#2021 - Mike Baker

That's a fun cigar.

Since last show, see, I even headlined it. Chinese spy balloon. Failed mutiny in Russia. Four indictments of Trump. Now, last night was the fourth.

Bank account records showing the Biden family took over $20 million.

Pee-wee Herman died.

It was a great show. This was, oh, fuck, it was years ago. So, it would have been before, it was probably like 80, shit, 82, 83, 81.. Oh, wow. It was that time frame, right?

It was a long time ago. It was at Georgetown University in D.C. And it was a great show. Anyway, point fake. And I always thought he didn't get enough credit for Pee-wee's Playhouse.

And I know that people are like, what the fuck is he talking about? But he was really, he was a good guy. He kind of got off the rails a little bit. for a period of time. He was wanking in a porn theater.

That's how the rap sheet spells. it. Spells it wrong. Instead of er, it says ee. In the Darkin Theater at 8.25 p.m.

and again at 8.35.. Twice.

He offered to perform at a children's benefit for the sheriff's office if the charges were dropped. Ah! A department spokesperson said that the deputies did not feel at the time they had enough probable cause to charge Rubens with attempted bribery. Is that bribery, really, when you say you're going to perform at an event?

But then he recovered. And, you know, he went on to...

And, like, those things are disgusting. To be fair. If people don't recognize... Like, I never went into one of those. So I'm just on anecdotes.

But I would imagine, like, porn theaters are fucking gross.

And that's just from the Pepsi. Yeah. Yeah.

He died. I just made a note because I thought...

I remember specifically the girl that I was dating at the time. That I was dating right around I was graduating high school. Because we were crying, laughing. Yeah. It was so funny.

Like back then, it was so unique. Don't forget to tell them Large Marge sent you. Fun fucking movie.

But anyway.

And, yeah. I'll give them to one of my boys. I'm not sure which one.

But we could start with the Chinese spy balloon. Since I started there first.

So, the Chinese regime continues. Just like with the fucking Wuhan lab. The Chinese regime continues to just say it was a weather balloon. It got blown off course. It was a weather balloon.

Well, A, it didn't get blown off course. It had a massive array of propellers. It had a rudder. It had solar panels to keep those propellers churning. They knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going.

And, you know, it shows up over Alaska at the end of January. And proceeds to travel across the country in a path that is clearly designed to collect intelligence from sensitive facilities. It flies over Montana.

There it is.

So we know how to protect communications. We know how to protect. And we also know what's available, right? So satellite imagery is going to give you a fair amount of information anyway. So the question is, okay, well, why the hell was this thing, which was as tall as the Statue of Liberty, why was it floating around up there with an array of antennas obviously there to collect?

But it went over there. It went over Omaha or near Omaha, where we've got U.S. Strategic Command and OFUT Air Force Base.

And, you know, the U.S. government, the military was like, well, we don't believe, after the fact, after we shot it down, we don't believe that it was collecting. And we took measures to prevent it from collecting. And not only that, we didn't shoot it down at the beginning because we were monitoring its capabilities and learning from that. Now, part of that is true, right?

If you've got a target, you identify a target, unlike with law enforcement in the intelligence world, you let that run, right? Because you want to learn everything you can about that target. You know, who's there to support it? What does, you know, what's that look like?

Initially, and, you know, because we live in a, you know, this highly partisan world, everybody was saying, well, because Biden's inept, and, you know, they didn't know what they were doing and they let it float all the way across the state.

So you can't discount the argument that says, well, part of it is we let it go because we were gathering intelligence ourselves from their capabilities. It's always interesting to know. It's just like when we, here I go, disappearing down a rabbit hole, when we lost that platform, that air asset, during the Abbottabad raid, right? And we had to leave it behind and they destroyed, you know, to the degree they could, everything that was in it of interest. But the platform itself was of interest, right?

It was because the two things that are important nowadays are stealth and speed. And, you know, there was a stealth design involved there. And there's also material science. It's interesting. So we left it behind after they bagged bin Laden, literally.

And then three days later, the Pakistanis had invited the Chinese to come in and they were swarming all over that helicopter, right? Gathering intelligence. So you always, if you have the opportunity to observe a target, I guess, like I said, you know, then you do, you can gain intelligence from. So I'm not one of those people who said, I should have shot it down immediately because I don't know what they were getting from it. But I do know that the purpose of the balloon was to gather intelligence on us, on our sensitive facilities, to some degree.

So anyway, and then they sent all the remains after they recovered them off the coast of South Carolina, to wherever, Quantico.

And that was kind of the last we ever heard of it, right? Because we've all got attention deficit disorder. Nobody wants to, you know, think, okay, what did we learn? Can we do a hot wash on it and figure it out? And to what degree can you tell the public what the hell was going on, right?

Because, honestly, I don't know that we ever would have learned about it if it hadn't been so large, and, you know, members of the public hadn't seen it. Right.

So it would be nice to know what the fuck actually happened, right? Not to disappear.

And so my point back then and the point now is that it's just, it's bound to happen. Right. We're an increasingly shrinking globe. There's more people we're in contact with, you know, with everything that goes on. Right.

Whether it's in a natural based or just what we're doing and in biotech and pharma, it's bound to happen. And so I guess you'd think that if we were serious minded, we would demand answers. And we wouldn't just allow the regime to just shrug it off constantly. Right. I mean, you know that there would be a massive debrief on this whole situation if it happened in the U.S.

or the U.K. or, you know, started in Australia or wherever. Right. The rest of the world wouldn't let it go. But there's something about it.

We never push the Chinese regime to the degree that we need to to get an answer. And so the point being, it's the same with the damn balloon.

If you're investing in a pseudo state owned enterprise or whatever, you always know there's going to be three or four or five sets of books, right? They're just very good at obfuscating. And they also think they don't need to answer. We don't care. They don't care.

And Xi believes that they are still on, despite some problems in their economy, they're still on the slow march to the top of the food chain. So he certainly doesn't care. Anyway.

We've had sort of an unsatisfactory relationship related to China for decades.

No administration has really pushed back appropriately against their theft of economic intelligence or research and development. So all those things keep happening and we never make the effort. I mean, look at some of the things they're doing. now. I've gotten bizarrely focused on the issue of, we've talked about this before, critical minerals, right?

Because one of the things that I find really interesting is this push towards net zero, carbon production and getting rid of fossil fuels, stopping fossil fuels. Well, you can't stop fossil fuels and regulate mining out of existence at the same time. You've got to do one or the other to fuel production, to fuel manufacturing, to heat people's homes, to produce whatever you're going to produce. And so if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, by definition, you have to increase mining of critical minerals. There's just no way around it.

If you do both, which the Biden administration is basically trying to do, I think they're placating their base by, yeah, we're going to get rid of fossil fuels. And they're also making decisions that are over-regulating the permitting process for mining. And we have a lot of critical minerals available in this country, right? We've got lithium, phosphate, which should be on the critical minerals list. We've got all these things that we need if we're going to continue to march away from fossil fuels.

But the current administration just keeps under this theory of keeping it in the ground, right? And that's a big push by environmentalists, right? Keep it all in the ground, right? Lock it up.

And China controls 30 of the 50 critical minerals anyway. They produce more than anybody else. And they certainly control the refining process for most of the critical minerals. But it doesn't matter whether they're mining it in their own country. They've also been busy locking up opportunities elsewhere, right, to control these things.

And so, you know, there's very little pushback. But if you look at one case – because we've talked about cobalt. We've talked about lithium, which is here we could be mining. But, you know, the government's shutting down opportunities to do that, either by declaring things off limits in terms of the land area or just making a permitting process. So damn difficult.

But, you know, phosphate, I'd mention that as an example. I got disappeared down some rabbit hole looking at all of this. It's not on the critical minerals list. There's 50 critical minerals. Now, phosphate, along with two other things, nitrogen and potassium, are the key nutrients that you use for fertilizers, right, to feed the world, not just the U.S.

You can't do mass farming. And everybody wants to grow local. But the reality is it's a lot of people. And if you want, you know, the least privileged people around the globe to eat, you've got to do large scale farming. You can't do that without phosphate.

And so China is the number one producer of phosphate in the world. And I think Russia is fourth. And they produce like five times more combined, five times more than we do in the U.S. And yet there is significant pushback here in the U.S. In part because it fits a Chinese narrative, and the Chinese have decided, the regime has, not the people, the Chinese regime has decided that one of the best ways to get what they want in terms of U.S.

behavior is not to try to influence, you know, the White House. But it's to reach out to local and state officials. So here's where I'm going with this. When you look at decisions made at state level or local level, the Chinese regime and the ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, released a report and they talked about this. They said the Chinese are doubling down on their efforts to exert influence through a variety of means, environmental groups, encouraging litigation, right, against mining operations or whatever it may be.

Social influencers to try to get a message out, right, that influences local and state regulators to do things such as saying, no, got to keep it in the ground. You know, no, we don't want phosphate mining, as an example. And that serves the purpose, whether an environmental group or whether a group that's out there that focuses on these things and files lawsuits constantly for environmental purposes. And then, by the way, those lawyers usually recoup their funds from, you know, what is called the Endangered Species Act. that allows them to get their money back.

So you think, oh, wow, these lawyers are fighting and it's pro bono. No, it's not. They're getting paid. But they're doing it, whether they do it knowingly or whether they do it unwittingly. It still serves the purpose of the Chinese regime, which is looking to say, keep it in the ground because we want to control all of this.

And again, whether it's cobalt, whether it's lithium, whether it's phosphate, whatever it may be, it's a fascinating thing. But the point being that we can't pursue a green future and at the same time overregulate the mining process. And it just doesn't work.

But China can do all those things here. And they can influence our universities. They bring their students over here. Their students siphon up data and information and oftentimes get caught. I mean, it's kind of crazy.

Yeah, they get caught, right? Yeah. There's been quite a few of those cases.

But then you think, how many more are there out there? Right.

Although we probably should talk a little bit about it. Yeah. And it's bubbling away in Afghanistan, which we should also talk about. But we used to talk about war on terror and how the terrorists were using our open society against us, right? Right.

And the Chinese regime does the same thing, right? They understand and they look at how we operate and they say, okay, where's the weaknesses, right? Where are the leverage points that we can use to turn that against them? And, you know, we – this idea – I mean, look, China produces more carbon than all the developed nations combined.

They've got way more resources. They've got a much longer view. Frankly, they're more sophisticated.

And so sometimes you look at things and you think, well, that doesn't make any sense. Why are we acting in this way? And then you think, well, because you've got like a local or a grassroots community activist group, right? And they're not Chinese spies. They're not – but they're – the Chinese regime identifies them and says, you know what?

If we can influence them, it's just pure propaganda or covert action campaign. If I can influence that activist group, to go out and tell those whomever, the city officials or the county commissioners or whatever, that this is bad, right? And this is – we need to stop this, right? We shouldn't be mining for lithium in Nevada or wherever. We shouldn't be pursuing logical steps to get control over the critical mineral supply chain issue, right?

Why wouldn't you do that, right? It's smart activity on the part of the Chinese regime and the intel service there. So that part of it to me makes sense. The problem we have is that there's a lack of awareness, right? Now, there was a – again, this shows you I've been spending too much time reading on this shit, but I'm fascinated by this idea that we're trying to do two things that are completely opposed to each other.

Stop fossil fuels and also keep critical minerals in the ground that we're going to need to pursue green energy.

Is he going – is he taking a nap? So they had a hearing in Arizona not too long ago about critical minerals, the issue of critical minerals and the importance of them, and the importance of speeding up the permitting process. If we want – again, if we want to pursue a green future, you've got to do it. And this guy, Congressman – I know I've got a note here – Gozar, Paul Gozar, from wherever, Arizona, said – and this is a quote. The anti-mining actions by the Biden administration hurt America's economy, threaten our national security, and push mineral production abroad, where environmental and labor standards pale in comparison with our own.

Right? And that's absolutely correct. And, again, all you have to do is look at what goes on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's insane, but I don't see that we're going to walk that back, because there's just – there's too much pushback. And no matter what mineral you're talking about, I don't see that necessarily changing, unless you get, maybe, a change in administration, and then you get the effort to deregulate, and then you speed up permitting. But at some point, we're going to be screwed. China recently put the brakes on exporting a couple of minerals that are critical to producing mineral systems and solar panels. And they've done that in the past.

And that should be a clear signal to us that we've got to change our thought process on all of this. But I'm not confident that will happen.

And so no wonder we sometimes don't push back. And I guess that's where I was coming back around. You said, well, why don't we push back?

We don't have that much leverage right now. So I think that's part of the answer.

It's not a big leap. Right. But you're right. People are so emotive. Yeah.

And they still. you can say Three Mile Island, and everybody knows. Right. And most people can't retain a lot of information about historical facts.

And so, and we've gotten better at safety systems and redundancies. Right. So, absolutely. But, you know, people talk about why we've got to expand nuclear energy.

Yeah. Where there's multiple coal plants near the area. And these people have like a fine dusting of particulate in their cars every day. So they're breathing this air. Yeah.

That has this coal particulate. And there's a host of chronic illnesses that are coming with this. So many people have respiratory conditions.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah. Oh, God.

And I don't think the Democrats think that he can win. I think they're right. And I think they're going to slowly but surely expose more of these, like, very clear pieces of evidence of corruption. Yeah. The $20 million is fucking bananas.

The fact that this isn't all over the New York Times and the Washington Post and mainstream news. That they're not blaring it from the rooftops, because you know they would be if it was Trump.

No, look, I've got a intelligence and investigations firm. You may have heard of them.

But I've got investigators, great people. That's the most rewarding thing about building a business is just the wonderful people that you eventually get to work with. And they raise families and they stick with you. And so I've got some investigators that I guess the point is they could have wrapped this puppy up some time ago. Right.

It's an asset tracing exercise is what they're engaged in. And, you know, maybe they'll, maybe they'll stay focused. Maybe they'll keep going. But when you've got an asset tracing exercise, you've got a myriad of single purpose companies set up around there.

First of all, when you look at a case and you say we've got 20 plus single purpose companies set up here for pass through of funds. That's what we would call a clue about money laundering. Right. That's that's why you do that. To hide beneficial ownership, to hide the flow of funds and transactions that are involved, to obfuscate and make it difficult for the obvious, because their feeling is that most people will maybe dig once or twice, but then they'll get bored and they'll move on.

Right. Let's make this as complicated as possible. And so you start to see there's always fraud indicators. You start to see certain things in an investigation. And the great thing about asset tracing also is that there are records.

Right. And that's what they're finding out now. So, and I'm I'm glad because whether it's a, whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, it wouldn't matter. If you've got an asshole who's in office and is engaged in pay for play. Right.

And there's no way, frankly, that this president didn't know that he was being used as the dog in the dog and pony show. Right. And so they've got these, these records, available to them. And with the power of the government, their ability to subpoena and do all these things they can do, they will have the case figured out at some point. The problem with Washington is, do they have the?

you know, do they have the grit to stick with it? Right. And then then the next question is, does anything happen as a result? But it is, in my mind anyway, for what that's worth, there's no doubt this is this is money laundering. And it is.

it's. it's pathetic, as you pointed out, that there's so little interest from a completely incurious. Well, not incurious, but just a completely partisan, significant majority of the media. They don't. it's not that they don't care.

It's that they do care. And they're taking every effort and they're now having to contort themselves into certain ways because it's getting more and more difficult to provide top cover for the Biden administration. But they've been trying. And, you know, they're. just at some point maybe the dam breaks and there's so much paper evidence that they can't ignore it anymore.

But you would have thought that some enterprising young journalists who understand the importance of objectivity, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, would have gotten off their ass and really pursued this story. Because it's a Pulitzer Prize winning story at the end of the day.

Right. So we've only gone back to what, like 2000,. what, 13 or 14 or something?

I mean, he's a wild boy.

That's your weak link next to, with the greatest access possible to the second most powerful person, theoretically, in the country. That's a fantastic target. Right. There's all sorts of weaknesses there that you can play off of.

So then the question becomes, all right, was the at the time vice president. And then after that, was he aware? Did he know that Hunter was out there doing all these things and using access? And at first it was like I had no idea. I wasn't talking.

And then suddenly it's like, well, you know, I was on some phone calls, but it wasn't important. And now the media has got to spin that narrative. Well, he wasn't talking about anything of substance.

She's got the lowest approval rating of any vice president ever. Including Dan Quayle. Oh, God. I forgot about that guy.

Nobody wants to kill the president and have that fucking guy take over.

Right. Because they wouldn't weather that optic. But if he has to step aside, then obviously it's a brand new ticket. It's a brand new day and they'll come up with something. So, you know, I, I guess the question is, do they firmly believe that Biden can't win again?

If it's Trump or whomever.

I don't know what percentages, but it's probably fairly high. Who are? they have enough trust in the Democratic establishment that they think that the Democrats would figure out a way to run the country better, even with a puppet, than they would with Donald Trump in office.

And I think they can't be stupid. So they probably understand that it falls apart in appeal. Right. And I don't think that's going to hold up. But I don't think they care, because last night, I mean, again, it shows you how bizarre this is.

They held a press conference where they rushed this thing through. First of all, here's an interesting fact. First of all, the indictment showed up on the county website in the afternoon before the grand jury had voted and before they had come across with what the charges would be. And so all of a sudden that comes across on the public domain. And I think it was.

I think it was Reuters that snapped it and kind of ran with it as a story. But then it was taken down off the county's website. And they were asked about it. later on. They said I was fictitious or some bullshit.

So you wonder, OK, how did that get leaked? Because then those charges that showed up earlier in the day matched what ended up being voted on by the grand jury. So that's a little odd. And it's as far as I can remember, I think it's illegal to leak that sort of information ahead of time. But also, how would they know?

How would they know how the grand jury was going to decide at the end of the day what indictments to throw out there or to put out there in this, in this charge? So that's something that probably should be looked at. But in today's world, may not. But I think really she was pushing last night at whatever, 11,, 30, 12 o'clock at night. Who holds a press conference at this point, at that time of night?

But she was saying she wants it out there and whether to start this trial in six months. And so, you know, six months from now is, is whatever, February. So right in the middle of of all the caucuses and all the all the campaigning that goes on. And whether it's that one or whether it's the one from D.C. or it doesn't matter.

They just they're. they're creating a very lasting narrative that's going to go through the election season. And I think that's really what they want. And whether any of this actually holds, I don't think they give a rat's ass.

This is like real clear stuff. Well, but they always come back with it.

You know, that's. that's part of the problem. That's how it gets muddied. is, is that people, you know, in the media or people who are supportive of an administration will say, yeah, but everybody does it. Everybody's engaged in pay for play.

Everybody's engaged in influence peddling. And there's some truth in that. But not everybody's engaged in money laundering. Right. That might, you know, be worth some investigation.

But again, I don't think that the point of this exercise on the part of the the various D.A. and and that's another one. The D.A. down in Georgia is is that's an elected position. And she's running for office again and she's campaigning based on getting Trump.

And she's raising money off off of. this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to get Trump. Right.

That seems a little odd, too. Right. I mean, I don't know this. It's no surprise that people are losing confidence in in the government.

The times that I have looked, there's a lot of. there's a lot of shit out there.

And trying to trying to decipher what is just crazy ass bullshit from what is legitimate and deserves investigation. Right.

I'll be honest with you, I, just like I, run out of time and I'm just like, I'm sorry, I got to go, you know, watch one of the kids games.

So which, by the way, one of my kids, the middle boy Sluggo, is heading to Florida to go to boarding school at the end of the month. Oh, boy. Yeah, he's going to go play basketball at IMG, which is an amazing academy, amazing, amazing place.

No, he's a great guy. He's a great kid. All the boys are fantastic, but he's very focused. He's very competitive. He's been.

this is all he wants to do is and he's been down there before, and they do a great job academically and sports wise. It's very much a sports focused program.

He's growing. He's making his way towards, you know, he's just turned, just turned, whatever, 14.. And he's making his way towards six foot and he'll get. he'll get as tall as he needs to be for a point guard. But he's a.

he's a focused, he's a focused kid.

And he's, he's a selfless kid. He, you know, he's. he's all about, you know, getting the ball passed properly, getting the assist. Right. He's not, he's not a, he's not a selfish player, but but he's also realistic about the tiny, tiny statistics in terms of who gets to even play D3 or D2 ball.

Right. And then certainly going on to to to professional sports. But it teaches a lot of other things. Right. And so boarding school for the right kid can be a great experience, can be a terrible experience for the wrong kid.

But for the right kid, it can be a great experience. And, you know, teaches them independence and discipline and motivation and and the value of of, of hard work. And, you know, just not taking shit for granted.

You probably quite frequently, because, you know, we, we, you know, he's again, he's all he's, he's young. So we'll be down there as often as possible. But at the same time, you want to let him run. Right. You don't want to.

you got to give him room. And we've never been those sort of parents for any of the kids where we sit on the sidelines and watch their practices. That drives me fucking crazy. You know, when you've got parents at every practice, you're sitting in their lawn chair, just, you know, watch it. And you think, just let the kids do well or not.

Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. So I think he's he again, he's very independent. And I think I think it'll be just fine.

But I forget how I jumped onto that. boarding school. Boarding school. Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's. it was a bit of a. it was a struggle to get to the point where we thought, OK, let's do it.

Right. The other two boys were like, no, get them out of the house. It'll be fine. before the youngest one was like, do I get his room and all his stuff?

But yeah. Anyway. And the oldest one was just out at the Naval Academy. There's, there's a fantastic place. God is out there for a visit and had a chance to play some lacrosse.

And and, you know, whether he applies or not, again, it's the experience of seeing what's out there and what's possible. And, you know, if you leave all the doors open for the kids and you try to get them to understand the importance of not shutting doors by stupid behavior or poor academics or whatever it is, it's all you can do as a parent. And then at some point they run and they do their thing. But, you know, from our perspective, you just you got to keep every door open for the kids. So they don't get there and think, oh, God, I should not have done that, because now I can't go there or I can't do this.

So we'll see. But it was. it was a great experience. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway. So how we went from election meddling. No, we went from Peewee Herman to election meddling. to to my kids. Yeah, I guess, you know, because I've got my list, I'm going to stick with my fucking list.

Yeah. There was one other thing I wanted to mention about how fascinating the the the our relationship with China is. And that is also since the last time we met the Chinese, a Chinese company, pseudo independent, supposedly, but there's very few of those. Right. They've all got some level of state sponsorship or cooperation.

They bought like 300 and some odd acres in near Grand Forks.

And there's a Grand Forks Air Force Base, which is home to whatever the 319th fighter wing or air wing. And one of the things the base does is it oversees in part the satellite systems that we run and oversees surveillance drone operations to some degree. And so it's very sensitive base. So I'll be damned if this Chinese group didn't buy up hundreds of acres of land about 12 miles from from this base. And they worked with the local officials, the local folks there, to say, we want to build a milling plant, a corn milling plant.

The company was a food company. And it's going to be great. It's going to give you like 200 local jobs. Let's build it. And so the local officials were like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

Well, it ran through the investment, CFIUS, the investment operation that looks at foreign investment, to make sure that it's it's above board. and kosher. And CFIUS said, we don't have any opinion. It's not really our domain. We don't see anything wrong with this.

So we can't cancel the potential purchase. And the Air Force had another thought. And they said, screw it. That's no, this is a threat to national security. You can't allow this to happen.

You can't allow them to build this plant. And so I'll be damned. In one of those rare moments of common sense, they shut it down. They said, you can't do this. And so, and then that become a bit, a bit of an issue.

And then started to see in Congress, you started to see all this talk about, well, my God, the Chinese are buying up farmland all across America.

But it was nice to see that there was some reaction, some common sense here and that they don't do that. And that's happening. It's increasing. So I think the bright spot here is that people are becoming more aware of the problem and that not every time is nefarious, not every time. You know, I'm not saying that, you know, it's not always going to be nefarious, but you should at least be smart enough to look and see.

It's like when we talk about, you know, Chinese equipment being put on regional telecoms all over the world or the country. Yeah. Yeah. Little things like that we should probably pay attention to.

So if your cell phone's on it, Wi-Fi, whatever.

Certainly, obviously, and you've talked about this a lot, that, you know, the cell phones and how hard you have to work to turn off applications that will do that. And most people just don't have the patience, right? You've got to really dig, right? If you want to prevent your, you know, 80-inch TV in your home from being switched on remotely as a monitor, what's going on in your home, you've got to really dig through the layers on that TV to get to the point where you can switch that off, right? And I mean, who's got the time nowadays, but...

Yeah.

Yeah. Anything that emanates. Anything. I mean, there's the ability to... Yeah.

It does start to look like a Tom Clancy movie where, remember, they used to... In the old days, you'd see this movie, and they could use it, and they could identify people moving through the building, right? Yeah. That was all bullshit back in the day. I mean, that was imagined, right?

Right. People were thinking, like, wouldn't that be great? And it is great, right? If you roll up on a target site now, and you're wearing the old, you know, highly advanced super soldier Google glasses, right? And you're getting all that data fed into you, right?

And you're getting heat signatures, and you're, you know, I got four people on the other side of this structure. I mean, that's fantastic intelligence. Or you can, you know, again, you know, the battlefield has changed completely. now. I mean, you have the drone capability, and be able to look down field and know what you've got.

Yeah. To be able to reach out and touch a target without getting your guys in harm's way. I mean, it's an amazing world, but it's also pretty, what's the word? I don't want to say frightening necessarily, but it's alarming, right? For just the average citizen in terms of, again, information that's being gathered on you.

And I think most people just at this stage of the game, certainly, I think, maybe younger folks just don't care.

Well, I guess, you know, he's just a 24-year-old kid. He's got nothing to worry about.

But anyway, today, today, this is, look at me, segue. Today is the two-year anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal.

And I was, I forget how I got started on that one, but I was looking at total cost of what we spent so far in Ukraine.

And not only is it a two-year anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but other comparisons we've spent in Ukraine since whenever, January 2022. So, you know, a little over a year, obviously, a year and a half. We've dropped about upwards, north of 80 billion dollars there. Right. More than that, in all honesty, because I don't think we actually know what the full number is.

I don't think the State Department knows. I don't think the Pentagon actually knows. They certainly don't know necessarily what all the money is going to. But we've dropped 80 billion, say, let's call it that.

From 2001 to 2020. in Afghanistan, we spent about 73, 74 billion dollars. So think about that. Wow. Almost 20 years in Afghanistan, we spent about 73 billion dollars.

About a year and a half in Ukraine, we've spent 80 billion dollars plus. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be doing it or that we should not be supporting the Ukrainian military. I'm just saying it's a fascinating fact. as far as I'm concerned. It just shows the level of support.

Ukraine is at the top of our, obviously, we don't give that much money to anybody by far. And the last time a European was country, it was at the top of the aid list was the Marshall Plan, maybe, the Truman administration. So it's pretty significant. But the Afghanistan thing, two years after the withdrawal, we've spent, since then, since the withdrawal, the U.S. government's allocated about 8 billion dollars.

Now, the interesting point there is who's been in control there in Afghanistan since the withdrawal? It's the Taliban. So we have allocated 8 billion dollars to various humanitarian groups, charities into Afghanistan. And no real controls over whether the vast majority of that money, or half of that money or whatever, is going to the Taliban. Really?

Yeah. And you can guarantee that it's being siphoned off.

And he testified before Congress, I think, much earlier this year. It might have been the January, February timeframe about Afghanistan. And he said, I cannot sit here and tell the sub, the committee or the American taxpayer that we are not funding the Taliban through this money that is being allocated for Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee that the American taxpayer or the American taxpayer that we are not currently funding the Taliban. He continued, nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending to the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.

Which never should have taken place the way it did. And we've still got. there's maybe a hundred and fifty hundred and fifty five thousand special immigrant visa applicants trapped in Afghanistan, waiting to get out. We don't know. We have no idea how many of our former Afghan allies, right, whomever it may be, are still there, trapped, trying to get out.

So we're going to use the money to give it to humanitarian groups and they're going to try to feed them and everything.

And yet there's no control over this, this fucking thing. And and so that's, that's a problem that, again, should be talked about. But we don't, you know, we get lost in these, in these issues of the day that that aren't, you know, really impactful, I guess, the other day. Maybe they're impactful to people's individual lives. But it is stunning that then the inspector general will come out and say he can't get sufficient information from State Department and from USAID that's responsible in part for allocating these funds.

And in pure, typical Washington, D.C. bullshit, the reason is because the State Department says, well, you know, we withdrew from Afghanistan. So therefore, the the inspector general, you know, doesn't have the same job. We're not reconstructing Afghanistan anymore. So we don't have to respond to his request for information.

So which is, you know, it's just. it's like this, bizarre. But we're going to continue to give money out. And meanwhile, the Taliban is just shitting all over the people. Right.

If you forget about women's rights anymore, they've shut down secondary schools. They've shut down. There's certainly no universities. they've done. They've.

they've restricted them. basically to, you know, women and girls sitting at home. They, they have very restricted movement outside. They have to be fully covered, obviously. Recently, they just they just shut down all beauty salons.

Right. Which was one of the few places women could work and only women could go into. Women can't go into parks. Right. They can't get it.

It's. it's insane when you think about it that way and you think about it. But we're giving them money again, not for a bad reason. Right. I mean, we want to help the people that are suffering most.

How does that money. But we have no control.

That have to be in the country, that have to get to the country to be dispersed. And the Taliban controls everything. Right. Now, by the way, we also allocated a handful of billions of dollars to recapitalize the central bank there in Afghanistan. Well, that would seem to be maybe I'm wrong.

That would seem to be basically putting money directly into the hands of the Taliban. And so it's. it's a problem. They are, they're looking into it.

But I mean, there's. there's so many weird if you spent too much time looking at the way the government sometimes operates and going switching back to Ukraine and saying, OK.

As an example, one of the things we're not doing is we're not fully sanctioning Russian oil, because why? It's a political reason. We don't want the Russian oil taken off the market and driving gas prices up, which is bad for politics. Right. So meanwhile, one of the few real significant sources of revenue for the Russians is oil that allows them to keep going.

So we're spending, what, 80 billion dollars on Ukraine. at the same time. We're not doing everything we can to shut down the ability of the Russian government to make money by sanctioning oil the way we should. And therefore they continue marching on. It's, I don't know, I just find it all, you know, going back to that original thought, you know, it's like we're going to stop fossil fuels, but we're also going to keep all the minerals in the ground.

How about that?

he's been making a real effort. He's been going out and trying to garner support from a variety of countries for his or for the Ukraine government's peace plan, which basically calls for return of all their lands, including Crimea, and obviously the exit of all Russian forces. And so he's out there talking and saying, this is what needs to happen. This is, we need to gather international support for this peace plan if it's going to work, which is not incorrect. Right.

Meanwhile, you know, the Chinese are trying to, you know, play top dog in the world stage by proposing their own peace plan. You know, Saudis are making an effort. So but there is no, there's no exit strategy really to speak of.

OK, we're done. There's peace. We've given back all the land and I'm a war criminal. And now, at some point, if I step outside the country, I'll be arrested. And I mean, that's that, that's a thought process.

So I don't think, unless Zelensky budges a little bit. Right. Which, you know, again, from a motive standpoint, why should he? Right. But unless he budges to some degree, I don't see that they're going to get a settlement where the two sides agree.

Because Putin, I don't, I don't still, I've said this before, but I don't imagine the Russian government giving back Crimea. Right. It's too important from their perspective, from a military perspective.

Maybe, maybe eight, maybe 2014.. I don't know. It's, it's ancient history now. And nobody cared back then. Right.

Really? Really? There was. there was some angry memos written. Obama talked about at the time and said, but nobody did anything.

Just like when the troops moved into eastern Ukraine, nobody really cared. Nobody did anything. Nobody was out there planting flags in their gardens and saying, we stand with Ukraine. And in fact, Ukraine was viewed as a highly corrupt place, you know, where, you know, a Ukrainian energy company would hire the son of the vice president. Yeah.

Oh, but at the same time, you can't, you know, we can't allow Putin's adventurism right to stand. You've got to. So I do believe we were. we have to support, and without our support, without our NATO allies, support and others, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish what they've done. Right.

And now whether they can make the counteroffensive a significant victory or not still remains to be seen, because the Russians, you know, they used the opportunity during the lull to really dig in. Right. They've created almost their own Maginot line, although it's more effective than the old Maginot line. So they they've created that along their, their, their perimeter. And it's been a real tough slog.

You know, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has gone much slower than people thought. Everybody was all very emotive. Oh, it's going to be a counteroffensive. They're going to sweep through. It's going to be done here soon.

And I don't think people still have their heads around the fact that this is that there's. there's no exit out there, right yet. So what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to just allocate every every couple of months? We say, well, we're putting another 800 million dollars in there.

You know, we've already, you know, approved F-16s, Abrams, tanks, Patriot missile system. I mean, HIMARS. We're doing everything possible. Intelligence support, satellite support. And again, rightly so.

You know, Putin, you know, needs to be driven out of there if possible. But at the same time, they need a logical thought process about how you have a settlement if there's going to be one.

I mean, what Putin did, because he's, you know, I think he, he imagined and he had bad intel. But he imagined that this incursion, this invasion, was going to show the cracks in NATO. And it had the opposite. It grew NATO. And so.

Look, he legitimately believes. you have to understand the motivations of whoever's on the other side of the table. And with Putin, he legitimately believed that, you know, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a terrible, terrible tragedy. Right. And he's been trying to recreate in some fashion the whole thing.

So he looks at that and that's just further. that reinforces his mindset, which is in his mind. I don't think he's. you know, I don't think he's making this up in his mind. He believes, you know, this is an attack on the motherland.

Now, it's bullshit. It's not. But that's how he pitches it. And that's how he tries to keep the population behind him by saying this is this is the West against us.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of similar to what NATO has done.

You have to be. Pragmatic about the world that you live in and you have to understand, and that requires good intelligence. You have to understand the plans and intentions and motivations of whoever, again, is on the other side of the table, or whatever dictator or whatever leader you're dealing with. And I think that. Is it helpful in reaching a peace settlement?

Look, if all your goal is and maybe we know, maybe we need to say that, OK, is the U.S. goal to drive Russia completely out and reclaim all the lands that they had taken since 2000?.

Then fine. That's our stated goal. And we just keep doing everything possible to make that happen. Short of boots on the ground. But it would seem to me that our goal should also be instead of that, maybe we find a way to end the war.

I typically get into a war and you want to end it. And I wanted to go on for 20 years.

Yeah. And I'll tell you, right now, there is an undercurrent in Washington, D.C., amongst contractors that are just they're. they're just super gleeful. We're not. That's the wrong word.

But they're. they're enthusiastic and anticipatory. I don't know if that's a word about this potential. And I saw this back during the Iraq days. Right.

When we went in to reconstruct Iraq, which went on for several years, produced massive amounts of fraud, created all sorts of bullshit. Everybody, suddenly everybody was looking for women owned, or Native American owned, or Eskimo owned companies that they could set up. So that would allow them to get those government contracts to go in and do some piece of reconstruction, whether they had experience to do it or not. And there was a God, the amount of energy that was involved in D.C. at the time, of companies just shooting up out of nowhere.

Right. I remember people walking through the door. We had an office in D.C. for the business. And and people walking through the door with, you know, looking for security.

Right. And saying, well, we're going to start this company. We're going to go out there. And I was like, well, how much experience do you have? We don't have any.

You know, they didn't care. So I sense that same level of excitement in the idea of the Ukraine reconstruction, because that's going to be a talk about the next sinkhole of.

Again, you got to support them. Right. So maybe I'm using the wrong terminology, but the next black hole of cost of money spent will be on the reconstruction effort. And if we think that it's currently expensive, wait till that hits. That's going to make this 80 billion dollars so far look like nothing.

I think that's just my opinion. But so I don't know. There's no, you know, you keep. I keep talking in circles about this because I don't see any any way out of it. Right.

It's, both sides are not going to budge, at least in the short term, midterm, on what they want.

Nothing's off the table. But Putin's still a rational player. Right. He may seem like he's irrational at times, or, you know, this was an incredibly stupid move. But I don't think he's off the rails.

He understands that's not. that's that can't be on the table as an option. So I'm not really worried about that. I'm more worried about the the long, slow slog that we find. Nobody, nobody ever anticipated.

we'd be in Afghanistan for 20 years. Right. And look at this. I mean, it's a, it's a perfect case study of. you probably should have an end in mind.

Right. Otherwise, it just keeps going. because, in part. Because, you know, some people, unfortunately, do benefit from it. Some, you know, major players out there who benefit from that sort of thing, and.

You know, other people trying to do the right thing, for sure, of course. But you would think that Afghanistan, you would have a perfect case study, but we didn't have a case study. Sorry, take that back. We had a case study in what the Soviets did in Afghanistan. And we we didn't learn shit from that.

Right. When we went in, we ended up making the same mistakes, you know, make the same hubris. Look, there were years where we knew.

During that 20 years that there were immense weaknesses and corruption inside the government, the Afghan government and the military. We knew for years that the Afghan military was problematic. And so this idea that we were surprised or shocked that they fell apart in a matter of hours, basically, as the withdrawal was taking place, is it's just bullshit. We just ignored it. We didn't want to hear it.

We didn't want to tell the truth about it. And so if we had been truthful, you know, we would have said, no, this isn't going to work. You know, and, you know, by the way, we never looked at that withdrawal was a disaster. We gave up Bagram Air Base. What the fuck are we doing?

If we're going to withdraw and pull everybody out and get all our allies and contacts and people that supported us for all those years out. We had the perfect resource to do that. And we didn't. They shut it down and then they, you know, they used Hamid Karzai Airport. Now, is it just from a simple security process?

I mean, we do security assessments on large facilities, and it's not rocket science. You see the same things over and over again in terms of, you know, how you protect your assets and how you protect your people and how you move things. That's a part of a logistical exercise. And they just fucking ignored it. And they ended up using this airport.

People died as a result, didn't have to. They should never have. And yet, you know, and then they come out with a bullshit assessment earlier this year. The White House does and basically blames the Trump administration, for, you know, cutting a deal with the Taliban with a timeline that had conditions which the Taliban never met and which we didn't have to stick with, frankly. And yet, you know, we thought politically the optic would be bad if we didn't.

And so they decided to withdraw, and they did it in a disgustingly, you know, insecure fashion. And, you know, they blame that. they blame the intel community. And, yes, you know,

we should. The way that we characterized the the ability of the Afghan military government to hold together was was abysmal. So that was a serious mistake. But the steps that were then taken in terms of leading up to that and the speed with which they tried to do it was, you know, that's on them.

So anyway, that's a, that's a cheery little conversation.

But the public wouldn't know it. And I think the government, and the military government in particular, the White House, needs to be better at explaining things. Right. What's going on and why we're doing this. Right.

Because you don't want aid, military aid in particular, to dry up to Ukraine government. But, you know, if they don't do a better job of explaining why we're spending this money, people are going to get fed up. Or they're going to start questioning. Is this really something that we should be worried about? Right.

And, you know, it's tough when you got problems at home. It's tough to get people to focus on something as large as, you know, you don't want the recreation of the Soviet Union because and that might encourage China on Taiwan. And then, you know, anyway. Yeah. Are you concerned about that?

About Taiwan? Yeah. Yes. Is the answer.

Because I think I think Xi looks at what's happening in Ukraine and he probably thinks, all right, that's Russia, you know, small GDP equal to a European country, small European country. He looks at China and says, OK, is the West really going to, you know, go into a proxy war over Taiwan? And I think their calculation is probably no. So I think from their perspective, it's a matter of time. And they're probably calculating, can we do this in a slow sort of soft war way?

You know, where we just cede the ground, that eventually we have Taiwan, much like, you know, with Hong Kong, where we, we, you know, eventually we look and go, oh, Hong Kong used to be a bastion of democracy in that spot. And they put the squash on that. So, yeah, I think that that's a real problem. And I think Xi views this as important to do during his time. Right.

I don't think he's going to want to leave that on the table and not have that as part of his legacy. So I think the timeline has been accelerated. And it may well be that the timeline is essentially how long does Xi view himself in power? So I think that's a problem. But, you know, do we honestly believe that we're going to put boots on the ground in Taiwan to fight the Chinese regime?

I don't, I don't think so. So what does that mean? Do we just it's, it's, it's a problem, you know.

But, you know, I don't know that we're. I don't know that we're overly focused. right now. We tend to. we tend to do one thing at a time, you know, as a government.

Right now, the thing is Ukraine.

For for future use. Right. You have to think about down the road. If, if we got into a major conflict with China at some point, what are they going to do? They're going to stop anything they can.

Right. That that would help us. Right. So their ability to restrict the importation of chips necessary for much of our economy now, in terms of running. That's a, that's a sort of a key point.

That's, that's more of a practical economic issue. Right. Then you've got the issue of, well, look, it's a democracy. Right. Are we just going to let another democracy get ruled by the communist government?

That sounds like an old 1960s Cold War theory. But, yeah, I, the reality is our values and our, and what we think important. Right. Say one thing, the realities of how that would play out, say something else. Right.

So, again, it's hard to marry those up. Are we going to? how far would we go down the road to protect Taiwan? And so maybe what that means is, you know, down the road, we need to be better at, you know, manufacturing on our own. We're going to bring things back, which is part of what's all that talk about.

onshoring and bringing manufacturing back. That's, that's part of it. Underlying that is our concern over national security issues. Should they get, you know, control of of, you know, more.

And so I think that was part of it. was, was it just it at the time? it made sense. Right. And we didn't imagine at the time, look, we had.

we had the opening of our relationship with China and it was going to be a new day. Right. We went through that with the Cold War. Right. And we finished the Cold War.

The wall fell. And suddenly we're all like, oh, there's got to be a peace dividend here. Right. We keep repeating the same mistakes. We came out of World War Two as an example.

This may not be the best example, but we came out of World War Two. At the time, we had the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA. So World War Two ends. And like the next day, you know, Truman says, thanks very much. You know, now close the doors on the OSS.

Right. Sent Bill Donovan home. Don't let the screen door hit your ass on the way out. And they shut it down because they imagined that's it. Why do we possibly need this organization that's out there doing special operations and gathering intelligence?

And, you know, we won. And so they stopped it. And then, you know, the Soviets went on the march and suddenly they were like, OK, fuck it. Maybe we need it. So they started the CIA.

And that's that's the. that's the lesson that should have been learned from there. Was he always going to need an intel apparatus that helps support national security concerns?

So there was that. Then we had the opening of a relationship again with China. And I think there was this imagining that so many things were different. Right. We were going to, we're going to grow.

And that really, the entire interconnectedness of our economies just blew up at that point and really expanded. And so, you know, we maybe didn't see exactly what their plans and intentions, motivations were. You know, and we always mirror our values. Right. So, you know, we imagine everybody's marching towards democracy, and that's not how it works.

So I think we, you know, that's, that's in part how we ended up in this situation. But now, again, there's more effort and more understanding, I think, to go ahead, and, you know, onshore and be more concerned about the supply chain. And you're right. The pandemic pointed that out pretty clearly.

And I think maybe that helped accelerate the process. But it's going to take years. Look, it takes. it takes years just to do the simple things. Right.

We talked about the mining issue and critical minerals and the things that we need to lessen our dependence on China's control over critical minerals. You're talking about six, eight, nine, ten years. Right. To get a mine open in the US.

So, you know, you think down the road, we better. I guess my point is we better accelerate our ability to do this. Right. Just to be pragmatic, maybe hopefully one day we're all holding hands and everybody's singing Kumbaya and, you know, unicorns are flying on our ass. But I think it's probably not going to happen.

So we just need to be a little more aware. Yeah. Yeah. I sound very cynical.

Yeah. She said, where you always sound like you're really negative and you're always. Well, you're just informed. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the problem. Yeah. I think I've spent enough time. I've just been, I've been, I've gotten very cynical about the way that countries interact with each other and our ability to to be realistic about that, rather than just design strategies based on what we'd hope for or what we feel like would be good to happen. Right.

So maybe that's, maybe that's part of it.

Yeah, that was, that was, that was a fascinating hearing. That was a fascinating hearing. Yeah. And was it shocking at all to you? No, no, no.

I think it was. it was. I loved listening. And, but I can't say that anything came out of it, even with with Dave Grush testimony. I mean, kind of come out there before.

But I think.

A couple of things. I think it's it's it's excellent that we're actually having these hearings and that there's a subcommittee, and that they're actually looking at this issue, because I think the more transparency, the problem the government's had in the past, is not being transparent enough. And so I think that was great. I think, David Fravor, I've had a chance to sit with him in the past.

Right. Yeah. You're not a commanding officer on a carrier. He was on the Nimitz at the time when he in 2004.. You don't get to that point by being irrational or hallucinating up in the air, or, you know, just being whimsical.

And the same with the other fellow, Ryan Graves, the other pilot, who was flying Hornets out of Virginia Beach about 10 years later when they were reported on some of these incidents. So that, to me, is is very credible. And I have not seen anything from the Pentagon or from the government. that, as an example, explains Fravor's encounter. And also, I mean, look, he had a wingman.

Her name was Alex Dietrich. She was a lieutenant commander at the time.

She observed the same thing and they have radar lock right down on the carrier. They knew what they were. They there wasn't just one person looking up in the sky and saying, I see a light, you know, I see something. This was a very legit sighting. And there's no.

there's been no explanation as to what it is. So it is a legitimate UAP, unidentified, you know, anomalous or anomaly, you know, phenomena.

And. So I think that's that's one thing I find David Fravor extremely credible. I've never met Ryan Graves, but again, given his experience and given the fact that, you know, they weren't, he wasn't the only person seeing this right off of Virginia Beach.

You're just seeing things out there that you wouldn't have picked up before. OK. And so some of those things then become maybe sightings that then are explained. Right. What is it?

Is it a balloon? Is it a drone? Whatever it may be.

But, you know, when you, when you get a an experienced pilot flying by and saying, hey, I saw something. It was a, you know, cube inside a sphere. Well, OK. Well, let's let's at least log it, record it without any criticism or pushback. Right.

Have a way to investigate. And that's been their problem. And that's what they talked about during the hearing. Also, again, they've talked about this before. But if you, if you stigmatize, you know, the pilots that are seeing these things, then, yeah, of course, you want to get.

And what did? what did Graves say? He said like five percent get reported. Right. So, and that's because nobody wants to, you know, get back on deck or land and say, yeah, I saw something.

Yeah. I saw a UAP or I saw a UFO back in the day. So you have to make the system more accessible. Right. For the sightings.