Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Okay, let's light this candle. Alex is upset by something, probably because I quoted, like, Mater. No, he's upset by dying in a video game. Okay, here we go!
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Break:
[0:28]
| We'll be right back.
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Sam:
[0:36]
| Welcome to curmudgeon's corner for saturday august 30th 2025 uh 2238 utc as i'm starting to record this i am sam minter did i say that already i don't know if i said that already i probably said that already yvonne bow is not here and neither is anybody else well my son alex is in the background, but he's probably not going to participate. I don't know. But the, like Yvonne messaged me Thursday afternoon, U.S. Time to say that he wasn't going to be able to make it this week. And I was busy Thursday afternoon, Thursday evening. I meant to like send out, send out the thing asking for co-hosts, but forgot. I finally got around to it like Friday afternoon sometime. time. And I, and even then when I did it, I screwed it up. I always like exclude the last three co-hosts we've had, but I forgot to reflect the fact that Pete had co-hosted with us just last week. And so I included Pete in the email I sent out and had left out like Todd should have been back in the list and I didn't include Todd, but whatever. I did have one bite of interest. Shout out to our loyal listener, Matt, who's been listening to this podcast since the beginning.
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Sam:
[1:59]
| And he said he really wanted to, but then the timing didn't work out. So here I am doing a solo show. As usual, when I do solo shows, I am going to do one segment at a time. And in between segments, I'm going to go off and do other things. And I'm going to probably take all weekend to record this stupid show rather than doing it all at once.
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Sam:
[2:20]
| In in this case after i finish recording this segment my wife my son and i are going to go to like the the what's it called that well it's like a state fair kind of thing around here but the it's the evergreen state fair there we go here in washington state washington state has several of these fairs of different kinds like there's a puyallup fair as well and there are a couple others i think but this is the evergreen state fair and this weekend is the last weekend that's around and we're going to go and visit. And when we do this, my wife likes to actually wander around and check out all the stuff at the fair. My son basically just goes for some of the fair food. He likes the corn, likes the hot dogs, maybe likes a couple other things. And I like the food too. I basically don't like the experience of fairs. You know, they're just too crowded, too many people, too whatever. So, I mean, years ago, we would go to these things and actually go on a couple rides and stuff. Sometimes when we had my daughter with us as well, and when my son was smaller... But you have to wait in line for those.
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Sam:
[3:33]
| Like, I'm old. I get nauseous on the rides now. You know, well, I've always gotten nauseous on the rides. There's a nice story from years ago, me throwing up on a ride. We don't have to go there now. But, well, okay, yes, we do.
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Sam:
[3:52]
| I've probably shared it on the podcast before. But I had basically, I had flown to Chicago to meet somebody. Basically, you know, we'd been flirting online for months and months and months. And so this was, we're going to meet in person, have a couple dates, whatever. And anyway, one of the places we went was like a carnival. And we went on a ride. And it was one of these, I forget what it's called, but it had, you know, multiple layers of spinning. It had like one thing that spun and it was attached to another thing that was spun. I think it was the zipper. I think it was the zipper. Let me. Zipper ride. Yes. Yes. This is, it was definitely the zipper. Anyway.
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Sam:
[4:39]
| Anyway, we, multiple layers of spinning. Anyway, I, in the middle of the ride, I started puking and just people, and it was falling out of the like carriage we were in and like dripping down onto people below. People were screaming because there was vomit falling on them from the sky. It was very embarrassing. The person I was with was very understanding, but I will say after that weekend, I never saw her again. I don't know if it was related, but that was it. Anyway, it was a fun weekend anyway. But yeah, that part did not go so smoothly. There was another part of the weekend where we went to like a medieval times and there were horses. And it turns out I'm highly allergic to horses. So I had like a massive asthma attack. Yeah, this weekend had a few issues. But yeah, no. Anyway, I did keep in touch with her for many years after that. But I never saw her in person again. Anyway.
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Sam:
[5:50]
| This first segment will be media i was starting to talk about fairs i got i got distracted about the fair oh let me finish about the fair anyway this first segment is always the the light fluffy like personal stuff we'll talk about news in the later two segments i don't know exactly what i'll talk about yet because news events may change what i feel like talking about before i record those segments but oh yeah the fair i'll talk about the fair for a little bit and then i will do a couple movies but yeah so we don't do the rides and stuff anymore you know what my son and i typically do is we will go find a quiet corner as far away from the other people as possible where we can just sort of camp out bring the food eat and hang out and we'll just sit there for a while you know watching the world go by we'll we'll bring our devices and we'll we'll We'll play on our devices. We'll do whatever. And just basically stuff ourselves silly with fair food for a couple hours and then go home. And, you know, it's just become a tradition. Now, honestly, I... It's one of those, like, I would not mind not doing this in a given year.
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Sam:
[7:02]
| However, if my family goes and I don't go, I kind of feel left out. So my wife, Brandy, and my son, Alex, have actually already gone. Like last week, they went without me during the workday while I was at work.
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Sam:
[7:20]
| And so I was sort of like, well, I kind of feel left out, blah, blah, blah. And so now we're going again. Now I had said, I don't really need to go. It's okay. You guys are already gone. However, then Alex was like, no, I want to go again. And so we're going again. Well, I'm going for the first time, but you know, like I said, I, I, I would, I would actually be fine skipping it, but I did feel kind of left out when they go without me. You guys know this kind of thing? Like, it's not actually my favorite thing. I actually don't, I can't really say I enjoy going to the fair. It feels like a little bit of a chore. I mean, I do like the, like the buttered corn on the cob and the hot dogs and some of the other fair foods. I don't, I don't do any of the weird, like fair foods, like, you know, fried butter or whatever that they have at some of these things. I don't think I've seen anything really weird and exotic at this state fair. I know that's a big thing in some other places, but, you know, I don't do the deep fried Oreos or the deep fried butter. I don't know. I don't go for the weird foods, but I like the buttered corn because, you know, we sometimes have that at home, but very rarely, you know, and the. Yeah.
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Sam:
[8:42]
| And, and, you know, it's just different at the fair. I don't know. Like, and, you know, and so we sit there and we enjoy. Anyway, maybe if anything interesting happens when we visit later today in the next segment, I'll mention something, but I don't expect anything interesting will happen. I expect that we will be, we will go there, we will do the thing, and then we will come home, you know? And so, yeah. So anyway, for this first segment, before we do newsy stuff later, the main thing is I'm going to do two of the movies from my big movie list. We are now on movie. Well, we have been for a while. Movies I watched last November. So this next one, Alex and I watched it November 23rd of last year.
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Sam:
[9:30]
| And I've previewed this the last couple weeks. King Kong versus Godzilla. from 1962. Okay. Now this is a crossover, obviously, between the King Kong franchise and the Godzilla franchise. We actually did this, you know, as we're going through, we've been going through both, I guess both of these are on our list to go through, but we got to this from the King Kong side, because this is the third King Kong movie. There was King Kong from 1933, Son of Kong from later in 1933. They put out two, one in March, one in December in that year. And then this third one was almost 30 years later, King Kong versus Godzilla in 1962. Meanwhile, the Godzilla franchise, this was also the third movie in the Godzilla franchise, but Alex and I had only watched the first one before this. We watched the 1954 Godzilla, I believe.
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Sam:
[10:34]
| The second one was from 1955 Godzilla raids again and then this is number three so at some point we're going to have to go back and pick up Godzilla raids again and watch that but, Godzilla, or no, King Kong vs. Godzilla. Let me start with, this is not a good movie, okay? Under no stretch of the imagination, could you say, oh man, this is a great movie, okay?
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Sam:
[11:09]
| And, but, but, I am going to say, I'm giving it a thumbs up anyway, because it was a lot of fun, okay? And it was fun in the, this movie is so bad it's laughable kind of way. You know i mean awful special effects not particularly great acting a plot that you know doesn't make a whole lot of sense necessarily lots of disjointed stuff.
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Sam:
[11:47]
| And and of course like these are well known for like you know bad dubbing of the parts that are in japanese and it just but it it there are bad movies that i've given a straight up thumbs down because they are painful to watch they are horrible there's nothing redeeming about them this is one of the ones that is just so bad it's comical and frankly like the the you know the people in rubber suits being the two main characters fighting and throwing styrofoam rocks at each other and things like that is just hilarious. It is just hilarious. And so, yes, I had fun. I think Alex had fun. We kept pausing it to like discuss parts of it, rewind, see the weird stuff again, make fun of the the effects all of this kind of stuff now you know obviously there's both of these franchises are you know let's see here now there are now 34 godzilla films in the original sort of toho films japanese oriented ones and and i guess there's a yeah and then there's six.
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Sam:
[13:16]
| American Godzilla films. On the King Kong side, there are fewer, and the Wikipedia page is stupid and doesn't number them. But, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 12 main movies and then 3 direct-to-video animated ones. And then there's some TV series as well.
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Sam:
[13:42]
| You know so these are these are well-loved long-lived franchises but and and and there's a whole genre of like monster films that go beyond these two of course as well and, it's a certain kind of thing i mean i guess that some of the newer ones try to be a little bit more they lean into the special effects and some other stuff and not try to be sort of the cheap pulp movies of the very early ones but still you know if you're going to like we were talking superhero movies last week monster movies are the same kind of genre you know where no no one's expecting high art you're expecting some sort of big creature rampaging and doing all kinds of damage and, and then the human beings valiantly fighting back. And, you know, in a lot of them, you get two of the big monsters fighting each other or more and, you know, cool.
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Sam:
[14:53]
| You know, if you're watching one of these, you kind of know what you're signing up for. Anyway, giving this one a thumbs up just because it's hilariously bad. And yeah. Again, there are bad movies that are just not enjoyable at all. They're just horrible. Then there are bad movies that are so bad they're comical and you can laugh at them. And this is in that category. So there you go. King Kong vs. Godzilla.
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Sam:
[15:23]
| Next up, All About Eve from 1950. And I believe this was, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was from the AFI list as we are working our way up. By the way, like, you know, I'm doing movies that we watched back in November right now, but we now only have number one left on that list. We, Alex and I watched number two on the 1998 AFI list a few nights ago. And so all we have left is Citizen Kane from 1941, which was number one on both the 1998 and 2007 lists. And which I've never seen. I'd seen number two before. Number two on the 1998 list was Casablanca and it was number three on the 2007 list.
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Sam:
[16:18]
| Anyway, I've never, ever seen Citizen Kane. So I'm actually kind of looking forward to it, to see if it lives up to the hype of being number one on all these top movie lists. Anyway, we'll get to reviewing those eventually. All About Eve was number 16 in the 1998 list. It dropped to number 28 on the 2007 list. By the way, I don't know if I mentioned before, Alex and I have agreed that once we pass number one on the 1998 list, we're going to start over from number 100 using the 2007 list and work our way back up again. But anyway, all about Eve. I will read the, I didn't even read the plot summary of King Kong versus Godzilla. You guys really need to know or care.
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Sam:
[17:15]
| Alex is indicating that maybe I should go back and do that. Okay, from Wikipedia, the one paragraph, the first paragraph of the plot description. I won't go past that because then, spoilers. But Mr. Taco, head of Pacific Pharmaceuticals, is frustrated with the television shows his company is sponsoring and wants something to boost his ratings. When a doctor tells Taco about a giant monster he discovered on the small Faro Island, Taco believes that it would be a brilliant idea to use the monster to gain publicity. Taco sends two men, Osamu Sakurai and Kinzaburo Furu, to find and bring back the monster. Meanwhile, the American nuclear submarine Seahawk gets caught in an iceberg. The iceberg collapses, unleashing Godzilla, who has been trapped within it since 1955. Godzilla destroys the submarine and makes its way towards Japan, attacking a military base as it journeys southward. Okay, one more paragraph. On Faro Island, a gigantic octopus crawls ashore and attacks the native village in search of farolactin juice, taken from a species of red berry native to the island.
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Sam:
[18:30]
| The mysterious Faro monster, revealed to be King Kong, arrives and defeats the octopus. Kong drinks several vases full of the juice while the islanders perform a ceremony, which causes him to fall asleep. Sakurai and Furu place Kong on a large raft and begin to transport him back to Japan. Mr. Taco arrives on the ship transporting Kong, but a JSDF ship stops them and orders that Kong must be kept out of Japan.
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Sam:
[18:59]
| Meanwhile, Godzilla arrives in Japan and terrorizes the countryside. Kong wakes up and breaks free from the raft. Reaching the mainland, Kong confronts Godzilla and proceeds to throw giant rocks at him. Godzilla is not fazed by King Kong's rock attack and uses its heat ray to burn him. Kong retreats after realizing that he is not yet ready to take on Godzilla. There's two more paragraphs of the plot description but I won't go there because spoilers.
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Sam:
[19:32]
| Okay, now the description of the plot of All About You. And again, I'll only do the beginning. I'll do two paragraphs to match, and then I'll leave the rest to avoid spoilers. At the Sarah Siddons Award Ceremony, honoring rising actress Eve Harrington, narration from acerbic theater critic Addison DeWitt introduces the attendees and hints that there is more to Eve's story. The narration switches to Karen Richards, wife of playwright Lloyd Richards. She recalls the previous October when she introduced Eve to aging Broadway star Margot Channing, who is starring in a play written by Lloyd. Eve tells Karen, Lloyd, and Margot's maid, Birdie, that she followed Margot's last theatrical tour to New York City after seeing her perform in San Francisco. She tells of her impoverished childhood and losing her husband in the South Pacific during World War II. And moved by Eve's story, Margot takes her into her home as her assistant. Eve quickly manipulates her way into Margot's life as both secretary and adoring fan. And it goes from there. Anyway, thumbs up on all about Eve as well.
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Sam:
[20:52]
| As with a lot of these sort of 1950s movies, it's a little bit stylized. You know you're not necessarily believing these characters as real characters it's not like intended to be super realistic like they're they're kind of caricatures, but it works anyway you know it you know you you see the the dynamics between these characters and i actually like after watching a bunch of these older movies as part of this afi top 100 thing I'll say that, you know, the trend towards, Being more realistic in sort of dramatic movies and making it, you know, you sort of, one reaction to it is people act better now because it's more convincing and more realistic. But really, it's not that per se. It's intentionally stylized. It's intentionally exaggerated. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It can be really effective in telling certain kinds of stories. And it's not to say the highly realistic mode doesn't work as well, but it's a different feel. It's a different type of movie. But I think it works in a lot of these.
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Sam:
[22:20]
| And they're good to watch. You know, it still gets you. It still grabs you in the right places, even though you know it's a little bit stylized. You know it's a little bit exaggerated. I mean, we were talking about superhero and monster movies. Those are obviously stylized and exaggerated as well and aren't really concentrating on realistic characters. I'd say this kind of movie is different. I mean, there are no superheroes. There are no monsters. It's human beings interacting with each other. But they... By making them somewhat caricatures and somewhat stylized, you immediately sort of get the point of how these characters are supposed to be interacting with each other.
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Sam:
[23:07]
| Where they're coming from, what the kind of thing is. This does have a few twists and turns.
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Sam:
[23:15]
| I had not seen this movie before. I had not read about it, heard about it. I mean, I'd heard the title, but I did not know what the plot was. So like some of the twists and turns, I didn't know about till they happened. Now, some of them I suspected were going to happen. You know, they sort of, some things were a little bit telegraphed and you could see that they were coming, but it was still very well done. I mean, I think it deserves its place on this list. It's good. I enjoyed the movie. It kept me sort of on the edge of my seat at the right moments. It tugged my heartstrings at the right moments. This isn't one where it's, maybe tugged my heartstrings is the wrong way to say this one. Like there's some where you're really like, you know, something tragic happens and you're really feeling for the characters or, you know, the main characters fall in love and you're like, oh, that's so sweet. Oh, that's wonderful. And, you know, Alex always makes fun of me because I'm a sucker and I start crying at all of those moments. This did not have me like crying. You know, it's not that kind of emotional resonance, but you still sort of feel the tension of the situation and feel bad for the characters that are getting screwed over.
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Sam:
[24:41]
| And at the same time, feel...
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Sam:
[24:45]
| And you sort of enjoy watching the character who's doing the screwing over doing some of it as well. Anyway, I like it. Thumbs up. I don't have anything else to say about all about Eve. There you go. Let's see. Did it win any awards? I'm pretty sure the King Kong one didn't win. King Kong versus Godzilla didn't win anything. Let's see. Let's make sure. Oh, there is.
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Sam:
[25:14]
| Anyway there are apparently like multiple versions of the king kong versus godzilla you know like there's japanese version american version i kind of presume we saw the american version i usually try to make sure to get like if something has an original language i try to get that when I can and what you use subtitles or whatever and not dubbing and whatever this one had they they intentionally sort of made two versions and I got whichever one was most easily available so yeah did we no the Godzilla was the one where we went out of our no this is the one where we had to buy the DVD wasn't it okay so Alex is correcting me on the fly here like the The online streaming version was a dubbed version. And so we did get a remastered, I think it was the remastered version of the Japanese one on Blu-ray. You know, now I'm going to have to freaking check. Let's go and I'll check my order history and search for King Kong.
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Sam:
[26:33]
| That should do it. I don't have a lot of things. Okay. We bought a King Kong versus Godzilla on Blu-ray and we did get, yeah. So, and this is the 2014.
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Sam:
[26:50]
| No, anyway, anyway, we got it, we got it on Blu-ray to make sure we didn't have a crappy dubbed version like that we found online. So, yeah. Yeah. So there, there was apparently also, so let's see home media in July, 2014, the Japanese version was released for a first time in Blu-ray, the English language version of the film on Blu-ray also in 2014. So we probably had the English language version of the blu-ray we had the japanese version well what we had was like the japanese when people spoke in japanese they spoke in japanese and we had english subtitles when they spoke in english we heard the english the the english language was in japanese too okay well alex knows better than i did so maybe i don't know anyway they they're slightly edited differently too apparently between the two. But anyway, I was looking to see if it had won any awards. No. It does not look like it.
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Sam:
[28:09]
| Oh, yes. Anyway, apparently there are ways to tell, which version we really saw, because in the Japanese version, both Godzilla and King Kong's roars are heard during the film's final fade to black, while in the American version, only Kong's roar is heard. However, in both films, the final shot of King Kong swimming away alone is on. Oh, no. Spoilers. I accidentally gave spoilers about the end. Oh, my goodness.
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Sam:
[28:40]
| Anyway, when we try to get the most authentic version of these that we can get our hands on when we do it. Anyway, all about it, you've won tons of awards. It was. Let's see. It won best motion picture Academy Awards, won best motion picture, best director. was nominated for Best Actress for two of the actresses. Best Supporting Actor won two nominations for Best Supporting Actress, one for Best Screenplay, nominated for Best Art Direction, nominated for Best Cinematography, one for Best Costume Design, nominated for Best Film Editing, nominated for Best Score, one for Best Sound Recording. And then there are a bunch of other awards that it won that weren't Oscars. So anyway, thumbs up for both King Kong vs. Godzilla and for All About Eve, but for very different reasons. All About Eve, I think, is actually a good movie. King Kong vs. Godzilla is a bad movie that's still fun to watch and laugh at. So there you go. There's all the stuff I have to say. I'm going to take a break. The family's going to go to the fair And sometime later I'll record another segment On something newsy And relevant to current events In the world Of what's going on These days.
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Sam:
[30:08]
| But in the meantime Here's a break for you A couple minutes for you Less than a couple minutes probably For me Many, many hours I don't know how many hours Depends on when I feel like continuing Enjoy the break anyway.
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Break:
[30:25]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. It's just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. The baby build the body of the body of the body of the body of the body of the body of the body of Bob I don't know, Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Come on, I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. It's amazing show on the road there's a road? there's a road? oh my god.
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Sam:
[31:29]
| And here I am. As I expected, it's like a day later. It's more than a day later. It's more than 24 hours later.
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Sam:
[31:37]
| And yes, now let's see. Sunday, August 31st, just after 22 UTC. So before I get on to the newsy stuff, I will do the quick fare report. As expected, we went, we ate, I had some corn, and I had a hot dog. I honestly did not eat as much as I usually do when I'm there because we'd already eaten earlier in the day. So whatever. And Alex had some corn. Alex had like some shaved ice and a hot dog as well. It was, yeah, it was a thing. The most notable thing, I think, we sat under a tree. The quiet area that we usually go was sort of is a sort of a shaded area with a bunch of trees, less people sort of in a in a corner.
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Sam:
[32:31]
| You know, behind like a bunch of the food booths. It was actually behind a vendor booth and next to where they do some shows. But when the show isn't actually going on, it's a sort of a quiet area. Anyway, in previous years, they'd had some picnic tables there. The picnic tables are gone. So now it's just a shaded area with trees. So we sat under a tree, we ate our food, and then I had packed a backpack containing my laptop and Brandy's laptop. And I pulled out my laptop and worked on some projects. Alex pulled out his, well, not his laptop.
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Sam:
[33:07]
| His mom's laptop and worked on some projects. So we just sat there with our laptops. Like I was, I was doing some work on one of my little projects. He was, I think, working on one of his projects. I didn't actually like spy over his shoulder to see exactly what he was doing, but it felt like he was working on something, not just playing a game or something.
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Sam:
[33:28]
| And yeah, we, we did that while my wife uh his mom obviously went out and wandered around and looked at vendor booths and did other stuff and you know whatever so we just sat and chilled and did that you know my main thing was this backpack with the two laptops a bunch of cords and stuff that we ended up not needing most of, like a jacket for when it got colder, a bunch of stuff, was really freaking heavy. And so when I was wandering around, I was like, this is so heavy. And I complained around. And we did go see some of the animals at one point, like look at the goats and cows and stuff like that. And yeah, so and because I was sitting on the ground by the tree or at one point lying on the ground by the tree. I ended up like my back was sore. My hip was sore. I was like, anyway, by the end of the day, I was just so ready to go home.
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Sam:
[34:38]
| And anyway, so, but the, the, the, the fair was done in the way that our odd family does it. Okay. Now to newsy stuff. There are a few things on the potential list here. I've got, we never really finished talking about this Trump-Zelensky subject. Got some stuff about hallway conversations at work, the weaponization of government, you know, that we got the Fed governor being attempted to be fired. The stuff at the CDC, the Bolton raid, the occupied occupation of DC, a bunch of other stuff, a bunch of other stuff. But for this first segment, and I will do one more newsy segment before wrapping up the show, but the thing that's been dominating social media in the last 48 hours, at least my slice of social media, obviously one of the whole things is like, this is very bubble oriented and you see certain things and not others, but has been first, like the, look, for weeks now, there's been an increasing buzz about Trump doesn't look good. We've talked about it here on the show, about Trump's health and.
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Sam:
[36:03]
| You know, he's not looking good and he's got bruises and what about his swollen ankles and does this mean he has congestive heart failure? Does this mean his death is imminent? All of this kind of stuff. Well, Friday of this week, this accelerated because somebody, I forget what, some personality or other, I forget which one it was, posted that, hey, by the way, Trump hasn't been seen in person in three days and there's nothing on his schedule for the long Labor Day weekend. What's going on? So, of course, the internet concluded, at least the left-leaning part of the internet, started speculating, he must be dead. He must be dead. And they are covering it up and or just haven't figured out how to release it yet and stuff's going on. He must be dead. He's either dead or almost dead or something like that. And any moment now will come the official announcement from the White House that he's dead and Vance is president now.
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Sam:
[37:15]
| The speculation was really, really rampant on Friday night, Friday night, U.S. time. It was just crazy. Like, and from, you know, not just like wackadoodle accounts, but like, you know, fairly prominent folks with lots of followers, responsible journalists, like for the most part, traditional journalists were not saying a damn thing. You know, they weren't about to touch this with a 10-foot pole, as they say. But they were the sort of next layer downs, like the George Conways of the world and sort of the pundits, the people who weren't sort of traditional journalists but who were liberal influencers of one sort or another, were running with this. And even when they were like, oh, we don't know anything. We're not sure, but maybe, but maybe, maybe, maybe he's dead. Maybe he's about to be dead. It's really suspicious that he, he hasn't shown his face in three days. And why doesn't he have anything scheduled for the weekend and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Sam:
[38:28]
| I went into the curmudgeon's corner slack and my, my statement there was the following. Okay, so social media has now been going nuts over the fact Trump hasn't been seen in public for three days and has no scheduled events for the long weekend. I figure it is the usual rumors spiraling way past reality, and he will probably show up again at any moment. But I figured I would go ahead and note it here. Pete, who co-hosted last week, said his underlings are not publicly stabbing each other in the back yet, so it can't be that dire. And then approximately, what is it? Can I do math?
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Sam:
[39:11]
| Eight hours after I posted this, we did have a Trump spotting. He was spotted leaving the White House with his granddaughter, Kai, loading the motorcade to go golfing in Virginia. And then since then, there have been, he went jogging a bit, jogging, no, he's not jogging, sorry, golfing. There's a difference there, jogging and golfing. I have not seen any evidence of Trump jogging. I'm not sure that that is a thing he does. But anyway, no, yeah, he apparently went golfing again Sunday and there was another picture circulated of him leaving for golfing. There was a little bit of controversy because the White House also put out a picture supposedly of Trump actually golfing, but that picture turned out to be months old. So it's like why did they do that and a number of people have pointed out that in the pictures of him leaving the White House to go golfing he doesn't look that great at least that's what the commentary says but honestly they are not great pictures taken from quite a bit away, and you know look, there are a couple things I want to talk about this first of all is.
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Sam:
[40:34]
| This whole zeitgeist on social media had the feeling of people being super excited. Oh my God, this is great. Maybe he's dead.
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Sam:
[40:46]
| And getting really hyped up and worked up about it that maybe this is... And I'll add, this is a meme that's been going on on social media for quite a while too, is like, what will it be like when it happens? Where it is quite clearly an announcement that Trump has passed away. And people posting all kinds of, like, memes about how there will be celebrations in the street. And look, I'll be honest, there probably will be. There will be lots of excited people. There will be lots of upset, sad people as well. I mean, the country is very divided on this issue. And, you know, it's a few steps away from people actively being like, we hope something does something to Donald Trump. That's a whole different thing. This is people hoping he drops dead of natural causes. Yvonne has been on this show hoping that he drops dead of natural causes and expressing his wish that that happens sooner rather than later. And all over social media, and look, when I say social media at this point, I'm not on X. I check threads fairly rarely.
|
Sam:
[42:07]
| I'm mostly on blue sky these days but i also still check mastodon regularly but on mastodon i usually check only my feed of people who post about the news not my feed of everything and then i'm on tiktok a lot so when i say on social media i'm talking about that universe of things oh i didn't even mention facebook i do check facebook occasionally but i don't see this kind of stuff there, and I don't check all the time for Facebook. But anyway, that's what I'm talking about on social media. But people were really excited about this. And first of all, look, I understand.
|
Sam:
[42:47]
| But that's still not a great look, you know, but also the running ahead of the facts. And look, I understand nobody trusts the White House physician's office at this point. We talked about that on the show a couple of weeks ago, how even before Donald Trump, it's not been an office that's been particularly forthcoming about presidential health issues.
|
Sam:
[43:16]
| Going, going back decades for presidents of both parties, you know, some have been more forthcoming than others, but even, even then it's not like, it's not like they're really releasing everything. It's always sort of, you know, here's some information, here's some basic information, here's the standard high level stuff. And I feel like the level of disclosure does vary quite a bit president to president. But in this particular case with Donald Trump, we know, like, he's had doctors lie about his weight, lie about other numbers. They always come out and say, like, he's the healthiest president ever. So nobody believes the official updates, understandably. And he has not looked great on a number of recent occasions. He's had the swelling of the ankles and And the White House doctor's office did provide an explanation for that. Some people think it's more than that, but they did provide an explanation. He's had the bruises on his hand. But as we've talked about here before, that is very common. It is not necessarily like some people have been talking about it like it's a sign of imminent death.
|
Sam:
[44:35]
| And it isn't necessarily. Now, could Donald Trump drop dead of a heart attack or stroke or something else imminently? Could it happen at any moment? Well, yeah.
|
Sam:
[44:50]
| He's, you know, he's an older man, not in the best shape in the world. So could it happen at any moment? Sure it could. He could also last years and years and years and years. And even people who've talked about some of his specific symptoms that have been obvious, even without trusting the doctor, they're like, yeah, those are sometimes indicative of serious underlying conditions. Sometimes they're not. But very often they do indicate some kind of underlying condition. But those underlying conditions can last for years. It is not necessarily a sign of imminent death you know it's not like you know oh he's definitely, going to be gone in days or weeks or anything like that again maybe could happen could also be years and so like you know i look i've watched a decent amount of the speculation i've seen all kinds of like people on tiktok that claim to be who knows if they really are not but claim to be doctors or nurses or people who work in hospice or whatever, you know, saying things like, oh, this looks like something I often see. And when I see this, things very often go downhill very rapidly. I've seen lots of those comments.
|
Sam:
[46:18]
| I have also seen much more rarely, but I have also seen the countervailing. Yeah, but.
|
Sam:
[46:25]
| Like, of course, you know, maybe hospice nurses see all this time right before people die, but they're hospice nurses. That restricts the universe of people they're seeing anyway. This kind of stuff also happens in people who last a long time. You know, and so there's a lot of wish casting here of people who want to see Trump gone and move on. And, you know...
|
Sam:
[46:59]
| There's all kinds of other stuff. There's like, and people are saying, well, why? Like, when have you ever seen Trump stay away from the press this long? He loves like talking to the press and, you know, it takes every possible advantage of it. And now he's like intentionally like gone for days.
|
Sam:
[47:21]
| And even his social media posts seem to be posts more like things that staff would write even one that he posted that was a long rant about somebody damaging the new patio where they paved over the rose garden apparently a contractor installing something else like scratched it or something and so there was a long rant complaining about that but people were like trying to read into it like.
|
Sam:
[47:50]
| Oh, but this, yes, it was a long rant. It was a long rant that people clearly wanted to sound like Donald Trump, but it has proper punctuation and he never does that. So maybe that's not really Donald Trump posting that. Maybe that's somebody else and, you know, posting on his behalf and he's still not really doing anything. And he posted again, apparently earlier today just saying never felt better in my life all caps also dc is a crime freeze president djt so because people keep asking for like can we can we see that he's really good like and look it is very possible the man hasn't been feeling good the last couple days he was sick he was in bed took a little time off it is a holiday weekend the last couple days he's apparently been golfing and people have been like, whoa, but we got pictures of him leaving the White House, but we didn't have any like press sightings at the golf course, actually watching him golf.
|
Sam:
[48:55]
| Look, sometimes we have that, sometimes we don't.
|
Sam:
[48:59]
| And again, look, another aspect of this is obviously, given what we saw in 2024, the slightest little thing about Joe Biden also led to this kind of speculation, both on the right and with Democrats who clearly wanted to push out Joe Biden, even before the bad debate. So we did have this with Joe Biden as well. We're now having it with Donald Trump. So although I have seen a number of people on the left complaining that, yes, sort of the left-wing social media sphere has been full of this, but as I said earlier, the mainstream press, for the most part, was not engaging in this speculation. A couple mentions here and there, but they weren't going nuts with it. Whereas with the Biden stuff, of course, it became the all-consuming conversation for, like, months, it seems like. You know, is he too old? What's going on? Is he healthy? Does he have an issue? Does he do this? And yes, I acknowledge that asymmetry. But I kind of think it was overblown with Biden and I kind of think it's overblown here now just watch before I even publish this podcast episode he's going to drop dead or something but and again possible but.
|
Sam:
[50:25]
| Fundamentally I feel like, Let's try to stick with the actual known information as much as possible.
|
Sam:
[50:35]
| And there is plenty of things that the Trump administration is continuing to do day by day, hour by hour, that we can talk about and react to, that we know are happening. At the beginning of this segment, I listed a few of them, right? You know, we've got, you know, the troops in D.C. We've got potential troops going to Chicago soon. We've got the Bolton thing. We've got the decimation of the CDC. We've got firing the Federal Reserve or trying to fire a governor of the Federal Reserve. We've got lots of stuff going on that is real and we know for sure it's real there's no question about that it seems like this kind of feeding frenzy over donald trump like not showing his face for a couple days is a waste of time if he actually dies we will know about it We will know about it really quickly There's not going to be I could say this right now We're not going to have a gap Between when the president dies And when we get a news alert about it That is measured even in hours.
|
Sam:
[51:59]
| Let alone days, okay? You know, worst case scenario He goes to bed and passes away right after he goes to bed and it isn't discovered until morning. So, okay, eight or nine hours, maximum, you know, in that sort of scenario. But if it happens during the day, There is no way that thing doesn't leak within moments of it happening because there's going to be a scramble at the White House. There are going to be ambulances. There are going to be people running. There are going to be members of the random White House staff who tell people about it instantly. That would be known immediately. And if he is sick enough to go to the hospital, even, that's going to come out pretty quick, too. Remember when he had COVID during the first term. Now, there was some hemming and hawing, and there was a lot of, you know, it became clear later that it was much more serious than they let on, but we knew he took the helicopter to Johns Hopkins, like, when it happened.
|
Sam:
[53:10]
| This is not a universe where it is a realistic thing to think, oh, the president died and they're covering it up. We're not going to have a Dave scenario. That is the right movie, right? Dave, I remember liking that movie. Let's double check it. Dave movie. And I should add it to my list again. Yes, Dave is a 1993 American political comedy.
|
Sam:
[53:39]
| There we go. I've taken a picture of it to make sure it's re-added to my list. He's a presidential lookalike hired by the Secret Service to be a stand-in, but the stand-in becomes stuck in the role indefinitely after the president suffers a major stroke. You know, that's the fundamental plot of the movie. And then things happen. And it turns out that the imposter Dave is better president than the one he replaced, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That situation is not going to happen in real life. If something serious happens to Donald Trump, we will know really quickly.
|
Sam:
[54:14]
| I'm sorry. Like anybody who wants to fantasize about these other scenarios. No, no, we would know right away. Now, that's if something acute happens, either death or something serious enough to go to the hospital right away. He's obviously got really good medical care right there at the White House. If he's just sick, and it isn't something that actually requires rushing him to the hospital, and he can be treated there at the White House, I absolutely believe they could and probably would keep that as quiet as possible and might be able to succeed in keeping that information from being out there. Like, is he getting IV treatments on a regular basis? Maybe. They could do that at the White House. They've got everything they need to do that there. You know, yeah, he could be treated for all kinds of conditions. He could have something serious that doesn't require hospitalization. And yeah, that could happen.
|
Sam:
[55:14]
| But again, I feel like us spending, and of course, I'm spending a whole segment on this, but I'm kind of reacting not to the rumors themselves, but to the, well, not to President Trump may be sick or dead, but to how everybody's reacting to that. And I feel like it's kind of a waste of time. When we figure it out, not when we figure, if something serious happens, we'll know then, And then we can react to that then and whatever happens then. You know, like if Vance does become president, then we can start talking about that. I mean, it is interesting a little bit to speculate how Vance would be as a president compared to Donald Trump. What would be the same? What would be different, et cetera? You know, agendas would be different. Style would be different. He might keep some things. He might ditch others. Like, I think he'd probably ditch the tariffs. But there's a whole bunch of stuff he would double down on. uh who are the people that whisper in his ear is a different set of people etc etc etc.
|
Sam:
[56:19]
| Interesting conversation but i feel like i don't know and look i i was watching all the rumors i was checking social media regularly to see if something was new you know has he shown up Has there been some leak of something? Look, yeah, okay. I was checking it regularly all night, Friday night. I fully admit that.
|
Sam:
[56:44]
| But is that a waste of time compared to other things? I think it is. I think it probably was. You know, if something happens, it happens and we'll know then. In the meantime, we can talk about the other stuff. And with that I am going to take another one of these exciting breaks and I will once again go do other stuff, I'm going to do some stuff with my son I will come back and we'll do one more newsy segment unless, and I will tell you it will be one of the other things, something other than Trump's health, unless, Trump actually does get rushed to the hospital or dies before I do the next segment. I'm not holding my breath for that. But yeah, people are still talking about it right now. Within the last few minutes, Midas Touch just did another post linking to something they're saying. The mysterious case of disappearing Trump continues to leave more questions than answers with each proof of life post put out by him. Get the latest updates in this weekend's I'm not even bothering clicking through, but obviously it's a way to get engagement. Lots of people talking about this. Lots of people excited.
|
Sam:
[58:09]
| Yeah. Okay. It's break time. Break time, break time, break time. And this time it's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Wait, did I count wrong? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Oh, there we go. There we go. It's this one. It's super short. This is the new one. that's super short. Fun. Here we go.
|
Break:
[58:31]
| I want to be on top of the tree. I want to be on the floor when I fall off the tree.
|
Sam:
[58:48]
| Okay. I am back as promised. It's a number of hours later. Let's It's now Monday, September 1st at 6, just before 6.30 UTC. So my goal of actually having this out while it was still Sunday Pacific time is going to fail at it. You know, it's only half an hour till the end of Sunday Pacific time. It'll be Monday. I, you know, the way these things usually go, I probably won't even finish recording this segment yet, let alone the extra steps I need to do to, you know, export it, put the three parts together and then post process and put it out. So whatever. And also, you know, I've been delaying because, well, first of all, like since I last stopped, I watched some TV with my son. But the more interesting thing, and I think I'm going to at some point put a video on my YouTube channel. I think you can find my YouTube channel by searching YouTube for Ablesmay, A-B-U-L-S-M-E. Or maybe you have to search for Samuel Mentor. I don't know. Let me check. We go to YouTube right now.
|
Sam:
[1:00:10]
| Anyway, it's not there as I'm recording this. but I think I might put a time lapse here.
|
Sam:
[1:00:14]
| You know, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that one of the contributing factors to my daughter clipping my car, trying to get out of the parking space is that Brandy has an old Buick Riata from like the late 1980s that hasn't moved under its own power in a decade, but is like taking up part of our driveway, but that it wasn't all the way scooched over to the edge of the driveway well today brandy and i well mainly brandy yeah i helped but mainly brandy successfully got this car scooched over several feet and we like the car again has not moved under its own power we tried putting it in neutral a little while ago and to like last week sometime to try to just see if we could just push it back and forward no luck like we needed to back it up turn the wheel move forward again no we couldn't push it and we tried jump starting the thing we actually had to have someone from like a mobile mechanic place start let help us open the hood so we could get to the battery because like the latches were all you know rusted shut apparently but we we got the hood open we got the battery attached and we got some power to it like the screen came on for for a second but then went off again and we We couldn't get it started either. Anyway, so we ended up.
|
Sam:
[1:01:41]
| Buying these, these little rolly things that you can put under the wheels. We, we got a jack, you know, a nice hydraulic jack. We got like four of these things to go under the wheels. We got the stuff underneath. And basically with a little bit of effort, we were able to just push the car to the left, like six feet, maybe eight feet. I don't know. It was anyway, I've got video of it from the security cameras. And so I may make a time-lapse of that and put it on YouTube or something. If I do, I'll mention it in the next episode, if I remember.
|
Sam:
[1:02:18]
| But yeah, let's see. Can you search YouTube for Abblesmay? Yes, you can search YouTube for Abblesmay, and it will say, did you mean abuse? You did not mean abuse. You meant Abblesmay. And the Samuel Minter channel will come up, and you can look at it. You can subscribe it. You can do whatever. And maybe I'll add this at some point the most recent video on there right now is still the the daddy torture video when alex made me drink some concoction that he put together of like all the random things on a diner table that you would expect to see in exchange for us having him sign some papers he needed to sign because in washington state if you're over 13 like in order to have parents be able to talk to your doctors and stuff. You have to sign stuff. And he drove a hard bargain. I had to drink this in order to do that. But yeah, so that's done.
|
Sam:
[1:03:23]
| Anyway on the youtube like the daddy torture video before that we had like me doing a stupid dance, and then before that we had me playing a cpm game and yeah i don't really have a lot on, my youtube channel these videos go under curmudgeon's corner youtube channel, there used to be more from many years ago but i just haven't been posting much there lately You know, there have been a couple of TikToks lately on my personal TikTok. There's obviously I've been posting clips from this show on the Curmudgeon's Corner TikTok. Although I'm behind still. I'm still like, I'm way behind. I'm like a month behind. But the very most recent video I posted on TikTok was a clip from the July 27th episode, I think. July 26th. the July 26th episode. And it has more views than any other so far. Like as I'm recording this 3,982 views, 37 likes, and six comments. That's more views than any other TikTok clip I've posted by like more than double. The previous record was 1,287.
|
Sam:
[1:04:40]
| So we'll see. I don't know. Like TikTok's picking up, but I need to catch up. Okay. What was it? Oh yeah. Yeah, like what I actually am talking about for like this episode on like actual newsy stuff for like actually now. One of the things, you know, besides all that like useful stuff, moving the car and stuff that I did, I also delayed a little bit because I wasn't sure which thing I wanted to talk about. You know, I rattled off the list in the last segment. And I'll rattle it off again right now. Trying to fire the Fed governor, Cook. The Bolton raid. The occupying D.C. and talking about occupying Chicago. And of course they did something in L.A. last month. Decimating the CDC.
|
Sam:
[1:05:34]
| Look, let me sort of munge all these things together into one topic. Which is basically things are getting bad fast you know whether you know, there's been the question uh you know people keep asking you know are are we moving towards an autocracy are we what is our democracy in danger blah blah blah look and i've said before This isn't a thing where you just wake up one day and it's over. There is a gradual degradation that happens. I say gradual, but it's been eight months, January, February, March.
|
Sam:
[1:06:22]
| End of January. Anyway, you know, it hasn't even been a full year yet. The damage being done by the Trump administration is huge already and accelerating quickly. At this point, we've had two cities where the National Guard has been called in and the military has been called in in L.A. As well, to do police work and help with ICE stuff. So we're sort of getting used to, oh yeah, Trump is calling in the military again, calling in the National Guard. They're wandering around the streets of an American city again. The talk is Chicago's next. And And, you know, the more that it happens, and also I'll add, the more that it's sort of been uneventful for the most part. There were a few little clashes in L.A. In D.C., no one's taken the bait. It almost seems like the desire is to get these people out here, get them confrontational, hope for some sort of conflict between protesters and these folks.
|
Sam:
[1:07:43]
| And so far, that hasn't really happened. Nothing is blown up. There hasn't been a major escalation of violence. It seems like the kind of thing that at any moment could. But so far, we've avoided that. And, you know, in L.A., they did their little cosplaying for a few weeks, and then it's kind of died down to nothing. I don't know if they're still present. I haven't heard about it much lately. We've heard about the D.C. situation. But the D.C. Folks have mostly, with a couple of exceptions, deployed to parts of the city that... Didn't really have a huge crime problem to begin with. You know, they're going to the rich neighborhoods and the mall where all the federal buildings are and Georgetown where there are lots of restaurants and stuff. I did see... And so, like, not much has happened in terms of a real difference to sort of this crime thing. They have been supporting grabbing potential people who don't have their papers in order for immigration purposes.
|
Sam:
[1:09:02]
| But, you know, it's sort of like it goes on and nothing major happens. And so it's like, oh, you know, so if Trump goes into Chicago, then it's like, oh, OK, there's another city. And then maybe Detroit's next or Pittsburgh or Seattle, where I am. And you sort of people talk about normalizing but that's what happens is you sort of start thinking oh well there he goes again nothing really bad happened last time maybe nothing bad will happen this time and but it's all part of the normalization you you sort of stop you you get acclimatized to it and then the outrage is not as much as it was before but it really should be and you know i i mentioned the ice stuff i mean that's horrid but it's been going on for months and months now at basically the same kind of levels we hear about the same kind of stories about people being pulled off the street and the first few times you hear it you see it it's absolutely shocking. The 30th time, it's a little bit less so. The 100th time, it doesn't even get the attention. It's just like, it's the background.
|
Sam:
[1:10:25]
| But we've got essentially concentration camps being set up with people who are captured. There was a news story in the last week or two about how the number of people in these detention centers has hit a new all-time high. And we've heard that the conditions at these places are horrible. There were, you know, some of the stuff is going through the courts and they have been ordered in a few places to improve the conditions. This alligator Alcatraz nickname thing has been ordered to shut down. But.
|
Sam:
[1:11:03]
| It's, you start, just the natural thing is, oh, you know, we've heard about that already. And so it's hard to maintain the constant level of outrage. And along those same lines, you know, we talked about, you know, firing, trying to fire, I should say. It's still legally up in the air, trying to fire the Fed governor. We now have a long history of Donald Trump and his minions firing all kinds of people in the federal government and doing so for no real reason other than they aren't 100% towing the line. Donald Trump is all about loyalty. Donald Trump is all about the only purpose of the federal government is to enact my will. The idea of a professionalized civil service is anathema.
|
Sam:
[1:12:04]
| So, you know, in a healthy organization, you want your underlings to have independent ideas and opinions. You want them to tell you when you're wrong. You want them to provide opinions and expertise in things where the leader is weak. Donald Trump doesn't believe any of that. Donald Trump is just, do what I say. Do what I say and shut up. And if you express any doubt or any alternative opinion or anything other than that, you're out of here. Now, the way things were set up in the federal government was that the top layers were supposed to be like that Look, the top layers are supposed to be political appointees who enact the policies of the president And they serve at the president's will But all kinds of lower levels are supposed to be technocratic are supposed to be based on expertise.
|
Sam:
[1:13:15]
| And that's not what's going on here. And this flows right into, I mean, and I was going to jump to the CDC, but let's talk about the Fed a little bit. They have really long terms as Fed governors, intentionally, because it is supposed to be nonpolitical. It is supposed to be independent of the president. They're supposed to last multiple presidents.
|
Sam:
[1:13:47]
| The president is allowed to dismiss them, quote-unquote, for cause. But like a lot of these things, for cause is not defined. So that's why it's in court now. Like, for good cause? Or just any cause? And if it is good cause, what defines that? And the law is unclear on that because, you know, they expect people not to take advantage of it. But, you know, I can easily see this going straight, not straight, but eventually getting to the Supreme Court.
|
Sam:
[1:14:23]
| And, you know, maybe lower courts will say, you know, for a cause, it needs to be a reasonable cause. It needs to be something well-defined and that makes sense, that has the right level of magnitude. And, of course, in the Fed governor case, he's said there's evidence of mortgage fraud. Now, they haven't actually supplied that evidence of mortgage fraud at this point. Apparently, there's some issue potentially with what she claimed as a primary home versus a secondary home, whatever. It's unclear. Maybe something there, maybe something's not. Does it rise to the level necessary here anyway? I don't know. Now, one of Trump's things, of course, is and she is not the first one that he's had investigated for mortgage fraud, which, by the way, is almost assuredly like everything's projection here. Because, of course, one of the charges against him was related to mortgage fraud. And so now he's going to go out and get everybody else for mortgage fraud.
|
Sam:
[1:15:29]
| Now, there are differences in scale, differences in degree. We'll see, like, if evidence ever actually comes out on this, then we'll find out. But she hasn't been charged with anything. No evidence has been presented yet. Maybe there's something there, maybe there's not. But everyone, the consensus is, like, this is not a case where the mortgage, fraud was blatant and obvious and therefore needed to be gone after no matter what. Now, of course, Donald Trump will say the exact same thing about the charges against him. His line all along has been, if I wasn't the ex-president, they wouldn't have gone after me for any of these things. And maybe he's right on some of them.
|
Sam:
[1:16:17]
| That's, and that I've said before, I think that's actually a problem. They should have gone after Donald Trump for his miscellaneous crimes as far back as the 1970s. I mean, we've got plenty of information about things that he's done that have at the very least been unethical, but I think in many cases have been illegal as well, going back decades and decades and decades, and people just didn't go after him, you know? Now, in this case, if she actually did something wrong, absolutely. And same thing with the Bolton thing. If he's actually got classified documents, absolutely, go after him. You know, do the proper investigation, go after him. Whether she should be fired or resign over it in the meantime while the investigation is ongoing, I don't know. But the clear motivation here seems to be get her out of the way so he can appoint someone to replace her so he can get a majority on the Fed and force interest rates down. And as a trial run to see if he can fire Powell as well. Because if he can fire her, he can fire Powell. He'll dig up something. People said that the old Soviet phrase, I think it was a Stalin thing actually, was show me the person and I'll show you the crime with the basic notion that almost anybody.
|
Sam:
[1:17:46]
| Probably everybody, if you dig deep enough, you can find laws they broke because there are so many laws about so many things. I mean, the simplest example is, I don't think you can find, I.
|
Sam:
[1:18:04]
| Maybe out of the millions and millions of drivers on this planet, you could find one, but I mean, show me somebody who hasn't broken the speed limit at least once. Come on. Even by accident, right? Like, did you go 22 in the 20 mile per hour zone? Throw the book at you. And the thing is, the book allows for more serious, in almost all cases, there's a range of potential punishments. And there's a lot of discretion involved. And so very few people are actually going to get pulled over and get a ticket for going 22 in a 20 zone. If you go 40 in a 20 zone, completely different story.
|
Sam:
[1:18:53]
| And even within that, there's a range of potential punishments you may get. A lot of this varies municipality by municipality, state by state. Some of the places have very regimented rules. Some of them have less regimented rules. But the point is, there's a lot of discretion there. And that discretion is often a good thing. But if the way you are using your discretion is universally go after your enemies and leave your friends alone, that's problematic.
|
Sam:
[1:19:28]
| And to the folks who say, well, that's exactly what the Clinton administration was doing against Donald Trump, I just don't think the facts back that up. If anything, it shows how careful and how reluctant they were and how they really didn't want to do that, but sort of had to. And even when they did so, they made sure to cross the T's and dot the I's and do as much as possible in the right way.
|
Sam:
[1:20:04]
| I mean, hell, like a lot of the investigations they were complaining about happened during the first Trump administration, you know, and then we had more during the Clinton, during the Biden administration, obviously. But I think if anything, there's evidence that they were being super careful and they recognized the gravity of going after an ex-president and were extremely cautious about it and had been criticized over and over again for being as cautious as they were. And meanwhile there was tons of evidence of really serious stuff you know so but we're normalizing this we've opened investigations and and you know in the in the prediction show at the end of last year i had predicted there'd be lots of investigations along these lines but that i didn't think any indictments would hit yet and somebody correct me if i'm wrong but i think that's so far a little more than halfway through the year. Well, we're getting close to three quarters of the way through the year.
|
Sam:
[1:21:18]
| That's pretty much what's happened. There have been a bunch of investigations. He's opened investigations into a lot of his political enemies, but there haven't been any indictments yet. And within people who actually work for the executive branch, he's fired a bunch of people and made things miserable enough for other people to resign. But the long and short of this is, The notion of the non-political expertise-based portions of the federal government have been eviscerated. You know, there have been, you know, DOJ already. There were lots of people, lots of people fired from there, and their priorities have been turned around. The biggest example from this week is CDC. I think he eventually actually fired the director there. Like, there was some back and forth on has he actually fired her yet personally because it was being done by intermediaries and tweets and blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[1:22:34]
| And whether or not she's technically been legally fired or not, I think she's filing a lawsuit too. But she's locked out. She's not actually getting into the building anymore. She's not doing the job.
|
Sam:
[1:22:47]
| And a whole bunch of other people at CDC have resigned based on this.
|
Sam:
[1:22:53]
| In this case, she was in a position that serves at the will of the president. She was a political employee. So he has every right to fire her. He's not even violating civil service protections for that one. And the only dispute was, does he have to do it himself by calling her up directly? And honestly, I feel that's kind of a weak case. Like he should be able to do it by directing somebody else to take the legal actions. But the reason for the dispute in this case was she basically refused to go along with some of RFK Jr.'s non-scientific anti-vax nonsense.
|
Sam:
[1:23:37]
| They were looking for, and have started to at this time, change vaccination guidelines for the COVID vaccine in terms of what's recommended. They also had FDA change what's allowed, because I shouldn't quite say it that way. There are a lot of pharmacies and insurance and et cetera that if CDC and FDA don't recommend something, even if they're not saying it's not allowed, if they don't recommend something, then they will not proceed with it. There were a bunch of stories about how CVS has now restricted the vaccine in many, many states based on the guidance this week, the COVID vaccine.
|
Sam:
[1:24:28]
| Even in those cases, I guess you can still get a doctor's prescription. Well, in some states, it's not available at all. But in other places, you need a doctor's prescription. And look, the guidelines they put out, I'm getting tangent a little bit. The guidelines they put out are fairly easy to, first of all, there's a list of pre-existing conditions that's pretty darn long. That says you can still get the vaccine if you have any of these. I've got at least two or three of the pre-existing conditions that say you can get it. So, like, I'll be able to get it. I'm also in Washington State where anybody will still be able to get it, basically. But there are conditions on the list, apparently, that are things like.
|
Sam:
[1:25:18]
| Oh, I'm fairly sedentary. Okay? You can just lie about that kind of stuff, you know. And I've seen places that in other places, you know, it's just self-attestation anyway. Do you have any of these conditions? Yes. Okay, here's your shot. They don't check. but anyway the director was upset that he was pushing some of this stuff with no good science behind it in fact the good science says the opposite and all indications are he's going to go all in on more of this in terms of you know blaming vaccines potentially for autism potentially for other things, basically hamstringing the CDC to come up with justifications for the opinion he already has, rather than actually following the science.
|
Sam:
[1:26:17]
| So there's already been cases where they're looking at cherry-picking evidence, they're looking at interpreting things in ways that do not match expert opinion. RFK Jr. specifically saying paying attention to experts is not what you do in a democracy. What? Give me a break. You know, you don't, I'm sorry. It's just so ridiculous. Like, you know, let's.
|
Sam:
[1:26:50]
| There are certain things that you don't just want to have a vote on and go with what the public thinks. You want to ask someone who knows what the fuck they're doing. And then you do that. And look, there are always disagreements. Like, you know, there's the, the nature of science is nothing is ever 100% settled and lots of things are subtle and there's not like one single answer and there's complications and all kinds of caveats and, that's just the nature of the beast. And so you have a bunch of experts who can debate and come to a consensus and just, you know, recommend an approach and sometimes they're wrong, but it's the best you can do at that moment. The one thing you don't do is have some jackass who doesn't even believe that germs are real, which by the way, RFK wrote about that in one of his books, that he believes a long discredited 17th and 18th century theory of the miasma explanation of diseases and other stuff. It's basically like, he doesn't believe in germs.
|
Sam:
[1:28:08]
| He basically wants to undo the last 100 to 200 years of medical progress in terms of understanding what the hell is actually going on with people's health. It's just unbelievable. Anyway, so there's no surprise that a bunch of CDC people are unhappy with that and are leaving. I mean, a whole bunch of them were fired anyway already in multiple rounds of layoffs. Of the ones that are left, the ones that can are leaving. I know they're ones trapped because they don't know where else they can go and are hoping that they can hunker down and still do some good where they are. But fundamentally, you are taking one of the premier public health institutions in the world, which has not been perfect. They made some mistakes during COVID, especially in the first few months of COVID. They made some big mistakes. Like there was that whole thing about insisting on using their own tests instead of using the European tests. And because of that, delaying things by a couple months. And there was the whole thing of being slow to realize it really was a fully airborne disease and not just droplets.
|
Sam:
[1:29:30]
| And therefore, you know, the quality of mask mattered. So it wasn't just use a mask. You needed to say use a good mask.
|
Sam:
[1:29:40]
| And there's been a whole bunch of things CDC has done wrong. They're not perfect. But they were still one of the best, if not the best, such institutions in the world. They've been destroyed. And no one can trust them at this point because there's no faith that they're actually making determinations based on the science at this point and you know things that they publish are being put through like political review before they can go out they've been prohibited from talking about certain topics at all. It's bad. And this is just the latest example of the federal agencies that are being systematically made ineffective. You know, I mean, we had all the USAID foreign aid stuff costing potentially millions of lives by taking away that aid from places it was really needed. Now we have CDC. It's also going to cost lives. They do good work there.
|
Sam:
[1:30:54]
| And even when they make mistakes, they're trying their damn best. Now they can't try their best anymore. And, you know, it all comes back to Steve Bannon's comment about deconstructing the administrative state. This was all in Project 2025, too, for all the people who are like, oh, that's all made up. That's not really anything Donald Trump's going to be doing. I saw this one website. I don't have it handy, but they're tracking like exactly what of Project 2025 has already been implemented. Let me see if I can find it really, really quick. project 2025 implementation tracker here we go okay this website project 2025 dot observer and basically they've got a nice little little tracker here and let's see 40 they what they track is 47 percent of what was in project 2025 has already been implemented so that's there are 317 total objectives that they distilled out of project 2025 116 are done 63 more in progress.
|
Sam:
[1:32:15]
| And the agencies where this has gone the furthest, there were six objectives for USAID, 100% complete. There was one objective for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 100% complete. For White House itself, 13 objectives, 92% complete. Department of State, 10 objectives, 75% complete. U.S. Agency for Global Media, three objectives, 67% complete. And then it goes down from there. And if you go to this website, they track it objective by objective by objective. So, for instance, the latest was the Department of Labor. Provide robust accommodations for religious employees. Note, OPM issued a memo that allow federal workers to promote their religious beliefs to colleagues, display religious items at work, and pray together or individually. And then they've got sources for that one. And before that, at the CDC.
|
Sam:
[1:33:14]
| Promote fertility awareness-based methods as opposed to contraception for family planning. Note, the administration is rerouting birth control funds to menstrual cycle education classes to try to prevent pregnancy without using birth control. And look, all of this stuff is, you know, you could say, well, what's objectionable about those things? Well, in the CDC example, it's because there have been plenty of studies about what's effective and what's not in terms of birth control, and the fertility awareness stuff is much, much less effective. So if you've got a dollar to spend, you want to spend it on the stuff that's more effective, not the stuff that's less effective. And on the accommodations for religious employees, look, as far as I know, well, I'm not going get out over my skis, but I have no problem with, you know, someone wearing religious headgear or religious necklace or otherwise, you know, discreetly doing stuff. But this is allowing proselytizing. This is allowing somebody in the workplace, you know, and this is federal employees in a federal place to try to convert me while I'm at work. No, that's not okay.
|
Sam:
[1:34:34]
| Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And with, look, it's, again, deconstruction of the administrative state. It is step by step, agency by agency, taking away the effectiveness of government where it has been built up over time. Now, and this is, you know, there was another conservative goal going back years that didn't work, called Starve the Beast, which was basically, take the budget away from the federal government to the point where it becomes ineffective.
|
Sam:
[1:35:15]
| And then you can make the argument that government is bad at XYZ and therefore shouldn't do it at all, and we should privatize these things. This is essentially the next level extension of that. Yes, they are reducing the budget to many of these things, but even where they couldn't reduce the budget because, you know, and they're doing that too, by the way, they're taking away funding from things that Congress has approved, but they're step by step taking away the ability to be effective, even when the money is still there. And it's part of that same strategy. It's like, you know, the argument all along has been government shouldn't be doing these things. And you would often hear this couched as government is not good at these things. Sometimes government hasn't been the best way to do some of these things. And when it's not, it's, you know, we shouldn't absolutely look at the alternatives. But in many cases, the reason government hasn't been good is because it's been hamstrung in one way or another.
|
Sam:
[1:36:29]
| But in this case, they're taking even the things that government has been good at and has been having positive effects. They're systematically breaking it. They're breaking every aspect of the federal government one piece at a time. And part of the reason for that is so that you can then more effectively make the argument that government sucks at this, it shouldn't do it at all, we should let the private sector do that. I think so far, I mean, they're, they're breaking the military too. What am I even saying? They're doing all kinds of things that are going to make the military less effective as well. But I'm not sure we're quite at the privatized military part yet, but we are certainly at the, the whole, just like with everything else, the notion of a professionalized military who has certain rules that they operate by and certain things that are okay and certain things that are not, I think that's... Anybody who expresses any sort of dissent or question about that is gone or going to be gone. They're getting rid of trans people. They're getting rid of women.
|
Sam:
[1:37:47]
| I believe at this point all of the female generals have been fired. If not all of them, certainly a lot of them at the highest levels, for sure. Maybe there's still some at lower levels. They, you know, it's get to go back to how I started this segment. It's getting bad. Point by point, step by step, power is being centralized in the president. And, you know, even if Donald Trump does die and it becomes J.D. Vance, by the way, latest speculation I saw, which resonates with me, is he probably had some non-hospital medical procedure that they could do at the White House. He was probably told about it several weeks ago, which explains why, you know, he was all talking about his mortality and wanting to get into heaven and all this kind of crap. And then he had the procedure and he's been recovering and he's like, you know, from whatever the procedure was, it was something they could do at the White House. They didn't have to take him to the hospital, but, you know, it put him out of commission for a couple of days and now he's recovered. Makes perfect sense. I saw a count called Hilly on TikTok that said that.
|
Sam:
[1:39:07]
| So, yeah, it's specifically Hilly the nurse. There you go. TikTok.com slash at Hilly the nurse. Made perfect sense to me. But anyway, the point is they're consolidating power and executive to an extent we haven't seen in this country. Donald Trump is right up at, I'd say he's passed the verge of defying court orders and it hasn't been brought to a head at the Supreme Court yet, but he's been defying court orders left and right. He's been making changes to spending that should have to be authorized by Congress. He's been shutting down agencies that were authorized by Congress that should only be shut down by Congress. He's...
|
Sam:
[1:39:53]
| Practicing putting troops domestically in various places, it's getting bad fast. We're seeing things that if you, I was going to say, you would be shocked to even see being considered if you went back 10 or 20 years. But that led me to think of the standard cliche, Like, can you imagine if Obama had done this, how this very same people who are rah, rah, Donald Trump are, you know, are happy about these things when Donald Trump is doing it. Can you even imagine if Obama had been doing this kind of stuff that already be, you know, armed insurrection? But what the hell am I talking about? There was one on January 6th.
|
Sam:
[1:40:44]
| Although the a lot of people there had weapons it didn't actually escalate into a battle from both sides with with firearms anyway i mean obviously they were beating people with flag flagpoles and fire hydrants and all kinds of things but.
|
Sam:
[1:41:03]
| Anyway i think it's just going to get worse before it gets better and i'm not and even if Even if Donald Trump is replaced by J.D. Vance, I don't have a lot of faith that it's going to get better fast.
|
Sam:
[1:41:17]
| Keep watching, try not to get too accustomed to all this stuff. I mean, people said don't normalize things from the very first day Donald Trump was elected, before he even became president. And of course, what we've been doing, it's human nature. We get used to things, and then that is just the normal. Oh, there goes Donald Trump again. There he goes violating another norm. There he goes violating another law. It's not even news anymore because he does it every day. Try to retain the outrage because we have to. In the meantime, like I said, I don't see a way that it doesn't get worse before it gets better. And on that happy note, let's wrap up the show. I've gone a lot longer in this segment than I had intended. Curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find our archives. you can find all the ways to contact us find transcripts and i still haven't linked the tiktok i mentioned the tiktok you can search for curmudgeon's corner on tiktok you'll find it, and i i i reserved the handle for blue sky but i haven't set up anything so curmudgeon's corner is not yet posting on blue sky but we are on mastodon you'll find that, and of course there's a link to a patreon where you can give us money at various levels we'll mention you on the show. We'll ring a bell, send you a postcard, send you a mug.
|
Sam:
[1:42:46]
| Soon, I'll set it up so you can just buy a mug if you want to buy a mug. I haven't done it yet. Maybe someday. And of course, at $2 a month or more on the Patreon, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and a bunch of listeners are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, and all kinds of other stuff. Should I do the highlight? Sure. Here's something from the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack that I have not mentioned on the show. There was an article on the BBC, Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-thru after man orders 18,000 waters.
|
Sam:
[1:43:28]
| This is exactly what you think it is. A whole bunch of fast food restaurants are experimenting with having AIs man the drive-thru. So when you talk at the drive-thru and make your order, there's an AI talking to you instead of a human being. McDonald's tried this a few months back and had to shut it down pretty quickly because it was doing all kinds of weird things like putting bacon in ice cream. Although, you know, I think about that and I'm like, maybe that would be okay. Maybe I should try that. But yeah, let's see. Last year, McDonald's withdrew AI from its own drive-thrus as the tech misinterpreted customer orders, resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error, and another having hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets mistakenly added to their order. This guy with the 18,000 waters was obviously just trying to screw with the AI. In another example from this AI, the Taco Bell AI, it kept asking, would you like a drink with that? Would you like a drink with that? Over and over and over again, after the guy had said what drink he wanted. And it just would never end. It got into a loop. It got stuck. Anyway, AI is awesome. Look, I'm using it for a bunch of stuff. You know, the question is where it's being used, where it's actually beyond what it's actually good at yet. I'm sure it'll get better.
|
Sam:
[1:44:57]
| People keep trying to push the limits, and bad things are going to happen. More than just 18,000 waters at the Taco Bell drive-thru. Something massive is going to get screwed up at some point. Well, we already had AI determine the tariff levels, the initial tariff levels, so what am I saying? Ah, geez. Okay, that's it. I'm done. I'm out of here. Hopefully, Yvonne will be back next week. Have a great time, everybody. Stay safe. All the stuff I usually say. And it is indeed after midnight Pacific time as I'm wrapping this up. It's coming close to 1230 a.m. On Monday Pacific time. Coming close to 730 UTC. Ah, I'll get this sucker out.
|
Sam:
[1:45:49]
| Probably, you know, sometime Monday. Whatever. I'm late. podcast is later than I like it to be, but it's not the first time it's come out on Monday. It's even come out on Tuesday before of the week after I anchored this in the week. It's supposed to be four because I started on Saturday. There's one podcast per Sunday through Saturday week. And this one started on Saturday. So it counts. Damn it. Haven't missed one. Not going to now, But I have been several days late finishing and posting them before because of things like this, where I space it out over the course of a couple days. Anyway, whatever. Here comes the music. Goodbye, everyone. I already said stay safe. Goodbye!
|
Sam:
[1:47:10]
| Okay, I'm going to hit stop now. We had no live viewers this time. But you know last week we apparently did have some people watch the watch a good chunk of the podcast if not even all of it on on the live stream well on the recording of the live stream on youtube so hi to anybody on youtube and goodbye hi goodbye whatever i'm hitting stop bye folks.
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