The Ricochet Podcast - Talk Amongst Yourselves

Episode Date: August 21, 2014

This week on the podcast, we’re guest free, but with plenty to talk about: Ferguson, James Foley, Rick Perry, the Minnesota State Fair, DeBlasio learns a life lesson, and last but not least, help us help you: silence Rob Long’s new member pitch from the podcast for all eternity. Click here to find out how. Music from this week’s episode: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron The... 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. I'm the king of the world! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long.

I'm James Lylex, and for guests today, well, we don't have any guests. We don't need any guests. It's just the three of us talking about the world and its issues. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Live from the timeless and placeless depths of the internet, it's the Ricochet Podcast number 226. It's brought to you by Harry's Shave. Hey, you tired of bleeding in the morning when you try to look beautiful?

Harry's is the cure. For the finest shave at the best price, go to harrys.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET at your checkout. And of course, we're also brought to you by Encounter Books. For 15% off any title, go to encounterbooks.com

and use the coupon code RICOCHET at the checkout. This week's featured title is Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Maravchik. And of course, we're brought to you by this entity, this thing, this wonderful, glorious, consensual hallucination we call Ricochet.com. Brought to you by Peter and Robin. Here's Rob Long to tell you why you, yes, you should belong.

Thank you, James. And you know what? If all goes according to plan, this will be one of the last times you have to hear me do this. I know everyone loves this part. You're leaving. No, simmer down. No, don't get too excited. No, listen, if you're listening, I'll do this now and then understand that maybe we don't have to do it again. If you're listening to this podcast and you are a Ricochet member, we are pleased to have you with us and we are thankful and we are proud and honored to have you be a member of Ricochet along with us as part of our community. If you

are listening to this podcast and you are not a member of Ricochet and there are tens of thousands of you who are not, and believe me, if everybody listens to this podcast was a member of Ricochet, well, we'd be a huge success instead of, you know, we're doing OK, but we'd be great. Let me tell you what you're missing. You're missing becoming part of the fastest growing, most civil, most intelligent, funniest, wittiest, best community on the web right now for center right conversation and community. It's not just what you read. It's not just the fact that you get to participate and comment on stories and interact with our contributors and our members. It's stuff like the extra podcast you get when you're a member. It's the extra events that we're throwing. It's stuff like that. It's even the coffee mugs, which arrived today, arrived this week,

Ricochet coffee mugs. There are a lot of people tweeting those, by the way, which I thought was kind of funny. And a lot of people making fun of John Gabriel's Twitter icon, you know, he's peeking over Coffee Mug. I got a lot of tweets about that. It's not a lot of money. It's about five bucks a month for the Coolidge level, the Calvin Coolidge level, which is our sort of introductory sort of, you know, no-nonsense practical level, Calvin Coolidge being the sainted president who was the last president, I think, who sort of understood what a president really should do, which is to keep his mouth shut.

We also have two other tiers of membership where you get a few more goodies. We have the Mrs. Thatcher level. It's the Mrs. Thatcher level. People keep calling it the Thatcher level, but that's not. It's the Mrs. Thatcher level. And, of course, the Ronald Reagan tier.

The Ronald Reagan tier is the highest tier. There will never be a higher tier than Ronald Reagan, the Reagan tier. That is the highest tier possible. And you get a bunch of stuff. We're having a big dinner. We're trying to arrange that with our Reagan members now, like the best possible location, the best possible date, so that we can make sure that they can all be there and getting a great guest too. So there's lots of good stuff, lots of reasons to join. We'd like to thank our Ricochet newest Mrs. Thatcher members,

Bruce Polk, Darn Cat, Walker, Limestone Cowboy, and Mizu. So thank you for joining this week. We appreciate it. But I want to say one thing before I get going. I just posted on the member feed. So if you remember, I posted a phone number on the member feed. It's there. Please go to it.

And we'd like to have you call and leave a message. The phone is going to ring. It's like a Google voice thing. So it's going to ring and then it's going to ask you – it's going to ring like you're actually calling a person, which you're not. But just wait for it to ring and then you'll hear Blue Yeti's voice saying, hi, please leave a message. And leave a message. And we'd like you to leave a short testimonial for why you're a member, why you like Ricochet, and why you think it's worth being a member. And we'd like to play those instead of this lousy thing that I do once a week and have done now for 200 weeks or 300 weeks or however many weeks.

And we'd like to have you guys do it because I think, as always, I'm lousy at it and you're much better at it. And if you're interested, we'd love to have you just leave a little short little CFC compliant please message. And also, if you have something negative to say, you can just post that on my member feed post there. You don't have to record that. We'll set up another line for that stuff. But anyway, so please join. It's a great idea getting people to supply your content for free and paying them nothing.

These guys have got the internet 2.0 all figured out. You know, Rob, you mentioned something interesting there, and Peter, jump in on this if you find this curious as well. In the modern world, when we hear a ringing phone, we think, well, we're being connected. There were the people who lost relatives on that plane that disappeared, and they said, but the phones are ringing, thinking that there must actually be a physical object on the other end that's making a sound, when actually, it's nothing of the sort. It's just a sound they play before you get connected, and there is no other phone ringing on the other end. But we're used to that.

We're used to that old vestige of the previous technology. And it's always disconcerting to when you listen to old radio shows and realize that the sound was different when phones rang. Or, for example, in Great Britain, I remember listening to The Wall and when the phone was ringing, the Pink Floyd album, the sound there was the busy signal back here. And so different cultures have different sounds that mean I am being telephonically communicated with somebody. But of course, they soon mean nothing. I mean, if you talk to anybody who's of a certain age, the idea that a phone number, first of all, the idea there was a phone number that corresponded to a specific, you know, bakelite object that was connected to the wall,

it just seems so weirdly primitive, just crazy primitive. It's hard to explain that to people, young people. I know. And also on your phone, even on my ancient cell phone, I noticed I call it a cell phone rather than a mobile to indicate how ancient it is. But when somebody is trying to call you, you have a button you can touch to reject the call. Yes. When somebody is trying to call you, you have a button you can touch to reject the call. And in the olden times, tell me if it wasn't this way in the house in which you grew up, men. When the phone rang, it was just a duty to pick it up. It was an imperative.

It was an imperative. The idea of not answering the phone simply wouldn't have occurred to anyone. No matter hour, night, day, the interrupt dinner, If the phone rings, somebody needs to talk to you. My, my wife, my wife is of that ilk and I free, I hate phones ringing. They interrupt my nap. They interrupt my work. So I mute them whenever possible. If I forget and it rings, let it ring. And my wife looks at me like I'm the rudest person on earth. Somebody's calling. And she's of the belief. tell me about this, if this also crosses generations, that if somebody calls you to chit-chat, it is up to them to initiate the end of the conversation. And I'm looking at her like, are you nuts? That's like somebody knocking at your door, getting a foot in the crack, coming on in, sitting down on the sofa, pouring themselves some tea and staying there as long as they like.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is taking Midwestern values and politeness way too far. I remember, I think I heard a lecture once by Joseph Campbell who had a very funny line. He said, there are really only two stages of life. When you're young, the phone rings and you say, it's for me, it's for me. And when you're old, the phone rings and you say, it's for me, it's for me. And when you're old, the phone rings and you say, it's for me, it's for me.

It's the only two. Oh, true. But on the other hand, I remember when answering machines came in, which relieved you of the obligation because now you could hide behind the anonymity of the machine itself, which had an electronically pre-programmed voice. So I would come home as a young man from my grueling job downtown at TV Guide, and I'd hit the little button, and the thing would say, hello, you have no messages. And they might as well have replaced the word messages with friends, because that's exactly how it's like, hello, you have no friends. Well, listen, guys, I know that everybody's fascinated by this, but what they really want to hear are three Caucasian fellows of gigantic about the country discussing exactly what happened in Ferguson and what it means for America and what people should be thinking. So let me go to you first, Peter. Um, you've been watching this from

a distance like everybody else. I don't know how intently you have, I don't know whether or not you have been a read to shifting in the, in the, in the winds of controversy that knocked this case back and forth. Where did you start out thinking about this and where are you now? And Rob, I'll ask you the same thing. So prepare your question. My first impression, I think this is the impression I mentioned when we spoke about it last week. My first overwhelming impression was I don't know what happened in the encounter between the cop and the kid. But what I see in Ferguson is an over-militarized police

and an over-reaction by the cops. That's the way it looked to me at first. Now, here we are. The protests have continued, but it's not just protests. There's still some looting taking place. The story has begun to emerge. We have a video of poor young Michael Brown engaging in a robbery at a drugstore. He was obviously violent. He shoved the guy from whom he was the drugstore attendant. I should say I think it was a convenience store. He shoved him and then glowered at him and took another step toward him to intimidate him. So the kid was in an aggressive frame of mind that evening. We now have an autopsy, the results of which have been made public.

He was shot six times from the front, not the back, as was originally alleged. Six times sounds high, but as I recall, four of the six were in the arm. They wouldn't have stopped him. We now have what looks like a kind of crystallizing set of sequence of events that is the witnesses have lined up and seem to be corroborating the policeman's account, which is that Michael Brown first tried to slam the door on the policeman, grapple for the cop's gun, walked away. The cop got out of the car to accost him or to tell him to stop. And then Michael Brown turned around and lunged at him.

And the cop, it looks reasonable to me, opened fire. So what you have there is an extremely unfortunate circumstance that does not, however, say a darn thing about race relations in America or any larger, wider issue at all, as Jason Reilly pointed out. And by the way, so the other aspect of this, there are two things angry piece in the Wall Street Journal saying, where are the black leaders with real moral authority? Where is a Martin Luther King Jr.? Nowhere to be seen. Instead, we have hucksters and shills. And lo and behold, by one week later, Jason Riley, young African-American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who has been writing and speaking about this on television and I think is just emerging as such an impressive journalist, but also what is there to say? A figure of sanity and authority. And his point of view is – he said this.

This is a very close paraphrase if I'm not quoting him exactly. On Fox News the other evening, two evenings ago as I recall, he said, I know something about growing up as a black male in the inner city. It's not hard to avoid being shot by the cops. If they pull you over, you answer their questions and you go on your way. What's hard is to avoid being shot by your fellow African Americans. And he pointed out that at about 11% of the population, African Americans account for something like 50% of homicides and the overwhelming majority of those homicides, I believe the statistic is 90%,

are black-on-black violence. So what we have here is not the man who needs to be protested against. We don't have an incident, as best I can tell, that even begins to justify looting as if an incident could justify looting. What we have is another example of the tragedy of the African-American experience in this country. That's where I stand right now. Rob. Yeah.

I mean, look, I mean, it seems like what we have is like what I forget. In the military circles, I'm sure somebody listening to podcasts can give me the proper terminology. But it's something like a tragic cascade or – tragic may be the wrong word. A cascade of events, right? One happens, the other happens, the other happens, the other happens, and all these things occur. Sometimes you're aware of – for instance, we now know that Michael Brown came from that convenience store where he stole a box of cigars of Swisher Sweets or Philly Blunts or something. And of course I love the fact that no one in the media ever asked why this young man was stealing old man cigars as if we're all supposed to kind of know secretly in the under news why young black men steal those kinds of cigars. It's so they can – Peter, I'll tell you.

Do you know why? No, I don't. OK. So they can empty them. They empty tell you. Do you know why? No, I don't. OK. So they can empty them. They empty them. They're called blunts. They empty them.

They kind of squeeze them out of the tobacco and they fill it with marijuana. I see. That's what he was going to – either going to sell them or do it with them. I mean that's – I'm not trying to cast – I'm not trying to attack the victim here. I'm just saying that's what he was doing. But everybody had to pretend that that's not what they were doing. I'm sure there were some people at CNN who didn't know. But I guarantee you there are a bunch of people at CNN that did know. So the cop didn't know that.

But the cop did know that there was this kid walking in the street. And the cop did. There was that weird altercation you get when cops push you around, which does happen. It has happened to me. It happens to all of us. Every now and then, there's a pushy cop who kind of is jerky. I had a cop pull me over for no reason on Halloween night in Malibu, a sheriff, an LA County sheriff, and he was just kind of a jerk about it. My dog was in the backseat and the dog was kind of barking and he was just being really kind of horrible for no reason.

And I've had – that happens, right? And then that's part of the cascade that then turns into this tragedy kind of impulse control he didn't have at that one time where he probably – I think. We don't know. I think he probably escalated that first stop, right? Asking a kid to get off the street shouldn't escalate to that extent. OK, but it did and the kid attacked him and the kid was wrong. What I find so amazing is how quickly it turns into not what happened in Ferguson, but how quickly it turns into one more opportunity for, frankly, if you look at the news now, white liberals and white progressives to come to a place and pour out all their political needs and political wishes and progressive drama, right?

It's all this incredibly almost autoerotic explosion of white progressive, white liberal attitude. So you have these political agitators from Chicago who come down. They have pictures of these white guys throwing rocks, right? And you have all these MSNBC journalists emoting. You have all this outpouring. It's almost as if the people who are involved are merely, as we all have always known, are merely pawns. It's not really – no one really cares about the African Americans in Ferguson. No one really cares, as Jason Reilly rightly points out in his book,

which is excellent, by the way, we're going to have him on a podcast. I think we're going to have him rather recently, but he couldn't make it because of timing, but we're going to have him soon. The book is just fantastic. It's called Please Stop Helping Us. No one really cares about them because if you cared about them, you wouldn't be so precious and specific about the solutions that you allow and the solutions that you don't. We all know the problem. We all know Michael Brown's problem, right? Where's his dad? I haven't seen his dad on TV. You're just living in some Cosby-esque

fantasy there. A couple of things occurred to me at the first. I got all these tweets after the autopsy of Michael Brown was released and said two shots in the head. Wow, that's an execution. That man was executed. And I thought, do you honestly believe? I mean, I don't know what happened. We're finding out what happened

as we learn what happened to the cop, as we learn what happened to the body. But do you actually believe that a policeman stops a guy who's trying to escape, shoots him in the back, in the head, knowing he's executing this guy for absolutely nothing more than, not even knowing that he stole a box of cigars and thinking that nothing is going to happen to my career or myself because of this. I can just wantonly shoot this guy for no reason because I'm in the mood to do so. I mean, you have to believe that's the modus vivendi, the modus operandi of the cops around there. And as Rob says, yeah, there's pushy cops. We've all met one. But, you know, the idea that they're just going to shoot a guy and think, well, interesting day, down a couple of bullets, have to put in a requisition. You think that's absurd. And then again, you read an article, I believe

in the Washington Post, from a cop who's telling you how to avoid essentially getting shot by a cop. And what he tells you is, do what I say. Do what I say and you won't get hurt. Yeah, I mean, I hate that. And I found that to be an utterly offensive, I mean, there's good advice in that thing,

but the idea that just shut up and do what I say or I will shoot you, that's the flip side of saying it's absurd that he set out that day just to kill a guy. On the other hand, here's the mentality of a guy who is saying, I'm sorry. You have to do what I have to say or I have the right to harm you physically. That I find, you know, that is wrong. Right. But look, there's a whole this whole pie chart here. The pie chart is a whole constellation of other issues.

Right. There are things I mean, Glenn Reynolds, the insta-ponent has been documenting for years now. All what he calls these these outrages of these no knock raids. Right. Where these these usually federal agents burst into your house without knocking and raid your house. People have been killed. People have been like shot. People you don't know. You don't know who's who's bursting into your house without knocking and raid your house. People have been killed. People have been like shot. People, you don't know who's bursting into your house. Babies maimed by a flashbang. Yeah. And often this has been, often it's the wrong house, right? Right. So it is true. There's this hyper-militarization of the police and there's this hyper-militarization and I, you know, the Department of Education does not need a SWAT team. OK?

So that is true. It is also true that there are racist cops. That is also true. It is also true that cops can be pushy sometimes and they can be kind of – they swagger around with their big nightstick and their gun and their big old car and they can be jerks. And that happens to me too all the time. And our contributor, Ricochet contributor, Jack Dunphy is a good friend of mine and I love him. And every now and then I see him at a party in LA and I'm like, hey, dude, this happened to me. And he's like, oh, come on. Yeah, I know. But that happens. All these things can be true. But it's a thought experiment. Imagine if there were next 12 months, no unarmed, no bad thing, no untoward or out of – or unfair or unjust action happened to an African-American male at the hands of a policeman.

Would the plight of African males in America be any different? And the answer is no. Well, the answer is, no, you're absolutely right, Rob. And there's more to it. You mentioned all of these white progressives coming in to pour their needs on the situation. You want somebody to ask them the question they cannot answer and nobody can answer.

Which set of laws would have prevented this? Would have prevented the Michael Brown tragedy from happening? How much money would it have taken to implement those laws? Give me, you're the social architect. Give me the exact constellation of regulations and expenditures by the state that would have kept this from happening. And of course, there's no answer to that. It's a preposterous question. But that's nevertheless their answer for absolutely everything. We've got to demolish the prison industrial complex. We've got to put more money into education. And then somehow when you flip that equation magically without the social intervention of the father, the values,

the culture, the neighborhood, somehow flowers grow from the pile of refuse. It's hard. We're coming up. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's very famous, very shocking at the time publication. He was at the Department of Labor and he published something called A Report on the Negro Family, A Call to National Action. Negro, of course, was the term at the time. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan laid out in shocking detail what was taking place in the inner city in America, the breakdown above all of the family structure. And he predicted that unless the United States was able somehow to reconstitute the African-American family, then there would be generation after

generation mired in ignorance, stuck in the inner city, unable to, all right. And when he issued that report, the illegitimacy rate among African-Americans was, as I recall, about 25%. Today, it is over 70%. By the way, among Hispanics, it's over 50%. Among Caucasians, it's over 30%. But among African Americans, it's over 70%. When Rob says, where was Michael Brown's father,

that's not a question. That is a kind of primal scream. We've known for half a century that this was a very serious problem. All the data that has come in in that half century since says to us over and over and over again that kids raised in intact families do dramatically better in every aspect of life than kids raised without intact families. Here's something. I mean James Q. Wilson wrote – was a wonderful, brilliant writer, brilliant – technically he was a political scientist I think at UCLA. He wrote the very famous essay, The Broken – created the broken window theory,

which was about policing and police actions and it was really kind of informed the Giuliani administration's attitude towards policing in New York City. And he said, listen, broken windows in a neighborhood signal subconsciously to people that no one cares. Graffiti signals subconsciously that no one cares. So you got to take care of the little things and that lead that, that helps stop the cascade to larger things. And I once had, I did dinner with him once with actually one of our Ricochet contributors and friend, Heather Higgins.

And we were talking about it. This is a near, you know, this is maybe the late, maybe 2000, year 2000. So it was like, it was not that long ago.

And, but Giuliani was still mayor. And of course the crime rate in New York city had plummeted. And Giuliani was being lauded as like this incredibly, you know, thoughtful mayor. And I said, what do you – was it just the broken window theory? And he kind of looked at me and he put down his wine glass. He said, well, yeah, obviously I like the broken window theory.

I created it. But he said there's a demographic item here too, which is that demographically there are fewer 18-year-old males in New York City or males between 16 and 23. And he said all crime is basically created by 18-year-old males. Those are the most dangerous people around, right? In a society, they're the ones that cause all the trouble. And as everybody on this podcast has been an 18-year-old male. You know exactly how stupid you were at 18. And he said when you have fewer of those, you're going to naturally get – the crime rate is going to naturally go down because that cohort, somewhere between 16 and 23, they cause all the trouble.

And Michael Brown was an 18-year-old male, a big one too by the way he's a big kid and what an 18 year old male needs more than anything is a father correct correct the the one more statistic this is to me the most heartbreaking of all. This is in Stephen and Abigail Thurnstrom's book, the title of which eludes me at the moment, I'm sorry to say. The percentage of African-American children who will live in a household with both parents present to the age of 18. Care to guess? No. 10%. 10%. And as Tom Sowell points out again and again when you speak to him about it, that statistic is a statistic that began to emerge and get worse in the 60s, late 60s, and the 70s after the civil rights legislation.

Right. Well, let's all go back in time and laugh at Dan Quayle from bringing up Murphy Brown, right? Yeah, right. Let's go back and have a great, wonderful, self-congratulatory wank over the fact that one person in one etalitated strata of the rich media elite is able to have a kid without suffering any consequences and set an example that nobody else can fill. Katy Perry comes out this couple of weeks ago and says she

wants to have a kid and she doesn't need a dude, a dude. You can see that partly as a reaction to being married to Russell Brand, or you can just say, you know, she traded up by the way. She's, yeah, she's got a lot of money and a lot of fame and she can afford to be insulated from all the consequences. Does this send a message? Well, there was a nice little article in Wired magazine on the UK side. This is my next national review column, actually, in the print version. But a guy saying, you know, with a coming transhumanist future where we're going to be able to grow babies in artificial wombs outside our bodies and live to be 170, shouldn't we be talking about licensing children? Shouldn't we be talking about giving parents a state approval in order to breed? Because the

wrong people, after all, are breeding. And I'm thinking, if you think you're having a fight with voter ID today, imagine going into all of these other communities and saying, I'm sorry, you're breeding too much. We need to take away your right to do so by pumping some antibiotics and some contraceptives into your water. Can you imagine the state saying on behalf of the next generation of African-American children, we are going to require the parents to have a license to breed? Never happened. Never happened in a million years. But by the same token, nothing the culture is saying is working and nothing of the experience that these people themselves are having is changing the attitude. And one more thing before I let you go. I work equidistant between two welfare shelters.

One of them is for families. I think they have a preference for intact families, and I see a lot more dads hanging around. They're not the happiest guys in the world, and frankly, they look a little sullen as they're trailing along behind the woman and the kid, but they're there. The other one is just come on, come all. And I saw the other day, this line, this like four or five women, all very young, all pushing strollers, all clutching another child as they all walked across the street and filed into the dark maw of this odiferous palace. And I just thought, wow, that here are all of these little men, all of these little boys, all these little girls, and they're all going to grow up in this matriarchy without ever having a man

to show them what it means to be a man. And they'll learn it from the worst possible exaggerated, cliched ways of proving your manhood. And there's nothing in those women's experience to keep them from wanting to pass that along. That's what I don't understand. That. Anyway.

Well, I mean, I think that's a really big, big deal. I think you have a lot of problems there, right? In those kind of communities, you have problems also with generational wealth. You look at immigrant populations, especially Asian immigrant populations. So one of the things they do is they have that kind of generational wealth they pass down. So they lend money to each other and they borrow money from each other and they build businesses and they owe money to each other constantly. They sort of – they come poor, right? Nobody is poorer than a Vietnamese boat person who came to this country in 74 or 75 or 76 or 77.

And in Southern California or California in general, they have little – they open little cafes, little pho shops where they have that soup they sell. And usually it says pho 77 or pho 78 or something. And usually the number is the year that that family came to the country. That's why they pick it. And they borrow the money from somebody else who was there. They pay that money back and it's all done kind of under the table or done at like the card table around the, you know, every Sunday with a family. And that's one way of generating wealth. That's one way of getting a leg up and believing in the future. But here, this is the stat that blew my mind. For every, a white white family typical white American family turns

every $1 of income into $5 of wealth the typical African American family turns every $1 of income into 69 cents of wealth how exactly I was that how is that done well i mean give me give me a dollar i don't have a magic machine i can put it into when they say five dollars of wealth do that do they mean i accumulate five dollars worth of stuff or i use to invest to create for somebody else or what you save over some large period of time over some large period of time. Over some large period of time, you've saved a retirement plan. You own a house. You buy a car. You use the car to go to work.

You know, the economic value of the car and your job increases. You know, you believe that one dollar that you earned is not supposed to be spent or turned into a depreciating asset, but it's supposed to be sort of invested in the future, right? You think about the future. You think about building something because you've got a family that you – that's really the company. It's James Lilacs, Inc., right? It's your family that you feel you're growing and that's where you put all your effort and your money. And that is not the case with your typical African-American family probably. And that's one of the problems with not having a father there is that you don't have that

sense of you're missing one of the – you're missing the CEO. You've got the CFO or the COO, but you don't have the CEO of the company. And then if you look at Charles Murray in Coming Apart, he pointed this out. All of this is heartbreaking and this just gets more and more heartbreaking. But this is also infuriating, anger making. Nothing the culture says is making things better. On the other hand, the culture itself is getting better in the sense that if you look at the top half of income among white America in the last couple of decades decades the divorce rate has gone down the abortion rate has gone down white successful white america has figured things has recovered the lost cultural the lost cultural rules for success for sanity for comedy in your family i mentioned earlier

the statistic that the that only 10 of afric of African-American kids will live in a household with both parents present to the age of 18. Flip statistic. This is David Brooks wrote this in one of his books. In the Ivy League, not that there's anything special about the Ivy League, but he had the statistic for this. The divorce rate of parents of kids who are admitted to the Ivy League, 10 percent, just 10 percent. Intact families make for success in this world and successful white America knows it. And will not, will not say so to Hispanics or to Africans. It is condescension of the most profound kind. It is

saying, oh, they're different. Oh, they couldn't abide by the rules. Oh, let's just provide more welfare and pension. Just let them live in the shanties out in the fields. It's the modern version of that. It is outrageous. Because it's not about them, Peter. It's never about them. If it was about them, the solutions are obvious. They should live the way we do, right? We should have the same standards for everybody. No, it's about us and how we feel about us. So all those white MSNBC and CNN reporters and Huffington Post reporters, it's all about us. And the report is mostly, it's not even about being white. It's about being a white reporter. Half of their reports are of their reports are about how hard it was to gather the news and they were congratulating each other on Twitter. Oh, you're doing a great job.

I mean we don't have to make fun of that – the Huffington Post reporter who took a picture of earplugs and said, I think these may be rubber bullets. Can someone please confirm? I mean he got enough – enough flack for that. But that was indicative of that kind of bubble mentality where the drama is all about me and myself and how I feel and my white privilege and really not at all about what's going to happen to these people a year from now when this is all over and you have and and a year from now when the governor has his diversity training in place and ferguson police they have a diversity training officer and none of this stuff ever happens again and they learn ways to de-escalate what happens a year from now and that's all been done they spend 10 billion dollars on it just say they'll move on they're still going to be Michael Browns walking around buying Philly blunts without dads, pushing shopkeepers around. what's really happening and from realizing the truth. That's their job. Because another example of this coming up will prove that the real problem is the composition itself of America.

The real problem is the capitalist engine, the supposed freedom, the supposed federalism. The way we are constituted as a nation is what causes these things. And that's why these things keep happening again. You know, to go back to the point that Rob made and Peter was making about people never growing up without a father and the culture being unable to tell people, look, we've got it figured out. Here's what you should do. I think part of the reason that that top 10 percent feels that way is that, for one, are they to say they don't want to be condescending to people to tell them how to live their lives to, it would be L seven.

It would be square to actually come out in favor of these old Norman Rockwell virtues until, until you look around the rest of your class and realize that it's okay to say so. But I don't think they've had that moment yet where they realize, no, this is the way to do it and we should be proud of it and we should state it. They can't because it's, that would be judgmental of the people who haven't got there yet.

And three, I think it comes down to the moment that they say to themselves, you know what, this is a better situation for a child to grow up in. They are saying that all of their 30-something, late 30-something female peers who are panicking because they're not married and are deciding to adopt or have a kid on their own, they're stating that there's something less than optimal about what their choice is. And not making any judgment whatsoever about professional career women in their late 30s, early 40s is the one thing that people actually have to do. You cannot judge the outcome of any

of their decisions. You just can't. You just have to facilitate whatever it is they want society to do to adapt to them. And that's the ultimate irony. It's white, female, professional media, East Coast, West Coast elites who themselves are now the most prized victim group about whom you can say absolutely nothing, except that it's really a pity that they don't realize that you don't have to use one of those 58 blade plastic pink Venus brand things on your legs. And actually, you can go in the bathroom and steal your husband's razor if you're married. And if your husband's razor is a hairy, you're going to have the smoothest legs you've ever had. Now, hair is, as you know, less than a year old,

pretty soon will be saying it's their first year anniversary of disrupting the shaving industry. And how do they do that? Well, they offered a better shaving experience at a better value than the giants like Schicker Gillette. The company makes amazing German-engineered blades, and they care so much about the quality, they bought the 93-year-old German factory that makes those blades.

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Half the price for the blades you pay. And they come to your house for the convenience and ease of ordering online. So ship to your door with a great looking box too. I mean, the whole shaving experience is just grand. Go to harrys.com and use the coupon code or the promo code, I'm sorry, Ricochet, and you will save $5 after your first purchase. Once you drag that first blade across the stubble on your cheek or stubble on your shins, you'll be a Harry's customer for life. Gentlemen, let's move on to something else. It appears that the problem in England might be lanky men who have a civilized London accent who go to other places and saw the heads off people. This is just a depressing story.

Who wants to take it? But before we do, can I just say, while you were doing that brilliant Harry's shaving spot, which of course we endorse and support 100%, I was Googling around for Michael Brown's father. He did appear with his mom on the Today Show. So it's not like he's absent. So I should – I need to clarify that because I don't want to sound like I was – I'm making a general point. I don't know whether they're together or not together, but he's not an absent dad. My point is more general about fatherless African-American males in America, which those statistics are unimpeachably huge.

This particular one, maybe not so much. So just to clarify. Point clarified. Point clarified. James Foley. Well, I mean I think – my first response was I'm not going to go on Twitter for a day until – I know I'm not going to see that. I don't understand quite why we have to see it. I did read an interesting statistic that one of the – when Obama's famous, hey, we tortured some folks statement.

One of the folks that we tortured was one of the folks who beheaded Daniel Pearl back during the Afghanistan – during the war with Afghanistan. So a lot of these folks – maybe we're going to catch this folk from – I guess he's still technically a British citizen, right? Could be. Yeah, this guy John the Beetle is for ISIS who now people believe is ISIS just a new rebranding of al-Qaeda or just the new renaming of it or the sort of rebirth of it. It does seem like if you're going to be – if you're going to have that kind of rhetoric – I mean it reminds me a lot of Pol Pot, right? Pol Pot, this great, incredibly evil, murderous dictator, could only have learned that level of intellectual and violent rhetoric at Paris University, right? He could have really only learned that from a Western – in a Western world, that kind of um i don't know what the indulgence and it doesn't seem to me that strange that these jihad young jihadists in iraq the isis

jihadists have come from a place that where they a place of plenty a place of freedom a place that has over the period of you know decades lost its ability for emphatic disapproval and emphatic cultural pride, I guess. It's probably the wrong word. And the plaintive wail of the siren behind you only underscores you. Oh, that's true. That's the siren behind me. I mean it doesn't – I mean I know I'm supposed to be shocked by that. We're supposed to think that, oh, no, it's growing up in tents in the desert that leads you to madness.

But I'm not so sure. It seems to me more like growing up in a council flat in some suburb in Britain with a bunch of indulgent, progressive, liberal helpers. It will lead you to believe that you are special and that there's nothing you do that can be criticized and that you have every right to be angry and to fight. All right? I mean – or am I just conflating two things? No, no, no. That this act was committed by someone who, as you point out, is probably still a British subject. In a way, it does us all a favor from the very get-go. It rules out the whole deeper causes

argument. Well, the real problem is poverty in the Middle East. The real problem is years of ignorance and the real poverty is the exploitation of the West, Western oil wells, sucking the, it has nothing to do with any of that. This young man was raised in one of the richest, most humane, and most liberal states that has existed since the beginning of human history. And that is the United Kingdom today. We can argue, I think we would argue, that the welfare state, and Britain is a fine example of the welfare state, that the welfare state is in fact corrosive.

But at a minimum, this heads off an entire line of liberal argument that we have to be understanding. Here's what we have to understand. They hate us. They're violent. This is a culture of death. And it is as simple as barbarism versus civilization. And to my mind, so that's one aspect of it. David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, whom I frankly, I am in the James Delling Poll School on David Cameron. I haven't thought very much of him. But he discovers that a British subject is responsible for this act and he returns immediately from his vacation

and begins to hold meetings at 10 Downing Street to make certain the intelligence services in Britain are doing everything they can to identify this man and the network from which he emerged. And the president of the United States interrupts his vacation, gives to give him credit about as genuinely felt, even impassioned, a set of remarks as I've seen Obama deliver since the last campaign, and says, however, the United States of America, I'm quoting him now, will continue to do what we must do to protect our people. Continue to do? We're not protecting our people.

That man just had his head sawn off on camera. We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. Close quote. He leaves the podium. He gets into a limousine. He flies to Andrews Air Force Base. He gets on a jet and returns to his golfing vacation in Martha's Vineyard. This is beyond unserious. I have to say I now find it unsettling. He is the commander in chief of the United States. The country has been challenged on camera in a video which the entire world has now seen. And you cannot permit a challenge like that to go unpunished, not undealt with, unpunished without endangering the security of other Americans and perhaps the security of this country itself. He needs to announce that someone will pay for this and someone will pay for it promptly. And he went

back and played golf. Pod Hortz pointed out, and I think on Twitter, that if you want to go on vacation, go to Camp David. There's a seriousness to going to Camp David because you see them sort of surrounded by the infrastructure of the White House, whereas opposed to going to Martha's Vineyard, which just seems like you're disconnecting and unplugging because, hey, it's August, man. The other thing is that is we have been doing something not specifically toward these guys, but there's been some very successful strikes against ISIS, ISIL, IS, and we took back the dam. We helped the Turks to take back. These are good things. And the fact that the administration is participating and assisting these efforts, it should be – if we're going to criticize them for not doing anything, we have to applaud the United States military. But, James, you're describing a war.

But apparently a point that I was making was Rob saw something else. No, no. I like that. I agree. I'm with you. Right. I'm with you. And that's great. And the thing is, is that the administration does not want, it seems, to be able to look like they're actually, you're right, Rob, it's a war. We're back in Iraq. We're doing what needs to be

done. And they don't seem to want anybody to know that it's happening. Why? Because it's not leading from behind because it's kinetic military action or because it's an actual application of the very thing that they have denied exists, which is American force dropped on the heads of the bad guys has effects, has short term positive, wonderful effects in that the, the dam,

which was going to send a 35 meter wall of water flooding the people of Moses, like a biblical story, that's not going to happen because guns and guys took it back. And guns and guys and, dare I say, bombs will liberate the places from the guys who are chopping off the heads and sending the little girls into sex slavery. Now here, okay, I came out against ISIS. Brave me. Here's a question. Here's a question.

I think you should rethink that, James. Here's a question about England, though, because we've all watched as England has accommodated, not assimilated, but accommodated, made excuses for bent over backwards until their vertebrae snap for what appear to us to be virulently anti-Western murderous Islamist elements in their midst. Is there something about having a tradition or a past history of imperialism that causes countries to go into that cultural cringe? Not just World War I and, oh, that we were bad because we marched into it with our heads

held high and then we all got slaughtered and it was all wrong. Not just that, but also the idea of having an imperialist past that makes you adopt a posture of shame and solicitousness when it comes to accepting all these people into your world. Isn't it sort of like we can't make them assimilate because that would be kind of imperialist too? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I mean, there's been a tradition.

I mean you remember the movie My Beautiful Laundrette? 1983, 84 I think. Yeah, yeah. That was – British movie. Stephen Frears. Really kind of a sweet little movie and the whole story behind that movie was that these Pakistani immigrants were entrepreneurial and pro-Thatcher and they were in London surrounded by these sort of white punk Brits on the dole who didn't do anything but took money from the government and sort of roamed around in packs and were racist and beat up the Pakistanis. And the movie was reliably lefty. You're supposed to sort of laugh at the pro-Thatcherite Pakistanis

and their way of like, oh, they all want to set up little restaurants and little laundrettes and stuff, all that stuff. But you watch the thing now and you realize those people are fully assimilated. Now it turns out that the next generation kind of went jihadi a little bit. But I'm not – I don't really know if it's colonial or post-colonial. It seems to me more like an unwillingness of Western progressive culture, which is to say all of Western culture, to emphatically stand for the very things – in many ways, this is exactly what we're talking about in Ferguson. To stand for the very things that brought it to its pinnacle. Like for the very thing that these white progressive liberal reporters who live in nuclear families and for $1 of income, they create $5 of wealth.

They would never dream of letting their kid push a shopkeeper around and take a box of Philly Blunts. They, when they go to Ferguson, that's OK. And it's the same way with these sort of white progressive cultural guardians in Britain and in the United States who would never dream of telling the third generation of Pakistanis, no, no, no, no, no. You need to sing God Save the Queen. You need to understand how Great Britain brought civilization to the world, that it wasn't a crime that was committed.

It was a great gift. Now, of course, yes, there were crimes that were committed, but there were crimes that were committed everywhere. But it was basically a great gift that – it was Great Britain that outlawed slavery. But way before it was outlawed anywhere else, including Africa, including the subcontinent. I mean slavery still exists right now in the Arab world. I hadn't thought of it this way, but listening to Rob talk, I do think that this background of what's taken place this last week or the last 10 days somehow plays into the reason why yours truly and many others, I believe, found Rick Perry so heartening. Because he's taking a stand. He is unapologetic. He is standing on the Constitution of Texas and the Constitution of the United States, and he's not going to take it. There is no lack of civilizational self-confidence on the part of the man from Painted Post.

Rick Perry is going to fight. That's true, actually. You're absolutely right. One of the things you realize is that Perry defining Texas the way that he does to the rest of the country and perhaps the rest of the world, you realize that it's a stark choice we have. Do we want to be like Texas and Israel or do we want to be like Portland, Washington? And eventually, of course, once Texas and Israel are twinned, then everybody's going to figure out that Texas is the bad guy completely. How does that happen? Well, if you want to know how Israel got turned into the bad guy, the book Making David into Goliath,

How the World Turns Against Israel by Joshua Moravchik is something you want to do. Now, here's the deal. We all know that Israel has been under siege by the press, by its neighbors for decades since its inception. But how exactly did the current narrative of Israel as the really bad guy, the complete of the Nazi Zionists, how did that come to be? All I got to tell you is that it's a great book by Encounter Books, and you know that Encounter Books doesn't publish anything unless it's a fascinating read. So go there now. Coupon code Ricochet at the checkout and you will get 15% off Joshua Moravchik's Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel. Now to spin back and back and back,

skipping past Rick Perry and going back to England, Rob said, why should we ask them to sing God Save the Queen, which reminded me, you know, God Save the Queen was the name of one of the famous Sex Pistols songs when they erupted and exploded in 1977. And the guy who was there on the scene, who Rolling Stone sent to cover the Sex Pistols and the rise of the punk movement

before it sort of got cleaned up and turned into New Wave, was a guy named Charles Young. And he died last, he died this week, I think just a couple of days ago. He was a great rock and roll writer. He wasn't the Lester Bang style writer. He was more of a reporter. And his 77 piece about the Sex Pistols showed you a culture that had absolutely turned to mung, to rot, to just slop, being manipulated by cynical avant-garde people like Malcolm McLaren. And, you know, if that had come

from an Eisenhower-type culture, if that had been a reaction to it, but it was a reaction to labor. What these kids were feeling when they were singing no hope, pretty vacant, dead end, they were the products of decades of labor belief that the dole is the answer to unemployment, that the dole in the state is the replacement for the family. And it's a fascinating story. And when we look now at England, we look at the result of the Thatcherite improvement, the Thatcherite renaissance. But again, you can rebuild a country like Thatcher or Reagan did, and then eventually you have the little parasites that circle and suckle off it as long as they can while giving everybody the wrong lesson as to how this was done. I mean, so you have the progressive glass telling us

that the reason that we have prosperity now is because of Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan. Right? Does that make any sense? So in other words, I get what you're saying, Rob, but that how can we ask them to sing God Save the Queen? Well, because, and you're absolutely correct, that this, I keep telling my daughter, we have these late-night philosophical conversations where she comes to me with this or that question.

The lessons that I want to leave her are always you are not a victim. You are not a member of a tribe. And America is a cultural civic inheritance that you are getting that is so rare among human history. The idea that we belong to a civic polity that transcends the individual bonds of blood is a rare and wonderful thing. And the West invented it. And the West is special for it. It is not a sin and a stain that we have to spend the rest of our lives scraping off with bleach and a wire brush. And frankly, the older you get and crankier you get, the less tired you become of apologizing. And you're like Rob. You just lean back in your chair and puff on your cheroot and say, I'm sorry.

Who abolished slavery again? Again, tell me. Yeah. I'm not puffing on the cheroot, but you're – here's what I – I mean just to – this is not a fully formed thought, which of course will come as no surprise to anybody who's listening to this podcast. But it does seem to me that you're onto something when you talk about the sort of the enemy that comes from those labor governments, right? And you see it now. I think you see it now in young people

based on this response to the progressive past years of Obama. But there's something that happens, and it even happened under the sainted Reagan, and I think it happened and will happen again, and it's a mistake. And it's where the successful people in a society, the winners pull away and barricade themselves in a manner of speaking in their own little communities and completely ignore the losers. And they completely

ignore the people in our society who are not succeeding. And it happened – a lot of it happened because of domestic politics and a lot of it in this country. A lot of it happened because of people like Barack Obama who basically turned the mostly African-American communities of poverty into their own little plantations of grievance, right, where they generated a certain number of votes and there's little plantations of grievance, right, where they generated certain number of votes and there's a certain amount of political power you get and you harness that power and those people vote. You get them to vote for you in lockstep.

They never break – you never break that voting block and people on the other side would make a little calculation on their calendar and they'd say, well, OK. Well, we can win without them. So suddenly you have the winners in society turning on the TV and saying, how did Ferguson get that way? How did those cities get that way? I mean, I remember being in LA thinking, I live in LA. How did South Central get that way? How does the black on black crime statistic get that way? Like that's a completely foreign, that's like a foreign country to us. How do you cross the border to Ferguson? That's a different place, right? Because we've

built that around, we've allowed those people, the community organizers of the world to sort of, we've off, we've basically outsourced the administration of those areas to them. You know, we've segregated them essentially and said, all right, well, you want to run it. I mean, these are – it's sheer luck that we focus on this great black and white story in Ferguson for the progressives because if we didn't, we'd have to look at places like Washington, D.C. and Chicago and Baltimore and cities that are run – that have a multiracial government that have a sky-high murder rate. But we don't have to talk about that because that's uncomfortable. So instead we have – if you're a white progressive, this is a perfect thing to talk about. So we'll be talking about this for years because it absolutely fits the progressive model for white evil. But I wish – I mean like I said,

it's not a fully formed thought but I wish there was some way that we – that the culture allowed people like the three of us and Jason Reilly and the people who really have something to say about this, especially Jason Reilly, a voice because they're the ones who are saying, you know, Ferguson is still America. That's still a town that we have, we should care about. And we should care about what happens there the same way we should care about why are all these black men killing each other in Chicago? And why is Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, not a poster child for black violence? Why is he not being – why are they not marching on his house? Well, because he's not the head of the IRA or the NRA and he doesn't make guns himself.

Guns are the problem. There's no – and individuals themselves are not to be held accountable for the corrosive effect that enters your mind once you wrap your hand around the butt of a gun. No, you're absolutely right, Rob. But we have to end here with something a little bit more cheerful. And cheerful there is perhaps in the expression that Peter alluded to earlier of Rick Perry's mugshot. That's how you do a mugshot, I think. I think. And Peter correctly put up a post on Ricochet correctly chiding Financial Times for saying, oh, problem for the Republicans with

this Perry indictment. Oh, please. They wish. Give us more problems like that one. If ever there was a moment when all of a sudden somebody, I mean, that was the perfect timing for Perry. Nobody had been really talking about him very much. He was just held in a bands in the back of your head saying maybe 2016. But all of a sudden, boom, presidential timber. So let's talk. You know me. I've been on the Perry bandwagon for a long time, and I've always thought it's going to be him.

Not necessarily because he's the conservative candidate that everybody wants. Everybody's going to have a problem with something that he does, but because he is more capable of winning, I think, than Ted Cruz, or Paul Ryan for that matter. What about Rand Paul? No.

No. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. No. No. No. Do you think the No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you think the American electorate, that great middle? And I know, yes, I'm sorry, but it's the facts. We got to appeal to those people who don't particularly pay attention until it rolls around. Do you think that they're actually going to find him to be a charismatic, warm, fascinating, empathetic character? No, they're not.

They're absolutely not. Town needs a Texan. And I think that Perry is that guy. Now tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why actually it's going to be a green eye shade Republican who can speak crisply and concisely to a variety of economic issues.

What if it's Biden versus Ryan again, except this time in the presidential debates? Well, look, Ryan, I heard Ryan on television talking rather eloquently about – As he can, yes. About inner city poverty. And Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is talking about jobs and why you – that's good stuff. And that's great. That's wonderful and we love him for it.

But, you know, I heard Ryan on the radio the other day, and again, I'm not criticizing him. I think he's a great asset to the side and to the party. But he was asked a question about what would you go down to Ferguson and say, and he brought up Jack Kemp, okay, which we know we all love Jack Kemp, but I don't think that's going to resonate. And when he kept talking about we have to be the party of opportunity, etc., etc. He's right, but this is becoming a

cliche already. I was at the GOP booth at the State Fair and they have the patio of opportunity that you can go to in the back. And I just... I will send a picture and post it at Ricochet because it's just

so earnest and the patio of opportunity. Oh, I know. That's exactly what you think. God bless him. But yeah, there's something a little bit removed from reality. I mean the ideas work. How do you connect them to people's experiences is what I'm saying. In my judgment, here's what happened in – or a large component of what happened when Rick Perry got indicted.

There's been this puzzle at about layer three or four, fairly deep layer. Nobody has been worrying too much about it. I worried about it because I interviewed the man a couple of years ago. But there's been a puzzle and the puzzle runs as follows. Rick Perry put in a really appalling performance during his presidential campaign. And in several debates, he looked, well, unimpressive is to put it kindly. And in the oops moment. Well, he was medicated.

He looked medicated. Well, that's OK. And so how do you make that? picture of Rick Perry fit with the man who has dominated the politics of a great, big, contentious state for almost 14 years now. And what happened this past week when Rick Perry held a press conference, we all looked at it on YouTube. I think in all of five minutes, he gave a statement. He delivered it extremely well. It was powerful. And then he took questions and he commanded the room. And a lot of people thought, he could either be in pain or medicated, I guess he must have been telling the truth. Suddenly, I think in particular conservatives have been looking at this guy and saying, wow, okay, I see it. This is a very compelling figure. And God bless Paul Ryan, who couldn't be more impressive. But there is something to be said

for a man who has been governor of a major state, as opposed to a man who has represented Janesville, Wisconsin in Congress. Rick Perry is very, very powerful, very impressive. I find. I agree. Okay. You agree? We're unanimous. Maybe every candidate needs that moment that this is I paid for this microphone moment. Maybe this is Rick Perry's moment. It could well be. It could well be.

The other thing I'd say about Rick Perry, which I've noticed, I may have said this before, but back in the old days when I was in Washington, Barry Goldwater was still in his last term in the Senate. And I heard him comment. He and John Kennedy came to the Senate together in what year would that have been? Fifty two, maybe. And they were freshman senators together. They knew each other well. The town was less contentious in those days. He and John Kennedy came to the Senate together in what year would that have been? 52 maybe? And they were freshman senators together. They knew each other well. The town was less contentious in those days. And Barry Goldwater said one of the things that impressed him about John Kennedy during John Kennedy's first couple of years in the Senate was that Kennedy was a terrible public speaker when he started out.

And by about 18 months or two years into it, he could command a microphone. He could command a room. He worked at it. He learned. He got better at the job. And Rick Perry is paying us all the very high compliment of working at being a good candidate. The final point I make is Rick Perry, as opposed to say, I think I do think Rand Paul, there's a certain reserve there, I guess may be the way to put it. Rick Perry just likes people.

How do I know this? Because after the presidential debate at Dartmouth College, this was, I think, the first presidential debate, all the other candidates went back to their rooms in the Hanover Inn and huddled with their staffs. And Rick Perry wandered around. I wasn't there, but my kids – Rick Perry wandered around the Dartmouth College campus. And to this day, there's a picture of him in the beta fraternity house because he stopped in and had a beer with the brothers. That sort of, that kind of warmth, he just enjoys the job of getting to know people, chatting with them, shaking hands. This guy, I think, is going to be a formidable candidate. And suddenly everybody realizes it.

It's hard to beat a southerner, Republican or Democrat. I realized it two years ago. But OK, I'm glad you're both coming around to it. Absolutely. Absolutely grand. Listen, we got to leave here because Rob's got things to do in the bustling Gotham. I know that, Peter, you probably have brilliant people to interview. I have to go to

the State Fair, where it's going to be about 92 degrees today, and find something about which to shoot a video. Yesterday it was a corn art, or crop art, I'm sorry. We have this tradition where people send in art that they have done entirely out of seeds, and then they judge

them. And somebody did Monk's The Scream this year. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, absolutely. The winner was this wonderful recreation of the classic portrait of Nikolai Tesla. And it was done entirely in seeds. And you laugh, but it's quite extraordinary. It's quite extraordinary, the things that people are able to do.

And then I interviewed a guy who has a collection of 500 seed bags, which themselves are a form of commercial art that people have completely, nobody knew about this, but there was this wide ranging, everybody knows that fruit crate labels are unique and individual and collectible. Well, seed bags were the same,

and there turned out to be all kinds of stories behind the iconography and images on that. And that's just one little tiny little corner of the state fair, and that's why I love to go there. But you know, if you join Ricochet and you get access to that member feed, it's like a state fair every day. There's always a post, always something new, always a little corner of somebody's mind or experience or politics that you get to explore

and become part of the community that is Ricochet and keeps it going. We'd like to thank you all for being here, for listening. We'd like to thank Harry's for sponsoring this. And again, if you go to harrys.com and plug in that coupon code, Ricochet, you get five bucks off your first order. You'll want that. And in the

present, you'll be happy to get those blades coming to your house. Also, EncounterBooks.com, that coupon code RICOSHET gets you 15% off any title, including this week's month's favorite pick, How David Became Goliath. And that's a story about how Israel got to be the bad guy. Gee, it's almost like it was a plan or something.

And of course, thanks to Rob and Peter for showing up here today and doing their usual extraordinary job of, who needs guests? Who needs guests when you've got Rob and Peter? It would be funny if we'd said, oh, shoot, we've had Rick Perry on the phone for 45, 50 minutes waiting.

But sorry, we can't get to you, Governor. We'll get to you next week. Not darn likely. But it would be great to have him back on the podcast again. Just to say that after he's sworn in in 2017, we were there long ago. Guys, we'll see you down the road. And everybody else, we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. With a special farewell to the folks in the chat room.

Oh, yes. And look for the member feed and give us a call and leave a message. We will appreciate it. Do we have a number yet? We have it. It's on the member feed. It's for the member feed and give us a call and leave a message. We will appreciate it. Do we have a number yet? We have it. It's on the member feed. It's on the member feed. So if you're listening to this and you're not a member and you want to call,

you've got to become a member to go to the member feed. So there you go. All right. And that's the kind of messy ending that Ron Pardo would have used. I'm sorry, Don Pardo. Ron Pardo was his brother who sold cars. Never mind. I'm done. I got to go.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no. You have to take us out as Don Pardo. I don't know how to. For one thing, as CT Law pointed out in the comments, I used too many polysyllabic words when Don Pardo was all about keeping it short and keeping it simple. So I'll just say, from Ricochet, goodbye. Next week.

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on stag and skip out for beer during commercials because the revolution will not be televised the revolution will not be televised the revolution will not be brought to you by xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions the revolution will not show you pictures of nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by john mitchell general abrams and spiro agnew to eat hog mossoths confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by the shape of a war theater and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen

or Bullwinkle and Julia. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner because the revolution will not be your mouth sex appeal. The Revolution will not get rid of the nub. The Revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner because The Revolution will not be televised, brother. There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance.

NBC will not be able to predict the winner at 8.32 on the report from 29 districts. The Revolution will not be televised. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay. There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on the rail with a brand new process. There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit that he has been saving for just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, Beverly Hills Police and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damn relevant and women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day. The revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the 11 o'clock news and no pictures of Harry

or a woman liberationist and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Engelbert Humperdinck, or the rare earth. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with coke. The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath.

The revolution will put you in the driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised. Will not be televised. driver's seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The revolution will be live. Ricochet. Join the conversation.

Have to go. Have a good day. See you then. Bye. If you would like to be a contestant on Jeopardy or receive tickets for Jeopardy please write to Jeopardy Post Office Box 336 Radio City Station, New York, New York and please include your telephone number Jeopardy was primarily called

This is Don Pardo