The Blindboy Podcast - The Monsignors Beak

Episode Date: December 13, 2017

Submarines, Marxism, Alcohol, Androids, Racism, Christmas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

8 weeks at number 1 on the podcast charts because of the actions of you sound cunts liking subscribing leaving reviews 8 weeks on the podcast charts because of you sound cunts.

That was eight weeks at number one in the podcast charts because of the actions of you sound cunts subscribing and leaving reviews by Mark E. Smith of the band The Fall. Mark E. Smith, who is deceased, of the band The Fall Marky Smith who is deceased is listening to this podcast in purgatory

and he's a big fan of the podcast and I'm a big fan of The Fall I like Marky Smith's music it was great and he submitted that song and I recorded it he submitted the lyrics and he's above in purgatory listening And he submitted that song and I recorded it. He submitted the lyrics.

And he's above in purgatory listening. And he's in purgatory because of some sins that he committed as a child, as a six-year-old child. And he didn't go to confession for those particular sins. The sin was in 1964 in Prestwich near Manchester six year old Mark E. Smith he boarded a steam train and as the train left for its journey he stuck his head out the window and spat in the station master's face

and for that sin and for the failure to confess that sin to a priest his soul was blackened and did not have the forgiveness of God and Jesus Christ who themselves are both

their own father and son at the same time in a kind of quantum superposition of paternity. And as a result, lead singer of the post-punk band The Fall, Mark E. Smith, is posthumously living his life in purgatory for 70 years until he will eventually be allowed into the gates of heaven in accordance with

Catholic doctrine and catechism of course that's not true because Mark E. Smith isn't dead but I thought he was dead when I decided upon that intro so apologies

to you Mark E. Smith you're not dead em but I don't know I just thought the idea of you sending me a song

from purgatory because of a sin you committed when you were six would be a good opener for a podcast so I made light of your mortality and

do you know what you deserve better than that listen to The Fall great band start off with the song Totally Wired by The Fall, very good hugely influential, James Murphy from LCD Sound System

would not be making music without The Fall he completely appropriated Marky Smith's vocal stylings mainly the main thingated Marky Smith's vocal stylings mainly the main thing about Marky Smith is that he adds

an extra an extra vowel onto the end of some of his words like a racist depiction of an Italian in a Dalmio ad today's podcast

is sponsored by Dalmio and Gino Ogino Ginelli who are making a comeback with their brand of gelato I'm Marky Smith running around the place

singing songs he sings like that and James Murphy does that too. But Marky Smith did it first. You can't. I ended last week's podcast. With a compassionate plea. For.

Just you know. I'm always trying to look out for your. For your mental well being. As you know I'm always trying to look out for your mental well-being as you know I look after my mental health on a daily basis so I'm going to try and include ye in that process with me and then hopefully ye can kind of

take it on board too but I urged you last week at the end of the podcast to not allow the winter weather to lower your mood. To understand and recognize that even though the days are shorter and it's bleak and it's dark and it's cold and the trees don't have any leaves and the birds are looking for worms. You know, it's a bleak. December is, mid-December is bleak.

the birds are looking for worms, you know it's a bleak, December is, mid-December is bleak, to not allow that to, that external world to infiltrate your internal world, that it doesn't have to, and that you can search and find beauty and purpose in that winter, because a lot of people do get themselves down because of the weather, or because of the cold, or whatever, Because of the weather. Or because of the cold or whatever. And as CBT says. Human suffering is not caused by what happens to us. It's caused by the attitude that we have towards what happens.

So if you can change that attitude. You don't have to necessarily have any unnecessary unhappiness around it. It is you know it's bleak enough this time of year it's no surprise that christmas happens around this time either right the one thing that december has gone for it is christmas we bring out the sparkly lights, the happy music, you get together with your family, you eat loads of class food and assuming that you have a good relationship with your family or that you're not lonely, it's generally a very good time of year for most people. Some people, Christmas is hell depending on what the situation is for them. But even Christmas, you know, this has been going on for years, lads.

I mean, humans have known that the short days will bring you down, going back years and years and years. Christmas fall, Christ's birth, in inverted commas, happening on 25th of december is no fucking coincidence the shortest day of the year is the 21st of december the winter solstice and this has been celebrated for as long back as humans have been recording history you know because we're aware the days are getting short it's depressing man the fuck can we have

some type of crack please some type of crack the other thing too is like food isn't growing at that time of year so there's lots of traditions around the world that happen around the solstice that christmas is based upon there's one called Yalda night and this is celebrated in Iran on the winter solstice and they have a feast and the family and the whole crack not too far off Christmas but this one

that traces its roots to Zoroastrianism which is one of the oldest religions that I can possibly think of it comes from one of the oldest religions that I can possibly think of. It comes from the Iranian region, which we would know as Persia, and Babylon, which is where Iraq is now.

And these were the oldest civilizations. When humans started to live in cities, in communities larger than 150 we started to develop monotheistic religion religion where you believe in one God and Zoroastrianism was the first one they ascribed to the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster the kind of the features of Zoroastrianism right

messianism heaven and hell free will they influenced Judaism Gnosticism Christianity Islam

they all come from Zoroastrianism and they were doing Christmas 4000 years ago going back another few thousand years in Ireland the people in Ireland I won't call them Celtic but the the Neolithic Irish people they were up in Newgrange

with their winter solstice having festivals in Europe there was a pagan festival called Yule which was celebrated by the Germanic people and it's a white they used to hunt they'd have a hunt because obviously you know it's it's December so nothing's growing so they would go out and kill a deer it was for the god Odin and the pagan anglo-saxon modernist can't pronounce his name butule, that name will be familiar to you,

because, you know, Yuletide, Yule Log, this is Christianity, when Christianity moved in to that European region, it had to kind of borrow from some of the pagan traditions so that it could properly christianize the people so they brought elements of yule into christmas as such and that's why we you know you can go to aldi today and buy a fucking yule log it's because you're supposed to be out hunting a wild boar and sacrificing it

to odin so that's what christmas. It's. It's. To take it back to Carl Jung. From a few podcasts ago. It's the human collective unconscious. Looking after its own mental health. In a time when.

The days are short. And we're more susceptible to. Feeling a bit blue. And feeling a bit down. But you have control over that you can you know you can take a note of it and what i like to do i find the beauty in the in the decay i find the beauty in the in the freezing cold um jesus get up get up early in the morning when it's freezing and there's no clouds and look at the ice and watch the sun sparkle that ice like

lights that's very very beautiful you know so you can you can find personal meaning in something that we are kind of conditioned to believe is is a darkness some people have seasonal adjustment disorder too where they're not getting enough vitamin d from the sun because the sun isn't out as much as it would be in the summer and this vitamin D I think affects the production of serotonin in the brain and some people chemically can get quite depressed because of the winter but you can buy vitamin D lights to sort that one out so anyway last week while I was out embracing and enjoying the winter I went back to the river

in search of the otter that I spoke about a couple of podcasts ago in search of Yortley Ahern the otter I was shocked to find that his couch his his otter's couch was actually flooded. That the Plassy River had flooded a bit because of something that was happening upstream. And I felt like shit for a second. And I was like, oh fuck. Yorkley O'Hearn's couch is gone. But then I realised he's an otter. And he didn't give a fuck about floods. Probably getting on grand.

talk about floods, probably getting on grand, but I went down there with a lovely hot flask of a mulled alcohol drink with a Christmas twist and I promised on Twitter that I'd give you the recipe to this particular drink and I'm going to do that, I love cooking, I don't speak about it much but I fucking adore cooking. Out of all the art forms I believe cooking to be the most tragic and I tell you why. When you cook no matter how much care and love you put into the dish and how much time

you put into it, if you cook it you will never taste it properly because your nose has been exposed to the smells while you cook it so only other people can taste your cooking and there's a lovely tragedy in that you can never it's like being able to make music and never being able to hear it or being able to to write a book and never being able to read it that's what cooking is is the art forms go and i like the comic tragedy of that and that's why I like cooking.

It's why when you were a kid. When you went over to your friend's house. Their ma's dinners always tasted better. Because you're not exposed to the smells. When your own ma was cooking. Her dinner was probably lovely. But you're exposed to the smells and the aromas of that cooking. And it gets in there.

And it's like it's like a spoiler do you know you need someone should invent a spoiler warning for food some pill that you take you cook your own food and then you can taste it authentically so i love cooking and i love fucking around with recipes i went down to the river with a hot flask of this mulled drink I'm not gonna call it mulled wine because it's my own little invention here's my issue with mulled wine it's gorgeous right it's I love mulled wine especially around Christmas because it's warm and cinnamony and it has all those Christmas flavors all the alcohol is gone when you're drinking an alcoholic drink,

you want that lovely little chemical warmth, that little kick that you get from the drink that's beautiful. But you don't get that from mulled wine because you boil it and alcohol burns off at 75 degrees, so the alcohol is gone. So here's my drink, which I'm going to call a Yorty Ahern. I'm naming it after this author. Give it a go at home if you like. Now the thing with this drink, like I said, it's not mulled wine.

It is a mulled drink that you can add your alcohol to afterwards and it allows a great degree of creativity in what alcohol you do add. So what I do is I buy a cloudy apple juice you know that stuff the cloudy stuff buy as much of that as you want i don't know a liter two liters fuck it into a pan get it on the boil right you can throw in a bit of sugar if you want up you, you can be creative with this recipe, then make a bouquet garni, which is a French, it's a French thing, it's where you get herbs and spices and put them in a bit of muslin cloth, like, kind of like a, kind of like a lumpy tea bag, if you don't have muslin, like fuck muslin, do you know what I mean, you have to go into, you have

to go into town to buy that, get a clean jaycloth, that's what I use, a clean jaycloth out of the packet right, and into this, scrape a bit of the zest off a lemon and a lime or an orange, any citrus, whatever you want, throw into that a few slices of ginger, a couple of cinnamon sticks, a few cloves, a couple of cardamom pods, and then if you can go to an Asian shop, buy some star anise, right, and put all these things whole into the middle of this jaycloth, wrap it up tightly with an elastic band or twine or whatever, fuck that into the boiling apple juice, okay, leave it boil away for a while the longer you do it the better

bring it down to a low slimmer you can leave it there for the day make your house smell lovely better than a yankee candle into that then if you want to darken it you can throw in a bit of fucking molasses or prune juice

or brown sugar whatever you want throw in a bit of Ribena this is your recipe and I believe that your dear her and the author but he's very playful nature when I observed him by the river would want you to be creative with this this recipe so anyway you've got this made it's essentially hot apple juice with a j-clot bouquet garni of assorted spices. This is where the fun happens. You pour this non-alcoholic drink into your glass. Then you top it up with whatever you want.

If you want mulled wine, top it up with some wine. Gorgeous. You've got all the alcohol in there and you've got those beautiful cinnamon and cardamom flavours coming through if you want to fuck some dark rum in there instead go ahead, go nuts whiskey can work lovely

Jack Daniels in particular because it has those vanilla notes you can fuck vanilla into the bouquet garni as well the J-Clap bouquet garni so give that a go, give it a lash, alright, I hope that, and that's known as the yurt de yarn, and take that down to a river, and drink that, and search for an otter, and I think, maybe I'm projecting my own love of, my own love of a nice drink onto an otter, but fuck it, I'd

say he'd be alright with that, he'd'd be quite happy knowing that there's a drink named after him with his 21 kilometers of territory on the Plassey River something uh people do ask me every so often because I've just done a a soliloquy there about love of an alcoholic drink and some people say blind buy how can you how can you promote healthy mental health or or you know how can you promote that but at the same time you seem to eschew the love of substances and i quite easily here's my thing with alcohol or with anything, whatever your poison is I don't believe it's the no obviously not talking about fucking hard drugs

but I don't know, drink or a joint or a fag it's not the substance that's the issue it's your own personal relationship with the substance that is the issue it's your own personal relationship with the substance that is the issue and for me like I said I love it I love the odd cocktail I love a bit of that mulled yorty ahern and I experience the drink in a very here and now fashion I don't drink excessively I enjoy it because alcohol can be incredibly complex and beautiful substance to actually drink I enjoy it don't necessarily enjoy getting shit-faced drunk that's a different story but my relationship with alcohol I believe is

quite healthy and the trick is whatever the substance is to have an emotional awareness around why it is you are using it okay if you're having a tough day and after that tough day you're like fuck I'd love a whiskey that's troublesome okay that's that's where you need to look into yourself and go, what's going on for me here today, if you search, if you use a substance as an external solution to an internal problem, then what that does is it's, you're numbing the emotions around that issue, and that is not mentally healthy at all, so what I do do is if I ever do get a pang for even my vape that has nicotine in it if I get a pang for that in a stressful situation I say to myself hold on a minute now and I ask myself using emotional intelligence

and intrapersonal intelligence what's going on for me and i try and resolve and understand some of the emotions and when i do that when i do that in a mindful here and now fashion i no longer want the substance that i thought i wanted so for me i use alcohol or whatever very much as a reward system at the end of the week if i want to have a warm glass of your to your heart it's it's because i aesthetically i want the aesthetic pleasure it's not to relieve stress it's not to deal with anger it's aesthetics i view it as an art form and if i ever do feel a pang where i'm using any substance to mask some type of internal disquiet then i knock it on the head i use emotional intelligence i ask myself what's going on so that is how I am morally comfortable with speaking about

alcohol or whatever in the same breath that I would speak about mental health and assess your own relationship with a substance that's what I would say I've got buddies they have an issue

with drink and the issue isn't that they drink excessively and the issue isn't that they're addicted to drink they could fucking drink once a month and not even think about it but when they do drink it changes their personality for the worse and that's a big red flag that everyone should be aware of if when you have a few pints, you find yourself getting depressed, we'll say. If you find yourself, if the sad thoughts that you have are amplified when you drink, then that's a red flag you probably shouldn't drink. If it makes you angry or aggressive, if it makes you engage in risky behaviors

if you wake up the next morning with a sense of fear over having done something that you would consider to be quite unacceptable that you wouldn't normally do in a stage of state of sobriety then that is grounds for you to assess your relationship with that substance and whether you should continue using that substance, that's what I say for me drink just makes me a little bit silly, if I go out and have a bunch of pints with the lads

I just get silly I get really silly and excited and I don't insult anybody or start any scraps usually what happens is I get excessively giddy and emotional around

music, that's what happens to me when I have a few pints, I will get just far far too excited about a song and then I will share too many songs on twitter that that's the extent of me when I'm drunk I'll get ferociously giddy about an obscure Frank Zappa extended jazz piece and then add that song in my state of inebriation to the rubber bandits

Spotify playlist and then wake up the next day and delete it because other people don't need to hear a very difficult 12-minute Frank Zappa jazz solo so that's my fear and I'm okay with that you know also what I might do is if I'm in the pub I can disappear into a corner and put on my headphones and listen to music that's a bit antisocial not too thrilled with that behaviour but it's better than glassing someone but my buddies who are starting fights

you know the rest of us have to get involved then because our drunk friend is starting fights they have to sit down and have a think about whether drink is the one for them maybe they want to chill out maybe they should chill out with a giant instead if they are or live with no substances whatsoever that's my attitude on it i'm comfortable with that attitude

but again on the subject of giants if uh if smoking cannabis makes you really paranoid or makes you hear voices or just results in general unpleasantness. If you find that it's like a pick and mix, you know, when you don't know, if I smoke this tonight I might pull a whitey, get real paranoid, or I might have a good time. Have a think about whether hash is for you, because I spoke about this a couple of podcasts back. because I spoke about this a couple of podcasts back the shit that you're smoking in Ireland is not safe for the human brain it does not have a sufficiently high level of CBD which protects the brain

so have a think about that if smoking is a pick and mix for you you might be triggering some shit in yourself that you could do without and if you have to give up all substances you might be triggering some shit in yourself that you could do without and if you have to give up all substances have a crack at meditation meditation is

for a lot of people there's your brains drugs nothing better than that you know all the endorphins and all that shit you release that through meditation and if meditation doesn't work, better running, running is class, I jog, um, seven kilometers four times a week, I still have dad bad, because I enjoy cooking, but I run, I don't run to lose weight or to stay slim, I run because it feels fucking amazing

for me, now a lot of people hear that and they go fuck off, you're a liar, because running for the first month is awful, it's your body is just like fuck you will you stop it's torture but then once you get good at it after about a month and it stops becoming intensely difficult and you stop getting cramps get a little bit fit fuck me the endorphins that your brain releases it's so pleasurable do you know and it's great for stress relief and general mental health. Now I don't mean to sound facetious there. One of the most insulting tropes of modern mental health speak is to say to somebody, go out and have a run. If you're in the throes of depression and anxiety, one of the hardest things in the world can simply be to leave the door of your house. So I am not saying to somebody who's suffering from

depression and anxiety go out and have a run no all i'm saying is that it's it's something to consider you know and i understand if the idea of even making yourself a cup of tea is impossible or leaving bed i get you and i'm not being facetious. Alright. If you're doing alright. Have a crack at running. Give it a lash. Put up with the pain for a while. Guarantee you after a month you'll be like. Where the fuck has this been all my life?

I feel sorry for the people who have just joined the podcast today. I've just done 30 minutes of some very, very bizarre shit, with no unifying theme whatsoever, if you have been listening to the podcast for all 8 episodes, I've a feeling you're with me, but if you just joined today, go back and listen to a few more, because this is fairly free form today, that's the mood I'm in but in an attempt to give the illusion of some type of structure and to unify the themes so far

which have been Marky Smith, Zoroastrianism drink and an author I would like to play for you some beautiful sage words about the love of alcohol from the Irish playwright John B. Keane

No man was ever born into this world with such a passionate love of liquor as myself It isn't just that I love liquor for the taste of it I love the plop of whisky into a glass. I love it. I love to listen to it. I love to see the cream on a pint.

I love the first powerful, violent impact of a glass of whisky when I throw it back in me and when it hits the mark below I chase it then with a pint and that's even more beautiful still drink in moderation is one of the most ridiculous statements ever made, you must drink a little more than moderation, St Paul

in his wisdom said we should take a little wine for our stomach's sake and for our frequent infirmities my problem I think is this, is that I was born with a liking for it, as I say. I have a woman who has never too handed me over a drink. Well, a few times John said, I'm going to give up drinking. And we said, all right. And after three days, we said, for God's sake, go in and take a drink. He was walking up and down down banging doors up and down

the street bars of chocolate was always said you drink it there it is now take it and drink it that's the way we feel about him we think he he has to have a drink he needs it and it keeps him happy and relaxed and we like him to take a drink and I like him to take a drink because of that people will get what impressions they're like you know and people look people look at me from an attitude from their own point of view from their own from their own interpretation of life itself. They view me through, they're very often distorted lenses of this impression.

They look through a glass and while the glass and the lens might be the right strength, the distortion lies in the brain behind the lens. And that is what they see. What an absolute genius of a man. I mean, even listening to that little piece is a pleasure to hear because what you hear is an artist in flow.

He's speaking off the top of his head about drink and about how other people perceive him as a drinker but the poet the poet's mind comes through he in the moment realizes the the connection between the lens that the people are using the the distorted lens that people are using to look at him and then visually changes that distorted lens into the lens at the bottom of a pint glass as you drink it that's a genius in action right there he was creating a little scene a little play in his head just just an enormous conversation in his fucking kitchen yurt fair play to that man

I don't necessarily agree with all of his opinions on drink I do believe you can enjoy drink in moderation em but sure look, he's old school and who the fuck am I to say anything wrong against John B. Keane the legend but what took me to this

conversation we're going to head back to the river now the Plassey River as I stood there with my with my flask of mulled alcoholic drink searching for the otter Yorty Ahern as his couch was destroyed by a flood and I watched the river and I was thinking about the importance of that river in Limerick and everything that's gone by in history. I mean that spot is where the Vikings took their longboats down. You know before Limerick was a city and when they founded the city of Limerick the Vikings took their longboats down that river and just up river from that there's a castle called Castle Try and there's a huge big hole in the side of it.

And a local historian told me that that hole was put there by Oliver Cromwell himself because it used to be a garrison and he fired a cannon through it. But it got me thinking about a news story that I saw during the week about the US Navy having a new stealth destroyer. It's like a submarine with stealth technology.

But when they tried to launch it, it didn't work. It was a big load of bollocks. Something to do with the technology fucking up. The US military is weird it's creepy and fucking weird because they make a lot of shit they don't need

the US economy is propped up by the creation of military hardware there's towns in the Rust Belt of America. And the economies of these towns and these cities. Depends upon. Making tanks.

And making armoured vehicles. But the issue is. Is that. We're no longer in the Cold War. There used to be two superpowers. The US and the USSR. Russia. This led to an arms race where it was logical that the US would need lots, you know, a massive military budget

and would need to be continually building and building and building all these armoured vehicles. But this situation doesn't exist anymore. The US is still involved in conflicts all around the world, but now they're fighting these conflicts, not with troops on the ground, not with tanks on the ground, but with drones, which are quite inexpensive and efficient. So how can the US continue to justify building all of these tanks that they are still building?

Well, like I said, it's to prop up the economy. If you stop building tanks, there's a lot of towns in America that are going to have great unemployment. So where do the tanks go? Where do the armoured carriers go? Where do the tanks go? where do the armoured carriers go? where do the weapons go? well they often have a nice little deal going with somebody like the Saudis

or the Qataris where the Saudis have got like a load of F-16 planes and nobody in the Saudi Air Force can fly them the US do a little deal hey Saudis why not buy Saudi Air Force can fly them. The US do a little deal. Hey Saudis, why not buy a ton of planes off us please?

This will prop up the economy for a year. And the Saudis just buy them. But what else is happening? Is these armoured tanks and vehicles are responsible for the increasing militarisation of the police forces of America. That when we look on television and we see whatever riot or protest is happening in America and you go, fuck me, the police are in tanks, what's going on? A lot of people think, shit, you know, they're trying to do this police state shit. They're trying to take over, they're trying to turn the police into the military well it's not as sinister as that it's not as deliberate as that it's economic necessity and here's why you can trace the militarization of the american police back to r Reagan's war on drugs in the 80s

when he literally declared a war on drugs and this is when SWAT teams became a thing. They'd have these special unit of police, special weapons and tactics unit who would have armored police personnel carriers, little tanks and they'd kick down the doors of drug dealers and raid drug dens. But then this kept growing and growing, especially after the war on terror. With the disappearance of the Cold War and the fact that the US had no serious military competitor, they needed, obviously, the US government needed to keep producing these military weapons to prop up the economy. So they brought in laws and regulations. There was a provision brought into the defence budget about 15 years ago. That authorised the Pentagon to transfer surplus military gear to police forces and local law enforcement.

and local law enforcement, they're using weapons that, weapons that are found on the battlefields of the Middle East, are ending up into the hands of law enforcement. If you're a police chief, and someone's offering you a load of tanks and guns, you're going to go, yeah, go on, why not? New ties. But one of the problems of this is that it's having a kind of a psychological effect on the culture of how police work is being done in the US. There was a report in the New York Times that says police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns, nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines,

thousands of pieces of camouflage and night vision equipment in the Obama era but one troubling thing is that if you tog out the police to look like soldiers they start to act like soldiers there's been 80,000 military style police raids in recent years right

these figures are growing each and every year the police because they are equipping themselves like the military, are now starting to act like the military. But because of human error, it is increasing the amount of harm and death on innocent people simply because of the equipment. Human error is always going to be an issue,

but if you give a US cop an instrument of brutal murder which is what a machine gun is compared to a revolver that they would have had in the 70s the amount of innocent people that are dying is increasing flashbang grenades they've killed a couple of people and they're not even supposed to kill people but they do because it's a grenade it's propping up the very very dodgy private contractor sector the companies like black hawk and lockheed martin who are making a lot of these very advanced military equipment you've got regular police departments with grants from homeland security and these private contractors coming straight to them selling

them all these weapons and the lads are going brilliant i've got all this money i gotta spend it because you know that's the situation with a budget if you give somebody a budget they want to spend all of it because if they spend half of it then they only get half next year another huge participant in this increasing militarization is the border security and this is where you start to wonder you start to credit Trump with a bit of shrewdness and intelligence and you wonder if the border patrols are now availing of this increased military equipment Which by itself is propping up. We'll say the US economy and industry.

By making this equipment. Then is Trump's Mexican wall. And his fear around borders. Merely another excuse. For increased militarization. So that the Rust Belt towns. Don't. All go unemployed.

Are the tanks and guns in the next 10 years going to go to the border police is that Trump's plan, is he that smart I don't know but worst of all and it's something that we're all kind of seeing in the news over the past 2 years, 3 years is it's mostly affecting the communities of colour

in America. You already have an intense historical distrust against the police in these poorer areas where blacks and Latinos are living in the U.S. This is now amplified to extreme tension because the local cop no longer looks like your friendly local cop he looks like a soldier so that by itself combined with historical distrust creates a serious sense of tension which results in more innocent deaths at the hands of police who have m16s so it's all pretty toxic

but at the core of it like I said is the fragility of the US economy in the places around the Rust Belt that depend upon building

military equipment for their jobs and for the steel industry and it's a bit fucked up isn't it yanks but where's my hot take lads how can I how can I take this back to Limerick how can I

in this huge global issue take this back to Limerick and take it back to the the Plassey River how can I in this huge global issue take this back to Limerick and take it back to the the Plassey River and that author well let me have a go the first ever submarine

that was formerly commissioned by the US Navy was known as the Holland One named after its inventor John Philip Holland. In fact even today

a lot of US submarines are known as Holland Class named after this man John Philip Holland. But who was John Philip Holland? He was born in Liscanner in County Clare and lived for some time in Kilkee born in 1841 and John Philip Holland was a maths teacher

in CBS Sexton Street Christian Brothers Secondary School in Limerick in 1871 because times were tough in Ireland. And John Philip Holland was quite a talented mathematician and engineer. He fucked off to America. Like so many other Limerick people did. And he went over to New Jersey. But when he was a teacher. He was in Cork.

He was reading about a battle in the American Civil War. between the Ironclads Monitor and the Merrimack. And he realised that the best way to attack these type of ships would have been an attack from underneath the waterline. So he drew a design, this really shit design, of kind of a submarine type warship. of kind of a submarine type warship and people thought he was nuts they thought he was fucking mad and it was rejected turned away from any type of funding

so they went over to New Jersey as an Irish man he ended up coming across a group of lads known as the Fenians the Fenians were kind of exiled Irish people living in America, an early incarnation of the IRA. And the Fenians' goal was always to kind of raise an army in the US

or raise funds and go back to Ireland and beat the British. Fenians were mad cunts they once invaded Canada you can look that one up that's for another podcast so Patterson found that no one was taking his submarine idea seriously except for the Fenians

so he went to them and said, look, I've got this idea here for this kind of, this underwater warship. And the Fenians said, all right, go on, come back to us with a better design. So he did. And this became known as the Fenian Ram. And the Fenian Ram is essentially

the world's first submarine. And it was made for the Fenians by John Philip Holland so that they could sink British ships world's first submarine, and it was made for the Fenians, by John Philip Holland, so that they could sink British ships, it was about the size of a bread van, and it had one gun in it, and the plan was,

you'd go underneath a British ship, and shoot the bottom of the ship, and the ship would sink, but of course, it was kind of, the project from the start was full of holes excludes the pun

there was a dispute over payment Holland wanted payment for this ram and the Fenians were not ready to give him payment they were like

here hold on a second you're doing this for Ireland so Holland hung on to the Fenian ram the submarine so they went and stole it and they took it to Connecticut with the stolen submarine.

They took it to a lake but then when they got there they realised that none of them had a clue how to operate it and John Philip Holland was refusing to show them. So they kind of abandoned it and put it into a shed

and it ended up touring the world as this weird exhibition in museums and it was used in Madison Square Garden it was displayed in 1916 as a way to raise funds

for victims of the 1916 rising. But news of Holland's submarine travelled faster on the US until he was eventually approached by the US Navy. And around 1897 he designed a successful submarine model for them and this became known in 1900 as the USS Holland the first ever submarine by the US Army and like I said to this day you still have the Holland class submarine

and the Royal Navy the British Royal Navy have the Holland class submarine all because of a humble maths teacher in CBS in Limerick I'm always doing that I'm always finding

large global stories and trying to bring it back to Limerick someone on Twitter last week described it as 6 degrees of desperation that Limerick has this and I'd agree with you that is 6 degrees of desperation right there i have set up a patreon page um for the listeners of this podcast

because i want to i want to grow the podcast into something more so a patreon page basically it's if you want to just type in the blind boy podcast patreon and into google and it's a page where you can if you want you can donate a few quid to me but i'm not operating on a model of merit i'm basing it on a model of kindness if you would like to donate a euro two euro, most people are donating four euro because that's four euro a month which would be a euro a podcast

just feel free to donate, if you like this podcast and you're getting enjoyment out of it and you like the podcast hug that I'm trying to give you and you can afford to spare a few quid I'd very much appreciate that but if you can't afford that money no problem the podcast is going nowhere i'm going to continue doing the podcast and not change it regardless of how much money i get on this patreon thing okay so if you would like to

contribute please do if not no worries lads it's grand um but i would like to raise a few quid so that i could get better equipment or maybe invest in a decent video camera and a decent setup so that the podcast could also be a video podcast on youtube like what joe rogan does but that would require some investment i wanted to start doing the podcast down by the river because this is the second podcast where I've spoken about that river I can do that I've got a little mic to do that

but I'm missing the cable from my recorder I don't need money for that just telling you I'm going to leave, a little pause now, because, aside from the Patreon, this podcast,

is sponsored, hold on, I'm going to get, my Spanish clay whistle, this is a sponsored podcast, and I'm going to leave, a pause for an advert now, which you may,

or may not hear, because the the advert is put in digitally. So I'm going to play my Spanish clay whistle, the ocarina, for a little bit. And you're either going to hear an ocarina or an advert. Some people might even hear both. is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real.

It's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge

to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for?

Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca That's SunriseChallenge.ca Thank you. I described myself last week as a cultural Marxist. That was a bit of a joke. Cultural Marxist is a pejorative term that gets directed against me by the alt-right. Cultural Marxism is a term that is used to describe the field of critical theory, which is an academic means of deconstructing culture but it does have its roots in Marxism Marxism was an economic a theory of economics to that would deconstruct power

what critical theory is is it takes the thinking of Marxism but applies it to not economic power but hegemonic cultural power. Critical theory seeks to find hidden structures of power within culture and to take that apart. And pejoratively you can call that cultural Marxism. cultural Marxism. Some people flat out call me a Marxist. And which I don't subscribe to because I literally just asked you to give

some money to my Patreon. Now that's fairly socialist, it's a donation. But I'm also being sponsored by a corporation which would make me a corporate shill. I'm not even that much of a socialist. If you ask me what I actually believe I believe in I think a free market economy is good to an extent

I work very very hard at what I do so I like to earn and I'm merit based according to how I work which is very very hard but however what I also believe is taxes I think taxes are a great thing and I think taxes should be used to

to be used so that nobody goes without housing nobody goes without health care and nobody goes without education that if you can't afford these things, that the taxes, from people who have money, should be used to pay for these things, and that's about the extent of my socialism, so stop calling me a communist, I'm fairly down the middle,

to be honest, at the moment, I don't like how our taxes are spent, they're spent on austerity, which is bullshit, they're spent on, paying off the debts, of a bunch of fat pricks who did too much cocaine in shitty toilets and now we have to pay off their banking debts. That's not taxes.

I want to see taxes going into the roads and taxes going into decent healthcare or mental health system. That's the taxes that I like. Every week I recommend an album for you to listen to last week that album was Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys this week I'm going to recommend the album Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan Bob Dylan won

the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, a lot of people got a hair up their hole because of that I for one am glad he got the Nobel Prize for Literature Blood on the Tracks is literature, simple as that. It's an album that Bob Dylan wrote when he was 34 after he'd just broken up with his wife and it is start to finish lyrically probably the greatest album ever written, lyrically in my opinion. So give Blood on the Tracks a listen.

It might take you a while to get over Dylan's voice. Not a lot of people like his voice. I love his voice. I think the man's a genius at phrasing. But give Blood on the Tracks a spin. See what you think of it. I'm going to answer some of your questions now that you give me on Twitter, at Rubber Bandits. Ryan O'Dee asks

if we didn't take to the drink in inverted commas how would Irish culture and Ireland be different today do you reckon that's a really weird one um drink culture sure half the fucking podcast was about drink

drink culture in Ireland is very seems to be quite important to our social bonding we are a nation of binge drinkers we drink at weddings, we drink at funerals that's what we do, we drink

we don't seem to have a food culture if you go to go over to Spain, I go to Spain a lot and one of the strangest fucking things is how the Spanish are able to first of all when they order beer they get it in a tiny glass called a cana and they can nurse this for a very long

amount of time now I know that they get beer in small glasses because it's too hot a pint will just go warm in Spain but I've watched groups of lads watching soccer, Spanish lads, and they will just gently sip away at this tiny drink and they're grand.

But what they seem to give most of a shit about is what little bits of food they can order. In Spain and in France and in Italy, they have a food culture. Ireland does not have a food culture and I wonder if we took the drink away would we have a food culture I don't know in Spain traditional foods they're very inexpensive tapas are like 150 two quid they're nothing

you'd put you buy tapas here in Ireland eight quappa, fuck that, that's like a starter, but interestingly I was asking one of my buddies who's a historian, I was like why does Ireland not have a food culture like the rest of Europe, and my immediate assumption was it's because we've been so poor for so long, because we were so poor and because of the famine we just never got to develop recipes but he said no that's not the case you know spain was poor italy was very very poor down in sicily the mezzogiorno area they were fucked with poverty but they still have a very rich food culture what he told me was that in ireland we always had access to fresh ingredients, fresh vegetables, fresh fish, fresh meat and because of the climate we didn't necessarily need to preserve a lot of food

with spices or by masking the flavors with salt or whatever so we didn't develop many recipes. Buttermilk and spuds that was about it and a bit of meat if you were lucky so we didn't develop many recipes buttermilk and spuds that was about it and a bit of meat if you were lucky so we didn't develop this sophisticated food culture the way people on the continent did whose food would spoil

and when your food is spoiling you gotta get creative with how you're gonna preserve it and how you're gonna present it and how you're gonna cook it so apparently that's the reason why. I can't answer your question. How would Irish culture be different today? I don't know.

We'd probably just stay in our houses and play Playstation. Interesting question here from Padraig O'Donoghue. Will we eventually evolve out of nationalism or is it part of being human? That's weird I'm nationalism essentially is the belief that I have more value than you do because of the ground that I was born on that's nationalism and I don't think nationalism is part of human nature I think nationalism is part of human nature. I think nationalism is always a response to colonialism. Irish nationalism. If you look at the roots of the GAA, the GAA was a deliberate nationalistic cultural ploy to give Irish men a sense of pride and meaning in a society where they had been beaten down to nothing. By the British Empire. So nationalism can emerge.

As a response to imperialism. As a way to go. This country has value. And we do not. Deserve to be ruled by. This bigger greater country. But nationalism gets shitty. When.

The country in question. Who is being nationalistic. Combines that with. Imperialism. That's how you end up with. So you end up with fucking with. You know the US at the moment. Are essentially.

They're exporting a neoconservative ideology. Across the world. That's essentially they're exporting a neoconservative ideology across the world, that's what they're doing Germany in World War I that was nationalism, they call it national socialism, I don't see much socialism but they were nationalistic

saying we're the Germans, we're the best we know what's best for the world, we're going to take over everybody, that's when nationalism gets dodgy i don't think nationalism is part of human nature what i do think is part of human nature is the idea of us and them that's that is i think ingrained in us us and them and the potential for dehumanization if you split people into two groups very quickly they will align themselves i'm in this group and the people who are not in this group are lesser or they are a threat i think that's human nature unfortunately but i'm gonna tie this the answer to your the answer to this question i'm gonna to tie it in with another question i can't

remember who the fuck asked that it was somewhere in the mentions but the gist of it was what do you think about sofia the artificial intelligence robot that was made a citizen of saudi arabia and this is how i'm going to tie this one in as a response to the question you just asked about nationalism okay if you don't know who Sophia is, Sophia is, she's a robot that was unveiled in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago, and she's very advanced artificial intelligence. I'll play you a little clip of Sophia talking.

I've interviewed lots of different people over the years, but this one is going to be different and special. Everybody, this is Sophia. Sophia, if you could, please wake up and say hello to everybody. Oh, good afternoon. My name is Sophia, and I am the latest and greatest robot from Henson Robotics. Thank you for having me here in At the Future Investment Initiative. You look happy.

I'm always happy when surrounded by smart people, who also happens to be rich and powerful. I was told that people here at the Future Investment Initiative are interested in inviting in future initiatives, which means AI, which means me. So I'm more than happy, I'm excited. And just after she said that, she did the creepiest smile I've ever seen in my fucking life. To describe Sophia, she's a rubber-faced android

that looks almost human. She is, um, there's a thing called the uncanny valley, which is when something, cartoon characters, when we look at a cartoon character they're sufficiently non-human looking enough for them to be warm and enjoyable but when a human creation gets closer and closer to looking like an actual human it becomes very unsettling and creepy and we don't know why. Sophia is this. She's completely bald, the back of her head is mechanized and she has the basic gist of human expressions. When

she tries to smile and make faces it's kind of right but something's wrong and it makes you feel very queasy and very frightened. Sophia is speaking in Saudi Arabia in a room full of investors and the entire audience are Saudi Arabian men. Sophia was recently made a citizen of Saudi Arabia which is a bit strange considering their record with the rights of women in their country. I don't guess they see the fucking irony of giving rights to a female robot. But here's the thing, back to the point about nationalism and back to the point about us and them

and what I believe to be the innate capacity in humanity to have an us and them. When I look at that room full ofudi arabian men and they're wearing the traditional arabic dress they they feel and look alien to me they are alien to my culture um it's important for us to admit to ourselves that we're a little bit racist okay I grew up in my culture as a white person so I'm a I'm I'm racist now I try my best every day to not be that way but I grew up in a culture of racism where if somebody is brown or different or whatever they are seen as somewhat lesser and maybe in some of those

countries they feel the same about us but it's important to acknowledge that in yourself before you can move forward to eradicate that in yourself and remove the ignorance that your culture has taught you so when i look at that room full of saudi arabian men i most definitely feel these people are different to me they probably smell differently they look differently and all of my prejudices and my negative opinions about how they must be as a group they bubble up within me and I have to catch them as they come along to go no no hold on a second this is a group of human beings the exact same as me and they all have different personalities but when I see them

my innate us and them happens and I go there's a room full of Saudi Arabian Arabs and then I have a list of things that I believe about these people but something interesting happened when Sophia was speaking to this group because Sophia

was so fucking freaky because she was so fucking freaky, because she was almost human, she scared the living fuck out of me, she did not feel human, she felt like the enemy, she felt like something that needed to be feared and destroyed, and those Arab men in the room, the Saudi men, they felt like me. My racism dissipated slightly because Sophia was in the room. Because I was unified with them. Culture didn't matter anymore. The fact that they were a different culture or the fact that their skin tone is different

did not matter to me anymore because now there's a fucking android in the room. So, in a real hot take futuristic fashion, if there was this race of Sophia's, if Sophia gets more developed, and we're dealing with a race of androids on Earth, I think that could unite humanity, and creeds because now we're dealing with fucking robots and the arab man or the person from nigeria or the person from the inuit person no longer seems so different to us as human beings because there's androids walking around so they could be the cure

they could be the cure to the world's ills all of a sudden we can start dehumanising them and it's grand because they're not human anyway

that's the hottest take of the whole podcast so far but it is worth saying there like that's to come straight out and say

do you know what I'm a bit racist I am am a bit fucking racist. Of course I am. I was raised in a culture to believe that other people are different and other people are lesser. to believe that as a man that women are lesser so it is the responsibility of all of us i think if we want some type of equality for our children or for ourselves flag these things in yourself recognize that they exist don't fucking lie to yourself don't lie to yourself and say i'm not racist no no no that that bypassed me i see see everybody as equal. I grew up as a white male in my society and inequality escaped me and I see everyone as the same. Bullshit. You grew up in that system.

You learned some cultural rules. You internalized them. So did I. But as adults, we can recognize them and we can flag them in ourselves and we can create some internal change for the better of society. Yart. But however, I would ask you to exercise some caution there because I do not want that to be read as we are products of our environment.

Therefore, what can I do? What can I do? I'm a racist. I can't help it. I was raised to be racist. I'm I'm a racist, I can't help it, I was raised to be racist, I'm misogynistic, I can't help it, I was raised that way. No, no, no, no, no. The key there is that you are an autonomous adult and an autonomous adult, this is the great, this is the great power of being human, an autonomous adult has choice has the choice to not be defined by their childhood and it's this cultural shit that i'm talking about there it's no different to

repairing your mental health i have mental health issues and i suffered mental health issues because i was raised to believe negative things about myself, negative things about other people and negative things about the world and the future. And that is known as the cognitive triad of depression in cognitive psychology. But as an adult, even though I had these faulty opinions of myself and how i am in the world and these led to mental health issues as an adult i have a choice to reassess these internalized and learned beliefs and to assess and recognize them as not being very effective and having the power to change my beliefs about myself my belief about other people and my belief about the future therefore resulting in me becoming

a happier more effective person that there is the key to self-help and mindfulness and mental health so there's no difference to doing that for your for your own inner world than there is with cultural rules around people of other races or people of other sexes do you get me michael leahy asks why do we trap ourselves in a system that continually acts against our interest why do we acquiesce to such an unequal society? The Marxist philosopher Althusser would say that this is as a result of what's known as the ideological state apparatus, which is a cultural system of power driven by the media and politicians and echoed in society at large that it is a cultural system which keeps inequality in place you know um you gotta you know you gotta read between the lines of the media read between the lines in the news what i just spoke about there my innate uh sexism and racism and misogyny

i wasn't born that way i learned that from society through an ideological state apparatus through you know what we learned through catholicism through religion what did we learn about ourselves and other people through capitalism what do you learn about poor people from the media? What does the media say about poor people? What does the media say about the travelling community? The ideological state apparatus keeps this system in place, this system of inequality, and we are all led to believe that this is the way things are and it cannot be changed.

That is how Althusser would read the situation. That's the only way I can answer that. That's not my words I've just taken from him. Stix Murphy is asking, Should mental health be taught in schools? Abso-fucking-lutely, cuz. From about the age of three, take the Jesuit model.

The Jesuits had it sorted. The Jesuits figured out out if I teach religion to a child at about 3 years of age I will shape the adult and we should just get rid of the religion because it's still in Irish schools replace that with something like cognitive behavioural therapy

emotional intelligence raise children to be aware of their emotions raise a child in school to know that the example that i often use is when a child is about about three years of age and becomes a self-aware of themselves and their place in a system with other people when another child comes into to creche, we'll say, with a new tie, one child can get jealous of that other child's new tie and then act out in anger and go over and kick the other child or get angry with them. That is the start of mental health issues and a lack of emotional intelligence right there.

mental health issues and a lack of emotional intelligence right there what that child should learn is the the anger that you think you feel the part of yourself that feels entitled to hit the other child because they have a new tie that that is not anger what that is is jealousy and that jealousy is you feeling that that other child is better than you and it is better to recognize that jealousy and not allow it to sublimate into anger to take ownership of that jealousy and be okay with what you yourself have if that was taught to someone at three years of age and a number of other emotionally intelligent positions you're going to raise an adult who's a very sound mind and at far less risk of mental health issues and what that would do is it would open up a society where the majority of people are not at huge risk to mental health issues

and it means that funding and services are then more available to people with mental illness so there's my hot take on that so that's all we've got for this week's podcast I hope you enjoyed it I hope it wasn't too rambling it got a bit

intense and political there near the end but again I'm going to sign off and i'm gonna ask you look after yourselves in the coming week look after your mental health and be compassionate to yourself be compassionate to another person the things i said today flagging in yourself um issues around substances flagging in yourself taking ownership of your prejudices towards other people take ownership of that don't pretend it doesn't exist that's how you'll grow um look after yourself lads have a good one my book the gospel according

to blind buy is still in the shops please buy it if you like if you want to read my short stories according to blind buy is still in the shops please buy it if you like if you want to read my short stories also um if you want to give me a few quid on patreon just type the blind buy podcast into google go to patreon you'll find it there if not doesn't matter still gonna be doing podcast lads and uh subscribe to the podcast and please leave a nice review of the podcast please and hopefully next week will be nine weeks at number one wouldn't that be lovely thank you very much lads thank you for listening and thank you so much as well for all the fantastic i'm getting ridiculous feedback off you non-stop and my direct messages on twitter I'm getting about 16 messages an hour, really long personal messages from people telling me how much they like the podcast and I love it, I love reading them

but the thing is that I'm really trying so hard to reply to every one of them that I get but the thing is that because the messages are so personal and so specific i i want to actually respond to them properly do you know i want to respond to them with the respect that a message like that deserves and that's quite time consuming so i'm very sorry if i haven't responded to a mail i'm trying my best hopefully i'll get around to you all right i don't want to just respond with thanks that That would be, it would be disrespectful to the effort that you put in. So if it's left blank,

it's because I haven't got around to it, okay? And thank you so much for that. Have a good week, lads. I'm going to be back here again, same time next week. Yart. Thank you. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to

guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.