I think the obvious explanation for Musk is the one we're not supposed to say anymore. That he is just full-on super-neurodivergent and their time in the sun for that being a legitimate condition evaporated when the compassionate Left realized that meant they would have to tolerate people diverging in ways they don't approve of. Sort of like Tourette's is a real disease unless a racial slur comes out of their mouths.
The Silk Road forum posts and message exchanges which were evidence for the murder-for-hire indictment of Ross Ulbricht came from corrupt DEA agent Carl Mark Force who had gained administrative access to the site that would allow him to edit the Silk Road database, including forum posts and message exchanges. The supposed murder-for-hire victim, Ross supporter, and one time Dread Pirate Roberts, Curtis Green, said he read through his old posts and claims the posts were not his words and that someone modified the posts. Admin access also allowed Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road. They both went to prison. So, it is no wonder the murder-for-hire indictment was never prosecuted.
I have a question about this. The TFC chat has a different character than these episode comment threads. And there are frequent commenters in the chat who don’t really seem to be over here. Is there a different barrier of entry?
Kind of off topic but…ding ding ding! Moynihan is on the latest Remnant podcast. Very pleasant surprise, I love when MM drops into my other podcasts :)
Listening him to ramble with Jonah was very fun. It was like two indie rock nerds trying to out-obscure each other at times (Gracchus Babeuf?!?) but that's half the fun.
"Listening to @mcmoynihan trash me on @JonahDispatch
podcast is hilarious. He calls me “batty” claims he can’t remember my name (it is a very difficult one) and his first criticism is that I don’t ever talk about economics.
Imagine claiming that you can’t remember someone’s name and then criticizing them for what they don’t talk about. If you don’t know enough about someone to remember the name Dave, maybe you’re not an expert on what subjects they are interested in. What could be battier than that?"
Also in that comment thread, is a drive by sniping from noted current Hamas simp/former podcast guest, Zaid Jilani
Ofd how the crowd who often self identify as “neurodivergent” and are champions of said group have no restraint piling on Musk, who a few short years ago was their darling.
Re: rule of law, I feel awkward saying this but the "eh, I don't have to enforce that" really started with the Obama administration and cannabis. I think cannabis should be legal, and I think the federal government shouldn't have a role in drug laws, but the law was what it was, and there was this awkward period where the whole recreational cannabis community got the word that the feds just weren't going to enforce the law in their states.
Instead of actually fighting it out, dealing with the issue of federal overreach and the 10th Amendment/how much states can just completely ignore federal law, and changing the law, Obama said "eh, I don't have to enforce that". I liked the first order consequences, but I feel like we are currently being blasted with the secondary and tertiary consequences of that decision.
There's a difference between prosecutorial discretion -- there just aren't enough federal cops to enforce all the federal drug laws against all the federal law-breaking, so you have to prioritize -- and a very specific, one-company, one-deadline law, which now (in addition to the non-enforcement of that deadline), the Trump admin is saying that it's fine for other businesses to break the letter of the law by doing businesses with it.
If I remember correctly the administration explicitly said "we aren't going to enforce federal cannabis laws in Colorado and Washington DC", not because of any logistical exigencies of lack of DEA agents but because his administration was cool with states working to break federal law on this one issue. Not any other issues, and certainly not any sort of constitutional reasoning behind the decision - it's sort of the legislative version of Jackson's "they've made their decision now let them enforce it".
He had promised to do the same with medical cannabis, broke tbe promise when his DEA raided medical facilities in several West Coast states, and then said "shit, I got the weed people to think I'm their guy, I can't keep fucking with them without throwing them a bone".
I'm not saying the two things are the same, but they violate the same principles. Trump is just a few steps further down the line, completely ignoring federal law nationwide rather than in states that have expressed the desire to pursue different policies.
I mean, IIRC, Jeff Sessions, lifelong drug warrior, said he was going to crack down on legal-marijuana states, and in fact did not, in part because it *is* a logistical issue (particularly on the consumption side), and in part because the political winds were blowing in that direction, and there is something that should rightly get one's enforcement attention when state law is in direct defiance of federal law. No such issues with TikTok, at all. Further, Trump explicitly said in his EO that *other* businesses can do business with the illegal business, which is a status that, say, the banking industry does not have with state-legal marijuana businesses, unless my information is out of date.
Totally fair points, although the landscape Sessions faced (iirc there were five or seven states with recreational cannabis and like 20+ with medical cannabis) and the landscape Obama faced (something like seven states with medical and one state and one territory with recreational) were very different, and it would have taken one week of shutting down Colorado businesses to put the chill on other states doing recreational cannabis for the foreseeable future. Maybe the actual equivalent to Trump's EO would have been an Obama EO codifying what was basically a promise into official policy, and demanding that state banks do business with cannabis businesses.
Again, I don't want any of those things to have happened, and I don't think anyone should be in jail for using or selling drugs.
And a side note, I've been thinking about this for a long time because I always thought medical (let alone recreational!) cannabis would be the source of the first Constitutional crisis of the 21st century - how can you have this absolute nonsense state of affairs where states openly oppose the federal government, even after the SC made it clear in their (bad) Gonzalez v Raich decision that congress absolutely has the authority to regulate cannabis, even if it's grown on the user's property for their own consumption. How could this not lead to a massive clash between state and federal executive branches?
And the way it's all worked out is a total mess, with cannabis still illegal federally while congress passes laws codifying banking rules for businesses that they refuse to make legal! Aaaah it's all so backwards and stupid.
If it's not clear from my argument, I think this should be a state issue, full stop, and in my state I would advocate to end the idiotic war on drugs.
Same but different: my local school district recently sent out a notice saying that they were exploring their options for helping out families who might be affected by upcoming DHS actions. So my federal tax dollars go towards immigration law enforcement, while my local-ish tax dollars go towards immigration law evasion.
As usual Kmele is correct. The problem with transgenderism or DEI is that government or those in public life have chosen to acknowledge it and take official positions on them. It’s absurd.
I’m thinking that the solution in necessary government documents would be to have a third category marking the person as transgender. How is the government in the business of affirming what is a mental disorder? And it is classified as such for the purposes of insurance paying for drugs and surgeries.
The new iteration of Nosferatu is glorious. Glad to hear Kmele giving it some love. Robert Eggers is a great director - The Lighthouse is magnificent. Another period piece disguised as a nightmare.
People seemed divided on the film. Some seem to hate it and say it's overrated. Personally I really liked it. I also recently watched the 1979? remake, which I also really liked.
Kmele always likes the same stuff I do. I feel vindicated. Ever since he raved over The Expanse I knew he knew what was up.
So good! Saw it in the theater a couple of days after Christmas. I bought it on AppleTV yesterday and watched it last night in a dark living room. Dinner with Orlok hit different!
My wife was hugely impressed by the Lighthouse so we are seeing his films now. Neither of us cared for the Northman, but both really liked the Witch. I haven't seen Lighthouse yet.
I listened to that episode right after hearing Noam Dworman’s conversation with Anthony Weiner on the Comedy Cellar podcast. That episode was awesome by the way….. especially getting to hear the cadence of two real New Yorkers going 100 mph.
She is really good at curating a variety of guests and matching them to topics (maybe they get to choose their topic, but I’m sure she has some editorial discretion). And she’s such a curious, engaged host who matches the guests’ energy. Well done, Katie. I think Jesse’s book leave was one of the best things that could have happened to her.
It would have been great if the new Nosferatu was a sequel to the original and the studio had called it “Nosfura2” that’s my input…
The third movie in the Nosferstu trilogy will be Nosf3ratu: Tokyo Drift
Obviously the fourth would be called Nos4atu. (Fast and Furious 4 was just called Fast and Furious. I am sticking with the schtick)
Shouldn't it be Budapest Drift?
😂
Moynihan’s hatred of Sam Altman remains undefeated.
Altman is a true sociopath.
This was an especially good episode. Thank you.
I think the obvious explanation for Musk is the one we're not supposed to say anymore. That he is just full-on super-neurodivergent and their time in the sun for that being a legitimate condition evaporated when the compassionate Left realized that meant they would have to tolerate people diverging in ways they don't approve of. Sort of like Tourette's is a real disease unless a racial slur comes out of their mouths.
Ness-feratu is the Scottish vampire who lives in a lake. This movie's about a different guy.
I thought it was NES-feratu, an undead gentleman who’s just really into 80s Nintendo games.
The Silk Road forum posts and message exchanges which were evidence for the murder-for-hire indictment of Ross Ulbricht came from corrupt DEA agent Carl Mark Force who had gained administrative access to the site that would allow him to edit the Silk Road database, including forum posts and message exchanges. The supposed murder-for-hire victim, Ross supporter, and one time Dread Pirate Roberts, Curtis Green, said he read through his old posts and claims the posts were not his words and that someone modified the posts. Admin access also allowed Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road. They both went to prison. So, it is no wonder the murder-for-hire indictment was never prosecuted.
https://freeross.org/false-allegations/
Dudes in the chat are gonna have a hard 4 years if they ever start listening to the podcast.
I have a question about this. The TFC chat has a different character than these episode comment threads. And there are frequent commenters in the chat who don’t really seem to be over here. Is there a different barrier of entry?
I'm pretty sure the chat is a paid feature. But your guess is as good as mine!
I only hang in the episode replies. Not the chat. I didn't know people were mean over there. It makes it unlikely for me to head over there.
Kind of off topic but…ding ding ding! Moynihan is on the latest Remnant podcast. Very pleasant surprise, I love when MM drops into my other podcasts :)
Listening him to ramble with Jonah was very fun. It was like two indie rock nerds trying to out-obscure each other at times (Gracchus Babeuf?!?) but that's half the fun.
I'm definitely going to have to check it out because it apparently pissed of "Comic" Dave Smith
https://x.com/ComicDaveSmith/status/1883219215341285535
"Listening to @mcmoynihan trash me on @JonahDispatch
podcast is hilarious. He calls me “batty” claims he can’t remember my name (it is a very difficult one) and his first criticism is that I don’t ever talk about economics.
Imagine claiming that you can’t remember someone’s name and then criticizing them for what they don’t talk about. If you don’t know enough about someone to remember the name Dave, maybe you’re not an expert on what subjects they are interested in. What could be battier than that?"
Also in that comment thread, is a drive by sniping from noted current Hamas simp/former podcast guest, Zaid Jilani
https://x.com/ZaidJilani/status/1883219959024951339
"Moynihan has become neocon conventional wisdom guy"
This might be my own incompetence, but I thought there were some editing errors in the podcast.
Yeah they bleeped out Moynihan’s cursing
Ofd how the crowd who often self identify as “neurodivergent” and are champions of said group have no restraint piling on Musk, who a few short years ago was their darling.
Can anyone confirm to me whether or not Moynihan thinks the Jan 6 people are Good People™️ or Bad People™️? He wasn't very clear.
pls get abe greenwald on the show.
We’d have to add “It’s worse than that” to The Fifth Column drinking game.
Re: rule of law, I feel awkward saying this but the "eh, I don't have to enforce that" really started with the Obama administration and cannabis. I think cannabis should be legal, and I think the federal government shouldn't have a role in drug laws, but the law was what it was, and there was this awkward period where the whole recreational cannabis community got the word that the feds just weren't going to enforce the law in their states.
Instead of actually fighting it out, dealing with the issue of federal overreach and the 10th Amendment/how much states can just completely ignore federal law, and changing the law, Obama said "eh, I don't have to enforce that". I liked the first order consequences, but I feel like we are currently being blasted with the secondary and tertiary consequences of that decision.
There's a difference between prosecutorial discretion -- there just aren't enough federal cops to enforce all the federal drug laws against all the federal law-breaking, so you have to prioritize -- and a very specific, one-company, one-deadline law, which now (in addition to the non-enforcement of that deadline), the Trump admin is saying that it's fine for other businesses to break the letter of the law by doing businesses with it.
If I remember correctly the administration explicitly said "we aren't going to enforce federal cannabis laws in Colorado and Washington DC", not because of any logistical exigencies of lack of DEA agents but because his administration was cool with states working to break federal law on this one issue. Not any other issues, and certainly not any sort of constitutional reasoning behind the decision - it's sort of the legislative version of Jackson's "they've made their decision now let them enforce it".
He had promised to do the same with medical cannabis, broke tbe promise when his DEA raided medical facilities in several West Coast states, and then said "shit, I got the weed people to think I'm their guy, I can't keep fucking with them without throwing them a bone".
I'm not saying the two things are the same, but they violate the same principles. Trump is just a few steps further down the line, completely ignoring federal law nationwide rather than in states that have expressed the desire to pursue different policies.
I mean, IIRC, Jeff Sessions, lifelong drug warrior, said he was going to crack down on legal-marijuana states, and in fact did not, in part because it *is* a logistical issue (particularly on the consumption side), and in part because the political winds were blowing in that direction, and there is something that should rightly get one's enforcement attention when state law is in direct defiance of federal law. No such issues with TikTok, at all. Further, Trump explicitly said in his EO that *other* businesses can do business with the illegal business, which is a status that, say, the banking industry does not have with state-legal marijuana businesses, unless my information is out of date.
Totally fair points, although the landscape Sessions faced (iirc there were five or seven states with recreational cannabis and like 20+ with medical cannabis) and the landscape Obama faced (something like seven states with medical and one state and one territory with recreational) were very different, and it would have taken one week of shutting down Colorado businesses to put the chill on other states doing recreational cannabis for the foreseeable future. Maybe the actual equivalent to Trump's EO would have been an Obama EO codifying what was basically a promise into official policy, and demanding that state banks do business with cannabis businesses.
Again, I don't want any of those things to have happened, and I don't think anyone should be in jail for using or selling drugs.
And a side note, I've been thinking about this for a long time because I always thought medical (let alone recreational!) cannabis would be the source of the first Constitutional crisis of the 21st century - how can you have this absolute nonsense state of affairs where states openly oppose the federal government, even after the SC made it clear in their (bad) Gonzalez v Raich decision that congress absolutely has the authority to regulate cannabis, even if it's grown on the user's property for their own consumption. How could this not lead to a massive clash between state and federal executive branches?
And the way it's all worked out is a total mess, with cannabis still illegal federally while congress passes laws codifying banking rules for businesses that they refuse to make legal! Aaaah it's all so backwards and stupid.
If it's not clear from my argument, I think this should be a state issue, full stop, and in my state I would advocate to end the idiotic war on drugs.
Same but different: my local school district recently sent out a notice saying that they were exploring their options for helping out families who might be affected by upcoming DHS actions. So my federal tax dollars go towards immigration law enforcement, while my local-ish tax dollars go towards immigration law evasion.
As usual Kmele is correct. The problem with transgenderism or DEI is that government or those in public life have chosen to acknowledge it and take official positions on them. It’s absurd.
With the exception of things governments actually does like issue drivers licenses that list gender where they kind of have to do make a choice.
I’m thinking that the solution in necessary government documents would be to have a third category marking the person as transgender. How is the government in the business of affirming what is a mental disorder? And it is classified as such for the purposes of insurance paying for drugs and surgeries.
Whatever solution is chosen will quickly become political if it doesn’t start that way as it has elsewhere.
The new iteration of Nosferatu is glorious. Glad to hear Kmele giving it some love. Robert Eggers is a great director - The Lighthouse is magnificent. Another period piece disguised as a nightmare.
Agree. Nosferatu was great, but The VVitch (Eggers’ first film) was my favorite.
I think Northman is mine, but it's like asking me to pick between 4 expensive bottles of wine.
Northman was fantastic and was my favorite but I think Nosferatu eclipse it.
I need to rewatch Northman. I did not love it the first time I saw it but this new one was so good I must be missing something.
People seemed divided on the film. Some seem to hate it and say it's overrated. Personally I really liked it. I also recently watched the 1979? remake, which I also really liked.
Kmele always likes the same stuff I do. I feel vindicated. Ever since he raved over The Expanse I knew he knew what was up.
Liking The Expanse is no indicator of good taste. It is simply an indicator that one has eyes and ears. Ditto for The Wire. :-)
Needed to mention The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
We just need an episode of Michael monologing about German Expressionism/UfA studios. Well, maybe 'we' don't, but I certainly do 😀
So good! Saw it in the theater a couple of days after Christmas. I bought it on AppleTV yesterday and watched it last night in a dark living room. Dinner with Orlok hit different!
So fucking good
My wife was hugely impressed by the Lighthouse so we are seeing his films now. Neither of us cared for the Northman, but both really liked the Witch. I haven't seen Lighthouse yet.
Re: Bannon & Breitbart, Mr. Megan McCain visited BARpod to explain how the hell we all got here.
https://open.substack.com/pub/blockedandreported/p/episode-244-the-breitbart-effect?r=7enhd&utm_medium=ios
I listened to that episode right after hearing Noam Dworman’s conversation with Anthony Weiner on the Comedy Cellar podcast. That episode was awesome by the way….. especially getting to hear the cadence of two real New Yorkers going 100 mph.
I like when Katie does solos. They’re always great.
She is really good at curating a variety of guests and matching them to topics (maybe they get to choose their topic, but I’m sure she has some editorial discretion). And she’s such a curious, engaged host who matches the guests’ energy. Well done, Katie. I think Jesse’s book leave was one of the best things that could have happened to her.
This is how Ben Domench got on BARpod
Give me more Welch rants. The people (me) demand it!
Brought me back to 2020