Ask not what your country can do for you, and what you can do for your country. Either you were with us or you were with the terrorists and you hurt even a little bit. Time counts, So why wait? Take up bromo when you don't have the time to feel bad? If the Ricochet Podcast Stephen gone, Charles gone, Peter gone.
But I'm James Lilax. I'm here, and so is Rob Long. So let's eversel's a podcast.
Welcome everybody.
It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven hundred and eighty five. You can join us at I know you can join us at ricochet dot com and see why we've gotten a seven eighty five because what's at ricochet dot com Well,
the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And that interjection you just heard there was from one of the founders who was here at the episode number one, and that's Rob Long, who, if you are looking at the video stream, seems to be wearing a like a like a a leisurely rugby player who's in Peru.
Yeah, I'm I just suddenly remembered that we do this, and there's a video which I don't recommend. I am sitting outside anybody who's been through the winter and knows why I'm sitting outside. It's beautiful day, but that means have to wear a hat. And that also means that I can't work. I can't figure out how to make the microphone work on the iPad and the mic, the big nice mic, and then use earbuds to hear, so I have to have headphones, and the headphones are from the back.
Now, so I kind of look, I look very weird.
You do you do?
And that This is why we advise people to look at the video feed, because you can seek not only does Rob Long look like he's some sort of uh, you know, astronaut from a country that hasn't quite figured out how to put a booster together, but you keep blurring in and out.
Which is also interesting.
Well, it's because you're fase shifting between this dimension and the other, and you are in You're in the dimension of New York. I believe correct. I'm in Princeton, New jerseyly Garden State. But you do you live in New York now or do you still do? Because you're I do not. I live in Princeton. I My life has changed radically in the sense that what I did, was I I radically and crazily, and I think probably without
any planning. This is something that you cannot relate to because I know that you are an obsessive planner.
I just I went from ah. I went from a basically the past ten years, went from a big house in California to a fairly large apartment but not you know, but still an apartment in Manhattan, to a large kind of townhouse in Princeton. And then I decided last year that that was ridiculous, that I'm I need to downsize radically, and I radically downsized in my mind, which is not in my will. I wanted to and I decided to. But what I didn't do is I didn't go through
everything and then do the work necessary. And so I basically crammed into a very small kind of graduate student kind of it looks like like a person going to Divinity school with how they live, surrounded by books. It's great, but it's small. And I have a storage facility down a few, you know, not about two miles from here, and I'm my goal is by October to get rid of it. So I'm giving myself till October to kind of get get get manageable. And I just I did very bad job.
But you're living in a month's sell and you want to get it down, so you have a single gladstone that you can use to go from place to place.
I'm living my foot My physical footprint is a monk sell, but my actual number of possessions is considerably more. And so what I have is like, look, if you went into my apartment right now and you looked at it, you would say to yourself, let's call the cops because we found the guy. There's just a lot of stuff there and I need to I need to get rid
of it. And what with the upside of the stuff is that you discover that you know, for instance, I have this, you know, from the Rugby seven's rugby shirt which I hadn't looked at for a million years, and it's in one of those boxes. And you know this is this shirt is thirty years old, thirty five years old. It's from ninety I don't know, yep, ninety three, so it's thirty six years old. That's time was at the Rugby Seven's in Hong Kong.
Well, two points about this one.
The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday a couple of days ago about storage facilities and how they're exploding. The industry is just absolutely taken off because people have too much, in the words of George Carlin, stuff, and a lot of people don't like them. They push back on them because they are fairly inert contributors to the civic landscape. There is something hulking and silent about them though, as though they're they're they're forced to keep secrets unwillingly
that they do not wish to. You know, there's a concentrated stillness to them that is part shame, you know, part you know, silence, part Yeah. Apparently there's four these that have that that caused people to get a storage locker. There's dislocation, death, divorced, something I can't forget the fourth d. Some someplaces are actually trying to make them look like they belong to the neighborhood. They're putting on facodomy shows that they have.
It's like like houses, or they put a little strip mall touch to it so it doesn't look so bad. But the article was linked to something that somebody else in the.
Wall Street Journal had written about how he'd spent one hundred thousand dollars over the course of the years to rent a storage locker simply because he dumped the contents of a house in there and kept throwing things in there and then moved, moved to New York, didn't have a car one.
Hundreds I'll go back and get it all that stuff, you say yourself, yeah, right, right, So, but you, unlike most people who just say, all right, I'm going to concentrate it down, I'm gonna move, I'm gonna put it into storage locker, and I'll leave it there.
You actually your goal is to get is to get past that so that there's no a storage locker.
Yeah.
I mean when I looked for it, I decided to not do one of the nice ones because they're nice. I mean some of them are like have this kind of mysterious clean antiseptic quality. I drive by this that when I'm driving back from Manhattan into into New Jersey and they're on sort of the root one wherever I am, and they're beautiful. They look and they're all lit up
on the inside. It looks like a sci fi movie, you know, they look like the you know, the the woman in the weird jumpsuit walking down said you know command here we've found the whatever. But I am in one that looks like sadness. It's the corner of sadness and the Princeton Airport, and it's fine for me. It is cheap, so I I just but but what I really should have done? Maybe I should have spent more money so that I would have felt stupider. But what
that's my goal anyway. So the upside is I discovered that I have these cool, old like items of clothing. And the downside is that I think, oh, well, I don't want to get rid of this, and that's not that's.
I know exactly what you mean. The one to which I go grudgingly smells of fish.
Occasionally it makes me wonder whether not somebody's storing something in there for a business.
At the rite the other day, somebody.
Moved out on the floor was speckled with glitter, and I thought, well, a stripper had this one for a while, or you know, some fashion toys as the rest of it. I had to go to it yesterday to remove a very large object that I was going to write about. Something that I found in the course of emptying out the house a family bible that was posed by my great grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century.
These elaborate, incredible compendions of knowledge. They're just stunning.
They have, for example, all the coins of the Roman era, and there would be biographies of all of these people who had nothing to do whatsoever to the Bible except one of them. One of the biographies was it was noted here because because Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, which they also said about Paul.
And there's a reference to Paul and being here.
I mean, I mean, there's the illustrations, the plates, the wood cuts, and then also writing in it.
So does somebody keep you sometimes they keep family records in it? Absolutely, absolutely genealogy.
There was writing, there was and I noted the marriage is stopped at one point. But there I noticed that my cousin Bruce, is a very young boy twelve or so, had written that he was going to marry a certain woman in nineteen seventy seven or.
Something in the future. He added this. He added this sneakily to the Bible.
So I found, well, my grandmother had pressed wondering why this glass, seine bag of leaves, why this you know, this diamond Jubilee celebration, bookmark pictures and the rest of it.
Can't throw it away. I never cannot throw it away.
What I have to wait and do is die because I'm the last I'm the last person who remembers my grandmother right, and well my cousin too, And so when I'm gone, there's no living person who can lay his hands on this book and know that hands that he knew and hell that helped it.
It'll mean nothing to my daughter. My daughter can take it.
So my goal is to reduce my storage facility down to half the size and have it be pretty much my personal archives.
The stuff that I don't want, that's my mild clips.
That's for you and me.
I mean you, I mean, there's an argument for you because you are incredibly detailed and thoughtful and careful archivist. So your stuff isn't all jumbled, as my guess is. It's got some I mean, I'm sure you look at it think what an incredible disorganized mess, and the rest of us think, my god, what kind of weirdo has this organized by whatever? But there's something valuable about that, especially the books and the things that people touched.
I think the things that people touched is kind of amazing. I mean, I have a silver baby cup that is.
That for a long time, I just thought I just thought was mine. I just because it has my name on it except for my but I didn't really look at it carefully. But it's actually my uncle's and my uncle who died when he was I think, I don't know, in his five, five or six. He was very young my mom's family that were living in Mexico, and my father, my grandfather, was in the mining business. He had gold and silver mines, and so I don't know what he
died of. He died of something, and and then my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, died I think a few years later. No, my uncle died it too, and I think it was childhood leukemia. And then my grand my maternal grandmother, died when she was when my mom was like five or.
Six, because that's what happened back then.
And I've had this baby cup, but I realized that I've been hanging on to it because I always thought it was mine, but in fact it's not. It's my namesakes. And there I know that there are three people who touched it, my grandmother, my namesake, uncle, and me and more than that, but at least those three touched it, and that's sort of a I mean, you can't get rid of that. You gotta I gotta's by the bed.
At some point, probably this summer at James Alex at substack dot com, I'm going to be doing small videos, very short videos. I know people hate videos at longer than ninety seconds. You start looking at your watch. Yeah, called small things. I bought a light box and I've been photographing a lot of the small.
Little objects that I've managed to accumulate over the years. They have no great value.
Nobody really needs a Matt Mason action figure at this point. But there's a story behind every one of them, and I try to tell that story as quickly as possible.
One I recently did was like a little hatpin box at eighteen ninety three Colombian Exposition. My great grandfather had gone to the Colombian Exposition and he came back with a ticket for it too. And I know that he went to the Republican Convention in Minneapolis in the nineties as well, because he came back with the ticket for that as well.
So it's this happen that's sat on my grandmother's desk for decades, and I don't know what did he buy it for her? Did he slip it in his pocket and think of his little daughter when he was going to get all of these things that you can glean from it, that you can into it, that you can guess, that you can build.
And no, I can't get rid of that.
But what I find interesting in you might too on the audience probably doesn't. Is that a lot of the things, when you remove them from one text to the other, they lose significance. Things in your house that you had on the mantelpiece, when you take it elsewhere, all of a sudden, it's homeless, It doesn't belong and it goes in a box.
Finance.
The smaller your unit gets, the more the things that you have out, the more potent and concentrated their meaning is like a Matt Mason action figure. Well, that's enough of us reminiscing about downsizing, and the rest of us yours willingly mind not so much. We should probably do what the Ricochet podcast does, and that is speak with complete confidence about things that we are completely ignorant of.
Generally, that's our motest I have been in the opinion that virtually nothing that I hear about what's going on in the Strait and the war in Iran is something about which I can base conclusion.
And that's not because we're being lied to or fog of war or the rest of it.
Maybe we are being lied.
To, but part of the cycle of that we've had is what did I see the other day a political headline, political headline House fails to curb Trump's war powers as war in Iran drags on.
I think that's what they said, drags on our seventy two.
Yeah, so the latest is has to do with the Straight And I don't know why we even bothered to talk about it, because by the time this is posted, there will be something else about the Straight. We were closing it to Iranian ships. They couldn't get out. Anybody else could come in. We were telling the NATO people to come and get it.
The other day.
I think today, as a matter of fact, it's a tweet that said the leaders of Great Britain and France that Macron and Starmer have gotten together to talk about the Strait of horrormone situation, and the tweet commentator said, this is like me and my wife getting together to discuss the optimal landing site on the Moon.
Yeah, that is.
Kind of what.
So let's take this in the absence of Charlie C. W.
Cook.
Where does this leave Europe? And is that a question that nobody really cares what the answer is one way or the other. I do, but let me take your take. Get your take.
Well, I mean, you know, everybody decides, you know, decided twenty years ago that we were gonna not rely on fossil fuels. So what they did was they said, we're not going to rely on fossil fuels. And what they didn't do is not rely on fossil fuels. Right, these pronouncements they made that they didn't actually fall through on, which is anyone could have told them was going to happen, because actually, fossil fuels are fantastic and fuel the world
and productory. Right, you know, they're portable, they have so much concentrated fantastic and there's tons of it so and tons of it is still in the North Sea apparently and certainly the Norwegians.
So so there's that problem.
Right, So there's that slow I'm looking more glacier moves, right, slow moves and then there's the the slow move of NATO, which is not in addition to the sort of the their their unwillingness to fund their fair share, which I think, you know, Trump is absolutely correct to point out, and to point it out many times. There was also this kind of sense that, well, what does this do? What is this for anyway? Right the end of the Soviet Union? What are we doing here?
Like?
Why are why are there American servicemen in Hamburg, Germany? It just doesn't make any sense, right, And so we petered out of that of the you know, the twentieth century in the early twenty first century.
Now we're trying to figure out what it is that we do.
And I suspect that part of the problem we have right now is that we have not decided.
As a country really what.
Steps we want to take in the world to shape the world the way we want it to be shaped, what things were going to protect and what things were not going to protect, what we're willing to pay, and what we're not willing to pay, And a lot of that has been this sort of astonishing amount of failure that you know, I'm skirting the issue, the Trump issue of that happened before Trump, which is really the Iraq War.
We had a war that didn't really accomplish much and was kind of there were no weapons of mass destruction.
I think we can say that now safely.
This well okay, but okay, but whatever. This is where I sort of agree with Trump. Right in twenty sixteen, the general understanding was that it was it was, it was. It did not unfold the way we were told it was going to unfold. And the second thing we were told in later is that it doesn't. That doesn't matter
anymore because we have these precise weapons. It can get right into this thing and can actually these bunker busters and we can just you know, six months ago we said, oh, well it rans they're nuclear programs have been sent back years. Well apparently it hasn't. So apparently that was a failure. So we just have to decide what it is we want to do and who is we want to do it for, and who do we want to do it with,
and who we want to do it against? And none of those dots have been connected, and none of those there's no there's no strategy you're understanding. So if you're the people and you're watching this thing unfold. It does feel like seventy two hours is forever because I don't know what the plan is. The planet is to open the Straight, it's to blockade the strait. The planets to secure the Straight. The plan is to protect the protect oil. The plan is to destroy it rans oil exporting capacity.
We don't quite know. It's change the regime, it's not to change the regime. It's all sorts of things. And in absence of a very clear plan, what happens is a lack of confidence. And I think that's what you're seeing from people. Not that it's not specific to Trump necessarily he inherited a lot of it, but you know, you play the character Dill, and he's not playing them
very well. It seems to me he needs and mostly because he's an erratic person and he's driven by poles and he's he speaks erratically and he doesn't project confidence. And then we have sort of Colonel Kurtz it's the Secretary of Defense. Now none of that seems like these are people who are the gray and colorless leaders we expect. But on the other hand, the gray and colorless leaders took us into a rack. So we got to figure this out right.
I think it's three things that work here, one of them which may be sound incoherent, but is actually probably basically it is just we are going to remove your capacity to bleep with us if you just don't get to bleep with us any We're not putting up, We're not buying, we're we're sending your palettes of money.
We're we're not sitting down at tables. That's all there is to it.
Before we went into Afghanistan and there were nice pictures of women holding up a blue finger outside of kabble, the culture was as barbaric and medieval. That's actually cruel to the medieval. It was irredeemable, and we waste a lot of time and money. We should have just got out and said, okay, well do what you're gonna do. We would like to make you like like you used to be in those pictures we see where women are walking run schools and going to university.
That'd be great. But if you're not up to the challenge, okay, just so you know that it's a moab.
Anytime anything happens and we trace it back to you, and even if we can't trace it back to you, it's a mo app ere act.
Same thing.
I mean, we we debathified. There was no culture to come in and do it. We should have put in in retrospect one of our guys, you know, with somebody who ran in the difficult, schismatic, fractured right.
Put that guy in and if.
They don't end up as a model of European parliamentary democracy, I guess you didn't have it in. You got sorry, Just don't bleep with us, or we're gonna have to do this again and the next time it might be bigger and bigger and worse.
That's it.
So don't the guys who are bleeping with us for forty seven years.
You're not going to it's not gonna happen again. Second, China, China is not going to get to run the table.
It's not gonna play with us. It just isn't gonna happen anymore. They're out of our hemisphere. They're gone.
We now have the ability to choke off the oil supply.
We're not the ability, but we have in place with the straight of horror moves which apparently we're going to run, I guess.
And then in the agreement that we just signed, the other route through which eighty percent of their oil goes to China. We've got our hands on the Carotid artery there, and that's great. And we're not doing it because all of a sudden we want to be you know, I mean, we are the guardians of the Sea. But we're not doing it because we have a great love for this part of the world. No, it's a simple strategic move
that puts China on the back foot. And that goes to the third point, which is you're rope.
You're nice, you're great, You've got fantastic museums in great cities. You're killing yourself your economic policies and your migration policies, and there's nothing you can do about it. And you're basically over. We're going to concentrate on a North American co prosperity sphere.
It's going to be us.
It's going to go down to the equator in a little bit past. We got Panama. It means Greenland, it means Canada if they want to play, if they don't screw them, they'll take Alberta. And it means that's our neck of the woods and China doesn't get to play in it. And any tempt that they have is going to be pushed out. So that's that, Ohen, We'll take Cuba too. That seems to me to be the three things that are in Trump's head. You can't believe in
the United States. He's been saying that about Aaransa forever. He's been talking about China forever, right, and the story is coming out about I mean eighty percent. I think now the iPhones have been moved out of China production, which is great, and talking about our backyard, the.
Donroe Doctrine as they call it.
All these things seem to me they don't require a great deal of brilliant thought and somebody coming out of Georgetown with a George Kennan mister X white paper or something like that. It's just basically now it's America first, and you know the rest of you.
Hope you like the ride.
Yeah, I mean I wish. I mean, that's an interesting game of risk you're playing. I don't mean that, I mean that the actual game of risk. I'm not sure. I think this administration is incredibly soft on China, I mean amazingly soft on China. They don't make strategic choices when they have easy choices. They tend to make the easy choices really hard. They tend to treat the hard choices like they're really easy. So, you know, if you're looking at the malefactors in the world, you'd have to
say it was Iran, you'd have to say it was China. Well, China maybe not so much off that you're just a competitor. You definitely have to say Russia. Russia and Iran were together. The idea of not weakening Russia when we have a sort of a willing partner in that was kind of a mistake, I think, strategic mistake born of some kind of weird, murky desire not to I guess, I guess excite Putin. On the other hand, you know, China, China
economies group five percent. China is doing great, and they're doing great because we have a president and we've had, you know, not just the only president who makes a lot of noise back here and then he goes to Beijing and gives them whatever they want. There is nothing that they want that we have not given them. There's no concession to trade that we have not offered.
Nothing.
So if that's a strategy, which is to say Okay, China, guess what you get Asia, all right, that seems fine. But the idea that that the idea that we're gonna do anything to stop their expansion if they choose to expand, anything to stop their their their takeover of Taiwan, if they choose to, it's just we're not going to.
And that's that may be fine.
We may we don't.
We may call that Japan sailed a warship through this through the strains the other day. China was absolutely furious about it, and believe that they did that. It's provocative move Japan all of a sudden, it seems to have gotten its mojo back in a way that you wish that European cities, Europrain Pe in states would.
So we don't know.
I think the point is to be unpredictable, and the idea that, as I said before, about being able to severely influence their oil amounts and you know, removing their influence from Venezuela, which is a good thing to do.
I'm more concerned about stuff like that, which seems to be broader stroked, than whether or not we let their TMU crap in in the same quantities as it was before again, I look at iPhone production, reshoring of technology fabric you know, chip fab all that stuff counts more than what the tariff is.
Hasn't the chip fab thing has not happened. That's just on paper, and that's a lot. That's more.
That's less about trade and for us, and more about our willingness to put up with. I mean, look, chip fabs are incredibly dirty. They're incredibly dirty, and they don't Nobody wants to have one in their backyard. So you do want to go to one of those countries where you can build anything and dump anything into the rivers. That's one of the reasons why we don't have chip babs in this country is because.
Just there until most build one, until MSK build one, build one.
Well yeah, you can build one or two, but the amount you need to build, I mean, the numbers aren't there.
I mean, they just aren't.
I Mean.
The my problem in general with this administration is it's leadership by anecdotes. So you tell a funny story and everything nods go, oh that's great, and we know we send in the drones and the missiles and we destroy Iran's nuclear research facilities. But actually we don't it's a story we're telling, and it lasts for a couple of months. That we've got to tell a new story. And that
works and politics certainly works in American politics. But I don't mean I think that when we're talking about real, three dimensional things moving through a straight and actual real oil prices, I think it's time to get serious. And I just don't find that. I'm just not confident in the leadership that they're serious, and I don't see anybody at the horizon.
Who's serious either.
I think I think it's a to me, and I don't think I certainly, I know I'm not alone because I am. You know, there's sixty percent, seventy percent of the country thinks the same thing. That is a leadership failure in a time of war, which they keep talking about a time of war. That is a leadership failure that needs to be addressed. And I just don't see anybody in Washington addressing it.
Well. Yes, the Democrats, of course would be worse.
One of the things that I'm sure horrifies them is the sight of all those oil tankers that were steaming towards the United States to fill up the United States is now just pumping out a lot, selling a lot. That's great. The Democrats would shut down, you know, construction or even the existing LG export plans in the Gulf because they don't like natural gas going to Europe.
They don't want anybody to use it. We've got to use renewables.
And yes, that that piece of American prosperity would be crippled under a democratic administration, as we see in New York where the Mandami administration is going by the playbook. And I kind of would like to go there because you're close to it, and I'm sure that you don't regard Mondami with the particular enthusiasm.
Or affection or do you are you are you secretly thrilled that he's finally going to going all full DSA and everybody, because that's the thing to do.
You know, we won't vote for a Republican because we'll get a Democrat in there, and then when people see how.
Bad it is, they'll vote for you. That that never works. To text day he was doing, he did a little real on Instagram or somewhere TikTok.
He leaned into the camera and said, it's tax state, and we're going to tax the rich and he taps the taps the lens. I find him one of the most abhorrent, repellent people on the political stage. But he's got that big, broad beaming smile, so he's got so he's got to be good.
It's weird because I actually, I mean, I don't. I've never met him. I mean, just like seeing him. It's a strange politician because seeing him in the news or seeing him on the news, I find him less annoying then the people who support him, Like it's a very strange thing where I find his supporters to be absolutely I mean, and pretty much everyone around him, I mean, everybody in the corridor is a power in the city to be absolutely unacceptably terrible. And his policies are terrible too.
He just when I see him, I don't, I don't. I don't get that, Like I don't get the kind of rage I got with with the Deblasio. So maybe that's just that's just a personal thing. The weird thing about all these guys is they seem to think they're entitled to rich people, like, well, rich people are going to be here, right, It's a very New York thing to think, well, I mean, where you're.
Gonna go, Well, where am I going to go? I mean, like a million paces rich people can Yeah, they go Princeton, they can go to Miami.
And so there's this attitude that well, we're gonna we're going to tax people who are rich.
Well, the.
Problem in New York City, if you're in New York resident, is that only rich people can afford to live there because the taxes are so high. Most you know, young people have to move out because they you know, the payroll taxes, the payroll taxes on your you're in your if your city dweller are incredibly high, you know, you get rid of rich people, but what do you have left? And and and then I heard just this happened just yesterday.
I was listening to his housing policy being described and unfolded.
On public radio likes w NYC actually.
And it just felt like, wait, this is stuff that you know, Mayor Lindsey talked about. This is a housing policy from the early seven late sixties, early seventies. This is the We already know how this movie turns out. This is not even rebooting it, it's actually just re running it. And we know how the ending is, which is like this housing collapse none of this feels like
which had becomes very strange to me. I mean, not strangely in New York City because there's no appetite, appetite for change, but none of this feels like a regeneration of the left, which is kind of what the marketplace seems to demand.
I mean, I was watching an interview with Rob Emmanuel.
And and he, you know, whatever he did in Chicago is sort of separate, but he he understands the problem, right, you know, he understands what the problem is for the left, for the Democratic Party. I'm not gonna do an thing about it, but he understands that he can articulate it. And and I he even he has this kind of he's incredulous that there hasn't been there hasn't been a movement to do this. There hasn't there's nobody on the on the horizon. The biggest star right now in the
Democratic Party is Bernie Sanders. That that tells you something. Whereas it should be somebody, it should be Bill Clinton. Find it, Bill Clinton, find a southern conservative Democrat governor and run him and you'll win. But you then you've got to find a southern conservative Democrat and that that to me is the is what I find astonishing. I mean, what I found weird. I guess I understand that this is that this is a free market argument I'm making, right.
I mean, if you're Milton Freedman, You're like, well, this is obviously market failure, so the market will correct itself. Like there's an addressable market in the Democratic Party for people who are basically patriotic, basically pro business, you know, basically normal, right, normal Americans? And why is there nobody selling a product about those people? And you can say the same thing Republicans in a way, perhaps.
They don't have to, perhaps because they know that these people will vote Depocratic no matter what, because to vote the alternative is to vote for a bunch of xenophobe, islamophobe, phobe phobes, transphobe turfs, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Lindsay may have Lindsay may have tried these things and it led to a housing collapse. But I don't think that Lindsay intended or wanted a housing market collapse.
I believe that Mandami and the rest of the idiots around him, the Democratic Socialists of America, want a housing collapse. Because property is theft, because landlords are evil, and the whole point is for the state. I'm not kidding.
The point is for the state. You could be right, because I mean somebody has to sit them down and say, all right, if you tax the Pieto tares of these people who live out of town, here's what's going to happen. First of all, they're just they're going to sell them the market.
You know, the price is going to go down, and whoever buys them, if somebody does, will pay less than property taxes because you crash the market on that. Secondly, these people are a net gain to the city because they pay taxes and they don't consume services.
The cops aren't coming to their house. They're not going to the food shelters, they're not going to the hospit they're not going to school right school. So they pop into town, they spend money on tax fifth Avenue, they walk up and down, they go to the restaurant, and they go back to Miami and you get the tax revenue. If you get rid of those people, you have. But what they seem to believe magically is that once these units are empty, into them will flow the deserving roles.
Now if you want the team or her family will move in.
Precisely, rent control means you've got I don't know what percentage of rent control departments aren't aren't occupied in New York, but it simply isn't worth it for the owners to fix them because they can't because they can't make the money, so they sit unoccupied. They want to get rid of that so that eventually the city put people in there
at their will. If you sell a building, the city will now have the first right of refusal, and the city will be able to say, well, we want to buy it for this and the next step, of course, is to crash the value so the city could take
it cheaply. Somebody takes the offer because nobody else is buying, and then fifty sixty seventy percent of the housing stock and ends up being in the hands of the state, which hands it out to its patrons at little or no cost whatsoever and secures itself a permanent voting base.
This is not crazy talk.
This is like, well, this is mendeurism Manhattan. Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is stiffly what happened.
I mean.
This infuriating me yesterday when I was listening to this. I was listening to somebody talking about this is Hokeels tax, is the Piana tear tax? And it was NPR, and I don't know what show was on, and somebody, the woman who was doing who was the anchor, was interviewing the reporter had this tone of voice that you just instantly hate and you don't even know why. It's just man. But then she said something that really really got me. She said, so, you know, what is a pieta tear?
I mean, I hear that, what is one? I mean, I don't I don't even know if I know what one is, she said, questioning what a pieta terear is. Now, I will pay you one million dollars in gold if that woman did not know what a piaa tear was.
And that is that is a definite problem I think with people in the media, and I mean in general, probably on the right too, but on the left for sure, which is this pretending to be somebody pretending this sort of like aw shucks, just us folks, quality, the the the and that that is what gets up my nose with Momdannie, is this kind of Hey, I'm just like normal New York well, no, your mom's a filmmaker and your dad's a trendy of professor, and they're all on the l far left, and you grew up in this
very very very very very rarefied atmosphere. I mean, Bloomberg actually made money and built a business and had employees and made zillions and zillions and billions of dollars because he had a better idea, not because he was a rich kid. And there is something that just sticks to my craw about that about people who have been for whatever reason, in whatever way, the benefits of a great country and a great culture and a great economy and
free market capitalism which managed to generate enough money. There was so much money generated by a country that it built a great university in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and in doubt it was zillions enough to pay a guy a lot of money to do nothing and to
raise a kid who's now going to mess up the cities. Like, there's something really wonderful about that, right, And that to not wake up every morning in absolute sheer gratitude that there was an economy and there was a country that did that, I just find and then to pretend that, oh, well, you know it was all terrible, like.
Give me a break, Come on, that's the word ingratitude. Yeah, and I get omar here in Minnesota as well. Yeah.
So I'll go into a record to say this as as I as everyone who listens to this podcast, even on the semi on irregular Nos. Not a fan of our president, not a fan of the administration, not a fan, not a fan, not at all. But uh, if he goes after Illinois, if he goes after her, I will be cheering. I mean, if he if he really goes to the you married your brother's stuff, which he mentioned like I saw him like a couple of weeks ago.
He's just kind of been passing. But if he digs in on that man erybum, I might actually I'll buy it. But I don't think I'll buy a bag of hat but I might.
I might.
I might price them well.
Also in the news there's the swall walled downfall.
Which I am police to see, I guess, but I don't know exactly what there is to say about his actions. The media's actions are more interesting to me. Everybody's striking their forehead V eight like and wondering exactly boy, boy, is this gosh? When it seems to be also common knowledge amongst a lot of people that this fellow was a creep. There was there was one guy I remembered on Twitter it was saying, well, it wasn't my beat to right, you know, I've.
Been hearing these things for years. You know, I'm glad it's finally coming out.
And Stephen Miller over in our set, why didn't get hell anybody? So it's not my beat? I cover international affairs. Well, he was sleeping with a Chinese spy at that count. So and a lot of people are saying who did this, who exactly.
Executed this particular hit and why?
And that's the sort of Vallas intrigue in the likes of which I suppose some people are fascinated by.
But I'm I'm not. So.
I don't know what to say about that. I don't know what to say about Trump versus the pulp, except you, as a man who is taking studies in that nature,
might be able to speak on exactly the relationship. I mean, the I thought that Vans is a point about the pope should stick to talking about issues of morality was silly, given that war often involves hannoply calledite a scopic number of issues about morality, but people have criticized the Pope for not realizing the Marshal's spirit that exists in portions of the Bible, and also for being silent on what many are saying is a concerted effort to remove Christianity
from certain parts of the world, be it countries in Africa where there have been constant schisms, or in Algeria or Egypt. When you can look at the map and say, there used to be eight hundred thousand Christians living in Elebanon and out there are five and why is that? Is that not something that the Pope should speak up about or would that be too divisive.
In the spirit of ecumenical handholding.
Well, I mean I think that I think that the Christian world is waking up to the fact that there's world. There's a great big parts of the world where that are not hospitable to Christians, and there's also a lot of Christian I mean, there's huge Christian growth too.
By the way, in Africa.
So it's hard.
I mean, if you're the pope, it's like hard to you don't really see Africa as a problem as a place where Christianity is on the wayan It's actually that's the fastest growing place.
Algeria is part of that Luxuria.
Yes, Algeria, it may be. Algeria is a complicated place too because the Algerians, I mean a little bit about Algeria. The Algerian government have been fighting Islamic radicals since the early nineties. It's a it's a not a democratic government, but they their argument is if it was a democratic government, it would they in al Kada, it would be an Islamic republic.
So we put a stop to that.
So you know, there's huge portions about I mean, Algeria's is the biggest country in Africa, is the biggest country in Africa, and most of it is just desert, sand and warlords. Algiers is a beautiful city, and it's a French city, and they grow wine and they drink wine. And the idea is that they are sitting on a powder cake. So I think too, I mean Algeria is I mean, are the pope. I would go and be friends with them. I wouldn't go and make trouble for
them because they have trouble enough. And I suspect that they would say, yes, we know trust me, we're here. We know we have trouble. But you go a country like Tunisia, a country like eat Well, you know, actually living eachypt's harbor. He has been really tough on the cops Genesis. You know, Chinese has a it's not a thriving Christian scene, even though it was the home from of Saint Augustine.
But it's.
It's not it's not unfriendly, and Morocco is very, very friendly. So that those those North African Arab countries aren't where aren't really where there's trouble. There's trouble in China. I think there's trouble for Christians in China. I think there's trouble in parts of the Middle East for Christians. But I think if you're looking for the country right now that is the most anti Christian, it's got to be China.
Mm hm. What the country where they're burning down the churches, dozens and dozens of torched churches, godless Canada. Yeah, yeah, well that's right.
I mean, what's been going on for a while now, and what people are People generally assume that it's people who are reacting to the false story of the you know what, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children were buried beneath church schools eventually debunked by doing by sounding the ground, but the story still persists. Or it's people who just don't like the apparitions of Christ, who don't like the
manifestations of Christianity. We ever did find Did we ever exactly find out who burned Notre Dame?
I don't know. I don't know if we did.
Was it was it a donkey that kicked over a candle into a pile of oily rags?
It might have been, and might I don't know if it was a person who did it. It might be I'm not qualified to say.
An immigrants who decided that that this, this this tootemic symbol of the western of Christianity was an ufront.
The problem is that you can't meet in Notre Dame.
If i'm I'll go with the thought experiment that it's Notre the Notre Dame was like it was artisan. The problem in France is that the people who believe, who are believers, who have faith, are Muslims. The people who are secular and who do not believe are the French, which is an incredibly secular country. You can't beat faith with no faith, really, you have to. There needs to be sort of an awakening of faith, and that that seems to be happening.
I mean anecdotally.
I'm not sure it is really happening statistically, but it is happening in some places. I mean, I see it in the news and people talking about it. I think there's a little too much happy talk about it. But look that that that. You know, Look, we've been running an experiment. I'm sixty years old, right, and we've been running experiment as for as long as I have been
alive pretty much. It started in the sixties, maybe late fifties, early sixties in this country, which is what would be like what would a culture in a country be like if it was entirely secular? Right, So what if we had lived in a secular world? And so America just kind of secularized itself for the past thirty forty fifty sixty years, took you know, religion basically out of the curriculum. I mean not only mean just prayer in school, I
mean just out of the curriculum. You can get a prestigious degree, a get a fantastic education in America and never ever in the Bible or read a part of it, or even as a piece of history. It's just kind of it's been, you know, siloed off in some weird for some weirdos on Sunday morning. But the problem with all that is that we haven't managed to secularize the
human life. Your life is not secular. Your life is, whether you like it or not, is deeply embedded in moments of faith, of your birth, of your death, of your marriage, of your children, of your life choices. Like your life human life cycle is anything but secular. And
so you know, you're now fine, you see. I mean, look, you talk about young people a lot, and I'm fine, But you're a lot of a lot of thirty forty fifty sixty year old people in America anyway, who are one hundred percent unchurched, totally unchurched, but are now curious because they've been going through enough life and have had some knocks and some things to celebrate, somesgiving, moments of Thanksgiving and moments of intercession where what happens on a
Sunday in church is suddenly interesting to them. And so I think that if there is a movement back to church, maybe it'll it'll look like young people, but I think it'll be middle aged people who were raised without this wondering how And problem with middle aged people is when they go to church, it's embarrassing because they don't really know anything, and so they have to learn. And most people who are in their thirties or forties just don't want to be embarrassed anymore.
Anyway, that's my that's my rant.
So so I'm less, I'm less concerned or less. I go to where I can find moments of optimism, and so I find optimism in that, and I think that is that that That's what I would focus on, and where I the pope, that's what I would be operationally be absolutely laser focused on. It's like, how do I get people to know what it is that we have here?
Yeah?
The people who go in their sixties in the middle age who didn't go before don't know when to stand and when to sit.
Yeah.
Right.
The whole thing is if you grew up in a church and you went through all of that, it's it's it's in your bones and your marrow and your DNA.
And yes, there is a lot that and it's not just however, old folks I know some.
Young I know some young people who are actually and I don't want toy returned with a Roman V. But they got they got pretty trad They actually went from Lutheranism to Catholicism because they appreciated the rigor. And you know, I imagine, I mean, you can get back if you started doing it Latin again. And I get that, and it's it's it's wonderful to see that in people who are absolutely normal. And it used to be absolutely normal for people to do that period. It was just simply
part of the culture. Now, you know that a lot of people were culturally Christian in the sense that they you know, grew up in it. Theyit the basics.
They went you know, Eastern Christmas, but they didn't particularly grapple with Christianity.
And they you know, if you if you oppressed them to it, they might not really believe it. But it was just it was the it was the atmosphere, it was the water in which we all swam. Now in France for a long time was culturally Catholic as well, and to a certain extent still is.
People will take their kids to their newborns to be christened, to get married in a church, et cetera. But yeah, the faith is dead and the people who believe it the people who are coming from elsewhere, and that wouldn't be a problem, except that those people are profoundly antithetical to the fundamental underpinnings of the society in which they now find themselves.
So they want to transform it. Same thing in Britain, and at a certain point it happens.
It happens. There's just enough of them, and they used the advantages of a democratic system to gain power.
And and then that's it. And then the call to prayer has played over loud speakers.
In what was, you know, a c of b neighborhood.
You have a king who was the head of a religion who a lot of people think is actually probably more inclined to Islam than he is to Christianity, you know, conquered without firing a shot at the last thing that Charles does and say, oh, by the way, all.
You know, all the akbar.
So that's why I mean for Europe, simply because it made it made a suicidal decision to replace its not
well place. Is that a loaded word to augment its population with people from another place believing in this preposterous post Christian transnational everybody's fine and equal thing that if you just simply transplant people to the society that took thousands of years to construct, they will absorb in a trice it's institutions, it's believes, it's guardrails and the rest of it, and they will become like us.
I'm not one of those people that say that.
It culture matters, is what I will say. And people from a culture steeped in it are not going to fit like a lego piece into another one period, sorry, unless they.
Really want to try, and unless unless it's.
America America, which has a different sort of civic identity than Norway, it's Ireland.
Yeah.
It's a funny thing though about this national identity and all that stuff, because you know, you can't beat something with nothing, right. I mean, that's sort of my larger going back to the foreign policy issues, like you know, you know, we can't want something more than they want it.
And I think that's what's happening inside Iran right now, is that we've been told and we promised for the past thirty years that there's this big independence but I mean a revolutionary movement or that they want to kick out the Islamic radicals who run the country, and yet it never quite seems to happen.
It's like we want it more than they wanted.
And I feel like that maybe that that is that is the question for Europe. The European monuments, the europe the Great European Cities, the Great European monuments, the great European cultural artifacts are entirely religious, or they are or they're based in, if not religion, religious war, you know, like they were fighting religious war, you know, nineteenth century.
So once you throw that out, like you don't, you can't replace it with sort of this neutral, you know, intellectual shrugging you It gets replaced by people who believe something.
So if you, if you, if you, if you.
Don't like the call to prayer and you don't like that stuff, well what are you offering? And what what europe and European Western in actual values offered was this kind of shrugging nihilism that we put up with for one hundred years, and a lot of that was maybe after World War One it seemed nihilism seemed like a pretty good option. But you know, at some point you have to decide if you if you believe any of this stuff, and it can't you know, I mean, I I like all this return to.
Church. I mean that's you know, listen, that's my job now. But you can't.
You can't go back to faith out of spite or because you're going to show the other side or because you have some partisan believe you have.
It has to be you have to be drawn to it.
And I suspect that that a younger generation, and I think an older generation is looking for something may go back to it. Look, there's a reason why these things last, you know, there is a reason they last speak.
Is that true?
Yeah, because you're not out of spikee part. But there's a certain energy that combines the religion with nationalism too. And you saw that a lot in Great Britain, when all of a sudden the old flags are coming out. I don't think that was necessarily a return to religion as much as you, as much as I you know, might like in the culture, but it's all bound up, it's.
All part of it.
Well in England especially right It's like but I would just say, like the Dutch had a very the Dutch, who were super super rational, have a very complicated relationship to religion. I've had a complicated one for five hundred years. They had this great you know they have they had trouble. They are they are out of it now they are they're they're Their culture is a little I mean every now they are flare ups. But as as a Northern European or European nation, they seem to be having they
seem to have a policy now about immigration. It's a little bit more, a little bit more sane you and I would think it's sane, not perfect, but it's on sway. And they made a video years ago that if you you want to come to Holland, yeah, and you want to be.
A Dutch citizen, you have to watch this video.
And the video was like people eating bacon and cheese, sitting around at the park, women bathing topless, uh dogs, yeah, dogs, a guy smoking weed, and two men making out. And it was like, if any of this stuff bothers you, Holland is not your place. Because we are tolerant about everything. And although Dutch are weird about tolerance too, I love
the Dutch for that reason. And I think that was that was a statement of values that the Dutch could the Dutch people could get behind because it that is kind of their modern way, right, and I think that needs to be The unapologetic, full throated assertion of your great values is perfectly legitimate, and I just think you spent one hundred years trying to make it knowledge of it, and some of those countries are just exhausted for war,
and I understand it. I'm not going to point fingers, but there there is nothing to be ashamed of in saying, hey, you know we you know, we're in Norwegians. We were like the Vikings, we were like the we were marauding, like the Danes. We were pagan warriors.
You know, we were tough, you'd think, but that's that that video that you just described, you say that that's a sign of tolerance. It would be viewed now as a sign of intolerance because it specifically suggests that people who do not share these cultural values are not welcome and cannot become Dutch, which is which is true, but it's a ridiculous idea now because you have this arrangement between between between Islam and Marxists, which is just makes
you scratch your head. But it's a temporary alliance of convenience I guess where the more you are in this country, the more you're on the left, the more you side with Islam because you believe somehow that it's a race. I mean, the tenets of it are irrelevant to you. What it has done to the various societies along the time, how it was spread by the sword, et cetera.
Et cetera, et cetera. You could almost call it, why a colonialist enterprise decolonized. It was Spain ever decolonized, I believe it was.
It's the reconquista that it's so you have this arrangement whereby it's progressive now to side with these people because they are viewed as the as the victims of your preferred oppression. So you can't say, in the name of tolerance, the Dutch would would insist that people follow these values, because it would be intolerant of the people who are primarily now at the top of the intersectionality pyramid.
And that's it's just it's bizarre, Yeah, I mean.
The Dutch for Dutch, like, I don't want to dump on them. I read this thing last night and so I didn't have a chance to check it. So it may not be true. It may not be It may not be accurate, although it has all of the ring, all the ring of truth and the ring of accuracy. It was a sort of history of the seat of the church and church movement, ecumenical movements of the you know, sixties,
mostly sixties and seventies. Well, you know the world counts of churches happened after World War two, all these things, you know, and a lot of them happened as a result of World War two as a result of a European Christian churches wondering how it was that they let the Holocaust unfold, Right, So that's where its kernel is. And you know, by the sixties it was kind of you know, nutty fruitcake stuff, but.
It was.
There was a paragraph that was simply a characterization of the sort of moral world, the broader church movements.
In the world.
Right, So, and I mentioned Malcolm X, and Malcolm X it was characterized as saying, so, I don't know if he said this, boy, it sounds like he did. Malcolm X said that he was drawn to Islam because in Islam he found none of the racism that he found in the Christian West. And I just I kind of laughed.
It was like it can't be. I mean, he couldn't have said something so dumb about the people who invented slavery, African child slavery based on race and actual skin, like the actual not just skin, Coller, but the precise you know, the value of the dark, you know, whatever it is, the intensity of it.
But I think, and so I have chance look it up. But I'm almost.
One hundred percent certain he said that and thought that. And I'm also one hundred percent certain that people they still think that, because everything must be seen through the prism of my personal animosity towards the blessings of my life, right to get back to gratitude again, and so everyone who hates my you know, forebears must also be an ally and must be free of sin.
And I just find that so weird.
And that's.
It's the I wrote a piece for my weekend column for NRO. There was a story saying that Germany and will now forbid seventeen to forty five year olds from leaving the country because of military service. And I looked a little bit deeper into it and it's like, no, now, actually, you just have to tell the military you're going abroad. If you're going abroad for more than three months, and the top of it was forty five. Forty five year
olds could be conscripted. And I thought, so, they're going to cut right to the stage of taking the shopkeepers and the and the accountants and putting a sharp stick in their hand, and they're going right to that fit.
But the idea is is that, you know, the conscription and the posture now having to increase their military is so our culture is bad, or our history is racist, our values are wrong. Everything that we stood for is soaked in blood. We are uniquely as being part of the West. Here go defend us. There's nothing they've failed to construct anything.
No one is going to go to war for bike lanes or for for wind farms off they just aren't.
They just aren't.
And eventually that to this forty five year old German infantrymen, you know, they're look look like German tourists, like the little incredibly short shorts, those like dangerously short shorts, and then the the birkenstock with socks like oh no, like you're not going to win the war.
But on the other hand, I mean the problem with all that is that like over that I see is that.
The opposite of thinking that your culture is the worst thing in the world is unfortunately, the reaction to that is thinking is the best thing in the world, and rather than what you really should be thinking, which is that it's yours and it's a mixed bag, like everybody's legacy, like everybody's inheritance.
It's mixed bag.
And we all try to be better, and we try to be proud of the people who are grateful of the I think grateful is better word than proud, grateful of the people who sacrifice to get us to this place. I mean, I'm sitting there in Princeton and Princeton, New Jersey, and you know this is a great pivotal you know, depending on I mean, everybody who lives your revolutionary war battlefield always says.
This is a pivotal war.
But people, you know, this is the pivotal war. And all these things are true.
And so the opposite of or I should say, the proper bromide or proper response to to your culture is drenched in blood and sin is well, it's mine and
it's not and it's not perfect. But I'm grateful for the things that brought me here, and I'm hoping to make it better, and so I sometimes I find the reactions to it even, you know, like not this right, but on the heading of well, actually, you know, slavery was good for them, you know, slaves, which is sure and ridiculous and not necessary to say, to make the argument that flawed people at a flawed time belatedly realized the mistakes they had made.
And okay, it's twenty twenty six.
You know, I got to move on prey quick points to wind up one. I agree with you to be proud of your culture. I also would note that there are hierarchies of cultures. Some are worse than the others, and we actually don't have much to learn from the ones that are demonstrably worse. We have munch to learn from the ones that are better.
But you always got to keep your eye out for the one that is completely secure, that absolutely.
It is the best and they're going to show it to everybody. Uh So, yeah, there are hierarchies too. You said the word bromide, and I think we would all be happier if you could get commercial bromides like you used to be able to do. There's something, there's something called nervine I never saw it, but Bromo Seltzer, for example, was alca Seltzer with a little bromide.
Right, and so now the term bromide has come to me sort of you know, a cliche to you know, to call them somebody or something like that.
No, it actually sort of worked nerves, the nerves if you could just goggle, if you could grab your afternoon so to diet free one.
And you know, going up in Baltimore, right, it was born in Baltimore. There are two famous factories in town in the center of towns Domino one of them. No, uh no, that was across the harbor. Yeah, h McCormick, the McCormick spice factory was in downtown Baltimore. And the Bromo Seltzer Tower and the battlem my Celter towers I think might still be there. This long sort of big, big tall, sort of Italianate looking, you know, plots of styles skyscraper of the time with a kind of a
light blue clock. You know when they when they all had clocks and it said Bromo Seltzer on the clock. And I remember, I don't even know if you could buy Broman Seltzer on I guess you probably could buy it, but that you know, these are great patent medicines. And then on McCormick, if you were downtown, you knew what spice they were packaging that day because you could smell it.
And that was just normal.
I mean, I don't know, I know, I'm playing the James YleX violin here, but that was pretty amazing.
You know, it was great.
I mean you would tell people, hey, buddy, take a Bromo and Bromo Seltzer ads on the radio had the sound of this of a of a.
Train, promosil, promosils, promostils.
Which actually made you more nervous and made you want to take a Bromo and McCormick. McCormack's one of the biggest spice companies in the country, and they later bought Shilling and so for a while it was McCormick in the east Shilling in the West that would be their ads.
I don't know why they had to tell this that until they eventually combined it, but they sort of had split up the country the way companies did in very odd ways. There was Asians and Hellman's right right. There was a chain called Cress. There was a chain called Kreskey, and they managed to split up the country in Niclely you find Crest all over the South. You'll never find a Kriskey down there. And yes, well we could get into retail history. That's another podcast I'd love to have with you.
The third thing I was going to say in this list was that you should go to Apple Podcast and give us five stars.
Give us six because Rob's back, and say more Rob, more Rob.
It's kind of odd everyone drifts in and out, yet I'm the only loadstone here we get star. I am the circus tent pole around which the elephants and the monkeys gaper. I would consider yourself the ring master. Well your top hat. Somebody has to keep an eye on the clock and pretend he's an old radio hand. Anyway, Rob, it was great to talk to you.
It always is. Don't be a stranger, come back more often.
Love to Yeah, And I apologize to listeners who wanted us to talk about current events, but aren't you exhausted by current events?
Like let's you know, I have talked to you in a long time, so it's nice to catch up.
And I often also want to remind people in the comments that if I don't respond necessarily to a thing that Robins said or an assertion, it is not because I agree with it, maybe that I don't agree with it, but I cannot refute it instantaneously with the amount of information I need or I want to move along, or such and such and touch. So you can argue with Rob all you like, an economics and the rest of it. Next week, I believe it'll be Stephen Hayward and Peter Robinson.
No, it'll be Charles C. W.
Cook as well, the gang back together. I don't know where I'll be. It could be my last from here, who knows. It's uncertain.
Off we go, Off we go, things in storage and eyes to the horizon. Rob it's been great and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point one point seven three five two anyway, bye
Bye, good to see you.