, right?

And also has the mindset of a marine DI.

Yes.

The fact that she uses this for like mostly evil is not great, but at a certain point, you have to not admire it, but you have to sort of like recognize the power of work.

Yeah, it's like, okay, okay, you'll be very good at your job.

Yeah, she was.

This guy had to switch parties to avoid getting yelled at.

He did.

He did it.

He would just like come back

just like with his tail between his legs.

And apparently it was just like Nancy days were the worst days

for the

I always laughed at that.

That just like this guy who's like now pals around with Trump and all that shit and talks about, you know, oh, we're going to save the state, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's just like, you couldn't handle getting gilled at by like a five-foot Italian dude.

I'm not sure if I could handle that, to be honest.

No, no, I think I would, I wouldn't have told you.

Like the older Italian women.

My mother, my mother-in-law, I'm fine.

The Mina they get and like,

yeah.

Yeah, I would not, uh, I would not, I would not do well in an argument with Nancy Pelosi, I think.

I don't think I would either.

Yeah.

Um, but anyway, uh, let's talk about our next charismatic hero.

Oh boy.

Um,

in other news,

let's talk about

level stuff because you wrote possible and I upgraded it on the basis of uh like intelligence assessed to probable

probable couch fucker chosen for ZP slot.

Let's talk about JD Vance.

You guys are incredible headline writers.

This motherfucker.

I will be saying the phrase this motherfucker about a number of people.

Incredible eyeliner game, though.

I do have to give up.

I was about to say, yeah, he's got,

he's going to be our first goth vice president.

That's not true.

Hubert Humphrey was like.

Hubert Humphrey, you son of a bitch.

That's a good point.

But yeah, no, JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy.

Terrible fucking book.

Yep.

Senator for Ohio.

All-round piece of shit.

And like the, I mean, here's the thing, right?

Bad enough to have the kind of like

horny-handed son of toil made good thing and come to like rain ruin on the elites bullshit.

But to do that specifically through the lens of like having been to Yale law school is just that that combination makes you one of the worst freaks going, right?

I just look at this guy and like, I could have written a book where I pretend to be from Appalachia, too.

Um, and uh, I could be vice president now.

Yeah, you could be talking about like Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew.

Yeah, well, how Diet Mountain Dew is racist, according to Democrats.

That was the worst

attempted joke I have seen in my life.

I don't even know how to say that.

That's got bad crowd work, is the thing.

The crowd work was really bad.

Like, I could have seen a way that you could have made that work with that audience, but his comedic timing is so bad.

Getting a laugh out of like a Trump audience is like the easy.

It's the easiest laugh in the world, right?

You just do

pronouns.

Huge laugh.

Bring the fucking house down.

That brings the house down.

Yeah.

And

the thing is, right, you want as like vice presidential candidate, someone who will be a bit of a like barnstormer, right?

You want someone like the Biden to your Obama, right?

The kind of the meme Biden, the grasps podium liquid swords biden um and what you've got instead is is jd vents instead of someone authentically like insane you know i i feel like you could you could warp shop workshop this fairly easily mountain dew it's a reference to moonshine who makes moonshine hillbillies hillbillies are racist that's why the democrats don't like mountain dew i assume that that is i'm not saying that's the exact format of the joke i'm saying these are the things you have to work with the thing is, this guy wrote a whole damn book where he said he hates hillbillies,

which is a bizarre choice

for, you know, ostensibly the racist hillbilly party.

You know,

something really funny.

You know who inspired him to write the book?

You remember the tiger mom lady, Amy Chua?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

She was his professor at Yale Law School and she told him to write the book.

She gave him like feedback on like early drafts and shit.

That tracks.

Got it.

So it's

when a villain from an earlier season comes back in a cameo.

But yeah, no, I just...

The funniest thing about Vance as a pick, aside from the fact that Trump now obviously regrets it and hates the guy.

Yeah, so

apparently been asking around for people to

who he should replace him with, which is incredibly funny to me.

The biggest cucking of all time if they do replace him.

But the thing is, the reason he got picked in the first place was it was Don Jr.'s pick.

Embarrassing.

They finally let it's like the fucking plane crash where the pilot lets his kid in the cockpit and the kid immediately nose dives the plane, right?

Like the one time.

Or like Hunter Biden trying to keep Biden back in.

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah, I know.

Do you think Biden's going to pardon Hunter on his way out?

That'd be funny.

That would be so good if he better do that.

I think if he really loves his son, he should do that just like fuck all of you uh i don't give a

i'm leaving i'm leaving with my son don't talk to me or my son ever again

yeah that would be pretty good actually like yeah

um but yeah so so don jr had like one shot uh at was like influence over the campaign he's like i want my like weird like fascist American monarchist esoteric guy who hangs out in a discord with a bunch of teenagers Oh, yeah, a bunch of weird 20-year-old groiper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a weird one.

That was a weird one.

Why are you talking about it?

You know, the couches I'm worried about him fucking, you know.

Oh, yeah, it's the kids.

It's, it's, he's going to fuck some kids.

Don't leave that.

Leave it in.

I made the same joke on the TF I recorded earlier today that, like, the reason Trump doesn't like him is because he's jealous that there's another gay paedophile around.

Jesus Christ.

You're not wrong, but Jesus Christ.

I mean,

this guy,

I don't understand the appeal of this guy.

I was going to say, I don't understand the appeal.

I can't put myself, I don't think you're easily put myself in the shoes of a hillbilly, which is why I'm writing a fake book about being one, so I can be a vice president.

But this guy, I would just look at this guy and say,

what the fuck?

I hate the beard.

It's so obviously the like

camouflage my like kind of doughy cheeked complexion and my weak chin.

Yeah, as a guy who does the same thing.

It's not it's not a real, it's not like a real, like it, this, this is a, this, this is a, you know, there, there's, what is, what is the word here?

There's beards that you grow because you like beards, and then there's beards of necessity.

Yeah.

This is, actually, you know, it's just occurred to me.

The eyeliner, the beard, the like groomed eyebrows, man is trying to make himself look like the the chad he's trying to make himself look like the like uh oh that could be the case yeah i think he's legitimately trying to do he might he might be going for that list

this this photo is the first time i've seen him in like close to profile and now that i'm seeing it i think that's legitimately what he's doing and i feel like i've cracked the fucking code here you know this is the first photograph i found of him and it was so bizarre because it was like at this weird angle i'm not sure if he was leaning back or not

yeah so i actually i just i corrected for that um

sort of like you spin-stabilized JD Vance.

Where does some, where would the couch fucking thing come from, by the way?

Because I believe that end was.

Like just a tweet that someone is like, oh, he talks about in hillbelly elegy.

No, he doesn't.

No, he talks about in hillbelly elegy about how

he put an inside-out latex glove in between two couch cushions and fucked it.

I'm not going to judge anyone.

I know a woman who fucked two cans of spam tape together, right?

So I'm not.

Oh, okay.

I know it's one of the worst things I've ever heard, but

that doesn't sound good.

No.

Was it the cans or was it the meat inside?

No, no, no.

It was the meat like pressed together into two halves, taped together, and then fucked.

Doesn't sound like fun.

I don't think so.

If it were the cans, though.

I actually thought it was the cans, so I was just like, oh, insertion.

Okay.

Yeah,

fair enough.

No, no, no.

We're still mutuals.

Like, that's oomphy.

I couldn't do that without immediately getting the spam song from Monty Python stuck in my head.

I definitely killed a vibe.

Spam.

Spam.

Yeah.

Spammity spam.

Wonderful spam.

At the climax.

That's not good.

You don't want that.

No, so I

on the one hand.

You develop some pathologies from that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would be like sort of remiss remiss then to criticize J.D.

Vance for fucking a couch.

But on the other hand, I entirely believe it of him because I know people who have fucked stranger things.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, the one thing that happened is, you know, after the first tweet,

then there was an article in the AP about, no, JD Fance didn't fuck a couch.

And then they had to retract it.

While there's no evidence for him fucking the couch, you can't prove he didn't.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the thing.

If that is Kamala, then she is leaning into the LBJ thing of like, I want to make the son of a bitch deny it.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not just the couch he's going to fuck.

It's if he gets in, it's going to be America.

Because, like, I can't stress enough.

Again, we talked about this on Trash Veech.

This is a guy who's like very deeply hooked into the...

the weird kind of fascist stuff.

Like Trump, Trump doesn't give a fuck about it.

Like the Project 2025 stuff, he'll do it.

He'll 100% become American Hitler if they give him the chance.

But it's not because he wants to do any work because he doesn't yeah

well yeah because because every every hitler needs a you know a a weird nazi party behind him full of like people trying to do like

weird rituals and it's absolutely like a himmel vibe off this guy you know like exactly if he's if he's vice president he's like like directing a bunch of u.s government money into like weird archaeology to like

he's gonna put runes on the naval observatory oh god

he's gonna he's gonna try and he's gonna try and do some kind of ancient viking summoning ritual yeah yeah

you can't let this guy be be vice president he's gonna start talking about odin in every speech he's gonna

Yeah, it's like he's on this like weird Mencius mold bug thing.

All of these guys, man, just they need to put them on a barge and they need to float it into the Pacific Ocean and just leave it for a while, you know?

Yeah.

They're just going to start decorating like the vice presidential residence with various

mosses and herbs that have ritual significance.

Oh my God.

This is the thing, right?

Trump, you know, kind of a like crowd pleaser if the crowd is extremely racist.

You just hear it gets some people going.

Gets them riled up, right?

And then we also brought in this guy who is trying to inscribe ancient Babylonian demon summoning sigils on the fucking stage.

He's gonna, he's gonna, he's gonna like throw off the atomic clock because he was trying to manipulate it in some kind of like fertility ritual.

I'm still baffled that this guy became a senator, to be honest.

But like, I don't want this guy anywhere near the atomic clock.

No, no.

But if he becomes vice president,

he'll be in his backyard.

Every couch in the Naval Observatory ruined.

Oh my god,

it'll be worse than Liz Truss and towels.

What?

What?

I missed this one.

Liz Truss went through like an alarming amount of bathrobes as prime minister at like the official residence.

She like soiled so many fucking bathrobes.

Well, okay.

I'm pointy.

You don't know what she was soiling them with.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the thought, Yova.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

Oh, God.

Spin that wheel, baby.

Let's do this.

In other news, don't worry, we'll get back to politics.

Well, this is still politics.

The city of Jasper, Alberta has been destroyed.

Oh, God.

Oh, no.

How'd that happen?

There's a big, huge wildfire in Jasper National National Park.

Yeah, that'll do it.

Yeah, so there's some indications a good chunk of the downtown survived.

This is one of these, you know, historic vacation destinations in the Rocky Mountains,

right?

But we'll have confirmation later.

This is St.

Mary's and St.

George, which is relatively close to downtown.

You know, this is like not a small or unknown place.

This is a pretty good-sized town.

And just this wildfire just completely overran it.

I mean, this is is a stop on the

Canadian, which is the Transcontinental Railroad and

Transcontinental Passenger Train in Canada.

You know, there were these really extensive evacuations.

You can see here,

people got stuck in a traffic jam for six hours trying to get out of the town.

You know, because that's, because we can't conceive that a town that has a railroad, you could maybe use a train to evacuate, but that's another story.

But yeah, this the Jasper Jasper wildfire has been

really, really aggressive, as I understand it.

It's been going on for like a long time now.

And yeah, it just went straight for the town of Jasper and like knocked out a good chunk of it.

Again, I think a good amount of the downtown area survived, but we don't know yet.

This sort of happened a few hours before we recorded.

Jesus.

I'm not loving that this is becoming like a sort of everyday occurrence.

Yeah.

Like a

town just gets wiped out.

Yeah.

Did it?

Didn't it?

Fort Mac didn't get completely wiped out.

It was some of the outer subdivisions that got wiped out, though.

Still, though.

Yeah, that's still like pretty bad.

That one town in Hawaii, that one got completely wiped out.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I forget what it's called.

Now I feel like I'm insulting the people of Hawaii.

I also do not remember.

Crap.

That's not

we're like canceled for

guys.

What?

Okay, good.

Lahaina.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

We're not canceled anymore.

There we go.

That one got completely wiped out.

I mean, this is, this is just becoming more and more common.

Yeah.

You know, and it is a combination of, there's been some folks who have been saying, well, this is because, you know, the Canadian government is spending money on aid to Ukraine instead of wildfire prevention.

Come on.

And it's like, I don't think that's the case.

I think, okay, climate change is an aspect.

Bad forest management is an aspect.

Really bad forest management.

You know, and,

you know, just sort of, okay, having less resources to fight wildfires is an aspect, but it's not like you couldn't have prevented this given all the decisions that had been made before.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, the town of Jasper existed in the context of all that came before it.

Did you?

She tried to warn us, guys.

Did not just fall fall out of the pine tree, yes.

I mean, like, this is the weird thing about forest fires.

I say weird, is that they really just like or wildfires just crop up in unexpected places.

This is not one of them, right?

Necessarily, but like, think a lot about how, like, the big like strategic planning document for like future resilience for London just got published.

Um, and aside from the like headline stuff that like, you know, half of all properties are going to get like hit with subsidence or like you need a new Thames barrier.

Uh, part of it is also, yeah,

a bunch of stuff's going to get burned down by forest fires.

Um, and yeah,

just

like or like wildfires because you just have enough grass around it, it burns.

Um, so

yeah, it's it's it's bad to be on a heating planet, I think.

Maybe.

Yeah, it's not very good.

Probably someone should do something about it.

I, I mean, listen, I think maybe the,

if Kamala is the next president, maybe she's just going to do the like cloud seeding or whatever and everything's going to be fine.

I mean, at this point, you're kind of stuck with, okay, maybe we should do the sulfur dioxide bullshit.

It's going to be, you know, we don't know what's going to happen, but at the very least, you know, if you find yourself in a sort of snow piercer situation, you can just stop seeding the clouds and it stops working.

Yeah, and then you get that sweet, sweet rebound effect.

Oh, yeah.

Which is the thing we're currently in, funnily enough, because of the like um uh boat fuels uh the boat fuels got changed yeah i mean this is uh presumably how they wound up in the game of thrones universe

you know you know where it's like 12 years of summer then 12 years of winter or whatever the bullshit is yeah yeah yeah i i mean this is the thing i guess if the the geoengineering doesn't work out we're just stuck with a we got to solve a kind of like heretofore unknown engineering problem or we're all going to die which is what we're already in now with like climate with like carbon capture and storage so it's got some air conditioners.

Yeah, just everybody like get an air conditioner and like run it as high as possible all the time.

That's what I'm doing right now.

Texas.

Yeah, fuck you, Texas.

If I am ever able to leverage this podcast to inshallah, buy a house, the first thing that I'm doing is air conditioning.

Central air, baby.

Not a thing that is common in the UK.

We will help you get central air.

It is about to be is the thing.

Like if you wanna, if you wanna make a bank in this country i think get into the the like hvac game soul shovels yeah yeah yeah i mean that that's uh a career advice for our younger listeners get into hvac yeah um it's absolutely miserable yeah like um

friend of the show and all three hosts of kill james bond manielchansky um used to work in that field and was like yeah and was so so like uh dispirited by it that they ended up drawing comics instead which i mean

well if it works it works yeah i'm very glad that it has done like uh yeah but

that that's the kind of endorsement of like working in hvac i guess is you will

bad enough to propel you into the idea of like maybe i should draw for a living you know yeah i mean you know it's uh it's uh especially in the united states i mean we install a lot of very obsolete hvac systems that aren't very good sure do we charge people a lot of money for them um many splits mini splits, mini splits.

I like many splits.

Hey, but you do get some complicity because by running the HVAC, you are also burning down the town

because you're making it harder on the outside.

You're polluting.

But I don't think Milkshake could live in a house that was un-air-conditioned in this weather.

No, he'd die.

Yeah, exactly.

I got to protect Milkshake.

In other

news.

This one's all me.

So we've been wanting to talk about this for a while, and I've kind of been reluctant about it because it hits a little close to home.

This man looks like an overgrown child.

Yeah, yeah.

So, this is to beat this man to death with his own shoes.

Is that an appropriate thing to say?

I can't possibly comment.

This is Wes Streesing, who is the Secretary of State.

Yeah, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

He's in charge of the NHS.

And

you begin to identify one problem of like socialized medicine.

So there's a couple

in that your healthcare is at the mercy of one extremely transphobic and careerist

licks bittle such as this.

Yes.

So you may have heard of the CAS review.

I think we talked about it on prior news thing,

which is a like...

The one that said

trans people aren't real.

Yeah, the one that said that trans people aren't real and specifically that like trans kids should just kind of like suffer.

I'm not that noise.

Yeah.

Whereas a consequence of that, this guy, Wes Dreising, has effectively banned puberty blockers, which are like reversible drug that you take.

If you're like, if you're a child and you are like, maybe trans, maybe not, you want to like wait and find out

rather than going through like the puberty that you got like assigned randomly.

It just kind of like defers.

That it kicks the can down the road, right?

And these are like, these are like things that are relatively commonly prescribed for other conditions, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

You know, it's like, it's like other,

it, it, it's normal unless you think you might be trans.

Exactly, yeah.

And explicitly for that reason, uh, you now can't get like a a private prescription of them and you also can't get them on the NHS.

Um, I believe the idea was that you would be able to get them like the CAS sort of like compromise, such as it was wasn't a compromise like it was a stalking horse for this was that you would be able to get them as part of like a research uh like protocol and then no research protocol was ever designed or like uh announced or anything like that so the answer is just suffer right so just go can't get it all yeah kids miserable cool that's great absolutely absolutely um and i mean the thing is aside from like the kind of naked spite of this

I've mentioned this on Twitter before, but like, I had this kind of naive idea at one time, even relatively recently, a few years back, that like there was this kind of the transgender tipping point, right?

There was this going to be this like sea change in attitudes

and there was going to be like a generation of kids for whom like being trans was like a sort of like minor personality detail, right?

Like a childhood illness, essentially.

Like that's that's a very like problematic way of putting it.

Don't yell at me.

But like, but like

fundamentally, like it's something that you sort of like realize as a kid, you take some medication for it.

And then, like, you kind of like, there's a qualitative difference to your life as a result because you never went through the like puberty that you would be like otherwise sort of coercively, genetically assigned.

Um,

and, you know, I was, I was like simultaneously happy for those kids and also a little bit worried for myself as a kind of original model transsexual.

that this would be a kind of like unfashionable mode of being.

Luckily, guys like Wes came to the rescue to make it so that there will be as yet no generation of trans people who are not miserable.

And ideally for them, like forced to go through

a kind of like agony.

Yeah, I mean, I experienced puberty basically.

Do you remember that scene from Prometheus?

Yeah.

Yeah, kind of like that.

Only it lasted for several years.

And

I don't love anyone else being forced to do that, but this guy does.

And as far as these things go, it is still like, it's still in the courts.

So we'll see.

Right.

But I think it shows the intent of the Labour Party in government.

And not just this, but some of the other stuff, like

the two-child benefit cap.

The right wing of the Labour Party, which kind of controls the government, is...

very set on this idea that we're going to like make the left squeal by doing these things and it's gonna like establish our kind of virility.

Like I've heard the the benefit cap described as a virility test for the government like internally,

which is an insane thing to say about like, oh, we're gonna make it like so your kids can't get food or your kids can't get healthcare, right?

Is that this this makes us tough.

We gotta make our government more fuckable.

We gotta make the government more fuckable by abusing people.

The government to be submissive and beatable.

We're like dominant in this case, but yeah, no, it's just, it's just really grim.

And I, you know, I'm sure there will be multiple Devon notes on this one as well.

Um, I think that it just

grotesque.

It's it's it's grotesque and it's like, even if I were so self-centered as to not care about the kids, it would be pretty frightening for me as an adult as well, because like I'm I'm aware that like I'm next, you know?

Um, and I think this should be pretty frightening for you, even if you're, even if you're cis in the UK, because because like if the guy's gonna like compromise with a bunch of evangelical headbangers and uh like freak bigots about this then why not abortion as well something which is on it will come for you eventually something which is on extremely shaky ground legally um in the UK and which could be very easily outlawed um so you know just uh just keep keep an eye on it I I think the best remedy as ever is like protest and direct action so maybe do some of that and kids um in addition to taking up smoking, learn to buy Russian research chemicals on the dark web.

Listen, as yet,

they have not succeeded in passing an online safety bill that stops kids from using Google, right?

So

you're allowed to find out what the standard for your health care in civilized countries is.

Yeah.

Yes.

And act on that as you see accordingly.

Legally, we probably can't put any links in the description.

I'm not going to do that.

Yeah, YouTube is.

I'm not going to like that one.

Yeah.

The algorithm already doesn't like this one.

It's depressing.

It's always like, you know, you see people talking about, isn't it Grade Labor one in Britain?

And then they immediately went around and just, you know, doubled down austerity.

You know, it's just an austerity.

And they're going to, you know, they hate the trans kids.

They hate the, they hate everyone.

They're making everyone miserable.

They're like, hey, we can make people miserable better than the Tories could.

Yeah.

You know, and HS2 is still cancelled.

Thanks for enough.

hey, but look on the bright side.

At least England won the Euros.

Oh, my God.

It turned out that what I was actually doing was jinxing it the hardest anyone had ever jinxed it.

You just saw that come home.

No, it did not.

It did not.

The world's most self-sabotaging country.

Yeah, I mean, I think that might be true, which is insane.

We're not allowed to have nice things.

No, no, because trans kids might get them.

Do not allow anything to trick you into thinking that Britain might be like a good or fun place to live.

On the other hand, I'm staying here for as long as I can because I'm fucked if I'm going to let this guy kick me out of it.

You know, that's a good point.

Yeah, why should I change?

He's the one who sucks.

That's right.

Yeah.

All right.

I'm sad of looking at this guy.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

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Back to the show,

Yeah, in other news,

we brought international war criminal Benjamin

Benny from Cheltenham, Netanyahu,

to address Congress.

Oh,

this is the note say this is a part whereas the review said we will be subtly anti-Israel.

Fuck, Israel doesn't deserve to exist.

I've never been accused of being subtle in my fucking mind.

No, no, no.

Someone wrote a review of the podcast saying that we were subtly anti-Israel.

Free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Yeah, whatever, exactly.

Now, I'm an I was, someone got mad on me at Twitter for being an anti-Zionist Jew, to which I say,

suck my ass and balls.

So

we invited this guy with a warrant out for his arrest by the International Criminal Court of Criminal Court of Justice.

Good enough, bud.

The ICJ, whatever it's called.

ICNJ, the new PB ⁇ J, et cetera.

The IC and J.

And he gave a speech, and it was horrible.

And everyone stood up and applauded.

You know, give us more weapons, we'll finish the job.

Yeah.

It's insane and insulting to be doing a like Zelensky tribute act, not least when you consider that

Zelensky more or less begged Israel for aid and they told him to go fuck himself consistently for a couple of years.

Um, which

yeah, no, it's just it's real bad, is the thing.

Um,

and it just

outside they had the like cops like macing kids while uh this smug fascist called them like unwitting agents for Iran and whatever.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, they, they, uh, they, you know, one of the various uh Jewish

pro-Palestine groups occupied the Capitol dome, and then the police had to forcibly evict them.

And then, you know,

they're obviously anti-Semitic Jews.

So

that was a whole thing right there.

I think someone dumped maggots into the conference room at the Watergate Hotel where Ned and Yaru were staying.

You're telling me that there are...

Bugs at the Watergate?

Yeah, there's bugs at the Watergate.

Yeah.

Very good, Dova.

It doesn't even make sense because were they planting bugs or just stealing documents?

I don't even remember.

I believe they were trying to bug it, too.

I'm pretty sure they were trying to bug it, though.

It makes sense.

They run into a bunch of Soviets also trying to bug it.

Hey!

This is our turf,

fuckhead.

I tried to combine motherfucker and fuckhead, and it came up muckhead.

Muckhead.

A lot of folks skipped the speech, but there's a lot of...

Including Kamala.

Yeah, Kamala did skip the speech to go to a sorority uh alpha kappa alpha i guess hey don't disrespect it i would never i i get much like the tiny italian woman thing i know better than to disrespect an alpha right like

um but yeah no um she she was out she was out of town uh nancy pelosi gave a surprisingly strident statement because again she's in like combat mode right now where she's like fuck this guy um i mean as as much as nancy pelosi

don't do that where she's like uh with you know she he's like a kind of like divisive figure.

We want him to take the deal and bring the hostages home kind of thing.

She wasn't going to do the

right entifada on the Liberty Bell.

A replica of the Liberty Bell.

Replica Liberty Bell defaced with pro-Hamas Graffiti.

Yeah, it's like, oh, well.

you know, when I wipe it off, come on, this is not difficult.

We see here Rashida Talib, who

did attend the speech to protest Netanyahu, who is factually speaking a war criminal as divined by several international bodies at this point.

I think the ICJ just...

Pathetic for your thing to be like, you know, California's top cop, like prosecutor, and then be like, oh, well, this guy with a warrant on him is coming to town, so I'm just going to be like away when he's here.

Yeah, I mean, maybe she should have just arrested him.

I mean, that would have been pretty funny.

Listen,

if Kamala had done like a citizen's arrest of Benny from Cheltenham, I think I would feel comfortable in saying that you should vote for her.

That would get her the like unqualified endorsement.

Yeah, that'd be an unqualified endorsement for me as well.

You know, I'd be like, okay, you know, citizens' arrest.

And then they, they put him in like, they don't put him in like a federal prison.

They put him in like local DC lockup.

You know,

next to a bunch of protesters.

Yeah, next to a bunch of protesters.

Oh, that'd be funny.

Hey,

how's everyone doing today?

I'm Ben from Cheltenham, Pennsylvania.

But yeah, no, I mean,

I admire Rashida Tlip a lot.

I think this is a brave thing to do.

And

it's shameful that she was the only one who was protesting in any meaningful way.

I was about to say, at least in the chambers, outside the chambers, quite a lot of protests.

You know,

there was the one everyone's taking pictures of in Columbus Circle outside Union Station, you know, where they put a bunch of graffiti on the Columbus statue and also the replica Liberty Bell.

But there were also like

some bigger protests,

you know, along Pennsylvania Avenue, I want to say.

Obviously, there were some outside the Watergate Hotel.

I mean, they were pretty strong protest presence the whole way.

I mean,

you know,

the war in Gaza has not exactly lit up.

You know, this is something to remember.

It's been less in the news recently, but I forget what that medical journal is.

The Lancet.

The Lancet, you know, has estimated that something like one-tenth of the Palestinian population has been killed.

Jesus conflict.

They've actually decimated them.

Yeah.

You know, in the traditional sense of the word.

Stuff's bad there right now.

It's absurd.

You know, just,

well, one of the things if you watch any like regular media coverage of this is, you know, it's like these killings just happen.

And it's like, well, no, this is entirely one-sided.

Um, it's all Israel killing Palestinians.

It's I don't know.

I had a experience,

you know,

watching news with my family last weekend.

And it's just, you know, you you look at the coverage of the news, of of the conflict from the mainstream media, it's just bizarre.

Um,'cause they're they

these deaths are not attributed to anything other than an abstract force.

Yeah.

There was a piece from a couple of American

surgeons who went over there to volunteer

about

what they saw in their time there and what they did.

And

they were like, we got another five kids today shot in the head by sniper rifles.

Wonder who did that?

Yeah, exactly.

The number of kids who they found shot in the head was astounding.

and and they could do like next to nothing for them right unbelievably fucking evil just pure fucking evil again israel specifically did has no right to exist yeah i should have put some cheerful news in this summer unfortunately there's not like for a week where decades have happened like i i this is why i kind of like understand on some level the people being like cameler so brat or whatever is like you gotta you gotta get something somewhere something right yeah

exactly you gotta have a little bright spot somewhere even if they're gonna they're gonna fuck that one up too but that's going to take a couple of weeks.

Val,

Israel continues to be bad in other news.

This is a little bright spot.

Yeah.

Well, no.

No.

SpaceX destroyed one of their rockets and some of their satellites and also the National Labor Relations Board.

They crash a rocket into it.

So there was some flaw in a recent Falcon 9 launch where the upper stage did not fire correctly.

I think there was a propellant leak, which is what all this ice here is.

It did not deliver the payload of 20 Starlink satellites into the correct orbit.

They're all going to de-orbit in like a week or two.

Yeah, exactly.

So if you, if, if a satellite crashes into your house, you know who to sue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Best of luck.

You know?

But sometimes.

Sometimes you just have to sue the most annoying man on the internet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to, you have have to go talk to Elon Musk, and he'll call you like a paedophile.

Oh, instantly, yeah.

He's got pedophile seeking satellites.

JD Vance in serious danger.

Oh, my God.

They crashed directly into his couch.

That couch told him she was 18.

Oh, God, Nova.

Yeah, the most unrealistic thing about that was the pronoun she.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Price on sale.

So they botched one of their own payloads on a Falcon 9.

But the other thing they did very recently is SpaceX has prevailed in getting a preliminary injunction against the National Labor Relations Board, preventing them from routine enforcement in Texas and Louisiana.

I think another state, but I'm not sure.

It might be Mississippi.

This is in anticipation of a future ruling by the Supreme Court, which would make the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional.

Yay, I mean, of course, this Supreme Court would do it.

Right.

Yeah,

the issue at hand.

Fuck you.

Yeah,

this was a lawsuit that I want to say was SpaceX and I think also Starbucks and then a third company.

Amazon?

I think Amazon.

Oh, the Super Friends.

The Super Friends, yeah.

At least Starbucks haven't

Amazon.

Yeah.

At least Starbucks haven't done a vanity project of trying to go to space, you know.

Not yet.

Yet.

Yeah, okay.

I copied this from Matt Brunig's newsletter.

Oh, boy.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, also known as SpaceX, sought a preliminary injunction in a Texas federal district court against the National Labor Relations Board and its officers, including the NLRB's administrative law judges.

The core issue was the constitutionality of the removal protections for NLRB members members and ALJs.

That's the administrative law judges.

SpaceX argued that these protections violate the president's Article II power of removal and the district court applying the

district court applying this Fifth Circuit's decision in Jarksey.

I don't know what that is.

That's probably a case of some kind.

Decided that SpaceX was likely to win this argument and preliminarily enjoined the NLRB from initiating an administrative proceeding against SpaceX.

In this case, that was, you know, they're not allowed to enforce or proceed in any basic labor complaint

because they think the way that judges are able to be removed is unconstitutional.

And it doesn't matter anyway, because after Chevron, like the NLRB is like, well, all kind of agencies are now like functionally powerless anyway.

This is true.

Yeah.

Like a lot of the administrative state is just

dead now,

Pending Supreme Court reform.

Yeah, it's some ideas about what to do.

I was going to say, I have some ideas too.

It involves massive at least pack the court.

I mean, a packet full of explosives.

Or, again, just as he leaves office,

24 Supreme Court justices a second.

President Joe Biden issues an executive order ruling that Marbury versus Madison was wrongly decided.

As we've agreed, yes.

Yeah.

Now, that depends a lot on who the next president is, whether you do that.

But if it's Kamala, okay, sure, whatever.

All power to the liberal coup, you know?

Yeah, all power to the liberal Soviets.

Would be very funny for the Federalist Society and the Republicans to have set up this

generation-long project that's about to come to fruition and that like it gets swept out from them and like turned around on them because Don Jr.

picks JD Vance to be vice president.

I mean, that would be entertaining if, like, they put, they, they did the whole Project 2025 thing, and then, like, the next guy was a Democrat.

Um, you know, it's like, oh, you know, you move too slow on, you know, the super gerrymander.

Yeah.

Um, you know, and now, uh, I don't know, Dr.

Brother Cornell West is president.

Just, uh,

you know, just I think he actually finally did make that tweet come true in his with a brother Trump recently.

Which, oh, oh, yeah, he has done that before.

Yeah, it's not the first time.

Brother Vance.

Brother Vance.

Yeah, we, we're going to wind up in a situation where there's no national labor relations board, and that's going to be interesting to see how the unions are going to respond to that.

Well, I mean, I know how the head of the Teamsters responded by going to the Republican convention.

uh sean o'brien i think made uh i i know that he's like trying to trying to you know uh what's the word he's trying to play both sides there i know that i just i'm not sure that it's like a gambit that it seems like it has very little upsides and a lot of downsides you know it does not i i i guess that yeah it's it's pretty bad pretty

i mean it wouldn't be the first time that the teamsters have endorsed a republican but you know it's uh it's sort of

you know a lot of a lot of teamsters are folks who are you know economically socially disadvantaged in various ways that you know a lot of teamsters are folks that the republicans want to kill um yeah you know it's it's it's it's kind of uh i don't know i don't know that this is gonna i don't know that this is playing well i believe he now has a challenger for the presidency of the union at this point because of a dickhead yeah it's kind of an unquestioning endorsement of whoever that is yeah it's kind of of like,

you know, maybe we shouldn't talk to the people who want to kill part of our membership.

Yeah,

if you are a Teamster, it is now your sacred duty to administer this guy an electoral punishment beating.

Yes.

Yeah, you're going to have to have to get out the big Teamster clubs.

You know, you're going to.

Some big guys, yes.

Yeah, we need some big guys for this.

Very big guys.

Very big guys.

Very good guys.

Anyway, so yeah, no more national labor relations board.

Well, I mean,

that's going to reduce the situation.

I mean, strikes are going to have to be a lot more militant because they will be able to, you know, just be broken up by the police.

I mean, they do that anyway already, but it'll be more.

You'll be able to just fire people for striking.

You'll be able to do all kinds of the old stuff they used to be able to do.

And, you know, I think this is...

I mean, it's not good.

It's going to make life very difficult, but it will, at the very least, I think you will see a lot more labor militancy where it is possible to have it it's it's uh not only the the bosses who can go back to the old ways you know well yeah i mean this is the thing i mean we'd prefer not to have a battle of blair mountain again but i mean

what else are you gonna do exactly all thanks to elon musk and jeff bezos and what's his name stupid space cunt howard schultz yeah space howard schultz yeah

neat you know he was supposed to be hillary clinton's labor secretary i want to say.

My God.

I'm just rotating the Karmala cabinet in my mind.

I mean, funniest answer, Buddha Jej, transportation again.

Just stay there.

Stay in purgatory.

Gay purgatory.

You're stuck in transportation forever.

Doing absolutely nothing.

Making some appearances.

Yeah.

Something that we didn't actually mention in the thing is that I have heard rumblings of Admiral William McGraven for vice president which fucking christ i don't know who that is uh he used to command the seals

uh oh i see wrote a really god-awful couple of books um

and uh some of the worst poetry i've ever read um so yeah he's like a warrior philosopher in his own mind um

be an interesting interesting secretary of defense and by interesting i mean bad yeah yes that was a very depressing episode of The Goddamn News.

All right.

Onto the main topic of tonight's episode.

Yes.

I forgot to put in a topic.

Onto safety third.

I got a 50-50 choice here.

There we go.

Shake hands for danger.

Hello, Roz, November, and Liam.

Yeah, I nailed it.

Yeah.

Good job.

We all know the safety rules.

are written in blood.

Today I'd like to tell you about a few of my favorite rules from my time working around steam locomotives.

Beautiful machines.

Yes.

It's not this one.

This is from the Walt Disney World Railroad.

I think I have an idea of what railroad this guy was working for, but I don't want to say.

When I started my career as an impressionable young brakeman, the rule book included two contrasting rules likely written a century apart.

Rule 227.

Dynamite that has leaked must not be used.

It must be handled carefully and taken to an open space and burned.

All wood showing evidence of dynamite leakage must be carefully removed and burned in the open.

The use of dynamite boxes or dynamite packing paper for kindling is prohibited.

I've built myself a beautiful little campfire out of dynamite boxes.

And Rule 968.

Employees must exercise great care when scooting across the floors in caster-equipped chairs.

Standing on chairs is not allowed.

Enjoy the use of of the word scooting there.

Very whimsical.

Actually, when was the caster, like when was like a chair with wheels invented?

When did they invent the office chair?

Yeah.

Rolling chair invented when.

This has perfectly sniped me here.

1876 patented.

So,

shit.

I mean, maybe not that far apart after all.

People were fucking around with office chairs in 1876.

And dynamite.

Thomas Jefferson.

Tom at the same time.

Never mind.

Yeah, no, we just uh

while these rules were absolute, others allowed open-ended exceptions, perhaps because no blood was available to rewrite them, or because cooler heads recognized the need to allow problem solving in the field.

It took me only a month on the job to experience such an open-ended rule.

Trains usually ran close to the locomotive's tonnage limit on the long climbing run, but today we were especially heavy with the addition of the fanciest and heaviest parlor car, so the executive bigwigs could entertain some dignitaries.

It had rained the night before, and on this cool morning, the rails were slick.

I am already concerned.

In conditions like these, locomotive engineers use a pneumatic system to spray sand onto the rails ahead of the wheels.

This increases the friction of the steel-on-steel wheel-rail interface to avoid the locomotive slipping.

Wheel slip is very bad.

Yeah, dig a hole in the track.

Yeah, it can damage your track, your locomotive, and most importantly, in this case, your forward momentum.

He's trying to go uphill.

Steam locomotives make a very distinct sound when slipping, which I will attempt to describe in technical terms.

Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga.

Chugga, chugga, chugg chugg chugg chugg chugga.

Then the engineer shuts off the throttle to regain their footing before carefully reapplying power.

And that's exactly what I heard as we struggled up the hill.

Eventually the grade lessened and the slipping stopped, but there was still one nasty grade ahead.

The engineer stopped the train on level track and the conductor and I walked up to the engine.

From his perch high above us in the cab, the engineer asked if I'd bring him a stack of empty soda cups from the Coke machine in the cafe car.

I dutifully went on my fetch quest, wondering what James the Red Engine bootlace fix he was about to perform.

When I returned, he and the conductor were looking grim.

I cheerfully offered the cups to the engineer, who refused to take them.

Those are for you, he said.

Oh boy.

We have sand, but it's not spraying properly.

You're going to ride in the cab with us, and when we get to the next hill, you're going to climb out onto the front of the engine and use those cups to pour sand onto the rails.

Fuck that.

Like the helpful and agreeable rookie I was, I agreed.

But later, I looked up the rule.

Number 145.

except when necessary in the performance of duty, employees must not ride on catwalks, ladders, steps, or tops of moving locomotives.

Now, necessary in the performance of duty is the exception for when railroading gets weird.

Subject to the requirements of the service.

I donned my gloves and climbed into the cab, taking care not to

dirty my uniform, a traditional trainman's cap, crisp, buttoned-down shirt, vest, and a clip-on-for-safety tie.

The fireman handed me a packet of earplugs and away we went.

Now, steam locomotives are loud machines and make a cacophony of noise.

Stack is barking, the fire is roaring, the fire doors are clanking open and shut as the fireman shovels.

The air compressor is panting, the injector is gargling, the dynamo is whining.

That's the most irritating sound.

And everything is rattling.

Lost in the kaleidoscope of sound, I barely noticed where we were until the engineer waved me over to his seat.

Over the din, he shouted in my ear, it's time.

Be fucking careful.

I squeezed past the fireman and clambered onto the running board above the wheels in this reference locomotive.

That's here.

Scad, scad, scad, scad.

Yeah, I don't like this.

Outside the cab, I could feel the chugga-chugga exhaust from the stack shaking my chest as the locomotive worked.

near its tonnage limit, building speed toward the hill.

My first task was to fill the cups with sand.

The sand dome is atop the boiler, usually the first dome behind the smokestack.

And here it would be

this guy, I believe,

in this reference locomotive.

But I have a feeling this one's a lot bigger, so it's going to be a much more low-profile dome.

With a white knuckle grip on the handrail attached to the boiler, I inched my way forward.

I could hear the pounding and clanking of the wheels and rods below my feet and knew that if I fell, I'd be mincemeat before I hit the ground.

This may or may not be true, but certainly felt true in the moment.

It counts.

We count those.

Yeah.

Climbing up the boiler to the sand dome was painful.

The smokestack was blasting not just exhausted steam, but also unburned bits of coal from the firebox.

Those are cinders, right?

These fruity pebbles of death pelted down on me, singeing the exposed skin of my wrists and neck.

As quickly as I could, I slid aside the heavy sand dome cover and filled two cups with sand.

Then I continued forward to the front pilot.

So, in this case, this one has sort of a fake cow catcher.

This whole assembly is the pilot.

This one probably has like two boards down here for standing on the front.

This is again, this is a Walt Disney World steam locomotive.

It's been dressed up to look older than it is.

Because these are from the Yucatan.

Listen to our Trend Maya episode where I talk about that.

Now, once I got ahead of the smokestack, my life improved immeasurably.

The sender stopped and even the exhaust got quieter.

Instead, I was greeted with the unnerving sight of the empty track curving in front of me before rapidly disappearing under the front coupler and cow catcher.

Oh, so it did have a cow catcher.

Okay, so this is difficult then.

I considered doing my best bow of the Titanic Jack were flying pose, but decided I didn't want that in my obituary.

I could already hear the locomotive starting to slip.

One hand on a handrail and one holding a sand cup, I knelt on the pilot and did a test pore off the front of the engine.

The wind caught the pore and scattered it everywhere except the railhead.

This clearly was not going to work.

I noticed the pilot deck had holes cast into it through which I could see the ties flashing past.

Hoping I wasn't pouring sand into some lubricated machinery, I aimed for the rail and poured sand through one of them

into those holes, and it missed the rail but stayed in a single stream.

I adjusted my aim and tried again, finally hitting the rail.

For the next hour, I poured a slow, steady trickle of sand onto the rail.

Actually, it was probably about five minutes, but I was so completely focused that I jumped when the fireman appeared, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me,

and gestured for me to follow him back along the running board into the cab.

We arrived safely at our destination.

If the big wigs in the parlor car were aware of the day's events, I never heard a word about it.

Of such things are railroads made.

years later i qualified as a conductor and then a dispatcher and continued to encounter weird railroading problems which now that i was responsible for solving them furthered my appreciation of rules with escape clauses as far as absolute as far as absolute rules go though i never did have problems with dynamite or caster equipped chairs this one this one has given me deja vu i think we may even have done it before nah this came in very recently huh well thank you for sending it in in.

If you want to send in a safety third, the email is like wtypod at gmail.com, right?

Yes.

Wtyppod at gmail.com.

Safety thirds.

We'd like to keep them about a page length.

Yeah, you assholes.

Send in some pictures if you want to.

And if you want to remain anonymous, obviously you can.

We're not going to get you fired.

Yeah.

Unless your boss listens to this podcast

and identifies you.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's true.

This is a good safety third.

This is not our fault, though.

This is a good one, though.

Yeah.

Thank you for your railroad service.

Thank you for your railroad service.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yes, I do.

I should have put this up front.

God only knows when this is coming out, but we continue to have tickets for the Kill James Bond live shows in London in August 9th, 10th, and 11th.

That's two weeks from the day we're recording it.

Go to killjamesbond.com slash live.

You can come and see us.

It'll be a good time.

It's about Johnny English, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Kill Johnny English.

Kill Johnny English.

Much to say about it.

I know Dev saw the second one recently, and I just got a message in the group chat that's like, wow, this is racist.

Oh, good.

I think I saw the first one once.

I've seen the first one, or maybe first two.

So,

movie weird.

All right.

End recording.

All right.

That was the podcast.

Good night, everyone.

Bye.