Rocky Patel The Edge Connecticut Howitzer

Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Nate. And I'm Mike. And we are smoking something rather large this episode. Large and in charge. We are doing the Rocky Patel Howitzer. Edge Howitzer. It is a 7x70 which is bigger than an inch. And this is the lighter wrapper. We have four edges in total to smoke. We have three Maduros. Two of them are the Howitzer size. One is the Connecticut which is what we have here. We have a Maduro and we have a regular size Torpedo, Robusto and then we have an Edge Fuma as well.

That's the same size. So another bundle. Alright, well we are going to fire these up. Yes, here we go. So initial thoughts. It's girthy. The thing is huge. It's borderline comical. I don't know if it's the same size, a little bigger, a little smaller than that Asylum 13 we smoked. Yeah, it's a... I know the Asylum 13 wouldn't fit in your V-cut. No, it would not. And this one did. Yes, so I feel like the Asylum 13 was a little, little bit, a little bigger diameter. At least the end was.

At least the end was. The start of the cigar is good. I like it. I'm expecting a good cigar from Rocky Patel. So despite the borderline humorous size of the cigar, I like a ridiculously huge cigar every now and again. It must be done. And we're actually in person. We are. And Mike was bartender and we've got some gin and tea. Gin and tea with a little bit of lemon. Which is different than gin and juice from what my friends have been telling me.

Yes. So now, I was watching a movie recently, as I tend to do. Yes. And in there, the character had a cigar and they took their lighter and ran it along the length of the cigar. And I was like, I've not seen that before. And so I was, before they lit it, you know, so they like wetted it and then kind of ran the lighter along the length of the cigar. It was a, this is a regular like Bic or Zippo lighter. It wasn't the torch. Sure. But I was curious if you knew what that might be. I might do that.

Never seen that before. I'm sure that somebody thinks it does something, maybe. Maybe it was just a cool thing to do in a movie. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Never heard of that. I know that I like cigars being lit by matches, as you know. Yes. I was very resistant to get a lighter for many years, as you know. But now I do. But now I've never heard of that. I know I've had a box years ago of cedar matches. And I really like the cedar matches with the cigar. And it's probably all in my head.

I don't know. Cedar's got its own smell, if anything. The sense of smell I've heard is the most closely attuned to memory and things. It was a cedar smell. And I don't know, it's kind of romantic. That's kind of why. I can find another box of it. Just my alone cigar cedar matches in solid needs. That's right. Yeah. Me and my spank bank. You took it there, not me. Most of our listeners are old enough to have had a spank bank back in the day. Oh, well, you know what?

Most of our listeners probably have to be because I mark each one of these explicit. So they'll at least have to be 18. So I'm sure they had something even if they don't call it the same term. Right. Back in the days before we had good internet, we had DSL. What is it now? The cum cloud? Cum cloud. Oh, Jesus. Nate's at my place today. And so here, up until two or three years ago, we only had DSL. You couldn't get regular internet. Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

Well, anything's better than dial-up. That's all I'll say. Anything is better than dial-up, yeah. That's all we could get for years and years and years. Yep. That was back when we still used the landlines because not everybody had cell phones and cell phones are crazy expensive to use. And you could only use the internet or the phone. You couldn't use them both at the same time. Right.

Unless you had extra lines brought in, which was even more expensive because then you were paying for two phone lines instead of one phone line. Oh, I remember a lot of people had two phone lines at their house so that one would always be open when their teenager was talking. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Not here. Not at my house. It was not at my house either. So, I don't know what you want to talk about tonight, today, this morning. I don't know. It's 4th of July weekend. It is 4th of July weekend.

It is 4th of July weekend. Well, you know what? We could talk about the new court cases because Roe versus Wade is taking a lot of energy. Spotlight. Yeah. Spotlight from the let's roll back America to 1943 or whatever it was. Right. But I think that the other court cases are more important. To be honest, I know it's not a popular thing to say potentially, but I think that the roll back of the Miranda rights, the roll back of the EPA specifically to this, but it's all government agencies.

These court cases don't just apply to one agency. It's every government agency is now going to have their regulatory authority rolled back. How about the prayer in school? The prayer in school. That's the 4th one. There's 4 big cases and I think that Roe versus Wade is the least big issue to be honest. You would have lost popularity points with me for saying that, but you've got this amazingly huge cigar and so your popularity is safe with me.

I say it's the least problematic issue because we live in a state where- There's an easy way for states to circumvent that. Right. It's not even a ban. It's just the states are going to be allowed to do what they want and the federal government could easily write a law and change it. It's the least long-term problem.

It's easiest, I think, easiest for the implications to be understood by most citizens and it's the easiest for them to get up in arms about, but it's also the easiest to change, fix. Yeah. The rolling back of Miranda rates is huge. Yeah. Not so much for you and I at this point in our lives, but it's a bigger deal for- Well, you never know. We already know our Miranda rates. What? That's what I mean. It's not that they revoked the rights.

They revoked the police having to tell the person that they just got done beating up. Right. That they have rights. Yes. You know what? Actually, I think that if we were to take all of these, with exception to maybe the prayer one, most of these or at least two of these four, two of these four or five- I think there's four big decisions, but there might be a few that I forgot about at this moment. You know, are kind of almost directly aimed at the poorer classes. Absolutely.

It's aimed at restricting the freedom of poor people. You know, if you're poor and not educated or you can't be educated, you're not going to know your Miranda rates. Right. That's just- Yeah. So real funny, Mike just dropped his nice ash in his lap and this was after his Sarah kind of chastised us to not make a mess of the room she just cleaned. And it is definitely on the floor. So if this is our last podcast, thoughts and prayers in school for Mike.

Yes. Yes. Yes. So anyway, the Miranda rates, yeah, that's a huge problem and it's not just poor people, it's young people. Well, and with all of the police, let's just say all the police headlines, you know, and in the news recently, giving them more freedom to be less accountable doesn't seem like a good thing. Well, not to you and I, but to the lords on the Supreme Court, it seems very good. Lords and ladies. Yes. Lords and lordettes. They might be lordettes. I don't know.

I haven't seen their junk. So I don't know what the term is for a female lord. I'm not, I'm not assuming their gender. The lords and gods. The gods. The lords and gods. So but yeah, I think that's a huge issue. I think that allowing a school official to host a prayer at a school event is bad module. Well, at a public school. If you're at a private religious school, no big deal. What I saw online was a lot of people that, you know, some people do take note of these other cases.

And so one of the things that came out of the prayer in school is, well, okay, if you want prayer in school, then anyone who's, you know, Muslim, anyone who's, you know, of a different faith, if you're a Satanist or, you know, whatever, be prepared to go to school and demand that the teachers show your child where Mecca is and, you know, which direction Mecca is. Oh, the one I heard was a shamanistic goat blood sacrifice after a football game on the football field.

So, because I mean, that's the whole thing is, you know, and we talked about this before on our podcast, but America was not founded on Christian principles. No, it was not.

And it doesn't matter how much proof that you have of this, those people that say America is a Christian nation, they like double down and go twice as hard and three times as hard on that all of the founding fathers were Christians and they founded, you know, this country on Christian ideals and they just can't, but they didn't, but you can't, you can't teach these people. And we shouldn't have it that way. There's a lot of people that think differently.

That's just, if we're going to have a functional society in the empire, which America is an empire, we have to come up with a governing system that allows for everybody to do what they want to do and not step on other people while they do it. Yes. And I think the, the Christians who think America is a Christian country and founded on Christian principles took like the one sentence where a lot of the early colonists came over to flee religious persecution.

And then they took that to heart saying, well, there's a Christian nation and that's not, not entirely what that means. No, at all. No. Well, the Puritans came to this country to flee persecution by the Anglican church so they could persecute people who didn't believe in their little subsect of Christianity.

So, and that's what a lot of these people, the people being the founding fathers wanted to get away from because they live in an environment where everybody had to be a member of the church and they didn't want that. But anyway, yeah, that's a huge issue too, because we know everybody who's a thinking adult knows Christians are going to force children to fucking pray in school. Yep. That's just the way it is.

It's going to be Christians because there's the majority in this country and they're, I mean, that's just, that's how it's going to be. And even if they're not the majority, they, for whatever reason, they are the most vocal religion, at least in this country.

But when you think about other religions, and my experience with this is in this country, you know, you can kind of tell who's a Jew, a Cidic Jew, because of the way they dress, you know, just as you can tell somebody who's Amish, you know, by them not responding to your friend request on TikTok. Right. Do they have friends on TikTok? I don't know. I've never been on TikTok. It's owned by China, so why would I go on it? I'm not a communist.

So you know, but some of these religions you can kind of tell based on garb or, you know, at the cookout, things they may or may not eat. But the most they'll ever say is, I can't do that because of my religion or I'm not allowed to eat that. And then that's the end of it. They're not sitting there trying to ask you if you've heard of the good stuff that Jesus Christ has done, you know, like for whatever reason the, it's not necessarily converting, but they call it like spreading the word.

Evangelizing. Evangelizing. There you go. But they're the ones most likely to evangelize. So they're the most likely to tell their kids to pray in school or to, you know, cause a fuss if they can't pray in school or for whatever reason. And I don't know why. I don't know. There's no ban from people praying at school. There was a ban before on school officials leading a prayer at a school sanctioned event.

And the issue becomes now this piece of shit coach is going to be leading a prayer and you and I as functioning adults know that if some kid doesn't follow what that coach wants, they are going to receive retribution based on their difference of opinion on religious belief than their fucking school teacher. Yes. So I grew up in the Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Made it to Eagle, praised Jesus because he invented the Eagle Scout rank. You talked about that on the Mount, right?

Sermon on the Mount. Yes. Because the Eagle High on the Mount. Yeah. But so like historically the Boy Scouts of America, that's not the first Boy Scouts group that was founded in England. And I can't remember his name now. Sorry. It's been a few years since I've been in that organization. Jesus Christy. Yes. But he was over in London and got lost in the fog. A Scout found him and refused payment for his service.

And so he was so enthralled by that that he went and met with the founder of the Boy Scouts over there, got permission to set one up here in America. But the American one has up until recently been very anti-homosexual and they just passed some laws, or not laws, but bylaws or rules of operation or whatever, within the organization to kind of open that up. But they're still very much, you must believe in a higher power.

They don't necessarily designate Christianity, but when you go to the church services on camp outs, they have like the Catholic service and like the Christian service. Then they have one called non-denominational. And I want to talk about the non-denominational one because I've only ever seen that one done right once. So the Catholic one is what you'd expect a Catholic one to be. And the Christian one is what you'd expect from, you know, kind of a Lutheran. So they're normal.

They're not really mouth breather. No, and they're not doing the, you know, they're not speaking in tongues. They're not, you know, I feel Jesus here next to me or whatever. You know, and it's a small portion of the camp. And most scouting groups are sponsored by churches and a lot of them will, you know, say grace before meal, but it's generally not overly specific. You know, may Cthulhu's tentacle come up and bless my piece of corn before I eat it. They don't do that kind of thing.

But the non-denominational one for most of my scouting career was just Christian, just plain Christian. And I went to one and I can't remember where it was, but it was a non-denominational one and they actually did have like legit non-denominational. It was readings from the Bible and readings from the Quran and readings from the Torah and readings from, you know, just a wide sampling of different religions. Well, those are three. Yes, that's three that I can remember.

But I thought it was neat because they had readings from other religious texts other than the Bible. And so when you're thinking about non-denominational thinking about trying to serve other people's faith, if that's something that almost any Christian would just stop and think, how can I serve somebody else's faith other than my own? Maybe we wouldn't have a lot of these issues in the world.

And that's not to say other faiths do it perfectly because there's a lot of, that's just being selfish, you know, and a lot of people are and that's okay. We understand that that's how it's going to be. But I thought it was neat that that was how it should have been, right?

For my entire scouting career is we should have, if somebody chose to go non-denominational, it should have truly been non-denominational or non-overarching religion and just here's something from the Bible, here's something from the Torah, here's something from the Quran, here's something from, you know, Buddhism, whatever it might be, just pick a sampling. You don't have to do every single religion, but, you know, pick the top ones, not just Christianity. That's good. There's one though.

Yeah. What were all the other ones? Were they just Christian? Yeah, Christian or Catholic. So, you know, but I don't know, maybe they were trying to, maybe as an organization, they were trying to distance themselves from overly catering to one religion as well. I know, you know, because organizations, you know, come and change and grow and leave and, you know, and a lot of times organizations are slow to adopt to modern times.

They can be, especially very large organizations, which the Boy Scouts have the same problems as many large organizations, but. Yeah. Interesting. So I think we're what, a third, fourth of the way through? I mean, it might be a quarter of the way through. It's good. It's good. It's one note, which I kind of expected from this big of a cigar, but, you know, it's good. It's good. It has, you know, I'd say the airflow is fine. It's fine. It's a big cigar. It's a big cigar. It has to be expected.

It's always interesting, you know, cigars and their air flows, because sometimes you grab one and you think, oh yeah, it's going to be real good and it's not, or, you know, sometimes it's real, real nice. But yeah, big cigar. I like it. Yep. It's good to smoke and shoot the breeze. Yep. So it's definitely enjoyable. Yes. Not the blood red moon or the CAO vanilla. Yeah. Bella vanilla. Yeah. Horrific. So, but yeah, Mike, Mike made us some drinks and he gave us metal straws.

And I just, the other day, yesterday, I had an experience with a paper straw, which rekindled my hatred for those. Why do you hate paper straws? They're fine. You don't want to let them sit in your drink for an hour. That's for sure. Because if you let them sit in your drink, or so we went to Chipotle and they have all paper straws. So I filled up my fountain drink, sucked it down, filled it up for the car ride.

And then the plastic lid where you put the straw in started to pinch the straw together so that, because it's paper. Let me get this right. Okay. They have a plastic lid. Yes. For a paper straw. For a paper straw. Yes. What's? And it's the same plastic lid that you punched the straw through. Right. You know, and it's got like the... So what are they gaining other than like... They got the Satan's butt hole. Yeah. Grabs your straw.

But what are they really doing that's better for the environment at that point? I'm sorry. Did you not hear the paper straw thing? They're fixing the environment. They have paper straws. Yeah, but they also have plastic lids. So what's the point? It's the hypocrisy of the thing, right? Yes. Like we did the paper straw thing. You can't be mad at us as a corporation now. Right. You can't be mad at this other company that doesn't do paper straws.

Yeah, don't be mad at us because we don't pay our workers anything. Yeah. So... Oh, sad. Well, you know. So I pinched it. It pinched it. And then it was like making this weird noise and it was getting soggy and there's pieces of paper coming off in my mouth. And just, you know, then I was like, well, I guess now I have to carry like a metal straw around with me everywhere I go in case somebody tries to pawn off a paper straw on me. Well, I guess that's progress in a manner of speaking.

Small price to pay. I guess so. Some would say. Some would say. Ugh. Awful. And then, yeah, they changed the ruling for the EPA. Yeah. That was our little EPA segue. That was a beautiful prayer. Now we talked about paper straws. Now we're talking about the EPA. Because we hate papers or I hate paper straws, but I don't hate the environment. Yes. I think there's a better way to save the environment than paper straws.

So the ruling, and I haven't looked into it, I know that they decided that the EPA could not regulate carbon emissions. But if the EPA can't regulate carbon emissions, what are they, you know, they've eliminated the ability for these agencies to regulate anything at that point because their argument was that because it wasn't explicitly in the charter for the organization, they couldn't regulate it. Well, I'm guessing that the FDA doesn't explicitly have regulation of...

Oxycontin. Yeah, Oxycontin. Yeah, exactly. That's a great one. Oxycontin didn't exist when the FDA came up. So now they can't regulate it. Is that what we're saying? You know, where are we? This is opening the door to corporate exploitation, which they already exploit the shit out of everything, which is what their purpose in existence is. I'm not saying that. It's their goals to exploit everything to the maximum. But yeah, it's just not... That's a bad road to go down, boy.

What a world without regulation, which I know when you were younger, you were a big fan of a world without regulation. Yeah, to a certain extent. A world without regulation is a world where buildings don't fucking stand. That's a world where your buildings light on fire. That is a world where there's nothing. If you don't have regulations that companies have to follow, they will not do it. They just will not do it.

Well, and part of it is they will not do it under our economic model, which a lot of people like to stand and scream that it's capitalism. I tend to prefer the term corporatism or consumerism. Well, some argue that monopoly is the end result of the capitalist system. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm no wizard, so I can't go into the future and find out, right? But I do know that ideally, if it were capitalist, capital would be the thing that would drive everything else.

Consumers would have power, therefore by not buying certain products and not doing certain things. But now with all the government bailouts of companies, you can't actually vote with your dollar because if they're going to go under, then they just petition the government and the government gives them your money anyway from taxes. I was just looking at the airline industry today. They got a $54 billion bailout. And for that, they were supposed to keep their pilots and other crew members on.

But what they ended up doing. On what? Leave? They were supposed to pay them. Yeah, basically pay them and keep them around, right? Well what they ended up doing is taking the $54 billion, doing stock buybacks and encouraging their employees to retire or quit. So now we don't have enough pilots and air people and traffic control people.

At every level, they've had all these retirements, early retirements, instead of using the goddamn money that they were given by the government for what they were supposed to do. And there's going to be no punishment for that. Nobody will suffer any consequences other than people who want to fly. Do you want to fly, Mike? No, I don't need to go anywhere. Good times. Stuff like that is just, I mean it's a story of our corrupt system. And none of these bailouts.

I don't think any of them ever had to be paid back either. No, they were just money given to them. The little talked about thing about the end years of the Trump administration was that they inflated the money supply by 33% because they just handed money to corporate interests to keep their stocks afloat after 2020 had the crash. And we are going to see, we have to see 33% inflation because 33% of the money supply was printed in a fucking year. That's way before Biden took over and all this.

And I'm not a fan of Joe Biden. I'm not going to defend his policies, but consequences are consequences. And it's the last two administrations, well, it's been more than just the last two administrations that have had the same faulty policy. This is the accumulation of longstanding bad policy that helps the rich people maintain their power.

And speaking of the rich wanting to maintain their power, did you hear the little nugget that came out of the January 6th hearings where Trump knew they were going to be armed protesters, encouraged them to go anyway, and then wanted his security team to drive him to the Capitol so he could storm it as well? Yes, I heard something like that. Yes, I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate information. I don't know either. It's a wonderful story. I can tell you that.

Other than, you know, it's probably in line with him as a person for him to do such a thing. When January 6th happened, I actually sat down on the couch and watched it on TV and I was drinking beers. Yeah, I was really enjoying, I was like, oh, this is so enjoyable. And it was great. And then Trump would come out and like inflame the crowd even more. He's like, now a message from the president to calm down the protesters. And it's like, you're all good people. Keep on doing what you're doing.

Okay. Yeah, and I think a big part of that was probably because, you know, the people storming the Capitol looked an awful lot like him in terms of, you know, skin color and class. And when there was protests over Roe versus Wade, Fox News was in a conniption fit calling it an insurrection and some sort of like, you know, affront to justice or something. And it's like, hmm, par for the course. When we start seeing federal officials getting French haircuts, then you can say it's an insurrection.

And Democrats calling what happened on January 6th an insurrection is way overblown. When I started seeing French haircuts on TV, that's when I'm going to say, okay, now we're in insurrection mode. And I may or may not have an opinion about it at that time. What would you? And I guess you could just, if you don't know what a French haircut is, you can Google it. But because we don't know either. You know what?

I just really think that French people, especially French people from the 1790s had really good hairstyles. Especially those in power. It's just a cool term I heard. I don't know what it means. All I know is that I got wood, rope and steel in my house. Would you? Yeah. And a grinder. An angle grinder. I do have an angle grinder. Yes, I do. So would you call the January 6th thing then like an attempted coup? I would just call it a riot. It was just a riot.

They definitely had kind of a political agenda. Yeah, a riot has a political agenda too. I mean, would you call it? No, I wouldn't call it an insurrection. It's not like they were attempting to take over the government. They were just trying to harass the government. Well, I guess it depends on how. And we weren't there and we don't know and we don't know what was all said by the then president who soon did not be president.

Because a lot of people seem to believe that this happened because they were trying to keep the presidency in Trump's hands. And he was still president, but not going to be president. And so to try and keep one person in power against the voting system, regardless of if you like the voting system or not, I mean, it is how it is. It is how it is. You know, that's a separate issue. It's a separate issue.

And there's a lot of other voting things that you could go and armed riot over to maybe make some changes rather than trying to keep the person in power in power for longer, because that's not what I wouldn't call it an insurrection because they weren't like they weren't actually taking over any government buildings that mattered. Right. And they didn't even take over that government building. It just ran through the hallways for a couple of minutes and then left. Took some Instagram photos.

Yeah. Behind the desk, you know. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that one guy didn't that one guy throw like a flag and speared somebody or something. Oh, sorry. I can do that with Braveheart. Oh, yeah. An actual that's an insurrection legit actual thing that people could do, you know, not like storm the Capitol building where nobody is ever hardly. Right. They had some talking heads, even if, you know, go to the go. I don't know, go to your local news station and take that over.

You have more chance of influencing politics that way. I just like the idea that pirate radio. This is related. All right. Pirate radio back in the day was a big deal for rep around radicals and stuff. But now there is no such thing because they can just do it over the Internet. Yeah. Largely. You can just do a podcast. You can just do a podcast. And I listened to a podcast a while back after Roe versus Wade first got leaked a month and a half ago.

And they talked about 20 different ways on how to induce an abortion without going to the doctor. So this information is out there. And it was a nurse who was not telling people how to do it, but it informing them that it is possible to induce an abortion by a certain methods. Yes, I think with the Roe v. Wade and it's the same with legalizing drugs is you want to make these things that people are going to do anyway. And you just want to make them safe for people.

And that's ultimately what it comes down to is the people that want or need an abortion will find a way to do it regardless. Yes. And why not just make it safe? People who want to smoke weed or eat edibles or do crack or whatever, they'll find a way to do it. So why not just try and make it as safe as possible for them?

Not saying that we need to be encouraging certain behaviors, but that's part of the government is supposed to maybe look out for the citizens and not tell the citizens how to live their lives. You want to do crack? Great. Go to Walmart, go to the crack aisle and you buy whatever strength crack you want. And you know what strength it is, somebody made it in a lab just for you.

And if you want to take too much of it, that's on you because it's right there in the package of how much you should be taking. Right. Probably none. But the spice head phenomenon really should inform everybody that US policy is the one we have right now is backfiring. Some people might not know who are listening, but spice is sold legally in stores and it gets you high and it's very similar to PCP, I guess. What is this? Spice. They're like bath salts. They're like bath salts.

Yeah, it's called bath salts. Well, they made it called spice, like in Dune. And they've made it called bath salts and all these, I call them spice heads. Okay. That's what they're called is spice heads. Is the spice must flow. That was the spice must flow. And it is fucking terrible. And it turns people into zombies. It's not good for your brain to be smoking these weird chemicals made in the factory, not when you can go out into a field and pick a flower and smoke it and feel good.

Dandelions he's talking about. Yeah. Not my field. A field. Very near here though. Or not. When I was growing up, there was all these ditches around this area on the dirt roads. They all had ditch weed in them. Every one of them. It was crazy. The McCuffs never did a damn thing about it, but that was before September 11th. Yeah. And ditch weed, it's hard to track that stuff down. Right. Because the ditch is legally city property or highway property. It's county property on the county roads.

They're not going to go out and burn it. They don't care. I had a, oh, I'm trying to, oh yeah. It just happened to down here, somebody was walking and found like some syringes in the ditch. Here? Yeah. And they called the sheriff for these syringes in the ditch. And it's like, what is the sheriff going to do? He's going to come down, say, please don't waste my time. Put those in a Sharps disposal container.

Like you think he's going to run DNA on these syringes to track down the heroin users or like they have more impressive things to do. You know, like, I mean, that's part of the problem too is we can, we can, you know, pooh pooh the cops all day long. But at the end of the day, a lot of times they have too much to do and they've got people that call for the most insane reasons. And you know what? Tracking down the owner, you know, heavy air quotes of hypodermic needles in the ditch.

No, that's not how that works. You know? Well, Sarah was managing apartments in Minneapolis. She had to do needle watch and she would sweep up needles every morning and every evening because people would just bang right there, you know, right on the front step of her apartment complex, you know, right?

You know, I mean, and so for anyone out there who's doing this, the way that stuff works is you can't just grab, you can't just grab DNA, put it into the computer and have it spit you out the name. Like that person's DNA has to be on file somewhere for some other reason. And the same with fingerprints. Like it's not just some magic thing.

And a lot of TV shows, crime TV shows and crime movies, they use that as a convenient plot point to move it forward because, you know, otherwise it's a very boring movie because there's like 16 months, 18 months where they're sitting around, banging their head against a wall and can't catch a break in the case. And you don't want to see that in a movie or form of entertainment. But you have to have that data somewhere to cross reference it. You can't just, oh yeah, it's DNA.

It's so and so and they live here. It's like, well, that's a whole bunch of different databases that suddenly have to talk to one another. And I can tell you from corporate America, that's not how databases work. Right. We're about halfway through the cigar. That's a good halfway segment. This is a good halfway segment. We are, it's still good. It's actually getting better. I do. It is getting better. And it's great. It's getting richer and earthier, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know about the Connecticut's, but for such a large cigar, it makes a lot of sense to have a lighter, lighter wrapper. I'm excited to try the darker one. Yeah, me too. Me too. We're drinking a jiggerage in a jigger, a lemon juice, a splash of club soda and tea, cold tea. Yes. Which was cold, cold brewed tea. So for the water I have here, I like to cold brew with Irish breakfast tea, but that's because I have soft water. And then I like to hot tea with Scottish breakfast tea.

So there we go. That's a subtle little factoid for all you tea drinkers out there who don't haven't done your research yet. The style of water you have at home should determine the type of tea you're buying, not the other way around. What if you filter it? If you filter it, yeah, you have to do a more modern tea blend then, because I don't filter my water here. We filter ours, but we live in the city and we get city water. And I don't want those damn Russkies stealing my essence. Right.

That's not a slur on my part. That's from Dr. Strangelove. Yes. So I'm just quoting a movie. Does your filter actually filter out, what the hell is it, fluoride? Fluoride. Does it filter out fluoride? It does out a lot of things. I don't know if it filters out the fluoride. There's a whole subset of people that believe fluoride makes for a docile population. Yes. Which I never had fluoride as a child. That's why you're not docile. I guess so. I guess so. My buddy James, you know James.

I think I met him once. Oh, okay. He's a wild man. He came and helped us move, I think, and that was the only time I ever met him. Rooster hair, right? You know what? It was so long ago. I don't know if you remember. There was just some strange guy there and he was helping us move, so I was happy. Yep. Then I was telling my Sarah that you've been talking about James fairly frequently and she was like, well, you met him. He helped us move that one time. I was like, oh, that's who that was.

It was a one-time thing, so it's like I never talked to him again, never saw him again. He kind of left my memory. He's a wild man. He lives 20 minutes from here on a little tiny lake. It's not a little tiny lake, but it's a lake and it's connected to a river, the big river, and he doesn't have electricity or running water or anything. He pumps water up. Yeah, it's crazy. He's a wild man, but he actually got himself a new place way up north, like on the border. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

His is a spouse, she lives in a Winnipeg area. Oh, okay. He wants to be closer, as close as he can be. Not that it's too far now, realistically, but he wants to be even closer. He wants to be, I think his new place is only like seven miles off the border or something. Every little bit helps or whatever. Maybe we'll talk not on the podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some interesting things I wanted to unpack there, but maybe not for our listeners. Yeah, maybe not for the listeners.

We try to respect people's privacy. Absolutely. There's much we can do. Well, we're being, it's like, you know we live in Minnesota, you know I live in northern Minnesota, so the fact he's going to move seven miles from the border, it's like, okay, well. Yeah, it's not Mexico. Yeah, there's like hundreds of miles of border, so. Yeah, I'm not trying to protect his location. I just had different questions, but also privacy and whatnot. Absolutely, absolutely. He hasn't chosen or been invited yet.

No. To be a guest. No, he has not. And maybe one day he will and maybe one day he will share his story and we'll get the wild story of James. He is a wild man. And maybe we won't. He's got a great picture of him with Hillary Clinton too. Okay. So apparently she is a real person. He verified that. He didn't think that she was a lizard person. Did he check for the crease, the line, to lift up the mask? That's you'll have to ask him. Because he'll have to ask him.

I would love, I'm not saying James is, because I don't know. But I would love to get one of those really devout conspiracy theorists on the show. And yeah, like Alex Jones, devotee. Anybody. Just, you know, you don't even have to be famous. No, no, I'm not talking about the real Alex Jones. Like somebody who's like. You know, the moon is hollow or Hitler still alive in Argentina or. Anybody who has a subscription to Infowars. That's good enough for me. If you subscribed to Infowars.

Anyone who watches Ancient Aliens, not ironically. Oh yeah. Oh, I used to work with a guy. And some of the stuff on there is really like fascinating, but it's also if you sit there and you kind of like, wow, they're even like a really fascinating story. But then you're like, but they're just going off of like a very bad misinterpretation of this one little like drawing. And they're like, yes, the Aztec rocket man or whatever.

And somebody is going to, somebody is going to ping me and say, it's not Aztec. It's you know, whatever, you know, but it's like a little like carving in stone. That's thousands of years old. That now to modernize looks like a rocket ship, but is perhaps a penis or something else. Or maybe it's, you know, Jeff Bezos is rocket ship. Maybe they were time travelers and they knew a giant penis would be flying to the sky in a ship of all things. I know. I worked with a guy.

He was Native American and he lived all over the country. He spent time up in Alaska in the Inuit villages and he was originally from North Dakota, but he also spent time on the West Coast. And he spent a lot of time with natives, obviously being a Native American. His mother was a teacher and all that growing up. So he got, he loved the ancient alien show and he always told me he's like, all this is is the native bullshit. But in Egypt, he's like these fucking Egyptians.

They're telling him these crazy nonsense stories. They know their lies, but they're going to tell Whitey that because then they get money from him. Yeah. He's like, you go to an Inuit village up in Alaska. Yes. These guys don't know any magical secrets. They're just going to spout some bullshit because Whitey gives them money. Well, and that's another danger of religion.

If you don't know the groundings of it or the basis of it, it's very easy to misinterpret it or to do something different with it. Absolutely. I think we might've talked about this on another episode, but like religion, when it first came out, when it was first released, not first released, but when man first invented it, it was invented as a way to explain their natural environment and things that were happening. And they didn't know about different, what would you call it?

Like forces of nature. Yeah. They didn't understand that. They didn't know, and science, and I saw a great little thing on dinosaurs, because we talked about George Washington. The first fossil wasn't discovered until after his death, so he had no idea about dinosaurs. And it was the first person to dig up a Triceratops skull just hunched over going, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. You wouldn't know what it is. How would you know? Nobody knew about that until he found the skulls and things.

Religion was a way to kind of explain life or to codify certain good suggestions. There's a whole chapter in the book, or there's a whole book in the Bible of keeping yourself clean and safe from diseases before they knew what diseases really were. But they had all of these ideas of what they might be, and they put that in the Bible to try and keep people clean and healthy and living for a longer period of time.

I've heard speculation that's where the restrictions on eating certain animals because they were living in a desert environment. And that's also where You Shall Not Lay with a Woman on Her Period comes from, because they weren't sure they didn't know, and things like that. Do we have more Supreme Court rulings that we wanted to discuss? No, we talked about the prayer, the EPA thing. We did a whole episode on Roe v. Wade. Miranda rights. I know you were super enthusiastic about that one.

Great timing, by the way, Supreme Court, to revolt people's Miranda rights right before you knew there was going to be a bunch of protests and potentially riots. We got them. We got them. We'll see. We'll see. I'm kind of... This is the second today. Yeah, that's going to be another challenge, I think, that'll... Anyone who doesn't get read their Miranda rights. Right. I think that's going to go right back to the Supreme Court. Oh, for sure.

And then, while I was specific, I was going to say, what's going to happen two days from now? Are we going to see massive protests? I'm not predicting anything. I don't really know. I don't know. I've seen a lot of people, I think, the general attitude for most people, most sane people that aren't on one or the other extreme of the political spectrum, because really it's the extremes that are the most vocal. And the majority of people fit somewhere kind of in the middle.

I might have strong opinions on one thing, but I'm willing to listen to and hear somebody else's opinions on that same thing, and maybe we can work together to come up with a way that we can both be okay with whatever the thing is. But a lot of the extreme people are the ones that maybe storm Capitol buildings and then make a bunch of, I don't know, what you would call it, poor me posts or something online.

But I think that a lot of people, even in the mass population, the majority of those people kind of feel like maybe the 4th of July this year should just be canceled if you're taking these rights away and taking... That's just on a national level. Okay, so the states have their own kind of say with Roe v. Wade and some other things, but it's just we're going backwards, you're going kind of into weird... We're going into the Green Book, boys. That's exactly what we're doing.

Yeah, going into some strange territory here. I'd like to see what Hare Valtz has to say about the Miranda rights issue and things like that, because the states can still change that. The state government could require cops in the state jurisdiction to do that. And the commandant, he's not really pro-freedom, that guy. Most politicians aren't. No, he is not. And maybe he will break his current losing streak on that issue. Maybe. I heard...

Well, I saw and I didn't fact check this or verify this, but there was some pictures of Biden being very anti-abortion in his younger years, and now he's calling it a travesty to the nation. It is a fact that he has been anti-abortion up until... Anti-abortion or pro-abortion? Anti-abortion. Oh, anti-abortion, right. Yeah, anti-abortion up until the day before he ran for president as a serious candidate. He's the last... I know we've said it so many times. I've said it so many times.

He's the last dixie-crat in the government. He's a fucking racist and he wants abortion banned and he is... He is every bit of Republican as the Republicans, he just happens to be in the Democratic Party. He only wants abortion... He wants to roll back Social Security. He just nominated somebody to the Social Security Board who wants to end the Social Security program. So he is as conservative as they can be. So what do you think about Social Security?

I think that the government, because of its malfeasance, has not done what it needs to do to make that program functional for the last 40 years. Or longer even. Well, potentially longer, but at least the last 40. If they just lifted the cap off of Social Security payments, number one, it would be resolved instantly. Number two, corporate persons, those corporate human beings should have to pay. And there should be no cap and they should have to fucking pay.

Because corporations are human beings and they have all the rights of people and blah, blah, blah, blah. So hey, we don't have to read corporations and Miranda rights. We don't have to read corporations and Miranda rights now. I think in general, helping citizens be set up for when they're not able to work due to age and things like that, Social Security, is one of those things good in theory, I think, in practice. Just because of we have the government we have, it just would never work.

Well, unless you could somehow... It worked 80 years ago when we had a government that was responsive to people's demands. But we haven't had a government responsive to people's demands in a very long time. So we're paying into Social Security. Yes. And that is supposed to be... that is currently paying for current Social Security people. And then the next coming generation will be paying for Social Security.

I almost wonder if it wouldn't be better to set up a government backed 401k or IRA or something that has... They've been talking about doing that crap forever. But then you can check your balance. You have a little more... there's more transparency. You also are subject to the market and people lose everything on the market. Yes. But it would be government backed and they would only put it in government approved funds or they could do government bonds or whatever it would be.

It wouldn't necessarily grow to the same rate as a individual 401k or an IRA would because you wouldn't be actually managing that money. But it would be there. You'd have an account, you could go in and you could check it and you could see your return every year. And you could say, hey, it's good. I know it doesn't take into account if you live longer than the actuary tables and things like that, but there's got to be more transparency, I think. Right.

I mean, they've raided the Social Security fund more than once. So even with the money that they took from it then, if that was to be put back into the pool, that would solve the problem. Like I say, we have such a corrupt government, has no responsiveness to anything people want. And these elected officials are buffoons. Lauren Boebert, have you heard her? We'll talk about her after we get done. But yeah, I mean, I like the idea of Social Security. I like the idea of having socialized medicine.

Having socialized medicine with the government we have now, they're not very responsive to people's demands and there's very little accountability as far as the elected officials go. So the only way that that could be viable is if they removed it from the power of the politicians to the point to where it ran efficiently, which a lot of government agencies are, depending on the size, efficient and some are inefficient. It all depends. And they're not necessarily designed to be efficient.

No. And there's a lot of room there to take something that is efficient and make it not. I'd be curious, I don't know if you've done, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I'm not sure if you've done any research into other countries that have universal health care. I have. And if you have one country that you think absolutely nails it. I think that the English system nails it. I think the English system nails it.

They have a public education system so people can get educated at low or no cost to themselves. And they have a GP general practitioner system nationwide to where your local doctor, you can go there and it costs you nothing. And that general practitioner gets a salary from the government and the government sends out a general practitioner out to some bung fuck island to take care of the 150 people out in the middle of no man's land.

And they have enough doctors because you can go to school for free anyway. So if you want to be a doctor, you can be a god damn doctor and it won't cost you anything. And that's all the way through college or what our college is. What they call it secondary. They have a private college system and they have a public college system and they have a private medical system and a public medical system. So they have public hospitals. So you can go become a doctor for free, close to free.

Or close to free. Or you can go to a private school, which if you're rich you can go to Cambridge or do whatever and they have two separate kind of systems there. And they have two separate medical systems too because they have private medical insurance. So a lot of corporations, if you have a corporate job, they'll give you health insurance to allow you to bump up your coverage.

Which you're not not covered under the public system but you're not going to be getting mints on your pillow when you're in the hospital. You know what I mean? It's bare bones. They don't give mints on pillows in this hospital, in this country. If they did they'd charge $700 for it. Because a nurse had to walk it from the cupboard to the pillow.

That's the excuse for charging so much for Tylenol and ibuprofen is because you have a medically trained professional handling that to deliver it to where it needs to go. Yeah I've heard lots of things where, and I just read one the other day, where a person had a malignant, right? So it's non-spreadable or whatever. They had a growth on themselves and it wasn't really a danger but it was painful and everything and they were moving to Norway or something.

It was going to cost tens of thousands of dollars here or more to have that removed and treated. They went to Norway and it cost them a grand whopping total of $30 to take care of that.

And I think part of the problem is the people that say universal healthcare is bad don't understand the financial strain put on a country and government by people who don't have access to healthcare and therefore don't take care of themselves and then go on these other programs anyway, but end up being a lot worse for the wearer because they didn't go in initially to get it treated right away.

And if you have insurance and if you have medical care and you have a problem, you should be incentivized to go in right away because that's when it's easiest to catch, not always easiest to catch, but if you can catch it early, it's a lot easier to treat in most cases and it's a lot cheaper to treat because it takes less intense actions. And there's an argument, oh, people will be going all the time.

Well, if you have a GP or one doctor, that's to get your primary doctor, but you have to go to your primary doctor first in most systems. They know who's the problems. They know. They can run you in and out. They know. They're going to weed it out. They're going to weed it out. They're going to spend 15 minutes on you and that's going to be in and out.

If somebody's a hypochondriac and they go in because they learned about monkeypox or whatever, which I guess we can't call it monkeypox anymore because it's derogatory to monkeys or something. You're fist-fucking me on that. You're not telling me the truth. No, that is the truth. It goes against the World Health Organization's naming conventions. You can't name something after an animal or a continent or whatever. That's why we can't call it the bat virus or whatever, the corona.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or the other names. Yes. Yes. Which were hilarious, by the way. I thought it was funny. We're not mentioning those. I thought it was very funny. It was. Come on. I'm not going to say that the W word, but it was hilarious. Only because people got triggered so hard. Yeah. It was so funny. The reaction to it was funnier than the name. The name was ridiculous and childish, but the reaction was hilarious. But if you have a hypochondriac, the doctor knows. The doctor knows.

In my job, it's the same way. There's people that complain about certain... We know who they are. We know who they are. It's like, I'll just call them back and talk to them and get some details and be like, all right, come on now, fella. Come on now, fella. Well, if you have educated doctors that aren't in the back pockets of prescription pill companies, big pharma companies- Well, big pharma, it's a lot harder for big pharma to exist in a system like that because the doctor gets a salary.

Well, the doctor gets a salary and the doctor will then prescribe what works because in a lot of those countries, big pharma cannot market directly to the consumer, to the end user. There's two countries where drug companies can market. In the Western world, modern world. I shouldn't say Western, modern world because the modern world is no longer Western. It's a global society amongst first world nations, which is also thrown on. It's New Zealand and us. That's it.

They have a universal healthcare system in New Zealand, so it's like they don't need to ban it because there's no reason for them to advertise because people can't ask their doctor for AstraZeneca products or whatever. Well, they can, but the doctor's not necessarily going to- The doctor's not going to necessarily give it to them.

But here, it's like the drug companies that have the money to run the advertisements have the money to, I'm not going to say bribe, not outright bribe, but to incentivize doctors to prescribe their pill over another pill because- The doctors are busy. They get sent a pamphlet from Pfizer about how great their drug is. It's like, well, they don't have enough time to do research on every single version of that drug.

If you watch the mini series on Oxycontin called Dope Sick, Michael Keaton's in it. It's incredibly well done. It's all based on the true story of Oxycontin and how they would not only market to people, but they would go and send salespeople who were incentivized to be salespeople and force, I'm sorry, convince these doctors to prescribe this miracle drug that they just invented. They told them it wasn't addictive. Yep. It was the non-addictive opioid. I remember that.

They incentivized the salespeople and they gave the salespeople all these big trips and stuff and, hey, pump your numbers up and that sort of thing, put a little more pressure on this doctor. They also released this pill and trials into the poorest counties they could possibly find. Which is this whole country, this whole territory up here. Yep. But they did a lot of it in mining Virginia and the Carolinas and stuff like that. So I grab my Virginia here. That's mining. That's hell.

Did I ever tell you the story about going up there? We went over there for dinner, Sarah and I did. Just over to the mine or what? We went to Hibbing and we drove through Virginia to get to Hibbing. I was like, you want to swing through Virginia? She said, what the hell we want to do that? I'm like, well, that's the Oxycontin capital of Minnesota. At that time, it was the number one place for Oxycontin. She looked at it and it was just like grain elevator tipped like 45 degrees.

Just a shit hole. She's like, I would never want to go to that place. Hey, name it. Grained elevator of Hibbing, Virginia. So come and take pictures with it. Right. Yeah. They have like the Ranger, the Iron Ranger, the big tall. I don't know if you've been to Hibbing lately, but I was up there once, but I don't. Okay. Yeah. They got a big tall iron statue. The only thing I remember is how big those tires are on those dump trucks for the mines. They're freaking huge. Huge vehicles.

They're ridiculously huge when you get up there. Down down Hibbing is really nice too. Oh, okay. I wish that all the downtowns up here were like that. They have real businesses like insurance brokers. People actually go downtown to conduct business. Yeah. Hibbing is really nice. They had a bar. We went to the brewery there and they had like the patio bar. Beautiful area. Yeah. I wish that- Not every downtown is created equal.

No, no. Where we currently live, we don't really like the downtown, the town that we live in. The town that we used to live in, we still just love that downtown even though we don't necessarily want to live there in that town. Not for any reasons really, other than it's one of the hip suburbs for younger families to move to and so housing prices are higher than anywhere else, but the downtown is great. They've got a record store. They have two breweries now, antique stores.

They used to have a movie theater, second run movie theater, which was nice, but yeah, not every downtown is created equal. No. They have ups and downs. The downtown here is a lot better than it was. It used to be real hell. Well, they've tried to revitalize it and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Now, I can't remember what we were talking about. Oh, I don't know. We were talking about conspiracy theorists for a while. Miranda Wrights. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. Corporations.

Yeah, corporations suck. We're talking about the healthcare system. You know what? If you're screaming at your podcast device right now and you remembered what we were talking about. We were talking about health insurance. We don't want a medical system. Yeah. Yeah. So England, do you like? Yeah. England seems to work out all right because it's a mixture of private and public and Americans love their corporate fucking fascism.

So without having that release valve of corporations being able to profiteer at the upper levels. Well, I went into the clinic two times because I was having issues, sicknesses, which I've pinpointed the cause of now and am now good. But I went in twice and I think one time I met with a doctor and one time it was just with a nurse practitioner. And so I feel like for the English model, one of the things would be, well, there's too many doctors then you have too many doctors.

The market saturated with doctors. Well, you know what? A doctor has more education than a nurse practitioner. It's almost the same as teachers. It's been proven that teachers and students learn better in smaller class sizes, but for smaller class sizes, you need more teachers. And to get better health care, you need more doctors because then they can see more people. And you're not in the waiting room where you can catch every sickness everybody there has.

And now it's a little different because in still most of our clinics and hospitals and things, you have to wear a mask still despite mask mandates being lifted almost everywhere else. And that's probably for the best because where do you see people go? Hospital. Where do I not want to catch whatever everybody else has? For what the mask is going to do, whatever it's going to do, if it's going to work, it's going to work there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I think we can all agree.

I went to the doctor's office last spring. I want to say I had to go take a COVID test. The guy had the doorman had to call the police on somebody because they were melting down because they had to wear a mask to come into the doctor's office. Yeah. It's like, dude, you are what is your problem? Yeah. I mean, they have people on ventilators in here. Yeah. You are you're entering a place where sick people are like, of course, they want everybody to wear a mask. That's just the way it is.

And you know what? It probably should have always been that way. You know what I mean? Potentially. I mean, think about it. Realistically, the nurses and stuff, they all wear masks in there. If you're in your private room in a hospital, do you need to wear a mask if you're sick? Probably not. I mean, you know, the scrubbers and things on their ventilation. But if you're in the waiting room going to the waiting room, they want to introduce whatever you might have.

Nor do you want whatever anybody else in the waiting room might have. They could have a super contagious disease. Right. They could have not monkeypox. Yeah. It's not super contagious. Primate pox. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I don't know. It's interesting. As a cigar note, I'm about a quarter of the way. I have a quarter of the way left. Yeah. We're three quarters through. Yes. And this cigar has become very spicy. Very not sour. No. But spicy.

Yes. I wasn't thinking about it because I was thinking more about health care and people that claim they can't breathe if there's a small piece of fabric over their face. Oh, yes. And stuff. But yeah, I you know, this one's really good. Yeah, it is. It actually had that flavor change that most good cigars have. Yeah. And we're smoking a Rocky Patel. So yeah, it should be good. Really, it should.

So we I was shooting the breeze with one of my longtime bowling associates about the old days when we could smoke in the bowling alleys. And because he was my smoke buddy would sit in the back of the back of the set. And I had smoked a cigar and he'd chain smoked cigarettes. Yeah. And he'd have a cigar every once and again. And we're talking about that. And I'd like to ask you, since we're smoking a cigar, do you think that they should have a smoking man like they have?

Hmm. A very, very interesting question. Because we talked about it. My experience is with smoking, I remember going to the Perkins and as a kid and they'd always ask smoking or not smoking. You have to wade through all the shitty cigarette smoke to go and eat. And then you'd be in a little room like this that didn't really stop any smoke from traveling back. And I remember we would go to the White Tails Unlimited banquet with my grandfather and in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

And there was a big banquet hall and almost everyone there was smoking. And as a child, that was gross. And I'm sure as an adult, it's gross because cigarettes, secondhand smoke, just stink. They stink and they're just terrible. However, with that being said, and having gone to Tobacco Grove by us, the cigar lounge, you can smoke cigars that you buy there, there. But they've got a phenomenal ventilation system in that building.

And I would say that if you're not having people under 18 in your establishment, at certain hours even, bars, some bars are family friendly to 6 or 8 p.m. or something and then you need to be 21 plus. And if they put in a ventilation system, I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to smoke inside. Bars are really never family friendly. I was at a bar for breakfast this morning and somebody brought the child in and this dad and his buddy were pounding crowned cokes.

Well, some bars are more family friendly than others. Yes. Because there's some that just have the scantily clad women all over and they've got the loud music and that's just all day every day. And some bars are, let's just say, with air quotes, classier, not that that signifies anything with class or with prices of drinks. But this place was classier in the sense that it was serving breakfast and liquor.

There's more bars down in the Twin Cities that you go early for a Bloody Mary and you get a phenomenal breakfast. They've got a great kitchen. They just happen to be a bar. Around here, a lot of the places you have a restaurant bar. That's what is there. So everybody has to go to it because there's only one place. But I would just say that I think it's fine if it's adults only and you put in a ventilation system.

I don't want to go back to having to wade through the Perkins cigarette stale smoke, gross everything. I said this at the time and I still agree with my thought then was that they should not have banned smoking inside. They should have regulated air exchange rates and come up with some sort of formula for places that wanted to have smoking to have proper ventilation to limit the secondhand smoke for people in there and the employees and everybody else. Yeah. Because you, there is a way to do it.

There's a way to do it. There is a way to do it. There's a way to do it and probably be safe with secondhand smoke exposure. Right. And I think a lot of the bars and breweries and things have kind of tried to get around that by doing the outdoor patio. Yes, they have. And that's fine for four out of the 12 months here in this state because it's winter for the rest of the time. Yes, it is. And I think that's a valid workaround.

But again, if they want to invest in the air exchange and the filters and everything and you have a high enough ceiling, so I think that probably helps. Then I don't see any reason to not let places do that. But I just, like an airline, you don't need to be smoking on an airplane. Probably not. No, you don't have to. Well, Charles de Gaulle, when I was through there 10 years ago, I wasn't 10 years ago, like seven, eight years ago, still raked like cigarettes in there.

And you weren't allowed to smoke anymore. No, they just didn't have any ventilation at all. And it reeked. You know, or no new tiles. No, it fucking reeked. It was horrible. And then I was smoking cigarettes at that time still. So that was 15, I think. But they didn't have it didn't even have a place to go smoke. You had to go outside to smoke. Yeah, it was crazy.

Like the Dutch airports and the Indian airports and like the Southeast Asian airports, they have they have little cubes of glass that have like a ventilation system and you have to smoke inside of there. And they'll have like little boxes of matches to light your cigarettes because you're not allowed to have a lighter. Yeah, I actually snuck my lighter all the way to India.

And then they found it there and they pointed a gun at me and thought I was like some kind of terrorist for like three seconds. You can fly with a lighter. At that time, I wasn't allowed. I mean, domestically. Yeah, domestically, you can. So I flew Delta. So I flew, you know, all the way to India with a lighter and they didn't give a shit at the three airports that I was at before I got to do Delhi. Yeah. And then I did from New Delhi to Roorkee. And no, not New Delhi to Roorkee, Varanasi.

And yeah, they were they were not having that they were pretty pissed off that I had a lighter in my pocket. I was like, and then they looked at me again. It's like, oh, yeah, fat white guy. Like we're not. We're not really worried about this guy. So yeah, I don't want to bring it back across the board. I'd be OK with it coming back. You know, the parameters you outlined. Right. Well, I think bowling alley specifically. Late night at a bowling alley is not a place for a kid to be.

Oh, no, that is not a place for a kid to be. Yeah. So there, you know, when I bowled in Fargo, they would close the lanes down and become a private club. Yeah. And they would allow people to smoke in there. Yeah. You know, then I was right at the start of the smoking ban. Yeah. When I was living there. Yeah. But yeah, I don't have a problem with that. Yeah. I mean, even if you don't even if you don't put it in the ventilation and you just want to be smoking after a certain time of the day.

I want them to have smoking or ventilation just because the people that were there. I would like them to have that because I probably wouldn't go there if they didn't. You know, if I showed up and I was like gagging on cigarette smoke. Right. And have the ventilation, I just wouldn't go. But then I would know if I want to bowl there, I just bowled before nine p.m. when they allow people to smoke. It doesn't matter.

When I was a little kid, we would show up at like seven in the morning to bowl on Saturday, but they would have three shifts of leagues on Friday and the lanes would have a blue haze over the top of them from all the smoke. So they just didn't have like ventilation at all. They had an air exchanger the size of a like a two by four microwave. Yeah, like a two foot by two foot by four foot. And that would be their air exchanger with like dripping tar. You know, like nothing. It was doing nothing.

Yeah. So yeah, I don't I don't miss those days. But you know, I don't smoke cigarettes and I don't need to eat and then smoke right away. Some people do. Right. You know, if you want to. I miss the days I haven't a drink and smoking a cigar at the lanes. Yeah, I can see that. You know, I'm about as young as you can be and still remember having those like still have those memories. Yeah. You got to put a like a two two lane in your basement here or something. Oh my God. That'd be great.

That'd be great. The house isn't long enough. I'd have to extend the basement out to the edge of the four season porch. And then I think we'd be long enough. Maybe you could do it because you got to have 60 feet. It was in. Was it in there will be blood. Yeah. I think I had bowling lane in this house. I like two lanes. White House has a bowling lane in it. OK. Yeah. Remember which president put him in Lincoln. Maybe it was. Maybe it was. Yeah. It was. It was. It was a good one, though.

Yeah. One of his policies were he's a bowler. Yeah. Yeah. Well, whatever the best president is, in your opinion, that's who put the bowl in. And because he's a bowler. There you go. Yeah. Now we know. I know Richard Nixon was a bowler and he definitely didn't have the best policies. Yeah. You know, he's less conservative than our current president in many ways. Mr. Richard Nixon, the man who signed in the EPA. So I don't know.

Is there a way outside of a Supreme Court case to give the EPA back the power it needs to do what it's doing? That's question number one. Question number two is. Yes, there is. OK. Was what the EPA was doing, was it helping? Was it fixing things? The EPA never actually enacted any policy because they got sued before they could. OK. They want to do a carbon cap and trade system in the United States, which is there's arguments to about whether it's actually functional or not.

Yeah. There are arguments about whether that's functional or not. But the so they never enacted the policy for cap and trade for carbon emissions. Yeah. The Congress would have to pass a law explicitly saying that the EPA was allowed to regulate carbon, which would basically update their charter. Yes. Effectively. Yes. And then it would circumvent this Supreme Court decision. It wouldn't circumvent it. It would basically do what the court said that it has to do.

It's like the legal stuff is very, very strange because it kind of you have to target the language at certain things that then make this or that legal or illegal. And under don't qualify under that initial condition, then the two outcomes or three outcomes don't pertain. If they like the current court is saying that if the legislature doesn't explicitly say that this and this and this, then it's not enforceable. So things like segregation would be legal under that.

I don't think that there's a law in the United States that bans segregation. So they could theoretically because the Supreme Court decided that separate but equal was illegal. And the Supreme Court. Unconstitutional. Unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court decided that black people were citizens, not the law of the US government. The US government never made a law that says that because conservatives would never, ever pass a law. Conservatives of that era. Who knows about now? We'll see.

So I think that might be the next one will be, you know, they might not segregate on a race, but they might try to segregate on sexual orientation. I know that in Texas right now, there's talk about them trying to enforce the sodomy laws. Which is interesting. I know that the court case where that was overthrown was an apartment or like a landlord wouldn't rent to a gay couple because it didn't want sodomy to happen in his apartment complex.

And they were basically said, well, you can't prove that they're going to do it. So you know, piss off. But we'll see how that all goes. I mean, it's easy to crap on minorities. Yeah. And if you, you know, take precautions and are clean, sodomy is no more dirty than oral sex is also considered as sodomy, according to the Texas law. Texas is weird.

Yes. So and so Texas, which I didn't never would have thought of because of the Texas Rangers and everything, but they also have the most cowardly police force. You know, I don't think they do. I think it's pretty standard. Not sure if you were aware, but there was some people complaining about police and what they were doing a couple of years back. We had a lot of riots here. You're talking in the United States in general. But here also specifically. Yeah. I'm not sure if you're aware of that.

You you happen to live in a city that was kind of like shut down for a significant period of time. And you know what happens? When you say shut down, you mean burnt down? Of large portions of it, right? Yeah. You know, I didn't change a damn thing either. They didn't pass a single law to change anything. Why would they? Nothing has changed. Like I say, even that is not not enough. Not that we're saying we need to do more.

Yeah. So like people and by the people like many people have said, don't blame the Republicans for all the things that are happening. They've always said that they wanted this to happen. Blame both of them, the Democrats for allowing it to happen. Well, blame both of them because they they're in collusion with one another. Well, they don't actually care anything about you or you or me. No, I don't. They don't. They don't care about minorities or majorities.

So long as one of those two parties is in power, they don't care because as long as they're in power, they get all the money. They get all the say. They get all the whatever. Well, when hell when Obama ran against McCain back in the day, Halliburton gave each candidate the same amount. Yeah. Why not? What is that? What is that? Oh, I think it's from it's always sunny in Philadelphia. It's like I'm playing both sides. So that's exactly what they do.

Yeah. You know, so I think the people that are diluted into, you know, the Trump versus Biden or, you know, my candidate versus your candidate, that has nothing to do with anything. Yeah. Just just accept that they're both garbage. These corporations are funneling money to both sides because if they give them money when they're in power, they get breaks. And the other person doesn't care that they gave their opponent money because they both came out ahead. You know what I'm saying?

Like they both made money. So they laugh about it in their cigar bowling alleys. Right. And they say, I see you're smoking your Halliburton cigar there. And I am too. You know, that's what they say. I'm sure. So if you're living in Tsarist Russia, does it really matter to the serf if the Tsar is Nicholas or his fucking brother? Does it matter? Yeah. You're still in Tsarist Russia. It doesn't really matter. That's it. You're king of the who? The Britons. Well, I didn't vote for you.

That's not how that works. I heard that one too. Don't say in Minecraft, say in Tsarist Russia. Okay. So until it's a new thing in Skyrim. Yeah. In Cyberpunk 2077 or whatever it is. I never played that one. I never played it either. But I know it made a lot of buzz because you can customize like your character's genitalia. Oh, that's pretty cool. Pretty fancy. You know what? Mike's downloading after this episode. I'm going to give this chick the biggest Johnson anyone's ever seen.

I want it to be at least as big as the Rocky Patel Howitzer. Jesus. And just as spicy. Oh, it has actually the very end of this is quite spicy. This is the best part of the whole thing, I think. Yeah, it's pretty good. It started out good and it kind of a mellow earthy. It got real nice and earthy in the middle. And then now we've got some real nice spice going. Oh yeah. And Mike and I, as we've said before, we like the spicy cigars. Yes, we do. So that's good.

Yeah. I don't think I'm going to put a roach clip on it. No, I wouldn't ever anyway. Even if it was, you know, like the greatest cigar of all time, I still probably would because you're not supposed to smoke them all the way down. Just as our what our disclaimer is, Mike and I are not to be trusted when we're drinking and kind of talking with one another. So sometimes certain things need to be removed. Absolutely. For reasons that are not necessarily strictly always legal.

But sometimes could be. We don't we won't we'll never mention the Clinton necktie ever again. We don't want to go to Gitmo. Did you hear about the Clinton advisor that hung himself and also shot himself with a shotgun in the face? No. So one of the former Clinton advisors at Little Rock went to a farm that he's never been to simultaneously himself and shot himself in the face with a shotgun and he called it a suicide. This is like the twenty third Clinton advisor has mysteriously had a suicide.

It's like, oh my God, when Epstein somehow managed to hang himself. Yes, he managed to hang himself in the only cell that had a failed camera in the only hallway that had a failed camera. Yeah. And the only block that had guards on break for a lengthy period of time. Right. Yeah. With the only his only roommate that was like a cop who was convicted of being like a serial killer. Yeah. Like a dirty cop, his roommate was a dirty cop.

So there's lots of things out there that if you look into them, you'll tend to be depressed or just laugh at the absurdity of the stuff. You know what? You got to laugh because what am I going to do? You know, I don't live in some of the stuff that the populace believes. Right. That's spoon fed to them by the media. Oh, I looked into that story and they had like interviews with the ranch hands. Like, yeah, we've never seen this guy. He's never been here magically drives out to this ranch.

And then like, you know, like he what Google mapped it. This would be a pretty place to do a horrific act on myself. Yeah. And then both hung and shot himself with a shotgun. That's pretty, pretty dedicated. That takes talent. That does. That is that is that is like 1936 in Mississippi committed to commit suicide. We can't stop them. Not to denigrate Mississippi explicitly. I think just in general, the South in that era.

Yes. South of that era in that era, because the south of that era was a lot more north than a lot of us would think. Yes. Yes, it was. But well, that was like I always thought the Mason Dixon line was like way down, but it's not. It's pretty high up there. Oh, yeah. So one of my favorite Supreme Court cases when I was in college was a Minnesota case. And it was a free speech case. And there was a black guy in Minneapolis who was living there.

And then the Ku Klux Klan came and burned across on his yard. So they arrested these Klan members. Like you can't burn across some people. You heard blah, blah, blah. So the guy made a First Amendment argument that he had the freedom of speech to do it. And the court was like, you can burn across on your yard. Yes. But you can't burn across on his yard. You're going to jail.

Yeah. And he charged them with terrorizing, well, the version of terrorizing at that time and property damage because he burned his grass. Yeah. Well, and that's a very reasonable response to that kind of legal challenges. Right. You know, and that's the whole point of, you know, the First Amendment. And if you're making death threats on somebody, you're no longer exercising First Amendment. Right.

You know, if you're credible death threats on somebody, you're no longer making First Amendment cases, especially if it's a person not in the public view. Like you can say certain things about people in the public view that you could never say about another citizen because it would be liable slander, some other thing. But people in the public view don't have a lot of those same protections, at least legally right now.

We'll see what the Supreme Court does if they're done or if they're going to keep kind of rolling things back there. Oh, they're rolling them forward, Nate. Rolling them forward so that we can get what, wrapped parts in our canned beans and things. Oh, it's, you know, we're rolling it forward. That was a 1448. Is that that weird number? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, we're rolling it forward to that. We're rolling it forward to that. We're rolling it. Oh, just around the horn.

Just go around the horn. Yeah. Go through the year 3000 and then boom, we're going to reset the clock, go back to 1448. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the Supreme Court's on storm front. They're on something, man. They might be on the spice, I think. Oh my God. Maybe they are on the spice. So yeah, I think about to the end of this cigar.

If you've got about an hour and a half, two hours and you want a delicious cigar and you don't want to have more than one cigar in that timeframe, very, very good cigar. Yep. I would say, you know, I'm not necessarily a Connecticut fan, but this was... It's worthwhile. ... great. Yeah. It was awesome. I'm almost kind of, I don't know how much different the Maduro's going to be. Yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, because this was really good and it had that nice flavor transition that I appreciate.

It started out mellow and then it got more complex, which was great. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, highly recommend the Howitzer. Don't let the size intimidate you. Yes, as they say, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yes. I'm curious, good and wet before you... Well, good and wet before you start smoking on it. Yeah. So thanks for listening. We'll catch you next episode. Bye bye.