(12/06) GAS Hour 3 - Swamp Watch

This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.

Mystery disease everybody watch out for.

If you've been traveling through the Democratic Republic of Congo, you might want to pay attention. They said that they have had an infectious disease outbreak. At least three hundred and seventy six people afflicted with what they're calling disease X. At least seventy nine people have been killed by disease X, and they said this flu like illness. About half of those who are afflicted are young, under the age of five.

That should be fun, That should be fun well, and then still should be okay.

New artificial intelligence based weather model could deliver fifteen day forecasts with unrivaled accuracy and speed. They said that this could potentially save lives. Gen Cast is what it's being called, showed better forecasting skill than the current world leading model. So the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. By the way they throw a great holiday party, produces predictions for thirty five countries. Is considered the global benchmark for

Pete is a winner, and there is nothing that can be done to change that. That is Trump on truth Social about his pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete haig Seth.

It's where we kick off swampwatch.

Swamp is horrible the government. We're gonna make it like a reality TV show.

Was a bad boos.

Always a pleasure to be anywhere from Washington, DC.

Hey, Joe after a town all too clearly built on a swamp and in so many ways still a swamp.

I have a watch of Malwarkee Boy, he said, drained the swamp. I said, Oh, that's so hell keep happens, you know the thing?

Well, I don't know exactly how, but Trump says he still believes that peaks at Pete Hegseth has a chance to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense.

This morning.

He went on a truth Social said that hag Seth's support is strong and deep among Congress. He says he's doing very well, much more so than the fake news would have you believe. He was a great student Princeton, Harvard educated with a military state of mind. He will be fantastic, high energy secretary of Defense. Defense one. I don't know, but it did he write it twice? Yes, one who leads with charisma and skill. He is a winter.

You've made this point multiple times, the things that he is accused of, whether it's having a couple of pops at a work event, which by the way, no one has put their name to. All these allegations that he's shown up drunk to work or was even on air at Fox drunk.

They've been kind of watered down to. He was hungover a couple times, right.

Allegations of sexual assault, which he says were consensual. Yes, he did pay a woman and no charges were brought in that case. Of course, the email where his mom ripped him a new one for the way that he was treating his wives and previous girlfriends. Does any of that matter when it comes to his job as Secretary of Defense.

The drinking would, but he has said it's not an issue and that he would abstain completely for the entire duration of him having that job, but him running.

Around on women, how does that.

Well outside of like we said back when this all came up, you know, that does violate rules within the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But is he an active member of the military at the time, which I don't know the timeline specifically of his dalliances, and I you know it, would he be able to convince enough senators and not just Democratic senators because I don't think any

Asked to take to take his name out of consideration.

He has yet to meet with Murkowski and Susan Collins.

Those are losses, I mean, those are uphill battles for him. Anyway, Yeah, there is I guess there is a chance I don't think it's a good chance, but there is a chance that he is able to convince senators that's not who I am now. And at what point do we give somebody an opportunity to rebuild their reputation.

I kind of think you are who you are at that point.

Well, my question is, listen, if one of the things that but doesn't matter. I guess one of the things that Trump wants is a guy who was a boots on the ground guy. He doesn't want a military administrator. He doesn't want somebody who was promoted simply because of some immutable characteristic that they didn't have control. That's not who he wants as secretary of Defense. He wants somebody who knows what's going on at the ground level. But

At least one Pentagon official spoke to Politico says, the biggest thing I'm picking up is a level of discomfort and uncertainty at the Pentagon. People want to know who their leadership is going to be and what they're going to be asked to do. These are professionals who can put personal feelings aside. They say that Trump's team Trump Team's delay and signing an agreement with the White House means the Pentagon and other agencies are in a holding pattern until transition officials are in place.

And you remember, remember that there has been some discrepancy as to whether or not the transition team was going to submit names to the FBI. They did submit Pete Hegseth's name to the FBI for a complete background check. They had announced earlier this week that the transition team was going to pave the way for it to get these background checks, announcing that had signed this memo of

Were working on them right now.

Trump told Pete Hegseth he wants to see him fight for votes in the Senate.

He continued backing.

His continued backing of his own nominee is part of the reason that Pete hag Seth has appeared more bullish this week and has not shied away. I mean, there's pictures right there of him standing in the hallways in the Capitol Building, saying that I am not the same guy that you think I am, and that this is a giant smear campaign where they're taking small, little incidents in my past and blowing them out of proportion.

Biden's team is considering blanket pardons for people that they think Trump is going to go after once he swoops, and we'll talk about that. Also, Bill Clinton gives Democrats some blunt.

Truths and RFK Junior has some unexpected support in the Senate to take over Health and Human Services.

Massive manhunts still underway to find the person who's shut what.

Transition, That's what we do here. That is what we do here. Transitions are nothing if not smooth.

Smooth, smooth, shot and killed the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson on Wednesday. They're coming through surveillance video. There's reports that this was a guy who arrived on a bus from Atlanta ten days before the murder. There is surveillance photo with him nearly his whole face when he removed his mask that came out yesterday, so they're trying to run that through all their facial recognition software.

Jarian Shannon I received a notice today from Igheart saying, and I have listened to one hundred and four and sixty five minutes of your programming here. Now that means if I'm doing the math right, I'm listening for I'm listening for about six and a half hours per day, and I think I deserve an award for that.

Well, congratulations, you won the award.

You won free programming.

You won the award from us to you.

The booty is the treasure.

You won the treasure.

You're giving him your booty, the booty. Who's booty?

I didn't say who, I just said the hm, the booty is the treasure.

President Biden's staff debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a bunch of Trump's perceived enemies to protect them from retribution when Trump takes office. For you to shift fauci names that are coming to mind, Liz Cheney, Cheney.

Yeah.

They said that this was previewed by the way he pardoned Hunter wiped away not just those criminal counts that he was convicted of, but any crime that he may have committed or taken part in over the course of the last eleven years. This presumably means that Donald Trump can't do anything to Hunter Biden or any allegations that he didn't merit that did not merit charges. But this act of clemency, they said, even theoretical crimes over the course of a decade, went beyond any scope of any

Trump has said on social media that Cheney should be prosecuted for what she's done, that the whole January sixth Committee should be prosecuted for their lives and treason, that Kamala Harris should be impeached and prosecuted. He promised to appoint a real special prosecutor to go after Biden and

But none of that had I mean, yes, in his mind, that's what he believes, and that's he likes to say it that way. I don't see any of those people ever actually facing any sort of criminal investigation at all. It just sounds like this is the bluster that people are get very afraid of, and we saw that going into his first term that a lot of stuff never materialized.

Bill Clinton has been giving Democrats some blunt truths. He went after Biden for the Hunter pardon handling. He said, I wish he hadn't said he was going to do it. It weakens his case because Biden repeatedly pledged not to pardon his son. He did an interview at the New York Times deal Book event. This is the first time he's been interviewed since Biden's move. He said, we had a lot better record than the Republicans, but what good did it do to us? No one believes in anybody anymore.

There was a Bernie Sanders cut that was making its way around yesterday that I found pretty interesting. He actually recently, within the last day or two, tweeted that he supports Robert F. Kennedy as or I should say, at least he's praised RFK Junior's message on food issues.

And Elon Musk and getting rid of governments.

Yeah, government waste, Bernie Sanders said, He hasn't really made up his mind yet on whether or not he's going to oppose Kennedy to head Health and Human Services, but he did say that there are things that they agree on when it comes to the criticisms of the influence of the food industry in Washington, DC. Right now, Bernie Sanders is the chair of the Senate Health Committee, and when he sat down in front of FDA officials this week, this was one of the exchanges that he had.

What is the reason that our kids are unhealthy? What role do this industry play? Even now you're getting out of wolpus, are you prepared to tell us that this committee, this Congress needs to take on the food and beverage industry. Who's green is destroying the health of millions of people. Well, I'm not going to castigade the people that work in the food and beverage.

And I love that. I love that.

I'm not going to castigate the people in the food industry.

And Bertie Sanders.

Says, you're the head of the FDA, You moron, That's exactly what you're supposed to do when they produce food that is bad for us.

Yeah, but that guy's in bed naked with the food industry.

Right, that's the problem, which is why that's why he at least agrees with Kennedy that you've got to get those people out of that relationship.

You've got to have got to.

Put their clothes on, get them out of bed, and get them moving.

Spray them with.

Cold water, right, whatever they do.

Do you want a good story?

Waiting guy by the name of Speedy Weber wrote his wife three hundred letters in World War Two, and now the letters have been given anonymously to the USO, and we're learning what that correspondence was all about.

A love that lasted fifty six years.

It was beautiful. Do you ever find any letters when your parents?

I don't want to read those.

I just I don't mean that.

I don't mean like, no, they never were apart ever, they never had to write letters back and forth.

I mean maybe cards and stuff for anniversaries or whatever, but no letters.

I found a couple. I found a handful in a shoe box in a closet in mom and dad's house. Dad was writing letters. He was at cal Poly writing letters to my mom. She was living in Bakersfield at the time. And so whatever, what twenty two twenty one years old something like that.

Was there a sexy talking there, No, no, just.

A matter of fact, I miss you and when we see each other, we'll go have to the sockhop or whatever they said. Oh, the side note to that story is my dad was complaining how hard his chemistry class was, and it was a specific physical chemistry class that he was taking at the exact time that my daughter was taking that exact class, and complaining about how difficult it.

Was at cal Poly.

It's wilde.

Finding letters written by your parents or grandparents can be pretty eye opening for people, whether it's the racy kind, the love letters, or just letters just to kind of give you an idea of how people communicated before there were things like cell phones, even before there were phones in some cases well.

And before you could send what we would consider now racy texts or what have you. It was a flowery it was people knew how to write.

Back then.

It was you could feel the anticipation of not being able to see somebody in the near future.

Yes, I've told you that there's.

An antique store near my house where they have boxes of these old letters, and I'll go in there and just be captivated reading the correspondence from you know, eighty years ago on those postcards. It's just fascinating to see what beautiful writers people once were, and now we just say things like lol duh.

The USO a couple of years ago got a collection of letters, three hundred or so letters that Lewis Weber wrote to his wife Francis.

He went by the name Speedy.

The first letter, the first wartime letter to his wife, he wrote on June ninth, nineteen forty two.

She was at home in the Bronx. He wasn't that far away.

He had enlisted in the army that day, and he was actually eating an Italian restaurant nearby before leaving.

Now this is something that would have been encapsulated in a text message these days. But he wrote to her while he's sitting at this restaurant, darling being shipped to Fort Dix. I'm writing this during my supper time. Excuse the card, love, Speedy, will write tomorrow.

This was a time when restaurants had postcards.

Also that so he goes to Fort Dix in New Jersey that night. He writes her on the tenth the next day and says, I want you to get word from me every day. He wrote her again on June seventeenth, and again on June nineteenth.

The letters kept coming from South Carolina, North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, Germany.

In all, more than three hundred letters written to his wife Francis at fifteen seventeen, jessup Avenue in the Bronx, and she saved every single one of those letters.

Michael Case with the USO says, I've never seen anything like it.

It's incredible.

They're sorting and digitizing them to try to piece together the couple's story.

What's fun is back in World War Two, if you were writing back to your family or whatever, the Army checked your letters. They wanted to make sure that you weren't divulging any secrets, either intentionally or accidentally. So army censors would go through and if they had to, they'd block out part of your letters.

But he knew that, yes, but the personal life went uncensored. His handwriting excellent. He wrote in one letter, I always said that I didn't care if the world knew how much I love you. Well, now the whole damn army will know. Knowing that they were reading his letters, right.

He wrote, just as sure as night must follow day, I'll keep missing you until I can come home and hold you in my arms once again.

You are always in my heart.

In another letter written from North Africa, he said, be good, and when this thing is over, we start where we left off by being so happy that people will envy us.

They said that they knew that there was some you know, spicy parts, intimate romantic racie, if you want to call it that. And what they said was a lot of his writing actually echoed what she had been writing in her letters. Now at this point we don't have any of Francis's letters.

We just have what Speedy wrote.

She did joke that she might get pregnant just reading his letters, Okay, funny, lady weird.

There are research specialists who look specifically at this kind of communication there, I mean, there's a there's such a rich value to handwritten letters like this, especially at a time that was so formative in our recent past of World War two. And they say that a lot of times, because you know, so many of our young men were overseas for very long tours, you know, years at a time. They had hundreds of letters, in some cases written by individual soldiers.

It's wild these were delivered anonymously, so they don't really know what happened with their relationship.

But we don't really know about their lives. They apparently had no Chill children.

In nineteen fifty, the US Census lists them still on Jessup Avenue there living with her widowed mother. She was working at the post office, and he was described as a watchmaker.

Yeah, we know they died. They passed away.

He died at the age of seventy eight back in nineteen ninety seven.

She lived a few years more.

She died at eighty seven in two thousand and five, and they're buried together in a cemetery there outside of Fort Lauderdale. But we don't know a whole lot else about them. But like you said, they didn't have any kids, So where who got these letters and where?

It must have just been through their estate that was just kind of sold off or whatever. Right, if they have no living relatives. It's interesting that they died five days apart, different years. But he died on a February nineteenth, she died on a February twenty fourth. You notice that he was twenty three went off to war when he wrote that first postcard at that restaurant in the Bronx.

Hers was.

Her father was a tailor. His parents were from what is now Ukraine, Biraktar.

I'm not sure that right.

That wasn't had nothing to do with anything. His father was a longshoreman. And then in nineteen forty the families lived about five blocks apart on the same street.

Which would explain why they knew each other. I mean, just that they were in the same neighborhood. Perhaps she would send him packages when he was overseas, Salami, Anchovy's gum, what.

A wonderful n salami and ritz crackers is the move.

So here's something also, this would be a great mystery to solve. In one of the messages, one of the letters he wrote, it apparently included a recording, what old fashioned primitive disc recording, and he wrote, if you want to hear what I've got to say, put it on the phonograph and listen.

Now we don't know where that is.

We don't know where the actual phonograph is, but that could you imagine what that would be. They talk about politics in these letters and the election in forty four. She was a huge Roosevelt person, and he wrote, the way you were rooting for Roosevelt, I wouldn't be afraid to bet that you would divorce me if I told you I voted for Dewey.

How funny is that we thought this whole polarization thing and politics creeping into relationships was new. She called him the life of the party, and she would criticize his spelling, which bugs him. He call her meatball and the girl in my dreams.

It's so funny that they can extrapolate from his writing what she would write in the letters back to him. They say, I mean because he references I got your letter, I got your letter, I got your left and so there's probably basically the same amount of letters that went the other direction from her to him.

We just don't know what they are.

But he would say he didn't like the fact that she would criticize his spelling.

I'm so mad.

This is a letter from Germany in nineteen forty four. I know very well that you didn't mean to hurt my feelings, but it so happens that you did. I'm not fortunate as you when it comes to brains. I guess I must have missed the boat.

The next day he felt better.

He said, yesterday I wrote you a pretty sarcastic letter, and today I'm back to normal again.

It's funny.

In June forty four, he was in France.

It was a couple of days after the D Day invasion, and he said, there must have been plenty of turmoil June sixth I could just see everyone who has someone or somebody in the forces over in England start hoping and praying that their loved ones were all right. In January of forty five, he wrote to her about the Battle of the Bulge, the one where Nazi forces smashed through the American lines in Belgium and Luxembourg. One of the last wartime letters he wrote July fourth, nineteen forty five.

Bye for now, baby, he wrote, Remember I love you and you only you are always in my heart, Speedy.

It's also important to point out they had nicknames like meat Beady and meatball.

What's your wife's what name?

What?

Bettichini?

No, I don't call her. I call her feel silly?

You're silly? Yeah, Oh that's good because.

She's a little squirrely. I don't know.

Are you a chocolate per I don't think.

I've seen you eat a lot of chocolate over the years.

I do like chocolate. I'd like dark chocolate. Dark chocolate is your favorite, that's my favorite.

Research obviously has gone gone to show that dark chocolate is I guess, the healthier of the chocolates, right, But there is something else about people who eat dark chocolate. It makes them less likely to develop diabetes. Now, it's not this is not a suggestion that you go eat dark chocolate just to avoid diabetes. That's not That's not what I'm saying. But if you are drawn to and prefer the dark of the chocolate, then you may be less likely to develop diabetes.

In the mid eighties early nineties, researchers began studying three groups of predominantly white health professionals, and every four years, the participants completed detailed diet questionnaires ask them how often they consume chocolate. Beginning in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven, the researchers tweak their questionnaires to ask how often they eat dark chocolate and milk chocolate, and then they followed the participant's health for up to thirty four years.

They said about ten percent of the people of the participants developed type two diabetes, and they adjusted for everything. They adjusted for lifestyle, exercise, alcohol, smoking, overall healthfulness, age, family history, everything they after they adjusted for all of that, they found that those people who consumed at least five servings of any type of chocolate per week had a ten percent lower risk of developing type two diabetes compared

So we should eat more dark chocolate all of the time.

I'm fine with that, okay, but I don't go to dark chocolate as my cre I have a craving for the that's not it. Never is that sentence finished with dark chocolate. You're more of a white chocolate guy. No, because it's white chocolate is just butter, which is you know, it has its has its qualities.

I'd tell you that.

I've seen you get into some white chocolate. There was a there was an article recently also about coffee. Yes, I don't know what I did with it.

And I said it out loud that I didn't have my cup of coffee or I didn't finish my cup of coffee this morning. So somewhere in this building there is about a three quarter cup full of coffee.

You just leave your I guess I did.

About you leave your tea bags everywhere too?

What do you mean you just leave them on the counter, You leave them in the office. You just I usually can take them out with me, throw them around.

Take them with me.

There was a study that was published in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine about how your.

Body responds to that cup of coffee.

So let's let's just peg of time. We'll say eight o'clock is your first cup of coffee? Right, Usually the half life of caffeine in a human adult body somewhere between five and six hours if you're a healthy adult.

That's how long it takes.

That's how long the caffeine affects you immediately, within the first five minutes. Usually it's just a placebo effect, right, Your caffeine isn't actually doing anything in those first few minutes.

But you have had experience with coffee to know that it is about to wake you up, about to go down, and so your body kind of releases those chemicals and responds to that knowledge, that knowledge that you have of what's going to happen when you have that cup of coffee. It's not till about twenty minutes later that you get the energy boost.

Yeah.

So again, if you had your first cup at eight, let's say, right about eight twenty is when you get that caffeine in your bloodstream. You start to start to feel the positive effects. But you also could overdo it.

I mean, if you have a rhythmia, you may want to avoid caffeine, or.

If you're just sensitive to caffeine and you have toxidrome a couple times a year because your body is.

Broken, the flow of caffeine in the bloodstream causes adrenaline to be released. It can sharpen our vision, which explains why those morning spreadsheets might be easier to look at after a cup of coffee or two.

Also, at the twenty minute mark comes the fleeting effect, a Russia euphoria.

They say, that's why your coworkers probably think you're the happiest at about eight twenty in the morning, because of that fleeting euphoria that you feel interesting.

I have that probably in the car.

Oh, no one gets to see it.

Now.

At about eight thirty, there may be a knock on the door boom. A small cup of coffee could go straight to your bladder and make you want to go pee. About an hour and a half in two, you are a cup of coffee, you may feel a knock on the back door, knock.

Knock, Feel the rumblings in the old uh, in the old mid drift.

Eleven am is when the crash comes. You've gotten through your emails, You've put together that spreadsheet. I'm just saying things that I think happen in real jobs, and that is when you get the slum.

Your TPS report is due.

Yes, sometimes a caffeine crash can include a headache, you'll see, tiredness, the inability to concentrate, someone's a little irritable.

They say that the ninety minute coffee rule works, that the best time to drink your morning coffee for optimal productivity is ninety to one and twenty minutes.

After you wake up.

After you wake up. Yeah, interesting.

And then about let's say four hours after the first cup, did you get a craving for another cup? A lot of people will have afternoon cups of coffee or tea, whatever it is. Coffee late in the day will blow you apart. And I don't mean in the back doorway, I mean the it will destroy whatever schedule you have planned.

Sometimes I can't sleep if I have coffee afternoon?

Is there?

Is it?

Noon?

Is that the cutoff? Free?

My cutoff? Yeah?

But I mean the only times I've tried it, or probably I get two or four. When I first started working with John and Ken, I would sometimes get a coffee on the way in and then I would be up till eleven midnight, which is much later than I'd like to go to sleep.

Which when you don't want to be up that late, it's frustrating.

It is frustrating.

It's another thing if you you know you're doing something that late and you want to be awake. But yeah, if you want to go to bed and you want to you know you have to get up early or something like that.

But you had your cup of coffee at two in the afternoon, you've been like listening to the Gary and Shannon Show.

You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio Lap