The Ricochet Podcast - Hitting For The Cycle

Episode Date: December 11, 2014

This year, opening day and Christmas came early. We’re blessed to have on two Hall of Fame guests: the great Thomas Sowell (get the new edition of his classic book Basic Economics on sale now). He discusses the economy, race, Ferguson, and Staten Island as only he can. Then, our good pal, law professor, author, and gaming connoisseur John Yoo stops by (on is way to CNN, of all places) to give us... Source

activate program more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism well i'm not a crook i'll never tell a lie but i am not a bully mr gorbache, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks, not to say that we're authoritative or anything today, but we've got Tom Sowell on economics and John Yoo on the torture report. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, this is the Ricochet Podcast number 241, and we're brought to you by foodiedirect.com.

Hey, if you're waiting for Santa to come down the chimney and bring you a big holiday meal, you really are kind of unclear in the whole Santa thing, aren't you? He doesn't bring food. No, that's Foodie Direct's job. It's great food, and it makes people happy, and it brings them together. This holiday season, you can click, don't cook, order order and serve an award-winning food package shipped directly to you. Later in the show, we'll tell you how you can save $10 on your first order from foodiedirect.com. We're also brought to you by, well, let me put it this way.

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because we're all kind of on the same boat on this subject. It's a great read, and we'll tell you a little bit more about it later. Check it out, Acculturated.com. And of course, we're brought to you by the same boat on this subject. It's a great read, and we'll tell you a little bit more about it later. Check it out, Acculturated.com. And, of course, we're brought to you by the entity that is Ricochet itself, and its co-founders, Peter and Rob, are here to tell you why you should partner with hard-earned money at the holiday time. Peter, Rob, how are you doing, guys?

Very well. Rob, where are you today? Peter, I am in New Orleans today. I'm sitting here in the French Quarter. It's cold, and it's wet, so I have a little bit of a cold from last night. I was talking and got a little sore throat. Excuse me. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, we up here in Northern California, to continue the meteorological theme very briefly so we don't actually scare potential customers away.

In any event, we're having this – what was being broadcast is the storm of the decade, which, James, just for your information, in Northern California, what that means is it's going to rain for two days. Everybody is going to get wet, right? Right. And people just stop driving too. They're like, well, I can't go out in this rain. Oh, all kinds of events have been canceled. We're not going to have that meeting because of all this rain. The rain is the multi-purpose excuse.

Well, if somebody's staying home and avoiding the roads because of the rain, that's all the more reason to find a quality site on the internet. So, Rob, why don't you – Thank you. Thank you for getting us back on track. If you are listening to this podcast and you are a member of Ricochet, we thank you and we are pleased and honored to have you along the ride with us. If you are listening to this podcast and you are not a member and there are many of you who are not members who listen anyway, listen.

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It's the gift that keeps on giving and keeps on receiving and keeps on giving you more internet entertainment value. However, when we look around, however, there's a little bit more space for Ricochet on the internet now because some of the more venerable institutions are thundering down into dust. I have a soft spot on my heart for the New Republic for one reason.

They gave me my first national print. I wrote a column for them, A Minneapolis Diarist, in that diarist section they had at the back. And I was so thrilled because we all loved the New Republic. But back then, unless I'm mistaken, Fred Barnes wrote for the New Republic. Charles Krauthammer wrote for the New Republic. It was a different institution.

And the one that it's become now is largely irrelevant and a nothing you can't get anyplace else. And the way that people have obsessed over this on the political side of the internet shows exactly how out of touch we are with mainstream America, which does not care. What they care about are movies because that is their primary cultural vehicle of entertainment. And the Sony story is a hundred times bigger than the New Republic story. So bye-bye, New Republic. See you later. Ta-da. Let's talk Hollywood.

And of course, Rob, you're there. You know. Is this not just the biggest bombshell to absolutely – Well, we should back up. Isn't this delicious that people are – It's complicated. I mean it really is complicated. We should back up. What's happened?

Last week, about a week and a half ago, unknown people called the guardians of decency, the Guardians of something they're calling themselves. They hacked into the Sony computers and they stole four movies that were in digital form ready to be released. One of them is Annie, which is Sony's big hope for the Christmas – for a Christmas release. And the other were two sort of awards-y kind of dramas. Annie, you can't mean a remake of the Little Orphan Annie movie, which was a Broadway hit 30 years ago. Yes. Yes, a remake, but it's a hip-hop remake, Peter, so I know you'll love it.

It's with the – I don't know, Jay-Z's in it. We should add that by hacking into the servers, we mean they typed the password password in order to get to the files. It's unclear what they did, but these guys were good. You got to give them credit. They were good. And so they hacked in there, and they got a bunch of stuff, including this treasure trove of documents. And for the first week, first five days, what was great about it was just the emails back and forth. Oh, no.

Sorry. The pay documents for a lot of people. So everyone in Hollywood was checking out and seeing what everybody at Sony was getting paid. And then it became an actual data dump of emails and personal addresses and things like that. And everybody in Hollywood has been reading the emails. The emails are a fascinating primer into how movies get made or don't get made and the characters behind them. And it pretty much has riveted the town.

The problem is that no one knows who did this. I guess they call themselves the Guardians of Peace, the GOP. But nobody knows who did this, and everyone they call themselves the Guardians of Peace, the GOP. But nobody knows who did this and everyone thinks it's the North Koreans because Sony is releasing a picture called The Interview with Seth Rogen and James Franco in which the story is the two reporters are hired by the CIA to go and assassinate Kim Jong-un. And so it's a complicated story. I find myself gleefully reading these – all of these emails and stuff at the same time feeling really guilty about it because it's stolen. And there's something weird about having – reading stolen – documents stolen presumably by the North Koreans who are punishing a studio for making a movie.

Oh, so you believe the idea that it may be North Korea? Well, I don't think North Koreans did it. I think North Koreans paid for it. This is pretty good, but they did. So it's sort of beyond – I mean North Koreans have technological issues and they don't really have the engineering. I don't think the engineering help support there. But the Chinese certainly do. For you as a professional in that business, what's the biggest surprise to come out of the leaked documents?

What have you learned that you didn't know? Well, I mean a lot of – I mean I've learned how tough it is still or how tough it is – it's more tough now to make movies. Because the movies, they're making fewer and fewer and fewer of them. And so each one is much more important and I suspect that that's the real big takeaway. are involved in the decision. And then, I mean, look, all movie studios are run crazily, but Sony seems to be run even more zany in precision, shall we say. So the documents that have been leaked are a portrait of a studio under intense pressure. Exactly. Fewer pictures.

As far as they're concerned, fewer personnel for those pictures because scheduling is the most, scheduling was always hard in movies, in the movie business, but now it's impossible because you really only believe you have a handful of choices. A handful of people to direct, a handful of people

to write, and a handful of people to star in it. And if you're talking about the same dozen and a half, two dozen people, and every studio is after them for every single thing, it gets tight. Does it make you want to bring back the studio system? It at least had the virtue that there were working ensembles of directors and actors and writers who got to know each other. You didn't have to devote enormous time and energy and money to reassembling the package for every project, right?

I mean they made Casablanca about five times under different names. Right, but you can't bring back the studio system because you can't bring back the movie business. That was when studios would release, I mean, two or three pictures a week. And you could see a new movie every day. So why – here's something that has always puzzled me why is the making of movies oh excuse me in the background sorry i'm turning off my phone that's it's a flash flood warning which is another indication that we here in northern california are rattled by anyway okay so why is the making of pictures so different from viewed as such a completely different industry run by different producers, executives, funded by different pools of money from long-form television? Isn't long-form – don't we all feel that – the last time we had Andrew Klavan on the show, you and he, Rob, were going on about long-form television is the place where the action is, the creative action.

Why isn't Sony just making more long-form television? Why doesn't the industry shift from big screens to smaller screens? Same people, same money. They are? Right. They're doing that. Same people, same money, and often same screens, right? Your phone, your TV.

I see. You watch people. They'll be releasing first-run movies on your home screen, video-on-demand they call it, in 12, 18 months. Got it. Hollywood is dead. That's the good news. Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood.

One of the interesting things about the memos is the conversation between a couple of studio execs about which movie they predicted the president would like to see at some screening. And it was rather, shall we say, racially reductive. It indicated a fairly small, narrow view of what human beings might wish to see. But then again, let's talk to somebody whose views are not reductive, but as expansive as the world itself. And that, of course, is our friend Tom Sowell. Back to the podcast. Welcome, sir. Glad to have you back.

Glad to be on. Tom, Peter Robinson here. Tom has just brought out – he actually – this is almost literally true. I always have a backlog of the age of reason in my family. It has the immense virtue. It's a long book. You can go topic by topic by topic. It covers the field, but it has the immense virtue of having no charts, no graphs. It is written in clear English.

Now, Tom, what do you expect to have happen to your reputation as an economist after writing a book in English? Well, you see, since I'm no longer a member of an economics department, I don't even worry about that. But it is true. Had I been a member of an economics department, it would have had a negative effect on my evaluation. I mean, I have sat in on departmental meetings when we're deciding who gets tenure and whose contract gets renewed. I remember one day I was looking for one man's scholarly contributions, and someone mentioned the great textbook he had written. And the reply was, textbooks I regard as negative evidence of scholarship. Wow.

But you, I remember, of course, you and I both knew you much better than I. Milton Friedman and Gary transform their academic findings, their scholarly findings into plain language. Milton in particular, you know, buddy who was then editing that page in the Wall Street Journal, and he said, oh, it first appeared this morning. Milton submitted it to us three days ago. It was based on work he was doing on monetary policy in Japan. And once he had decided on his scholarly findings, he felt an obligation to explain them to his fellow Americans. They believed in democracy. That's just gone from the profession. Is that right? It's true.

That's true. Because at the very least, you'll be tolerated for doing it. But it adds absolutely nothing to your stature in economics. All right. Tom, points A, B, and C, I'm going to name them and then step back and let you explain to us how you went from A to B to C. 1948, you tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. 1958, you graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics. And in 1968, you graduated from the University of Chicago with a doctorate in economics.

Connect the dots, would you please? Oh, my goodness. All kinds of memories come back, not all of them pleasant. But no, 1948, I was living on my own for the first time, rooming in various places in Harlem. From there, I guess I was just drifting at that time. As a result of being in the Marine Corps, I was entitled to the GI Bill and then that took me on to college. And of course, from there,

it was just a progression on to graduate school and then die in a doctorate. And Tom, was there any person in your life, some teacher, someone who said, you, Thomas Sowell, are unusually bright. We need to make sure that care is taken to give you a serious education. Is that how that happened? No.

It was just fighting. If there was anyone who had such a thought, they might have kept it to themselves. Though that's not totally true. I guess the crucial thing when I was at Howard University and getting ready to apply to transfer to a number of other places, uh... i guess the crucial thing that when i was at howard university uh... and and and trucking getting ready to plied transfer at all of number of other places uh... what one of the people with a

dear lady who taught me freshman english named uh... dr marie gadsden and then and then uh... my idol uh... professor sterling brown and the two of them wrote very strong letters of recommendation uh... total to harvard among other places of Sterling Brown, and the two of them wrote very strong letters of recommendation to Harvard, among other places. And I suspected that, and my SAT scores had a lot more to my being admitted than my B-minus average.

Tom, we're also on the line with Rob Long, who I know wants to get into the conversation. Rob? Hey, Dr. Soule. How are you? Thank you for joining us again. All right. Your new book is a revised edition of Basic Economics. That's a very provocative title. Gruber appearing before a congressional committee to describe what he really meant to say when

he described the basic economics of Obamacare. Could you just, you know, if you can, just, I know it's sort of reductive, but could you give us a little praises on the basic economics of Obamacare? Well, Obamacare, as it was sold, was going to add millions of people to the insurance rolls, give them broader coverage, and at the same time reduce the cost. And when I first heard that, I thought, if they do that, what can they do for an encore? Walking on water would be an anticlimax. Right. But so where's the flaw there? Is the flaw that they didn't tell us they were going to tax us all, that they didn't tell us that you weren't going to be able to keep your plan?

They didn't tell us they were going to kick people off their existing plan and put them on a more expensive one? And then my second question is why do you think people bought it? Well, people didn't have a choice as to whether to buy it. The people who voted for it in Congress didn't even read it. So, I mean, even if Gruber had said nothing, the evidence was blatant that this was just an absolute insult to everyone's intelligence. And unfortunately, it flew because the lure of something for nothing caused people not to use their intelligence. Is that an economic law though? The tendency of people to believe what they know in their heart cannot be true because it's just – man, it would be so great if it was true.

I think psychiatry would deal with that more so than I do. Rob? I have one more actually. You grew up in – you were a New Yorker. Were you a native New Yorker? Were you born there? No, no. I was born in North Carolina.

We moved to New York when I was eight years old. Okay. So you spent some time in New York City. And right now, I've been living in New York City most of the autumn, and right now the city's talking about only one thing, and that is the police conduct in Staten Island when they put a man in a chokehold and they killed him. And there are some people we had a – yes, last week we had a discussion where a lot of us made a distinction between what happened in Ferguson and what happened in Staten Island.

But as a longtime New Yorker in the past, do you think things in that city are getting better or worse between the police and the establishment and the African-American community? Well, a lot depends on what is your initial period and what is your current period. When I grew up in New York, and then specifically in Harlem, which is where I grew up, I was never stopped on the street by a policeman. I was never stopped on the street by a policeman, even when I was a Western Union messenger delivery, they were down in an all-white neighborhood, in which I don't, I'm not sure I ever saw another black person there. Here I was, a young black man. Supposedly, the cops were pouncing on me left and right.

It never happened. My experience with police since then has not been what is widely pronounced. So, you know, the whole thing with the Choco, most people, of course, have never had to take anyone into custody who was resisting arrest. I only had that experience once in my life when I was a corporal of the Guard in the Marine Corps. It still happened to the guy we had taken into custody with White. I was advancing towards him with the help of a very frail, older sergeant, a much younger, much bigger bigger, a more aggressive size,

intervened, he grabbed the guy, handled him, believe me, no more gently than a guy was handled in New York, even though they were both white. But think about it. People have no idea. Once you resort to physical force, nobody knows what's going to happen the next moment. That guy

could have hit somebody and sent him to the hospital or conceivably to the morgue. When you're trying to bring down somebody who weighs 350 pounds, your first thing is to secure him so he cannot lash out and

maim one of the people, one of the police. I doubt seriously if these guys were spending their time listening to what this fellow was saying rather than seeing that he got handcuffed soon enough that everyone would be safe. It bothers me when people can sit in the safety and comfort of their homes and second guess someone doing something dangerous that they themselves have never done. I was shocked recently to be told that at the Marine Corps Paris Island boot camp, they discovered that three-quarters of the men there had never had a fight. Having grown up where I grew up, you didn't grow up without having a fight.

But the people who've never had these experiences, their ignorance does not inhibit them in the slightest. I want to back up to a second and add to the lore of Tom Sowell. You were a Western Union telegraph delivery person. Did you have the cap?

Did you get a nickel tip? That's a profession that people don't really think, well, it doesn't exist anymore because telegrams don't exist. But what was that like? Were you just hanging around the central office cooling your heels until somebody said, we got a hot one, go down to 30 Wall Street? I mean what was that experience like? There was a little set of us there, and we were kept busy all day long carrying telegrams, hiller and yarn. Did you know that?

I'm sorry, go ahead. No, it's Peter here, Tom. I'm just curious. What did you learn about human beings, about economics even, from that job? Who gave good tips? What were the interesting aspects of the job? The most interesting aspect of the job was finishing the end of the day and going home. That's every job.

But this was a predominantly white, predominantly working class neighborhood. And one of the things I learned, which I think people could, what was helpful, was that all white people were not living in the lap of luxury. And I can remember one case in particular where I delivered a telegram to this lady who was not fluent in English, and she asked me to not only read it to her, but to explain to her what it meant. I had the same experience many years later as a student at Harvard when I was, during the Christmas holidays, I took a job delivering mail, and one of the ladies there in one of the neighborhoods also asked me if I could read the letter she got and tell her what

it meant. And, you know, life is tough all over. Yeah. I do love the idea that we're, although the point of departure for this conversation is that you've just written, you've just brought out the fifth edition of this massive and wonderful book, Basic Economics.

We're also talking to a man who tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was a telegram delivery boy, served as a mailman, and served in the United States Marine Corps. Tom, there's just no bottom to you. Well, I don't know. You and I were talking just yesterday, and you made what I thought was a very, very powerful, if very disheartening point. And you said, if you're serious about evidence about the African-American experience in this country, compare where African-Americans stood a century after the end of slavery with where they stood 30 years after the foundation of the liberal welfare state, the great liberal experiment in race relations and so forth.

Could you draw that contrast for us? Yes. I guess one of the most easiest to understand things is the children raised with only one parent, or in some cases no parent, 22% of black children were that way in 1960, which is nearly 100 years after the end of slavery. But you come forward another 30 years, and the number of black kids in that situation has tripled, more than tripled. And yet it's ironic that people on the left who are grateful, blaming others for all kinds of things, never examine what they themselves have done and what the actual empirical consequences have been, quite aside from what their good intentions must have been.

And this is just one sample of the havoc that they have left in their wake while walking away feeling good about themselves because of their good intentions. And if I could just interject, it's Rob Long again. Those same trends you now see in other groups. White children born in single-parent homes with no father, the same thing in Hispanics, the same thing, I think,

in every other group except Asians. You see this breakdown. Can you ever get it back? I mean, is there any way to turn this around? It can be done. I think the Victorian era in England turned around some very bad situations, both in the crime rate and the alcoholism rate and other examples of social pathology declined consistently for decades on end

through this era that we now look back on and sneer at as compared to what happened in the glorious era of post-1960s when so many things deteriorated greatly, including things that had been getting better before. For example, venereal disease rates had been going down at a steady rate for more than a decade as of 1960. And yet, within the first decade after these marvelous reforms, the near-older disease rate skyrocketed.

Teenage pregnancy had been going down for years. It skyrocketed up again. And so a murder rate, a classic example, a 1960 murder rate was something like half of what it was in the mid-30s. And yet by the mid-1970s, the murder rate was more than double what it was in 1960. So all these things you can trace, and yet, although these are things that are right there on the surface for those who want to look, it's amazing how few people do want to look.

Well, how do you turn it around, though? I mean, in the Victorian era, what was it? It wasn't legislation, was it? Or was it generally a cultural decision? It was both. You stop, to some extent, in crime, they've done something. For example, the notion that you don't put people behind bars, you do put the people behind bars. And the crime rate started the downward movement. You do stop the so-called broken window syndrome

where all kinds of misdemeanors were ignored. And once they stopped ignoring them and clapping down on people, those things stopped. I'm told that the latest bright idea in Southern California is that they're going to call a robbery on under $900 a misdemeanor. Well, you know, for someone who has a low income, $900 is a lot of money. I was just gasping in disbelief. And they were making excuses, of course. The common, faddish,

decent intellectuals of the 50s were ascribing antisocial behavior to having grown up in broken situations. But even by the time of West Side Story, they had their number. There's that song in Officer Krupke, the line where the guy says, I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived, making fun of it in 62, 61, where they already knew the jig was up.

But we're still bound to these ancient progressive notions that supposedly cause these pathologies. I think Rob makes a good point. How do you get it back or do you just have to wait for all the people who hold those discredited ideas to finally pass out-of-the-body politic? Or are they just so – go on. No, you can't wait because they are indoctrinating the younger generation from elementary school all the way through to postgraduate study, even as we speak. You have to fight them. You can't outweigh them. Well, let me ask you then when it comes to education

because I have a daughter who's 14 years old this will be the last thing and then we let you go and thank you she came to me last night and said dad I overheard some kids in the hallway they were talking about capitalism and why it's so bad they said capitalism is bad and they rolled their eyes and said

so many people had to die of starvation for free enterprise and competition she said so many people had to die of starvation for free enterprise and competition she said what do i say to them and i said nothing really because you're talking to idiots there's there's there's no there's no point in talking to people that's stupid and i advised her to ask them just ask them questions about what they believe because once you ask questions as opposed to confronting them with an argument, then everything falls apart. But I've got you here. What should she say that Tom Sowell would say to them?

They say capitalism is bad, man. If you had one pithy little response to give them, what would it be? I would say go into any low-income neighborhood and find someone who looks skinny. Wow. I will tell her that, and I will also press a volume of your work into her hand in another year or two so she can continue her education as we've had our education continue today. Thanks, as ever, for joining us on the podcast podcast here and we hope to talk to you again down the road.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Tom. Take care. That's absolutely – that's wonderful. Go find somebody. Well, but it's true. It's true. The entire idea behind food stamps and behind a lot of early progressive movements in the 19th century was to defend – to end starvation among America's poor.

They've been so astonishingly successful that now the problem with America's poor is their obesity. So now they've come up with new euphemisms for it, for food insecurity or something. The food insecurity makes something. Food insecurity makes you overeat. Deserts, right? We have food deserts here in Minneapolis supposedly when people don't have access to the fresh produce. So what the city council and their

infinite wisdom has done has announced that any convenience store that carries food has now got to start have a certain amount of their inventory devoted to vegetables and lettuce and the rest of it. Oh, you're kidding me. No, this is the government. So 7-Eleven has to carry fresh lettuce and tomatoes?

Unbelievable. And a gas station. And as somebody who's in this family business, this is the government telling you what kind of inventory you have to have. And of course you have to pay for the refrigeration. You have to carry, it spoils because nobody's going to buy it. If you carry Brussels sprouts, they're going to go –

It can't be frozen? No, no, no. It's got to be fresh. So as I understand it now, they're still working on the details and figuring out how they'll help people. It is absolutely preposterous. And if anybody is sitting around the house looking and saying, gosh, access to Brussels sprouts is probably a sign that things aren't that bad in this part of the world. That's true. But, you know, it's all a continuum. On the one hand, the folks can't get the Brussels sprouts in the 7-Eleven on the wrong side of town. On the other hand, somebody's complaining because UPS doesn't

deliver to their house on Sunday. And frankly, they want their foodie direct stuff now. Well, someday UPS will deliver to your house on Sunday. But until that day comes, you might want to order ahead of time to make sure that the foodie direct dot com gets to you when you want it. Because it's going to be it's going to be fresh. I didn't see that coming. I did. I did. And I I just I sat back to enjoy it from Brussels sprouts in gas stations. And for a minute, I was like, how was he going to get into shaving?

But he didn't. And I was astonished. Well, that one was all on the fly. I mean, they're all on the fly, but that one, yes. Anyway, I just had to get to it because we have to tell you about Foodie Direct. And you have to start ordering because you know, you've got to get the stuff out for Christmas. All that's coming.

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So go to foodiedirect.com slash ricochet and use that coupon code RICOCHET10 during your checkout and let the gustatory epicurean delights flow to your house. So this season, click, don't cook. Gentlemen, we have someone else on the line coming up here to talk about torture because we all know America is now right in the camp with North Korea, Nazis, Bolsheviks, and the rest of the torture community. We're just as bad as everybody else. It proves, if nothing else, the altruism of the left, that I would rather have him on CNN even though I think we have more podcast listeners than CNN has viewers. The Senate – CNN needs the help more.

Yeah. Senate Democrats who control the committee released that memo. Sorry, released the executive summary of a longer memo that apparently no one is allowed to read. And the response to it was pretty interesting because I think on the one hand, you have sort of progressives, some natural progressives and some – I think some principal conservatives saying, hey, this is wrong. We shouldn't be doing this and that it's ineffective. But on the other hand, you have some very, very, very committed people on the other side. The former vice president is one of them. All of the former DCIs going back to 2000 and associate DCIs I think. I'm not thinking all of these associates but definitely all the former DCIs saying, hey, we did everything we're supposed to do and we did it within the bounds of the law and we saved lives. That they're really – and I think the American people – well, right now the American people are saying when they poll them, torture is bad, but hey, listen, if it's a choice between torture and another 9-11, we're fine with the waterboarding.

And I suspect that's where it's going to come down. This report and this issue seems to me to be one of those things where there's a fundamental disconnect between the people and the chattering classes. And the people get the bargain. Yeah, yeah. The one thing I would – you're right. Yeah, yeah. by the federal government, including the defense and intelligence establishment. Very careful lines have to be drawn. And John Yoo, when he was at the Department of Justice, as he's explained many times at

book length and column length and talking to us since, I mean, one thing you have to give John huge credit for is he's not, he, as I was talking about this with Tom Sowell, like Milton Friedman, John feels an obligation to explain himself to his fellow citizens. John very carefully drew lines about what was legal and what wasn't legal. In other words, he was one of those who worked extremely hard to make distinctions about what was legally torture and what wasn't torture. And one of the things that unnerves me a little bit about the current controversy is that nobody's attempting to make any such distinctions. And the other side is particularly, in my judgment, getting away with a lot of nonsense because they're using torture torture as we use it in ordinary speech is a very very subjective and a last

right term and when and it can apply to there are people who would say that sleep deprivation is torture keeping some some but putting somebody in a cold cell is torture. So you have to draw. And well, the point is, you can you can. People do argue about exact. I think Richard Epstein and John, you argue about exactly where the lines were drawn. worked very hard to draw lines about what the government could and could not do. Rob, did I just get cut off? You sounded as though you had swallowed a duck call signal.

Did I really? I'm sorry. The storm up here in northern California is – the rain is – I'm looking out my window. The rain is coming down and the wind is blowing and I'm sure my connection is getting wobblier and wobblier. Why don't we go back to what – making the distinction between what the government could – what torture is and what it is not? Yeah. OK. What torture is and what it is not. Yeah. Okay. So the point you could argue, and I think even Richard Epstein and John, you do argue about where John and others in the Department of Justice drew the line.

But it is an important datum in itself that very serious, conscientious people took immense pains. Well, while we get Peter back and while we deal with the fact that the rain is somehow affecting his internet signal, which leads us to believe that he's got a string with a can to it, tapping out ones and zeros with his pens. We ought to remind you, however,

that what you can expect very soon is for the U.S. torture, which was an idea that had subsided somewhat to come roaring back. And you'll find it's interesting manifestations in all kinds of pop culture. I have no doubt whatsoever that, Rob, you know the business. Probably movies are being made, television shows being pitched on this idea because torture is hot again especially. Well, they've all failed, right? I mean the problem with it is that all those shows failed.

I mean 24 did really well but 24 celebrated torture. Homeland is doing – having probably on Showtime is having a very, very good season, this season and it's all about – there's lots of torture going on on Homeland. So again, as I say, I agree with Peter. I think that the American people sort of writ large are willing to accept – so far anyway – are willing to accept the idea that waterboarding and sleep deprivation are not torture. Right there where John Hughes' famous torture memo was because it doesn't cause any lasting harm and anything else, anything more physical, anything more sort of violent does and is torture. And I suspect that where we're going to find is that there were instances that – in that report, if corroborated, those instances will be considered the Abu Ghraib of the CIA effort in counterterrorism. And that feels to me more like where this is going to land up culturally and politically as an attempt by an outgoing Senate chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, to get her last kicks in,

the last couple kicks into the Bush administration. They can get in. They got in. The irony, of course, is that the first person to pop up to administration, they can get in. They got in. The irony, of course, is that the first person to pop up to respond was Dick Cheney, who said this – I think his exact words were, this report is full of crap. Well, what they'll try to do if they bring it back in the culture is they try to have it both ways, that somehow the torturing is emblematic of America, its corruption. But yet somehow it's against our values, at least the values that the liberals perceive to be us and the ones that they are the sole stalwart holders of.

They're the ones who hold – As you say, we're lucky right now. I think we have John Yoo on the line. John, are you there? Yeah, I am. How are you guys? All right.. I think we have John Yoo online. John, are you there? Yeah, I am. How are you guys? All right. So I'm sorry. I just got a message that you were here. I know we have you for a short amount of time because you're busy appearing in front of the vast CNN audience, all ten of them.

So what do you make of this? What do you make of this memo, of this report by the Senate Democrats? What do you make of its revisionist history? Do you still stand by your definitions? And do you think that there are things in that report that cross the line? Well, first, I don't think we can call it a history. I think it's one of the most biased reports I've ever seen come out of the Senate. And that's saying something. I was on a Senate Judiciary Committee. I've run investigations like this.

And it's absolutely unprecedented for there to be a report, an investigation report, that wasn't bipartisan. And that's the crucial guarantee that allows us to have some reliance on whether the report tells us the truth. And then the second thing, which is, I think, even worse, is that this is a committee that wouldn't allow any of the people, officials who participated in the program to be interviewed. So it's like if we had a courtroom proceeding and the judge said, okay, prosecution gets to make its case and we're not going to hear from any witnesses. I've never heard of any kind of congressional investigation that wouldn't allow witnesses to testify and defend themselves. So first, I just don't trust what's in the report. And the second thing is, you can really see the test of it, I think, on the most important case that everyone should agree on, which is the Osama bin Laden case.

The report says, well, you know, the guy everyone admits, this courier who led us when they were getting information from other intelligence services and so on and so forth. You know, that may be true, but there's hundreds, if not thousands, of names in that database of suspected al-Qaeda members. Right. And only the interrogations are the things that led us to who that particular guy was and to follow him. And you wouldn't know that because the Senate intelligence committee was just building a prosecutorial case against the CIA. It didn't give anybody a chance to respond. Well, right now, the stories right now are about not about waterboarding, but about a lot of other even worse things. You read

the executive summary. Were there things on there that you thought would have crossed the line? Yes. I mean, there are things in there which were never approved by the justice department when i was there were not on a list of interrogation methods and look i think the story even there's two possible explanations one you could buy what the senate intelligence committee saying which is the cia has conspired in this grand conspiracy and cover-up in order to just brutalize and beat the hell out of al-Qaeda leaders for really, for what it would say, no reason. Or what I think, what I saw at

the time, what I think was really reinforced to me by reading the report, the summary, was that this is an agency that was on the mat reeling after 9-11, as we all were. We just suffered this enormous attack. And in just the space of a few weeks, the president, Congress, everyone is unified in demanding that the CIA push the envelope, become aggressive, and start a detention interrogation program that should be running at 100 miles an hour when it had been running at zero miles an hour. They didn't even have these kinds of programs before. So, of course, you're going to get some kind of chaos. You're going to have miscommunications. You're going to have people not sure what their orders are doing things they're not supposed to do. And in some cases, you're going to have people who shouldn't have been participating in the program. But I don't

think this is a sign of, as James was saying, this torture culture in America or failure of American values. I think these are men and women who are trying to protect the country under the most extreme circumstances, having just suffered this attack. We knew very little about Al-Qaeda, and everyone thought that there was going to be a second attack coming. And there were. It's just that we were able to stop them. So do you think this is a Washington, D.C. media story? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Peter. Oh, listen.

If my connection is bad, I will shut up. So I can hear you perfectly. But if I'm throwing things off with a bad connection, say so, Rob, and I'll just fall silent. But if you can hear me, John, it's Peter here. And here's my question. I heard just the other day, just yesterday in the car, I heard somebody on NPR interviewing a government official. And the government official was trying to do a good job of drawing lines, even as you did in your now famous memorandum, about what was and wasn't permitted. And the NPR interviewer brushed it all aside and said, yes, yes, yes, yes. But in common language, in common parlance, as ordinary people understand the word, was it torture?

And my question to you, John, is, is that a fair question? Isn't it important to emphasize that lines were drawn, that people did the hard work of trying to establish what was and was not permissible? First, before I answer your question, can I always use that blank check? And whenever I don't like one of Peter's questions, I can just say he has a bad connection. I can't hear you, Peter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I do.

That's what I do. It's like when Captain Kirk pretends he can't hear the commands from the Starfleet high command. You're breaking up. You're breaking up. Admiral Nelson turning a blind eye. No, I agree with you. I think, one, it's important. We did draw lines between what's permissible, what's not permissible.

We'd like to live in a world where we never have to ask where that line is. But this was a war that was thrust on us and the type of enemy we have been in that we had to ask those questions and answer them. And I think if you put the American people, you read them the list of what the enhanced interrogation methods were, all except waterboarding. And I think actually most Americans even think waterboarding would not be torture. I think American people are very reasonable. I'd be happy to put it to them,

to ask them what they think is reasonable under the circumstances or not, what most people think sort of. But so, you know, sleep deprivation, not letting people sleep more than six hours a night, making people stand at attention. You know, you could go down the list. And I think I just saw a poll out this week from Fox News that said Americans by two to one would be willing or would approve of the interrogation message, including waterboarding, if they thought it was necessary to get information that would save lives. So I think it's I think you're right. I think you're like the media wants to brush it off and just say everything is torture. But then this is a hard question for them. Well, then what would you be willing to do? Because the Feinstein Report's implication is, well, then they can sit there and have a lawyer and wait it out in New York prison, waiting for trial, and they'll never learn anything from them. They'll sit there for years. We have people from the First World Trade Center bombing back in the early 90s who were sitting in prison who still never told us anything. Right. So, John, Peter here, I have a second.

If you can hear my connection, I have a second question for you. It's a pretty easy question, so I think you will be able to hear my connection. And the question is this. You know a lot of people in the intelligence business, so to speak. And the question is, how is their morale? Because, in a certain sense, this democracy is asking the impossible of them. When 9-11 happens, the first reaction is the CIA and the intelligence community let us down. You're not doing your job.

You let this happen to the country. And now here we are, decades later, you did your job too well. You were too harsh. You were overdoing it. Come on. Knock off the zealotry. And if you're some 21-year-old kid at a good college thinking about maybe going into the intelligence business – Even Yale.

Even Yale, exactly. Oh, sorry. Slow down. So what effect does this have on hiring, on recruitment, on the morale of the people who are already there? The CIA guys, they're patriots. They do jobs that require them to make life or death choices, and they're underpaid, overworked. But worse than what most people complain about. And they're demoralized. And it's not just been, and this is kind of like the last straw because you're completely right, Peter, but this has been going on for the last five or six years. That's a point I tried to make in this piece I wrote yesterday. If you look at what President Obama has done with the CIA,

he's had prosecutors investigate all these guys. He had to go over and give a speech to try to buck up CIA morale because he had taken so many steps against the CIA. And this is what this reminds me of is like the 1970s under Carter. If you remember, Carter came in, Carter had even toyed with the idea of getting rid of the CIA. He fired, I think more than almost half of all the special operations directorate. And you're going to see intelligence. We're seeing intelligence failures. Now we've had a run of them actually,

you know, where we think ISIS is the gene of varsity, but we don't know Russia is going to invade Ukraine. You know, the Benghazi attacks, just like in the late varsity, or we don't know Russia's going to invade Ukraine, or the Benghazi attack. Just like in the late 70s, the CIA couldn't predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the Iranian revolution. We're going to suffer from this five or six year period now of attacks on the CIA by President Obama and by Senate Democrats, but we're going to suffer for over a long term

because we're losing all the investments into intelligence that President Bush made for the first eight years. John, Peter, this is my last question before I relinquish you to Rob and James again. And the question is you personally, your morale. You were sued. You continue to be vilified. You've had people protest against you. And yet to those of us who know you well, even off camera, so to speak, you're serene and cheerful. You show no evidence of scar tissue. Not at the craps table, I have to say. Not at the craps table. So how do you do it, John? Did you guys tell him how I learned how to play craps in Yiddish from the Blue Yeti? That's right.

That's right. He was playing craps and shouting in Yiddish, which was a very weird thing to see, just so you know, on the National Review Cruise, thanks to the Yiddish lessons by our own Blue Yeti. Also, every day you have to say oy vey at the end, I think. Yeah, that's right. So how do you do it? Will you take the question seriously, please? You know, I live in Berkeley. So, you know, this is just par for the game.

I mean, I've been, you know, living behind enemy lines now for, I guess, almost 20 years. I mean, Peter, you must know what it's like to live in... Well, we all do. We all live in these crazy liberal communities. And I just, you know, this is not even the most exciting thing going on in Berkeley right now. And we just have these riots that have been going on for the last five or six days where, right, the looters for some reason thought it was a good idea to break into.

It's very telling what liberals try to steal. They went into Trader Joe's and tried to steal champagne. I mean, who drinks Trader Joe's champagne? And then they looted Radio Shack. These are like the first people to step foot in a Radio Shack in 30 years. Hey, so John, I mean, I just – I know you've got to run. What do you make of that? Since you brought up the riots, the riots are in reaction to perceived police brutality in Ferguson and in Staten Island.

I've got two questions, one a serious one and one not a serious one. The serious one is what do you make of that? Do you make a distinction between those two events as best we can as distant observers between what happened at Ferguson and the chokehold in Staten Island? Yeah, I do. I think based on what I've just seen, I don't think the killing in Brown was illegal. I think the police officer was justified. And the grand jury is basically a random selection of people from the community,

and you're asking them to make a judgment about what was reasonable. That's a constitutional test, mind you, for using force by police officers. What's reasonable under the circumstances at that time? And grand juries are already biased in favor of prosecution. So if this grand jury looked at that evidence, I looked at it, it seemed to me that the police officer acted reasonably and that the doubts weren't against him. I think it's very different with the Garner case.

I mean, looking at the video of what happened, I just don't see any reason why force was required there. With the guy selling these cigarettes, I don't see you need to use deadly force to restrain him. So I think it's very possible to have a consistent standard, you know, to be principled about it and come out differently in both cases. I don't think that every time someone is killed by the police, this means that we're a corrupt nation or something. So I worry that a lot of people, and I see it in Britain,

that people are just hijacking two unfortunate events and using it to try to engage in hooliganism. Well, you teach law school. I actually want to put a post on, ask record-sharing members, what we're supposed to call these people, anarchists or hoodlums. What's a good 21st century word for these people? Well, I mean you teach law. You're a law professor. Law students at Columbia and I believe Georgetown and now Harvard have asked a petition and been granted I think. I'm not sure about Harvard but the other schools.

Passes or waivers or extensions on papers they have due and extensions on exams they have to write because they're just so upset and so traumatized by the events in Ferguson and the grand jury in the Garner case. To the extent that Columbia Law School has counselors available to these little wounded law students who just simply can't make it to their exam because they're too upset. Will you be doing the same thing for your students? I hope so.

You know, for my students, the traumatic event is being in the classroom. But I think it's ridiculous. What I tell the students about this is, why don't you try that on the judge next time you appear in a courtroom on behalf of a client? So you suppose you do your social justice thing and you have to represent

a poor criminal defendant and you go to the judge and you say, I need an extension because of some national tragedy, they're going to kick your ass right out of there. There's not even no judge that'll settle for that kind of stuff. Right. We know you have to get to CNN enough of this first lugger madness.

It's been a mitzvah having you and we can't wait to have you back. Ladies and gentlemen, John,, give my regards to CNN, and I hope their questions aren't too loaded when they drop them in your lap. Okay, thanks. Thanks, John. You know, shortly after the Democratic memo was released the other day on terror, there was somebody who tweeted from one of the usual sites, Salon or Slate or Dissent or Dissentary or whatever, and said,

you just know that after 9-11 there were people of the usual sites, Salon or Slate or Dissent or Dissentary or whatever, and said, you just know that after 9-11, there were people in the CNN saying, great, now we get to torture someone. This pre-existing culture, of course, of people just, oh, just a good way to get their hands on some dusky person and start attaching the electrodes. These are the same people, of course, who will cheer on the Berkeley demonstrators because they're speaking truth to plate glass windows and showing us exactly the sins of American capitalism and culture and whatnot. And these are the people who, of course, who believe it's still to be a brave statement to wear that stupid Guy Fawkes mask out there from V from Vendetta and have that smirking little infantile adolescent idiocy as you liberate the champagne. If you're curious, however, as to exactly why they wear those masks and you haven't been caught up on that whole nonsense and how it goes back to the guys who wrote The Matrix and how no longer they're guys anymore but a guy and a guy who's not a guy anymore.

That's an aspect of pop culture you may just not have any contact or truck with, but it's important. It counts because pop culture drives politics eventually. And that's why you want to go to culturator.com where pop culture matters. You will find features such as the daily scene. That's the best from the internet on hot pop culture topics. Original posts every day covers books, comics, culture, fashion, movies, games, music, sports, tech, and TV. And it's got the writing of all the people that you like, Emily Smith, Abby Schlechter, R.J. Mohler, Mark Judge, and many, many more. I hope to write for the site myself, and I'd love to see Peter and Rob there as well. Peter, for example, could do a piece about the pop culture effects of 1950s British stage drag queens.

Yeah, exactly. You can never get enough of that. We should say that Acculturated, I mean, it came out of a book by Templeton Press. I contributed to the book. Emily Esfahani-Smith often appears here at Ricochet. R.J. Muller is a Ricochet

poster and friend. So it's kind of in the family. It's a great site. And the Templeton Press actually has some great books too. Just adding to that. We'll be telling you more about it in subsequent podcasts, quoting from it. But in the meantime, follow the link.

Go there, acculturator.com. It's a site you may have found a long time ago and you're glad we're getting around to describing it. Or you just may need some new stuff. I clean out my browser book tabs or bookmarks at the start of every year and add them as I go along. What do I need? What do I don't care about anymore? Acculturated is one of those that's going to stick. Speaking of keeping it all in the family, the member feed segment this week, we had a post about anybody else married to a liberal in which Jay Fly, am I pronouncing that? Flea? Fly? It looks German, but I don't know. I wrote, I love my wife. She disagrees with just about everything I think on politics.

She's pretty far to the left, and although she's a member of the I don't vote party, you know, that liberal really thinks the most annoying, non-fact-based, naive things you can possibly imagine. That's my dear wife, and I don't mean that cynically at all at all he said she's perhaps the most dear person on earth to me from her point of view that angry racist warmongering reactionary controversial dictatorial conservative she can never stand is me ah and quote i couldn't live like that do any of you know that sort of – Carville – no. No. If somebody you're married to holds a series of positions that you believe to be intellectually vacuous, how can – I mean I don't know how you can divorce – I mean there are things that my wife and I disagree upon. Of course.

But I respect the reasoning that she has behind it. If I was married to a Bolshevik who realized – who deeply believed that the extermination of the Menshevik menace was necessary to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat, I mean I – how do you just get past that and say hand me the – pass me the gravy? Well, I mean I guess it depends on who's making the gravy. I don't know. That's a good question. I mean I'm not married, but I have many, many incredibly liberal progressive friends, and we seem to do OK. And a lot of times we just don't talk about politics, some things, so they kind of roll their eyes when a subject brings up. I mean I remember I went to a dinner party. Now, this is in 2007, and I was sort of sitting around. There 20 people there and one person just said hey i know let's go around the room i'm really interested in this and everybody say obama or clinton

and my hosts who know me very well kind of looked at me and said why don't we start with rob and you know there's a look of horror on some people's faces. But then again, I don't have to drive home with any of those people. So that's – you're making me rethink this, James. Friends are different. Friends, you can always step back, walk away. But when you're wedded to somebody, living in the same place contractually, legally, morally, philosophically bound for the rest of your lives. I can't imagine.

I mean how do you – everything then becomes freighted. There's always this – I would imagine this unspoken lurking argument behind almost every element of domestic life. That's right. I mean because how you view the world as a liberal or a conservative is not just related to tax policy or foreign policy stat. It affects your worldview and that affects the way that you regard almost everything. So I don't – My advice to Jay Flea, Jay Fly, is have a big family. Children, having children tends to drive out discussion of anything but the kids themselves. That's the first point. And the second point is in my experience, by the way, so my wife and I have, as it happens,

agree on everything. If anything, you're more liberal, I think. I think that may be so. But as a matter of fact, we never talk politics because it's always a question of, oh, Issa's got a tickle in her throat. Did Andrew do his homework? What's the latest? It's just family life. And then this is my contention.

On this point, I may be – on the first point, I'm absolutely certain. The more kids you have, the less politics you talk. My contention is that raising a family is an inherently conservative project. You start to resent taxes in a way that you never would have when all you had to support was your own beer and pizza habit. When what you're trying to do is save some money for college, you start to pay a lot of attention. You see what liberal nonsense does in harming the curriculum in junior high and high school. All of this is an inherently conservative project. And you raise those kids and my suspicion is that Mrs. Flea or Fly, we don't know.

It's bothering now that we don't know how to pronounce that name. But very clearly there will be a distinction available and the distinction will be between the liberal political views which just aren't serious and the increasingly conservative views attached to the raising of the children which are really serious. That's what I suspect. I'd like to think so. But living here in Minneapolis, I see a lot of examples of people where they may indeed feel the tax pinch but that means that we just have to raise taxes on those 1%. They may see the schools are failing, but they don't attribute that whatsoever to an ossified bureaucracy and a destroyed family structure in some communities. They attribute it to insufficient funding. So, I mean, never underestimate the inability of common sense to penetrate the chitinous carapace that these people have wrapped around their most precious ideas.

Here also, I'm sorry, I just burned the mic there for some reason. Here also in the Twin Cities, right by my office, a building is a huge stadium in which the Vikings will be gambling in a couple of years, you know, losing team. A billion dollars is being spent to give them a playpen, hurrah. However, some may say, this is the third stadium we've had here. And I anticipate that in 20, 25 years, it will be declared insufficient for the needs of the future because it doesn't have enough holographic projection suites or drones will

not be able to reach the VIP areas. And so they'll have to tear it down and build a new one. What happened to the Hubert Humphrey Astrodome? The Metrodome. Metrodome. The Hubert H. Horatio Hornblower Humphrey Metrodome was clawed apart last year. You're kidding. I wrote the speech that the then vice president of the United States delivered the day that thing was dedicated.

Wow. I have outlived the Metrodome. You've outlived a giant building, Peter. Oh, no. Sorry. You're a monument. All right. Change the subject.

Continue. Whatever you were saying. Get it off my – the cricket on my back. Well, the stadium will be wonderful and brand new and gorgeous until the day that it isn't and they have to build another one. But then some people looking in the future saying, is there even going to be an NFL 20, 30 years down the line? There was a recent story, and Peter, this should be of interest to you. Football maniac that you are. Half of Americans, survey says, survey says don't want their sons playing football.

And I assume it's because they don't want their noggins to be knocked in their tender brains to be rattling around their brain pan. Does this mean that football eventually will be – that we'll have to start importing football players from other countries and they'll all be Samoans? I mean tell me. What does this mean? Well, there's a – I mean we don't know how many people wanted their sons to play football 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago. So you just don't know. It's likely that a lot of people, 50%, that's more or less, you could just say, I don't know any mother who's thrilled that her son wants to play football. So maybe that's the 50%. The moms of America don't want their kids playing football. Who knows what the poll means? What I've noticed, this controversy about football and the concussion, you can divide that into two pieces.

One piece is actually concerned about concussions, and they are therefore interested in all these medical findings and the possible redesign of helmets. At Dartmouth College, for example, the medical school is working with the football team. They've put sensors in helmets so that the coaches know immediately. They can read right on the sidelines how hard a hit a kid took. And if he took a hit of a certain degree of severity, they immediately yank him out and do a test on him whether he feels bad or not. I mean there are ways of addressing the problem because it's a beautiful game. But then there is also an attack which is just – which is cultural. Football is – football is middle American.

It's like NASCAR racing and that's just another liberal attack on another element of American culture on which they – to which they condescend. Well, nuts to that is my attitude. But isn't – I mean isn't partly the solution not better helmets but worse helmets? I mean part of the problem is that all that fancy equipment just makes the players feel like their heads are kind of encased in some safety material. Whereas back when they wore the leather helmets, you didn't see these kind of giant headbutts. They didn't lead with their head. They led with their shoulder. And apparently in rugby, which is a rough, tough sport, but there are no helmets worn in rugby.

Apparently, just as a statistical matter, it is the case that there are fewer concussions in rugby. But that's the kind of question that the NFL and people who really love the game of football are asking. They're asking serious questions about how do we address this problem. But the liberals aren't asking serious questions. They just want football to go away because they don't like it. It's too middle American. I think they don't like it especially because they like it so much in Texas. Exactly.

I couldn't agree more actually. I'm sure that's a piece of it. I'm sure that's a piece of it. Well, to paraphrase the old song for liberals, all my vexes live in Texas. If they could just carve it off and give it back to Mexico, they'd be happy to do so. Listen, folks. That had to have been spontaneous, didn't it, Rob? James couldn't have written that down in the middle of the night some night and said,

it's amazing what this man does. Well, I was just going through rhymes in my head while you were talking. In fact, that'll work. Well, it is time for us to wrap it up, but we remind you that if you want to keep this podcast going, there's a bunch of things you should do. One of them is patronize our sponsors.

And by patronize, I don't mean speak to them in a contemptuous, condescending way. I mean go there and give them money. And that's why foodiedirect.com has a coupon code for you, Ricochet10, that will allow you to take $10 off your first order. And the food you get will be delish. And also acculturator.com. Go there. Give them the clicks. Enjoy.

Read it and find another place to bookmark for 2015. And, of course, we'll see you at that other place that Peter and Rob have so masterfully cobbled together and presented to the world with grace and skill and such philanthropic glee. And that is Ricochet 2.0. Guys, we'll see you down the road. It's been fun. And we'll see everybody in the comments. Next week. Next week, fellas.

I can't stand the rain against my window Bringing back sweet memories Yeah, when the rain, do you remember? When we were together Everything was so grand Now that we've parted There's just one sound That I just can't stand I can't stand the rain

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