We need to talk about ideas, good ones and bad ones.

We need to learn stuff about the world.

We need an honest, intelligent, thought provoking and entertaining review of what the hell.

Happened on this planet in the last seven days.

We need to sit back and listen to the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove foreign.

Hello and welcome, dear listener, Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove podcast.

Back after the longest break in the history of this podcast.

A good solid month off, which I really needed.

So anyway, I'm Trevor, AKA the Iron Fist, over there in the electorate of our opposition leader, Peter Dutton.

The electorate of Dixon.

Yes.

It's Joe the tech guy.

Joe, our new overlord.

Joe's here.

No, Scott.

Scott has a private matter that is happening and thoughts and prayers with members of a particular member of Scott's family.

So no doubt he'll tell us about that when he returns at some stage.

But thinking of you, Scott, and also Landon, for that matter, right in the chat room.

John's back.

So, yes, John had a very nice Christmas highlight for me, Joe.

Christmas was my granddaughter, who is 6, was given a magic kit and teaching her sort of a thumb, sort of a ball and cup trick in the magic thing.

And as she practiced that and got better at it and was able to fool adults with it, was the highlight of Christmas Day for me.

So simple things like that.

Yeah.

And it's without notice, without warning.

Any highlights you want to share, Joe, or anything in particular?

No, nothing particularly exciting happened.

Okay.

All right.

If you think of it, let me know who else is in the chat room.

Daniel Moore.

Good on you, Dan.

Daniel.

Right, well, what is on the agenda?

So gonna get back in the swing of doing a podcast.

Well, gonna do a little bit of prediction.

Just look at the state of the world that we're at for an overview of the year ahead.

Going to look at the Pharmacy Guild.

Remember how they said they would go broke because of the changes to prescriptions?

We'll see what happened there.

Norway and electric vehicles.

Jimmy Carter died.

Good guy, but not without his faults.

A civil war in the BBC explaining why the BBC's coverage of the genocide in Gaza has been so biased in favor of Israel.

And then a whole bunch of clips with friend of the podcast, Donald Trump.

Friend of the podcast, Joe, because he's just going to be a source of crazy material, isn't he?

Yeah, well, yeah, we've got enough for.

For months, I should think, with him.

I think we do.

Also got Ethan is in the chat room and.

Daniel saying that he's just become a father.

So.

Congratulations.

Congratulations.

Daniel.

Yes, and James is there as well.

Good on you, James.

Right, John, I did get the gay priest message, but I can't remember exactly what it was about.

Well, the.

The Pope is allowing gay priests in for the first time.

As long as they promise not to suck any.

Right, sorry.

As long as they stay celibate.

Right.

Okay.

What's the other joke I heard?

This is from the swimming group.

On your.

On your 100th birthday, you get a letter from the Queen, and on your.

And on your 12th birthday, you get a letter from Prince Andrew.

It was a joke.

Boom.

Boom.

Right?

Yeah.

Okay, let's get back to what I had to do.

Right.

Looking ahead.

So just going to read a little bit from Caitlin Johnston, which kind of encapsulates my thinking for this podcast for the year and years ahead.

So she writes this.

Escaping from the matrix of the mainstream Western worldview is like escaping from a cult.

It starts with one tiny heresy, one small secret thought that goes against all your indoctrination.

One little heretical thought can be all it takes to get someone seriously questioning whether everything they've been taught about the world is a lie.

So we point out the lies wherever we find them.

Any glaring plot hole in the official narrative anywhere it pops up.

Right now, Gaza is a constant deluge of information and raw video footage that can spark some major heresy if it is truly seen and ingested.

That's a big one, Joe.

I really believe that.

One like that is the ultimate test of the information we're getting from the mainstream media.

And the world is just failing miserably on the whole Gaza test.

So anyway, she goes on the way we were just told to cheer for Syria being taken over by Al Qaeda is another one that's true, Joe.

Like it's a goddamn jihadist group taking over and we're supposed to be happy about it.

The lies we're told about Ukraine and the events that led up to the war is another.

Every day there's something coming up that you can show anyone who will listen to you saying, see, look at that.

They lied.

They're lying right now.

I wonder what else they're lying about.

And it takes just one.

One well placed spotlight on one obvious plot hole is all it takes to get someone pulling on a thread that will eventually unravel the whole matrix of delusion for them.

So looking to the year ahead, as we look at news and politics and sex and religion and the events that go on, and we'll just, wherever possible, point out the craziness and the lies and the inconsistencies.

And at some point with various people, maybe it'll confirm what they already know.

And maybe other people go, gee, well, they are lying about that.

What else are they lying about?

You used to spend a fair bit of time, Joe.

Well, you quite liked convincing religious people or trying to convince religious people that their belief was misplaced.

Did you have the idea that one little pointing at one little heresy might trigger a whole bunch of other.

Oh, absolutely.

It was called the.

The stone in the shoe effect.

Oh, okay.

Just.

Just one little thing that sets off a series of questions in somebody's mind.

I'm fairly sure that might even have been Socrates.

Okay.

So certainly it's a known philosophical thing.

The pebble in your shoe, the one question that makes you question everything else.

So, yeah, it.

It is striking me the Western worldview that we are indoctrinated with just does have a lot of similarities with religious indoctrination, to me.

And instead of the Bible, we've got a mainstream media that's just feeding us a particular view.

And, you know, a significant proportion of the world, the Global south, just isn't buying it.

They don't get that media.

They think entirely differently to us.

So the world's really dividing up between people subjected to a particular form of indoctrination accepting a Western worldview, and the rest of the world that are just going, nope, we don't accept that anymore.

So anyway, we'll point out all of those inconsistencies as we go along through the year.

Where was I?

Joe, you're the one looking at the chat there.

Tell me if there's anything you want to raise as we go through this.

The other one is from the John Menadieu blog.

Dear listener, if you are not subscribing to the John Menadieu blog called Pearls and Irritations and getting their daily newsletter.

They invariably.

It's about eight articles and they're superb.

So highly recommend that blog to you as a news source.

So if you do stop, if you're listening to this audio, stop right now.

Put it on pause.

Go Google John Menadieu pearls and irritations and just sign up to the newsletter.

Okay?

One of the articles from that blog is by Eugene Doyle, who says, ordinary humanity faces an emerging threat from the combined might of the human elites, billionaires and military political class working with perhaps the greatest power the planet has ever seen, artificial intelligence.

Their combined might has the potential to totally screw us.

2025 is said to be a breakout year for artificial intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg says we will see the arrival initially of thousands, but soon billions of AI agents who, via the major tech companies, will integrate themselves into our lives and perform an increasing number of tasks for us.

An agent can be defined as a software based entity powered by artificial intelligence, designed to perceive its environment, make decisions and take actions autonomously or semi autonomously to achieve specific goals.

And Deloitte forecasts that by the end of the year, 25% of companies that currently deploy AI will have agents.

25% of companies that currently deploy AI, they will have agents by 2027 that will have grown to 50%.

Joe, are you worried about AI?

Is our tech guy worried that we.

Put more faith in it than it deserves?

So basically, most of the large language models have been trained on stolen information and they regurgitate it with absolute assurance and not necessarily any accuracy.

So it's very good at predicting how words go together to make a sentence.

So it sounds very reasonable, but quite often it's absolute bullshit.

So large.

Well, machine learning, as it used to be called, has applications where if you train it on a very specific set of data, you can ask questions about that set of data and get reasonable answers.

The problem is we've trained it and it's not going to get smarter because we've trained it on almost everything we have.

So we're reaching the limits of stolen information realistically and people are making these grand predictions of how wonderful it is.

But if you actually ask AI anything and then validate what it tells you, it just makes up it sounds very convincing.

So there are places where it's suitable.

If you go, here are the highlights of a letter I want to write.

Write the letter for me.

And then you go through it afterwards and you edit it and make sure that it.

That's great.

So it will do the bulk of writing an interaction that you're not necessarily good with.

But if you ask it to generate knowledge, then no, it's useless at that.

So what about where it's being put to tasks like help desk, type stuff?

We're using Restream here and in the bottom corner is a need help button.

And if you type in I can't get this to work, that's increasingly going to be an AI agent responding to that sort of stuff.

Yeah, I mean if it's, if it's searching through a knowledge base that is very specific and only trained on this, then yeah, that makes sense that it can retrieve information and possibly point you to a properly written document by human.

But where we're using it, I mean, I know that News International were saying that however many whatever percentage of their articles are now written by AI.

So more and more the things that you are paying money for value is getting less and less value.

Yep.

That scares me that more like wading through the information minefield and trying to sort the wheat from the chaff is hard enough as it is.

More, more being generated and then the ability to massage the algorithm so that the articles are written with a bias that the owners of the AI want.

That's the part that scares me.

Yeah, I mean certainly there's an ability for bad actors to use it to generate what look to be individually written emails to an mp.

Yeah, I could get a bot to write a thousand emails, send them all from different email addresses to an mp.

I've put, I don't know, five minutes of effort in and the MP would need to spend in theory a thousand hours reading those emails and they're not going to be able to tell the difference.

Eventually they're just going to get, oh well, we've got a thousand emails against whatever it is they're doing.

Yep.

And could well have scraped validation names and addresses from the electorate that they're supposedly representing.

So yeah, the other one, Joe, is just military, like just smart drones and smart robots given a rough guideline as to who to kill and off they go.

Yeah, I think we're a long way from that because they can identify what looks to be a human with relative accuracy, but detecting on who it is, you're not going to be programming it with the face of every enemy.

So how's it going to work out who is an enemy and who isn't?

Well, the problem is people devising these things don't care.

They will just send them into a village where they reckon everyone's the enemy and say, for example Gaza, for example a hospital, and so go in there and just kill everybody.

You can find any warm blooded mammal lurking there and shoot it.

So.

But really, is that any different from soldiers?

Well, it just seems incredibly effective.

Like if you can just generate these things, they fly through the air, up and down corridors, in and out of windows, all over the place, relentlessly.

That's scary.

Yeah, but I, I, I think more is the lack of overview, the lack of oversight because yeah, even guided drones, even guided soldiers are committing war crimes.

Out in Palestine, so.

Oh, in the chat room about North Koreans.

Yeah, I did see an article about captured North Koreans.

I don't know if it's in these notes, if we get to it, but the Ukrainians basically saying we've got, well.

I think the South Koreans were saying.

I thought it was the, I thought it was the Ukrainians who were saying, okay, yeah, capture these two guys.

So yeah, and John says that won't be true.

It's not in the Menadu blog.

You know, I was thinking about it because you said to me, Joe, what evidence would I accept about this?

And I thought, I was thinking about this the other day and I thought, you know, with these guys here, if, for example, a reputable independent group, I don't know, Amnesty International or something, interviewed the Korean guy prisoner and said, you know, he says, yeah, we all came, there's about a thousand of us, we all came over on a train and we're all here, you know, deployed and I just got unlucky and was captured and you know, sort of verified a story like that.

Then I would say, okay, but I'm not prepared to do it if it's the Ukrainian military saying it.

So just if there's some Red Cross, amnesty, I don't know, some name and name something that's relatively neutral type UN agency based thing I'd be happy with, that's, that would be enough for me.

There was also the comment, I did read an article that said, of course there are North Koreans in, in that edge of Russia, you know, on the edge of the war zone because they supplied weapons.

There are going to be observers there going, how well do our weapons, weapons work?

Yes.

So it's not whether there are North Koreans there, it's the volume and whether they're over there as infantry.

Yeah.

A few generals watching how to, how to run a modern war and a few guys helping to operate any equipment they've got.

But you know, is different to several hundred troopers who are there as cannon fodder.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

John says it's coming.

We'll see about that one.

John, where was I?

Yeah.

Back to this article that was in the John Menadieu blog.

Bernie Sanders gave a powerful address a few days ago.

His comments apply equally to societies around the planet.

This is Bernie Sanders.

We are in an extraordinary, pivotal and volatile moment in history and things are moving very, very rapidly.

The most important point I want to stress today is how fast our country is evolving into an oligarchic society.

Sanders pointed out that three men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans.

All three, by the way, have heavily invested in AI.

Similarly, he says, it's just three Wall street firms, blackrock Vanguard and State street are the major shareholders in over 90% of S&P 500 companies, wielding incredible power over the American economy.

So economic power is combined with political power as the wealthy buy politicians and political parties virtually at will.

The mainstream media is already in the bag.

It keeps our minds well away from this central issue in our system.

Never before in our history have we seen a ruling class with so much political power.

Sanders said, probably true, Joe.

Three men, 50% of American wealth, one.

Of whom is hanging out all the time with the future President of the United States.

Making the most nutty end.

Crazy tweet.

This is Elon Musk you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah.

He reminds me of Spitting Image, who were a UK puppet show back in the 80s did a song called I've Never Met a Nice South African.

Robin Bristow is a South African.

He's a nice.

He's a nice one.

Yeah.

Anyway, John said, could you reply to his AI comments?

Yes, there are places where AI, or sorry, machine learning is useful.

I refuse to pretend that it's artificial intelligence, because it isn't.

It's just machines learning from large data sets and being able to predict futures.

Yeah.

There are things, specific tasks you can train at, but general, it's not just coming for everybody's job is what I'm saying.

The, the ChatGPT is reaching its limitations and there are some things that it's very good at, but the vast majority of things it's very bad at.

And I wouldn't be overly concerned that, oh no, I'm going to be replaced by AI.

There are some, there are some menial tasks, there are some grinding jobs where machines are good at repetitive tasks.

There we go.

And John says, general, AI is decades away.

Yeah, he's only a colonel at the moment.

Yeah.

So.

Bernie's right about the consolidation of power.

I, I think had had the Democratic Party not screwed Bernie over when he was the popular vote for the Democratic party back in 2016 and, and, and insisted that Hillary was there because she was the basically bought by Wall Street, I think there would have been a very different election back in 2016.

I guess the whole point is that when the system's so stacked in front, you know, in favor of rich and powerful people, Bernie was never going to get in.

No.

Yeah.

And I think that seriously, viva revolution.

I think the sooner the revolution happens, the sooner some oligarchs lose their heads, the quicker we can reset.

Because at the moment they're thinking it's all going in their direction.

Well, how does this manifest itself?

Here's the.

Here's a NATO chief.

In fact, let me just give you a bit more about this notorious Austerian, Mark Root, talking about what he wants to fund and where he wants to get the money from.

NATO chief here.

I know spending more on defense means spending less on other priorities, but it is only a little less on average.

European countries easily spend up to a.

Quarter of their international of their national.

Income on pensions, health and Social Security systems.

We need a small fraction of that.

Money to make our defenses much stronger.

And to preserve our.

There we go.

Simple.

Don't need that.

Functions and Social Security just chip away at those.

Yeah.

And more bombs, tanks.

That's what Trump is going to do in the US so although he's probably going to pull out a NATO, which is why NATO's general or NATO's boss wants more money.

Right.

Because they think there's a coming war.

Yes.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's.

That's a sort of an overview of where we're heading for the year.

Picking away at the lies as they're told and being ever mindful that there's a huge concentration of power that's going on that is quite unique in human history, it seems like.

Yeah.

So I think we broke up.

We stopped before.

Luigi was a thing, did we not?

We.

We stopped before.

What do you mean?

What are you talking about?

The assassination of the.

Yeah.

Of the medical.

That's.

You're right.

When you talked about the revolution and there was that head.

No, we did briefly mention him, I think.

Joe.

The.

Okay.

Head of a.

Of a health insurance fund that was notorious for not paying out.

Yes.

Very well, like.

And using AI to predict who we could get away with not paying out.

Yes.

And the guy who assassinated him became something of a cult hero with people.

Applauding his banning Mario T shirts saying it's a me Luigi.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, we did talk about that one.

Okay.

Joe.

Joe.

In episode 412 on 9 January 2024, which was our first episode back in 2024, I tipped a Donald Trump victory basically on thinking he was going to be against Joe Biden.

But it turned out, Joe, I think we can safely say that the American electorate was sort of a cost of living election.

Eggs are too much, apparently.

Yeah.

So here's my prediction for the year, Joe.

I reckon Peter Dutton's going to win.

I think he's somehow going to scrape enough election enough members and a few teals to form a coalition with some teals minority government or on his own.

I'm hoping that Peter Dutton won't have a seat after this election, but I'm hoping that a teal gets in here.

But anyway, I think he's going to win because I think it's going to be based on cost of living and people are feeling the heat when it comes to the economy and even if they're not feeling it, they've got the impression that things are really bad.

Well, yeah.

I don't know that the LMP have had long enough in Queensland to screw things up to make them lose some seats up here.

No.

So.

So anyway, that is my tip for.

Did you see Whiny Piney's article, by the way?

Whiny Piney?

Who's Whiny Piney?

Christopher Pine.

No, he wrote an article.

He's.

Yeah, he's.

I told you I'm not reading the Australian these days.

Okay.

He wrote an article saying that basically he's absolutely bullshitting about nuclear power.

It'll never happen, but that it's a.

A smart strategy.

It was interesting but he was saying that there's no way that it'll be.

If it does get built.

If they do try it, it'll cost way more than it than he's saying that really it's just a strategy to try and screw the government over by ignoring renewables.

Yeah.

And he wants to.

To lay the blame of the current cost of energy on the labor government because of an obsession with renewables which would be fixed if Dutton was in charge.

Yes.

In just a total story.

Of course.

Absolutely.

But with enough propaganda people will believe it.

So.

And if he has to do a deal, you know, the only difference between.

Between Dutton and the Teals is really on climate.

Yeah.

And so he will cut a deal with them.

Regard.

Okay, well.

Well no, there's some.

There's some per labor stuff, as in union stuff that labor are a bit better on.

So cost of living increases, things like that.

Yeah.

But I'm just saying he's going to form.

He's going to get the Teals in as part of a minority government.

Dutton will.

I don't think the great that the Teals are going to sign on to his wonderful nuclear plan.

No.

But I think as part of the deal it'll be convenient for him to then go.

I'd really like to push the nuclear deal through but I can't because I've got to do this deal with the Teals.

Oh well, we'll shelve that until three years time.

The next election when you vote me in.

In My own right.

And he can sort of.

Because he knows it's a dog.

And this would give him a chance to sort of.

To sort of say, oh, I had to cut a deal with the Teals.

As much as I'd like to do a nuclear facility, can't do it with these guys.

The best I can do.

Yeah.

John's saying that the Teals hate dub.

Well, they might, but they're essentially liberals.

Yeah.

So although a lot of them are women.

And apparently unless he's fixed the misogyny problem in the lnp.

Yeah.

They like the economics.

They like small government.

Get rid of the regulation.

They're sort of.

Yeah.

Liberal, not small government.

It's poking your nose into other people's business, not into business's business.

Yeah.

So they're very pro business.

Yeah.

They'll slide with him.

Enough of them.

I think he's gonna.

There's my tip anyway.

See how that one pans out.

But have you taken any notice of the.

Well, in Canada, Justin Trudeau has.

Has resigned.

Yes.

People are saying he hasn't left enough time for his successor to build up a profile before the general election.

So they're predicting he's going to lose.

And have you heard the new.

Have you heard the opposition, the Conservative leader speaking at all?

You're about to Joe.

Yay.

Can you pronounce his name for me?

Are you looking in the show notes where I've got predictions and cost of living speech example by Pierre Marcel.

And how do you pronounce that last.

Hang on.

I'm scrolling down to it.

Predictions.

Find the predictions.

Third line.

Oh, okay.

Hang on.

I think it's poil, but okay.

Boylev.

Okay, you look at that in the meantime.

Yeah.

Here is this.

Here is this.

Thank you.

As he's the opposition Conservative opposition leader speaking in the Canadian Parliament.

I'll just play the first two and a bit minutes of this.

This is the blueprint for Peter Dutton.

And what now?

Peter Dutton's delivery will not be as good as this guy.

But this is the sort of stuff that Dutton will say, talking about cost of living, saying he's going to fix it, but with no details of how and no real care about it either.

Just blaming the existing government and also throwing in a bit of a bit of stuff about people not being safe in their homes.

So violence in the community.

This.

This Peter Dutton will be copying this guy.

Here we go.

For the first two minutes.

When I travel across this country, I consistently meet two types of people.

One, those who are a little better off and Tell me that.

And I'll be very blunt about this, if that if I don't win, they will leave the country.

And they are very numerous.

But you know, I don't worry about them as much.

You know who I worry about?

The ones who can't leave, the ones who don't know.

And if I can just be use very blunt language, who tell me, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do.

I have no idea how I'm gonna pay my way.

I met a waitress at a restaurant not long ago and she came up to me and she grabbed me by the hand and she said, you have to win.

And I said, oh, thank you, I promise, appreciate your support.

She said, no, no, it wasn't a compliment.

You have to win.

And then she told me her story.

She told me that she was working one full time job and two part time jobs just to pay her bills as a single woman in her late 50s.

And she was tired of working all the time.

So she cut everything out of her budget.

Every creature comfort, everything she enjoyed about her life.

She cut it out so that she could drop one of those part time jobs.

And then one morning she woke up and she walked outside and her car was gone.

And she called her insurance and they said they weren't going to cover the replacement value.

So she had to take that job back.

Because she simply cannot live her life without a car.

Now you can bet your bottom dollar the guy who stole the car, he was probably out on bail.

This was not his first.

I love throwing in the law and order gone up anyway.

Her heating bill has gone up, her wages have not gone up.

She's scared to go out in the streets in places where they didn't even lock the door not long ago.

These are the people we're fighting for.

These silly games over here, they're very entertaining.

This soap opera that everyone seized with today, that's all fine, but there are real people whose lives are on the line here and we have a duty to work for them.

And quite frankly.

Just a little bit more.

This woman doesn't see me as, or any of us as any kind of savior.

They see us all as a last hope.

In fact, she doesn't want to be saved.

She just wants her life back.

Exactly.

She was taking care of herself just fine.

For attacks, her heat, her grocery bill went through the roof and her car went missing.

Yes, Joe, she was doing just fine on just the full time job and the part time job.

You.

And she's smoking crack.

If she thinks The Conservatives are going to make her life any better rather than cutting tax for businesses and.

And reducing her weight of rate of pay.

If she really wants, she could go to America and discover just what.

At work, at will.

Working means.

She may not have a choice soon, Joe.

We'll get back.

We'll get on to that one.

When.

When.

When America.

When.

When Canada is.

I was going to say the 51st date, but Australia is already the 51st, so.

Well, the UK is the first state.

Elmo is.

Sorry, Elon is already.

He's a big fan of the British national.

No, sorry.

Re.

Reform Refuse something.

I don't know, whatever Nigel Farage's party is.

And Elon is saying, well, they're going to win, but he needs to go, we need somebody else.

Tommy 10 names, Yaxley, Lennon, whatever he calls himself, Tommy Robinson is.

Needs to be leader of the party.

Yes, yes, Elon sticking his fingers into the UK political system.

Absolutely.

We'll get on to that in a moment.

But.

But anyway, that.

That guy speaking there with the people of poor.

They're struggling.

They can't pay their bills.

It's all the fault of the government, of course.

No real intention of fixing that.

No.

And then throwing in the law and order.

Her car was stolen and afraid to walk the streets and because of all those bloody immigrants.

Yeah, and the Indian guy in the back is nodding along with him, you know, all those bloody immigrants.

Indeed.

You're right, Joe.

I did get that as well.

Like.

Yes, that as well.

So I did see somebody.

I can't remember where it was on the Internet, commenting.

Well, I'm a Canadian and somebody underneath went, yes, but are you an original Canadian or are you an invader?

Colonial Canadian.

Yeah.

Because, you know, you can't really talk if you want.

No, no.

Are you indigenous or are you a white person?

Right, yeah, yeah.

If you're a white person.

Shut up.

Was that it?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So.

Oh, Watley's in the chat room.

Hello, Whatley.

We're back.

Whatley.

We can continue our correspondence.

Whatley now.

Anyway, if you thought that guy sounded reasonable.

This is the Canadian opposition leader and Joe, you've provided every.

Thank you.

Just a terrible Australian education I've had with no French.

Anyway, that same Canadian opposition leader.

Let's.

Yeah.

Did he sound reasonable?

Maybe.

What is.

What's he got to say about Israel and Gaza?

Let's find out.

Where is it?

No, we won't find out.

Hang on.

Same guy on Israel.

No.

Why have I lost that?

Oh, I would need to find it Let me just quickly add this to it because I need to find this.

It's too good to miss out on.

I think it's in local.

Okay, bear with me.

Won't be long.

Nearly there.

Local video.

Try that.

I hope this is it.

See if it is.

The word apartheid is.

No, that's not it.

Damn it.

Anyway.

Okay, there's another clip where he's asked about.

Let me just go back to where we are.

There's another clip where he's asked about Israel and Iran and he basically says that the risk with Iran and nuclear weapons.

Oh, yeah.

That Israel should attack the nuclear facilities of Iran and the risk of Iran having nuclear weapons if Israel attacks.

It's.

It's performing a service for the rest of the world.

So basically a green light for Israel to attack Iran on the basis of Iran having nuclear weapons program.

And just for your own edification out there, Dear listener, outgoing CIA director William Burns stated in an interview on 10 January that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program following a decision it made in 2003.

He was being interviewed on the National Public Radio to discuss his time as director of the CIA under President Joe Biden, and he's asked whether Iran may accelerate its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.

Burns answered that, quote, the Iranian regime could decide in the face of that weakness that it needs to restore its deterrence as it sees it and, you know, reverse the decision made at the end of 2003 to suspend their weaponisation program.

However, Burns clarified, quote, we do not see any sign today that any such decision has been made, but we obviously watch it intently.

So I call bullshit on that.

That's the CIA director.

Yeah, Yeah, I still call bullshit on it, because Stuxnet was a computer virus that was developed between 2005 and 2010, and it was aimed at Siemens Industrial Control Systems, which were centrifuges which were used for purifying uranium.

So there is a virus that got leaked out onto the wild that has been traced back to CIA and Mossad, and it was purely aimed at.

Purely designed to kill centrifuges that are used for purifying uranium.

Right, so.

And it appears that it was Iran that it was targeted at.

Right.

So there's fairly good evidence that the CIA and Mossad were trying to kill Iran's enrichment program as late as 2010.

Well, when Trump came in, there had been a deal where Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program.

And that was working very well according to all reports, because they were subject to inspections.

And the overwhelming consensus was that Iran was complying with its obligations.

When Trump pulled the deal and said, yeah, no, we're no longer going to allow, basically, in return for not weaponizing nuclear stuff, Iran was getting allowed back into trade with the rest of the world.

And Trump just said, no, not going to let that happen.

So it was a pretty good evidence at the time by weapons inspectors that there was no nuclear weapons facility in operation or underway in Iraq.

Yes, but I think as late as 2010, there was something going on.

Okay, well, we'll agree to differ on all that evidence, but that's the current CIA director talking about the current state of play and the current opposition leader of Canada saying, go and bomb them because they've got nuclear weapons facilities, so do us all a favor and blow them up.

Yeah, I, I don't know why the CIA director would be saying that, but I think there's evidence that after 2003 and, and before 2016, they were doing research that.

Well, when, when did the treaty, when did that they might have arms.

Okay.

Because it might have, I think it might have been under Obama that the agreement was reached.

Yeah.

In which case.

And they possibly came to the agreement because the CIA had managed to kill their weapons enrichment, their uranium enrichment program.

Right.

Okay, there we go.

What's happening in the chat room?

Ultimate we in most other Western countries are stuck in a Sisyphean cycle of voting out one incompetent government and voting in another equally and even more incompetent government, hoping for a miracle.

That's true.

But you know what?

I reckon we've reached the point where we're no longer even hoping for a miracle.

We're just knowing it's, it's all going to suck no matter what happens.

I think we might have reached that point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Still on.

Where am I going to do next?

Oh, just briefly, this, this is the line.

This is the.

While we're talking about Israel and Iran.

This is the US Envoy to the UN Here we go.

Iran has done.

Iran's fingerprints are all over all of the bad things that are going on in this region.

And Iran needs to end its support.

For these proxies and they need to do it now.

And we need to all work for de.

Escalation of this conflict that is of paramount importance right now.

What about Israel's fingerprints all over the region?

I don't know what you, what you're talking about, do you?

Iran's fingerprints are all over this region.

They're going to stop these proxy wars.

What about Israel's fingerprints?

I don't know what you're talking about.

For sake.

That's just one of the little heresies.

They're lying to us, being subtle about it.

Israel has just gone in and launched attacks.

He doesn't know what they're talking about.

No.

For fuck's sake.

And just.

There we go.

There we go.

Shameless.

Shameless.

Let's divert briefly, Joe, to talk about the pharmacies.

Good idea.

Remember when the Pharmacy Guild's Trent tomi cried over 60 day scripts?

So, dear listener, normally a script was for 30 days a month's supply.

And as almost all of you would know, you'd have to go back each month and get another script filled every month, pay your dispensing fee and pay a dispensing fee.

And the government said, you know what, let's let people get two months worth.

And that will cost the pharmacies some dispensing fees.

And the Pharmacy Guild's president saying that 665 pharmacies would close and there would be 20,000 job losses.

Hmm.

Let's see if I've got that guy.

Nah.

Yeah, let me just see.

I'm gonna have to.

Joe.

There was a system here that I was experimenting with where I could get videos from, from the hard drive and didn't have to upload them all.

I'm gonna try and just grab this video and see with the Pharmacy Guild guy.

So bear with me, dear listener, this time.

I think I know where this one is, so I think I'll be able to find it.

As long as it's not your porn foldable farm.

That would be a disaster.

It's been a really difficult week.

I've had a lot of members ring.

I had one young woman this morning, in her 30s, single mum.

She got her dad to put her house up as equity to sorry to buy her first pharmacy.

She will be bankrupt.

I had a 28 year old guy who just got married.

Him and his girlfriend saved up for a house, they got a deposit.

House went up in value last year and he put that up to buy his first pharmacy.

He's in Victoria, he's now bankrupt.

And you know, it's just.

It's been a really tough week.

I've had Labor Party senators and mps just take their phones off the hook because I don't give a.

Ryan, I'm sorry, I'm a North Queenslander.

I don't mean to swear, but they just don't care, you know, this is supposed to be a government that cares.

This is not how one operates.

So that was back then, was it?

That was back then, right.

A compelling tearful story of a disaster looming over the pharmacy industry.

Crocodile tears.

Unfortunately for him, James Masala decided to have a look.

So what did he say?

Yeah, he wrote an article here and he says the change meant pharmacies would lose money because they would receive fewer dispensing fees.

A couple of months later, after the change was announced, the Guild released a major new independent report which it had commissioned by Economist and the Australian columnist Henry Ergus and the Relational Insights Data Lab at Griffith University to back up its dire warnings, which was.

As many as 20,000 jobs will be lost.

665 pharmacies will close and Australia's most vulnerable patients will suffer under the Albanese government's 60 day dispensing policy.

Thundered the first line of the media release.

Joe getting a.

The Pharmacy Guild getting a report from.

An economist that says exactly what they wanted to say.

Sounds a lot like the Dutton opposition getting a nuclear policy report by Frontier Economics who I railed about a month.

Ago, who were registered to a shack on Kangaroo island.

And just honestly you can just grab an economist to say anything.

Yes, and it's just given credence.

Anyway, back to this article.

But the government stood its ground nearly 18 months on from the policy change taking effect.

The dire warnings have proved misplaced.

Here's the important part.

Between September 2023 when 60 Day Scripts began in 30 November 2024, the Department of Health and Aging received a total of 165 applications to open new pharmacies.

Joe.

And of those, 87 were approved 87 new pharmacies, just 22 closed across Australia.

So, so there we go.

Rather than massive closures and loss of jobs, there's in fact been an increase of 65 pharmacies in that period.

Also in this article it says at the time the policy was announced, Butler, now Butler, was Albanese government health minister of some sort, I think.

Who was Butler?

Someone like that.

Butler promised $1.2 billion in dispensing fees that the government would save would be plowed back into community pharmacies so they could expand their services.

In a reminder of the Guild's influence and power, negotiations over the next community pharmacy agreement were brought forward by about a year.

And in March 2024 an extra 3 billion was promised to pharmacists over five years and the Guild ended its anti government campaign.

So Joe, they lost dispensing fees but picked up $3 billion.

Yeah, I, I think there was a big push to get them involved in chronic health care.

Right.

So, you know, checking insulin levels on diabetics, things like that.

So there was a.

This is what their community pharmacy stuff is, as far as I know, is.

Helping them to expand their market.

Well, but also trying to relief a bit of pressure on GPS by allowing some of the routine stuff to be done by pharmacists instead.

Yeah.

And with the injection of $3 billion that killed.

Put Tommy to the side and said, you don't need to cry in front of the cameras anymore.

Yes, mission accomplished.

James in the chat room says he is the health minister.

Thank you, James.

Congratulations, James.

Yes.

Alex says that would be rent, as in rent seeking behavior, enforced government inefficiency so that a select group could benefit.

Yes.

And John says you're a bit like my mum at the PC tonight, trying.

To find the files.

Ah, thanks, John.

It's not easy.

I'm out of practice.

I've had a month off.

You don't come back in form after a month off.

Joe, you can no longer buy an electric vehicle.

Sorry, a combustion engine vehicle in Norway now that it's 2025.

Yeah.

So you can only buy electric vehicles and essentially people going to tow their boats.

Yeah.

Since 1990, Norway just did a series of.

Passed a series of laws to basically speed up the transition to electric vehicles.

In 1990, no purchase or import tax on electric vehicles.

In 94.

Sorry.

In 96, no annual road tax for electric vehicles.

In 97, they said no charges on toll roads for electric vehicles.

That lasted 20 years.

In 99, free municipal parking for electric vehicles.

In 2000, reduced company car tax.

In 2001, an exemption from the 25% value added tax on purchase.

In 2005, they gave them access to bus lanes.

Some of these laws only lasted 20 years, some of these changes, but it was enough to get people going.

2009, no charges on ferries for electric vehicles.

Let me see.

In 2017, the Norwegian Parliament decided on a national goal that all new cars sold by 2025 should be zero emissions actually reached a goal that they set eight years ago.

I think more importantly the right to charge.

Yes.

People living in apartment buildings.

That's been a big problem.

I know in a number of countries where people who live either in a place where they have no off street parking or in a shared tenancy building, just trying to get a charging point installed has been really difficult.

And I tried to look into the details of that because, Joe, I look at the apartment building that we stay in down the coast and there's just no facilities.

And it would be really hard to retrofit, I think, charging facilities.

But so I'm not exactly sure how the Norwegians did that, but they did actually pass laws for body corporates to essentially provide charging facilities as mandatory.

So really a range of just smart ideas that made people think, I might get myself an electric vehicle.

I'll save all this money on ferries and road tax and all the rest of it.

Just imagine if Australia had done that with renewable energy back in the 90s.

Jeff.

How many times did we look at Norway.

Yeah.

And with their, you know, their sovereign wealth fund and all the rest of it.

And we think, God, if only we had done.

We should be jumping up and down in the streets every lunchtime saying, why don't we just do what the goddamn Norwegians did?

Because Gina Reinhardt would be upset.

Yeah.

Do Norwegians make sort of dark films?

You know, sort of dark, humid dark films?

I don't know.

I'll have to ask the one Norwegian I know.

Okay.

You could do that.

Yeah.

So anyway, that was a little digression.

Back to the depressing stuff.

Jimmy Carter.

Did you like Jimmy Carter?

He was really before my time.

I, I vaguely remember the time as a child, the name.

But Ronnie Reagan was president by the time I even could pay attention to politics.

The anecdote I remember about Jimmy Carter was he was such a control freak that while he was president, if people wanted to use the tennis court at the White House, he was in charge of, of the, of the bookings.

Right.

If you wanted to book the tennis court for a 10 o'clock game, had to go through the president.

Okay.

That's what I heard.

So I, I heard that up until well into his 70s he was building houses for homeless people.

Yes.

His church ran a group that would go down and build low cost housing.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Joe, this is one of those other videos which is on my local drive.

Let me see if I can find it.

I'm going to try this one again.

John's going to give me curry over this, but we'll just see if it is able to be found.

CARTER ON Palestine Yes.

This is going to work.

Provide I name them.

I can do it.

The word apartheid is, is exactly accurate.

You know, this is an area that's occupied by two powers.

They're now completely separated.

The Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory.

The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except they're Israeli soldiers.

The Palestinians never see an Israeli except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers.

So within Palestinian territory they're absolutely and totally separated.

Much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way.

And the other thing is, the other definition of apartheid is one side dominates the other and the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.

Why don't Americans know what you have seen?

Americans don't want to know and many Israelis don't want to know what is going on inside Palestine.

It's a terrible human rights persecution that is far transcends what any outsider would imagine.

And there are powerful political forces in America that prevents any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land.

I think it's accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I'm familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks.

There hadn't been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years.

So this is a taboo subject.

And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out as I've just described, they would probably not be back into Congress the next term.

So that's Jimmy Carter back in 2007 describing the power of the Israeli lobby.

Yeah.

On U.

S.

Politicians, Anti Defamation League.

Yeah.

So it's quite frightening, the power that they have.

And I was unaware of it until this whole sort of Gaza genocide situation has come up.

And you're thinking, why is the world so silent about all this?

To give more meat on the bones of that story, here is John Mearsheimer.

We've mentioned him before.

He's an American scientist, international relations scholar.

He's at University of Chicago, best known for developing the theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the desire to achieve regional hegemony, blah, blah, blah.

He wrote a book in 2007, the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, and he argues that the Israel lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S.

foreign policy.

And this is what he had to say about the Israel Lobby, which matches up with what Carter just said.

Let me talk a little bit about how the lobby operates.

It operates at two levels, one of which you were talking about and one which you were not talking about.

The first level, which you were not talking about is in terms of public opinion and in terms of dealing with the public.

And there the lobby is deeply concerned with controlling as much as possible the discourse.

That's what we were talking about before the Lobby does not want Israel to be portrayed in a negative light.

The lobby does not want much discussion of the lobby's role in American politics.

The lobby wants to control the discourse or influence the discourse as much as possible.

That has become exceedingly difficult to do.

That was the point that I was making to you early.

Second, this is the second avenue of influence.

The lobby is interested in making sure that policymakers inside Congress and inside the executive branch, and here we're talking not just about the White House, but also the State Department, the Defense Department, and so forth and so on, making sure those policymakers support Israel unconditionally.

That word unconditionally cannot be underestimated.

So the name of the game here is to influence those policymakers.

Now, there are obviously many policymakers who think that what Israel is doing in Gaza is reprehensible, but they will not speak out and they will vote in support of Israel at almost every turn.

There will be a few exceptions, but not many.

That raises the question why?

And the answer is that in the United States, to get elected to office and to remain in office, campaign contributions matter enormously.

And the lobby is really good at providing money, providing resources for individuals who support the lobby's positions.

And anyone who doesn't support.

Support the lobby's positions will find him or herself being opposed by someone in the next primary or in the next, you know, campaign by someone who supports Israel and who is getting a huge amount of money from pro Israel sources.

So politicians, and this again includes politicians in the executive branch and in the legislative branch, understand that there will be a huge price to pay if they don't support Israel hook, line and sinker, and they end up in almost all cases supporting Israel as a result.

If you took away the ability of the lobby to provide campaign funds for political candidates, I think you would see very different voting patterns when it comes to Israel, because this is not a case of all these politicians loving Israel and feeling they have to support Israel because it shares our values or it's a strategic asset.

They do it in good part out of fear, fear that the lobby will put its crosshairs on them.

But this isn't new.

Israel as a state wouldn't have existed without American support.

The, the, the landing fleet, the weapons were all from the American army from the Second World War.

But the control over politicians, quite extraordinary.

I don't.

Yeah, yeah, I don't think it's anything new.

Obviously it's got worse since Citizens United.

It, it might have seemed like a conspiracy theory 20 years ago.

You know, oh, the Jews are controlling the, the U.S.

politicians would be sound like a nasty conspiracy theory, but this one of the state of Israel basically controlling these politicians the way that they're doing it.

Sort of Zionists if you like.

Yeah, I don't even know that it's the state of Israel, but it's like Israel and the Vatican are two special groups where they have large numbers, not necessarily of citizens, but of people who have a fealty to them overseas.

And this was, you know, you remember the court case about a Catholic MP in Australia having dual loyalty, having a loyalty to the Vatican and loyalty to Australia.

And, and this is true of Jewish people.

There is a large diaspora of people who are not necessarily deeply involved but are approached by Israeli interests going, you're a Jew, Are you willing to do a favor for the state of Israel?

And lots of them are willing.

Yeah.

So, dear listener, still about probably another half hour.

You got to go anywhere, Joe, only for a pee.

Head off if you need to, because I'm about, about to launch into a story about the BBC and its coverage of the genocide in Gaza, which a bit like our ABC has been so, I mean disappointing is such a lame word, shocking in that they're not jumping up and down showing images of what's happening all the time.

And, and the, if you're a patron of this podcast, you'll get the show Notes, which is a link to this article with the sort of detail about it.

But it's a story, well, it's, it's a report about a civil war essentially in the BBC with its coverage over the genocide in Gaza.

This was on drop site news and it's an investigation that they covered, based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel's narrative and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers.

If you like the sound of this story or you want to hear it, you know, hang on for 20 minutes, if you've had enough of that, then I think that's going to be the last topic.

See you next week.

But I'm going to go on with this one and I'm going to quote extensively from this article.

So the investigation of the BBC has three main components.

A deeply reported look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative assessment of how BBC characterized the siege on Gaza, and a review of a couple of the key people who are behind the coverage who seem to be particularly involved in skewing how it's reported one guy in particular, an editor called Raffi Berg.

So.

So the primary battlefield has become the online news operation.

At the BBC.

The coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK's own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media.

Like this.

The BBC has been more positive than the Israeli media about Israel while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities and creating a false equivalence.

BBC journalists who spoke to Dropsite News believe the imbalance is structural and has been enforced by the top brass for many years.

The journalists overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular, Rafi Berg, who is the BBC News Online Middle east editor.

And that guy sets the tone for the BBC's digital output on Israel and Palestine.

And they allege that internal complaints about how the BBC has been operated have been brushed aside.

And they say that this guy Berg's job is to water down everything that's critical of Israel.

So in November, a hundred BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organisation of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards.

Journalists say the BBC failed to highlight amnesty.

Well, there's a range of examples, one of which is journalists say the BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International report concluding that Israel is committing genocide.

Senior correspondents expressed their dismay at the angle chosen for the limited coverage.

So this was a finding by Amnesty that concluded that Israel is committing genocide.

And the BBC headline was Israel rejects fabricated claims of genocide.

Going down further in the article, I'm skipping a good thousand words here just to give you some of the highlights.

Dear listener, this Raffi Berg wasn't the only senior figure discussed at the meeting.

In May, the role of another powerful individual was raised.

Robbie Gibb, one of five people who serve on the BBC's editorial guidelines and Standards Committee.

This is Robbie Gibb.

So he's charged with helping to define the BBC's commitment to impartiality on this issue.

But his ultra partisan record speaks for himself.

So between 2017 and 2019, he served as Director of Communications for Theresa May and was knighted upon her resignation.

In 2020, Gibb led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy.

In 2021, Gibb returned to the BBC, joining its board as a non Executive director.

So his deep involvement with the Jewish Chronicle continued after he took up his BBC role in 2023.

In his declaration of personal interest, he declared he was the 100% owner of the newspaper before being replaced by venture capitalist.

One former journalist at the Jewish Chronicle declared that since the change in ownership, the papers read more like a propaganda sheet for Benjamin Netanyahu and that Gibb regularly appeared in the office to check up on what stories were topping the news and offering a view.

The main guy is this guy Berg.

His key role has been emphasised by staffers.

A crucial part of the BBC News website is its curation department, which selects the stories that are displayed on each section's front page as well as the overall BBC News homepage.

If a story appears on the front page, it often receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.

If it's published on a regional index page, then it'll only get a fraction of those views.

And the BBC staff has alleged that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle east stories appear on the BBC News front page.

If it's an Israel Palestine, it's got to go through Rafi before curation even okay it, one journalist said.

Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked, has it gone to editorial policy lawyers and has it gone to Rafi?

So in response, the BBC said that Berg's power has been exaggerated.

But a former journalist said, I was working for a world service department producing content for language services.

We have to run this past.

Rafi was the reflex answer to any producer pitching anything on Israel.

The journalist said that other editors were reluctant to sign off content, treating Berg's verdict as their safety step in the editorial process.

There was an extreme fear at the BBC that if you ever wanted to do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say if you want to pitch something, you have to go through Rafi and get his sign off.

And this dynamic was corroborated by a third journalist who said that even if the story which touched on Israel and Palestine, appeared on another news index, it would be flagged for Berg's attention.

How much power he has is wild, said the journalist.

So this guy Rafi Berg began his career in local radio, spent a year as news editor for the U.S.

foreign Broadcast Information Service, an outlet he later discovered was run by the CIA, a fact he was thrilled to learn.

His first job at the BBC was as a reporter.

He bylined.

A work included Israel's Teenage Recruits, which was a story published in 2002 that presented young IDF soldiers as courageous defenders of their country.

One journalist described the article as an IDF puff piece.

Berg's reported work also included a three part series on Israeli settlers in the west bank and Gaza.

The series presented them as victims seeking a better quality of life and did not mention the fact that the settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal.

In 2013, Berg became Middle east editor for BBC News Online, and it was in this role where he encountered material that would form the basis for his book Red Sea Spies the True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort, an account of the Israeli spy services efforts to evacuate Jews from Ethiopia between 79 and 83.

In the book, Berg describes Mossad in glowing terms, calling the agency much vaunted.

Burke received extensive, extensive cooperation from Massad for the book, including over 100 hours of interviews of past and present agents and Navy and Air Force personnel.

So further on in this article, BBC journalists emphasize this context when they point out to how Berg reshapes everything from headlines to story text to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as death by a thousand cuts.

One of the examples was Muhammad Barr's lonely death.

In July, the BBC published a story on its website about Muhammad Barr, a 24 year old Palestinian man with down syndrome and autism.

He lived in Gaza with his family who provided him with around the clock care since Israel began its assault on Gaza.

He had been terrified of the shells exploding around him caused by violence he was unable to understand.

On July 3, the Israeli military raided Barr's home.

The family begged for mercy for their disabled son, but the unit's dog savaged him.

He begged the dog to stop using the only language he could access at that moment, which was in Arabic.

That's enough my dear.

The soldiers put the injured man in a separate room, locked the door and forced the family to leave at gunpoint.

A week later, the family returned home to find bars decomposing body.

So the story was originally documented by Middle East Eye with the headline Gaza Palestinian with Down Syndrome Left to die by Israeli soldiers after Combat Dog Attack.

And that's a pretty fair headline.

The Independent used the headline Gaza man with Down Syndrome Mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to die, Family says.

Four days later, after the first reports, the BBC published its own version of the story.

Its headline the Lonely Death of Gaza man with Down Syndrome.

The headline did not reflect the hideous circumstances of Barr's death and omitted the specifics of who did what to whom, a recurring theme in complaints made by BBC reporters and presenters to management regarding the online coverage.

In the original version of the story, it took 500 words to learn that an Israeli army dog had attacked Bahr, another 339 to discover how he died.

So there's a content management system that shows that Berg's fingerprints are all over that he must have signed off on its framing anyway.

Eventually the BBC decided to Rewrite the story.

So the bar story symbolizes what PBC staff has spoke to dropsite news say is occurring all the time in the story.

They do quantitative sort of studies of the number of stories, how often different language is used in the story that's either positive or negative towards Israel and mentioning of Palestinians death and sort of a quantitative analysis which is damning of the BBC coverage.

And what else have we got here?

Apparently Rafi Berg is claiming that he's going to sue Owen Jones who wrote this article.

Yeah, yeah.

Which would be interesting because if discovery is allowed or whatever it's called in the uk, I forget.

Yeah.

And just try and see what else there is.

So it's a, it's a pretty thorough report on, on what's going on in the BBC, which is kind of an ex.

You know, when you look at the Murdoch press or others and you, you get the very pro Israel, anti Palestinian view, you go, okay, well, that's not surprising.

But when a public broadcaster does the same, you sort of think, why?

How's that work?

But that's a sort of an explanation of how it comes about.

I have to say our own ABC has been terrible in its coverage as well.

Like considering the genocide that is going on there, the coverage has been pathetic.

So, so, yeah, that's, that's an example of, of, of how it doesn't take more than a few people in a powerful position.

Yes.

To be extraordinarily influential over such a wide, sprawling organization like the BBC, so.

Well, it's the same with the Murdoch press.

Yeah.

If you pick your editors, then it doesn't matter how dedicated the staff are.

The, the journalists are, you know that it's not going to get past editorial.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

So there we go.

That was that story there.

Joe, you're back.

I was busy looking.

Look, I'm tempted to do some Donald Trump stuff.

Please.

How many.

How many are still with us?

5.

Anybody there want to hear any Donald Trump stuff?

Come on.

If you're in the chat room, egg me on.

Nobody's responding.

I'm not going to do it.

I think they're all asleep.

They must be.

Either that or the chat's.

I'll just do one.

I've got a mind up here.

John's curious.

Curious.

All right.

Okay, that's enough.

John.

One from John.

Okay.

All right.

Well, we've heard the amazing stuff by Donald Trump basically wanting to take over Greenland and Panama and wanting to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America because clearly.

Joe, did you see the Mexican prime minister's response to that.

What did she say?

Well, she said originally the whole of North America was Mexico America.

So she's happy to rename it.

Yes.

Yeah.

Let me run through some of, some of the things Trump has.

Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?

No.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is?

Are you going to negotiate a new treaty?

Are you.

Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold the vote?

What is the strategy?

I can't assure you.

You're talking about Panama and Greenland.

No, I can't assure you on either of those two, but I can say we need them for economic security.

The Panama Canal was built for our military.

I'm not going to commit to that now.

It might be that.

You'll have to do something.

Look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country.

It's being operated by China.

China.

And we gave the China Canal to.

I saw an interesting YouTube video talking about how there were two possible routes through Central America and the Panama Canal was one of them, but the other one was a bit further north, I think.

Costa Rica, I can't remember.

But basically it was to cut through.

There's a lake on the west side that flows down to the sea on the east, so they could basically elo.

Enlarge the river and then it's a short distance on the west of that mountain range to get through.

And they're talking about putting in, basically putting in a second canal.

Yeah, yeah.

So when it comes to Panama and Greenland, Donald Trump is not ruling out.

Ruling out military force to take Greenland in particular.

I mean, I mean, Panama was a.

Was a U.

S.

Instigated revolution.

Anyway, Panama was, I think, part of Colombia from.

From memory.

And the US Engineered a breakaway group so that they could create a new country of Panama and then build their canal.

So that was the sort of genesis.

There were three countries that were in one and they all split up.

Yeah.

Panama was.

Yeah.

Nicaragua, Costa Rica.

And Panama.

And Nicaragua is where the other possible canal is.

There we go.

Yep.

Okay.

Which.

Well, I don't know who's in charge of Nicaragua anymore, but infamously the Sandinistas were there and.

Yeah.

Helped by the CIA.

Yeah.

And what was his name?

Oliver North.

Yeah.

I told you my money changing anecdote with Nicaragua.

No, because I was traveling backpacking through Central and South America.

I'd been through a number of border crossings by that stage and they were always frantic.

Things you take a bus to the border, walk across, and then grab another bus to your next destination.

And at these border locations, there would just be all these people scrambling, offering you to exchange the money that you had from the previous country and any US Dollars that you might have, and you'd buy the local currency and move on.

And they're all yelling at you, their exchange rate that they're offering, and you haven't even seen this money before in your life, and they're handing it to you.

And it's quite a frantic experience.

And I.

I've been through a couple of these crossings, and I thought to myself, you know, I might have been dotted a couple of times.

I'm going to really take my time at this next border crossing, and when I hand over my money, I'm going to count it properly and make sure everything's above board.

So I think it was Nicaragua, which had at that stage undergone hyperinflation.

And I handed over 40 US dollars and the guy hands me two bricks of paper tied with rubber bands, literally the size of bricks.

There was that much notes.

I looked at it and went close enough, threw it in my backpack and just kept going.

So much for the counting of it.

We're going to count it all.

Yes.

I'm sure if you'd paid in US Dollars, they'd have all accepted it.

Every shop would have accepted it.

Yeah, yeah, probably.

They might have given you a change in local.

Yeah.

Anyway, that was that story.

So.

So that was that Donald Trump clip.

Now, what else we got to say about Donald Trump?

So that's military force.

In one of his tweets, Donald Trump says, I'm hearing that the people of Greenland are MAGA.

My son, Don Jr.

And various representatives will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sites.

Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if and when it becomes part of our nation.

We will protect it and cherish it.

And from a very.

The huge caves they discovered in Greenland.

No, what are these huge caves?

So the US Military, you know, the US Military were there for a long time.

They're still there, aren't they?

I don't know if they're still there.

They certainly used to be because they had all the early warnings.

Apparently at one stage, they built this huge underground city, tunneled into the ice, and then forgot about it.

Right.

And they were doing some ground penetration radar for something or other, and discovered these miles and miles and miles of.

Tunnels still on the ice.

Yeah.

Oh, no, I hadn't heard that.

Yeah.

John says, and you thought Trump would bring peace to Ukraine?

Well, I think he's going to stop funding Zelensky and the Ukrainians, so they're going to have to come to a peace deal.

Well, apparently, day one, the.

The war was going to stop because old Vladi Poodles was going to accept his offer.

Only Vlad has told him to go himself.

We'll wait and see on that one, but I don't know how we've diverted into that one.

But anyway, Donald Trump and Greenland.

Yes, it goes on in his tweet.

Greenland is an incredible place and the people will benefit tremendously if and when it becomes part of our nation.

We will protect it and cherish it from a very vicious outside world.

Make Greenland great again.

This guy on Twitter, Larry the Cat, says, what was it that first attracted you to the sparsely populated island rich in rare metals and minerals?

That's very cynical, Larry the Cat, because we know that it would be for national security reasons.

It's got to be.

Let's just see.

Let's just see.

Purposes.

I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran.

I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time.

You have approximately 45,000 people there.

People really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security.

That's for the free world.

I'm talking about protecting the free world.

You look at, you don't even need binoculars.

You look outside, you have China ships all over the place.

You have Russian ships all over the place.

We're not letting that happen.

We're not letting it happen.

And if Denmark wants to get to a conclusion, but nobody knows if they even have any right, title or interest, the people are going to probably vote for independence or to come into the United States.

But if they did, if they did do that, then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.

Here we go.

Nobody knows if Denmark's entitled to it.

And if they don't hand it over, we're going to hit them with tariffs to make them regret not handing it over.

Yes.

And.

And of course, you know, China and Russia are using the waterways near there to.

Okay, not gonna allow that.

What.

What a fun four years we've got ahead of us based on that, Joe.

God's sake.

Just to.

Because I forgot to mention the Canada.

One, that it's going to be four years and that his heart isn't going to give up before then.

Well, if J.D.

vance takes over.

It'll still be fun.

It'll just be crazy.

You're right.

The couches won't know what hit them.

Yeah.

Just on Gulf of America assets, we're.

Going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory.

The Gulf of America.

What a beautiful name.

And it's appropriate.

Gulf of America.

Yeah.

John, in the chat room there is an 80 year old defense agreement between Denmark and the USA already.

But since where, since when is America or Donald Trump in particular?

Well, yes.

Cared about finding agreements.

Yeah.

You know about the war between Denmark and Canada?

No.

There is a disputed island in between Greenland and Canada.

I'm starting to think Falkland Islands here.

No, no, no, no.

And apparently once a year one of the navies or the other visits the island and leaves a bottle of their local spirit on the island for the other team when they come back the next year.

They plant the flag and leave a bottle of whiskey or whatever.

Right.

That's the way to conduct international relations.

Yes, There we go.

But it's a territorial dispute that's been going on for some time.

If there's only 45000 people in Greenland and if they were wanting independence or working towards independence, sort of.

I don't know that it would be economically viable.

Well, you know, it'd be.

It wouldn't be that hard for the Americans decide to the.

To the local natives there.

Here's a couple of million dollars for each of you if you agree to split off and become part of American state.

You could pay people off potentially.

So 45 million.

Thank you.

Is it that many on Greenland?

It's a lot.

It is.

John, Is it that many population of Greenland that seems too many.

Just looking on Wikipedia.

Okay.

Population estimated 53, 583.

There you go.

John.

Expect a sorry in the comments.

GDP US$52 billion.

Right.

Per capita 57,000.

James said they resolved this conflict just after Russia invaded Ukraine.

I presume this is the Canada Denmark war.

Right.

Okay.

It sounds like it was already resolved.

You know the, it looks like China resolved that dispute it was having with India in the mountainous region there.

Remember they, they agreed they wouldn't use bullets.

I do remember that.

And they would just attack each other with baseball bats and, and, and stuff like that.

Every so often they'd burst into some sort of melee where they would be whacking each other with sticks of wood.

But that has been resolved in recent times.

Wasn't it on K2.

Or it was near K2.

Yeah.

Somewhere high up in the.

In the mountains there.

So, yeah.

So, yes, the Whiskey war has been resolved.

Who got it?

James, in the end, how was it resolved?

I mean, which was a Canada or Greenland that ended up with that obscure island?

Keen to know.

Finally settled in 2022.

There is a land border on the island between the two states.

Ah, they just run a line down the middle, did they?

Maybe.

Yep.

They agree to return to the lines of actual control.

They still haven't agreed to a border.

Good on you, James.

James.

John, you hang on this long in the podcast, you will be rewarded by us referring to your comments.

Now, what else have I got here?

Who's the wise king who cut the baby in half, threatened her?

Is that Solomon?

It sounds like a Solomon.

The wisdom of Solomon.

Yes.

Right.

When there was a dispute over.

Yeah, two women claimed that a baby was theirs, and so he threatened to cut the baby in half.

And one woman said, no, no, let her have the baby.

And the king said, right, it's obviously your baby because you're willing to give up the baby.

Yeah.

You were more concerned with the life of the child.

Yes, that sounds correct.

Indeed.

Yeah.

According to the Shovel, Australia has offered to sell New Zealand to Donald Trump.

Hours after Donald Trump said he wanted to take over Greenland, Australia has contacted the incoming president and offering him the chance to purchase New Zealand.

Thank you.

Yeah, they said, we know it's still.

Funny, but I don't find the Onion funny anymore.

Right, the Onion, yeah.

You know, it's hard to know whether it's real life or the Onion these days.

Well, yes.

Yeah.

In this Shovel article, they said, we know Mr.

Trump is looking to take over a cold, remote, largely uninhabited island.

Here's a chance to snap up, too.

And yeah, Philip Adams said, canadians reject offer to become 51st state.

They pointed out that Australia filled this role decades ago.

Gulf of Mexico, what else we got?

The age of oligarchs.

Might as well mention this one.

Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook and count owing to Trump.

Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world.

They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more.

The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.

Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.

Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.

China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US Government.

And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US Government has pushed for censorship by going after US and other American companies.

It has emboldened other governments to go even further.

But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.

It'll take time to get this right.

And these are complex systems.

They're never going to be perfect.

There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.

But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.

I'm looking forward to this next chapter.

Stay good out.

Yeah, stay good out there.

And of course, saving themselves lots of money by not paying for fact checkers, but allowing the public to moderate content and put community notes on posts.

Imagine being as rich as Zuckerberg where you should be able to just say you to anybody.

But he has to suck up.

Feels he has to suck up to Donald Trump.

Well, Vladimir apparently says you can keep your billions of dollars as long as you give half of it to me.

And, and I wonder if Donald's about to do the same thing.

And this is what all the billionaires are worried about.

Yeah, just pathetic.

And just, just, oh, we can't do anything innovative in Europe and these other countries have these court systems where they lock people up in secretive trials and.

Ah, yes, Julia, Facebook's roots were.

Is she hot or not?

Who was ranking uni students?

Yes, hello, Julia.

I don't know if anyone's looked actually paid attention to their feed.

I looked the other day and I think one post in five was something that I'd subscribed to.

The other four posts were either stuff that I hadn't subscribed to and had no interest in were guesses at what I might possibly like other groups and adverts and really, I'm just getting fed up with Facebook.

Want to uninstall it?

What else have I got?

We're nearly done here, dear listener, but we'll keep going.

We had Zuckerberg sucking up.

Oh, just.

So my view was that Trump would tell Zelensky no money for you and the war would finish due to lack of funding unless at some point stepped up.

Well, unless somebody is smart enough to offer Donald Trump an equity position in an arms manufacturing company, which is what I'd be doing if I was one of them seeking to ensure future business.

But I've always thought when it comes to Israel, these seems happy to support Israel embassy, didn't he?

Yeah.

Here's what he had to say on the state of play over there.

If those hostages aren't back, I don't want to hurt your negotiation.

If they're not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle east and it will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.

All hell will break out.

I'm sure those Palestinian Americans are really happy they voted for him.

Yeah, they really showed it to Hillary.

Kamala.

All hell's going to break loose because it hasn't already in Gaza.

Well, exactly, apparently.

No, no.

But they're going to give them even more American weapons.

All right, that's Trump.

Of course, Israel is holding more hostages than Hamas, but we won't go into that.

And just to finally finish off on these set of notes you mentioned earlier about Elon Musk meddling in the uk, it's all to do with the sort of the.

The old story of grooming gangs.

The scandal in 2011, Joe, where there were gangs of Muslims who were accused of.

Pakistan, Pakistanis who were accused of.

Well, and convicted of terrible sort of.

Charges against taking teenage girls who ring and basically pimping them out.

Yes.

And so Elon Musk is going on about wanting to support Tommy Robbins and wanting a new inquiry to be conducted in the uk, kind of alleging that Zakir Starmer, who was Director of Prosecutions at the time, didn't do enough.

But there's been a number of inquiries since 2011.

There's been a major inquiry.

Yeah.

And the Labour Party are trying to implement the.

The recommendations.

So having yet another inquiry is just going to interfere with that.

And, and essentially the finding was, well, that it was the local authorities who failed.

It wasn't a failure of the Department of Prosecutions, it was local level policing.

So.

But also it was child safety, child protection agencies.

Yes.

Who were being told, effectively, that the girls were willing and were choosing to abscond from their care homes to go with these adults and that they were allowed to do that.

There was nothing that the, the child protection agencies could do.

And it was alleged that it was because of fear of being seen to be racist.

And Keir Starmer did do stuff with trying to, I think, create a panel of judges for some reason to make running trials easier and all the rest of it.

Anyway, it seems Like a crazy beat up by Elon Musk sticking his nose into something and creating chaos where he's got everything wrong.

He's just going to cause problem.

A bit like when those kids were caught in that cave and he was suggesting using his submersible and.

And then called the guy who went in to rescue them a few pedophile.

Yes, it's that sort of crazy interference.

So.

So, yeah.

So right.

That's all the clips I had done.

I can clear all those.

What's the latest word in the chat room?

Is John saying I already won the North Korean bet?

I don't think so, John.

Not yet.

So actually, what did the John Menerjee blog say about North.

I know it was in here and let me just find it.

No, it's not there.

Okay, I'll come back to that next week.

But John, I don't think you can claim a victory on the North Korean issue at this stage.

Not yet.

Right.

Double.

And because he says double or nothing, Trump doesn't withdraw money from Ukraine.

John, when are you going to leave the Labor Party?

That's what I want to know.

Well, nearly two hours.

That's a solid return.

Hopefully Scott will be available next week.

Five of you brave listeners have held on to the end.

Good on you.

We'll be back next week to talk about more stuff.

Until then, bye for now and it's.

A good night from me.