The Ricochet Podcast - Tartan Spicy

Episode Date: September 18, 2014

This week, the tuned-out (and checked-out) President; James Delingpole on the Scottish secession vote, UKIP, and the horror that is Rotherham; Then, who’s more unpopular, Ebola or ISIS? Also, a rare Ricochet Podcast sports topic: the NFL’s worst week ever; And which one of the guys will buy an Apple Watch? The answer may surprise you. Music from this week’s episode: Mull of Kintyre by Wings The... Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie 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! 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 Lilacs, and today we hop across the pond to talk to James Dillingpole about the Scottish vote, what it means for the UK and the rest of the world. And we've plenty of time to talk amongst ourselves, and if this was a Jeopardy category, it would be Poe-Pourri. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

There you go again. Yes, welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast number 230. It's brought to you by Harry's Shave. For the finest shave at the best price, go to harrys.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET at checkout. Because you don't have to pay a lot for a great shave. And you don't have to pay a lot for a great website either. But if you want to, we can help. We'll get to that in just a second.

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 your checkout. This week, the feature title is Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Moravchik. And as I mentioned before, if you want a great website at a great price, Ricochet is, of course, the best deal out there. But who are we to stand in your way if you want to lavish large amounts of money at the site and keep it going in perpetuity? And for that, here is co-founder Rob Long to tell you – not to tell you, to guilt you into doing something about this. Not only am I not going to tell you, I'm also not going to guilt you. If you're listening to this and you're a member of Ricochet, we are thrilled to have you along the ride with us and we are pleased and happy to have you and call you a fellow member of Ricochet along with me and James and Peter. And also to tell you that I'm going to be on the East Coast a lot in the autumn and I think, James, you and I are going to be in DC together and maybe even in New York together.

And we're going to try to do something and arrange maybe a little small Ricochet meetup in one or both of those two cities in the next coming week. So we'll let you know when that happens. And if you can do it, James, that'd be great. But I've been making this member pitch now on every podcast. What is this? 230 podcasts.

And it's been mildly successful, nearly successful as going to the source. So don't take my word for it. Listen to Rush Babe 49 from Everett, Washington. Yes, this is Rush Babe 49, and I live in Everett, Washington. What do I get out of Ricochet? Laughter. There's more total sense of humor on Ricochet than anywhere else in the known universe.

And Ten Cents is responsible for a large percentage of that. I get new friends, people who are just plain good, every single one. I'm a regular audio meetup participant, and even those who I haven't met in person, I feel like I know. This is especially important for those of us who live out here in the great deep blue wilderness. I've also participated in at least seven meetups in various places, and I have learned that once you join Ricochet, wherever you travel, you'll find friends and tour guides, and you'll never be alone in a strange city wondering where to have dinner.

I get news commentary from a hundred different points of view, book reviews, pictures of people's pets and kids, and the opportunity to give help and advice. It's remarkable how much knowledge resides in our members. John Walker, that's you. And how willing everyone is to share expertise. Ricochet 2.0, anyone? And prayer is when needed. Thank you, Nanda.

Every dollar spent on Ricochet is worth at least 10. Well, it's great to hear from the distaff side, but we've got to appeal to the guys as well here. Yeah, the shoots. Also, Squishy Blue Rhino, obviously one of my favorite member names in Ricochet, is going to make the case to why you should become a Mrs. Thatcher-level member. Hey, Rob, this is Louie Vengrave, the Squishy Blue Rhino calling. I'm calling to tell you why I just ponied up $100 American dollars to Thatcherize my Ricochet membership. And really two reasons. One, I really believe in you guys. I was a big fan of Peter, big fan of James, big fan of yours before I ever knew you guys had started Ricochet or had a podcast. And, you know, I just,

I believe in what you're doing. I really do. And the second reason why is I don't really fit into the conservative movement at all. I'm not really all that conservative. I'm not even sure if I'm Republican anymore. I have to check the voter registration. But, you know, there are things that I want to see happen, and I do appreciate the opportunity to have a voice. And for somebody who is a Mike Murphy, Jen Rubin, doesn't own a pointy hat or a machine gun, doesn't sit in a lawn chair on the border and worry about hordes of U.S. and Hondurans coming to, you know, take over our country, I like to have a place where I can speak up. And I don't think I'm the only one out there that feels that way. And Ricochet is a place where I can actually speak my mind.

And I appreciate that. So that's that. Keep it up and thank you. Are there any new Thatcher members to tell us about Rob? Well, yes. Thanks, James. We have some new Thatcher members. We'd like to thank and welcome Jonathan Beakakley, Ann Batten, TKC 1101, and our newest Reagan-level member. And as you know, the Ronald Reagan-level member is the highest-level member. There can be no higher-level member than the Reagan-level member, Frank Gillespie. Thank you all, every member from the Coolidge-level to the Mrs. Thatcher to the Ronald Reagan-level. Thank you for joining Ricochet.

If you are listening to this, you are not a member. Join today and become a member along with the rest of us and maybe we'll see you at a meetup. Well, one last question, as Peter likes to say. Are you going to put up another post with your phone number asking people to call in and say why they should vote for

why they should? Yeah, I think we'll have to do that. Probably not this week, but maybe next week we'll put up with a member feed. We have a lot. We have some great, great, great member testimonials, and so we'll probably have to recharge our batteries soon. But they were fantastic. A lot of them were very, very funny.

We got a few actually where Google Voice kind of cut out, unfortunately, so we couldn't use them, and so we're going to try to re-record some of them. They were really, really funny. And we had some musical ones too, as you heard last week. A free service actually didn't work as advertised I'm stunned why this morning while calling up Ricochet I noticed for the first time and maybe it's been there

all along but there's an ad now on the Skype it was an ad for Kraft Cheese telling me about Kraft Cheese and the virtues therein. Ah commerce but let's rise above commerce for a second and bring in Peter Robinson whose high mindedness always takes us away from this world of clay and brings us to the lofty intellectual realm. Hey, Peter, I have to ask you.

It's been an interesting week as ever. The president has drawn red lines, laid out policy, told the world, frankly, where America stands. And yet his polls seem to dip. What's going on here? How do you look at the next year for the president? Nobody believes him. And nobody even enjoys hearing him talk anymore. That's my, my summary statement of what's going on. It happened. I'm sorry to say this, but it happened to George W. Bush as well, that at some point, two or three years

before the end of his presidency, the country essentially tuned out the president of the United States. Nobody thought it would happen. Well, we thought it would, but nobody in the press thought it could happen to this orator, this gift to us from on high, Barack Obama. But he's been so weak for so long, so meandering, and his speeches, the quality of the speeches, for someone who considers himself a fine writer, if you just, if you took the speech he gave last week, announcing a

policy against his strategy, that was the word against ISIS, and just dumped it into any competent English composition class at any college in the country, you'd find, and just started underlining in bright red pen to cliches it was just it's boring there's a sense of ennui about it he's reached the carter malaise point it's not the nation that has malaise it's he himself i just think people

are tired of him they're just tired of barack obama how's that for a high-level analysis? I think you're right. I mean, yeah. But it's just slightly different with this guy. I mean I think people were tired of Bush's noise, right? The two-term president is a little different. You're tired of their noise. You're tired of their – you're sort of exhausted.

I mean with Clinton, they had the same thing, the Clinton fatigue because it was the scandal fatigue. And I think even with Reagan, there was that because you had kind of scandal fatigue with Reagan and you had the palace intrigue fatigue with him that in the second term, there are all these people writing books and screaming at each other in the White House and trying to get each other fired. And with Clinton, you had this – you had Lewinsky and impeachment and all that stuff. This guy, I think the problem is that no one – there's no connection between anything he says and anything he does. So no one actually believes any of this is going to happen. No one actually believes that any of the words mean anything. So it's not like he's floundering around or he's desperately trying to justify himself or what Bush did really, which was to simply go into hiding.

There were two and a half years there of his second term where he just simply didn't – they didn't talk about anything. He just didn't make the case and they were in this defensive crouch. That's not what this guy is doing. He's acting as if we all still believe any of this stuff is really going to happen and I think that's what's weird about it. It's very strange. It forces us to sort of be part of this psychotic, weird, bad relationship. Wait. Say that again. He's acting as if he still believes anything is going to happen.

Yeah. I mean it's like we all have to – he's like – I always think of him as like he is like this gifted child. These progressive parents have this gifted child and he's in the Gifted and Talented program and everybody has got all this like huge amount of political and cultural capital and personal capital invested in how gifted he is and that he's got to be really gifted. And so everybody – people come over to the house. They have to listen to him play the piano and they have to listen to him recite poetry and they have to look at his report card and everybody slowly thinks well you know he's not really that gifted but you can't stop it and you have to believe everything he says he's going to do you have to believe he's going to do the only person really who believes that barack obama is this you know great and effective

president is barack obama right everyone else is just kind of like well we don't want to hurt his feelings and let him down. It's very strange. So the entire nation then is reduced to being sort of aunts and uncles who have to look with a frozen stare as the small children perform a puppet play. Not having bothered to work on a plot in advance first, of course, just saying we're going to put on a show and so we're watching this

and smiling and clapping. I see your point. It's just odd to think that you're right, that we all have to participate in this little narcissistic self-aggrandizing psychodrama. But on the other hand, you know, people may say on the weekend chat shows, talk about American weakness,

how we're projecting nothing but absolute, mewling inability to confront the world. But how many millions of people watch The View? And how many millions of people, when watching The View, nodded their head in sympathy when one of the characters said, Krauthammer, who's that? Who's Charles Krauthammer? Is he a big deal in your world? You realize the huge gulf

between those of us who actually know who Charles Krauthammer is and those people who aren't paying attention, but I get the feeling that even the people who aren't paying attention, they're not bored with the drama. They're not bored with the weakness. What they're simply bored with is being talked down to. And this person that they thought perhaps was their peer because he wore shades and smoked cigarettes and could sink a basketball turns out not to be a cool guy at all.

Turns out to be the squarest cat on the block. Another guy from the professor's lounge who thinks he knows better how to do everything than you do. Well, one thing that they know how to do over in England is something that we're pretty bad at here, and that is split up a country and ruin it for everybody. We learned our lesson about that in the 19th century and got over it. Nobody's talking about succession yet, but when you look, when you cast your eyes to perfidious Albion, you wonder what the hell is going on. And when you want to know what the hell is going on, you reach for a Ricochet fave,

and that would be James Dellingpole. Now, you know him, of course. He's the host of the fabulously popular radio-free Dellingpole, and the London editor of Breitbart.com. And he also has a few thoughts about global warming. We welcome him back with pride to this, the Ricochet podcast. Hello, James. Thank you. I'm here.

Well, I am cute and you are there. That's part of the problem, James. All right, we were just talking before briefly about Scottish independence and we're split about it here, so to speak. We understand that you are likewise tormented about the issue, aren't you? Yeah, I am. It's one of those – it's like asking an Irishman for directions, and he says to you, you don't want to start from here if you want to get there. And that's exactly the situation that I think we're in now.

We should never have been in a situation where the Scots, and only the Scots, it's only the people actually living in Scotland to get the vote, that they should have been given the chance to vote on something so important, which is going to, I think, ultimately be the ruination of us all.

And you know what? Even if they don't get independence, we've already gone so far down the road. We should never have been in this position where on the basis of a vote which has been informed by the most outrageous demagoguery by the lunatic, dangerous lunatic, Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, who has been setting out a false prospectus for independence, all kinds of lies to the Scots. We should never have been in this position where something as important as the union could depend on the vote of five million brainwashed Scots

is what I'm saying. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day

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Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie But James, why is it important? Really, what would it matter if a mere 5 million people dropped out of the United Kingdom it would cause, number one. But it also matters for more emotional reasons. And I think the emotional reasons have been underplayed by the no campaign, that's as in no to independence. And the reason that I think for that is that we've become culturally embarrassed about speaking up for our virtues. I mean, I think it's a that we've become culturally embarrassed about speaking up for

our virtues. I mean, I think it's a problem in America as well. We're afraid of celebrating what is good about our culture for fear that we might obsess another rival culture. But the fact is that England and Scotland and Wales have worked very, very well, and Northern Ireland, of course, have worked very, very well together. In the, of course, have worked very, very well together. In the last 307 years we've been together, we created the greatest empire in the world. And we did so partly with Scottish cannon fodder and partly with Scottish genius.

You think of some of the great inventors we've had, James Watt, some of the great economic thinkers, Adam Smith. You think of Dr. Johnson and James Boswell. We work well as a partnership, even though we are quite dissimilar in some ways. We're a chalk and cheese marriage. So is there a poll this morning? How does it look? How will it all come out?

It's too close to call. My suspicion is that the vote will go no at the last minute. People will see dissent. However, one cannot rule out the possibility that the Alex Salmond and the SNP have rigged the votes, have stuffed the ballots. I wouldn't be surprised if, like certain other communities in England, they've done some ballot rigging that the postal vote has been cheated. Because children get to vote in this as well. Down to the age of 16. And again, there's lots of potential complications there.

Apparently the check-ups on children are not nearly as stringent as the ones for adults. And really, I would put nothing past Alex Salmond and that they are an evil shower. So James, last question from Peter before Rob is sending me text messages saying, stop talking to that man I want in. So here's my last question. Here's the silver lining and it's a and it's an extensive silver lining isn't it if scotland drops out of the union then as night doth follow day the english will clamor to boot the scots representatives out of parliament england will be dominated england will be dominated by the Tories. It will have the opportunity to cut taxes, to break free, to become a little Hong Kong of Europe. few upsides to this sorry mess. One is pure schadenfreude. It will be great to watch the Scots when they have to pay their own welfare bills

rather than expecting London to pay for them. Secondly, yes, Labour will be denied their majority in England. It will destroy the Labour Party. But the corollary of that is that it would also destroy UK independence party, our cheap party. It will also mean that Cameron will be, Cameron's mushy centrism

will be vindicated by default, not because people like him or want him, but because simply an accident of, of, uh, typology went by at Scott's register for independence, which is not a, I want Cameron to, to be made to see the error of his ways, not to be buoyed up by what the Scots do. Oh, so James, um, I was going to say, I was a little surprised when I read, uh, I've been reading what you've been writing about, uh,

Scottish independence. You seem a little, you seem a little sad. And I thought you'd be, I frankly, I had to predict, I thought you'd be saying to Scotland, hey, buddy, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. If you want out, then go. But is that a new feeling among English conservatives to be a little bit more elegiac and wistful about what could be the end of the United Kingdom. I mean all you guys I know, whenever I would say – whenever I call you British or say Britain, I could see you wince. All you English guys would wince and say England. We're English. I'm English. And I've seen you tweet little – I've seen you tweet these incredible pictures of yourself fox hunting. I mean you're –

You have explaining to do. Yeah, you're quite glamorous, James. And so is this part of your sort of Downton Abbey phase where you're wistfully thinking about the sun setting on the British Empire? My views on Scotland have got nothing to do with my liking for fox hunting. And also, I think like a lot of British people, although we find the Scots a pain in the ass to a degree, at the same time, we recognize that we're much greater together. We've achieved a lot together. You know, Dr. Johnson said, the finest prospect a Scotchman sees is the high road that leads to London.

But his chronicler was James Boswell, who was a Scot, and he loved Dr. Johnson, and whom Dr. Johnson loved. And we work better as a partnership. I think most English people actually would much rather keep the union than lose it. It's part of our heritage. So let me ask you just a couple of nuts and bolts questions. Then I want to get back to the culture question and you, Kip,

because I have a couple of thoughts about that. Nuts and bolts uh if if the vote comes comes out to be no uh then then then it's that's done then at least we can put that issue to bed and other things will happen if it's yes let me let me hold you there because that won't be the case um if it's a no vote all that will happen is that the rabid nationalists, the bully, bully, bully boys, boot boys that have been put together by Alex Salmond, they will not be satisfied. They will want more and more bigger chunks of meat until until Scotland achieves de facto independence, regardless of whether it is officially independent.

Yeah. Let me jump in for a second. I was listening to the BBC reporting live from some classic pub somewhere, and there are Scots who said what they've accomplished here is regardless of the vote, they have divided the country. Yes. All right. So my next question is, if the vote is yes, what happens then? What could happen then? happen then one i guess it could be a period of negotiation where we uh where essentially um the london and westminster figures out a way to

buy them back two it could be a canadian style um um accommodation where sc becomes, you know, the equivalent of French Canada or three actual independence. I mean, is there a fourth possibility that I'm missing? You know, that scene in gladiator where he says unleash hell. It's going to be like that. That's, that's, that's all we know. But look, the fact is that until two weeks ago, no one, I don't think, apart from, you know, in the deranged imagination of Alex Salmond

and a few blue-painted, kilt-wearing lunatics, no one imagined for a second that it was going to be anything other than a no vote, which is why the no campaign was so complacent and why in the last week we've seen this embarrassing scrabble as the various leaders of the various parties, David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour, the ghastly Nick Clare, they've all gone up to Scotland. They've all crawled on their knees across broken glass and promised

to do everything. It's a bit like a divorcing couple where the man is being caught cheating, not that I'm saying England has been caught cheating, but in this situation, England is the man. And he promises, I will give up golf, I will give up drinking, I will wash the dishes every day, I will scrub the floor. His marriage is not worth having, frankly, after all that. So that's what happens if it's a no vote. If it's a yes vote, no one's planned for this stuff. No one knows what's going to happen.

Because least of all, Alex Salmond, I think he wrote something like a 600-page document outlining exactly what's going to happen. But it was all gibberish. It was all smoke and mirrors. There was no serious thought that had gone into it. So nobody knows what independence might look like other than unleash hell, other than chaos. Right. So, James, this is my sort of final question, more of a sort of a larger issue.

I think that it actually appeals, it applies to the United States as well. It's something you said at the very beginning, that a country that loses a sense of itself, that loses a sense of its greatness and its purpose, the great in Great Britain. Yeah. This is natural. This is almost a predictable event where when you no longer have as your bedrock part of your culture the idea that no no we're awesome we've done some amazing things where instead you have this um steady drum beat almost this constant spine of your of your culture is all the awful things you've done which leads of course on a small scale to that town in the north in britain i think it's in the north in britain where they sort of allowed all that sort of the child abuse to go ratherham, yeah. It happens in every northern town, by the way, not just Rotherham.

It happens across the country, yeah. And it's almost the same thing. We don't want to – for fear of offense, we don't want to stand up for our values. And once you do that on a small scale, you get Rotherham, yeah. This is why the philosophy of multiculturalism is so dangerous. And this has been waiting to happen for a long time. Once and this is a message for Obama as well, of course. Once you cease to believe in your own country's exceptionalism,

once you cease to believe in what it is that make your country's great, once you're incapable of making a case for the values that you've had, which have been sanctified by tradition, then you are lost. This is what you get. You get the sort of the balkanization of your country. You get a recipe for, well, division. So my question then is when do we have Prime Minister Nigel Farage or when do we have a UKIP government? And if you could translate for us in the United States, is UKIP, the UK Independence Party, are they conservative or are they nationalist? Are they closer to Marine Le Pen in France, which she's basically a socialist?

Oh, no way. Or are they free market conservatives? Should we be cheering and flying their flag or should we be saying, well, wait a minute. Yeah, more or less. I'd say you Kip are about,

about as good as it gets. So then they're not perfect. They're a work in progress. I, for me, I wish they could be a bit more libertarian, a bit more classical liberal, pure classical liberal.

For example, where they fall down. I wish they could be a bit more libertarian, a bit more classical liberal, pure classical liberal. For example, where they fall down, I saw a speech today from the European Parliament by one of the new UKIP MEPs, was making a speech where he called the NHS great, the National Health Service great. Well, the National Health Service is many things, but it is not great. It is a sclerotic Stalinist hangover from the post-war years in which health is allocated by rationing rather than the market. You get massive inefficiencies as a result, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, UKIP MEPs are just as capable of saying stupid things as MPs from other parties. But nevertheless, they've sometimes been described

as the Tory party in exile, and I think that's probably true. Cameron's Tories are squishy centrists, they're rhinos, as you would call them. UKIP are, yes, a galvanising force, and they are definitely not like Marine Le Pen's party, who are much closer to being fascists, i.e. a left-wing political ideology. So when do we have Prime Minister Nigel Farage? Isn't he the big beneficiary here?

I don't see how he can be Prime Minister. I think the best hope is that, okay, this is how it pans out. There has to be a no vote in the referendum, which means that the union stays together, which means that Labour isn't destroyed, which means that the Conservatives don't have a guaranteed majority at the next general election next year, which in turn means that UKIP has become a very viable force and they will almost certainly result in the loss of the next general election to Labour because the UKIP will split the Conservative vote.

And then what will happen in, what, five years after that, four years after that, another general election, is that you will get a revived uh right much on the lines that happened to canada you remember when the uh right when the conservative split and then then joined together again i think only only with a period of darkness um sort of 19 long winters of Labour in power, showing how awful they can be. Will the Conservative movement in the UK get it back together and acquire some cojones and some red-kneed principles again? So, James, Peter here, there is no chance, zero chance,

even if Scotland votes yes tomorrow, there is zero chance of replacing David Cameron as leader before the next election. Ah, well, no, no. Actually, no. If Scotland votes yes, I'm not really sure how David Cameron can survive, frankly. And does Boris Johnson somehow, who mounts the challenge? Well, Boris Johnson might be lurking in the wings. I think, look, if Scotland votes yes,

all bets are off. No one knows what to want. It will be very exciting, if nothing else. These will definitely be interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, yeah. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you.

That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly.

18plusgamblingcare.ie. Right. And last question. I read a piece the other day. I simply hadn't followed this very closely. But as you know, over the last 25, actually even over the last 30 years, there have been two referenda in Quebec. They've both been close. Yeah.

And they both lost. And even at that, even at that, the financial center of Canada, which used to be unambiguously Montreal, is now unambiguously Toronto. Banks, insurance companies, trading operations, everybody got out of Quebec. Quebec did itself enormous economic damage, even by holding the referenda, even though it chose to remain in Canada. How much damage has Scotland done itself, no matter how the vote comes out tomorrow? I think loads and loads of damage. And this is where Chardon-Freuda comes in. Chardon-Freuda, for the nationalists mixed with pity for the for the poor

no voters who never wanted this in the first place alex sandman is a very very dangerous irresponsible man and i think he's done enormous damage to scotland not just in terms of the wreckage wreckage he's inflicted on the landscape with his wind farm policy um but also politically with this with this foolhardy and aggressive nationalistic campaign for independence. James, I'd ask you the obligatory question about global warming, but who cares? You, about half a mile back, you threw a rather large grenade into a very shallow ditch when you mentioned that Rotherham is just one of many cities that it goes

on everywhere. Explain. Oh, yeah. Oh, goodness me. Rotherham was just the one where they got found out. There have been Muslim rape gangs, and you can call them Muslim rape gangs. They are made up of Muslims, operating in Britain since the earliest known case was 1989. Originally, they targeted Sikh girls, not white girls. And then they moved on to white girls. And there are various cultural reasons for this. White girls are seen as, as you know, too far. They are they are dirty, dirty prostitutes and therefore deserve everything that's coming for them.

What's extraordinary has been the collusion between local authorities, children's care charities, local police and the Muslim communities. It seems that political correctness has been so great that people would rather thousands of girls ended up being serially raped or trafficked in an industry worth about $300,000 a year per girl trafficked in this way. They would rather have this industry carrying on than be thought to be slightly

racist or Islamophobic. I think this just is indicative of how completely warped our values are in this grisly modern age. And one of the reactions you can't help but think is the rise of UKIP. Now, the question, of course, is managing that rabble on the right, which always seems to overreact when it comes to things like this, but it'll be something we'll watch. Yeah, UKIP's been, if anything, UKIP's heard on the side of caution, I would say.

UKIP has been relatively quiet about this, for obvious reasons, because, of course, it doesn't want to put itself in the same as the the more fascistic organization the obvious one has been the bnp the british national party and also the edl the english defense league but this is the but this is a sort of catch-22 situation a lot of the people who were attracted to the EDL in particular were people from those northern communities, white working class people whose daughters had been sexually abused and tried to report it to the police and found their reports fell on deaf ears. They were told that these girls were consenting to this. You know, girls as young as 11 were consenting to being gang raped and put on heroin by these gangs. So these people joined the EDL and it became convenient for our sort

of politically correct media, politically correct establishment, rather than, well, to shoot the messenger, essentially, to say, look, these guys are racist. They're making all these outrageous claims. But the fact is these claims were true. Well, if we learned anything from Elvis Costello lyrics, it's that any questioning whatsoever about the cultural impact of immigration means you've got Oswald Mosley's making people running to the night rallies. So report from us when fascism descends on glorious Albion. I'll do that, definitely.

Thank you, sir. Go to bed, and we'll talk to you later.'ll do that, definitely. Thank you, sir. Go to bed and we'll talk to you later. Happy fox hunting, James. Yes, James. Bye. Bye-bye. You know, it's a good thing I did not bring up one of the BBC's shows I recently did. The last time I brought up BBC to James, he

didn't seem to be a fan, but it's a large No, he's not a fan. It's a big thing. There's so many different aspects to the BBC, and it's funny how Scotland is now saying, well, we're going to have a Scottish broadcast system then, and we'll have to figure out the licensing and the rest of it. It would be amusing if the BBC just said, you know what? We're going to turn all our transmitters around in the other direction so nothing goes up to Scotland and you don't get to see any of our programming.

Sorry. You want to leave? That's what you leave. There's a show called Happy Valley, and it took place in Yorkshire, which is a place that is so impoverished they can't afford the definite article. It's interesting to hear that the Yorkshire speech where, well, I'm going down to hospital. I'll take road there and then I'm going to get to car. I mean, there's a the, but it's a T apostrophe, and it's just sort of almost completely evaporated,

along with work and along with masculinity. It's a show about a female police officer, and when you watch it, you realize there's not a single male in the series who's worth the skin that he occupies, with the exception of a cheeky little policeman who himself later shows himself to be quite weak. It's extraordinary. And you see not so much a different – you see a weakened culture. You see a culture that has lost its way. And it's – you also see a culture that is completely comfortable apparently with the female cop grabbing the arbles of a suspect and squeezing them until he cries.

Because in sort of a meta sense, he deserved it to being a male. It's quite extraordinary. But all those things are commissioned and organized and sort of created and written the way they are here in a cultural center in London, right? These are all – this is the elite's view of what it's like to live in the horrible north it's when people hear something about like i we're gonna set this we're gonna set this movie in mississippi where it's scary and there are evil violent people around which is complete nonsense exactly and that's what i'm getting to when it comes to that cultural cringe that james was describing what was the slogan that the no people had better together we're better together which which to quote something that i wrote in the bleed is sort

of like a guy whose wife is leaving him saying making an argument for compound interest in their joint account right yeah i mean it's just yeah the the the idea somehow that you would stand all those companion tickets on our airlines that you would stand up and make a case for your own culture uh you know no but we have to apologize for England, which in its imperialism and its racism was absolutely unique in human history. Which, Mark, I think for us, for our progressives, for people here, for conservatives here

who haven't been over there, we tend to think that the worst, the worst kind of progressive excesses are here, right? We roll our eyes at all this. You go to Ann Arbor or Cambridge or Berkeley. You think, oh my god, nothing could be worse than this. And then you go and you see what happens in Britain and it's really astonishing how the progressive PC culture has taken root there everywhere. It's bananas and so it it i mean my my i mean i know

you you were probably making a segue james i'm going on go on rob oh well i saw you know i i read every now and then i i pick up the spectator which is the british uh british conservative uh paper uh magazine I read it. I saw a wonderful cartoon a couple weeks ago which had these sort of set in – looked like the biblical desert. And there was a giant. It looked like Goliath. And Goliath was lying flat on the desert and these two little people were staring at him. And somebody had knocked Goliath down and said, ha disproportionate Israeli response I thought was fun uh hmm James isn't giving you any satisfaction at all Rob I'm just

just gonna let you play that one all the way down to wherever it's going I just got caught up in the conversation. I just forgot. No, I know. We were talking about English culture, though, and you realize that – and you're right, Rob. They are progressives to the 10th, 10th, 100th degree, and you almost wonder if they could do Fair Lady now because it would be – Because it makes fun of people's accents, right? Could you make fun of Liza because she drops her H's? Could you make fun of her for saying Henry Eggins? I mean, I actually don't know.

It's possible because the Cockneys have become sort of a culture that you can spoof and have fun with the rhyming slang and the rest of it. But that dropping of the H's, isn't that – doesn't that privilege receive standard Oxford-type English. Doesn't that – isn't it a microaggression to actually point out that somebody's age has been dropped, whether you're saying Henry or Igans or Aries? Yeah. It's now chic to do it. I think people kind of try to sort of – Harry, as in Harry's the sponsor, as in – So subtle.

I thought you were going – I thought you were going to talk about encounter. I didn't know you were going to Harry's. I apologize. I'm all wrong. I'm all wrong. I'm going to sit silently here. That's where I was going. Because we want to talk about things that are better together.

Scotland and England, your face and a good blade. That's Harry's. Man, that was great. Good Lord. I have no idea how much work, how much scaffolding I have to erect in advance only to watch you drive a Morris Minor into it and topple the whole damn thing. And you know what's funny is that I wasn't even trying. I'm doing it now inadvertently. I just apologize.

That's the worst part of it. I know. I know. I feel bad about this one because i really didn't know but i do it on purpose i don't feel bad i'll be honest with you yeah i know he just can't help it it's like the dog every time one of us leaves we'll take a shoe from the back and just move it elsewhere to tell us what he thinks and one of these days there'll be something in the shoe to tell us exactly what he thinks even more so but let me go back to what

we're telling you about harry's and the reason that you should listen is because not only are they a sponsor, which is great because they keep this thing going, you can patronize them to thank them for that, and in the bargain get an incredible shave. An incredible shave. Harry's is coming up to its first anniversary, but they've already completely just torn asunder, disrupted the shaving industry.

Their standards lie in ruins. Why? Because here's a good price on a great blade that comes to your house. A better shaving experience than the giants like Schegg or Gillette or the rest of them. They make their own amazing German engineered blades. That's right. They found a distributor. They found a manufacturer and they said, what are we going to do? We got to buy the factory. This 93 year old facility in Germany now produces blades for Harry's and they come to your door. That's just the thing. You don't have to go to the store and pay huge drugstore prices. No, they're focused on

providing guys with a great shaving experience for just a fraction of the competitors. Half the price of other razor blades. You're tired of paying whatever you have to pay for that 9, 10, 6, 14 blade monstrosity, a scrape across your face. No, if you go to Harry's, you'll find a high quality blade. Half the price, as I mentioned, order online, comes to your door. Comes to your door. And even though, you know, there's no film crew busting in your house to do the life and times of you and your style choices, you'll be proud and pleased when you pick up that nice little razor

and look at a well-designed piece of industrial machinery and scrape it across your face. There you go. Harry's.com. Use the promo code RIC face. There you go. Harrius.com. Use the promo code RICOSHET to save five bucks off of your first purchase. And Robin mentioned that there was an encounter spot that he intended on ruining. Completely unaware that he was ruining something else. And I believe you were actually telling some sort of Goliath-related joke or story about

Yeah, it was a cartoon I saw that I thought was very funny which is like two little uh two people from the middle east standing over a fallen uh goliath and saying look another disproportionate israeli response right well at that point the audience enjoyed that the audience thought that the world had been turned upside down which i believe was the song that the brits played as they marched, defeated out of America. Because for a moment there, they thought that you, you, Rob Long, were segueing into the spot. Because the encounter book that we're telling you about this month is Making David into Goliath. How the world had turned against Israel by Joshua Barovchik. Let me read from the prices. Making David into Goliath traces the process by which material pressures and intellectual fashions reshaped world opinion of Israel.

Initially, terrorism, oil blackmail, and the sheer size of the Arab and Muslim populations gave the world powerful inducements to back the Arab cause. Then, prevalent new paradigm of lessness orthodoxy, in which class struggle was supplanted by the noble struggles of people of color, created a lexicon of rationales for taking sides against Israel. Thus, nations can behave cravenly while striking high-minded poses and aligning themselves in the Middle East conflict. If you want to read this book, you can go, of course, to EncounterBooks.com. The coupon code RICOSHET will get you 15% off the price of Joshua's book or any other book for that matter. We thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, we have two examples of foreign policy at work here. One of them is the Middle East, where the president's finely tuned,

calibrated, calculated, and precise strategy is about to be put into place somewhere. And the other has to do with the dispatch of actual boots on the ground, a phrase that I'm never going to say again because I hate it, to combat Ebola. Now, I don't know if you guys read a piece in the New York Times earlier this week about why we should pay attention to Ebola and be concerned. Did you? It was by a fellow named Mike Osterholm. I did not, but 10 years ago or 15 years ago when it came out, I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and Ebola has my attention. I've seen a movie with Dustin Hoffman in it, so I'm entitled to speak.

You're there. Yeah. Mike Osterholm, I know Mike a little, and he's not an alarmist. So when he talks about this, it's something to pay attention to. This is the largest outbreak apparently ever. They've never had something that moved into the cities like this. And as the article points out, every time somebody new gets infected, it's a trillion rolls of the genetic dice,

and it's just a matter of time before it becomes aerosol, before it becomes transmosol before it becomes transmissible by air uh do you think the president is the president doing the right thing i think he is uh is he motivated by optics i think it's irrelevant uh and because of obviously he is uh does this change the subject does anybody say let's not pay attention to america's other failings elsewhere let's pay attention to this's other failings elsewhere? Let's pay attention to this marvelous Ebola response. Because somebody is saying – and I saw this elsewhere that actually the Democrats are trying to push a narrative of economic recovery in order to get them through the midterms. Exactly.

I'm sorry there. No, we're not in the Great Depression. There are no Walker Evans-style black and white vistas of people trudging across the dusty plains. But recovery? Let's go to you, Peter. Tell me, do you think America feels be a very good argument that Ebola – that dealing with Ebola is a more pressing matter than figuring out what to do about ISIS. We're not going to be able to do much more in the short term than contain ISIS, give some people troops, kill some people from the sky. To be honest about it, the idea of eradicating ISIS, a three-year project that takes us into somebody else's, nobody's listening when Obama talks about that. Certainly, we don't want any more heads chopped off if we can possibly avoid it. But Ebola, that's a direct threat to this nation. We're what? A five-hour flight from,

or six, seven-hour flight from Lagos, that could pop up here at any moment. At the same time, the country, the press is not responding to that as the pressing issue. So what is the pressing issue? Just being tired of Barack Obama, this continuing rolling semi-recovery that isn't really recovery where the workforce is now so shrunken. It's hard for me to see how the Democrats can do anything except in state by state, a couple of states. Udall seems to have found out how to connect with voters in Colorado. Senator Udall, the Democrat, will probably win reelection. I don't sense a Republican wave. It seems to me now a state by state fight to take the Senate, but I certainly don't sense a Republican wave. It seems to me now a state by state fight to take

the Senate, but I certainly don't sense any kind of democratic recovery. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm not really sure about a wave yet or a no wave. I think waves emerge probably in October, October 15. I think you can I don't think you can tell about a wave before then. I mean, it retro retro retroactively or retrospectively, it always seems like it was, oh, it's obvious there was a wave or obvious there wasn't one, but I'm not sure that's the case now. I think all of those, I even think Colorado is still not, is still a toss up. I think it could be a wave for the Republicans now, but I think it's still state by, it's always been a state by state fight, but it just looks like the democrats have some weak candidates to run on um because there's no recovery they can't run next to the president that's a really when you can do that that's really strong that's a great

that's a really hard thing to to beat when you when a sitting senator gets to run with a popular president that's a that's a great thing to be able to do and they can't do it. As far as the president, what's interesting, of course, is that there was a story – I think it was Media Research put out a story last week that at equivalent points in their administrations, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Barack Obama is a little less popular than George W. Bush, but they're roughly equally unpopular. There were something like 72 stories about the unpopularity of George W. Bush and his unpopularity polls and how low he was.

And there have been about nine of them about Barack Obama. And when you take Fox News out of the equation, I think there have been three. No one in the press has any appetite for reporting about the failure of the Obama administration on multiple fronts. And I actually think that works against them. I think it creates this kind of inchoate, unvoiced unease with the direction of the country. It's kind of a good thing every now and then for people to see their president getting beat up. And when they don't, I think they beat him up in endless cycles in their own head. So I don't think it's helpful. I don't think all the training wheels and the bicycle helmets they're putting on this president and the pads and just the cosseting and the pampering is helping him at all.

So I'm not – I mean i don't but but in terms of the ebola ebola versus isis look i don't know i mean i don't know this is going to sound terrible but people are going to get beheaded in that region because they're monsters and people have been beheaded and and thrown into dungeons and into yeah weird ditches i mean the emir of bokhara used to throw english ambassadors into holes in the ground and and leave them there for years until the 20s or you know a long time um it's weird it's a weird place it's a weird culture it's dangerous if It's a weird place. It's a weird culture. It's dangerous. If you're a freelance journalist, you should really think twice about going there. The world is a very dangerous place and we're never, ever, ever, ever going to make it safe enough for freelance journalists to decide to go out and buy a ticket and go somewhere. That's just the way it is. However, Ebola is a symptom of something that's going to happen and going to happen more and more often, which are fast mutating viruses that are no longer contained in rural areas that are hard to get to and hard to get out of. I have to say, I myself don't understand the

administration's tardiness in putting together Obama's announcement, putting together funding and so forth because Ebola plays exactly to what they ought to understand. Ebola does require a federal response. It does require the Centers for Disease Control, the deployment of expertise. All the Ivy Leaguers, I say that kindly, Rob, you Yale man, all the Ivy Leaguers who are staffing the Obama administration who believe profoundly in expertisely within the competence of the federal government and of genuine experts and it relies on years and years of research funding by the federal government yeah it's just it's it's well it falls right within there it doesn't but it doesn't require any planning from them i mean the the truth is it doesn't no one in the obama administration

needs to think about what to do. The protocols have already been written. They've been written for the past 20 years. They've been updated every year. This is not a political decision. It's not even an administrative decision. It's simply like there's – I think there's a menu of 12 choices and you just pick which one of which level of severity you want and things automatically happen. People automatically do stuff it

doesn't really even doesn't matter who the president is the president could be joe biden or mickey mouse it doesn't matter um so this what's odd about it is just how how weirdly theatrical it's been it doesn't have to be it's just well this is the outbreak we're going to do this and that and the other and it's you know it you know the i mean i know james and i are both huge fans for the movie the Andromeda Strain. And the whole point of The Andromeda Strain is like it doesn't matter. Like it's just they have practiced this thing. It's a protocol.

They're going to follow it. And that does exist that way. I mean I'm kind of a nut on this stuff. So I love it. I love all this. I'm creepily obsessed with viral outbreaks and things. So I like to follow it. But yeah.

Right. At the time of the Andromeda strain, I think the understanding would be that if there was an outbreak like this, that the president would say, all right, open up wildfire, get the eggheads down, fix this thing. Okay. But now I think that the reason that the administration has been dragging its feet is that people were waiting for the president himself because the president is probably a better virologist than most of the virologists on his staff and is thinking that that if he was an epidemiologist in this sense he would ask them to look at resequencing the genes in order to disrupt reproduction there's a protein in there i believe that can be tinkered with so until the president himself brought his great intellect to this and then realized that perhaps maybe no he's

you know it's going to interfere with the golf. So yeah, you guys take it from here. Okay, there's that. Well, let's go to the member feed where there's lots of stuff. And folks, if you are not a member of Ricochet and we hate to keep banging this drum, but it's a great drum, it's big

and our arms feel nice and Popeye-like from thwapping it every week. If you go to the member feed and you pay money to Ricochet, you can comment on these things. There's so many posts, so many things from which to choose. Fred Cole, who loves to stir

the hornet's nest or poke you in the eye or depending whatever or just state positions that get people talking. Fred asked the question, how would you vote for independence for your state? A rather germane issue in these times. I hate this dissolution.

While you like the idea of self-determination, it's wonderful. The idea that we have grouped cultures into larger nation states. I mean France has about five or six separatist movements, which I just find fascinating. The idea that a Frenchman would say, I do not want to be part of France, just strikes you as completely inimical to the national character. But Italy, you know, Italy's cobbled together as a nation for just 120 years or something.

There's a north-south split. Even then, all the Italians knew they were all Italians. Right. They're just organized, yeah. And all the Frenchmen, except for a couple of mad Occitanians, know that they're French people. The Languedoc people, yeah, right. Right, and as I said, again, And all the Frenchmen except for a couple of mad Occitanians know that they're French people. The Languedoc people, yeah, right.

Right. And as I said, again, to quote the Blit, because I hate coming up with statements that sound like I just spun them on a thin air when I actually wrote them down. Given the Western civilization is under something of an assault these days, I would prefer that we hang together rather than being hung separately. Of course, we wouldn't be hung by our enemies because there would be no neck to put the rope around. But I prefer solidarity at this point. And the United States is a magnificent experiment in which these disparate groups are assembled into a larger civic identity. Don't you think it's been flipped on its head though these days? I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but these days when I hear people talk about that, it's not not it's never we should secede these days it's often they should go i've heard more progressive say maybe this is where i live and people i hang out with is like

you know texas is just go be on their own they're not even part of america you're like well you okay but you know texas you know contributes about six times more to the federal coffers than they take so i don't know where you get the money for your your fancy programs you love so much. I don't I don't hear that. That may be the rarefied era Venice in which you could be. It is rarefied in which you trod because no, I mean, the people that you're talking to are the ones who regard the vast majority of the country between the thin crusts of enlightenment on the coasts to be an embarrassment. So but you guys are in California and they're always talking about California splitting up into five states. Right.

Yeah. Secession. Would I say to Minnesota that we should go? That's an absolutely preposterous notion. We used to joke when I was a kid about North Dakota seceding because if we did, we would have been one of the great nuclear powers in the globe because we had so many Minutemen missiles. And now, of course, if North Dakota seceded, they'd be a great oil power.

Yeah, but you'd be like – you'd be giant. You'd be the fifth or sixth, right? And they still have some nukes as well. But no, North Dakota is wedded to the Union far distant as Washington may be. So let's say California decided that it wanted to go. How would you guys split the talk? If California wanted to secede or it's much more likely that california would vote to break itself up not that that would get anywhere because would require the approval of congress so on so forth but i'm opposed to breaking up california for

the same reason that if i were a scott i would vote no tomorrow which is to say that in the place i live i rely since i'm surrounded by liberals here in Northern California, I rely on conservatives in Orange County to provide at least a little bit of counterbalance in this state. If Orange County were its own state, Robinson here would be high and dry. I cling to California as presently constituted. It always feels to be like a strange – it's the horrible result, the bad result of progressivism, right? The idea that we're supposed to – the reason you secede is because you're too different. And you feel like you're too different because everybody wants you to be exactly the same. I mean the great thing about being conservative is – now, there's also a code word dog whistle problem with it. But it's the idea that the states are not supposed to be the same.

They're supposed to be different. They're supposed to be – you are allowed to vote with your feet but you're also allowed to vote culturally with your feet. There are no boiled peanut stands in Massachusetts but there are plenty of them in the Carolinas and Florida and Georgia. And there's a reason for that. That's because they're delicious and they grow down there and that's what the people like to eat. And the differences, the cultural differences from state to state are what makes the country great. And the idea that you couldn't possibly have a union that allowed for those differences and those differences may be larger cultural issues than we now allow, is kind of crazy.

That's kind of crazy. Well, now that we all have an image in our minds of Rob eating boiled peanuts with his feet, let me remind people also that Ricochet just isn't about politics. It's also about religion and cultural and social matters and the rest of it. So let's have a couple of questions

that we really don't address very much here in the podcast. I'm not a sports guy. Never was. Defer to those who are. NFL's got itself a little bit of an image problem these days. We have a player here in Minnesota whose picture was prominently displayed in all the renderings of the brash, big, old, new stadium they're building right by my office. Those pictures are gone. They've been replaced by a generic Vikings icon. And of course, there's the Rice situation. And everyone is saying now that the NFL commissioner should fall on his sword and go. A, is that so?

B, do you care? Peter? The answer to B is not particularly. I don't really care. A, is it so? You know, I'm not sure that it is. So I will now say a few things that are, well, this is ricochet, of course, I'll say things that are politically incorrect. Rice is the one who punched his girlfriend and knocked her down in an elevator. Is that Rice? Yep. Yes. Okay. So if you're Roger Goodell, and what do you do when it is very clear that Mrs. Rice, as she is now, the one he assaulted, am sticking with him, how dare you attempt to intercede in our marriage or inflict a punishment on my husband and affect my family's livelihood?

That strikes me as a pretty difficult argument to confront if you're Roger Goodell. With this fellow Adrian Peterson, spare the rod and spoil the child. That is in the Old Testament. You know, my father had a hairbrush that he used on my backside several times. The idea of corporal punishment, the idea that that is now illegal strikes me as pretty, pretty tricky territory for Roger Goodell to be wandering onto. Who was it? Charles Barkley, the basketball great. By the way, Charles Barkley is funny and well-spoken and smart.

I hope he ends up in office somewhere. He's still a young man. He's always talked about it. He's always talked about it. Boy, I like that guy. Anyway, he said – he made this same point about the way he was raised, that getting your backside tanned by a switch. Now, if he actually hurt his son – I don't know the details of it, but which you work, is now responsible for enforcing your marriage codes and your parenting style. I mean, you're right. It is absolutely an abomination to punch your fiance in the face and knock her out.

And if I think if she presses charges and you are arrested, then I think, yeah, maybe that's a that's a problem for your employer. Right. But I don't think it's I think it's weird that your employer would then impose upon you. And look, maybe we say there's a cultural problem. This woman clearly has these horrible self-esteem problems that she needs to understand. She needs to be educated as to why this guy should go to prison is supposed to, in addition to running the NFL, also be intimately familiar with the child-rearing style and the marriage and relationship business of every single one of his employees is kind of nuts. Yeah, yeah. I guess if I were Roger Goodell, I would draw the line on the law.

And if – so you draw a distinction between the Rice case and the Peterson case. Peterson has now been indicted by a grand jury in Texas. So I guess when I talk about spare the rod and spoil the child, my problem is really with the law in Texas or with the grand jury. But if you're Roger Goodell, you say, wait a minute, if one of my players gets on the wrong side of the law, there will be, we have to take action right but the rice case is much trickier because not only does she not bring charges but she is standing by her husband married him subsequently married him she married him i just don't i mean i i began this by saying i don't particularly care but i guess i do sort of care how can anybody all right enough for me but it does. But it does show this weird busybodiness and also the queasiness with the whole attitude, which is like, well, I mean he is a kind of – he's a jerk.

I mean he's a terrible person. He punched this woman in the head in an elevator and knocked her unconscious. It's an unforgivable action. And yet she somehow forgave him, and it's her right to do that and it's no one else's right to second guess that because they weren't there. They don't know her and yet everyone in America feels entirely entitled not only to say he should – not only say he should lose his job and that she's a moron but that his boss should also lose his job for not – I don't know what, for not – So here's the question just to get myself in further trouble here. Why is it that all the people who a decade ago said, wait a minute, if Hillary Clinton is willing to stay with her husband, then the rest of us should just shut up and back out of it. It's between them.

Why is there no one I've heard saying the same thing about the Rice case? Or why is it that people say a woman can do whatever she wants with her uterus but she can't do whatever did not want her face to impact the hand bar of the elevator with the velocity that it did. It's the element of – That's a good point. It's a very good point. I would like to go on the record thanking Rob for that comment just now because he just covered me completely. Whatever I said that was outrageous pales by comparison. And I'd like to thank James for reminding me of this little thing called

agency and consent. Yes. I accept your point, James. And now that I'm tainted by both of you, let me back out of this very carefully by saying that at least when we look back on all of this, when it comes to domestic violence and corporal

punishment, the most important thing, of course, is that we had a national conversation about it. This was an opportunity for a national conversation. And if anything happens, of course, to either of them a year from now, you'll be able to get it by just feeling your wrists tingle. That's a lot different from the world in which we live now, where if you want to get the news, you've got to pick up your phone. You've got to take it out of your pocket, you got to turn it on, you got to look. There's so much involved in getting things beamed to you electronically, cybernetically these days on a phone. It's just so old. The idea that you could wear a device on your wrist, which kept you up to date constantly, every single second of the day, is fascinating to some people, and Apple

is going to accommodate them. Now, there have been smartwatches before, but Apple seeks to redefine the genre, improve it and make it its own and be a leader in style and purpose and integrate it into your lifestyle like few companies are capable of doing. So, Peter, Rob, are you going to get an Apple watch? Certainly not. Rob? Here's my system. I will emphatically tell you why it's stupid and I won't get one. And they look dumb and I'm not going to be a jerk and walk around with that stupid looking watch and then I will get one. That's how that works.

Yeah. That's self-knowledge. I'm just going to skip to the second part. It won't be stupid because it's going to be – I'llknowledge. That is self-knowledge. I'm just going to skip to the second part. It won't be stupid because it's going to be – I'll have to get the smaller girl-sized one because I'm a wee fellow and I don't exactly have wrists that require a yard of fabric to get something cinched around them. But the smaller units with its endlessly customizable face, I just – as I said, as I tweeted before, again, I keep apologizing for having said things, but I just have to be honest. I would have loved if Tim Cook had come out and said, what if there was a way to tell time without taking your phone out of your pocket? I mean, because we all used to just be so used to the very reflex action of checking your wrist for the time.

And then we got away with it. Everybody switched to their phone, which meant that everybody became sort of a 19th century guy who's pulling a watch out of a pocket on a chain on his vest. I still wear a watch. Well, good for you. I'm glad there are a couple of people who do. I haven't worn a watch in years, and I'm happy for that. And what would it take to get me to have one again? I don't get a lot of texts. I don't get a lot of messages. I don't feel the need to check whether or not I got a tweet or a Facebook update or anything like that. There's one thing about this that does fascinate me, and that's what they call the taptic input. There's a little device, a sensor, on the side that rests against your wrist. And if you want to send a message to somebody, you can have a little custom series of vibrations.

And when you get that little tap on your wrist, that tells you you've got a message from your wife, you've got a message from work, you've got a message from your wife, you've got a message from work, you've got a message from your child or something like that. And it's going to be more intimate than any other device of its type when you think about it. That's how we'll communicate with each other on the podcast? We'll tap into things? We'll just be tapping to each other.

And you can also draw with your finger little device, little smiley faces or hearts or anything like that that will be instantly beamed to somebody else. I'm just thinking of a parent. thinking you get one that doesn't do that yes you can it's called not getting it at all okay you there are two things that fascinate me about this one you know a parent whose child is in europe on vacation and of course you think you worry you put it out of your mind and then then across the continents, across the ocean, you could actually touch – you can touch the wrist of the other person. There's something very different about that and that's a direction we're going and I like it. There's just something reassuring about that. And secondly, it's got to be a plot point in a novel.

Somebody is writing a novel already right now where on their Apple Watch, they're getting a special custom tap from a dead person. Or a custom tap from the guy across the way at the poker hall who's looking at the cards of the person you're playing with. It's endless. What we won't be doing is, well, I remember some of the mock-ups for the watch, which looked a lot better, frankly, than some of the things that Apple actually came out with. But one of the things that people said you could do on this watch was watch video entertainment. And it had a picture of Star Trek into darkness. I mean, 70-millimeter, huge, long film, which I saw in 3D IMAX, reduced down to a letter box, a little tiny slit on your wrist. For God's sakes!

No, I don't want to watch movies on my flippin' wrist. The Dick Tracy world may be getting here, but we're not to the point yet of going around the moon in little magnetic coffins as he used to do. But, you know, we'll talk about that, and a year from now we'll be telling people how they can listen to the Ricochet podcast on their watch. On their watch!

Because it will connect via Bluetooth to your earphones and you can walk down the street. And maybe we will even integrate into the Ricochet podcast moments where we can nudge the listener to pay attention to this point. So you guys, you've got a year, but come up with some custom patterns that say Rob, that say Peter. And now we know what Rob's going to be. It's going to be like a poke in the sternum, okay? And Peter's will be just a gentle little rubbing back and forth. Revolting. Like I say, you've got a year to plan.

Well, listen, we thank you for listening to this, the Ricochet podcast. And this is probably the point where the music comes up and you tune out and you maybe even complain about the music. If you want to complain about the music that ends the podcast, there's one place you can do that, and that's in the member feed. Go read it. Go join. And go to harrys.com to get those great plays and encounter books. You use the coupon code Ricochet in either one of those, and riches will befall you, and you'll be a happy man. You'll be a happy man, a happy woman a whatever gender you choose you will be delighted because that's what we here are all

about customer service guys it's been fun we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 2.0 next week Kintyre Home is Strolling in from The sea My desire Is always To be Here on the wall Of Kintyre

Far have I traveled And much have I seen Dark distant mountains With valleys of green Past painted deserts The sun sets on fire As he carries me home to The Mall of Kintyre

Mall of Kintyre Home is crawling in from the sea. My desire is always to be here. Oh, Mull of Kinshaw. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Sweet through the heather Like deer in the glen Carry me back to the days I knew then Nice when we sang Like a heavenly choir

All the night And the times of The roll of guitar The roll of guitar All right, you lovelies. All together.