Chapo Trap House - 616 - Living Vampires (4/4/22)

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

The boys discuss outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki and her history with Amazon’s anti-union consulting company, some former Obama guys and their good opinions, and Jenifer Rubin’s advice for helping Dems in the midterms. Then, we take a look at a piece taking Morbius to task for failing to live up to Vampires’ potential as maligned outsiders. Find Felix’s conversation about the opiate crisis on our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/64735826 Tickets to Jacques + Friends Podcast Dream live show at Littlefield on 4/15: https://littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=262639771627

Greetings friends. It's Joppo Monday April 4th, 2022. Gentlemen, back from a weekend. Let's go. How are we feeling? Just another week of the news. Another more news. The sun keeps on rising. The news keeps on printing. I keep on reacting to it. I keep copying the link to the tweet and saying, I guess this is happening now. It continues to be a normal world. We're here for it. All right. So I guess just first things first, big congratulations to the Amazon union in

Staten Island. Now, I don't want to blow the bells and whistles too soon on this. They still need a contract, but a big, big, big victory on the union vote for the Amazon people. And I will say, for starters, we should have an interview coming tomorrow, if all goes well, that should be of some interest if you've been following this case. But we'll be interviewing Jeff Bezos. We'll be asking him how he's feeling. No one's really asking if there's anything we can do for him. You can rub his tummy, maybe. No one's really tried to get his side of the story. That's what we've noticed in all this,

and that's what we're trying to fix. Well, I mean, a question that comes up over and over again is, why would these people seek to get in between a family relationship? Why would they screw up a family dynamic that was working perfectly? I got to say, this polyamory stuff has gone way too far. You have a series of beautiful monogamous relationships between the Amazon corporation and these individual workers, and now you got these union people bumbling in to be an awkward third. They're making fondue when people just want to Netflix and chill.

Polyorganizers are coming into your workplaces and suggesting that they, quote, open things up. Well, let me tell you, I've been in relationships like that, and it never works. It just screws up the whole dynamic. I want to communicate with my wife directly. No, I don't want to, and I want to communicate with him through a third party who happens to be having sex with her. Yeah, no, thank you. But yeah, it's family dynamic. The family structure in America is breaking down. The relationship between parent and child, and the relationship between employer and employee,

and there's a lot of sickos out there that are trying to take advantage of that. Our interview tomorrow with Jeff Bezos, we'll be touching on all these issues. But before I want to get there, did you guys see Jen Sackie react to this news? She seemed very thrilled. She was very excited for that. The question is, is there any comment on the vote in Staten Island by Amazon workers to unionize? Sure. Well, the president was glad to see workers ensure their voices are heard with respect

to important workplace decisions. He believes firmly that every worker in every state must have a free and fair choice to join a union and the right to bargain collectively with their employer. The Amazon workers in Staten Island made their choice to organize a grassroots union and bargain for better jobs and a better life. Well, yeah, it was a terse response to say the least. I just want to like... Proact coming soon. If you thought neoliberalism was dead before, just wait till the proact passes, which is coming soon.

No. These days, she made a statement that was us. She was very glad. She was very happy for these Amazon workers that they won this vote. But Amazon hired her former employers to kill this union drive. Jen Sackie, of course, ran the DC office of the Global Strategy Group, which is an influential Democratic polling firm which Amazon hired to fight unionization efforts on the Staten Island facility. Just reading here from CNBC, Amazon tapped an influential consulting and polling firm with close ties to Democratic political groups to help the company thwart a critical unionization

effort at a Staten Island New York warehouse CNBC has learned. Global Strategy Group, which has served as a polling partner for a pro-Biden super PAC ahead of the 2020 election, has been working for Amazon since at least last year to produce anti-union materials, according to documents viewed by CNBC. Amazon fought aggressively to beat back unionization efforts on Staten Island, just as it had in Bessemer, Alabama, where workers concluded a second union vote after the initial one failed last year. Workers' warehouse staffers across the company amped up their activism during the COVID pandemic

demanding safer worker conditions and better pay. The videos and printed materials distributed by Global Strategy Group attempt to discourage employees from joining a union. They use phrases like one team, working together, and unpack it, get the facts about unions, a slogan repeated on Amazon's anti-union website, unpack JFK8. Some of the materials tout the many benefits that Amazon already provides, including healthcare and vacation time, and opportunities for improving job skills. GSG employees in New York, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. have been involved in the

project, document show. Barbara Russell, Amazon's Global Director of Employee Relations, is helping to oversee the work with GSG. So yeah, that's Jen Sackie's former job. You know, I mean, it's just, it's a shame she has to fight so hard against them now in the Biden White House, which, you know, supports all this stuff. Well, not for long, she's, she's on her way out. Her audition went really well, and now she's gonna get a gig at MSNBC.

They really liked her headshot. Yeah, and, and like, that, it is awesome now that government postings are now just explicitly auditions to, I mean, yeah, obviously get lobbying money and all that, but that's, that's just assumed. The real goal is, yeah, get, get on TV, because what else is there? You sure as hell not governing. You might as well make more money for less hours and get to be famous. Yeah, but MSNBC, it's like, damn, aim high.

I don't think anyone's used Periscope, except for people who have been banned from every platform in the world. I think that's sort of the last resort, but I think if she just like had a Periscope show, it would get more viewers than MSNBC. MSNBC is getting slaughtered. It still has its, its small band of fans, and, and, and like when the collapse comes, you can ensure that there will be a, a, a dedicated hardcore of you, whatever, you know, warlord faction you end up part of.

Yeah. I kind of think, I think she's better positioned than others to be a big media star because they do love her. Like the... They love Sacky. Yeah. Sackybots. The remaining Biden loyalists, like, love her.

And I mean, I guess, I guess she could supplant like Joy Reid or like someone else with like exactly 33,000 viewers in the entire... Yeah. 33,000 people who would like die for her. She'll be like Boatica. Oh no. I think, I think she'll have more than that. I mean, like it just, I don't know, it seems like, it seems like moving backwards a bit.

Everyone obviously wants to be a media star, but the cable news route seems to be foreclosed on unless you're Tucker. Well, if the CIA doesn't work out, there's always journalism. Tucker learned that one. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, if you're too stupid to be a spook, journalism will hire anyone basically. And basically you can still do the same job.

So better pay too. Yeah. No, it's, it's the only move as we, as we well understand, if you're not in the media, what the hell are you doing? But just as like a, you know, we're talking about like the current Biden administration people. Ken, I think I found the worst former Obama person. Oh, Jay Carney.

No, no, no, no. Jay, Jay Carney's up there. Jay Carney is up there. He was, you know, he was the one who was slandering Chris Mall's last year for spreading COVID or whatever. This one is for a former Obama official, Brandon Friedman. And I, I like, I mean, this is a since deleted tweet, he was responding to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, who, you know, was saying, you know, gosh, you know, I don't, you know, like maybe

this is weird to point out, but like, you know, there are plenty of very profitable, successful companies all over the world that have unionized workforces. Gee Willikers, Brandon Friedman replies to him in this since deleted tweet, one reason I've always been sort of standoffish with the very idea of unions is that they're a sign of weak governance, as in, to protect their interests, workers are forced to band together to do what government should be doing. Yeah, you know, if Obama had had 62 votes in the Senate, we would have had Democratic Centralism.

Yeah, that rule, because he's making this point, ideally, the government should be providing all this stuff. And it's like, yeah, they should. It's so rational and reasonable that they would do that. And yet they don't. Well, what, why is that? How could that be? And it's weird.

It's like, really only when you have strong labor unions, is there really any political pressure at all on making any of those things happen? Yeah, yeah. And that as soon as it goes away, their, the status quo is to demolish them. It's really odd. It's, it's like, it's like there's something other than rational governance determining the decisions of these bodies. I don't know what it could be.

Yeah. It's like a banner week for former Obama guys just walking around saying, who farted? Why is Lee stayed quiet? Yeah. I haven't seen any Messina, Messina gems out there. I guess he's just, he's stoically sitting on his lily pad in England, figuring out there's got to be a way out of the air. There's got to be a way that I could actually, I could somehow get Cure Starmer executed by

the state if he hires me. God, I know I have it in me to have that happen. They bring back the death penalty just to kill him after I run his campaign against Boris Johnson. Don't you wish he was working for the Tories in 2019? Yeah. Oh God, if you don't, oh my God, if they kept him around, you know, if Bernie, oh my God, Bernie had like a billion fucking dollars and they spent it on like TV ads for people

who think he's Russian anyway. Yeah. They should have, they should have like gone to Jay Carney and been like, here's $200 million to work for Joe Biden. Get all of them. Get Messina. Get Carney. Yeah.

No. Just get all, get Messina especially and then Biden loses. What a waste. What a sad waste. But David Axelrod, the post where it's like, oh, has anyone ever had a problem with their insurance? Just suddenly like stops covering something and they have to pay $7,000 a year for pundit medicine like I have to take.

Yeah. No, he said that. Play pundit pills. Skyrocket. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. He said some pill he takes has now cost $638 a month and he was like, who can afford this?

Your money or your life is a hell of a thing to be offering people in terms of healthcare or whatever. It was just like, you're like, wow, are you the same David Axelrod that worked for the Obama administration? No way. A couple more hits from this Brandon Freedman guy. You know, he used to be a troop too. Oh yeah.

No. His bio ends with once the soldier and does it finish that statement? I don't know. Once the soldier, then what? Well, actually, funnily enough, now his current gig as he works for this fucking, it's like a tea company that says it works in post-conflict spaces. Oh man, that is like, oh man, that is a beautiful detail. It's like, yeah, if Dave Eggers wrote a novel where a character used to work for Obama,

I would be like, this wouldn't happen in real life. It's too perfect. It's too ridiculous. But no, he really does it. And I'm just like, well, I mean, come on, dude, open up shop in Libya. There's a ton of new post-conflict spaces that you're creating the opportunity to invest in. Talk about a loose labor market, too.

Thanks to you. Loose-leaf tea? Loose-leaf workers. Yeah. Start picking those leaves. No, but Brandon also had some thoughts about, God, this guy's name's Brandon and he worked for the Obama administration. What a fucking blown opportunity.

He had to say this about the Ukraine war. He says, no cities during the Iraq invasion were ever made to look like Maripole, Bukha or other heavily damaged places in Ukraine. The heaviest fighting was in Nazaria and Baghdad and neither came close to what we see today. One of these figures is wildly inaccurate, possibly both. I haven't reviewed empirical research over the years, but just based on first and second hand observation and what I know about civilians and war carnage, I feel safe estimating Russia killed more civilians in its invasion than the U.S. in Iraq by at least an order of magnitude.

Yeah, you know, I'm eyeballing it. And let me just tell you, that's a lot of casualties, definitely more than the one we did. Like, for going the fact that he's completely wrong, something like 60 to 70% of the buildings in Fallujah were destroyed. Okay, you say that, Felix, but he has already defeated this line of inquiry quite ably by pointing out that Fallujah happened after the initial invasion. You see, he's talking about the invasion, which was prosecuted quite morally, but the

10 years plus of war that happened after it is a different matter entirely. And one that supports this point that America would never do anything like what Russia did to Maripole to a city full of people. But I mean, at least they wouldn't do that during an invasion. They would do it during an occupation of a war that happened after the invasion. Even during the invasion, the U.S. was using artillery on cities. They did that shit. And the artillery is not guided in any fucking sense.

And it's loaded in American munitions with fucking depleted uranium. Yeah. I mean, among our many crimes in that country, just an absurd amount of increased birth defects since we used depleted uranium shells in the end. We're the only ones to do that, by the way. Yeah. So that's one thing you can say, whatever is happening in Maripole, nobody, there's not going to be some giant spike in fucking cancer, pediatric cancer diagnosis that's going to

last for decades. That's the Uncle Sam touch. Well, you really see why old Brandon, Mr. Let's Go Brandon Friedman, he's sort of sea tier former Obama guy, because he kind of gave up the game. Everyone in that fold is so excited about this, so happy over this war. Because A, this is the end goal of our Ukraine policy for the last decade was to make them fight our war for us and then point to the destruction and death of this country that we've already put through so fucking much.

This country, every employer in Ukraine with more than 50 employees has a special little fucking escape valve where the sons and daughters of US politicians could siphon money out. Every awful thing we have forced on that country, we can now point to the dead and maimed and go, look, look, we told you Russia's bad. But the secondary thing, the more emotional prize for people like Brandon Friedman is now Americans don't have to talk about Iraq, we don't have to reconcile with Iraq, we don't have to think about Libya. No, look, there's a new bad thing, which like, you know, if anything, we're just looking

at our mirror. I would argue that we're still the great Satan, we're the primary mover of evil in this world. But he sort of, he blows the whole prize by bringing Iraq back up again and trying to stack these two together when they really don't. He blows everything because he says, and what I know about civilians and war carnage, speaking from my own personal experience in the matter, it's like, dude, what are you talking about, man? Like, don't you feel guilty about any of this shit?

No, I mean, like, I'm sure that like, the Russian military is doing like absolutely fucking awful things there, like positive. I'm sure of that because that's probably what Brandon Friedman was doing in Iraq. This is generally what invading armies do. Yeah, but at the end of the day, I mean, the distinction that will always animate these arguments and that, and that undergirds all the assumptions that go into saying something that's absurd, something that's so easily dunkable is that whatever we do, we had to do it for, and, you know, you could argue, oh, you're just talking about like the narrow

self-interest of like, you know, America, you know, as opposed to some greater good. But they would argue that in a world filled with bad actors, our self-interest is the greatest good. And so if we decide we have to do something like go into Iraq, even if it was, you know, an oops, at the time, we felt we had to do it. Everything we do is under that moral umbrella of necessity. Other countries act out of bad motives, like they, because the narrow self-interest of their country is not like elemental to the greater good.

Putin, if he should allow himself to be overthrown, he should do the right thing because it doesn't matter what happens in Russia, it only matters that America persists and prevails. And, you know, like, and also, the other line that these people use to exonerate themselves is that they're just like, well, like all of the barbarity that we did in Iraq, it wasn't systematic and intentional. And then they're like, yes, I know about Abu Ghraib and torture, yes, like granted, that was pursued systematically. But you know, like, we're not just mercilessly massacring civilians, like we would never

do that. The cruelty wasn't the point. Yes, exactly. That's the distinction. Yeah. That's why liberals love saying that, because our cruelty is an unnecessary byproduct. Their cruelty is something that they enjoy, and it's not right if you may have fun. That's the liberal credo.

Yeah, we have to do all this stuff. We have to, you know, squeeze the global, the losers in the global order into oblivion in the face of, you know, massive catastrophes, ecological and otherwise, but we're not having fun doing it. Yeah. And if you have fun doing it, then you shouldn't be in charge. And that's why the Washington-led, Western consensus has to defeat all these nasty, revanchist nationalist movements, because they have fun doing it.

And that's unseemly. Would Russians ever make the green zone? That's because they'll have. Would they ever have a P.F. Chang's right next to their embassy in Kiev if they took it? I don't think so. Oh, no. I meant the movie, The Green Zone.

Would they ever make a horrible movie that 25 people see that's about how hard it is to do work? That's a very good point. Yeah. I kind of hope they do. Oh, geez. Oh, dang it. Yeah.

I hope they do do that. I hope they just, like, they just completely do, like, every single thing we do. Yeah. Like, a Russian Obama, who's like, I was against the Ukraine invasion, and there's like, the invasion of Chechnya. They re-bake in the Valley of Ella with Stephen Segal and the Tommy Lee Jones role. Yeah. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you one motherfucking thing about my son.

President Putin snatched away every last motherfucking birthday. Oh, doing, doing, doing, like, there's zero dark 30, but it's about, like, Stephen Segal killing Jonathan Ben Ness. After a long time, our enemies defeated. But all my, all my friends who turned motherfucking gay along the way, I think was this shit worth it, blood, I don't even know. Russian, Russian Catherine. Ramzakotarov, your family hates you, sucka.

All your warlords, they turned their back on you, bitch. I don't know. It's just like, I mean, like, feel like you, you had, you had these guys dead to rights years ago when you, you know, loudly proclaimed the honor of the Hillary man versus these spineless fucking worms in the Obama administration. Cause it's like, I don't know, man. Like it's just like the, the introduction of these guys is just like, what, like, what, what exactly separates them from like Mitt Romney on, in terms of their like attitudes

on like labor, war, taxes, like, yeah, yeah, I mean, the only difference is Jay Carney likes guided by voices. That's it. He knows who's guided by voices is, yeah, that makes him more repulsive to me. Yeah. Like I, it's like, it's charming to me that Mitt Romney probably like, listens to Pat Boone. But like, yeah. Oh man.

No. See, but like media consumption is virtue for a liberal. It has to be because they foresworn any, you know, actual responsibility for anything. They have accepted that getting as high as you can in the hierarchy of blood is the only worthwhile human pursuit. So they have to find a somewhere to imagine themselves to be worthy of their position. And it comes from their virtue, which doesn't come from action. Their actions have to go against anything virtuous.

It comes from consumption like it does for the rest of us and specifically media consumption. Like the fact that Obama was black was a huge, right? And helped him become president, but his enduring popularity and the way that he shaped the Democratic Party had way more to do the fact that he liked the wire. Yeah. Like that was mind blowing for liberals. And it gave them this idea that like, if you're doing horrible imperial shit or horrible corporate shit, but you watched the wire, it means you're doing it because there's no other option.

Because obviously you get it, right? You get it. So you would never do something bad that you didn't have to do. And so the fact that he listens to the fact that J. Tarning's a cool exer with cool X-values and Mitt Romney's a fucking square listens to the Osmans while looking at the wiki feet page for Kristen Cinema, that makes him worthy of power and Romney not. Yeah. And the wire is sort of the perfect show because it shows all these completely ignored problems

in the inner city that exist in every city in America. And by the time it gets near the end of the show, they're like, all right, so the problem starts in schools. If the schools were better, this wouldn't happen. Maybe if we turn, maybe if we turn them all over to McDonald's, they would be more efficient at least. Because that's the thing. It's like, the solution is not to be found in stuff like the wire, only the problem.

The solution can be pulled out of the air, AKA, you know, what all of the billionaire funded NGOs have to say the problem is. All the people who have the same interests as you, but also have charts to show you. And of course, these charts are accurate because these guys watch the wire too. I just got to say that, like, if it had been Hillary, who's the president of the past ACA, and her equivalent, David Axelrod, like his insurance, just like dropped his, his bunded pills. We had to pay like an extra $30,000 to do it.

And Terry McAuliffe, he would never say, he would never, ever acknowledge that. No, because he knows that an extra $600 a month wouldn't mean shit to him. Yeah. Well, that, but also it's like, no, he would kill himself before dishonoring the administration like that. Absolutely. I mean, David Axelrod is sort of a Ronan because he was disinvited from the Obama birthday bash.

That is true. But you know, we're kind of seeing why he was disinvited, sort of a chicken and egg situation. And lastly, the fact that he did not commit sepuku in front of that hideous fucking house Obama has in, of Martha's Vineyard is proof that he has no honor. Yeah. A Samurai's honor is not worn for show. Okay.

So, like, those are talking about, you know, Democrats, let's talk, let's talk, let's talk some strategies that could help them in the midterms because, you know, we let, come on, there's got to be something. There's got to be something here. You know, I'm reading a lot of articles, it's like, you know, ooh, this, this Gen Z turnout is not looking great for Joe Biden. You know, what are we going to do? We've got to do something for them.

And you know, Matt, I've seen, I think you're right about this. I've seen a lot of people saying, like, why, why can't Joe Biden just like de-schedule marijuana at the federal level? Or you know, like, it's like, wouldn't that be an easy, easy W for him? I think you're right that it's now totally too late to make a difference in that regard. Like that is not moving the fucking needle. Yeah, especially so, yeah, like all the young people who want weed legalized, it's a good chance it is legalized in the states they live in by this point.

And there's just so much other stuff that I can't imagine it really getting anybody that excited. I mean, it's obviously the correct moral and like obviously there's political benefits to it. It's like a broadly popular policy, but it's just like these, these magic bullets people think that he could just be like, just start, you know, zinging off or whatever, like, okay, here's one. Here's an idea that I think is worth considering.

Can somebody like, you know, perhaps President Joe Brandon or just make a political issue out of just junk and scam email and phone calls, which now are basically 98% of like all phone calls and like emails that you receive are just straight up like crimes, just straight up people trying to rob you. And there doesn't seem to be any attempt made to just like stop this or I don't know, hey, could you cut that? So maybe maybe half of the phone calls and emails I get are not just attempting to rob me.

Man, actually, this is, yeah, I know you're saying, well, why isn't Brandon doing something about this? He's actually part of his abolitionist agenda to allow these crimes to go unpoliced as they can. Yeah. A cab includes people who would stop them from calling you about how you have to pay your IRS bill in Amazon gift cards. The scam phone call thing, which every American seems to get about 30 a day.

I've noticed. Yeah. I mean, time and time again. I have to say, why even have an NSA? What the fuck are we doing with this thing? We built the greatest surveillance apparatus in the history of humanity, something that no one ever could have conceived. They could go anywhere.

They could see anything. They have metadata of everything and they can't just go like, oh, here's a guy's house in India where he makes 47% of the calls to Illinois saying that their vehicle warranty expired. The recipient needs to send their social security card and routing number. What the fuck? I mean, we're never getting rid of the NSA, obviously. It's just one of those things that everyone will live with until this entire thing comes

down like student loans. But what the fuck is it doing? It can't do anything about this. Are you serious? Again, it should be like, we are the only country in the world where this is a thing. I'm sure there are phishing phone calls in other countries, but we all know, everyone who has a cell phone knows that any number that you get that's not in your contact book don't pick up the phone.

Well, I will say that America has much looser personal data sale regulations than any other country, any other industrialized country. I mean, it has to because it's the only new thing that you can make money off of. Exactly. We basically have replaced the petrodollar with the data dollar at this point, and those things only have value because we have access to them. If you've been to Europe and you try just go to a news website, you usually go to, it runs, it loads about 90% faster.

And all that chrome crashing that happens in America, it doesn't happen over there. All of that is just data mining. Everything runs like shit here because you could just mine everything from everybody. But in the EU where there is some regulation on it, your shit doesn't just brick like that. We were also probably never going to change this because yeah, there has to be something. There has to be something because it's either that or companies that lose $70 billion a year in a quest to gain total market share while also having the secondary benefit of providing a more precarious middle class with the experience of having servants.

Yeah. That data is essentially worthless. It's just the collective decision that it's hypothetically effective to use in market ads. That's the same as the lie that the US dollar is backed by something. You have to believe it for the circulation to take place. It's incredibly easy to just get a bunch of phone numbers pinned to like any consumption choice in America.

It's incredibly easy. One might say that America is the real Romeo dialers paradise. I guess that way you could look at this thing as a necessary black market parasitic part of the greater data economy. You've got the legal pharmaceutical industry and then you've got illegal drug trafficking, but they're both necessary. You could theoretically stop all drugs from entering the United States if you screened every single shipment that comes in, but that is absolutely impossible.

Same deal here. I mean, it just seems to me like you can, whether it's like student loan relief or legalizing marijuana, easy things that Biden could do, but he doesn't and won't do. People will say, well, those are issues that only appeal to people who are going to vote for him anyway. There's a certain amount of truth to that, but when it comes to the scam phone calls that annoy everyone, I think this is an issue that everybody can get behind or it's not just like snotty young people or just like the assholes that voters don't like.

I think like voting, taxpaying Americans could get behind. I mean, they would get behind it for sure, but I don't really think that they're going to credit Brandon enough to pick him again and his party again. Probably not. I just don't think so. I think it's way too late. There's too many other things associated with the brand and brand, you know, it's basically nothing but bad relationships like people's people, the checks people were getting suddenly

stopped after Biden became president inflation for the first time in 40 years. I mean, like those, those people were really expecting $2,000 though. I mean, come on, weren't they paying attention? No one said $2,000. Yeah, I mean, in the current way of doing things, the next president was always going to be the guy who comes in after unemployment flows for the first time in a lot of people's memories. That was 2020 and like the first like week of 2021 for a lot of people that is the first

time in their life that they ever saw the federal government give them anything. That is the first time, the first and only fucking time. The guy who comes in right after it is like, okay, substitutes gone, wheeling the TV out of the class, it's quiz time. It was always going to be that in this current system, right? Because it's like, you know, the dreaded tight labor market, we can't have that. But in so far as that it was never going to not be the case that Biden would be the guy who turns and spig it off, those people are also never going to like him.

And that is just reality. I mean, I did see some crosstabs that show Biden above water, head above water with the silent generation. With the silent generation. It's awesome. Amazing. Amazing. Because they identify with him.

Yeah. He's up there. He's very confused. People are telling him he shouldn't do it. And it reminds them of when their kids gently asked them if they maybe shouldn't drive their car anymore. And young people also hate him. Yeah, exactly.

And vice versa. And vice versa. Fuck you. Yeah. Like I could still fucking drive. Okay. What? I hit a shopping cart.

It was fine. Well, here are some other ideas for the midterms. This comes courtesy of Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post. Four things Biden could do to help Democrats in the midterms. Beginning with, first, he can venture beyond the White House more than he has. It's baffling that his administration announced last week its dramatic release of one million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve from the White House. Why not talk to energy workers in Texas or set up a podium somewhere in Pennsylvania?

I think can is. I don't know about the choice of the word can. The White House might be nervous about aggravating environmentalists who are not thrilled about reliance on carbon-based fuels, but Biden has already made the policy call. He might as well get credit for it. A two or three day tour around the country focused on cutting fuel prices would boost visibility. Okay.

Okay. Jennifer. Okay. Biden White House memo to Jennifer Rubin. We love credit for this, but here's the problem. We don't really like letting Joe out of the White House. Yeah. We don't like it.

But last time we did that, he almost started World War III when he got a little off the cuff. He got weepy. He heard a fucking illen pipe in the background and he decided to just become the fucking weepy mick that nearly ended civilization. No, we can't let him out. Yeah. Let's just let him out unsupervised among some energy workers in Pennsylvania, Texas.

The Leslie Nielsen silver screen version of Mr. Magoo, that would be the vibe. Just walking onto a construction site, wandering onto a fucking an I-beam that just goes into the air and then just walking off just as it gets onto one of the levels. Proposal number two from Rubin is the White House can drop the Build Back Better proposal. Instead, propose a bill to fight inflation with just two parts, cutting the deficit with new taxes on the Uber rich and cutting prescription drug prices. That's it. No more talk about childcare, universal pre-K and the rest.

If Democrats can survive the midterms, they can come back for those items later. Cutting drug prices would be good policy and good politics. Let Republicans vote it down on the Senate floor. At the same time, the White House should hammer the 193 Republicans who voted last week against reducing insulin prices, many of whom voted to support a similar insulin cost-cutting measure under the defeated former president. Apparently denying Biden a win is more important than preventing millions of diabetes patients from getting gouged.

Here's how Biden can put it. Republicans not only want to scrap the Affordable Care Act, but are happy to see Americans pay unnecessarily high prices for insulin and other medications. I mean, come on. This is a no-brainer. Can you believe the Republicans voted against slightly reducing co-pays for people who already have insurance and need insulin? It's not like the Republicans could respond with an absolutely bulletproof counterattack

that would nullify the entire issue to any swing voter who might catch this. No, we don't. Yeah. No. We want to lower insulin prices. That's it. Boom. Why should I listen to you when you tell me that that's what they think, Brandon?

Nothing that they say has credibility, so their accusations mean nothing, and the Republicans will lie. I mean, the first thing Trump tried to do, like his first major project after the Muslim ban and everything, was trying to just make it so your health insurance company could kill you. It took about 50 other things to get Democrats to take the house in the following year. Yeah. I started to imagine why Biden isn't doing this.

Let's get those insulin prices down and let's crawl about it. The bill they're talking about, though, was about co-pays for insulin. Once again, in our idiotic fucking barbaric private health insurance, it's not exactly reducing the cost of insulin, or better yet, having the government just produce insulin and just add cost and give it to people, we can do that. Man, that would be so easy. Yeah. It is wild how easy that would be, relatively, just in terms of dollar terms and infrastructure.

It's doable in a way that a lot of the stuff. Insulin is not an mRNA vaccine. It's not just hypothetically-creatable. The system we have could actually do that, realistically. Yeah. You could even repurpose TSA people to do it, even they could do it. Even they could work in the factory. This is another thing.

It's like the telemarketer calls. It's like anything else. The best course of action for everyone, for the most amount of people, would be to completely nationalize the healthcare system, not Medicare for all. A single-payer government health insurance would just be the greatest fucking bilking project of the criminal American medical industry the world has ever seen. They would bleed it of like $3 trillion a week. The entire medical system is built on overbuilding, bloat, inefficiency.

Inefficiency is the prime driver of profits in it. Create the best result for the most people. You would completely nationalize it. You would have an American NHS. You would have the government make most pharmaceuticals, if not all. You would, yeah, have government insulate factories. But again, you can't do that because it's like, well, what the fuck? Now people can't get their associates degree in medical billing and make $75,000 a year

as an extortionist. Yeah. Can't do that. You know what's wild? I'm sorry to go. No. I was going to say, well, then you'd have Brandon Friedman piping up to be like, here's a bone I have to pick with national healthcare systems.

If we give everyone the same medical care, what will incentivize people to get better medical care? Yeah. Now, the limited scope of Democrats on healthcare is, I mean, it can't be anything but limited. Doctors seem to be shittier than they've been since they worked at the barber shop. Just by virtue that we're not making that many more of them, that the entire growth of the medical field has been, you know, medical billers, administrative jobs. Those choke points, narrow, you've got to keep it so that those people on the other

side of it can maintain their rent seeking capacity. Right. But no Democrat, no Democrat will really like talk about it because it's like, well, what the fuck? You're giving up the, this is one of our only things. One of our only things is the hospital fun house in America. That's one of our only profit centers. You know what's wild?

So by the 1970s, when the technology of dialysis had become like sufficiently advanced, somebody who had like a chronic kidney failure could be kept alive indefinitely if they had access to dialysis. And that of course is a problem in a for-profit sector because, you know, if you can't afford something, you can't get it. And we now have a situation where there's this disease, this, this kidney disorder that if you don't get this thing, you will not might, you will die. And so in the 1970s, Nixon passed a law basically exempting dialysis from the healthcare market

and making it directly provided like public good because it's not optional the way other healthcare is. But that's, it's just because of like the starkness of it, but it really emphasizes the underlining absurdity because all of it is necessary and look specifically at like fucking insulin is the same thing. If you don't get insulin, you will die will. So why the shit is this not part of this general understanding we have that life-saving treatments have to be provided.

And when the federal government or a state government says something is necessary, like in states where they say like children's dental healthcare is necessary, what that usually means is that the shittiest fucking providers for that thing that has been declared necessary will start like, you know, there's this trend of children's dentist office that Bill medicaid that there was a awful case I heard of just this like fucking rundown shack where they would just like drill, drill cavities for kids that didn't have cavities like 50 a hundred a day just to Bill medicaid a few thousand dollars where they gave a kid like Buprofen and killed him.

And that is that is always going to be the result of declaring something necessary in our current system unless you had like, yeah, a state run dentist office, I should say, Medicaid extortion scheme. The publicly provided a dialysis treatment in America is terrible and filled with incredible corruption and graft. But that's because it's just weird little mutant, just the same way that the VA sucks because it's it's not it's it's just this weird offshoot of a general health care market that is just poisonous and eats the fucking foundation of everything it's fucking connected

to. I think what you have to you just have to kill the beast, you have to kill the beast and people love people love like bringing up people they never give a shit about when you say this. Oh, what happens to the people that work for the insurance companies, okay, get a new fucking job. Yeah. What about the steel workers when they close the factories in America, you didn't give

a shit. Yeah. And you know what? Okay, fun. The lowest paid workers for insurance companies, they can now work for the new American NHS. They can. Yeah. That's like that's going to take bureaucrats for Christ's sake.

The highest level. Well, you know, if this is happening, we're living in my best possible world. So they're already executed. Think of a few things. Yeah. I could think of a few things. They're there. They're there.

They're not going to worry about unemployment and supermass. Like the actual jobs that would be lost to the health care sector, like the ones that couldn't be replaced in a public health care system are people who would should be lucky that they are in front of a firing squad. Yeah. It's like, who gives a shit about them? They're lucky that we let them live. I mean, I don't mean, I don't just mean like health insurance executives.

I mean, hospital CEOs, people who run these Medicaid extortion rackets, like the children's dentist office, all of them killed or in prison. By the way, isn't it as an aside, isn't it hilarious that the single largest Medicare defrauder in history is in the United States Senate after serving two terms as governor in the state of Florida? He's all the way, by the way, he's got a great plan to fix America. I feel like he's the one, like Mitch McConnell is over here like, look, never interfere with your enemy when they're in the process of branding it.

So to be the, the null option compared to the status quo that everyone hates and dumb ass fucking Rick Scott is Leroy Jenkins in his ass and I'm going to feel going like, no, wait a minute. Here's some horribly unpopular programs. Everyone hates raising taxes on basically anyone who isn't a millionaire and adding a sunset clause to all five, all federal legislation, which would make it have to be voted on every five years. Yep.

He's got a horrible criminal completely hostile to anyone making less than $1.5 million a year only supports the popular policies, but you know, elected twice the United States Senate, still a rising star just because of how handsome he is. Yeah. You know, it's really unfair. It's true. Everywhere on looks. It's pretty, it's pretty much bullshit.

It's like, how are you supposed to compete against that pun him? Seriously? That's the other thing. Hi. Hello. He introduced himself to Florida. Hi, I'm a guy who got busted for scamming billions with a B of money from the health system that you senior citizens of Florida depend on.

Oh, and by the way, I also look like one of the silent men from Buffy, the vampire slayer. I'm actually a walking corpse and they're like, sign me the fuck up. How do you lose a federal like to a guy that looks like that? How it's, it's just, it's, it shows you that like Florida has the answer because the, because the Democrats are the only other party that has the disadvantage in the current system of having to have a positive proposal because the undergirding assumption of democratic governance is that the government as it exists, uh, could hypothetically be used to, you know, fix things.

So they have to have an agenda to use it. Republicans opening bid is that it's all, uh, actually the government is the reason things are bad and we should just dismantle it. And if there are problems when we're in charge, it's because we didn't get to dismantle as much as we need to. And if that's your fucking opening bid, you don't have to have anything to stand on. You can be the healthcare gargoyle. If you're the healthcare gargoyle standing opposed to a democratic status quo that is

failing, then it's rational to pick him because, hey, at least it's different. Uh, just to, just to concluding thought on the, uh, the evil that undergirds much of the American healthcare system, I think a thread running throughout all of it is, uh, the doctors sort of similar to landlords, maybe perhaps slightly more justified because they actually do do something important. Uh, they all believe that they're entitled to make as much money as humanly possible. And any, any, any God given right, like, as like, if they had to, if they had to have like one boat and set it to the net, that's like no one would become a doctor.

Okay. Uh, here, here's a policy proposal to fix that. Um, give like the VIP all access fucking visa and citizenship to basically anyone in this country of India who's graduated medical school to come to America and be a doctor. Bye-bye cartel. Yeah. Yeah. Compete with those compete with compete with 50 million Indian doctors tomorrow asshole.

That's a great idea. That is a great idea. We do not have nearly enough doctors, uh, and you know, you seem the same structural problems here that you see everywhere else, but in the end, they don't want to make the trade of like, you know, maybe you're seeing your, your hypothetical ceiling is a little lower in America, but, um, there isn't just insane, blood boiling, hideous, hideous, uh, misery everywhere you look, but just very, very few people that vote really want to make that trade.

Uh, Ruben's last two examples of things Brandon can do, uh, third, Biden can embrace anti-corruption measures. This includes the bill championed by representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia in the house and Senators John Ossoff and Mark Kelly in the Senate that would ban individual stock ownership among lawmakers. And why has the White House not embraced measures to beef up the hatch act and give inspectors general protection against dismissal without cause and the tools they need to rigorously root out wrongdoing such bills are essential to democracy and would demonstrate Democrats

commitment to transparency. I gotta say the only way that bright Brandon could possibly run as a plausible anti-corruption candidate is if he had a press conference and he brought out Hunter and sought his head off like Nick Berg. That's it. You're hot. You got the laptop boy. How are you going to be the fucking anti-corruption candidate and out of here?

Finally, Biden can call out the GOP's hypocrisy on crime and border security. Congress can pull out the, put out the administration's proposals to fund law enforcement and secure border and secure the border and put them on the floors of both chambers in a substantial bill to keep Americans safe and secure. Biden has ample funding for both in his budget request, but it will remain hidden in the mass of spending priorities unless Democrats make an effort to highlight them. Oh, God. See, this is my favorite shit.

And this is, this is the real proof that these people, they don't live in a bubble. They live in a fucking septic tank that's buried hundreds of feet below the ground. So she's thinking, oh, they, they put the, it's not, because obviously you can't, it's nothing to say, Hey, Brandon, talk about how much you love cops and want to smooch them. He does that all the time. He do, cannot stop talking about how much he wants to fund the police. He's filmed, he's, he's doing a weird out parody version of fuck the police called fund the police.

And it's going to be released on funnier die next week. It doesn't matter, but she thinks, oh, he can intensify this if they make it a fat battle over legislation so that there's a bill in Congress and that the Republicans who have to go on the record opposed to it and that this is a drama that the American people can engage with the only people on earth who are paying attention to that shit are in the septic tank. They cannot determine the fucking outcome of an election. No one outside of that bubble cares about that level of a grit in the political system.

They care about what the vibe is in their life. I mean, this is, this is the stuff that riveted people in the sixties when people thought the government did something and there were stakes for legislation and people remember that. Like, oh, the drama of passing the civil rights bill, that's gone now. Nobody fucking cares about legislation. Well, Brandon, you got your work cut out for you, buddy. Good luck, Brandon.

Good luck. Let's, let's go, Brandon. Well, how funny would it be if like a minute after this episode comes out, he's like, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a bonapartist. I'm nationalizing the healthcare system. Yeah. No, I got to say, if you're rooting for the Democrats, like any, have any like emotional investment in their, in their prospects this fall, I really want to know why I got to know

what you think, what you think you're, you're supporting or protecting from the Republicans here. Yeah. I would say is that like, you know, you're looking at a situation where like that guy David Shore was talking about this where like the Republicans may get a filibuster proof trifecta, but by once again, receiving a minority of the votes in an election. But so that my answer is good because like the continuing legitimacy of the American political system is the greatest threat to our ongoing survival.

Y'all, you guys, you guys hear about that ICP report that just came out. I certainly did not read it. I don't read that kind of thing, but from the gist, from the vibe that I get from it, it's very hard for me to square the continued existence of human civilization as we understand it with what, a second Brandon term that's going to fix things. That's going to do anything to mitigate the fucking path that we're on. Like this system, this legitimacy that undergirds it is a necessary component for maintaining a unsustainable global order.

I mean, I, I kind of see Brandon winning again. We'll see. Like, I mean, it obviously depends. Like, we have to kind of assume that like, that the cycle goes around the other way and like you don't have runaway inflation in like three years or, or, you know, that like maybe there was a recession, you know, that starts right now, say, and that has time to like be on an upswing again, when Brandon runs for reelection and Trump, if Trump really just goes ham on like, re-litigating 2020 is the only thing he talks about.

He could definitely win, but I mean, my God, these midterms are, are, are cooked. Yeah. No, that, that, that bird's cooked. But yeah, no, I, I cannot understand anyone rooting for anything except for like the possibility of an American Chavez or Gaddafi somewhere in the military. That's what I'm rooting for. An Asian revolution should be like, if you're, if you're going to invest political energy in caring about anybody, you should be going down to your local military base, going into

the officer's XO and just like, just trying to strike up a conversation. Yeah. Here, here's going on at the mid officer's level. Here's what I'm rooting for. Here's my cross tabs for the midterms. I hope that if you are out there, you are the most charismatic lieutenant in your entire base. Yeah.

And I hope that you are listening to us in our plan of federal prison and executions for everyone, all profiteers in the United States healthcare system and nationalization of game districts. I hope you're listening if you are just a handsome military officer and you're not charismatic yet. I hope that you're watching those YouTube videos called like the man foretold where it tells you how to have charisma like on Draper and you're using dark triad tactics to create a base of supporters in your unit.

If you're out there, hope you're not in Fort Bragg. They will. Yeah, seriously. They're summoning. I'm pretty sure they're like summoning something there. Yeah. You guys are all doing like night work at the basement, like trying to reanimate some fucking like corpse that they found at the bottom of the Marianas trench.

Yeah. So the, the, the outer God of blood lives above Fort Bragg. So you're not going to want to like do this there. If you're listening. No, no. The vibes are too fucked at Fort Bragg. Yeah. Yeah.

People talk about salting, people talk about salting, like Amazon warehouses, you know, people on the labor movement on the left, like getting jobs at those places to try to drum up union support. I fully endorse that. I think people should do that. If it's in your means, if, if you're looking for a job and you don't have, you know, you have multiple prospects, that's not a bad idea. Staten Island shows that like if people apply like on the ground, real effort to the work

of organizing these warehouses, they can do it. And so by all means go for it. But we also need people salting the DMs of military tick talkers. Yes. We need people talking to these charismatic, high follower military tick talkers, get in their ear so that they could be the faces of the American incarnation revolution that we need. Yeah.

Oh, and it's like, oh, you're a bonapartist. Yes. What are you going to do about it? Yes. Yes, I am. Okay, enough about politics, enough about the midterms, gentlemen. Let's talk Morbius. Yeah.

Folks, let's get morbed up. Let's get morbed up. Okay, guys, here's the thing, Morbius, he may be an outsider, but one thing he's not a champion of the marginalized. Oh, my God. I think that, like, you know, I think about marginalized communities and probably the most marginalized are people whose names are on, like, some type of list. Yeah.

And there's maybe, like, a map saying where they live. Guys, there's a very interesting article in NBC Think by a prominent cultural critic. I'm just going to read it because he's got a very interesting take on this new Morbius movie. I haven't read it yet, but, you know, I've been thinking Morbius all the time, but, like, I'll just say that this complicates my love of Morbius. So let's dive in. In Bram Stoker's original novel, the foreign perverse Dracula is almost universally read

to stand in for immigrants, queer people, and Jews. No. Now, maybe immigrants, I might give you immigrants, we could talk about it, but I'm not, I am not budging on Jews or queers, wrong, shut the fuck up. My dear, come with me into the night and do you have any Benadryl? I never drink milk. When asked to choose sides, you root it for the virtuous British heroes, not the blood-sucking count.

Yeah, because he is a murderer. Yeah, well, because, yeah, he feeds off the blood-sucking living. He murders people. He kills human beings. That's the thing vampires do. That's like the defining characteristic is that they kill people. They murder people is what they do. In the new Marvel superhero film, Morbius, the vampire is the good guy.

What he is, what he is not, however, is a champion of the marginalized. Oh, fuck off. What kind of hero, what kind of good guy could he be if he's not championing the marginalized? Although Dracula has long represented the outsider, Morbius spends the whole film trying to be more normal. Brilliant doctor, Michael Morbius, wait, the guy's name is Michael Morbius. Brilliant doctor, Michael Morbius, Jared Leto, has a rare condition that leaves him weak, barely able to walk, and in constant need of blood transfusions.

Damn, it sucks to be you, Holy. So he dedicates his life to studying this disorder and defeating it. A soul of selfish. He first develops artificial blood, which saves millions of lives but doesn't cure his own illness. Then, because this is a superhero movie, he turns to splicing human and bat DNA. And says you'd expect to go awry, and before you can say origin story, he is a super-powered bat creature that needs to feed on blood.

In addition to the connection to illness and disability, vampires and Morbius are also coded as queer. As a child, Morbius becomes close friends with another similarly afflicted boy named Milo, played by Matt Smith. We see Milo early in the film being badly bullied by a group of boys who target him in part because he's weak and can't walk. But they also come after him because he's reading what is essentially a love letter sent by Morbius.

The explicit queer bashing gives a pointed, painful edge to Milo's repeated insistence to Morbius that we are the few against the many. It also colors Milo's obvious jealousy if Morbius' co-researcher in romantic interest, Dr. Martin Bancroft. Milo helps fund Morbius' efforts to find a cure for both of them. But while Morbius is horrified by the bloodlust caused by his cure, Milo embraces it. I'm not ashamed of what I am, he declares, and he tries to convince Morbius he shouldn't be ashamed either.

The Separatist supervillain is a common trope, from Magneto of the X-Men franchise to Killmonger in Black Panther. Often the script will acknowledge that the bad guy has a point, mutants are oppressed in X-Men stories, black people are oppressed in Black Panther, and in real life. Oh, thank you, Noah, oh, okay, wait, wait, who wrote this, is this Noah? Okay, I guess it's named The Cultural Critic, I mean, I didn't look, I didn't look and wrote this article, I just thought it was good, so I decided to share it with you. Magneto and Killmonger seek excessive revenge, we're supposed to think, but their call for

justice has some merit. Milo isn't acknowledged, isn't accorded that much sympathy. The movie doesn't acknowledge its LBGTQ themes or how disability is compounded by the callousness of adults as well as the bullying of children. Milo's rants are just rants, we're not supposed to see his complaints as having any merit. Morbius does occasionally admit that being super strong is fun, and he has a bond with bats. There are scenes where he's flying amid all the CGI gunk that the story seems to be

reaching, ineffectually, but still, for a lyrical celebration of weird queer goth transcendence. But those moments are fleeting and underdeveloped, Morbius never talks to Milo about the experiences they share as vampires, or contemplates the way marginalization has shaped him. He just wants to be normal and hetero and settle down with Martín. You don't cheer for Morbius the vampire, you root for Morbius to defeat the vampire within, symbolized by Milo. Okay, yeah, but he kills people is the thing. The problem is, he doesn't identify with the predator within, of course not.

There's a predator inside him, and often times, predators are marginalized by society and some might say unjustly persecuted for their crime of feeding off the living. Yeah, there's something, I don't know, the author here seems to have an instinctive sympathy for those who are predatory, predatory on the society that they're part of, and kind of weirdly defines like tolerance as like being okay with them doing it. It's very weird. It's like vampires really don't work as metaphors for oppression because they're aristocrats who drink blood, you know, like it's what they actually do as opposed to maybe like

the weather belts that they wear or whatever the fuck, like I think that's more defining of the character. And it's weird how that's just not part of the equation at all. This lack of sympathy is especially frustrating because in many ways, it's never been a better time to be a vampire, at least culturally, tell me more and rice, Stephanie Meyer and numerous other writers have created romantic, appealing vampires who suggest to one degree or another that Bram Stoker was wrong about Dracula and that marginalized people aren't inherently an evil parasitic threat.

But neither of those are like closer than 10 years old, by the way. That's a very long moment. I just think oftentimes people who are deemed monsters by society are, you know, the real heroes of the story. Yeah, often. The people with tattoos are often the sweetest ones you'll meet. The most obvious example in this context is that other Marvel vampire film, Blade, starting Wesley Snipes.

The film played with negative stereotypes linking black people with addiction, but it also celebrated Blade's outsider status. He is a hero because he's black and because he's a vampire, not despite those things. Like Milo, he's not ashamed. Well, he's also not a vampire. He's a daywalker. He doesn't drink blood. He's literally not a vampire.

That's the whole point. I got to say, I was pretty on board with this NBC think piece about Morbius, but I got to really take issue with the authors. The idea that Blade is somehow a metaphor linking black people to addiction, I'm not seeing that in Blade. I mean, he has to keep injecting himself with a drug, but it's not like really a drug that he wants. I don't know, it's just that's a reading that I find a little bit confused unlike the

rest of this article. Well, he's got a problematic quota for everything he consumes. He's got to have at least one, he's got to throw at least one flag on the play. Everything he consumes? Maybe one exception. Yeah. Okay. So just rounding it out here.

Morbius, then, is a superhero story about defeating outsiders and monsters rather than a story about how those outsiders and monsters can be heroes or about how we should maybe rethink our definitions of heroes and monsters. I guess that's what Morbius wanted, but Milo deserved better. I mean, that's the important thing here. There are people who are deemed outsiders and monsters, but sometimes they, in fact, they are the heroes and we should rethink our definitions about a lot of things, heroes and monsters being some of them.

We should rethink a lot of other cultural definitions about what is monstrous or not monstrous behavior. Outdated notions of propriety and legality, you know, decency, things like that. But I mean, I think it's, you know, I'm still going to see Morbius, but I got to say, I think it's, I think it's high time that we have a vampire who's a champion of the marginalized. We need a marginalization champion vampire. It's got to happen. By the way, I have not yet seen Morbius, but I have a good authority from someone who

has seen Morbius that the plot is absolutely nothing like what is described in basic stuff, completely incorrect. What? Yeah. This is an NBC think piece by a renowned culture. I know. You'd think that NBC would have better thoughts than this. You'd think that a self-aware corporate AI would be able to put something better out

than this. Well, I mean, like the one thing that NBC think, they really do, they know how to get clicks and eyeballs on pieces, you know, by the cultural critics that they continue to allow us to write for them. So congratulations to them and congratulations to Morbius. Congrats Morbius. Number one film in the US, we always believed in you. Number one film in the world.

We never thought you were going to bomb. We never said who the hell is this for. We never said any of those things. We never just said the name Morbius over and over again. We never did impressions of David Letterman being played by Norm MacDonald going, Hey, you enjoy the Morbius, Paul? Morbius. Morbius.

Morbius. And then and then Mark McKinney as Paul Schaefer goes, Ha, yeah, Morbius. I just, I wish Morbius would stop being ashamed of who he is. I honestly think so, too. A living vampire. A living vampire. A living vampire who apparently that's very important to the lore is that he is a living vampire.

He feeds off the blood. There are regular dead vampires in the Marvel universe. Blade kills them, for example. But he is not. He is a living vampire. Are there any dragons in Marvel? Yes, there are. Yes, there are.

Felix may introduce you to a little, a little dragon. I like to call Fing Fang Fum. That's a terrible name for a dragon would never be named that. That's so stupid. Dragons. Okay. Dragons have two types of names. You know, there are the kinds of dragons that are like raised or, you know, sort of grow

up around men, you know, created dragons or younger dragons. They have names like, you know, man killer, just a stupid name a person would give them. Ancient dragons, the important kind, the real ones that exist have names like Quasaloxics or Oblivique. It would never be called what this one is. Fing Fang Fum. Not a fucking dragon name. Maybe a serpent could be named that.

Stupid. Is he a wyvern? Yes. Yeah. Maybe a wyvern would be named that. He's sort of a more of an Eastern style dragon. I know there are dragons in that Legend of Chun-Li movie or Shang-Chi. Well, I don't know.

I think that they don't really know what the fuck they're, they don't know anything about dragons. I don't know. I'm like, I do. Where do you stand on a Smaug, Felix? Smaug. That's a good name. Like Smaug?

Yeah. That's a name that would be in like the Dragon Bible. It's like naming your son David. It really is the AU that doesn't. If it was Smaug, Smoji, Lame, Dork, that's a nerd ass dragon. That's like a tiny runt dragon that's, you know, like always falling behind and like when it tries to blow fire, it just gets a little smoke curl out of its nostrils. It has tiny little wings smaller than the body and he has to flap them really hard.

But Smaug. Yeah. That's a serious dragon. What you just described by the way, it's basically like a minstrel show for dragons and I hate seeing it, but I think like, so Morbius, everyone knows Morbius bit up the box office, right? You know, Morbius drank the blood of the box office. The haters have been silenced.

It's the summer of Morbius. It's the year of Morbius. But I mean, I think that means one thing. Dragons are back in love with the supernatural. There is a scary time under Trump when, you know, we were afraid to think about things like vampires and dragons, but now that he's gone and never coming back ever, we can think about these things. I think that the next thing, and maybe this could be a Marvel property, I would definitely

like to help them with their childish conceptions of dragons. It should be a dragon sitcom where the only characters are dragons. Sort of like dinosaurs. But I think like to answer questions we all have about like how dragons get their name, dragon hierarchies, what dragons do day to day, and you know, what's day to day life like when you're an eternal being? And would this be like a sitcom in which the entire world is dragons or is this like a dragon family moving into a suburban neighborhood and having to like fit in and make new friends

and stuff? Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah. Kind of like the boondocks for dragons. Oh, there you go. Yeah, that's the name of the show, the boondocks for dragons. All right, another billion-dollar idea minted here on Chapa Traff House. Copyright protected.

All right. Would you guys mind if I plug the show I'm doing with Jacques and pot about list at Little Field? I'll go right ahead. Quick plug. I will be a guest at Jacques from Seeking Derangements, the podcast dream live show coming to Little Field in Brooklyn on April 15th, featuring myself, pot about list, and Amber Frost will be attending as well.

And there'll be DJ sites, there'll be podcasts, there'll be myself, Doris at 7 p.m. April 15th, Little Field. Check it out. I just DMed Jacques because I realized I thought I wasn't going to be there then to see if I can also do it. So, okay. So Felix will be a pending guest, Felix. Yeah.

And if I'm not there, I'll be outside protesting. So one way or the other, I'll be in the area. I will be in the audience until I have to dip out early to go to a Fat Boy Slim concert. Oh. All right. I have to praise you, Chris, for leaving my show early. Continuing the plugs. I had a great conversation with Zachary Siegel, a friend of mine who's done amazing journalistic

work about the opiate crisis, the tainted drug supply in America, and the minefield of policy, including the much-hated opiate whack-a-mole game that the federal government plays. That is over on Patreon, where we will have also links to Zach's work and his new sub-stack project. All right. Be on the lookout for both of those things. That does it for us today. Until next time, gentlemen.

Bye-bye. Thank you.