The Ricochet Podcast - The Curmudgeons

Episode Date: April 17, 2014

Michael Bloomberg is going to heaven, the UN is getting warmer (just ask them), Charles Murray is dispensing indispensable wisdom (courtesy of his new book The Curmudgeon’s Guide To Getting Ahead). Later, what will happen in the Crimea and Ukraine, the Obama administration cares more about regimes than the common man, Troy on the Charlotte meet-up, and should a conservaive accept food stamps? Source

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No hassle delivery direct to your door with Just Eat. Delivery and service charges apply. See justeat.ie for details. 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. Rob Long is up in the air today, so Troy Sinek is sitting in the co-founder's chair.

I'm James Lilacs, and our guest today is Charles Murray, with good advice for young and old. Also, the Ukrainian crisis favorite member posts, rants and raves. Let's have a podcast. There you go again. Yes, welcome to this, the Ricochet Podcast, number 211, and it's brought to you by Encounter Books. Our feature title this week, as it's been for most of the month, is Dancing with the Devil, the Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes by Michael Rubin. We'll be talking about this a little bit more, but right now, if you want, you can scurry off to Encounter Books, use the coupon code RICOCHET at your checkout checkout and get 15% off the price of anything.

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Gosh, if Rob does call in, guys, wad your ears with cotton because I think it might be a little bit true. But in the meantime, language like that I hope does not exclude one from one's just reward after you die. Otherwise, a lot of people would be disappointed. But when it comes to heaven, Michael Bloomberg is pretty sure he's going there already. He's got a VIP status apparently at the pearly gates. I guess there's a gate for everybody else and then there's another one with a velvet rope and a big burly bouncer and they let

moral avatars like Michael Bloomberg stroll right in. Peter, what do you think? What do I think? Let's see. Michael Bloomberg said, yeah, here's the quotation. I'm telling you if there's a God when I get to heaven, I'm not stopping to be interviewed. I'm heading straight in. I've earned my place in heaven.

It's not even close. Close quote. This on the day that he announced he's devoting $50 million of his own money to an anti-gun initiative. Fine. Let him spend his money as he'd like. that this indicates is what an amazingly insular place the city and county of New York is. That Michael Bloomberg, who is after all one of the richest men in the world, can satisfy all his intellectual and cultural desires so thoroughly in New York that he has no idea, really apparently, no idea that when you look across the Hudson and see the Palisades, beyond those Palisades lies a country that is not liberal. And what astounds me about it is that he supposes that God himself grew up on the Upper West Side and is the very perfect liberal.

It's just such an insular, New York-centric thing to say. Modern New York. When your morality is based on not on sinner behavior but whether or not you're having healthy habits. I mean if you have healthy habits in New York and you don't smoke and you look down your nose at foie gras and you don't eat cronuts and you exercise until you're a whippet thin, then you are a morally good person. That's the only kind of judgment that we can make anymore. Troy, you're with us again. Tell me whether or not you think this moral preening is of his class or rather could extend to say anybody of his particular political persuasion, by which I mean the nanny, the

scold. Well, moral preening is – that's actually precisely the phrase that I had in mind in thinking about it. The thing that I find remarkable about it is exactly what you just delineated, James. I mean if Mike Bloomberg is preparing the resume to be presented at the Pearly Gates, it's remarkable that he thinks he has a fast pass on the basis of trans fats and on the basis of smoking bans. I mean this is – I could understand a statement like this from the likes of – to use a name that we're not familiar enough with but should be, Norman Borlaug. The guy who did all the genetic modification. He saved a billion people around the world.

Now, the thing about Norman Borlaug is Norman Borlaug was an extremely earnest, humble son of Iowa who would have never said something like this. I mean I think the fact of somebody uttering this is probably proof of its untruth. And I mean this gives you a window into the psychology of Mike Bloomberg. This is sort of salvation through micromanagement of people's lives. I think it is a function of class. I think it's also a function of how – you know, there's an interesting sort of cosmopolitan provincialism in urban life in America that you can be Mike Bloomberg and you can be the mayor of New York City and really think that these are the great issues of our times, the calorie count. Yeah. It also – it says something about the total evaporation from at least certain corners of American culture, liberal New York, one of them, total evaporation of any notion of – any real notion of sin.

The idea that it's easier, much easier to get an abortion in New York City than it is to light up a cigarette is – to them, that's actually – that's the way it should be. That's the way it should be. Absolutely. Right. That's a feature, not a bug. And that sort of is an affront to the moral order that has been in place in underpinning civilization for 5,000 years. All that took place just in Mike Bloomberg's – really, there's a kind of historical arrogance.

If you're Mike Bloomberg, this change, this inversion in the moral order has happened in your own lifetime and you think that you're smarter than the 500 generations, a thousand generations who preceded you and who believed in and cherished and attempted to live up to the old moral order. It is – actually, now that I think – I started out thinking, oh, this is just amusing and unimportant. But now I actually think it's not amusing at all and it really is important. The kind of moral arrogance of the liberals who suppose that in their own lifetimes, they have discovered a new moral order in which trans fats are bad but gay marriage is to be celebrated is just astounding. Can we add one proviso to that because we're talking about liberals in the governing class and you used the example, Peter, of abortion and smoking. And when you mentioned abortion, I was thinking not of the broad issue even of just accessibility to abortion.

I was thinking there's a very narrow issue which has come up in California over and over and over again, which is parental notification if a minor is having an abortion, which to me should be a no-brainer regardless of which side of the issue you're on. I mean that's almost secondarily an abortion issue and primarily a parental rights issue. No, come on, Troy. You know that if the parents are informed, the dad will mercilessly beat the daughter in 100 percent of the instances. That's the only reason that ban is there. Do go on. But James, this is the point. That seems to be an argument that has traction not just with the governing class in California but with the citizenry. This has been on the ballot four or five times in California. It has failed every time. So I think there are certain precincts of

America where we sell it short if we think it's just the governing elite. There are places where this has a broader traction, sadly. That's true. Oh, sure. I mean here in Minnesota, now the city is considering banning styrofoam takeout containers. Now I loathe styrofoam takeout containers but I'm of the mind that actually they do serve a purpose for some people and if you would like to be able to use them, great. Of course, we're going to ban them because if the city of Minneapolis ceases to allow the consumption of however many thousands are used in the course of a year, the seas will stop rising and the planet will cool.

And we will no longer, of course, be buried under coursing tsunamis of trash as we are. It will change nothing. It's a symbolic gesture that will cause more money to be paid by people and more trouble for business. But that doesn't matter. It's the right thing to do. James, by the way, while I'm feeling ticked off, something else just popped into my mind that ticked me off this past week or 10 days. 10 days, I guess it is, since I missed the podcast last week.

The IP – something – anyway, the UN body of 200 scientists who again are smarter than anybody else who has ever lived issued their latest report on global warming. IPCC. Thank you. Climate change, please. Climate change. Excuse me. I beg your pardon. On climate change.

Yes, I'll be correct as correct as I can in saying this. And as a matter of fact, even if you grant all of their conclusions, and even if you grant their moral fervor about climate change, even if you call it climate change instead of global warming, grant all of that in all the coverage I saw in the New York Times, online and elsewhere of the IPC's latest report and of the entire issue of climate change, I did not anywhere, not once, see the following fact reported. And the following fact is this, that of all the signatories of the Kyoto Accord, back in the late 90s, I think, was when the accord began to be negotiated. Of all the signatories, only one nation, and that is a nation that in the end refused to sign the accord, has actually reduced its emission of greenhouse gases.

And that country is the United States of America because of fracking, because we're moving to natural gas. In other words, the vigorous application of the free markets and American know-how and technology have actually done something about greenhouse gas emissions. It is not reported in the IPC, whatever it's called, report. It didn't get picked up anywhere in the press. All of this pompous, self-righteous nonsense about global warming. And it's obvious all they're engaging in, to use the phrase you've both used, is moral preening because if they actually cared about the emission of greenhouse gases, they would say, oh, wait, look, the United States has already set an example for the rest of the world to follow.

Well, Troy – Silence. Silence. Let me ask Troy this. You're absolutely right, Peter, and it's a great point. And Troy, what do you think actually is going on here? Do you think that they're concerned about global warming or do you think perhaps that the UN has established or wants to establish some mechanism by which the wealth of the first world will be transferred to those of the second and third so that they too can follow our wonderful example. Peter Van Doren My question would be why can't it be both?

I think that's probably their question too. Peter Van Doren Well, setting up a false distinction for the point of giving the guest a second thought is a specialty of mine I would like to say. Peter Van Doren Well, to Peter's point, I mean I think obviously the reason that you're not seeing those kind of statistics included is because it busts up the narrative. And I think it's important anytime you look at that global warming coverage to understand – this I think has become more clear as time has passed. The whole reason that the denier thing has traction, that they utilize that all the time, is it's very important for the left and particularly people who are really spun up about this issue to elide any

sort of reasonable distinctions and make it binary because in reality, if anybody actually sort of scratches the surface on this issue, it becomes this sort of stair step where you have to ask the question, do you believe global warming is happening? Then you have to ask the question, do you believe humanity is causing it? If so, what percentage of it is humanity causing? If so, is there something that we can do to arrest that or is that already baked into the cake? If we have to do something, is a cap and trade – all these numerous questions that emanate from this one sort of fundamental assertion at the start and they want to elide all of that because that conversation doesn't work for them. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Troy is smart, James.

I know, I know, I know. I don't believe that you said the term anthropogenic global warming, though. Is it too early where you are? Because that's always a test for me. If I can say it, I don't need any more coffee. If I can't say it, I need another cup. I can't even get out the initials. IP, what is it?

IPCC. It's IPCC, but you tried valiantly, Peter. And then IGW and the rest of it. So many acronyms, so many. I just remember when the world was simple and scuba and radar was just about all you needed to know, but not so much today. Now, does that make me an old crotchety guy to say that? Well, let's ask somebody who might be an authority on the fact. Charles Murray is a political scientist, an author, and a libertarian.

He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which has been credited in the intellectual foundations for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve, co-authored with the late Richard G. Herrnstein, sparked a heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America's class structure. His last book, Coming Apart, describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century. And his newest book is The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead, Do's and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life. We welcome to the podcast, Charles Murray. Hello, sir. Hi, how are you? We're just grand. All right, you're a self-declared curmudgeon. Doesn't that mean

you're shaking your fist at the hip smart kids as they walk past? What possible advice do you have for them, and why should they listen to you? Well, I kind of redefined curmudgeon for my own purposes. So it's not just grumpy old men. It is bosses in workplaces of either gender who are inwardly grumpy about lots of the current sensibility. And if you aren't careful, if you're a young person, they'll write you off. And more broadly, I'm actually writing this book for people who are in their 20s, they're ambitious, they're just out of college,

and they are engaged in a really treacherous transition. I mean, they're transitioning to adult life oftentimes with very little preparation for what they're getting into. And they're doing so at a time when the culture has allowed them to attenuate adolescence well into their 30s. I mean, when my father was in his 20s, he'd already fought a war, got married, and was starting a business. You have somebody today who's 24, 25. They've been playing video games for an awful long time. They're marinated in internet culture and not necessarily conversant with the terms of adult existence as it comes crashing down on you, when it eventually does. So how really different, though, is today's generation from, let's say, my own, which came of age in the 80s?

Well, I'm way too old to know what the generation came of age. Because I came of age in the late 1950s, early 1960s. However, I will say what I think is a very widespread difference. That a lot of 23, 24-year-olds who are new graduates, when they get a job, they're in just about their first job ever you simply don't have the uh... the the same number of kids from upper middle class families who have been working construction not working at a store scooping ice cream a basket robbins or doing all the other things that formerly i think we're very common experiences teenagers so they get into their job

and they have the supervisor who tells them to do something and doesn't say please. And then when they turn in the work, not quite on time, the supervisor doesn't accept their excuse for why they didn't get turned in on time and they feel shocked and

victimized by this cruel treatment they're getting. I'm exaggerating but there is a real problem with people being in their first job. Charles, Peter Robinson here. Charles, you're a Harvard College class of? 65. 65, okay. So here's, I have a couple of kids in college.

You have a couple out of college. You graduated from Harvard. That's important, Harvard, for the question I'm about to ask. In 1965, here's my emerging theory. This first struck me when I took a couple of my own kids around to college tours. And at every single college, the tour guide said the same thing, which is we are preparing the leaders of tomorrow. And at these fancy pants institutions, kids spend four years being told explicitly that they are the leaders of tomorrow. And then they get the degree and go out to the job market

and discover that they're not the leaders of tomorrow. They're the followers of tomorrow. I have the feeling that back in the 60s, even at august mother Harvard, kids didn't graduate with the same feeling of expectation, to use the word that's used these days, entitlement. Does that sound right to you? Yeah, I was at a transitional time. David Brooks, who's working on a new book about humility, has very interesting stories about Princeton in the 1930s and the degree to which they explicitly took the young men coming into Princeton at that time

and saw their job as toughening them up. So yes, they were going to be the leaders of tomorrow, but how do you do that? You hold their feet to the fire. And by the 1960s, I think Harvard still had some of that attitude, but it slacked off considerably at holding feet to the fire. And it's gotten much worse since then. So I had kids go to Harvard in the late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties and already by that time uh...

core core core curriculum requirements were joke uh... the uh... the former kinds of discipline that you self-discipline that you had to insert in course college career had been replaced by much more home like environment etcetera you know these places are going not preparing the leaders of tomorrow. They are prolonging the adolescence of the future leaders. Right, right. I'm sorry.

I'm like a curmudgeon, aren't I? Dr. Murray, Troy Sinek, let me confess to you up front that I am on the far end of the cohort that you're writing for in your new book. I'm in my early 30s, so I'm about as old as you can be and still be considered a millennial. And as a self-loathing millennial who suffers from premature curmudgeonliness, I'm right

there with you on the book. Here's my question. The thing that always strikes me about my cohort, my generation, is that the sense of entitlement for which they're criticized so often often takes the form of making the perfect the enemy of the good. That is they will turn down jobs earlier in their career even when they desperately need the work because the position doesn't fit perfectly with their vision of what their career is going to look like.

As opposed to understanding that particularly when you're young, sometimes you work a job that you don't like, that you might even hate just to bring in a paycheck. And a lot of them are the same way with relationships. They're so used to this sort of bespoke marketplace that we have today where everything is customizable that someone who meets 75 percent of the requirements that they'd want in a mate if they wrote it up in the abstract is considered 25 percent deficient. I mean in essence they have a tendency to behave as if there's only one side in any given market, and it's them. To what do you attribute that sense, that the world ought to come to them? Is that a byproduct of prosperity, of growing up with the world at your fingertips? How do you read it? I blame it all on the boomers, the baby boomers.

I mean, we came of age. I'm technically not a baby boomer. I was 1943, but I think I can't escape the mark of Cain. You know, I grew up at that same time. Our parents had gone through the Depression and so forth. They were determined to give their kids a better childhood than they had. They did indulge us. The man of the year for Time Magazine in 1965 were the under-25s.

I mean, come on, get serious. Under-25s, man of the year, because we were such a force for social change. So we thought we were the center of the universe. Then the self-esteem movement comes along in the late 1960s. So we raise our kids. Well, we're raising our kids first on the basis of our own experience. The self-esteem movement says we're supposed to tell our kids they're wonderful all the time. And we jump two feet, you know, both feet into that kind of parenting.

And so in great many cases, it's truly not the millennials' fault. There is no suddenly developed genetic defect in that generation. They were raised to have the resilience of crystal champagne flutes, basically. And we shouldn't be surprised when they behave that way when they're finally thrust into the job market. But they need to know, they really need to know that the supervisors, who are oftentimes people who raise their own kids in these bad ways when it comes to the job place, the workplace, are judging them, writing people off, and

thinking about promoting other people. And so suddenly it's a whole different world out there that Combustion's Guide is trying to tell about. Charles Peter here once again. Do they need to recognize, do they, the millennials, need to recognize that there may be enduring differences between men and women? In other words, what – sorry, go ahead, Charles. Well, I have a son who's 24 now, 25. Right. and I would not trade places with him for anything

because on the one hand he finds that the girls do still respond to the bad boys one of the things that always irritated me about girls is that they responded to the bad boys but on the other hand they also take umbrage if they're treated as young ladies at some point. It's a terribly confusing situation for them. I don't think I have anything useful to say because it's just so mystifying to me.

Okay, then let's go to a couple of pieces of specific advice that you do offer in the Marvelous Curmudgeon's Guide. Excise the word like from your speech why like why you want like like why is that so important because it drives me personally look when you're writing a book called the curmudgeon's, which I had more fun writing than just about anything I've ever written. It is you get to vent. Now, it turns out that a whole lot of other people also are completely irritated by this use of like as a verbal tick.

But here's the serious part of it. I have met extremely bright 22 year olds, a very high IQ, well-educated who use like four times in every sentence. I had a hard time staying in a conversation with them. I would not want them as a subordinate just because it would drive me crazy. Well, you know what?

A lot of people feel that way. And maybe you just better not talk that way anymore. Take religion seriously. That's another piece of your advice. Yeah. And there's the coda on that, especially if you've been socialized not to. It is my view that my generation, and it's been true ever since I went to school, who went to elite colleges, have been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as previous generations were socialized to be devout. If you go to Harvard in 1965 or you go to Stanford in 2010, and the milieu says, oh,

well, smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. If you're smart, you're an atheist. It's not taught in classes. It's just part of the air. people don't believe that stuff anymore. If you're smart, you're an atheist. It's not taught in classes. It's just part of the air. Well, you're 18, 19, 20 years old. What do you want more than anything else when you've just gotten into Stanford? You want to fit in.

You don't want to look like some hayseed who still believes in God and all that stuff. And so you don't reject thoughtfully Christianity or Judaism or whatever. You just sort of never pay it much attention. And I've become increasingly convinced. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but I've watched my wife, who's a very serious Quaker, and I've said, you know what?

Religion is way too important to dismiss casually. You may dismiss it, but do your homework first. Know what you're dismissing. And as you do that, I think you will get shakier in your unbelief. Shakier in your unbelief. What a wonderful phrase. James? Oh, I was just thinking, casting my mind on the millennials and, of course, shaking my fist. My daughter is 14, and she's grown up never knowing what we knew in our bones when we were young, which is inevitably we will all die in a nuclear holocaust because of Reagan. And maybe it's entirely possible that one of the problems with this generation is that they've never had their tender souls rubbed with the astringent tonic of existential dread. We actually cast our eyes into the future and could see nothing sometimes because all of the literature, all of the culture, all of the dystopian novels and movies predicted a really horrible future out there, probably. And when you grow up without the bristling nuclear weapons on either side, I'm thinking that maybe this Ukraine situation is a, let's have some nuclear saber rattling just to give them a taste of what we went through growing up, expecting.

Be careful of what you wish for, because I think we're on the verge of that in Ukraine right now. But I, okay, well, that's, I don't know. What about the alternative, which is on the verge of that in Ukraine right now. But I don't know. What about the alternative, which is, on the one hand, they're going up with predictions of catastrophe from climate change, and they look upon the world as being an oppressive place for the great majority of people and all that. But they themselves have lived an incredibly cocooned life. They've been in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. They've gone to private or extremely good public K-12 schools.

They've never held a job. They've had internships, also known as affirmative action for the rich during the summers. And so in that sense, they are actually coming into the world naïve, self-absorbed naïves. That sounds to me more like, okay, I guess they've had excellence. The world is going to hell, but their own little cocoon has made that all kind of unreal to them. That's true. But the world going to hell from global warming, the inefficacy of sustainability efforts and all these things, it's very vague.

And it's just, it's a slow-mo mudslide maybe elsewhere. It doesn't happen to them. I mean, we grew up with little circles around Fargo, North Dakota, indicating where the ICBMs dropped on our Minutemen missiles. The life is real and life is earnest. Yeah. We've got nuclear war in the future. OK.

I take your point there I guess. So we're going to introduce as the revised edition of Curmudgeons. We need more existential dread. Yes. The James Lyle Cotasill to your existential dread. Yes, the James Lyle to your great book. Troy, you had a question I believe relayed from Rob in the air

to show the miracles. Well, we're going to get to the one from Rob but before that, I wanted to ask you Dr. Brewer, you did this interview earlier this week, I believe it was yesterday with Mary Kessel from the Wall Street Journal, one of our contributors here at Ricochet which is getting a lot of play today on the internet.

If people go to RealClearPolitics right now, they can see it there. And what I found interesting about your interview and you can see that it caught Mary slightly off guard was that we seem to have lost the ethos that said if you were successful, if you made a lot of money, you didn't go showboating it around. And what I found slightly arresting about this is that it's not all that common to hear prominent conservatives or libertarians talk about the cultural side of capitalism. And Mary's response was, so what if they buy private jets or 25,000 square foot homes? That's the attitude of a lot of people on the right to essentially think of the market in instrumental terms. But once it gets to the social implications, say people are free to do what they want with their money.

I guess because we don't want social criticisms to be confused with a call for government action. But does that strike you as a weakness of those of us on the right sometimes that we're maybe too focused on the mechanics of public policy to the exclusion of the underlying social dynamics? I think that's a huge problem with the new upper class in general. You know, the initial, the most important definition of self-government is the government of the self. That's where it starts. And it has been very deeply embedded in the American ethos that we're all Americans together. I'm not saying we always make good on that, with the fact of the american transcended what our class was and there is a great quoting in tokeville

uh... where he says it's almost exact quote that the more opulent members of america take great care not to separate themselves from the lower classes they talk to them every day and that uh... that was really true for a great part of it plus the fact is that you have the people who did get rich usually bore the working class of the middle class so they still remembered what it was like

and uh... yeah did you have some people acting like to go reach sure you had a lot of others who were very circumspect and i think that's an essential part of American exceptionalism, and it's being lost. And the indication that it's being lost, I think, is in the increasing degree to which the new upper class is comfortable thinking of itself as an upper class. That's pretty un-american It is and I'm thinking for example of of all the wonderful lifestyle stories I read from Portland in San Francisco where people are priding themselves over having discovered the ideal

Artisanal toast restaurant which which for seven which for seven, but these people don't see themselves as waspy types who hang around the country club. They're simply possessed of a greater sensibility, a more refined sense. Charles, Peter here. Troy, we've got this last question that I know Troy wants to get to because Rob texted it in from LAX, but I just, I want to make sure I'm understanding the point you're making right now because it seems to me profound and very upsetting actually. So let's take – here's the mental experiment that occurs to me. Architectural Digest is this big glossy magazine that every issue is devoted to interior shots of three or four or five rich people's houses.

And quite often the rich people themselves pose in the shots. And always, always, always, it's told who their architect is, who their designer is. And the names of the rich people, even if they don't appear, the names of the rich people are always given. You're saying that in the 1950s, no such publication could have existed, and that that was a good thing. Is that right? I don't know if I go quite that far, because the rich have always been a kind of, or formerly, played a lot of the same role the celebrities do today, and celebrities in the entertainment business. If you go back to the early 1900s or the late 1800s with the Gilded Age,

the antics of the New York 400 and the Newport set was a major form of source of entertainment for most of the rest of the country. But here's the difference. At that time, the people who were morally suspect were the effete rich.

Everybody knew that the backbone of the country was the working class, the middle class. Those were the feet rich. Everybody knew that the backbone of the country was the working class, the middle class. Those were the real Americans. And as you rose in society, it is not that you rose above the rest of the country in ways where you could lord it over the rest of them. In a way, you were looked upon suspiciously, and you kind of had to prove to other people as you rose

that you were still one of the guys. We're talking about a very complicated issue here. But I would just throw in this point. When you look at those houses in Architectural Digest, or when you have been in very lavish houses, how often have you said, gee, I wish I could live in a place like that? And to what extent have you said to yourself, you know, actually, I have a real nice house, but my wife and I basically live in the kitchen and one of the bedrooms in the bathroom. All of us, I think, know that in our own homes, some of which are quite fine, we don't actually

use the whole lot of room in our real lives. And so a lot of what I'm saying to the new upper class is, come on, think about what you really enjoy in life and ask yourself, is this what I want? I've often said if there's ever a revolution in this country, it will be because of the mansion section in the Wall Street Journal. That will be the thing that finally tips people over where they slam it down on the table and say I've had it with these people. Troy, you had a question. Yes, this is the question that Rob Long texted in for you, Dr. Murray. He's asking you, will the next president come from Belmont or Fishtown? Is Scott Walker from Fishtown?

Is Chris Christie? They are – well, they sure act like they're from Fishtown. town is scott walker from fish town is chris christie they are they should help make sure act like they're from chris today they have exactly that the right uh... uh... attitude never got more writers from fish town he's literally from no i should use literally there he is

actually from life neighborhood very like this job uh... working-class neighborhood uh... when hillary clinton not so much not so much and since hillary probably is the best shot i think we got a bill mott lady in our future probably

the problem is of course that no matter what what know you the president comes from uh... increasingly the uh... operatic who run the u s government to the regulatory agencies and all the rest of it they are drawn from mom the kind of the upper class i'm talking about which is not distinguished by twenty five thousand square-foot homes but are distinguished by the kind of

culture which makes a lot of attention to their artisanal bread of a certain very special quality. Well, there you have it, folks. If any of this strikes you as wise, and every syllable and phoneme has struck me that way, then you're going to want to run out and get The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead, Do's and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life from Charles Murray. It's been a pleasure, sir, and thank you for the podcast. We hope to have you back again soon.

I've enjoyed it greatly. Thank you, Charles. Thank you. You know, the artisan – By the way, Troy, before we lose this, Troy had better just provide a couple of sentences on what Fishtown and Belmont are, why we ask the question where those concepts come from. If you read Dr. Murray's – I guess it was the last book, right? The one immediately preceding this. I don't think there was one in between.

Coming Apart where he talks about the differing sort of cultural trends in America. Belmont and Fishtown are the two metaphorical cities. Correct me on this, guys, if I've got this wrong. I thought Belmont is mostly based on the – yeah, well, Belmont is the sort of upper class enclave and Fishtown is the sort of downtrodden, more working class area. I think Belmont is based loosely around the Belmont area in Massachusetts, right? Fishtown I think is extrapolated from somewhere in Pennsylvania. But when he talks about these social differences between classes, those two fictionalized cities serve as his kind of metaphorical proxies for them.

Right. Good. Dr. Lalex? No, it's a wonderful distinction and it goes to what he – the point that he made in his previous book, which is coming apart. The curious thing that he discusses is the way in which one class is modeling a certain behavior while at the same time endorsing laws and social changes that encourage the opposite of that behavior in lower classes. In other words, when you look at,

and who is the, I think we may have even had a ricochet post about this recently, that you've got these Hollywood people who themselves get married, actually get married, or just your upper managerial class, they get married. Oh, Jay Carney, that was the example. Jay Carney and his wife have kids. They've got a nice house. They are bonded together in all of the forms that we associate with a solid home structure. But yet the policies that they advocate are ones that permit people who don't have their resources to sunder and fraction their lives until they don't have a husband or a

wife or they've got too many kids by too many parents and they don't have a place to live that that that's the curiosity of it is that while they live their lives according to conservative models they regard it as somehow intellectually and morally um you know unspeakable to actually say that they provide an example for other people, which is really strange when you think about it because it's encouraging horrible behavior in people who do not have your resources to fall back on. The problem is, of course, is that the people you're giving license to are all as happy

as can possibly be to say, thank you for dissolving those social strictures. Now I'm going to go ahead and have fun hedonistically with no care of the future. So the upper class is getting played, is absolutely getting played. And that's sort of what happens when you have a government that goes to negotiate with a bad government who realizes I can play you and runs the table because you're naive and thinking that you're on the same page as to what's better for the future of all. As a matter of fact, Michael Rubin's new book, Dancing with the Devil, the Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes. There it is. It just slides right in. Oh, boy. OK. Well, in the absence of Rob, we've got two people to absolutely take a baseball bat to my segue.

His book, Dancing with the Devil, the Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes, we've been talking about it this month. And essentially it says this. You have a dangerous world you have rogue regimes governments and groups who issue diplomatic normality and sponsor terrorism and proliferate nuclear weapons they challenge the u.s around the globe and our response has been to talk and to talk and to talk and the theory that it never hurts to talk to enemies well that's the conventional wisdom and seldom has it been so wrong while it's true that sanctions and military force come at high costs, case studies examining the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Taliban, all these guys demonstrate that talking doesn't make engagement work. As a matter of fact, it leads to greater problems.

Rogue regimes have one thing in common, Rubin says. They pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. And whether in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Islamabad, these rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives. And that for the State Department, the process of holding talks is often deemed more important than the results. You listen to that and you say,

yeah, that's the way it looks to me. Well, then you'll want to read Dancing with the Devil, The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes. And if you go now, or tomorrow, or the day after that, heck, to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET to check out, you will get 15% off the book. And do so to thank Encounter Books for sponsoring this,

the Ricochet podcast. Well, speaking of rogue regimes, I was thinking the other day about what happens when Vladimir Putin decides that the 25% of Estonia, which speaks Russian, or the 15 percent of the 17, I forget, that they need desperate protection from that the end result, one of the most spectacular failures of the Obama administration in the end will be the dissolution in fact, if not a name, of NATO. What do you guys think?

It's strange to hear you say that, James, because I've been wrestling with that same thought for the past couple of weeks. I mean there was talk – remember there was talk at first when everything happened in Crimea. I didn't think this was a terrible idea that when you pull off the Crimea, bring that back into the Russian order. But what you're left with is a Ukraine that is shorn of those Russian allegiances that some people in the Crimea have, at which point there becomes an argument that, well, just – that's a perfect entity to put into NATO. And as I thought about it, you can bring NATO right up to the line with Russia. I thought I don't know what could happen that would make NATO actually act.

I mean the dirty little secret – it's not a dirty little secret. Everybody knows this. The United States has to act in order for NATO to act. I mean when you look at the countries involved, this still comes down to us but the alliance is significant. It strikes me as utterly plausible and deeply disturbing that the kind of scenario that you laid out could happen, that you could have an incursion into a NATO country and I don't know that our reaction would look any differently than it does now. It seems like it would have to be different.

But I have a hard time envisioning it. Peter? So Estonia is different, right? Because we never recognized the Soviet incorporation of the Baltic states the way we did later recognize the communist governments of Poland, Hungary, so forth. Estonia is a NATO member. It is deeply pro-American. If the Soviets carved off a piece of Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania and we did nothing, that would be really, really serious. So would Vladimir Putin carve it off the way he carved off Crimea? No, he'd be much more shrewd than that. Question, I guess, would Barack Obama act?

Answer, probably not. Next question, what would the Germans do? That's what's so strange about this whole enterprise that six decades after the Second World War, after they lost, seven decades after they lost, the Germans are actually in charge of Europe. Everybody looks to Angela Merkel. How is she going to respond to the Crimea? I have no idea how all of this will turn out. But the idea that Vladimir Putin can take over the Crimea, where I don't believe we had very serious interests, and I've said all that, but that he can just take it. And now that he can send thugs into eastern Ukraine, cause trouble, cause violence, and there's no challenge. There's not even any serious denunciation in Berlin, let alone in Washington. It's just bizarre and unsettling and I have to believe it's dangerous.

Well, they need the gas. As far as Estonia comes, you will just have – you will have marches in the capitals of every western nation with people saying no blood for Amber if they decide to go to this. But if they do – if Russia does indeed – I'm sorry. Not if when they carve off the eastern portion and everybody else acquiesces because of the gas. What I'm keen about is the amount of the pipeline that goes through Ukraine proper, what's left, the western portion. Does anybody know exactly how much that is? Because I believe the western portion obviously is where the pipeline portion. Does anybody know exactly how much that is? Because I believe the Western portion obviously is where the pipeline goes, right? Okay.

Well, then that's a very odd situation to be in for Russia, isn't it? Where you antagonize and carve up a country, but you leave in place a strategic asset of your own, which when tampered with, you know, yes, the Ukrainians need the gas themselves. But as somebody pointed out on the radio yesterday, if there's anybody who's forgotten more about anti-Soviet insurgency than anybody else ever knew, it's Ukrainians. So whether or not that pipeline itself might have a little pyrotechnics here and there to discomfort the Europeans and the Russian, I don't know. It's just, it's a horrible thing to see. And it comes after a conspicuous manifestation of weakness in the part of the administration. And everyone's saying, well, what should they do? Something more than give them MREs is what I would say. I would say send diplomats to all of the Baltic capitals now

and start talking, handshakes in front of the cameras and saying, oh yes, jets, we're giving them a bunch of them, a whole bunch of our ordnance. Yes, as a matter of fact, here's a laundry list of what capabilities will be enhanced. And how can anybody possibly say that that would be a provocative maneuver at this time? And if they consider it to be so then let it be so as if putin isn't provoking every time he uh casts his eyes toward the toward toward ukraine right well the thing that's the thing that's always irritating too about the well what would you do the saint demonius question along those lines is well i probably i probably wouldn't

have laid the predicate for this over the last five years i mean it's at the moment when you hand it over to me at the moment of crisis, yeah, my options are constrained. But I'll tell you one other thing they could do, and I agree with everything that James just said, which I think is kind of the same message that John McCain is pushing right now as well. Don't let that deter you, James. which is really easy to do, and maybe it doesn't matter because we're so weak across the board anyway. At least that's the way we come off, is to stop explicitly ruling out things. Jay Carney is doing this all the time. The president is doing this all the time. Well, we don't want an armed conflict, which everybody knows.

I mean everybody knows we're not going to go to the mat in that fashion. But they said – I think it was yesterday that Carney disavowed any idea of sending arms over there. Even if you're not going to do it, don't telegraph your punch. This is just the mostability of some sort of response with this dispassionate clinical tone. It was like watching somebody do a play-by-play on a rape as it was happening in front of his face. There's not a jot, an iota, an atom of passion

or engagement in this man, a clinical disconnect from the world that he is supposedly the free leader – the free world leader of. Well, it's easy to do when you don't give a damn, right? I mean can we all agree at this point that this is – he regards this as an irritating distraction? At best. At best.

At best. From what – but a distraction from what exactly? What is the key thing? You know, Troy, when this – both of – this question, as you say, the sanctimonious question, well, what would you do? You know, when it comes to step two or step three or step four, I have to admit I'm not quite sure what I would do. On the other hand, I'm not president of the United States. I don't have advisors. I haven't had people who should have been exploring military and diplomatic options.

But you know what? I do know step number one. Step number one is tell the truth, isn't it? Isn't step number, even when our hero, Ronald Reagan, couldn't actually do anything to the Soviets or with the Soviets or against the Soviets, he would stand up and give a speech and tell the truth about what was happening. The other day, I listened to someone knowledgeable commenting on the radio, and it turns out that this is four or five days ago, one of the first disturbances of the pro-Russian forces, the protesters attempted to occupy the town hall in, I think it was Donetsk, but I'm not sure, and they got it wrong and occupied the opera house instead. That is how obviously they had been bussed in from elsewhere. They didn't even know which building they were supposed to occupy. Where is the speech in which the president of the United States says,

we understand what is happening. We understand that these protests are being orchestrated in Moscow. We understand and we have evidence. We know this and we know this and we know this. It is wrong. It is no good for Russia. It is an affront to the dignity of Ukrainians, many of whose grandparents were starved by the Russians in the 1930s. And we will not permit this. We will not become, the implicit message here is, that we will not become morally complicit. We won't just let it happen. We won't treat it as an irritant or a set of technical issues

for the diplomats to solve. We will tell the truth and express moral outrage. That's step one, and that's what I would do. Fair? Fair, but the difference is what audience you care about, isn't it? I mean this is where Reagan was better than anybody. He cared about the people who – He came from Fishtown.

Yeah, but he cared about the people who were being dispossessed by these kinds of things. And the consistent trend with the Obama administration is they care about the regimes. And it's obviously – it's important to keep the regimes in mind as a matter of strategy. But that's the opinion they care about cultivating. I mean I've mentioned this before, but to me there is no more damning example of their mindset where foreign policy is concerned than during 2009, the Iranian uprisings. They wouldn't say anything because they thought that they could make inroads with the mullahs down the road for negotiations. They would not stand with those people and they tried to dress it up as, well, it's just going to hurt them if there's American support for them. OK, but you could funnel stuff into the country.

I mean there are other things you could do. Maybe that's a legitimate strategic concern. They didn't care. Their audience is the other heads of state. Their audience here is – they care more about what Vladimir Putin thinks than about those folks in Ukraine. And their faith in paper is so – would be touching if it weren't so tragic. I mean they're really standing in front of

a firing squad holding up a sheet of paper but you agreed not to shoot me thinking that that it will ward off the bullet somehow if the end result of not antagonizing vladimir putin is to be able to say a year down the road election time well look at us We got ourselves a nuclear arms treaty. For God – as if that is the sort of thing that prevents the world from having the thermonuclear swap meet someday. As if START and all the rest of those tortuous, meaningless scholasticism level of detail, as if that was the thing that kept the United States and the USSR from going at each other's throats. And it's the same mistake being made with the mullahs. And none of this is – as if the whole point of this is to provide Hillary Clinton come 2016 with some sort of perfect world that she helped create and that were to elect her to make sure that it's shepherded on to the next century. It's just – it's insane. It's just – it's insane. It's absolutely insane. As if the countries with which we are engaged who themselves rhetorically and ideologically are opposed to the very foundational concepts of Western civilization, as if they too want a world in which cooperation and not domination is the goal.

I mean it – that level of naivete you can understand in high school, to see it manifested in your elite chattering classes is astonishing to me. It just gobsmacked me. Hillary Clinton will get the world that she helped to create. There's no doubt about that. It just won't be perfect. Hey, Troy, I would just like to salute you because this point about which audience do they care about, the regime or the people, is really basic. I hadn't seen it anywhere expressed quite that sharply. And so James, you certainly get as always the segue of the day award, but if I may,

I'd like to award Troy the insight of the day award. Back in the Reagan days when we would write these speeches over and over and over again. The diplomats at the State Department would say, you don't understand how much trouble this causes. The Russian diplomats, they're on the phone to us. They're furious. And of course, the answer was Ronald Reagan isn't talking to the Russian diplomats. He's talking to the American people. And to the extent that he can get through to them, to the extent that the media permits his message to reach them, he's talking to the Russian people. was he was released. The Soviets finally let him go. And in his meeting in the Oval Office with President Reagan, he said, you need to understand how important your words were to us, not to the regime, to us. In prison, people would pass into us, written down on little screws or twists of paper, quotations from the American president. And we would pass them from hand to hand,

making sure the guards didn't see us. Those are the people the president of the United States quotations from the American president, and we would pass them from hand to hand, making sure the guards didn't see us. Those are the people the president of the United States should be talking to. Well, did you not, Peter, feel a twinge of pain when James was reading the pricey for the book? Every time I hear you do that, James, I sort of twitch a little when I hear the line about the State Department caring more about negotiations and the substance of what's going on because I think any White House speechwriter who has ever gone through the vetting process – we should explain just briefly for people who don't understand this. It may have been slightly different for you guys, Peter, than it was for us.

But when you write a speech in the White House, the various drafts go out and get staffed and all the various components, whatever relevant offices in the executive office of the president in exactly how James described it in reading that price. I mean they are so, so process obsessed. There's also a fair amount of nativism. I mean you just – a number of people go to the State Department and then whatever country they're assigned to, they start seeing themselves as a representative from that location to the United States. Oh, absolutely. So I have told people for a long time when I meet people who are in college or grad school and thinking about going into government. First I try to wave them off of it and then when they insist – yeah, I've said for a while it would – one of the most helpful things that conservatives can do in government I think is to go into the foreign service because there are so few of them.

There is so much to be corrected. And yeah, you're standing in front of a tsunami, but it's a worthwhile effort because if you're not there, we're left with the dregs. If Rob was here, he would draw a parallel between government and show business then because when you're doing a sitcom or a show, you get notes back from the network, right? Right, right, right. They always tell you change this, change that, change this, change – so it's intriguing. Well, let's just hope then come Ricochet Podcast number 250, we're not talking about how, well, really the Baltics were historically within Russia's sphere of influence. What we really have to draw a line is now with Poland.

Poland is important. Miami. Miami has Russian cultural ties. There's no reason that Russia doesn't have a legitimate claim to South Beach. Yeah. It's an interesting argument to say that because there are people in this country who speak your language that therefore you're entitled to walk and carve it off. And the number of – and when I do sort of bring the issue up with friends of a liberal persuasion, the analogy that they always come back with is Iraq.

Always. Well, we invaded Iraq, ergo. And even if the fatuity of that aside, you can look at them and say, oh, so you believe that Putin then will leave Crimea and eastern Ukraine in X number of years. Right, exactly. After securing an agreement with the government. Well, there's always North Carolina and Charlotte and Troy. I understand that you went to a ricochet meetup. Yes, yes. And you met some folk.

Tell us all about that party that I missed. Yes, there was a terrific ricochet meetup in Charlotte over the weekend. There's sort of an evolution that's happened with Ricochet meetups, which is people used to get – they still do in some places. But people used to get together for dinner or drink somewhere. They just pick a date and do it. And then starting with the event that they did in Las Vegas back in October, people have started kind of making a weekend of it. You will do something on Friday night and then have events – do something during the day on Saturday and then everybody will get together for a dinner on Saturday night, which is kind of a nice way to organize things because it means that people who are in the area who maybe can't get to one thing can get to another. And we had in Charlotte several dozen people and people from at least four or five states that I'm aware of. We had people from both the Carolinas, from Tennessee, from Georgia.

Fred Cole drove down there from upstate New York. From upstate New York. Wow. And the thing that's terrific about these meetups – I mean you guys had this experience in LA, although it was a little bit different because we had the show aspect of it. But the more of them I attend, I think I've been to about a half a dozen now. The more I'm convinced that – it's almost misleading to call them ricochet meetups. They're almost like ricochet reunions, which is really strange because you – I knew a few people here because they had been at a previous event. But it doesn't matter. When you meet people that you've never met before, there's this – people have read each other and sent messages back and forth in some cases for years now because the site has been together for so long.

And I'll tell you, fellas, the single greatest metric – it's not a metric at all. The single greatest representation I think of how these things work. The event in Charlotte, people got together and had drinks on a Friday night, and there was a dinner on a Saturday night. And they had arranged it so that on Saturday afternoon, everybody would get together and have lunch and then could go off their separate ways to see whatever they wanted to see in Charlotte, whether the NASCAR museum or there's the Billy Graham museum. Charlotte's a nice town. There's a lot to do there. Not a single person went off and explored the city of Charlotte. They spent all day sitting there, eating, drinking, laughing, having fun and talking with you.

You couldn't break them away from each other. It was a fantastic event and I would tell Ricochet members, if you haven't been to one, go to one. If there's not one near you, set it up. I mean this is really – Peter, you and Rob have created something special. It's very impressive to see and they're great people across the board, fantastic people. This became special the moment Ricochet members took it unto themselves to make it special. Rob and I – Nobody set up a meetup on our end. Exactly, exactly. Totally spontaneous, totally spontaneous. I will grant that Rob and I set something in motion, but it's being kept in motion by the Ricochet members themselves.

It's wonderful. Well, it's interesting that the great sort of achievements of Ricochet – the unintended insight of Ricochet is that things tend to work pretty well when you don't centrally plan them. The spontaneous order that has been generated on Ricochet is the biggest recommendation for the site. For that, we have our members to thank. Well, and the members are also generating, of course, some of the wonderful unpaid content. I'm sorry, the wonderful volunteer content. Yeti, edit that out. We'll just take out the –

Take out the unpaid part. And every week, of course, there's a new favorite post and I'm trying to decide what I like the most this week. Sometimes it's just one of those threads that you know is going to be great. If somebody says – and who was it? Miss Theocracy who said – or Tabula Rasa said there are no good jokes lately. We may be living in an age in which humor has been expunged because we're so politically correct and so sensitive and so terrified. And of course you knew that was going to turn into a 60-70 post-joke thread and it did. Which was fantastic.

Which was indeed. So I'm thinking of that and I'm casting my eyes across the rest of the site to remember what I liked this week. And what comes to mind, guys? Well, first, because I want to make sure – I had to look it up. Oh, I know. I know. I know. I know.

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I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know several similarly situated conservatives who have had to deal with this. We have a – remember by the name of John Boyer who wrote a post which I think we promoted on Monday called Should Conservatives Use Welfare Programs? John is a young academic married with a child on the way. An academic – he's an adjunct professor which of course – for people, most of our

listeners probably don't. The money there is terrible. As somebody who looked at academia seriously at one point, one of the reasons I couldn't justify it was because of what you get. But the money in academia is being somebody who got tenure in 1972. That's how you do okay in higher ed. Adjunct shopping your could take it or not. And there's a very interesting discussion that spilled out afterwards. A lot of people saying, look, you paid into it.

Everybody else can take advantage of it. There's no reason you can't. But these interesting questions that only conservatives ask, right? I mean liberals never feel constrained about things like this. And that's one of the things that I actually love the most about our site is these are – if you were looking at an online magazine or newspaper, you probably wouldn't get this content because this is more sort of over coffee with your friends stuff and we just happen to have thousands of pretty smart, funny friends across the country having the conversation. I thought that was a great post. You know, there was a big debate.

This is putting me in mind of it. This is a quarter of a century ago. At National Review, the question arose – oh, because someone, one of the contributors had reached the age of social security. And so the question arose, should conservatives accept social security? And this got batted around National Review. And finally, Bill Buckley asked Milton Friedman. And Milton Friedman's answer was, yes, of course you should. You should oppose social security and cash your check when it arrives. It is an impossible position to permit, you must not permit the other side to put us in the position of saying, if you oppose something,

you can't use it. Because they will progressively read us out of any participation in American life. That is to say, what would come next is affirmative action. If you're an African-American, how can you remain, how can you avoid affirmative action? I mean, it's just, it's endless. The rules are what they are. We can fight to change the rules. But while they are what they are, we abide by them. And when they offer us benefits, we take them.

I think that's intellectually consistent. In any event, I'm very willing to stand with Milton Friedman on issues like this. Can I tell you a quick story just to emphasize this point? I love this story. I went to graduate school with a fellow who – You went to graduate school? Stop there. You're fired.

I did indeed. Not at an Ivy League institution however. So that ought to give me some points back. When I was in graduate school, I had a classmate who had gotten accepted after – or right before he graduated. He got accepted to go to law school afterwards at Catholic University of America in DC. And he got – now, my friend was about 6'1 and looked like a Scottish Highlander. I mean he was bright blue eyes, practically albino, flaming red hair, and he got a scholarship at Catholic University of America based on his – I think it was his Cherokee heritage, which was fractional at a level that I had never heard of.

It was like three 178ths, but there was apparently money available for that. And I asked him at the time – he's a good conservative guy. And I asked him at the time. I said, how are you going to – are you going to take it? How are you going to live with that? How are you going to justify that? And he said, well, he said, I'm going to take the money. I'm going to go through the program.

I'm going to graduate and then I'm going to sue them for offering me it in the first place. I thought that was OK. That is OK. Or the famous – I'll shut up after this one because we've been yammering on for more than an hour. We need to close. Robbie George at Princeton, who has transformed intellectual life at Princeton, to mention an Ivy League school, by establishing the Madison Program, which is essentially the place at Princeton where the ideals of the United States of America, the founding ideals, get a fair shake. And he's given conservatives, all kids interested in American history, but conservatives a place to go and sort of raise the whole level of it. Okay. So I asked Robbie, how did that happen? And he was a very successful rising star academically.

And he told me the story that when he was called to the office of the president of Princeton, when he was a young man, and he was informed that the Department of Politics at Princeton had awarded him tenure. And not only that, but he had been given a very famous chair at Princeton, which was once held by Woodrow Wilson himself. And Robbie said he thanked the president of Princeton, and then he turned around and began walking back to his office, and he thought to himself, what can I do to justify this honor? And Robbie George said that before he got back to his office, it had come to him that he must conduct himself at Princeton so that they all regretted giving him tenure

for the rest of their lives. That's not bad. Not bad. If he's going to use the Woodrow Wilson chair, you should know that it doesn't come with an Ottoman, but I believe that Wilson used a black man on his hands and knees for that purpose. Dander gets up when I hear that, when I hear about Wilson. Speaking of people who seemingly don't understand the equality of all human beings in the face of the earth,

I'm just going to read you this from USA Today. You know, the USA Today, that just crazy website that prints anything. This is today. Jews in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where pro-Russian militants have taken over government buildings, were told they have to, quote, register, end quote, with Ukrainians who are trying to make the city become part of Russia, according to Israeli media. Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city's Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee, quote, or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation, and see their assets confiscated, reported Ynet News, Israel's largest news website.

So. There you go. Wow. Oh, but remember, never again. If you say that, then it won't be. And also, Tibet will be free if you have a proper bumper sticker. It's not required to do anything. Right.

But just have the right ideas and the right moral stances. And preen, preen, preen for them all as the spotlight falls upon your wonderful person. But enough of Michael Bloomberg to bring it back to where we started this whole thing. We want to thank everybody for listening to this. And we want to thank Rob, of course, for founding it in part with Peter. And when he gets back next week, we'll ask him how his trip was. Troy, as ever, thanks.

You're great. Peter, wonderful. Charles Murray, great guest. Thumbs up to the Yeti who once again shepherded this entire thing through the inner tubes and did his magnificent job and will toil and toil

splicing it together to make it sound great. And thanks to you, of course, the Ricochet member, for keeping this alive. Thank you, everybody, and we'll see you in the comments.

Next week. Thank you, fellas. Oh, when you hear a woman Thank you, everybody, and we'll see you in the comments. Next week. Thank you, fellas. Thank you. You can bet your bottom dollar That some no good man has done wrong Same thing when you hear a woman shout You can bet it's some old man She's a Shouting about I say ain't it a mean old man Mean old man's world

I say ain't it a mean old man Mean old man's world? Oh, no, it's a mean old man, mean old man's world. It's a mean old man, mean old man's world. I'm going to ask you one more time girls and saints ain't it a mean ain't it a mean mean old man's world

you see man has held the world in the palm of his hand. It's been that way ever since the world began. I'm so thankful for the days when man started fooling around with a thing called play. Cause he wants people that you understand. Cause he says woman was made for nothing but man. I ask you, ain't it?

I ask you, ain't it? I ask you, ain't it? One more time, ain't it? Ain't it a mean old man? Ain't it a mean? Ain't it a mean, lord? Ain't it a mean old man Ain't it a mean Ain't it a mean lord It's a mean, mean old man Whoa

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